USANDTHEM-"fight for the right to say it"

IOF Abducts Palestine’s Democratically Elected Leaders

2006-06-29T21:08:24+02:00

by Kurt Nimmo

Thursday June 29th 2006, 8:23 am

Now that Israel has attacked Gaza and the West Bank and kidnapped members of the democratically elected government there, it will be interesting to see if the United Nations condemns these criminal acts and moves to pass another worthless resolution.

Israel’s “Operation Summer Rain” is not specifically intended to win the release of prisoner of war corporal Gilad Shalit so much as continue the nearly sixty year aggression against the Palestinian people. “According to some Western analysts, the military action, rather than being aimed at rescuing the captured Israeli soldier, is aimed at preempting the consequences of a recent agreement [to recognize Israel] reached by the Fatah block and Hamas,” notes the Arab Monitor.

Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades and the Popular Resistance Committees, responsible for taking Shalit, want to use him as a “bargaining chip” to gain the release of women and children held in Israel’s dungeons in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

It should be noted, although this will not be mentioned in the corporate media, that Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that abducting Arabs and holding them hostage is entirely legal according to the laws of the tiny outlaw state. As well, the Israeli government has attempted to codify GSS (General Security Services) torture during “interrogation.” According to Amnesty International official, “Israel is the only country in the world known to have effectively legalized torture by officially allowing such methods,” namely beatings, electric shock, sleep deprivation, forcing prisoners to remain in painful positions, violent shaking, hooding, confinement in tiny spaces, exposure to temperature extremes, prolonged toilet and hygiene deprivation, degrading treatment, and other methods, which have in cases led to the death of the detainees.

Osama Hamdan, a Hamas official, put the capture of Gilad Shalit into perspective. “He’s an Israeli soldier, a prisoner of war, taken in a battle and falls under a legal category,” Hamdan told the Associated Press. “What happened yesterday [the abduction of elected Palestinians] were hostage-takings and acts of terrorism.” Israel, however, has nothing but contempt for such legal categories, as the systematic murder and maiming of more than 24,500 Palestinians since the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada reveals.

“On Wednesday, the crisis seemed to be tipping toward escalation as Israeli tanks hunkered down inside southern Gaza at the airport after warplanes had knocked out half of Gaza’s electricity and pounded sonic booms over houses,” reports the New York Times. “Also on Wednesday, Israel battered northern Gazan towns with artillery and sent warplanes over the house of the Syrian president, who is influential with the Palestinian leader believed to have ordered the kidnapping.”

In other words, the Israelis violated Syrian airspace and terrorized Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, basically an act of war. “In a predawn operation Wednesday morning, Israel Air Force warplanes carried out a low-altitude flight over Assad’s palace in the Mediterranean port city of Latakia in northwestern Syria,” explains Haaretz. [Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin] said it was ‘absolutely unacceptable’ to breach the border or air space of any country,” a fact lost on the neocon, pro-Jabotinsky, AIPAC seduced government of the United States.

Ehud Olmert, who got his start in the Arab-hating revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar (founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky), declares Israel has “no interest to harm the Palestinian people, and in the operation we carried out tonight, civilians were not harmed. The Hamas Government and its sources in Syria are directly responsible for the reality we’ve fallen into,” according to a translation provided by the World Today.

Granted, according to news reports, the IOF has yet to slaughter Palestinians outright, although it is disingenuous for Olmert to claim “civilians were not harmed,” considering the IOF has bombed electrical facilities and “destroyed the main water pipe feeding Nuseirat and El-Bureij refugee camps,” according to an by Electronic Intifada press release posted last night.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights “strongly condemns IOF retaliatory measures targeting Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, including the destruction of properties that are not classified as a legitimate military targets. The Center calls upon the international community, particularly the High Contracting Parties of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to force IOF to respect the convention, which prohibits reprisals against protected persons, as stipulated in article 33. In addition, the convention prohibits the destruction of private properties belonging to individuals, groups, organizations or official bodies. The Center calls upon the High Contracting Parties to enforce article 3 regarding adherence to the convention and respect of its stipulations, and to take appropriate sanctions against the serious violations currently being perpetrated.”

Of course, this will be ignored, both in Israel and the United States, where the dutiful corporate media portrays the invasion of the Gaza Strip and West Bank as a defensive move against terrorists.

In effect, Israel is attempting to break any agreement between Fatah and Hamas in regard to recognizing Israel’s “right” to exist, a “right” predicated on more than sixty years of violence and ethnic cleansing.

Olmert and the Jabotinsky Likudites are engaged in a long-term plan to deny not only Palestinian statehood, but the most basic of human rights. “Zionism is a colonizing adventure and, therefore, it stands or falls on the question of armed forces,” Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote.

As well, it stands or falls on the ability to use such armed forces to terrorize Palestinians, run them off the land, bomb their civilian infrastructure, abduct their elected representatives, throw their women and children in torture dungeons, dynamite their homes, plow under their olive groves, shoot peace activists in the head (or run them over with military bulldozers), and engage in other crimes, illegal and shameful in more civilized places in the world.

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Insurgents Offer to Halt Attacks in Iraq

2006-06-29T20:54:49+02:00

STEVEN R. HURST and QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA Associated Press | June 28 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Eleven Sunni insurgent groups have offered an immediate halt to all attacks including those on American troops if the United States agrees to withdraw foreign forces from Iraq in two years, insurgent and government officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Withdrawal is the centerpiece of a set of demands from the groups, which operate north of Baghdad in the heavily Sunni Arab provinces of Salahuddin and Diyala. Although much of the fighting has been to the west, those provinces are increasingly violent and attacks there have crippled oil and commerce routes.

The groups who've made contact have largely shunned attacks on Iraqi civilians, focusing instead on the U.S.-led coalition forces. Their offer coincides with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's decision to reach out to the Sunni insurgency with a reconciliation plan that includes an amnesty for fighters.

The Islamic Army in Iraq, Muhammad Army and the Mujahedeen Shura Council the umbrella group that covers eight militant groups including al-Qaida in Iraq were not party to any offers to the government.

Naseer al-Ani, a Sunni Arab politician and official with the largest Sunni political group, the Iraqi Islamic Party, said that al-Maliki should encourage the process by guaranteeing security for those making the offer and not immediately reject their demands.

"The government should prove its goodwill and not establish red lines," al-Ani said. "If the initiative is implemented in a good way, 70 percent of the insurgent groups will respond positively."

Al-Maliki, in televised remarks Wednesday, did not issue an outright rejection of the timetable demand. But he said it was unrealistic, because he could not be certain when the Iraqi army and police would be strong enough to make a foreign presence unnecessary for Iraq's security.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that President Bush's "view has been and remains that a timetable is not something that is useful. It is a signal to the enemies that all you have to do is just wait and it's yours.

"The goal is not to trade something off for something else to make somebody happy, the goal is to succeed," he said.

Bush has said U.S. troops will remain in Iraq for years to guarantee the success of the new Iraqi government. However, American military officials have said substantial reductions of the current force of 127,000 U.S. troops could be made before the end of 2007.

Eight of the 11 insurgent groups banded together to approach al-Maliki's government under The 1920 Revolution Brigade, which has claimed credit for killing U.S. troops in the past. All 11, working through intermediaries, have issued identical demands, according to insurgent spokesmen and government officials.

The officials spoke on condition of anomymity because of the sensitivity of the information and for fear of retribution.

The total number of insurgents is not known, nor how many men belong to each group. But there are believed to be about two dozen insurgent organizations in Iraq, so the 11 contacting the government could represent a substantial part of the Sunni-led insurgency.

Al-Maliki's offer of amnesty for insurgents would not absolve those who have killed Iraqis or American coalition troops. But proving which individuals have carried out fatal attacks would, in many if not most cases, be a difficult task.

The issue is extremely sensitive in the United States, which has lost more than 2,500 uniformed men and women in Iraq, many to the insurgents' bombs and ambushes.

Coinciding with al-Maliki's attempts to bring Sunni Arabs to the bargaining table, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad held talks Tuesday in Saudi Arabia with King Abdullah. The Saudis have influence with many Sunni insurgents in Iraq.

Al-Maliki also set up an e-mail account to communicate with insurgents, flashing the address on the screen during a broadcast Sunday night.

For al-Maliki, reaching out to the Sunnis risks heightening tensions in his ruling coalition of mostly Shiite Muslim political groups. Al-Maliki is said to be increasingly disenchanted with the close ties between the country's most powerful Shiite organization and Iran, which is ruled by a Shiite theocracy.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite group with historic ties to the Iranians, favors close relations with Iran. Many of Iraq's most powerful Shiite politicians and religious figures spent years in Iranian exile during Saddam Hussein's regime.

In addition to the withdrawal timetable, the Iraqi insurgents have demanded:

An end to U.S. and Iraqi military operations against insurgent forces.

Compensation for Iraqis killed by U.S. and government forces and reimbursement for property damage.

An end to the ban on army officers from Saddam's regime in the Iraqi military.

An end to the government ban on former members of the Baath Party which ruled the country under Saddam.

The release of insurgent detainees.

The 1920 Revolution Brigades, the umbrella for seven other groups, was established in the so-called Sunni Triangle north and west of Baghdad shortly after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Its name refers to Iraq's historical fight against British colonialism.

The group has claimed responsibility for attacking American troops, including the downing of two helicopters in 2004.

"If they set a two-year timetable for the withdrawal we will stop all our operations immediately," said the leader in a telephone interview with the AP. The man, who refused to give his name for security reasons, spoke from the telephone of one of the mediators. Others present made similar remarks.

Besides the 1920 Revolution Brigades, the eight include Abtal al-Iraq (Heroes of Iraq), the 9th of April Group, al-Fateh Brigades, al-Mukhtar Brigades, Salahuddin Brigades, Mujahedeen Army and the Brigades of the General Command of the Armed Forces. The three other groups are small organizations that also mainly operate in areas north of Baghdad.

In other developments Wednesday:

Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his special services to hunt down and "destroy" the killers of four Russian Embassy workers in Iraq.

National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie said a key al-Qaida suspect wanted in the bombing of a Shiite shrine a Tunisian identified as Yousri Fakher Mohammed Ali was captured. However, he said the Iraqi mastermind of the attack that pushed the country to the brink of civil war, Haitham Sabah Shaker Mohammed al-Badri, was at large. There never was a claim of responsibility for the bombing.

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Blair laid bare: the article that may get you arrested

2006-06-29T20:45:15+02:00

By Henry Porter

Republished from Independent Online: 29 June 2006

In the guise of fighting terrorism and maintaining public order, Tony Blair's Government has quietly and systematically taken power from Parliament and the British people. The author charts a nine-year assault on civil liberties that reveals the danger of trading freedom for security - and must have Churchill spinning in his grave

In the shadow of Winston Churchill's statue opposite the House of Commons, a rather odd ritual has developed on Sunday afternoons. A small group of people - mostly young and dressed outlandishly - hold a tea party on the grass of Parliament Square. A woman looking very much like Mary Poppins passes plates of frosted cakes and cookies, while other members of the party flourish blank placards or, as they did on the afternoon I was there, attempt a game of cricket.

Sometimes the police move in and arrest the picnickers, but on this occasion the officers stood at a distance, presumably consulting on the question of whether this was a demonstration or a non-demonstration. It is all rather silly and yet in Blair's Britain there is a kind of nobility in the amateurishness and persistence of the gesture. This collection of oddballs, looking for all the world as if they had stepped out of the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, are challenging a new law which says that no one may demonstrate within a kilometre, or a little more than half a mile, of Parliament Square if they have not first acquired written permission from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This effectively places the entire centre of British government, Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, off-limits to the protesters and marchers who have traditionally brought their grievances to those in power without ever having to ask a policeman's permission.

The non-demo demo, or tea party, is a legalistic response to the law. If anything is written on the placards, or if someone makes a speech, then he or she is immediately deemed to be in breach of the law and is arrested. The device doesn't always work. After drinking tea in the square, a man named Mark Barrett was recently convicted of demonstrating. Two other protesters, Milan Rai and Maya Evans, were charged after reading out the names of dead Iraqi civilians at the Cenotaph, Britain's national war memorial, in Whitehall, a few hundred yards away.

On that dank spring afternoon I looked up at Churchill and reflected that he almost certainly would have approved of these people insisting on their right to demonstrate in front of his beloved Parliament. "If you will not fight for the right," he once growled, "when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."

Churchill lived in far more testing times than ours, but he always revered the ancient tradition of Britain's "unwritten constitution". I imagined him becoming flesh again and walking purposefully toward Downing Street - without security, of course - there to address Tony Blair and his aides on their sacred duty as the guardians of Britain's Parliament and the people's rights.

For Blair, that youthful baby-boomer who came to power nine years ago as the embodiment of democratic liberalism as well as the new spirit of optimism in Britain, turns out to have an authoritarian streak that respects neither those rights nor, it seems, the independence of the elected representatives in Parliament. And what is remarkable - in fact almost a historic phenomenon - is the harm his government has done to the unwritten British constitution in those nine years, without anyone really noticing, without the press objecting or the public mounting mass protests. At the inception of Cool Britannia, British democracy became subject to a silent takeover.

Last year - rather late in the day, I must admit - I started to notice trends in Blair's legislation which seemed to attack individual rights and freedoms, to favour ministers (politicians appointed by the Prime Minister to run departments of government) over the scrutiny of Parliament, and to put in place all the necessary laws for total surveillance of society.

There was nothing else to do but to go back and read the Acts - at least 15 of them - and to write about them in my weekly column in The Observer. After about eight weeks, the Prime Minister privately let it be known that he was displeased at being called authoritarian by me. Very soon I found myself in the odd position of conducting a formal e-mail exchange with him on the rule of law, I sitting in my London home with nothing but Google and a stack of legislation, the Prime Minister in No 10 with all the resources of government at his disposal. Incidentally, I was assured that he had taken time out of his schedule so that he himself could compose the thunderous responses calling for action against terrorism, crime, and antisocial behaviour.

The day after the exchange was published, the grudging truce between the Government and me was broken. Blair gave a press conference, in which he attacked media exaggeration, and the then Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, weighed in with a speech at the London School of Economics naming me and two other journalists and complaining about "the pernicious and even dangerous poison" in the media.

So, I guess this column comes with a health warning from the British Government, but please don't pay it any mind. When governments attack the media, it is often a sign that the media have for once gotten something right. I might add that this column also comes with the more serious warning that, if rights have been eroded in the land once called "the Mother of Parliaments", it can happen in any country where a government actively promotes the fear of terrorism and crime and uses it to persuade people that they must exchange their freedom for security.

Blair's campaign against rights contained in the Rule of Law - that is, that ancient amalgam of common law, convention, and the opinion of experts, which makes up one half of the British constitution - is often well concealed. Many of the measures have been slipped through under legislation that appears to address problems the public is concerned about. For instance, the law banning people from demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament is contained in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005. The right to protest freely has been affected by the Terrorism Act of 2000, which allows police to stop and search people in a designated area - which can be anywhere - and by antisocial behaviour laws, which allow police to issue an order banning someone from a particular activity, waving a banner, for instance. If a person breaks that order, he or she risks a prison sentence of up to five years. Likewise, the Protection from Harassment Act of 1997 - designed to combat stalkers and campaigns of intimidation - is being used to control protest. A woman who sent two e-mails to a pharmaceutical company politely asking a member of the staff not to work with a company that did testing on animals was prosecuted for "repeated conduct" in sending an e-mail twice, which the Act defines as harassment.

There is a demonic versatility to Blair's laws. Kenneth Clarke, a former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, despairs at the way they are being used. "What is assured as being harmless when it is introduced gets used more and more in a way which is sometimes alarming," he says. His colleague David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, is astonished by Blair's Labour Party: "If I had gone on the radio 15 years ago and said that a Labour government would limit your right to trial by jury, would limit - in some cases eradicate - habeas corpus, constrain your right of freedom of speech, they would have locked me up."

