Why the Bush Rush on Iran? Could be the Oil!

Iran to take control of world's oil trade in 2005

"The Insider" mailing list article, 19 June 2004.

In 2005 Iran will launch a new oil exchange that is expected to put an end to Western domination of the international oil trade. The US and UK, currently home to the world's largest oil markets, are unlikely to allow Iran to undermine their control of the oil trade without putting up a fight.


Iran is to launch an oil trading market for Middle East and Opec producers that could threaten the supremacy of London's International Petroleum Exchange.

A contract to design and establish a new platform for crude, natural gas and petrochemical trades is expected to be signed with an international consortium within days.

Top oil producing countries are determined to seize more control of trading after being advised that existing markets such as the IPE and Nymex in New York are not working in their favour.

Three years ago a former compliance director accused the IPE of manipulating prices, although these allegations were dismissed after an investigation.

The Tehran oil bourse is scheduled to open in 2005, according to its architect, Mohammad Javad Asemipour, who is a personal adviser to the Iranian energy minister.

"We are in the final stage of choosing a concession for what is going to be a very big development for us and the region," he said.

The expected winner of the contract is a consortium of Iranian and international companies known as Wimpole, which is understood to include PA Consulting and a former director of Nymex.

Mr Asemipour has been in London in the last few weeks visiting commodity traders to encourage them to participate in his new venture.

He played down the dangers that the new exchange could eventually pose for the IPE or Nymex, saying he hoped they might be able to cooperate in some way.

Some industry experts have warned the Iranians and other Opec producers that western exchanges are controlled by big financial and oil corporations, which have a vested interest in market volatility.

The IPE, bought in 2001 by a consortium that includes BP, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, was unwilling to discuss the Iranian move yesterday. "We would not have any comment to make on it at this stage," said an IPE spokeswoman.

Many of the contracts for crude oil being exported from producers such as Iran and Saudi Arabia are linked to prices for the UK North Sea Brent blend.

The Middle East producers would like to establish a rival Persian Gulf blend contract alongside hedging mechanisms that could operate around the new bourse.

The regional initiative is significant but not entirely new. The Dubai Mercantile Exchange recently tried to develop an oil trading market with the help of Nymex but it collapsed through lack of interest.

The Tehran bourse is considered to be more likely to succeed because Iran exports 2.7m barrels a day and produces 13m tonnes of petrochemicals every year. The country has the second biggest oil reserves in the world behind Saudi Arabia.

But Adam Sieminski, oil analyst with Deutsche Bank in London, questioned whether it would succeed. "The IPE and Nymex work because there are many sellers and many buyers. They are regulated markets based on well-established systems for trading and I think the Iranians will struggle to duplicate that."

Mr Asemipour said the new project is in tune with both Islamic and local constitutional law and has been given the go-ahead by government and parliament as part of the country's five-year plan.

· The world is not short of oil and reserves should last 40 years at today's rates of consumption, according to BP chief executive John Browne.

There was "considerable scope" for proven reserves and production levels to keep on rising in Russia and elsewhere, he said in BP's statistical review of world energy.

Production in some areas such as the North Sea might have peaked but "this is no reason for current high prices," said BP chief economist Peter Davies. Oil prices during 2003 were the highest for 20 years despite world oil production growing by 3.8%, higher than the 2.1% increase in demand, BP noted.

SOURCE: The Guardian (UK), "Iran takes on west's control of oil trading", 16 June 2004.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
business/story/0,3604,1239644,00.html


FURTHER READING

BBC News, "Iran 'to charge British sailors'", 22 June 2004.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
1/hi/world/middle_east/3828377.stm

Iran is to prosecute eight UK sailors detained for illegally entering its territorial waters, state-run TV quotes military sources as saying.

Three British naval craft and crews were seized on Monday in the Shatt al-Arab waterway near the Iraqi border.

Al-Alam TV said the men had admitted entering Iranian territory, and were a kilometre across the marine border.
...
The television report said weapons and maps were confiscated from the men after they were apprehended.
...

Washington Times, "Iran massing troops on Iraq border", 15 June 2004.

http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/
20040615-055649-4707r.htm

Beirut, Lebanon, Jun. 15 (UPI)
Iran reportedly is readying troops to move into Iraq if U.S. troops pull out, leaving a security vacuum.

The Saudi daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat, monitored in Beirut, reports Iran has massed four battalions at the border.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat quoted "reliable Iraqi sources" as saying, "Iran moved part of its regular military forces towards the Iraqi border in the southern sector at a time its military intelligence agents were operating inside Iraqi territory."

CNN Exec. Suggests Journalists Targeted by U.S. in Iraq

All Roads Lead to Rome (Again)
Posted by Danny Schechter
Feb. 9th, 2005


WERE JOURNALISTS TARGETED IN IRAQ?
MY TESTIMONY FOR THE TRIBUNAL
WHEN FOX VIEWERS ATTACK

A funny thing happened to me as I prepared to leave for Rome today to participate in the citizens-initiated World Tribunal on Iraq session on the role of the media in covering the conflict. Last night I got another summons from the evil empire. I was invited again to appear on the nightly Hannity and Colmes wrestling match on Fox News Channel.

As most readers know, the media war issue is one I have been following with religious intensity, I wrote the book, Embedded, about it and followed up with the film, WMD. I have also written up a storm about even as some jaded reviewers and columnists insist the issue is moribund, over. I can't tell you how many times I have heard that WMD was released too late even though it was not about the election and deals with a series of ongoing issues.

And yet it keeps coming back, perhaps because the war hasn't gone away. As I reported in recent days, CNN executive Eason Jordan stirred a hornets nest by telling an off-the-record panel at the World Economic Forum that 12 journalists were killed by the US military in Iraq.

The reaction, to read Howard Kurtz's account in the Washington Post, was SHOCK and denial by people like Senator Chris Dodd and even Congressman Barney Frank. After a blogger broke the confidentiality of the session, Jordan was besieged with attacks from the right with angry demands for proof . Conservative bloggers went into action by criticizing the rest of the media for not covering the story. Their assumption: Jordan is lying.

As viewers of WMD know, there is a section in the film that asks: "Were Journalists Targeted in Iraq?" It points out that BBC's Kate Adie was told by the Pentagon that independent journalists would be targeted. It shows how the Al Jazeera office whose coordinates were given to the Pentagon was bombed and its bureau chief Tariq Ayoub was killed. It shows what happened to the Palestine Hotel where two journalists were killed by a tank shell. It interviews one of the journalists who were wounded who asks "why did they target us; what did we do to them?" It reports that press freedom groups and Reuters demanded an investigation that was not forth coming. It concludes with a quote by veteran war correspondent Phillip Knightly, author of "the First Casualty," a book on the history of censorship in war who says that he believed that occasional shots at media sites are "not accidental."

I heard about this statement from a friend who was at the panel. I thought that some new information was on the verge of coming out. So I reached out to Jordan who I once worked around at CNN to ask if he could help me get on CNN to discuss and debate the issue. Our PR wizard Gary Kenton wrote to him thusly:

In WMD Danny asks whether independent journalists might have been targeted by the U.S. military, an issue you addressed at Davos, and setting off a firestorm. We wanted to talk to you about two things:

1) We are uncomfortable, as we assume you are, talking about the possible targeting of reporters, but it is too important to ignore. Allowing it to "go away" seems like an abdication of journalistic responsibility. Would you consider scheduling some on-air discussion on some program? The clip from the film deals with the Palestine Hotel incident with original interviews

2) WMD is currently in theaters in New York and elsewhere. As you know, it is difficult to make a documentary such as this, no less get a theatrical release. Any assistance you might provide in getting Danny interviews on any CNN outlets would be greatly appreciated. He's a great interview and, as you know, he was part of the start-up team in Atlanta "back in the day" before he went on to ABC News.

Eason, seemingly shaken by all the heat coming down on him for discussing something that many journalists and press freedom groups like the International Federation of Journalists has been discussing, began to withdraw from the controversy he stirred. He wrote back to Gary:

I was not as clear as I should have been during the Davos panel discussion. I was trying to make a distinction between journalists killed being the victims of collateral damage and journalists being killed under different circumstances. No doubt most of the 63 journalist deaths in Iraq fall outside the collateral damage category. I have never felt and never intended to suggest, however, that anyone in the U.S. military meant to kill anyone known to be a journalist. As you will see in the Howard Kurtz Washington Post today, my comments were controversial. While I am pleased the spotlight is on the issue of journalist safety in Iraq, I intend to let others do the talking for a while after I gave several interviews and statements on the subject. I will let my colleagues know of Danny's availability as an on-air guest. I thank you and wish you well.
Eason.

I was hoping CNN might call and we reached out to Lou Dobbs and Aaron Brown to no avail.

I guess CNN was not interested in taking on this fight.

But Fox News was. Fox is always at war with CNN which it brands as a liberal network, a label CNN does not want or like. And so Fox scheduled a segment and asked if I was interested. When I told them I had a film documenting the attack on the Palestine Hotel, they were doubly interested. Frozen out by CNN and most TV networks who we bombarded with Info on WMD (save Court TV) I entered the Fox arena the way Christians were fed to the lions.

Needless to say Fox wanted to trash Eason, not the killing of journalists. They showed a very clip of my film with the sound muted but I did get to make a few points and plug the movie the best I could expect in circumstances of hostility..

