Let’s see now: President dropping in the polls; impeachment talk over illegal wiretaps gaining traction; majority of Americans now supporting withdrawal from Iraq; Abramoff scandal reaching into the White House; big push starting for war with Iran; the Bush gang reduced to defending their crime, deception and despotism with their last, threadbare card, the “terrorist threat”…..

Why, yes, I think it’s about time for a guest shot from Osama!

And so the deadly symbiosis between that dynamic, death-peddling duo, Bush and bin Laden, goes on. And as usual, the timing — even the wording — of the terrorist’s bloviation falls, with eerie perfection, into lock-step with Bush’s political needs.
prisonplanet.com

A top-level Pentagon review of defense strategy calls for bolstering the U.S. military with thousands more elite troops skilled in fighting terrorists and insurgents and partnering with foreign forces — as part of a decades-long plan to expand efforts to thwart terrorists worldwide, according to U.S. officials and military analysts familiar with the review.

The increase would bring the ranks of Special Operations Forces — which include covert Delta Force operatives, Rangers, Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces — to their highest levels since the Vietnam War while adding billions to the budget of the 52,000-strong U.S. Special Operations Command, based in Tampa, over the next five years, said the officials and analysts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the final document has not been released.
washingtonpost.com

Thanks to Suburban Guerilla, Mark Crispin Miller and Save the USA for pointing out Section 605 of the House version of the Patriot Act renewal legislation. It calls for the creation of a Federal Police Force. Your imperial presidency at work.

“A permanent police force, to be known as the ‘United States Secret Service Uniformed Division,'” empowered to “make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in their presence” … “or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States if they have reasonable grounds to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing such felony.”
prisonplanet.com

According to the Resistance Blog, A-level students (16-18) in Britain are being asked questions about alternative 9/11 beliefs, conspiracy theories and how much faith they have in government.

Is this part of a vetting process to try and identify the next generation of political dissidents or is it simply an assessment of how deep the alternative truth movement has penetrated the mass collective unconscious?

The exam took place in West Yorkshire England and in the first question, the student was asked to discuss the possibility of governments leading populations into believing facts that are not necessarily true. The source given was an individual who presented an alternative explanation behind 9/11.

Other questions centered around how much the student trusted Tony Blair and George W. Bush.
prisonplanet.com

Up to 16 million adults – nearly half the workforce – are holding down jobs despite having the reading and writing skills expected of children leaving primary school, a new report reveals today.
guardian.co.uk

The term of a World Bank presidency is an all-too-brief five years and the early months are frequently marred by sniping from the career staff who are more permanent fixtures. Because the post is filled by the nominee of the US president, a new chief often knows little about the organisation and takes time to make a mark. Almost eight months after taking up the role, Paul Wolfowitz has yet to set a course for his presidency and staff disquiet is reaching deafening levels.

The immediate cause of the turmoil at the World Bank is the appointment of an adviser to Mr Wolfowitz with close ties to the Republican party as the new director of the internal watchdog that investigates suspected fraud and staff misconduct. His choice has raised questions about the selection of someone so close to the president and whether this was the best person for such a sensitive post. But the ensuing strife has revealed widespread unhappiness among senior bank staff and executive directors over Mr Wolfowitz’s management style and performance.

Following his arrival, Mr Wolfowitz made clear his intention to streamline the bank’s management structure. His predecessor had appointed five managing directors, four of whom had already left. There were more than 30 vice-presidents below managing director level, whose ranks he planned to thin out.

The fifth managing director left late last year, as did the highly regarded general counsel. Only now is Mr Wolfowitz close to appointing new managing directors, who are unlikely to be in place until the summer – a year after his arrival. Meanwhile power has gravitated to his immediate circle – mainly Republican stalwarts, prompting agitation among the career staff.

Nor has Mr Wolfowitz set a new intellectual agenda for his presidency. Instead, he has appeared more concerned about being seen to respond to criticisms on Capitol Hill over allegations of corruption – allegations that bank staff often see as witch-hunts against them for the sins of those in the countries where the bank operates.

Mr Wolfowitz can reasonably say that he wanted time to assess priorities for the organisation and that 2005 was a year of heavy commitments, such as the Group of Eight summit at Gleneagles. But as time has passed, authority has drained upwards from those beneath him in the hierarchy to his clique of advisers. Decision-making has slowed – made worse by his tendency to take a long time making up his mind.