Indeed they would. But there's more, so much in fact that it is difficult to grasp the scope of the campaign against British freedoms. But here goes. The right to a jury trial is removed in complicated fraud cases and where there is a fear of jury tampering. The right not to be tried twice for the same offence - the law of double jeopardy - no longer exists. The presumption of innocence is compromised, especially in antisocial behaviour legislation, which also makes hearsay admissible as evidence. The right not to be punished unless a court decides that the law has been broken is removed in the system of control orders by which a terrorist suspect is prevented from moving about freely and using the phone and internet, without at any stage being allowed to hear the evidence against him - house arrest in all but name.

Freedom of speech is attacked by Section Five of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which preceded Blair's Government, but which is now being used to patrol opinion. In Oxford last year a 21-year-old graduate of Balliol College named Sam Brown drunkenly shouted in the direction of two mounted police officers, "Mate, you know your horse is gay. I hope you don't have a problem with that." He was given one of the new, on-the-spot fines - £80 - which he refused to pay, with the result that he was taken to court. Some 10 months later the Crown Prosecution Service dropped its case that he had made homophobic remarks likely to cause disorder.

There are other people the police have investigated but failed to prosecute: the columnist Cristina Odone, who made a barely disparaging aside about Welsh people on TV (she referred to them as "little Welshies"); and the head of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, who said that homosexual practices were "not acceptable" and civil partnerships between gays were "harmful".

The remarks may be a little inappropriate, but I find myself regretting that my countrymen's opinions - their bloody-mindedness, their truculence in the face of authority, their love of insult and robust debate - are being edged out by this fussy, hairsplitting, second-guessing, politically correct state that Blair is trying to build with what he calls his "respect agenda".

Do these tiny cuts to British freedom amount to much more than a few people being told to be more considerate? Shami Chakrabarti, the petite whirlwind who runs Liberty believes that "the small measures of increasing ferocity add up over time to a society of a completely different flavour". That is exactly the phrase I was looking for. Britain is not a police state - the fact that Tony Blair felt it necessary to answer me by e-mail proves that - but it is becoming a very different place under his rule, and all sides of the House of Commons agree. The Liberal Democrats' spokesman on human rights and civil liberties, David Heath, is sceptical about Blair's use of the terrorist threat. "The age-old technique of any authoritarian or repressive government has always been to exaggerate the terrorist threat to justify their actions," he says. "I am not one to underestimate the threat of terrorism, but I think it has been used to justify measures which have no relevance to attacking terrorism effectively." And Bob Marshall-Andrews - a Labour MP who, like quite a number of others on Blair's side of the House of Commons, is deeply worried about the tone of government - says of his boss, "Underneath, there is an unstable authoritarianism which has seeped into the [Labour] Party."

Chakrabarti, who once worked as a lawyer in the Home Office, explains: "If you throw live frogs into a pan of boiling water, they will sensibly jump out and save themselves. If you put them in a pan of cold water and gently apply heat until the water boils they will lie in the pan and boil to death. It's like that." In Blair you see the champion frog boiler of modern times. He is also a lawyer who suffers acute impatience with the processes of the law. In one of his e-mails to me he painted a lurid - and often true - picture of the delinquency in some of Britain's poorer areas, as well as the helplessness of the victims. His response to the problem of societal breakdown was to invent a new category of restraint called the antisocial behaviour order, or Asbo.

"Please speak to the victims of this menace," he wrote. "They are people whose lives have been turned into a daily hell. Suppose they live next door to someone whose kids are out of control: who play their music loud until 2 am; who vilify anyone who asks them to stop; who are often into drugs or alcohol? Or visit a park where children can't play because of needles, used condoms, and hooligans hanging around.

"It is true that, in theory, each of these acts is a crime for which the police could prosecute. In practice, they don't. It would involve in each case a disproportionate amount of time, money and commitment for what would be, for any single act, a low-level sentence. Instead, they can now use an Asbo or a parenting order or other measures that attack not an offence but behaviour that causes harm and distress to people, and impose restrictions on the person doing it, breach of which would mean they go to prison."

How the Asbo works is that a complaint is lodged with a magistrates' court which names an individual or parent of a child who is said to be the source of antisocial behaviour. The actions which cause the trouble do not have to be illegal in themselves before an Asbo is granted and the court insists on the cessation of that behaviour - which may be nothing more than walking a dog, playing music, or shouting in the street. It is important to understand that the standards of evidence are much lower here than in a normal court hearing because hearsay - that is, rumour and gossip - is admissible. If a person is found to have broken an Asbo, he or she is liable to a maximum of five years in prison, regardless of whether the act is in itself illegal. So, in effect, the person is being punished for disobedience to the state.

Blair is untroubled by the precedent that this law might offer a real live despot, or by the fact that Asbos are being used to stifle legitimate protest, and indeed, in his exchange with me, he seemed to suggest that he was considering a kind of super-Asbo for more serious criminals to "harry, hassle and hound them until they give up or leave the country". It was significant that nowhere in this rant did he mention the process of law or a court.

He offers something new: not a police state but a controlled state, in which he seeks to alter radically the political and philosophical context of the criminal-justice system. "I believe we require a profound rebalancing of the civil liberties debate," he said in a speech in May. "The issue is not whether we care about civil liberties but what that means in the early 21st century." He now wants legislation to limit powers of British courts to interpret the Human Rights Act. The Act, imported from the European Convention on Human Rights, was originally inspired by Winston Churchill, who had suggested it as a means to entrench certain rights in Europe after the war.

Blair says that this thinking springs from the instincts of his generation, which is "hard on behaviour and soft on lifestyle." Actually, I was born six weeks before Blair, 53 years ago, and I can categorically say that he does not speak for all my generation. But I agree with his other self-description, in which he claims to be a moderniser, because he tends to deny the importance of history and tradition, particularly when it comes to Parliament, whose powers of scrutiny have suffered dreadfully under his government.

There can be few duller documents than the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 or the Inquiries Act of 2005, which is perhaps just as well for the Government, for both vastly extend the arbitrary powers of ministers while making them less answerable to Parliament. The Civil Contingencies Act, for instance, allows a minister to declare a state of emergency in which assets can be seized without compensation, courts may be set up, assemblies may be banned, and people may be moved from, or held in, particular areas, all on the belief that an emergency might be about to occur. Only after seven days does Parliament get the chance to assess the situation. If the minister is wrong, or has acted in bad faith, he cannot be punished.

One response might be to look into his actions by holding a government investigation under the Inquiries Act, but then the minister may set its terms, suppress evidence, close the hearing to the public, and terminate it without explanation. Under this Act, the reports of government inquiries are presented to ministers, not, as they once were, to Parliament. This fits very well into a pattern where the executive branch demands more and more unfettered power, as does Charles Clarke's suggestion that the press should be subject to statutory regulation.

I realise that it would be testing your patience to go too deeply into the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill, which the Government has been trying to smuggle through Parliament this year, but let me just say that its original draft would have allowed ministers to make laws without reference to elected representatives.

Imagine the President of the United States trying to neuter the Congress in this manner, so flagrantly robbing it of its power. Yet until recently all this has occurred in Britain with barely a whisper of coverage in the British media.

Blair is the lowest he has ever been in the polls, but he is still energetically fighting off his rival, Gordon Brown, with a cabinet reshuffle and a stout defence of his record. In an e-mail to me, Blair denied that he was trying to abolish parliamentary democracy, then swiftly moved to say how out of touch the political and legal establishments were, which is perhaps the way that he justifies these actions to himself. It was striking how he got one of his own pieces of legislation wrong when discussing control orders - or house arrest - for terrorist suspects in relation to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is incorporated into British law under the Human Rights Act. "The point about the Human Rights Act," he declared, "is that it does allow the courts to strike down the act of our 'sovereign Parliament'." As Marcel Berlins, the legal columnist of The Guardian, remarked, "It does no such thing."

How can the Prime Minister get such a fundamentally important principle concerning human rights so utterly wrong, especially when it so exercised both sides of the House of Commons? The answer is that he is probably not a man for detail, but Charles Moore, the former editor of The Daily Telegraph, now a columnist and the official biographer of Margaret Thatcher, believes that New Labour contains strands of rather sinister political DNA.

"My theory is that the Blairites are Marxist in process, though not in ideology - well, actually it is more Leninist." It is true that several senior ministers had socialist periods. Charles Clarke, John Reid, recently anointed Home Secretary, and Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary, were all on the extreme left, if not self-declared Leninists. Moore's implication is that the sacred Blair project of modernising Britain has become a kind of ersatz ideology and that this is more important to Blair than any of the country's political or legal institutions. "He's very shallow," says Moore. "He's got a few things he wants to do and he rather impressively pursues them."

One of these is the national ID card scheme, opposition to which brings together such disparate figures as the Earl of Onslow, a Conservative peer of the realm; Commander George Churchill-Coleman, the famous head of New Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist unit during the worst years of IRA bombings; and Neil Tennant, one half of the hugely successful pop group Pet Shop Boys.

The idea of the ID card seems sensible in the age of terrorism, identity theft, and illegal immigration until you realise that the centralised database - the National Identity Register - will log and store details of every important action in a person's life. When the ID card is swiped as someone identifies himself at, say, a bank, hospital, pharmacy, or insurance company, those details are retained and may be inspected by, among others, the police, tax authorities, customs, and MI5, the domestic intelligence service. The system will locate and track the entire adult population. If you put it together with the national system of licence-plate-recognition cameras, which is about to go live on British highways and in town centres, and understand that the ID card, under a new regulation, will also carry details of a person's medical records, you realise that the state will be able to keep tabs on anyone it chooses and find out about the most private parts of a person's life.

Despite the cost of the ID card system - estimated by the Government as being about £5.8bn and by the London School of Economics as being between £10bn and £19bn - few think that it will attack the problems of terrorism and ID theft.

George Churchill-Coleman described it to me as an absolute waste of time. "You and I will carry them because we are upright citizens. But a terrorist isn't going to carry [his own]. He will be carrying yours."

Neil Tennant, a former Labour donor who has stopped giving money to and voting for Labour because of ID cards, says: "My specific fear is that we are going to create a society where a policeman stops me on the way to Waitrose on the King's Road and says, 'Can I see your identity card?' I don't see why I should have to do that." Tennant says he may leave the country if a compulsory ID card comes into force. "We can't live in a total-surveillance society," he adds. "It is to disrespect us."

Defending myself against claims of paranoia and the attacks of Labour's former home secretary, I have simply referred people to the statute book of British law, where the evidence of what I have been saying is there for all to see. But two other factors in this silent takeover are not so visible. The first is a profound change in the relationship between the individual and the state. Nothing demonstrates the sense of the state's entitlement over the average citizen more than the new laws that came in at the beginning of the year and allow anyone to be arrested for any crime - even dropping litter. And here's the crucial point. Once a person is arrested he or she may be fingerprinted and photographed by the police and have a DNA sample removed with an oral swab - by force if necessary. And this is before that person has been found guilty of any crime, whether it be dropping litter or shooting someone.

So much for the presumption of innocence, but there again we have no reason to be surprised. Last year, in his annual Labour Party conference speech, Blair said this: "The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don't misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety. It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn't mean abandoning human rights. It means deciding whose come first." The point of human rights, as Churchill noted, is that they treat the innocent, the suspect, and the convict equally: "These are the symbols, in the treatment of crime and criminals, which mark and measure the stored-up strength of a nation, and are a sign and proof of the living virtue in it."

The DNA database is part of this presumption of guilt. Naturally the police support it, because it has obvious benefits in solving crimes, but it should be pointed out to any country considering the compulsory retention of the DNA of innocent people that in Britain 38 per cent of all black men are represented on the database, while just 10 percent of white men are. There will be an inbuilt racism in the system until - heaven forbid - we all have our DNA taken and recorded on our ID cards.

Baroness Kennedy, a lawyer and Labour peer, is one of the most vocal critics of Blair's new laws. In the annual James Cameron Memorial Lecture at the City University, London, in April she gave a devastating account of her own party's waywardness. She accused government ministers of seeing themselves as the embodiment of the state, rather than, as I would put it, the servants of the state.

"The common law is built on moral wisdom," she said, "grounded in the experience of ages, acknowledging that governments can abuse power and when a person is on trial the burden of proof must be on the state and no one's liberty should be removed without evidence of the highest standard. By removing trial by jury and seeking to detain people on civil Asbo orders as a pre-emptive strike, by introducing ID cards, the Government is creating new paradigms of state power. Being required to produce your papers to show who you are is a public manifestation of who is in control. What we seem to have forgotten is that the state is there courtesy of us and we are not here courtesy the state."

The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best expressed by Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught from the Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has been lost in the British people. "We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and surveillance within an open and free environment," he says. "That architecture only has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the Government to have control.

"That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate. They've bought the Government's arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively And that is the great lesson that other countries must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions of individual freedom."

Those who understand what has gone on in Britain have the sense of being in one of those nightmares where you are crying out to warn someone of impending danger, but they cannot hear you. And yet I do take some hope from the picnickers of Parliament Square. May the numbers of these young eccentrics swell and swell over the coming months, for their actions are a sign that the spirit of liberty and dogged defiance are not yet dead in Britain.

This article is taken from the current issue of Vanity Fair

Charged for quoting George Orwell in public

In another example of the Government's draconian stance on political protest, Steven Jago, 36, a management accountant, yesterday became the latest person to be charged under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act.

On 18 June, Mr Jago carried a placard in Whitehall bearing the George Orwell quote: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." In his possession, he had several copies of an article in the American magazine Vanity Fair headlined "Blair's Big Brother Legacy", which were confiscated by the police. "The implication that I read from this statement at the time was that I was being accused of handing out subversive material," said Mr Jago. Yesterday, the author, Henry Porter, the magazine's London editor, wrote to Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, expressing concern that the freedom of the press would be severely curtailed if such articles were used in evidence under the Act.

Mr Porter said: "The police told Mr Jago this was 'politically motivated' material, and suggested it was evidence of his desire to break the law. I therefore seek your assurance that possession of Vanity Fair within a designated area is not regarded as 'politically motivated' and evidence of conscious law-breaking."

Scotland Yard has declined to comment.

Enemies of the state?

Maya Evans 25

The chef was arrested at the Cenotaph in Whitehall reading out the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. She was the first person to be convicted under section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, which requires protesters to obtain police permission before demonstrating within one kilometre of Parliament.

Helen John 68, and Sylvia Boyes 62

The Greenham Common veterans were arrested in April by Ministry of Defence police after walking 15ft across the sentry line at the US military base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. Protesters who breach any one of 10 military bases across Britain can be jailed for a year or fined £5,000.

Brian Haw 56

Mr Haw has become a fixture in Parliament Square with placards berating Tony Blair and President Bush. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 was designed mainly with his vigil in mind. After being arrested, he refused to enter a plea. However, Bow Street magistrates' court entered a not guilty plea on his behalf in May.

Walter Wolfgang 82

The octogenarian heckled Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, during his speech to the Labour Party conference. He shouted "That's a lie" as Mr Straw justified keeping British troops in Iraq. He was manhandled by stewards and ejected from the Brighton Centre. He was briefly detained under Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act.

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Arming the Heavens: Why we must oppose US weapons in space

2006-06-29T20:36:51+02:00

Three terrible dangers face the world.

The first, global warming, has received much attention, if only relatively modest political action so far.

The second threat is the very real and increasing dangers of nuclear proliferation, and the dangers of terrorists acquiring nuclear materials and weapons. The collapse of the May 2005 non-proliferation talks, mostly due to U.S. intransigence, is a tragedy. And, despite the importance of nuclear proliferation, I doubt if one in a thousand are even aware of or concerned with the issue. The Bush administration failed to send a single high-ranking official to the May talks, even though they were held in New York with 153 nations in attendance.

The third issue, the weaponization of space, may represent the greatest and most urgent danger for the future and the survival of our civilization.

When we talk about the weaponization of space, we're not simply postulating about something that might happen in the distant future. There is already an abundance of irrefutable evidence that the United States intends to place weapons in space, beginning as early as 2008.

Here's a recent quote from the New York Times, May 3, 2006:

The Bush administration is seeking to develop a powerful ground-based laser weapon that would use beams of concentrated light to destroy enemy satellites in orbit.

The largely secret project, parts of which have been made public through Air Force budget documents submitted to Congress in February, is a part of a wide-ranging effort to develop space weapons, both defensive and offensive.

