The designation of John Negroponte as the first director of national intelligence recalls the Central American wars of the 1980s, where he played a critical, if deeply controversial, role as U.S. ambassador to Honduras, 1981-85. Despite feigning amnesia while questioned, Negroponte implicitly participated in questionable events at the time, including bribes handed down from the embassy to high ranking military and government officials and ties between Honduran death squads and the witnessed massacres of dissidents in nearby El Salvador and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

For the neocons overseeing Washington’s occupation of Iraq, El Salvador was a significant success story which they hope to emulate. The recent exhumation of the phrase “Salvador Option” recalls for current and former ultra conservatives like then assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, Ollie North, Admiral Poindexter and Negroponte the glorious era when the feckless Jimmy Carter (who, of course, was overly concerned with human rights) was defeated by the Reagan-Bush ticket. In the aftermath of victory, the new administration committed itself to install freedom, democracy and free market economies throughout Central America. Given the congratulatory, if unmerited nature of the above beliefs, it’s hardly surprising that some Pentagon and White House officials are now talking openly about resurrecting the “Salvador Option” in Iraq-that is, to create “hit squads” composed of Kurdish and Shi’a paramilitaries to seek out and kill armed dissidents as well as non-violent sympathizers, just as the U.S. indirectly mobilized and financed death squads throughout Central America two decades ago.
Full Article: counterpunch.org

LONDON (Reuters) – More than 211 million children worldwide aged 5-15 are working full time, half of them in appalling conditions, some as prostitutes and miners, and huge aid increases are needed to help them, UNICEF’s UK branch said.

In a scathing report published on Monday, the British branch of the United Nations Children’s Fund said the only way to end child labor was to end poverty, and rich industrialized nations must give far more in development aid to poor countries.

“A huge amount still remains to be done to protect children’s rights all over the globe and to prevent their exploitation,” UNICEF UK’s executive director David Bull said.

From unregulated chemical plants in Asia to the giant open cast mines of Latin America and the stone quarries of West Africa, child labor is a scar on the conscience of the world in the 21st century, the report said.

Children are forced to work not only as soldiers in African wars or in the sweatshops of Asia, but also as cheap farm labor in north America and prostitutes in Europe, it said.

“Estimates of the number of young people working on farms in the U.S. vary from 300,000 to 800,000,” the report said. “Many are from minority groups, particularly Spanish-speaking immigrant families.”
Full Article: nytimes.com/reuters

According to the BBC, this represents one in twelve of the world’s children. Appeals to ‘conscience’ however, and ‘development aid’ disembodied from total system overhaul are simply worthless. Further, the condition of children speaks profoundly to the oppression of their mothers.

For the first time, more blacks are coming to the United States from Africa than during the slave trade.

Since 1990, according to immigration figures, more have arrived voluntarily than the total who disembarked in chains before the United States outlawed international slave trafficking in 1807. More have been coming here annually – about 50,000 legal immigrants – than in any of the peak years of the middle passage across the Atlantic, and more have migrated here from Africa since 1990 than in nearly the entire preceding two centuries.

New York State draws the most; Nigeria and Ghana are among the top 20 sources of immigrants to New York City. But many have moved to metropolitan Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Houston. Pockets of refugees, especially Somalis, have found havens in Minnesota, Maine and Oregon.

The movement is still a trickle compared with the number of newcomers from Latin America and Asia, but it is already redefining what it means to be African-American. The steady decline in the percentage of African-Americans with ancestors who suffered directly through the middle passage and Jim Crow is also shaping the debate over affirmative action, diversity programs and other initiatives intended to redress the legacy of slavery.

In Africa, the flow is contributing to a brain drain. But at the same time, African-born residents of the United States are sharing their relative prosperity here by sending more than $1 billion annually back to their families and friends.

“Basically, people are coming to reclaim the wealth that’s been taken from their countries,” said Howard Dodson, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, which has just inaugurated an exhibition, Web site and book, titled “In Motion,” to commemorate the African diaspora.
Full Article: nytimes.com

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 20 – Three months after American forces recaptured the insurgent stronghold of Falluja in the biggest operation of the war, the Marine division that led the assault said Sunday that it had started a new offensive against insurgents in Ramadi, Falluja’s twin city, on the Euphrates about 75 miles west of Baghdad.

The Marine statement gave few details, beyond saying that the first moves of the offensive have involved curfews and travel controls along a 100-mile stretch of the Euphrates that runs northwest toward the Syrian border. The statement said that the offensive involved other cities along the river, including Hit, Baghdadi and Haditha, and that the aim was to “locate, isolate and defeat” insurgents intent on disrupting the new government after Iraq’s recent elections.

The offensive appeared to be a new phase in the military strategy adopted last summer, when the American military commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., took over with a plan to reclaim a string of cities that had fallen to insurgent control.

Between August and November, the strategy drove Shiite rebels out of the holy city of Najaf, forced a standdown by the same group in Baghdad’s Sadr City district, and ended Sunni insurgents’ stranglehold on Falluja, a major staging post for attacks.

