This is showdown time for the Central America Free Trade Agreement. Thanks largely to strong opposition from labor, environmentalists, human rights, and other activist groups, the Bush administration still lacks enough support to ensure victory in a House vote expected between July 27 and 29.

Unable to sell CAFTA on its merits, desperate Republican supporters have had to resort to the fear factor. Their reasoning appears to be that if you can get Americans jittery enough, they will support pretty much any darn thing.

But since Osama bin Laden is hiding somewhere in the hills of Tora Bora instead of the highlands of Guatemala, Republican free traders have had to strain to conjure up an effective monster. The best they could do was Daniel Ortega. Remember him? He’s the former Nicaraguan guerrilla fighter-turned-politician who was voted out of office 15 years ago.

Ortega continues to have aspirations of regaining the Presidency, but lost electoral bids to do so in 1996 and 2001. And of course the specter of a Soviet Union-Sandinista alliance is long gone.

It is hard to imagine this former leader of the hemisphere’s second-poorest country posing a dire threat to US national security. But listening to Congressional debate over CAFTA, you would almost think that Ortega and his fellow Sandinistas were preparing to march on the White House-arm in arm of course with Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s elected President Hugo Chavez.

During Senate debate on June 30, Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe warned his colleagues: “These Communists, these enemies of the United States, Chavez, Ortega, and Castro, are all in opposition to CAFTA. If you want to be on their side, you would vote against CAFTA.”

Senator Pat Roberts, a Republican from Kansas, chimed in by declaring: “I do not want to go back to the Nicaraguan situation and Danny Ortega. That is not in the best interests of these countries in the region, and it certainly is not in the best interests of our national security.”

Republican John Cornyn of Texas repeated the mantra, stating that “There are literally people waiting to take advantage of America, if we turned our back on these countries [by blocking CAFTA], and to claim that instead we should align our interests with people like Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, and others.”

In all, Ortega’s name came up 12 times during the Senate’s one day of debate, before that body approved the deal by a narrow margin. In the House, where the real battle will be, debate hasn’t officially begun yet. But that didn’t stop California Congressman David Dreier from playing his Ortega card in a letter to the Washington Post. “Those of us who well remember Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega do not take lightly his fierce campaign to defeat this agreement,” Dreier wrote. “We can abandon our friends to poverty, dictatorship and the Ortega vision for the future. Or we can help them to grow, prosper and improve their standard of living.”

But Rep. Mike Kirk of Illinois takes the fear-mongering prize. On July 20, he informed House colleagues that Chavez, whom he dubbed “Venezuela’s Mussolini,” was purchasing weapons “to fight a new war. His war may be in Central America. His agents are already funneling oil money to groups hostile to the United States and to free trade. We in the Congress have a choice to make. We can either send exports to Central America or troops. Next week let us enact a free trade agreement with Central America to lock in democratic growth and stability, and let us make sure that President Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan agents find no fertile ground in America’s back yard.”
Full: commondreams.org

by Noam Chomsky
The resort to fear by systems of power to discipline the domestic population has left a long and terrible trail of bloodshed and suffering which we ignore at our peril. Recent history provides many shocking illustrations.

The mid-twentieth century witnessed perhaps the most awful crimes since the Mongol invasions. The most savage were carried out where western civilisation had achieved its greatest splendours. Germany was a leading centre of the sciences, the arts and literature, humanistic scholarship, and other memorable achievements. Prior to World War I, before anti-German hysteria was fanned in the West, Germany had been regarded by American political scientists as a model democracy as well, to be emulated by the West. In the mid-1930s, Germany was driven within a few years to a level of barbarism that has few historical counterparts. That was true, most notably, among the most educated and civilised sectors of the population.

In his remarkable diaries of his life as a Jew under Nazism — escaping the gas chambers by a near miracle — Victor Klemperer writes these words about a German professor friend whom he had much admired, but who had finally joined the pack: “If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honourable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene.”

Klemperer’s reactions were merited, and generalised to a large part of recorded history.

Complex historical events always have many causes. One crucial factor in this case was skillful manipulation of fear. The “ordinary folk” were driven to fear of a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy to take over the world, placing the very survival of the people of Germany at risk. Extreme measures were therefore necessary, in “self-defence”. Revered intellectuals went far beyond.