Some Congressional Democrats and other experts fault the research as potential fuel for an anti-satellite arms race that could ultimately hurt the U.S. more than others because the United States relies so heavily on military satellites.

The Air Force has pursued the secret research for several years. In January 2001, a commission led by Donald Rumsfeld warned that the American military faced a potential "Pearl Harbor" in space and called for a defensive arsenal of space weapons.

There is zero question that the U.S. plans to "control space" and plans to "deny others the use of space" for any purpose the U.S. now opposes, or might oppose in the future.

Both the Russians and the Chinese understand that although they strongly oppose the weaponization of space, they will have no choice but to deploy their own offensive and defensive space weapons, regardless of the potentially cataclysmic consequences.

Even though ultimately the U.S. would be infinitely more secure by joining with other nations in opposing space weaponization, the military-industrial complex in the U.S. has grown so powerful in Washington that rationality relating to perceived threats from China no longer exists, and growing administration paranoia reigns supreme.

The China syndrome

While Russia once again is considered a threat in the Pentagon, it is Beijing that is the focus of growing fears in Washington.

The result now is rising tensions in all three countries and plans for large new military expenditures and deployments. There is no longer a potential for a horrendously expensive new arms race. It's here already. The potential for a disastrous conflict over Taiwan is real and increasing.

In a widely circulated article in Foreign Affairs during the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, George W. Bush's then foreign adviser, one Condoleezza Rice, warned that China, even six years ago, presented a danger to U.S. interests, and that the U.S. must prevent China's rise as a regional power.

In the spring of last year, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, of all things, complained about China's military buildup, suggesting that clearly this will be threatening to the U.S. (Rumsfeld somehow neglected to mention that total U.S. military spending in 2006 will be $562 billion, over eight and half times China's military spending.)

Meanwhile, as has been widely reported, the Bush administration is doing everything it can to curtail Chinese influence in Asia, while the U.S. Defense Department is expanding and enlarging the American military presence in areas adjacent to China.

In a February, 2006 Pentagon document, a long-standing U.S. position is repeated. The United States "will attempt to dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive or other capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the United States" and China is clearly identified as the greatest threat.

New arms race

What are the implications according to Mr. Rumsfeld's Pentagon? No question. The U.S. must and will develop new weapons systems to guarantee American victory in a major all-out military confrontation.

In the words of Peace and World Security Professor Michael T. Klare of Hampshire College in Massachusetts:

Preparing for war with China, in other words, is to be the future cash cow for the giant U.S weapons-making corporations in the military-industrial complex (and it) will be the prime justification for the acquisition of the costly new weapons systems such as the F-22A Raptor air-superiority fighter, the DDX destroyer, the Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine and a new inter-continental penetrating bomber.

Even now, the U.S. Navy is upgrading its presence in the Western Pacific to six aircraft carriers and 60 per cent of its submarines will be in the area, and the U.S. has been conducting its largest military maneuvers near China since the end of the Vietnam War. Klare continues:

From Beijing's perspective, the reality must be unmistakable: a steady buildup of American military power along China's eastern, southern, and western boundaries.

China...has always responded to perceived threats of encirclement in a vigorous and muscular fashion...Beijing will (respond) with a military buildup of its own.

What is happening in Washington now is almost beyond belief. The embarrassing downgrading to "official visit," instead of a state visit, of President Hu Jintao's trip to Washington was a serious loss of face for President Hu. The same neocon theocons who brought us Iraq planned the event and are now clearly dedicated to and relishing a China-U.S. confrontation.

Dangerous prize: oil

Anyone considering a potential for conflict between the U.S. and China must consider the principal reason the U.S. invaded Iraq: oil. And anyone considering oil must regard recent American warnings to China not to attempt to secure more oil supplies in the future as the height of the most arrogant hypocrisy.

The U.S. now uses just over 20 million barrels of oil a day. China consumes about 6.5 million. Keeping in mind China's 1.3 billion population, and that it is now the second-biggest consumer of oil in the world, and considering its real annual GDP growth of about 9 per cent, plus the fact that within a very few years China's number of automobiles will be almost 100 times what it was in the mid-to-late 1980s, the New York Times suggests that by 2030 the country will have more cars than the U.S. The Times puts it well:

The United States doesn't have the right to tell a third of humanity to go back to their bicycles...Asking other countries to lay off the world's oil supply so America can continue to support its gas-guzzling Hummers doesn't really cut it.

The bottom line here? It's not just Taiwan that could provoke a deadly confrontation between the world's major superpower and a rapidly emerging new giant superpower. Oil and other resources are bound to pose significant dangers to peace.

Last month, American generals invited representatives of 91 countries to discuss the U.S. war on terrorism. China, which borders on so many countries involved in terrorist activities, was not invited to the meeting. But the intentional snub was carefully noted. The Pentagon regards China as a "strategic competitor." Obviously, for the U.S., more important in the war against terrorism are the likes of Albania, Tonga and Tajikistan.

Russians ramp up

A few words about Russia.

Last month, the Kremlin chief of staff accused the United States of planning "a whole arsenal of new destabilizing weapons."

Meanwhile, for over a year, Russia has been claiming unrivalled success in the development of new missiles capable of penetrating any missile shield. The new Topol-M and Bulava ballistic missiles are each equipped with six nuclear warheads, and Russia has reaffirmed plans to maintain a minimum of 2000 warheads for as far as one can speculate into the future.

The head of the top Russian missile-design centre, Yuri Solomonov, says Russia will soon unveil plans to adapt the new Bulava missile for both land-based strategic use and for its nuclear submarines.

Not to be ignored are the many and increasing signs of unprecedented Russian and Chinese military, economic and political cooperation.

Both countries are firmly opposed to the weaponization of space. Both have pleaded many times for an effective anti-weapons-in-space-treaty.

And both will certainly respond with their own space weapons when the U.S. forces them to do so.

Misguided weapons

Well, of course, the greatest irony of all in the U.S. policy is that placing weapons in space will seriously reduce U.S. security rather than increasing it, just as the invasion of Iraq substantially increased the potential for future attacks on the U.S., rather than increasing so-called "homeland" security.

A further irony is that by withdrawing from the existing international agreements such as the 1972 ABM Treaty and by failing to support or actively block effective agreements on non-proliferation, fissile materials, nuclear testing, the development of space weapons, and other international agreements, the U.S. rather than increasing protection for the American people, is actually increasing the danger of attacks.

Yet another further irony is that there is an abundance of scientific documentation showing that space weapons are not only terribly expensive, but are at the same time vulnerable to far less costly countermeasures.

For the Rumsfelds, the Cheneys, the White House and Defense hawks, it is inevitable that space will be weaponized, so the U.S. "had better be the first" in this "ultimate high ground" battlefield of the future.

This means deploying anti-satellite weapons, sensors and lasers and hit-to-kill weapons, plus space to ground weapons including powerful, enormously destructive lasers, so-called tungsten "rods or god," etc. It means satellite jamming and destruction and the disruption of communications.

For the Pentagon, space superiority will be essential and of the utmost importance in the battles of the future.

Accidental doomsday

Four respected American space weapons experts, Bruce M. DeBlois, Richard L. Garwin, Scott Kemp and Jeremy C. Maxwell note that:

In a recent space war game, U.S. commanders found that preemptively deploying or denying an opponent's space based information assets could lead to a rapid escalation into full scale war, even triggering nuclear weapon use. As one "enemy" commander commented: "If I don't know what's doing on, I have no choice but to hit everything, using everything I have."

...war through accident, misunderstanding, or the action of a third party (would be a grave danger without) multilateral agreements on space.

Space weapons, paradoxically, seem more likely to imperil than to protect overall U.S. military capability.

Not to mention the overall safety of millions of men, women and children around the world.

Stop for a moment to contemplate the meaning of a decision to "hit everything" and "use everything."

The deployment of space weapons will be certain to inflame, will immediately produce dangerous instability and feelings of vulnerability that other nations will feel must be addressed. As DeBlois, Garwin, Kemp and Maxwell suggest, the best strategy for the U.S. would be:

An aggressive campaign to prevent the deployment of weapons by other nations which might best be implemented as a U.S. commitment not to be the first to deploy or test a space weapon or to further test destructive anti-satellite weapons. A treaty would have the added benefit of legitimizing the use of sanctions or force...

Harper's shift

Well, this is very nice, except for one problem. It will never happen as long as George W. Bush is President of the United States. And, it will never happen even with a Democrat is the Oval Office, so long as the military-industrial complex continues to finance a corrupt, undemocratic American electoral system. The failure of efforts to reform elections and election financing in the U.S. is a tragedy, not only for that country, but a real potential tragedy for all of mankind. If the U.S. proceeds with its plans to weaponize space, the chances of a cataclysmic nuclear holocaust will be real and not far over the horizon.

Canada's position on the weaponization of space has been clear for over 30 years. Canada has not only been strongly opposed to the weaponization of space, but has long been a leader among nations in this opposition.

The question for Canadians now is what will the Harper government do in response to the dangerous American plans? Given Harper's desire to move closer to the Bush administration, given his decision to further integrate Canada's military with the U.S. military as we have already seen with the renewal and expansion of NORAD, given the government's dedication to helping the U.S. out in Afghanistan, given the governments desire to revisit the question of missile defence, is there much doubt that Canada's opposition to U.S. plans for the weaponization of space will be muted, if not entirely non-existent?

So to summarize:

The United States plans to weaponize space.
The Chinese and Russia reaction will surely be to do the same thing.
The potential for a horrendous, cataclysmic nuclear confrontation will be inevitable.
There is no reason to believe that traditional government diplomacy and negotiation will alter any of the above.
There are currently no political leaders in Canada or in the United States who are likely capable of changing any of this.

A citizens' revolt

Bleak? Yes.

Realistic? Unfortunately yes.

The question, the paramount question, is do we want to save this planet, save our families and our friends, save our civilization, or are we going to allow the Strangelovean madman in Washington to destroy the world?

Can anything be done? Perhaps.

What can we do if we can't rely on our political leaders, or on a conservative media increasingly owned and controlled by wealthy right-wing plutocrats?

I can think of only one thing we can try, a people's revolt employing the internet.

In Canada in 2004, we used the internet to dramatically turn around the debate about Canada's participation in the absurd American missile defence plan. Through the wide dissemination of authoritative scientific information, in a few months we turned the public opinion polls around from roughly 65 per cent in favour to 65 per cent opposed. We had press conferences featuring our own Canadian experts, and we brought in respected experts from outside the country. We provided such an abundance of valuable information that citizens were previously not aware of, that the growing passion and anger across the country left the Martin government with little choice.

Even though the Liberals fully intended to join in with the Americans, even though our defence minister was sent down to Washington to inform Donald Rumsfeld that they could count on Canada, the growing strongly-opposed to polls forced Ottawa to change its mind with an election on the horizon and with more and more Liberal MP's now opposed. Yes, there were a few books, lots of speeches, and articles supporting our position, but the single most effective tool we had was the internet and the information we provided Canadians across the country via the net.

Organize in cyberspace

With so many peace, disarmament, environmental and other groups to call on, a properly organized viral internet campaign could force even the Harper government to renew our long-standing Canadian strong opposition to the weaponization of space.

A long shot? You bet.

Could it succeed? Absolutely

Citizens won't be able to rely on our current government leadership in Canada or the U.S. for us to win this one. We have to do it ourselves. Canada could lead the way.

I wish we could rely on our politicians, but we can't.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps there's a better idea.

If there is, I'd certainly like to hear about it.

Bombs Away, a youth-driven campaign of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, opposed the Liberal government's aim to join the U.S. effort to weaponize space. Their web site is here.

This article is drawn from an address given yesterday by Mel Hurtig to the World Peace Forum in Vancouver. Hurtig is the National Chairman of the Committee for an Independent Canada and is the founder and former Chairman of the Council of Canadians. Among his many bestselling books is Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence and Star Wars, which the Globe and Mail review called "perhaps the most important book published in Canada this year."

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China! The new neo-colonialists in Africa?

2006-06-29T12:52:27+02:00

The favourable business environment in Africa is of course no secret to the multinationals and post 9-11 investments into Africa have been flowing in from various countries at a feverish pace. China, the fastest growing economy on the planet, has started making inroads into the African markets after establishing a Sino-Africa Business Council. Trade between China and Africa registed an unprecedented growth of ninefold between 1999 and 2003 and stands at approximately $18 billion. Trade analysyts expect this figure to reach a whopping $110 Billion by 2008.

China National Petroleum Company has acquired a 40 per cent stake in one of Sudan’s major oil exploration project and Chinese workers built a 1,600 kilometre long pipeline in Sudan. In fact, China has been actively partnering with African governments to meet its rising demand for oil. In March, 2004 the Chinese governemnt extended a soft loan of $2billion to Angola to secure a regular supply of 10,00 barels of oil per day.

In Zimbabwe, China has reportedly finalised a deal to supply the African nation with fighter jets and other military goods worth $200 million. China has taken advantage of the isolation resulting from the moral and financial bankrupcy of Mugabe's government in the eyes of the Western powers. Indeed, Trade and tourism ties between China and Zimbabwe have been "flourishing" in recent years. A growing number of Chinese citizens are now travelling to Zimbabwe "to enjoy the many tourist attractions that the country of Robert Mugabe as to offer"!! The increased trade and tourism ties between Zimbabwe and China has resulted in the recent announcement of twice-weekly direct flights between Harare and Beijing. In fact, speculation is rife that the exiled western farmers of Zimbabwe will eventually be replaced by Chinese investors eager to capitalise in Zimbawe’s ailing tobbaco farming industry. Chinese companies are also reportedly vying to gain a major share of Zimbabwe’s lucrative mineral extraction industry.

In Zambia, Chinese contractors have said to have won a contract worth $600 million to build a hydroelectric plant at Kague Gorge. Other Chinese construction companies are also reportedly working on lucrative contracts to build hotels, roads and bridges in Botswana and South Africa. High level delegations from China have been busy forging trade ties with various African countries and have bee touring countries like Nigeria, Gabon, Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

Exports from Africa to China have also been registering a marked growth in recent years. South Africa’s exports to China have more than doubled in the last five years. Notable among these exports are raw materials needed to meet the rising demand for China’s manufacturing sector – commodities like coal and gold. Chinese companies have also been using African factories to stitch garments using Chinese raw materials and cloth for exports to the United States under the AGOA agreement that allows duty free imports from certian African countries into the United States.

China's position with regard to its relationship with African countries is that it has simply been making efforts to establish "a new strategic partnership with political equality and mutual trust, economic cooperation and cultural exchange". However, some of the talking heads have recently attempted to "discredit Sino-African relations" by, "propagating their African version of the 'China threat' theory".

Among other things, the charge has been levelled that China is trying to impose "a kind of neo-colonialism on Africa" and that they are plundering Africa's resources. This is seen by China as an attempt to "drive a wedge between China and African countries and to destroy the Sino-Africa Cooperation". Indeed these statements could be said to lack historical basis and are open to obvious charges of hypocrisy. China has a very dark side undoubtedly with regard to its Human Rights record. But for Western pundits to accuse China of colonialism in Africa really is the pot calling the kettle black. Its likely purpose is to obstruct Chinese enterprises from accessing the African market and safeguard the interests of Western countries in Africa.

It is well noted that Western colonial powers committed numerous crimes including slavery in their exploitation of Africa. At a conference in Berlin in 1885, European powers secretly divided up Africa between them and rewrote the map of Africa by setting up about 50 colonies and protectorates. In addition to trade and military control, European powers also gradually molded African countries into their material suppliers and product-dumping markets. This too can be used as a measure of exploitation. It resulted in single and abnormal economic structures in many countries, thereby having a long-term impact on the sustainable economic development of these nations.

European colonial powers also introduced new languages and new clans to Africa, which created ethnic conflicts, incited religious dissent and provoked religious conflict, thereby undermining the traditional African social and economic order. As a result, African countries have been in a poor and backward state since they were granted independence. Even today, those industries which are of utmost importance to African countries' economic lifeline such as heavy industry, mining and manufacturing are owned by Western multinational corporations.

