When US bombers finally caught up with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to end the life of one of the world’s most savage terrorists, they were acting on a remarkable chain of intelligence.

It started in a dusty border post in the rock-strewn desert between Iraq and Jordan. A quiet operation that received no attention. A frontier guard arrested by the Jordanian police. Not even worth a news brief in a local newspaper.

But Mohammed al-Karbouli was not just a frontier guard.

Karbouli, arrested on 22 May, disappeared, hidden in one of the scores of secret prisons and intelligence installations that the Jordanians run in their arid hinterland. If Karbouli’s actual detention went unnoticed, the consequences of his arrest would not. Teams of US special forces, CIA, Jordanian secret services and Iraqi intelligence have spent three years hunting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was blamed for beheading hostages – including the Briton, Kenneth Bigley – and killing hundreds of people in suicide bombings. This was the breakthrough they had needed.

There had been ‘breakthroughs’ before – almost as many as there have been ‘turning points’ in Iraq since 2003. But this was different. Karbouli had been arrested as part of a major investigation by Jordanian secret services into suicide bombings at hotels. He was thought to have assisted the bombers to enter Jordan from Iraq; he was also thought to have been a key figure in the transfer of weapons, money and material to insurgents in Iraq from Jordan. Most importantly, Karbouli talked.

His information was transmitted to the Americans and the intelligence stations that the Jordanians have, secretly and recently, been allowed to set up in Iraq itself. The Jordanians have made a huge effort of late to recruit agents and sympathisers among the powerful al-Dulaimi clan, in and around Falluja and Ramadi. The clan has become alienated from hardline Islamic militants such as Jordanian-born Zarqawi – even killing some ‘mujahideen’ whom they felt were targetting Iraqis too enthusiastically or encroaching on their own tribal power.
guardian.co.uk

Zarqawi Betrayed by Qaeda Insider
BAGHDAD Muhammad Ismael, a 40- year-Iraqi taxi driver, was standing outside his home in the tiny village of Hibhib on Wednesday evening when something unusual caught his eye.

Three GMC trucks, each with blackened windows, rumbled past his home and toward the little house in a nearby grove of date palms that for more than three years had stood abandoned.

“It was something very strange,” Ismael said in a telephone interview a day later. “That house is always empty.”

Meanwhile, in Baghdad, U.S. military commanders believed they had at last cornered Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist whose murderous onslaught against Iraqi civilians and U.S. troops made him the most wanted man in all of Iraq.

For the first time, the U.S. officials said they had a source deep inside his terrorist group. Zarqawi, the source told them, was in the little house in the palm grove.

U.S. jets were in the sky above.

In recent weeks, U.S. officials said, they had begun following a man who they believed could lead them directly to Zarqawi: his “spiritual adviser,” a man named Sheikh Abd al-Rahman. A member of Zarqawi’s network, captured by the Americans, had told them that the sheik was Zarqawi’s most trusted adviser.

cover-stories within cover stories…

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) – The worst three weeks of violence since the fall of the Taliban have left more than 500 people dead, the U.S.-led coalition said Saturday.

Fighting on Saturday killed six insurgents and three police, officials said. Late Friday, a top Afghan intelligence agent narrowly survived a bomb attack on his convoy that killed three other people near the capital, Kabul.

Much of the recent Taliban fighting is believed funded by the country’s $2.8 billion trade in opium and heroin – about 90 percent of the world’s supply.
guardian.co.uk

And who runs the global heroin trade?

June 9, 2006: On May 7th King Abdallah declared that al Qaeda had been “defeated” in Saudi Arabia. Saudi security authorities reported that clashes since May of 2003 had resulted in the deaths of about 150 Saudi and foreign personnel, as well as at least 120 confirmed al Qaeda operatives. There have been thousands of arrests, and several hundred terror suspects are believed still under arrest. No official figures were given for persons detained. But al Qaeda was never a major threat to the Saudi monarchy.
strategypage.com

This report comes from the people who predicted Zarqawi’s death for June 7. So they should know.

The world’s political elite, top thinkers and powerful business folk gathered here for an annual, ultra-secretive Bilderberg conference as heavy security kept conspiracy theorists and curious onlookers at bay.