……The rhetorical framework rests on three pillars (Weeks): “the assumption of the unique moral virtue of the United States, the assertion of its mission to redeem the world” by spreading its professed ideals and the ‘American way of life,’ and the faith in the nation’s “divinely ordained destiny”. The theological framework undercuts reasoned debate, and reduces policy issues to a choice between Good and Evil, thus reducing the threat of democracy. Critics can be dismissed as “anti-American,” an interesting concept borrowed from the lexicon of totalitarianism. And the population must huddle under the umbrella of power, in fear that its way of life and destiny are under imminent threat…
Full: zmag.org

This is probably as far as Chomsky dares to go.

by Robert Fisk
That fine French historian of the 1914-18 world conflict, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, suggested not long ago that the West was the inheritor of a type of warfare of very great violence. “Then, after 1945,” he wrote, “… the West externalised it, in Korea, in Algeria, in Vietnam, in Iraq… we stopped thinking about the experience of war and we do not understand its return (to us) in different forms like that of terrorism… We do not want to admit that there is now occurring a different type of confrontation…”

He might have added that politicians – and here I’m referring to Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara – would deliberately refuse to acknowledge this. We are fighting evil. Nothing to do with the occupation of Palestinian land, the occupation of Afghanistan, the occupation of Iraq, the torture at Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantanamo. Oh no, indeed. “An evil ideology”, a nebulous, unspecified, dark force. That’s the problem.

There are two things wrong with this. The first is that once you start talking about “evil”, you are talking about religion. Good and evil, God and the Devil. The London suicide bombers were Muslims (or thought they were) so the entire Muslim community in Britain must stand to attention and – as Muslims – condemn them. We “Christians” were not required to do that because we are not Muslims – nor were we required as “Christians” to condemn the Christian Serb slaughter of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica just over 10 years ago. All we had to do was say sorry for doing nothing at the time. But Muslims, because they are Muslims, must ritually condemn something they had nothing to do with.

But that, I suspect, is the point. Deep down, I wonder if we do not think that their religion does have something to do with all this, that Islam is a backward religion, un-renaissanced, potentially violent. It’s not true, but our heritage of orientalism suggests otherwise.

It’s weird the way we both despise and envy the “other”. Many of those early orientalists showed both disgust and fascination with the East. They loathed the punishments and the pashas, but they rather liked the women; they were obsessed with harems. Westerners found the idea of having more than one wife quite appealing. Similarly, I rather think there are aspects of our Western “decadence” which are of interest to Muslims, even if they ritually condemn them.

…But those who cannot, those who have enjoyed our freedoms but feel guilty for doing so – who can be appalled by the pleasure they have taken in “our” society but equally appalled by the way in which they themselves feel corrupted (especially after a trip to Pakistan for a dose of old-fashioned ritualised religion) have a special problem.

Palestine or Afghanistan or Iraq turn it incendiary. They want both to break out of this world and to express their moral fury and political impotence as they do so. They want, I think, to destroy themselves for their own feelings of guilt and others for the crime of “corrupting” them. Even if that means murdering a few co-religionists and dozens of other innocents. So on go the backpacks – whoever supplied them is a different matter – and off go the bombs. Something happens, something that takes only a second, between saying “I love you” and then hanging up the phone.
Full: counterpunch.org

…t is quite a paradox that Blair was the first to infuse the term “barbaric” following the London carnage; a paradox because the barbarism in London had an undeniable kinship with the years of barbarism in Iraq, which continues to unfold in full force.

In May 2003, following protests from human rights groups regarding the British army’s use of cluster bombs in and around the Iraqi city of Basra, British officials had nothing but unabashed rationalization as a response.

Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram justified the use of cluster bombs, in an interview with BBC radio, on military grounds, arguing: “Cluster bombs are not illegal. They are effective weapons. They are used in specific circumstances where there is a threat to our troops.”

Those “specific circumstances”, according to British media, compelled the dropping of 2,000 Israeli-made cluster bombs on Basra and its surroundings in April 2003 alone. Richard Lloyd, Director of Landmine Action, asserted that he had seen maps – provided to the UN by the US military – showing cities that were almost completely masked by a heap of symbols indicating where cluster bombs had been used. “These weapons were used in and around virtually every built-up area where there was major fighting,” Lloyd said.

Hundreds of these bombs are still there, not yet detonated and just waiting to go off among hoards of scavenging children, a dreadful and recurring episode in both Afghanistan and Iraq; utterly barbaric indeed.
Full: commondreams.org

…The audiovisual media, with their ability to push the public’s emotional hot buttons, need to play a more responsible role. Of course it is the news media’s job to inform the public about the risk and the incidence of terrorism, but they should try to do so without helping terrorists achieve their objective, which is to terrify.

Television images, in all their vividness and specificity, have an extraordinary power to do just that, and to persuade the viewer that a distant risk is clear and present, while a pressing but underreported one is nothing to worry about.