When Mr Wolfowitz was appointed, the Financial Times urged him to give the bank greater focus and to overhaul its management. He cannot achieve this in an organisation with 10,000 staff operating in more than 100 countries by relying on a handful of trusted aides from his own country. Unless he moves quickly to appoint a team representative of the shareholders that is credible to the staff, his presidency risks ending in paralysis and disappointment.
news.ft.come

World Bank accuses West of undermining Karzai
Donor countries including Britain and the United States are engaged in often wasteful projects outside the control, and sometimes the knowledge, of the Afghan administration, says a report by the Bank’s economists.

Its main recommendation, that aid should be channelled through government agencies, is due to be discussed at next week’s London conference on Afghanistan. The summit, jointly chaired by Tony Blair, the UN secretary general Kofi Annan and President Karzai, will draw up a five-year plan for speeding up reconstruction and attempt to combat the rising tide of violence. It will be attended by the representatives of 70 countries.

The Afghan government will present its own blueprint for the future, the national development strategy, which will also call for greater control over international aid. The top UN envoy in Afghanistan, Jean Arnault, said in Kabul yesterday that the plan was the result of “detailed consultations between the Afghan government and the international community”.

He added: “It contains some key provisions on the Afghan leadership, capacity building for people and institutions, fairness and transparency aimed at making sure that international assistance to Afghanistan is not only maintained but further improved.” Total aid, running at around $3bn (£1.7bn), is 10 times the government’s revenue of $300m. But three -quarters of the money from donors is channelled outside the government budget. Alastair McKechnie, the World Bank country director for Afghanistan, said: “Experience demonstrates that channelling aid through government is more cost-effective. For example a basic package of health services contracted outside government channels can be 50 per cent more expensive than the package contracted by the government on a competitive basis.

“Furthermore, the credibility of the government is increased as it demonstrates its ability to oversee services and become accountable for results to its people and newly-elected parliament.” Afghanistan is experiencing one of the bloodiest periods since “liberation” by US and British forces, with an increase in suicide bombings and attacks by a resurgent Taliban in the provinces bordering Pakistan. Britain is sending around 3,000 extra troops to one of the most violent provinces, Helmand, and the Dutch parliament is due to debate the deployment of a force of 1,200.

The report says donors want the government to establish its authority, but they are disempowering it through their aid strategy. Even the Afghan army and police are paid their salaries outside the control of Kabul.

by Phil Toler
Jan. 22, 2006
It seems that these days you need a crystal ball to figure out what’s already happened, or at least a good internet connection. We flash back to the dust up regarding the secret energy policy meetings sponsored by Dick “the Sneer” Cheney early on in the current administration’s first appointed term. In retrospect, it’s looking like a minor affair compared to the unfolding scandals in Washington, but the fact is, those meetings were in fact briefings on all that was to come, which, of course, had already been decided by the real string-pullers on Wall Street and in the City of London and Tel Aviv. I can now report with confidence that I know what those decisions were, and why they were taken — but only because I have learned a dab of macroeconomics. Let me now attempt to share this valuable information with you in the form of a speech, of sorts, that “the Sneer” might have made in those august meeting rooms.

“I want to thank all of you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to attend this meeting, and I will make the essence of our message to you as brief as possible. You all are fully aware that Saddam Hussein is now demanding Euros for his oil exports. This is an act of war on the United States, because our currency can only be inflated, that is printed at will without collapsing, if oil continues to be denominated in US dollars. The entire US economy hinges on the ability of the Fed to constantly pump up liquidity to outpace the natural decline of the dollar, and for the government to, for example buy securities strategically to shore up the various markets, among many other actions we must do behind the scenes, for obvious reasons. Should even one major oil exporter denominate in Euros, we will soon find others following as the Euro strengthens and the dollar declines, which would inevitably lead to the utter collapse of our financial system.”

(Long sneer, for effect.)

“Because we cannot let that happen on our watch, we will have to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, maps of which you will find in your packets. There is an obstacle to this course of action, however, that will require some, shall we say, ugliness to remove. But the plans have long been laid and gamed, and we now have the planners in positions of power to execute the operation. I will be candid with you and depend on your vow to never repeat what you will hear, mainly because if we go down, you go down, and I know how fond we all are of our grand homes and well-heeled families.”

(Another sneer to emphasize that he ain’t kidding.)