Global luminaries such as former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, US banker David Rockefeller and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands were greeted at the airport by limousine drivers holding single-letter “B” signs late Thursday, said local reports.

They were quickly whisked away to the Brookstreet Hotel in a serene suburb of Ottawa for three-day talks on oil markets, security concerns tied to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, terrorism, and immigration, the Ottawa Citizen reported.

Conspiracy theorists who follow the group accuse it of plotting world domination at its informal annual gatherings.

But, Richard Perle, former US defence policy advisor, upon his arrival in Ottawa, denied allegations the group crafts public policy behind closed doors. “It discusses public policy,” he stressed to a Citizen reporter.

A statement from the group said the meetings were private to encourage “frank and open discussions.”

But skeptic Daniel Estulin, who flew from Spain to try to cover the conference, said their intent is to “create a world government ruled by an elite group of people whose main objective is to control all the natural resources on the planet.”

Another local observer commented to the Citizen: “There are all sorts of gaps in what politicians say and do. This is just another example of the circumventing of the democratic process.”

The talks are by invitation-only. Because discussions are off-the-record, the group has been subject to similar criticisms and speculation about its intentions since 1954 when the first conference was held at the Hotel de Bilderberg in the Netherlands.

Several sources say Poland’s Joseph Retinger, former Belgian prime minister Paul van Zeeland, and former Unilever chief executive Paul Rijkens organized the first meeting to unite European and US elites amid growing cross-Atlantic tensions a half-century ago.

Its success spawned similar talks at posh hotels and palaces in Europe, the United States and Canada each year since.

Other attendees seen arriving in Ottawa on Thursday included former Canadian ambassador to Washington Frank McKenna, Royal Dutch Shell chairman Jorma Ollila, former World Bank president James Wolfenson and Scandinavian Airlines chairman Egil Myklebust, according to reports.

Former New York governor George Pataki, Iraq’s deputy prime minister Ahmad Chalabi, the heads of Coca-Cola, Credit Suisse, the Royal Bank of Canada, several media moguls, and cabinet ministers from Spain and Greece, were also expected to attend.
breitbart.com

…The English settler colonies in North America were different ? unique. Masses of armed migrants came to steal, and stay, and keep stealing. Theirs was an enterprise of aggrandizement at the native’s expense, and unlimited expansion. Less than a century and a half after the massacre and near-erasure of the Pequots, in celebration of which the Governor of Massachusetts proclaimed the first day of Pilgrim Thanksgiving, the white colonists decided that they were a distinct people, no longer Europeans.

They were right. American colonial society was shaped by constant depredations against non-whites, close up and brutal. By 1776, one out of five non-Indian residents of the colonies were Black slaves, the control and dehumanization of which had become a daily collective duty of much of the white population. Across the Alleghenies lay unconquered Indian lands that, once cleansed, could usher into being a white empire that would dwarf Europe. The English King and his treaties with the Indians stood in the way; he had to go.

The ‘American’ mission was clear, manifest: to endlessly expand through the elimination of impediments posed by the External Other (‘savage’ Indians), while keeping white society safe and separate from the ‘debauchery’ of the valuable, Internal Other (Black slaves). This is the foundation on which the American iconography and celebration is based. Lacking any other, it is the template of white American identity and purported ‘civilization.’
blackcommentator.com

Imagine living in a cloud forest in the Ecuadorian tropical Andes. The region is recognized as one of the most ecologically diverse places in the world.

Although the community you live in is considered poor by “first world” standards, sustainable projects from organic agriculture to ecotourism enable you to raise your family in a pristine and tranquil environment free from traffic, pollution and the excesses of consumer culture. Would you see a Wendy’s or McDonalds down the road as a fair trade off for putting the future of such a community in peril?

Gary E. Davis, President and CEO of Ascendant Copper Corporation, speaking from his office in Lakewood believes so. He said that such fast food chains would be an example of the benefits a massive copper mine would bring to the region.

