Saturday September 29, 2001
The Guardian

In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: “Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don’t know massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee.” Then he broke down and wept.

Here’s the rub: America is at war against people it doesn’t know, because they don’t appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an “international coalition against terror”, mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.
guardian.co.uk

Lest we forget where all those poppy fields in Afghanistan come from…

Their film records what was probably history’s shortest-lived coup d’etat. It’s a unique document about political muscle and an extraordinary portrait of the man The Wall Street Journal credits with making Venezuela “Washington’s biggest Latin American headache after the old standby, Cuba.”

Chavez, elected president of Venezuela in 1988, is a colorful folk hero, beloved by his nation’s working class and a tough-as-nails, quixotic opponent to the power structure that would see him deposed. Two independent filmmakers were inside the presidential palace on April 11, 2002, when he was forcibly removed from office. They were also present 48 hours later when, remarkably, he returned to power amid cheering aides.

Watch the film

Now here is democracy in action.

You can tell that the US-led campaign against Hugo Chavez has reached a critical stage when the New York Times starts providing rhetorical cover for Condoleezza Rice’s and Donald Rumsfeld’s increasingly desperate efforts to isolate the Venezuelan president.

Chile’s center-left president Michelle Bachelet — who Rice name-drops every chance she gets to prove she can have socialist friends — just last week warned Washington not to “demonize” Chavez. Yet despite this endorsement from Latin America’s most lauded reformer, the Times on Saturday ran a 1300-word, front-page hatchet job by Juan Forero titled “Seeking United Latin America, Venezuela’s Chavez Is a Divider; Some Neighbors Resent His Style as Meddlesome.”

The article quotes seven sources, all openly anti-Chāvez save for Brazil’s president Luiz Inācio Lula da Silva. Lula, like Bachelet, has repeatedly defended his Venezuelan counterpart against Washington. But Forero ignores this support, instead choosing to cherry-pick through Lula’s public statements to find, and take out of context, a rare criticism.

Other supposedly objective comments come from the center-right — NYU’s Jorge Castaneda — to the Right-Right — Johns Hopkin’s Riordan Roett — of the political spectrum. Its worth noting that Roett’s primary claim to fame was a 1995 memo he wrote while an emerging-market consultant to Chase Manhattan Bank urging the Mexican government to “eliminate the Zapatistas” and to slowdown democratic reforms. Now that’s “meddlesome.”
counterpunch.org

Bachelet is no reformer.

Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale.

The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s when each community fled to places where its members were a majority and were able to defend themselves. “Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you,” warned one of four men who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, a pregnant mother of three children in the city of Baquba, in Diyala province north-east of Baghdad. He offered chocolate to one of her children to try to find out the names of the men in the family.

Mrs Mohammed is a Kurd and a Shia in Baquba, which has a majority of Sunni Arabs. Her husband, Ahmed, who traded fruit in the local market, said: “They threatened the Kurds and the Shia and told them to get out. Later I went back to try to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house. I came away with nothing.” He and his wife now live with nine other relatives in a three-room hovel in Khanaqin.

The same pattern of intimidation, flight and death is being repeated in mixed provinces all over Iraq. By now Iraqis do not have to be reminded of the consequences of ignoring threats.

In Baquba, with a population of 350,000, gunmen last week ordered people off a bus, separated the men from the women and shot dead 11 of them. Not far away police found the mutilated body of a kidnapped six-year-old boy for whom a ransom had already been paid.

The sectarian warfare in Baghdad is sparsely reported but the provinces around the capital are now so dangerous for reporters that they seldom, if ever, go there, except as embeds with US troops. Two months ago in Mosul, I met an Iraqi army captain from Diyala who said Sunni and Shia were slaughtering each other in his home province. “Whoever is in a minority runs,” he said. “If forces are more equal they fight it out.”

Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale.

The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s when each community fled to places where its members were a majority and were able to defend themselves. “Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you,” warned one of four men who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, a pregnant mother of three children in the city of Baquba, in Diyala province north-east of Baghdad. He offered chocolate to one of her children to try to find out the names of the men in the family.

Mrs Mohammed is a Kurd and a Shia in Baquba, which has a majority of Sunni Arabs. Her husband, Ahmed, who traded fruit in the local market, said: “They threatened the Kurds and the Shia and told them to get out. Later I went back to try to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house. I came away with nothing.” He and his wife now live with nine other relatives in a three-room hovel in Khanaqin.

The same pattern of intimidation, flight and death is being repeated in mixed provinces all over Iraq. By now Iraqis do not have to be reminded of the consequences of ignoring threats.

In Baquba, with a population of 350,000, gunmen last week ordered people off a bus, separated the men from the women and shot dead 11 of them. Not far away police found the mutilated body of a kidnapped six-year-old boy for whom a ransom had already been paid.

The sectarian warfare in Baghdad is sparsely reported but the provinces around the capital are now so dangerous for reporters that they seldom, if ever, go there, except as embeds with US troops. Two months ago in Mosul, I met an Iraqi army captain from Diyala who said Sunni and Shia were slaughtering each other in his home province. “Whoever is in a minority runs,” he said. “If forces are more equal they fight it out.
counterpunch.org

CONDITIONS in the financial markets are eerily similar to those that precipitated the ‘Black Monday’ stock market crash of October 1987, according to leading City analysts.

