The legal counsel to Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) admitted yesterday that he was the author of a memo citing the political advantage to Republicans of intervening in the case of Terri Schiavo, the senator said in an interview last night.

Brian H. Darling, 39, a former lobbyist for the Alexander Strategy Group on gun rights and other issues, offered his resignation and it was immediately accepted, Martinez said.
Full Article:news.yahoo.com

Liberal handwringing over the World Bank simply reflects a failure to recognise the role it exists to fulfill.

by George Monbiot
It’s about as close to consensus as the left is ever likely to come. Everyone this side of Atilla the Hun and the Wall Street Journal agrees that Paul Wolfowitz’s appointment as president of the World Bank is a catastrophe. Except me.

Under Wolfowitz, my fellow progressives lament, the World Bank will work for America. If only someone else were chosen, it would work for the world’s poor. Joseph Stiglitz, the bank’s renegade former chief economist, champions Ernesto Zedillo, a former president of Mexico. A Guardian leading article suggested Colin Powell or, had he been allowed to stand, Bono. But what all this hand-wringing reveals is a profound misconception about the role and purpose of the body Wolfowitz will run.

The World Bank and the IMF were conceived by the US economist Harry Dexter White. Appointed by the US Treasury to lead the negotiations on postwar economic reconstruction, White spent most of 1943 banging the heads of the other allied nations together. They were appalled by his proposals. He insisted that his institutions would place the burden of stabilising the world economy on the countries suffering from debt and trade deficits rather than on the creditors. He insisted that “the more money you put in, the more votes you have”. He decided, before the meeting at Bretton Woods in 1944, that “the US should have enough votes to block any decision”.

Both the undemocratic voting arrangement and the US veto remain to this day. The result is that a body that works mostly in poor countries is controlled by rich ones. White demanded that national debts be redeemable for gold, that gold be convertible into dollars, and that exchange rates be fixed against the dollar. The result was to lay the ground for what was to become the dollar’s global hegemony. White also decided that the IMF and the bank would be sited in Washington.

At the time, no one doubted that these bodies were designed as instruments of US economic policy, but all this has been airbrushed from history. Even the admirable Stiglitz believes the bank was the brainchild of the British economist John Maynard Keynes (he was, in fact, its most prominent opponent). When Noreena Hertz wrote on these pages last month that “the Bush administration is a very long way from the bank’s espoused goals and mandate”, she couldn’t have been more wrong.

From the perspective of the world’s poor, there has never been a good president of the World Bank. In seeking contrasts with Wolfowitz, it has become fashionable to look back to the reign of that other Pentagon hawk, Robert McNamara. He is supposed to have become, in the words of an Observer leader, “one of the most admired and effective of World Bank presidents”. Admired in Washington, perhaps. McNamara was the man who concentrated almost all the bank’s lending on vast prestige schemes (highways, ports, dams) while freezing out less glamorous causes such as health, education and sanitation. Most of the major projects he backed have, in economic or social terms or both, failed catastrophically.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

VATICAN CITY – Cardinal Bernard Law, who resigned in disgrace as archbishop of Boston over his role in the clergy sex abuse crisis, has been given a role of honor in the mourning for Pope John Paul II.

The Vatican announced Thursday he will lead one of the daily Masses celebrated in the pope’s memory during the nine-day period that follows the funeral, called Novemdiales. The service will be held Monday at Rome’s St. Mary Major Basilica, where Law was appointed archpriest after leaving Boston.

Some Roman Catholics in his former archdiocese immediately protested.

Suzanne Morse, spokeswoman for Voice of the Faithful, a Massachusetts-based reform group that emerged from the scandal, said Law’s visibility since the pope’s death has been “extremely painful” both for abuse survivors and rank-and-file Catholics.

“It certainly shows and puts a spotlight on the lack of accountability in the Catholic Church, that the most visible bishop in the clergy sexual abuse crisis has been given these honorary opportunities,” she said.
Full Article: yahoo.com.news

KIBBUTZ MAANIT, Israel – A Texas oilman is using his Bible as a guide to finding oil in the Holy Land.

John Brown, a born-again Christian and founder of Zion Oil & Gas of Dallas, can quote chapter and verse about his latest drilling venture in Israel, where his company has an oil and gas exploration license covering 96,000 acres.

“Most blessed of sons be Asher. Let him be favored by his brothers and let him dip his foot in oil,” Brown quotes from Moses’s blessing to one of the 12 Tribes of Israel in Deuteronomy 33:24.

