Thursday, March 31st
Ousted president blames US for coup
The ousted Kyrgyzstan president, Askar Akayev, last night accused the US of being behind the "anti-constitutional coup" which forced him to flee the country last week, and said he would only resign if given sufficient a guarantee of his personal safety.
In his first interview with the western media since he was driven from the central Asian state he had ruled for 15 years, Mr Akayev said "foreign interference" was "unconditionally an important aspect" in the dramatic events that culminated in his flight last Thursday.
"I think that their influence was prevailing," he said when asked of US government involvement in the mayhem that is becoming known as the daffodil revolution. He added that the opposition was "supported by the [US organisations] the National Democratic Institute, Freedom House, and other organisations ... They were providing training and finance," he said. The US has maintained an airbase near the capital, Bishkek, ever since it persuaded Kyrgyzstan to host its Afghanistan campaign in 2001.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.31.05 @ 09:05 PM CST [
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DeLay Targets Legal System in Schiavo Case
WASHINGTON (AP) - House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on Thursday blamed Terri Schiavo's death on what he contended was a failed legal system and he raised the possibility of trying to impeach some of the federal judges in the case.
``The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior,'' said DeLay, R-Texas.
But a leading Democratic senator said DeLay's comments were ``irresponsible and reprehensible.'' Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said DeLay should make sure that people know he is not advocating violence against judges.
DeLay, the second-ranking House GOP lawmaker, helped lead congressional efforts 10 days ago to enact legislation designed to prod the federal courts into ordering the reinsertion of Schiavo's feeding tube. He said the courts' refusal to do just that was a ``perfect example of an out of control judiciary.''
Asked about the possibility of the House's bringing impeachment charges against judges in the Schiavo case, DeLay said, ``There's plenty of time to look into that.''
Full Article: guardian.co.ukLet's shoot us up some judges--how dare they defend the law? The apparent intent of this whole Shiavo circus is to build up the fires of divisiveness that already exists. Graffiti has been springing up in my town: 'F***ing leftists murdered Terry Shiavo'.
rootsie on 03.31.05 @ 09:01 PM CST [
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Panel: Agencies 'Dead Wrong' on Iraq WMDs
WASHINGTON (AP) - America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most prewar assessments about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and know disturbingly little about current nuclear threats, a presidential commission said Thursday.
"Our collection agencies are often unable to gather intelligence on the very things we care the most about," the panel concluded in an unsparing report.
It recommended dozens of organizational changes, and said President Bush can implement most of them without congressional action. It also urged the president to back up John Negroponte, his choice to be the new director of national intelligence, in any bureaucratic turf battles ahead.
"The central conclusion is one which I share. America's intelligence community needs fundamental change," Bush said at the White House after receiving the critique from a commission he was at first reluctant to appoint.
Full Article:apnews.my.comI think my outrage quotient is all used up for the time being. This is how they are playing off their WMD scam. But hey they count on mass amnesia and that's a good bet.
rootsie on 03.31.05 @ 08:51 PM CST [
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Wolfowitz confirmed as next World Bank president
The board of the World Bank today approved the controversial nomination of Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at the Pentagon, as its new president.
Mr Wolfowitz, who will succeed James Wolfensohn on June 1, was assured of board approval after he won over European diplomats during a five-hour charm offensive in Brussels yesterday.
Full Article: guardian.co.ukAll it takes is 5 hours of 'charm' and you too can win the right to f*** the world
rootsie on 03.31.05 @ 08:36 PM CST [
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US bars Sandinista academic
More than 120 North American academics have begun campaigning to get the US state department to change its mind about banning a leading figure from the Nicaraguan Sandinista revolution from teaching in the US.
Dora María Téllez has been prevented from teaching at Harvard because she is considered to have taken part in "terrorist acts" - the Sandinistas' overthrow of the dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979.
Ms Téllez was due to take up the post of Robert F Kennedy visiting professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard this spring when she was told that she would not be allowed to enter the country.
She has visited the US on many occasions in her profession as a historian. The decision to ban her appears to have been taken in response to the new national "anti-terror" policies.
"The accusation made by the state department against Dora María Téllez is not only a grave violation of her human rights but also amounts to political persecution of those who have engaged in overthrowing the atrocious dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua," the petition says.
It likens her position to that of Nelson Mandela, who was also once accused of being the member of a terrorist organisation. "Today, the US administration puts in danger the life and security of many persons by arbitrarily accusing them of involvement in 'terrorist activities'."
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.31.05 @ 08:22 PM CST [
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The global remittance rip-off
Rip-offs by banks and money transfer firms are costing consumers up to 40% of the cash they send abroad, while transactions can take up to 10 days, according to a survey published today by the UK Department for International Development (DFID).
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.31.05 @ 08:18 PM CST [
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Land of ‘Murka’
Manuel Valanzuela
Decline and Decrepitude
03/07/05 "Information Clearing House" - - From the highest mountains to the lowest valleys a great energy has gone missing from the land once known as America, its pulsating and vibrant warmth no longer felt as the enveloping mist of the last four years spreads far and wide, from sea to shining sea, penetrating every porous cavity of escape. An energy of positive realms and humanist inclinations has been imprisoned, wasting away in the dungeons of human malice, replaced with the negative manifestation of an alternate universe devoid of light, spawned by miscreants hijacking the idea and principles of what the land once known as America was.
From clear-cut forests to urban jungles, from golden prairies to steel-glass canyons, from arid deserts to honeycomb-looking, cookie-cutter suburbs, the winds of parallel worlds blow, causing drought throughout, poisoning lands once bountiful, bringing communal sickness to millions of citizens. In their surreal manifestations and hypocritical inclinations swaying and tilting the lone superpower into dimensions of lunacy, hatred and decrepitude, the winds of alternate universes have collided with those of normalcy, love and prosperity, transforming, for the worst, a nation and those residing inside it, creating a schism where non existed, helping send humanity on a collision course with itself, its most dangerous and formidable enemy.
Come inside the belly of the beast, journeying outside the box of conditioned realities, venturing into new realms of thought, acquiring open minds and nascent understandings, willing to question what is thought to be known and what has been learned, no longer blind to new ways of seeing the world and no longer deaf to the wailing truth of a nation in utter pain and mental anguish.
Inside the belly of the beast the world presently finds itself trapped in, exploring through polluted bowels birthing malignant cancers spread by corporate indifference, continuing into diseased and enlarged entrails of gluttonous addictions, traversing black-blood veins soaked in oil, peering into the empty brain cavity of empire exhibiting corrosive mental disorders created by society itself, showcasing non-existent attention spans, Alzheimer's-like amnesia, medicated chemical imbalances laced with conditioned fear and insecurity, and the remnants of anti-depressant, hyperactivity sequestering cocktails eating away the minds, imaginations and futures of youth.
Inside the belly of the beast will we venture into, witnessing the overflowing testosterone of the human animal, the hate-filled, violence-seeking, fear controlled and deranged xenophobia of half the population, the ignorance fed by gutted educations and dumbed-down televised fictions, the castrated courage of the sane half of its citizenship, the silent acquiescence by the citizenry to mass murder and war crimes, the government and corporate controlled minds of people turned sheeple and the wisdom-lacking behaviors of so-called leadership.
Let us observe a youthful empire in freefall, a nation in decadent decline, collapsing under its own weight and its own self-induced ignorance and unenlightenment, drunk off its arrogance and self-proclaimed aggrandizements of magnificence and manifest destiny. Let us be witness to a land in disrepair, a population in mental anguish. Let us examine a country decrepit in true moral values, empathy and wisdom, a nation quick to rise and fast to fall, lacking the experience of history and the wisdom of time.
Full Article: informationclearinghouse.infoFew articles make as clear as this one that we are dealing with the culmination of a long history of male dominance and male violence. I know that violence and bestiality are NOT the defining elements of 'human nature.' The Christian construct of humans as fallen creatures who need outside intervention to be restored goes far to perpetrate this idea. We may well be 'fallen' but we can help ourselves and each other RISE to our TRUE human nature.
rootsie on 03.31.05 @ 08:53 AM CST [
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Scott Ritter: Neocons as Parasites
In this final part of the three-part series, the former weapons inspector details his beliefs about the neoconservative movement, the American legislative process and his hopes for the future.
Congressional Catch-22
Larisa Alexandrovna: Paul Wolfowitz stated prior to the Iraq invasion that Iraqi reconstruction would pay for itself. It seems that Mr. Wolfowitz, now charged with handling the World Bank, miscalculated. What is going on with the oil in Iraq?Scott Ritter: Paul Wolfowitz was a salesman; his job was to sell a war. He acknowledged this in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, in which he acknowledged that WMDs and the threat they posed, was nothing more than a vehicle to sell this war to America. Now you [get] to the war itself and selling it to Congress and [the] questions: How long will this take? Or how much will this cost?
Paul Wolfowitz lied to Congress about the costs of war. There is not a responsible member of government who thought this would be quick and cheap. There was nobody who believed that Iraq oil would pay for itself, no one in the oil business thought so.
What about oil companies, were they for the war or against it?No oil professional in their right mind would support what is happening in Iraq. This isn't part of a grand 'oil' strategy; it is simply pure unadulterated incompetence.
So they are concerned about their bottom lines, and chaos doesn't forward that goal.Right. Oil company executives are businessmen and they are in a business that requires long-term stability. They love dictators because they bring with them long-term stability. They don't like new democracies because they are messy and unstable. I have not run into a major oil company that is willing to refurbish the Iraq oil fields and invest in oil field exploration and development. These are multi-billion dollar investments that, in order to be profitable, must be played out over decades. And in Iraq today you cannot speak out to projecting any stability in the near to mid-future.
OK, so now to Congress. They approved the war. I know we have discussed the post-9/11 reality and the pressure of not seeming unpatriotic.Yes, but they also approved the war because Congress had been locked into a corner by the neocons in 1998. Our policy in Iraq since 1991 has been regime change.
How many times did G. H. W. Bush have to say 'we will not remove sanctions until Saddam is removed from power?' Bill Clinton inherited this policy of regime change, but the Bush policy was not an active policy, it was a passive policy to strangle, as it were, Saddam. It was not our policy to take him out through military strength. Saddam, however, was able to out-maneuver this policy, he did not get weaker he got stronger. The neocons played on the political implications of this, to box the Clinton administration and Congress into a corner.
When you declare Saddam to be a threat with WMDs and then do nothing, you have a political problem. The neocons played on this. In 1998, the Heritage Foundation, Paul Wolfowitz and the American Enterprise Institute basically drafted legislation [that] became the Iraq Liberation Act. This is public law. So when people ask why did Congress vote for the current war in Iraq, it is simply that they had already voted for it in 1998, they were trapped by their own vote.
So your implication is that in our current foreign policy the neocons have set the tone via thinktanks or supposed thinktanks?Yes. Look at who funds the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, and I think you'll have your answer.
The American Heritage LeninistWhat do you think these institutions are trying to achieve? I know the public claim is conservative values, but there is a some speculation regarding what appears more like Leninist, even Trotskyite values, especially given the current domestic government involvement and control or attempt at control of almost every facet of society, economy, family, etc. Even the term 'Leninist' was used by the Heritage Foundation to describe their approach to Social Security during the 1980s (read it here – PDF).A high-level source, a neocon at that, within the system has said to me directly that 'John Bolton's job is to destroy the U.N., Rice's job is to destroy the State Department and replace it with a vehicle of facilitation for making the Pentagon's national security policy.'
And what of Karen Hughes' appointment?Hughes – she is a salesperson; she will sell the policy. She is irrelevant. She is nothing. Her appointment means nothing. Rice has already capitulated to the Pentagon and the White House, and Hughes' appointment is but a manifestation of that larger reality.
The neocons are parasites. They build nothing. They bring nothing. They don't have a foundation. They don't stand for business. They don't stand for ideology. They use a host to facilitate and grow their own power. They are parasites that latch onto oil until it is no longer convenient. They latch on to democracy until it is no longer convenient.
Rice's appointment to the State Department is simply to reshape it into a neocon vehicle.
Why the State Department? Why Rice?The State Department still has free thinkers in it. Rice is a dilettante. Anyone who was there during the Reagan era and her advising on Soviet policy knows how inept she is. She is not there because she is a brilliant secretary of state.
The media has bought into this, because the neocons cleverly put a woman, an African-American woman at that, into this position. So when Rice goes abroad, people do not look at the stupid things she says, they look at what she was wearing and such.
'Godless people who want power, nothing more'So you believe the neocons are elitist parasites?Yes, elitism is the perfect term.
Do you consider it localized or global elitism?The neocons believe in what they think is a noble truth, power of the few, the select few. These are godless people who want power, nothing more. They do not have a country or an allegiance, they have an agenda. These people might hold American passports, but they are not Americans because they do not believe in the Constitution. They believe in the power of the few, not a government for or by the people. They are a few and their agenda is global.
Full Interview: alternet.org
rootsie on 03.31.05 @ 02:00 AM CST [
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Saturday, March 26th
Interview with Philip Agee former CIA Operative : The nature of CIA intervention in Venezuela
How do you view recent developments in Venezuela?When Chavez was first elected and I began following events here, I could see the writing on the wall, as I could see it in Chile in 1970, as I could see it in Nicaragua in 1979-80. There was no doubt in my mind that the United States would try to change the course of events in Venezuela as they had in Chile and in Nicaragua, and before that in various other countries. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to really follow events day to day, but I did try to follow them from a distance, and eventually when Eva Golinger started her website it came to my attention and I began reading some of the documents on the website and I could see the application here of the same mechanisms that were used in Nicaragua in the 1980s in the penetration of civil society and the efforts to influence the political process and the electoral process here in Venezuela.
In Nicaragua I had in 1979 I think, just after the Sandinistas took over, written an analysis of what I believed would be the US program there and practically everything I wrote about happened, because these techniques, through the CIA, through AID, through the State Department, and since 1984 through the National Endowment for Democracy, all follow a certain pattern.
In Nicaragua the program for influencing the outcome of the 1990 elections began about a year and a half before the elections, for uniting the opposition, for creating a civic movement, all these things seem to be happening again in Venezuela. So this is my interest politically in Venezuela, is to see these things happening and to write from time to time about them.
