Killing Canada's Wheat Board

Edmonton Journal, Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Harper gov't is doing to CWB what the U.S. couldn't do by itself
Loss of wheat board would mean loss of power

by Albert Horner and David Orchard
-------------------------------------------------

For a year the Harper government has been threatening to destroy the power of the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB). Agriculture minister, Chuck Strahl, says barley will be removed from the board's jurisdiction by August 1; a decision on wheat will follow.

In the early 1930s, there was no CWB. Prairie farmers took the price offered by the large grain companies or took their wheat home. Grain sold for a few cents a bushel. Farmers were driven off the land in droves.

In response to pressure and thousands of farmers demanding an end to the unfettered power of the grain giants, R.B. Bennett made a historic radio address referring to "unconscionable monopolistic purchasers" and "economic parasites." He set up the CWB as a single seller of prairie wheat. In the 1940s Mackenzie King extended the board's power to include oats and barley.

Starting from nothing in 1935, the board has grown into the world's largest marketer of wheat and barley, one of Canada's biggest earners of foreign currency and perhaps the most prestigious marketing board in the world.

A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers study described as "huge" the $1.6-billion annual economic impact of the Winnipeg-based Board, "with Western Canada as a major economic beneficiary."

As OPEC gave undeniable clout to oil producing countries, so the CWB's quasi-monopoly put marketing power in the hands of farmers.

Since its founding, the U.S. grain companies dominating the world grain trade have fought this impressive upstart. Earlier, they called it "communist." In the last fifteen years, the U.S. has mounted a dozen trade challenges seeking its demise.

The reason is simple. The Wheat Board returns all revenue earned to the farmer, minus a miniscule per bushel administrative charge.

Loss of the CWB would move the Canadian grain trade into U.S. hands virtually over night. Hundreds of millions more in profits annually would drain from the farmer to the "five sisters" that dominate the international grain trade, none Canadian. The Port of Churchill -- with the bulk of its business from the CWB -- and the entire east-west rail system including the great grain terminals in ports from Quebec City to Prince Rupert would be at risk.

If the Canadian Wheat Board goes, who believes the rest of Canada's supply managed agriculture is safe?

Since assuming power, the Harper government has waged an unrelenting attack on the CWB --firing its popular CEO, Adrian Measner, stacking the board with government appointees who detest it, and holding a fraudulent barley "plebiscite" (complete with gag orders, a secret voters' list, traceable ballots and deliberately misleading questions). Still, only 13.8 per cent voted to remove barley from the board.

This unprecedented assault on the internationally respected CWB by its own government has not gone unnoticed. Standard and Poors recently downgraded the board's formerly pristine credit rating, and according to the largest buyer of Canada's wheat, China's Yang Hong, "Once the CWB's single-desk system is abolished, we think the Canadian wheat industry may lose advantages to other competitors."

He said his company may turn to other countries if Canada can no longer guarantee reliable supply and quality.

Mexico's Grupo Altex president wrote, "We would hate to see you adopting the U.S. model, where we have to deal with the large trading houses that always try to take advantage of both farmers and clients like us and very seldom, if ever, deliver what they promise."

But the Wheat Board is not gone yet. For over seventy years it has -- with Ottawa's backing -- withstood American hostility. Now the Harper government is about to do what the U.S. alone has been unable to accomplish; it plans, by order-in council, to strip the board of its marketing power on barley.

Once before, a Canadian government joined the Americans against its own farmers. Following its signature on the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement in 1989, the Mulroney government took oats from the board. In 1993, it tried the same with barley, but was stopped by a successful court challenge. The government changed and held a fair vote among farmers, restored barley to the board, where it has remained ever since, and introduced the Canadian Wheat Board Act, putting farmer-elected directors in control.

This time too, a court challenge may follow. However, as in 1993, only a change of government will secure the Board's future. A Harper majority will see the CWB gone, and quickly. The new Liberal leader, Stephane Dion, behaving more like a friend of the Western farmer than the Alberta-based Harper administration, has promised to restore the board's powers putting full control of its future back into farmers' hands. Whatever changes the CWB needs -- and every farmer knows of some -- will be made by farmers, not imposed from Ottawa or Washington.

Today, the Liberal party is truer to John Diefenbaker's defence of the West than the party claiming his name.



Albert Horner is a retired grain producer and livestock breeder. A four-term Progressive Conservative MP under John Diefenbaker, he lives in Blaine Lake, SK.

David Orchard was a candidate for the Progressive Conservative party leadership in 1998 and 2003. He farms at Borden, SK.

Jazz and Jihad

Jazz and Jihad:
the discourse of solidarity

Gilad Atzmon

Speech given at University of Denver,
13 April 2007

Ladies and Gentlemen,


For many years I considered America as my promised land. As a young Jazz musician I was pretty convinced that sooner or later I would end up living in NYC. My Jerusalem was Downtown Manhattan and of course my holy scriptures were the old Blue Note vinyls. My Rabbis were named Coltrane, Bird, Miles, Duke, Dizzy, Bill Evans and naturally, there were many others. I was convinced of this reality for a while, and in fact, it took time before I realised that Jazz was far more than mere music. It took a while before I gathered that Jazz was something else, that it was actually a form of resistance. Nowadays I realise that Jazz is no different from Jihad, accordingly, playing Jazz is my personal Jihad. I do grasp that some people in this room may already find my ideas nostalgic, some may even be convinced that I am either totally deluded or just out of my mind. I can live with it. I do realise that �things have changed�, they�ve changed for you as much as they�ve changed for me. I do realise that Jazz is not exactly a form of resistance anymore. May I mention that America isn�t my promised land either. In fact, at the time of writing this talk, I wasn�t even sure whether I would be allowed entry into your country. As much as Jazz, the classical music of America, has been a call for freedom, America is not a free place anymore. I often argue that before liberating others, it is the American people who should first liberate themselves. I am pretty sure that sooner or later they will.


Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine


I have been participating in some public debates lately concerning the common denominator between Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. I�m glad to mention that it is rather noticeable that more and more people are now happy to admit what some of us realised years ago. The Palestinians, the Iraqis and the Afghanis are paying a very dear price for the Ziocentric shift within the Anglo-American decision-makers circuit. Seemingly, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine are just the aperitif for an endless feast. The Ziocons have some big appetite to satisfy. The same lobbies that led America towards this disastrous invasion in Iraq and Afghanistan are now doing whatever they can to push America towards intervention in Iran and Syria. For those few who still fail to realise it, America has been operating officially as an Israeli mission force. It currently fights the last sovereign pockets of Muslim resistance.


Often enough, the true aim of the Zionist lobbies is concealed. Instead the Zionist lobbies promote some righteous phoney humanitarian alternatives. The American Jewish Committee (AJC), for instance, is aggressively lobbying against human rights abuse in Iran and Darfur. Since human rights issues are really close to my heart, I find myself wondering whether the Jewish organisation shouldn�t rather be concentrating on the colossal war crimes that are daily repeated by Israel in Palestine. Rather occasionally we read about AIPAC equating Iran and Syria with Nazi Germany. Again, someone should remind the Zionist lobbyists that actually it is Israel, the �Jews Only State�, that happens to be the one and only ideological remnant of racist nationalism.


Three weeks ago the Palestine Chronicle made an on-line poll (http://www.palestinechronicle.com/). It asked the following question.
�Does the Israel Lobby control US policy on the Middle East?�


Needless to mention, no one would even have dared raising such a question five years ago. Now this question is asked repeatedly and as it seems, people aren�t shying off from telling what they really think. 80% said yes, 15% said no, and 4% were not sure. Looking at these results points to the reality many want us to deny. The vast majority of English-speaking Palestinians, Palestinian solidarity campaigners and anti-war activists are now ready to admit that the Israel Lobby controls US policy in the Middle East. We are ready to accept the fact that America operates as an Israeli mission force. America straightens the line with Israeli interests and sacrifices its sons and daughters maintaining Israeli regional hegemony.


But here is an interesting twist. I do not intend to talk to you about Zionised America. I want to believe that the majority of Palestinian supporters and anti-war activists in this room know far more about it than me. I would like to try taking the discussion further. I would like to elaborate on the notion of solidarity and empathy.


Those who are familiar with my writings know that I am not exactly a political scientist. I am not interested in politics and I am even far less interested in politicians who, generally speaking, evoke nothing but a strong sense of repulsion in me.