Standing next to a 177-foot derrick at Kibbutz Maanit in northern Israel, Brown said the passage indicated there is oil lying beneath the biblical territory of the Tribe of Asher, where the agricultural community is located.

Geological surveys and an attempt by an Israeli-based company to find oil at the same site 10 years ago, a venture he said was abandoned for lack of funds, led Brown to pick the spot where new drilling will begin this week.

Brown said he raised money for “Project Joseph” from fellow evangelical Christians in the United States.

“From the investment standpoint, they certainly hope to have a return of the money,” he said. “But the basis of it is Genesis, chapter 12.”

In that passage, God promises to shower blessings on those who bless the “great nation” sired by the Hebrew patriarch Abraham.
msnbc.msn.com

The streets are filled with vipers who’ve lost all ray of hope
You know it ain’t even safe no more in the palace of the Pope
– Bob Dylan

by Jeff Wells
Is everything a conspiracy? No. Just the important stuff.

Since there’s a lot of speculation these days about who will succeed Pope John Paul II, it seems a good time to recall the circumstances of the last papal succession. Because Luciani Albini, Pope John Paul I, was almost certainly murdered, by an international network of fascists and money launderers, with ties to far-right elements within military and intelligence agencies. (And isn’t it just amazing, how often we find that convergence?)

He only served 33 days; what could he have done in that short time to deserve death? What kind of Pope was he becoming?

To the second question, there’s the suggestion of an answer in this passage from David Yallop’s In God’s Name:

On August 28, the beginning of his papal revolution was announced. It took the form of a Vatican statement that there was to be no coronation, that the new pope refused to be crowned. There would be no sedia gestatoria, the chair used to carry the pope, no tiara encrusted with emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds. No ostrich feathers, no six-hour ceremony…. Luciani, who never once used the royal “we,” was determined that the royal papacy with its appurtenances of worldly grandeur should be replaced by a Church that resembled the concepts of its founder. The “coronation” became a simple Mass. The spectacle of a pontiff carried in a chair…was supplanted by the sight of a supreme pastor quietly walking up the steps of the altar. With that gesture Luciani abolished a thousand years of history…. The era of the poor Church had officially begun.

That right there would have been enough to make the Vatican’s power elite nervous, but surely not enough to seek the Pope’s death. Not even his expressed interest in reconsidering the Church’s position on birth control would have been enough for that. What was enough, was his intent to overturn the tables of the corrupt Vatican Bank, and purge the Vatican of the P2 Lodge.

This is one of those things that make being a “conspiracy theorist” seem entirely superfluous. Just try imagining P2: an elite, ultra-secretive, neo-fascist, Masonic cabal, involved in money laundering, assassination and false-flag terrorism. (The “Strategy of Tension,” to discredit Italy’s Communist Party. For instance, the engineering of Aldo Moro’s kidnapping and murder, and the Bologna train bombing.) P2 counted among its members the future Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, and reputedly boasted honourary members like Henry Kissinger, George HW Bush and arch-neocon, Michael Ledeen.

I mentioned P2 last August, with regard to Ledeen’s long history with the Italian far right and the linchpin of Italian military intelligence to the Niger “Yellow Cake” forgery. [For more on the significance of P2 to US intelligence and the “Octopus,” refer to David Guyatt’s excellent articles “Operation Gladio”, “Holy Smoke and Mirrors” and “The Money Fountain.”]

Licio Gelli was P2’s Grandmaster, and can’t even be called a neo-fascist. He was Old School: a member of the Italian Black Shirt Brigade which fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. During World War II, he spied on partisans in his native Italy for the Nazis, and obtained the SS rank of Oberleutenant. This same Gelli was a honoured guest of George HW Bush after the 1980 inauguration, and there is evidence that Gelli and P2 played a role in the October Surprise; even that Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was murdered on Gelli’s orders because he’d refused to provide Swedish cover for the covert transfer of money and arms. In her October Surprise, Barbara Honegger writes that a P2 informant claimed to her that before Palme’s death, Gelli sent a message to former Republican National Committee advisor (and also alleged “honourary” P2 member) Philip Guarino, assuring him that “the Swedish tree will be felled,” and to “tell our good friend Bush.”

Your head exploding yet? There’s more. GHW Bush’s reputed code name for October Surprise was “The White Rose,” which was also the name of a far-right Cuban exile group with which the CIA’s Bush was reportedly engaged during the ramp-up to the Bay of Pigs. Honneger reports that when Italian police uncovered the P2 control cell responsible for terrorism in Italy, they learned that its code name was “The Rose of Twenty.” Gelli seems to have had a weakness for the flower.