What was the most prominent strategy of US intelligence when you were at the CIA, for protecting US ‘strategic interests’ in Latin America?When I was in the agency from the late 1950s on through to the late 1960s, the agency had operations going internationally, regionally, and nationally, attempting to penetrate and manipulate the institutions of power in countries around the world, and these were things that I did in the CIA—the penetration and manipulation of political parties, trade unions, youth and student movements, intellectual, professional and cultural societies, religious groups and women’s groups and especially of the public information media. We, for example, paid journalists to publish our information as if it were the journalists’ own information.
The propaganda operations were continuous.
We also spent large amounts of money intervening in elections to favor our candidates over others. The CIA took a Manichean view of the world, that is to say there were the people on our side, and there were people who were against us. And the agency’s job was to penetrate, weaken, divide, and destroy those political forces that were seen to be the enemy, which are those to the left of social democrats, normally, and to support and strengthen the political forces that were seen to be friendly to US interests in all these institutions I just mentioned a few minutes ago.
Full Article: axisoflogic.com
rootsie on 03.26.05 @ 11:51 AM CST [
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Vital Signs of a Ruined Falluja Grow Stronger
..."Falluja is safe," said Hadima Khalifa Abed, 42, who returned to her ruined home in January with her husband and 10 children. "But it is safe like a prison."
American military officials here say they face a difficult choice. Easing the harsh security measures might help revive the economy and cut the 50 percent unemployment rate; it could also allow the return of the insurgents who ran Falluja from last April until the American intervention in November. Even now, insurgents lob occasional mortar shells into the city, and a number of contractors have been killed here.
There are other obstacles. Falluja still lacks a mayor and a city council because of the new Iraqi National Assembly's failure to form a government. The American military is reluctant to make decisions that will shape the city for decades, and the resulting power vacuum has been crippling.
Hundreds of new police officers, trained in Jordan, are expected to arrive in the city soon, American military officials say. Nongovernmental organizations have donated truckloads of equipment for fire stations, hospitals and schools. But there are no police stations for the officers to work in, and there are no new fire stations because no one has the authority to decide where to build them.
Full Article: nytimes.comThe optimistic headline and pics accompanying this article contrast starkly with its content. Most people just skim headlines and captions anyway.
rootsie on 03.26.05 @ 11:45 AM CST [
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Family Wonders if Prozac Prompted School Shootings
RED LAKE, Minn., March 25 - In their sleepless search for answers, the family of Jeff Weise, the teenager who killed nine people and then himself, says it is left wondering about the drugs he was prescribed for his waves of depression.
On Friday, as Tammy Lussier prepared to bury Mr. Weise, who was her nephew, and her father, who was among those he killed, she found herself looking back over the last year, she said, when Mr. Weise began taking the antidepressant Prozac after a suicide attempt that Ms. Lussier described as a "cry for help."
"They kept upping the dose for him," she said, "and by the end, he was taking three of the 20 milligram pills a day. I can't help but think it was too much, that it must have set him off."
Lee Cook, another relative of Mr. Weise, said his medication had increased a few weeks before the shootings on Monday.
"I do wonder," Mr. Cook said, "whether on top of everything else he had going on in his life, on top of all the other problems, whether the drugs could have been the final straw."
The effects of antidepressants on young people remain a topic of fierce debate among scientists and doctors.
Last year, a federal panel of drug experts said antidepressants could cause children and teenagers to become suicidal. The Food and Drug Administration has since required the makers of antidepressants to warn of that danger on their labels for the medications.
The suicide risk is particularly acute when therapy starts or a dosage changes, the drug agency has warned.
Full Article: nytimes.com
rootsie on 03.26.05 @ 11:38 AM CST [
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Friday, March 25th
Rumsfeld, in Brazil, Criticizes Venezuela on Assault Rifles
SÃO PAULO, Brazil, March 23 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ratcheted up the war of words between the Bush administration and Venezuela's government on Wednesday, suggesting that the country's plans to buy 100,000 assault rifles from Russia could further destabilize an already tumultuous region.
"I can't imagine what's going to happen to 100,000 AK-47's," he said at a news conference in Brasília, the Brazilian capital, where he met with Brazil's vice president and defense minister, José Alencar. "I can't imagine why Venezuela needs 100,000 AK-47's."
"I just hope that, personally hope, that it doesn't happen," Mr. Rumsfeld added. "I can't imagine that if it did happen, that it would be good for the hemisphere."
Mr. Rumsfeld's remarks were the latest in a string of public warnings from senior American officials to Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, about what the Bush administration has cast as a worrisome arms buildup. Mr. Chávez's government has been shopping around to modernize its poorly armed 100,000-member military, raising eyebrows both in Washington and in neighboring Colombia.
Besides the assault rifles, Venezuela has agreed to buy at least 10 military helicopters from Russia and is considering updating its air force with Russian MIG's. Mr. Chávez has also talked of "military cooperation" with Brazil and has expressed interest in buying as many as 24 Super Tucano patrol planes from the Brazilian jet maker Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica, or Embraer.
The Bush administration, which has had increasingly tense relations with Venezuela since it tacitly backed a brief coup against Mr. Chávez in 2002, has suggested that the arms purchases could end up benefiting "irregular groups," a reference to Marxist rebels in neighboring Colombia. Mr. Chávez, himself a former paratrooper who staged a failed coup in 1992, has been reluctant to condemn the Colombian guerrillas overtly, prompting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to call the Venezuelan leader a "negative force" in Latin America.
Mr. Chávez has responded angrily to the criticism from Washington, going so far as to warn of the possibility of an American invasion. In addition to upgrading the military, Mr. Chávez has announced plans to expand so-called popular defense units, a sort of citizen militia.
Mr. Rumsfeld was in Brazil to discuss the country's growing leadership role in the region, including its peacekeeping mission in Haiti. But some analysts have speculated that the defense secretary may have also used the visit to ask for Brazil's help in tempering Mr. Chávez.
nytimes.comDivide and conquer. Big time.
rootsie on 03.25.05 @ 08:54 PM CST [
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U.S. to Lift Ban on Military Aid to Guatemala
MEXICO CITY, March 24 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced Thursday that the United States would lift its ban on military aid to Guatemala, whose government has embarked on a major effort to change a military accused of kidnappings and massacres during more than 30 years of civil war.
"I've been impressed by the reforms that have been undertaken in the armed forces," Mr. Rumsfeld said at a joint news conference with President Óscar Berger of Guatemala. "I know it is a difficult thing to do but it's been done with professionalism and transparency."
Since taking office last year, President Berger has cut the military's troop strength by close to half, to 15,000 soldiers from 27,000. And he closed several bases that had been used to stage attacks against an armed insurgency.
Human rights investigations into the violence uncovered significant military atrocities, conducted under so-called scorched-earth policies. Some 200,000 people were killed or went missing in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996, mostly Mayan Indian civilians. A United Nations-backed truth commission found that 90 percent of those deaths were caused by the military.
The United States withdrew aid from Guatemala's military in 1990 after it was learned that soldiers were involved in the killing of an American named Michael Devine.
In the joint news conference in Guatemala City on Thursday, Mr. Berger assured Mr. Rumsfeld that such abuses had ended. "The shadow that was above our army has disappeared," he said. "Today we have a transparent army with half the personnel."
Human rights organizations denounced the move. Displaced soldiers, they said, had joined powerful criminal organizations that smuggle drugs and weapons through Guatemala.
Adriana Beltrán, an expert on Guatemala with the Washington Office on Latin America, a research institution, said Mr. Berger's government had done very little to stop private groups of gunmen from intimidating and killing people who were working to uncover past and present human rights abuses in Guatemala. Rewarding the government with arms sends the wrong message, she said.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 03.25.05 @ 08:48 PM CST [
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U.S. Moves to Sell F-16's to Pakistan Over Indian Objections
The Bush administration agreed today to sell Pakistan F-16 fighter planes in a major policy shift that was meant to reward Pakistan for its help in combating terrorism but was also certain to deeply antagonize Pakistan's longtime adversary India.
President Bush telephoned Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from his ranch in Crawford, Tex., and "explained his decision to move forward" on the sale, a White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, told reporters in Texas. Mr. Singh expressed "great disappointment," a spokesman in New Delhi told Reuters.
Pakistan's information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, called President Bush's decision "a good gesture," one that shows that "our relations are growing stronger," Reuters reported.
There were conflicting reports on how many F-16's might be involved in the sale, which would require Congressional approval. One Bush administration official said the number was 24, but another said it was still indefinite, Reuters reported. A State Department spokesman, J. Adam Ereli, said that both the number of planes and the terms of the sale had not been determined. Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm in Fairfax, Va., said the planes could cost $35 million each, Bloomberg News reported.
Full Article: nytimes.comWhy does Chavez need the AK's? Maybe because the U.S. sells hardware to Guatemala and Pakistan. Such hypocrisy.
rootsie on 03.25.05 @ 08:45 PM CST [
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In a Polarizing Case, Jeb Bush Cements His Political Stature
WASHINGTON, March 24 - Gov. Jeb Bush's last-minute intervention in the case of Terri Schiavo, even after the president had ended his own effort to keep her alive, may have so far failed in a legal sense, but it has cemented the religious and social conservative credentials of a man whose political pedigree is huge and whose political future remains a subject of intense speculation.
On one level, the Florida governor's emergence as the most prominent politician still fighting, despite a string of court and legislative defeats, to have a feeding tube reinserted in Ms. Schiavo was very much in keeping with someone who has repeatedly declared a deep religious faith.
Several associates noted that he had been devoutly religious longer than President Bush, and even critics said his efforts - prodding the Florida Legislature and the courts and defying much of the electorate - were rooted in a deep-seated opposition to abortion and euthanasia rather than in political positioning.
Yet inevitably, the events of recent days have fed the mystique of Mr. Bush as a reluctant inheritor of perhaps America's most famous dynasty since the Adams family two centuries ago.
Full Article: nytimes.com"deep", "devout", "intense", "mystique"...my my my. The Times says the Shiavo case is "cementing" Jeb's "political stature." I would say that this propaganda piece masquerading as journalism has just that intent. I like the picture with the studious looking glasses: nice touch.
rootsie on 03.25.05 @ 08:38 PM CST [
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NRA Says Teachers Should Have Guns
PHOENIX (AP) - All options should be considered to prevent rampages like the Minnesota school shooting that took 10 lives - including making guns available to teachers, a top National Rifle Association leader said Friday.
``I'm not saying that that means every teacher should have a gun or not, but what I am saying is we need to look at all the options at what will truly protect the students,'' the NRA's first vice president, Sandra S. Froman, told The Associated Press.
Gun-control restrictions would not have prevented Jeff Weise, 16, from killing nine people and himself Monday at Red Lake High School near Bemidji, Minn., said Froman, an attorney expected next month to be elected president of the NRA, which claims 4 million members.
The presence of an unarmed guard at the school failed to stop the siege, she noted.
``No gun law, no policy that you could implement now or that was already implemented, I think, could possibly prevent someone so intent on destruction,'' she said. ``I think everything's on the table as far as looking at what we need to do to make our schools safe for our students.''
Froman said if it is the responsibility of teachers to protect students in a school, ``then we as a society, we as a community have to provide a way for the teachers to do that.''
Full Article: guardian.co.ukYeah and it is so so obvious that teachers packing heat is the way.
rootsie on 03.25.05 @ 07:37 PM CST [
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Thursday, March 24th
Oil rig blast 'not terrorism'
The explosion on a Texan crude oil refinery that claimed at least 14 lives and left more than 100 people injured remains a mystery, BP said today.
Terrorism, says the British oil giant, was not the cause of yesterday's incident at the 470,000 barrel-a-day facility, the third largest in the US. The explosion occurred in a unit that makes components that boost octane in petrol.
"We have no reason to believe this was anything caused by an outside agent," said Hugh Depland, a company spokesman.
BP's chief executive, John Browne, travelled to Texas today to meet employees and families affected by the explosion. Company officials and area health officials said that of the 100 hurt, some were in critical condition. There are still some people unaccounted for.
"We have a process to account for everyone working in the plant at the time of the incident, and we are proceeding with that process. This is a major focus at this time," Don Parus, BP's refinery manager, said on the company's website.
This latest incident took place just a year after another blast at the same refinery. On March 30 2004, a large explosion and fire occurred, but there were no casualties.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.24.05 @ 08:34 PM CST [
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Army to use patriotic appeal after missing recruiting goals again
WASHINGTON - The Army probably will fall short of its monthly enlistment goals again in March and April but expects a new emphasis on patriotic pitches to make up the difference later, Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey said Wednesday.
In February, for the first time in five years, the Army's active, Reserve and National Guard components missed their monthly recruiting goals. Now, the Army has forecast that it will fall short this month and in April, Harvey said at a Pentagon news conference.
"So are we concerned? Absolutely," Harvey said.
Despite the possible three-month shortfall, Harvey added that there's time to reach annual goals and that he's "cautiously optimistic."
"I'm clearly not going to give up," he said. "At this stage we still have six months to go. And I've challenged our human resource people to get as innovative as they can."
The Army has been struggling to fill its ranks as the war in Iraq, which has claimed the lives of more than 1,500 service members, enters its third year. It's increased enlistment bonuses, the number of recruiters and the maximum enlistment age for the Reserve and Guard.
The Army's usual peacetime pitches - money for college, vocational training - aren't so appealing when weighed against the perils of one or more tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So it's crafting pitches appealing to parents' patriotism, since recruiters have encountered resistance from people reluctant to send their sons and daughters into harm's way.
Full Article: news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 03.24.05 @ 08:31 PM CST [
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Army Orders Further Involuntary Troop Call-Up
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army is ordering more people to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan involuntarily from a seldom-used personnel pool as part of a mobilization that began last summer.
They are part of the Army's Individual Ready Reserve, made up of soldiers who have completed their volunteer active-duty service commitment but remain eligible to be called back into uniform for years after returning to civilian life.
The Army, straining to maintain troop levels in Iraq, last June said it would summon more than 5,600 people on the IRR in an effort to have about 4,400 soldiers fit for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan after granting exemption requests for medical reasons and other hardships.
