Archive for June, 2006

U.S. Airstrikes Rise In Afghanistan as Fighting Intensifies

Monday, June 19th, 2006

As fighting in Afghanistan has intensified over the past three months, the U.S. military has conducted 340 airstrikes there, more than twice the 160 carried out in the much higher-profile war in Iraq, according to data from the Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for the Middle East.

The airstrikes appear to have increased in recent days as the United States and its allies have launched counteroffensives against the Taliban in the south and southeast, strafing and bombing a stronghold in Uruzgan province and pounding an area near Khost with 500-pound bombs.

U.S. officials say the activity is a response to an increasingly aggressive Taliban, whose leaders realize that long-term trends are against them as the power of the Afghan central government grows.
washingtonpost.com

‘Long-term trends’ are always against invaders. Other reports are saying that 100 ‘Taliban’ were killed in these airstrikes. How would they know?

Tigers issue warning as sea and land battles kill 52

Monday, June 19th, 2006

COLOMBO (AFP) – At least 52 people have been killed in Sri Lanka as heavy sea and land battles erupted while Tamil Tiger rebels warned that the island would plunge in a “fatal war” if the military kept up air strikes.

The military used Mi-24 helicopter gunships to defend naval patrol craft which came under attack off the northwestern coast Saturday, the defence ministry said, hours after deploying supersonic jets to bomb rebel positions elsewhere.
news.yahoo.com

Obama’s Profile Has Democrats Taking Notice

Monday, June 19th, 2006

…Obama, a first-term Democratic senator from Illinois, seems to be hitting the right notes these days. During Senate recesses, he has been touring the country at breakneck pace, basking in the sudden fame of a politician turned pop star. Along the way, he has been drawing crowds and campaign cash from Democrats starved for a fresh face and ready to cheer what Obama touts as “a politics of hope instead of a politics of fear.”
washingtonpost.com

Yeah, Joe Leiberman’s protegee, wants the US to ‘finish the job in Iraq’…ra ra ree.

Disaster industrial complex: New Orleans gripped by greed

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

New Orleans was not devastated by a hurricane. From my travels around New Orleans and surrounding areas, it’s clear that very little damage was done to my city by Hurricane Katrina.

Bay St. Louis, Biloxi, Gulfport and other Gulf cities have suffered extensive hurricane-related damage. However, the damage to New Orleans came from brutal negligence, a lack of planning and a stunningly slow response, created by a federal government that didn’t care about the people of New Orleans and still doesn’t.

Academic Cornel West has called it Hurricane Povertina. Poet Suheir Hammad has referred to the “survivors of the rescue.” Others have referred to the displaced as “victims of Hurricane FEMA” or simply “Michael Brown’s victims.”

The houses of New Orleans were not hit by 35-foot tall waves or 200-mile winds. On the day after the hurricane, most of the city was in good shape and many of us still in the city felt that New Orleans had once again come through, battered and bruised but all right.

Then, over the next few days, the levee broke and water rushed into the city and relief, rescue and repair efforts were far too little, far too late.

But the worst damage is what is being done now, this confluence of forces barraging New Orleans and its Diaspora, what some local organizers have referred to as “the Disaster Industrial Complex.” This is the perfect storm created by an orgy of greed and opportunism engaged in by the jackals of disaster profiteering.

The list of those who are gaining from our loss is large, and it includes everyone from the heavily armed thugs of Wackenhut Security and Blackwater USA, to the often well-meaning but ineffective bureaucrats of Red Cross and FEMA, to the Scientology missionaries crowding the shelters, to journalists and disaster-gazers taking up a chunk of available housing, to the major multi-nationals such as Halliburton, working in concert with rich elites from uptown New Orleans, seeking partners with which to exploit this tragedy.
sfbayview.com

Stories from the displaced: Post-Katrina housing attacked on multiple fronts
Katrina survivors receiving rental assistance or living in FEMA trailers face serious threats to their already tenuous housing situation. Thousands of hurricane evacuees are being dropped from the FEMA housing programs. Evacuees have voiced major concerns over new FEMA policies, HUD policies and inaction by the federal government to appropriately address the housing crisis.