Rather than politics per se, it is humanity and the notion of humanism that I am interested in. Often I find myself wondering what being in the world may entail. And I better admit it; I am puzzled by the fact that as a society, as a collective bunch of individuals, we have managed to continuously fail to act for the people of Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan. I think that this very collective failure is in itself an alarming message. Thus, rather than looking into the crimes committed by Blair, Bush and the Ziocons, I am becoming gradually interested in the general Western apathy. To be more precise, I would argue that the common denominator between Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine is our collective indifference to a crime that is committed on our behalf and in our names.


As some of us may remember, in the days leading to the doomed illegal invasion of Iraq, the anti-war movement was extremely successful in mobilizing millions of people into protest. We saw them in every capital. They were calling Blair and Bush to withdraw their military plans. Millions of people questioned the sickening Anglo-American intelligence hoax. We could all see through the lies, we could all foresee the emerging crime, we were outraged, and we were convinced that we were doing the right thing. Yet, strangely enough, just four years later, with hundreds of thousands dead, with millions of casualties, with many millions of displaced people, when it is clear that everything went as wrong as it possibly could, when it is openly established that �the danger of Iraq�s WMDs� was nothing but a lie, not very many care about it all anymore. Now when the grim prophecy turns into reality of genocide with no end, we are collectively sinking into apathy. What are the logos behind this collective indifference, why did we lose interest? Why don�t we fight? Why aren�t we a mass movement?


I am not so sure whether I have the exact answers at my disposal, yet, I may be able to throw some light on the issue.


Cultural Clash


I am inclined to admit that the notion of Cultural Clash has indeed some deep meanings especially when it comes to the discourse of solidarity. Naturally, we tend to expect the subject of our solidarity to endorse our views while dumping his own. As much as Blair and Bush insist upon democratising the Muslim world, we, the so-called left humanists have our own various agendas for the region and its people. In Europe some archaic Marxists are convinced that �working class politics� is the only viable outlook of the conflict and its solution. Some other deluded socialists and egalitarians are talking about liberating the Muslims of their religious traits. The cosmopolitans within the solidarity movement would suggest to Palestinians that nationalism and national identity belongs to the past. Noticeably, many of us love Muslim and Arabs as long as they act as white, post-enlightenment Europeans. In other words, we love Muslims as long as they stop being Muslims.


For those who fail to realise, I may as well mentioned that �working class politics� has nothing to do with Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan. For those who fail to see the obvious truth, I may as well mention that the industrial revolution has never made it to Gaza. Furthermore, the landslide victory of the Hamas proves beyond doubt that Palestinians are not exactly on the verge of dropping Islam. The million Shias that protested in Najaf last Monday were not exactly secular Arabs either. It is crucial to mention that the Palestinian struggle is a national struggle. The million Iraqi Shias who followed their Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr last Monday were overtly burning American flags while raising their own Iraqi ones as high as they could. In other words, we have good reason to believe that they may hold a consistent and genuine nationalist vision of their conflict and its resolution. Again, to expect Palestinians or Iraqis to become secular, cosmopolitan and working class ideologists is to expect Arabs and Muslims to act as European Marxists. It has noting to do with solidarity; it is actually nothing but projection. We project our solipsistic worldviews on others.


Self-centred activism


In Lacanian terminology, love means loving oneself through the other. At large, our notion of solidarity is not much different: we run a constant risk of performing solidarity with ourselves through the suffering of Palestinians and Iraqis. We are at risk of using Palestinians and Iraqis as an approval of our greatness. Alternatively I would suggest that to support the other means to accept otherness, to accept that which you may never grasp. To accept otherness is to let in the unknown and the unfamiliar. To support Palestine is to back the Hamas and to support Iraq is to back the Iraqi resistance and liberation struggle. Simply speaking, to show solidarity is to support and accept other people and their will.


But somehow, instead of doing just that, in most cases we happen to transform our subject of solidarity into a fetish. We self indulge with peace ideologies at the expense of other people�s pain. We instrumentally use the cry of the other as a reassurance of our own goodness. This may explain why so many of us have lost interest in Iraq and Palestine. If all we are interested in is just making love to ourselves, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran and Syria are more than replaceable. As it happens, once in a while we may show up in mass demonstrations and then just fade away into apathy for a decade or so.


We get away with it


Why do we fade away? Because we get away with it. Legally speaking, America and Britain are responsible for the colossal carnage in Iraq. Bearing in mind the fact that America and Britain are democracies and adding the embarrassing fact that the people of these two �great democracies� have re-elected war criminals, leaves no other option but admitting a collective guilt. To a certain extent, every American and British citizen is liable for the crimes in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan. Yet this state of criminality means very little to most of us. Americans and Brits at least for the time being simply get away with it.


America has lost 3,000 of its sons and daughters in the Iraqi war. As much as I feel sorry for those who lost their beloved, for a superpower the size of America, such a scale of loss is nothing but a negligible casualty rate. In comparison, on D-Day, America lost more or less the same number of combatants in a few hours. In modern warfare, superpowers are mainly engaged in killing innocent people from afar. America doesn�t risk its soldiers. It doesn�t provide occupied Iraq and Afghanistan with even elementary security. Seemingly, the American Generals realise that this would cost lives of their troops. How come the Americans fail to provide security? They simply get away with it. Why are we sinking into apathy? More or less because of the same reason, we get away with it.


A bridge too far


As I am getting to the end of my talk, I may conclude that supporting Muslims and Jihad is probably a bridge too far for most Westerners. The typical Westerner doesn�t know how to bridge the gap between �materialism� and �Jihad� or between �self-loving� and �martyrdom�. We happen to regard our lives as a precious gift with an immense value. We submitted to the post-enlightenment notion of individuality and individualism. Succumbing to the school of orthodox rationalism we believe in the ultimate power of reason. We adore science and admire technology. We are libidinally aroused by electronic gadgets.


Seemingly, spirit and beauty means very little to us unless attached to a commodity. In our Americanised reality, existence means market value. Yet, spirit of resistance and beauty are invaluable. I may suggest that we will never be able to fully understand what the Palestinian and Iraqi struggle means to its people unless we liberate ourselves from our narrow material vision of reality. We can never grasp people who sacrifice the ultimate unless we acknowledge that there is far more to life than just life. We can never understand Iraqi insurgency and the Palestinian liberation struggle unless we try to understand what soil may mean to people who refuse to get drunk on Coca-Cola.


The search for the meaning of solidarity is a personal issue. I believe that the meaning of solidarity is probably a very dynamic notion. I am starting to realise that within the current structure of affairs, the left who was pretty effective in mobilizing anti-imperial campaigns for years, may not provide anything for Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. The left, being a rational, post-enlightenment outlook, has its problem to solve with Islam and religious devotion. I hope that I am wrong here. I can see some isolated islands of left dialectic thinkers are ready to acknowledge that Muslim resistance may as well convey an alternative vision of reality and resistance.


I can speak for myself. For me, Jihad and Jazz are very similar forms of commitment. For me, the generations of Black Americans who sacrificed everything for the sake of beauty and resistance were actually engaged in a holy war. For me it was Bird, Max Roach, Dizzy, Coltrane and others who went far beyond the American dream of materialism and market value. Jazz was their voice of freedom. Jazz was their call for a change. Jazz was an ideology, a spirit, and a way of living as well as dying. To be a Jazz musician is to fight for beauty, to create and recreate, to construct and deconstruct, to question while knowing that answers may not be available for a while. To play Jazz is to get lost deliberately. To play Jazz is to leave the self behind.

New and Improved

Blood in the Water for Wolfie at WB

World Bank Staff Seek
Wolfowitz's Ouster

by Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Apr 12 (IPS) - The World Bank's Staff Association, which represents 10,000 employees, asked Bank President Paul Wolfowitz to step down Thursday amid charges that he gave his girlfriend, a Bank employee, improper pay raises and attempted to cover it up.

The association made the call during an informal press conference inside the Bank at which dozens of employees showed up, the first time anyone inside the Washington-headquartered institution has demanded his ouster.

The gathering became dramatic when Wolfowitz himself appeared uninvited and sought to defend his actions.

"The president must acknowledge that his conduct has compromised the integrity and effectiveness of the World Bank Group and has destroyed the staff's trust in his leadership," said a statement from the Staff Association signed by its chairwoman Alison Cave. "He must act honourably and resign."

The call came less than an hour after Wolfowitz issued his own statement. "I made a mistake, for which I am sorry," said the 64-year-old World Bank president.

The Staff Association said it decided to call for his resignation even though the Bank's Board, which runs the institution's day to day affairs, announced that it is prepared to officially investigate the allegations that Wolfowitz used his position to enrich Shaha Riza, a Bank employee with whom he had a personal relationship, through large pay hikes that violated Bank protocols.

