…Palestinian Planning Minister Ghassan Khatib played down the significance of Sheetrit’s remarks, saying Sharon and the Palestinians had a different peace deal in mind.

“He is pursuing a unilateral approach, which is not constructive, and he wants peace that is incompatible with our legitimate rights and with international legality,” Khatib said.

In practice, Sharon is building settlements and consolidating Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, “moving in the opposite direction” of a final peace deal, he said.
guardian.co.uk

Giant snowflakes tumble down outside the Kaikanten bar. Inside, Mustafa Mirreh from Somalia stares down his pool cue, trying to pot the black. His opponent, Italian engineer Pier Luigi Poletto, has turned to the slot machine. The Kilkenny beer has run out. There is only canned Guinness. This could be grounds for a fight, but French fishermen J-P and Max have been distracted by the rare sight of a woman crossing the floor.

These are the Klondikers of global warming: men from all over the world who have come to Hammerfest, gateway to the Barents Sea, to make their fortune from new resources – oil, gas, fish and diamonds – made accessible by the receding ice.

It is the dark season here – two months from November to January when the sun never rises above the snow-laced rocks around Hammerfest, ice-free thanks to the Gulf stream. In the horseshoe-shaped port, trawlers from all over the world wait for favorable weather to head back into the Barents Sea. Hammerfest, with its colorful wooden houses, feels cozy. But it is a nerve center of the scramble for the Arctic’s wealth that raises urgent questions.

The 14 million sq km Arctic Ocean is home to 25 per cent of the planet’s unextracted oil and natural gas. With a population of four million, the region is much more stable than the Middle East. Global warming, in combination with the current high oil price, makes it ever more accessible. Yet the bordering countries – Russia, Canada, the US, Norway and Danish Greenland – have yet to agree on who owns what. Long-forgotten bays, waterways and islands are moving to the top of the international agenda.
commondreams.org

NEW DELHI: America’s loss is turning out to be India’s gain. Within days of announcing 30,000 job-cuts in the US, automobile giant General Motors Corp will this week unveil plans to increase its workforce in India by nearly 30%.
indiatimes.com

A leading Hindu ideologue has angered secular parties in India by urging Hindu women to have at least three children to stop Muslims outnumbering them in some areas.

K S Sudarshan, the leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh group, has been accused of playing on sectarian divisions.

“Whenever new people come to me for blessings, I tell them, ‘Not less than three [children].’ The more … the better,” he said at the launch of a controversial book, Religious Demography of India.

His words, condemned as “the politics of scare and silliness” by moderates, aim to strike a chord with the Hindu masses who comprise 80 per cent of India’s population of more than 1.1 billion.
telegraph.co.uk

“Cuando muere una lengua,
las cosas divinas,
estrellas, sol y luna,
las cosas humanas,
pensar y sentir,
no se reflejan en eso espejo.”

“When a language dies,
the divine things,
stars, sun and moon,
the human things.
to think and to feel,
are no longer reflected
in this mirror.”

The planet upon which we dwell is no longer the Tower of Babel it once was. Like bio-diversity, linguistic diversity is drying up at an alarming rate. Of 6000 known human languages, half are in imminent danger of disappearing, and 90% could be erased forever within a century, according to dire UNESCO reports. One language system is lost every two weeks, the United Nations cultural agency warns–five Indian subcontinent languages were irretrievably wiped out during the tsunami that obliterated islands in the Bay of Bengal earlier this year.

Because just a few people speak most of the world’s languages–4% of the world’s people speak 96% of its languages–most linguistic systems are extremely vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life and death.

Linguistic diversity flourishes in the south–half of the world’s languages are concentrated in just eight countries: Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Australia, India, Nigeria, Cameroon, Brazil, and Mexico. Mexico’s Oaxaca state, smaller than Portugal, is host to 16 distinct ethnic groups and speaks more languages than all of Europe.

“Cuando muere una lengua
todo lo que hay en el mundo,
mares y rios,
animales y plantas,
ni se piensen, ni se pronuncian
con atisbos, con sonidos,
que no existan ya.”

“When a language dies,
all that there is in this world,
oceans and rivers,
animals and plants,
do not think of them,
do not pronounce their names,
they do not exist now.”