“The obstacle I mentioned is of course the American people who cannot be told about these matters as it would obviously undermine their confidence in the entire American way of life. They wouldn’t be able to grasp our post-War plan to extend our hegemony indefinitely into the future by becoming the first empire to tax our client states indirectly by , in effect, borrowing from them items priced in dollars that will be paid back with dollars that are worth less than when the original transaction took place. Thus, we can essentially raise our debt ceiling indefinitely using the savings of the rest of the world to support our way of life.”

(Cunning smile, then return of the sneer.)

“Since many of you may not have had the time to read the document in your packages entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” written mostly by Mr. Zackheim, here on my left, and Mr. Wolfowitz, on my right, I will summarize it quickly. While they do not say so in the document, it is crucial for the continuation of our ability to support Israel, as well as our own economic security, so they are providing us a great deal of cover in the execution of our operation, that is “Operation Black Greenback”. In the document, they do state that continued leadership of the world by the United States is in everybody’s best interests — well maybe not every everybody — but, shall we say almost everybody. In order to maintain our domination, uh, leadership of the world, we need a new geo-strategic option which is unilateral attacks on regimes unfriendly to our purposes. We will call them “preemptive” attacks and find innumerable reasons for them to justify the actions to the American people and to other governments, but in order to set this policy in motion, we need what one of our brilliant planners termed: ‘A New Pearl Harbor’. While those who lost their lives in that attack, (which of course we could have easily defused), never knew the degree to which their sacrifice was necessary, in fact, we aroused the people to fight and win World War II allowing us to extend our empire from Tokyo to Berlin, well, West Berlin. If Hitler had taken out the Soviets as planned, we’d be sitting in Moscow, too. But you can’t control the weather, or at least, we couldn’t then.”

(Pause to rest the sneer. Re-sneer)

“Our ‘New Pearl Harbor’ is actually taken from an old playbook that that Papist Kennedy cancelled in the sixties, (and I don’t think I was in Dallas, either) called ‘Operation Northwoods’. We were going to stage the shoot down of a passenger aircraft and blame it on that Castro bastard, and take back our island. Well, now we have a President who understands, well, kind of understands, what the stakes are and he is not afraid to sacrifice a handful of Americans and others in order for our nation to continue to prosper.
This variation will have to be far more dramatic than ‘Northwoods’ and we have been setting the stage for it for many years. We have established the timetable, but in the interests of absolute secrecy, we cannot say more than that. I feel sure that when the events occur, you will completely understand.”

(Zackheim’s beady little eyes glaze over in sheer joy at the apparition of events to unfold.)

“Now, when the events unfold, they will be blamed on a long-time CIA asset who has been groomed explicitly for this action, and because he is an Arab based in Afghanistan, it will allow us to go in and deliver that carpet of bombs we promised those Taliban bastards if they would not let us build the pipeline. And then we quickly knock off the former CIA asset who is no longer of use to us, Saddam Hussein, and our people in the new regime will simply re-denominate Iraqi oil in US dollars. As I said, Israel, and especially its Mossad, will play a very important role in all this, but we must not let this be widely understood. Since they have a long history of acquiring the land Jehovah promised them and keeping the vermin that claim it for themselves down, it will be of great help for them to guide us as we eventually move on to Iran. We have learned that those Mullah bastards not only want to re-denominate their considerable energy exports in Euros, they have the unmitigated gall to plan to establish an energy bourse, which would be a fatal blow to our ability to tax the world using inflated dollars. After that, the Saudis are next, with perhaps a backtrack to Syria and Lebanon, and Israel can establish Greater Zion and help us protect all that oil, and especially the way it is denominated. Any Question?”

(Everyone is too busy counting the money to be made in all this to bother.)

So, there you have it. Since everything went according to plan except for the insurgency launched by those dead-enders in the Sunni triangle, there has been an unwelcome slowdown in the timetable which has created some real problems for the final stages to be executed. But, bolder than ever, Cheney didn’t even keep secret that he had instructed the Pentagon to draw up plans to attack Iran with nukes even if they can’t be tied to the next Pearl Harbor. My friend Weben Hadd thinks it will be in San Francisco, but I think it will be in whatever neighborhood “Casino” Jack Abramoff is singing. Since the old Bush Pioneer has surely got some verses that will cause McNulty to come a-knockin’ on the White House door, they’ll be killing two canaries with the same dirty bomb.