Since the 9/11 attacks, Western countries have adjusted their policies toward Africa. starting to attach greater importance to African countries because of the significance of its resources. The proportion of African oil imported by the United States has risen to 16 percent and is expected to hit 25 percent by 2015. Nigeria is Africa's largest oil producer and the world's sixth largest oil exporter. However 95 percent of its daily oil output is under the control of Western oil companies.

In order to maximize profits in Niger Delta oil-producing areas, major Western oil companies reduced spending on infrastructure construction. Frequent pipeline ruptures have led to the spontaneous combustion of oil spill fire. Large areas of farmland and forest have been burned to ashes. Thick smoke has generated heavy pollution in the air, soil and rivers. Surrounding residents cannot even drink clean water. Long-term exploitation by these companies has led to recurrent violence in the area. Since the second half of last year, the unstable situation in this region has become the major reason for the rise in international crude oil prices. The predatory exploitation of African resources by largely Western transnational corporations is the real cause of the so-called "economic colonialism" of Africa, despite transparent mainstream media attempts to snipe at the easy target of China so enthusiastically.

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Venezuela will set fire to its oil deposits in the event of a US military operation

2006-06-29T12:28:30+02:00

Venezuela will set fire to its oil deposits in the event of a US military operation, Venezuelan Ambassador to Russia, Navarro Alexis Rojas said at a news conference in Moscow, Wednesday.

“Such an invasion would be aimed at gaining control over oil. We will set our oil fields on fire in the event of any invasion. It will be our first response to it,” the Interfax news agency quoted the diplomat as saying.

Oil prices would skyrocket if reports claiming any imminent aggression appeared, the ambassador said. Venezuela would also take advantage of Latin America’s solidarity agreements, he said.

Venezuela has raised worries in the United States by purchasing a large batch of assault rifles from Russia and reportedly being in talks to buy several Russian combat aircraft.

The Rosoboronexport Federal State Unitary Enterprise displayed one hundred and fifty types of armaments and other military hardware at the “Expo Ejercito-2006” international show, which ended in Venezuela, last weekend

This annual exhibition was held for the first time in spite of the embargo on arms deliveries to Venezuela, which the Bush administration had clamped down on the country last May.

The American sanctions were allegedly imposed due to the Venezuelan authorities’ insufficient backing of Washington’s fight against terrorism. The embargo was clamped down, in particular, on the deliveries of spares for the American F-16 fighters with which the Venezuelan Air Force is armed. Due to this, President Hugo Chavez announced last week a decision to buy twenty-four Russian multi-functional Su-30 fighters to renew the country’s aviation pool and to replace the American F-16 planes.

Leader of the Russian delegation and Chief of the Rosoboronexport Regional Department Sergei Ladygin held talks in the course of the show on the promotion of Russia’s defense contacts with Venezuela, which are being implemented in keeping with the inter-state agreement on military-technology cooperation between the two countries.
Interviewed by Itar-Tass, Ladygin confirmed that the negotiations were all by completed on the delivery of Russian fighters and helicopters to Venezuela and on the licensed production within the country of AK-103 submachine-guns and ammunition for them, on the establishment of a servicing and training centre to take care of the delivered helicopters.

Ladygin spoke highly of the level of military-technology cooperation with Venezuela, which he stated was "mutually profitable and in keeping with the international agreements, regulating the sale of armaments and military equipment".

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U.N. Council Urged to Protect Civilians

2006-06-29T12:14:16+02:00

By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press Writer

June 29, 2006, 4:36 AM EDT

UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. humanitarian chief urged the Security Council to do more to protect civilians from conflicts and terror attacks, saying thousands have died in recent months in Iraq, Afghanistan and several African countries.

The Security Council should have acted against those in Ivory Coast who inspired and directed mob violence against civilians and humanitarian organizations in January, and against the militias and warlords receiving daily arms shipments in Somalia in violation of an embargo, Jan Egeland told an open meeting of the panel on Wednesday.

Egeland said the council didn't act because it was "overburdened by many responsibilities" and should give Ivory Coast and Somalia the same attention that the conflicts in Congo and Sudan's western Darfur region have received in recent months.

"The world is indeed a safer place for most of us, but it is still a death trap for too many defenseless civilians, men, women and children," Egeland said. "Despite all our efforts, women are still raped and violated as a matter of course, children are still forcibly recruited, and defenseless civilians continue to be killed."

Despite the council's focus, the situation in Congo and Sudan remains precarious, he said.

"Up to 1,200 people are dying in silence every day" in Congo, he said. In Darfur, the African Union has reported 69 people killed since the Darfur Peace Agreement was signed on May 3, but "we know the real figures are much higher," he added.

"However, it is in Iraq that the greatest numbers of civilians are being killed by indiscriminate acts of terror and sectarian and conflict violence," Egeland said.

Baghdad's main mortuary has received over 6,000 bodies of Iraqis killed since the beginning of the year, he said, citing Iraqi Health Ministry figures. President Bush, he noted, has estimated more than 30,000 Iraqis were killed between March 2003 -- the start of the Iraq war -- and the end of 2005.

In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai said recently that up to 600 civilians had been killed in recent weeks, Egeland said.

He called for stepped-up action by local, national and regional leaders and groups to protect civilians. Egeland also called for earlier efforts to mediate conflicts, new approaches to peacekeeping, access for humanitarian workers and, most importantly, well-trained and financed peacekeepers with strong mandates to protect civilians.

The international community needs peacekeepers trained to deal with human rights abuses in Darfur and across the border in eastern Chad, where the conflict has spilled over, he said. Nor are there enough trained policemen to deal with groups like Ivory Coast's pro-government Young Patriots militia, which is using street violence to advance its agenda, he said.

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Many newspapers' websites are still behaving rather like Iron Curtain commissars in 1989

2006-06-28T11:05:12+02:00

June 2006 By: Oliver Luft

Republished from www.journalism.co.uk

Internet journalism is still in its infancy.

Yet already websites are a primary source of news and information for millions and the web seems certain to become the dominant journalistic medium within a few years.

It's no secret why. Most simply and obviously, the internet is the most versatile and complete of media - the only one that can mix words, pictures, video and sound and be constantly and instantaneously updated.

Our audience expects, when they log on, to get the very latest news. They don't want to wait until the next bulletin on the hour or the following day's paper.

A news website can and should be like a newspaper that is published and republished every minute of every day.

Even more important is the relationship that internet companies encourage with their audience.

We don't simply want to bring people the news; we want to be the medium through which people share and discuss what is going on, through messageboards, chatrooms and blogs.

The two big news events of 2005 - the tsunami and the July 7 bombings - were key landmarks in internet journalism as online sites such as AOL produced compelling packages that mixed words, pictures, audio, video and contributions from witnesses and those involved in the incidents.

Millions came to our sites to see the news unfold and to discuss it and react to it. The mix of content we provided seems like the model for the way internet journalism will develop.

So where does this leave newspapers? On the most brutal view they are stuck on the hard shoulder of the information superhighway.

Circulations are falling but the press seems content to churn out a tired editorial mix that hasn't substantially changed in the past forty or fifty years.

The process of getting journalists' words to readers' breakfast tables is a daily organisational miracle but, compared with the immediacy of the internet, is practically guaranteed to provide a product that is out-of-date before it is consumed.

The same malaise by and large infects papers' websites. In newsrooms geared up to the daily ritual of producing a print edition, the internet is a poor relation.

Journalists expect to see their best work in the paper. Editors and business managers want to preserve the commercial value of their print editions.

So readers must wait until the following morning for the best articles, the biggest exclusives.

Newspapers continue to cling to an "us and them" world in which journalists are clever, informed, well-connected experts who find out what is going on, decide what is important and what isn't, analyse what it all means and present it to their grateful readers.

And if readers have opinions on the issues of the day, well, the journalists are frankly not terribly interested.

They may publish a handful of readers' letters but they don't really want to know what you think. It's your job to listen to them - not the other way around.

This is a state of affairs that clearly suits journalists and flatters their egos but readers seem to find it less satisfying.

They want to have their say, to react to the news and to the media's take on the news. The internet, with its messageboards, chatrooms and blogs, provides them with that opportunity.

Newspapers initially ignored the phenomenon or looked down on it as a kind of inadequate, amateurish version of journalism.

Even now, some newspaper sites still refuse to accept comments from their users, while others pre-vet and post only a 'representative selection'.

In the face of a wave of media democratisation, many are still behaving rather like Iron Curtain commissars in 1989.

Newspapers as dinosaurs lumbering towards their own extinction: that's the gloomy view of the current media landscape. But there are grounds for a more optimistic outlook.

Papers remain hugely powerful brands. To say that someone is a Sun reader, Guardian reader or Mail reader is instantly understood shorthand and shows that papers still stand for something.

It is possible to produce a newspaper that makes sense in the modern media age. Look at the Metro papers: rigorously designed to meet the needs of a young, time-pressured commuter audience and hugely successful.

Another positive sign is that newspapers are starting to address the internet seriously.

The Guardian’s Comment is Free site is a genuine attempt to get to grips with the blogging phenomenon.

Several papers are taking cautious steps into 'web-first' publishing. Time will tell whether they are adapting quickly enough.

Technology may yet ride to papers' rescue. 'Electronic paper' - digital screens that you can roll up and stuff in your back pocket - has been promised for years and could soon be with us. When it finally arrives, it could breathe new life into the press.

Most importantly, newspapers have the knowledge and resources to provide great journalism.

Though sites like AOL are producing more and more of our own content, in key areas like news and sport reporting, we continue to utilise the expertise of long-standing newsgathering organisations.

We don't have reporters on the scene of breaking stories or networks of correspondents and experts around the world. One future for some newspapers may be as suppliers to big online brands.

Some papers will manage to make the transition from print to online in their own right and those that succeed will do so because of the quality of their journalism.

Specifically, what will set them apart is quality reporting in breadth and depth combined with radical thinking about how to present information in a new medium, rather than simply reproducing the conventions of print on a computer screen.

Like any other medium, the internet depends on great content. Newspapers need to make sure they are in a position to supply it.

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Oil-for-food trial eyes backroom tactics in Saddam's Iraq

2006-06-28T10:47:51+02:00

Republished from Antiwar

(REUTERS) The prosecutor in the first U.S. federal trial over the U.N. oil-for-food program said on Tuesday he would show evidence of kickbacks, intrigue and back channel tactics during the United Nations dealings with Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

Prosecutor Michael Farbiarz laid out his case in opening arguments at the trial of South Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park, who is accused of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the former Iraqi President .

Farbiarz said evidence would show that during 1996 Park received substantial cash payments from Iraq, including an envelope with $100,000, and by the end of 1996 the oil-for-food program was in place.

But defense attorney Michael Kim said Park was just "a middleman or facilitator, like almost everybody else involved in the giant international game of oil and money."

The oil-for-food program allowed Iraq to sell oil and use the proceeds to buy nonmilitary goods, under U.N. supervision. It aimed to ease the impact of U.N. sanctions imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, but the $67 billion program was rife with corruption, investigators say.

Several defendants are facing criminal charges in federal court in New York in connection with the program.

Kim urged jurors not to be blinded by the prosecution's presentation of intrigue and reminded them that Park was not charged with spying or selling access to the United Nations.

Park, 71, faces charges in U.S. District Court of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government and money laundering. He has pleaded not guilty and faces a maximum of five years in jail

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A new breed of paramilitary takes power in Colombia

2006-06-28T10:34:48+02:00

By Diana Cariboni

Republished from Inter Press Service

Legend has it that Ciudad Bolivar, a poor neighbourhood strung along the hills on the south side of the Colombian capital, is so called because independence hero Simon Bolivar briefly took refuge in the area after narrowly escaping an assassination attempt in 1828. Today, it is riddled with the concrete failure of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s push for paramilitary demobilisation. Large urban areas are now finding themselves run by organized crime

Some eight ultra-right paramilitary groups are said to have a toehold in Ciudad Bolivar and neighbouring Altos de Cazuca (Cazuca Heights) in the municipality of Soacha.The situation is basically like living in an area controlled by a well-organized, heavily armed mafia.This new breed of paramilitaries will be easier for the government to ignore, since Uribe can simply say, “we already disarmed them.” And as long as the FARC and the government are fighting openly, Uribe can simply ignore his urban areas.

At least three are offshoots of the bloc of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC- the paramilitary umbrella organisation) that was headed by drug lord Miguel Arroyave until his death in 2004—likely at the hands of his own men. At the time he had been negotiating with the government as part of the disarmament process.

Ombudsman Roberto Sicard says there are three groups made up of former AUC members, from the Central-Santander Bloc and the Capital Bloc, in the slums of Altos de Cazuca, where 17,000 of the area’s 50,000 residents took refuge after being displaced by the civil war.

Sicard coordinates the United Nations-funded “House of Rights,” almost the only presence the state has in Altos de Cazuca, a marginalised zone where water runs only two hours a week.

Some sources report that the right-wing groups threaten and murder community leaders and activists, more or less force youth into “social cleansing” of suspected criminals (indeed, rampant unemployment provides little incentive for young people to refuse the opportunity for steady pay) and forcibly collect “taxes” from businesses and bus and taxi drivers.

The area is also ripe with cocaine labs—the fuel for the country’s long-running armed conflict.

Thrown into the mix, say these sources, are “pseudo-paramilitaries,” who operate as “subsidiaries” of the AUC or rent their criminal services to the highest bidder.

“In Colombia, I don’t think people kill for ideology—they kill for food or power,” Sicard told some 20 journalists from several South American countries who visited the area in mid-June.

In Ciudad Bolivar, the armed conflict is reflected in “the network of informants (who give information to the police and army), paramilitary control and the collection of ‘taxes’,” explained Michael Jordan, director of the Latin American regional office of Diakonia, a German non-governmental organisation that provides aid in disaster situations.

“Constant threats and selective killings” are the norm, and the situation does not involve classic military confrontation, Jordan said.

One 40-year-old man, the president of a town council in Cazuca who wished to remain anonymous, told IPS that he and 13 other community leaders have received death threats from illegal groups. “On May 30 they attacked me with knives and ordered me to leave the area.”

“People are scared. We thought carefully about whether we should file a joint complaint, but in the end we decided it was safer to do it individually,” he added.

“We don’t want to become victims of these organisations, which is why I decided to file a legal complaint,” said the former member of the now-defunct leftist Patriotic Union party, most of whose members were murdered.

He said they do not want to have anything to do with the politicians. “They hand out food for votes,” he maintained.

This month, several people spoke up to denounce murders and frequent disappearances on the southern outskirts of Bogota. The bodies are not always recovered; nearby Rincon del Lago is believed to be the dumping ground of choice.

It is almost impossible to report attacks or crimes to the authorities. The closest police station is a 20-minute car ride away. But also, some sources say that lower-ranking police officials have ties to the criminal world.

The right-wing Uribe, whose term began in 2002 and who was reelected in late May, negotiated with the AUC a controversial demobilisation process under a legal framework that basically pardons most of the human rights abuses committed by the paramilitaries.

At their height, the groups were responsible for 80 percent of the country’s human rights violations, according to the United Nations.

Before the negotiations began, the paramilitaries numbered fewer than 5,000. Today, authorities talk of 32,000 demobilised members who are benefiting from different kinds of assistance aimed at their reinsertion into society, and approximately 17,000 surrendered weapons.

The press, analysts and human rights activists have already pointed to the emergence of a third generation of these illegal groups, who had well-documented ties to members of the armed forces.

Ciudad Bolivar and the neighbouring Altos de Cazuca provide squalid refuge to tens of thousands of campesinos fleeing the armed conflict. They have come to the capital from rural areas around the country, seeking government protection.

But they arrive only to discover the same threats they thought they were leaving behind. And having sacrificed their houses, land and livelihoods, the displaced families have the added burden of poverty in the cities.

According to 1993 figures, Ciudad Bolivar was home at that time to 713,000 people in 252 neighbourhoods. But more recent estimates say the number is now closer to one million residents. The office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that 100,000 of these are displaced persons.

On this day, Belfa Marin, 37, arrived with two of her children at the House of Rights, clearly upset. Sobbing tearlessly, she explained that the government had closed the local polyclinic. To date the facility had provided care for some 10,000 people, attending an average 1,050 patients per year.