Outside of Lafayette, Louisiana, thousands reside in FEMA trailers without transportation to jobs, without the option to move and now under threat of a second displacement by FEMA.

Katrina survivor Van Parker, who drives fellow trailer residents around because there is no bus system, is frustrated by FEMA. ‘If you were homeless before the storm, FEMA is now trying to kick you out of the trailers. It doesn’t matter if you are working now or trying to turn your life around.’

George Galloway: Katrina shows there are two Americas
The scenes from the stricken city almost defy belief. Many, many thousands of people left to die in what is the richest, most powerful country on earth.

This obscenity is as far from a natural disaster as George Bush and the U.S. elite are from the suffering masses of New Orleans.

The images of Bush luxuriating at his ranch and of his secretary of state shopping for $7,000 shoes while disaster swamped the U.S. Gulf Coast will haunt this administration.

In the most terrible way imaginable, they show to the whole world that it is not only the lives of people in Baghdad, Fallujah and Palestine that Bush holds cheap. It is also his own citizens – the Black and poor people left behind with no food, water or shelter.

This is not simply manslaughter through incompetence, though the White House’s incompetence abounds. It is murder, for Bush was warned four years ago of the threat to New Orleans, as surely as he was warned of the disaster that would come of his war on Iraq.

Yet he plundered the city’s defenses to fill the maw of his war machine and the body count rises at home and abroad.

How US hid the suicide secrets of Guantanamo

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

…The high degree of surveillance has foiled dozens of previous attempts by prisoners to take their own lives. ‘It happened in front of me several times. The soldiers would see what was happening and they were in the cell in seconds,’ Rasul said. But somehow, in circumstances that the Pentagon has succeeded in keeping totally obscure, late on Friday, 9 June, three detainees, all weak and emaciated after months on hunger strike and being force-fed, managed to tease bedsheets through their cells’ mesh walls, tie them into nooses and hang themselves. With the cells little taller than the height of a man, they stood no chance of breaking their necks: the only way they could die was slowly, by hypoxia.

‘That would take at least four or five minutes, probably longer,’ said Dr David Nicholl, consultant neurologist at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, who has been co-ordinating international opposition to Guantanamo by physicians. ‘It’s very difficult to see how, if the landing was being properly patrolled, they could have managed to accomplish it.’

…By the time of my own visit in October 2003, a fifth of them were on Prozac and there had been so many suicide attempts – 40 by August 2003 – that the Pentagon had reclassified hangings as ‘manipulative self-injurious behaviours’. Cannily, perhaps, it has refused to give exact statistics on how many SIBs have occurred, claiming that since the reclassification there have been (until last week) only two genuine attempted suicides.

Tarek Dergoul, another freed British former detainee, knew two of the dead men well. ‘I was next to or opposite Manei [Habadi] for weeks, maybe months,’ he said, ‘and like me his morale was high. He was always up for a protest: a hunger strike or a non-co-operation strike. He used to recite poetry, not just Arabic, but English – he knew chunks of Macbeth and he taught me how to read the Koran correctly. When you go through that sort of experience with someone, you really get to know them. I just can’t believe he would take his own life. He would have had to be really desperate.’ Likewise, Dergoul said, Zahrani was ‘a person everyone loved. It’s offensive to me to say he could have killed himself.’ Apart from anything else, all three men would have been deeply aware of Islam’s prohibition of suicide.
guardian.co.uk

Somali Islamists Cement Control of South Amid Border Tension

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

MOGADISHU, Somalia, June 17 The leader of the Islamists who now control most of southern Somalia accused the United States on Saturday of orchestrating what he called a border incursion by hundreds of Ethiopian troops.

“We want the whole world to know what’s going on,” Sheik Sharif Ahmed, chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, told reporters in the provincial town of Jowhar. “The United States is encouraging Ethiopia to take over the area.”

American officials said they were not involved in an incursion, and Ethiopian authorities denied the claims that several hundred of their soldiers had entered Somalia in the southwestern Gedo region on Saturday morning. What had occurred, Ethiopian officials told reporters in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, was that their troops had massed on their side of the border to prevent an incursion from the Islamists in Somalia.