The association said it feared that the Board may not act quickly enough, and called for the release of all relevant documents, including a memorandum from Wolfowitz to the human resources vice president instructing him to second Riza to the U.S. State Department on a generous package that brought her salary to 193,000 dollars a year -- 7,000 dollars more than that earned by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Wolfowitz defended himself on Thursday, saying that he had already sought the advice of the Ethics Committee at the Bank and that he acted "in good faith".

He also said he was trying to ward off a possible legal problem for the Bank. He did not elaborate on whether Riza had threatened to sue the Bank if she was involuntarily assigned to the State Department -- a necessary move since Bank employees who are personally involved may not work together.

"This was an involuntary reassignment and I believed there was a legal risk if this was not resolved by mutual agreement," he said. "I take full responsibility for the details."

But Wolfowitz's statement did not allay concerns among staff that he may have placed his girlfriend's interests before the institution's.

The Staff Association says, for example, that there was no representation by the Bank's legal counsel during negotiations of the new contract for Riza, although her own attorney was present.

Wolfowitz has taken several hits over the past week, the last of which came from Ad Melkert, former chairman of the ethics committee, who denied that the committee directed or agreed to Riza's contract terms, as the Bank president alleged.

The Staff Association also says that the former general counsel of the Bank, Roberto Danino, rejected the terms for Riza's reassignment, leading to his exclusion by Wolfowitz from the actual contract negotiations.

The association said the affair is taking a toll on morale inside the Bank. "It therefore seems impossible for the institution to move forward with any sense of purpose under the present leadership, especially in our endeavor to assist governments and their people in improving their own governance," it said.

The controversy has been particularly embarrassing for Wolfowitz and the Bank because since he came to office in 2005, Wolfowitz has sought to make an anti-corruption crusade the signature of his tenure.

Last year, he announced a "long-term strategy" for using the Bank's funds and expertise to help developing countries rid their governments of bribe-taking and other dishonest practices.

But even as he assumed responsibility for decisions related to Riza, Wolfowitz went on the offensive, implying that the staff's reaction may have been motivated by displeasure with his role in the Pentagon as a main architect of the U.S. invasion and later occupation or Iraq, now in its fifth year and exacting huge human and financial costs.

"For those people who disagree with the things that they associate me with in my previous job, I'm not in my previous job," Wolfowitz said in a statement. "I'm not working for the U.S. government; I'm working for this institution and its 185 shareholders."

Wolfowitz came to the World Bank in mid-2005 from his post as the U.S. deputy secretary of defence.

His appointment to the World Bank sent ripples through many at the institution and within development circles who feared that his neo-conservative credentials and close association with the carnage caused by the Iraq war could undermine the Bank's image as one of the world's leading development agencies.

But the controversy over Riza's salary increases has mostly skirted his role in the Iraq war -- with Wolfowitz himself bringing it up.


source:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=37327

Iran: The Greatest Crisis of Modern Times?

Iran May Be the
Greatest Crisis of Modern Times
by John Pilger

April 12, 2007

The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. “They were sick and some were dying,” she says. “Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable ‘looking from the side’.”



It is time we in Britain and other Western countries stopped looking from the side. We are being led towards perhaps the most serious crisis in modern history as the Bush-Cheney-Blair “long war” edges closer to Iran for no reason other than that nation's independence from rapacious America. The safe delivery of the 15 British sailors into the hands of Rupert Murdoch and his rivals (with tales of their “ordeal” almost certainly authored by the Ministry of Defence -- until it got the wind up) is both a farce and a distraction. The Bush administration, in secret connivance with Blair, has spent four years preparing for “Operation Iranian Freedom.” Forty-five cruise missiles are primed to strike. According to Russia's leading strategic thinker General Leonid Ivashov: “Nuclear facilities will be secondary targets . . . at least 20 such facilities need to be destroyed. Combat nuclear weapons may be used. This will result in the radioactive contamination of all the Iranian territory, and beyond.”



And yet there is a surreal silence, save for the noise of “news” in which our powerful broadcasters gesture cryptically at the obvious but dare not make sense of it, lest the one-way moral screen erected between us and the consequences of an imperial foreign policy collapse and the truth be revealed. John Bolton, formerly Bush's man at the United Nations, recently spelled out the truth: that the Bush-Cheney-Blair plan for the Middle East is "an agenda to maintain division and ethnic tension". In other words, bloodshed and chaos equals control. He was referring to Iraq, but he also meant Iran.



One million Iraqis fill the streets of Najaf demanding that Bush and Blair get out of their homeland -- that is the real news: not our nabbed sailor-spies, nor the political dance macabre of the pretenders to Blair's Duce delusions. Whether it is treasurer Gordon Brown, the paymaster of the Iraq bloodbath, or John Reid, who sent British troops to pointless deaths in Afghanistan, or any of the others who sat through cabinet meetings knowing that Blair and his acolytes were lying through their teeth, only mutual distrust separates them now. They knew about Blair's plotting with Bush. They knew about the fake 45-minute “warning”. They knew about the fitting up of Iran as the next “enemy”.



Declared Brown to the Daily Mail: “The days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over. We should celebrate much of our past rather than apologise for it.” In Late Victorian Holocausts, the historian Mike Davis documents that as many as 21 million Indians died unnecessarily in famines criminally imposed by British colonial policies. Moreover, since the formal demise of that glorious imperium, declassified files make it clear that British governments have borne “significant responsibility” for the direct or indirect deaths of between 8.6 million and 13.5 million people throughout the world from military interventions and at the hands of regimes strongly supported by Britain. The historian Mark Curtis calls these victims “unpeople”. Rejoice! said Margaret Thatcher. Celebrate! says Brown. Spot the difference.



Brown is no different from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and the other warmongering Democrats he admires and who support an unprovoked attack on Iran and the subjugation of the Middle East to "our interests" -- and Israel's, of course. Nothing has changed since the US and Britain destroyed Iran's democratic government in 1953 and installed Reza Shah Pahlavi, whose regime had "the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture" that was "beyond belief" (Amnesty).



Look behind the one-way moral screen and you will distinguish the Blairite elite by its loathing of the humane principles that mark a real democracy. They used to be discreet about this, but no more. Two examples spring to mind. In 2004, Blair used the secretive "royal prerogative" to overturn a high court judgment that had restored the very principle of human rights set out in Magna Carta to the people of the Chagos Islands, a British colony in the Indian Ocean. There was no debate. As ruthless as any dictator, Blair dealt his coup de grâce with the lawless expulsion of the islanders from their homeland, now a US military base, from which Bush has bombed Iraq and Afghanistan and will bomb Iran.



In the second example, only the degree of suffering is different. Last October, the Lancet published research by Johns Hopkins University in the US and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, which calculated that 655,000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion. Downing Street officials derided the study as “flawed”. They were lying. They knew that the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence, Sir Roy Anderson, had backed the survey, describing its methods as “robust” and “close to best practice,” and other government officials had secretly approved the “tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones”. The figure for Iraqi deaths is now estimated at close to a million -- carnage equivalent to that caused by the Anglo-American economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s, which produced the deaths of half a million infants under the age of five, verified by UNICEF. That, too, was dismissed contemptuously by Blair.



“This Labour government, which includes Gordon Brown as much as it does Tony Blair,” wrote Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, “is party to a war crime of monstrous proportions. Yet our political consensus prevents any judicial or civil society response. Britain is paralysed by its own indifference.”



Such is the scale of the crime and of our “looking from the side.” According to the Observer of 8 April, the voters’ “damning verdict” on the Blair regime is expressed by a majority who have “lost faith” in their government. No surprise there. Polls have long shown a widespread revulsion to Blair, demonstrated at the last general election, which produced the second lowest turnout since the franchise. No mention was made of the Observer's own contribution to this national loss of faith. Once celebrated as a bastion of liberalism that stood against Anthony Eden's lawless attack on Egypt in 1956, the new right-wing, lifestyle Observer enthusiastically backed Blair's lawless attack on Iraq, having helped lay the ground with major articles falsely linking Iraq with the 9/11 attacks -- claims now regarded even by the Pentagon as fake.



As hysteria is again fabricated, for Iraq, read Iran. According to the former US treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, the Bush cabal decided to attack Iraq on “day one” of Bush's administration, long before 11 September 2001. The main reason was oil. O'Neill was shown a Pentagon document entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,” which outlined the carve-up of Iraq's oil wealth among the major Anglo-American companies. Under a law written by US and British officials, the Iraqi puppet regime is about to hand over the extraction of the largest concentration of oil on earth to Anglo-American companies.