Full Article: news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 03.24.05 @ 08:25 PM CST [
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Tuesday, March 22nd
Destroying Iraq Isn't Enough for Bush
by Cynthia McKinney
Remarks at Chicago Anti-War Rally, March 19, 2005
Two years ago we gathered all across America to say no to war.
We were joined by people all over the planet who know that there is an alternative to war.
But war is about the only option available when the real motive is to steal natural resources that belong to someone else.
Or to restack the deck in the Middle East with today's generation of coups and assassinations, following the likes of the US 1949 ouster of Syria's elected government, the US 1953 ouster of Iran's elected government; US 1958 landing of Marines in Lebanon; and its 1963 support for a coup in Iraq after an assassination attempt against its leader failed.
The militarism we see today is nothing new.
Even though some 14 countries have withdrawn their troops since March 2003, Bush tells the American people that he has no idea when US troops can expect to come home.
Sadly, many of them are being forced to take matters into their own hands. With filings for conscientious objector status, forced pregnancies, disappearances, seeking asylum in Canada, and leading rallies like this today all over America.
The American people, and our children over there fighting, still haven't been told the real reason the US is at war with the Iraqi people.
And against the people the US war machine has turned.
Thousands of Iraqis, especially children, have been killed by our sanctions and our bombs.
This is an immoral and illegal war and we need to bring our troops home now.
Instead, they lay the groundwork to expand the war and destabilize Iran, Lebanon, and Syria.
Destroying Iraq isn't enough for them.
Nor are the million men and women in our Armed Services enough for them.
The George Bush war machine wants you, too. And your children.
Everywhere you turn the Pentagon is denying it wants a draft while at the same time lamenting that recruitment is way down.
Mercenaries will increasingly be used to fight their wars with your tax dollars.
While reinstating the draft only feeds the war machine.
In fact, we need to get the military recruiters out of our high schools; they need to stop harassing our children, and the 1 billion dollars they spend on slick radio and tv spots and friendly neighborhood offices, ought to be put in the education budget so our kids can go to college without having to go to war first.
They tell us we're at war for democracy.
But that's a joke; George Bush came to power by stopping democracy at home--denying the opportunity to vote to blacks and Latinos in Florida.
They built on that fine record last year with hackable voting machines that don't accurately tally our votes.
And in countries like Haiti where democracy was thriving, they arrested President Aristide at gunpoint and forced him out of his own country.
While they purport to cherish democracy, they really have a disdain for it.
Democracy in Venezuela, India, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay has produced proud people willing to stand up to US imperialism, coup attempts, and destabilization of their countries. And the good news is that this resistance will spread.
The worse they are, the stronger we become.
And worse they will become because they've aimed their sights on Russia and China after they've balkanized the Middle East.
But one thing I guarantee to you and to them: we won't be fooled!
We know the truth. And we won't stop.
Stay strong, my brothers and sisters, we have a lot of work to do.
Full Article: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 03.22.05 @ 11:00 PM CST [
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Halt the Anniversary Rallies:End the Damn War
by Ron Jacobs
We've got to do more than mark their anniversaries and we've got to take the initiative. Leftists all around me complain that there is no left in the USA. If there isn't I wonder, than who are you and who am I? Anarchists hit the streets with their fellow travelers; and the liberals against the US war on the world seem to be waiting for their savior-some kind of Democratic wolf in peacenik clothing, I assume. Meanwhile all around, death, destruction and deception go on. Congress votes another hundred billion for the war industry under the guise of staying the course and too much of the country is wondering if Mark McGwire took steroids and/or did Michael Jackson wore pajamas to court today.
In Iraq, the battle continues. Bombs in the streets and helicopter gunships in the air. Corrupt politicians behind military police checkpoints negotiate their place in a puppet government with one of their eyes on the monetary prize. One can almost hear the players saying, Ahmed Chalabi, please show us how you scammed the ideologues in Washington and then go away. It's our turn at the trough now. Sooner or later, one or more of these leeches will lose their grip on the Pentagon monetary supply vein and fall into themselves like a college frat boy pledge trying to drink a fifth of whiskey in an hour. Puking their vanity and duplicity all over their freshly ironed overpriced clothing.
In the streets of Sadr City and Mosul, to name just a few zones where the occupiers dare not go unless accompanied by a tank or, at the very least, that behemoth they call the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, Iraqi children and their parents face an indeterminate amount of time under the yoke of occupation. Elections fade into one's memory quicker than the life they had before the invasion of 2003. Here in the US of A, we watch the misery unfold-those of us who bother to pay attention, anyhow. Everyone else just wants it all to go away. Why, they wonder, is this war a war? That's not what they promised.
Of course, the US troops didn't mean to kill that Italian intelligence officer. Even when the war is wrong, our soldiers only act with the noblest intentions.
Meanwhile, the larger national organizations that organize these rallies appear to be fighting over direction (a direction that the leaders of the organizations seem to have lost). The one led by liberals and others who appear only too eager to isolate the more radical elements of the movement and cozy up to the Democratic wing of the war party disses the other communist-inspired group. At the anniversary protests, it was the latter that got out the black and Latino communities and it was the liberals who got arrested. Go figure. Meanwhile, those of us who want to do something effective to end this war (and the "war on terror") go to the rallies but ignore the national organizations and follow our own agendas or do nothing.
Bottom line-this war is a war fought to maintain and (if the war planners can pull it off) and expand the US empire. This means that the Democrats will only help the antiwar cause so much. After all, they profit from the current situation just like the GOP. To oppose this war at its fundamental level, we can't look to the democrats. After all, Bill Clinton's bombs and cruise missiles killed and destroyed with the same impunity as George Bush's. The cause of most of the world's problems is not George Bush, it's US imperialism.
That imperialism is best represented off the battlefield by the nomination of Iraq War architect and all-around evildoer Paul Wolfowitz to the presidency of the World Bank. It is further represented by Donald Rumsfeld's claim that it is Turkey's refusal to allow their countryside to be used as a launchpad for the northern invasion of Iraq that is the reason there is still armed resistance to the US occupation. Domestically, it is represented by the continued destruction of social services, tax cuts for the rich, and more money for military recruiters who have failed to make their quota for the past two months at least. It is represented in the continued imprisonment of unknown numbers of immigrants and others without charges in Guantanamo Bay and who knows where else. It is further represented in the incredible numbers of people incarcerated in the United States, often for acts that are not even crimes in other countries.
Two years is how long the Bush war on Iraq has been going on, but the US war on those who either disagree with its plans or just don't fit in to them has been going on considerably longer. The unfortunate fact of this latter war, however, is that very few people oppose it. Are we that bought off? Or are we just too busy trying to maintain the lifestyle we are accustomed to? Are these last two questions essentially the same question? Or better yet, are these last two years just a small example of what our future looks like? George Bush and his Book of Revelations Bible Study Group have got to be told that the Second Coming is not a utopian vision. Before we're all blown to hell.
Full Article: counterpunch.org We ARE all busy maintaining our lifestyles and we absolutely do not have the attention span to sustain a coherent anti-war movement. It's recreation for college kids.I've had plenty of people tell me they have lost their taste for thinking about the war, because it is all 'too depressing.' The inevitable reckoning will be as much of a shock to the vast majority of the left as to everybody else in the U.S.
rootsie on 03.22.05 @ 10:49 PM CST [
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Sunday, March 20th
Congress Ready to Approve Bill in Schiavo Case
WASHINGTON, March 19 - Congressional leaders reached a compromise Saturday on legislation to force the case of Terri Schiavo into federal court, an extraordinary intervention intended to prolong the life of the brain-damaged woman whose condition has reignited a painful national debate over when medical treatment should be withdrawn.
Top lawmakers in both the House and the Senate said they hoped to pass the compromise bill as early as Sunday. They said it would allow Ms. Schiavo's parents to ask a federal judge to restore her feeding tube on the ground that their daughter's constitutional rights were being violated by the withholding of nutrition needed to keep her alive.
The White House announced late Saturday that President Bush, who was vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., would make an unscheduled return on Sunday to Washington, where he would remain until early Monday in anticipation of signing the measure.
Conservative lawmakers scrambled to find a way to override a Florida judge's order Friday to remove Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube. Her husband, Michael Schiavo, has maintained for years that his wife would not want to be kept alive in her current state by artificial means.
Ms. Schiavo suffered extensive brain damage when her heart stopped briefly 15 years ago due to a potassium deficiency; she remains in what doctors have testified is a "persistent vegetative state."
Full Article: nytimes.comHow, Constitutionally speaking, is it possible to remove a case from a state court and throw it into a federal one? Well, we didn't think the Supremes would hear the Bush vs. Gore case either.
What is particularly grotesque about all this is having to listen to right-wing Republicans pleading for 'the sanctity of human life.' Since when? Thousands and thousands Iraqis and Afghanis don't bother them. Torture doesn't concern them. They are even willing to tolerate the deaths of 1500 American soldiers, as long as they are not their children.
They apparently believe that they should be the sole arbiters of who will live and who will die.
rootsie on 03.20.05 @ 10:13 AM CST [
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Labeling Kids Mentally Ill for Profit
by Evelyn Pringle
Citing recommendations by the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health (NFC), Bush wants to launch a nationwide mental illness screening program in government institutions, including the public school system, for all students from kindergarten up to the 12th grade.
The New Freedom Commission was established by an Executive Order Bush issued on April 29, 2002. According to a July 22, 2003, press release, the Commission recommends transforming America's mental health care system.
ìAchieving this goal will require greater engagement and education of first line health care providers - primary care practitioners -and a greater focus on mental health care in institutions such as schools, child welfare programs, and the criminal and juvenile justice systems. The goal is integrated care that can screen, identify, and respond to problems early,î the Commission's press release stated.
According to the NFC, its recommendations are being already being promoted in Alaska; Arizona; Arkansas; California; Colorado; Connecticut; Delaware; Florida; Georgia;Hawaii; Idaho; Illinois; Indiana; Kansas; Kentucky; Louisiana; Maryland; Massachusetts; Michigan; Montana; Nebraska; New Hampshire; New Jersey; New Mexico; New York; North Carolina; North Dakota; Ohio; Oklahoma; South Carolina; Tennessee; Texas; Utah; Virginia; Washington; West Virginia; Wisconsin; and Wyoming.
The truth is, this is nothing but another Bush profiteering scheme to implement a drug treatment program for use in the public institutions that will generate high volume sales of the relatively new, but inadequately tested, high-priced psychiatric drugs. If all goes as planned, the scheme will generate millions of new customers for the drug companies.
Full Article: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 03.20.05 @ 12:39 AM CST [
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Husband hits at bid to save coma wife
The husband of a severely brain-damaged woman condemned to a slow death by starvation has launched a vitriolic attack on last-minute efforts to keep her alive.
After a week of political and legal manoeuvring, doctors at a Florida hospice chose to follow a long-standing order from a state judge to stop feeding Terri Schiavo, who has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years. Without nourishment, she will die within three weeks.
Their actions defied the instructions of members of Congress, who issued subpoenas to attempt to block 'the barbaric' removal of her feeding tube on Friday just hours before the 1pm deadline set by George Greer, the Florida Circuit Court judge who has presided over the case for a decade.
One leading Republican has called the tube's removal 'the murder of a defenceless American citizen'.
However, the lawyer for Michael Schiavo, who insists that his wife never wanted to be kept alive artificially, has accused the Washington politicians of 'acting like the Soviet Politburo'.
'I feel like the government has just trampled all over my personal life,' Schiavo said hours after nutrition to his 41-year-old wife was withdrawn for the third time since he began his fight with her family a decade ago.
'It is incomprehensible that a government can walk all over somebody's private judicial matter because of their own personal feelings. It is just horrible the way the government is acting. This is what Terri wanted. It is her wish.'
Full Article: observer.guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.20.05 @ 12:25 AM CST [
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Activists Protest Iraq War on Anniversary
NEW YORK (AP) - Anti-war activists marched in the streets of American cities big and small Saturday, stopping traffic and lying down alongside flag-draped cardboard coffins to mark the second anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq.
Some of the demonstrators were arrested in New York as they demanded that U.S. troops be brought home.
``This country was founded by acts of civil disobedience,'' said David McReynolds, 75, of New York, as he marched along 42nd Street. ``We have an obligation to make our resistance public and to say as clearly as we can that the war is illegal.''
In San Francisco, hundreds of protesters rallied in Dolores Park in the city's Mission district, holding up posters with photographs of dead American soldiers. The protesters then marched to City Hall for another rally.
One protester dressed up like the hooded Iraqi prisoner in the famous photo taken of detainee abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. The woman was surrounded by others wearing masks of President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who were dancing to the song ``Shout'' by the Isley Brothers.
``This is a war of aggression,'' said Ed McManus, 54, a Vietnam War veteran. ``Bush has admitted by his actions and his deeds that he is a war criminal.''
Organizers encouraged civility at rallies in the city, where protests just after the war began were among the most vocal and angry in the country, with thousands of arrests and frequent conflicts between police and demonstrators.
Police wearing helmets and armed with batons lined the streets Saturday, but they reported no disturbances.
Across Europe, tens of thousands of protesters also packed streets and public parks to protest the war. In England, 45,000 people marched from London's Hyde Park past the American Embassy to Trafalgar Square, while an estimated 15,000 people - some carrying signs reading ``Murderer Bush, get out'' - marched in Turkey.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.20.05 @ 12:22 AM CST [
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Irish terror groups 'to hit London'
Police have issued a stark warning that mainland Britain faces a 'substantial threat' of an Irish republican bombing campaign, The Observer can reveal.
Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism section sent out an email about a new threat to businesses across London on Friday evening, following intelligence received from MI5 about an increase in activity from breakaway groups such as the Real IRA.
The chilling note, seen by The Observer, states: 'Reporting indicates that dissident Irish republican terrorists are currently planning to mount attacks on the UK mainland.'
Full Article:observer.guardian.co.ukGosh these heavy-handed tactics are surprising coming from the Brits. They are usually slightly more subtle than their American cousins. I confidently predict that this latest flurry of events will fail to quash 900 years of Irish resistance to British occupation.
rootsie on 03.20.05 @ 12:20 AM CST [
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Saturday, March 19th
MESSAGE FOR PEACE MARCHERS IN NEW YORK AND BOSTON!
by The Bolivarian Circles of Aragua State, Venezuela!
Mar 17, 2005, 15:37
Greetings to all the peace marchers and US citizens from the people of Venezuela on this important day!
We congratulate you on your commitment to stopping the war in Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan. The great majority of the Venezuelan people are also in complete disagreement with the use of US military force to dominate the peoples of the Middle East and other countries, classified arbitrarily as the "Axis of Evil". This march is vital to pressure the current Administration from desisting in its plans to invade other countries in search of oil or other primary materials, which will serve the pretensions and domination of the global corporate empire.
These countries threatened include Syria, Iran and our country…the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
One month ago, the US Navy sent an aircraft carrier and marines to the island of Curaçao, 46 miles from the Venezuelan coast. Our government was not notified of this maneuver, which is contrary to international laws and conventions. It was said that the marines were on Curaçao for Rest and Recreation! Blatant lies! This was outright intimidation!
There is written documentation that the Bush administration was involved in the coup d'etat in Venezuela of April 2002, the sabotage of our oil industry and lock out of workers in the so called general strike and economic sabotage of our economy in December 2002 - February 2003. The Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) and US Agency for International Development (USAID) have all been financing subversive, non-democratic groups of the traitorous Venezuelan opposition - to discredit our President, Hugo Chavez, with the aim of fomenting chaos and overthrowing the democratically elected government. They are using your tax dollars to do this… were you ever asked about the use of your money to subvert other nations?
You must be told the truth now……today……at this precise moment… President Chavez has faced 9 electoral or referendum contests from December 1998 to end October 2004, and has wiped the floor each time with the fascist opposition of our country.
What other world leader has gone to the polls 9 times in 6 years? Not one!
Full Article: axisoflogic.com
rootsie on 03.19.05 @ 12:54 PM CST [
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Soldiers' families to hold anti-war rally at Ft. Bragg
Military families and veterans are helping organize a major anti-war rally outside Fort Bragg in North Carolina that could draw several thousand people Saturday, the second anniversary of the Iraq war.
Groups such as Iraq Veterans Against The War and Gold Star Families for Peace, whose members have lost relatives in Iraq, will play a prominent role.
"We figured if we formed and used our grief in a positive way that could be very powerful," says Cindy Sheehan, a member of Gold Star Families For Peace from Vacaville, Calif., near San Francisco.
Sheehan says U.S. soldiers in Iraq need to come home, but she knows her son will not be among them. Casey Sheehan, a 24-year-old Army specialist, was killed in April during an ambush in the Sadr City section of Baghdad.
Groups like Gold Star Families For Peace, made up of 60 families, and Iraq Veterans Against the War, with nearly 200 members, were formed within the last nine months. The members were brought together by grief and opposition to the Iraq conflict. More than 1,500 U.S. service members have died in Iraq.
These new groups are one component of a national anti-war effort, says Andrew Pearson of the North Carolina Peace and Justice Coalition, one of the march's organizers. Since the November elections, there has been "a strategic reorientation for the anti-war movement. And a lot of it coming from the direction of leadership of military families and veterans," he says.
Full Article: usatoday.com
rootsie on 03.19.05 @ 10:13 AM CST [
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Mercury Pollution, Autism Link Found - U.S. Study
SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS -- Mercury released primarily from coal-fired power plants may be contributing to an increase in the number of cases of autism, a Texas researcher said on Wednesday.
"The main finding is that for every thousand pounds of environmentally released mercury, we saw a 17 percent increase in autism rates," she said in an interview.
About 48 tons of mercury are released into the air annually in the United States from hundreds of coal-burning plants.
The study looked at Texas county-by-county levels of mercury emissions recorded by the government and compared them to the rates of autism and special education services in 1,200 Texas school districts, Miller said.
"The study shows that there may be a very important connection between environmental exposure to mercury and the development of autism," she said in an interview.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control has said it does not know how many cases of autism there are in the country or whether the number has increased, but that the issue is under study.
Some experts estimate there are 1.5 million people in the United States with autism, most of them children, and say the number of cases has risen rapidly in recent years.
Full Article: commondreams.org (Reuters)
rootsie on 03.19.05 @ 10:09 AM CST [
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East Africans Agree to Send Some Troops to Somalia
NAIROBI (Reuters) - East African peacemakers decided on Friday to send troops to Somalia from countries that do not border the lawless state, potentially defusing a constitutional standoff in Somalia's interim government.
``There will be no personnel at all (from bordering countries),'' said Ugandan Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa of the decision by east African peace body IGAD.
``It is cognizant of the sensitivities of the people of Somalia.''
Influential Somali warlords and militant Islamists have promised to attack any troops from neighboring states -- especially from traditional rival Ethiopia -- if they deploy as part of a planned African Union peacekeeping force.
The communique issued by IGAD on Friday said ``deployment will be undertaken by the remaining IGAD countries pending the deployment of the African Union force.''
The AU force has yet to be constituted, funded or given a deployment date.
President Abdullahi Yusuf, backed by Ethiopia, wants 7,500 AU and Arab League troops to help secure Somalia so his government can return home from Kenya, and has been adamant that border states be included.
Full Article: nytimes.com
rootsie on 03.19.05 @ 09:58 AM CST [
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Pakistan Test-Fires Nuclear-Capable Missile
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan Saturday successfully test-fired a long-range, nuclear-capable ballistic missile, the latest in a series of tests in one of the world's flashpoints.
``Today, we carried out a successful test-firing of the indigenously developed Shaheen II missile,'' a military official told Reuters.
The missile could travel up to 2,000 km (1,200 miles) and carry all kinds of warheads, he said.
The military said Pakistan had informed neighboring countries about the test in advance -- a practice also observed by nuclear-armed rival India, which regularly tests its own nuclear-capable missiles.
Pakistan first successfully tested a nuclear weapon in 1998.
President Pervez Musharraf, who watched the missile test, said the country's nuclear program had broad public support and was a matter of the highest national importance.
``The nation's nuclear capability ... was developed for Pakistan's own security and will continue to receive the highest national priority,'' Musharraf was quoted as saying in a statement issued by the military.
``The capability was here to stay, will continue to go from strength to strength and no harm will ever be allowed to come to it,'' he was quoted as saying.
Full Article: nytimes.comWell that's ok. They are our 'staunch allies.'
rootsie on 03.19.05 @ 09:53 AM CST [
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Insurgency Is Fading Fast, Top Marine in Iraq Says
WASHINGTON, March 18 - The top Marine officer in Iraq said Friday that the number of attacks against American troops in Sunni-dominated western Iraq and death tolls had dropped sharply over the last four months, a development that he called evidence that the insurgency was weakening in one of the most violent areas of the country.
The officer, Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, head of the First Marine Expeditionary Force, said that insurgents were averaging about 10 attacks a day, and that fewer than two of those attacks killed or wounded American forces or damaged equipment. That compared with 25 attacks a day, five of them with casualties or damage, in the weeks leading up to the pivotal battle of Falluja in November, he said.
Full Article: nytimes.com
rootsie on 03.19.05 @ 09:48 AM CST [
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C.I.A. Says Approved Methods of Questioning Are All Legal
WASHINGTON, March 18 - The Central Intelligence Agency said Friday that all interrogation techniques approved for use by agency personnel in questioning terrorism suspects were permissible under federal laws prohibiting torture.
"All approved interrogation techniques, both past and present, are lawful and do not constitute torture," the agency said in a statement.
Full Article: nytimes.comWell now that's a relief, now isn't it? But hold on: "approved for use by agency personnel"? This is why of course they use proxies.
rootsie on 03.19.05 @ 09:45 AM CST [
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Friday, March 18th
'They can't train you for the reality of Iraq. You can't have a mass grave with dogs eating the people in it'
At the same time that Kevin Benderman's unit was called up for a second tour in Iraq with the Third Infantry Division, two soldiers tried to kill themselves and another had a relative shoot him in the leg. Seventeen went awol or ran off to Canada, and Sergeant Benderman, whose family has sent a son to every war since the American revolution, defied his genes and nine years of military training and followed his conscience.
As the division packed its gear to leave Fort Stewart, Sgt Benderman applied for a discharge as a conscientious objector - an act seen as a betrayal by many in a military unit considered the heart of the US army, the "Walking Pride of Uncle Sam".
Two years ago today, the columns of the Third ID roared up from the Kuwaiti desert for the push towards Baghdad. When the city fell, the Marines controlled the neighbourhoods on the east side of the Tigris and the Third ID had the west. It was, according to the army command, an occasion for pride.
Some of the men and women who were there remain unconvinced. Like Sgt Benderman, who served six months in Iraq at the start of the war, they were scarred by their experience, and angry at being called again to combat so soon.
They may not be part of any organised anti-war movement, but the conscientious objectors, runaways, and other irregular protesters suggest that, two years on, the war is taking a heavy toll. "They can't train you for the reality. You can't have a mass grave with dogs eating the people in it," Sgt Benderman told the Guardian. "It's not like practising for a football game, or cramming for a test in college. You can go out there and train, but until you actually experience war first hand you don't know what it's like."
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.18.05 @ 11:33 PM CST [
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'One huge US jail'
Kabul was a grim, monastic place in the days of the Taliban; today it's a chaotic gathering point for every kind of prospector and carpetbagger. Foreign bidders vying for billions of dollars of telecoms, irrigation and construction contracts have sparked a property boom that has forced up rental prices in the Afghan capital to match those in London, Tokyo and Manhattan. Four years ago, the Ministry of Vice and Virtue in Kabul was a tool of the Taliban inquisition, a drab office building where heretics were locked up for such crimes as humming a popular love song. Now it's owned by an American entrepreneur who hopes its bitter associations won't scare away his new friends.
Outside Kabul, Afghanistan is bleaker, its provinces more inaccessible and lawless, than it was under the Taliban. If anyone leaves town, they do so in convoys. Afghanistan is a place where it is easy for people to disappear and perilous for anyone to investigate their fate. Even a seasoned aid agency such as Médécins Sans Frontières was forced to quit after five staff members were murdered last June. Only the 17,000-strong US forces, with their all-terrain Humvees and Apache attack helicopters, have the run of the land, and they have used the haze of fear and uncertainty that has engulfed the country to advance a draconian phase in the war against terror. Afghanistan has become the new Guantánamo Bay.
Washington likes to hold up Afghanistan as an exemplar of how a rogue regime can be replaced by democracy. Meanwhile, human-rights activists and Afghan politicians have accused the US military of placing Afghanistan at the hub of a global system of detention centres where prisoners are held incommunicado and allegedly subjected to torture. The secrecy surrounding them prevents any real independent investigation of the allegations. "The detention system in Afghanistan exists entirely outside international norms, but it is only part of a far larger and more sinister jail network that we are only now beginning to understand," Michael Posner, director of the US legal watchdog Human Rights First, told us.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.18.05 @ 11:30 PM CST [
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Ukraine admits it sold cruise missiles to Iran, China
Ukraine has sold nuclear-capable cruise missiles to both China and Iran, the prosecutor-general's office said but stressed that the deals were illegal and under criminal investigation.
"This is not about exports of missiles but rather illegal sales which are being investigated by the SBU (security service) which has opened a criminal investigation of the director of the company Ukraviazakas," the office said in a statement confirming a report by the London-based Financial Times.
Svyatoslav Piskun, Ukraine's prosecutor general, earlier told the daily that 18 Soviet-era X-55 cruise missiles were exported in 2001 -- 12 to Iran and six to China.
Full Article: sg.news.yahoo
rootsie on 03.18.05 @ 03:20 PM CST [
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Wolfowitz Discusses World Bank Mission with Bono
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Paul Wolfowitz, whose nomination as World Bank (news - web sites) president has stirred controversy, discussed poverty and development issues with Irish rock star Bono in two phone conversations on Thursday, an adviser said.
Wolfowitz adviser Kevin Kellems told Reuters the deputy U.S. defense secretary initiated the lengthy conversations with the lead singer of the rock group U2, whose name had been bandied about for the World Bank presidency.
President Bush on Wednesday named Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq war, to be the next World Bank president, but the choice has been controversial, especially in Europe.
An endorsement by Bono, who campaigns extensively for African aid and debt relief, could defuse some of the criticism of Wolfowitz.
Kellems said the discussions "were incredibly substantive about reducing poverty, about development, about the opportunity to help people that the World Bank presidency provides and about charitable giving and social progress around the world.
Full Article: news.yahoo.comWell Thank God.
rootsie on 03.18.05 @ 03:17 PM CST [
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Thursday, March 17th
Bush nominates Wolfowitz for World Bank
...The selection of Mr Wolfowitz, who as deputy defence secretary was a prime mover of the president's decision to go to war, was greeted with incredulity in Europe and the development community, and by Democrats in Washington.
"It's a very surprising and in many ways an inappropriate nomination," said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist and economic adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan.
"Hundreds of millions of people depend for their lives and livelihood on the efforts of professionals to fight extreme poverty," he said, adding that he was speaking as a development expert and not as a United Nations official.
Mr Bush tried to beat back some of the criticism yesterday, telephoning world leaders to lobby for his choice.
"Paul is committed to development. He is a compassionate, decent man who will do a fine job at the World Bank," he told a press conference.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.17.05 @ 07:43 AM CST [
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Wednesday, March 16th
Warning over fish mercury levels
Eating certain types of fish can increase the risks of having a heart attack, a study suggests.
A team of international researchers has found a direct link between mercury and heart disease.
High levels of mercury are found in shark, swordfish, king mackerel and marlin. It is also found at lower levels in fresh or frozen tuna.
The researchers have suggested that people should consider eliminating fish with high mercury levels from their diet.
The UK's Food Standards Agency recently advised pregnant women and children against eating this type of fish.
There are fears that mercury can damage the nervous system of unborn infants and can increase the risks of poisoning in young children.
Full Article: bbc.co.ukBush administration issues first U.S. controls on toxin from coal plants, but critics say rule falls short ALBANY -- The nation's first controls on mercury from coal-burning plants do not go far enough to clean up tainted fisheries in wild areas like the Adirondacks, environmentalists and researchers said.
The Bush administration's Clean Air Mercury Rule issued Tuesday uses a "cap-and-trade" approach to cut power plants' mercury emissions from 48 tons per year currently to about 15 tons by 2025.
Power plants that burn coal are the nation's biggest source of mercury, a potent neurotoxin that retards brain development in fetuses and small children. Discoveries of high levels of mercury have resulted in bans on eating fish in 50 New York state lakes, rivers and reservoirs.
Critics say the new rule is a huge step back from the Clinton administration's mercury proposal, which would have cut power plant emissions by 90 percent by the end of this decade. They also point to new evidence that mercury is not only bad for pregnant women and developing children who eat contaminated fish, it also damages animal and bird populations in the Northeast's wild areas.
The mercury plan also drew fire from Gov. George Pataki's acting commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation, Denise Sheehan. The Republican governor's staff has rarely criticized Bush administration proposals.
In a letter Monday to acting Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson, Sheehan called the rule "unacceptable and unwarranted" and wrote that it "will prove to be detrimental to the public health and the natural resources of New York state."
The EPA's Office of Air and Radiation said the rule achieves because the technology that scrubs mercury from smokestacks is still in development.
"We believe that the Clean Air Mercury Rule will protect all Americans, especially pregnant women and their unborn children, from the harm of mercury," said Jeff Holmstead, the office's assistant administrator.
"The rule will also help maintain coal as a viable energy source, keeping jobs in the United States and keeping energy prices down."
The cap-and-trade system lets companies that fail to meet targets for reducing mercury pollution make up their deficits by purchasing "allowances" issued by the government to those that exceed targets.
Full Article: timesunion.com
rootsie on 03.16.05 @ 05:00 PM CST [
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Senate Votes to Open Alaskan Oil Drilling
WASHINGTON (AP) - Amid the backdrop of soaring oil and gasoline prices, a sharply divided Senate on Wednesday voted to open the ecologically rich Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling, delivering a major energy policy win for President Bush.
The Senate, by a 51-49 vote, rejected an attempt by Democrats and GOP moderates to remove a refuge drilling provision from next year's budget, preventing opponents from using a filibuster - a tactic that has blocked repeated past attempts to open the Alaska refuge to oil companies.
The action, assuming Congress agrees on a budget, clears the way for approving drilling in the refuge later this year, drilling supporters said. The House has not included a similar provision in its budget, so the issue is still subject to negotiations later this year to resolve the difference.
The oil industry has sought for more than two decades to get access to what is believed to be billions of barrels of oil beneath the 1.5 million-acre coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the northern eastern corner of Alaska.
Full Article:apnews.myway.comWhat a shame, and worse, not a single politician on the planet willing to challenge the ideology of growth at any cost even if it means environmental catastrophe. Nobody should be burning fossil fuels, and instead of acknowledging that obvious fact, we are fighting wars for the right to render the planet unliveable.Oil Prices Jump to New High Above $56 MarkFull Article: news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 03.16.05 @ 04:37 PM CST [
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Philadelphia: 21 Homicides in 8 Days
Police and prosecutors concerned with a spate of killings in the city begged the public Monday for more help identifying murderers.
District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham vowed that her office will protect witnesses, even if it means sending a moving van to their home to take them to safety the day they come forward.
“We cannot only move you out of the city, we can move you out of the state; we can move you across the country,” Abraham said.
Within the past eight days there have been 21 homicides in Philadelphia, including three in the late-night and early morning hours after the prosecutor made her appeal Monday.
Now, CBS 3’s Walt Hunter reports that Mayor Street said under certain circumstances he would consider help from the Pennsylvania State Police and even the National Guard.
Street has declared the violence throughout the city a crisis and as a result has ordered the full review of police department policies and has suggested a full moratorium on the issuing of gun permits.
In addition, Street has requested a meeting with Governor Ed Rendell to talk about possible new gun legislation.
Full Article: kyw.com/news
rootsie on 03.16.05 @ 04:14 PM CST [
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African-American Youths Are Rejecting Army, Military Says
As he made his way to the cafeteria, Malcolm Cotton spotted the Army recruiters passing out video games and making their pitches from a long table they had set up in a hallway at his school.
The recruiters made joining sound oh so terribly good - a $20,000 bonus for enlisting, $9,000 more if enlistees shipped out in the next 30 days and even better, $70,000 for college.
Cotton, 18, a senior at Gateway High School, just walked on by without pausing, almost with disdain.
"I love this country and I will defend this country if someone is really attacking us," he said. "But I don't agree with this war. I believe it's really nonsense. It's about power and taking oil. I really don't think we need to be over there fighting."
Increasingly, young African-Americans have been turning away from the Army, many for the same reasons as Cotton, the military says. They don't agree with the war. They dislike President George W. Bush's handling of the military and foreign policies, and they are not willing to fight and possibly die for a cause they don't believe in.
The number of African-American recruits, a cornerstone of the Army in recent years, has plummeted, the military says. And the Army is struggling to maintain a force large enough to wage a war on two fronts, Afghanistan and Iraq.
For years, African-Americans have made up nearly 25 percent of the Army, more than twice their representation in the general population. The military, especially the Army, has had a long history of providing opportunities for African-Americans.
But since 2000, according to the Department of Defense, African-American representation among Army recruits has fallen sharply.
In 2000, 23.5 percent of Army recruits and 26.5 percent of Army Reserve recruits were African-American. Last year, African-Americans represented just 15.9 percent of Army recruits and 20.2 percent of Army Reserve recruits. As of the end of last month, those numbers had fallen even further - to 13.9 percent of Army recruits and 18.4 percent of Army Reserve recruits.
Full Article: commondreams.org
rootsie on 03.16.05 @ 03:29 PM CST [
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Tuesday, March 15th
Street protests by poor push Bolivia to the brink
Scratching her swollen and shoeless feet after digging up her potato field, Roberta Centeño looks exhausted but says she has plenty of energy for the struggle ahead.
"We blocked roads before and we will do it again," says the Aymara Indian mother of 12. "It is the only way the government ever listens, they want to just think about the rich."
Sitting on the kerb with his family, their feet in sewage, unemployed mechanic Estanislao Mamani says he, too, believes it is the right time to demand more. "We will paralyse the country when the order comes," he says.
Ms Centeño lives in a hamlet on Bolivia's vast highland plain, 4,000 metres (13,000ft) above sea level, which also houses the sprawling working-class city of El Alto.
From the potato fields to the slums, South America's poorest country is a political time bomb which, analysts say, could explode at any moment.
In recent weeks, a wave of street protests by indigenous and labour groups opposing the government's economic policies have almost crippled the country. Trade unions have called a 48-hour strike starting today.
Roadblocks of stones and tree trunks have cut off one region in the centre of the country for weeks, with long lines of trucks filled with rotting produce unable to move and reports of shortages in some towns. Meanwhile, the political leaders of Bolivia's poor, primarily indigenous majority are poised to extend the protests nationwide from tomorrow unless the government gives in to their demands.
Their central demand is 50% royalty payments on exports of Bolivia's natural gas, which are bought by foreign companies, most notably Petrobras in Brazil, Repsol in Spain and BP.
The government and the private sector say this would turn the country into a no-go area for foreign investment. "Fifty per cent is like saying to foreign investors in so many words, don't come here," says Eduardo Bracamonte, head of the national exporters' association. "The image of Bolivia has seriously deteriorated already. The perception of the risk of doing business has gone up enormously and we all suffer because of that."
There are other tensions between the people and the government, ranging from pressure to kick out the French water company which is running the services in El Alto to the prices of bus tickets.
Today, human rights officials had been expected to bring together the major players to seek a compromise on the royalties issue, but plans for the meeting fell apart when the president, Carlos Mesa, decided not to attend.
Last week, the centrist President Mesa seemed to strengthen his chances of bringing the situation under control when his offer to resign was unanimously rejected by parliament. But pressure on the president from the middle and upper classes to crack down on the protests is growing, prompting rumours that he will declare a state of siege.
Since Bolivia's revolution of 1952 petered out, the country has suffered bloody dictatorships and corrupt democratic governments interspersed by political turmoil which one analyst, Alvaro Garcia, describes as power struggles between those at the top. What is different now, he says, is that groups representing the poor indigenous majority have begun to challenge the traditional elite, mostly of European origin and US-educated.
guardian.co.ukThe indigenous people of the Andes have been challenging their white invaders since Pizzarro showed up on the Inca altiplano in 1532, and they were not poor then.
rootsie on 03.15.05 @ 07:30 AM CST [
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Monday, March 14th
Look Deeper, Mr. Moyers
by Stan Cox
It's enough to make your hair stand on end and your eyes bug out. Not only is the Earth in peril, but some people who hold sway over the fate of the planet believe that soon the whole place is going to go up in a blaze of brimstone anyway -- and they can't wait to watch it happen!
Bill Moyers, in the March 24 issue of the New York Review of Books, paints a scary picture indeed. With a greeting of "Welcome to the Rapture!", Moyers writes about the vast numbers of Americans who believe that an imminent end of the world is predicted in the Book of Revelation and about their energetic support for the Bush administration. He draws this conclusion:
A powerful current connects the administration's multinational corporate cronies who regard the environment as ripe for the picking and a hard-core constituency of fundamentalists who regard the environment as fuel for the fire that is coming. Once again, populist religion winds up serving the interests of economic elites.
Moyers is right: It "sends a shiver down the spine." But the Earth was headed down a highway to hell long before Bush was elected or the Armageddon Clock started up. Triumphant capitalism, performing precisely to specifications, is showing itself fully capable of pulling off an ecological apocalypse, with or without the help of superstitious scripture-twisters.
When it comes to shining a light on some of the most alarming outgrowths of capitalism, Moyers is a master. But in going after the Bush administration's scorched-Earth environmental policies, its "multinational corporate cronies", and those hallucinatory crackpots brandishing their biblical licenses to plunder, he missed the root cause of the problem:capitalism's addiction to perpetual growth.
Full Article:counterpunch.org
rootsie on 03.14.05 @ 09:47 PM CST [
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Torture TV - Televising the Revolution
by Kurt Nimmo
If there were any doubts the New World Order is galloping along towards the fulfillment of the fascist dystopia warned against for so long, today's tidbits from Iyad Allawi's Iraq should dispel them entirely.
Iyad Allawi's occupational government has launched a new TV show, sort of an Iraqi version of reality television. "Terrorists in the Hands of Justice" runs several times a day in Iraq and features the confessions of beaten up "insurgents" who admit to terrible crimes, for instance serial murder.
"One man said he stalked 10 college girls who were translators for the U.S. Army, then raped and murdered them. Another said he beheaded 10 people after first practicing on animals," reports NBC News.
It is said the show is "wildly popular" but obviously this claim has to be taken with a grain of salt. Most Iraqis are desperately poor and it is fair to say many do not own televisions and even if they did much of the time there is no electricity. It is also fair to say millions of Iraqis, even if they had televisions and consistent electricity, would refuse to believe anything broadcast by Allawi's occupational government.
"The program's goals are to convince people the security forces are defeating insurgents, and lift the police's own morale. Police wanted to televise the confessions to inspire people to give tips, but they've had the unexpected effect of turning public opinion here against Syria," writes Richard Engel for NBC.
Even here in the United States, thousands of miles away from Iraq, with a barrage of corporate media propaganda and a seemingly endless stream of pro-Bush pundits, it is obvious the "security forces" are not "defeating insurgents." In Iraq this reality is even more obvious. Blaming Syria and portraying the resistance as a gaggle of serial murderers and animal torturers will not put an end to the violence against "security forces" and foreign occupation troops.
More than anything, it would seem, "Terrorists in the Hands of Justice" is an idea devised for American consumers, although the show is not run in the United States. But then it doesn't need to be. A sound-bite sized chunk of video broadcast on NBC is more than enough, especially if the video contains content Americans are familiar with-violent young men and confessions given to police by ruthless serial murderers preying on young women.
Full Article:rense.com
rootsie on 03.14.05 @ 02:40 PM CST [
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A New Mood in Congress to Relax Corporate Scrutiny
WASHINGTON, March 9 - In what has seemed a daily ritual, the Senate in the last two weeks has defeated the most modest attempts by Democrats to curb bankruptcy abuses by corrupt or troubled corporations and their senior executives.
The votes illustrate a new reality and a sharp swing of the pendulum in the Senate, which has nearly completed its work on the legislation that everyone expects will soon become law.
Just two and a half years ago, in the midst of plunging stock markets and widening business scandals that left many thousands of workers unemployed and without their retirement savings, fearful lawmakers rushed by a vote of 97 to 0 to adopt the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. It was the most aggressive federal anticorruption law Congress had adopted in decades. On the day of the Senate vote, the Dow Jones industrial average was down as much as 440 points. Days earlier, WorldCom executives disclosed the first details of the largest accounting fraud in history.
Now, as business scandals occupy a less prominent place in newspapers and the stock market is well above 2002 lows, the politics of financial regulation have sharply shifted.
The new mood has emboldened corporate lobbyists to ask for and receive more from lawmakers, who no longer seem to be concerned about recrimination at the polls. At the same time, business interests have picked up new allies in the Senate, giving them significantly more influence over its proceedings.
"How quickly things change," said Ann Yerger, executive director of the Council of Institutional Investors, a group of major shareholders that sought tough corporate governance and accounting rules. "It's been stunning. In the past few months alone, there has been a clear push back from the corporate community, and it has resonated. Folks have short memories, and there is a perception that the Enrons are behind us.
"We now spend much of our time trying to hold onto the reforms we had won," she added.
During the recent debate on tightening the bankruptcy code, the lawmakers rejected a proposal to prohibit corrupt companies from issuing huge payouts to senior executives shortly before entering bankruptcy. They blocked consideration of a measure that would have curtailed the ability of companies like Enron and WorldCom to shop for the most favorable bankruptcy courts; such actions have had the effect of disenfranchising employees and retired workers from the process.
They defeated a proposal to protect those employees and retired workers when their companies go bankrupt. They refused to close the "millionaire's loophole" that permits wealthy individuals to shelter their assets from lenders by creating special asset-protection trusts.
And on Wednesday, they rejected a proposal to put a nationwide limit on the homestead exemption, a provision that has enabled corporate executives to buy expensive homes in states like Florida and Texas to shelter their assets from creditors.
Full Article: nytimes.com
rootsie on 03.14.05 @ 02:36 PM CST [
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Crumbling nation? U.S. infrastructure gets a 'D'
WASHINGTON - Crowded schools, traffic-choked roads and transit cutbacks are eroding the quality of American life, according to an analysis by civil engineers that gave the nation’s infrastructure an overall grade of D.
A report by the American Society of Civil Engineers released Wednesday assessed the four-year trend in the condition of 12 categories of infrastructure.
The overall grade slipped from the D+ given in 2001 and 2003. Overall conditions remained the same for bridges, dams and solid waste, the group said, and worsened in roads, drinking water, transit, wastewater, hazard waste, navigable waterways and energy.
"The condition of our nation’s roads, bridges, drinking water systems and other public works have shown little to no improvement since they were graded an overall D+ in 2001, with some areas sliding toward failing grades," the society said.
Full Article: msn.com
rootsie on 03.14.05 @ 02:32 PM CST [
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Sunday, March 13th
Can Democracy Survive Bush's Embrace?
by Naomi Klein
It started off as a joke and has now become vaguely serious: the idea that Bono might be named president of the World Bank. US Treasury Secretary John Snow recently described Bono as "a rock star of the development world," adding, "He's somebody I admire."
The job will almost certainly go to a US citizen, one with even weaker credentials, like Paul Wolfowitz. But there is a reason Bono is so admired in the Administration that the White House might just choose an Irishman. As frontman of one of the world's most enduring rock brands, Bono talks to Republicans as they like to see themselves: not as administrators of a diminishing public sphere they despise but as CEOs of a powerful private corporation called America. "Brand USA is in trouble...it's a problem for business," Bono warned at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The solution is "to re-describe ourselves to a world that is unsure of our values."
The Bush Administration wholeheartedly agrees, as evidenced by the orgy of redescription that now passes for American foreign policy. Faced with an Arab world enraged by its occupation of Iraq and its blind support for Israel, the US solution is not to change these brutal policies; it is, in the pseudo-academic language of corporate branding, to "change the story."
Brand USA's latest story was launched on January 30, the day of the Iraqi elections, complete with a catchy tag line ("purple power"), instantly iconic imagery (purple fingers) and, of course, a new narrative about America's role in the world, helpfully told and retold by the White House's unofficial brand manager, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. "Iraq has been reframed from a story about Iraqi 'insurgents' trying to liberate their country from American occupiers and their Iraqi 'stooges' to a story of the overwhelming Iraqi majority trying to build a democracy, with U.S. help, against the wishes of Iraqi Baathist-fascists and jihadists." This new story is so contagious, we are told, that it has set off a domino effect akin to the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of Communism. (Although in the "Arabian Spring," the only wall in sight--Israel's apartheid wall--pointedly stays up.)
As with all branding campaigns, the power is in the repetition, not in the details. Obvious non sequiturs (is Bush taking credit for Arafat's death?) and screeching hypocrisies (occupiers against occupation!) just mean it's time to tell the story again, only louder and more slowly, obnoxious tourist-style. Even so, with Bush now claiming that "Iran and other nations have an example in Iraq," it seems worth focusing at least briefly on the reality of the Iraqi example. The state of emergency was just renewed for its fifth month, and the United Iraqi Alliance, despite winning a clear majority, still can't form a government. The problem is not that Iraqis have lost faith in the democracy for which they risked their lives on January 30; it's that the electoral system imposed on them by Washington is profoundly undemocratic.
Full Article: commondreams.org
rootsie on 03.13.05 @ 05:31 PM CST [
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Run, Fight or Die in Colombia
The Paramilitaries Burned Wayuu Children Alive and Killed Others With ChainsawsBy James J. Brittain
Colombia's civil war is a conflict between two and only two principle groups; the people struggling or change and the Colombian state. No greater example of this can be realized than the recent massacre of several inhabitants of the Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó (Peace Community of San José in the Apartadó municipality of the Antioquia department).
The Comunidad de Paz was established as the first organically constructed and established peace community within Colombia that sought the existence of an alternative autonomous society surrounded by a raging four decade old war. San José's goal was to be a progressive community independent from violence existing apart from the armed activities and actors presented throughout the country. One of the principal founders of the historically significant community was a man named Luis Eduardo Guerra. Guerra, like all too many social justice-minded personalities within the Andean country, was brutally murdered on February 21st. His remains were found alongside Deyanira Areiza Guzman (Guerra's partner), Deiner Andres Guerra, (Guerra's son), Luis Eduardo Guerra, (Guerra's half-brother), Alfonso Bolivar Tuberquia Graciano (a leader/member of the Peace Council of the Mulatos humanitarian zone), Sandra Milena Munoz Pozo (Graciano's partner), Santiago Tuberquia Munoz and Natalia Andrea Tuberquia Munoz (Graciano and Munoz's children). The murderers, according to several eye-witnesses, were members belonging to the 17th Brigade of the Colombian army.
It should be noted however that this article does not seek to expound the atrocious events carried out by the coercive arm of the Colombian ruling-class but rather seeks to illustrate how, as according to Father Javier Giraldo, "there is no place for neutrality" within Colombia. As the Catholic priest states, "peasants who live where there are guerrillas are killed or displaced". On March 8th the Comunidad de Paz released a statement which stated that the community had been the recipients of "many attacks" such as "harassments, threats, beatings, bombings, murders" and now, "massacres". Nevertheless, the people of San José presented that "the will of the community is firm" and they are determined to maintain their "position of pacifist coexistence".
While many may applaud such a position, what in actuality does this moral outlook mean? As Giraldo (a devout non-violent liberation theologian who has been struggling on the front lines within Colombia for decades) stated, Colombians live in a black and white world, a society which is not blurred with grey undertones of reality. He imparts that there are two truths for people living alongside the guerrilla; death or displacement. In the March 8th release, the Comunidad de Paz argued that "we are not going to coexist with our victims"; therefore, subtracting death from the categorical realm of possibilities, thus leaving only one outcome according to Giraldo's premise; displacement. The Comunidad de Paz recently wrote that if the state imposes its militarized forces against them than they "are determined to move on" with their ideals in hand, thus giving rise to the latter of Giraldo's bilateral outcomes. However, is this all that is left? Is this all that the people in Colombia seeking social justice can do? Merely run or die?
Since 2001, the 2nd Brigade of the Colombian army (and members of the AUC) organized numerous devastating attacks, similar to that which took place in San José de Apartadó, against members of the Wayuu indigenous nation. On April 18th, 2004 paramilitaries (and soldiers) entered into the village of Bahía de Portete where a large majority of Wayuu peoples inhabited. On this date the state forces systematically "burned two children alive and killed others with chain saws". Jhony Valetta ("Wayuu Indians go to war against Colombian government: May 27, 2004 On-Line http://www.anncol.org/side/587) wrote of one Wayuu father's experience.
"You can not imagine how it is to have to escape on the run so that they won't kill you, and then hear the cries of the kids, of my two little sons who they burned alive with out me being able to do anything. . . . They burned them alive inside my pick up. Also, they beheaded my mother and cut my nephews to pieces. They didn't shoot them, they tortured them so we would hear their screams, and they cut them up alive with a chain saw."
...As the Comunidad de Paz de San José de Apartadó tries to cope with their tremendous loss and regain some sense of peace and positive memory they must decide if death or displacement is all they have to look forward to. Are they going to stay 'vigilant' in their morals and run every time the state instills its military prowess or will they head the words that are only too prevalent and truthful within Colombia; "there is no place for neutrality". In order to do more than merely subsist, the people of San José must respond to their oppression with more than immaterial ideals.They must abide by their morality and know that they can materially respond to oppression and, like the Wayuu, defend their morality through objective justice.
Full Article: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 03.13.05 @ 05:27 PM CST [
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Revealed: Israel plans strike on Iranian nuclear plant
ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans for a combined air and ground attack on targets in Iran if diplomacy fails to halt the Iranian nuclear programme.
The inner cabinet of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, gave “initial authorisation” for an attack at a private meeting last month on his ranch in the Negev desert.
Israeli forces have used a mock-up of Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant in the desert to practise destroying it. Their tactics include raids by Israel’s elite Shaldag (Kingfisher) commando unit and airstrikes by F-15 jets from 69 Squadron, using bunker-busting bombs to penetrate underground facilities.
The plans have been discussed with American officials who are said to have indicated provisionally that they would not stand in Israel’s way if all international efforts to halt Iranian nuclear projects failed.
Full Article:timesonline.co.uk
rootsie on 03.13.05 @ 05:13 PM CST [
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Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News
It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.
Full Article: nytimes.comNow there's some democracy for you...
rootsie on 03.13.05 @ 04:41 PM CST [
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Friday, March 11th
Blair challenges world to end 'obscenity' of African poverty
The prime minister, Tony Blair, today challenged the world to help end the poverty, conflict and disease plaguing Africa, as he launched a major international report on how to ease the continent's problems.
"There can be no excuse, no defence, no justification for the plight of millions of our fellow beings in Africa today. There should be nothing that stands in our way of changing it. That is the simple message from the report published today," said Mr Blair, unveiling the findings of his Commission for Africa at the British Museum in central London.
The 400-page report calls on the international community to immediately double foreign aid to Africa to $50bn (£26bn) and make fighting Aids a priority. It sets 100% debt cancellation as a goal and urges rich nations to drop trade barriers that hurt poor countries. It also says African leaders must move faster toward democracy, stamp out corruption and take other steps to improve how their countries are run.
Mr Blair said he hoped the report would be embraced worldwide as a blueprint for an African renaissance. He has made helping Africa a key priority for Britain's presidencies of both the European Union and the G8 group of wealthiest nations this year.
"In a world where prosperity is increasing and more people are sharing each year in this growing wealth, it is an obscenity that should haunt our daily thoughts that 4 million children in Africa will die this year before their fifth birthday," Mr Blair said, calling for a new partnership between the developing world and Africa "that goes beyond the old donor and recipient relationship". " If we fail to act we will betray the future not only of hundreds, millions of children in Africa but of our own children too. It is unthinkable that we should do so."
Full Article: guardian.co.ukBob Geldof: Africa has become a living wound. Now we have the chance to heal it Eat your dinner, they told me as a boy, think about the poor starving children in India.
In those far-off days the concern of the adult world was for Asia. It had a huge population and gloomy prospects in the eyes of economists.
The people of Africa were poor, too, but they had riches in the form of gold, diamonds and copper - and ground so fertile that plants grew overnight wherever you dropped a seed the day before. Africans earned double what Asians did. Africa would be all right.
Forty years on and things are not all right. Africa has stagnated while Asia has seen an astonishing turnaround. First the tiger economies of east Asia leapt ahead. Now India and Bangladesh have followed. Today Asians earn double what Africans do. And life expectancy in Africa is now 17 years less than in India. Why has Africa fallen so far behind?
What we have done on the Commission for Africa - as our declaration in The Independent today tells the world - is analyse the situation, define the real problem and come up with a plan for change.
Full Article: independent.co.ukWow. Bob Geldof formulating policy for Africa, and Bono a candidate to head the World Bank! It all lends a certain hallucinatory aspect to the farcical quality of all this chest-beating, conscience-stricken concern for the plight of Africa.
Now the Great White Hope is going to charge forward to 'fix' Africa, without a whisper of the 500 years it has ravaged her, and in fact what it is here proposing is merely a 3rd millenium 'kinder, gentler' form
of ravaging. The West takes more resources out of the continent than it did under colonialism, and nobody is proposing changing that.
And due to the corruption of governments that these sudden saviors in every respect set the scene for, 'Africa' will go right along.
As Chancellor Brown proclaimed, it is time for Europe to 'stop apologising' for colonialism, as if 'sorry' were sufficient, as if it ever even said 'sorry' in the first place.
Blair turns the idea of 'conscience' into a universal moral gesture, sidestepping the particular reasons why the Brits might have good cause to lose a bit of sleep over 400 years of wicked behavior.
They think they can avoid a reconcilement with history. They can't. They use straegies of amnesia and silence to cushion this festering wound, and like every supremacist white, believe they will be remembered as the great heroes of this tawdry old story. Blair is looking to his legacy, and that is about all this report of his amounts to, an empty ceremony, devoid of substance, just another arrogant testimony for the ages, put forward by small people for their own narrow purposes.
The emotionalist rhetoric tells the whole story. "It's so ghastly, how can we as decent humans bear it?" Well, we have been bearing it for a long time now, and continue to be more than happy to directly benefit from Africa's suffering.
In books and speeches and articles, with floods of words, theories are spun about the incomprehensible mystery of the 'haves' and 'have nots' on this planet. It's their climate, it's the animals they domesticated or not, their forging of steel weapons, their germs, their naivete, their ignorance. But never never the simple bottom-line fact: the rich are rich because the poor are poor. The Incas were not starving before Pizarro came and sucked the silver out of their mountains: Europeans however, were. The 'open veins' of the non-white world hemorrhaged its wealth into Europe. Period.
rootsie on 03.11.05 @ 08:07 AM CST [
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U.N. Aide Chides Bush on Democracy Campaign
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's top aide said on Thursday that he slightly resented the suggestion that "somehow democracy is President Bush's invention."
"I kind of think there are 42 other American presidents who might resent that as well," Mark Malloch Brown, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's chief of staff, told a news conference. "Democracy has a lot longer roots and a lot more friends than just the current campaign of President Bush."
The comments came during a daylong conference on "the state of democracy in the world," organized by the Community of Democracies, a fledgling group of about 100 nations founded in June 2000 in Warsaw to promote democratic government.
The meeting was also meant to firm up plans for the community's next meeting, an April 28-30 ministerial-level conference in Santiago.
Malloch Brown, who is also the U.N. Development Program administrator, said he did "slightly resent this question that somehow democracy is President Bush's invention."
Chilean officials preparing for the Santiago conference also took what appeared to be a swipe at U.S. policy, although they denied it was aimed at Washington.
They said democracy cannot be imposed from outside and is best promoted by many nations, not one.
"We must also remember that democracy develops from within the people," Chilean Vice President Jose Miguel Insulza told the gathering.
Full Article:news.yahoo.comThe kind of democracy that 'develops from within the people' is just the sort of thing that the US has brutally repressed over the past 60 years. PS: Where has Lebanon gone? It seems to have dropped out of the news.
rootsie on 03.11.05 @ 07:18 AM CST [
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Thursday, March 10th
Lebanon's Nightmare
by Robert Fisk
Lebanon confronts nightmare today. As the Syrian army begins its withdrawal from the country this morning, after mounting pressure from President George Bush--whose anger at the Syrians has been provoked by the insurgency against American troops in Iraq--there are growing signs that the Syrian retreat is reopening the sectarian divisions of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war.
The first Syrian units are expected to cross the Lebanese-Syrian border at Masnaa before midday and their military redeployment should be completed by Wednesday.
To the outside world, this may seem a victory devoutly to be wished: just two weeks after the murder of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri--a prominent opponent of the Syrian presence in Lebanon--the army of Damascus is pulling out of the country it has dominated for 29 long years. At last, free elections might be held in Lebanon, further proof that--thanks to Mr Bush--democracy is breaking out across the Arab world. Iraq held elections, Saudi Arabia held local elections, President Hosni Mubarak promises a contended election for the presidency of Egypt. So why shouldn't Lebanon be happy?
Have we forgotten 150,000 dead? Have we forgotten the Western hostages? Have we forgotten the 241 Americans who died in the suicide bombing of 23 October 1983? This democracy, if it comes, will be drenched with blood--but the blood will be that of the Lebanese who live here, not that of the foreigners who wish to bestow freedom upon them.
Full Article: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 03.10.05 @ 09:01 AM CST [
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Secret FBI Report Questions Al Qaeda Capabilities
No 'True' Al Qaeda Sleeper Agents Have Been Found in U.S.
For all the worry about Osama bin Laden's sleeper cells or agents in the United States, a secret FBI assessment concludes it knows of none. (ABCNEWS.com)
A secret FBI report obtained by ABC News concludes that while there is no doubt al Qaeda wants to hit the United States, its capability to do so is unclear.
"Al-Qa'ida leadership's intention to attack the United States is not in question," the report reads. (All spellings are as rendered in the original report.) "However, their capability to do so is unclear, particularly in regard to 'spectacular' operations. We believe al-Qa'ida's capability to launch attacks within the United States is dependent on its ability to infiltrate and maintain operatives in the United States."
"Limited reporting since March indicates al-Qa'ida has sought to recruit and train individuals to conduct attacks in the United States, but is inconclusive as to whether they have succeeded in placing operatives in this country," the report reads. "US Government efforts to date also have not revealed evidence of concealed cells or networks acting in the homeland as sleepers."
It also differs from testimony given by FBI Director Robert Mueller, who warned in the past that several sleeper cells were probably in place.
"Our greatest threat is from al Qaeda cells in the United States that we have not yet been able to identify," Mueller said at a Senate Select Intelligence Committee hearing in February 2003. "Finding and rooting out al Qaeda members once they have entered the United States and have had time to establish themselves is our most serious intelligence and law enforcement challenge."
When the secret report was issued last month, on Feb. 16, Mueller testified at a hearing before the same committee that the lack of evidence concerned him. "I am concerned about what we are not seeing," he said.
Full Article: abcnews.comWell that leaves an endless number of things to be 'concerned' about. How about a preemptive strike against the whole US?
rootsie on 03.10.05 @ 08:50 AM CST [
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Wednesday, March 9th
Lebanon May Reinstate Pro-Syria PM
BEIRUT, Lebanon - Bolstered by a massive pro-Syrian demonstration, Lebanese allies of Syria moved Wednesday to reinstate the prime minister, who recently was forced out by anti-Damascus protests. Their action ensures Syria's continued dominance of Lebanese politics.
Outgoing Prime Minister Omar Karami was virtually assured nomination after 71 legislators put forward his name during consultations with pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud, parliament members said. Under the constitution, the president is obliged to comply with the choice of a majority of the 128-member parliament.
Full Article: yahoo.com/newsVenezuela '02 anyone?
rootsie on 03.09.05 @ 06:53 PM CST [
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Sunday, March 6th
Buffett deepens dollar worries
Warren Buffett has warned that the US trade deficit risks creating a “sharecropper’s society” as his letter to shareholders sounded an increasingly bearish tone about the value of the dollar.
...Mr Buffett stepped up his warning about the US trade deficit and the need to finance it with foreign investment, devoting more than two full pages of the annual report to the topic.
“This force-feeding of American wealth to the rest of the world is now proceeding at the rate of $1.8bn daily, an increase of 20 per cent since I wrote you last year,” he said. “Consequently, other countries and their citizens now own a net of about $3,000bn of the US”
In particular, he warned that this meant a sizeable portion of what US citizens earned in future would have to be paid to foreign landlords.
“A country that is now aspiring to an “Ownership Society” will not find happiness in – and I’ll use hyperbole here for emphasis – a “Sharecropper’s Society,” added Mr Buffett. “But that’s precisely where our trade policies, supported by Republicans and Democrats alike, are taking us.”
Full Article: news.ft.com
rootsie on 03.06.05 @ 11:35 PM CST [
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Prosecutor Says Probe Will Go On in Case Swirling Near Delay
A Texas prosecutor who gained the indictments of three associates of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Tex., says that his investigation of illegal corporate campaign contributions and money laundering will continue and that ``We're following the truth ... wherever that leads.''
Full Article: drudgereport.com
rootsie on 03.06.05 @ 11:30 PM CST [
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Italian Journalist Rejects U.S. Account
ROME (AP) - The Italian journalist wounded by American troops in Iraq after her release by insurgents rejected the U.S. military's account of the shooting and declined Sunday to rule out the possibility she was deliberately targeted. The White House said it was a "horrific accident" and promised a full investigation.
...The U.S. military has said the car Sgrena was riding in was speeding, and Americans used hand and arm signals, flashing white lights and warning shots to get it to stop at the roadblock.
But in an interview with Italian La 7 TV, Sgrena said, "There was no bright light, no signal." She also said the car was traveling at "regular speed."
...Suddenly, she said, she remembered her captors' words, when they warned her "to be careful because the Americans don't want you to return."
Sgrena wrote that her captors warned her as she was about to be released not to signal her presence to anyone, because "the Americans might intervene." She said her captors blindfolded her and drove her to a location where she was turned over to agents and they set off for the airport.
Full Article: apnews.myway.com
rootsie on 03.06.05 @ 11:27 PM CST [
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Saturday, March 5th
The Other Colombia, the One of Hope
By Raul Zibechi
"Half of the country is in the hands of the paras," Paula says by the candlelight in a bar in La Candelaria, the historic old town of Bogotá that has been declared a World Heritage Site. "Wherever they establish their domain, they impose strict rules on daily life and customs: the haircuts of the young people, the closing times of the bars and clubs, and above all, they control and harass the women." Paula works for an environmental organization and she cannot hide her anguish over a country that she and many other Colombians feel is slipping out of their hands. Daniel, a university professor, more calmly adds, "Here there was a war and the paramilitaries won. The paramilitaries are not only auxiliaries of the state, but they are also the embodiment of a societal project that hopes to wipe out the social advances and conquests of more than a century."
War is destroying the social fabric of the country: Almost 3 million displaced persons, 8,000 homicides annually for socio-political reasons, 3,500 detentions a year, and hundreds of forced disappearances. These are the tragic results of a conflict that appears interminable. In all, Colombia has one of the highest crime rates in the world, with some 27,000 homicides a year. (1) The state appears incapable of offering security and justice in a situation of deteriorating institutions. This panorama explains the reasons why the population feels fear and chose security in 2002, electing Álvaro Uribe, who was promoted by the paramilitary sector, on a hard-line platform of ending the war. The ruinous situation dates back decades. In 1978, then-President Turbay Ayala (1978-1982) expanded the Statute of Security, which gave the armed forces judicial functions and opened the doors to the systematic violation of human rights. The Constitution of 1991 eliminated the state of siege with which the country had been governed for one century, but it instituted a state of shock.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 03.05.05 @ 07:02 PM CST [
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Dolphin Beaching Followed Sub's Exercises
KEY WEST, Fla. (AP) - The Navy and marine wildlife experts are investigating whether the beaching of dozens of dolphins in the Florida Keys followed the use of sonar by a submarine on a training exercise off the coast.
More than 20 rough-toothed dolphins have died since Wednesday's beaching by about 70 of the marine mammals, Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary spokeswoman Cheva Heck said Saturday.
A day before the dolphins swam ashore, the USS Philadelphia had conducted exercises with Navy SEALs off Key West, about 45 miles from Marathon, where the dolphins became stranded.
Navy officials refused to say if the submarine, based at Groton, Conn., used its sonar during the exercise.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.05.05 @ 06:53 PM CST [
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Blair targets corruption in Africa plan
Tony Blair will next week demand a radical shake-up of the west's approach to the world's poorest continent when his year-long Africa Commission calls for a doubling of aid, the dismantling of trade barriers, the writing off of debts and immediate action to stamp out corruption.
In what is being billed as the most serious analysis of Africa's problems for a generation, the prime minister will use the launch of next Friday's report to urge a new partnership between developed and developing countries.
The report's recommendations - likely to be the subject of hard bargaining between Britain and her G8 allies in the run-up to the Gleneagles summit in July - include tough measures to tackle bribery by western multinationals in addition to huge injections of cash to fund health, education and improvements to Africa's rudimentary infrastructure.
Full Article: guardian.co.ukSpotlight falls on corruption of Africa Forty-six countries in the world are listed as politically "fragile" by the Department for International Development, and 23 of them are in sub-Saharan Africa.
That accounts for nearly half the countries of the region. In the last forty years, more wars have been fought in this corner of the world than anywhere else.
This is the scale of the crisis of governance in Africa which Tony Blair's Commission on Africa had to consider.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk Well isn't Africa fortunate, being so thoroughly considered at long last. It's all about the West's approach and the West's 'concern'. Britain abopve all others set the stage for the corruption it is so eager now to 'crack down' on. Well England has a long history in Africa of cracking down on resistance and stamping out the people's aspirations. They are to be trusted no more today than they were then.
rootsie on 03.05.05 @ 06:50 PM CST [
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'People wake up angry at being alive in a society like this'
Lagos poet "AJ" Daga Tola is also a musician and activist who lives in some of the worst urban conditions on earth. The main road to his eight foot square shack in Ajegunle slum is ankle-high in litter. The open drain down his alley overflows with black sewage. Fires smoulder below the nearby motorway bridge; armies of hawkers sell water on the permanently jammed expressway; and burned-out lorries and cars are dumped on either side of the road.
"Everyone here wakes up in anger," says the man who has taken the initial letters of the slum as his first name. "The frustration of being alive in a society like this is excruciating. People find it very hard and it is getting worse. Day in, day out, poor people from all over Africa arrive in this place, still seeing Lagos as the land of opportunity. They are met at the bus stops by gangs of youths who demand payments. There is extortion at every point. Only one in 10 people have regular work."
Roughly one million people live in Ajegunle - known in Lagos as "Jungle City" - which is just one of many dozens of chaotic slum areas across the mega-city that now stretches over roughly 300 square kilometres with a population density greater than either Mumbai or Calcutta. Some, like Makoko, are built partly on water with families eking out a precarious and unhealthy existence in shacks balanced on stilts. All are dangerous, volatile and unhealthy.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.05.05 @ 06:34 PM CST [
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Syria Announcement 'Not Enough' - U.S. State Dept
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States said on Saturday that Syria's plan to gradually withdraw from Lebanon fell short and urged that Syrian remove all of its troops from the country.
While announcing a partial withdrawal, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said that did mean his country would end its role in Lebanon.
``We mean complete withdrawal -- no half-hearted measures,'' said Darla Jordan, spokeswoman for the State Department.
U.S. officials have said Washington and European allies are considering ``next steps'' if Syria fails to pull out, including diplomatic and economic sanctions and a tougher U.N. resolution.
Full Article: nytimes.com/reutersl
rootsie on 03.05.05 @ 06:32 PM CST [
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Aristide Supporters Demonstrate in Haiti
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, March 4 (Reuters) - Thousands of supporters of the deposed president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, marched peacefully on Friday through a Haitian slum, calling for his return and praising United Nations troops that secured the demonstration.
The march in the Bel-Air neighborhood of Port-au-Prince was the second pro-Aristide demonstration in five days. On Monday, the police opened fire on a demonstration and killed at least three Aristide supporters. On Friday, United Nations officials mounted their first major operation to secure a demonstration, with 300 heavily armed peacekeepers. Brazilian peacekeepers kept the route under tight control, blocking Haitian police officers who wanted to enter the march's perimeter.
Full Article:nytimes.com
rootsie on 03.05.05 @ 06:28 PM CST [
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Wednesday, March 2nd
The Ghosts of Karl Marx and Edward Abbey
by Michael D.Yates
...The ghosts of Karl Marx and Edward Abbey haunt the contemporary United States. Marx needs no introduction to readers of this magazine, but perhaps Abbey does. Edward Abbey was born in 1927 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, a small town about thirty miles from where I was born. He spent some of his youth on a hardscrabble farm in the nearby tiny village of Home, Pennsylvania, but he lived most of his adult life in the desert and canyon country of the Southwest. He was a novelist, essayist, poet, and a radical environmentalist. Among his best works are Desert Solitaire, an account of a year he spent as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now a national park) in Moab, Utah, and The Monkey Wrench Gang, the novel which inspired a generation of militant environmentalists.
Marx argued that capitalist societies tended to exhibit poles of wealth and misery, with each pole tightly connected to the other. This prediction has been dismissed by mainstream thinkers, who argue that while there might have been some truth to it in capitalism’s early years, the advanced capitalist countries have shown that all boats tend to rise on the tide of the system’s incredible economic growth. However, if we look at the United States today, nearly 140 years after the onset of full-scale capitalism in the 1870s, we see that Marx’s prediction still has a lot of life in it.
Marx was speaking of relative misery, that is, how those at the bottom compared to those at the top. Workers create profit by their labor, and the capitalists take this profit because they own the workplaces. If the workers are not organized, employers will squeeze more and more profit from their labor, and the workers will become relatively worse off over time. Growing inequality is therefore the consequence of uncontested employer power. Other things being equal, there is no limit to rising inequality except the natural limits imposed by the inability of workers to minimally sustain themselves. Of course, if workers are organized, both at their workplaces and politically, they can and have placed social limits on the growth of inequality.
Today, the power of capital in the United States is more and more uncontested. Labor unions continue to hemorrhage members, and they exert a very limited power politically. The state is more firmly in the hands of employers than it has been in seventy years. Property rights reign supreme in the law, and capital is pretty much free to do what it wants, whether that means firing workers trying to organize unions or moving operations to a low-wage venue in another country. Workers are becoming more insecure, without allies or organizations, and slowly but surely losing the social securities won by hard struggle many years ago.
monthlyreview.org
rootsie on 03.02.05 @ 09:22 PM CST [
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The "Noble Liars" Attack Syria
by Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen
After 9/11, Administration neo-cons offered a "noble lie" to sell the public on the need to invade and occupy Iraq (The Iraqis will shower our troops with flowers and kisses). The same group has invented a new "virtuous prevarication" to build support for an attack on Syria. Ignoring recent testimony by CIA Director Porter J. Goss that "Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists" (Washington Post, February 17, 2005), this group of high US officials in Defense, State and the Vice President's office have organized a "get Syria" movement.
Without evidence, US officials accused Damascus of responsibility for the February 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut, and of sponsoring terrorism in Iraq as well.
Anti-Syria rhetoric followed from the Iraq precedent. Following the 9/11 attacks, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and then-Defense Policy Board Chair Richard Perle found they could convince President Bush to switch from traditionalist (do little) policy to aggressively asserting naked military power.
Full Article:counterpunch.org
rootsie on 03.02.05 @ 09:05 PM CST [
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GOP Jewish Group Critizes Byrd's Remarks
WASHINGTON (AP) - A pair of Jewish groups accused Sen. Robert Byrd on Wednesday of making an outrageous and reprehensible comparison between Adolf Hitler's Nazis and a Senate GOP plan to block Democrats from filibustering. A GOP senator called for Byrd to retract his remarks.
Byrd spokesman Tom Gavin denied that Byrd, D-W.Va., had compared Republicans to Hitler. He said that instead, the reference to Nazis in a Senate speech on Tuesday was meant to underscore that the past should not be ignored.
``Terrible chapters of history ought never be repeated,'' Gavin said. ``All one needs to do is to look at history to see how dangerous it is to curb the rights of the minority.''
But Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the Senate's No. 3 Republican, called for Byrd to retract his statement.
``Senator Byrd's inappropriate remarks comparing his Republican colleagues with Nazis are inexcusable,'' Santorum said in a statement. ``These comments lessen the credibility of the senator and the decorum of the Senate. He should retract his statement and ask for pardon.''
Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Wednesday that Byrd's remarks showed ``a profound lack of understanding as to who Hitler was'' and that the senator should apologize to the American people.
``It is hideous, outrageous and offensive for Senator Byrd to suggest that the Republican Party's tactics could in any way resemble those of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party,'' Foxman said.
Full Article: guardian.co.ukMethinks they dost protest too much.Columbia University and the New Anti-Semitism Rape, massacre, theft, torture, ethnic cleansing: these are not crimes which nations can defend with ease - especially when unearthed by their own historians. Israel recently faced this most troubling predicament. Combing through declassified state archives, Israeli scholars of the past twenty years have discovered their nation was founded upon the mass expulsion and deliberate destruction of the native Palestinian people. (1) Israel, it turned out, was far more Goliath than David. Since this presented somewhat of a public relations problem for a state still engaged in brutalizing Palestinians and stealing their land, a new self-justifying rationale needed to be authored.
Enter the "new anti-Semitism." This doctrine turns reality on its head, declaring criticism of Israel's racist behavior to be itself racist "anti-Semitic." Empathy for Palestinians being beaten, bullied, and bulldozed out of existence, the doctrine goes, is nothing but some disguised expression of Jew-hatred. Goose-stepping Germans and uprooted Palestinians are portrayed as part of the same unbroken line of anti-Semitism, even though those inhabiting concentration camps today "the largest ever to exist," says Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling - are the Palestinians themselves. (2) But no matter. Abusing the memory of Holocaust victims to shut down criticism of Israeli crimes crimes unearthed mostly by Jewish historians - may be obscene, but it is also effective.
Wielding this new ideological weapon, Israel's champions aim to cut down pro-Palestinian voices inside America with the same ruthlessness Israeli soldiers employ to shoot up Palestinian children outside their homes. (3) The latest targets in this well-organized hit are Arab-American professors at Columbia University who teach Middle Eastern studies. The targets have been judiciously selected. Since these particular professors are Arab in an age when bombing and torturing Arabs has virtually become a national sport, they make for easy prey; and since they have added to their original sin of being Arab the even graver sin of speaking the truth about Israel's past no less in a country which subsidizes Israel's existence - they also make for necessary prey.
Full Article: counterpunch.org
rootsie on 03.02.05 @ 09:00 PM CST [
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Lawmakers to Question FBI About Translator
WASHINGTON (AP) - A woman fired by the FBI after alleging security lapses in its translator program has gained support from two members of Congress who said Wednesday they will question the Justice Department about her accusations.
After listening to former translator Sibel Edmonds complain about her treatment at the hands of the Justice Department and the FBI, Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said their staffs would debrief Edmonds and confront Justice Department officials with the information.
Edmonds alleges she was fired after complaining to FBI managers about shoddy wiretap translations and telling them an interpreter with a relative at a foreign embassy might have compromised national security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by passing information from an FBI wiretap to the target of an investigation.
Edmonds commented on the issue while testifying at a House Government Reform subcommittee hearing on the government's designation of information as classified. She told lawmakers the people she accused were still working at the FBI.
Full Article: guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 03.02.05 @ 08:50 PM CST [
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China charges U.S. monopolizes the Internet, seeks global control
China's ambassador to the United Nations last week called for international controls on the Internet.
Chinese Ambassador Sha Zukang told a UN conference that controls should be multilateral, transparent and democratic, with the full involvement of governments, the private sector, civil society and international organizations.
"It should ensure an equitable distribution of resources, facilitate access for all and ensure a stable and secure functioning," he said at the conference on Internet governance.
Sha said China opposes the "monopolization" of the Internet by one state, a reference to the Untied States, which ultimately controls the digital medium.
"It is of crucial importance to conduct research on establishing a multilateral governance mechanism that is more rational and just and more conducive to the Internet development in a direction of stable, secure and responsible functioning and more conducive to the continuous technological innovation," he said.
Full Article: worldtribune.com
rootsie on 03.02.05 @ 08:47 PM CST [
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Tuesday, March 1st
U.S.: Terrorists in Syria Bombed Tel Aviv
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration on Tuesday blamed terrorists based in Syria for last week's deadly suicide attack in Israel and called for an immediate end to Syrian military and political domination over neighboring Lebanon.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice applied the strongest American pressure on the Syrians to date, saying at an international conference in London that they were "out of step" in the Middle East and there was growing international resolve against them.
In Washington, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said, "We do have firm evidence that the bombing in Tel Aviv was not only authorized by Palestinian Islamic Jihad leaders in Damascus, but that Islamic Jihad leaders in Damascus participated in the planning."
Full Article: news.yanoo.comIn the last few days Syria has been blamed for practically every bad thing in the region,and is scrambling to get out of the way before the hammer falls. All this US muscle-flexing, do they smell blood or what? What is going on?
rootsie on 03.01.05 @ 10:06 PM CST [
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Death of a democracy
The mud biscuits sold in the markets and stacked high by the street vendors in the most desperate parts of Port-au-Prince are made in a part of the city known as Fort-Dimanche. There, close to the site of a former prison, once used by the dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier to lock up political prisoners, women combine clay, water, a little margarine and a scratch of salt. Sometimes they will crumble a foil-wrapped cube of bouillon into the mixture, which they stir, shape into discs the size of a saucer and leave to bake in the Caribbean sun.
In Haiti, these mud cakes are traditionally eaten by expectant mothers who believe they contain nutrients and minerals important to the health of a newborn child. But in recent months they have been sold increasingly to other people, who are too poor to afford anything else. "I have been selling more in the last year. People have less money," says Mafie, the young woman sitting behind a pile of the pale brown mud cakes at Salamoun market.
In their own way, these biscuits, known in Creole simply as terre, tell a bigger story. One year after the enforced departure of Haiti's elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country he was forced to flee, having been long undermined by the US authorities, is in a hellish state of affairs. Unstable, deadly, wracked by division and wrecked by a hurricane that tore through the country in September, many of the citizens who voted for the bespectacled former priest with a prayer that he might bring them hope and salvation are forced to fill their bellies with cakes fashioned from mud. Naturally enough, they taste like dirt.
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 03.01.05 @ 08:27 PM CST [
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How Dubai, the playground of businessmen and warlords, is built by Asian wage slaves
Twenty storeys above the streets of Dubai tiny figures of workmen hammer steel into place day and night in the Middle East's biggest construction boom.
Labourers from south Asia man the forest of cranes along the half-built tower blocks south and west of Jumeira Beach, the world's second-biggest building site after Shanghai and a magnet for those hoping to make money by buying property here, ranging from Afghan warlords to the England football team.
The sheikhs who run Dubai plan to make it the commercial capital of the Middle East, so dozens of skyscrapers and thousands of apartment blocks are shooting up. The boom has sucked in an army of workers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, unskilled men who toil for years away from families to save £30 a month.
Full Article: independent.co.uk
rootsie on 03.01.05 @ 08:16 PM CST [
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Nepalese civilians disappear as King's forces crack down
Nepal's security forces are blamed for the disappearance and probable deaths of hundreds of Nepalese civilians, particularly in the month since King Gyanendra seized power.
Nepal has been in the grip of a Maoist insurgency since 1996. As the Maoists have taken control of more territory - they are now a few miles from the capital, Kathmandu - Nepalese security forces have responded with increasingly heavy-handed and repressive tactics.
In 2003 and 2004, the United Nations working group on disappearances said Nepal had the highest rate of disappearances in the world. Over the past five years, more than 1,200 people have vanished, documented by local human rights groups.
Full Article: independent.co.uk
rootsie on 03.01.05 @ 08:12 PM CST [
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Peers line up to condemn 'terrifying' house arrest plan
Peers bitterly criticised the Government's proposals for house arrest yesterday as a string of former judges and law lords declared that planned anti-terror laws undermined Britain's historic legal rights.
Peers lined up to attack the Prevention of Terrorism Bill as they started four days of debate on it, warning that it was "unconstitutional" and attacked fundamental protection for citizens by allowing ministers to hold or tag people without trial.
Full Article: independent.co.uk
rootsie on 03.01.05 @ 08:09 PM CST [
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Uruguay Inaugurates First Leftist Leader
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay (AP) - A doctor took office as Uruguay's first socialist president Tuesday, joining the ranks of left-leaning leaders in Latin America - now six in all - governing a majority of the region's people with a cautious approach to U.S.-backed free-market policies.
In one of his first official acts, Tabare Vazquez restored full diplomatic ties with communist Cuba, more than two years after a diplomatic row divided the countries.
Thousands of Uruguayans - many waving flags and chanting ``Ur-u-guay!'' - filled Montevideo's streets for the inauguration of Vazquez, a 65-year-old cancer specialist whose swearing-in ended more than 170 years of power by two moderate parties.
Full Article: guardian.co.ukHow Latin America turned to the left Today Washington's unqualified, 100 per cent loyal allies to the south of its border with Mexico are no more than one or two - El Salvador and Honduras certainly, but who else? Even Chile defied the superpower by refusing to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a slight not yet entirely forgotten in Washington.
Instead, a de facto centre-left bloc is emerging across the continent. Its members vary greatly from Chile, the economic poster-boy, to Washington's bugbear Venezuela. One thing, however, they have in common. They may not be necessarily opposed to the US on every issue, but they are no longer beholden to it.
Their drift away is testament to an historic failure of American foreign policy. In recent years the US approach to Latin America has been hopelessly distorted by its fixation with one modest-sized island 90 miles south of the Florida Keys. In economic and military terms Cuba is of little significance, but its symbolic importance has been vastly magnified by the attentions lavished upon it by Washington.
Full Article: independent.co.uk
rootsie on 03.01.05 @ 08:06 PM CST [
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Implanted Electrodes Combat Depression
A procedure that involves drilling two holes into a person's skull and then implanting electrodes in the brain has shown promise in treating individuals who are severely depressed and resistant to other types of treatment.
Full Article: forbes.com
rootsie on 03.01.05 @ 07:58 PM CST [
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Newspaper exposes Saddam trial judge
The judge in charge of Saddam Hussein's trial was in fear for his life today after his identity was revealed by a UK newspaper.
The Iraqi Special Tribunal had asked the media to protect his anonymity. But he was named by Robert Fisk, foreign correspondent of The Independent.
Downing Street warned that the judge now faced reprisals from Saddam loyalists. A Foreign Office source added: "Obviously this shows questionable judgment about an individual's safety." When TV footage was broadcast yesterday, censors made sure the judge was pictured only from behind.
Simon Kelner, editor of The Independent, defended his decision, saying: "This was not a British court, it was an Iraqi court. We don't want to compromise the judge's safety but the cameras showed side views of him and he was instantly recognised by many Iraqis."
thisislondon.co.ukThis is an attempt to neutralize Fisk, one of the few on-the-scene journalist who reports anything real.
rootsie on 03.01.05 @ 07:55 PM CST [
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Wolfowitz on shortlist for World Bank top post
Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy secretary of defence, has emerged as a leading candidate to replace James Wolfensohn as the president of the World Bank.
Mr Wolfowitz is one of a small number of people being considered for the US nomination, administration insiders said.
The nomination of Mr Wolfowitz, one of the chief architects of the Iraq war and a former US ambassador to Indonesia, would likely be highly controversial, and could raise new questions about the process by which the World Bank chief is selected. One administration official said his nomination “would have enormous repercussions within the development community”.
Others on the US shortlist include Randall Tobias, former head of Eli Lilly and the administration's co-ordinator on Aids.
Leadership of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund is decided by all the shareholders in the institutions. But the US and Europe in effect divide up the top jobs, with an American heading the bank and a European running the fund.
Full Article: financialtimes.comAh yes, it can be said truly that the wolves are at the door...
rootsie on 03.01.05 @ 09:34 AM CST [
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