Sean Hannity took some predictable whacks along with Brent Bozell but I held my ground and was still standing at the bell. I would score the round as a draw.

It was hard to shift the conversation back to the real issue – the killing of journalists and not what Eason Jordan said or didn't say – no one there seemed to know or really care in what was really a bash CNN exercise. You can read what some Fox regulars thought of my performance in today's letters section.

Spectres of Past Bad Days

Bush’s New Freedom Fighter


Elliott Abrams: The Neocon’s Neocon
by Tom Barry
CommonDreams.org
Wednesday, February 9, 2005


President Bush’s Inaugural Address was the sound of the second shoe dropping. Three years ago the president shocked the world with the announcement of the U.S. government’s new doctrine of preventive war and global military engagement. Last month he proclaimed that U.S. power and influence had a soft side. Along with use of our military might, the U.S. government was committing the American people to an international campaign to promote freedom and democracy.
Minutes before his State of the Union Address, in which he repeated the promise to answer the call of freedom worldwide, the White House announced that Elliott Abrams would direct the new global democracy campaign as well as overseeing Middle East policy from his perch in the National Security Council.

Elliott Abrams embodies neoconservatism. Perhaps more than any other neoconservative, Abrams has integrated the various influences that have shaped today’s neoconservative agenda. A creature of the neoconservative incubator, Abrams is a political intellectual and operative who has advanced the neoconservative agenda with chutzpah and considerable success.

As a government official, Abrams organized front groups to provide private and clandestine official support for the Nicaraguan Contras; served as the president of an ethics institute despite his own record of lying to Congress and managing illegal operations; rose to high positions in the National Security Council to oversee U.S. foreign policy in regions where he had no professional experience, only ideological positions; proved himself as a political intellectual in books and essays that explore the interface between orthodox Judaism, American culture, and political philosophy; and demonstrated his considerable talents in public diplomacy as a political art in the use of misinformation and propaganda to ensure public and policy support for foreign relations agendas that would otherwise be soundly rejected.

Abrams has moved back and forth between government and the right’s web of think tanks and policy institutes, holding positions as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), advisory council member of the American Jewish Committee, and charter member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Abrams has maintained close ties with the Social Democrats/USA, the network of right-wing social democrats and former Trotskyites who became the most vocal of the self-described “democratic globalists” within the neocon camp in the 1990s.

His family ties have helped propel Abrams into the center of neoconservatism’s inner circles over the past few decades. In 1980 he joined one of the two reigning families of neoconservatism through his marriage to Rachel Decter, one of Midge Decter’s two daughters from her first marriage. As a member of the Podhoretz-Decter clan, Abrams became a frequent contributor to Commentary and Norman Podhoretz’s choice to direct the magazine’s symposiums on foreign policy. As one of the leading neocons in the Reagan administration, Abrams also served as a liaison between government and the right wing’s network, as exemplified by his appearances at the forums organized by Midge Decter’s Committee for the Free World in the 1980s.

Emblematic of Abrams’ visceral right-wing politics was his statement following the murder of John Lennon in December 1980. Setting the tone for the cultural and political backlash that would soon dominate U.S. politics, Abrams complained publicly about all the media attention given the famous singer: “I’m sorry, but John Lennon was not that important a figure in our times…Why is his death getting more attention than Elvis Presley’s? Because Lennon is perceived as a left-wing figure politically, anti-establishment, a man of social conscience with concern for the poor. And, therefore, he is being made into a great figure. Too much has been made of his life. It does not deserve a full day’s television and radio coverage. I’m sick of it.”

Abrams as Anti-Communist Gladiator

As an aide to Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson in the 1970s, Abrams began his political career mixing the soft and hard sides of the neoconservative agenda­as both a proponent of Jackson’s strategically driven human rights policies and as an advocate of his proposals to boost the military-industrial complex. Through Jackson, Abrams became involved in a group of Cold Warriors called the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which was associated with the Democratic Party and led by the neoconservatives.

Among former members of Jackson’s staff to find positions in the Reagan administration’s foreign policy team were such neoconservative operatives as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, Charles Horner, and Ben Wattenberg. Other Jackson Democrats who secured appointments in the Reagan administration included Jeane Kirkpatrick, as UN ambassador, and neoconservatives on her staff, such as Joshua Muravchik, Steven Munson (like Abrams a Podhoretz-Decter son-in-law), Carl Gershman, and Kenneth Adelman.

Abrams joined the neocon exodus from the Democratic Party in the late 1970s led by members of the Committee on the Present Danger and the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. His first position in the Reagan administration was director of the State Department’s Office for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. But he was appointed only after Reagan’s first choice came under fire in the Senate.

During the Reagan years, the neocon human rights program was a velvet glove tailored for the iron fist side of foreign and military policy. During the Reagan administration, Abrams was at once a human rights advocate, a manager of clandestine operations, and a bagman for the Nicaraguan contras­calling himself “a gladiator” in the cause of freedom.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Although he entered the Reagan administration scandal-free, he left as a convicted criminal. Abrams, who entered the administration as its human rights chief and in 1985 became assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, was indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for intentionally deceiving Congress about the administration’s role in supporting the Contras, including his own central role in the Iran-Contra arms deal.

The U.S.-backed and organized Contras were spearheading a counterrevolution against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Congress had prohibited U.S. government military support for the Contras because of their pattern of human rights abuses. Abrams pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses (including withholding information from Congress) to avoid a trial and a possible jail term.

Abrams and five other Iran-Contra figures were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992, shortly before the senior Bush left office. By pardoning Abrams, John Poindexter, and other former Reagan officials, Bush was in effect protecting himself. At that time media and congressional investigations of Iran-Contra scandal were threatening to expose the role of Bush himself, who was Reagan’s vice president during the executive branch’s program of illegal support to the Nicaraguan Contras.

During the Reagan administration, Abrams was the government’s nexus between the militarists in the National Security Council and the public-diplomacy operatives in the State Department, White House, and National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Abrams worked closely with Otto Reich, who directed the White House’s Office of Public Diplomacy, which was in charge of disseminating “white propaganda” to the U.S. public, media, and policymakers to build support for the Reagan administration’s interventionist policies in Latin America and elsewhere.

Abrams in the 1990s

After Reagan left office in 1989, Abrams, like a number of other prominent neoconservatives, was not invited to serve in the Bush Sr. administration. Instead, he worked for a number of think tanks and in 1996 became president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. With EPPC as his new base, Abrams wrote widely on foreign policy issues, especially on Middle East policy, and on cultural issues, including about the threats posed by U.S. secular society to Jewish identity.

Created in 1976, EPPC was the first neocon institute to break ground in the frontal attack on the secular humanists. For nearly three decades, EPPC has functioned as the cutting edge of the neoconservative-driven culture war against progressive theology and secularism, and the associated effort to ensure right-wing control of the Republican Party. It explicitly sought to unify the Christian right with the neoconservative religious right, which was mostly made up of agnostics back then. A central part of its political project was to “clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy.” Directed by Elliott Abrams from 1996-2001, EPPC counts among its board members well connected figures in the neocon matrix including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Neuhaus, and Mary Ann Glendon.

Abrams remained an integral part of the tight-knit neoconservative foreign policy community in Washington that revolved around the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Abrams was also a charter member of the Project for the New American Century, which issued its statement of principles about the need for a “neo-Reaganite” foreign policy in 1997.

Elliott Abrams, when serving as EPPC president, said that human rights should be a “policy tool” of the U.S. government. Working closely with Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress, EPPC together with the Christian Coalition and Family Research Council lobbied for the creation of a new permanent commission that focused on religious persecution. The main countries of concern listed in the congressional deliberations were China, Sudan, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia, as well as general condemnation of Muslim nations. Abrams became a founding member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and served as its chairman until mid-2001, when he joined the Bush administration.

Regarding Abrams’s biased stance on Middle East affairs, Dr. Laila al-Marayati, a former member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, wrote: “From the vantage point of the [U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom], as an American and as a Muslim, I had the unfortunate opportunity of witnessing­clearly and unequivocally­the deep bias that Abrams brings to his new position. …As chairman of the commission at the time, Abrams led the delegation to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but did not go to Jerusalem with three of us as he was of the opinion that there are no problems with religious freedom in Israel that would warrant the attention of the commission. …Bypassing Israel was not the only way Abrams undermined the Commission’s visit to the Middle East. …Abrams managed to snub the leading Islamic cleric in Egypt… which nearly created a diplomatic nightmare that was only narrowly averted by the intervention of the U.S. ambassador.”

The New Freedom Fighter

Since Bush’s reelection in early November, Abrams has become one of the administration’s most high-profile officials. He has acted as Bush’s envoy to Europe and Israel as part of the administration’s new attention to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Abrams participated in an hour-plus meeting in the Oval Office with the president and Natan Sharansky, Israel’s minister for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs. Sharansky, the author of The Case for Democracy, subsequently met with Rice. Both Bush and Rice have repeatedly referred to Sharansky’s book in their pronouncements about the U.S. government’s new commitment to ending tyranny and spreading democracy, frequently using the same phrasing as Abransky.

Also in November, Abrams arranged conference calls with the leaders of the major national Jewish American organizations in advance of formal meetings with Rice. Last week, Abrams traveled to Israel and met with Ariel Sharon’s top adviser Dov Weisglass to smooth the way for Secretary of State’s visit with Prime Minister Sharon.