The House of Rights provides legal assistance and education and health services, and organises productive projects for displaced persons.

Mar©looked for paper to collect signatures to protest the polyclinic’s closure. “Why are they abandoning us? I trusted the doctors,” she said, outraged. Three years ago, she fled her small farm in Vista Hermosa, in the central department (province) of Meta, with her husband, three children, brother-in-law and a niece. That area is under the influence of the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the biggest rebel group.

They first walked to San Juan de Arama, slightly to the north, only to stumble into paramilitary territory.

Marin won’t hear of returning, even though life in the city is miserable.

In decades gone by, Ciudad Bolivar and Altos de Cazuca were FARC territory, providing logistical support to the group. But paramilitaries, who grew in strength since the 1980s, have long since taken control of the area.

Some walls are scrawled with graffiti with slogans such as “AUC presentes” (The AUC are here.)

Almost all the houses are made of brick. Lower down on the hills of Ciudad Bolivar they even have small yards and the roads are paved, and water and electricity run steadily. The landscape deteriorates the higher one climbs. Sewage streams through open gutters on the sides of the streets, the houses become more squalid, and greenery basically disappears.

The more recent arrivals settle higher up the hill. The process for emergency state aid (approximately 200 dollars per month for up to six months) can take up to two months or more. So it is common to see recently displaced persons panhandling at stoplights.

German Luna was there once. Now he is president of the displaced people’s association “Seeds of Hope,” a collective of 350 families.

Luna gathered some 50 mothers and their children together in a community soup kitchen in Santa Viviana, a neighbourhood in Ciudad Bolivar that has no water, power or telephone service. Today, there will be no lunch. But they have waited patiently to tell their stories to the visiting journalists.

Luna runs the “Little Moons of Love” kitchen. Using the rice, lentils, oil and “panela” bread donated by the World Food Programme through the Bogot©ity government, they provide a daily meal to 417 children.

“We survive on charity,” says Luna. “There is no work here, and the state’s talk of resettlement means nothing. It’s not safe to return.” In September 2001, his wife and 17 others were killed in Montes de Maria, in the northeastern department of Sucre. Luna fled with his children, now seven and eight years old.

One of his children, smiling, approaches with a blank piece of paper, asking for my name and phone number. While writing, I say I live far away, in Uruguay. “It doesn’t matter. If you don’t mind, I could walk all the way there.”

When the journalists are about to leave, a young woman holding a feverish baby approaches. The mother asks for “an autograph” on the sole of the tiny, impeccably white shoe. “It’s for when she grows up, so I can tell her you all were here,” she says.

It can only be hoped that Colombia’s war will be over by then.

But “It will be a long time before we see the end of the conflict and the paramilitaries—killers who work alongside the security forces. They’ve changed their name over the years; before they were “sicarios” (hired killers), then the AUC—and now, we’ll just wait and see,” sighs Jordan.

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Poppycock: Establishment Media Attempt to connect Afgan Heroin to the Taliban

2006-06-28T10:17:42+02:00

– By Jack Blood (www.jackblood.com)

I just about fell out of my sneakers when I heard some goon on MSNBC suggest that the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan was due to funding coming from bumper opium crops. The very crops the Taliban nearly eradicated when in power before 9.11.01. Of course many believe that one reason to expel the Taliban in the first place was because they were cutting off supply of the drug, a drug that has a long history connected with the CIA

I am no Taliban sympathizer, but the fact remains; after the Taliban were excused from power in Afghanistan, record poppy harvests begin to roll in. Some would blame this on the “Warlords” who are allegedly funding their former arch enemies the Taliban… but if you believe these regional governors work as independents, free from outside tax, and able to move and refine these huge quantaties of smack – well I have a cliché bridge to sell you.

What we already know through the foreign un-embedded press. That is the “Taliban” who were honored guests of George Bush Jr. at his Crawford Texas ranch in early 2001, were flown out on C-130’s into safe havens in Pakistan. As we speak the former spokesman for the Taliban is attending, you guessed it, Yale University on a scholarship studying political science. The Bush Administration is also locked into business deals with the UAE, who openly support the Taliban… I am sure that you remember the deals to have them secure our Ports that blew up in Ws face.

The Phony war on drugs:

A statue of Nathan Hale stands on Old Campus at Yale University. There is a copy of that statue in front of the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yet another stands in front of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts (where George H.W. Bush ('48) went to prep school

Nathan Hale, along with three other Yale graduates, was a member of the "Culper Ring," one of America's first intelligence operations. Established by George Washington, it was successful throughout the Revolutionary War. Nathan was the only operative to be ferreted out by the British, and after speaking his famous regrets, he was hanged in 1776. Ever since the founding of the Republic, the relationship between Yale and the "Intelligence Community" has been unique.

In 1823, Samuel Russell established Russell and Company for the purpose of acquiring opium in Turkey and smuggling it to China. Russell and Company bought out the Perkins (Boston) syndicate in 1830 and moved the primary center of American opium smuggling to Connecticut. Many of the great American and European fortunes were built on the "China"(opium) trade.

One of Russell and Company's Chief of Operations in Canton was Warren Delano, Jr., grandfather of Franklin Roosevelt. Other Russell partners included John Cleve Green (who financed Princeton), Abiel Low (who financed construction of Columbia), Joseph Coolidge and the Perkins, Sturgis and Forbes families. (Coolidge's son organized the United Fruit Company, and his grandson, Archibald C. Coolidge, was a co-founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.)

William Huntington Russell ('33), Samuel's cousin, studied in Germany from 1831-32. Germany was a hotbed of new ideas. The "scientific method" was being applied to all forms of human endeavor. Prussia, which blamed the defeat of its forces by Napoleon in 1806 on soldiers only thinking about themselves in the stress of battle, took the principles set forth by John Locke and Jean Rosseau and created a new educational system. Johan Fitche, in his "Address to the German People," declared that the children would be taken over by the State and told what to think and how to think it.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel took over Fitche's chair at the University Of Berlin in 1817, and was a professor there until his death in 1831. Hegel was the culmination of the German idealistic philosophy school of Immanuel Kant.

It is from this that the Hegelian Dialectic spawns: Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis, or as it is better know today: Problem, Reaction, Solution.

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Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy

2006-06-28T09:47:02+02:00

'Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy'

A Documentary Film By John Pilger

Pilger uncovers the shocking complicity of the US and Great Britain governments in the East Timor genocide - the same governments who were willing to go to war with Saddam Hussein for his invasion of Kuwait, but who stood aside as Indonesia broke the exact same UN regulations to rape and pillage East Timor using Western arms. Click here to watch Windows Media - Real Video Here

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Israeli "Retaliation" and Double Standards

2006-06-28T09:34:55+02:00

By JONATHAN COOK

Republished from Counterpunch

The killing by Palestinian militants of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third from an army post close to the Gaza Strip set the scene for Israeli "reprisals" and "retaliation", according to the reports of BBC correspondents in Israel and Gaza yesterday.

The attack by the Palestinians, who sneaked through tunnels under the electronic fence surrounding Gaza, marked a "major escalation in cross-border tension" (Alan Johnston) that threatened to overturn "a week of progress on two fronts" (John Lyon): namely, the recent talks between Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in Jordan, and between rival Palestinian groups Fatah and Hamas.

Thus, according to the BBC's analysis, this attack ends the immediate chances for "peace" negotiations and provides the context for the next round of the conflict between the Israeli army and the Palestinians of Gaza. We are left to infer that all the suffering the army inflicts in the coming days and weeks should be attributed to this moment of "escalation" by the Palestinians.

We can ignore the weeks of shelling by the Israeli army of Gaza, the firing of hundreds of missiles into the crowded Strip that have destroyed Palestinian lives and property, while spreading terror among the civilian population and deepening the psychological trauma suffered by a generation of children.

We can ignore the deaths of more than 30 civilians, and dozens of horrific injuries, in the past few weeks at the hands of the Israeli military, including three children hit in a botched air strike last week, and a heavily pregnant woman and her doctor brother killed a day later as a missile slammed into the room where they were eating dinner.

We can ignore the blockade of Gaza's "borders" by the Israeli army for months on end, which has prevented Palestinians in the Strip from trading goods at crossing points with Israel and from receiving vital supplies of food and medicines. As a captive population besieged by Israeli soldiers, Gazans are facing a humanitarian catastrophe sanctioned by Israeli government policy and implemented by the Israeli army.

We can ignore Israel's bullying of the international community to connive in the starving of the Hamas-led government of funds and diplomatic room for manoeuvre, thereby preventing the elected Palestinian leadership from running Gaza. So desperate is the situation there that Hamas officials are being forced to smuggle in millions of dollars of cash stuffed in suitcases to pay salaries.

And finally we can ignore the violation of Palestinian territory by Israeli commandos who infiltrated Gaza a day before the Palestinian attack to kidnap two Palestinians Israel claims are terrorists. They have been "disappeared", doubtless to be be held in administrative detention, where they can denied access to lawyers, the courts and, of course, justice.

None of this provides the context for the Palestinian attack on the army post -- any more than, in the BBC's worldview, do the previous four decades of occupation. None is apparently relevant to understanding the Palestinian attack, or for judging the legitimacy of Israel's imminent military "reprisals".

In short, according to the BBC, we can ignore Israel's long-standing policy of unilateralism -- a refusal to negotiate meaningfully with the Palestinians, either the old guard of Fatah or the new one of Hamas -- with its resort to a strategy of collective punishment of Gaza's population to make it submit to the continuing occupation.

In the skewed moral and news priorities of the BBC, the killing of two Israeli soldiers by Palestinian militants -- the "escalation" -- provides a justification for "fierce retaliation" against Gaza, with the inevitable toll on Palestinian civilians and militants alike. The earlier killing of tens of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, however, is not presented as justification for yesterday's Palestinian retaliation against the army.

In other words, on the scale of moral outrage the BBC ranks the deaths of Israeli soldiers enforcing an illegal occupation far above those of Palestinian civilians enduring the illegal occupation.

There is another notable asymmetry in the BBC's assessment of the "escalation". Participation by the military wing of Hamas in the attack is evidence, suggest the reporters, of the role of the Palestinian leadership in "escalating tension". But the killing by the Israeli army of a Palestinian family of seven on a Gaza beach on June 9, and many more civilians since, was apparently not an "escalation", even though it provoked Hamas to renounce a ceasefire it had maintained for 16 months in the face of continuous Israeli military assaults.

So how is the ordinary viewer to make sense of these events -- the endless "cycle of violence" -- with the BBC as guide. (And the BBC is no worse, and possibly better, than most of other Western broadcasters. At least its reporter Alan Johnston is based in Gaza.)

Not only do its reporters exhibit the biases associated with its institutional racism -- as an organisation, the BBC chooses to identify with Israeli concerns before Palestinian ones -- but they then compound this distortion by repeating uncritically Israel's own misrepresentation of events.

The reporters, like so many of their colleagues, fall into the trap of presenting the conflict through the eyes of the Israeli government, the same government whose prime minister, Ehud Olmert, last week proudly displayed his ethnic chauvinism by setting the suffering of the Jewish residents of Sderot, who face a mostly non-lethal smattering of Palestinian home-made Qassam rockets, far above the rising death toll of Gaza's civilians from the army's constant aerial and artillery bombardment. "I am sorry with all my heart for the residents of Gaza," Olmert said, "but the lives and well-being of Sderot's residents are more important than those of Gaza residents." In other words, a potential threat to a single Jew is more important than the deaths of dozens of Palestinian innocents.

Thus we learn without comment from the BBC that Olmert has denounced the killing of the two soldiers as "terrorism", even though the word cannot describe an attack by an occupied people on an occupying army. How is it possible for a few men with light arms to terrorise one of the most powerful armies in the world? What next: are we to listen sympathetically to claims by the US that its soldiers are being "terrorised" by Iraqi insurgents?

The defence that the BBC is simply reporting Israel's position does not stand up to scrutiny. Is it even conceivable that we might hear a BBC reporter neutrally repeat a Hamas statement that the Israeli army is terrorising Palestinians by reckless shelling civilians in Gaza, even though the word's usage in this case would better satisfy the dictionary definition? The shells most certainly do spread terror among Gaza's civilian population.

We hear too without comment that Olmert is holding both Hamas and the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas responsible for the attack. The BBC dutily repeats Israeli claims that Abbas has the resources to fight "terror" even as the money to pay Palestinian security forces is held by foreign banks unwilling, at Israeli and American behest, to hand it over, and as Hamas and Abbas are locked in battle for control of the Palestinians' shrinking government.

Does common sense not recoil from the suggestion that both Hamas and Abbas can be equally blamed for the attack when the two are bitter rivals for power? Or that either can be held accountable when Israel has refused to negotiate with them or treat them as the genuine representatives of the Palestinian people?

Again, would the BBC report with due solemnity claims by the Palestinians that they hold Olmert and Peretz personally guilty for the civilian deaths in Gaza over the past fortnight, even though in an enlightened world both should be standing trial for war crimes?

Instead, however implausible the Israeli version of reality, the BBC happily sows confusion on behalf of the Israeli army. Like other broadcasters, it credulously reports preposterous arguments seeking to exonerate the Israeli army of responsibility for the shelling of the beach in Gaza that killed a Palestinian family of seven. It treats as equally credible the army's belated version in which Palestinian militants are said to have laid a single mine at a favourite seaside picnic spot in the futile hope of preventing the Israeli navy landing along the Strip's miles of coastline. (In consequence, the BBC excludes the seven dead and dozens of Palestinian injured in that Israeli attack from its list of recent civilian casualties in Gaza).

And both BBC reporters note gravely Israel's concerns that this is the first time Palestinian militants have broken out of the fenced-off Strip since Israel withdrew from Gaza nearly a year ago. Somehow the fact that the Palestinians have briefly escaped from their cage appears to make the attack all the more shocking not only for Israel but for the two reporters.

This attack in Israel, they tell us, is the most serious to date, with the implication that it is therefore illegitimate and part of the same "escalation". Even ignoring the fact that this attack was against Israeli soldiers besieging, imprisoning and shelling the Palestinians of Gaza, does the BBC not to pause to consider the double standard it is applying?

Was the Israeli army's incursion into Gaza a day earlier to capture two alleged Palestinian militants not an equal escalation? Was it not an equal violation of Palestinian sovereignty? Of course not. The BBC knows, as do the rest of us, that the army never really left Gaza and the occupation never really ended. But you won't hear that from any of its reporters.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

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Cost of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to top $500 billion in 2007

2006-06-28T09:26:25+02:00

The costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wil pass the $500 billion mark next year, says a Congressional Research Service report, the National Journal's CONGRESS DAILY has reported today. The Congressional Research Service is a non-partisan arm of Congress. Excerpts from the registration restricted article follow:

The overall cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other global anti-terror operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will top $500 billion next year, according to congressional estimates and expectations of future funding.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said in a report that through the current fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the government will have spent $437 billion on overseas military and foreign aid funding. That includes the latest supplemental spending bill signed into law this month, which provided $69 billion for the war effort.

Add in roughly $1.5 billion in FY07 Foreign Operations funds for Iraq and Afghanistan; $50 billion in Pentagon "bridge" funds for the first half of FY07, plus as-yet-undetermined supplemental funds for the remainder of the next fiscal year, and total war-related costs will easily soar over $500 billion one year from now.

At least $37 billion or so will have gone to the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development for Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction, embassy operations and other foreign aid programs. War costs alone are expected to be at least $450 billion, not including the expected supplemental request early next year.

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Israeli forces launch Gaza strike

2006-06-27T23:16:45+02:00

Israeli planes attacked a bridge in central Gaza in the last few hours, Israel Radio reported Israeli tanks to be on the move, signaling the start of a new military operation.

Palestinian security forces said Israeli tanks were moving near the Israeli village of Nahal Oz, a main Israeli staging area just outside Gaza, but that they had not yet entered Gaza.

In the Shajaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City, not far from the border fence, armed militants took up positions across from the blaring headlights of Israeli vehicles, and Israeli attack helicopters hovered overhead. The militants told residents to leave the area.

Israeli military officials said a limited operation has been authorized for southern Gaza, aimed at "terrorist infrastructure." The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.