To be fair, the president of the junior mining company said a commercialized mine would also provide hospitals and other service providers for local residents. Davis is quick to point out any perceived benefits and support associated with the mine. He would, because Ascendant eagerly awaits approval by the Ecuadorian government to begin the first exploration phase of its “Junin Project.”
upsidedownworld.com

Whenever I hear talk of ‘human rights’, I reach for my gun. No, dear new global democrats, don’t worry: there is no dangerous ‘Nazi’ that wants to shoot at your humanitarian holy card. It is because there are too many who, having heard ‘human rights’ invoked on their own skin, they prick up their ears and are ready with the barrel loaded after having come to know them. Three populations taken ‘at random,’ from the list of the most famous bad guys of the world: the Serbs, the Iraqis and the Cubans, who resist the assault of ‘human rights’, but who are certainly not willing to label themselves en bloc as ‘Nazis.’ These three peoples have never spoken nonsense regarding ‘human rights’ for hours and hours. They had them or they still have them, it was a real life experience, therefore, they didn’t need to waste their breath over them. Free education, from nursery school to the specialisation courses in university, free health services from aspirin to transplants, rights to a house and to a job. Seems like nothing: knowledge, health, home and work. Curiously, in all of the ‘Rogue States’ these ‘rights’ are guaranteed. They are the same ones that transmit trust in the future and safeguard the reproduction instinct.

But if you think that someone is going to explain in detail what these ‘human rights’ are by talking about education, health, homes and work, well then, you haven’t understood anything about ‘human rights’. ‘Human rights’ in the minds of the dull masses, are not those things that guarantee the rights of a collective group of people, but they are rather tied to individualistic instances, or to their degeneration to narcissistic ones, congenial to the society that ‘produces, consumes and then dies.’ Here are a few of them: the right to speak your mind (even on things that you are absolutely incompetent on and however these thoughts having a low distribution, limited to the old, dear cyclostyled pamphlets or internet lists that only a handful of people actually read), the right to ‘express’ always and everywhere one’s ‘real self,’ including the ‘sexual preferences’ (paraded beyond limits of decency and mental stability for our children), the right to the ‘free market business,’ that is, drowning in luxury and skinning your neighbour just as long as you come out first, straight up to the right to carry a gun, in full cowboy style!
axisoflogic.com

As four Mapuche activists imprisoned under draconian anti-terrorist laws spend 70 days on a hunger strike, the troubled relationship between the Chilean state and “the oldest of Chileans” is rockier than ever.

Chile’s Michelle Bachelet shone during her presidential debut in Europe last month. Hailed by Europe’s leaders and press as a progressive icon, Bachelet leads a country seen as a model of political stability, economic dynamism and social modernity.
But there was another side to BacheletÍs trip. As she touched down in Madrid, Juan Guzman – the Chilean Judge famed for his judicial siege of General Pinochet – was giving an interview to El Pais. “The police act brutally,” said Guzman, describing the persecution of Chile’s Mapuche Indians. “They raid the villages and ransack houses. With luck they decommission a sharp knife or a machete which is often the only evidence used against suspects detained and charged under anti-terrorist laws.” (1)

Next day, the Portuguese literary Nobel Prize winner, Jose Saramago, challenged Bachelet in person. “Do me a favor”, pleaded the novelist. “Look out for the Mapuches: the oldest of Chileans.” That evening, outside Madrid’s House of the Americas, Bachelet was presented with a letter. “Dear President Bachelet,” it read. “It is incomprehensible that in Chile today there are over 200 law suits involving Mapuches in which irregular laws, created by the military to suppress opposition to the dictatorship, are applied.”
upsidedownworld.com

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – Michael Berg, whose son Nick was beheaded in Iraq in 2004, said on Thursday he felt no sense of relief at the killing of the al Qaeda leader in Iraq and blamed President Bush for his son’s death.

Asked what would give him satisfaction, Berg, an anti-war activist and candidate for U.S. Congress, said, “The end of the war and getting rid of George Bush.”

The United States said its aircraft killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the insurgent leader who masterminded the death of hundreds in suicide bombings and was blamed for the videotaped beheading of Nick Berg, a U.S. contractor, and other captives.