Cheerio, for now.
axisoflogic.com

“After 500 years of domination and colonialism, more than 50 years since the introduction of universal suffrage and five years of intense social struggle, the indigenous majority of Bolivia have, for the first time, elected one of their own as president”
— Evo Morales,
President of Bolivia

Morales won 53.7% of the vote, making him the first president in decades to gain over 50% and not have to be ratified by a majority in parliament. This was a clear indication of the rejection of 20 years of neoliberal rule and the search for an alternative by the majority of South America’s poorest country.

The size of the vote, which surprised even Morales’ own party, is all the more remarkable given the intensity of the unanimous opposition of the mainstream press to Morales’ candidacy, and the evidence of fraud in some districts. In addition, more than 800,000 voters discovered on election day that they had been removed from the electoral roll, the majority within areas where MAS has strong support.

MAS won 72 of the 130 deputies, 12 of 27 senators and three of the nine prefects (department governors), which were elected for the first time. However the significance of this victory cannot only be measured in votes. More importantly, it represents a new stage in the cycle of revolutionary struggle in Bolivia, which opened in 2000 with the “water war” in Cochabamba against privatisation, along with the Aymara rebellion in the altiplano and the cocalero (coca growers) resistance in the Chapare region that same year. Since those battles, two presidents have been forced to resign — in October 2003 and in June last year — as continuous waves of protest have demanded greater control by the Bolivian people over their natural resources, particularly gas, and the decolonialisation of the racist Bolivian state.

There have been two fundamental issues at the core of the new wave of struggle. The first is the destiny of Bolivia’s gas reserves, the second largest in South America. Calls to nationalise the gas have grown among the poor majority, as a way out of poverty for the country. The second call has been for an end to the racist colonialist state and for the country to be refounded through a new constituent assembly. This assembly would rewrite the constitution and for the first time actively incorporate the indigenous majority into the country. Both of the issues were central planks of MAS’s election campaign.

As long-time Peruvian activist Hugo Blanco pointed out in an article published on January 4 at Rebelion.org, “the new president is not the result of a simple ‘democratic election’ like the many that frequently occur in our countries, it is an important step in the path of the organized Bolivian people in their struggle to take power into their own hands”.
axisoflogic.com

Africa’s Twin Curses
2005 was dubbed the “year of Africa” by the G8 and it brought some welcome progress in conflict resolution on a continent which has had more than its share of political instability: a peace deal in Sudan was finalized, U.N. peacekeepers left Sierra Leone, elections were held in Liberia and Burundi, even the peace process in the Democratic Republic of Congo appeared to be moving forward.

But Africa’s troubles are not over. There are continuing armed conflicts in Sudan (Darfur), Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda, Nigeria, Somalia and increasing tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea and between Sudan and Chad. Those countries where peace has been achieved remain vulnerable to future conflict. Throughout the continent effective formulae for the emergence of representative states capable of delivering successful economic development, justice and security remain elusive.

On top of Africa’s internal problems there are also two non-African issues which are hampering efforts to resolve conflicts and to promote better government and economic development.

The first is the industrialized world’s increasing thirst and competition for African oil, which seems to take precedence over pious statements about African development.

Oil has long been a curse for most people in oil producing countries in Africa. Countries like Nigeria (where almost a fifth of all Africans south of the Sahara live, Angola and Equatorial Guinea would probably be better off—less corrupt, violent, unstable and poverty-stricken—had they left the black stuff in the ground.

Since their public relations disasters in Africa in the 1990s (the execution of the Nigerian rights activist Ken Saro Wiwa in the Niger Delta; the Angolan oil-for-arms scandal), the oil majors have spent millions of dollars trying to brush up their “corporate governance” credentials. But in reality little has changed, as the latest spike in violence in Niger Delta and the continuing flagrant and debilitating corruption at the heart of Nigerian and Angolan politics demonstrate.

Now the oil curse is spreading to other African states and it is increasingly accompanied by competition for political and economic influence between China and the West.

WASHINGTON – January 23 – It began with a bulletin from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles (1/4/06) accusing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of invoking an old anti-Semitic slur. In a Christmas Eve speech, the Center said, Chavez declared that “the world has wealth for all, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, have taken over all the wealth of the world.”