Nothing like this piracy has happened before in the modern Middle East, where Opec has ensured that oil business is conducted between states. Across the Shatt al-Arab waterway is another prize: Iran's vast oilfields. Just as non-existent weapons of mass destruction or facile concerns for democracy had nothing to do with the invasion of Iraq, so non-existent nuclear weapons have nothing to do with the coming American onslaught on Iran. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations. The International Atomic Energy Agency has never cited Iran for diverting its civilian program to military use. For the past three years, IAEA inspectors have said they have been allowed to “go anywhere.” The recent UN Security Council sanctions against Iran are the result of Washington's bribery.



Until recently, the British were unaware that their government was one of the world's most consistent abusers of human rights and backers of state terrorism. Few Britons knew that the Muslim Brotherhood, the forerunner of al-Qaeda, was sponsored by British intelligence as a means of systematically destroying secular Arab nationalism, or that MI6 recruited young British Muslims in the 1980s as part of a $4bn Anglo-American-backed jihad against the Soviet Union known as “Operation Cyclone.” In 2001, few Britons knew that 3,000 innocent Afghan civilians were bombed to death as revenge for the attacks of 11 September. No Afghans brought down the twin towers. Thanks to Bush and Blair, awareness in Britain and all over the world has risen as never before. When homegrown terrorists struck London in July 2005, few doubted that the attack on Iraq had provoked the atrocity and that the bombs that killed 52 Londoners were, in effect, Blair's bombs.



In my experience, most people do not indulge the absurdity and cruelty of the “rules” of rampant power. They do not contort their morality and intellect to comply with double standards and the notion of approved evil, of worthy and unworthy victims. They would, if they knew, grieve for all the lives, families, careers, hopes and dreams destroyed by Blair and Bush. The sure evidence is the British public's wholehearted response to the 2004 tsunami, shaming that of the government.



Certainly, they would agree wholeheartedly with Robert H Jackson, chief of counsel for the United States at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders at the end of the Second World War. “Crimes are crimes,” he said, "whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."



As with Henry Kissinger and Donald Rumsfeld, who dare not travel to certain countries for fear of being prosecuted as war criminals, Blair as a private citizen may no longer be untouchable. On 20 March, Baltasar Garzón, the tenacious Spanish judge who pursued Augusto Pinochet, called for indictments against those responsible for “one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history” -- Iraq. Five days later, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, said that Blair could one day face war-crimes charges.



These are critical changes in the way the sane world thinks -- again, thanks to the Reich of Blair and Bush. However, we live in the most dangerous of times. On 6 April, Blair accused “elements of the Iranian regime” of “backing, financing, arming and supporting terrorism in Iraq.” He offered no evidence, and the Ministry of Defence has none. This is the same Goebbels-like refrain with which he and his coterie, Gordon Brown included, brought an epic bloodletting to Iraq. How long will the rest of us continue looking from the side?

John Pilger is an internationally renowned investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker. His newest book is Freedom Next Time (Bantam Press, June 2006). Visit John Pilger's website: www.johnpilger.com

Nixon's Ghost Rising

Shades of Richard Nixon! The Justice Department federal attorney scandal just deepened, as the White House announces that many e-mail messages -- potentially incriminating -- have been 'lost' inadvertently. The Senate Judiciary Committee isn't buying that.

U.S. Attorney Scandal Broadens with
White House E-Mail Scandal

by John Nichols

The U.S. Attorneys scandal seems to be turning an important new page every day. And April 12, it turned what can best be referred to as the "Rose Mary Woods" page.


Rose Mary Woods was the longtime secretary to Richard Nixon who as a fiercely loyal employee of the president in the waning days of the Watergate crisis claimed in grand jury testimony that she had inadvertently created at least part of an 18 1/2 minute gap a White House audio tape that had become central to the investigation of presidential wrongdoing.


"The Rose Mary Woods Defense" proved to be a tough sell in 1974, failing to close off congressional inquiries that would eventually lead to votes by the House Judiciary Committee in favor of articles of impeachment against Nixon.


But that has not stopped the Bush White House from mounting a "Rose Mary Woods Defense" in its attempt to prevent the House and Senate judiciary committees from examining the full scope of the scandal that arose after the White House fired eight U.S. Attorneys who, apparently, did not want to politicize their offices in a manner that would benefit Republican electoral prospects.


In response to demands from the Senate Judiciary Committee for records of political communications by Bush aides, the White House is claiming emails that could shed light on the role political czar Karl Rove and as many as 21 other presidential appointees may have played in pressuring U.S. Attorneys are "potentially lost."


White House spokesman Scott Stanzel had acknowledged that 22 White House aides have e-mail accounts sponsored by the Republican National Committee. Those accounts have become a focus of the rapidly-expanding U.S. Attorneys inquiry, as it is assumed that they would have been the avenue by which state party officials sent memos asking key players in the White House to pressure the Department of Justice and U.S. Attorneys to advance so-called "voter fraud" cases, to prosecute Democrats or to back off prosecutions of Republicans.


Stanzel says e-mails sent and received on those accounts can't be found.


Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, is not taking those claims seriously.


"They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!" Leahy declared in what for him was an exceptionally passionate speech on the Senate floor Thursday. "You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers. Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary."


Stanzel insists that the White House, which has repeatedly attempted to thwart congressional inquiries into matters relating to the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys who fell afoul of the Bush administration for what appear to have been political reasons, now says that there is no effort to conceal emails that could reveal information about contacts regarding the eight fired U.S. Attorneys or about pressures on the 85 U.S. Attorneys who were no fired.


On April 10, Leahy and five other senators demanded documents regarding a botched prosecution in Wisconsin by a U.S. Attorney who was not fired. That prosecution paralleled the 2006 election cycle and was exploited by Republicans in a television ad campaign against Democratic Governor Jim Doyle. The Senate's interest in the Wisconsin case indicates that the inquiry is expanding to examine not just White House pressures on fired prosecutors but on those who were retained.


Stanzel says the White House counsel's office is conducting a "review" into the missing emails. "The purpose of our review is to make every reasonable effort to recover potentially lost e-mails, and that is why we've been in contact with forensic experts," says the Bush aide.


But Leahy bluntly responds, "E-mails don't get lost. These are just e-mails they don't want to bring forward."


It looks like the "Rose Mary Woods Defense" is not going over any better in 2007 than it did in 1974. To his credit, the usually cautious Leahy says he is prepared to subpoena the emails and related documents. He won't be satisfied with "dog-ate-my-homework" excuses. And rightly so.


These emails are definitely not missing, but they may well be incriminating.




John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine.


Copyright © 2007 The Nation


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Word Count: 681
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Feith in Action: Return of Irangate

The deceptive acts of the Bush administration, pushing the country to war against Iraq, have been revealed in a recent report by the US Defence Department Inspector General. How Bush went to war against Iraq can be best compared to the Irangate scandal of the Reagan administration.

Iraq War Pushers' Deception Exposed

by Patrick Seale

A shadowy Pentagon unit -- the Office of Special Plans, headed by Douglas Feith, former U.S. Under Secretary of Defence for Policy -- deliberately fabricated intelligence linking Saddam Hussein’s regime to al-Qaida in order to incite the United States to make war on Iraq.


This conclusion, long suspected by most observers of the Middle East, has now been confirmed by Thomas F. Gimble, Inspector General of the U.S. Defence Department, in a declassified report, released on April 5, at the request of Senator Carl M. Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.


Together with his boss, Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Defence Secretary, Douglas Feith was one of an influential group of pro-Israeli neo-conservatives in the Bush administration who exploited the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the U.S. to campaign and intrigue for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.


According to the Inspector General’s report, Feith produced intelligence assessments which claimed that there was a "mature, symbiotic relationship [between Iraq and al-Qaida]" in no fewer than ten specific areas, including training, financing and logistics. To bolster his case, Feith made much of an alleged meeting in Prague in April 2001 between Muhammad Atta, one of the Al-Qaida hijackers, and an Iraqi intelligence officer, Ahmad al-Ani.


To mobilize the American public for an attack on Iraq, Feith leaked his fraudulent conclusions to the Weekly Standard, the neo-con magazine which, under its editor William Kristol, had been stridently calling for "regime change" in Iraq since the late 1990s -- and which has now turned its attention to calling for war against Iran.


After a thorough examination of the evidence, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) both concluded that Feith was wrong. They found "no conclusive signs" of a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida and no evidence of "direct cooperation."