After the scandals involving neoconservatives in the late 1980s and the end of the cold war, many foreign policy observers wrote off the neoconservatives as a spent force. The same dismissal of the enduring influence of the neoconservative camp became widespread among pundits and analysts when the Iraq invasion proved a quagmire rather than a liberation “cakewalk.”

It’s likely that Elliott Abrams, who has established a close working relationship with Condoleezza Rice, will become the leading administration architect of Middle East policy during the second Bush administration. Like the Middle East policy of the first administration, the regional initiatives of the new administration will continue to be guided by neocon notions about the centrality of Israel, the U.S. mission to restructure the Arab world, and the use of public diplomacy gloss of spreading freedom and democracy to advance U.S. national security strategy.

Tom Barry is policy director of the International Relations Center, online at http://www.irc-online.org, and author of numerous books on international relations. He directs the IRC’s Right Web program.

Hate and the Words Left Unsaid

ZNet | Race

What Ward Churchill Didn't Say (It's the singer...not the song)

by Mickey Z; February 09, 2005

My sources tell me that U.S. intelligence has just uncovered a chilling pre-9/11 edict from Osama bin Laden on the topic of striking the infidels where it hurts:

"What is necessary is cruel and strong reactions. We need precision in time, place, and casualties...we must strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise, the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action, there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent."

Actually, not only do I not have any "sources," but that quote does not come courtesy of the reigning bogeyman...it's a January 1, 1948 diary entry by one of Israel's founding fathers, David Ben-Gurion (talking about the Palestinians, of course.)

It's the singer, not the song...and when those crooning are Israeli, the tune they carry is never panned by the American corporate media. Golda Meir can declare, "There was no such thing as Palestinians; they never existed" while Menachem Begin can conversely admit the existence of Palestinians but paradoxically call them "beasts walking on two legs" and "cockroaches" but the H Word isn't uttered.

Thanks to Ward Churchill, we have a good idea of what provokes the H Word in today's McSociety. But is he really guilty of hate speech for what he said? In the end, that's a matter of opinion...but I do know what Churchill didn't say.

Ward Churchill didn't say this: "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them. And then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did." That was George W. Bush, twice un-elected president of the United States of Advertisement.

Ward Churchill didn't say this: "There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire." That was John F. Kerry and he was still considered soft (he just didn't hate enough, I guess).

Ward Churchill didn't say this: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building" or this: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." That was the noted humanitarian Ann Coulter.

Ward Churchill didn't say this: "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work." That was Nobel Peace Laureate, Henry Kissinger

Ward Churchill didn't say this: "Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country" or this: "Democracy has justified itself by keeping for the white race the best portions of the earth's surface." That was Mount Rushmore's own, Teddy Roosevelt.

Ward Churchill didn't say this: "The Antichrist is probably a Jew alive in Israel today," or this: "Communism was the brainchild of German-Jewish intellectuals," or this: "The Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew." That was political power broker and God's best friend, Pat Robertson.

Ward Churchill didn't say this: "I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you...Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty; we are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism." That was the very holy Randall Terry, founder of "Operation Rescue," speaking to a like-minded audience.

Ward Churchill didn't say this: "Racism isn't holding blacks back, it's their own laziness!" That was Bill Cosby (net worth: $540 million).

And here's one more thing Ward Churchill didn't say: "Freedom of speech...just watch what you say." That was Ice T (before he started playing a cop on network TV).

One last note: The last time I checked Ward Churchill's most recent book, "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens : Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality," is ranked #365 at Amazon...thus proving yet again that hate sells.

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net. If you buy his books, he'll promise to hate you forever.

The Shattered Glass

The shattered glass ( ... and the milk it spilled)

I have long insisted that the heart-wrenching trauma that was 9/11 is the key to understanding both the past and the future of American history. If you choose to accept the official version of these horrible events, you are continuing to ingest a poison that has killed millions of innocent people, and will surely kill millions more.



What if we what we thought was healthy was actually killing us?
By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net


The only sound in the darkness was the voice of a woman on the phone outlining her plans to awaken a sleeping citizenry with an accurate video version of the crime of the century. But when a man listens to a woman, he often doesn't hear her words, but instead drifts off into the uncharted narrative of his own dreams.

Fifty years ago I stood in the kitchen of my childhood. The giant glass of milk I always consumed before bedtime had accidentally crashed onto the kitchen floor, spewing a white Rorschach blot across the checkered linoleum. I loved milk, I told her. But her voice chided through the line: no adult animal drinks milk; it isn't healthy, because the excess protein putrefies in your digestive tract and catalyzes all manner of debilitating ailments.

So we learn what we thought was essential to our well-being may in reality be a recipe for needless misery, not to mention serious injury. This passing thought, this shattered glass in my memory, got me thinking about what we once learned was good and life-giving can with the right information lead to the realization that we are killing ourselves because we remain ignorant of basic facts.

This evolving image coalesced in my mind as she talked about the need to convince people that 9/11 was really an inside job inflicted on the American people by our own leaders. Hence this thought: what we thought was good and pure can, without accurate information, actually be a poison that we eagerly and happily guzzle down.

I have long insisted that the heart-wrenching trauma that was 9/11 is the key to understanding both the past and the future of American history. If you choose to accept the official version of these horrible events, you are continuing to ingest a poison that has killed millions of innocent people, and will surely kill millions more.

Once you begin to contemplate the notion that our own leaders callously engineered the whole tragedy simply to advance their own greedy agenda, you open up a very unsettling window into the predatory behavior of the United States, both throughout its bloody, falsely reported history, and obviously also to a terrifying future of what America's power-mad leaders have planned for the rest of the world in the coming months and years.

Yet most Americans, willingly distracted by simpler concerns like children and bank accounts, cannot — or will not — see this, despite an avalanche of evidence that could, if we had an uncorrupted court system, convict thousands of rich and famous men of profoundly serious crimes.

Intellectually stunted by a one-size-fits-all educational system and constantly deceived by clownlike media that deliberately ignore certain negative events like fixed elections and toxic medicines, a majority of the American people simply cannot bring themselves to believe their leaders could be such cold-hearted villains, such sociopathic criminals.

Could President Bush, who throbs the hearts of blue-haired ladies across America and sends squadrons of superficial preachers into convincingly feigned rhapsodies of Rapture fever, have supervised the murder of 3,000 Americans just to get his geopolitical way?

To most Americans who have sworn their allegiance to their churches and their country, the idea is too preposterous to consider. Yet this allegiance, based on false information, is, for so many (including those many Americans who are persuaded to physically fight for their country), a fatal misstep.

But when we do open our minds to the endless string of lies, the towers that couldn’t have fallen due to airplane crashes, the phonecalls that couldn’t have been made with existing technology, the so-called Arabs who never showed up on the passenger lists (allegedly devout Muslims who ate pork and went to strip clubs), the building that fell for no reason, the air defenses that failed to respond, the deliberate lies, the stonewalled investigations, the confiscated videos and tapes that would have more clearly revealed what happened, and various other pieces of the puzzle that will never in a million years fit together, we have an inkling that something is really wrong, regardless of whatever allegiances we may profess. That we have not been told the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And then we recall bits and pieces of history that still stick in our craws like bad fish. The window opens.

Historian William Blum always describes these matters best.

“From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the U.S. bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair.”

But one need not lurch into history books to taste that sour burp of genuine American history. One need only not rely on newspapers and look elsewhere for unspun info on the American genocides transpiring this very day in Palestine, Iraq, Haiti, Colombia, Serbia, Afghanistan and throughout Africa and Asia to acquire an accurate picture of the way America really works.

It always comes as a shock to me to realize that today’s majority of the American population was not alive for Watergate, never mind that tragic spate of assassinations in the Sixties — all of which were engineered by the same demonic faction of the U.S. government that exerts its murderous impulses over all of us today.

So for you young victims of the American public school system, let me recount just a little of the actual history of your country that you may, in your media-induced, consumeristic coma, have missed:

Few Americans know that America's involvement in World War I was triggered by a deliberate deception known as the sinking of the Lusitania, which was a passenger ship torpedoed by a German U-boat that changed public opinion in America from neutral to pro-war. 128 Americans died and America eventually went to war over the incident, after first concealing that the Lusitania was covertly carrying ammunition to Britain, and that fact had been deliberately leaked to German intelligence to assure a suitable public affront to American dignity.

Many historians theorize that this period actually signalled the end of the republic, since the most important legislative act ever passed in American history, the Federal Reserve Act, gave control of the currency to private bankers, who have been igniting wars ever since for the purpose of making huge amounts of money.

This process remains the centerpiece of the American economy, and is the reason you can bask in your self-depleting trivalities while the rest of the world forever mourns the millions murdered by the American war machine.

World War II was triggered by an almost identical process. Americans did not want to participate in another European war, but it's well known now that Franklin Roosevelt goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor, creating the necessary outrage and support for millions more to die so the bankers could make money with that best moneymaker of all — all out war.

And Vietnam. Surely you’ve heard by now. The famous Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the Vietnamese supposedly opened fire on a U.S. ship, never happened. It was a total fabrication that triggered 20 years of misery for all and killed up to four million people, but the bankers who start these things made out like the bandits they are. They even loaned money to the Russians who furnished weapons to the Viets just to prolong this profitable operation as long as possible.

Most of you still remember Saddam, the Iraqi stoolie put in power by the Americans, and, thirty years later, declared to be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. Our leaders said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, so we bombed. But now we know he had no such weapons; yet still we bomb.

The bad perpetrators of 9/11 were hiding in Afghanistan, they told us, so we bombed. But when we had the chance to catch them, we didn’t want to; and still we bomb.

What kind of lies have you been telling yourself that America is the land of the free and the home of the brave? Are you still feeding your children this crap? America is the land of racist mass murderers. And you wave your flag and cheer as the rest of the world bleeds.

If 9/11 is the key to understanding American history, your own ignorance of how America has behaved over time is the key to understanding how America is raping and prostituting the world, and always has been. And you cheer that. By our silence, we are all complicit in these crimes, because we elected these fools. Every one of them. We are the real fools.

Realizing all this is possible when you understand what happened on 9/11, and what has happened in all of America’s foreign adventures. America sees a commodity it likes, arranges with corporate bigwigs how to steal that commodity for its big campaign donors, invents a false story enumerating some perilous threat to the American people, and goes off and murders millions.

America also kills thousands of your own sons and daughters just to make it look authentic. And you cheer.

This is the key to understanding. Your own participation in mass murder. Look in the mirror. And see how your opulent standard of living is the direct result of all those people who were killed, who are being killed as we speak, in your name. You are the mass murderer. And you cheer. And then you lie about what’s really happening. It’s the American way. And it always has been.

A toast, then. To the real American justice. The real history. Your wonderful way of life. Raise your glass of champagne high in a salute to our valiant heroes defending freedom and democracy around the world. Then let the glass slip through your fingers, and crash onto the kitchen floor. You may now choose — or not — to see the blood you’re standing in.



John Kaminski’s Internet essays can be seen on hundreds of websites around the world. They have been collected into two anthologies, the latest of which is titled “The Perfect Enemy,” about how the Zionist-controlled U.S. government created the terrorist group knowns as al-Qaeda.

For more information go to http://www.johnkaminski.com/

Moon Over America: of Cults and Country

February 07, 2005

Email to the Editors of World Peace Herald: the Propaganda of Arnaud de Borchgrave

Dear Editors of World Peace Herald,

This morning I read with a considerable degree of incredulity Arnaud de Borchgrave’s commentary, “Al-Qaida’s camp followers,” on your web site. Of course, considering the World Peace Herald is owned by News World Communications Inc., and NWC is a “newspaper publishing company owned by the Unification Church,” according to a Yahoo Finance company profile, and Arnaud de Borchgrave is the editor of the Washington Times, another Moonie operation, and is connected to the Unification Church, incredulity is probably not appropriate.

Regardless of de Borchgrave’s connections to the Moonie cult and its leader, Sun Myung Moon, who believes he is a Christian deity, I must write to protest Arnaud de Borchgrave’s commentary, primarily because it is not only riddled with inaccuracies, but serves as obvious propaganda for the Bush neoconservatives, a “cult,” as Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh correctly notes, currently engaged in planning yet another invasion of a sovereign nation, namely Iran.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is connected to Benador Associates, a right-wing “public relations firm” created by Eleana Benador, a Peruvian-born publicist for Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, and a dozen other prominent neoconservatives connected to the Bush administration and its less than secret plan to wage perpetual war against Islam in the Middle East. Thus I must assume Arnaud de Borchgrave opinions, most notably his assertion that thousands of people attending the World Social Forum, held in Porto Allegre, are al-Qaeda “groupies” is a sentiment shared by the neocon luminaries mentioned above.

Arnaud de Borchgrave’s transparent attempt to connect Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected leader of Venezuela, to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda is not only scurrilous, it is a paranoid and hateful delusion, all too common among the people who currently run U.S. foreign policy. Popular social and political movements in South America, so threatening to de Borchgrave and the neocons, have absolutely nothing to do with the mostly illusory al-Qaeda, an organization that is literally a godsend for de Borchgrave and the neocons, otherwise they would have no excuse to invade Afghanistan, Iraq, and, soon enough, Iran and Syria, or rather convince Bush to do so.

Finally, it is interesting de Borchgrave would mention Ward Churchill in his paranoid screed, the University of Colorado professor currently under attack by de Borchgrave’s fellow travelers for the crime of expressing his constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech, especially pertinent since Churchill is an employee of a public institution. Obviously, Arnaud de Borchgrave and his ilk have a problem with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, a document they have consistently attempted to undermine, most notably with the PATRIOT Act, since September 11, 2001.

Fortunately, history will ultimately judge Arnaud de Borchgrave, a water carrier and propagandist for the neocons, as a war criminal, as Nuremberg war crimes tribunal attempted to do with Hans Fritzsche, one of the individuals chiefly responsible for Nazi newspaper and radio propaganda. Although Fritzsche was found not guilty and released, he was re-arrested and found guilty of a variety of crimes by the German courts and sentenced to nine years hard labor. Arnaud de Borchgrave may suffer a likewise fate, that is if he lives long enough, since he is getting along in his years. In the meantime, I wait expectantly for our own Nuremberg war crimes tribunal to pass sentence on the neocon “cult” that has hijacked our republic and is in the process of rendering it into a tyrannical war machine.

Sincerely,

Kurt Nimmo

21st Century Slave

Cashing in on Cons
Undercover at the American Correctional Association’s 2005 Winter Conference
By Silja J.A. Talvi


In 1971, investigative journalist Jessica Mitford attended the 101st Congress of the American Correctional Association (ACA) in Miami Beach. The ACA was founded in 1870 as the National Prison Association by reform-minded wardens who saw promise in the rehabilitation, religious redemption and humane treatment of prisoners. By 1971 they had developed a substantial membership, attracting 2,000 attendees to that year’s congress.

In her seminal 1973 book, Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business, Mitford reported that the organization had shifted its focus from reforming and rehabilitating prisoners to reaping profit from incarceration. Exhibitors, she wrote, sold everything from tear gas grenades to stun gun prototypes. And with prisons facing costly lawsuits instigated by prisoners, litigation, Mitford wrote, was “very much on everybody’s mind.”

Thirty years later, how much has changed?

The 2005 winter conference in Phoenix—attended by an estimted 4,000—found the ACA still touting its principles: “Humanity, Justice, Protection, Opportunity, Knowledge, Competence and Accountability.” The organization stresses that it brings together individuals and groups “that share a common goal of improving the justice system.” But with the prison industry now bringing in annual revenue of $50 billion, the ACA seems most intent on “improving” profits.

Today’s ACA is a sleeker version of the organization Mitford examined, complete with online certification courses for correctional employees (starting at $29.95) and an expensive prison accreditation process that claims to instill transparency and accountability. Members are enticed to earn accreditation in order to receive up to a 10 percent discount on prison liability insurance (see “A Dubious Distinction”).

Keeping litigation costs down is only one way prison corporations profit from incarceration. In addition, for-profit prisons also increase revenues by contracting with other corporations to provide substandard or overpriced services to prisoners. In some states, companies like Microsoft pay prisons to employ prisoners at wages far below market rates.

Taking advantage of the unprecedented prison boom of the late ’80s and ’90s, prison administrators, politicians, lobbying firms and corporate boards created a prison-industrial complex in which everyone benefits except the prisoners.

In 1980, federal and state prisons incarcerated 316,000 people. In 1990, that number had grown to 740,000, not including jail populations. By 2000, the number of prisoners had surpassed 1.3 million. Prison construction accompanied this growth: More than 1,000 prisons are now in operation, and each new prison comes with a bevy of contracts for construction and services.

The ACA conference is where many of these transactions are cemented.

Noting that the prison population may have reached its apogee, ACA President Gwendolyn C. Chunn told members at the conference, “We’ll have a hard time holding on to what we have now.” But attendees seemed more than willing to try; everyone at the conference seemed to be riding high on the promise of growth, expansion and profits.

Just business


This conference’s theme was “Corrections Contributions to a Safer World,” and the conference program didn’t try to hide the gathering’s militaristic bent. The cover of the 201-page ACA booklet featured a soldier with an enormous phallic tank gun, superimposed over the blue planet earth. And ACA’s three keynote speakers were prominent conservatives or military officers: retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, Michael Durant, the pilot of Black Hawk Down fame, and disgraced Homeland Security nominee Bernard Kerik.

The conference was financially supported by private prison giants such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the GEO Group (formerly known as Wackenhut), Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) and Correctional Medical Services (see “Detention Blues,” July 5, 2004 for background on CSC). The titles of the dozens of overlapping workshops indicated what the ACA defined as the latest trends in corrections: “Faith-Based Juvenile Programming,” “Anti-Terrorism in Correctional Facilities,” and “Can’t Simply Paint it Pink and Call it a Girl’s Program.”

