The Defence Secretary, Des Browne, has said that the presence of British forces in Afghanistan has “energised” the Taliban.

He made the comment after it emerged that reinforcements would be added to the current deployment of 3,300 soldiers in the southern Helmand province.

In an interview with the Guardian, he said: “It is certainly the case that the very act of deployment into the south has energised opposition, and the scale of that opposition and the nature of that opposition became apparent when we were deploying.”
telegraph.co.uk

Mexican elections are stolen before, during, and after Election Day. Just look at what happened in the days leading up to the tightest presidential election in the nation’s history this past July 2nd.
counterpunch.org

Democracy, Mexican Style
What do these presidential elections all have in common: Mexico, 1988, US, 2000, US, 2004, Colombia and Peru, 2006 and the just concluded Mexican election on July 2? In each case, the outcome was “arranged” and known in advance before voters went to the polls. They’re what economist and media and social critic Edward Herman calls “Demonstration Elections ” – the characterization and title he gave his 1980s book analyzing and documenting sham elections in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Vietnam. Professor Herman is an expert, and although his book was written over 20 years ago, it’s clear little has changed except for the added sophistication gained since then in the ability of officials to make elections turn out the way they wish. The same fraud occurs in many countries, and Professor Herman might have included many others besides the ones he chose but had he done so he’d have had to have written a book with no end.

In Bushzarro world, terrorists have the expertise to blow up New York’s Holland Tunnel and flood Wall Street, even though the tunnel is buried in bedrock below the Hudson River, is constructed of concrete and cast-iron steel, and lower Manhattan is above the level of the river. Like the official version of nine eleven, the Holland Tunnel plot runs counter to science and the laws of physics.

‘The FBI discovered the plot by monitoring Internet chat rooms, where the aspiring terrorists discussed striking the U.S. economy,’ reports the New York Daily News.

If we are to believe the FBI and the corporate media stenographers at the Daily News, this chat room chatter, or rather puerile blather followed on the heels of a declaration uttered by a dead man.

‘Al Qaeda founder Bin Laden has often urged his followers to “bleed” America financially,’ the Daily News continues. ‘They’re hell-bent on destroying the economy in the U.S.,’ a so-called counterterrorism source told the newspaper.

Of course, it is not clear who is ‘hell-bent on destroying the economy,’ supposed terrorists or the FBI.
kurtnimmo.com

Racism, the ideology that came into full flower as a justification for European conquest of most of the planet, is now headquartered in the United States with an annex in Israel. Tel Aviv is a very active annex.

There could be no justification for George Bush’s aggressions, without the underlying assumptions of racial superiority. Bush has committed multiple crimes against peace, a capital Nuremburg offense for which a number of Nazis were hanged. He is a war criminal, many times over. However, he will never be prosecuted in the United States, because of the pervasive ideology of imperialism, which is racist at its very core: it dehumanizes the victims.

Race is, indeed, a construction, a very convenient one when you want to take someone else’s property, or kill them, or enslave them. It is this construct that animates the American debate about foreign policy, or even domestic policy when it comes to ‘aliens’of one kind or another.

But it is deadly. It swarms countries, and consumes cities. Fallujah was flattened, with its main hospital the first target. Three hundred thousand people are now refugees in their own country, because of US actions, and an unknown number are dead. That is a war crime, but is not seen as such by most of the US public, who are under the sway of the ideology of imperial racism. The death of an entire city does not matter to them, because there were no real people there. Racism does more than color the situation, it defines it. How do you kill a city and call it victory? Why is this celebrated as a benchmark of ‘progress’? Is the assumption that the white man’s triumph is, inherently, progress?

Of course it is. That’s what imperial racism is all about. There are ‘enemies’ and ‘others’ who are not ‘Western’, a euphemism for ‘non-white’, the construct they keep making up every time they want to steal something.
blackcommentator.com

On Thursday, Israeli tanks and troops invaded northern Gaza, encountering fierce small-arms fire and some rocket attacks from armed Gazans. Twenty-one Palestinians, mostly militants, and an Israeli soldier were killed. It was the largest Israeli troop presence in the territory since the unilateral Israeli withdrawal of August 2005. Late Thursday, Palestinian Interior Minister Said Siam called on Gazans to “prepare to repel the Israeli attack” — the first time a Palestinian governmental official has called Palestinians to arms since the crisis erupted.