“Ethiopia has a right to monitor its border,” said Bereket Simon, an adviser to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

The reports touch on a very real concern in Somalia. Ethiopia has sent troops into Somalia in the past to root out suspected militants, and the Ethiopian government has distanced itself from the new Islamist administration in Mogadishu. It favors instead the fledging transitional government led by President Abdullahi Yusuf that is based well outside Mogadishu in the provincial town of Baidoa.

It is clear, however, that the Islamists in Mogadishu now hold the bulk of the power in the country.

The militias associated with them have sealed their grip on most of the south. They first defeated Mogadishu’s longtime warlords on June 6 after months of fighting that left more than 300 people dead and thousands injured.

The Islamists set up Shariah courts, based on Islamic law, across Somalia in recent years, trying to pull the country from its long decline into anarchy. The United States has accused them of harboring a small number of people suspected of being Al Qaeda members. The courts union leaders deny links to extremists.

On Friday, the courts union arranged a large demonstration in Mogadishu against plans to allow foreign peacekeepers into Somalia to quell the long spell of violence. “We will be able to bring peace without bringing in foreign troops,” said Sheik Abdulkadir Ali Omar, the deputy chairman of the courts union.

Two of the main warlords who had battled the Islamists in recent months fled Mogadishu late Friday by boat, according to news agency reports, meaning the end of the 11-member, American-backed Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, the secular warlords’ coalition. Islamic leaders said that an American warship had picked them up off Somalia’s coast, a claim that Navy officials disputed.
nytimes.com

UN fears new conflict in Somalia
Daily arms shipments are arriving in Somalia in violation of a United Nations arms embargo, a senior UN official has told the BBC.
Bruno Schiemsky, co-ordinator of the UN Monitoring Group, said the flow of arms had risen substantially since Islamists went on the offensive this month.

He warned it was only a matter of time before the Union of Islamic Courts clashed with interim government forces.

The African Union has urged the world to renew support for the government.

Odd actions near Cheney prompt arrest

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

BEAVER CREEK A man was arrested by Secret Service agents when he tried to approach Vice President Dick Cheney in Beaver Creek Village yesterday afternoon, said Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren.

Cheney was walking outside when the agents charged with protecting him noticed the man, identified as Steven Howards, who ‘wasn’t acting like the other folks in the area,’ Zahren said.

‘His behavior and demeanor wasn’t quite right,’ Zahren said.
vaildaily.com

Former Antiterror Officials Find Industry Pays Better

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

WASHINGTON, June 17 Dozens of members of the Bush administration’s domestic security team, assembled after the 2001 terrorist attacks, are now collecting bigger paychecks in different roles: working on behalf of companies that sell domestic security products, many directly to the federal agencies the officials once helped run.

At least 90 officials at the Department of Homeland Security or the White House Office of Homeland Security, including the department’s former secretary, Tom Ridge; the former deputy secretary, Adm. James M. Loy; and the former under secretary, Asa Hutchinson, are executives, consultants or lobbyists for companies that collectively do billions of dollars’ worth of domestic security business.

More than two-thirds of the department’s most senior executives in its first years have moved through the revolving door.
nytimes.com

All you need to succeed in our meritocracy is privilege

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

We cannot say we weren’t warned. In his dystopian satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, published in 1958, Michael Young warned that meritocracy wouldn’t lead to equality but to a new, more vicious form of elitism. That is exactly what has happened. Inequalities of wealth and income are as ever but, more importantly, the new elite makes no apologies for its privileges, including the privilege of ensuring an easy passage through life for its own children.
guardian.co.uk

US military honoured in secret by Britian

Sunday, June 18th, 2006

The government has been secretly awarding honours to senior figures in the US military and foreign businessmen with lucrative public sector contracts. The Observer has obtained a Foreign Office list detailing all non-British citizens who have been awarded honours since 2003 – the first time the complete three-year dossier has been released.

It has emerged that Riley Bechtel, billionaire boss of the US-based Bechtel Corporation, which has won big transport and nuclear contracts in Britain and made a fortune from the Iraq war, was secretly awarded a CBE in 2003.
guardian.co.uk