Like pharmaceutical companies, the news media should study the side effects of their product, one of which is the distortion of the viewer’s mental risk map. Because of the way the brain is built, images and striking narratives may well be necessary to get our attention. But just as it takes a diamond to cut a diamond, the news industry should find ways to use images and stories to bring us closer to the statistical truth.
Full: nytimes.com

The news industry is doing exactly what it wants to do, which is to create a terrorized people who will believe anything and accept anything.

The sight of a dozen police riot vans racing off from outside Brixton police station yesterday afternoon was a dramatic signal that Britain’s largest Islamist terror manhunt was gathering pace.

Firearms and anti-terrorist officers from across the capital were heading for nearby Tulse Hill, as this area of south London becomes the the centre of the police investigation into last Thursday’s failed bomb attacks at Oval, Shepherd’s Bush and Warren Street tube stations and on a Number 26 bus in Hackney.

By the early afternoon their target was clear: an address in Scotia Road, Tulse Hill, where it is believed a suspected bomber could be holed up. The scene that followed is by now familiar: armed police in full riot gear, CS gas fired through windows, followed up with a raid by officers in gas masks.

This area of south London, stretching from Stockwell south through Brixton to Tulse Hill, was beginning to look like a war zone. Neighbours described the scene, as police set up an emergency cordon, trapping a children’s party inside the police tapes.

In the early hours of yesterday morning, police had swooped on a Stockwell council estate to arrest a Somali suspect who was led away to join another, thought to be Ethiopian, who was seized on Friday at a nearby estate. Both are being questioned in Paddington Green high security police station. A raid on an address in west Kilburn earlier in the day also targeted a house occupied by a Somali family, The Observer has established.

The arrests have led police and the intelligence services to the conclusion that they are now hunting a cell with its origins in the lawless war-torn chaos of the Horn of Africa, long known as a haven for terror groups.

In a dramatic development last night, the investigation unearthed the first tentative suggestion of a link between the cell and the 7 July bombers who killed 52 in attacks in London. A connection has been made between individuals connected to the raids and a whitewater rafting trip to north Wales last year attended by the Leeds bombers, Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammed Sidique Khan.

Stockwell is an ill-defined district where the urban middle classes mix with recent immigrants from the world’s war zones, long established Caribbeans and the Portuguese community who have made the area their own.

But that all changed at 10am on Friday morning when police chased a further suspect on to a train at Stockwell underground station, wrestled him to the ground and shot him five times in the head.
Full:guardian.co.uk

Now the magic bullets have moved from the young man’s torso to his head. And there’s war in the projects, which is nothing new, except for the fact that now it’s ‘justified.’ “The lawless war-torn chaos of the Horn of Africa…” dark-skinned men with ‘primitive’ bombs (downgraded from ‘military-grade explosives).

Links have been uncovered between the two teams of bombers who have brought terror to the streets of London over the past two weeks, say security sources.

Police now believe some of the men they are pursuing for last week’s abortive attacks – on Shepherd’s Bush, Oval and Warren Street tube stations and on a No 26 bus in Hackney – attended a whitewater rafting trip at the same centre as two of the 7 July bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer.

This raises the distinct possibility that the two operations were connected as part of a larger plan to bring carnage to the capital.

Evidence discovered in the rucksacks left behind by the failed bombers led police to three addresses in London. When investigators cross-referenced them with the electoral register they discovered names that tallied with those of individuals who attended the outdoor adventure course in Snowdonia last summer.

Scotland Yard has con-firmed the explosive used in the 21 July bomb attempts bore a similarity to that used in the earlier attacks. Initial tests on a package found in bushes in Little Wormwood Scrubs, north-west London, yesterday show it may contain the same explosive.

The Observer understands that investigators are examining the possibility that the trip to Bala in North Wales was used as a bonding experience.

…Scotland Yard has con-firmed the explosive used in the 21 July bomb attempts bore a similarity to that used in the earlier attacks. Initial tests on a package found in bushes in Little Wormwood Scrubs, north-west London, yesterday show it may contain the same explosive.
Full: guardian.co.uk

Oy veh. A ‘bonding experience.’ I think the bumbling stupidity of this investigation is a convenient way of explaining away the numerous holes in this story, not least of which no ‘credible’ terrorist group has even claimed responsibility for these bombings. The irrationality of ‘suicide bombers’ is accepted unquestioningly, while any discussion of who might plan and execute terror in their own clear interest is completely absent. The same is true in Iraq. What self-respecting ‘freedom fighter’ is going to go around blowing up his own people?