But Feith was not deterred. Instead, he did his best to discredit the CIA and DIA findings and, bypassing the intelligence community, he presented his phoney evidence as fact to another prominent neo-con, I. Lewis Libby, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and to Deputy National Security Director Steven Hadley. In due course, by means of complicities in the Administration, Feith’s dubious material was passed up to President Bush and Vice-President Cheney who used it in speeches preparing the public for war in March 2003. The intrigue was successful.


Senator Carl Levin said in a written statement last week that the Defence Department’s report fully demonstrated why the Inspector General had concluded that Douglas Feith had "inappropriately" written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between Iraq and al-Qaida. The word inappropriately is hardly a precise description of Feith’s criminal behaviour.


As is now plain for everyone to see, the war has been an unmitigated disaster for the United States, for Iraq, and for the whole Middle East. But it is only now, four years after the American seizure of Baghdad, that an official report has clearly pointed the finger at the men largely responsible.


Why did Feith and his neo-con associates do it? And how did they manage to get away with it?


Clearly, in pressing for war, they were primarily concerned to enhance Israel’s security by smashing a major Arab state, thereby removing any potential threat to Israel from the east. As they schemed to transform the region with America’s military power, they dreamed of defeating all of Israel’s enemies -- Arab nationalists, Islamic radicals and Palestinian militants -- at a single stroke. Overthrowing Saddam was to be only the first step in a thorough transformation of the region to the advantage of both Israel and the United States.


In the event, the United States has suffered a devastating blow to its political influence and moral authority, as well as to its finances and to the fighting ability of its armed services, while Israel, confronted by a resurgent Iran, is itself less secure than before the war.


The reckless enterprise of Feith and his fellow neo-cons would probably have had little chance of success had they not managed to team up with men like Dick Cheney and former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who were evidently seduced by the prospect of taking control of Iraq’s oil reserves, second-largest in the world after Saudi Arabia’s, and of turning a submissive Iraqi client state into a base for the projection of American power throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.


President George W. Bush himself bought their agenda -- a decision he must now bitterly regret, as he and his advisers seek desperately to find a way out of the Iraqi quagmire.


In retrospect, the campaign by Israel and its American friends to push the United States into war with Iraq must be judged one of the most audacious sabotage operations of the Arab world ever mounted.


Israel has a long history of seeking to destabilise its neighbours in the belief that a weak and divided Arab world is to its advantage. Over the years, it has sent funds, weapons and military instructors to stiffen the southern Sudanese in their long war against Khartoum and has provided even greater support to the Kurds against Baghdad.


Its repeated invasions of Lebanon -- in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006 -- have been designed to wrest that country out of Syria’s sphere of influence and bring to power in Beirut a government prepared to do Israel’s bidding. In the Occupied Territories it has sought to destroy Palestinian resistance not only by boycotts, military strikes and a systematic campaign of murder of Palestinian activists, but also by setting one Palestinian faction against another, notably Islamists against nationalists.


But for sheer daring, the intrigue which carried the U.S. into war against Iraq can best be compared to the Iran-Contra Scandal of the mid-1980s.


It will be recalled that Israel started sending American weapons secretly to Iran from the start of the Iraq-Iran war in 1980, even while American hostages were held captive in Tehran and in infringement of the arms embargoes imposed by both the Carter and Reagan Administrations.


Israel’s interest was to fuel the war so as to rule out any possibility that Iraq might turn westwards and combine its military power with that of Syria. Selling arms to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was then fighting for its survival, was a way to weaken two potential enemies -- Iran and Iraq. It was also highly profitable for Israel’s arms dealers.


To persuade Washington to turn a blind eye to this arms trade, Israel came up with an ingenious idea. It proposed overcharging Iran for the American weapons it was secretly supplying and diverting the profits to the Nicaraguan Contras. The Americans fell for it. They had been looking for ways to support the Contras after Congress had cut off funding.


On 17 January 1986, President Reagan signed a Finding which formally re-launched the clandestine arms programme. Israel’s arms sales to Iran were freed from all constraint. But the exposure of what was to become known as Irangate crippled the last years of the Reagan Administration, much as Bush’s last years have now been crippled by the Iraq war.


Can Israel now be persuaded to seek its long-term security by means of good neighbourly relations with the Arabs rather than by spreading mayhem among them?


The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, re-launched at the recent Arab Summit in Riyadh -- which offers Israel peace and normal relations with all 22 members of the Arab League if it withdraws to its 1967 borders -- could perhaps be seen as an invitation to Israel to play a constructive rather than a destructive role in the region.


The Arab message to Israel seems to be this: "Stop being the bad boy on the block. Let’s put war behind us and cooperate for a better future." But Israel’s interventionist instincts are so deeply ingrained that it would take something of a revolution in its military and security thinking for it to seize the opportunity now being presented to it.




Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.


Copyright © 2007 Patrick Seale


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Released: 11 April 2007
Word Count: 1,325
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Advisory Release: 11 April 2007
Word Count: 1,325
Rights & Permissions Contact: Agence Global, 1.336.686.9002, rights@agenceglobal.com
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Agence Global
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for The Nation, Le Monde diplomatique, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Mark Hertsgaard, Rami G. Khouri, Peter Kwong,Tom Porteous, Patrick Seale and Immanuel Wallerstein.

The Story of Sami al-Arian

The True Story of Free Speech in America
By Robert Fisk

04/07/07 "The Independent" -- -- Laila al-Arian was wearing her headscarf at her desk at Nation Books, one of my New York publishers. No, she told me, it would be difficult to telephone her father. At the medical facility of his North Carolina prison, he can only make a few calls - monitored, of course - and he was growing steadily weaker.

Sami al-Arian is 49 but he stayed on hunger strike for 60 days to protest the government outrage committed against him, a burlesque of justice which has, of course, largely failed to rouse the sleeping dogs of American journalism in New York, Washington and Los Angeles.

All praise, then, to the journalist John Sugg from Tampa, Florida, who has been cataloging al-Arian’s little Golgotha for months, along with Alexander Cockburn of Counter Punch.

The story so far: Sami al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, was a respected computer professor at the University of South Florida who tried, however vainly, to communicate the real tragedy of Palestinian Arabs to the US government. But according to Sugg, Israel’s lobbyists were enraged by his lessons - al-Arian’s family was driven from Palestine in 1948 - and in 2003, at the instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft, he was arrested and charged with conspiring “to murder and maim” outside the United States and with raising money for Islamic Jihad in “Palestine”. He was held for two and a half years in solitary confinement, hobbling half a mile, his hands and feet shackled, merely to talk to his lawyers.

Al-Arian’s $50m (£25m) Tampa trial lasted six months; the government called 80 witnesses (21 from Israel) and used 400 intercepted phone calls along with evidence of a conversation that a co-defendant had with al-Arian in - wait for it - a dream. The local judge, a certain James Moody, vetoed any remarks about Israeli military occupation or about UN Security Council Resolution 242, on the grounds that they would endanger the impartiality of the jurors.

In December, 2005, al-Arian was acquitted on the most serious charges and on those remaining; the jurors voted 10 to two for acquittal. Because the FBI wanted to make further charges, al-Arian’s lawyers told him to make a plea that would end any further prosecution. Arriving for his sentence, however, al-Arian - who assumed time served would be his punishment, followed by deportation - found Moody talking about “blood” on the defendant’s hands and ensured he would have to spend another 11 months in jail. Then prosecutor Gordon Kromberg insisted that the Palestinian prisoner should testify against an Islamic think tank. Al-Arian believed his plea bargain had been dishonored and refused to testify. He was held in contempt. And continues to languish in prison.

Not so, of course, most of America’s torturers in Iraq. One of them turns out to rejoice in the name of Ric Fair, a “contract interrogator”, who has bared his soul in the Washington Post - all praise, here, by the way to the Post - about his escapades in the Fallujah interrogation “facility” of the 82nd Airborne Division. Fair has been having nightmares about an Iraqi whom he deprived of sleep during questioning “by forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes”. Now it is Fair who is deprived of sleep. “A man with no face stares at me … pleads for help, but I’m afraid to move. He begins to cry. It s a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.”