The Falluja offensive ended with much of the city reduced to rubble, and insurgent groups still capable, weeks later, of mounting attacks from isolated pockets of resistance.
Full Article: nytimes.com

Fallujah: The Truth at Last 

Doctor Salam Ismael took aid to Fallujah last month. This is a report of his visit.

IT WAS the smell that first hit me, a smell that is difficult to describe, and one that will never leave me. It was the smell of death. Hundreds of corpses were decomposing in the houses, gardens and streets of Fallujah. Bodies were rotting where they had fallen-bodies of men, women and children, many half-eaten by wild dogs. 

A wave of hate had wiped out two-thirds of the town, destroying houses and mosques, schools and clinics. This was the terrible and frightening power of the US military assault. 

The accounts I heard over the next few days will live with me forever. You may think you know what happened in Fallujah. But the truth is worse than you could possibly have imagined. 
Full Article: information clearinghouse

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – China is waging an aggressive campaign of seduction in the Caribbean, wooing countries away from relationships with rival Taiwan, opening markets for its expanding economy, promising to send tourists, and shipping police to Haiti in the first communist deployment in the Western Hemisphere.

And the United States, China’s Cold War enemy, is benignly watching the Asian economic superpower move into its backyard.
Full Article: news.yahoo.com

by Justin Raimondo
A gay prostitute, a phony media organization that managed to sneak its “reporter” into White House press briefings, and the lies that were fed to the media and the American people in the run-up to war with Iraq – what possible connection could these items have to one another?

The answer: a man called “Jeff Gannon.”

Amid the media frenzy over Gannon’s journalistic bona fides, or lack of them – and the lurid speculation going on in the left lane of the blogosphere about how a purported male hooker got admitted to White House press briefings before his “Talon News Agency” (a front group created by “GOPUSA”) was even created – one has to ask: who cares?

Answer: Patrick J. Fitzgerald, for one, the chief prosecutor in an investigation that could rope in several high-ranking administration officials and even lead to the White House itself. And those of us who have been awaiting the come-uppance of this White House, for two, and are ready to get out the popcorn and the chips-and-dip and settle down for a nice long juicy scandal.
Full Article: antiwar.com

Self-Hating Gays: Welcome to the White House and Welcome to Commit Suicide
by Gary Leupp
In 1999, an ex-Marine in his late 30s pays a web designer to build him a web site advertising his services as a male prostitute, emphasizing the military-fetish aspect, replete with lots of explicit body shots. Already owing the state of Delaware $20,700 in back taxes from 1991 to 1994, he perhaps needs the money. He flourishes in his trade, servicing in particular a military officer clientele, who grace his websites with such testimonials as the following, posted in 2002:

“I hired Jeff last winter when I was in Philadelphia on business. I was so pleased with the experience that I recently had him travel with me on a weekend trip to North Carolina. I am an active duty senior officer in the US Army. Discretion is of utmost importance to me. Jeff understands that because of his Marine background. He has so many talents besides the bedroom, it was a great experience for me. He is all-man, athletic and self-assured. Great body, he helped me work out twice, one time on base. The sex was great, he’s a hard core top, verbal and strong, never romantic, but not mean.”

“Jeff,” whose real name is Jim Guckert, terminates the sites just a month after he acquires a new job in 2003. Using the pseudonym Jeff Gannon, he acquires credentials as a journalist by taking a $ 50 two-day course and joining “Talon News,” a website without an office or staff whose material is circulated by an organization called GOPUSA, whose motto is “Bringing the conservative message to America.” “Gannon” is profiled on the Talon site as a gun-toting, SUV-driving, born-again Christian conservative Republican. As such, he applies for access to White House press briefings, and after the requisite background check becomes a staple in the question and answer sessions with presidential press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan. He becomes known for his vapid, tendentious questions designed to denigrate Democrats and others questioning Bush policy. His fluff becomes the welcome foil to the irritating, meatier questions posed by real people.

Meanwhile “Jeff” hosts a right-wing radio show, “Jeff Gannon’s Washington,” and authors homophobic articles, focusing on Democrats’ gay-friendly positions, including one on October 12, 2004 warning that John Kerry “could become the first gay president.” Then, alas, his ass-kissing questions raise suspicions that he might be a GOP plant. Web sleuths discover his play-for-pay past, feel indignant not so much about his business ventures as his abject hypocrisy, and they expose his sorry ass to a broader audience than he’d ever intended. Their exposé generates a host of questions. How was this lightweight able to join the White House press corps in the first place, alongside John King, Ron Hutcheson, etc.? Did the necessary background check reveal his fraudulence? It appears he attended using daily passes, rather than a “hard” pass, although there is some debate about that. McClellan says he knew the man was using a pseudonym. Did he know all the other stuff?
Full Article: counterpunch.org

by Salman Rushdie
I was in Washington just before the Iraq war began in March 2003 and was invited to speak to groups of senators from both parties. The most obvious distinction between the Democrats and the Republicans was that the Republicans used exclusively religious language. They discussed why they hadn’t seen each other at a certain prayer meeting. One senator said to me, in tones of genuine horror, that what he disliked most about Osama bin Laden was that he called America a Godless country. He said: “How can he call us Godless? We’re incredibly God-fearing!”