Israel has been massing troops and armor around Gaza since Sunday, when Palestinian militants tunneled under the border and attacked an Israeli army post at a Gaza crossing, killing two soldiers and abducting a third.

Anticipating an invasion, Palestinian militants piled up sand on roads near the border and in Gaza City. "We are ready to confront any stupid act that the Zionists might commit," said Abu Obeida, spokesman for the military wing of Hamas, the Islamic group that controls the Palestinian parliament.

The group also claimed that militants from various factions had taken up positions throughout northern Gaza.

Egyptian officials said the government asked Hamas to release the soldier and has deployed 2,500 extra troops along the border with Gaza to prevent an influx of Palestinians if Israel invades. Egypt also imposed a nighttime curfew on residents along the border.

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National Security Agency (NSA) Datamines MySpace

2006-06-27T12:48:00+02:00

by PAUL MARKS (NEW SCIENTIST)

"I am continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves."

So says Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software. He is far from alone in noticing that fast-growing social networking websites such as MySpace and Friendster are a snoop's dream.

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.

And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Americans are still reeling from last month's revelations that the NSA has been logging phone calls since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.

The Congressional Research Service, which advises the US legislature, says phone companies that surrendered call records may have acted illegally. However, the White House insists that the terrorist threat makes existing wire-tapping legislation out of date and is urging Congress not to investigate the NSA's action.

Meanwhile, the NSA is pursuing its plans to tap the web, since phone logs have limited scope. They can only be used to build a very basic picture of someone's contact network, a process sometimes called "connecting the dots".

Clusters of people in highly connected groups become apparent, as do people with few connections who appear to be the intermediaries between such groups. The idea is to see by how many links or "degrees" separate people from, say, a member of a blacklisted organisation.

By adding online social networking data to its phone analyses, the NSA could connect people at deeper levels, through shared activities, such as taking flying lessons. Typically, online social networking sites ask members to enter details of their immediate and extended circles of friends, whose blogs they might follow.

People often list other facets of their personality including political, sexual, entertainment, media and sporting preferences too. Some go much further, and a few have lost their jobs by publicly describing drinking and drug-taking exploits.

Young people have even been barred from the orthodox religious colleges that they are enrolled in for revealing online that they are gay.

"You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumé. People don't realise you get Googled just to get a job interview these days," says Callas.

Other data the NSA could combine with social networking details includes information on purchases, where we go (available from cellphone records, which cite the base station a call came from) and what major financial transactions we make, such as buying a house.
“You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumé”

Right now this is difficult to do because today's web is stuffed with data in incompatible formats. Enter the semantic web, which aims to iron out these incompatibilities over the next few years via a common data structure called the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

W3C hopes that one day every website will use RDF to give each type of data a unique, predefined, unambiguous tag.

"RDF turns the web into a kind of universal spreadsheet that is readable by computers as well as people," says David de Roure at the University of Southampton in the UK, who is an adviser to W3C. "It means that you will be able to ask a website questions you couldn't ask before, or perform calculations on the data it contains." In a health record, for instance, a heart attack will have the same semantic tag as its more technical description, a myocardial infarction. Previously, they would have looked like separate medical conditions. Each piece of numerical data, such as the rate of inflation or the number of people killed on the roads, will also get a tag.

The advantages for scientists, for instance, could be huge: they will have unprecedented access to each other's experimental datasets and will be able to perform their own analyses on them. Searching for products such as holidays will become easier as price and availability dates will have smart tags, allowing powerful searches across hundreds of sites.

On the downside, this ease of use will also make prying into people's lives a breeze.

No plan to mine social networks via the semantic web has been announced by the NSA, but its interest in the technology is evident in a funding footnote to a research paper delivered at the W3C's WWW2006 conference in Edinburgh, UK, in late May.

That paper, entitled Semantic Analytics on Social Networks, by a research team led by Amit Sheth of the University of Georgia in Athens and Anupam Joshi of the University of Maryland in Baltimore reveals how data from online social networks and other databases can be combined to uncover facts about people. The footnote said the work was part-funded by an organisation called ARDA.

What is ARDA? It stands for Advanced Research Development Activity. According to a report entitled Data Mining and Homeland Security, published by the Congressional Research Service in January, ARDA's role is to spend NSA money on research that can "solve some of the most critical problems facing the US intelligence community".

Chief among ARDA's aims is to make sense of the massive amounts of data the NSA collects - some of its sources grow by around 4 million gigabytes a month.

The ever-growing online social networks are part of the flood of internet information that could be mined: some of the top sites like MySpace now have more than 80 million members (see Graph).

The research ARDA funded was designed to see if the semantic web could be easily used to connect people. The research team chose to address a subject close to their academic hearts: detecting conflicts of interest in scientific peer review. Friends cannot peer review each other's research papers, nor can people who have previously co-authored work together.

So the team developed software that combined data from the RDF tags of online social network Friend of a Friend (www.foaf-project.org), where people simply outline who is in their circle of friends, and a semantically tagged commercial bibliographic database called DBLP, which lists the authors of computer science papers.

Joshi says their system found conflicts between potential reviewers and authors pitching papers for an internet conference. "It certainly made relationship finding between people much easier," Joshi says. "It picked up softer [non-obvious] conflicts we would not have seen before."

The technology will work in exactly the same way for intelligence and national security agencies and for financial dealings, such as detecting insider trading, the authors say. Linking "who knows who" with purchasing or bank records could highlight groups of terrorists, money launderers or blacklisted groups, says Sheth.

The NSA recently changed ARDA's name to the Disruptive Technology Office. The DTO's interest in online social network analysis echoes the Pentagon's controversial post 9/11 Total Information Awareness (TIA) initiative.

That programme, designed to collect, track and analyse online data trails, was suspended after a public furore over privacy in 2002. But elements of the TIA were incorporated into the Pentagon's classified programme in the September 2003 Defense Appropriations Act.

Privacy groups worry that "automated intelligence profiling" could sully people's reputations or even lead to miscarriages of justice - especially since the data from social networking sites may often be inaccurate, untrue or incomplete, De Roure warns.

But Tim Finin, a colleague of Joshi's, thinks the spread of such technology is unstoppable. "Information is getting easier to merge, fuse and draw inferences from. There is money to be made and control to be gained in doing so. And I don't see much that will stop it," he says.

Callas thinks people have to wise up to how much information about themselves they should divulge on public websites. It may sound obvious, he says, but being discreet is a big part of maintaining privacy.

Time, perhaps, to hit the delete button.

(From issue 2555 of New Scientist magazine, June 2006)

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Money-tracking leak angers Cheney

2006-06-24T13:57:52+02:00

BBC - JUNE 2006

US Vice-President Dick Cheney has condemned as "offensive" US media disclosures of a secret programme that probes global financial transactions.
The government has covertly tracked thousands of international money transactions for nearly five years as part of its so-called war on terror.

Mr Cheney said leaking the programme played into the enemy's hands.

The New York Times defended its coverage, saying the information was in the public's interest.

Speaking in Chicago, Mr Cheney said the disclosures, which went ahead despite appeals from the White House, would make it more difficult for the administration to prevent future attacks.

The operation uses a huge financial database in Belgium, known as Swift, to track private money transfers around the world.

But civil liberty groups have raised concerns that the programme, which began soon after the 9/11 attacks in the US, may infringe individual rights to privacy.

Mr Cheney said: "These are good, solid sound programmes. They are conducted in accordance with the laws of the land."

He added: "What I find most disturbing is the fact that some in the media take it upon themselves to disclose vital national security programmes, thereby making it more difficult for us to prevent future attacks against the American people."

The programme had earlier also been defended by Treasury Secretary John Snow.

He called it an "effective weapon in the larger war on terror."

The treasury says the programme is strictly confined to the records of suspected foreign terrorists.

The government had compelled Swift, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, which links about 7,800 financial institutions around the world, to open its records, using subpoenas.

The New York Times, which revealed the programme, defended its coverage.

Executive editor Bill Keller said: "We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

Although there is no direct connection, the scheme has echoes of a recently revealed US surveillance programme in which millions of international and domestic phone calls and e-mails were monitored, correspondents say.

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Just another day in the war on terror...

2006-06-24T13:50:24+02:00

America was briefly plunged back into full "war on terror" response mode yesterday - a state it has not been in for nearly two years.

In a throwback to the post-September 11 era the rolling television news channels were pumping out endless footage of politicians urging people to stay calm and go out and enjoy their weekend.

Americans were also urged to keep their eyes open for people acting suspiciously and casing out public buildings but emotions began to cool when it emerged that the plot was very much in the planning stage - "aspirational" in the words of the deputy head of the FBI.

Nearly five years on from the Twin Towers attacks, it appears that the nation is becoming more robust and that it takes more than a plot to prompt panic.

For President George W Bush the foiling of the apparent plan to bomb Chicago's Sears Tower was a political windfall.

The day began with a bubbling row over the news that the government had been tracking international money transactions to follow the flow of possible terrorist funds abroad.

The arrests in Miami and Georgia made the US Treasury's case much easier to defend.

But the real lesson of the day may be that Americans can now absorb such seemingly shocking news without rushing out for duct tape and food.

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N. Korea Has Already 'Mock Nuked' Alaska - With US Government Help

2006-06-20T11:41:05+02:00

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | June 19 2006

Reports today concerning the completed fueling of North Korea's long range Taepodong-2 missile and its planned launch within a month omit several key aspects of the story, including the fact that North Korea already launched a missile that hit Alaska, with the help of the US government.

In March 2003, the Korea Times reported that the U.S. National Assembly included a startling admission in its final report regarding Pyongyang’s missile capabilities.

A nuclear-capable North Korean test warhead was found in Alaska.

``According to a U.S. document, the last piece of a missile warhead fired by North Korea was found in Alaska,’’ former Japanese foreign minister Taro Nakayama was quoted as saying in the report. ``Washington, as well as Tokyo, has so far underrated Pyongyang’s missile capabilities.’’

The 1994 Agreed Framework deal gave North Korea the capacity to generate enough nuclear fuel to produce almost 100 nuclear bombs per year. A 1999 congressional study undertaken by the House North Korea Advisory Group warned,

“Through the provision of two light water reactors [LWRs] under the 1994 Agreed Framework, the United States, through KEDO, will provide North Korea with the capacity to produce annually enough fissile material for nearly 100 nuclear bombs, should the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [DPRK] decide to violate the Nonproliferation Treaty [NPT].”

In April 2002 the Bush administration announced that it would release $95 million of American taxpayer’s dollars to begin construction of the ‘harmless’ light water reactors. Bush argued that arming the megalomaniac dictator Kim Jong-Il with the potential to produce a hundred nukes a year was, “vital to the national security interests of the United States.” Bush released even more money in January 2003, as reported by Bloomberg News,

“President George W. Bush is seeking $3.5 million for the international consortium that continues to build two nuclear reactors for North Korea, even as the U.S. confronts the communist regime over nuclear arms.”

The company that got the contract to deliver equipment and services to build the two light water reactor stations was ABB (Asea Brown Boveri), which describes itself as, “a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve performance while lowering environmental impact.” The contract was valued at $200 million and was signed in January 2000.

It should not surprise us that our old friend Donald Rumsfeld, the man who paved the way for U.S. companies to sell Iraq chemical and biological weapons in 1983, was an executive director for ABB from 2000-2001. Rumsfeld resigned when he was appointed U.S. Secretary of Defense. Wolfram Eberhardt, a spokesman for ABB confirmed that Rumsfeld was at nearly all the board meetings during his involvement with the company. The meetings were held quarterly in Zurich, Switzerland. However, Rumsfeld again displays his uncanny ability to forget things in stating that he ‘doesn’t remember’ the issue of North Korea being brought before the ABB board. Swiss Info concluded,

“Rumsfeld’s position at ABB could prove embarrassing for the Bush administration since while he was a director he was also active on issues of weapons proliferation, chairing the 1998 congressional Ballistic Missile Threat commission.”

North Korea is controlled by a hereditary Stalinist dictatorship that has starved two million of its citizens to death in favor of building a million-man army. Some people put the figure at four million, one-quarter of the population. In the far north of the country there is a network of forced labor gulags where people who have ‘expressed a bland political opinion’ are, along with their entire families, tortured, raped and executed. Horrific bio-chemical experiments are performed on mass numbers of people. Babies are delivered and then stamped to death by the camp guards. If the mother screams while the guards are stamping on the baby’s neck, she is immediately assassinated by a firing squad. These guards are rewarded with bonuses and promotions for ripping out prisoners’ eyeballs.

The North Korean people are enslaved by a government that is using food as a weapon. Perhaps this is why the EU and the United States, via the UN World Food Program, resumed the shipment of hundreds of
thousands of tons in food aid at the end of February 2003. This goes directly to the sitting dictatorship, which then decides who gets it by their level of allegiance to the state. Food aid only increases the power of Kim Jong-Il and yet it is veiled by the UN in bleeding heart humanitarian rhetoric. The money goes straight to enabling the North Korean leadership to live in the lap of westernized luxury with casinos and lavish new cars.

Under the 1994 Agreed Framework, the Clinton administration agreed to replace North Korea’s domestically built nuclear reactors with light water nuclear reactors. So-called government-funded ‘experts’ stated that light water reactors couldn’t be used to make bombs. Not so according to Henry Sokolski, head of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre in Washington,

“LWRs could be used to produce dozens of bombs' worth of weapons-grade plutonium in both North Korea and Iran. This is true of all LWRs -- a depressing fact U.S. policymakers have managed to block out.”

Sokolski has also gone on the record as saying,

“These reactors are like all reactors, they have the potential to make weapons. So you might end up supplying the worst nuclear violator with the means to acquire the very weapons we're trying to prevent it acquiring.”

The U.S. State Department contends that the light water reactors cannot be used to produce bomb grade material and yet in 2002 urged Russia to end its nuclear co-operation with Iran for the reason that it doesn’t want Iran armed with weapons of mass destruction. Russia is building light water reactors in Iran. The State Department announced on its own web site,

“In the official answer to a question asked at the January 31 State Department daily briefing, the State Department said the United States has "consistently urged Russia to cease all [nuclear] cooperation with Iran, including its assistance to the light water reactor at Bushehr.”

“We have underscored to Russia that an end to Russian nuclear assistance to Iran would allow the United States and Russia to reap the full promise of our new strategic relationship, benefiting Russia economically and strategically far more than any short-term gain from construction of additional reactors or other sensitive transfers to Iran.”

According to the State Department, light water reactors in Iran can produce nuclear material but somehow the same rule doesn’t apply in North Korea.

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Troops back on the streets of New Orleans

2006-06-20T11:29:23+02:00

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- Acting at the mayor's request, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Monday she will send National Guard troops and state police to patrol New Orleans streets following a bloody weekend in which six people were killed.

"The senseless slaying of five teenagers this weekend is shocking," Blanco said in a statement. "Things like this should never happen, and I am going to do all I can to stop it."

The governor did not specify how many troops and officers she planned to deploy.

Earlier Monday, Mayor Ray Nagin asked for as many as 300 National Guardsmen and 60 state police officers.

Nagin sought the troops after five teenagers in an SUV were shot and killed in the city's deadliest attack in at least 11 years.

This is the first time the National Guard will be used for law enforcement in the United States since the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Police said the SUV attack was apparently motivated by drugs or revenge. Also, a man was stabbed to death Sunday night in an argument over beer.

"Today is a day when New Orleanians are stepping up. We've had enough," Nagin said. "This is our line in the sand. We're saying we're not going any further."

Nagin said he would not allow criminals to take over when the city is still trying to recover from the hurricane.

The mayor said troops should be posted in heavily flooded neighborhoods to free police to concentrate on hot spots elsewhere.

Community leaders have raised fears that the violence could discourage people from moving back to New Orleans.

Governor calls for curfew
The National Guard had as many as 15,000 soldiers in the city in the weeks after Katrina. As many as 2,000 stayed until February, said Louisiana National Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Pete Schneider.

Blanco said plans were being crafted last week to step up anti-crime efforts, but the weekend slayings forced authorities to move faster.

She said she was talking with New Orleans Police Chief Warren Riley about his exact needs.