“I don’t think that Zarqawi is himself responsible for the killings of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq,” Berg said in a combative television interview with the U.S. Fox News network. “I think George Bush is.”
reuters.com

Hubub in Hibhib: The Timely Death of al-Zarqawi
…Zarqawi, the notorious shape-shifter who, according to grainy video evidence, was able to regenerate lost limbs, speak in completely different accents, alter the contours of his bone structure and also suffered an unfortunate binge-and-purge weight problem which caused him to change sizes with almost every appearance, was head of an organization that quite fortuitously dubbed itself “Al Qaeda in Iraq” just around the time that the Bush Administration began changing its pretext for the conquest from “eliminating Iraq’s [non-existent] weapons of mass destruction” to “fighting terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.”

The name change of the Zarqawi gang from its cumbersome original Ð “The Monotheism and Holy War Group” Ð to the more media-sexy “Qaeda” brand was thus a PR godsend for the Bush Administration, which was then able to associate the widespread native uprising against the Coalition occupation with the cave-dwelling dastards of the bin Laden organization. This proved an invaluable tool for the Pentagon’s massive “psy-op” campaign against the American people, which was successful in sufficiently obscuring reality and defusing rising public concerns about what many experts have termed “the full-blown FUBAR” in Iraq until after the 2004 elections.

However, in the last year, even the reputed presence of a big stonking al Qaeda beheader guy roaming at will across the land has not prevented a catastrophic drop in support for President Bush in general and the war in Iraq in particular. Polls show that substantial majorities Ð even those still psy-oped into believing the conquest has something to do with fighting terrorism Ð are now saying that the war “is not worth it” and call for American forces to begin withdrawing.

With the Zarqawi theme thus producing diminishing returns, the Administration has had another stroke of unexpected luck with his reputed sudden demise. Moreover, the fact that Zarqawi was killed in a military action means that Mr. Bush will not have to cough up the $25 million reward placed on the head of the terrorist chieftain. That money will now be given to Mr. Bush’s favorite charity, Upper-Class Twits Against the Inheritance Tax, an Administration spokesman said.

Despite its fortuitousness, the reputed death of the multi-legged brigand came as no real surprise. After all, approximately 376 of his “top lieutenants” had been killed or captured by Coalition forces in the past three years, according to press reports, and some 5,997 lower-ranking “al Qaeda terrorists” have been killed in innumerable operations during that same period, according to Pentagon press releases. With the widespread, on-going, much-publicized decimation of his group, Zarqawi had obviously been rendered isolated and ineffective Ð except of course for the relentless series of high-profile terrorist spectaculars he kept carrying out, according to other Pentagon press releases.

News of the reputed rub-out brought bipartisan praise. “This enormous victory in the War on Terror is due entirely to the courage and wisdom of the president,” squealed Senate Majority Leader Lick Spittle of Tennessee. “He has seen us through when so many of the flag-burning destroyers of marriage wanted to cut and run. I think this president is the best president the world has ever seen, and if I am ever fortunate enough to be chosen as president by the American people Ð minus the three million or so whose votes will be discarded, lost, inadvertently mangled or just ignored, of course Ð I promise I’ll be a president just like him!”

“We must give credit where credit is due,” said Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, in a rare television appearance. “I have my differences with the way the Administration is conducting this war, but the elimination of Zarqawi is, I believe, a turning point, comparable to the capture of Saddam Hussein, the first Iraqi elections, the second Iraqi elections, the formation of the first Iraqi government and the formation of the second Iraqi government. This is not the end, or even the beginning of the end, but it is, I believe, the end of the beginning. And no, I didn’t plagiarize that. I made it up my own self.”

The reputed end of Zarqawi’s reign of terror comes a mere four years after U.S. forces had pinpointed his hideout and were prepared to destroy his entire operation, only to be forestalled by the White House. Before the war, Zarqawi and his band of non-Iraqi Islamic extremists had a camp in northern Iraq, in territory controlled by American-backed Kurdish forces, who had wrested it from the hands of Saddam Hussein. U.S. Special Forces, CIA agents and other American personnel had a free hand to operate there; indeed, anti-Saddam Iraqi exiles held open meetings in the territory, safe from the reach of the dictator.

In June 2002, American forces had locked in on Zarqawi’s location. They prepared a detailed attack plan that would have destroyed the terrorist band. But their request to strike was turned down not once, but twice by the White House. Administration officials feared that such a strike would have muddied the waters in their public relations effort to foment war fever against Saddam’s regime.

