Archive for March, 2006

Billy Bragg: The lonesome death of Rachel Corrie

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Rachel Corrie went to Gaza to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinians, whose voice is seldom heard in her country, the US. That she herself should be silenced – first by an Israeli bulldozer, next by a New York theatre cancelling a play created from her words – is a testimony to the power of her message. This song was written on a plane on March 20 and recorded at Big Sky Recordings, Ann Arbor, Michigan on March 22. The tune is borrowed from Bob Dylan.
guardian.co.uk

US planning bases across Middle East, Central Asia

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

WASHINGTON: The United States is planning to build at least six bases across the Middle East and Central Asia in the next 10 years for “deep storage” of munitions and equipment to prepare for regional war contingencies.

According to William M Arkin, author of more than 10 books on military affairs, and a former US army intelligence analyst and nuclear weapons expert during the Cold War, the plan came to attention this month through contracting documents that call for the continued storage of everything from packaged meals ready to eat (MREs) to missiles in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman, as well as the establishment of two new storage hubs, one in a classified Middle Eastern country “west” of Saudi Arabia and the other in a yet to be decided “Central Asian state.”

The plans to continue to “pre-position” war material in the Persian Gulf region leave ambiguous whether the US military foresees the ability to establish a permanent present in Iraq in the long-term. By 2016, the contracting documents show that the tonnage of air munitions stored at sites outside Iraq will double from current levels.
dailytimes.com

Iraq minister says US, Iraqi troops killed 37

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Iraq’s security minister, a Shi’ite political ally of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, accused U.S. and Iraqi troops on Monday of killing 37 unarmed people in an attack on a mosque complex a day earlier.

“At evening prayers, American soldiers accompanied by Iraqi troops raided the Mustafa mosque and killed 37 people,” Abd al-Karim al-Enzi, minister of state for national security, said.

“They were all unarmed. Nobody fired a single shot at them (the troops). They went in, tied up the people and shot them all. They did not leave any wounded behind,” he told Reuters.

Shi’ite politicians had earlier said 20 people were killed at the mosque. The U.S. military’s account of Sunday evening’s incident said Iraqi special forces with U.S. advisers killed 16 “insurgents”, arrested 15 people and freed an Iraqi hostage. The military denied entering any mosque.
reuters.com

Baghdad governor says suspends cooperation with US
BAGHDAD, March 27 (Reuters) – Baghdad provincial governor Hussein al-Tahan said on Monday he would suspend all cooperation with U.S. forces until an independent investigation is launched into the killing of 20 Shi’ites in a mosque.

“Today we decided to stop all political and service cooperation with the U.S. forces until a legal committee is formed to investigate this incident,” he told reporters, adding that the inquiry panel should include the U.S. embassy and the Iraqi defence ministry but not the U.S. military.

2 weeks ago:Iraqis killed by US troops ‘on rampage’
Claims of atrocities by soldiers mount

THE villagers of Abu Sifa near the Iraqi town of Balad had become used to the sound of explosions at night as American forces searched the area for suspected insurgents. But one night two weeks ago Issa Harat Khalaf heard a different sound that chilled him to the bone.
Khalaf, a 33-year-old security officer guarding oil pipelines, saw a US helicopter land near his home. American soldiers stormed out of the Chinook and advanced on a house owned by Khalaf’s brother Fayez, firing as they went.

Khalaf ran from his own house and hid in a nearby grove of trees. He saw the soldiers enter his brother’s home and then heard the sound of women and children screaming.

“Then there was a lot of machinegun fire,” he said last week. After that there was the most frightening sound of all — silence, followed by explosions as the soldiers left the house.

Once the troops were gone, Khalaf and his fellow villagers began a frantic search through the ruins of his brother’s home. Abu Sifa was about to join a lengthening list of Iraqi communities claiming to have suffered from American atrocities.

According to Iraqi police, 11 bodies were pulled from the wreckage of the house, among them four women and five children aged between six months and five years. An official police report obtained by a US reporter for Knight Ridder newspapers said: “The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 people.”

The Abu Sifa deaths on March 15 were first reported last weekend on the day that Time magazine published the results of a 10-week investigation into an incident last November when US marines killed 15 civilians in their homes in the western Iraqi town of Haditha.