Scotland Yard Challenged by Missteps in Bombing Inquiry
Scotland Yard’s extraordinary reversal from assertions made just 24 hours earlier was the latest in a series of incomplete characterizations about the direction of the inquiry and, in some cases, public misstatements about the evidence. The missteps included statements about the timing of the bombs on July 7, whether the bombers in the initial attack had died with their bombs or were at large, and swiftly changing their assessments of certain suspects’ importance.

The admission carries profound consequences for the Metropolitan Police’s complex antiterrorist investigation, which police officials have characterized as the most difficult in Scotland Yard’s history. It raised serious questions about the police’s shoot-to-kill policy on suicide bombers and threatened officers’ morale. More important, it could undermine public confidence in the police’s handling of the case – a serious problem in a case where the public is being asked directly to participate in the investigation. The outrage has been strong in the Muslim community, one of the most crucial in the quest for identities and clues.

…At two consecutive news conferences, senior police officials inaccurately reported that the first bomb exploded at 8:51 a.m., on a train near Liverpool Street station, on the edge of the city’s financial district. They said the second bomb exploded five minutes later, at 8:56 a.m., on a train at Russell Square station. And the third, they said, hit a train at 9:17 a.m. as it approached Edgware Road.

On the evening of July 8, cellphone video aired by the BBC showed that the bomb at Edgware Road had exploded at 8:51 a.m. – not at 9:17 a.m., as the police had said.

On July 9, the police acknowledged their mistake and revealed that the bombs had exploded within 50 seconds of each other. Their initial estimate of the times that the bombs exploded was mistakenly pegged to when the first emergency calls were placed at each subway station.

One of the most important questions, in the early days, was whether the attacks were launched by suicide bombers. If true, it would be a first in the history of Western Europe.

But for several days, the police denied repeated questions by reporters about whether the bombers had died in the attacks. It was not until July 12 that the police said they had identified the bombers, but did not release their names. Though their identities emerged gradually from other sources in the ensuing days, two days later, the police said only two suspected bombers had been formally identified. On July 15, Scotland Yard identified the four bombers who had died in the attacks.

The police have still steadfastly avoided calling the men suicide bombers, possibly because of a live theory inside Scotland Yard that the men were duped into carrying the bombs on board the trains.

There was also much interest in the makeup of the bombs, as it is one of the most important forensic clues that investigators have to help them solve a case. On July 9, two days after the bombings, the Metropolitan Police made a preliminary conclusion that the bombs were of “military grade.” They passed the information on to their counterparts in Europe and the United States, and some news organizations reported it.

But within days, Scotland Yard determined that the bombs were powerful but crude, homemade explosive devices made with TATP, a mixture of widely available chemicals, including acetone, hydrogen peroxide and mineral acid.

A senior Scotland Yard official said Saturday the police’s initial assessment was not released publicly by the police, and he stressed that it was only a tentative conclusion leaked to the press by others. “It’s true our assessment changed,” the official said, “but we can’t really be held to account for the premature announcements made by others.”

As police reversed their earlier conclusion about the slain man’s connection to the inquiry, they also retreated from an optimistic assessment of another aspect of the investigation.

On Friday night, the police arrested two men held under the Terrorism Act, a development that they said was “promising.” One senior police official said one of the suspects might be one of the would-be suicide bombers who had attempted to carry out Thursday’s attacks.

But by late Saturday evening, police officials gloomily cautioned reporters that the two men may not be the would-be suicide bombers after all.

For his part, Sir Ian, the police commissioner, said nothing about the arrests or the man shot by police officers the day before. In brief remarks to reporters outside Scotland Yard on Saturday, he hailed the men and women conducting the investigation, saying they were exhausted but their spirits remained high. And he praised the investigators for their hard work and the “fast progress” they had made in the investigation.

Six in 10 Americans said they think such a war is likely, while only one-third of the Japanese said so, according to polling done in both countries for The Associated Press and Kyodo, the Japanese news service.

“Man’s going to destroy man eventually. When that will be, I don’t know,” said Gaye Lestaeghe of Freeport, La.

Some question whether that war has arrived, with fighting dragging on in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism.

“I feel like we’re in a world war right now,” said Susan Aser, a real estate agent from Rochester, N.Y.

The Japanese were less likely than Americans to expect a world war, less worried about the threat from North Korea and less inclined to say a first strike with nuclear weapons could be justified.
Full: news.yahoo.com

Devices recovered from the scenes of Thursday’s failed terrorist attacks in London bore striking similarities to material found in the wake of the July 7 bombings.

Forensic experts have not yet established the exact chemical make-up of material found in Leeds and Luton in the wake of the bombings two weeks ago that killed 52 victims and the bombers. But security sources told the Guardian that it was markedly similar in appearance to the material found in containers inside four rucksacks carried by the bombers involved in Thursday’s attacks.