"I will not tolerate criminal behavior. We must protect our citizens. Having more law enforcement patrolling the streets is a direct deterrent to the criminal element," Blanco said.

She urged the mayor to put a juvenile curfew in place.

"I have two warnings: First, to parents, keep your teenagers off the streets and out of trouble. Second, to judges, I am urging you to keep hardened criminals where they belong -- in jail and off the streets. We must protect our citizens."

Nagin's request had been backed by the City Council.

"If we don't have wind knocking us down, we have shooters knocking us down, and that's unacceptable," said City Council President Oliver Thomas.

Reaction to the mayor's request was mixed.

"As we tell people to come home, we have to keep these areas safe," said LaToya Cantrell, president of the Broadmoor Improvement Association, a heavily flooded neighborhood.

"It's long overdue. Neighborhoods should not have been left alone to begin with. Pulling out was a mistake."

But Sherman Copelin, president of the New Orleans East Business Association, cautioned that handing over some neighborhoods to troops unfamiliar with those areas could be a mistake, saying officials should not "let someone come in and be a housekeeper."

The killings over the weekend brought this year's murder toll to 53, raising fears that violence was back on the rise in a city that was plagued by violent crime before Katrina drove out much of the population last year.

Crime has been creeping back into the city: 17 killings in the first three months of 2006, and 36 since the start of April.

At least three other people, ages 16 to 27, have been fatally shot in the same area where the five teenagers were killed early Saturday. (Watch cops work the scene on the narrow, blood-stained street -- :40)

In addition to Nagin's request for troops and state police, the City Council said it would consider increasing overtime for police to put more officers on the street. It also called for a "crime summit" within two weeks.

"We have to deal with it now," Councilman Arnold Fielkow said. "If we don't make people feel safe in their homes, nothing will happen. Let's make this priority No. 1."

Cynthia Willard-Lewis, who represents predominantly black eastern New Orleans, said a big part of the solution will be getting young people off the streets and into caring environments such as schools.

She suggested opening schools after hours but didn't say how that could have prevented Saturday's 4 a.m. shooting.

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Human Cells + Animal Cells = ?

2006-06-20T11:23:23+02:00

CBS | June 19 2006

On the sun-splashed Caribbean island of St. Kitts, Yale University researchers are injecting millions of human brain cells into the heads of monkeys afflicted with Parkinson's disease.

In China, there are 29 goats running around on a farm with human cells coursing through their organs, a result of scientists dropping human blood cells into goat embryos.

The mixing of humans and animals in the name of medicine has been going on for decades. People are walking around with pig valves in their hearts and scientists have routinely injected human cells into lab mice to mimic diseases.

But the research is becoming increasingly exotic as scientists work with the brains of mice, monkeys and other mammals and begin fiddling with the hot-button issue of cloning. Scientists Are Trying New Combinations In The Name Of Research. Harvard University researchers are attempting to clone human embryonic cells in rabbit eggs.

Such work has triggered protests from social conservatives and others who fear the blurring of species lines, invoking the image of the chimera of Greek mythology, a monstrous mix of lion, goat and serpent.

During his State of the Union speech in January, President Bush called for a ban on "human cloning in all its forms" and "human-animal hybrids," labeling it one of the "most egregious abuses of medical research."

He didn't elaborate, but scientists working in the field believe that by "hybrids," the president meant creating living animals with human traits - something they say they aren't doing.

Other critics are calling for stricter regulations of the research.

"The technology is advancing quicker than the regulations," said Osagie Obasogie of the Oakland-based Center for Genetics and Society, which opposes the mixing of human and animal cells.

But scientists say the ethically charged work will help them better understand disease and hopefully cure some illnesses. They argue their work will never result in the birth of any living being, but lets them experiment with human disease without using people.

"The president touched on a nerve that we all feel," said Doug Melton, the Harvard researcher trying to eliminate the need for women to donate their eggs for cloning research by creating human embryonic stem cells in rabbit eggs.

"The prospect of having animals that are chimeras is frightening. This is not that kind of research. These experiments don't make animals, they make cells."

Melton's work, if successful, would reduce the need for female donors, who have to take fertility drugs to increase their egg production and undergo invasive procedures to extract the eggs. But he has not yet succeeded in extracting human stem cells from the cloned rabbit eggs.

United Kingdom researchers led by Dolly the Sheep creator Ian Wilmut are planning similar experiments, which aim to copy a Chinese research team's success with goats, reported in the journal Cell Research in 2003.

"The concerns about chimeras and mixing species may be justified in some circumstances," Yale researcher Gene Redmond said by e-mail from his St. Kitts laboratory, where he's studying Parkinson's disease by injecting human brain cells into monkeys. "But there are strong scientific reasons to do it in many cases and great benefits to be had for humanity."

Redmond's work is funded by the U.S. government, but he works in St. Kitts because it and the neighboring island of Nevis have a large population of feral African monkeys. The research aims to reverse the symptoms of Parkinson's by supplying dopamine, a chemical in the brain whose absence is thought to cause the disease.

"There seems to be little or no chance that the monkeys would be 'humanized,"' because of the relatively few and highly specialized human cells that are being implanted, Redmond said.

Still, it's research like Redmond's that upsets critics the most.

Stanford University bioethicist Christopher Scott said "the stuff that raises the most ethical concerns" are the experiments that implant human cells into animals' brains.

So far, Scott and others know of no researcher that has come close to putting enough human cells into animal brains to confer any signs of humanity, such as emotion.

In December, for instance, Parkinson's disease researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported they had created mice with .01 percent human cells by injecting about 100,000 human embryonic stem cells per mouse, a trace amount that didn't remotely come close to "humanizing" the rodents.

Most scientists also argue that the "architecture" of animals' heads couldn't support a brain of mostly human cells. The animals are also wired differently and couldn't survive with a human brain.

Still, there's enough concern about human-animal mixing that the influential National Academy of Sciences addressed it last year when it issued guidelines for stem cell research.

The report endorsed research that co-mingles human and animal tissue as vital to ensuring that experimental drugs and new tissue replacement therapies are safe for people. But the report warned that the "idea that human neuronal cells might participate in 'higher order' brain functions in a nonhuman animal, however unlikely that may be, raises concerns that need to be considered."

The report recommends that each institution involved in stem cell research create a formal, standing committee to specifically oversee the work, including experiments that mix human and animal cells.

Drawing ethical boundaries that no research appears to have crossed yet, the Academies recommend a prohibition on mixing human stem cells with embryos from monkeys and other primates. But even that policy recommendation isn't tough enough for some who advocate for formal regulations.

"You don't want a monkey with 95 percent of its brain cells being human," said Obasogie of the Center for Genetics and Society, "and to ensure that takes more than a recommendation."

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Okay, so what happens now?

2006-06-18T22:30:26+02:00

Republished from WHATREALLYHAPPENED.COM

This last week has started to see the façade crumble away from the wars. Gone is the comfortable fraud, leaving in its wake a very stark and harsh reality.
The Carnegie Report affirmed that there had never been a military threat from Iraq, no weapons of mass destruction were poised just 45 minutes away to strike at hearth and home. The last-second discovery of a few dozen rusted out warheads from 10 years ago only underscored that the desperate attempt to find weapons of mass destruction to retroactively justify the war in Iraq had failed, and failed miserably.

The Carnegie Report came hard on the heels of Paul Bremer’s comments that claims of underground WMDs labs having been found in Iraq were a total fiction. Paul was apparently unaware that Prime Minister Tony Blair was the author of the aforesaid claims.

This was followed by a startling admission by Colin Powell that there was no evidence that linked Iraq or Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda. This admission was startling because it was Colin Powell himself who nearly a year ago was assuring the world of the exact opposite, that Iraq was supporting and arming Al Qaeda.

A last-ditch attempt to explain the absence of WMDs in Iraq by claiming that Syria now had them was torpedoed by no less a personage than National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, who admitted for the record that there was no evidence at all that Iraq had sent WMDs to Syria, a reasonable conclusion now that it is apparent that Iraq did not have WMDs at all.

Finally we have former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who has gone public with the revelation that the Bush administration was planning war on Iraq from the day they took office, long before the events of 9-11.

None of these revelations are shocking to those people who get their news from the internet. What has changed is that the mainstream media, possibly out of concern that the internet has succeeded in capturing the lead in reporting stories of government wrongdoing (my own website now has a readership larger than all but the largest city newspapers) , has started to report these embarrassing admissions and exposures to the general public.

The immediate result of these stories is that non-computer literate Americans can no longer avoid what has been obvious to the internet Americans for months. The US Government lied to start wars planned long before the general public even knew they were coming.

No doubt there will be a great deal of denial on the part of those flag-waving ‘true believers’ who eagerly shipped off other people’s children to be killed and crippled. Nobody likes to admit they were wrong, or made a fool of, and we may see the flag-waving ‘true believers’ eager to ship off more of their neighbors’ kids to be killed before they are ready to admit their own error at not being more skeptical of the government’s pre-war claims.

But there can no longer be any doubt. The US Government lied to start the war in Iraq. The whole world knows that now. And more to the point, the whole world knows that Americans know that the US Government lied to start the war in Iraq. The world is now watching to see what the people of the United States will do. We must do something. No longer able to pretend we are innocent victims of government deception, the world will expect the people of the United States to do something about this horrific deception and the equally horrific war it created.

Americans have long held themselves up as the champions of justice and freedom for the rest of the world. It is our image to the world. It is our image to ourselves. It is how we define ourselves, it is our identity, and it is who we are collectively as a nation. And, if we fail to take action in the face of the lies used to start a war, we must in the process sacrifice that image, not only to the world, but to ourselves. Either one acts like a champion of truth and freedom, or one admits one is just another sheep. There is no other choice left.

Most Americans don’t want to face that choice. They want their cake and eat it too. They want to believe that, being Americans, they are honorable people willing to fight for principles, but being practical, they also don’t want to run the risks that taking a stand against corrupt government entails. It is for that reason that so many people will gratefully accept even the most obvious and shoddy propaganda lies, in order to avoid that choice. They can go on believing they have the courage to stand up for freedom and justice while pretending they do not see any reason to do so at the present moment.

But the current, “Big deal, so we lied” attitude of the administration has removed that comforting self-deception. Americans are facing that unpleasant choice of deciding whether they really do have the courage to stand up for truth, justice, and freedom, or if they are cowards who wear their convictions only for show on the appropriate social occasions.

For many Americans still believing the idea that the government is the servant of the people and is looking out for the people’s best interests, the revelation of the deception that took this nation to war in Iraq is a severe psychic shock, not unlike that felt by a child who realizes that it is not the child but the abusive parent that is the problem, or the discovery that one’s spouse has been cheating all along. Reactions to the shock will be varied, evolving through denial, anger, and finally acceptance.

Ultimately, after the angst, the choice Americans do not want to face will have to be made. First choice; stand up for freedom, truth, and justice. In other words, be what an American is supposed to be before the world and before oneself. Second choice, do nothing, and by that nothing cease to be what an American is supposed to be.

From those that choose the second course, we can expect the usual excuses, justifications, rationalizations, the pathetic “my country right or wrong” voiced in a thousand variations by a million useful idiots throughout history. Like the abused child making excuses for the abusing parent, or the cuckold covering up for the wandering spouse, these are pathetic people in deep denial, and can hardly be called Americans any longer. Having had their money and children stolen through lies and deceptions, they have now lost their very identity. In such surrender, in ceasing to live what America is supposed to be, such people have damaged the nation far more deeply than any real terror attack could hope to do, and must rank in history with those Germans who knew what Hitler was really doing, and stayed silent, or worse, were driven to fanaticism by their own denial that they were doing wrong.

For the rest of us, the time has come to face the reality of a government that rules us by lies and deceptions. Action is called for, at all levels of society.

At the very least, men and women of good conscience, confronted with the lies that led us to war in Iraq, must now abandon the assumption that the government has ever told us the truth about anything. Lies got us into war with Iraq. Did lies get us into war with Afghanistan? Was 9-11 a deception to further the war agenda?

The Warren Report claimed JFK was shot by a lone gunman, but the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded JFK was killed by multiple gunmen. We are taught in school that Pearl Harbor was a surprise, but documents declassified in 1994 proved that FDR not only knew the Japanese were coming, but had goaded the Japanese into the attack, as a means to get the US into the war against the Axis. There were no torpedoes in the Gulf of Tonkin. USS Maine was not blown up by a Spanish mine but by a fire in a coal bunker located imprudently next to a magazine. The investigation into the attack by Israel on the USS Liberty was ordered by President Johnson to conclude the attack was an accident even though the evidence indicated otherwise. The Iraqis did not actually steal incubators from Kuwaiti hospitals.

Time and time again the stories We The People are fed to justify wars both current and past do not bear close scrutiny. Of the dozens of military interventions carried out by the US in the years since the Korean war under the claim of bringing democracy to the world, not one has actually resulted in a functioning democracy. In Chile, the US actually destroyed a democratic government to install the dictator Pinochet.

For those Americans with the courage to stand for truth, justice, and freedom, living under a government that lies is intolerable. And, given that the Constitution of the United States does not explicitly grant the government the right to lie to the people, it is illegal as well.

Let me reiterate. The Constitution of the United States does not explicitly grant the government the right to lie to the people. And the Tenth Amendment bars the government from simply assuming that right.

Therefore, under the rule of law, a government that lies acts both unconstitutionally and illegally. At the point in time when the lie is told, the government steps outside its lawful authority and ceases to be the legal government of this land. And for those Americans who have the courage to stand for truth, justice, and freedom, the time has come to acknowledge that the current government is acting in an illegal manner.

Clearly a government that lies to the people to take from them money and children for wars created out of personal desire and greed is not a government of the people, by the people, or for the people, but usurpers stealing gold and blood under false pretenses.

When Bush lied to start the war in Iraq, the entire government and media, with only a few exceptions, stood up to be counted with the lie. It therefore follows that the entire government has lost its legitimacy. How can it be legitimate? How can a government that claims to rule with the consent of the people claim to have that consent when the people never consented to being lied to?

Some observers have stated that because of the current lie, the burden of proof has shifted onto the government. In truth, it was always there. The government is always obligated to be able to document the accuracy and honesty of whatever it claims, whether it’s the ratification of the 16th amendment, or Dick Cheney’s Energy policy.

We live under a government that has lied to Americans to trick us into wars waged for conquest and profit. We cannot allow this to stand and remain Americans. Bush’s lies about Iraq have forced an unpleasant choice on you, and the time to choose what you will do about it is now.

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Written in the stars at least 4200 years ago

2006-06-18T22:06:52+02:00

ARCHAEOLOGISTS working high in the Peruvian Andes have discovered the oldest known celestial observatory in the Americas - a 4200-year-old structure marking the summer and winter solstices that is as old as the stone pillars of Stonehenge.

The observatory was built on the top of an 11-metre-tall pyramid with precise alignments and sightlines that provide an astronomical calendar for agriculture, said archaeologist Robert Benfer of the University of Missouri, who presented the find last month in Puerto Rico at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The people who built the observatory - three millenniums before the emergence of the Incas - are a mystery, but they achieved a level of art and science that archaeologists say they did not know existed in the region until at least 800 years later.

Among the most impressive finds was a massive clay sculpture, an ancient version of the modern frowning "sad face" icon flanked by two animals. The site, protected from looters beneath thousands of years of dirt and debris, marked the position of the winter solstice.

The find adds strong evidence to support the recent idea that a sophisticated civilisation developed in South America in the pre-ceramic era, before the development of fired pottery sometime after 1500BC.

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How Washington Created a New Enemy

2006-06-16T15:32:12+02:00

By funding the warlords in Somalia, the US has given credibility to their extremist opponents.

Washington has been playing with fire in Somalia, where its support for a warlord alliance has ended up boosting Islamic militias, which now hold the capital Mogadishu, analysts say.

Somalia has been torn by four months of fighting between the Islamists and an alliance of warlords who largely controlled the lawless state for the past 15 years.

The Joint Islamic Courts militias appeared on Thursday to have defeated the warlords after capturing their last two strongholds, and have vowed to rapidly open Sharia courts in the areas under its control.

Only a few months ago, this would have been impossible for lack of public support, experts said.