Did American Marines murder 23 Iraqi civilians?
US military investigators are examining allegations that Marines shot unarmed Iraqis, then claimed they were “enemy fighters”, The Independent on Sunday has learned. In the same incident, eyewitnesses say, one man bled to death over a period of hours as soldiers ignored his pleas for help.

American military officials in Iraq have already admitted that 15 civilians who died in the incident in the western town of Haditha last November were killed by Marines, and not by a roadside bomb, as had previously been claimed. The only victim of the remotely triggered bomb, it is now conceded, was a 20-year-old Marine, Lance-Corporal Miguel Terrazas, from El Paso, Texas.

An inquiry has been launched by the US Navy’s Criminal Investigation Service after the military was presented with evidence that the 15 civilians, including seven women and three children still in their nightclothes, had been killed in their homes in the wake of the bombing. If it is proved that they died in a rampage by the Marines, and not as a result of “collateral damage”, it would rank as the worst case of deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians by US armed forces since the invasion three years ago.

40 recruits killed at Iraq base
A suicide bomber attacked an Iraqi army recruiting centre today in northern Iraq, killing at least 40 people and wounding 30 others, the Iraqi military said.
The bomber struck shortly after midday at the recruiting centre in front of a joint US-Iraqi military base between Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city, and the ancient city of Tal Afar.

All the victims were believed to all be Iraqis; the US military said no American troops were hurt in the bombing, which was around 18 miles east of Tal Afar.

Some troops headed back to Iraq are mentally ill

Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

The psychotropic drugs are a bow to a little-discussed truth fraught with implications: Mentally ill service mem-bers are being returned to combat.

The redeployments are legal, and the service members are often eager to go. But veterans groups, lawmakers and mental-health professionals fear that the practice lacks adequate civilian oversight. They also worry that such redeployments are becoming more frequent as multiple combat tours become the norm and traumatized service members are retained out of loyalty or wartime pressures to maintain troop numbers.

Sen. Barbara Boxer hopes to address the controversy through the Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health, which is expected to start work next month. The California Democrat wrote the legislation that created the panel. She wants the task force to examine deployment policies and the quality and availability of mental-health care for the military.

“We’ve also heard reports that doctors are being encouraged not to identify mental-health illness in our troops. I am asking for a lot of answers,” Boxer said during a March 8 telephone interview. “If people are suffering from mental-health problems, they should not be sent on the battlefield.”
rinf.com

Venezuela hits BP with tax bill

Monday, March 27th, 2006

Venezuela has hit UK oil giant BP with a $61.4m (£35m) back tax bill.
The country’s tax authority, the Seniat, said the figure arose from the firm’s operations in the country between 2001 and 2004.

BP confirmed the bill had been given to its BP Venezuela Holdings unit and that it was in talks with tax officials.

Venezuela’s left-wing President Hugo Chavez is demanding foreign oil firms pay more taxes and give up majority control over their Venezuelan ventures.

In the 1990s Venezuela signed 32 operating agreements with private companies at a tax rate of 34%.

But last year Mr Chavez decided the agreements should have set a rate of 50%.

He wants to use the additional revenues to increase social spending in the country.

The move has added to tensions between Venezuela and the US. Relations between the two worsened earlier this year after a tit-for-tat expulsion row over allegations of spying.

At the weekend, Mr Chavez said that America was planning to invade Venezuela, an accusation Washington immediately dismissed.
bbc.co.uk

Nigerian Militants Free Foreign Hostages

Monday, March 27th, 2006

WARRI, Nigeria (AP) — Militants demanding control of revenues from Nigeria’s oil-rich southern delta released their last remaining foreign hostages on Monday — two Americans and a Briton — but the group threatened to continue attacks on oil installations.

Abel Oshevire, spokesman for the southern Delta state government, said Americans Cody Oswalt, Russell Spell and Briton John Hudspith were released just before dawn after more than five weeks in captivity.

”They are here with us now and are all in good health,” Oshevire told reporters.