A report by Barclays Capital says the run-up to the 1987 crash was characterised by a widening US current-account deficit, weak dollar, fears of rising inflation, a fading boom in American house prices, and the appointment of a new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
timesonline.uk

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says the Bush administration may prosecute New York Times reporters who wrote about the NSA’s spying on Americans, which means Bush can break the law by ordering the spying but he wants to prosecute reporters who caught him breaking the law.
capitolhillblue.com

Can a blowjob save America?
At lunch the other day, a relatively-refined female friend blurted out: “I wish somebody would catch George W. Bush getting a blowjob from an intern so we could impeach him.”

Kind of says a lot about where this country is headed. We can impeach a President for cheating on his wife and then lying about it but we can’t seem to do a damn thing about one who lies, spies on Americans without legal authority, consistently abuses the power of his office and sends thousands of Americans to die in a baseless invasion founded on deceit.

WASHINGTON – For the first time since the Abscam scandal a quarter-century ago, multiple lawmakers face criminal and ethics investigations that are tarnishing Congress, already low on public approval.

“We have an entire generation who imagines their member of Congress in an orange jumpsuit,” said Paul Light, a New York University professor of public service, referring to the common prison uniform. “It’s like members of Congress don’t have any shame.”
leadingthecharge.com

Dems need to clean their own house first
If Democrats are truly sincere about cleaning up Congress, they need to prove it by purging their own collections of crooks, thieves and con-artists.

WASHINGTON – Prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars by last summer.

The total on June 30, 2005, was 56,428 more than at the same time in 2004, the government reported Sunday. That 2.6 percent increase from mid-2004 to mid-2005 translates into a weekly rise of 1,085 inmates.

Of particular note was the gain of 33,539 inmates in jails, the largest increase since 1997, researcher Allen J. Beck said. That was a 4.7 percent growth rate, compared with a 1.6 percent increase in people held in state and federal prisons.

Prisons accounted for about two-thirds of all inmates, or 1.4 million, while the other third, nearly 750,000, were in local jails, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Beck, the bureau’s chief of corrections statistics, said the increase in the number of people in the 3,365 local jails is due partly to their changing role. Jails often hold inmates for state or federal systems, as well as people who have yet to begin serving a sentence.

“The jail population is increasingly unconvicted,” Beck said. “Judges are perhaps more reluctant to release people pretrial.”

The report by the Justice Department agency found that 62 percent of people in jails have not been convicted, meaning many of them are awaiting trial.

Overall, 738 people were locked up for every 100,000 residents, compared with a rate of 725 at mid-2004. The states with the highest rates were Louisiana and Georgia, with more than 1 percent of their populations in prison or jail. Rounding out the top five were Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma.

The states with the lowest rates were Maine, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire.

Men were 10 times to 11 times more likely than women to be in prison or jail, but the number of women behind bars was growing at a faster rate, said Paige M. Harrison, the report’s other author.

The racial makeup of inmates changed little in recent years, Beck said. In the 25-29 age group, an estimated 11.9 percent of black men were in prison or jails, compared with 3.9 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males.
news.yahoo.com

Is The U.S. using new experimental “Tactical High Energy Laser” weapons in Iraq?

“Star Wars in Iraq” is a new investigative report by Maurizio Torrealta and Sigfrido Ranucci.

According to official Pentagon sources, military vehicles equipped with this laser device have been used in Afghanistan to explode mines. According to two reliable military information sites ? Defense Tech and Defence Industry Daily – at least three such vehicles are being used in Iraq as well and some people report having seen them.
informationclearinghouse.info

A backbench MP is to investigate the “unanswered questions” from the official inquiry into the death of weapons scientist Dr David Kelly.
The former Liberal Democrat environmental spokesman Norman Baker today revealed his decision to stand down from the shadow cabinet two months ago was based on a quest to establish the “truth” behind Dr Kelly’s death.

Mr Baker said he wanted to return to the issue because the 2003 Hutton inquiry had “blatantly failed to get to the bottom of matters”.

He vowed to question ministers and to unearth new facts in a bid to establish the “truth” of the case.
Dr Kelly was found dead on July 18 2003 after being named as the possible source of a BBC story on the government’s Iraq dossier.

Later that month Lord Hutton was appointed head of an independent inquiry into the events surrounding Dr Kelly’s death. After a two-month inquiry, Lord Hutton concluded the scientist had taken his own life.

Oxford coroner Nicholas Gardiner subsequently looked into the possibility of reopening the inquest into Dr Kelly’s death, but after reviewing the evidence with the lord chancellor, decided that there was no case for doing so.

Mr Baker explained that he had decided to wait until he relinquished his environmental role before embarking on an investigation to find out the “truth” that the Hutton inquiry had failed to deliver.

“It did not answer questions,” he told Guardian Unlimited today.

“It was not carried out using proper rules of evidence, people were not giving evidence under oath and the whole thing became a criticism of the BBC.”

Mr Baker said he had given himself a year to carry out his inquiries. This will include revising the medical evidence, interviews with experts and looking at issues relating to the government’s “behaviour” in the affair, as well as the weapons of mass destruction claims made in the months preceding Dr Kelly’s death.

Mr Baker admitted he already holds a “number of theories” about the scientist’s death, but declined to speculate so early into his investigation, which began two months ago just after he stood down from his shadow post.
guardian.co.uk