At every turn, the Bush team had painted a picture of Saddam Hussein as a powerful dictator able to threaten the entire world. They had implied, insinuated and sometimes openly declared that he was in league with al Qaeda. But this wildly successful psy-ops campaign would have been undermined by a raid on Zarqawi, which would have exposed the truth: that Saddam was a crippled, toothless despot who had lost control of much of his own land and couldn’t even threaten vast enemy armies within his own borders Ð much less his neighbors or the rest of the world. It would have also exposed the fact that the only Islamic terrorists operating on Iraqi soil were in areas controlled by America and its allies Ð which, now that Mr. Bush’s invasion has opened the whole country to extremist terror, is still the case.

With Zarqawi’s Bush-granted liberty reputedly at an end, the Pentagon moved quickly to confirm the identity of the man killed in Hibhib today. At a joint press conference with Prime Minister Maliki, U.S. Gen. George Casey said Zarqawi’s body had been identified by “fingerprints, facial recognition and known scars” after a painstaking forensic examination by Lt. Col. Gil Grissom and Major Catherine Willows.

In yet another amazing coincidence, the announcement of the death of Zarqawi or somebody just like him came just as Prime Minister Maliki was finally submitting his candidates for the long-disputed posts of defense and interior ministers, which then sailed through parliament after months of deadlock. The fortuitous death also came after perhaps the worst week of bad PR the Bush Administration has endured during the entire war, with an outpouring of stories alleging a number of horrific atrocities committed by U.S. troops in recent months.

Oddly enough, Zarqawi first vaulted into the American consciousness just after the public exposure of earlier U.S. atrocities: the tortures at Abu Ghraib prison in the spring of 2004. With story after story of horrible abuse battering the Administration during an election year, Zarqawi, or someone just like him, suddenly appeared with a Grand Guignol production: the beheading of American civilian Nick Berg. This atrocity was instantly seized upon by supporters of the war to justify the “intensive interrogation” of “terrorists” Ð even though the Red Cross had determined that 70 to 90 percent of American captives at that time had committed no crime whatsoever, much less been involved in terrorism, as the notorious anti-war Wall Street Journal reported. Abu Ghraib largely faded from the public eye Ð indeed, it was not mentioned by a single speaker at the Democratic National Convention a few weeks later or raised as an issue during the presidential campaign that year.

Today’s news has likewise knocked the new atrocity allegations off the front pages, to be replaced with heartening stories of how, as the New York Times reports, Zarqawi’s death “appears to mark a major watershed in the war.” Thus in his reputed end as in his reputed beginning, the Scarlet Pimpernel of Iraq has, by remarkable coincidence, done yeoman service for the immediate publicity needs of his deadly enemy, the Bush Administration.

It is not yet known who will now take Zarqawi’s place as the new all-purpose, all-powerful bogeyman solely responsible for every bad thing in Iraq. There were recent indications that Maliki himself was being measured for the post, after he publicly denounced American atrocities and the occupiers’ propensity for hair-trigger killing of civilians, but he seems to be back with the program now. Administration insiders are reportedly divided over shifting the horns to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s already much-demonized head, or planting them on extremist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, or elevating some hitherto unknown local talent Ð or maybe just blaming the whole shebang on Fidel Castro, for old times’ sake.

The announcement of the new bogeyman is expected sometime in the coming weeks.

A PAZ, Bolivia Ñ Russia’s state-controlled natural gas company Gazprom is considering investing around US$2 billion (euro1.56 billion) in Bolivia’s recently nationalized gas industry, the president of Bolivia’s state energy company Wednesday.

Gazprom is looking to build gas separation plants and pipelines to help export liquefied natural gas as well as explore for gas in new and abandoned fields, said Jorge Alvarado, president of Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos, or YPFB.

“We want … to find hydrocarbons at a greater depth in the fields that are now abandoned,” Alvarado told reporters.

In a few weeks, Gazprom experts will visit Bolivian again to do further investigation and another team will come later to finalize the contract details, Alvarado said.

“In Russia we have the longest pipeline in the world which allows us to supply three neighboring eastern European countries and this experience and length of experience can be applied to Bolivian interests,” said Vladimir Kulikov, Russia’s ambassador to Bolivia at the news conference.
chron.com