I said: “Well, senator, I suppose he doesn’t think so.” But his outrage at being presented as un-Godly was undeniably sincere. He meant business. And the increasing power of God-fearing America – of the Christian coalition, Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ variety – subsequently determined the result of the November 2004 presidential election.

Now here in Britain I discover another kind of Anschluss of liberal values in the face of resurgent religious demands. One of its results is the proposal by Tony Blair’s government – under the auspices of its Serious and Organised Crime and Police Bill – to introduce a ban on the “incitement to hatred on religious grounds”.

The pressure of members of English PEN has wrested a late concession from the government, which has renamed the proposed offence “hatred against persons on racial or religious grounds”. But the danger the legislation carries for freedom of speech, while diminished, remain. It seems we need to fight the battle for the Enlightenment all over again in Europe as well as in the United States.

That battle was about the church’s desire to place limits on thought. The Enlightenment wasn’t a battle against the state but against the church. Diderot’s novel La Religieuse (1760), with its portrayal of nuns and their behaviour, was deliberately blasphemous: it challenged religious authority, with its indexes and inquisitions, on what it was possible to say. Most of our contemporary ideas about freedom of speech and imagination come from the Enlightenment. We may have thought the battle won. If we aren’t careful, it is about to be “un-won.”
Full Article: opendemocracy.net

I Am Ward Churchill
by Chris Clarke
So Ward Churchill is the latest target of right-wing outrage, and all over the online punditosphere liberals are taking up the banners of free inquiry and leaping to his defense.

Oh, wait. No they’re not.

I’ve read the specific instance of Churchill’s writing that has prompted all the outrage, and the most I can say about it is that it is too imprecisely worded and rather inflammatory. Churchill addressed the imprecision to my satisfaction in a subsequent clarification. As for the flamethrowing, well, I interviewed Churchill a dozen years ago, and have read much of his writing since then, and I’ll just say the incendiariness comes as no surprise.

And as far as I can tell, there isn’t any phrase in the First Amendment that says anything like “unless, of course, you’re impolite.”

Others have addressed the nature of what Churchill actually said in the piece at issue, an ironic (if ham-handed) attempt to extend the accepted logic of wartime to the events of September 11, 2001. I would observe that no matter how liberals may object to the notion of American exceptionalism, nothing makes them angrier than pointing out that the American standard of living has less to do with democracy than it does with empire. My house, and most likely yours, sits on land that was stolen at gunpoint. I can drive to the train station as cheaply as I do because people are tortured and enslaved on the Arabian peninsula.
Full Article: counterpunch.org
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SULAIMANIYA, Iraq, Feb. 17 – From his snow-covered mountain fortress, Massoud Barzani sees little other than the rugged hills of Iraqi Kurdistan and green-clad militiamen posted along the serpentine road below.

The border with the Arab-dominated rest of Iraq is far off. Baghdad lies even farther off and, if Kurdish leaders like Mr. Barzani have their way, will fade almost entirely out of the picture here.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Kurds have made known their determination to retain a degree of autonomy in the territory they have dominated for more than a decade. Now, after their strong performance in the elections last month, Kurdish leaders are for the first time spelling out specific demands.

From control of oil reserves to the retention of the Kurdish militia, the pesh merga, to full authority over taxation, the requested powers add up to an autonomy that is hard to distinguish from independence.

“The fact remains that we are two different nationalities in Iraq – we are Kurds and Arabs,” Mr. Barzani said as he sat in a reception hall at his headquarters in Salahuddin. “If the Kurdish people agree to stay in the framework of Iraq in one form or another as a federation, then other people should be grateful to them.”
Full Article: nytimes.com

Hizbullah, the Lebanon-based militia organisation, rejected US demands to disarm yesterday, one of the main causes of tension between Washington and Iran and Syria.

In a defiant response to US pressure, Hussein Nablousi, a spokesman for Hizbullah, said: “We are a sword that prevents Israel attacking Lebanon.Without Hizbullah, you would see the Israelis back in downtown Beirut.”

Hizbullah, a Shia Muslim organisation that is one of the most disciplined and feared fighting forces in the Middle East, receives support from Iran and Syria.

The US, along with France, pushed through the United Nations security council in September, a resolution calling on Syria to withdraw its 14,000 troops from Lebanon and for Hizbullah to disarm.

Israel also claims that Hizbullah, acting on behalf of Iran and Syria, is interfering in the West Bank and Gaza to disrupt Israeli-Palestinian peace moves. Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, described Hizbullah as a barrier to peace.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk