The U.S. Has Plans to Invade Iran Before Bush's Term Ends
Bill Gertz is a right-wing national security reporter for the Rev. Sun Yung Moon's neo-fascist newspaper, The Washington Times. He's also a spigot from which flows much classified information illegally leaked by like-minded "patriots" seeking to advance their hawkish agenda in the military-industrial-congressional complex. And, frankly speaking, that's the only reason I pay any attention to him.
So I was hardly surprised when, on September 16, 2005, Gertz reported on the Bush administration's "computer slide presentation." which was aimed at persuading whoever would listen that Iran is working feverishly to build nuclear weapons.
According to Gertz, the report claims: "Iran's nuclear program is well-scaled for a weapons capability, as a comparison to [Pakistan's] nuclear weapons infrastructure shows…When one also considers Iran's concealment and deception activities, it's difficult to escape the conclusion that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons."
The report also states that "Iran's uranium ore resources are insufficient for Tehran to produce enough fuel for civilian electrical power generating reactors. 'However, Iran's uranium resources are more than sufficient to support a nuclear weapons capability.'" [U.S. Report Says Iran Seeks To Acquire Nuclear Weapons," Washington Times, 16 September 2005]
Unlike the Washington Post's article on the subject two days earlier, Gertz predictably failed to mention that the slide show "dismisses ambiguities in the evidence…and omits alternative explanations under debate among intelligence analysts." He also failed to mention that several diplomats "said the slide show reminded them of the flawed presentation on Iraq's weapons programs made by then-secretary of state Colin L. Powell to the UN Security Council in February 2003" ["US Deploys Slide Show to Press Case Against Iran," Washington Post, 14 September 2005]
Moreover, in order to serve as water boy for the Bush administration, Gertz had to ignore (or discount) the recent report from Britain's prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies, which concluded that Iran "was at least five years away from producing sufficient material for 'a single nuclear weapon,'" Instead, Gertz obediently and dutifully noted that the Bush administration "is pressing the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] to refer the issue… to the United Nations Security Council," which "could then impose economic sanctions against Iran or possibly a future authorization for the use of force." [Ibid.] Ah yes, "authorization for the use of force"—the source of many a neocon and chickenhawk wet dream.
But much more disconcerting than Gertz's piece was one written by Claude Salhani on 22 September 2005 for the same loony "Moonie" scandal sheet. Salhani shamelessly reintroduced the tactics, which proved so successful in inflaming a frightened American public about the threat posed by Iraq. He invoked the words of an Iranian dissident (today's Ahmad Chalabi), as well as former U.S. government officials (seeking to "empower resistance" inside Iran), to make the claim the Iran is, in fact, "gearing for war" with the United States.
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 09.30.05 @ 07:42 AM CST [
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Thursday, September 29th
What Israeli Disengagement Sounds Like
In the last days, Gaza was awakened from its dreams with horrible explosions which have shattered our skies, shaken our buildings, broken our windows, and installed feelings of panic.
We suddenly felt helpless, under the control of the Israelis and at their mercy. The new method of exploding sound bombs in our skies is now available to the Israeli army who would not use it before the disengagement because they were careful not to alarm or hurt the Israeli settlers who were in Gaza. This new method was used by the Israeli army since Friday day and night. Usually between 2-4 in the morning, between 6:30 and 8 in the morning school going time, and in the afternoon or early evening. The explosions are heard and felt all over the Gaza Strip with the same intensity. These explosions were used alongside the usual routine of bombing and killing which the Israelis forces are familiar with.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 09.29.05 @ 02:12 PM CST [
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Obama the Enabler
...Senator Obama's "town meeting" (a well-controlled PR exercise) was an apparent triumph. An editor of the right-wing local newspaper, The Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, wrote, "It was a virtual love-in Thursday at the Illinois Terminal in Champaign when Democratic U.S. Sen. Barack Obama stopped by to answer questions at a town meeting. Even the anti-war protestors, who criticized Obama for not arranging the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq after a mere eight months in office, were deferential."
The student newspaper, The Daily Illini, described AWARE's activities: "Anti-war protesters met Obama in the Illinois Terminal parking lot with posters critical of the senator's reluctance to endorse an immediate pullout. After a short exchange of words with Obama, the protesters followed him all the way to the fourth floor ballroom of the terminal. As Obama delivered his opening statement from the podium, a member of the Anti-War/Anti-Racism Effort walked the aisles passing out the group's literature. Obama attempted to align himself with the protesters' sentiments while defending his cautiousness toward a pullout."
In fact, the senator took just one (gentle) question on the war, and never mentioned torture, Iran, the Downing Street minutes, Israel, impeachment, imprisonment without trial by the US government, etc. (Asked about that by a member of AWARE after the rally, Obama replied, "Other people have the right to ask questions, too.") What he did say about the war was even more disturbing -- that he hoped US troops "could begin to leave Iraq next year, [but] removing the troops now would result in a massive bloodbath for both countries."
That is, of course, almost identical with the administration's position, and it ignores the fact that a majority of the Iraqis want the U.S. out now, understandably enough, because the "massive bloodbath" is already occurring. It contrasts sharply with the view expressed so clearly this summer by Cindy Sheehan, who points out that one is either for the ending of the war and the withdrawal of the U.S. from Iraq, or for its continuance.
But to a largely sympathetic audience in August, Obama pled his poor power to add or detract from the blood-letting: he was, after all, only "99th in seniority" in the Senate. "I am not the president -- yet," he said -- "prompting loud cheers," according to the student newspaper.
There was a vein of smug self-satisfaction in Obama's casual talk, as there was in his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. When asked about John Rogers' nomination to the Supreme Court, he replied with a smile, "Well, I know he went to a good law school." (Obama and Rogers were both at Harvard Law.) In an article for Time magazine about another Illinois politician, he had earned some condign ridicule by writing, "In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat -- in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles."
But it's Obama's role as a liberal enabler of the war that most disquieted members of AWARE. He is cooperating in the critical support that the Democratic party has given to the war and to U.S. government policy in the Greater Middle East -- a policy that has killed tens of thousands of people during this administration and may yet have even more catastrophic results. Leading Democrats are now to the right of the Bush administration in calling for an expansion of the U.S. military.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 09.29.05 @ 02:08 PM CST [
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Red Cross Criticized, Urged to Share Cash
NEW YORK - As its hurricane relief donations near the $1 billion mark, more than double all other charities combined, the American Red Cross is encountering sharp criticism of its efforts and mounting pressure to share funds with smaller groups.
The complaints — that Red Cross operations were chaotic in some places, inequitable in others — have stung deeply within an organization that is proud of its overall response to Hurricane Katrina, by far the most devastating natural disaster it has confronted on U.S. soil.
"It's frustrating to our thousands of volunteers out there every day, away from their families, helping people," said spokeswoman Devorah Goldburg. "We never said we were perfect — we're trying to do our best under extraordinary circumstances."
The frustration stems partly from the fact that the Red Cross has worked to avoid a recurrence of the humbling fundraising controversy that flared after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Back then, the Red Cross raised about $1.1 billion — its record so far for a single disaster — but the organization was assailed when donors belatedly learned that $200 million of their gifts were being earmarked to prepare for future crises rather than to help victims. Red Cross president Bernadine Healy resigned, the money was shifted back to the Sept. 11 Liberty Fund, and the organization promised greater accountability in future fundraising campaigns.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 09.29.05 @ 02:02 PM CST [
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Trinidad appeals to Met and FBI over crime wave
Scotland Yard and the FBI have been asked to help stem a surge in violent crime in Trinidad and Tobago.
Patrick Manning, the Caribbean nation's prime minister and finance minister, announced that he had asked for assistance from overseas while delivering his annual budget presentation yesterday.
He said he had asked the Metropolitan police to supply equipment and expertise to a special police unit in Trinidad, the largest of the 23 islands that make up Trinidad and Tobago.
The prime minister has been under intense pressure to tackle the rising crime level. There have been 275 murders so far this year and police say that this is more than the number of murders in the whole of 2004.
Last week, import-export businessman Dr Eddie Koury, a nephew of a government minister, was abducted and beheaded by a criminal gang.
Mr Manning said the task of coping with the crime wave - including an upsurge in murders and kidnappings - was compounded by criminal deportees sent home from the UK, US and Canada.
"These add significantly to the challenge of law enforcement by bringing to our country the sophistication and expertise of the most advanced criminal networks," Reuters reported Mr Manning as saying.
He said the illegal drugs trade had created an international "criminal elite".
Mr Manning told BBC News that money from drug trafficking was being used to buy weapons and ammunition that were then being used by feuding gangs, pushing up the murder rate in the country, which has a population of 1.3 million.
Yesterday the Trinidad and Tobago Manufacturers Association (TTMA), which represents some 400 businesses, took out adverts in newspapers accusing Mr Manning of failing to tackle crime.
"Regardless of colour, creed, race or economic standing, we all live in constant fear of being robbed, kidnapped or killed. We no longer have a peaceful way of life," the TTMA said.
A poll this week in the Trinidad and Tobago Express following the killing of Dr Koury depicted a population living in fear.
In his speech yesterday, Mr Manning said "high-level meetings" had taken place between authorities in the UK and US. The FBI had been asked to help reorganise the country's police force, he said.
A spokesman for the Metropolitan police said: "We are happy to help in whatever way we can. It is normal for officers from overseas to visit us and for our officers to visit various countries."
Trinidad and Tobago is the most southern island in the Caribbean and lies just of the coast of Venezuela. It obtained its independence from the British empire in 1962 and became a republic in 1976.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 09.29.05 @ 11:29 AM CST [
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Rice Visits Haiti Ahead of Elections
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Sept. 27 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the poorest nation in the Americas today to urge Haitians to vote in the first elections since Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted last year and spirited into exile on an American military jet.
In a visit to the presidential palace and then a voter-registration office just a block outside its walls, Ms. Rice directly addressed the Haitian people, telling them that "this is a time when Haiti can have a new start." But she also warned the current interim government that in a country with a long history of voter fraud, intimidation and authoritarian rule, Haiti's leader must move far more aggressively to guarantee the integrity of the presidential and parliamentary election on Nov. 20, and a peaceful transfer of power on Feb. 7.
"These elections must be open and inclusive and fair," she said, standing next to Haiti's interim prime minister, Gérard Latortue.
Ms. Rice's visit here was her first as secretary of state, and her six hours on the ground here considerably more peaceful than the visit by her predecessor, Colin L. Powell, last December. As he met Haitian leaders in the same palace, gunfire erupted outside, and ensuing gun battles between gangs and peacekeepers, most of whom are from Brazil, left three Haitians dead and at least nine injured.
American officials traveling with Ms. Rice and a delegation of five members of Congress said they were encouraged that violence had tapered off a bit in recent weeks. But American officials took extraordinary precautions, helicoptering Ms. Rice the few miles from the airport to the presidential palace rather than risk driving her downtown, on roads where kidnappings and shootings are still a frequent occurrence. Here guards openly brandished automatic weapons from the moment she landed.
More than 2.6 million people have registered to vote, and Ms. Rice talked to a few of them today as they obtained national identity cards and used computer systems put in place by the Organization of American States to verify their identities by scanning their fingerprints and creating digital images of their signatures.
But the registration center, in a health clinic, was an island of quiet in a city coping with collapsed housing, deep poverty, periodic gunfire and suspicions of the United States, which once supported Mr. Aristide and then encouraged him to go when he was forced from office in February, 2004.
nytimes.comNow there's some revisionist history for you.
rootsie on 09.29.05 @ 11:22 AM CST [
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Depleted Uranium Tests for US Troops Returning from Iraq
US troops returning from Iraq are for the first time to be offered state-of-the-art radiation testing to check for contamination from depleted uranium - a controversial substance linked by some to cancer and birth defects.
Campaigners say the Pentagon refuses to take seriously the issue of poisoning from depleted uranium (DU) and offers only the most basic checks, and only when it is specifically asked for. But state legislators across the US are pushing ahead with laws that will provide their National Guard troops access to the most sophisticated tests.
Connecticut and Louisiana have already passed such legislation and another 18 are said to be considering similar steps. Connecticut's new law - pioneered by state legislator Pat Dillon - comes into effect on Saturday.
"What this does is establish a standard," said Mrs Dillon, a Yale-trained epidemiologist. "It means that our Guardsmen will have access to highly sensitive testing that can differentiate between background levels of radiation." DU - a heavy metal waste-product of nuclear power plants - has been used by the US military since the 1991 Gulf War. It is used to tip tank shells and missiles because of its ability to penetrate armour. On impact DU burns at an extremely high temperature and is widely dispersed in micro particles.
The science surrounding DU remains hotly contested though the majority of studies have concluded there is no genuine risk from battlefield contamination. One 2001 study by the Royal Society, concluded: "Except in extreme circumstances any extra risks of developing fatal cancers as a result of radiation from internal exposure to DU arising from battlefield conditions are likely to be so small that they would not be detectable above the general risk of dying from cancer over a normal lifetime."
commondreams.org
Yeah right. This attempt to deny the effects of low-level nuclear radiation has been going on for 60 years.
rootsie on 09.29.05 @ 11:16 AM CST [link]
From a Cave in Afghanistan: It’s the al-Zarqawi Show
Osama, finally blessed with a donated kidney from a Pakistani religious student (the transplant was performed in one of his better equipped caves in Afghanistan), has launched an internet news show entitled “the Voice of the Caliphate,” featuring an anchorman wearing a black ski mask and an ammunition belt.
I’m not making this up. Well, I made up the part about the donated kidney (although Pakistani religious students have offered to donate their kidneys to their hero Osama), but the business about the internet show and the anchorman is true, if we can believe the Washington Post.
“The anchorman, who said the report would appear once a week, presented news about the Gaza Strip and Iraq and expressed happiness about recent hurricanes in the United States. A copy of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, was placed by his right hand and a rifle affixed to a tripod was pointed at the camera.”
Note all the pedestrian al-Qaeda stereotypes here—a prominent copy of the Koran, a rifle, the ski mask (brought back into vogue after Black September by that nimble—for a guy with one leg—Abu Musab al-Zarqawi), and of course expressions of joy over the death and misery of Americans, especially by way of natural disaster attributable to the will of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him.
“The lead segment recounted Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which the narrator proclaimed as a ‘great victory,’ while showing Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia walking and talking among celebrating compatriots,” reports Daniel Williams for the Post. “That was followed by a repeat of a pledge on Sept. 14 by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, to wage all-out war on Iraq’s Shiite Muslims. An image of Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born Sunni Muslim, remained on the screen for about half the broadcast.”
In other words, al-Qaeda wants to reaffirm its support for the Palestinians (and these people want their own state) and al-Zarqawi is the leader and Osama is the titular head of al-Qaeda, if that. It is interesting this video or program would appear so close to the airing of a 60 Minutes “Osama who?” episode. “If he (bin Laden) is hiding in a hole, neither the electronic nor the human intelligence can find him. Is it all that important to find him? If he’s taken out tomorrow, his ideology is not going to come to an end. I don’t think that it’s important … if he is captured,” Gen. Safdar Hussain, a top army commander supposedly responsible for anti-terrorism operations in northwestern Pakistan, told 60 Minutes. The Pakistani military and intelligence should know something about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda—hell, with a lot of money and TLC from the CIA, they made Osama into what he is today (or was before he died of kidney disease) and turned a handful of cantankerous Islamic fanatics and goat herders into a formidable world-class terrorist organization.
It makes absolutely no sense and is completely counterproductive for al-Zarqawi to “wage all-out war on Iraq’s Shiite Muslims,” but then, recall, we are assured the guy is none too bright, even if he is billed as a logistical mastermind. If al-Qaeda “in Iraq” is busy killing Shi’ites—and thus perpetuating the age-old Islamic schism—there will be less time and effort put into killing American and British occupation troops. Obviously, al-Qaeda needs a couple net meetings to hammer out its mission statement. I mean, it is rather muddled and impulsive to take on the Great Satan and millions and millions of Shi’ites at the same time.
“The masked announcer also reported that a group called the Islamic Army in Iraq claimed to have launched chemical-armed rockets at American forces in Baghdad,” the Post continues. “A video clip showed five rockets fired in succession from behind a sand berm as an off-screen voice yelled ‘God is great’ in Arabic. The Islamic Army asserted responsibility last year for the killing of Enzo Baldoni, an Italian journalist who had been kidnapped in Iraq.”
“According to Atmane Tazaghart and Roland Jacquard, in the French Figaro magazine, [the Islamic Army in Iraq was] founded by Abu Abdallah Hassan Ben Mahmoud on the 29th of September 2003, and is composed by internationalist salafist islamists, former baasists and also former militants of the Palestine Liberation Front of Abu Abbas,” notes Wikipedia.
Of course, it makes perfect sense the Palestine Liberation Front would fire chemical weapons at Americans. Bush told us as much about these evil-doers. Abu Abbas was responsible for tossing the wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer off the Achille Lauro and into the sea (after shooting him) back in 1985. It is said Abbas died in American captivity in Iraq—and none too soon, since it was claimed by Ari Ben-Menashe, a salesman for the Israel Defense Forces’ armaments business, that the Achille Lauro hijacking was a Mossad operation designed to make Palestinians look like brutal killers and cutthroats. It appears “internationalist salafist islamists” and Palestinians will do whatever it takes to build their rep as scurrilous terrorists and thus conform to our worst nightmares, possibly with a little help from Mossad and the CIA. Even Italian journalists are not safe these days.
“A commercial break of sorts followed, which previewed a movie, ‘Total Jihad,’ directed by Mousslim Mouwaheed. The ad was in English, suggesting that the target audience might be Muslims living in Britain and the United States.”
More likely, the “target audience” consists of Americans and Brits, regardless of religious persuasion. The ad—in fact, the entire program—sure the heck is not intended for average Muslims in the Middle East because most of them don’t have computers or broadband internet connections (many of them, especially Iraqis, are lucky to have consistent electricity and clean drinking water). It’s also curious how much “Total Jihad” sounds like one of those late night infomercials. Instead of exercising equipment or vegetable preparation tools, the al-Qaeda infomercial sells death to infidels.
“The final segment was about Hurricane Katrina. ‘The whole Muslim world was filled with joy’ at the disaster, the anchorman said. He went on to say that President Bush was ‘completely humiliated by his obvious incapacity to face the wrath of God, who battered New Orleans, city of homosexuals.’ Hurricane Ophelia’s brush with North Carolina was also mentioned.”
In short, all Muslims are sadistic and want every last American to suffer and suffocate in toxic sludge. No wonder we declared war on them. As for the homosexual comment, it would seem the producers of the al-Zarqawi Hour consulted with Jerry Falwell and the Christian Zionists, many who believe the same thing about Katrina—it was an act of God in response to our wickedness and our inability or unwillingness to ferret out gay people and stone them to death, as mandated in the Old Testament.
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 09.29.05 @ 11:11 AM CST [
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Sinister Events in a Cynical War
09/28/05 "ICH" -- -- Here are questions that are not being asked about the latest twist of a cynical war. Were explosives and a remote-control detonator found in the car of the two SAS special forces men "rescued" from prison in Basra on 19 September? If true, what were they planning to do with them? Why did the British military authorities in Iraq put out an unbelievable version of the circumstances that led up to armoured vehicles smashing down the wall of a prison?
According to the head of Basra's Governing Council, which has co-operated with the British, five civilians were killed by British soldiers. A judge says nine. How much is an Iraqi life worth? Is there to be no honest accounting in Britain for this sinister event, or do we simply accept Defence Secretary John Reid's customary arrogance? "Iraqi law is very clear,? he said. ?British personnel are immune from Iraqi legal process." He omitted to say that this fake immunity was invented by Iraq?s occupiers.
Watching "embedded" journalists in Iraq and London, attempting to protect the British line was like watching a satire of the whole atrocity in Iraq. First, there was feigned shock that the Iraqi regime's "writ" did not run outside its American fortifications in Baghdad and the "British trained" police in Basra might be "infiltrated". An outraged Jeremy Paxman wanted to know how two of our boys - in fact, highly suspicious foreigners dressed as Arabs and carrying a small armoury - could possibly be arrested by police in a "democratic" society. "Aren't they supposed to be on our side?" he demanded.
Although reported initially by the Times and the Mail, all mention of the explosives allegedly found in the SAS men's unmarked Cressida vanished from the news. Instead, the story was the danger the men faced if they were handed over to the militia run by the "radical" cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. "Radical" is a gratuitous embedded term; al-Sadr has actually co-operated with the British. What did he have to say about the "rescue"? Quite a lot, none of which was reported in this country. His spokesman, Sheikh Hassan al-Zarqani, said the SAS men, disguised as al-Sadr's followers, were planning an attack on Basra ahead of an important religious festival. "When the police tried to stop them," he said, "[they] opened fire on the police and passers-by. After a car chase, they were arrested. What our police found in the car was very disturbing - weapons, explosives and a remote control detonator. These are the weapons of terrorists."
The episode illuminates the most enduring lie of the Anglo-American adventure. This says the "coalition" is not to blame for the bloodbath in Iraq - which it is, overwhelmingly - and that foreign terrorists orchestrated by al-Qaeda are the real culprits. The conductor of the orchestra, goes this line, is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian. The demonry of Al-Zarqawi is central to the Pentagon's "Strategic Information Program" set up to shape news coverage of the occupation. It has been the Americans' single unqualified success. Turn on any news in the US and Britain, and the embedded reporter standing inside an American (or British) fortress will repeat unsubstantiated claims about al-Zarqawi.
Two impressions are the result: that Iraqis' right to resist an illegal invasion - a right enshrined in international law - has been usurped and de-legitimised by callous foreign terrorists, and that a civil war is under way between the Shi'ites and the Sunni. A member of the Iraqi National Assembly, Fatah al-Sheikh said this week, "There is a huge campaign for the agents of the foreign occupiers to enter and plant hatred between the sons of the Iraqi people and spread rumours in order to scare the one from the other... The occupiers are trying to start religious incitement and if it does not happen, then they will start an internal Shi'ite incitement."
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 09.29.05 @ 11:03 AM CST [
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Turkish Women, Too, Have Words With U.S. Envoy (on Iraq War)
ISTANBUL, Sept. 28 - Under Secretary of State Karen P. Hughes, seeking common ground with leading women's rights advocates in Turkey, was confronted instead on Wednesday with anguished denunciations of the war in Iraq and what the women said were American efforts to export democracy by force.
It was the second day in a row that Ms. Hughes found herself at odds with groups of women on her "public diplomacy" tour, aimed at improving the American image in the Middle East. On Tuesday, she told Saudi Arabian women she would support efforts to raise their status but was taken aback when some of them responded that Americans misunderstand their embrace of traditions.
She met Wednesday with about 20 Turkish feminist leaders in Ankara, the capital. She introduced herself, as she has done on this trip, as "a working mom" and said she was there to emphasize the many things Turkey and the United States had in common. The women welcomed her but had a different emphasis.
"You are very angry with Turkey, I know," said Hidayet Tuskal, a director of the Capital City Women's Platform, referring to what she characterized as United States reaction to opposition in Turkey to the Iraq war, which she said was a feminist issue because women and children were dying daily. "I'm feeling myself wounded," Ms. Tuskal added. "I'm feeling myself insulted here."
Fatma Nevin Vargun, identifying herself as a Kurdish rights advocate, said she was "ashamed" of the war and added that the United States bore responsibility. Referring to the arrest of a war protester at the White House on Monday, she added, "This was a pity for us as well."
With her brow furrowed, Ms. Hughes replied: "I can appreciate your concern about war. No one likes war." She went on to say that "my friend President Bush" did all he could to avoid a war in Iraq, but then asserted about Iraq: "It is impossible to say that the rights of women were better under Saddam Hussein than they are today." She said that women had been tortured, raped and killed under the leadership ousted by American troops.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 09.29.05 @ 10:59 AM CST [
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The Mysteries of New Orleans: Twenty-five Questions about the Murder of the Big Easy
1. Why did the floodwalls along the 17th Street Canal only break on the New Orleans (majority Black) side and not on the Metairie (largely white) side? Was this the result of neglect and poor maintenance by New Orleans authorities?
2. Who owned the huge barge that was catapulted through the wall of the Industrial Canal, killing hundreds in the Lower Ninth Ward -- the most deadly hit-and-run accident in U.S. history?
3. All of New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish east of the Industrial Canal were drowned, except for the Almonaster-Michoud Industrial District along Chef Menteur Highway. Why was industrial land apparently protected by stronger levees than nearby residential neighborhoods?
4. Why did Mayor Ray Nagin, in defiance of his own official disaster plan, delay twelve to twenty-four hours in ordering a mandatory evacuation of the city?
5. Why did Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff not declare Katrina an "Incident of National Significance" until August 31 -- thus preventing the full deployment of urgently needed federal resources?
6. Why wasn't the nearby U.S.S. Bataan immediately sent to the aid of New Orleans? The huge amphibious-landing ship had a state-of-the-art, 600-bed hospital, water and power plants, helicopters, food supplies, and 1,200 sailors eager to join the rescue effort.
7. Similarly, why wasn't the Baltimore-based hospital ship USS Comfort ordered to sea until August 31, or the 82nd Airborne Division deployed in New Orleans until September 5?
8. Why does Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld balk at making public his "severe weather execution order" that established the ground rules for the military response to Katrina? Did the Pentagon, as a recent report by the Congressional Research Service suggests, fail to take initiatives within already authorized powers, then attempt to transfer the blame to state and local governments?
9. Why were the more than 350 buses of the New Orleans Regional Transportation Authority -- eventually flooded where they were parked -- not mobilized to evacuate infirm, poor, and car-less residents?
10. What significance attaches to the fact that the chair of the Transportation Authority, appointed by Mayor Nagin, is Jimmy Reiss, the wealthy leader of the New Orleans Business Council which has long advocated a thorough redevelopment of (and cleanup of crime in) the city?
11. Under what authority did Mayor Nagin meet confidentially in Dallas with the "forty thieves" -- white business leaders led by Reiss -- reportedly to discuss the triaging of poorer Black areas and a corporate-led master plan for rebuilding the city?
12. Everyone knows about a famous train called "the City of New Orleans." Why was there no evacuation by rail? Was Amtrak part of the disaster planning? If not, why not?
13. Why were patients at private hospitals like Tulane evacuated by helicopter while their counterparts at the Charity Hospital were left to suffer and die?
14. Was the failure to adequately stock food, water, potable toilets, cots, and medicine at the Louisiana Superdome a deliberate decision -- as many believe -- to force poorer residents to leave the city?
15. The French Quarter has one of the highest densities of restaurants in the nation. Once the acute shortages of food and water at the Superdome and the Convention Center were known, why didn't officials requisition supplies from hotels and restaurants located just a few blocks away? (As it happened, vast quantities of food were simply left to spoil.)
16. City Hall's emergency command center had to be abandoned early in the crisis because its generator supposedly ran out of diesel fuel. Likewise many critical-care patients died from heat or equipment failure after hospital backup generators failed. Why were supplies of diesel fuel so inadequate? Why were so many hospital generators located in basements that would obviously flood?
17. Why didn't the Navy or Coast Guard immediately airdrop life preservers and rubber rafts in flooded districts? Why wasn't such life-saving equipment stocked in schools and hospitals?
18. Why weren't evacuee centers established in Audubon Park and other unflooded parts of Uptown, where locals could be employed as cleanup crews?
19. Is the Justice Department investigating the Jim Crow-like response of the suburban Gretna police who turned back hundreds of desperate New Orleans citizens trying to walk across the Mississippi River bridge -- an image reminiscent of Selma in 1965? New Orleans, meanwhile, abounds in eyewitness accounts of police looting and illegal shootings: Will any of this ever be investigated?
20. Who is responsible for the suspicious fires that have swept the city? Why have so many fires occurred in blue-collar areas that have long been targets of proposed gentrification, such as the Section 8 homes on Constance Street in the Lower Garden District or the wharfs along the river in Bywater?
21. Where were FEMA's several dozen vaunted urban search-and-rescue teams? Aside from some courageous work by Coast Guard helicopter crews, the early rescue effort was largely mounted by volunteers who towed their own boats into the city after hearing an appeal on television.
22. We found a massive Red Cross presence in Baton Rouge but none in some of the smaller Louisiana towns that have mounted the most impressive relief efforts. The poor Cajun community of Ville Platte, for instance, has at one time or another fed and housed more than 5,000 evacuees; but the Red Cross, along with FEMA, has refused almost daily appeals by local volunteers to send professional personnel and aid. Why then give money to the Red Cross?
23. Why isn't FEMA scrambling to create a central registry of everyone evacuated from the greater New Orleans region? Will evacuees receive absentee ballots and be allowed to vote in the crucial February municipal elections that will partly decide the fate of the city?
24. As politicians talk about "disaster czars" and elite-appointed reconstruction commissions, and as architects and developers advance utopian designs for an ethnically cleansed "new urbanism" in New Orleans, where is any plan for the substantive participation of the city's ordinary citizens in their own future?
25. Indeed, on the fortieth anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, what has happened to democracy?
commondreams.org
rootsie on 09.29.05 @ 10:53 AM CST [
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Tuesday, September 27th
Blair in secret Saudi mission
Tony Blair and John Reid, the defence secretary, have been holding secret talks with Saudi Arabia in pursuit of a huge arms deal worth up to £40bn, according to diplomatic sources.
Mr Blair went to Riyadh on July 2, en route to Singapore, where Britain was bidding for the 2012 Olympics. Three weeks later, Mr Reid made a two-day visit, when he sought to persuade Prince Sultan, the crown prince, to re-equip his air force with the Typhoon, the European fighter plane of which the British arms company BAE has the lion's share of manufacturing.
Defence, diplomatic and legal sources say negotiations are stalling because the Saudis are demanding three favours. These are that Britain should expel two anti-Saudi dissidents, Saad al-Faqih and Mohammed al-Masari; that British Airways should resume flights to Riyadh, currently cancelled through terrorism fears; and that a corruption investigation implicating the Saudi ruling family and BAE should be dropped. Crown prince Sultan's son-in-law, Prince Turki bin Nasr, is at the centre of a "slush fund" investigation by the Serious Fraud Office.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 09.27.05 @ 08:01 AM CST [
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Confessions Of A Hit Man
John Perkins' book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" explains American foreign policy better than any of the academic tomes you might read on the subject.
In a nutshell, the game is played this way: People like Perkins work for consulting firms, and their job is to entice a foreign head of state to go deeply in debt. They do this by greatly exaggerating the economic returns on big projects such as dams and electrification systems.
The payoff comes in two ways. The foreign country hires American contractors to build the systems, and they make big profits. Then, mired in debt, the head of state will do what the United States government tells him to do. If he proves too independent or too honest to accept bribes, then he will be removed from power, either in a coup or in an accident.
Yes, I know that sounds more like the Mafia than the great and good government of the United States, which wants only to spread peace, prosperity and democracy around the world. Read the book and decide for yourself. The publisher is Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc.
I believe Perkins is telling the truth, because I have observed through the years that the United States hates any honest nationalist leader. Let some guy try to benefit his own people instead of catering to multinational corporations, and the U.S. government and the propaganda machine will crank up and paint him as a villain. After the American people have been sufficiently indoctrinated, the poor guy won't be around much longer.
We did that to Mohammed Mossadegh, a democratically elected nationalist who thought Iran's oil should benefit Iranians. We painted him as a communist, and the CIA engineered a coup that replaced him with the Shah. In case you're curious, that's why so many Iranians hate us. We did it to a Guatemalan patriot, Jacobo Arbenz, when he tried to implement land reform and thus ran afoul of the United Fruit Co., which orchestrated the campaign that led to his overthrow by the U.S. Omar Torrijos, a Panamanian reformer, and Jaime Roldos, president of Ecuador who locked horns with big oil companies, both died in planes that exploded.
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 09.27.05 @ 07:57 AM CST [
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The Independent on Sunday asks questions about the undercover soldiers arrested in Basra.
The Independent on Sunday, 25 September 2005, asks: So what were two undercover British soldiers up to in Basra?
The paper reports:
1. an Iraqi judge has issued arrest warrants for the two 'British' soldiers recently snatched from a police station in Basra.
2. "Judge Mudhafar says he is not convinced the two men are British - possibly because one of them was said to have been carrying a Canadian-made weapon - and they may not be entitled to immunity. This has added yet another layer of mystery to what is already an extremely murky affair...
3. "The picture the British public has been allowed to gain of our occupation of southern Iraq - one of relative tranquillity and co-operation compared to the bloody mayhem further north - is at best misleading, at worst deliberately distorted...
4. "It is not impossible that one or both of the men are not British. Special forces from Australia and New Zealand, for example, often work closely with the SAS. They could even be "civilian contractors" of the kind hired by the CIA, usually ex-special forces.
'The so-called "insurgent" bombings are really being carried out by UK and US operatives'; the role of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment.
5. "Subversion from nearby Iran has been blamed for a recent increase in attacks on British forces in southern Iraq... Initial assumptions that the undercover pair were working to combat such influence have been contradicted by military and other sources...
6. "Initial attempts by British military spokesmen to minimise what happened merely heightened confusion and suspicion. Claims that the crowd was small and the violence minor were quickly belied by photographs of a soldier leaping from the turret of his Warrior armoured vehicle, his uniform burning from a petrol bomb. British troops were said to have emerged largely unscathed, only for it to emerge later that one was flown home in a serious condition.
Not only did it appear that lethal force had to be used to suppress the riot, causing an unknown number of Iraqi deaths, it was also claimed that the two undercover men had opened fire when they were stopped at a police roadblock, killing at least one policeman. There were also sharply conflicting accounts of why troops crashed into the station: to determine where the pair were, according to one version, or to rescue a negotiating team, according to another. The surveillance team had been handed over to militants and were found at a house in the district, the military said, but Iraqis denied this, saying the building was within the compound."
7. "Conspiracy theories, always rife in Iraq, have been fuelled dramatically by last week's events, according to Mazin Younis of the Iraqi League, an alliance of Iraqi exiles based in Britain. He has close contacts with Basra. 'Everyone you talk to [thinks the two undercover men] were up to something very bad... to kill somebody or destroy a building, and let us battle against each other,' he said."
prisonplanet.com
rootsie on 09.27.05 @ 07:54 AM CST [
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Cynthia McKinney: They Can't Fool Us Anymore
Remarks at the Anti-war Rally, Washington, DC, September 24, 2005
If we didn't know it before, we certainly know it now.
A cruel wind blows across America. Starting in Texas and Montana, and sweeping across America's heartland, it's settled here in Washington, DC. And despite our presence today, it continues to buffet and batter the American people.
This cruel wind blew disenfranchisement into Florida and Ohio.
It blew hardheartedness into the Capitol.
Division across our land. And wretchedness in high places.
The American people have been forced to endure fraud in the elections of 2000 and 2004, criminal neglect on September 11th, a war started on deliberately-faked evidence, the outing of a CIA agent to cover up the truth, and now criminal incompetence in providing our security.
When hurricane survivors had lost everything, and it was there for all America to see, sybaritic men, wrapped in self-righteousness, worked to save their jobs instead of the people.
As dead bodies lay strewn about the New Orleans Superdome, military recruiters blew into Houston's Astrodome to reap the harvest.
This ill wind that engulfs our country is also global in its impact. It dipped into the Caribbean hitting Haiti and Cuba; it reached into Latin America to slap Venezuela; it swept death, greed, and destruction across Africa into Eastern Congo; and it breathes occupation onto the peoples of Iraq and Palestine.
But just as sure as an ill wind now blows, it doesn't always have to be so.
The people, united, can stop wars.
We can stop injustice; and we can stop indifference. The people, united, can tear down the mightiest walls of oppression.
These ill winds have brought us high crimes and more than misdemeanors. But they've also brought us together: one answer, united for peace and for justice.
Let's stay together. Because we have to get rid of these ill winds and breathe fresh breath into a new jet stream of life.
We can do it, ya'll, because they can't fool us anymore.
Cynthia McKinney is the US representative from Georgia's fourth congressional district.
counterpunch.orgDemocrats Flee Peace Protests I have been thinking for a while now that the Democrats really should sit down and consider changing their mascot from a donkey to a marmot. A rodent really is more emblematic or their provincial habits than a donkey could ever be. Think about it. Just this past weekend antiwar rallies were held across the country and the Democratic leadership was nowhere in sight. They had high-tailed it out there. They hid in their holes and were afraid to be seen.
In all fairness, a few elected Democrats did show face, mainly two: Reps. John Conyers and Cynthia McKinney. But I wouldn't constitute either as party leaders. The better-known Democrats, like Senators John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, two likely candidates for 2008, were nowhere to be seen. Even more striking were the absences of DNC Chairman Howard Dean, Russell Feingold and Ted Kennedy -- all occasional critics of the Iraq war.
Of course the Democrat's collective criticism only goes so far. They certainly don't want to be photographed with any militant protestors. By God, that would taint their reputations! They've got campaign contributions to worry about here. No, the Democrats aren't about to take to the streets. They'd rather sit back and project the illusion that they care.
On her way out to Washington, the anti-war movement's leading lady Cindy Sheehan offered a tepid excuse for Senator Clinton's refusal to attend the protest, "She knows that the war is a lie, but she is waiting for the right time to say it. You say it and you risk losing your job."
Well, sorry, but I think the time to speak out against the war is right now and if it means Clinton could lose her job (even though that's highly unlikely, given that almost half of all Americans, according to a recent Pew research poll, think we should end the occupation and come home), so-be-it.
This isn't to say that the Democratic grassroots don't oppose the war. The majority does--but then so do nearly half of all Republicans. So this begs the question: why are anti-war activists so loyal to a Democratic Party that supported Bush's war and still refuses to oppose it?
Much of the Democrat's cognitive dissonance has to do with the success of Howard Dean at the DNC. He's been able to corral anti-war Democrats into the fold, making sure they don't flee en masse over the war issue even though they should. Many still see Dean as a sign of future hope, where party leadership stays in touch with the grassroots. Plus, Dean's early criticisms of the Iraq war earned him significant street-cred with party advocates.
It was un-deserved. Dean, like the rest of the Democratic leadership, is pro-war and pro-occupation, and it couldn't be more damaging for the peace movement to continue putting faith into this futile party. If Democratic activists really want to make some change -- the best thing they could do would be to get up and leave their party. Only then will Democratic leaders start to think twice about the monstrous policies they endorse.
rootsie on 09.27.05 @ 07:50 AM CST [
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Monday, September 26th
Chavez Staying True To Pledge For U.s. Poor
When Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on the weekend that he was going to open the taps on subsidized heating oil for poor folks in the United States, many assumed it was a drive-by comment aimed at raising the ire of his frequent critics in Washington.
But, as it turns out, Mr. Chavez is a man of his word.
Officials at Citgo Petroleum Corp. -- the Houston-based company that is wholly owned by Venezuela's state-owned energy company -- say they are scrambling to put the fine points on Mr. Chavez's promise to supply some of the poorest neighbourhoods in the United States with cheap heating oil this winter.
"The idea is to work with communities in need, with schools, and we'll have to work through not-for-profit organizations that will serve as intermediaries," public affairs manager Fernando Garay said.
"The very specific details, we don't have yet."
The Venezuelan leader's program is scheduled to begin next month in the Mexican-American community in Chicago, followed by the South Bronx, and then Boston.
Analysts say that Mr. Chavez's bold use of a state-owned company in a foreign country to so openly pursue his ideological aims is highly unusual.
"It's the first time I've heard that a foreign leader is basically giving away his country's natural resources," said Nikolas Kozloff, a senior research fellow at the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs.
zmag.org
rootsie on 09.26.05 @ 08:15 AM CST [
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Armed and dangerous - Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina
It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.
Experts who have studied the US navy's cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying 'toxic dart' guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet's smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.
Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War. The US Atlantic bottlenose dolphins have apparently been taught to shoot terrorists attacking military vessels. Their coastal compound was breached during the storm, sweeping them out to sea. But those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the US defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly.
Leo Sheridan, 72, a respected accident investigator who has worked for government and industry, said he had received intelligence from sources close to the US government's marine fisheries service confirming dolphins had escaped.
observor.guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 09.26.05 @ 08:14 AM CST [
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Britain refuses apology and compensation for Iraqis caught up in Basra riots
· Judge's arrest warrant for soldiers still in force
· Local authorities suspend cooperation with British
British officials in Iraq have ruled out an apology for the mission to rescue two undercover soldiers from a Basra police station last week, saying police in Iraq's second city had disobeyed orders from their bosses in Baghdad.
"An apology to the police or the government would not be appropriate because there were orders to the Basra police from the interior ministry to release the two soldiers and they didn't obey," Karen McLuskie, a British diplomat in Basra, told the Guardian. "Our people were considered to be in danger and our actions were justified."
She said there were no special plans for compensating the relatives of the four Iraqis killed and the 44 injured in violence surrounding the raid last Monday.
"Any citizen who was hurt can apply for compensation in the same way as if they had been hit by an army Humvee or truck," said Ms McLuskie. There were no plans to help rebuild the police station.
Her remarks come after a weekend of tension during which the British base in Basra was hit by mortars and the city's chief anti-terrorist judge issued a warrant for the arrest of two soldiers on suspicion of committing "terrorist acts".
A British soldier who was seriously injured when his Warrior armoured vehicle was attacked with petrol bombs has been evacuated to Britain, where he is receiving treatment for burns, the Ministry of Defence said yesterday.
Many Basra residents are angry at what they said were "suspicious" and heavy-handed tactics by the British military. The soldiers, who were disguised in Arab dress, were arrested by Iraqi police then freed by British troops as tanks smashed down the wall of the police station. The raid infuriated locals, who set two British armoured vehicles ablaze and pelted soldiers with rocks. "We explained clearly to the authorities that they were British forces on a run-of-the mill observation mission," said Ms McLuskie.
guardian.co.ukYou'd think that if the Brits were remotely interested in what they say their mission is in Iraq, they'd apologize and rebuild the jail.
rootsie on 09.26.05 @ 08:11 AM CST [
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Sunday, September 25th
A Movement Gathers Power on the Sorrow Plateau
by Greg Moses
The movement for peace and justice in the USA has been transformed during the past two months. But what is the nature of the change, and how will it help to move us forward? The short answer, I think, is that we have been enriched by sorrow; we gather upon a sorrow plateau. Because of this place we have come to, we have new opportunities to broaden the scope of our power to sustain lasting change for freedom.
Sorrow is the new power that Cindy Sheehan brought into the movement last month. And the power of our sorrow has grown in response to the sufferings caused by hurricane Katrina. This sorrow has not overcome us, but it has infused our motivations. Out of this sorrow comes a renewed sense of our struggle's significance.
Sorrow grounded Cindy's moral footing in the bar ditches of Crawford, Texas. Her sorrow was the reality that could not be conjured away by the alchemists of spin. It drew like a magnet so many who were grieving the loss (or the risk of loss) of a dearly loved life. The beauty of this sorrow was how it wept in consideration of one precious life at a time. For Cindy, the loss of her son Casey was enough. With each new arrival to Camp Casey came testament that one wasted life brings sorrow enough. To save just one life more is now motivation enough to stop the Iraq war.
Then came hurricane Katrina and the sorrowful reports of last moments: the one man who held with one hand the one woman he had to release. And that also was sorrow enough.
Refusal to share our plateau of sorrow was what exposed the President to the most devastating public rejection of his political life--a rejection from which he may not recover. When, during the early days of Katrina, we tuned to televised images of his trademark smirk and watched him attempt his cheerleading formulas as answer to the devastation, we saw naked as never before one man's incapacity to be moved by sorrow.
From the bar ditches of Texas and from the broken canals of New Orleans, the nation had been lifted to a sorrow place, and the President on vacation had transparently refused to follow. On that basis, his approval ratings sunk to the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain, faster than a sack of sand.
counterpunch.orgBUSH'S BOOZE CRISIS">
Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again, The National Enquirer can reveal.
rootsie on 09.25.05 @ 09:56 AM CST [link]
Largest, most powerful protest in the U.S. since the Vietnam War - The People Put the Enemy on the Defensive
Washington – At Axis of Logic, we have been involved in all of the anti-war protests in Washington, New York and Boston since the U.S./U.K. invasions of Afghan and Iraq began. Yesterday’s mobilization in Washington D.C. was undeniably the largest, most high-spirited anti-war protest in the U.S. since the first attack on the people of Afghanistan in 2002. About 5-6 hours were required for the river of people to flow past the White House on a packed Pennsylvania Avenue. There was no sign of George W. Bush or anyone in his regime - all bunkered down - afraid to face the people who came to their doorstep to confront them. But present or not, they know and that is what is important.
One by one – we watched massive contingents from many states, organizations and tens of thousands of individuals, families and children file past the White House. Smiling faces spoke of self-empowerment and the very real possibility of the end of empire. Street theater, music, chants and spontaneous-uproarious swelling of audible protest moved the long procession past the temporary home of the neoconservative regime. U.S. soldiers - 1900+ killed and the 15,000+ wounded were well-represented before the gates of the enemy.
Throughout the day, the ghosts of a hundred thousand Iraqis haunted Pennsylvania avenue under a gray, overcast sky. The speeches from the stage powerfully articulated the voice of the people. The moving messages from musicians like Joan Baez, Steve Earle and The Coup stirred and united the spirit and purpose of the massive and diverse crowd.
But it was the people … allow me to say the words more slowly and with reverence … the people … who brought the anti-war movement to the level of a threat to the entrenched, corrupt government that leads the global corporate empire with their magnificent, united voice.
axisoflogic.com
rootsie on 09.25.05 @ 09:49 AM CST [
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Gaza erupts as Israel strikes back at Hamas
Israel killed two Hamas militants and wounded more than 20 civilians yesterday in a sustained series of air strikes on the Gaza Strip, the first since it pulled troops out earlier this month.
A series of huge explosions were heard across Gaza signalling the worst violence since Israel's pullout after 38 years of occupation.
Yesterday afternoon Israel fired rockets at two vehicles in Gaza City which it said had been carrying munitions and Hamas militants. A further series of air strikes came later in the day after Israeli ministers held an emergency session and agreed to resume targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants, according to a source who took part in the meeting.
Security officials said 'Operation First Rain' would include artillery fire and air strikes in response to a wave of mortar attacks on Israeli towns by Hamas. Israel promised the operation would grow in intensity, leading up to a ground operation - unless the Palestinian security forces takes action to halt the rocket attacks or Hamas decides to end the attacks itself.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 09.25.05 @ 09:45 AM CST [
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Britain to pull troops from Iraq as Blair says 'don't force me out'
British troops will start a major withdrawal from Iraq next May under detailed plans on military disengagement to be published next month, The Observer can reveal.
The document being drawn up by the British government and the US will be presented to the Iraqi parliament in October and will spark fresh controversy over how long British troops will stay in the country. Tony Blair hopes that, despite continuing and widespread violence in Iraq, the move will show that there is progress following the conflict of 2003.
Britain has already privately informed Japan - which also has troops in Iraq - of its plans to begin withdrawing from southern Iraq in May, a move that officials in Tokyo say would make it impossible for their own 550 soldiers to remain.
guardian.co.ukIraqi judge issues arrest warrant for British troops
rootsie on 09.25.05 @ 09:41 AM CST [
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Big bonuses go to rulers of aid empire
Benita was up before dawn. She had to start work early to avoid the baking heat and the oppressive humidity of the Papua New Guinea climate. Her job was to scoop up fertiliser with an empty fish can and spread the chemicals around the base of thousands of palm trees growing on a huge plantation in the Milne Bay province on the island's south-eastern tip.
Oil from these palm trees is used as an ingredient in hundreds of Western foodstuffs including chocolate, margarine and crisps. For a gruelling 10-hour day, Benita was paid less than £3. But this was to be her last day of toil. At the end of her shift, she collapsed and died after a cardiac arrest.
Benita's name is fictional, but her case is real. She died on 14 April, 2003. Her death was recorded in a confidential internal company document obtained by The Observer - her real identity was not revealed nor who, if anyone, was to blame. It simply states: 'The post mortem cited severe chest and abdominal injuries.' While there are many young people who die while working for corporations across the developing world, Benita's case has particular resonance for the British authorities.
The company Benita worked for, Pacific Rim Palm Oil Ltd, is managed by an arm of British government known as CDC, an abbreviation for its former name - the Commonwealth Development Corporation. CDC controls more than £1 billion of public money and its aim is to invest in developing countries to help the poor. The organisation has one shareholder - Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State for International Development.
The people who run CDC certainly do not want for much. Richard Laing, its chief executive, earned £380,000 last year, of which more than £200,000 was paid in bonuses. Other executives at the quango earned hundreds of thousands of pounds in salary and bonuses.
An Observer investigation into CDC's activities reveals that Benita's death was just one of 13 'fatal accidents' at its main projects in 2003. Others include two separate incidents where children were killed at Songas power project in Tanzania. In one case a two-year-old was crushed by a company tractor and in another a small girl was hit by another company vehicle and died in hospital three days later. In Swaziland a contractor's truck killed a child on his way to school. The firm's internal report, 'CDC fatal accidents and injuries', dated 10 March, 2004, reveals that there have been 62 such deaths in nine years, many of them involving company vehicles killing individuals in road accidents. It concluded that, though it believed its accident rate was relatively low, 'it is clear from the investigations into the 2003 fatalities that there were many instances where management could have done more'.
But it is not just the number of fatal accidents that are causing concern to campaign groups and politicians. CDC has been accused of environmental damage, misjudging investments that do little to help the poor and paying large bonuses to its British bosses.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 09.25.05 @ 09:35 AM CST [
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Bush plea for cash to rebuild Iraq raises $600
An extraordinary appeal to Americans from the Bush administration for money to help pay for the reconstruction of Iraq has raised only $600 (£337), The Observer has learnt. Yet since the appeal was launched earlier this month, donations to rebuild New Orleans have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars.
The public's reluctance to contribute much more than the cost of two iPods to the administration's attempt to offer citizens 'a further stake in building a free and prosperous Iraq' has been seized on by critics as evidence of growing ambivalence over that country.
This coincides with concern over the increasing cost of the war. More than $30 billion has been appropriated for the reconstruction. Initially, America's overseas aid agency, USaid, expected it to cost taxpayers no more than $1.7bn, but it is now asking the public if they want to contribute even more.
It is understood to be the first time that a US government has made an appeal to taxpayers for foreign aid money. Contributors have no way of knowing who will receive their donations or even where they may go, after officials said details had be kept secret for security reasons.
USaid's Heather Layman denied it was disappointed with the meagre sum raised after a fortnight. 'Every little helps,' she said.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 09.25.05 @ 09:31 AM CST [link]
Wolfowitz sets new course for World Bank
"If we can help liberate the energies of the African people and unleash the potential of the private sector to create jobs, Africa will not only become a continent of hope but a continent of accomplishment," Wolfowitz will say.
Wolfowitz also called for more political accountability.
"Effective leaders also recognize that they are accountable to their people," he said. "Effective leaders listen. Institutions of accountability like civil society and a free press help leaders listen, hold them accountable for results and are key to controlling corruption."
He called for more action to combat corruption.
"Corruption drains resources and discourages investments," Wolfowitz said. "It benefits the privileged and deprives the poor."
news.yahoo.comThis is the astonishing arrogance of imperialist discourse. Liberating the energies of the African people...he's talking really about privatization, about liberating African people of their resources under the empty rhetoric of democracy. They want to invest the African people right out of existence.
rootsie on 09.25.05 @ 09:26 AM CST [
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Saturday, September 24th
Hart Viges: 'You can't wash your hands when they're covered in blood'
My name is Hart Viges. September 11 happened. Next day I was in the recruiting office. I thought that was the way I could make a difference in the world for the better.
So I went to infantry school and jump school and I arrived with my unit of the 82nd Airborne Division. I was deployed to Kuwait in February 2003. We drove into Iraq because Third Infantry Division was ahead of schedule, and so I didn't need to jump into Baghdad airport.
As we drove into Samawa to secure their supplies my mortar platoon dropped numerous rounds on this town. I watched Kiowa attack helicopters fire Hellfire missile after Hellfire missile. I saw a C130 Spectre gunship ... it will level a town. It had belt-fed artillery rounds pounding with these super-Gatling guns.
I don't know how many innocents I killed with my mortar rounds. I have my imagination to pick at for that one. But I clearly remember the call-out over the radio saying "Green light on all taxi-cabs. The enemy is using them for transportation".
One of our snipers called back on the radio saying "Excuse me but did I hear that order correctly? Green light on all taxi cabs?" "Roger that soldier. You'd better start buckling up." All of a sudden the city just blew up. Didn't matter if there was an innocent in the taxi-cab - we laid a mortar round on it, snipers opened up.
Next was Fallujah. We went in without a shot. But Charlie Company decided they were going to take over a school for the area of operations. Protesters would come saying "Please get out of our school. Our children need this school. We need education".
They turned them down. They came back, about 40 to 50 people. Some have the bright idea of shooting AK-47s up in the air. Well a couple of rounds fell into the school ... They laid waste to that group of people.
Then we went to Baghdad. And I had days that I don't want to remember. I try to forget. Days where we'd take contractors out to a water treatment plant outside of Baghdad.
We'd catched word that this is a kind of a scary place but when I arrive there's grass and palm trees, a river. It's the first beautiful place that seemed untouched by the war in Iraq. As we leave, RPGs come flying at us. Two men with RPGs ran up in front of us from across the road.
"Drop your weapons". "Irmie salahak." They're grabbing on to women and kids so [we] don't fire. I can't take any more and swing my [gun] over. My sight's on his chest, my finger's on the trigger. And I'm trained to kill but this is no bogey man, this is no enemy. This is a human being. With the same fears and doubts and worries. The same messed-up situation.
don't pull the trigger this time ... it throws me off. It's like they didn't tell me about this emotional attachment to killing. They tried to numb me, they tried to strip my humanity. They tried to tell me that's not a human being - that's a soft target.
So now, my imagination is running ... What if he pulled his trigger? How many American soldiers or Iraqi police, how many families destroyed because I didn't pull my trigger. After we leave this little village we get attack helicopters, Apaches, two Bradley fighting vehicles, and we go back. And we start asking questions. Where are they? Eventually they lead us to this hut where this family is living, and myself and [another soldier] started searching for AK-47s, for explosives, for RPGs, you know ... evidence. And all I can find is a tiny little pistol, probably to scare off thieves
Well because of that pistol we took their two young men ... Their mother is at my feet trying to kiss my feet like I deserve my feet to be kissed. Screaming, pleading. I don't need to speak Arabic to know love and concern and fear. I had my attack helicopter behind me, my Bradley fighting vehicle, my armour, my M4 [semi-automatic] with laser sight. I'm an 82nd Airborne killer. But I was powerless ... to ease this woman's pain.
After I came home I applied for conscientious objector [status]. I'm a Christian, what was I doing holding a gun to another human being? Love thy neighbour. Pray for those who persecute you, don't shoot them.
I get my conscientious objector packet approved. I'm free. It's all gone now, right? No! I still swerve at trash bags ... fireworks ... I can't express anything. All my relationships are falling apart because they can't fucking understand me. How do they know the pain I've gone through or the sights I've seen? The innocence gone, stripped, dead? I couldn't stand the pain. People were leaving me.
I couldn't cut my wrists. So I called the police. They come stomping through my door. I have my knife in my hand. "Shoot me." All of a sudden I was the man with the RPG, with all the guns pointed at him, thinking "Yes, we can solve the world's problems by killing each other". How insane is that? Lucky I lived through that episode. See, you can't wash your hands when they're covered in blood. The wounds carry on. This is what war does to your soul, to your humanity, to your family.
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 09.24.05 @ 04:30 PM CST [
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Saudi Warns U.S. Iraq May Face Disintegration
WASHINGTON - Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said Thursday that he had been warning the Bush administration in recent days that Iraq was hurtling toward disintegration, a development that he said could drag the region into war.
"There is no dynamic now pulling the nation together," he said in a meeting with reporters at the Saudi Embassy here. "All the dynamics are pulling the country apart." He said he was so concerned that he was carrying this message "to everyone who will listen" in the Bush administration.
Prince Saud's statements, some of the most pessimistic public comments on Iraq by a Middle Eastern leader in recent months, were in stark contrast to the generally upbeat assessments that the White House and the Pentagon have been offering.
But in an appearance at the Pentagon on Thursday, President Bush, while once again expressing long-term optimism, warned that the bloodshed in Iraq was likely to increase in the coming weeks.
commndreams.orgMission accomplished!
rootsie on 09.24.05 @ 04:23 PM CST [
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Purging the Poor by Naomi Klein
Outside the 2,000-bed temporary shelter in Baton Rouge's River Center, a Church of Scientology band is performing a version of Bill Withers's classic "Use Me"--a refreshingly honest choice. "If it feels this good getting used," the Scientology singer belts out, "just keep on using me until you use me up."
Ten-year-old Nyler, lying face down on a massage table, has pretty much the same attitude. She is not quite sure why the nice lady in the yellow SCIENTOLOGY VOLUNTEER MINISTER T-shirt wants to rub her back, but "it feels so good," she tells me, so who really cares? I ask Nyler if this is her first massage. "Assist!" hisses the volunteer minister, correcting my Scientology lingo. Nyler shakes her head no; since fleeing New Orleans after a tree fell on her house, she has visited this tent many times, becoming something of an assist-aholic. "I have nerves," she explains in a blissed-out massage voice. "I have what you call nervousness."
Wearing a donated pink T-shirt with an age-inappropriate slogan ("It's the hidden little Tiki spot where the island boys are hot, hot, hot"), Nyler tells me what she is nervous about. "I think New Orleans might not ever get fixed back." "Why not?" I ask, a little surprised to be discussing reconstruction politics with a preteen in pigtails. "Because the people who know how to fix broken houses are all gone."
I don't have the heart to tell Nyler that I suspect she is on to something; that many of the African-American workers from her neighborhood may never be welcomed back to rebuild their city. An hour earlier I had interviewed New Orleans' top corporate lobbyist, Mark Drennen. As president and CEO of Greater New Orleans Inc., Drennen was in an expansive mood, pumped up by signs from Washington that the corporations he represents--everything from Chevron to Liberty Bank to Coca-Cola--were about to receive a package of tax breaks, subsidies and relaxed regulations so generous it would make the job of a lobbyist virtually obsolete.
Listening to Drennen enthuse about the opportunities opened up by the storm, I was struck by his reference to African-Americans in New Orleans as "the minority community." At 67 percent of the population, they are in fact the clear majority, while whites like Drennen make up just 27 percent. It was no doubt a simple verbal slip, but I couldn't help feeling that it was also a glimpse into the desired demographics of the new-and-improved city being imagined by its white elite, one that won't have much room for Nyler or her neighbors who know how to fix houses. "I honestly don't know and I don't think anyone knows how they are going to fit in," Drennen said of the city's unemployed.
New Orleans is already displaying signs of a demographic shift so dramatic that some evacuees describe it as "ethnic cleansing." Before Mayor Ray Nagin called for a second evacuation, the people streaming back into dry areas were mostly white, while those with no homes to return to are overwhelmingly black. This, we are assured, is not a conspiracy; it's simple geography--a reflection of the fact that wealth in New Orleans buys altitude. That means that the driest areas are the whitest (the French Quarter is 90 percent white; the Garden District, 89 percent; Audubon, 86 percent; neighboring Jefferson Parish, where people were also allowed to return, 65 percent). Some dry areas, like Algiers, did have large low-income African-American populations before the storm, but in all the billions for reconstruction, there is no budget for transportation back from the far-flung shelters where those residents ended up. So even when resettlement is permitted, many may not be able to return.
As for the hundreds of thousands of residents whose low-lying homes and housing projects were destroyed by the flood, Drennen points out that many of those neighborhoods were dysfunctional to begin with. He says the city now has an opportunity for "twenty-first-century thinking": Rather than rebuild ghettos, New Orleans should be resettled with "mixed income" housing, with rich and poor, black and white living side by side.
What Drennen doesn't say is that this kind of urban integration could happen tomorrow, on a massive scale. Roughly 70,000 of New Orleans' poorest homeless evacuees could move back to the city alongside returning white homeowners, without a single new structure being built. Take the Lower Garden District, where Drennen himself lives. It has a surprisingly high vacancy rate--17.4 percent, according to the 2000 Census. At that time 702 housing units stood vacant, and since the market hasn't improved and the district was barely flooded, they are presumably still there and still vacant. It's much the same in the other dry areas: With landlords preferring to board up apartments rather than lower rents, the French Quarter has been half-empty for years, with a vacancy rate of 37 percent.
The citywide numbers are staggering: In the areas that sustained only minor damage and are on the mayor's repopulation list, there are at least 11,600 empty apartments and houses. If Jefferson Parish is included, that number soars to 23,270. With three people in each unit, that means homes could be found for roughly 70,000 evacuees. With the number of permanently homeless city residents estimated at 200,000, that's a significant dent in the housing crisis. And it's doable. Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, whose Houston district includes some 150,000 Katrina evacuees, says there are ways to convert vacant apartments into affordable or free housing. After passing an ordinance, cities could issue Section 8 certificates, covering rent until evacuees find jobs. Jackson Lee says she plans to introduce legislation that will call for federal funds to be spent on precisely such rental vouchers. "If opportunity exists to create viable housing options," she says, "they should be explored."
Malcolm Suber, a longtime New Orleans community activist, was shocked to learn that thousands of livable homes were sitting empty. "If there are empty houses in the city," he says, "then working-class and poor people should be able to live in them." According to Suber, taking over vacant units would do more than provide much-needed immediate shelter: It would move the poor back into the city, preventing the key decisions about its future--like whether to turn the Ninth Ward into marshland or how to rebuild Charity Hospital--from being made exclusively by those who can afford land on high ground. "We have the right to fully participate in the reconstruction of our city," Suber says. "And that can only happen if we are back inside." But he concedes that it will be a fight: The old-line families in Audubon and the Garden District may pay lip service to "mixed income" housing, "but the Bourbons uptown would have a conniption if a Section 8 tenant moved in next door. It will certainly be interesting."
Equally interesting will be the response from the Bush Administration. So far, the only plan for homeless residents to move back to New Orleans is Bush's bizarre Urban Homesteading Act. In his speech from the French Quarter, Bush made no mention of the neighborhood's roughly 1,700 unrented apartments and instead proposed holding a lottery to hand out plots of federal land to flood victims, who could build homes on them. But it will take months (at least) before new houses are built, and many of the poorest residents won't be able to carry the mortgage, no matter how subsidized. Besides, it barely touches the need: The Administration estimates that in New Orleans there is land for only 1,000 "homesteaders."
The truth is that the White House's determination to turn renters into mortgage payers is less about solving Louisiana's housing crisis than indulging an ideological obsession with building a radically privatized "ownership society." It's an obsession that has already come to grip the entire disaster zone, with emergency relief provided by the Red Cross and Wal-Mart and reconstruction contracts handed out to Bechtel, Fluor, Halliburton and Shaw--the same gang that spent the past three years getting paid billions while failing to bring Iraq's essential services to prewar levels [see Klein, "The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," May 2]. "Reconstruction," whether in Baghdad or New Orleans, has become shorthand for a massive uninterrupted transfer of wealth from public to private hands, whether in the form of direct "cost plus" government contracts or by auctioning off new sectors of the state to corporations.
This vision was laid out in uniquely undisguised form during a meeting at the Heritage Foundation's Washington headquarters on September 13. Present were members of the House Republican Study Committee, a caucus of more than 100 conservative lawmakers headed by Indiana Congressman Mike Pence. The group compiled a list of thirty-two "Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices," including school vouchers, repealing environmental regulations and "drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." Admittedly, it seems farfetched that these would be adopted as relief for the needy victims of an eviscerated public sector. Until you read the first three items: "Automatically suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas"; "Make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone"; and "Make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone (comprehensive tax incentives and waiving of regulations)." All are poised to become law or have already been adopted by presidential decree.
In their own way the list-makers at Heritage are not unlike the 500 Scientology volunteer ministers currently deployed to shelters across Louisiana. "We literally followed the hurricane," David Holt, a church supervisor, told me. When I asked him why, he pointed to a yellow banner that read, SOMETHING CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT. I asked him what "it" was and he said "everything."
So it is with the neocon true believers: Their "Katrina relief" policies are the same ones trotted out for every problem, but nothing energizes them like a good disaster. As Bush says, lands swept clean are "opportunity zones," a chance to do some recruiting, advance the faith, even rewrite the rules from scratch. But that, of course, will take some massaging--I mean assisting.
commondreams.org
rootsie on 09.24.05 @ 04:18 PM CST [
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French Lesson: Taunts on Race Can Boomerang
PARIS, Sept. 20 - The French news media were captivated by Hurricane Katrina, pointing out how the American government's faltering response brought into plain view the sad lot of black Americans. But this time the French, who have long criticized America's racism, could not overlook the parallels at home.
"It is true that the devastations of Katrina have cruelly shed light on the wounds of America, ghettoization, poverty, criminality, racial and territorial tensions," Le Figaro, the conservative daily, said in an editorial on Sept. 8. "In France, those in disagreement ran to pelt the 'American model' and the neoconservative president. But have they just looked at the state of their own country?"
Only four days before, a fire had swept an apartment in south Paris, killing 12 people, most of them black. And just days before that, 17 black people died in a single blaze. Since April, 48 people, most of them children and all of them black, have died in four separate fires in Paris.
In neighborhoods like Château Rouge, filled with the hundreds of thousands of nonwhite immigrants, some Arabs but mainly blacks, whom France has absorbed over the years from former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, you feel the anger.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 09.24.05 @ 04:14 PM CST [
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Opinions Differ on Rising Price of Gold
NEW YORK - Gold is hovering near 17-year-highs. What that means depends on who's doing the interpreting.
According to one school, demand from China and India is pushing the price higher, but another school insists gold is up because Western investors are convinced inflation is much higher than their governments admit.
Gold has always been the investment of choice for bomb-shelter-building doom-and-gloomers, those accumulators of canned goods whom everyone avoids at family gatherings. As an asset, gold usually behaves according to its own set of rules. Gold rises with oil prices, falls when the dollar rises and increases when inflation fears intensify.
It's considered a "safe haven investment" — should your currency become worthless, your gold will retain value.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 09.24.05 @ 04:09 PM CST [
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US Army Whistleblowers Describe Routine, Severe Abuse
WASHINGTON - As a military jury in Texas considers the fate of Lynndie England, the low-ranking reservist pictured in the notorious photos of the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in late 2003, two sergeants and a captain in one of the U.S. Army's most decorated combat units have come forward with accounts of routine, systematic and often severe beatings committed against detainees at a base near Fallujah from 2003 through 2004.
According to their testimony, featured in a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), beatings and other forms of torture were often either ordered or approved by superior officers and took place on virtually a daily basis. The soldiers, all of whom had also been deployed to Afghanistan before coming to Iraq, testified that the same techniques were used in both countries.
The beatings were so severe that they resulted in broken bones "every other week" at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Mercury, where detainees would ordinarily be held for three or four days before being transferred to Abu Ghraib. In one case, an Army cook broke the leg of a detainee with a metal baseball bat, according to one of the sergeants quoted in the report, entitled "Leadership Failure".
Residents of Fallujah, an insurgent stronghold since the 2003 invasion, referred to the unit as "The Murderous Maniacs", because of their treatment of detainees, according to the report.
Full: commondrams.org
rootsie on 09.24.05 @ 04:05 PM CST [
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Israel Vows 'Crushing' Response to Attacks
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Israel ordered ground forces to the Gaza border Saturday and threatened a "crushing" response after Israeli towns were hit by the first major Hamas rocket barrage from the coastal territory since Israel's pullout two weeks earlier.
Israel also resumed airstrikes against Hamas targets, hitting several suspected weapons workshops, and imposed a blanket closure that bars all Palestinians from its territory.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called his Security Cabinet for a meeting later Saturday to approve the military's response, expected to last several days. A large-scale operation appeared unlikely but the timing of the Cabinet meeting suggested a sense of urgency.
The Cabinet session comes as Sharon faces a major leadership challenge in his Likud Party this week over the Gaza pullout. Sharon's challenger, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has warned the withdrawal will endanger Israel. The barrage of 39 rockets, with five Israelis hurt, could give him a boost against Sharon.
apnews.myway.comGosh kids, ya think Hamas might be working for Netanyahu?
rootsie on 09.24.05 @ 04:01 PM CST [
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Friday, September 23rd
Democratic disillusionment
...But if the streets were vacant, so were the voting booths. In one polling station after another, voters dribbled through the doors. At a primary school in western Kabul, I found just one voter - a 70-year-old woman hobbling into the polling station, supported at the elbow by her son.
And at the Habiba high school, there were none. My footsteps echoed loudly in the empty corridors as election officials fidgeted beside vacant booths.
It seemed bizarre - Afghanistan was hosting a great party for democracy, yet it looked as though nobody had bothered to turn up. Figures released yesterday confirmed those suspicions.
Turnout was just 36% in the capital and around 53% across the country, the chief electoral officer, Peter Erben, said - a sharp dip on the 70% seen in last year's presidential poll.
Officials are pedalling hard to find comforting explanations. Mr Erben said the drop was normal in comparison with other post-conflict countries - even though, days earlier, he had handed me a factsheet predicting a sharp rise in turnout.
The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, also put on a happy face for a positive spin. He was "more than happy", he said during a roundtable press conference at his fortified Kabul palace a few days later.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 09.23.05 @ 08:51 AM CST [
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Facing Opposition, U.S. and E.U. Backpedal on Iran Action
VIENNA, Sept. 22 -- The European Union and United States backpedaled Thursday in their drive to have Iran referred to the U.N. Security Council for nuclear treaty violations, following strong opposition from other countries on the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.'s nuclear monitoring group.
Russia, China and members of the 115-nation Non-Aligned Movement said during a closed board meeting that they opposed a draft E.U. resolution backed by the United States to escalate pressure on Iran through a Security Council referral.
washingtonpost.com
rootsie on 09.23.05 @ 08:47 AM CST [
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Iraqis: "This Government has No Authority"
The Iraqi official was visibly flustered and embarrassed when questioned in Baghdad about the storming of the police station in Basra by British troops.
"It is a very unfortunate development that the British forces should try to release their soldiers the way it happened," said Haydar al-Abadi, the Prime Minister's press secretary.
He defended the way the local police had acted. He said: "For two guys to collect information in civilian clothes, in the current tense security situation, I believe that the reaction of the Iraqi security is totally understandable."
It was not a good day for the Iraqi government. It wanted to publicise the capture of the northern city of Tal Afar by the Iraqi army backed by US forces at the weekend. Instead it had to answer question after question about why Iraqi sovereignty had been treated with such contempt at the other end of the country.
At the weekend an Iraqi minister said to me in frustration: "We must try to eliminate the grey areas where our authority conflicts with the coalition. We must try to reach some understanding about what to do when our jurisdictions clash."
Ordinary Iraqis were drawing their own conclusion about what had happened in Basra. Abdul Hamid, a goldsmith, said over the phone from the city: "People here have seen that our government has no authority inIraq. The British did not respect them when they smashed into the jail, so why should we respect our own leaders?"
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 09.23.05 @ 08:43 AM CST [
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Mr.Blair, an explanation, please!!
British soldiers in terrorist attack? What is going on in Iraq?
That nothing would surprise anyone now, two and a half years into the incredible act of mass butchery called the war in Iraq, in which a sovereign nation was attacked, its infrastructures destroyed and tens of thousands of its civilians slaughtered in an unprovoked and unfounded casus belli, is nothing new. But day-by-day, new chasms of incredulity are opened with revelations which would have appeared absurd only a few years ago.
After Abu Ghraib, little else remains to shock and few stones are unturned in terms of the depths of evil and sheer depravity to which the soldiers of the USA and its allies are prepared to sink to, in a never-ending war which sees the occupation forces losing control on a daily basis.
Now it transpires that two British soldiers were dressed as Arabs and attacking the Iraqi security forces in Basra? And the British authorities have admitted they were members of the SAS? They were caught after shooting at and murdering an Iraqi police official and their car was found to be packed with explosives and a C4 detonator?
Or is it that the two troops were in fact undercover agents dressed as Sadrists, Al-Sadr's Mahdi army, trying to stir up a war in Iraq between rival anti-occupation forces to help the beleaguered Iraqi security forces to stay in control as events spiral ever downwards? Is it that they were planning a massive bomb attack against Shia targets, to blame on the Sunni?
Is it true that many of the killings in Iraq are not in fact perpetrated by Sunni extremists or foreign insurgents, but indeed by British and American security forces, trying to take the strain off their troops in their realization that the war in Iraq was a monumental mistake from day one, witness to freedom and democracy George Bush style and that followed by his sickening bunch of sycophants eager to make an easy buck on the international stage by breaking an international law or six?
At the end of the day, who are the terrorists in Iraq?
pravda.ru
rootsie on 09.23.05 @ 08:39 AM CST [
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U.S. deploys warfare unit to jam enemy satellites
The U.S. military is bracing for future attacks in space, and the Air Force has deployed an electronic-warfare unit capable of jamming enemy satellites, the general in charge of space defenses says.
"You can't go to war and win without space," said Gen. Lance Lord, the four-star general in charge of the Colorado-based Air Force Space Command.
Gen. Lord said in an interview with The Washington Times that his command plays a key role in monitoring space, protecting satellites from attack or disruption and preparing to carry out strikes on enemy spacecraft.
Gen. Lord said the United States has a major strategic advantage over other nations' militaries because of its satellite communications and intelligence capabilities. "So we've got to protect that advantage," he said.
"We're not talking about weaponizing space. We're not talking about massive satellite attacks coming over the horizon or anything like that. This is really a way to understand space situational awareness, who's out there, who's operating. We understand that," Gen. Lord said.
The top priorities of the space command are monitoring space and knowing the threats. Two other missions are defending satellites and conducting offensive operations against enemy spacecraft or ground signals that threaten U.S. satellites.
washtimes.com
rootsie on 09.23.05 @ 08:34 AM CST [
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Study: Resistant 'Superbug' Staph Germ Kills Three Children in Chicago-Area Community
Three Chicago-area children have died of a toxic shock syndrome-like illness caused by a superbug they caught in the community and not in the hospital, where the germ is usually found.
The cases show that this already worrisome staph germ has become even more dangerous by acquiring the ability to cause this shock-like condition.
"There's a new kid on the block," said Dr. John Bartlett of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, referring to the added strength of the superbug known as methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.
"The fact that there are three community-acquired staph aureus cases is really scary," continued Bartlett, an infectious disease specialist.
abcnews.go.com
rootsie on 09.23.05 @ 08:31 AM CST [
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Thursday, September 22nd
More Blood, Less Oil
t has long been an article of faith among America's senior policymakers -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- that military force is an effective tool for ensuring control over foreign sources of oil. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to embrace this view, in February 1945, when he promised King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia that the United States would establish a military protectorate over his country in return for privileged access to Saudi oil -- a promise that continues to govern U.S. policy today. Every president since Roosevelt has endorsed this basic proposition, and has contributed in one way or another to the buildup of American military power in the greater Persian Gulf region.
American presidents have never hesitated to use this power when deemed necessary to protect U.S. oil interests in the Gulf. When, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the first President Bush sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, he did so with absolute confidence that the application of American military power would eventually result in the safe delivery of ever-increasing quantities of Middle Eastern oil to the United States. This presumption was clearly a critical factor in the younger Bush's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.
Now, more than two years after that invasion, the growing Iraqi quagmire has demonstrated that the application of military force can have the very opposite effect: It can diminish -- rather than enhance -- America's access to foreign oil.
commondreams.orgThe motivation for Iraq's invasion was not primarily oil.
rootsie on 09.22.05 @ 08:30 AM CST [
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Lawmaker Cautions Against Eminent Domain in Rebuilding
Lawmaker Cautions Against Eminent Domain in Rebuilding
Maxine Waters Sees Threat to Poor Blacks in New Orleans
by Carolyn Lochhead
WASHINGTON - Rep. Maxine Waters, a Los Angeles Democrat, warned Tuesday against using government's power of eminent domain to redevelop New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina concentrated its devastation on largely poor African American neighborhoods.
"We have to watch the redevelopment in New Orleans for a lot of reasons, and one of them is to make sure that the shadow government of the rich and the powerful does not end up abusing eminent domain to take property that belongs to poor people in order to get them out of the city."
Waters' comments came after the Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hearing on legislation to cut off federal funding for cities that use eminent domain to condemn private property for economic redevelopment, including such private uses as shopping malls, hotels and condominiums.
Congress is searching for ways to blunt the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in June in Kelo vs. New London, Conn., which held that governments can condemn private property if the project serves a "public purpose."
The decision created a public uproar and a rare alliance of conservative and liberal lawmakers, many of them minorities, concerned about government incursions on private property.
commondreams.com
rootsie on 09.22.05 @ 08:23 AM CST [
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Katrina's Death Toll Climbs Past 1,000
NEW ORLEANS - Searchers looking for bodies smashed into homes that had been locked or submerged under Hurricane Katrina's highest floodwaters, pushing the overall body count past 1,000 as another hurricane threatens to prolong the hunt for the dead.
The death toll in Louisiana stood at 799 on Wednesday, an increase of 153 since the weekend and nearly 80 percent of the 1,036 deaths attributed to Katrina across the Gulf Coast region. Officials said the effort could last another four to six weeks.
"There still could be quite a few, especially in the deepest flooded areas," said U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jeffrey Pettitt. "Some of the houses, they haven't been in yet."
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 09.22.05 @ 07:43 AM CST [
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The Tipping Point: Where the Neo Con-Job Unraveled
by Phil Toler
No matter how they spin it, the red-handed nabbing of two British agents-provocateurs in Basra will lift the veil of deceit that has cloaked the otherwise unexplainable internecine attacks between Sunnis and Shi’ites. The long-held Israeli/Neocon goal has been to break up Iraq, among other Arab states, into more easily managed Bantustans. The obvious fault lines among the Sunni, Shia, and Kurd communities made Wolfowitz believe achieving the goal would be a cakewalk. It wasn’t the toppling of Saddam he was talking about, you see, and all those terrible 'mistakes' made by Proconsuls Garner and Bremmer were as carefully calculated as the rest of this bloody farce.
What happened in Basra, from the Iraqi standpoint — which is all that matters now that the end-game approacheth — is that two Brits in robes were driving a civilian car packed with explosives. Their mission was to throw a heavy distraction at the Shia militias who were quite upset that three of their chiefs were taken captive by the Brits. They sought to blow up a huge bomb in the busy marketplace, with the obvious blame pointing to Sunnis. But, as often happens with such false flag tactics, they backfired.
Now, those in the Shi’ite community who favor the withdrawal of the occupation troops, sidelined only by their apparent power grab in the elections, are smelling the salts of reality and will come out of their stupor to realize the Yanks have screwed them yet again. They’ll go back to the bloody beginning, say, to the massive bombing of the UN Headquarters in Baghdad, and recalculate. They know they weren’t responsible, and it will dawn on them that the ‘coalition’ had far more to gain from the routing of the international body, such as it is, than the ‘dead-enders’ in the Sunni Community. Same goes for the Jordanian Embassy, the scores of journalists, the mosque bombings, and virtually all of the so-called suicide bombers. These actions all had the effect of fomenting civil war with the Kurds, who are heavily backed by the Israelis, being the only local party to gain from the mayhem.
Early in the war, there were reports of Iraqi men being detained by occupation authorities for several hours while they were interrogated and had their vehicles ‘searched’. The were released on the condition they must go to a specific police station to pick up their papers, or some such necessity. Fortunately, a lucky few discovered by happenstance that explosives had been placed in their vehicle with the purpose remote detonation at whatever destination they were directed to. Apparently the trick still works, because the rash of ‘suicide’ car bombings is unceasing.
But back to Basra. The Yanks have to placate the Shia — at least enough to feel secure that they will not be overwhelmed from the rear, the only point of escape if such becomes necessary. It was the only reason elections were held in a way that would guarantee nominal Shia control of the ‘government’. But, perhaps with Iran’s nominal assistance, the Shia began to look for proof of coalition involvement in acts that really only benefit the coalition. Hence the capture of the two Brit operatives en flagrante. You can ignore comfortably British claims their disguised boys were just surveying suspected militants. If that was their true mission, why would they shoot up the Iraqi police who stopped them, and why would storming of the police station occur before negotiations could produce the soldiers’ release with far less hoopla? More crucial, why would the usually calm city of Basra erupt in such rage? Perhaps they’re feeling the twisting Yankee knife in their backs yet again.
As for the other predictions I have made, the potential for economic collapse has been virtually guaranteed by Katrina and her sibling, Rita, which is poised to take out the drilling platforms Katrina missed. Throw in further damage to refineries, and they’re going to have to retrofit the nation’s gas pumps to accommodate triple digit fill-ups. Toss in roughly the cost of another Iraqi war, which has quietly surpassed the Vietnam debacle in one third less time, to sop out the pork to Halliburton and the like for hurricane cleanup, and it’s clear the numbers in the debit column will overwhelm real American assets to back them up. It’s all blue sky from here on out, baby.
As for the growth of doubts about the official legend of 9/11, a former Bush official has bluntly stated that the WTC buildings were brought down by explosives, and it is reported that the probe into the outed CIA asset has begun to sniff at the edges of the strange anomalies for which no answer has been given. And this is the real danger for the Neocons, the only thing that could conceivably bring down the Bush administration, or lead to unabashed martial law so that all would know the color of their true designs. In this regard, America will collapse from the rot within and on a schedule that resembles the famously aggressive Spartans far more than Britain or Rome.
Enjoy your Fall, folks, I’ve got to go stock the storm shelter.
axisoflogic.com
rootsie on 09.22.05 @ 07:34 AM CST [
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Continued anger on the streets of Basra as marchers denounce 'British aggression'
Hundreds of policemen and civilians marched in Basra yesterday denouncing "British aggression" in the raid to free the two undercover soldiers arrested by Iraqi police on Monday.
The protesters, some carrying handguns and AK-47s, chanted "No to occupation" and waved banners calling for the two men be tried as terrorists. Soldiers and armed police watched the march but did not intervene.
Senior aides to Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi militia were at the heart of Monday's events, hit back at what they said were "distortions and nonsense" designed to discredit the firebrand cleric. "What is all this talk of infiltration of the police and destabilisation of Basra by supporters of Moqtada?" asked Abbas al-Rubaei, a spokesman for Mr Sadr in Sadr city in eastern Baghdad.
"The real problem of stability in Basra was the fact that British forces attacked a police station and in doing so released 150 Salafists [Sunni militants] on to the streets." He was referring to reports, denied by British forces, that 150 prisoners escaped when British tanks demolished a prison wall to rescue the two men.
guardian.co.ukFake Terrorism Is a Coalition's Best Friend The story sounds amazing, almost fantastical.
A car driving through the outskirts of a besieged city opens fire on a police checkpoint, killing one. In pursuit, the police surround and detain the drivers and find the vehicle packed with explosives – perhaps part of an insurgent's plan to destroy lives and cripple property. If that isn't enough, when the suspects are thrown in prison their allies drive right up to the walls of the jail, break through them and brave petroleum bombs and burning clothes to rescue their comrades. 150 other prisoners break free in the ensuing melee.
Incredible, no? Yet this story took place in the southern Iraqi city of Basra recently. Violence continues to escalate in the breakout's aftermath... just not for the reasons you think.
You see, the drivers of the explosive-laden car were not members of an insurgency group – they were British Special Forces. Their rescuers? British soldiers driving British tanks.
rootsie on 09.22.05 @ 07:18 AM CST [
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Wednesday, September 21st
Iraqis Rally to Denounce British Rescue
BAGHDAD, Iraq - About 500 civilians and policemen, some waving pistols and AK-47s, rallied Wednesday in the southern city of Basra and denounced "British aggression" following London's decision to use force to free two of its soldiers being held by Iraqi police.
Attacks by insurgents continued in and around Baghdad, with a roadside bomb wounding two U.S. soldiers. The blast came a day after the death toll for U.S. forces in Iraq rose to more than 1,900.
The demonstrators in Basra shouted "No to occupation!" and carried banners condemning "British aggression and
demanding the freed soldiers be tried in an Iraqi court as "terrorists."Some of the protesters met with the Basra police chief, Gen. Hassan Sawadi, to demand a British apology, said police spokesman Col. Karim al-Zaidi. Heavily armed soldiers and police watched the protest but didn't intervene. Al-Zaidi said
the demonstration was arranged by some policemen, not by the force or its commander.
Clashes between British forces and Iraqi police have killed five civilians, including two who died of their injuries Wednesday in a hospital, authorities said.
The fighting occurred Monday night when British forces used armored vehicles to storm a Basra jail and free their two soldiers who had been arrested by police. During the raid, British forces learned that Shiite Muslim militiamen and police had moved the men to a nearby house. The British then stormed that house and rescued them.
Interior Minister Bayan Jabr disputed the British account. He told the British Broadcasting Corp. the two soldiers never left police custody or the jail, were not handed to militants, and that the British army acted on a "rumor" when it stormed the jail.
Britain defended its action, saying the men were first stopped by plainclothes gunmen, then moved by militiamen from a jail to a private home while British officials tried to negotiate their release with Iraqi officials.
Lisa Glover, a British Foreign Office spokeswoman in Baghdad, said Wednesday the two soldiers "were challenged by armed men in plain clothes ... and they obviously didn't know who there were being challenged by." But "when Iraqi police asked them to stop, they did," she said in an interview with The Associated Press.
She said British officials had been negotiating with Iraqi authorities in Basra for the release of the two soldiers with an Iraqi judge present. "When it became apparent they were no longer at the station, but had been moved elsewhere, we naturally became concerned."
British Defense Minister John Reid said his forces were "absolutely right" to act. A spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said the operation was "very unfortunate."
"At this time, where there are forces in Basra and all over Iraq, such things are expected to happen," al-Jaafari said after talks with Reid in London. "As for us, it will not affect the relationship between Iraq and Britain, and we hope that together we will reach ... the truth of the matter."
Reid said "there has not been a fundamental breakdown in trust between the British government and the Iraqi government," and he vowed British troops would stay in Iraq until the country was stable. "We will not cut and run and we will not leave the job half done," Reid said.
After British armored vehicles stormed the jail to free two commandos, National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie said the operation was "a violation of Iraqi sovereignty."
Al-Jaafari's office in Baghdad issued a statement Tuesday afternoon, insisting there is no crisis in relations between the two countries.
At first, Basra police said the men shot and killed a policeman, but on Tuesday al-Jaafari's spokesman, Haydar al-Abadi, said the men — who were wearing civilian clothes — were grabbed for behaving suspiciously and collecting information.The British said the soldiers had been handed over to a militia. The Basra governor confirmed the claim, saying the Britons were in the custody of the al-Mahdi Army, the militia controlled by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
"The two British were being kept in a house controlled by militiamen when the rescue operation took place," said Gov. Mohammed al-Waili.
"Police who are members of the militia group took them to a nearby house after jail authorities learned the facility was about to be stormed," he said, demanding that the British soldiers be handed over to local authorities for trial. He would not say what charges they might face.
Britain's position appeared to be strengthened by al-Rubaie, who acknowledged that one problem coalition forces face is that insurgents have joined the ranks of security forces.
"Iraqi security forces in general, police in particular, in many parts of Iraq, I have to admit, have been penetrated by some of the insurgents, some of the terrorists as well," he said in an interview with the BBC on Tuesday night.
Officials in Basra, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared for their lives, said at least 60 percent of the police force there is made up of Shiite militiamen from one of three groups: the Mahdi Army; the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq; and Hezbollah in Iraq, a small group based in the southern marshlands.
All militia have deep historical, religious and political ties to Iran, where many Shiite political and religious figures took refuge during the rule of Saddam Hussein.
news.yahoo.comNice how they add the touch about Iran at the end...
rootsie on 09.21.05 @ 01:13 PM CST [
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Iran to have nuclear bomb in six months, says Israel
Israel is seeking to rally international support for a tough United Nations stand against Iran's nuclear ambitions with a warning that it could have the knowledge to produce a nuclear bomb "within six months".
As Israel tried to stiffen resolve among the members of the International Atomic Energy Agency who are meeting in Vienna, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon urged the US to take the lead in ensuring Iran was brought before the UN Security Council "as soon as possible".
Mr Sharon told Fox News that Iran was "afraid of a Security Council meeting and sanctions that might be taken against them".
Mr Sharon appeared to indicate that Israel was not contemplating a unilateral military strike on a nuclear plant in Iran, of the sort it carried out on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. While acknowledging that Israel cannot "live with" Iran as a nuclear military power, he added: "I don't think [it] is the sole responsibility of Israel. I think this only can be an international pressure on Iran."
independent.co.ukOthers say 6-10 years away, Israel says 6 months to 'have the knowledge to produce a nuclear bomb'. What does that mean?
rootsie on 09.21.05 @ 07:56 AM CST [
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Iraq police militants 'must go'
"Rogue elements" in Iraq's police force must be rooted out, the head of the multi-national force in Basra has said.
Colonel Bill Dunham told BBC Radio 4's Today programme he wants to work with Iraqi authorities "to weed them out".
This comes after the British Army said it had to rescue two of its soldiers after they were arrested in Basra and handed to a militant group by police.
UK defence chief John Reid is to discuss Basra tensions when he meets Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari.
Chief of staff Col Dunham told BBC News of the need to "reinforce the good parts" of Iraq's police service.
bbc.co.ukLook at what this story has morphed into: 'militant elements' in the police force!
What about two British 'elite special forces' DRESSED AS ARABS IN A CAR PACKED WITH EXPLOSIVES'?? Getting set for a 'suicide bombing'? How did the two Iraqi police end up dead? When in a spot, just flip the script and blame 'them'. I presented the three articles from yesterday's bog to a class and we went to town on them, especially the BBC one, with its o so civilized talk of 'staging' and 'theater' and clinical precision James Bond in and out...THEY BLEW OPEN A JAIL AND 150 PRISONERS RAN OUT! Why did they want those guys back so badly? The way they're playing off the story here just raises suspicion that they have been caught attempting a faux-'insurgent' attack. If that's not the case, why don't they just explain? Instead they use the old strategy of blaming 'them.'UK Guardian:Military anger at delay to Iraq pull-out plan Plans to withdraw substantial numbers of British troops from Iraq next month have been abandoned after the explosion of violence in Basra on Monday night. The decision has dismayed military commanders, who are concerned about growing pressure on their soldiers.
"We are not planning a withdrawal," a senior defence source said yesterday, referring to a plan to hand over control of two southern provinces to the Iraqis.
The fragile situation in the south of the country was dramatically exposed when Iraqi police arrested two undercover British SAS soldiers on Monday and handed them over to militiamen before they were rescued. The incident came after months of concern that local security forces in the region had been infiltrated by radicals.
Both the left-wing rags, the Guardian and Independent, ran articles with the same theme: we need to get out. Another way to deflect. This particular 'explosion of violence' appears to have little or nothing to do with infiltration by 'radicals'!The New York Times take: In Basra, the bizarre fight on Monday between some police officers and British soldiers threatened to further destabilize the region, a Shiite-dominated area that had been relatively calm but has had a surge of skirmishes among rival Shiite militias that control much of the Iraqi police and military forces there. The fight broke out when British forces attacked a police station after the detention of two British soldiers apparently disguised in local dress.
Offering new details about the incident, the British military accused the Basra police of turning over the soldiers to hostile Shiite militiamen. That action was a crucial factor in the decision to begin a rescue attempt and knock down the police station's walls with armored vehicles, British officials said.
Pictures of the fighting included images of a British soldier aflame as he scrambled from his burning armored vehicle, and of hundreds of Iraqis throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the troops. The British military said no soldiers were seriously wounded.
Ultimately, the two soldiers were not at the jail but were later rescued from a home in Basra, the British military said.
The governor of Basra Province, Muhammad al-Waili, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying militiamen loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr had taken custody of the soldiers because of the looming British attack on the police station. He also called for the soldiers to be handed back to the Basra authorities for trial.
This was buried deep in another story. At least they said the guys were 'in local dress'.
rootsie on 09.21.05 @ 07:25 AM CST [
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Tuesday, September 20th
Carry on Killing
Damn the blind eyes of anyone who still can't see after Basra.
How it began:
"Two persons wearing Arab uniforms opened fire at a police station in Basra. A police patrol followed the attackers and captured them to discover they were two British soldiers," an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua. The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with explosives, the source said.
Here are the two while in Iraqi police custody. Reuters appended a note to each photo over the wire: "ATTENTION EDITORS - THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT REQUESTS THAT THE IDENTIFICATION OF THIS MAN IS NOT REVEALED, EITHER VIA PIXELLATION OF THEIR FACES OR BY NOT PUBLISHING THE PHOTOS."
As you probably know, they didn't remain in custody for long:
British forces using tanks broke down the walls of the central jail in the southern city of Basra late Monday and freed two Britons, allegedly undercover commandos, who had been arrested on charges of shooting two Iraqi policemen.
Witnesses said about 150 Iraqi prisoners also fled the jail.
Violence flared earlier in the day as demonstrators hurled stones and Molotov cocktails at British tanks; at least four people were killed.
The British Defense Ministry spun, but found it difficult to maneuver with its pants about its ankles. "We‘ve heard nothing to suggest we stormed the prison," a defense ministry spokesman in London said. "We understand there were negotiations." When it found some equilibrium, it changed its story to better comport with the undeniables: "We understand that the authorities ordered their release. Unfortunately they weren't released and we became concerned for their safety and as a result a Warrior infantry fighting vehicle broke down the perimeter wall in one place."
These hard men, likely SAS ops, must have had some stories to tell, otherwise tanks would not have negotiated their way through the prison walls of Britain's reputed hosts so soon after their capture.
Walking into the untidied mess of this astonishing and grotesque and predictable story feels a bit like the British detective catching the killer red-handed: "Well well well, what have we here?" We have long had reason to suspect imperial instigation to Iraq's sectarian violence, but here, as clearly as we've ever seen it, is the provocateur state revealed: two British "undercover soldiers" in Arab dress, caught firing upon police from a car laden with explosives. And the British government all but admitting its culpability by breaking them out of prison.
It doesn't make sense? Only if you haven't been paying attention. This is the subtext of the Iraq tragedy: blow up the Hajis and play the Sunnis on the Shias; create the chaos that introduces the conditions necessary for the long-game, and the long-held aspirations of the neoconservatives to divide Iraq into ethnographic bantustans.
I wonder what will be made of this story by those who think escalating bloodshed in Iraq is a measure of the failure of US policy, and not its success, and who believe black ops and false flags are figments of our paranoiac fantasies. Probably, as with so much that would bedevil their worldview if only they were intellectually honest enough to permit it, this too will be filtered out and forgotten. But our burden is we won't forget. And damned if the Iraqis will.
A British soldier jumps from a burning tank which was set ablaze after a shooting incident in the southern Iraqi city of Basra September 19, 2005. Angry crowds attacked a British tank with petrol bombs and rocks in Basra on Monday after Iraqi authorities said they had detained two British undercover soldiers in the southern city for firing on police.
rigorouintuition.blogspot.comXinhua News:Iraqi police detain two British soldiers in BasraBBC: Iraq Probe Into Soldier IncidentLooks like we might have some concrete proof that thos pesky 'insurgents' are US
rootsie on 09.20.05 @ 10:19 AM CST [
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New Orleans battens down for second storm
The mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, has suspended the reopening of large portions of the city and ordered most people to evacuate as the latest violent storm closes in on the battered region.
Tropical storm Rita has gathered strength after passing through the Bahamas yesterday and is expected to hit the coast of Florida before possibly moving to areas already devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 09.20.05 @ 07:48 AM CST [
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Ex-White House Aide Charged in Corruption Case
WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 - A senior White House budget official who resigned abruptly last week was arrested Monday on charges of lying to investigators and obstructing a federal inquiry involving Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist who has been under scrutiny by the Justice Department for more than a year.
The arrest of the official, David H. Safavian, head of procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget, was the first to result from the wide-ranging corruption investigation of Mr. Abramoff, once among the most powerful and best-paid lobbyists in Washington and a close friend of Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader.
According to court papers, Mr. Safavian, 38, is accused of lying about assistance that he gave Mr. Abramoff in his earlier work at the General Services Administration, where he was chief of staff from 2002 to 2004, and about an expensive golf trip he took with the lobbyist to Scotland in August 2002.
Mr. Abramoff, a former lobbying partner of Mr. Safavian, was indicted last month in Florida on unrelated federal fraud charges. He is not identified by name in the court papers involving Mr. Safavian's arrest. But "Lobbyist A" in an F.B.I. affidavit could only be Mr. Abramoff based on descriptive details in the documents filed in the Federal District Court here.
nytimes.comHe wasn't an 'ex-White House aide' as of last Friday.
rootsie on 09.20.05 @ 07:43 AM CST [
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Poll Shows Americans Want Troops Brought Home; Top Dems Ignore the Public
...et, as we see in Sen. Joe Biden's (D) Washington Post op-ed today, top Democrats still can't find the guts to push for withdrawing troops, and instead continue to drone on with the same split-the-difference posturing and weak-kneed whining that has marked their electoral decline in the last few years. As Atrios's Duncan Black notes, all Biden and the D.C. Democratic Establishment seem to be able to muster is, "If only a bunch of stuff that won't happen would happen, Iraq would be a lot of fun."
This kind of pathetic cowering isn't limited just to the Senate. Roll Call reports today that House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D) "has assembled a kitchen cabinet of fellow moderate Members to shape the Democratic strategy on national security issues." What's troubling is that every single member mentioned in the article as working with Hoyer recently voted against legislation to force President Bush to detail an exit strategy from Iraq. Similarly, nearly every member voted for the Iraq War (including Hoyer).
This apparent exclusion by D.C. Democratic Establishment types like Hoyer of those who want troops withdrawn from Iraq doesn't seem inadvertent. In fact, it seems like Hoyer is going out of his way to put a thumb in the eye of the few courageous Democrats who are trying to get their party to take a real position on the war. As the article notes, Hoyer is unveiling his group's agenda "just as some of the Caucus’ left-leaning Democrats are becoming ever more vocal about their opposition to the war in Iraq and heightening their call to bring U.S. forces home."
commondreams.org
rootsie on 09.20.05 @ 07:38 AM CST [
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US to send four astronauts to moon in 2018
The United States will send four astronauts to the moon in 2018 in a return to its pioneering manned mission into space, NASA administrator Michael Griffin announced.
NASA is to design a new rocket based on the technology from its ageing shuttles that are to be retired in 2010, Griffin said Monday. The new rocket could be orbiting in space by 2014.
The last manned mission to the moon was the Apollo 17 rocket in 1972. But the new mission will enable preparations to set up a permanent base on the moon, Griffin said Monday.
The NASA chief estimated the cost of the moon programme at 104 billion dollars.
He said the new rocket would be "very Apollo-like, with updated technology. Think of it as Apollo on steroids."
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 09.20.05 @ 07:33 AM CST [
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Outpouring of relief cash raises fear of corruption and cronyism
The outpouring of billions of dollars in federal relief money to victims of Hurricane Katrina is raising concerns about the risks of corruption and cronyism, with Bush administration critics expressing the fear that the Gulf coast, like Iraq, could become another grand experiment in neoconservative ideology.
Already, no-bid contracts have been awarded to major Republican contributors including Kellogg, Brown & Root, the subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney's old company Halliburton. President Bush has unilaterally lifted a protection law that makes it possible for contractors to pay sub-minimum wage rates to reconstruction workers.
Among provisions releasing more than $60bnto the disaster area meanwhile, is a rise in the limit on government-issued credits cards from $25,000 to $250,000. One Republican Senator, and the Democrats, have denounced this provision as outrageous and open to abuse.
Critics have been particularly disturbed by reports that Karl Rove, President Bush's political brain who has no experience in disaster relief or urban planning, may be put in charge of the reconstruction effort. Since his speciality is fighting and winning elections, the concern is that he will want to redraw the electoral map of southern Louisiana and Mississippi before providing new homes or electricity and water.
independent.co.ukClinton Launches Withering Attack on Bush on Iraq, Katrina, Budget On the US budget, Clinton warned that the federal deficit may be coming untenable, driven by foreign wars, the post-hurricane recovery programme and tax cuts that benefitted just the richest one percent of the US population, himself included.
"What Americans need to understand is that ... every single day of the year, our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, and our tax cuts," he said.
"We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, military conflict, by borrowing money from somewhere else."
Clinton added: "We depend on Japan, China, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Korea primarily to basically loan us money every day of the year to cover my tax cut and these conflicts and Katrina. I don't think it makes any sense."
rootsie on 09.20.05 @ 07:27 AM CST [
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Kurtzer: Bush Backs Israel’s Annexation of Larger Colonies
Obviously encouraged by the outgoing US ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer’s statement that President Bush would back keeping larger West Bank colonial Jewish settlements under Israeli control in a permanent peace agreement with the Palestinians, Israel’s Prime Minister Sharon reiterated in Washington on Sunday that the major colony blocs “are going to be a part of Israel” and “contiguous with Israel,” including Jerusalem’s Ma’ale Adumim.
“In the context of a final status agreement, the United States will support the retention by Israel of areas with a high concentration of Israeli population,” Kurtzer said in an interview broadcast Sunday.
“The policy is exactly what the president (George W. Bush) said,” Kurtzer said in the prerecorded interview to Israel Radio.
Kurtzer, who completed his term Friday, cited an April 2004 letter from Bush to Ariel Sharon, setting out the US position on settlements.
“In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,” Bush wrote in the letter handed to Sharon during a visit to Washington on April 14 last year.
Bush’s letter, which also pledged that the United States will not support the Palestinian refugees’ “right of return” and said that a return to the prewar borders of 1949 was unlikely, was dubbed by Palestinian officials as a “New Balfor Declaration.”
When asked by The Jerusalem Post before leaving: “In a recent interview with The Jerusalem Post, Prime Minister Sharon referred to President George Bush's letter of commitments from April 2004 as nothing less than an agreement. What is the status of this letter. Is it binding on the president that will come after Bush?” Kurtzer replied:
“Congress supported the letter in a resolution, but it was no concretized in law. But it carries great weight, not only because it is a commitment of the US, but it is in writing by the president. It is part of a package where the prime minister provided a letter to the president, the president provided a letter to the prime minister, and there were other attachments.”
palestine-pmc.comHere's the story re: Kurtzer the NY Times did NOT publish yesterday.
rootsie on 09.20.05 @ 07:15 AM CST [
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Lords of War
It's not every day Amnesty International asks me to go see a Nic Cage movie. So, when I got their e-mail about "Lord of War," I promptly caught a bargain matinee at my local multiplex. This is not a movie review but, by Hollywood standards, "Lord of War" rates R for radical...and I was pleased to witness a film about the governments and freelancers supplying the weapons that kill men, women, and children every minute of every day.
According to the Federation of American Scientists (http://www.fas.org):
*Half of the world's governments spend more on defense than health care.
*The U.S. share of total world military expenditures per year has been roughly 36 percent, while comprising under 5 percent of the world's population.
*The U.S. Arms Industry is the second most heavily subsidized industry after agriculture.
*2001 world military expenditures topped $839 billion, while at the same time an estimated 1.3 billion people survive on less than the equivalent of $1 (U.S.) a day.
*The International Red Cross has estimated that one out of every two casualties of war is a civilian caught in the crossfire.
*The United Nations estimates there to be over 300,000 child soldiers around the world, now serving as combatants in over 30 current conflicts.
*The Center for International Policy estimates that around 80% of U.S. arms exports to the developing world go to non-democratic regimes.
*There are more landmines planted in Cambodia than people. Cambodia is just one of 64 countries around the world littered with some 100 million anti-personnel landmines. Intended primarily to maim, landmines can lie in wait years after a conflict ends, causing 500 deaths and injuries per week.
*The U.S. government is training soldiers in upwards of 70 countries at any given time.
"Since the end of the Second World War, tens of millions of people have been killed by conventional weapons, mostly small arms such as rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers," reports Lowell Bergman of Frontline. "Low-tech, handheld weapons and explosives do the vast majority of the killing today. There are more than 550 million small arms currently in circulation, many of them fueling bloody civil strife in countries from Sri Lanka to Sierra Leone."
And the home of the brave is the number one merchant of death. In 2004, the #2 and #3 weapons-exporting nations were France ($4.4 billion) and Russia ($4.6 billion). At #1 was the United States at $18.5 billion...and if that number alone isn't enough to provoke action, consider where those weapons are going.
"The U.S. has a long-standing (and accelerating) policy of arming, training, and aiding some of the world's most repressive regimes," says Frida Berrigan, Senior Research Associate with the Arms Trade Resource Center of the World Policy Institute. "The U.S. transferred weaponry to 18 of the 25 countries involved in active conflicts in 2003, the last year for which full Pentagon data is available."
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 09.20.05 @ 07:14 AM CST [
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Poverty Increases as Incomes Decline Under President Bush
The day after Hurricane Katrina hit, exposing much of the public to the tragic conditions of poverty in America, the Census Bureau quietly released its annual report entitled, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States.” In some respects, it provided a demonstrable backdrop to the pockets of poverty common to New Orleans and other cities. It also explained why, despite President Bush’s assertion last month that, “Americans have more money in their pockets,” many people aren’t faring as well as they once did.
The report indicates that in 2004 there was no increase in average annual household incomes for black, white, or Hispanic families. In fact, this marks the first time since the Census Bureau began keeping records that household incomes failed to increase for five consecutive years. Since President Bush took office, the average annual household family income has declined by $2,572, approximately 4.8 percent.
Black families had the lowest average income last year, at $30,134. By comparison, the average income for white families was $48,977. The average pretax family income for all racial groups combined was $44,389, which is the lowest it has been since 1997. The South had the lowest average family income in 2004.
Interestingly enough, as the Economic Policy Institute notes in their analysis of the Census Bureau’s report, not all families did poorly last year. Although the portion of the total national income going to the bottom 60 percent of families did not increase last year, the portion going to the wealthiest five percent of families rose by 0.4 percent. And while the average inflation-adjusted family income of middle-class Americans declined by 0.7 percent in 2004, the wealthiest five percent of families enjoyed a 1.7 percent increase.
zmag.org
rootsie on 09.20.05 @ 07:09 AM CST [
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World has slim chance to stop flu pandemic
NOUMEA, New Caledonia (Reuters) - The initial outbreak of what could explode into a bird flu pandemic may affect only a few people, but the world will have just weeks to contain the deadly virus before it spreads and kills millions.
Chances of containment are limited because the potentially catastrophic infection may not be detected until it has already spread to several countries, like the SARS virus in 2003. Avian flu vaccines developed in advance will have little impact on the pandemic virus.
It will take scientists four to six months to develop a vaccine that protects against the pandemic virus, by which time thousands could have died. There is little likelihood a vaccine will even reach the country where the pandemic starts.
breitbart.comBird flu could cause global economic catastrophe
rootsie on 09.20.05 @ 07:03 AM CST [
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Monday, September 19th
We have long ago lost our moral compass, so how can we lecture the Islamic world?
by Robert Fisk
n an age when Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara can identify "evil ideologies" and al-Qa'ida can call the suicide bombing of 156 Iraqi Shias "good news" for the "nation of Islam", thank heaven for our readers, in particular John Shepherd, principal lecturer in religious studies at St Martin's College, Lancaster.
Responding to a comment of mine - to the effect that "deep down" we do, however wrongly, suspect that religion has something to do with the London bombings - Mr Shepherd gently admonishes me. "I wonder if there may be more to it than that," he remarks. And I fear he is right and I am wrong.
His arguments are contained in a brilliantly conceived article on the roots of violence and extremism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam - and the urgent need to render all religions safe for "human consumption".
Put very simply, Mr Shepherd takes a wander through some of the nastiest bits of the Bible and the Koran - those bits we prefer not to quote or not to think about - and finds that mass murder and ethnic cleansing get a pretty good bill of health if we take it all literally.
The Jewish "entry into the promised land" was clearly accompanied by bloody conquest and would-be genocide. The Christian tradition has absorbed this inheritance, entering its own "promised land" with a ruthlessness that extends to cruel anti-Semitism. The New Testament, Mr Shepherd points out, "contains passages that would ... be actionable under British laws against incitement to racial hatred" were they to be published fresh today.
The Muslim tradition - with its hatred of idolatry - contains, in the career of the Prophet, "scenes of bloodshed and murder which are shocking to modern religious sensibilities".
Thus, for example, Baruch Goldstein, the Israeli military doctor who massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, committed his mass murder on Purim, a festival celebrating the deliverance of the Jewish communities from the Persian empire which was followed by large-scale killing "to avenge themselves on their enemies" (Esther 8:13).
The Palestinians, of course, were playing the role of the Persians, at other times that of the Amalekites ("... kill man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey" - 1, Samuel 15:1, 3). The original "promised land" was largely on what is now the West Bank - hence the Jewish colonisation of Palestinian land - while the coastal plain was not (although suggestions that Israel should transplant itself further east, leaving Haifa, Tel Aviv and Ashkelon to the Palestinians of the West Bank are unlikely to commend themselves to Israel’s rulers).
The "chosen people" theme, meanwhile, moved into Christianity - the Protestants of Northern Ireland, for example, (remember the Ulster Covenant?), and apartheid South Africa and, in some respects, the United States.
The New Testament is laced with virulent anti-Semitism, accusing the Jews of killing Christ. Read Martin Luther. The Koran demanded the forced submission of conquered peoples in the name of religion (the Koran 9:29), and Mohammed’s successor, the Caliph Abu Bakr, stated specifically that "we will treat as an unbeliever whoever rejects Allah and Mohammed, and we will make holy war upon him ... for such there is only the sword and fire and indiscriminate slaughter."
So there you go. And how does Mr Shepherd deal with all this? Settlement policy should be rejected not because it is theologically questionable but because the dispossession of a people is morally wrong. Anti-Semitism must be rejected not because it is incompatible with the Gospels but because it is incompatible with any basic morality based on shared human values.
If Muslim violence is to be condemned, it is not because Mohammed is misunderstood but because it violates basic human rights. "West Bank settlements, Christian anti-Semitism and Muslim terrorism ... are not morally wrong because theologically questionable - they are theologically questionable because morally wrong."
And it is true that most Christians, Jews and Muslims draw on the tolerant, moderate aspects of their tradition. We prefer not to accept the fact that the religions of the children of Abraham are inherently flawed in respect of intolerance, discrimination, violence and hatred. Only - if I understand Mr Shepherd’s thesis correctly - by putting respect for human rights above all else and by making religion submit to universal human values can we " grasp the nettle".
Phew. I can hear the fundamentalists roaring already. And I have to say it will probably be the Islamic ones who will roar loudest. Reinterpretation of the Koran is such a quicksand, so dangerous to approach, so slippery a subject that most Muslims will not go near.
How can we suggest that a religion based on "submission" to God must itself "submit" to our happy-clappy, all-too-Western " universal human rights"? I don’t know. Especially when we " Christians" have largely failed to condemn some of our own atrocities - indeed, have preferred to forget them.
Take the Christians who massacred the Muslims of Srebrenica. Or take the Christians - Lebanese Phalangist allies of the Israelis - who entered the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut and slaughtered up to 1,700 Palestinian Muslim civilians.
Do we remember that? Do we recall that the massacres occurred between 16 and 18 September 1982? Yes, today is the 23rd anniversary of that little genocide - and I suspect The Independent will be one of the very few newspapers to remember it. I was in those camps in 1982. I climbed over the corpses. Some of the Christian Phalangists in Beirut even had illustrations of the Virgin Mary on their gun butts, just as the Christian Serbs did in Bosnia.
Are we therefore in a position to tell our Muslim neighbours to "grasp the nettle"? I rather think not. Because the condition of human rights has been so eroded by our own folly, our illegal invasion of Iraq and the anarchy that we have allowed to take root there, our flagrant refusal to prevent further Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank, our constant, whining demands that prominent Muslims must disown the killers who take their religious texts too literally, that we have long ago lost our moral compass.
A hundred years of Western interference in the Middle East has left the region so cracked with fault lines and artificial frontiers and heavy with injustices that we are in no position to lecture the Islamic world on human rights and values. Forget the Amalekites and the Persians and Martin Luther and the Caliph Abu Bakr. Just look at ourselves in the mirror and we will see the most frightening text of all.
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 09.19.05 @ 08:21 AM CST [
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Chavez Will Try to Improve U.S. Relations
NEW YORK (AP) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Saturday that he would attempt to improve his relations with Washington, which have been rocky in recent months.
''Sometimes I make mistakes, I tend to respond to any official from the government of Mr. Bush who verbally attacks Venezuela,'' Chavez said during a speech at a Manhattan church, his last public event in New York before heading to Cuba to meet with his close ally Fidel Castro.
Chavez said the Rev. Jesse Jackson and U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano, D-N.Y., who sat with him at the church, had advised him ''not to be provoked'' by representatives of the U.S. government.
nytimes.comHurricane Hugo at the UN "Practically no one in the United States knows that we've donated millions of dollars to the governorship of Louisiana, to the New Orleans Red Cross. We're now giving care to more than 5,000 victims, and now we're going to supply gasoline, freely in some cases, and with discounts in other cases, to the poorest of communities, starting with New Orleans and its surroundings... We've been helping. And we've been even rescuing people." Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez; "Nightline" with Ted Koppel, 9-16-05
Hugo Chavez's performance at the UN was greeted with the bucket-loads of bile that one expects from America's rightward-titling media. Washington Post hatchet-man Colum Lynch provided a typical summary of the speech by dismissing it as "a rant" from the Venezuelan "bad-boy". But, Lynch isn't alone in his hostility; the outpouring of venom came from all corners; appearing in many newspapers across the nation, invoking the hackneyed expressions of contempt for any foreign leader who rebuffs Washington or who follows redistributive economic policies.
...Unlike Bush, Chavez's record is backed up by a solid performance in nearly every area of social development. Its no wonder the elitist American media, driven by their class-based ideology, has tried so desperately to discredit him.
Chavez oratory to the General Assembly will undoubtedly elevate him in the eyes of many as a serious futurist who offers genuine solutions for a war-ravaged planet. His personal fortitude and optimism are matched by his selfless conduct as President; working persistently on behalf of his people and strengthening global relations. His iconic image around the world is well deserved.
"We will fight for Venezuela, for Latin American integration and the world. We reaffirm our infinite faith in humankind. We are thirsty for peace and justice in order to survive as species... Now is the time to not allow our hands to be idle or our souls to rest until we save humanity."
His speech was received with thunderous applause.
rootsie on 09.19.05 @ 08:17 AM CST [
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U.S. and Allies Seek Iran Resolution at U.N.
The United States and its allies said yesterday that they would push for a resolution critical of Iran from the United Nations nuclear monitoring agency, although the body might not refer the country to the Security Council for sanctions.
The action came a day after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran stood before the General Assembly, vowing to press ahead with a nuclear program and berating the United States and Europe for trying to interfere. Western diplomatic officials said the address had essentially played into their hands, making the monitoring body, the International Atomic Energy Agency, more likely to approve a strong resolution at its meeting, which begins today.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 09.19.05 @ 07:52 AM CST [
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Four Years of Unruly Diplomacy in Israel
TEL AVIV, Sept. 18 - Daniel C. Kurtzer has spent the last four years trying to represent the United States to Israel, two countries that think they understand each other.
"I think this is the most complicated, complex and politically challenging relationship of any we have in the world," Mr. Kurtzer said. Not only do the leaders have inevitably close relations and connections that often bypass the ambassadors in Tel Aviv and Washington, "but the other country is a key factor in the domestic politics of the other."
"The sense of intimacy at the top tends to make it challenging for both the ambassador in Washington and here to stay in the game and manage the policy flow," Mr. Kurtzer said in an interview last week. It can lead to misunderstandings, like the Israeli assumption that its sale of antimissile weapons to China would not really matter to the United States, which was outraged. The Middle East as an issue "has been at the nexus of the most serious foreign-policy issues of the last 25 years," he said, so as a job, "it's hard to do."
By most accounts Mr. Kurtzer, an observant Orthodox Jew with close family ties to Israel, did his job well, first as ambassador to Egypt beginning in 1997 and then to Israel, beginning in July 2001, as the hopes for peace he helped nurture as part of an agreement reached in Oslo more than a decade ago crashed and burned in suicide bombings and a cycle of retaliation.
"It took him awhile to realize that Oslo was over," said Yossi Klein Halevi, a writer for The New Republic and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a conservative research organization in Jerusalem. "But he proved to be a fast learner. I think he began to see the Oslo process the way most of us here had come to see it, as a disaster for Israel."
Full: nytimes.com
rootsie on 09.19.05 @ 07:48 AM CST [
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Relentless Rebel Attacks Test Shiite Endurance
That attack, and a string of others that have followed, all aimed at Shiites, have brought new vulnerability and dysfunction to the streets of Baghdad, the capital. For days, three of the four main roads leading in and out of Kadhimiya have been closed. Neighborhoods have been unusually quiet, as Shiites stay home, afraid to venture out. The violence has also reinforced a new reality of the war here: That Shiites are now paying the highest price in blood of any group in Iraq.
"Americans are not attacked anymore; it's the Shiites who suffer from these bombings," said a 40-year-old owner of a cigarette shop in front of the bombing site, who gave only his nickname, Abu Ali. "It is increasing now. Sometimes several in one day."
American service members are clearly still a major target of insurgent attacks, with deaths reported every week, and the overall toll in the war nearing 2,000. But in recent months, insurgents have pointedly shifted their focus toward killing Shiite civilians, with the number of attacks on mosques, markets and populated areas rising sharply since the spring. The threat of further massacres was sharpened last week when the architect of much of the killing, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, declared a "full-scale war on Shiites all over Iraq, wherever and whenever they are found."
nytimes.comHas 'al Zarqawi's' bio changed again? It said he fought beside bin Laden in Afrghanistan, and named his group 'al Quaeda in Iraq'. I have to look in the archive, but isn't 'he' a Shi'ite? The quotes reflect the fact that I am not at all convinced of 'his' existence.
rootsie on 09.19.05 @ 07:44 AM CST [
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Vulnerable, and Doomed in the Storm
If some of those who died in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have been described as stubborn holdouts who ignored an order to evacuate, then these citizens of New Orleans defy that portrait: The 16 whose bodies were wrapped in white sheets in the chapel of Memorial Medical Center. The 34 whose corpses were abandoned and floating in St. Rita's Nursing Home. The 15 whose bodies were stored in an operating room turned makeshift morgue at Methodist Hospital.
“The statement that you can judge a society by the way it treats elders and the vulnerable is a good way to look at our society.” Alice Hedt, National Citizens’ Coalition for Nursing Home Reform executive director
The count does not stop there. Of the dead collected so far in the New Orleans area, more than a quarter of them, or at least 154, were patients, mostly elderly, who died in hospitals or nursing homes, according to interviews with officials from 8 area hospitals and 26 nursing homes. By the scores, people without choice of whether to leave or stay perished in New Orleans, trapped in health care facilities and in many cases abandoned by their would-be government rescuers.
Heroic efforts by doctors and nurses across the city prevented the toll from being vastly higher. Yet the breadth of the collapse of one of society's most basic covenants - to care for the helpless - suggests that the elderly and critically ill plummeted to the bottom of priority lists as calamity engulfed New Orleans.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 09.19.05 @ 07:36 AM CST [
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Britain 'sleepwalking to segregation'
...The minister for constitutional affairs, Harriet Harman, agreed that some of Britain's black and poor communities were beginning to resemble those in the US.
"We don't want to get into a situation like America - but if you look at the figures we are already looking like America," she told the Independent. "In London, poor, young and black people don't register to vote."
Among the measures Mr Phillips will suggest is for "white" schools to be forced to take larger numbers of ethnic minority pupils to aid integration.
Mr Phillips admits his message is "bleak", but says the UK must heed the lessons of Hurricane Katrina.
"The fact is that we are a society which - almost without noticing it - is becoming more divided by race and religion," he will say.
Some districts are on their way to "literal black holes into which nobody goes without fear and trepidation and from which nobody ever escapes undamaged".
He will warn that this situation risks culminating in a "New Orleans-style Britain of passively coexisting ethnic and religious communities, eyeing each other over the fences of our differences".
In his assessment of the UK following the July 7 terror attacks on London, Mr Phillips will add: "We are sleepwalking our way to segregation.
"We are becoming strangers to each other and leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream."
guardian.co.uk"Literal black holes..."
rootsie on 09.19.05 @ 07:31 AM CST [
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Sunday, September 18th
President Chavez's Speech to the United Nations
Your Excellencies, friends, good afternoon:
The original purpose of this meeting has been completely distorted. The imposed center of debate has been a so-called reform process that overshadows the most urgent issues, what the peoples of the world claim with urgency: the adoption of measures that deal with the real problems that block and sabotage the efforts made by our countries for real development and life.
Five years after the Millennium Summit, the harsh reality is that the great majority of estimated goals- which were very modest indeed- will not be met.
We pretended reducing by half the 842 million hungry people by the year 2015. At the current rate that goal will be achieved by the year 2215. Who in this audience will be there to celebrate it? That is only if the human race is able to survive the destruction that threats our natural environment. We had claimed the aspiration of achieving universal primary education by the year 2015. At the current rate that goal will be reached after the year 2100. Let us prepare, then, to celebrate it.
Friends of the world, this takes us to a sad conclusion: The United Nations has exhausted its model, and it is not all about reform. The XXI century claims deep changes that will only be possible if a new organization is founded. This UN does not work. We have to say it. It is the truth. These transformations – the ones Venezuela is referring to- have, according to us, two phases: The immediate phase and the aspiration phase, a utopia. The first is framed by the agreements that were signed in the old system. We do not run away from them. We even bring concrete proposals in that model for the short term. But the dream of an ever-lasting world peace, the dream of a world not ashamed by hunger, disease, illiteracy, extreme necessity, needs-apart from roots- to spread its wings to fly. We need to spread our wings and fly. We are aware of a frightening neoliberal globalization, but there is also the reality of an interconnected world that we have to face not as a problem but as a challenge. We could, on the basis of national realities, exchange knowledge, integrate markets, interconnect, but at the same time we must understand that there are problems that do not have a national solution: radioactive clouds, world oil prices, diseases, warming of the planet or the hole in the ozone layer. These are not domestic problems. As we stride toward a new United Nations model that includes all of us when they talk about the people, we are bringing four indispensable and urgent reform proposals to this Assembly: the first; the expansion of the Security Council in its permanent categories as well as the non permanent categories, thus allowing new developed and developing countries as new permanent and non permanent categories. The second; we need to assure the necessary improvement of the work methodology in order to increase transparency, not to diminish it. The third; we need to immediately suppress- we have said this repeatedly in Venezuela for the past six years- the veto in the decisions taken by the Security Council, that elitist trace is incompatible with democracy, incompatible with the principles of equality and democracy.
And the fourth; we need to strengthen the role of the Secretary General; his/her political functions regarding preventive diplomacy, that role must be consolidated. The seriousness of all problems calls for deep transformations. Mere reforms are not enough to recover that “we” all the peoples of the world are waiting for. More than just reforms we in Venezuela call for the foundation of a new United Nations, or as the teacher of Simón Bolívar, Simón Rodríguez said: “Either we invent or we err.”
At the Porto Alegre World Social Forum last January different personalities asked for the United Nations to move outside the United States if the repeated violations to international rule of law continue. Today we know that there were never any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The people of the United States have always been very rigorous in demanding the truth to their leaders; the people of the world demand the same thing. There were never any weapons of mass destruction; however, Iraq was bombed, occupied and it is still occupied. All this happened over the United Nations. That is why we propose this Assembly that the United Nations should leave a country that does not respect the resolutions taken by this same Assembly. Some proposals have pointed out to Jerusalem as an international city as an alternative. The proposal is generous enough to propose an answer to the current conflict affecting Palestine. Nonetheless, it may have some characteristics that could make it very difficult to become a reality. That is why we are bringing a proposal made by Simón Bolívar, the great Liberator of the South, in 1815. Bolívar proposed then the creation of an international city that would host the idea of unity.
We believe it is time to think about the creation of an international city with its own sovereignty, with its own strength and morality to represent all nations of the world. Such international city has to balance five centuries of unbalance. The headquarters of the United Nations must be in the South. Ladies and gentlemen, we are facing an unprecedented energy crisis in which an unstoppable increase of energy is perilously reaching record highs, as well as the incapacity of increase oil supply and the perspective of a decline in the proven reserves of fuel worldwide. Oil is starting to become exhausted.
For the year 2020 the daily demand for oil will be 120 million barrels. Such demand, even without counting future increments- would consume in 20 years what humanity has used up to now. This means that more carbon dioxide will inevitably be increased, thus warming our planet even more.
Hurricane Katrina has been a painful example of the cost of ignoring such realities. The warming of the oceans is the fundamental factor behind the demolishing increase in the strength of the hurricanes we have witnessed in the last years. Let this occasion be an outlet to send our deepest condolences to the people of the United States. Their people are brothers and sisters of all of us in the Americas and the rest of the world.
It is unpractical and unethical to sacrifice the human race by appealing in an insane manner the validity of a socioeconomic model that has a galloping destructive capacity. It would be suicidal to spread it and impose it as an infallible remedy for the evils which are caused precisely by them.
Not too long ago the President of the United States went to an Organization of American States’ meeting to propose Latin America and the Caribbean to increase market-oriented policies, open market policies-that is neoliberalism- when it is precisely the fundamental cause of the great evils and the great tragedies currently suffered by our people. : The neoliberal capitalism, the Washington Consensus. All this has generated is a high degree of misery, inequality and infinite tragedy for all the peoples on his continent. What we need now more than ever Mr. President is a new international order. Let us recall the United Nations General assembly in its sixth extraordinary session period in 1974, 31 years ago, where a new International Economic Order action plan was adopted, as well as the States Economic Rights and Duties Charter by an overwhelming majority, 120 votes for the motion, 6 against and 10 abstentions. This was the period when voting was possible at the United Nations. Now it is impossible to vote. Now they approve documents such as this one which I denounce on behalf of Venezuela as null, void and illegitimate. This document was approved violating the current laws of the United Nations. This document is invalid! This document should be discussed; the Venezuelan government will make it public. We cannot accept an open and shameless dictatorship in the United Nations. These matters should be discussed and that is why I petition my colleagues, heads of states and heads of governments, to discuss it.
I just came from a meeting with President Néstor Kirchner and well, I was pulling this document out; this document was handed out five minutes before- and only in English- to our delegation. This document was approved by a dictatorial hammer which I am here denouncing as illegal, null, void and illegitimate.
Hear this, Mr. President: if we accept this, we are indeed lost. Let us turn off the lights, close all doors and windows! That would be unbelievable: us accepting a dictatorship here in this hall.
Now more than ever- we were saying- we need to retake ideas that were left on the road such as the proposal approved at this Assembly in 1974 regarding a New Economic International Order. Article 2 of that text confirms the right of states to nationalizing the property and natural resources that belonged to foreign investors. It also proposed to create cartels of raw material producers. In the Resolution 3021, May, 1974, the Assembly expressed its will to work with utmost urgency in the creation of a New Economic International Order based on- listen carefully, please- “the equity, sovereign equality, interdependence, common interest and cooperation among all states regardless of their economic and social systems, correcting the inequalities and repairing the injustices among developed and developing countries, thus assuring present and future generations, peace, justice and a social and economic development that grows at a sustainable rate.”
The main goal of the New Economic International Order was to modify the old economic order conceived at Breton Woods.
We the people now claim- this is the case of Venezuela- a new international economic order. But it is also urgent a new international political order. Let us not permit that a few countries try to reinterpret the principles of International Law in order to impose new doctrines such as “pre-emptive warfare.” Oh do they threaten us with that pre-emptive war! And what about the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine? We need to ask ourselves. Who is going to protect us? How are they going to protect us?
I believe one of the countries that require protection is precisely the United States. That was shown painfully with the tragedy caused by Hurricane Katrina; they do not have a government that protects them from the announced nature disasters, if we are going to talk about protecting each other; these are very dangerous concepts that shape imperialism, interventionism as they try to legalize the violation of the national sovereignty. The full respect towards the principles of International Law and the United Nations Charter must be, Mr. President, the keystone for international relations in today’s world and the base for the new order we are currently proposing.
It is urgent to fight, in an efficient manner, international terrorism. Nonetheless, we must not use it as an excuse to launch unjustified military aggressions which violate international law. Such has been the doctrine following September 11. Only a true and close cooperation and the end of the double discourse that some countries of the North apply regarding terrorism, could end this terrible calamity.
In just seven years of Bolivarian Revolution, the people of Venezuela can claim important social and economic advances.
One million four hundred and six thousand Venezuelans learned to read and write. We are 25 million total. And the country will-in a few days- be declared illiteracy-free territory. And three million Venezuelans, who had always been excluded because of poverty, are now part of primary, secondary and higher studies. Seventeen million Venezuelans-almost 70% of the population- are receiving, and for the first time, universal healthcare, including the medicine, and in a few years, all Venezuelans will have free access to an excellent healthcare service. More thatn a million seven hundred tons of food are channeled to over 12 million people at subsidized prices, almost half the population. One million gets them completely free, as they are in a transition period. More than 700 thousand new jobs have been created, thus reducing unemployment by 9 points. All of this amid internal and external aggressions, including a coup d’etat and an oil industry shutdown organized by Washington. Regardless of the conspiracies, the lies spread by powerful media outlets, and the permanent threat of the empire and its allies, they even call for the assassination of a president.
The only country where a person is able to call for the assassination of a head of state is the United States. Such was the case of a Reverend called Pat Robertson, very close to the White House: He called for my assassination and he is a free person. That is international terrorism! We will fight for Venezuela, for Latin American integration and the world. We reaffirm our infinite faith in humankind. We are thirsty for peace and justice in order to survive as species. Simón Bolívar, founding father of our country and guide of our revolution swore to never allow his hands to be idle or his soul to rest until he had broken the shackles which bound us to the empire. Now is the time to not allow our hands to be idle or our souls to rest until we save humanity.
Translated by Néstor Sánchez
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 09.18.05 @ 09:41 AM CST [
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Iran Proclaims Right to Nuclear Energy
UNITED NATIONS - Iran's president proclaimed his country's "inalienable right" to produce nuclear fuel Saturday, defiantly rejecting a European offer of economic incentives if the Mideast nation would halt its uranium enrichment program.
In a fiery speech to the U.N. General Assembly, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied his nation had any intention of producing nuclear weapons. To prove that, he offered foreign countries and companies a role in Iran's nuclear energy production.
The Iranian leader lashed out at the United States for its insistence on keeping its nuclear weapons even as it rejected Iran's efforts to build a peaceful energy program.
He said Iran has a right to produce nuclear fuel under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and implicitly accused the Europeans and Americans of "misrepresenting" Iran's desire for civilian nuclear energy "as the pursuit of nuclear weapons."
"This is nothing more than a pure propaganda ploy," he said.
"The Islamic Republic of Iran reiterates its previously and repeatedly declared position that in accordance with our religious principles, pursuit of nuclear weapons is prohibited," Ahmadinejad said.
The Europeans and Americans have argued that Iran doesn't need to enrich uranium because it can obtain it from other countries, but Ahmadinejad said "the peaceful use of nuclear energy without a fuel cycle is an empty proposition."
To reassure the international community of Iran's peaceful intentions, Ahmadinejad said his government is prepared to take "the most far reaching step outside the requirements of the NPT... in keeping with Iran's inalienable right to have access to a nuclear fuel cycle."
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, has already installed cameras to monitor Iran's nuclear activities, he said.
As a further "confidence building measure and in order to provide the greatest degree of transparency the Islamic Republic of Iran is prepared to engage in serious partnership with private and public sectors of other countries in the implementation of uranium enrichment programs in Iran," he said.
news.yahoo.com
rootsie on 09.18.05 @ 09:29 AM CST [
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Widespread Hunger Strike at Guantánamo
A hunger strike at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has unsettled senior commanders there and produced the most serious challenge yet to the military's effort to manage the detention of hundreds of terrorism suspects, lawyers and officials say.
As many as 200 prisoners - more than a third of the camp - have refused food in recent weeks to protest conditions and prolonged confinement without trial, according to the accounts of lawyers who represent them. While military officials put the number of those participating at 105, they acknowledge that 20 of them, whose health and survival are being threatened, are being kept at the camp's hospital and fed through nasal tubes and sometimes given fluids intravenously.
The military authorities were so concerned about ending a previous strike this summer that they allowed the establishment of a six-member prisoners' grievance committee, lawyers said. The committee, a sharp departure from past practice in which camp authorities refused to cede any control or role to the detainees, was quickly ended, the lawyers say.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 09.18.05 @ 09:19 AM CST [
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Avian Flu: Is the Government Ready for an Epidemic?
Sept. 15, 2005 — It could kill a billion people worldwide, make ghost towns out of parts of major cities, and there is not enough medicine to fight it. It is called the avian flu.
This week, the U.S. government agreed to stockpile $100 million worth of a still-experimental vaccine, while at the United Nations Summit in New York, both the head of the U.N. World Health Organization and President Bush warned of the virus' deadly potential.
"We must also remain on the offensive against new threats to public health, such as the Avian influenza," Bush said in his speech to world leaders. "If left unchallenged, the virus could become the first pandemic of the 21st century."
According to Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, Bush's call to remain on the offensive has come too late.
abcnews.go.com
rootsie on 09.18.05 @ 09:13 AM CST [
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Military May Play Bigger Relief Role
President Bush's push to give the military a bigger role in responding to major disasters like Hurricane Katrina could lead to a loosening of legal limits on the use of federal troops on U.S. soil.
Pentagon officials are reviewing that possibility, and some in Congress agree it needs to be considered.
Bush did not define the wider role he envisions for the military. But in his speech to the nation from New Orleans on Thursday, he alluded to the unmatched ability of federal troops to provide supplies, equipment, communications, transportation and other assets the military lumps under the label of "logistics."
The president called the military "the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice."
At question, however, is how far to push the military role, which by law may not include actions that can be defined as law enforcement _ stopping traffic, searching people, seizing property or making arrests. That prohibition is spelled out in the Posse Comitatus Act of enacted after the Civil War mainly to prevent federal troops from supervising elections in former Confederate states.
Speaking on the Senate floor Thursday, Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said, "I believe the time has come that we reflect on the Posse Comitatus Act." He advocated giving the president and the secretary of defense "correct standby authorities" to manage disasters.
breitbart.com
rootsie on 09.18.05 @ 09:09 AM CST [
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Saturday, September 17th
Chavez: U.S. Plans to Invade Venezuela
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Friday he has documentary evidence that the United States plans to invade his country.
Chavez, interviewed on ABC's ''Nightline,'' said the plan is called ''Balboa'' and involves aircraft carriers and planes. A transcript of the interview was made available by ''Nightline.''
He said U.S. soldiers recently went to Curacao, an island off Venezuela's northwest coast. He described as a ''lie'' the official U.S. explanation that they visited Curacao for rest and recreation.
''They were doing movements. They were doing maneuvers,'' Chavez said, speaking through a translator.
He added: ''We are coming up with the counter-Balboa plan. That is to say if the government of the United States attempts to commit the foolhardy enterprise of attacking us, it would be embarked on a 100-year war. We are prepared.''
Chavez has been attending the summit of world leaders at the United Nations in New York this week. On Thursday, he denounced the U.S.-led war in Iraq and told other leaders they should consider moving the U.N. headquarters out of the United States.
To prove U.S. intentions to invade Venezuela, Chavez offered to send ''Nightline'' host Ted Koppel maps and other documentation.
''What I can't tell you is how we got it, to protect the sources, how we got it through military intelligence,'' he said.
In the event of a U.S. invasion, Chavez said the United States can ''just forget'' about receiving any more oil from his country.
nytimes.comChavez Takes Bush to Task on World Stage Over War in Iraq "There were never weapons of mass destruction but Iraq was bombed, and over U.N. objections, (it was) occupied and continues being occupied," Chavez said. Bush alleged that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction but none have been found, shattering one of his main arguments for going to war.
"That's why we propose to this assembly that the United Nations leave this country, which is not respectful of the very resolutions of this assembly," Chavez said.
Chavez, a close ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, suggested moving U.N. headquarters New York to an international city "outside the sovereignty of any state" and said some have mentioned Jerusalem as one possibility.
But the Venezuelan leader said the new headquarters has to be in the South, home to most developing countries.
Bush was not in the audience when Chavez spoke to the world representatives. But the U.S. president did address the summit's the opening session on Wednesday morning, then returned to Washington later that day.
World leaders at the summit had been asked to speak for five minutes but Chavez ran long and when the presiding diplomat passed him a note saying his time was up, he threw it on the floor. He said if Bush could speak for 20 minutes, so could he.
When he finally stopped, he got what observers said was the loudest applause of the summit.
Hugo Chavez: «United States a terrorist state» At a press conference after his speech, Chavez said that the United States was a "terrorist state" because of its actions in Iraq, Robertson's assassination call and for harboring Luis Posada Carriles, who is wanted for the bombing of a Cuban airliner.
"It is a terrorist state. It is a government that violates all rules and behaves shamelessly," he said.
"The United States is the champion of double standards. The United States' government defends terrorism. They talk of the fight against the terrorism, but they commit terrorism, state terrorism," said Chavez.
The Venezuelan president said the United States had used napalm in Iraq and protects Posada Carriles, who is being held in the United States on immigration charges.
rootsie on 09.17.05 @ 08:54 AM CST [
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Frances Newton Died for Bush's Sins
Frances Newton died Wednesday for Bush's sins.
The 40-year-old black woman, executed by the death-obsessed state of Texas last night following a rejection by the US Supreme Court of her attorneys' last-ditch appeal, and after the state's craven and bloodthirsty "pardons and parole" board refused to recommend a stay to Gov. Rick Perry, hardly merited mention in the nation's media, which is now awash in stories about Bush's disaster in New Orleans. (The story got a 79-word shirt-tail report on page 25 of the New York Times, tucked under a larger story about the House changing rules for hate crimes and child molesters, and next to a story about Hurricane Ophelia.)
Those who are looking for an example of an innocent person's being executed by the state may well find it in the case of this unfortunate woman, who almost certainly was not guilty of killing her husband and child as charged by the state of Texas.
Her guilt was always hard to fathom, with the prosecution claiming that, after killing her alleged victims, Newton somehow left the scene, disposed of the gun, and returned only 30 minutes later with not a trace of blood on her body or clothes, which were all dry-a good trick, as OJ Simpson could attest, given the amount of blood at the scene.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 09.17.05 @ 08:41 AM CST [
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US conservatives round on Bush over Katrina aid pledges
US president George Bush's promise to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf coast "higher and better" has triggered a wave of anxiety among conservatives in his own party, who are shocked at the expansion of the federal role in disaster relief.
Yesterday Mr Bush led the country in a day of prayer for the victims of Hurricane Katrina in Washington's national cathedral, declaring: "The destruction of this hurricane was beyond any human power to control, but the restoration of broken communities and disrupted lives now rests in our hands." But his ambitious pledge the night before to lead "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen" has dismayed many of his own followers.
The promise was made in a dramatic prime-time address to the nation from a floodlit Jackson Square in the heart of New Orleans, where President Bush attempted to rebuild his credibility as a strong leader. In doing so, he apologised once more for the bungled, delayed response of the federal government.
...The promise of arguably the biggest federal government project since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal triggered a reaction among fiscal and "small-government" conservatives. "This is a shocking expansion of the federal role in disaster relief," said Stephen Slivinski, director of budget studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian thinktank. "The fear is these programmes that are supposed to be temporary will find a permanent home in the budget."
The broad and deep tax cuts of the Bush administration's first term coupled with the Iraq war drove the federal budget from a surplus to a $412bn deficit in 2004. Higher tax revenues brought White House predictions it would drop to $333bn this year, but that hope has been dashed.
Some Republicans are voicing their unease. Senator Tom Coburn declared: "I don't believe that everything that should happen in Louisiana should be paid for by the rest of the country."
So far, Mr Slivinski said, Republican rebels in Congress could be counted "on two hands and one foot" but he predicted that, as congressional elections approach next year, concern will rise when leaders face the rank and file, who still believe in small government and balanced budgets.
guardian.co.ukWell they knew all this very well when they gave their liberal speech. It was a weird experience sitting there listening to Bush touch on every point Democrats have been making for 50 years. I wonder what they'll cut instead of raising taxes on the rich: how about Medicaid? That way you rob poor people to 'help' other ones.Ishmael Reed: Race, Katrina, and the Media
rootsie on 09.17.05 @ 08:30 AM CST [
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After Blocking the Bridge, Gretna Circles the Wagons
GRETNA, Louisiana - Little over a week after this mostly white suburb became a symbol of callousness for using armed officers to seal one of the last escape routes from New Orleans — trapping thousands of mostly black evacuees in the flooded city — the Gretna City Council passed a resolution supporting the police chief's move.
"This wasn't just one man's decision," Mayor Ronnie C. Harris said Thursday. "The whole community backs it."
Three days after Hurricane Katrina hit, Gretna officers blocked the Mississippi River bridge that connects their city to New Orleans, exacerbating the sometimes troubled relationship with their neighbor. The blockade remained in place into the Labor Day weekend.
Gretna (pop. 17,500) is a feisty blue-collar city, two-thirds white, that prides itself on how quickly its police respond to 911 calls; it warily eyes its neighbor, a two-thirds black city (pop. about 500,000) that is also a perennial contender for the murder capital of the U.S.
Itself deprived of power, water and food for days after Katrina struck Aug. 29, Gretna suddenly became the destination for thousands of people fleeing New Orleans. The smaller town bused more than 5,000 of the newcomers to an impromptu food distribution center miles away. As New Orleans residents continued to spill into Gretna, tensions rose.
After someone set the local mall on fire Aug. 31, Gretna Police Chief Arthur S. Lawson Jr. proposed the blockade.
"I realized we couldn't continue, manpower-wise, fuel-wise," Lawson said Thursday. Armed Gretna police, helped by local sheriff's deputies and bridge police, turned hundreds of men, women and children back to New Orleans.
commondreams.org
rootsie on 09.17.05 @ 08:20 AM CST [
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FEMA's City of Anxiety in Florida
PUNTA GORDA, Fla. -- "Someone killed my dog," sputtered Royaltee Forman, still livid two weeks later.
"They just threw him out the window and hung him with his own leash," he said, convinced that someone broke into his home while he was out. "I mean, what kind of place has this become?"
Forman's place is FEMA City, a dusty, baking, treeless collection of almost 500 trailers that was set up by the federal emergency agency last fall to house more than 1,500 people made homeless by Hurricane Charley, one of the most destructive storms in recent Florida history. The free shelter was welcomed by thankful survivors back then; almost a year later, most are still there -- angry, frustrated, depressed and increasingly desperate.
"FEMA City is now a socioeconomic time bomb just waiting to blow up," said Bob Hebert, director of recovery for Charlotte County, where most FEMA City residents used to live. "You throw together all these very different people under already tremendous stress, and bad things will happen. And this is the really difficult part: In our county, there's no other place for many of them to go."
As government efforts move forward to relocate and house some of the 1 million people displaced by Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast -- including plans to collect as many as 300,000 trailers and mobile homes for them -- officials here say their experience offers some harsh and sobering lessons about the difficulties ahead.
Most troubling, they said, is that while the badly damaged town of Punta Gorda is beginning to rebuild and even substantially upgrade one year after the storm, many of the area's most vulnerable people are being left badly behind.
washingtonpost.com
rootsie on 09.17.05 @ 08:15 AM CST [
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English exams hit by epidemic of street language
An epidemic of the use of street-culture language broke out in this year's GCSE English exam essays, according to examiners.
A report by the Edexcel exam board said there was "a surprising number of lapses" in standard English. It issued a reminder to teachers that they should discourage pupils from using "street language and text style", adding: "Most answers require formal expression [of language]."
"Many concerns were expressed by examiners about elementary errors, often appearing in the work of apparently able candidates," the report continued.
"At this level it is almost unforgivable for a candidate to use a lower case for the first person pronoun - and yet in occasional answers this mistake was repeated throughout essays." It added that the use of street and text language "appeared with surprisingly regularity in the work of candidates who clearly aspired to at least a C grade".
"Most answers require formal expression but - even when an informal register or style is appropriate - candidates should remain aware of the examination context and, in particular, should not use street language and text style," it said.
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 09.17.05 @ 08:10 AM CST [
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Global Warming 'Past the Point of No Return'
A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.
They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.
The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a "tipping point" beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically.
Satellites monitoring the Arctic have found that the extent of the sea ice this August has reached its lowest monthly point on record, dipping an unprecedented 18.2 per cent below the long-term average.
Experts believe that such a loss of Arctic sea ice in summer has not occurred in hundreds and possibly thousands of years. It is the fourth year in a row that the sea ice in August has fallen below the monthly downward trend - a clear sign that melting has accelerated.
commondreams.org
rootsie on 09.17.05 @ 08:05 AM CST [
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Poll: 8 in 10 Want Drivers to Drop SUVs
Eight in 10 people say it's important for Americans now driving sport utility vehicles to switch to more fuel-efficient vehicles to reduce the nation's dependence on oil, a poll found.
With gas prices hovering around $3 a gallon nationally and the price of natural gas rising sharply, six in 10 said they are not confident President Bush is taking the right approach to solving the nation's energy problems, according to the survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
Given several choices for dealing with energy problems, the public has some clear preferences:
-Almost seven in 10 want the government to establish price controls on gasoline and want more spending on subway, rail and bus systems.
-Just over seven in 10 want to give tax cuts to companies to develop wind, solar and hydrogen energy.
-Just over eight in 10 want higher fuel efficiency required for cars, trucks and SUVs.
-Slightly more than half, 52 percent, favor giving tax cuts to energy companies to explore for more oil.
commondrams.orgOut of steam: India's decrepit railways in line for overhaul Everything about the Indian railways is epic, from the distances covered and the millions transported, to the endless hours spent waiting for a train. Until now the choice for passengers has been first class or "hard class". And neither offered a pleasant experience.
Its ageing trains and decaying stations are notorious for delays, overcrowding and surly employees. Bathrooms stink, security is poor, and rats and stray dogs roam many stations.
All that is supposed to change after the government gave the state railway one month to clean up its act. Rail authorities have been ordered to implement a "touch and feel" programme to transform its antique network into a modern customer-focused environment.
One of the more remarkable legacies of the colonial era, Indian Railways is among the world's largest employers, with a staff of 1.6 million. It has 40,000 miles of track with 7,000 stations, and more than 11,000 trains running every day. The network is a lifeline to the nation's poor, providing long-distance connections for as little as £1 and supports the livelihoods of some 80 million people.
While in the U.S. there is virtually no cheap long-distance transportation. What happens to the burbs when the oil runs out?
rootsie on 09.17.05 @ 08:01 AM CST [
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Friday, September 16th
Pentagon draft plan calls for preemptive use of nukes
Critics say plan is designed for possible attack against Iran.
The Pentagon has drafted a revised plan to allow for US military commanders in the field to ask presidential approval to use nuclear weapons in order "to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction." The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the plan would also allow for the use of nuclear weapons to destroy "known" enemy stockpiles of "nuclear, biological or chemical weapons."
To deter the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, the Pentagon paper says preparations must be made to use nuclear weapons and show determination to use them "if necessary to prevent or retaliate against WMD use."
The draft says that to deter a potential adversary from using such weapons, that adversary's leadership must "believe the United States has both the ability and will to pre-empt or retaliate promptly with responses that are credible and effective." The draft also notes that US policy in the past has "repeatedly rejected calls for adoption of 'no first use' policy of nuclear weapons since this policy could undermine deterrence."
GlobalSecurity.org, a leading global intelligence firm, also has a copy of the document on its website. The draft plan's executive summary outlines four key goals:
The US defense strategy aims to achieve four key goals that guide the development of US forces capabilities, their development and use: assuring allies and friends of the US steadfastness of purpose and its capability to fulfill its security commitment; dissuading adversaries from undertaking programs or operations that could threaten US interests or those of our allies and friends; deterring aggression and coercion by deploying forward the capacity to swiftly defeat attacks and imposing severe penalties for aggression on an adversary’s military capability and supporting infrastructure; and, decisively defeating an adversary if deterrence fails.
christiansciencemonitor.com
rootsie on 09.16.05 @ 08:00 AM CST [
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Weldon: Atta Papers Destroyed on Orders
WASHINGTON - A Pentagon employee was ordered to destroy documents that identified Mohamed Atta as a terrorist two years before the 2001 attacks, a congressman said Thursday.
The employee is prepared to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was expected to name the person who ordered him to destroy the large volume of documents, said Rep. Curt Weldon (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa.
Weldon declined to name the employee, citing confidentiality matters. Weldon described the documents as "2.5 terabytes" — as much as one-fourth of all the printed materials in the Library of Congress, he added.
A Senate Judiciary Committee aide said the witnesses for Wednesday's hearing had not been finalized and could not confirm Weldon's comments.
A message left Thursday with a Pentagon spokesman, Army Maj. Paul Swiergosz, was not immediately returned.
Weldon has said that Atta, the mastermind of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and three other hijackers were identified in 1999 by a classified military intelligence unit known as "Able Danger," which determined they could be members of an al-Qaida cell.
On Wednesday, former members of the Sept. 11 commission dismissed the "Able Danger" assertions. One commissioner, ex-Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., said, "Bluntly, it just didn't happen and that's the conclusion of all 10 of us."
Weldon responded angrily to Gorton's assertions.
"It's absolutely unbelievable that a commission would say this program just didn't exist," Weldon said Thursday.
Pentagon officials said this month they had found three more people who recall an intelligence chart identifying Atta as a terrorist prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Two military officers, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott, have come forward to support Weldon's claims.
news.yahoo.comInteresting what pops up on yahoo news and then goes away...
rootsie on 09.16.05 @ 07:56 AM CST [
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Bush Pledges Full Recovery From Katrina
...Going beyond the vein of FDR, Bush addressed the issue of poverty, particularly as it relates to racial disparity in America. The president had been accused of not being quick or sensitive enough in his initial response because the majority of people in need after the hurricane were minorities and poor.
In his remarks, the president acknowledged that poverty in the region has its roots in "a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America" and said the government has a duty to confront poverty with decisive actions.
foxnews.comA flash of Rovian genius, this speech, liberal, humanistic...Earlier in the speech he spoke of the "vulnerable people left to the mercy of criminals, who had no mercy," and that is the truest thing he said, oblivious to the fact that he represents the real criminals here...
rootsie on 09.16.05 @ 07:51 AM CST [
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POLICE STATE IN AMERICA: Now Bush can lock up anyone forever without charge
As if the official ineptitude of the Bush administration in the aftermath of Katrina and the callousness of the Bush family were not enough to digest, a U.S. Federal appeals court has just delivered this bombshell in the Jose Padilla case:
"The Congress of the United States, in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Joint Resolution, provided the President all powers necessary and appropriate to protect American citizens from terrorist acts by those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001... [T]hose powers include the power to detain identified and committed enemies such as Padilla, who associated with al Qaeda and the Taliban regime, who took up arms against this Nation in its war against these enemies, and who entered the United States for the avowed purpose of further prosecuting that war by attacking American citizens and targets on our own soil..."
What this means is that unless the Supreme Court overturns this verdict, the U.S. government can keep Mr Padilla, a U.S. citizen, in jail indefinitely, without charge. Worse, the government will be tempted to invoke this power against pretty much anyone it likes since the Appeals Court made no attempt to verify the authenticity of the allegations made against the prisoner. While the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says the judgment "does not authorize the government to designate and detain as an 'enemy combatant' anyone who it claims is associated with Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups", the bitter truth is that U.S. citizenship will not protect individuals from being deprived of their liberty if the Administration decides they are a threat to U.S. national security. Its Guantanamo time for everyone. And since the war on terror has been described by U.S. officials as "an endless war", the period of incarceration will also be endless. This is precisely what the Italian scholar, Giorgio Agamben, means when he says the State of Exception -- which in 'democratic' countries is meant to be a 'provisional measure' -- has become a normal , routine, paradigmatic form of rule.
globalresearch.caJesse Ventura Compares Bush to Hitler, Says US Becoming a 'fascist state'by Jeff Wells
... since we've come to this almost inconceivable moment, when dogs pick at uncollected corpses in the streets of a murdered American city, preemptive nuclear war against the threat of non-nuclear weapons is official policy, the potential repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act is floated, and a former US Governor - even if it is Jesse Ventura - speaks of fleeing the fascism and ruin that the Bush White House is visiting upon the country, I'm thinking maybe what's really needed is a proper allegory. Something like Bob Dylan's Masked and Anonymous.
rootsie on 09.16.05 @ 07:41 AM CST [
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New Orleans: Dress Rehearsal for American Lockdown
The war has come home to America, right here, right now and so have myriad questions so disturbing that most Americans, even if they know what the questions are, are terrified to ask:
Why is Blackwater USA, the principal mercenary force outsourced by the Pentagon to fight in Iraq, now patrolling the streets of New Orleans?
Why the disgraceful, ghastly slowness of response by the federal government to the Katrina disaster? Why FEMA’s destruction of communication lines and implacable refusal to allow food, water, and medicine into the city? (http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/, September 6)
Why have reconstruction and clean-up contracts conveniently fallen, with perfect timing, to Halliburton and Bechtel, the two U.S. corporations most infamous for their expertise in rebuilding Iraq and worldwide whatever the U.S. military has blown up?
globalresearch.caThe Militarization of New Orleans. From Victims to Vandals: Mass Media and New OrleansOminously, in his speech last night Bush said one of the 'lessons of Katrina' was the need for "greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces."
rootsie on 09.16.05 @ 07:32 AM CST [
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An Evening With Hitchens and Gorgeous George
The crowd gathered on Lexington Avenue awaiting the chance to see Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway's debate of the occupation of Iraq wrapped around the block, and kept growing by the minute. As I stood in line, still hundreds of yards from the auditorium's entrance, I spied Hitchens and an armada of young staffers from the neoconservative cultural journal, the New Criterion, seeding the crowd with leaflets exposing Galloway in bold print as "The Toad to Damascus," an apologist for "his new fascist playmate Bashar al-Assad." The crudely composed leaflets, which seemed to have been adapted from notes Hitchens scribbled on a cocktail napkin, set the tone for a sleazy, pointless debate which ultimately had more to do with its two bilious Brit stars than its purported topic.
In fact, Hitchens and Galloway's verbal slime-fest wasn't much of a debate at all. It was more like a competition for who could do the most possible damage to his own cause. Galloway tried his best, declaring, "You may think that those airplanes in this city on 9/11 came out of a clear, blue sky. I believe they emerged out of a swamp of hatred created by us." True or not, Galloway had severely miscalculated. He was in New York City, after all, and even anti-war audience members began to boo.
Galloway bulldozed ahead at full-steam, seemingly determined to personify the terrorist-sympathizing, loony leftist lifted from the neoconservative imagination. "How dare you slander the Iraqi resistance?" he asked Hitchens with his trademark stentorian tenor. The Iraqi "resistance?" Did Galloway mean the assorted Ba'athist and al-Qaeda vampires drowning Iraq in a pool of their own countrymen's blood? Or was he referring to a previously unknown band of oppressed peasants led by a cadre of revolutionary intellectuals in a quixotic struggle against Yankee imperialism? He didn't say.
While "Gorgeous" George displayed all the political acuity of Curious George, he was not to be outdone by Hitchens, who defended not only the Bush administration's policy in the Middle East, but its hapless response to Hurricane Katrina. "For people to start pumping out propaganda saying those were black people who were killed in New Orleans is shameful," Hitchens exclaimed with indignation. "Those bodies haven't even been identified." (If only the press had been more contrarian!) He added, "Only the Governor could have given the orders" to send help. For this, Galloway dubbed Hitchens, "The court jester" of the "Bourbon Bushes."
huffingtonpost.com
rootsie on 09.16.05 @ 07:21 AM CST [
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Clinton Launching First Global Summit
An initiative led by former President Clinton to tackle poverty, climate change and other worldwide issues is launching with a gathering of political leaders and activists who are promising to pitch in _ and must put those pledges in writing.
Participants who fall short can't come back next year, said Jay Carson, spokesman for the Clinton Global Initiative.
Among the 800 expected at a Manhattan hotel for the three-day event beginning Thursday are British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, and Clinton himself.
"This conference is not about talk, it's about action," Carson said. Clinton has been "very clear that if people aren't here to make a difference, then they're at the wrong conference."
Some commitments have already been lined up, including establishment of a $100 million foundation to fight poverty, and others will come out at the meeting, Carson said.
Clinton's wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, is speaking on a panel. Other notables include financier George Soros and media chiefs Rupert Murdoch and Richard Parsons. Many participants are already in the city for a summit marking the 60th anniversary of the United Nations.
washingtonpost.com
rootsie on 09.16.05 @ 07:16 AM CST [
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Thursday, September 15th
Ex-FEMA Chief Tells of Frustration and Chaos
Worth reading, just for the pure crap-factor, but here is definitely the quote of the day:"Until you have been there," he said, "you don't realize it is the middle of a hurricane."
Michael D. Brown
nytimes.com
rootsie on 09.15.05 @ 03:49 PM CST [
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Terrorists unite to plot Iraqi civil war
A TERRORIST mastermind has united insurgent groups in Baghdad to target the Iraqi Shia Muslim community with the aim of bringing civil war to Iraq, The Times has learnt.
According to US military intelligence sources, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the man responsible for the bloodiest acts of terror in Iraq over the past two years, now commands thousands of fighters from various rival groups and is set to order further waves of bombings.
Yesterday the self-styled “emir” of Iraq was blamed for a dozen co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad that killed 152 people, the single worst death toll in the city since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Most of the dead were poor Shia labourers killed by a huge car bomb in a busy square.
“The al-Qaeda organisation in Mesopotamia is declaring all-out war on the Rafidha [a pejorative term for Shias], wherever they are in Iraq,” said the 38-year-old in an audio message released on an Islamic website. He urged Sunni Muslims to “wake up from your slumber” and joint the fight.
Last night the threat was being taken seriously by US and Iraqi officials, who have offered a $25 million reward for his capture. “We have got reason to believe that al-Zarqawi has now been given tactical command in the city over groups that have had to merge under him for the sake of survival,” an American intelligence officer in Baghdad told The Times yesterday.
timesonline.co.ukO my goodness what a crock. There certainly are terrorists in a plot to throw Iraq into civil war. Blair and Bush are two of them--maybe 'Zirqawi' works for them.
rootsie on 09.15.05 @ 03:44 PM CST [
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The Man Beneath The Hood Speaks Out: “They tortured me, they humiliated me"
An interview with Shalal el Kaissi, who has become a symbol of U.S. torture .
Translated from an article in La Repubblica, by Mary Rizzo
09/14/05 "ICH" -- -- “They tortured me, they humiliated me, they have destroyed me inside. I want that what has happened to me never happens again, that everyone knows what those months in Abu Ghraib were like. This is my new life: to denounce that which is happening in the Iraqi prisons, to defend the rights of those who are inside of them”. Former prisoner number 151716 of the prison of shame speaks. The man who has been recognised in one of the photo-symbols of the violence of Abu Ghraib: the hooded prisoner, standing balanced on a cardboard box, his shoulders to the wall, with his arms opened and the fingers of his hands connected to electrical wires.
Ali Shalal el Kaissi, 42 years old, was arrested in October of 2003 in a car park near the mosque of El Amariyah and was imprisoned with the accusation of being part of the guerrilla movement. In the disgusting jargon of his torturers, he was “Clawman”, due to a noticeable burn mark on his hand. He was released January of 2004 and, several months later, founded together with another 12 persons, “The association of the victims of American occupation prisons".
Invited to speak at the Conference on Iraq organised by the Anti-Imperialist Camp this October, Hajj Ali (“Hajj is a title that is given to those who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca) knows of the American pressures on the visas which have been denied to the other Iraqis. He is still awaiting a response: “I don’t know if I will be allowed to attend,” he says. In these days he is in Amman, in Jordan, where he has frequented a formation course for humanitarian operators.
When did you see the photo of the hooded man for the first time and did you recognise yourself?
“The volunteers of an Iraqi association that deals with human rights showed me the photos taken at Abu Ghraib. It was a shock, a personal destruction. I suffered that which you see in the images: they covered my head, tortured me and made me undergo such strong pressure. They photographed me many times. But others established that that prisoner was me: human rights organisations and even journalistic investigations, one from the American broadcaster PBS, and another from a magazine, “Vanity Fair”.
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 09.15.05 @ 11:23 AM CST [
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The occupation forces are the real perpetrators of bomb attacks in Iraq?
Iran’s top military commander accused the United States and Israel of planning the non-stop bomb attacks that killed thousands of civilians in Iraq.
Brigadier General Mohammad-Baqer Zolqadr, the deputy commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), told a gathering of senior officials, that the U.S. needs those attacks to justify the continuation of its military presence in Iraq.
“The Americans blame weak and feeble groups in Iraq for insecurity in this country. We do not believe this and we have information that the insecurity has its roots in the activities of American and Israeli spies,” Zolqadr said.
“Insecurity in Iraq is a deeply-rooted phenomenon. The root of insecurity in Iraq lies in the occupation of this country by foreigners”.
“If Iraq is to become secure, there will be no room for the occupiers”.
Zolqadr also said that the U.S. forces pursue “important and strategic goals in their continuing occupation of Iraq”.
The U.S. wanted to remain in Iraq to “plunder the country’s wealth, bring the Middle East under its control, and create security for Israel, which is on the verge of annihilation”.
Zolqadr, moreover, noted that dozens of new U.S. military are being built in Iraq “for this reason they are constantly creating insecurity”.
The U.S.-occupation authority has repeatedly claimed that the Iraqi security forces are not ready yet to protect the country against rebel attacks, with the aim of defending the continued heavy presence of U.S. troops there even after an Iraqi government was elected.
Source: Iran Focus
aljazeera.com
rootsie on 09.15.05 @ 10:55 AM CST [
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Mystery Surrounds Floodwall Breaches
One of the central mysteries emerging in the Hurricane Katrina disaster is why concrete floodwalls in three canals breached during the storm, causing much of the catastrophic flooding, while earthen hurricane levees surrounding the city remained intact.
It probably will take months to investigate and make a conclusive determination about what happened, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. But two Louisiana State University scientists who have examined the breaches suggest that a structural flaw in the floodwalls might be to blame.
"Why did we have no hurricane levee failures but five separate places with floodwall failures?" asked Joseph Suhayda, a retired LSU coastal engineer who examined the breaches last week. "That suggests there may be something about floodwalls that makes them more susceptible to failure. Did (the storm) exceed design conditions? What were the conditions? What about the construction?"
Ivor Van Heerden, who uses computer models to study storm-surge dynamics for the LSU Hurricane Center, has said that fragmentary initial data indicate that Katrina's storm-surge heights in Lake Pontchartrain would not have been high enough to top the canal walls and that a "catastrophic structural failure" occurred in the floodwalls.
Corps project manager Al Naomi said that the Corps' working theory is that the floodwalls were well-constructed, but once topped they gave way after water scoured their interior sides, wearing away their earth-packed bases. But he said some other problem could have caused the breaches.
"They could have been overtopped. There could have been some structural failure. They could have been impacted by some type of debris," Naomi said. "I don't think it's right to make some type of judgment now. It's like presuming the reason for a plane crash without recovering the black box."
Officials long had warned about the danger of levees being topped by high water from a storm surge. Absent topping, floodwalls are supposed to remain intact.
The floodwalls lining New Orleans canals consist of concrete sections attached to steel sheet pile drilled deep into the earth, fortified by a concrete and earthen base. The sections are joined with a flexible, waterproof substance.
Floodwalls were breached in the 17th Street Canal, at two places in the London Avenue Canal, and at two places in the Industrial Canal, Suhayda said. Naomi said last week that one of the Industrial Canal breaches likely was caused by a loose barge that broke through it.
Suhayda said that his inspection of the debris from the 17th Street Canal breach suggests the wall simply gave way. "It looks to have been laterally pushed, not scoured in back with dirt being removed in pieces," he said. "You can see levee material, some distance pushed inside the floodwall area, like a bulldozer pushed it."
He suggested that because the walls failed in a few spots, the flaw may not be in the design but in the construction or materials.
"Those sections in the rest of the wall should have been subjected to the same forces as that section that failed," he said. "Why did one side fail, not the other side?"
Drainage canals typically are lined with floodwalls instead of the wider earthen levees that protect the lakefront because of a lack of space, engineers say.
"It's a right-of-way issue," Naomi said. "Usually, there are homes right up against the canal. You have to relocate five miles of homes (to build a levee), or you can build a floodwall."
Constructing a more expensive earthen levee also would require building farther out into the canal itself, reducing the size of the canal - and the volume of water it could handle.
Naomi said that an earthen levee also could have been breached if the surge had pushed water over the top. "A levee failure might be more gradual than with a floodwall," he said. "It means you may have flooded a little slower."
The central question for engineers investigating the breaches will be whether the floodwalls were topped - and that's still unclear.
The levee system, floodwalls included, is designed to protect against an average storm surge of 11.5 feet above sea level. The Corps adds several more feet of "freeboard" to account for waves and other dynamics.
Naomi said the Industrial Canal floodwalls were topped by water coming in from the east. But scientists don't yet know exactly whether Katrina's Lake Pontchartrain surge was high enough to go over the wall in the two other canals.
Many storm surge gauges stopped functioning during the storm, LSU climatologist Barry Keim, though initial data point to a mi-lake height of eight or nine feet. Heights typically are higher at the Lakefront area because wind pushes water higher against the levees.
Suhayda said the debris line on the lakefront levee adjacent to the canal was "several feet" below the top. The levees are 17 or 18 feet high in that area. The canal levees, however, average only 14 feet. Storm surges have waves and other dynamics that push water still higher than the average height.
"There are big implications for as little as a one-foot change in elevation" of the storm surge, Suhayda said.
If the water did not top the levees, the breaches could prove more mysterious. Typically, the pounding of wave action would be the most likely way to cause a breach, scientists say. But there isn't much wave action in canals.
"Waves constantly breaking on the structure start to erode it and make it become unstable," said LSU coastal geologist Greg Stone, who studies storm-surge dynamics. "But I don't think that was a major factor in the canals. You just don't have the (open area) to allow wave growth to occur."
nola.com
rootsie on 09.15.05 @ 10:52 AM CST [
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Baghdad: The bloodiest day
by Patrick Cockburn
A suicide bomber sparked Baghdad's worst day of slaughter since the fall of Saddam 30 months ago when he lured labourers desperate for work towards his van by offering them jobs and then detonated explosives that killed 114 and injured 156 of them.
On a day when more than a dozen co-ordinated attacks thundered across Baghdad from dawn into the late afternoon - claiming 152 lives and wounding 542 - al-Qa'ida in Iraq said it was retaliating against a US-Iraqi operation directed at the insurgents' northern stronghold of Tal Afar. And as the hours passed with car and roadside bombs shattering the relative calm of the past few days, fears of civil war intensified.
A posting on the internet by al-Qa'ida in Iraq said: "To the nation of Islam, we give you the good news that the battles of revenge for the Sunni people of Tal Afar began yesterday."
Today the carnage continued when 16 policemen and five civilians were killed and about 20 injured when a suicide bomber drove his car into a convoy of police vehicles in Baghdad's southern Dora district, police said. Together with three other bombings, today's death toll in Baghdad rose to more than 30.
Just 24 hours eariler, in Aruba Square in the Shia district of Qadimiyah, the crowd cried: "Why? Why? Why," as the dead and dying were carried out. Severed heads and limbs were stacked beside burnt bodies inside the gates of the local hospital, its floor slippery with blood.
"We gathered and suddenly a car blew up and turned the area into fire and dust and darkness," said Hadi, a worker who survived the blast. Along with some 1,500 others he had gone at dawn to the square where labourers traditionally wait to be hired. Most of those who died were impoverished Shia workers from Iraq's deep south who have come to Baghdad for jobs and sleep rough or in squalid hotels around Aruba.
Oily black smoke rose into the blue sky over Baghdad as more than a dozen bombs exploded across the city throughout the morning. Terror mounted as we heard the detonations. People stayed at home to avoid being caught by the blasts.
Fearing another suicide bomb, police and soldiers stopped vehicles entering Qadimiyah, at the centre of which are the golden domes of a much venerated Shia shrine. But angry and distraught people raced on foot to the nearest hospital to see if friends or relatives were alive or dead.
"Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! God is Great! God is Great! This is a terrible disaster," chanted Sayef Ali Abed as he walked with a nervous gait as if frightened of what he would find at the hospital. "I heard what happened on the radio and came directly because I know my brother was looking for work there. I did not even tell our parents where I was going." In the hospital, Abbas Rada Mohammed, a distraught middle-aged man, was vainly studying a list of the names of 162 injured. "I am looking for my brother. Maybe he is dead or in another hospital."
The people torn apart were not the only ones to die in Iraq yesterday. In a Sunni village 10 miles north of Baghdad near Taji, men dressed as soldiers - and who possibly were soldiers - moved in just before first light and took away 17 men whom they handcuffed, blindfolded and shot. The dead included one policeman and several men who worked as drivers and construction workers at a US base.
One of the many reasons why Iraqis are becoming more terrified by the day is that they do not know if the policemen or soldiers who wake them in the middle of the night truly work for the government or are a death squad.
independent.co.uk
rootsie on 09.15.05 @ 07:45 AM CST [
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Iraq Slams U.S. Detentions, Immunity for Troops
BAGHDAD - Iraq's justice minister has condemned the U.S. military for detaining thousands of Iraqis for long periods without charge and wants to change a U.N. resolution that gives foreign troops immunity from Iraqi law.
Speaking to Reuters, Justice Minister Abdul Hussein Shandal also criticized U.S. detentions of Iraqi journalists and said the media, contrary to U.S. policy in Iraq, must have special legal protection to report on all sides in the conflict.
"No citizen should be arrested without a court order," he said this week, complaining that U.S. suggestions that his ministry has an equal say on detentions were misleading.
"There is abuse (of human rights) due to detentions, which are overseen by the Multinational Force (MNF) and are not in the control of the justice ministry," said Shandal, a Shi'ite judge respected for standing up to Saddam Hussein on the rule of law.
Killings and unjustified arrests of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops risked going unpunished, he said, because of U.N. Security Council resolution 1546, which granted U.S.-led forces sweeping powers following their overthrow of Saddam in 2003.
"The resolution ... gives immunity to the MNF and means taking no action against the MNF no matter what happens or whatever they do against the people of Iraq," Shandal said.
"We're hoping to make more efforts with the Security Council and the whole United Nations to end this resolution or amend it so that anyone who violates Iraqi law or assaults any citizen is held accountable," he said. "This is a matter of sovereignty."
commondreams.org
rootsie on 09.15.05 @ 07:40 AM CST [
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Who Murdered Arafat?
by Uri Averny
...But, since now all dikes have been breached, I am prepared to say what is on my mind: from the first moment, I was sure that Arafat had been poisoned.
Most of the doctors interviewed by Haaretz testified that the symptoms point towards poisoning, and, in fact, are incompatible with any other cause. The report of the French doctors, who treated Arafat during the last two weeks of his life, states that no known cause for his death was discovered. True, the tests did not find any traces of poison in his body - but the tests were conducted only for the usual poisons. It is no secret that many intelligence services in the world have developed poisons that cannot be detected at all, or whose traces disappear in a very short time.
Some years ago, Israeli agents poisoned the Hamas chief Khaled Mash'al with a slight prick in a main street of Amman. His life was saved only because King Hussein demanded that Israel immediately provide the antidote. (As a further indemnity, Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to the release from prison of another Hamas chief, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who was assassinated several years after his return to Gaza by more conventional means - an airborne missile.)
counterpunch.orgAnd yesterday, Ariel Sharon is welcomed at the UN for his 'brave' deecision to 'give peace a chance.' Bush met privately with only two of the leaders who were in NY: Tony Blair and Ariel Sharon.
rootsie on 09.15.05 @ 07:37 AM CST [
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Katrina Havoc Reflects the New America
by Bill McKibben
...Over and over in the last few weeks, people have said that the scenes from the convention center, the highway overpasses and the other suddenly infamous Crescent City venues didn't "look like America," that they seemed instead to be straight from the Third World. That was almost literally accurate, for poor, black New Orleans (whose life had never previously been of any interest to the larger public) is not so different from other poor and black parts of the world. Its infant mortality and life expectancy rates, its educational achievement statistics mirror scores of African and Latin American enclaves.
But it was accurate in another way, too, one full of portent for the future.
A decade ago, environmental researcher Norman Myers began trying to add up the number of people at risk of losing their homes from global warming. He looked at all the obvious places - coastal China, India, Bangladesh, the tiny island states of the Pacific and Indian oceans, the Nile delta, Mozambique, on and on - and predicted that by 2050 it was entirely possible that 150 million people could be "environmental refugees," forced from their homes by rising waters. That's more than the number of political refugees sent scurrying by the bloody century we've just endured.
Try to imagine, that is, the chaos that attends busing 15,000 people from one football stadium to another in the richest nation on Earth, and then multiply it by four orders of magnitude and re-situate your thoughts in the poorest nations on Earth.
And then try to imagine doing it over and over again - probably without the buses.
commondreams.org
rootsie on 09.15.05 @ 07:28 AM CST [
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Back Inside New Orleans
by Jordan Flaherty
What actually happened in New Orleans these past two weeks? We need to sort through the rumors and distortions. Perhaps we need our version of South Africa's Truth And Reconciliation Commission. Some way to sort through the many narratives and find a truth, and to find justice.
I spent yesterday inside the city of New Orleans, speaking to a few of the last holdouts in the 9th ward/ bywater neighborhood. Their stories paint a very different picture from what we've heard in the media. Instead of stories of gangs of criminals and police and soldiers keeping order, there were stories of collective action, everyone looking out for each other, communal responses.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 09.15.05 @ 07:24 AM CST [
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Chertoff delayed federal response, memo shows
WASHINGTON - The federal official with the power to mobilize a massive federal response to Hurricane Katrina was Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, not the former FEMA chief who was relieved of his duties and resigned earlier this week, federal documents reviewed by Knight Ridder show.
Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Chertoff could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials. Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown had only limited authority to do so until about 36 hours after the storm hit, when Chertoff designated him as the "principal federal official" in charge of the storm.
As thousands of hurricane victims went without food, water and shelter in the days after Katrina's early morning Aug. 29 landfall, critics assailed Brown for being responsible for delays that might have cost hundreds of lives.
But Chertoff - not Brown - was in charge of managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster, according to the National Response Plan, the federal government's blueprint for how agencies will handle major natural disasters or terrorist incidents. An order issued by President Bush in 2003 also assigned that responsibility to the homeland security director.
But according to a memo obtained by Knight Ridder, Chertoff didn't shift that power to Brown until late afternoon or evening on Aug. 30, about 36 hours after Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi. That same memo suggests that Chertoff may have been confused about his lead role in disaster response and that of his department.
realcities.com
rootsie on 09.15.05 @ 07:20 AM CST [
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Wednesday, September 14th
The place where bad things happen
When nature turns nasty, refugees flee a swamped city and anarchy prevails, it seems there is only one adjective that will do: Hurricane Katrina has, inevitably, been compared to an "African" tragedy.
Images of helmeted white troops rescuing hapless black people have cemented the comparison, reminding viewers of the famous image from the Mozambican floods of a white South African helicopter crew rescuing a black woman who had given birth in a tree.
Africa has become an acceptable byword for disaster. Even some African journalists such as the CNN correspondent Jeff Koinange, a Kenyan, have been unable to resist the parallel.
"It was an America that resembled a large African refugee camp," Koinange wrote recently in Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper. "This was the New Orleans I encountered in the summer of 2005. Not Niger, not Darfur, not Monrovia - New Orleans, Louisiana, the 18th state in the union."
For Africans, Katrina has not only exposed racial divides within the US; it has been a reminder of how the developed world sees their continent.
As a commentator in the same newspaper put it a few days later: "The Africa of Koinange's imagination is the continent where bad things happen without fail. If there isn't civil strife in which deranged men hack their neighbours with machetes, women with shrivelled breasts suckle their skeletal babies."
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 09.14.05 @ 07:54 AM CST [
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Tal Afar; crackdown in the Sunni Heartland
by Mike Whitney
The siege of Tal Afar follows a familiar pattern of brutal American incursions into densely populated areas under the pretense of fighting terrorism. It is a ritual that is repeated endlessly despite the dismal results. The Pentagon seems to prefer these grand displays of military strength to anything that might produce a political solution. It brings to mind the old saw, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again; expecting a different result." This appears to be the guiding principle of the Defense Dept. with Tal Afar serving as the most recent example.
In the present case, a city of 250,000 has been almost entirely evacuated following weeks of artillery bombardment, aerial bombing raids, downed power-lines and water-system, and house-to-house searches.
Ho-hum. Such paltry events never even reach the front page of American newspapers where the ceremony of American suffering is the only topic of interest.
The remaining occupants of the city have reported the killing and maiming of innocent women and children, the use of chemical weapons, and the predictable destruction of Mosques and holy sites. In Tal Afar the Pentagon's "Hearts and Minds" program seems to be running at high-gear.
There was no doubt that Donald Rumsfeld would use the cover of Hurricane Katrina to mount a massive attack in Iraq, and he didn't disappoint. The military conducted a 10,000 man invasion only to find that the city had been abandoned and that the Iraqi resistance had slipped away without incident. Not one foreign fighter was captured during the siege despite claims that the city was a haven for foreign terrorists.
Colonel Greg Reilly told Al Jazeera that the resistance "went into hiding, avoiding us. That's why there's no fighting..They are not putting up a fight".
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 09.14.05 @ 07:46 AM CST [
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WalMart Lawsuit: Workers from California, China, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nicaragua,Swaziland Denied Basic Rights; Cites Massive, Systematic Wage, Hour Violatio
WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Wal-Mart workers on four continents sued the giant retailer today in California Superior Court in Los Angeles. They maintain that Wal-Mart failed to meet its contractual duty to ensure that its suppliers pay basic wages due; forced them to work excessive hours seven days a week with no time off for holidays; obstructed their attempts to form a union; and, made false and misleading statements to the American public about the company's labor and human rights practices.
rootsie on 09.14.05 @ 07:42 AM CST [
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Unbearable Crime on the Mississippi
by Thulani Davis
When I woke up today, the only thought that came to mind was Reverend Jesse Jackson's indignant cry, "This is the bottom of the slave ship we are looking at."
I think Jesse actually put his finger on what happened to all of us this week. Those shots we've seen are, as he said, the bottom of the slave ships. I think that really goes to why all the rest of us watching are so traumatized. And I think it is necessary to repeat what he has said about how the people in this country have a high tolerance for viewing "black pain." Yes, while we are asking the unheard question as to why a third of New Orleans' population is poor and all black, everyone from the president on down is comfortable with these realities of our ongoing unemployment, overcrowding, homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, neighborhood crime and despair.
Jesse's metaphor is also so apt in that you only had to listen to five minutes of reporting to know families had been separated in ways that could be irreparable – across states, even mothers from month-old babies...just evacuating babies without contact with the parents is such a nightmare, I hate even hearing about it. These are the people who were marginalized from the Internet as well; are they going to run to a computer site?
African Americans in this crisis are further having the devastating experience of watching parents suffer and die right in their faces on sidewalks where people were forced to stand, not even sit for days. And the people crowded next to them experienced the same deaths. And like our ancestors, the poor today will have no access to therapeutic treatment. This is where you just have to agree with Jesse that the people in charge have the capacity to tolerate scenes of suffering they know have been suffered by blacks for generations.
At the same time, people among the stranded have been made aware that they are being portrayed as lawless by media people who are freaking out at the idea of thousands of black people not guarded by police. That in itself is a legacy of slavery. And even as we watched, the reporters and anchors on both NBC and CNN last week both misidentified Congressman John Lewis as Congressman Elijah Cummings for hours. This is one of the staples of the era when I was young and black people first appeared on TV and no one could tell one of us from another. This is really tired, old nonsense. I found myself filing email complaints to the networks, even though I know John Lewis and many others probably told them.
Lastly, there is now what is called the Katrina Diaspora. This diaspora of people without resources puts the restoration of families and community at risk, and in the case of New Orleans' black community, probably makes that impossible. Even people who own land there are going to be in deep trouble trying to hold onto it when the real estate boondoggle gets in the courts. I'm afraid we'll be reading a lot of stupid crap about how they couldn't be found, taxes were owed, etc. as in times past throughout the South. That's why I hope Jesse gets someone to bring people like Congressman Bennie Thompson into the fold, as he is familiar with the commission that had to be set up in the Delta because people are still trying to get back land stolen in the 1930s. And the developers are probably asking for eminent domain to be declared even as I'm typing.
Will Jackson, Rev. Al, Rep. Elijah Cummings, et. al. be asking after the fact, after they've read about development plans in the papers that the black community be represented at the table of planning "the NEW New Orleans?" The cultural heritage of New Orleans, which is so singular, is in serious jeopardy. The perfect mix of forces and cultures was based in a particularly unique feature of the dispersion of Africans during slavery: a disproportionate share of the Yoruba brought here (who were a minority within the groups in Middle Passage) landed in that area. What happened after that in encounters with the French, the Caribbean and the peoples of the States, cannot be replicated. Replacing the architecture with vinyl versions of shotgun and camel back houses will not produce any Buddy Boldens, Jelly Roll Mortons or Louis Armstrongs. As a writer, I myself have used the invaluable records kept there of this unique heritage. Just as one had to worry in the several rounds of the bombing of Baghdad that not only were untold people being killed but some of the oldest treasures of human life, I feel even more concerned that no one will care that thousands have died in New Orleans, others thousands dislocated and that one of our own cultural treasures, the city of New Orleans itself, will be deprived of its cultural engine.
This is a tragedy not only for the millions there on the ground, and the national economy but for the culture at large. We are witnessing in a matter of days a dislocation one-fifth the size of Middle Passage – which took place over more than 200 years. And all those conveniences of modern social organization which would mitigate its effects for most of us – phone, internet, cars, gasoline, and family with ample housing – do not apply to this country's poor. For them, getting lost may mean not being found any more easily than in 1865 when people went on foot and in wagons following word of mouth leads to find where family members may have been sent.
It is unbearable, and unconscionable.
blackcommentator.com
rootsie on 09.14.05 @ 07:37 AM CST [
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Hurricane Looting Not Over Yet
by Jesse Jackson
The victims have been dispersed to states across the country. Many still sleep on cots in arenas, desperately trying to locate family members separated in the furies of Katrina. They are struggling with a staggering psychological toll -- destruction of homes, loss of jobs, suffering, abandonment, displacement to a new city, prospects unclear, past literally under water.
But while the victims are simply trying to get their bearings, the barracudas are circling. Naomi Klein, who witnessed this in Iraq, calls it "disaster capitalism." Congress has appropriated $62 billion already. Hundreds of billions more will be spent on reclaiming the Gulf Coast, rebuilding and relocation. The feeding frenzy has begun.
Already Halliburton is on hand with a no-bid contract for reconstruction. Fluor, Bechtel, the Shaw Group -- Republican-linked firms -- are lining up for contracts. Lobbyists like Joe Allbaugh, close friend of George Bush, and James Lee Witt, close friend of Bill Clinton -- both former heads of the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- are advising their corporate clients to get teams on the scene. Normal rules of contracting and competition are being waived in the emergency. Big bucks are on the table. It is a time to be wired politically.
The ideologues are in the hunt, too. Newt Gingrich is circulating memos calling for turning the region into a massive enterprise zone, slashing corporate taxes, reducing regulations. The oil lobby is pushing for drilling in Alaska and off the shores of the United States. Right wing activist Grover Norquist calls for cutting taxes on the wealthy even more to stimulate the economy. Arizona Republican Rep. Jeff Flak suggests conservatives use the crisis to try out their favorite ideas -- vouchers for education and health care.
President Bush characteristically issued an executive order effectively lowering the wages of reconstruction workers -- and hiking the profits of their companies. He wiped out the requirement to pay prevailing wages in the disaster region, apparently thinking that $9 an hour for construction workers was too high a price to pay. The government can save money, no doubt, by exploiting illegal immigrant labor.
The New Orleans business establishment has already created a headquarters in Baton Rouge. They want to reopen the French Quarter, which didn't suffer much flooding in 90 days. They are planning to lobby for one of the 2008 presidential nominating conventions -- although it is hard to imagine that Republicans would want to remind folks of the administration's monumental failure. They're talking about capturing the next available Super Bowl.
Business optimism and energy are vital for rebuilding New Orleans. Big dreams and big schemes are essential to the human spirit that will bring the Gulf Coast back. But those who were abandoned in the Superdome are looking at another manmade catastrophe. Dispersed in 40 states, Katrina's victims are struggling to get by, as companies pick up contracts and others get the jobs. If New Orleans is rebuilt as an enterprise zone, private investors will wait for the government to clean up the mess and then build luxury condos to replace affordable housing. They'll turn New Orleans into a theme park, with its former residents unable to afford to come back.
We shouldn't let disaster capitalists make a killing while those who suffered the greatest devastation are left out of the mix. We need a serious plan to rebuild vital infrastructure, to make New Orleans sustainable, to develop affordable housing and mass transit, to rebuild schools. Tax breaks and enterprise zones will end up building floating casinos and luxury condos. We need public investment, linked to a Civilian Construction and Conservation Corps that gives priority to housing, hiring, training and putting to work the poor people who lost.
The Bush administration's inaction and indifference after Katrina hit abandoned the poor and added to their suffering. It would be tragic now if action by the Republican Congress and the Bush administration added to the misery. These people already have had their past swept away by Katrina's furies. We should ensure that their future is not erased by right wing ideologues rewarding disaster capitalists and excluding those who suffered the most from the deal.
commondreams/chicago sun-timesA Shameful Proclamation On Thursday, President Bush issued a proclamation suspending the law that requires employers to pay the locally prevailing wage to construction workers on federally financed projects. The suspension applies to parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.
By any standard of human decency, condemning many already poor and now bereft people to subpar wages - thus perpetuating their poverty - is unacceptable.
The ostensible rationale for suspending the law is to reduce taxpayers' costs. Does Mr. Bush really believe it is the will of the American people to deny the prevailing wage to construction workers in New Orleans, Biloxi and other hard-hit areas? Besides, the proclamation doesn't require contractors to pass on the savings they will get by cutting wages from current low levels. Around New Orleans, the prevailing hourly wage for a truck driver working on a levee is $9.04; for an electrician, it's $14.30.
rootsie on 09.14.05 @ 07:30 AM CST [
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"The dead bodies they're trying to hide are their own"
FEMA has relieved volunteers of their emergency mortuary services in Louisiana only, and contracted out to Kenyon, a "wholly-owned subsidiary of Service Corporation International" of Houston, Texas.
Are the alarms sounding yet? LightUpTheDarkness reminds us why they should be:
You may remember Service Corporation International, SCI, as it was part of the case against confirming Alberto Gonzales due to his involvement in the Texas and Florida scandals known as Funeralgate. As we covered back in February, Service Corporation International was "recycling" graves, removing the bodies that were there originally and throwing them in the woods to use the space to house new customers at two Jewish cemeteries in Florida . Service Corporation International, the world’s largest funeral service company, is headed by Robert Waltrip, a longtime friend and generous financial patron of the Bush family. Eliza May was head of the Texas Funeral Services Commission when it began receiving complaints about unlicensed embalmers, and sued when she was fired. Gonzales kept Bush from testifying in this case and was also under scrutiny when a memo surfaced that was sent to his office when he was Bush’s gubernatorial counsel. The memo suggested possible improprieties by two funeral commissioners with ties to SCI and Joeseph Allbaugh, Bush’s former chief of staff in Austin, 2000 presidential campaign manager, who now serves as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The case was suddenly settled in November 2001. The Menorah Gardens case in Florida, involving 72 families, was settled in Oct of 2004.
So, coincident with the emergence of happy talk and silver linings - Sure, it's bad, but New Orleans rescuers find fewer dead than feared - the duties of processing Louisiana's fresh kill is consigned to Bush Texas mafia with a criminal record including desecration of human remains, "recycling" graves and dumping bodies.
There is a deeply bizarre note to this, because to anyone who has paid attention to this slow-motion atrocity the bodies will be hidden in plain sight. (There is pointed irony, as well: in a bid at boosting government transparancy, China has just announced that it will no longer treat death tolls from natural disasters as state secrets.) The arrival of SCI in New Orleans is like a shredder truck pulling up outside the offices of a crooked firm expecting a forensic audit. The evidence - the bodies that are still tied to lamp posts - could be going up in the smoke of one of the city's uncontained fires, or weighted down and dumped in the bayou. It's not unimaginable - SCI has already done this.
rigorousintuition.blogspot.comDisaster Capitalism in New Orleans The cost (or here) of cleaning up the results of Bush's negligence in failing to deal with global warming and spending money needed for New Orleans levees on his war in Iraq may be as much as the $300 billion spent in four years to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Of course, what most people would regard as a cost, the entrepreneurial politicians in the Bush White House see as yet another opportunity to transfer money from taxpayers to their personal friends. The scheme is blatantly obvious:
Bush has started to issue Iraq-style no-bid contracts, with cost-plus provisions that guarantee contractors a certain profit regardless of how much they spend.
Old buddies like Halliburton, Bechtel, and Fluor are first in line. Joe Allbaugh, the former director of FEMA, is lobbying for Halliburton, and another winner of the Katrina windfall, Shaw Group Inc.
In order to increase profitability at the expense of the working people most affected by the hurricane and thus most in need of money, Bush has removed (or here) federal minimum-wage provisions from the reconstruction contracts.
rootsie on 09.14.05 @ 07:29 AM CST [
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Tuesday, September 13th
Glittering sea is the most precious treasure for many in regained land
Some came to burn. Many more came to marvel and then plunder. But for young Mohammed Hijezi it was enough just to touch the sea for the first time. The nine-year-old lives a short run from the beach but until yesterday the Israeli military cut off access and he had never seen the sea.
"I came very early, as soon as I had my breakfast and put on my clothes," he said. "I was supposed to go to school. My parents don't know. I was dreaming of swimming. The water is very beautiful and very cold."
...Yesterday, Israel described the attempts to burn down or bulldoze synagogues in four former Gaza settlements as "barbaric".
guardian.co.ukBarbaric? It is BARBARIC to have forbidden the children of Gaza from putting their feet in the sea. They destroyed a couple of abandoned synagogues? How many houses did the Israelis bulldoze with people living inside???
rootsie on 09.13.05 @ 07:58 AM CST [
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Monday, September 12th
London bombs: Former UK cabinet minister Meacher says MI6 is trying to cover its tracks
In the September 10
Guardian Meacher writes:
'According to a recent report by the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, a contingent was also sent by the Pakistani government, then led by Benazir Bhutto, at the request of the Clinton administration. This contingent was formed from the Harkat-ul- Ansar (HUA) terrorist group and trained by the ISI. The report estimates that about 200 Pakistani Muslims living in the UK went to Pakistan, trained in HUA camps and joined the HUA's contingent in Bosnia. Most significantly, this was "with the full knowledge and complicity of the British and American intelligence agencies".
'As the 2002 Dutch government report on Bosnia makes clear, the US provided a green light to groups on the state department list of terrorist organisations, including the Lebanese-based Hizbullah, to operate in Bosnia - an episode that calls into question the credibility of the subsequent "war on terror".
'For nearly a decade the US helped Islamist insurgents linked to Chechnya, Iran and Saudi Arabia destabilise the former Yugoslavia. The insurgents were also allowed to move further east to Kosovo. By the end of the fighting in Bosnia there were tens of thousands of Islamist insurgents in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo; many then moved west to Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
'Less well known is evidence of the British government's relationship with a wider Islamist terrorist network. During an interview on Fox TV this summer, the former US federal prosecutor John Loftus reported that British intelligence had used the al-Muhajiroun group in London to recruit Islamist militants with British passports for the war against the Serbs in Kosovo. Since July Scotland Yard has been interested in an alleged member of al-Muhajiroun, Haroon Rashid Aswat, who some sources have suggested could have been behind the London bombings.
'According to Loftus, Aswat was detained in Pakistan after leaving Britain, but was released after 24 hours. He was subsequently returned to Britain from Zambia, but has been detained solely for extradition to the US, not for questioning about the London bombings. Loftus claimed that Aswat is a British-backed double agent, pursued by the police but protected by MI6.
'One British Muslim of Pakistani origin radicalised by the civil war in Yugoslavia was LSE-educated Omar Saeed Sheikh. He is now in jail in Pakistan under sentence of death for the killing of the US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 - although many (including Pearl's widow and the US authorities) doubt that he committed the murder. However, reports from Pakistan suggest that Sheikh continues to be active from jail, keeping in touch with friends and followers in Britain.
Sheikh was recruited as a student by Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Muhammad), which operates a network in Britain. It has actively recruited Britons from universities and colleges since the early 1990s, and has boasted of its numerous British Muslim volunteers.
'Investigations in Pakistan have suggested that on his visits there Shehzad Tanweer, one of the London suicide bombers, contacted members of two outlawed local groups and trained at two camps in Karachi and near Lahore. Indeed the network of groups now being uncovered in Pakistan may point to senior al-Qaida operatives having played a part in selecting members of the bombers' cell. The Observer Research Foundation has argued that there are even "grounds to suspect that the [London] blasts were orchestrated by Omar Sheikh from his jail in Pakistan".
'Why then is Omar Sheikh not being dealt with when he is already under sentence of death? Astonishingly his appeal to a higher court against the sentence was adjourned in July for the 32nd time and has since been adjourned indefinitely. This is all the more remarkable when this is the same Omar Sheikh who, at the behest of General Mahmood Ahmed, head of the ISI, wired $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, the leading 9/11 hijacker, before the New York attacks, as confirmed by Dennis Lormel, director of FBI's financial crimes unit.
'Yet neither Ahmed nor Omar appears to have been sought for questioning by the US about 9/11. Indeed, the official 9/11 Commission Report of July 2004 sought to downplay the role of Pakistan with the comment: "To date, the US government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance" - a statement of breathtaking disingenuousness.
'All this highlights the resistance to getting at the truth about the 9/11 attacks and to an effective crackdown on the forces fomenting terrorist bombings in the west, including Britain. The extraordinary US forbearance towards Omar Sheikh, its restraint towards the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, Dr AQ Khan, selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea, the huge US military assistance to Pakistan and the US decision last year to designate Pakistan as a major non-Nato ally in south Asia all betoken a deeper strategic set of goals as the real priority in its relationship with Pakistan. These might be surmised as Pakistan providing sizeable military contingents for Iraq to replace US troops, or Pakistani troops replacing Nato forces in Afghanistan. Or it could involve the use of Pakistani military bases for US intervention in Iran, or strengthening Pakistan as a base in relation to India and China.
'Whether the hunt for those behind the London bombers can prevail against these powerful political forces remains to be seen. Indeed it may depend on whether Scotland Yard, in its attempts to uncover the truth, can prevail over MI6, which is trying to cover its tracks and in practice has every opportunity to operate beyond the law under the cover of national security.'
Michael Meacher is the Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton; he was environment minister from 1997 to 2003.
prisonplanet.com
rootsie on 09.12.05 @ 07:57 PM CST [
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VIDEO: Earwitness tells ABC explosives blew Industrial Canal levee
prisonplanet.com
rootsie on 09.12.05 @ 07:51 PM CST [
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Exiles from a city and from a nation
by Cornel West
It takes something as big as Hurricane Katrina and the misery we saw among the poor black people of New Orleans to get America to focus on race and poverty. It happens about once every 30 or 40 years.
What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was the most naked manifestation of conservative social policy towards the poor, where the message for decades has been: 'You are on your own'. Well, they really were on their own for five days in that Superdome, and it was Darwinism in action - the survival of the fittest. People said: 'It looks like something out of the Third World.' Well, New Orleans was Third World long before the hurricane.
observor.guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 09.12.05 @ 07:36 PM CST [
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Explosive Residue Found on Failed Levee Debris
Source: HalTurnerShow.com
New Orleans, LA -- Divers inspecting the ruptured levee walls surrounding New Orleans found something that piqued their interest: Burn marks on underwater debris chunks from the broken levee wall !
One diver, a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, saw the burn marks and knew immediately what caused them. When he surfaced and showed the evidence to his superior, the on-site Coordinator for FEMA stepped-in and said "You are not here to conduct an investigation as to why this rupture occurred, but only to determine how best to close it." The FEMA coordinator then threw the evidence back into the water and said "You will tell no one about this."
At that point, the diver went back down to do more inspection of the levee. On the second dive, he secreted a small chunk of the debris inside his wet suit and later arranged for it to be sent to trusted military friends at a The U.S. Army Forensic Laboratory at Fort Gillem, Georgia for testing.
According to well placed sources, a military forensic specialist determined the burn marks on the cement chunks did, in fact, come from high explosives. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity said "We found traces of boron-enhanced fluoronitramino explosives as well as PBXN-111. This would indicate at least two separate types of explosive devices."
cytations.blogspot.com
rootsie on 09.12.05 @ 07:30 PM CST [
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Mike Brown Advises 'Take the Scenic Route in Life'
by Judith Moriarty
Take Boss - Hog, Police Chief, Arthur Lawson; of the City of Gretna that is across the bridge from New Orleans and remained dry. When citizens tried to escape to some semblance of normalcy, this bozo had the audacious gall (not surprising down there) to close the bridge to foot traffic. Two paramedics, the Bradshaw couple, visiting New Orleans, joined a group of people who had been turned out by the hotels they were staying at. When they tried to reach the Superdome they were turned back by National Guards.
Ms. Bradshaw stated that she asked, "What's our alternative?" The guards told her that was their problem and that no, they did not have extra water to give them. As they made their way to the bridge in order to leave the city, armed Gretna (bedroom community to New Orleans) police formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Ms. Bradshaw stated on MSNBC Sept 10-05, that they began firing their weapons over their heads. When they asked police why they couldn't cross the bridge, they said that the West Bank wasn't going to become New Orleans. The Bradshaw's said that there was no doubt in their minds, that because there were few whites in their group, with the majority being Black, that's why they were refused help. When the Bradshaw's then set up a camp for the some 90 people, the police came and took their food and water. This Hog - Boss Police Chief, Lawson, said on MSNBC, that Grenta, had no food or places for people to stay; that they were keeping people from crossing for their own protection! If you visit the website of Gretna; you'll note that there are numerous schools, churches, and hotels. The police were allowing cars to pass. This is probably very alien to those who've never lived in the South or in a large city. When I lived in CT, there were these bedroom communities outside the large city where I lived. There were no Blacks, unless they were the maids or groundskeepers. When a veteran I knew, went back to visit the exclusive town, where he grew up, he told me a police cruiser followed him every bit of the way. Back from war and bedraggled and ill, there was no longer the pretense of flags - ribbons - or supporting the troops.
New Orleans will come back, but it will be absent the multitudes of poor folks and Black residents. They'll have themselves a Mardi Gras theme town, complete with hotels and corporate businesses and we'll be picking up the tab. It'll be Disney World Times Square. We'll be made to pick up the tab for decades of ineptness and incompetence; from the derelict levee system, to the barrier islands and marshes - all destroyed from years of oil and gas drilling, and 8000 miles of canals, dug through wetlands, by the Army Corps of Engineers. This disaster was made and created by man and allowed to happen - much like the Everglades, that we're now being billed billions to restore. Hey, but Representative Baker of Baton Rouge was overheard telling lobbyists: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did." Yep - good old God, decided to flood ONLY the poor sections of New Orleans, and protect the French Quarter - and exclusive/business parts of town. It's just like these hypocritical - self -righteous prigs, to shrug and tell the folks, "Obviously you were the sinners in town - the ner' do wells, and God kicked you all to the curb. Got problems go to Him about it."
The Wall Street Journal reports, Sept 8 -05, that "The mostly African - American neighborhoods of New Orleans are largely underwater, and the people who lived there are scattered across the country. But in many of the predominantly white (isn't God good - JM) and more affluent areas streets are dry and passable. Gracious homes are mostly intact and powered by generators."
Full: rense.comMercenaries guard homes of the rich in New Orleans Hundreds of mercenaries have descended on New Orleans to guard the property of the city's millionaires from looters.
The heavily armed men, employed by private military companies including Blackwater and ISI, are part of the militarisation of a city which had a reputation for being one of the most relaxed and easy-going in America.
After scenes of looting and lawlessness in the days immediately after Hurricane Katrina struck, New Orleans has turned into an armed camp, patrolled by thousands of local, state and federal law enforcement officers, as well as 70,000 national guard troops and active-duty soldiers now based in the region.
Blackwater, one of the fastest-growing private security firms in the world, which achieved global prominence last year when four of its men were killed and their bodies mutilated in the Iraqi city of Falluja, has set up camp in the back garden of a vast mansion in the wealthy Uptown district of the city.
..."relaxed and easy-going..."? For who?
rootsie on 09.12.05 @ 07:26 PM CST [
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CNN PRODUCERS TOLD ON-AIR GUESTS: GET ANGRY
After weeks of intense Katrina coverage from the main press, LA TIMES guru and former CNN host Michael Kinsley divulges that CNN was coaching guests to artificially enhance emotions!
Kinsley writes:
"The TV news networks, which only a few months ago were piously suppressing emotional fireworks by their pundits, are now piously encouraging their news anchors to break out of the emotional straitjackets and express outrage. A Los Angeles Times colleague of mine, appearing on CNN last week to talk about Katrina, was told by a producer to 'get angry.'"
drudgereport.com
rootsie on 09.12.05 @ 07:14 PM CST [
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Friday, September 9th
New Orleans tragedy: The 17th street levee was bombed
Report from the Houston Astrodome
10:23: Joel just got removed. Almost arrested. Fox News is down on the floor. I’m in dome, hiding in seats. They’re allowing some media on the floor, not others.
10:31 Just met members of the Polish press, they are being stopped from entering floor. Says this is like the former USSR.
10:57 Raw transcript of comments by NOLA evacuee : "The 17th street levee was bombed by the Army Corps of Engineers to save the more valuable real estate in the city... to keep the French Quarter protected, the ninth ward was sacrificed... people are afraid to speak out... everyone who was near there heard the bombings... they bombed seven times. That’s why they didn’t fix the levees... 20 feet of water. Gators. People dying in water. They let the parishes go, not the city center. Tourist trap was saved over human life. A six year old girl was raped in here.. 9 year old boy killed. A man in the shower beaten. No hot food. No help for elderly."
bellaciao.orgSo they killed people in order to save deserted white neighborhoods.
rootsie on 09.09.05 @ 08:05 PM CST [
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Four Killed in Partisan Violence in Jamaica
KINGSTON, Jamaica, Sept 8 (Reuters) - Four people were shot and killed in partisan violence in the Mountain View community east of Jamaica's capital, where fires and gunfights raged, police said on Thursday.
The violence began on Tuesday during a nationwide protest against rising prices, which was organized by the opposition Jamaica Labour Party and led to a virtual shutdown of commerce on the island.
A 71-year-old man was shot dead by a group of men during a dispute over an impromptu roadblock and police were trying to quell an ongoing dispute as his friends sought revenge.
Three other men were shot and killed during the disturbances in the Mountain View neighborhood that links the capital of Kingston with Norman Manley International Airport.
Police said four houses were set afire and burned to the ground and bombs were thrown into other homes.
Supporters of the ruling People's National Party and the opposition party assigned themselves to sections of the community and have prevented each other from entering the other's neighborhoods.
Scores of frightened residents fled the area and traffic to and from the airport was diverted onto lengthy detours.
The killings pushed Jamaica's murder tally to 1,157, the highest ever recorded for the year to date. The nation of 2.7 million people had 1,469 murders last year and police said the annual toll could top 1,500 for the first time in Jamaica's history.
nytimes.com I have never heard the US Republicans referred to as the 'ruling party'. Of course unruly and inscrutable 'natives' like the ones portrayed in this article need some sort of ruling party, right? This article is also a good example of bias by ommission. They begin by speaking of politically motivated killings and and up talking about the murder rate. It's hard to get it from this article, but yesterday in Jamaica there was a general strike that shut the country down. For the Times, the big story was 'partisan violence.'
rootsie on 09.09.05 @ 02:50 PM CST [
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Advance Men in Charge
The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced this week that it didn't want the news media taking photographs of the dead in New Orleans. A FEMA spokeswoman talked unconvincingly about the dignity of the dead. But the bizarre demand, a creepy echo of the ban on news media coverage of the coffins returning from Iraq, is simply the latest spasm of a gutted federal agency.
It's not really all that surprising that the officials who run FEMA are stressing that all-important emergency response function: the public relations campaign. As it turns out, that's all they really have experience at doing.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 09.09.05 @ 02:33 PM CST [
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Genes Show Signs Brain Still Evolving
WASHINGTON (AP) - The human brain may still be evolving. So suggests new research that tracked changes in two genes thought to help regulate brain growth, changes that appeared well after the rise of modern humans 200,000 years ago.
That the defining feature of humans - our large brains - continued to evolve as recently as 5,800 years ago, and may be doing so today, promises to surprise the average person, if not biologists.
"We, including scientists, have considered ourselves as sort of the pinnacle of evolution," noted lead researcher Bruce Lahn, a University of Chicago geneticist whose studies appear in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
"There's a sense we as humans have kind of peaked," agreed Greg Wray, director of Duke University's Center for Evolutionary Genomics. "A different way to look at is it's almost impossible for evolution not to happen."
apnews.myway.comThis is good news: now we need a mutation, quick.
rootsie on 09.09.05 @ 08:10 AM CST [
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Frustrated: Fire crews to hand out fliers for FEMA
ATLANTA - Not long after some 1,000 firefighters sat down for eight hours of training, the whispering began: "What are we doing here?"
As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin pleaded on national television for firefighters - his own are exhausted after working around the clock for a week - a battalion of highly trained men and women sat idle Sunday in a muggy Sheraton Hotel conference room in Atlanta.
Many of the firefighters, assembled from Utah and throughout the United States by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, thought they were going to be deployed as emergency workers.
Instead, they have learned they are going to be community-relations officers for FEMA, shuffled throughout the Gulf Coast region to disseminate fliers and a phone number: 1-800-621-FEMA.
On Monday, some firefighters stuck in the staging area at the Sheraton peeled off their FEMA-issued shirts and stuffed them in backpacks, saying they refuse to represent the federal agency.
Federal officials are unapologetic.
"I would go back and ask the firefighter to revisit his commitment to FEMA, to firefighting and to the citizens of this country," said FEMA spokeswoman Mary Hudak.
The firefighters - or at least the fire chiefs who assigned them to come to Atlanta - knew what the assignment would be, Hudak said.
"The initial call to action very specifically says we're looking for two-person fire teams to do community relations," she said. "So if there is a breakdown [in communication], it was likely in their own departments."
One fire chief from Texas agreed that the call was clear to work as community-relations officers. But he wonders why the 1,400 firefighters FEMA attracted to Atlanta aren't being put to better use. He also questioned why the U.S. Department of Homeland Security - of which FEMA is a part - has not responded better to the disaster.
The firefighters, several of whom are from Utah, were told to bring backpacks, sleeping bags, first-aid kits and Meals Ready to Eat. They were told to prepare for "austere conditions." Many of them
came with awkward fire gear and expected to wade in floodwaters, sift through rubble and save lives.
"They've got people here who are search-and-rescue certified, paramedics, haz-mat certified," said a Texas firefighter. "We're sitting in here having a sexual-harassment class while there are still [victims] in Louisiana who haven't been contacted yet."
The firefighter, who has encouraged his superiors back home not to send any more volunteers for now, declined to give his name because FEMA has warned them not to talk to reporters.
mosnews.com
rootsie on 09.09.05 @ 08:06 AM CST [
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Oil spillages threaten Gulf of Mexico
Oil storage tanks ruptured by Hurricane Katrina may have dumped as much as 3.7m gallons of crude oil into the lower Mississippi river and surrounding wetlands.
Officials estimate the spillage at roughly a third of the volume of the huge spill when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground off Alaska in 1989. Last night experts said they could not yet assess the short-term effects of the spills but were hopeful there would be few long-term effects. Some of the oil is expected to find its way into the Gulf of Mexico.
But officials at the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality remain cautious because it is difficult to gain access to the area, which can be reached only by water. It is also unclear how much oil has been lost.
financialtimes.com
rootsie on 09.09.05 @ 07:56 AM CST [
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Democrats' anti-Bush petition also seeks political contributions
WASHINGTON -- A new Democratic effort to whip up indignation about the Bush administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina also tried to raise money for Democratic candidates.
Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat and the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, issued an appeal Thursday urging people to sign an online petition to fire the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency over his handling of the Katrina response.
After an inquiry from the Associated Press, the DSCC quickly pulled down the page and said they would donate to charity any money raised by the anti-FEMA petition.
When recipients clicked on a link to the petition, the top center of the screen _ above the call to "Fire the FEMA director" _ had asked for a donation to the DSCC.
nynewsday.com
rootsie on 09.09.05 @ 07:52 AM CST [
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Clarke: Europe must trade civil liberties for security
British Home Secretary Charles Clarke has warned that European citizens will have to accept that civil liberties may have to be bartered away in exchange for protection from terrorists and organised criminals.
theregister.co.uk
rootsie on 09.09.05 @ 07:48 AM CST [
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Hunger strikers pledge to die in Guantánamo
More than 200 detainees in Guantánamo Bay are in their fifth week of a hunger strike, the Guardian has been told.
Statements from prisoners in the camp which were declassified by the US government on Wednesday reveal that the men are starving themselves in protest at the conditions in the camp and at their alleged maltreatment - including desecration of the Qur'an - by American guards.
The statements, written on August 11, have just been given to the British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. They show that prisoners are determined to starve them selves to death. In one, Binyam Mohammed, a former London schoolboy, said: "I do not plan to stop until I either die or we are respected.
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 09.09.05 @ 07:44 AM CST [
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Thursday, September 8th
New Orleans starts to remove dead
Some 25,000 body bags have been sent to the New Orleans area, as authorities begin to recover the dead in the city.
The official death toll stands at 83 in the city, including 30 elderly people found in a flooded nursing home. But thousands are feared to have died.
Bodies remain in the stagnant flood waters as health fears grow for up to 10,000 people still in the city.
Three people are also known to have died from contaminated flood water, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
They are believed to have contracted infections after coming into contact with cholera-related bacteria.
New Orleans' mayor has ordered the forced evacuation of the city, which used to have a population of 450,000.
A temporary morgue in a town about 70 miles (113km) away is preparing to handle 5,000 corpses.
A state health official told the Associated Press he did not know how many bodies to expect.
bbc.co.uk
rootsie on 09.08.05 @ 07:34 AM CST [
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Ukrainian President Fires His Government
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko fired his government Thursday, saying the abrupt action was motivated by an absence of team spirit among Cabinet members and other top aides.
Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's fragile coalition of former opposition leaders fell amid the greatest crisis to face Yushchenko in his seven months in power.
nytimes.comSo much for the bogus "orange revolution."
rootsie on 09.08.05 @ 07:17 AM CST [
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Dueling Reports on Causes of Arafat's Death
New York Times: Infection, StrokeJERUSALEM, Sept. 7 - The medical records of Yasir Arafat, which have been kept secret since his unexplained death last year at a French military hospital, show that he died from a stroke that resulted from a bleeding disorder caused by an unidentified infection.
The first independent review of the records, obtained by The New York Times, suggests that poisoning was highly unlikely and dispels a rumor that he may have died of AIDS. Nonetheless, the records show that despite extensive testing, his doctors could not determine the underlying infection.
Arafat seemed frail in his final months but not, by anyone's account, at death's door when he suddenly fell ill last October. After more than two weeks without improvement, he was airlifted to a French hospital, where he died on Nov. 11. The cause of death was never announced and speculation has remained rife.
nytimes.comHaaretz (Jerusalem): AIDS, poisoning An analysis of the confidential medical report on Yasser Arafat's death reveals three main possibilities as to the cause: poisoning, AIDS or an infection.
Israel and foreign doctors who have seen the report say the details do not lead to a conclusive determination on what caused the death.
After Arafat died on November 11, 2004 at a military hospital in Paris, copies of the pathology report compiled by the hospital staff - and kept under wraps until now - were handed over to Arafat's widow, Suha, and senior Palestinian Authority officials. The report's findings are now being published for the first time in the revised edition of "The Seventh War" by journalists Amos Harel and Avi Isacharoff, to be released next week by Yedioth Ahronoth in Hebrew.
The report does not lift the veil of mystery surrounding Arafat's death entirely: It lists the immediate cause of death as a massive brain hemorrhage, but adds that "a discussion among a large number of medical experts... shows that it is impossible to pinpoint a cause that will explain the combination of symptoms that led to the death of the patient."
Dr. Ashraf al-Kurdi, Arafat's personal physician who played no part in the late PA chairman's medical care during the final weeks of his life, said that he knows that the French doctors found the AIDS virus in Arafat's blood. Al-Kurdi refuses to divulge the source of this information, but claims that the virus was put into Arafat's blood in an effort to blur the traces of poisoning, which was the cause of death.
Most senior Palestinian officials, including Mohammed Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub, have said in interviews with the book's authors that they are convinced Arafat was poisoned by Israel. The Palestinians mention Israel's assassination attempt by means of poison on Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Amman in 1997. According to the officials, Arafat was not sufficiently cautious and could easily have been poisoned, because he would receive candies and medicines from visitors and consume them without medical supervision.
haaretz.com
rootsie on 09.08.05 @ 07:17 AM CST [
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Wednesday, September 7th
The Moral Empire: The Politics of Comscience
by Priyamvada Gopal
A few years ago, Tony Blair termed the state of Africa a 'scar on the world's conscience'. It was not the first time that the dubious honour of being a moral touchstone had been conferred upon the continent. By the late 19th century too, Africa was the foil for various European crises of conscience even as major European powers were busy consolidating colonial regimes across large swathes of the globe. In his remarkable book, King Leopold's Ghost (1999), which chronicles the brutalities of the Belgian monarch's venal reign over the Congo, Adam Hochschild has shown how British popular outrage over extreme degradation 'elsewhere' could serve to normalize injustices at home and in Britain's own colonies. Interestingly, Leopold had undertaken his own violent expropriation of the Congo's land and natural resources by establishing humanitarian bodies such as the 'International Africa Association', whipping up righteous European indignation at 'Arab slave traders.' He had his celebrity allies, like the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who extolled the 'wisdom and goodness' of Leopold's ostensibly humanitarian reign which also came to be known as the 'rubber terror' during which thousands of Africans were forced into servitude, maimed and killed to feed Europe's hunger for the newly discovered material.
Despite a shared penchant for self-regarding moralism and for all the unconscionable bloodletting that he has sponsored in Iraq—which now rebounds on British civilians (most of whom opposed the invasion)—Tony Blair is no Leopold. But the two historical moments have something in common. Then as now, the technology of modern warfare was used to help 'civilisation overcome barbarism'. It was then too that international humanitarian crusades came to have distinct political uses. Firstly, vast tracts of African or Asian land and resources come under indirect or direct command of the benefactor nations. An equally significant, though less visible, fact was that the emphasis on situations of extreme degradation had the effect of minimizing other kinds of misrule and violence even within progressive quarters. For instance, remarkable activists like the intrepid E.D Morel, who founded the hugely important Congo Reform Movement to expose Leopold's murderous reign in that region, refused to criticize Britain's colonial practices which could also include the expropriation of resources and the use of forced labour. With scrutiny focused on material misdeeds elsewhere, Britain could function, Hochschild suggests, as a kind of new and different 'Moral Empire.'
zmag.org
rootsie on 09.07.05 @ 09:49 PM CST [
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Virus Ravaging India's Poor Stirs Call for Counterattack
LUCKNOW, India, Sept. 7 - Government ministers descended on this storied North Indian state capital on Wednesday to kick off an ambitious rural health initiative. The city's roads were freshly tarred, and banners hung along the main boulevard to welcome its chief guest: former President Bill Clinton.
All were victims of the viral disease known as Japanese encephalitis, which causes high fever, aches, eventual coma and often death. It has struck this region with a particular fury this year, shining a harsh light on India's inability to halt an entirely preventable disease that has killed or stunted some of its most vulnerable citizens for the last quarter-century - the young rural poor.
The director general of the state government's health department said Wednesday that since July 1 the death toll had reached nearly 500, and those were only cases reported to government hospitals across the state. Reuters on Wednesday gave a figure of 600.
More than 1,500 suspected cases of Japanese encephalitis have been reported so far, according to the state.
nytimes.com
rootsie on 09.07.05 @ 09:45 PM CST [
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Global warming causes soil to release carbon -study
LONDON (Reuters) - Global warming is causing soil to release huge amounts of carbon, making efforts to fight global warming tougher than previously thought, scientists said on Wednesday.
A study in the journal Nature looked at the carbon content of soil in England and Wales from 1978-2003 and found that it fell steadily, with some 13 million tonnes of carbon released from British soil each year.
The team from Britain's National Soil Resources Institute at Cranfield University said its results implied a similar process would be under way in other temperate areas across the globe.
"Our findings suggest the soil part of the equation is scarier than we had thought," Professor Guy Kirk, of Cranfield University, told journalists at a science conference in Dublin. "The consequence is that there is more urgency about doing something."
Since the carbon appeared to be released from soil regardless of how the soil was used, they concluded that the main cause must be climate change itself.
Though they could not say where all the missing carbon had gone, much of it may be entering the atmosphere as the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, which scientists say has caused global warming.
breitbart.com
rootsie on 09.07.05 @ 09:42 PM CST [
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No Direction Home
by Chris Floyd
"How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home."
Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"
Let's be clear about one thing. Nothing that has happened in the past week -- the mass destruction in the Mississippi Delta, the obliteration of the city of New Orleans, the murderous abandonment of thousands of people to death, chaos and disease will change the Bush Administration or American politics at all. Not one whit. The Bush Administration will not reverse its brutal policies; its Congressional rubber-stamps will not revolt against the White House; the national Democrats will not suddenly grow a spine. There will be no real change, and the bitter corrosion of injustice, indifference and inhumanity that is consuming American society will go on as before.
counterpunch.org
rootsie on 09.07.05 @ 09:35 PM CST [
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FEMA censorship: don't show the dead
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When U.S. officials asked the media not to take pictures of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, they were censoring a key part of the disaster story, free speech watchdogs said on Wednesday.
The move by the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in line with the Bush administration's ban on images of flag-draped U.S. military coffins returning from the Iraq war, media monitors said in separate telephone interviews.
"It's impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story," said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors' group that defends free expression.
U.S. newspapers, television outlets and Web sites have featured pictures of shrouded corpses and makeshift graves in New Orleans.
But on Tuesday, FEMA refused to take reporters and photographers along on boats seeking victims in flooded areas, saying they would take up valuable space need in the recovery effort and asked them not to take pictures of the dead.
reuters.myway.com
rootsie on 09.07.05 @ 09:30 PM CST [
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FEMA Privatized Hurricane Disaster Recovery Planning for New Orleans and Southeastern Louisiana
WASHINGTON, DC -- Adding to the controversy regarding the Army Corps of Engineers diverting $250 million from the SELA (Southeast Louisiana) Urban Flood Control Program to Iraq and Halliburton reconstruction projects, is the revelation that FEMA outsourced hurricane recovery planning to the Baton Rouge-based consulting firm Innovative Emergency Management (IEM), Inc. to develop a "Catastrophic Hurricane Disaster Plan for New Orleans & Southeast Louisiana." The award was announced on June 3, 2004 on the firm's web site but was taken down just as Hurricane Katrina's winds and waves first started pounding New Orleans. It would now appear that the hurricane plan IEM and its team developed wasn't worth a damned thing.
IEM's team partners for the more than $500,000 contract are Dewberry of Arlington, VA, URS Corporation of San Francisco, and James Lee Witt Associates. Witt was FEMA Director under Bill Clinton. IEM's president is Madhu Beriwal. The company was founded in 1985. Dewberry and URS are engineering firms. IEM is also a Defense Department contractor and has contracts with the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) along with team members Booz Allen Hamilton and Lockheed Martin.
globalresearch.ca
rootsie on 09.07.05 @ 09:26 PM CST [
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The real costs of a culture of greed
Los Angeles Times WHAT THE WORLD has witnessed this past week is an image of poverty and social disarray that tears away the affluent mask of the United States.
Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame. The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina's destruction grew longer with each hour's grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans.
Yet the problem is much deeper. For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans' flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long's ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss.
Full: informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 09.07.05 @ 09:23 PM CST [
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"Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial."
-Aaron Broussard, president Jefferson Parish council, MSNBC, TRANSCRIPT Meet the Press with Tim Russert, VIDEO: "Feds criticized for slow response," and VIDEO: "She drowned Friday night," September 4, 2005 (VIDEO Mirror)
"'Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now," he insisted. Broussard hinted that he thought President Bush should be held responsible, saying, 'whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chain-sawed off and we've got to start with some new leadership.'"
-Newsmax, "La. Official: Feds 'Murdered' Flood Victims," September 5, 2005
"Even though dry land routes exist leading out of the city, emergency officials continued to prevent able-bodied storm victims from trying to walk across the Crescent City Bridge, citing the dangers they said would be posed by an uncontrolled exit from the city. 'The last thing we need is people walking an en masse exodus on the interstate,' said Louisiana State Police Lt. Lawrence McLeary. 'Number one, they could probably be in shock and need medical attention. We don't know if they're lawless going out of town and we don't want them walking around wreaking havoc.'"
-James Janega and Howard Witt, "Help arrives, but many in New Orleans still wait for deliverance," September 2, 2005
Female reporter: "Is it true that the levees were blown up on purpose?"
White House Press Bullshitter: "This is not the time or the place for questions like that!"
-Press Conference with Ex-President George Bush Sr. Sir Knight of the British Empire and Ex-President Bill Clinton-Blythe-Rockefeller IV, MSNBC Morning Show, September 5, 2005
"Repair crews have patched the ruptured levee along the 17th Street Canal and have begun pumping water from New Orleans, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Monday. Helicopters closed the approximately 300-foot breach by filling it with more than 200 15,000-pound sandbags [BUT PHOTO AND VIDEO SHOWED A SECTION LEFT OPEN]. Trucks also poured loads of fill dirt into the damaged section. Crews intentionally breached levees in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes Monday so that water would flow back into Lake Borgne, John Rickey, a corps spokesman said."
-CNN, "Pumps begin to drain New Orleans," September 5, 2005 (click for satellite images of all levee breaks)
piratenews.orgLots more quotes and full Broussard transcript here.
rootsie on 09.07.05 @ 09:17 PM CST [
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Bush to Probe Storm Response
Stung by criticism of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, President Bush yesterday promised to investigate his own administration's emergency management, then readied a request for tens of billions of dollars for relief and cleanup.
washingtonpost.comThe headline for this story on prisonplanet.comreads, "Bush to Investigate Himself."
rootsie on 09.07.05 @ 09:09 PM CST [
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Tuesday, September 6th
Five dead 'were army workers"
From yesterday's
New York Times:"In a city riven by violence for a week, there was yet another shootout yesterday. Contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers came under fire as they crossed a bridge to work on a levee, and police escorts shot back, killing three assailants outright and a fourth in a later gunfight, the police said, adding that a fifth suspect had been wounded and captured. There was no explanation for it, only the numbing facts."
and today's 'numbing facts,' since, clearly, yesterday's were wrong, and featured 'armed thugs' instead of trigger-happy NOLA cops::At least five people shot dead by police as they walked across a New Orleans bridge yesterday were contractors working for the US Defence department, according to a report by The Associated Press.
A spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers said the victims were contractors on their way to repair a canal, the new agency said, quoting a defence Department spokesman.
The contractors crossing the bridge to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain, in an operation to fix the 17th Street Canal, according to the spokesman.
The shootings took place on the Danziger Bridge, across a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River.
Early on Sunday, Deputy Police Chief W.J. Riley of New Orleans said police shot at eight people, killing five or six.
No other details were immediately available.
theaustraliannews.com
rootsie on 09.06.05 @ 01:48 PM CST [
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One city's tragedy may be another's boon
HOUSTON No one would accuse this city of being timid in the scramble to profit from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Oil services companies based here are already racing to carry out repairs to damaged offshore platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, and the promise of plenty of work to do sent shares in two large companies, Halliburton and Baker Hughes, soaring to record levels last week. The Port of Houston is preparing for an increase in traffic as shippers divert cargo away from the damaged ports of New Orleans and Pascagoula, Mississippi.
With brio that might make an ambulance-chaser proud, one company, National Realty Investments is offering special financing deals "for hurricane survivors only," with no down payments and discounted closing costs.
"It feels like the only things left in south Louisiana are snakes and alligators," said John Olson, co-manager of Houston Energy Partners, a hedge fund that operates out of a skyscraper in the city center. "Houston is positioned for a boom."
Perhaps no city in the United States is in a better spot to turn Katrina's tragedy into opportunity. Long known for its commercial fervor, Houston, the largest city in the South with a metropolitan population of more than four million, has one of the busiest ports in the United States and remains unrivaled as a center for the energy industry.
Halliburton moved its headquarters to Houston from Dallas in 2003, joining dozens of companies based here that provide services for oil and natural gas producers.
Halliburton differs from many oil services companies in that it also does significant business with the federal government. Halliburton has a contract with the U.S. Navy, similar to its contracts in Iraq, that has already kept it busy after Hurricane Katrina. The company's Kellogg, Brown & Root unit was doing repairs and cleanup at three naval facilities in Mississippi last week.
Executives at other Houston companies said they were wasting little time in carrying out repairs in the Gulf of Mexico, where at least 20 offshore rigs and platforms are believed to be damaged or destroyed. Tetra Technologies, which repairs old platforms in the Gulf of Mexico or decommissions them, had employees in a helicopter the day after the storm passed to survey the damage.
"I always hate to talk about positives in a situation like this, but this is certainly a growth business over the next 6 to 12 months," said Geoffrey Hertel, the chief executive of Tetra. By Friday, Tetra had been able to send an 800-ton derrick barge it owns, the Arapaho, to the gulf to be used for platform repairs, Hertel said.
...The displacement of companies to Houston from New Orleans is an abrupt acceleration of a trend that has been going on for decades. Many large companies, particularly those in the energy business, have made that move over the years, leaving New Orleans more dependent on tourism and other service industries.
A surge of business activity in Houston might lift the fortunes of a city that is still struggling to recover from the collapse of Enron and two decades of job cuts in the energy industry.
Rising oil and natural gas prices in the last two years have strengthened the finances of Houston's largest energy companies, but have done little to improve job prospects in the city, where the unemployment rate was 5.5 percent in July, compared with 5 percent nationally. During the last oil boom, in the 1970s, 150,000 jobs were created in the business of oilfield equipment, according to Barton Smith, director of the Institute for Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston.
But since the 1980s, about 130,000 of those jobs have been lost as oil and natural gas exploration moved away, largely to West Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and companies were able to produce oilfield equipment more cheaply abroad.
One company that has exchanged New Orleans for Houston is Whitney Holding, the parent company of Whitney National Bank, founded in 1883 and the oldest operating bank in New Orleans. Another New Orleans oil exploration company, Energy Partners, said in a statement last week that it was also making Houston its temporary headquarters. Other companies are following suit, according to real estate brokers.
"It's exploding," said Steve Duplantis, senior managing director at CB Richard Ellis. "When I talk to owners of office buildings, they say people are not even negotiating. As tragic as it is for New Orleans, it is a boon for Houston."
iht.comNiceSan Antonio Times Editorial Nothing could compare to the differences between the hip-hop celebrities at the MTV Video Music Awards recently and the masses of people wading through the chaos of New Orleans in the days that followed.
On one side, you had some of the best-coiffed, best-dressed and richest-fed beautiful people on the planet. On the other, you see people who haven't looked in a mirror in days — and could care less because they may not have eaten in the same time.
...The disaster in New Orleans is bringing out all the normal complaints that the government could have done this or it should have done that. Why weren't we better prepared for this storm? Why didn't we build stronger levees? Why aren't we doing more to help evacuees?
The short answer is that we could have done each of the things suggested. But contrary to the beliefs of some utopians and those who think that somehow this storm was part of a Halliburton conspiracy, we can't take risk out of life. And we don't have unlimited cash to prevent every potential disaster.
You want a stronger levee? Fine. Unfortunately, to pay for that, we will have to forgo rebuilding public schools. That's not acceptable? Then I guess we could postpone that sports arena you needed to attract a major league team. Not good either? Well, I guess we need to "increase revenues," which means raising taxes, which will slow down the economic growth that the city needs to create jobs.
So you make compromises.
BUSH MOM: EVERYONE WANTS TO MOVE TO TEXAS "Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we're going to move to Houston," Barbara Bush told NPR.
"What I’m hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this --this is working very well for them."
O yes. Very well indeed.
rootsie on 09.06.05 @ 08:17 AM CST [
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Murder and rape - fact or fiction?
..."There is nothing to correct wild reports that armed gangs have taken over the convention centre," wrote Associated Press writer, Allen Breed.
"You can report them but you at least have to say they are unsubstantiated and not pass them off as fact," said one Baltimore-based journalist.
"But nobody is doing that."
Either way these rumours have had an effect.
Reports of the complete degradation and violent criminals running rampant in the Superdome suggested a crisis that both hastened the relief effort and
demonised those who were stranded.By the end of last week the media in Baton Rouge reported that evacuees from New Orleans were carjacking and that guns and knives were being seized in local shelters where riots were erupting.
The local mayor responded accordingly.
"We do not want to inherit the looting and all the other foolishness that went on in New Orleans," Kip Holden was told the Baton Rouge Advocate.
"We do not want to inherit that breed that seeks to prey on other people."
The trouble, wrote Howard Witt of the Chicago Tribune is that "scarcely any of it was true - the police confiscated a single knife from a refugee in one Baton Rouge shelter".
"There were no riots in Baton Rouge. There were no armed hordes."
Similarly when the first convoy of national guardsmen went into New Orleans approached the convention centre they were ordered to "lock and load".
But when they arrived they were confronted not by armed mobs but a nurse wearing a T-shirt that read "I love New Orleans".
"She ran down a broken escalator, then held her hands in the air when she saw the guns," wrote the LA Times.
"We have sick kids up here!" she shouted.
"We have dehydrated kids! One kid with sickle cell!"
guardian.co.uk
rootsie on 09.06.05 @ 08:00 AM CST [
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Monday, September 5th
"We have been abandoned by our own country"
Interview on Meet the Press with Aaron Broussard, President of Jefferson Parrishsee it and weep
rootsie on 09.05.05 @ 11:31 AM CST [
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Insurgents Seize Key Town in Iraq
BAGHDAD, Sept. 5 -- Abu Musab Zarqawi's foreign-led Al Qaeda in Iraq took open control of a key western town at the Syrian border, deploying its guerrilla fighters in the streets and flying Zarqawi's black banner from rooftops, witnesses, residents and others in the city and surrounding villages said.
A sign newly posted at the entrance of Qaim declared, "Welcome to the Islamic Kingdom of Qaim." A statement posted in mosques described Qaim as an "Islamic kingdom liberated from the occupation."
Zarqawi's fighters were killing officials and civilians seen as government-allied or anti-Islamic, witnesses, residents and others said. On Sunday, the bullet-riddled body of a woman lay in a street of Qaim. A sign left on her corpse declared, "A prostitute who was punished."
washingtonpost.comSo, "massive US offensive" near the Syrian border they told us about results in "Zarqawi" taking over? Hmm.
rootsie on 09.05.05 @ 10:24 AM CST [
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New Orleans Begins a Search for Its Dead; Violence Persists
Troops patrolled the streets, rescuers hunted for stragglers and New Orleans looked like a wrecked ghost town yesterday as the evacuation of the city neared completion and the authorities turned to the grim task of collecting bodies in a ghastly landscape awash in numberless corpses.
In a city riven by violence for a week, there was yet another shootout yesterday. Contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers came under fire as they crossed a bridge to work on a levee, and police escorts shot back, killing three assailants outright and a fourth in a later gunfight, the police said, adding that a fifth suspect had been wounded and captured. There was no explanation for it, only the numbing facts.
nytimes.com"The numbing facts"??? "a city riven by violence"??? "yet another shootout"??? I haven't heard about any others! This is the Times' violent hyperbole in full effect used to obscure the fact that NOPD shot 5 people dead with "no explantion", which is indeed nothing new in New Orleans."Highly Strung" CopsLocal officials warned that law enforcement officers and their armed deputies were "highly strung" and anyone thinking of entering to loot might not make it out alive. Warren Riley, the deputy police chief, said that officers shot eight people, killing five or six of them, after the gunmen fired on a group of contractors working for the Army Corps of Engineers.
...After five days of hesitation, the national guard and troops were staging what amounted to an invasion of the abandoned city with 4,000 soldiers searching house-to-house for survivors and another 7,200 airborne combat troops and marines on the way.
Another NY Times Article"They've already lost their cars," he said. "All they have left is their house. They don't want those animals stealing from them. Write that, animals. Anybody that would take advantage of this is hardly better than animals. Not the people who are taking food and water and clothing. Those stealing TV's and shooting at police. What can you do with a TV? There's no electricity."
I heard a journalist say that people took tv's with the idea of selling them so they could get out.
rootsie on 09.05.05 @ 10:17 AM CST [
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Times-Picayune: An Open Letter to the President
Dear Mr. President:
We heard you loud and clear Friday when you visited our devastated city and the Gulf Coast and said, "What is not working, we’re going to make it right."
Please forgive us if we wait to see proof of your promise before believing you. But we have good reason for our skepticism.
Bienville built New Orleans where he built it for one main reason: It’s accessible. The city between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain was easy to reach in 1718.
How much easier it is to access in 2005 now that there are interstates and bridges, airports and helipads, cruise ships, barges, buses and diesel-powered trucks.
Despite the city’s multiple points of entry, our nation’s bureaucrats spent days after last week’s hurricane wringing their hands, lamenting the fact that they could neither rescue the city’s stranded victims nor bring them food, water and medical supplies.
Meanwhile there were journalists, including some who work for The Times-Picayune, going in and out of the city via the Crescent City Connection. On Thursday morning, that crew saw a caravan of 13 Wal-Mart tractor trailers headed into town to bring food, water and supplies to a dying city.
Television reporters were doing live reports from downtown New Orleans streets. Harry Connick Jr. brought in some aid Thursday, and his efforts were the focus of a "Today" show story Friday morning.
Yet, the people trained to protect our nation, the people whose job it is to quickly bring in aid were absent. Those who should have been deploying troops were singing a sad song about how our city was impossible to reach.
We’re angry, Mr. President, and we’ll be angry long after our beloved city and surrounding parishes have been pumped dry. Our people deserved rescuing. Many who could have been were not. That’s to the government’s shame.
Mayor Ray Nagin did the right thing Sunday when he allowed those with no other alternative to seek shelter from the storm inside the Louisiana Superdome. We still don’t know what the death toll is, but one thing is certain: Had the Superdome not been opened, the city’s death toll would have been higher. The toll may even have been exponentially higher.
It was clear to us by late morning Monday that many people inside the Superdome would not be returning home. It should have been clear to our government, Mr. President. So why weren’t they evacuated out of the city immediately? We learned seven years ago, when Hurricane Georges threatened, that the Dome isn’t suitable as a long-term shelter. So what did state and national officials think would happen to tens of thousands of people trapped inside with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets and dwindling amounts of food, water and other essentials?
State Rep. Karen Carter was right Friday when she said the city didn’t have but two urgent needs: "Buses! And gas!" Every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be fired, Director Michael Brown especially.
In a nationally televised interview Thursday night, he said his agency hadn’t known until that day that thousands of storm victims were stranded at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. He gave another nationally televised interview the next morning and said, "We’ve provided food to the people at the Convention Center so that they’ve gotten at least one, if not two meals, every single day."
Lies don’t get more bald-faced than that, Mr. President.
Yet, when you met with Mr. Brown Friday morning, you told him, "You’re doing a heck of a job."
That’s unbelievable.
There were thousands of people at the Convention Center because the riverfront is high ground. The fact that so many people had reached there on foot is proof that rescue vehicles could have gotten there, too.
We, who are from New Orleans, are no less American than those who live on the Great Plains or along the Atlantic Seaboard. We’re no less important than those from the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia. Our people deserved to be rescued.
No expense should have been spared. No excuses should have been voiced. Especially not one as preposterous as the claim that New Orleans couldn’t be reached.
Mr. President, we sincerely hope you fulfill your promise to make our beloved communities work right once again.
When you do, we will be the first to applaud.
nola.comWhy did help take so long to arrive? After the authorities in Baton Rouge had prepared a field hospital for victims of the storm, Fema sent its first batch of supplies, all of which were designed for use against chemical attack, including drugs such as Cipro, which is designed for use against anthrax. "We called them up and asked them: 'Why did you send that, and they said that's what it says in the book'," said a Baton Rouge official.
...Federal officials have defended their response. Michael Chertoff, head of the homeland security department, which has responsibility for Fema, said: "We are extremely pleased with the response of every element of the federal government, all of our federal partners, to this terrible tragedy.
"For those who wonder why it is that it is difficult to get these supplies and these medical teams into place, the answer is they are battling an ongoing dynamic problem with the water."
liarN.O. resident: Our government is killing the people of New Orleans "There are supplies sitting in Baton Rouge for the folks in New Orleans, but the National Guard has the city surrounded and is not letting anyone in or out. They are turning away people with supplies, claiming it is too dangerous. If we have planes that can drop bombs on people in Iraq, certianly we can air drop supplies into the city. Our goverment is KILLING the people of New Orleans. This is the message I am now sending to all major media sources, national and worldwide, as well as posting to email lists, blogs, etc. The story is getting out that the people there are not getting supplies, but the truth of WHY is not. Please help spread the word, we must get this story out. Please so not let any more of my friends die.
...Also heard that part of the reason our house flooded is they dynamited part of the levee after the first section broke - they did this to prevent Uptown (the rich part of town) from being flooded. Apparently they used too much dynamite, thus flooding part of the Bywater. So now I know who is responsible for flooding my house - not Katrina, but our government."
CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE AND KATRINA? What do you do when the words on the paper don't match the action in the field? People are dying today in New Orleans because of the failure to provide immediate aid are dead in part because of the negligence of Michael Chertoff. That is a harsh judgment, but if you will take time to read the National Response Plan that was signed into effect in December of 2004 there is no other reasonable conclusion.
The current effort by the Bush Administration to blame the victims in Louisiana and Mississippi is bad enough, but they are in big trouble once Americans take the time to understand that they the Administration ignored it's own plan for dealing with a threat like Katrina. Why did they fail to implement the plan until it was too late to save lives along the Gulf Coast?
Don't take my word for it, read the plan yourself. You can download it at
http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/NRPbaseplan.pdfThe National Response Plan was accepted and implemented by Bush Administration in December 2004. According to the PREFACE, President Bush, "directed the development of a new National Response Plan (NRP) to align Federal coordination structures, capabilities, and resources into a unified, all discipline, and all-hazards approach to domestic incident management. . . .The end result is vastly improved coordination among Federal, State, local, and tribal organizations to help save lives and protect America's communities by increasing the speed, effectiveness, and efficiency of incident management."
"not one of my seed/will sit on the sidewalk and beg bread"Rice says race had nothing to do with Katrina aid ""I don't believe for a minute anybody allowed people to suffer because they are African-Americans. I just don't believe it for a minute."
rootsie on 09.05.05 @ 09:54 AM CST [
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Sunday, September 4th
NOLA Police kill "five or six"
NEW ORLEANS - New Orleans turned much of its attention Sunday to gathering up and counting the dead across a ghastly landscape awash in perhaps thousands of corpses. "It is going to be about as ugly of a scene as I think you can imagine," the nation's homeland security chief warned.
As authorities struggled to keep order, police shot eight people, killing five or six, after gunmen opened fire on a group of contractors traveling across a bridge on their way to make repairs, authorities said.
news.yahoo.comUglier I'm sure. And oh by the way, the police killed a few more...
rootsie on 09.04.05 @ 10:44 PM CST [
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Al-Sadr vows revenge on Sunnis over stampede deaths
THE maverick Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has raised sectarian tension in Iraq by vowing vengeance against Sunnis he blames for the stampede that killed almost 1,000 pilgrims last week in Baghdad.
While more moderate clerics have avoided blaming Sunni insurgents for provoking the tragedy, al-Sadr claimed in a message from his mosque in al-Kufa, near Najaf, that civil war was already underway.
The interior ministry has said 953 Shi’ite worshippers died last Wednesday, trampled underfoot and drowned in the Tigris river after they tumbled from the narrow al-Aima bridge on their way towards the shrine of Moussa al- Kadhim, an 8th-century imam. An earlier exchange of mortar fire had made the crowd nervous, but pandemonium broke out when rumours spread that there were Sunni suicide bombers in their midst.
In a statement to newspapers al-Sadr identified “Ba’athists and Saddamists” and “fanatic sectarians” as likely culprits. “The number of dead is sufficient for us to prove that this incident was organised,” he said. “You should ask about the dirty hands who spilt all this blood.”
informationclearinghouse.infoReport: 50 Killed As Health Clinic Bombed In Military Attack On Al Qaim
rootsie on 09.04.05 @ 09:53 AM CST [
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White House Shifts Blame to State and Local Officials
Tens of thousands of people spent a fifth day awaiting evacuation from this ruined city, as Bush administration officials blamed state and local authorities for what leaders at all levels have called a failure of the country's emergency management.
...Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.
The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.
A senior administration official said that Bush has clear legal authority to federalize National Guard units to quell civil disturbances under the Insurrection Act and will continue to try to unify the chains of command that are split among the president, the Louisiana governor and the New Orleans mayor.
Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.
"The federal government stands ready to work with state and local officials to secure New Orleans and the state of Louisiana," White House spokesman Dan Bartlett said. "The president will not let any form of bureaucracy get in the way of protecting the citizens of Louisiana."
Blanco made two moves Saturday that protected her independence from the federal government: She created a philanthropic fund for the state's victims and hired James Lee Witt, Federal Emergency Management Agency director in the Clinton administration, to advise her on the relief effort.
Bush, who has been criticized, even by supporters, for the delayed response to the disaster, used his weekly radio address to put responsibility for the failure on lower levels of government. The magnitude of the crisis "has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities," he said. "The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable."
washingtonpost.com
rootsie on 09.04.05 @ 09:49 AM CST [
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The Two Americas
Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.
What is Cuban President Fidel Castro's secret? According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, "the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go."
"Cuba's leaders go on TV and take charge," said Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush's reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, "nothing about the president's demeanor yesterday - which seemed casual to the point of carelessness - suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis."
"Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable" in Cuba, Valdes said. "Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin."
They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators, "so that people aren't reluctant to leave because people might steal their stuff," Valdes observed.
After Hurricane Ivan, the United Nations International Secretariat for Disaster Reduction cited Cuba as a model for hurricane preparation. ISDR director Salvano Briceno said, "The Cuban way could easily be applied to other countries with similar economic conditions and even in countries with greater resources that do not manage to protect their population as well as Cuba does."
Our federal and local governments had more than ample warning that hurricanes, which are growing in intensity thanks to global warming, could destroy New Orleans. Yet, instead of heeding those warnings, Bush set about to prevent states from controlling global warming, weaken FEMA, and cut the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for levee construction in New Orleans by $71.2 million, a 44 percent reduction.
informationclearinghouse.comTroops begin combat operations in New Orleans ...“This place is going to look like Little Somalia,” Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force told Army Times Friday as hundreds of armed troops under his charge prepared to launch a massive citywide security mission from a staging area outside the Louisiana Superdome. “We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”
People of the Dome ...Les says that "it's only because of the looters that non-looters -- old people, sick people, small children -- are able to survive."
Those people who stole televisions and large non-emergency items have been selling them, Les reports (having witnessed several of these "exchanges") so that they could get enough money together to leave the area.
Guardsmen ' played cards' amid New Orleans chaos: police official ..."We expected a lot more support from the federal government. We expected the government to respond within 24 hours. The first three days we had no assistance," he told AFP in an interview.
Riley went on: "We have been fired on with automatic weapons. We still have some thugs around. My biggest disappointment is with the federal government and the National Guard.
"The guard arrived 48 hours after the hurricane with 40 trucks. They drove their trucks in and went to sleep.
Rep. Cynthia McKinney:Shame on This AdministrationEx-officials say weakened FEMA botched response ..... Thirteen months before Katrina hit New Orleans, local, state and federal officials held a simulated hurricane drill that Ronald Castleman, then the regional director for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, called "a very good exercise."
More than a million residents were "evacuated" in the table-top scenario as 120 m.p.h. winds and 20 inches of rain caused widespread flooding that supposedly trapped 300,000 people in the city.
"It was very much an eye-opener," said Castleman, a Republican appointee of President Bush who left FEMA in December for the private sector. "A number of things were identified that we had to deal with, not all of them were solved."
Still, Castleman found it hard to square the lessons he and others learned from the exercise with the frustratingly slow response to the disaster that has unfolded in the wake of Katrina. From the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans to the Mississippi and Alabama communities along the Gulf Coast, hurricane survivors have decried the lack of water, food and security and the slowness of the federal relief efforts.
"It's hard for everyone to understand why buttons weren't pushed earlier on," Castleman said of the federal response.
The Real Looters Wear PinstripesDrenched in profits: Drenched in bloodKanye West comments censored
rootsie on 09.04.05 @ 09:37 AM CST [
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Saturday, September 3rd
Look Who FEMA is telling people to send money to
American Red Cross
America’s Second Harvest
Humane Society of the United States
Operation Blessing
United Jewish Communities
Adventist Community Services
B'nai B'rith International
Catholic Charities, USA
Christian Disaster Response
Christian Reformed World Relief Committee
Church World Service
Convoy of Hope
Corporation for National and Community Service Disaster Relief Fund
Disaster Psychiatry Outreach
Feed the Children
Lutheran Disaster Response
Mennonite Disaster Service
Nazarene Disaster Response
Presbyterian Disaster Assistance
Salvation Army
Southern Baptist Convention -- Disaster Relief
UJA Federation of New York
Union for Reform Judaism
United Methodist Committee on Relief
fema.govGee Whiz--Halliburton Hired to do CleanupSonic 'Lasers' Head to Flood Zone crowd control/mind control experimentationSobbing Geraldo: Let the People Go Kanye West: "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People"
rootsie on 09.03.05 @ 11:05 AM CST [
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Because they can
by Jeff Wells
When it all comes down to dust, I will help you if I must;
I will kill you if I can. - Leonard Cohen
Maybe you think the worst is over, now Bush has had his photo op as the clockwork convoy of aid finally rolled into New Orleans. I thought, maybe so. Maybe that's enough death for them.
If you're like I was, you haven't seen this yet:
It's Geraldo Rivera, Friday night at the New Orleans Convention Center, where 30,000 Americans are locked down again with their piss and their shit and their dead. Rivera gets it, but he doesn't know what he's got. "What the hell, man - let them walk out of here!" If anyone tries it, if anyone reaches the perimeter, they're turned back.
From the website of the American Red Cross, their disaster FAQ:
Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?
"Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.
The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city."
This week, look for it: the "pacification" of New Orleans.
rigorousintuition.blogspot.comRing Them Bells
rootsie on 09.03.05 @ 10:08 AM CST [
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Friday, September 2nd
The Smirk of a Killer
The man in the Oval Office is fond of condemning "killers." But his administration continues to kill with impunity.
"They can go into Iraq and do this and do that," Martha Madden, former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, said Thursday, "but they can't drop some food on Canal Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, right now? It's just mind-boggling."
The policies are matters of priorities. And the priorities of the Bush White House are clear. For killing in Iraq, they spare no expense. For protecting and sustaining life, the cupboards go bare.
The problem is not incompetence. It's inhumanity, cruelty and greed.
Media outlets have popularized some tactical critiques of U.S. military operations in Iraq. But the administration is competent enough to keep the military-industrial complex humming. It's good at generating huge profits for "defense" contractors, oil companies and the like. First things first, and first things last.
Why shore up levees when the precious money it would take can be better used for war in Iraq? Why allow National Guard units to remain home when they can be useful, killing and being killed, in a faraway war based on lies?
And when catastrophe hits people close to home, why should the president respond with urgency or adequacy if their lives don't figure as truly important in his political calculus?
It's time to end the impunity of President George W. Bush.
informationclearinghouse.orgAudio Interview With Mayor Nagin--ListenJordan Flaherty: Notes from Inside New OrleansTrapped in an Arena of SufferingRandall Robinson blogTwo Americas: Sink or SwimFrom Natural Disaster to National HumiliationThe Humbling of a SuperpowerThe Perfect StormHurricane Katrina: the Obvious QuestionsWhat They Should Have Learned from a Hurricane Named IvanMajor Oil Spill Seen on Mississippi RiverNew Orleans Rocked by Huge BlastsWill the 'New' New Orleans be Black?Venezuela Offers Food and Humanitarian Aid
rootsie on 09.02.05 @ 10:47 PM CST [
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Don't Give Your Hurricane Donations to the Red Cross
As the aftermath of hurricane Katrina continues to wreak mayhem and havoc amid reports of mass looting, shooting at rescue helicopters, rapes and murders, establishment media organs are promoting the Red Cross as a worthy organization to give donations to.
The biggest website in the world, Yahoo.com, displays a Red Cross donation link prominently on its front page.
Every time there is a major catastrophe the Red Cross and similar organizations like United Way are given all the media attention while other charities are left in the shadows. This is not to say that the vast majority of Red Cross workers are not decent people who simply want to help those in need.
But what the media fails consistently to remember in their promotion of the organization is that the Red Cross have been caught time and time again withholding money in the wake of horrible disasters that require immediate release of funds.
The Red Cross, under the Liberty Fund, collected $564 million in donations after 9/11. Months after the event, the Red Cross had distributed only $154 million. The Red Cross' explanation for keeping the majority of the money was that it would be used to help 'fight the war on terror'. To the victims, this meant that the money was going towards bombing broken backed third world countries like Afghanistan and setting up surveillance cameras and expanding the police state in US cities, and not towards helping them rebuild their lives.
prisonplanet.com
rootsie on 09.02.05 @ 08:03 AM CST [
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"Where is FEMA? Where's the Red Cross? Who's in Charge?"
I have been listening to BBC and NPR reports: about the Louisiana governor's 'shoot-to-kill' orders against 'armed thugs,' about hospitals yards away from National Guard and relief stations, in dry areas, filthy and stinking with dead bodies stacked in stairwells who have not received a scrap of help. The mayor of New Orleans:"Where's the beef? Cause I don't see no beef."
This morning we're told the relief efforts are being held up by these same 'armed thugs.' Why are we being treated to the same 30 seconds of 'armed thug' footage on every tv channel if the problem is so widespread? Only 1/3 of the usual number of National Guard troops, whose intended function is to respond to civil emergencies, remains to respond to this one. Yesterday a bunch of them were lying in the shade on the West Bank of the Mississippi waiting for Red Cross food and water that has still not come. People there had walked for days in the choking heat with their few possessions, their children in their arms, propelled by the promise of relief on the other side of the bridge: buses, food, water...there was nothing there.
The people remaining in the Superdome have not had food or water for five days. The dead are stacking up. The 'shelter of last resort' is turning into a death camp.
This morning I wake to the news of huge explosions and raging fires spreading a toxic pall over this dying city.
After years of the deepest suspicions about the motives and actions of my government, I have to admit I cannot imagine what these terrible people have in mind. I know they have been eager for the chance to practice their FEMA/martial law scenario, but you'd think they'd at least take a page out of Hitler's book and offer bread along with the boot in the face. Are they just going to start shooting black people?
One thing is certain, in the 'new city' that will rise from the muck of the old one, these 'poorest of the poor' suffering in New Orleans and displaced throughout the South, will not be welcomed back.
They think to get away with this because it's just poor blacks, just 'thugs' who are the sufferers here. But I wonder. I wonder if it's sinking into the white American consciousness that what is being done here to 'the least' is also a crime being perpetrated against them, against their own humanity. I wonder if, as they contemplate their missing Guards, they recall that they are over in Iraq participating in the daily, unnatural devastations taking place there, paid for by their tax dollars.
There are thousands of troops there who have been directly impacted by this disaster. What are they thinking about now, in the desert 5000 miles away? Visiting suffering on other people's mothers and kids, are they thinking this morning of their own?
Local officials forcibly evacuated from New Orleans Example of Racist Media Caught by Web Surfer During Hurricane Katrina Coverage
rootsie on 09.02.05 @ 07:57 AM CST [
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Al-Qaeda number two claims London attacks: Al-Jazeera video
Al-Jazeera aired snippets of a video tape attributed to Al-Qaeda, in which it said the network's number two Ayman al-Zawahiri claims responsibility for the July 7 London bombings.
The Qatar-based Arab television station said the video, more of which was to be broadcast later in the evening, also showed footage of one of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, outlining the reasons for his action.
Al-Zawahiri describes the rush-hour bombings on underground trains and a bus as a "slap for the policy" of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the channel said.
Al-Jazeera aired footage of a turbaned man alleged to be Sidique and said he explained the reasons for his action.
He blamed Western citizens for the bombings in London and last year in Madrid, as well as for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, "because they elect governments which perpetrate crimes against humanity."
Sidique Khan, a 30-year-old British national of Pakistani origin, was named as one of the four suicide bombers who killed 52 people in coordinated attacks in the British capital.
news.yahoo.comYeah right. A video appears with BOTH Zwahiri and Khan on it. The SAME video. Zwahiri appears to be the same sort of fabricated boogie-man as al Zarqawi in Iraq, and indeed Osama himself.
rootsie on 09.02.05 @ 07:20 AM CST [
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RIA Novosti: US Offered USD 75 Million to Iraqi Sunnis for Signature under Constitution
The United States have offered to Sunni representatives USD 75 Million to sign the draft Constitution of Iraq, RIA Novosti announced, citing information of source close to the Constitutional Committee of the country, published in the Saudi daily Al Vatan.
focus-fen.net
rootsie on 09.02.05 @ 07:12 AM CST [
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Venezuela to sell cut-price heating oil to U.S. poor
CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez said on Monday his government plans to sell as much as 66,000 barrels per day of heating fuel from its U.S. Citgo refinery to poor communities in the United States.
The offer, made after populist Chavez held talks with U.S. civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson, would represent 10 percent of the 660,000 bpd of refined products processed by Citgo. The deals would cut consumer costs by direct sales.
Venezuela's Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said officials were still working on the details on how the oil would be sold from Citgo, a unit of the state oil firm PDVSA.
"We are going to direct as much as 10 percent of the production, that means 66,000 barrels, without intermediaries, to poor communities, hospitals, religious communities, schools," Chavez told reporters at a press conference.
reuters.com
rootsie on 09.02.05 @ 07:08 AM CST [
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Chemtrails Coming Out of the Closet?
Nearly seven years after extensive "lay downs" of lingering and spreading white plumes were first reported smearing skies over across North America, Europe is in an uproar and Washington could be close to coming clean about chemtrails.
At least the Bush White house will soon have a legitimate weather control agency to finally "launder" one of the biggest cons ever perpetrated.
Introduced in the US Senate on March 1, 2005, Bill S517 calls for a US "Weather Modification Advisory and Research Board" to officially commence operations in October 2005. When passed as expected, this law will make large-scale chemical alteration of the atmosphere legal across a formerly free and beautiful land called America.
It's already happening. Less than two weeks before the bill was introduced, Linda wrote from "up here in the mountains of northeast Georgia" of the worst spray day she had ever seen. "Not one day in the past two months have we had a blue sky with normal clouds," Linda wrote. Even normal clouds "are 'laced' with whatever the hell is coming out of those white planes that have no engine sounds, even when they fly low enough to see there is no printing anywhere on the planes."
Several years ago the US Air Force stated that it was repainting its silver aircraft white, and retrofitting its jet tanker fleet with "hush kits" to silence their engines.
DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THE WEATHER
Whatever fresh environmental disaster Bill S517 accomplishes, this bill will ease the way for admission of a project suspected by many and confirmed by air traffic controllers at America's biggest airports. When and if the US public demands that their government "do something" about the extreme weather pummeling their neighborhoods, Washington will be able to officially reply, "We are."
Intended to "develop and implement a comprehensive and coordinated national weather modification policy," the board is tasked with coordinating state and federal weather modification efforts. It's direct mandate is stepped-up research and development aimed at developing experimental "models, devices, equipment, materials, and processes" to change or control, "by artificial methods" the development of clouds and/or precipitation in the troposphere. This weather-forming region of the atmosphere lies between Earth's surface and the stratosphere, starting around 35,000 feet.
The federal weather modifiers will now directly oversee the cloud-seeding operations currently being carried out over dozens of states to increase rain and snowfall for irrigation, electrical power and winter recreation purposes. As droughts intensify under an onslaught of moisture-absorbing chemicals dispensed behind ozone-destroying jet tankers, and future towns wash away in sudden flash floods triggered by rain-inducing atmospheric tinkering, these unnatural disasters and other "inadvertent" effects of weather modification will be closely "studied" by the newly created board.
But no studies have been released on the implications of wide-scale alteration of regional atmospheric heat balances.
rense.com
rootsie on 09.02.05 @ 07:04 AM CST [
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Thursday, September 1st
Bush is the real threat
Now that the US president has announced that he has not ruled out an attack on Iran, if it does not abandon its nuclear programme, the Middle East faces a crisis that could dwarf even the dangers arising from the war in Iraq.
Even a conventional weapon fired at a nuclear research centre - whether or not a bomb was being made there - would almost certainly release radioactivity into the atmosphere, with consequences seen worldwide as a mini-Hiroshima.
We would be told that it had been done to uphold the principles of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) - an argument that does not stand up to a moment's examination.
The moral and legal basis of the NPT convention, which the International Atomic Energy Agency is there to uphold, was based on the agreement of non-nuclear nations not to acquire nuclear weapons if nuclear powers undertook not to extend nuclear arsenals and negotiate to secure their abolition.
Since then, the Americans have launched a programme that would allow them to use nuclear weapons in space, nuclear bunker-busting bombs are being developed, and depleted uranium has been used in Iraq - all of which are clear breaches of the NPT. Israel, which has a massive nuclear weapons programme, is accepted as a close ally of the US, which still arms and funds it.
Even those who are opposed, as I am, to nuclear weapons in every country including Iran, North Korea, Britain and the US, accept that nuclear power for electricity generation need not necessarily lead to the acquisition of the bomb.
Indeed, many years ago, when the shah - who had been put on the throne by the US - was in power in Iran, enormous pressure was put on me, as secretary of state for energy, to agree to sell nuclear power stations to him. That pressure came from the Atomic Energy Authority, in conjunction with Westinghouse, who were anxious to promote their own design of reactor.
It is easy to understand why president Bush might see the bombing of Iran as a way to regain some of the political credibility he has lost as a result of the growing hostility in America to the Iraq war due to the heavy casualties suffered by US forces there .
It is inconceivable that the White House can be contemplating an invasion of Iran, and what must be intended is a US airstrike, or airstrikes, on Iranian nuclear installations, comparable to Israel's bombing of Iraq in 1981. Israel has publicly hinted that it might do the same again to prevent Iran developing nuclear nuclear weapons.
Such an attack, whether by the US or Israel, would be in breach of the UN Charter, as was the invasion of Iraq. But neither Bush, Sharon nor Blair would take any notice of that.
Some influential Americans appear to be convinced that the US will attack Iran. Whether they are right or not, the build-up to a new war is taking exactly the same form as it did in 2002. First we are being told that Iran poses a military threat, because it may be developing nuclear weapons. We are assured that the President is hoping that diplomacy might succeed through the European negotiations which have been in progress for some months.
This is just what we were told when Hans Blix was in Baghdad talking to Saddam on behalf of the UN, but we now know, from a Downing Street memorandum leaked some months ago, that the decision to invade had been taken long before that.
informationclearinghouse.info
rootsie on 09.01.05 @ 07:52 AM CST [
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White People's Burden
It's time for white Americans to fully acknowledge that in the racial arena, they are the problem.
Editor's Note: This essay is excerpted from The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege, forthcoming from City Lights, September 2005.
The United States is a white country. By that I don't just mean that the majority of its citizens are white, though they are (for now but not forever). What makes the United States white is not the fact that most Americans are white but the assumption -- especially by people with power -- that American equals white. Those people don't say it outright. It comes out in subtle ways. Or, sometimes, in ways not so subtle.
alternet.orgNew Orleans is Sinking, But... "Hey, Shoot that Black Guy Running Off with the Bottled Water from Wal-Mart!"
rootsie on 09.01.05 @ 07:48 AM CST [
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Pentagon Coordinating Katrina Response
WASHINGTON - From Navy ships and Army helicopters to the USNS Comfort hospital ship, the Pentagon is mobilizing possibly an unprecedented U.S. rescue-and-relief mission for areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
...Largely coordinated by a newly created military Joint Task Force Katrina, based at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, all of the armed services are participating in what many say is the largest domestic disaster relief effort in years. The military is mainly providing search and rescue, medical help and sending in supplies in support of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Gulf Coast states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
...National Guard troops from at least eight states are going into the region to provide law enforcement support, communications, medical help, debris removal and other assistance.
news.yahoo.comThe Prospect of Martial Law: "Transformation" and the Beginning of Global Resistance The changes that are taking place within the military under the deceptive name of "transformation" have nothing to do with national defense or preparedness for terrorist attack. Rather, the military is being converted into a taxpayer subsidized security apparatus for multinational corporations that will seize foreign resources through force of arms and then crush the indigenous elements that resist US aggression. On the home front, the changes are equally dramatic. "Transformation" is a conspicuous attempt to weaken traditional defenses provided by the National Guard so that the Pentagon can insert itself into domestic affairs and establish an ongoing military presence within the United States. Donald Rumsfeld has already suggested that the military will play a greater role in dealing with the aftereffects of any future attack. There's no doubt that he will honor that commitment.
The media has predictably echoed the government line that transformation is simply intended to revamp the military for the wars of the next century. They have highlighted the effects of base closures on local economies and unemployment. They have also emphasized the Pentagon's intention to create smaller, more agile military units that can be quickly deployed anywhere around the world in less than 48 hours. But, the media have scrupulously avoided any analysis of the objectives in these changes or discussion of Rumsfeld's attacks on homeland security. Rumsfeld has already savaged the National Guard; 40% of who are now serving in Iraq. That means, that the American people are 40% "less safe" in the event of terrorist attack no matter how one chooses to look at it. Instead of strengthening the damaged Guard, Rumsfeld is executing a plan that will wreak havoc on domestic preparedness and expose the American public to even greater risk. For example, "Rumsfeld called for 30 Air Guard units scattered around many states to lose their aircraft and flying missions." (Liz Sidot; Ass Press 8-27-05) How can the states be expected to conduct routine patrols or reconnaissance missions if their planes have been seized by Washington?
In Pennsylvania Rumsfeld tried to "dissolve the Pennsylvania Air National Guard division without the Governor's authority". (Ass Press) The move was a conspicuous attempt to undermine homeland defenses and put more power under the direct control of the Defense Dept. Rumsfeld also tried to "transfer" all 15 "Pacific Northwest and Oregon National Guard fighter jets that patrolled Seattle's skies after 9-11"; leaving the region with no protection from aerial assault. (Northwest's F-15's Should Stay Put" Seattle PI staff, 8-27-05) Consider the risk to a "target-rich" area like the Pacific Northwest, with its industry, harbors and nuclear power plants, if it was stripped of its first line of defense? Rumsfeld's behavior has been the same everywhere across the country. He is determined to undermine the National Guard and limit the states' ability to protect themselves against attack. His intention is to smash America's internal defenses, which are under control of the states' governors, and introduce the military into homeland security. It is a clear attempt to centralize authority and further militarize the country. By weakening America's defenses, Rumsfeld has paved the way for deploying troops and aircraft within the country and setting the precedent for a permanent military presence within the nation. It is one giant step towards direct military rule.
rootsie on 09.01.05 @ 07:41 AM CST [
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BRITAIN'S POLICE STATE: The cry now is “treason” or the Star Chamber revisited
Secret, judge-only courts where the accused has no access to the ‘evidence’? Changes to the law will include making it illegal to advocate violence to further a person’s belief, justifying or validating such violence, or fostering hatred.
Under the Lords Chancellor Cardinal Wolsey and Archbishop Cranmer (1515-1529), the Court of Star Chamber became a political weapon for bringing actions against opponents to the policies of Henry VIII, his Ministers and his Parliament. Then, under James the 1st and Charles the 1st, the Star Chamber Court sessions were held in secret, with no indictments, no right of appeal, no juries, and no witnesses. Evidence was presented in writing. On October 17, 1632, the Court of Star Chamber banned all “news books”.[1] Sound familiar?
This is a moment to seize. The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us."
Tony Blair @ the Labour Party Conference, October 1st 2001
Tony Blair tells us that “Let no one be in any doubt. The rules of the game are changing”, but whose changing them and whose ‘game’ is it? [2]
The cry of ‘Treason’, is after all, the logical conclusion to a policy based upon demonisation of the ‘other’ and the latest sign of a ruling class in desperate need to justify not only its onslaught on the people of Iraq but the attacks on our rights and liberties. Not surprisingly, the bombings of July 7 and the ‘topping up’ of July 21 came in very handy in the run-up to the cry of ‘treason!’
The terrible irony of our current situation is that although the state is undergoing an unprecedented crisis of credibility because of its policy of allying itself with the US imperium, there is no real domestic opposition. So what is it that the state is allegedly so afraid of?
What should not be let out of our sight is the fact that unless the domestic population is presented with a ‘clear and present danger’, the state faces the real possibility of a genuine opposition developing to its policies. This is the real danger. For the reality is that it is precisely the policies of Blair’s government along with that of the US that is the cause of the current situation.
globalresearch.ca
rootsie on 09.01.05 @ 07:32 AM CST [
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Chimp and human DNA is 96% identical
The first detailed genetic comparison between humans and chimpanzees shows that 96 per cent of the DNA sequence is identical in the two species. But there are significant differences, particularly in genes relating to sexual reproduction, brain development, immunity and the sense of smell.
An international scientific consortium publishes the genome of the chimpanzee, the animal most closely related to homo sapiens on Thursday in the journal Nature. It is the fourth mammal to have its full genome sequenced, after the mouse, rat and human being.
Some of the scientific analysis of the 3bn chemical “letters” of the chimp’s genetic code focused on its remarkable closeness to the human genome. After 6m years of separate evolution, the differences between chimp and human are just 10 times greater than those between two unrelated people and 10 times less than those between rats and mice.
But most scientists are concentrating on the differences. The vast majority of these probably have little biological significance, said Simon Fisher of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford: “The big challenge for the future is to pinpoint the tiny subset of differences that account for the origins of unusual human traits, such as complex language.”
The preliminary evidence suggests that the outstanding size and complexity of the human brain owes less to the evolution of new human genes than to the different way existing genes produce proteins as the human brain grows in the foetus and during infancy. Genes for transcription factors - molecules that regulate the activity of other genes and play a vital role in embryonic development - are evolving more quickly in humans than in chimps.
Three key genes involved in the human inflammatory response to disease are missing in chimps, which may explain some of the differences between the two immune systems. On the other hand humans have lost a gene for an enzyme that may protect other animals against Alzheimer’s disease.
The clearest differences to emerge from the analysis are in the Y (male) sex chromosome. While the human Y chromosome has maintained its count of 27 active gene families over 6m years, some have mutated and become inactive on its chimp counterpart.
This finding contradicts the popular view that the human Y chromosome is withering away because it has no genetic “mate” with which to swap genes - a process that repairs damaged DNA on other chromosomes. Presumably an alternative repair mechanism has evolved in humans but not in chimps.
David Page of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research suggested that mating habits in the two species might explain the difference. Because male and female chimps mate with multiple partners there is stronger selective pressure on sperm-producing genes and conversely less pressure on evolution to preserve other genes on the Y chromosome in the apes than in largely monogamous humans.
news.ft.com
rootsie on 09.01.05 @ 07:27 AM CST [
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Report Scores Runaway CEO Pay, Alleges War Profiteering
WASHINGTON - Chief executives at U.S. defense contractors have seen a 200-percent pay raise since the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, widening the chasm between compensation in the corner office and wages on the factory floor, a new report said Tuesday.
Average CEO pay--$11.8 million in salary, stock options, bonuses, and incentives--rose last year to 431 times what the average worker earned, $27,460, according to the report from the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies and Boston-based United for a Fair Economy. In 2003, CEOs had made 301 times their average employees' pay.
The ratio had peaked at 525-to-1 in 2001.
''If the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the U.S. would be earning $23.03 an hour today, not $5.15 an hour,'' the research and advocacy groups said.
The report charged that individual CEOs have profited from the Iraq War, with huge average raises at the biggest defense contractors. To arrive at this conclusion, it looked at 34 of the top 100 defense contractors of 2004. While most firms in the larger group were privately held, the 34 included in the report were publicly traded, meaning that their financial results were easier to research.
The 34 companies covered by the report--firms including United Technologies, Textron, and General Dynamics--made at least 10 percent of their revenues from defense contracts.
At these firms, average CEO pay rose 200 percent from 2001 to 2004--as compared to seven percent for all CEOs.
Examples cited in the report include that of David Brooks, CEO of bulletproof vest maker DHB Industries, who earned $70 million in 2004, up 3,349 percent from his 2001 compensation of $525,000.
commondreams.org
rootsie on 09.01.05 @ 07:21 AM CST [
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