Thank God, Fair didn’t write a play about his experiences and offer it to Channel 4 whose executives got cold feet about The Mark of Cain, the drama about British army abuse in Basra. They quickly bought into the line that transmission of Tony Marchant’s play might affect the now happy outcome of the far less riveting Iranian prison production of the Famous 15 “Servicepersons” - by angering the Muslim world with tales of how our boys in Basra beat up on the local Iraqis. As the reporter who first revealed the death of hotel worker Baha Mousa in British custody in Basra - I suppose we must always refer to his demise as “death” now that the soldiers present at his savage beating have been acquitted of murder - I can attest that Arab Muslims know all too well how gentle and refined our boys are during interrogation. It is we, the British at home, who are not supposed to believe in torture. The Iraqis know all about it - and who knew all about Mousa’s fate long before I reported it for The Independent on Sunday.

Because it’s really all about shutting the reality of the Middle East off from us. It’s to prevent the British and American people from questioning the immoral and cruel and internationally illegal occupation of Muslim lands. And in the Land of the Free, this systematic censorship of Middle East reality continues even in the country’s schools. Now the principal of a Connecticut high school has banned a play by pupils, based on the letters and words of US soldiers serving in Iraq. Entitled Voices in Conflict, Natalie Kropf, Seth Koproski, James Presson and their fellow pupils at Wilton High School compiled the reflections of soldiers and others - including a 19-year-old Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq - to create their own play. To no avail. The drama might hurt those “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak”, proclaimed Timothy Canty, Wilton High’s principal. And - my favorite line - Canty believed there was not enough rehearsal time to ensure the play would provide “a legitimate instructional experience for our students”.

And of course, I can quite see Mr Canty’s point. Students who have produced Arthur Miller’s The Crucible were told by Mr Canty - whose own war experiences, if any, have gone unrecorded - that it wasn’t their place to tell audiences what soldiers were thinking. The pupils of Wilton High are now being inundated with offers to perform at other venues. Personally, I think Mr Canty may have a point. He would do much better to encourage his students to perform Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, a drama of massive violence, torture, rape, mutilation and honor killing. It would make Iraq perfectly explicable to the good people of Connecticut. A “legitimate instructional experience” if ever there was one.

© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited

source:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17503.htm

Pope Sues Indymedia

Vatican threatens to sue Indymedia
By FREEDOM OF PRESS 06/04/2007 At 19:41


It looks clear to us that the trial is going to restrict the liberty of expression and is politically motivated, trying to silence satirical criticisms published in a letfist site about the political positions of the new pope.



Back in April 2005, the World Press reported that the Italian Public Departmen's attorney, Salvatore Vitello, intends to take legal action against a satirical photomontage picturing Cardinal Ratzinger, the then newly chosen pope, in Nazi uniform. A few months ago, the intention materialized in the form of a letter of request that is now being considered by the Brazilian Superior Court of Justice (STJ). The request letter asks for the the page to be taken down and disclose the identity of the people deemed responsible for the site, which is registered in Brazil.

The case in question is a good example of the double standards in dealing with the freedom of the press. In the incident of the cartoons that satirized prophet Mohammed in the Danish journal Jyllands-Posten, the public opinion of the liberal democracies jumped to condemn the fanaticism and the restriction of the freedom of expression. Now that the satire concerns a religious figure that occupies a privileged position in the international setting, the Italian Judiciary, in accordance with the Vatican, initiates forms of cyber political pursuit.

The photomontage at the heart of the trial is a satirical composition published on the Italy Independent Media Center site in April 2005. IMC, or Indymedia, is a global network of open publishing websites, where readers can publish news and opinion, established in 1999 to cover the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. The photomontage is an anonymous contribution by one of the site users and puts the face of the Pope Benedict XVI to the body of a Nazi officer. The picture is accompanied by following comment, which the Italian Public Department considered offensive: "Nazi pope - happiness to all the faithful. After the anti-communist reactionary, now comes the ultra-reactionary Nazi."

The satire is clearly a composition that ridicules and criticizes persons and institutions by means of funny exaggeration. The right of satire is one of the foundations of the freedom of expression and press, and is what guarantees that all papers and magazines carry cartoons and caricatures on their pages every day. As an exaggeration, satire is always based on some elements of truth that are then maximised, aiming for a funny effect. In the case of the Pope photomontage, the truth element is that Pope Benedict XVI was member of the Hitler Youth in Germany when he was 14, as well as the fact that his politics, as Mayor of the Faith Doctrine Congregation during John Paul II rein, was considered ultra-conservative. The cartoon does not have as its object the Catholic faith but, rather, the political orientation of the person in charge of the Papacy, as highlighted in the comment.

Despite the fact that the photomontage contains all the elements that qualify as a satire and, therefore, should be protected by the laws that defend the freedom of expression, the Italian Public Department used an article of the Italian penal code that criminalizes the "contempt of a minister of the Catholic faith", Catholicism being the "state religion" there.

However, the jurisprudence established in Italy already regards as outdated and illegitimate the argument that fuses State and Religion. That means that the core argument that substantiates the solicitation of the letter of request is questionable in its own country of origin.

Although Indymedia is not the author of the post concerned, the maintenance of the page where it is published is to us a question of principles. We believe that the photomontage is a satirical criticism of the political positions assumed by the Pope during his ecclesiastical career and that attorney Salvatore Vitello is criminalizing a publication based on outdated articles of the Penal Code, especially that this very Penal Code has recently had substantial changes to its writing.

The letter of request sent to the STJ is based on a judicial agreement of mutual cooperation between Brazil and Italy which limits this cooperation to predicted cases in the legislation of both countries and to crimes that are not of a political nature. However, the Brazilian law does not offer special protection for the ministers of the Catholic faith. Further, the letter of request, although claiming the trial is not of political nature, does highlight that the Independent Media Center website is the "expression of the information circuit of the antagonist left".

It is pretty obvious that the trial is going to restrict the freedom of expression and is politically motivated. It is trying to silence satirical criticism, published on a leftist site, about the political positions of the new pope. We expect the Minister entrusted by the trial in the Superior Court to have the same understanding. We also expect that the Brazilian civil society, as we as the international community, would express their opposition to this attempt by the Italian attorney to silence any criticism of the controversial political orientations of the Catholic Pope.

Recently, the request for filing the case was sent to the Italian Judicial authorities by the Italian Public Department itself. However, the request letter sent to Brazil is still being processed by the Federal Justice.

source:
http://prod.midiaindependente.org/en/blue/2007/04/378371.shtml

Who Killed in Afghanistan?

6 NATO Troops Die in Afghanistan Blast

Sunday April 8, 2007 6:16 PM


KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - A NATO vehicle was struck by an explosive device in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, leaving six soldiers dead and another wounded, the alliance said.

The statement from NATO's International Security Assistance force did not identify those killed and wounded or specify the location of the explosion.

The Taliban, meanwhile, claimed to have beheaded the kidnapped translator for an Italian journalist.

Ajmal Naqshbandi, a freelance journalist and translator, was kidnapped March 5 in southern Afghanistan along with journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo and a driver.

The driver was beheaded. Mastrogiacomo, who worked for the daily La Repubblica, was released March 19 in a much criticized swap for five Taliban militants.

The Taliban made a similar demand in return for Naqshbandi's release.

``We asked for two Taliban commanders to be released in exchange for Ajmal Naqshbandi, but the government did not care for our demands, and today, at 3:05 p.m., we beheaded Ajmal in Garmsir district of Helmand province,'' said Shahabuddin Atal, who claimed to be a spokesman for regional Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah. The report could not be independently confirmed.


source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6541876,00.html


Late in:


6 Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan
Last Updated: Sunday, April 8, 2007 | 2:39 PM ET
CBC News
Six Canadian soldiers were killed in southern Afghanistan, Prime Minister Stephen Harper confirmed on Sunday.

No names or hometowns of the soldiers involved have been released. Earlier in the day, NATO reported that six soldiers had been killed by a roadside bomb in Helmand province.

"Sadly today has been a difficult day in Afghanistan," Harper said at a dinner for veterans in the French city of Lille, near historic Vimy Ridge.

"We've learned that an incident has claimed the lives of six Canadian soldiers and injured a number of others."

"Our hearts ache for them and their families, and I know as we gather here on Easter Sunday our thoughts and prayers are with them," said the prime minister, who is in France as part of the ceremonies marking the 90th anniversary of the attack on Vimy Ridge in the First World War.

The troops were serving with NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Helmand province, where the multinational force recently launched a major offensive against the Taliban.

Continue Article

Maj.-Gen. Ton van Loon, the ISAF chief of Regional Command South, said "the hearts of his soldiers" go out to the victim's families and their country.

Since 2002, 51 Canadian soldiers and a diplomat have been killed in Afghanistan, where Canada has more than 2,000 troops, with the majority in the southern province of Kandahar.

The main thrust of the offensive in Helmand province is being handled by British and American troops, with Canadian soldiers offering backup and security. About 5,000 soldiers in all are engaging the Taliban, including elements of Afghanistan's army.

In February, the Taliban said it has 6,000 fighters ready for a spring offensive and could dramatically increase that number if necessary.

Al-Jazeera reported at the time that Taliban leader Mullah Dadallah had recruited 500 suicide bombers for the campaign.

IPCC: 'Canada the Lucky One'

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has good news and bad for Canada within its second of four reports regarding global climate change, released Friday in Brussels. The good news is: Canada is better able to weather global climate change than poorer nations. Other than that, the report is a stern warning to all nations, citizens, and businesses to get serious about changing the way we do things.

Despite what some of the participating scientists who prepared the report say was a "softening" of the message for political purposes, there is little good news contained within "Climate Change 2007" Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for anyone, anywhere on the planet.

And, despite Canada's relatively "lucky" positioning in the northern hemisphere, surrounded by three oceans, with still favorable weather patterns providing plenty of rainfall on the coastal regions, and enough for prairie farmers, the country faces some of the greatest challenges a warming planet will present; challenges that will take more than thrown money to address. But even so, money is needed for research and development of the alternative products and processes a new world will require, and at a time when green rhetoric is all pervading, Ottawa is in fact de-funding the very departments of government designed for the purpose.

According to Mike De Souza at CanWest News, the greenhorn Federal Environment Minister John Baird defensively suggested, his government's cutting off funding devoted to climate change was done to better serve the issue, saying;

"One of the biggest findings (of the UN report) is that these (impacts) can be mitigated, can be reduced, can be delayed by action to reduce greenhouse gases, and that's got to be the first, the second, and the third priority. At some point, it's sort of like the planet's on fire, we've got to throw water on it. We don't need to research it, we need to act."

In the face of the Conservative retreat from climate change leadership, the minister advises Canadians act without thinking about, or researching, where and how to act. Baird would have Canada throw its metaphorical water on a burning planet, by first firing the ones hired to look for the smoke.

Among those losing funding: Climate Impacts and Adaptation Research Network; the Adaptation program funding frozen, research program faces March '08 shutdown.

Health Policy Research Program; a program to explore possible health sector scenarios due to climate change; de-funded.

Reducing Canada's Vulnerability to Climate Change; program to study landscape, coastal areas, and infrastructure and community planning; scheduled to be phased out March '08.

Canada Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences; a major foundation, doing research and training the next generation of climate scientists; funding frozen since July 2006.

Again, Baird doesn't seem capable of grasping the ramifications of his party's policies. De Souza quotes the minister saying;

"It depends on what the research is about. We don't need more research to convince us this is a major problem. We accept the science. We accept the global research and it seems that (for) Stephane Dion and the Liberals, all they want to do is more research. We don't need more reports, We need to focus on the big challenge at hand."

If anything, the U.N. report stresses the need to remove politics, both domestic and international, from the climate change challenge; time, they say, is not a luxury we can afford to squander with petty finger-pointing and internecine squabbling. If this is a preview of the Conservative environmental platform for the expected late Spring federal election, the Environment minister's ham-handed explanation of his party's environmental black thumb, retrograde policies will prove a godsend to the Liberals.

Ian Burton, one of the Canadian delegation and co-author of the second report to the IPCC, says despite Canada's geographic and financially advantageous position, it lacks a clear vision, and more importantly, any practical plan in place to deal with some of the urgent issues at hand. Margaret Munro of CanWest quotes Ian Burton;

"What is missing, he said, is a comprehensive strategy to cut the country's greenhouse-gas emissions and deal with the "destabilizing" changes underway."

Duane Smith of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference emphasizing the necessity to move, saying;
"Let's not just talk about it, let's put a game plan in place. We are bearing the brunt of the changing environment as we speak."

And Smith ain't whistling Dixie; the poles, north and south, are the most effected areas of the planet. The polar ice cap is melting at a rate even faster than the most skeptical scientists believed possible a few short years ago, and the Antarctic has seen major calving of the ice shelves there. Canada's northern boreal forests are endangered by industrial logging, and resource exploration and extraction. The permafrost, literally the foundation of the north, is melting, undermining the towns and cities built upon it. Not to mention the almost unthinkable: An end to Canada's vast and diverse wildlife.

We Canadians are fortunate, we're often reminded by the scolding patriarchs of government. Indeed, we are lucky to be living here, surrounded by peace and abundance, but luck isn't enough anymore. As the environmentalists' report warns, we do not have the luxury of wasting time, either arguing, and warring amongst ourselves, or suffering the fools and ass-backwardly obsessed, who have hijacked the instruments of state to serve the ends of a increasingly outrageous global elite, desperate to maintain their extravagance regardless of the costs borne by the rest of us.

It is too late to suffer the Stephen Harper's, and George W. Bush's, and John Baird's of the world, who would fiddle while the planet burns.



Chris Cook is a contributing editor to www.pacificfreepress.com and host of Gorilla Radio

De-Taxing War

Hang Up on War

By Amy Goodman

04/05/07 "ICH' -- -- If you are upset that Congress won’t defund the war in Iraq, there’s something you can do: Stop paying a tax. Legally.

The Internal Revenue Service is giving a rebate this year on a telephone war tax. This is one of those line items at the bottom of your phone bill. The tax was instituted in 1898 to help the United States pay for the Spanish-American War. Individuals and businesses have one chance to obtain a refund on this telephone war tax, by asking for it in their 2006 income tax returns.

Remarkably, the Internal Revenue Service has made it easy to request the refund, yet IRS Commissioner Mark Everson says that many taxpayers are overlooking it. Obtaining the refund is easy. But first, a little history.

The Spanish-American War lasted from April to August of 1898 and was predicated on a U.S. government demand that Spain abandon its colony in Cuba, which the U.S. subsequently occupied. By the end of 1898, the United States had also taken over the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico.

The war was also used as an official pretext to take over Hawaii. The Senate debated over the annexation in secret, some arguing for total annexation, others for just Pearl Harbor. Sen. Richard Pettigrew of South Dakota derided the annexation plan as money “thrown away in the interest of a few sugar planters and adventurers in Hawaii.” Military bases and raw materials—sound familiar?

The telephone tax was instituted as part of the War Revenue Bill, which expanded the government’s ability to collect taxes, ostensibly to pay for the war. As with the myriad controversial “pork” items added to the recent Iraq war funding authorization, the 1898 bill was the subject of scores of amendments that benefited big business. These included tax breaks for powerful industries like the insurance companies and tobacco dealers.

The telephone tax of 1 cent per call targeted the wealthy, who were generally the only ones who had telephone access in 1898. After the war, the tax was eventually raised to 3 percent. Since the Vietnam War, it has been the target of war tax resisters, people who refuse to pay taxes because they do not want to fund war.

Tax resistance has a long history. Henry David Thoreau promoted it in his essay “Civil Disobedience” to fight slavery: “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.” The IRS has vigorously targeted full-fledged tax resisters—ranging from those refusing to pay the Pentagon’s percentage of their taxes, to those who outright refuse to pay anything to the government—making an example of them by garnishing wages, sending them to prison for tax evasion and confiscating their homes.

Tax resisters figured out that they could protest the telephone tax simply by writing their checks to the phone company, withholding the amount of the tax. The IRS deemed the collection of the tax too expensive, relative to the small amount of the tax itself. According to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee, early collection efforts by the IRS included the auctioning of Jim Glock’s bicycle for $22 in 1973 and of George and Lillian Willoughby’s VW Bug in 1971 for $123 (in 2004, Lillian, at 89, with the support of her husband, George, 94, was jailed for protesting the Iraq war).

Court losses convinced the IRS to dump the telephone war tax in 2006 and to offer the retroactive rebate for phone taxes paid between March 1, 2003, and July 31, 2006. Typical refunds will be between $30 and $60. Ironically, while the IRS has dropped the tax on long-distance and “bundled” services, like high-speed Internet, the tax remains for older, standard local phone services and rental of equipment that enables the disabled to use phones. Thus, this tax on the rich is now a tax on the poor. Congressman John Lewis, D-Ga., has submitted a bill to permanently wipe this remnant clean. Two-thirds of the bill’s co-sponsors are anti-tax Republicans, so Democrats might be leery about passing it.

The website, www.refundsforgood.org, lists step-by-step instructions on how to recoup the telephone tax rebate, and recommends donating it to charity.