One workshop—“Intensive Medical Management: How to Handle Prisoners Who Self-Mutilate, Slime, Starve, Spit and Scratch”—featured footage of a non-violent paranoid schizophrenic in Utah being forcibly extracted from his cell and then tied down to a restraint chair. After being strapped down naked for 16 hours, the delusional prisoner died. The session was facilitated by Todd Wilcox, the medical director of the Salt Lake County Metro Jail, who used the imagery as an example of how to avoid costly litigation. “Don’t get personal with this,” Wilcox said. “It’s just business.” He reminded the audience how important it is to sever the “emotional leash” that guards and nurses can form with inmates. He also referred to some mentally ill patients with “Axis II disorders” as “the people we affectionately call ‘the assholes.’ ”

Pain for a price


The real draw of the ACA conference was the exhibitors, who had two full days to showcase their wares. The exhibition hall corridors had been given names like “Corrections Corporation of America Court,” “Verizon Expressway,” “Western Union Avenue,” and “The GEO Court Lounge,” where one could sip Starbucks and eat free glazed doughnuts.

Here, the discussions were all about increasing profit margins, lessening risks and liabilities, winning court cases, and new, improved techniques and technologies for managing the most troublesome inmates. In the glaringly bright exhibit hall, attendees buzzed around booths, snapping up freebies and admiring the latest in prison technology.

Exhibitors hawked restraint chairs, tracking systems, drug-detection tools, suicide-prevention smocks and prison facility insurance. Dozens of companies competed to sell private health care systems, pharmacy plans, commissary services and surveillance systems. Of particular interest were behavior modification programs, juvenile boot camps, and Internet and phone services. Interest in the latter brought in the “big boys” of telecommunications: Sprint, AT&T, NEC, MCI Communications, Verizon, Global Tel*Link and Qwest. And why not? Prison phone contracts that overcharge prisoners and their families generate an estimated $1 billion a year.

The range of products went on from one corridor to the next: storage systems, money wiring, surveillance, security transport, fencing and prison medical packages. (Industry giant Prison Health Services brought in rescued owls and hawks to draw crowds. What was the connection to prison health? “Oh, nothing!”) Vendors who couldn’t afford dog-and-pony shows handed out free bags, pens, toothpicks, mugs, tape measures and sugarcoated churros. The exhibitors who didn’t need giveaways to draw crowds included weapons manufacturers Smith & Wesson, Glock and Taser International.

Two smiling exhibitors, standing behind the Taser booth, allowed the curious to handle the latest in 50,000-volt stun gun technology. On the Taser table a video looped on a monitor. It depicted a naked African-American man being chased down by police officers. Shot once he’s shown falling hard to the ground. Tasered again, his body shudders, before collapsing altogether. The contextless footage was meant to illustrate the efficacy of the stun gun, used by more than 6,000 police departments, that had become the leader in the “non-lethal weapons” industry—that is, before a spate of negative press, including reports of an SEC investigation, had put the company’s stock price into a tailspin.

In November 2004, Amnesty International issued a report that blamed at least 74 deaths since 2001 on Tasers and called for a suspension of their use until further studies could prove just how “non-lethal” these weapons were. Headline business news emerged during the ACA conference: Taser executives were reported to have sold $91.5 million of their own stock, raising suspicions that they sought to maximize their own profits before their product lost ground. The company subsequently announced that sales were projected to slow in the months to come. The stock plunged 30 percent. As if all that weren’t bad enough, Taser International President Tom Smith said in an interview that four active-duty police officers had been offered stock options for law enforcement training programs they supervised, which in turn had “led directly to the sale of Tasers to a number of police departments.”

It’s a good thing that former Taser spokesman Bernard Kerik cashed in when he did. The former New York City police commissioner made more than $6.2 million in pre-tax profits from the sale of Taser stock in the month leading up to his abortive Homeland Security nomination.

The venal system


Scores of individuals from prison acquisition and purchasing departments, consulting agencies, and the ranks of high-level prison administrators had come to the conference for networking, recruiting and, above all, business. Private contractors, like food service businesses Aramark and Canteen, discreetly targeted these attendees for their off-site wine-and-dine dinners, issuing covert invitations to people whose badges indicated their importance in the field.

Following a day of tours at Arizona jails and prisons, about 60 conference-goers headed to the Canteen fete at an upscale Italian restaurant in the nearby Arizona Center. Cocktails and bottles upon bottles of wine were poured out prior to a multicourse meal. Wardens and top-ranking corrections administrators from Arizona, New Mexico and Maryland sat in the outdoor patio under heat lamps. Salesmen from Canteen were pressing flesh and passing out business cards. There were smiles all around.

Like so many other private companies working in prisons, Aramark and Canteen have had their share of problems. Aramark was singled out by “Stop the ACA” union-organized protests outside of the conference. On the third day of the conference, protesters snuck in and placed informational materials in the toilet seat cover holders of convention center bathrooms.

On the fourth day of the conference, Aramark sought to spruce up its image with a faux-New Orleans-style gentleman’s “entertainer,” complete with pink top, feather cap and black fishnets. The heavily made-up young woman knelt before prison administrators, giving them free shoeshines.

Aramark’s low bids have succeeded in getting contracts in many jails and prisons. The company boasts that it provides more than a million meals a day to prisoners nationwide. Aramark materials also emphasize the company’s adherence to ACA standards, but that hasn’t stopped the allegations from piling up. In Dauphin County, Pa., for instance, a grand jury is investigating charges of overbilling and poor food quality. In July 2004, New Mexico inmates at Los Lunas prison, fed up with Aramark’s low food quality and “inedible” meat-type products, organized a hunger strike. Similar problems have been reported in at least a dozen states.

Privatization, politicians and payola

The glossy GEOworld magazine, distributed at the ACA conference, trumpeted the success of the largest “Private-Public Partnership in the World,” a sprawling detention center complex in Pecos, Texas. Known as the Reeves County Detention Facility (RCDC), the complex consists of prisons for both Bureau of Prisons and Arizona state inmates. According to GEO, “the joint venture ... between GEO Group and Reeves County has been a rewarding challenge.”

Unmentioned was the fact that a Reeves County judge, Jimmy Galindo, is facing a lawsuit over his role in granting the private operation and expansive construction of RCDC. According to the local Odessa American newspaper, building RCDC has led to the “near financial ruin of the county.” RCDC is currently the subject of an FBI and Texas Ranger investigation into tampering with government documents. (In addition, two corrections officers resigned in early January 2005 over sexual molestation charges.)

The RCDC is a private-public partnership in more ways than one. Randy DeLay, the brother of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R–Tex.), lobbied the Bureau of Prisons to send its prisoners to RCDC, at the behest of county officials.

Randy DeLay isn’t the only member of his family with an interest in corrections. In December, Rep. DeLay accepted a $100,000 check from the CCA for the DeLay Foundation for Kids.

The CCA has become a leader in securing private prison contracts. In FY 2003, the CCA generated more than $268.9 million in revenue. Greasing the palms of legislators nationwide hasn’t hurt: In 2004, the CCA’s political action committee gave $59,000 to candidates for federal office—92 percent to Republicans.

This is part and parcel of an industry in the business of locking up human beings. As the industry has grown, the ACA has moved away from the ideals of rehabilitation and redemption of the human spirit. Today, human beings behind bars are little more than commodities to be traded on the open market.

Bill Deener, a financial writer for the Dallas Morning News, writing about recent gains in the private prison market, put it this way: “Crime may not pay, but prisons sure do.”

In 1963, philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about the “banality of evil.” Contained within the packed exhibition hall of the ACA conference was evidence of what Arendt cautioned against: the normalization of dehumanization. Today, the banality of evil has found a home in the mundane marketplace that is the prison industry.

Three days before the ACA conference, MSN Money’s Michael Brush issued a glowing report on the investment potential for the CCA and GEO. The children of the baby boomers, he explained, are about to enter the 18-24-year-old age group—“the years when people commit the most crimes.” He suggested now is the right time to buy into the trend: “[T]he nation’s private prison companies look like solid investments for the next several years.”

In reporting this story, the author did not disclose her identity as a journalist. All the attributed quotes in this article come from individuals speaking in an official capacity at ACA events.

The Burial Details of Falluja

"There were corpses everywhere, bodies burned, decapitated, mutilated. Some were still wearing explosive belts. Others met their death in their cars. We had to pay attention to everything. We put the bodies in bags, then in trucks to take them to the cemetery or to bury them just as they were, with none of the usual preparations, at the stadium. - Abu Ahmed, press-ganged in Falluja



Falluja Residents Testify to the Destruction of Their City
Michel Bôle-Richard
Le Monde

Monday 07 February 2005

Three months after the American offensive and capture of the Sunni bastion, barely 20% of the population has returned. Some residents survive in the ruins. The Red Crescent tries to help, while the Iraqi Army patrols and loots whatever remains.


Three months after the American offensive against Falluja that began November 8, 2004, the rebel city fifty kilometers west of Baghdad is devastated, emptied, sepulchral. "Like after an earthquake, a fire and bomb tsunami that spared practically nothing, not even the mosques," relates Sheikh Taghlib Al-Alousi, President of the Chura, the assembly of religious dignitaries.

The city with a hundred mosques is now only a shadow of its former self. "It's a tragedy! I cried about it like a child," explains the official from the Hazrah Mohammedia mosque, who has returned to what was once a Sunni bastion three times in the period since the end of the main fighting in early December.

Tears come to his eyes when he evokes the present condition of this city of 400,000 on the banks of the Euphrates. "Practically not a single house has been spared. 20% of them have burned and at least 10% are totally destroyed," asserts this engineer who denounces the massive American bombardments every time the Marines encountered any resistance.