But the United States support for the warlord Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism—hated by the population—sparked a wave of anti-American sentiment that massively boosted support for the Islamists, they said.

Washington has never publicly confirmed or denied its support for the alliance but US officials have told Agence France-Presse they provided the warlords with money and intelligence to help rein in “creeping Talibanisation” in Somalia.

“In reality, the Islamic courts are not strong. They are divided along traditional clan lines,” argued Roland Marchal, a Horn of Africa expert from France’s CNRS institute, who recently returned from a trip to Somalia.

“They benefited from this anti-Americanism,” said Marchal. “People who are absolute moderates in religious terms are fighting alongside the Islamic courts to get rid of the warlords.”

For US specialist Ken Menkhaus, a political science professor at the University of Davidson: “It’s not only that the US backed the wrong guys, it’s also that some of the US assistance was misused for a different agenda than the US had in mind.”

“The Americans had a fairly limited agenda in Mogadishu: it was to work through non-state partners to monitor and if possible apprehend a small number [three or four] of foreign al-Qaeda operatives in the city.”

“It was not the US government’s intent to see this alliance engage in a full-scale war against the union of Islamic courts,” he said.

“It’s plausible that the US assistance to these militias was misused: the militia leaders saw an opportunity to … strengthen their own political base vis-á-vis their principal rivals in the city: the Islamic courts.

“They hoped to harness US counter-terrorism assistance to their own political agenda, but they got whacked.”

Marchal also suggested Washington had committed a tactical error by supporting the warlord alliance—but for a different reason.

“The Americans’ mistake was to arm people who were already a spent force—and who had their own agenda,” he said.

“People I talked to [in Somalia] told me the alliance’s militiamen didn’t really put up a fight, because the war made no sense for them.

“They just took the American money and went home. It was a military collapse. That doesn’t mean the Islamic courts are strong—it just means their opponents have disintegrated.”

Two powerful warlords—Mohamed Afrah Qanyare and Issa Botan Alin—fled the town of Jowhar without fighting ahead of the Islamic assault on Tuesday.

Others who had holed up in Mogadishu defected to the Islamic courts’ side this week.

Karin von Hippel, a former United Nations expert on Somalia and member of the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies, says that by backing the warlords, Washington encouraged the Islamic courts to take up arms.

“If in recent weeks Somalis have been protesting alleged US interference in the fighting in Mogadishu, it is not only because of perceptions that the US government is anti-Islam but also because they don’t want the warlords to be any stronger than they already are,” she wrote in a recent newspaper column.

Meanwhile, Marchal said it was essential for the international community to open up channels of communication with the moderate elements in the Islamic courts as soon as possible.

“To cry that this is an al-Qaeda plot will only radicalise the population. We are busy creating an enemy that didn’t exist two months ago.”—AFP

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Iran And Syria Sign Defense Agreement

2006-06-16T14:32:53+02:00

Tehran (AFP) Jun 16, 2006

Defense ministers from close allies Iran and Syria on Thursday signed an agreement for military cooperation against what they called the "common threats" presented by Israel and the United States. In a joint press conference, Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar and visiting Syrian counterpart Hassan Turkmani said their talks had been aimed at consolidating their defense efforts and strengthening support for one another.

"Our cooperation is based on a strategic pact and unity against common threats. We can have a common front against Israel's threats," Turkmani told reporters after two intensive rounds of talks with Najjar.

Syrian Defence Minister Hassan Turkmani and his Iranian counterpart Mostafa Mohammad Najjar signed the cooperation agreement in Tehran, on the 15 June 2006. The two defence ministers agreed today to expand defence cooperation, the Iranian ministry said. Turkmani started a four-day official visit to Tehran earlier this week.

"Our cooperation with the Iranians against Israeli threats is nothing secret and we regularly consult about this with our friends," he said.

Before the press conference, Iran's defense ministry said the two sides "stressed strengthening mutual ties and the necessity to preserve peace and stability in the region."

The defense ministry statement also said they discussed "ridding the region of weapons of mass destruction," in an apparent reference to the widely held belief that Israel possesses nuclear warheads.

The United States has led opposition to Iran's nuclear program, which Tehran insists is aimed at civilian energy purposes but which Washington suspects is a cover for atomic weapons-making.

US President George W. Bush has advocated diplomacy to resolve the international row over Iran's aims but has also said "all options are on the table" if Iran refuses to halt sensitive uranium enrichment work.

Washington has included Syria in its so-called axis of evil that also comprises Iran and North Korea, citing these nations as "supporters of terrorism."

Asked about US threats against Damascus and Tehran, both top brass brushed off the importance of such threats.

"This is nothing new, we will resist these threats," the Syrian defense minister said.

However, Turkmani dismissed the possibility of hosting an Iranian military base on Syrian soil.

"The language of a (foreign) military base in our country is alien to us. I want to say that it is not on the agenda," he added.

The Iranian defense minister said: "US threats are a kind of psychological operation. It is not new. With unity among the region's nations, these threats will not prevail."

Although the two refused to give specifics about the agreement for military cooperation, Najjar said Iran "considers Syria's security its own security, and we consider our defense capabilities to be those of Syria."

Najjar also shrugged off reports that Iran could pose a threat to the region.

"Iran is ready to sign a non aggression pact with regional countries," he said.

"Our military warfare equipment is based on deterrent policies and strategy. Enemies should know about our capabilities and should not even think about an assault against us," he said in response to a question about the optimization process going on for the medium range Shahab-3 missile.

Iran's Shahab-3 missiles have a range of 2,000 kilometers (1,280 miles), capable of hitting arch-enemy Israel and US bases across the Middle East.

Najjar added that the Syrian side has purchased some Iranian military equipment, but did not elaborate on the purchased items and did not say whether the purchases were made as part of Thursday's agreement.

Turkmani started an official visit to Tehran on Sunday.

During his trip, Turkmani has also met with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Islamic republic's military chiefs and visited Iranian military factories in Isfahan and Tehran.

Source: Agence France-Presse

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North Korea accuses US spy plane of intruding into its territory

2006-06-16T14:15:13+02:00

SEOUL, June 16 (AFP) Jun 16, 2006

Republished from SPACE WAR

North Korea's air force on Friday accused a US reconnaissance plane of intruding into its territorial waters to spy on strategic targets.

The North's Air Force Command said that a US RC-135 plane being refueled in the air had spied on strategic targets for hours after flying over its waters off the northeast coast.

"The ceaseless illegal intrusions of their strategic reconnaissance planes on spy missions have created an imminent danger of military clash in the sky above those waters," it warned in a statement published by the official Korean Central News Agency.

It was the North's second warning in a week against alleged US spy plane intrusions.

On Sunday, the air force threatened to "punish" US spy flights, recalling the fate of a US Navy plane it shot down in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) in 1969.

Another US-North Korean incident occurred when North Korea fired missiles at an SR-71 spy plane in August 1981. The jet was undamaged.

The warning comes amid jitters over the Stalinist country's preparations for a long-range missile test.

Officials here and in Washington confirmed earlier this week that North Korea appeared to be preparing to launch an inter-continental ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland United States.

North Korea is believed to be developing the missile for a range of up to 10,000 kilometers.

It shocked the world in August 1998 by firing a long-range Taepodong-1 missile with a range of up to 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) over Japan into the Pacific Ocean, claiming it was a satellite launch.

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Fly us to the moon . . . in 20 years

2006-06-16T13:46:52+02:00

HUMANS must learn to live on other planets to survive, Professor Stephen Hawking has claimed.

The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University said humans must find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there is an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth.

Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, he told a news conference in Hong Kong.

"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Prof Hawking, who arrived in Hong Kong "to a rock star's welcome".
Prof Hawking said that if humans could avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that could continue without support from Earth.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," he said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

Prof Hawking's comments were reminiscent of the work of American astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who was a believer in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

But his work focused on the search for habitable worlds and intelligent life beyond the solar system, as well as theories about life's origins, ideas popularised in his best-selling 1985 novel, Contact,

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Stephen Hawking says pope told him not to study beginning of universe

2006-06-16T12:53:33+02:00

By MIN LEE Associated Press Writer
2006-06-15

HONG KONG (AP) - Famous British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that the late Pope John Paul II once told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God.

The British author _ who wrote the best-seller "A Brief History of Time" _ said that the pope made the comments at a cosmology conference at the Vatican.

Hawking, who didn't say when the meeting was held, quoted the pope as saying, "It's OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not enquire into the beginning itelf because that was the moment of creation and the work of God."

The scientist then joked during a lecture in Hong Kong, "I was glad he didn't realize I had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began. I didn't fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo."

The church condemned Galileo in the 17th century for supporting Nicholas Copernicus' discovery that Earth revolved around the sun. Church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.

But in 1992, Pope John Paul II issued a declaration saying that the church's denunciation of Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension."

Hawking is one of the best-known theoretical physicists of his generation. He has done groundbreaking research on black holes and the origins of the universe. He proposes that space and time have no beginning and no end.

His hourlong lecture to a sold-out audience at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology was highly theoretical and technical. During the question-and-answer session, Hawking was asked where constants like gravity come from and whether gravity can distort light.

But there were several light, humorous moments.

Hawking _ who must communicate with an electronic speech synthesizer _ said he once considered using a machine that gave him a French accent but he couldn't use it because his wife would divorce him.

The astrophysicist is wheelchair-bound and uses an electronic voice because he has the neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

Hawking was asked why his computerized voice has an American accent.

"The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986," he said. "I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it."

But Hawking said he's shopping for a new system because the hardware he uses is large and fragile. He also said it uses components that are no longer made.

"I have been trying to get a software version, but it seems very difficult," he said.

He urged people with physical disabilities not to give up on their ambitions.

"You can't afford to be disabled in spirit as well as physically," he said. "People won't have time for you."

The moderator at the lecture told the audience that at a recent dinner, she asked Hawking what his ambitions were. He said he wanted to know how the universe began, what happens inside black holes and how can humans survive the next 100 years, she said.

But she added he had one more great ambition: "I would also like to understand women."

Hawking ended his lecture saying, "We are getting closer to answering the age-old questions: Why are we here? Where did we come from?"

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Cambodian Prime Minister : "World Bank corrupt"

2006-06-16T12:19:16+02:00

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen accused the World Bank on Thursday of hiring corrupt foreign consultants, mirroring recent corruption allegations made against his government.

Hun Sen also urged the bank to publish full details of its investigations into alleged government fraud in several aid contracts which led to the suspension earlier this month of $7.6 million in funding for three development projects.

The bank has demanded repayment of the money.

"It is now four weeks old and still no full report has been provided to us, so where is the transparency?" Hun Sen said at a hospital construction ceremony attended by foreign diplomats in the northwest province of Banteay Meanchey.

"Foreign consultants who signed to approve the projects must be brought to account. If Cambodian officials are corrupt then foreign consultants are even more corrupt because they are the decision makers," he said in remarks monitored in Phnom Penh.

World Bank officials in Phnom Penh were not immediately available for comment.

These sorts of allegations are sadly nothing new and alarmingly has been shown to be in fact the modus operandi of many such NGOS. An excellent book released in 2005 "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins shed light on this shadowy area. Perkins, in telling the real-life story about his extraordinary dealings as an EHM, claims to have exposed the "world of international intrigue and corruption that is turning the American republic into a global empire despised by increasing numbers of people around the planet."

As an Economic Hit Man or EHM his job was to "convince Third World countries to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development—loans that were much larger than needed—and to guarantee that the development projects were contracted to U.S. corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel". Once these countries were saddled with huge debts, the U.S. government and the international aid agencies allied with it were able to control these economies and to ensure that "oil and other resources were channeled to serve the interests of building a global empire".

In his EHM capacity, John Perkins traveled all over the world—to Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East—and was "either a direct participant in or witness to some of the most dramatic events in modern history, including the Saudi Arabian Money-laundering Affair, the fall of the Shah of Iran, the assassination of Panama’s President Omar Torrijos, the subsequent invasion of Panama, and events leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq".

John Perkins also served as one of these highly paid consultants to some of the largest multinational corporations on the planet, whose pockets he had previously helped to line—taking on this role "partly in response to a series of not-so-veiled threats and lucrative payoffs". Perkins revelations were described by Harvard professor and Pulitzer prize-winning author—John E. Mack as, “A bombshell. One of those rare instances in which someone deeply entrenched in our governmental/ corporate imperialist structure has come forward to reveal in unequivocal terms its inner workings.

The case of Cambodia, as one of the world's poorest countries, relies heavily on foreign aid. Donors have often criticized the Hun Sen government for failing to tackle chronic corruption.

"We must take responsibility for our mistakes _ if we were truly wrong," Hun Sen said during a recent trip to the northwestern province of Banteay Meanchey. "But we also appeal to the World Bank to punish its own officials ... who signed (approval) for those projects."

The three suspended projects cover land management and administration; provincial and rural infrastructure; and provincial and suburban water supply and sanitation. They are worth about US$71.8 million (euro57 million) in World Bank financing, according to a June 6 statement by the bank.

The World Bank said it has "sufficient evidence to substantiate allegations of fraud and corruption" and that the projects that cannot be resumed unless the government "deals head-on with corruption."

It has also demanded that the government pay it back any amount of money already disbursed under contracts "misprocured because of corruption."

Prime Minister Hun Sen claimed that the bank's allegations could be part of a wider political conspiracy to tarnish his government's credibility ahead of local and national elections in 2007 and 2008.

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Field commanders tell Pentagon Iraq war 'is lost'

2006-06-10T21:39:47+02:00

By DOUG THOMPSON
Republished from Capitol Hill Blue

Military commanders in the field in Iraq admit in private reports to the Pentagon the war "is lost" and that the U.S. military is unable to stem the mounting violence killing 1,000 Iraqi civilians a month.

Even worse, they report the massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha is "just the tip of the iceberg" with overstressed, out-of-control Americans soldiers pushed beyond the breaking point both physically and mentally.

"We are in trouble in Iraq," says retired army general Barry McCaffrey. "Our forces can't sustain this pace, and I'm afraid the American people are walking away from this war."

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has clamped a tight security lid on the increasingly pessimistic reports coming out of field commanders in Iraq, threatening swift action against any military personnel who leak details to the press or public.

The wife of a staff sergeant with Kilo Company, the Marine Unit charged with killing civilians at Haditha, tells Newsweek magazine that the unit was a hotbed of drug abuse, alcoholism and violence.

"There were problems in Kilo company with drugs, alcohol, hazing [violent initiation games], you name it," she said. "I think it's more than possible that these guys were totally tweaked out on speed or something when they shot those civilians in Haditha."

Journalists stationed with the unit described Kilo Company and the Third Batallion of Marines as a "unit out of control," where morale had plummeted and rules went out the window.

Similar reports emerge from military units throughout Iraq and even the Iraqi prime minister describes American soldiers as trigger happy goons with little regard for the lives of civilians.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki says the murder of Iraqi civilians has become a "daily phenomenon" by American troops who "do not respect the Iraqi people."

"They crush them with their vehicles and kill them just on suspicion. This is completely unacceptable," Maliki said. The White House tried to play down Maliki's comments, saying the prime minister was "misquoted" although Maliki himself has yet to made such a public claim.

''Can anyone blame Iraqis for joining the resistance now?'' Mustafa al-Ani, an Iraqi analyst living in Dubai, told The Chicago Tribune. ''The resistance and the terrorists alike are feeding off the misbehavior of the American soldiers.''

As the resistance mounts and daily violence escalates, the overstressed U.S. units are unable to control the mounting violence and conclusions escalate that the war is lost.

"Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood," says Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.

The former commander of American forces in Northern Iraq admits incidents like Haditha add to the impression that the U.S. cannot win the war.

"Allegations such as this, regardless of how they are borne out by the facts, can have an effect on the ability of U.S. forces to continue to operate," says Army Brig. Gen. Carter Ham.
Others say the incident just shows the U.S. has lost he "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people.

"When something like Haditha happens, it gives the impression that Americans can't be trusted to provide security, which is the most important thing to Iraqis on a day-to-day level," says Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "It tends to confirm all of the worst interpretations of the United States, and not simply in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan and in the region."

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