A source described the substance as “liquid mixed with a lump of matter”.

The material used in the July 7 attacks was at first rumoured to be military or commercial explosives. But the discoveries in a car abandoned by the bombers in Luton and in a flat connected with the bombers in Leeds shifted the emphasis to home-made explosives.

It was then suggested that the substance could be acetone peroxide, possibly TATP, nicknamed Mother of Satan because of its extreme volatility. However, police sources say the substance still has not been positively identified.

…But home made explosives such as TATP degrade over time, which could explain why Thursday’s bombs malfunctioned.

It is believed that the detonators on three of the bombs recovered on Thursday exploded, but failed to ignite the main explosives, while the detonator in the fourth device did not even go off.

If the explosives do turn out to be made from the same recipe it will not necessarily prove a definitive link between the two bomb gangs, but would strongly suggest that they may have been a part of the same loosely connected network.
Full: guardian.co.uk

That last paragraph is a doozy, and ‘suggests’ the absurdly tangential nature of all this evidence we’re having thrown at us. Amazing isn’t it, that 4 out of 4 bombs failed to detonate. Hmmm. Calculating the minimum of casualties for the maximum impact of fear. That way when you shoot a kid dead like a dog for jumping a turnstile nobody makes a peep. Why are you going to empty 5 shots into the torso of someone you think has a bomb wrapped around his waist?

Police Shoot Suspected Suicide Bomber
…At Stockwell Station, armed officers opened fire on the suspect after he hurdled a ticket barrier and raced along a platform.

Police screamed at passengers to evacuate and are thought to have shot the suspect as he stumbled on to a train.

Alarmed onlookers said they saw up to 10 plain-clothed officers chasing an Asian-looking man before opening fire.

Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair said the shooting was “directly linked” to ongoing anti-terrorist invetigations in the capital.

He said the man had failed to comply with instructions from police before he was shot dead.

The public should not approach these men and should dial 999 immediately if they know of their whereabouts, a spokesman said.

Witness Mark Whitby was on the train as he saw a big man wearing a large coat and “looking absolutely petrified” lurch through the doors.

Admitting to being “totally distraught”, he went on: “He half-tripped, was half-pushed to the floor.

“The policeman nearest to me had the black automatic pistol in his left hand, he held it down to the guy and unloaded five shots into him.”

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: “We can confirm that just after 10am armed officers shot a male at Stockwell Underground station.

“A man was challenged by officers and subsequently shot. London Ambulance Service attended the scene. He was pronounced dead at the scene.”

Police are believed to be under orders to shoot to kill if they believe someone is about to detonate a bomb.

Sky News Crime Correspondent Martin Brunt said: “The officer or officers involved in this clearly felt this suspect was about to detonate a bomb.”

Three eyewitnesses were taken to a nearby veterinary surgery by police before being taken away for interview.

…The vast majority of British Muslims condemn the London bombings but a substantial minority are clearly alienated from modern British society and some are prepared to justify terrorist acts.

The divisions within the Muslim community go deep. Muslims are divided over the morality of the London bombings, over the extent of their loyalty to this country and over how Muslims should respond to recent events.

Most Muslims are evidently moderate and law-abiding but by no means all are.

YouGov sought to gauge the character of the Muslim community’s response to the events of July 7. As the figures in the chart show, 88 per cent of British Muslims clearly have no intention of trying to justify the bus and Tube murders.

However, six per cent insist that the bombings were, on the contrary, fully justified.

Six per cent may seem a small proportion but in absolute numbers it amounts to about 100,000 individuals who, if not prepared to carry out terrorist acts, are ready to support those who do.

Moreover, the proportion of YouGov’s respondents who, while not condoning the London attacks, have some sympathy with the feelings and motives of those who carried them out is considerably larger – 24 per cent.

A substantial majority, 56 per cent, say that, whether or not they sympathise with the bombers, they can at least understand why some people might want to behave in this way.

YouGov also asked whether or not its Muslim respondents agreed or disagreed with Tony Blair’s description of the ideas and ideology of the London bombers as “perverted and poisonous”.

Again, while a large majority, 58 per cent, agree with him, a substantial minority, 26 per cent, are reluctant to be so dismissive.

The responses indicate that Muslim men are more likely than Muslim women to be alienated from the mainstream and that the young are more likely to be similarly alienated than the old.
Full: telegraph.co.uk

As evidenced by events today, open season has been declared on young non-white males. The pictures of the 4 suspects reflect the entire diversity of non-whites in the UK.