Sheikh Taghlib was not there during the fighting. He left before it began. On the other hand, Abu Ahmed lived through hell, sheltering in a mosque which the Americans made him leave with some other men to bury the dead who were lying in the streets. "There were corpses everywhere," he says, "bodies burned, decapitated, mutilated. Some were still wearing explosive belts. Others met their death in their cars. We had to pay attention to everything. We put the bodies in bags, then in trucks to take them to the cemetery or to bury them just as they were, with none of the usual preparations, at the stadium. Those who were with me all went along with it; no one resisted except for a Sudanese man."

During this trip, Abu Ahmed discovered survivors holed up in their houses who came out haggard, holding white flags. He tells the story of a young woman, Suad, who had telephoned him at the beginning of the assault and whom he saved from fear and madness after ten days of terror. "I do not wish this on anyone," he adds. "The soldiers marked an "X" on the houses that had already been searched, an "X" with a circle around it on those that were to be blown up, and a death's head on the houses where there were bodies. I can promise you, there are still more in the ruins."

Marine Control

It's difficult for Sheikh Taghlib to say how many people died. He offers several figures: "1,800, 2,000, maybe 2,500. I don't know whether it will ever be known exactly."

Falluja has since become a ghost town. A very small fraction of the population has returned, certainly less than 20%, most of them poor people who had no means to live in Baghdad or who found no other place to live elsewhere. They survive in an apocalyptic decor, in the midst of ruins and roads blocked or clogged up with burned out cars and piles of rubble.

The stores are empty, looted. The hospitals have been damaged and closed. Electricity and water service are just beginning to barely return. Cars are only exceptionally permitted to enter the city. The residents live like nomads.

The Red Crescent is trying to provide for basic needs and a few itinerant merchants on foot bring some subsistence into this broken city which the Marines continue to occupy and control through numerous checkpoints.

The Iraqi Army has installed itself on the central square and patrols the city. Composed essentially of Shi'ites and peshmerga (Kurdish fighters), it scours the houses, looting, firing on furniture, walls, and appliances, according to several witnesses to these scenes. "They take computers and throw them on the ground. I saw them with my own eyes, just as I saw them open the gas lines and start fires. They amuse themselves by destroying whatever hasn't already been destroyed," rages a resident who does not wish to give his name.

Every day, former residents return to the place where their home used to be. In order to do that, they must be equipped with an American-issued identity card and go through the hours of waiting at check points before they can get into the city which is still under high surveillance, just to observe the damage and preserve whatever still can be preserved. Most people leave again the same day.

They return to Baghdad, Ramadi and Habbania and to all the camps that have been opened on the periphery of Falluja, back to farms, make-shift shelters, and tents.

Thousands of families have settled this way in the expectation that the soldiers will one day leave. A whole city in exile demands to be able to return to what remains of its walls, to be able to rebuild what the guerilla had transformed into a Salafist stronghold and the Americans have demolished by fire.

According to witnesses, the mudjahidin fled to Mosul or elsewhere. Some, like the snipers or suicide bombers, still try to make forays into what had been their fief. No one ever saw the Al Qaeda Jordanian Mussab Al-Zarkawi in Falluja, although the Americans always pinpointed him there.

"For us, he's ghost. The Americans made him up because they needed an enemy to justify their actions" is Sheikh Taghlib's considered opinion. Opposed to the Salafists, this dignitary explains how he tried to save the city from the fighting. He highlighted the futility of fighting, arguing that it was "a trap set by the Americans" and that they "shouldn't fight the Marines as they wanted.... We didn't want the war." He was not listened to.

In the face of this field of ruins, he asks himself how and when Falluja could be reborn from this chaos. Abu Ahmed is desperate. "I'd be happy never to see another American, not here or anywhere else on Earth," he says. "If I could take up arms, I'd do it, but I'm too old and the Americans are too strong. They're going to colonize Iraq for twenty years or more because we have oil. I don't know whether they'll ever leave."



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.

Manufacturing Sector Petitions Ottawa: Raise Living Standards

Canadians have seen almost no improvement in their living standards in the last 15 years and prospects for don't look good for gains any time soon.

SANDRA CORDON
Globe & Mail

Ottawa — Canadian manufacturers are urging Ottawa to put much more attention — if not dollars — into boosting living standards as Finance Minister Ralph Goodale puts the finishing touches on what’s likely to be a spendthrift budget.

Cabinet ministers and labour leaders will join the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters organization in a two-day session beginning Monday at the foot of Parliament Hill. The meetings are aimed at finding ways to improve business, jobs and living standards.

Unless changes are made, and quickly, to boost productivity, Canada won’t have the money to fund the child care, old-age security and education improvements that Mr. Goodale wants to fund in his budget, says Jay Myers, chief economist with the CME.

“We can’t expect to improve health care, we can’t expect to educate young people, improve the environment, improve child care, if we’re not creating the economic growth that is going to pay for all of that,” Mr. Myers said.

“We need a strategy … to look at what it takes to continue to increase our economic prosperity as a part of any social priorities the government might have.”

Mr. Goodale is to deliver his second federal budget on Feb. 23 with a surplus likely to reach almost $9-billion this fiscal year, and many spending promises are expected.

The CME hopes the budget will also cut business taxes and increase spending on border crossings, ports and other infrastructure to ease trade and commerce.

But it’s also concerned with longer-term improvements to education, skills training and innovation — issues of interest to the broader business community.

That helps explain why the CME conference has attracted such cabinet members as Industry Minister David Emerson, Trade Minister Jim Peterson and Joe Volpe, the new Immigration Minister.

Manufacturing plays a large role in the economy, contributing about 18 per cent of the country’s entire economic activity and employing 2.3 million people.

Mr. Myers hopes to promote the notion that modern manufacturing rarely involves dirty, dangerous shop floors any more but instead requires well-trained, sophisticated workers.

“It’s a very highly skilled industry today where two-thirds of the work force now coming into manufacturing needs some post-secondary education.”

To develop a blueprint for improving productivity, or living standards, the CME has been holding town hall-style meetings around the country over the last year.

It concludes that much of the work toward improving productivity must be done by businesses themselves, who are no longer sheltered somewhat by the very cheap dollar.

When the loonie was as low as 62 or 63 cents US — as recently as two years ago — it actually made financial sense for many businesses to delay investments in new equipment.

But with a dollar trading above 80 cents and trending higher, coupled with increased global competition, the days of coasting on a low loonie are long gone, concludes the CME in a major report to be released at its conference.

“In recent years, other countries have been gaining on Canada in terms of their ability to generate economic wealth,” says the study.

Canada has dropped from the fifth to ninth most prosperous country in the OECD over the last 15 years, while per capita income levels are now 22 per cent higher south of the border compared with Canada, it says.

To close the gap “we must continue to grow the high-value, high-paying activities that are part of the modern business of manufacturing in this country.”

Other business groups and leading economists such as Don Drummond of TD Bank Group have also urged Ottawa to develop a long-term strategy for modernized trade, economic growth and productivity.

In a recent report, Mr. Drummond said Canadians have seen almost no improvement in their living standards in the last 15 years and prospects for don’t look good for gains any time soon.

He urged widespread tax cuts and increased spending on education and skills training.

Canadian Troops for Iraq?

Harper warns Grits about 'deception' on Iraq
CTV.ca News Staff

Conservative Leader Stephen Harper is warning the Liberal government will pay a "severe price" if it sends Canadian troops to Iraq.

"I remembered how the prime minister attacked us during the federal election for wanting to spend more on defence,'' Harper told reporters Saturday in Halifax.

"I sat through an election campaign where the prime minister accused me of having secret plans to send troops to Iraq. If it turns out he has secret plans, this has to be one of the biggest election deceptions in history.''

However, Harper didn't rule out supporting such an initiative if he could be convinced it was safe.

He was in Halifax to inspect the fire-damaged HMCS Chicoutimi and to speak to the Nova Scotia Progressive Conservative Party's annual meeting.

Harper was responding to a report that Canadian troops may be deployed to Iraq to help with reconstruction if Prime Minister Paul Martin agrees to the anticipated request from U.S. President George Bush.

The two leaders are expected to discuss the issue when they meet later this month in Brussels for a NATO summit meeting, the Toronto Star reported Saturday.

The paper says a small contingent of 40 Canadian troops would be sent abroad, joining another 300 NATO forces -- if Martin agrees.

The news comes days after Bush's state of the union address. In it, he called on his allies for more foreign aid and support for Iraq's new government after a Jan. 30 election that Bush deemed "a great and historic achievement."

The mandate of the Canadian troops would be to help train Iraqi troops and prepare the violence-ravaged country for the eventual withdrawal of foreign troops.

The Star reports that sources have told it Canada is considering the notion more favourably after last weekend's successful elections in Iraq.

CTV's Rosemary Thompson told Newsnet the Prime Minister's Office is saying they haven't had an official request yet.

If it did happen and Martin agrees to the request, "it could be fireworks in the House," she says.

"I spoke to two opposition leaders today. They both said that Parliament should be consulted before this happens. They both want a vote in the House of Commons."

The decision would be controversial following the move by former prime minister Jean Chretien to keep Canada out of the war -- a move political analysts said alienated Chretien and Canada from Bush and the United States.

France, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Greece banned their nationals from participating in training efforts -- even when NATO increased its training troops from 60 to 300, the Star reported.

Earlier this week, Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew said Canada stands behind its southern neighbour.

"We share a lot of priorities with the President of the United States," Pettigrew told reporters on Parliament Hill.

"He can certainly count on Canada to be a steadfast partner in fighting terrorism around the world."

But in October 2004, Martin expressed his hesitance to commit any Canadian troops to Iraq.

"There's a limit to our resources," Martin said at the time.

"And that's why I'm putting the focus right now on Afghanistan, on Haiti.

"Whatever it is that we do, I really want to see us do it in an area that makes a difference," Martin said.

With files from The Canadian Press and The Associated Press

Warning: Campus Creepers on Watch!

Kurt Nimmo.com
February 05, 2005

Is the Attack on Ward Churchill Orchestrated by Neocon Fellow Travelers?


In regard to my piece (A Ward Churchill Kind of Day) appearing in Counterpunch today, Ron Jacobs, also a Counterpunch contributor, sent the following email:

Nice work. Just a note regarding how organized this campaign against university faculty who vocally oppose US imperial wars, etc. The campaign against Churchill (with whom I have problems—political and otherwise—but do consider an ally) was organized by the Campus Republicans at CU and also at Hamilton (I think).

When Churchill spoke at an environment and indigenous rights conference at the Univ. of Vermont in late October/early November of 200—soon after 911 and the attack on Afghanistan, the local Campus Republicans—a bunch of self-righteous mostly wealthy young men and women who had already punched out an ISO member and encouraged attacks various antiwar activists in town—led a campaign to get Churchill’s engagement cancelled.

They organized call-ins to the university administration, local news organizations, and the local Gannett rag, all with the intention of banning Churchill. Fortunately, the university admin refused to cave in to the pressure and defended the first amendment rights and academic freedom. Through conversations with one of the Campus GOP members—a young military vet from a middle class background (unlike the wealthier backgrounds of his cohorts)—I learned that the local group had received coaching from folks connected to CampusWatch, AIA, and other neocon organizations.

Indeed, this young man even went to a conference later that school year where he attended workshops that laid out methods local campus GOP clubs could use to chase antiwar and leftist groups off campus. Later that same academic year, the UVM Campus GOP tried to get the local ISO group “unrecognized” as an official student group. They failed, thanks to support from a variety of individual students and groups stepping up to defend ISO’s right to be on campus. In short, it is more organized than it appears.

Not surprising, in fact something I have long suspected, considering the agenda of Campus Watch and AVOT (Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, or more appropriately victory over the Bill of Rights as it applies to those they disagree with). Campus Watch claims to be “Keeping an Eye on Professors Who Teach About the Middle East,” but obviously their anti-democratic, proto-fascist agenda (making sure all academics agree with their right-wing politics—or lose their jobs) is directed against not only Middle Eastern scholars and academics, but all academics who they consider “anti-American,” that is to say it is directed against those who disagree with the Strausscon view of foreign policy (in a nutshell: Islam is evil, Zionism is good, and the United States, against its better interests, needs to wage “World War IV” against Israel’s Arab and Muslim enemies).

“AVOT will encourage scholarly research into various aspects of Islamic theology, history, and culture,” reads the AVOT Statement of Principles. “AVOT will hold such scholarship to a serious and rigorous standard,” in other words, those who hold a contrary standard will be purged. “To expose the internal ‘threats,’ AVOT has compiled a sample list of statements by professors, legislators, authors, and columnists that it finds objectionable,” writes the New York Library Association. “The strategy appears similar to an earlier, much-criticized effort to monitor war dissidents by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a group founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, and neo-conservative Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman.”

“Bill Bennett, this nation’s self-appointed moral cop and founder of Empower America, is AVOT’s chairman,” explains Sheila Samples. “Bennett and his right-wing, neo-conservative henchmen vow to ‘resist’ dissention both here and abroad. In simpler terms, Bennett’s mission is to seek out American citizens who dare to question Bush. Then, by using the far-ranging tentacles of AVOT and ACTA—to smoke ‘em out, git ‘em on the run—and bring ‘em to justice…” ACTA (American Council of Trustees and Alumni) is “referred to as ‘a conservative nonprofit group devoted to curbing liberal tendencies in academia’ by The New York Times in a Nov. 24 [2001],” according to John Troyer.

“Rarely did professors publicly mention heroism, rarely did they discuss the difference between good and evil, the nature of Western political order or the virtue of a free society. Indeed, the message of much of academe was clear: BLAME AMERICA FIRST,” states an ACTA report, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About it, authored by Lynne Cheney.

Obviously, as Jacobs notes in his email, “what can be done about it” is simple: college GOP groups, with help from Campus Watch and AVOT, will hound professors deemed “anti-American” until they either give up their positions (as in the case of Churchill, under death threats) or are removed by university administrations for their “equivocation to explicit condemnations of America,” as described by Cheney (note the use of the word “equivocation,” in other words they are not cheerleading mass murder and waving their little plastic flags strenuously enough).

“The fact remains that academe is the only sector of American society that is distinctly divided in its response,” Cheney continues. “Indeed, expressions of pervasive moral relativism are a staple of academic life in this country and an apparent symptom of an educational system which has increasingly suggested that Western civilization is the primary source of the world’s ills—even though it gave us the ideals of democracy, human rights, individual liberty, and mutual tolerance.”

Ward Churchill, however, did not engage in “moral relativism,” in fact the historical truth and moral values he described—the United States has slaughtered millions of people, both directly and indirectly, in the name of its immoral foreign policy objectives, from Vietnam to Iraq and Latin America—are anything but relative and are certainly absolute.

Cheney is correct—the tenets of Western civilization, in particular the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, “gave us the ideals of democracy, human rights, individual liberty, and mutual tolerance,” and Cheney are her crew of Strausscon fellow travelers and right-wing Christian Zionists are systematically destroying these values, beginning with the Patriot Act and the destruction of habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

As for “tolerance,” ask Ward Churchill.

Campus Watch, the brainchild of right-wing Zionist Daniel Pipes, “publishes dossiers on professors, as well as some examples of their writings,” explains Will Youmans. “While the website dresses their monitoring as a purely academic exercise, it generates hostile phone calls and e-mails to listed professors and their families, as a profiled academic told me. Not only is this website inflammatory, but it clearly seeks to bring political pressure to bear on the professors and institutions. Under the guise of keeping the public informed, they are trying to force professors who do not share their unquestioning support for Israel to be silent.” Again, in Churchill’s case, it has generated death threats as well.

AVOT, Campus Watch, and their college GOP activists—more accurately described as stalkers and harassers—will not stop until “equivocation” is purged from the academic landscape. However, as AVOT’s principles clearly state, they will not rest until all “internal threats” are neutralized, including “legislators, authors, and columnists.” In other words, they will continue their right-wing, anti-democratic, unconstitutional jihad until all voices of dissent are stifled or locked up as “enemy combatants.”



February 04, 2005
The Murder of Mahmoud Mudhar al-Dhari: Engineering Sunni Rebellion
AFP reports:

The nephew of the head of an influential Sunni Muslim clerics’ association was shot dead by US soldiers Thursday on a road west of the Iraqi capital, a spokesman for the group said.

The US military said it unaware of the incident but would investigate.

“The US army opened fire and killed the nephew of Sheikh Hareth al-Dhari, who was driving in a car with a friend Thursday morning on a flyover,” said Omar Ragheb, a spokesman for the Committee of Muslim Scholars.

“Mahmoud Mudhar al-Dhari, 40, was coming from Khandari to Baghdad … when his car was shot up. His friend is safe and in good health.”

The Committee of Muslim Scholars called for a boycott of last Sunday’s national election and has warned that the incoming government would lack legitimacy.

The association has been the leading Sunni religious voice in Iraq since the fall of the old regime and has demanded a timeline for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

We have one of two explanations here:

1) al-Dhari was a random victim of U.S. violence, as ordinary as oil wells and pipelines (even the burning ones) in Iraq. Since the corporate media reports from hotel rooms in the Green Zone, we have no idea, outside of reports filed by Dahr Jamail, Robert Fisk, and a few other brave souls, how many innocent civilians are butchered in Iraq by trigger happy yahoo soldiers.

2) al-Dhari was deliberately targeted, as the nephew of an influential Sunni cleric, because the Committee of Muslim Scholars boycotted the stage-managed elections and insists the United States get out of Iraq. Naturally, Sheikh Hareth al-Dhari is not going to be very happy now that his nephew was assassinated (or killed randomly) and this is will likely increase, at least incrementally, the anger and intransigence of the Sunnis.

It’s all part of a plan to increase the level of violence in Iraq to the point where the Shi’ites, who will obviously win the “election,” and the Kurds, who hate the Sunnis because they were connected to Saddam and Saddam repeatedly used brutality against the Kurds, who are not Arabs, will team up with the United States to “defeat” the resistance. Of course, this will ultimately result in civil war, precisely what the Strausscons want in Iraq (and everywhere else in the Muslim Middle East).

If I was a betting man, I’d go with the second scenario because it makes sense, although the level of random violence in Iraq is at a fever pitch (and this is part of the Strausscon plan as well) and al-Dhari may simply be another victim.