If each language was a room than Mexico would be a great mansion of 62 rooms, linguist/poet/historian Carlos Montemayor reflected at a recent presentation of a newly translated volume of Mexican indigenous poetry. “These languages are not dialects but rather complete linguistic systems. Purepecha is as complete as Greek, Maya as complete as Italian. There are no superior language systems. All have grammar and syntax and vocabulary and etymology. It is an expression of cultural racism to consider indigenous languages to be dialects.”
counterpunch.org

It isn’t very often that a mere visit to an exhibition counts as a political act, but that’s certainly how it feels these days as you mount the steps of the American Museum of Natural History, overlooking Central Park. Admittedly, there wasn’t a protester in sight when I visited this week, and staff have not yet faced picket lines or hate mail. This is, after all, New York City not Salt Lake City. But organisers of the museum’s terrific new exhibition on the life and work of Charles Darwin acknowledge that theirs is an explicit gesture of defiance towards an anti-scientific Christian fundamentalism that is again running fast and deep in contemporary America.

New York’s Darwin exhibition – which will reach London for the Darwin bicentenary in 2009 – is a model of its kind. It takes you comprehensively and fascinatingly through the great scientist’s life story. But it is the exhibition’s deeper message that matters most in modern America. It asserts without shame, fear or compromise that Darwin’s theory of evolution is, quite simply, true. In other modern democracies this is an uncontroversial statement. In modern America it is an act not without bravery. That is why, for instance, corporate sponsors have run a mile from a £1.7m event that elsewhere would have them queueing up for the privilege. It is why this exhibition – unlike, say, the Fra Angelico show on the other side of the park at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – is reported on the news pages of US papers as well as the arts and leisure pages. It is why Newsweek magazine’s US edition this week has Darwin’s picture on the front cover, while Newsweek’s international edition, addressing a more relaxed readership perhaps, opts for a cover on John Lennon.

Reflect on this. Only one out of four Americans believes life on earth today has evolved through natural selection. Three-quarters of Americans, in other words, still do not accept what Darwin established 150 years ago. Just under half of all Americans believe the natural world was created in its present form by God in six days as described in Genesis. They believe, incredibly, that the earth is only a few thousand years old.
commondreams.org

Just to complexify this a bit: the Brits’ arrogance is an ugly thing. Darwin, as the ‘great scientist’ he was, explicitly used natural selection to explain that African blacks are a different species of human, that they would under the laws of natural selection eventually disappear, and thus the imperialist slaughter spree could actually be seen as a mercy.

Underneath the Intelligent Design debate there exists a simple truth: there are astonishing patterns to be observed in the universe, linking vast cosmological and sub-atomic processes. The Western constructs of both science AND ‘God’ are narrow and constrained by Europe’s rootlessness.

The phenomenon of death squads operating in Iraq has become generally accepted over recent months. However, in its treatment of the issue, the mainstream media has zealously followed a line of attributing extrajudicial killings to unaccountable Shia militias who have risen to prominence with the electoral victory of Ibramhim Jafaari’s Shia-led government in January. The following article examines both the way in which the information has been widely presented and whether that presentation has any actual basis in fact. Concluding that the attribution to Shia militias is unsustainable, the article considers who the intellectual authors of these crimes against humanity are and what purpose they serve in the context of the ongoing occupation of the country.
globalresearch.ca

FLASHBACK Jan. 14, 2005: “The Salvador Option”

Jan. 8 – What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called “the Salvador option”—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. “What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are,” one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. “We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing.” Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking “the back” of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out.

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported “nationalist” forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report “utterly gratuitous.”)

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called “snatch” operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

YESTERDAY: US takes casualties in Syria

Following the violent combat that raged on Thursday night between Iraqi and other Arab Resistance fighters on the one hand and US occupation troops on the other, the Mafkarat al-Islam correspondent in the al-Qa’im area learned that US troops penetrated about five kilometers into Syrian territory in an attempt to chase down Resistance fighters.

Residents of Makr adh-Dhib village as well as Syrian citizens, who spoke with Mafkarat al-Islam over the telephone, said that a US armored vehicle was completely destroyed on Syrian soil and was then hauled back into occupied Iraq.

The correspondent reported that the battles that went on for about three hours left 20 American troops dead or wounded. A number of Arab Resistance fighters were also killed.

The Syrian army was observed deployed in very large numbers along the border, separated by only a few kilometers from the American occupation troops who retreated back into occupied Iraq after their penetration into Syrian territory.

In al-Qa’im the Mafkarat al-Islam correspondent reported that US occupation forces had carried out raids and searches there looking for Arab resistance fighters who had got into occupied Iraq and into the al-Qa’im area, specifically, having volunteered to resist the American invaders of Arab territory.
(more…)

How do you convince military planners to prepare detailed plans for a nuclear attack against a non-nuclear nation, without having them think you are a madman?