The day’s battles continued the cycle of violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians that has simmered for months but exploded during the past two weeks. Israel’s grossly disproportionate response to a tit-for-tat Palestinian guerrilla raid during which two Israeli soldiers were killed and a third abducted has pushed the impoverished Gaza Strip to the edge of a humanitarian crisis, smashed the barely functioning Palestinian Authority, and threatened the Middle East’s fragile peace. The actions of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seem intended to create a failed state in Gaza and the West Bank, thus rendering the Israeli claim that “we have no one to talk to” a self-fulfilling prophecy and allowing Israel to continue with its unilateral, annexationist policies, free of the need to even pretend to negotiate.
salon.com

Most Israelis want Hamas leaders assassinated-poll
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The vast majority of Israelis believe the Jewish state should assassinate leaders of the governing Palestinian movement Hamas in response to the crisis in Gaza, a newspaper poll published on Friday showed.

The survey in the Maariv daily showed 82 percent of Israelis favoured killing leaders of the Islamic militant group, whom Israel holds responsible for the abduction of a soldier on June 25 in a cross-border raid from Gaza and recent rocket attacks.

On Memorial Day, I read the following in a Chilean magazine: “In November 1977, ‘Mamo’ [General Manuel Contreras, chief of DINA, Chile’s Secret Police and Intelligence] asked him to cook up a bacteria soup to ‘incapacitate’ Mena [General Odlanier Mena, head of CNIA, the secret police-Intelligence agency that would replace DINA]. ‘I spoke with Eugenio Berrios [DINA’s chemist] . he told me he would make a tetanus or botulism poison. and give the concoction to Major Vianel Valdivieso – who could drop it in his tea.'” These are Michael Townley’s words from a 2005 deposition about how Contreras planned to kill Mena. (Jorge Molina Sanhueza, La NaciÑn, May 23, 2006)

To understand what lay behind such a Macbethian act of murder, described by Townley, one of DINA’s assassins, one must remember a scene in the Oval Office, in September 1970, 36 years earlier. Dr. Salvador Allende had just won the presidential election. President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger ordered the CIA Director into the Oval Office.

According to Kissinger, Nixon told CIA director Richard Helms “that he wanted a major effort to see what could be done to prevent Allende’s accession to power. If there were one chance in ten of getting rid of Allende we should try it; if Helms needed $10 million he would approve it.”

Helms later boasted to a Senate committee: “If I ever carried the marshal’s baton out of the Oval Office it was that day.” The Senate report published Helms’ notes of the meeting with Nixon.

One in ten chance perhaps, but save Chile

worth spending

not concerned risks involved

no involvement of embassy

$10,000,000 available, more if necessary

full-time job -best men we have

game plan

make the economy scream
counterpunch.org

Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, the purported successor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, is in an Egyptian prison and not Iraq, a lawyer has claimed.

Egyptian newspaper Al-Masri al-Yawm has quoted Mamduh Ismail as saying he met al-Muhajir, also known as Sharif Hazaa, or Abu Ayub al-Masri, in Tura prison in Cairo, where he has been held for seven years.

“Sharif Hazaa [al-Muhajir] is in Tura prison, and I met him two days ago while I was visiting some of my clients,” Ismail, a lawyer known for defending Islamist groups, told the newspaper.

Al-Muhajir is on the “most wanted” list issued by the Iraqi government last week. The US military in Iraq has put a $5million price on his head.

The US army media centre in Iraq said: “We cannot comment on the news that … al-Masri is in an Egyptian prison and not in Iraq, we have to clarify that from the Egyptian government.”
aljazeera.net

As the apparent victor in Mexico’s presidential election switched back and forth Thursday morning, ballots were found in two garbage dumps, RAW STORY has learned. The news was accompanied by various wire reports showing that left wing candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had rejected findings that his opponent Felipe Calderon was the winner.

Although official tallies indicated a victory for Calderon of 0.3%, the Mexican newspaper El Universal reported that 10 ballot boxes and a polling station report were found in a garbage dump in a poor neighbourhood in Mexico City, according to Reuters. The ballots came from three precincts in the city of Nezahuacoyotl, a Lopez Obrador stronghold according to the website Narco News.

In another indication of electoral fraud, ballots were also found in a second garbage dump in the city of Xalapa, the capital of the Mexican State of Veracruz. Parts of the Spanish language report were translated by a contributor to a discussion board at the website Democratic Underground.