Gorilla Radio for Monday, February 7th, 2005

While the majority of Canadians are rightly appalled by the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, few in this country are aware of, or care about, OUR collective criminal complicity in the invasion and occupation of Haiti. In fact, we’re willing to pay for a portion of the continued state terror being conducted against the Haitian people.

Last week, Paul Martin pledged 17 million dollars to help with Haiti’s upcoming elections. That’s on top of the nearly 150 million already pledged to “help” ease the crisis in Haiti. What the Prime Minister left unsaid however, was Canada’s role in creating that crisis.

Anthony Fenton is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist who has spent the last year researching and documenting human rights abuses occurring in Haiti since the February 2004 coup that chased the elected government of Jean Paul Aristide off the island. Anthony Fenton in the first half.

And; the confetti and balloons from the 50 million dollar Bush inaugural extravaganza have been swept up and trashed. Though this election was as illegitimate as the last, the American media and political elite seem content to pretend all is well, and so consign democracy to the same dumpster.

No court challenge short of impeachment can now loose the hold on power of George and his neo-con cohorts.

But, that doesn’t mean the American people are happy about it. Eric Blumrich is an artist, social commentator, and blogger. His site, Bushflash.com uses flash animation to marry images, text and music that deliver dissent by the boatload. Eric Blumrich and documenting the evil effects of Bush unleashed, and the harrowing desperation of his victims in the second half.

And; Janine Bandcroft will be here at the bottom of the hour to bring us up to speed with all that’s good to do in and around Victoria this week.


Gorilla Radio airs live, every Monday between 5-6pm pacific time at 101.9 FM in Victoria, 104.3 FM cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca

But first, Anthony Fenton and Canada’s imperial ambitions.

Good News for the World Weary

Good News for the World Weary

I talked to Anthony Lappe, the Exec-Editor at Guerrilla News Network on the radio show last week. He's the son of Frances Moore Lappe, the author of the seventies classic, 'Diet for a Small Planet,' and the recently published follow-up to that, 'Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet.' The thrust of that book is a determination to find hope in horrible situations. It's an incredibly powerful book, with an absolutely vital message. Anthony picked up on that, and created a new weekly feature down at GNN...but, he can tell you better than I. - {lex}

GNN Launches New Feature: Happy News for Gloomy Mondays

Editor’s note: GNN is proud to announce the launch of our newest weekly feature, the Good News Roundup. GNN, like many alternative news outlets, can often feel overly preoccupied with everything that is wrong in the world – war, disease, disaster, corruption. It’s a bull market for negative news these days. So we’re happy to announce we’re going to be focusing on the positive from now on – OK, once a week, but it’s a start.

The Good News Roundup will run every Monday, and is compiled by longtime GNNer Savanna Reid. Savanna, 24, is a student in Las Vegas, Nevada completing her Environmental Studies thesis on groundwater contamination risk assessment. Many of you may know her as gavin_rose. If you have suggestions for a good news story for next week, PM her here.

The Good News Roundup
Mon, 31 Jan 2005
By Savanna Reid

Since the U.S. army stopped prescribing Lariam last year and improved its mental health support programs for troops serving in Iraq, the suicide rate dropped by half. Read more about the military’s use of Lariam in GNN’s book, True Lies.

Chile’s ex-secret police chief General Manuel Contreras has finally been brought to justice – hundreds of demonstrators cheered his arrest and some pelted him with eggs en route to the jail. He will serve 12 years for the 1975 disappearance of leftist activist Miguel Angel Sandoval, one of thousands tortured, exiled or disappeared under the Pinochet government.

Meanwhile Serbia’s General Vladimir Lazarevic has surrendered to the UN, and will face charges at The Hague next week for war crimes against Kosovo Albanians.

In a long-overdue step back from its policy of unconditionally supporting the Mugabe regime, South Africa’s leading national party the ANC has decided to support a trade union’s delegation to Zimbabwe to highlight the political crisis in a country where allegations of election-rigging have nearly destroyed confidence in the government.

The U.S. has committed an additional $500 million to resolving the Darfur crisis in Sudan, which was not addressed by the recent peace accords between the Sudanese government and rebels in the south.

Natural disaster may have opened the doors to a peace process in Aceh, prompting the Indonesian government to meet with rebel leaders for the first time in two years. Their meeting, held in Finland, was described as constructive but brief. “Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has said he is willing to offer the rebels wide-ranging autonomy and other concessions in return for an end to their campaign,” but that full independence is not an option.

Uganda is moving to expand a papyrus wetland that filters and controls the Nakivubo channel, to reduce the risk of flooding in the capital city of Kampala. This will involve massive garbage removal and revegetation, and will improve the wetland’s ability to clean sewage water before it reaches Lake Victoria.

The South African High Court at Cape Town has pushed back construction approval for a pilot pebble bed nuclear reactor on the grounds that the environmental impact assessment process didn’t involve enough public input. This sets an important precedent, making South Africa’s environmental protection law work for the people most vulnerable to planned environmental impacts, by guaranteeing them a voice in the decision-making process. Earthlife Africa is fighting to force a more public discussion of safety concerns and nuclear waste management plans before construction begins.

A team with the National Energy Technology Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University has developed a computational model for purifying hydrogen gas which could make the recovery of pure hydrogen from fossil fuel deposits significantly cheaper.

Doctors at Imperial College London and the University of Manchester have succeeded in making damaged retinal cells see light again, by activating melanopsin proteins to serve as photoreceptors. This could lead to the development of prosthetic retinas to provide black-and-white light sensitivity to people blinded by retinal diseases like retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration, which are currently untreatable.

Good News for the World Weary

I talked to Anthony Lappe, the Exec-Editor at Guerrilla News Network on the show last week. He's the son of Frances Moore Lappe, the author of the seventies classic, 'Diet for a Small Planet,' and the recently published follow-up to that, 'Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet.' The thrust of that book is a determination to find hope in horrible situations. It's an incredibly powerful book, with an absolutely vital message. Anthony picked up on that, and created a new weekly feature down at GNN...but, he can tell you better than I. - ape


GNN launches new feature: Happy news for gloomy Mondays
Editor’s note: GNN is proud to announce the launch of our newest weekly feature, the Good News Roundup. GNN, like many alternative news outlets, can often feel overly preoccupied with everything that is wrong in the world – war, disease, disaster, corruption. It’s a bull market for negative news these days. So we’re happy to announce we’re going to be focusing on the positive from now on – OK, once a week, but it’s a start.

The Good News Roundup will run every Monday, and is compiled by longtime GNNer Savanna Reid. Savanna, 24, is a student in Las Vegas, Nevada completing her Environmental Studies thesis on groundwater contamination risk assessment. Many of you may know her as gavin_rose. If you have suggestions for a good news story for next week, PM her here.

The Good News Roundup
Mon, 31 Jan 2005 02:03:26 -0600
By Savanna Reid

Since the U.S. army stopped prescribing Lariam last year and improved its mental health support programs for troops serving in Iraq, the suicide rate dropped by half. Read more about the military’s use of Lariam in GNN’s book, True Lies.

Chile’s ex-secret police chief General Manuel Contreras has finally been brought to justice – hundreds of demonstrators cheered his arrest and some pelted him with eggs en route to the jail. He will serve 12 years for the 1975 disappearance of leftist activist Miguel Angel Sandoval, one of thousands tortured, exiled or disappeared under the Pinochet government.

Meanwhile Serbia’s General Vladimir Lazarevic has surrendered to the UN, and will face charges at The Hague next week for war crimes against Kosovo Albanians.

In a long-overdue step back from its policy of unconditionally supporting the Mugabe regime, South Africa’s leading national party the ANC has decided to support a trade union’s delegation to Zimbabwe to highlight the political crisis in a country where allegations of election-rigging have nearly destroyed confidence in the government.

The U.S. has committed an additional $500 million to resolving the Darfur crisis in Sudan, which was not addressed by the recent peace accords between the Sudanese government and rebels in the south.

Natural disaster may have opened the doors to a peace process in Aceh, prompting the Indonesian government to meet with rebel leaders for the first time in two years. Their meeting, held in Finland, was described as constructive but brief. “Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has said he is willing to offer the rebels wide-ranging autonomy and other concessions in return for an end to their campaign,” but that full independence is not an option.

Uganda is moving to expand a papyrus wetland that filters and controls the Nakivubo channel, to reduce the risk of flooding in the capital city of Kampala. This will involve massive garbage removal and revegetation, and will improve the wetland’s ability to clean sewage water before it reaches Lake Victoria.

The South African High Court at Cape Town has pushed back construction approval for a pilot pebble bed nuclear reactor on the grounds that the environmental impact assessment process didn’t involve enough public input. This sets an important precedent, making South Africa’s environmental protection law work for the people most vulnerable to planned environmental impacts, by guaranteeing them a voice in the decision-making process. Earthlife Africa is fighting to force a more public discussion of safety concerns and nuclear waste management plans before construction begins.

A team with the National Energy Technology Laboratory and Carnegie Mellon University has developed a computational model for purifying hydrogen gas which could make the recovery of pure hydrogen from fossil fuel deposits significantly cheaper.

Doctors at Imperial College London and the University of Manchester have succeeded in making damaged retinal cells see light again, by activating melanopsin proteins to serve as photoreceptors. This could lead to the development of prosthetic retinas to provide black-and-white light sensitivity to people blinded by retinal diseases like retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration, which are currently which are currently
untreatable.