Use the dachshund principle, as illustrated by this old story:

A small boy asked his father how wireless telegraphy works.

“First let me explain how telegraphy works with wires,” said the father. “Imagine a dachshund so long that his tail is in New York and his head is in London. You pull his tail in New York and he barks in London [no reference to Tony Blair intended]. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said the boy, “it’s perfectly clear. Now what about wireless telegraphy?”

“Exactly the same thing,” replied the father. “Only without the dachshund.”

In July of this year, a remarkable story by former CIA intelligence analyst Philip Giraldi appeared in the American Conservative and spread quickly over the Internet. It read,

“The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons.”

The “9/11-type terrorist attack” is, of course, the dachshund. You need it to make the process understandable, but not to actually do wireless telegraphy.

If you are Dick Cheney and you want to draw up plans to nuke Iranian installations, how will you go about it? You need a “reasonable” scenario to convince people that you are not mad, that it is not a waste of time to plan to nuke a non-nuclear country that is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a country that is working with the IAEA to dispel unproven accusations that it is aiming to produce nuclear weapons, and that is at least a decade away from the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons (NIE estimate), further than it was in a CIA 1993 estimate. Well, if another 9/11 attack or worse were to occur, and it was attributable to Iran, such a response might be conceivable. So let’s draw up the plans, just in case.

Once wireless telegraphy is in place, it works without the dachshund. Once plans to nuke Iran are in place, they can be implemented without the “9/11-type terrorist attack.”

Barely two months after the Giraldi story appeared, the Pentagon’s “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” [.pdf], which outlines several scenarios for the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries in precisely the same situation as Iran, came to light. Coincidence?

Barely two weeks later, the U.S. succeeded in getting a totally toothless resolution passed by the IAEA [.pdf] on Iran’s noncompliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which implies, however, that the U.S. would not be violating its commitment to the NPT if it used nuclear weapons against Iran. Coincidence again?

John Bolton has been the administration’s point man on nuclear policy and aggressive in denouncing Iran’s supposedly evil intentions. He will be the ideal person to explain to the world, after the fact, why a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran was justified. Earlier this year, he was appointed as U.S. ambassador to the UN, over extraordinary bipartisan opposition. Coincidence again?

All along, the administration has been ratcheting up the pressure on Iran, disseminating “classified” evidence from a laptop computer that purports to prove that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. U.S. pressure managed to derail the negotiations between Iran and the European Union following the “Paris agreement” of December 2004.

The Philip Giraldi story concludes,

“Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing –that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack – but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.”
antiwar.com

Where Was the Media Between Invasion and Murtha? Networks Gave Vietnam War Twice the Minutes Iraq Gets; Baghdad Bureaus Cut Back; Amanpour: ‘Patronizing’

On the morning of Aug. 3, 1965, a 33-year-old CBS correspondent named Morley Safer, in fatigues and with a bulky recording contraption on his hip, stood in Cam Ne, Vietnam, before a backdrop of burning thatch-roof huts. He clutched a battered metal microphone. Moments earlier, a unit of baby-faced American soldiers had set the huts on fire. Young women ran wailing, cradling babies; an elderly man hobbled toward Mr. Safer, pleading in Vietnamese.

“This is what the war in Vietnam is all about, the old and the very young,” Mr. Safer said, turning to face the camera.

Forty years later, the United States is in a desert war, transmitted instantly by satellite and broadband. There are no boundaries on our technical capabilities to cover events.

But there are other limits—commercial, political, editorial. And they have kept the war in Iraq marginal in the American media, from soon after the initial invasion in the spring of 2003 till last week, when Representative John Murtha hurled it back into the spotlight.

While Vietnam is remembered as the television war, Iraq has been the television-crawl war: a scrolling feed of bad-news bits, pushed to the margins by Brad and Jen, Robert Blake, Jacko and two and a half years of other anesthetizing fare. Americans could go days on end without engaging with the war, on TV or in print.
observor.com

…former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark arrived in Baghdad, airport officials said, apparently to aid in Saddam’s defense.

Clark has been advising nearly a dozen international lawyers on Saddam’s defense team. He has contended that Saddam’s rights have been violated in the legal process following his capture. But a U.S. government official close to the court said the defense team had not filed the proper paperwork to have a non-Iraqi lawyer in the courtroom.
abcnews.go.com