The Voice of America (1/5/06) covered the charge immediately. Then opinion journals on the right took up the issue. “On Christmas Eve, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez’s Christian-socialist cant drifted into anti-Semitism,” wrote the Daily Standard, the Weekly Standard’s Web-only edition. The American Spectator (1/6/06) was so excited about the quote, which it called “the standard populist hatemongering of Latin America’s new left leaders,” that it presented it as coming from two different speeches:

Venezuela’s Chavez in his 2005 Christmas address couldn’t resist commenting that “the descendants of those who crucified Christ” own the riches of the world. And on a Dec. 24 visit to the Venezuelan countryside, Chavez stirred up the peasants by claiming that “the world offers riches to all. However, minorities such as the descendants of those who crucified Christ” have become “the owners of the riches of the world.”

Then more mainstream outlets began to pick up the story. “Chavez lambasted Jews (in a televised Christmas Eve speech, no less) as ‘descendants of those who crucified Christ’ and ‘a minority [who] took the world’s riches for themselves,'” the New York Daily News’ Lloyd Grove reported (1/13/06). A column in the Los Angeles Times (1/14/06) used the quote to label Chavez “a jerk and a friend of tyranny.” The Wall Street Journal’s “Americas” columnist, Mary Anastasia O’Grady (1/16/06), called Chavez’s words “an ugly anti-Semitic swipe.”

One can see why the words attributed to Chavez provoked outrage. After all, descriptions of the Jews as a wealthy minority that “crucified Christ” have been an anti-Semitic stock in trade for centuries. But the criticisms of Chavez almost uniformly used selective, even deceptive editing to remove material that put his words in a different context.

Here’s a translation of the full passage from Chavez’s speech (VoltaireNet, 1/18/06):

The world has an offer for everybody but it turned out that a few minorities–the descendants of those who crucified Christ, the descendants of those who expelled Bolivar from here and also those who in a certain way crucified him in Santa Marta, there in Colombia–they took possession of the riches of the world, a minority took possession of the planet’s gold, the silver, the minerals, the water, the good lands, the oil, and they have concentrated all the riches in the hands of a few; less than 10 percent of the world population owns more than half of the riches of the world.

The biggest problem with depicting Chavez’s speech as an anti-Semitic attack is that Chavez clearly suggested that “the descendants of those who crucified Christ” are the same people as “the descendants of those who expelled Bolivar from here.” As American Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who questioned the charge, told the Associated Press (1/5/06), “I know of no one who accuses the Jews of fighting against Bolivar.” Bolivar, in fact, fought against the government of King Ferdinand VII of Spain, who reinstituted the anti-Semitic Spanish Inquisition when he took power in 1813. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, a Jewish sympathizer in Curacao provided refuge to Bolivar and his family when he fled from Venezuela.

Most of the accounts attacking Chavez (the Daily Standard was an exception) left the reference to Bolivar out entirely; the Wiesenthal Center deleted that clause from the speech without even offering an ellipses, which is tantamount to fabrication.

…That Chavez’s comments were part of some anti-Semitic campaign is directly contradicted by a letter sent by the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela to the Wiesenthal Center (AP, 1/14/06). “We believe the president was not talking about Jews,” the letter stated, complaining that “you have acted on your own, without consulting us, on issues that you don’t know or understand.” The American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress agreed with the Venezuelan group’s view that Chavez was not referring to Jews in his speech (Inter Press Service, 1/13/06).
commondreams.org

“President George W. Bush] lied to the people of this nation, distorted the truth, declared war on a nation who had not attacked us . . . put Americas sons and daughters in harm’s way . . . and destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of [Iraqi] women and children who had nothing to do with it. It was an act of terror.”
Harry Belafonte, Amsterdam News, January 25, 2006, Page 1, 30

Harry Belafonte did more than speak truth to a President who lied to justify an invasion that has taken the lives of more than 2,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. He became part of a proud African American tradition Frederick Douglass started in 1848.

Frederick Douglass excoriated President Polk’s administration for “grasping ambition, atrocious aggression, and wholesale murder of an unoffending people” in “a disgraceful, cruel, and iniquitous war,” and demanded “the instant recall of U.S. forces from Mexico.” President Polk lied to justify a U.S. invasion that seized land stretching from Texas to California for new slave states. “I would not care if tomorrow, I should hear of the death of every man who engaged in that bloody war,” said Douglass. (Congressman Abraham Lincoln also reviled Polk for ordering an invasion of an innocent neighbor based on a lie.)
counterpunch.org