And this may mean nothing, or I know what you did: in 1988, on the 25th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s murder, Ted Kennedy marked the occasion in Runnymede England by placing, at the foot of his brother’s memorial, a single white rose.
Full Article: rigorousintuition.blogspot.com

A Balanced View Of Popes – Part 1
…Karol Wojtyla was a sort of chief assistant to the Bishop of Krakow, who being pro-Nazi, controlled fellow Poles with an iron fist and kept them submissive and docile for the benefit of the German occupation forces. Later, far too many Poles claimed they knew nothing of the round-up of the Jews from the ghettoes and transporting them to concentration camp for slave labor for I.G. Farben.
 
Millions of Jews, labor leaders, and other “enemies of the State” were worked to death while being starved. Elderly and disabled Jews were quickly disposed of; they were of no use in the Nazi war factories.
 
Most Poles later either denied knowing of this when it was happening or claimed they did not participate in the crimes against humanity. Presumably, Wojtyla took the same position as his fellow Poles. In his later career, did anyone in the Monopoly Press ever dare ask him?
 
Then there is the story of another one. In 1978, in their secret Conclave, the Cardinals selected another Italian to be Pope, John Paul 1st. But, soon it became evident from a geopolitical and religious standpoint, they most likely made a wrong selection.
 
He soon enough let it be known that he was for modifying the Vatican position of absolute prohibition for Catholics to use birth control. In simple terms, he was against birthing more children than a couple could financially take care of. It was a reasonable , humane position to non-Catholics.
 
Furthermore, he was determined to put an end to the traditional Sicilian and Italian Mafia, jointly with
certain corrupt Archbishops, and the American CIA, in using the Vatican Bank as a money laundry for stolen gold treasuries, dope money, illlcit weapons deals, assassination funds, and superior counterfeit currency dealings, among other dirty, bloody business.
 
Some Italian editors dared demand that Pope John Paul 1st, do something about the Continental Bank of Chicago, the majority owners jointly being the Vatican and the Queen of England. The bank, some Italian editors stated, was a laundry for the Mafia.
Full Article: rense.com

…John Graham, a Canadian citizen and former AIM activist, has been charged in a U.S. court with the 1975 murder of Anna Mae Aquash, a member of the Mi’kmaq First Nation who was a prominent young leader of AIM.

An editorial piece such as this can’t do justice to the complexities of this case, nor to the sordid history of U.S. government sabotage of the American Indian Movement. Rex Wyler, a Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist, has written extensively on the Graham case, and his in-depth article – published in the CanWest Global Vancouver Sun of all places – provides a fairly definitive summary. (See ‘Who Killed Anna Mae?’ January 4, 2004).

Suffice to say, though, that the evidence against Graham is highly dubious, and must be viewed in light of the 1976 Peltier extradition, where it is now acknowledged that the FBI falsified evidence. Further, the entire context of the case is the U.S. government’s efforts to exterminate oppositional Native movements, as a culmination of a centuries-long genocide and colonisation.

The COINTELPRO infiltration by government agents — also now well documented — was designed to create and fuel violent internecine conflicts within AIM as well as other organized threats to ‘Homeland Security’ such as the Black Panther Party, the Socialist Workers Party and a myriad of other groups organizing for social change.

A number of journalists, commentators, and Native activists have articulated a principled position on the case: No matter who pulled the trigger, the FBI is responsible for the murder of Anna Mae.
Full Article: zmag.org

…So Afghanistan has once again become the land that time forgot. Given the present Bush democracy blitz and given the country’s “success” — a “struggling” or “nascent” democracy or “semi-democracy,” liberated from one of the worst regimes on Earth and helped back onto its feet by 17,000-plus American troops stationed on its territory, it seems a case worth revisiting. What follows is the best assessment I can offer — from this distance — based at least to some extent on more fulsome reporting done for media outlets outside the United States.