The militants, responsible for a wave of recent attacks in southern Nigeria, took nine foreign oil workers hostage Feb. 18 from a barge owned by Willbros Group Inc., the Houston-based oil services company that was laying pipeline in the delta for Royal Dutch Shell. The group released six of the captives after 12 days.
nytimes.com

Somalis Bury Dead, Brace for Battle

Monday, March 27th, 2006

MOGADISHU, Somalia, March 26 — Radical Islamic militiamen and rivals buried their dead Sunday and brought in more fighters during a lull after four days of combat on the outskirts of Mogadishu, witnesses said. So far, at least 93 people have died and nearly 200 have been wounded in the violence.

A prominent moderate Islamic scholar appealed to the warring sides not to restart the fighting, which ranks among the deadliest in recent years in the nominal capital of this Horn of Africa country.

“I offer the warring sides a venue for them to talk to resolve their differences,” Sharif Sheik Muhidin said.

Somalia has been without a working government for 15 years. The recent battles involve a militia supporting hard-line Islamic clerics who are trying to expand their influence and fighters loyal to businessmen and Somali warlords who have formed an alliance to oppose the religious movement.
washingtonpost.com

Turning the Taps Back to the States

Monday, March 27th, 2006

LOMAS DE ZAMORA, Argentina — Carina Grossi turned on the tap in her kitchen sink and raised a glass of water to the light, her eyes narrowing in disgust.

“Look at that,” said Grossi, 32. “Look how cloudy the water is, how dirty.”

“It’s a disaster,” said her father, Eduardo, a 65-year-old grocer. “That’s what is making your mother so sick.”

Like many of their neighbors in this working-class suburb of Buenos Aires, the Grossis are convinced that their water is contaminated — and they now use bottled water to make soup and tea. They blame the problem on the French company that has provided water and sewer service since the federal government privatized the utility in 1993.

Across Latin America, a growing number of people say the privatization of public services, a movement that swept the region in the 1980s and 1990s, has failed. Protests have erupted over the issue in several countries, and some governments are beginning to reverse these policies. Last week Argentina announced it was rescinding its 30-year contract with the French company Suez and reinstating government control of the water supply.

The Grossis, among many others, have welcomed the about-face.

“The trains, the water, the electricity — I say it all needs to come back to national control,” Carina Grossi said. In her suburb, authorities estimate about 30 percent of homes lack water and the majority are without sewage service. “We pay money out to these foreign companies and get nothing in return,” she said. “This is our country. We should stop selling it out to others.”
washingtonpost.com

Judge ‘rejects Guantanamo rights’

Monday, March 27th, 2006

A US Supreme Court justice has been quoted as saying that Guantanamo detainees do not have the right to be tried in civil courts.
Newsweek magazine said it had heard a tape of a recent talk given by Antonin Scalia in which he made these comments.

The report comes as the court prepares to hear a challenge by a Guantanamo detainee against US military tribunals.

The case is considered an important test of the Bush administration’s handling of its war on terror.

Lawyers for Salim Ahmed Hamdan – Osama Bin Laden’s former driver – will argue that President George W Bush does not have the constitutional right to order these military trials.

The US government has urged the Supreme Court to dismiss the case.

“War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts,” he is quoted as saying.

“Give me a break.”

Asked whether Guantanamo detainees have any rights under international conventions, Justice Scalia reportedly answered:

“If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs.

“I had a son (Matthew Scalia) on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son and I’m not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it’s crazy.”

Mr Scalia is also quoted as saying he was “astounded” at the “hypocritical” reaction in Europe to Guantanamo.
bbc.co.uk

15 Killed in Bombing on U.S.-Iraqi Base

Monday, March 27th, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq — A suicide bomber attacked a joint U.S.-Iraqi military base in northern Iraq on Monday, killing at least 15 people and wounding as many as 30, the Iraqi military said. At least 21 more bodies were found _ many with nooses around their neck _ and mortar and bomb attacks killed at least four people.

The nationalities of the victims in the suicide bombing about 20 miles east of the ancient city of Tal Afar were not immediately known. The bomber struck shortly after noon at an Iraqi army recruiting center in front of the base.

President Bush singled out Tal Afar in a recent speech as a success story for American and Iraqi forces in the drive to quell the insurgency.

Iraqi army Lt. Akram Eid told The Associated Press that many of the wounded were taken to the Sykes U.S. Army base on the outskirts of Tal Afar. The U.S. military in Baghdad said it was checking the report.
washingtonpost.com