A State Department spokesman had earlier declared that “Mexico has a vibrant and dynamic democracy and Mexican institutions are fully capable of dealing with any — you know, with any irregularities and ensuring the principles of rule of law and transparency.”
rawstory.com

Conservative wins Mexico’s protracted presidential election
Conservative candidate Felipe CalderÑn has won the final official count of Mexico’s presidential poll by a razor-thin margin but his main rival, the leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has vowed to contest the result. With 99.56% of the vote counted, Mr Calderon had 35.82%, Mr Lopez Obrador 35.37% with three other candidates sharing the remainder.

“We cannot accept these results,” Mr Lopez Obrador said yesterday at his campaign headquarters. “We triumphed and we are going to prove it.”

The charismatic champion of Mexico’s downtrodden said he would take his claim that the election was full of irregularities to the electoral tribunal within the four days allowed by law. He also called supporters to an assembly in the capital’s central plaza tomorrow, suggesting a strategy of street protests could follow.
About 42 million Mexicans voted in Sunday’s election after a protracted and often dirty campaign. It was the first presidential poll since 71 years of single party rule ended in 2000. The provisional count immediately after polls closed gave Mr Calderon, the governing party candidate, an advantage of one percentage point, but was deemed inconclusive by the electoral authorities. The final official count of the tally sheets that accompany each ballot box began on Wednesday. Usually little more than a formality to confirm the provisional result, this count had the nation on tenterhooks through the night.

Mr Lopez Obrador led until shortly before dawn when tallies from Calderon strongholds reversed the situation. Minutes later a beaming Mr Calderon addressed hundreds of cheering supporters at his headquarters and called for the result to be respected. “This has been the most competitive election we’ve ever had,” he said. “But it has been the most democratic in Mexico’s history.”

A few hours later Mr Lopez Obrador shot back that his rival should be ashamed to declare himself the winner: “They know that there is nothing to celebrate. They know what they did.”

The Lopez Obrador camp claims Mr Calderon’s supporters and the government orchestrated a subtle fraud while the votes were being counted so that the tally sheets did not reflect reality. They want the tribunal to order all the ballot boxes opened so there can be a vote-by-vote recount. According to a strict reading of the law, opening the boxes would annul the election.

his is not the first time the left has been so close, and yet so far, from power. In 1988 Cuauhtemoc Cardenas was winning the election when a computer failure stopped the count. When the lights came on he had lost. Many on the left who were bitter that Cardenas did not defend his claim to power more energetically hope Mr Lopez Obrador will not give up pushing his.

Israel faces the prospect of a long-term reoccupation of parts of the Gaza Strip after Palestinian rockets for the first time struck a major Israeli city, escalating a crisis that began with the capture of a single soldier.

The Israeli army launched an assault on the Gaza town of Beit Lahiya and reoccupied three former Jewish settlements in response to the attacks on Ashkelon, until now well beyond the range of the rudimentary Palestinian missiles.

Politicians and the army acknowledge that now the tanks and troops are in again it may be politically impossible to withdraw them swiftly even if the captured Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, is freed.
guardian.co.uk

Do tell. ISRAEL faces the prospect of reoccupation? Are we supposed to sympathize?

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A leftist anti-poverty campaigner took a slim lead over his conservative rival in a dramatic recount of Mexico’s presidential election vote on Wednesday and warned the country’s stability was at stake.

In scenes reminiscent of the Florida recount in the U.S. presidential vote in 2000, the divided nation bit its nails as partial returns showed Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador overtaking Felipe Calderon, who ended a just ahead in an initial count.

Lopez Obrador, the former mayor of Mexico City, led pro-U.S. lawyer Calderon by 2 percentage points in the recount of 80 percent of polling stations but it was still too early to declare a victor from Sunday’s vote.

Protests broke out in the capital to press home claims that the leftist was the victim of fraud in the preliminary count.

Lopez Obrador warned electoral authorities to be thorough in the recount, expected to last about a day.

“The stability of the country is at stake,” he said.
reuters.com

The difference is that, unlike Florida, ALL the votes are being recounted.

Yesterday: More votes counted — gap shrinks
…Federal Electoral Institute officials were under mounting public criticism Tuesday for not counting some 2.6 million ballots that they deemed had “inconsistencies” because of conflicting information or blank entries. At a hastily called evening news conference, institute officials finally released these votes, which narrowed Calderon’s lead from 1.04 percent to 0.64 percent.

Election officials also noted that the initial count did not include an additional 827,317 ballots that were nullified because of undisclosed errors or approximately 800,000 ballots that did not arrive to counting centers on time.