When you begin to look around, you quickly find that just about everyone — Bush proponents and critics alike — seems to agree on at least some of the following when it comes to the experiment in “democracy” in Afghanistan: The country now qualifies, according to the Human Development Index in the UN’s Human Development Report 2004, as the sixth worst off country on Earth, perched just above five absolute basket-case nations (Burundi, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Sierra Leone) in sub-Saharan Africa. The power of the new, democratically elected government of Hamid Karzai extends only weakly beyond the outskirts of Kabul. Large swathes of Afghanistan are still ruled by warlords and drug lords, or in some cases undoubtedly warlord/drug lords; and while the Taliban was largely swept away, armed militias dominate much of the country as they did after the Soviet withdrawal back in 1989. In addition, a low-level guerrilla war is still being run by elements of the former Taliban regime for which, in areas of the South, there is a growing “nostalgia.”

Women, outside a few cities, seem hardly better off than they were under the Taliban. As Sonali Kolhatkar, co-Director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!:

“We hear… about [how] five million girls are now going to school. It is wonderful. When I was in Afghanistan, I noticed that in Kabul, certainly schools were open, women were walking around fairly openly with not as much fear. Outside of Kabul, where 80% of Afghans reside, totally different situation. There are no schools. I visited the Farah province, which is a very isolated, remote province in western Afghanistan and there were no schools except for the one school that Afghan Women’s Mission is funding that is administered by our allies, the members of RAWA. Aside from that one school for girls, there are no schools in the region. And so we hear all of these very superficial things about how great Afghan women are, you know, the progress they’re making. The U.N. just released a report recently on Afghanistan where they described Afghanistan’s education system as, quote, ‘the worst in the world.’ And, you know, we never hear that. Our media, when they covered Laura Bush’s trip, will not mention, will not do their homework, and will not mention these facts.”
Full Article: zmag.org

WASHINGTON (AP) – A government scientist at the center of a controversy over falsifying documents on the Yucca Mountain nuclear dump project received another Energy Department contract for more work on the project as the problems came to light.

The worker was asked to help run computer models of how water moved through the proposed waste dump site in Nevada – the same kind of work he was doing when he wrote e-mails about falsifying documents, deleting data and keeping two sets of records, the U.S. Geological Survey said Wednesday.

The USGS, where the scientist works as a research hydrologist, disclosed the new DOE contract a day after USGS Director Charles Groat assured a congressional committee that the workers who wrote and received e-mails about fudging data were no longer working on the waste dump project.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk

MANAGUA, Nicaragua – It has been more than two decades since this tiny nation of five million people and its revolutionary strongman, Daniel Ortega, kept Washington awake at night. In recent months, new fears, but the same old politics, have revived that tossing and turning.

Mr. Ortega, one of United States’ fiercest opponents during the cold war and the entrenched leader of the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front, has opened his fourth campaign for the presidency. Washington is worried once again that its old nemesis might win, this time with consequences for a new global war, on terrorism.

Even though the elections here are more than a year and a half away, and even though Mr. Ortega’s chances seem slim, the Bush administration is taking no chances and has begun concerted efforts to stop him.

The clearest shot across the bow came in March when the United States suspended some $2.3 million in military aid to Nicaragua to put pressure on the government, and an army with roots in the Sandinista movement, to destroy its arsenal of Soviet-made SA-7 missiles.

But pressure had been building since January, when a sting operation by the United States and Nicaraguan authorities netted two Nicaraguan men trying to sell an SA-7, a shoulder-fired missile that terrorism experts consider a threat to civilian aircraft.

The sting set off alarms among conservative Republicans, and the State Department sent two high-level delegations here to Managua.

In political magazines and Congressional testimony in Washington, cold war alums – almost as masterly at political resurrection as Mr. Ortega – issued strong, although vaguely substantiated warnings about Al Qaeda recruiting operatives in Latin America; about a new “axis of evil” forming across the Western Hemisphere, from Venezuela through Nicaragua to Cuba; about a “destabilization,” or a “backslide away from democratic principles” south of the border; about Daniel Ortega serving as a tool to Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
Full Article: nytimes.com

So wrong. On so many levels. Now anyone advocating democracy south of the border is a ‘terrorist.’ How do you get credentialed as a terrorism expert? Seems like a good gig.

MIAMI (AFP) – Florida’s legislature has approved a bill that would give residents the right to open fire against anyone they perceive as a threat in public, instead of having to try to avoid a conflict as under prevailing law.

Outraged opponents say the law will encourage Floridians to open fire first and ask questions later, fostering a sort of statewide Wild West shootout mentality. Supporters argue that criminals will think twice if they believe they are likely to be promptly shot when they assault someone.

Republican Governor Jeb Bush, who has said he plans to sign the bill, says it is “a good, commonsense, anti-crime issue.”
Full Article: news.yahoo.com