While Congress and President Bush trade barbs over war funding, with a simple check mark on your tax return you can help to defund the war. Claim your telephone tax rebate. Let the Pentagon hold a bake sale.







Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 500 stations in North America.

© 2007 Amy Goodman

Driving

Driving the Riff-Raff

Click Name for Bio of ')">Chris Cook

Tuesday, 03 April 2007

Driving the Riff-Raff by C. L. Cook The peril of our current reality occurred suddenly to me the other night, revealed, as Shakespeare said many truths often are, in jest; the terminal fate of the human race could not have been made more clear. * Witness: the University bus exchange - Victoria - night. Waiting to board the perennially overcrowded University bus, (the under-serviced situation there too a symptom of our collective undoing), I saw three bus drivers shooting the breeze, while laying over. Our driver "Dan," as he later identified himself, turned to his fellows and said; "Well, time to go drive the riff-raff." That would be me, and my fellow sardine-packed transit passengers. Whether Dan considers himself to be another of the "riff-raff" I don't know, but I expect, while he's wearing the uniform of his occupation, he considers himself one of US rather than THEM, the passengers whom's safety and service he is charged to maintain. Of course, Dan is, in the eyes of others wearing other uniforms, one of THEM; riff raff, hoi polloi, a lowly "civvie" to be denigrated, disregarded; someone whose societal relevance is to be dismissed out of hand: a nobody. * Witness: a city bus - Victoria - day. On a blustery, late winter's morning, a near empty bus approaches a bus shelter, near empty too, but for a ragged old man, his chin on his chest, snoozing. The driver pulls up to the shelter, opens the door, and shouts at the elder; "Clear off!" My friend tells me; "No-one rang for the bus to stop, and nobody was getting on. He [the bus driver] just took it on himself to hassle this poor old guy, one of the real survivors." And off the man shuffled, his bundled rags pulled in tow. * Witness: a city sidestreet, piled high with snow - Victoria - night. The sidewalks impassable, an elderly woman picks her way carefully along the street, gingerly following the automobile ruts. A Victoria City police van comes up behind. The window rolls down, and the head of a young constable emerges. He bawls at the woman; "Get outta the road!" and splashes on past. There are doubtless many more examples, many I'm certain you've witnessed yourself: Bicycle police downtown pushing around the homeless for the crime of their poverty; shopkeepers abusing youngsters for the fault of their youth; automobile drivers abusing everyone for the sin of slowing their progress. It's all indicative of a growing incivility, directed downwards towards those deemed socially inferior, and therefore fair game for petty tyranny. I believe, this deterioration in the fabric of public life isn't merely a local phenomenon, but a trend dropped from the heights of what's left of western civilization upon the heads of its neo-peons. Witness: a television - anywhere - anytime. The walls of the room are blue hued behind the viewer. On the screen, chaos; a city is drowning, desperate people wave make-shift flags, surrendered to the situation, begging for help. But help isn't quick to arrive. The people are left to their own devices - sink or swim. I watched as the hurricane approached. I saw what Katrina did to Florida, and I heard what the veterans of storms past said about "Little Andrew." I watched as the storm slowly turned into the Gulf, the Gulf grown unnaturally warm. I watched that Gulf feed that storm, and I followed it's inexorable progress toward the doomed city. And I watched the people of that city abandoned to the waters. Witness: a television - anywhere - all the time. The walls of the room are blue hued behind the viewer. On the screen, chaos; a city is burning, desperate people wail and wave make-shift flags, surrendered to the situation, begging for help. But no help will arrive; those sent know only how to start fires, not stop them. I watched as the wars approached. I saw what George Bush did to Iraq, and I heard what the veterans of Desert Storm said about their "splendid little war." I watched as that storm turned slowly into Gulf War Syndrome, an unnatural pollution of the gene pool. And I followed the inexorable succession of a second George, and watched as he approached the doomed city, and I saw the people of that city abandoned to the flames. Writing of "the day that changed everything," Victoria novelist, Hal Sisson, in the "dedication" section of his 'Modus Operandi 9/11' says; "[U]ntutored emotions of ignorant people are the material that enables evil deeds; and when I have shuffled off this mortal coil I want to leave concrete proof that I was not one of the willfully blind or deliberately ignorant persons unwilling to question the ridiculous government story of what happened on 9/11; unable to entertain the irrefutable evidence of the administration's complicity and participation in the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon." Is it too much to believe a government would sacrifice a few thousands of "its own people" to profit its benefactors? How could it seem incredible, when thousands die daily due to the cancerous by-products of an industrial society gone off the tracks? How could it seem absurd that a system routinely disposing of hundreds of millions to a life of want, and suffering, and penal servitude would flinch at a few thousands of souls thrown into the crucible of their infernal greed? The abrogation of civic responsibility, as we see today in both global polity and local policy, are the twin disasters spelling the end of us all. And if that sounds too incredible, consider what we collectively countenance with our silence as humanity's epitaph; again, taken from Hal Sisson's dedication. "The major incredible international crime perpetrated by the world's bully was the use of radioactively contaminated depleted uranium 238, that is spreading through Iraq, Afghanistan, other neighboring countries and the world, via dust storms and global air currents, and becomes deposited in human bones, causing cancer and congenital anomalies. If the U.S. administration is allowed to use nuclear weapons on Iran, then mutually assured destruction and annihilation becomes only a matter of time." I'm watching as that storm approaches. ["*" denotes incidents occurring right here in genteel Victoria that I'm personally acquainted with. Quotes are from the dedication in 'Modus Operandi 9/11' by Hal Sisson.]

Lethal Solution

A Lethal Solution

We need a five-year freeze on biofuels, before they wreck the planet

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian 27th March 2007.

It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless.

In theory, fuels made from plants can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cars and trucks. Plants absorb carbon as they grow – it is released again when the fuel is burnt. By encouraging oil companies to switch from fossil plants to living ones, governments on both sides of the Atlantic claim to be “decarbonising” our transport networks.

In the budget last week, Gordon Brown announced that he would extend the tax rebate for biofuels until 2010. From next year all suppliers in the UK will have to ensure that 2.5% of the fuel they sell is made from plants – if not, they must pay a penalty of 15p a litre. The obligation rises to 5% in 2010(1). By 2050, the government hopes that 33% of our fuel will come from crops(2). Last month George Bush announced that he would quintuple the US target for biofuels(3): by 2017 they should be supplying 24% of the nation’s transport fuel(4).

So what’s wrong with these programmes? Only that they are a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster. In 2004 this column warned that biofuels would set up a competition for food between cars and people. The people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are, by definition, richer than those who are in danger of starvation. It would also lead to the destruction of rainforests and other important habitats(5). I received more abuse than I’ve had for any other column, except when I attacked the 9/11 conspiracists. I was told my claims were ridiculous, laughable, impossible. Well in one respect I was wrong. I thought these effects wouldn’t materialise for many years. They are happening already.

Since the beginning of last year, the price of maize has doubled(6). The price of wheat has also reached a 10-year high, while global stockpiles of both grains have reached 25-year lows(7). Already there have been food riots in Mexico and reports that the poor are feeling the strain all over the world. The US department of agriculture warns that “if we have a drought or a very poor harvest, we could see the sort of volatility we saw in the 1970s, and if it does not happen this year, we are also forecasting lower stockpiles next year.”(8) According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the main reason is the demand for ethanol: the alcohol used for motor fuel, which can be made from both maize and wheat(9).

Farmers will respond to better prices by planting more, but it is not clear that they can overtake the booming demand for biofuel. Even if they do, they will catch up only by ploughing virgin habitat.

Already we know that biofuel is worse for the planet than petroleum. The UN has just published a report suggesting that 98% of the natural rainforest in Indonesia will be degraded or gone by 2022(10). Just five years ago, the same agencies predicted that this wouldn’t happen until 2032. But they reckoned without the planting of palm oil to turn into biodiesel for the European market. This is now the main cause of deforestation there and it is likely soon to become responsible for the extinction of the orang utan in the wild. But it gets worse. As the forests are burnt, both the trees and the peat they sit on are turned into carbon dioxide. A report by the Dutch consultancy Delft Hydraulics shows that every tonne of palm oil results in 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, or ten times as much as petroleum produces(11). I feel I need to say that again. Biodiesel from palm oil causes TEN TIMES as much climate change as ordinary diesel.

There are similar impacts all over the world. Sugarcane producers are moving into rare scrubland habitats (the cerrado) in Brazil and soya farmers are ripping up the Amazon rainforests. As President Bush has just signed a biofuel agreement with President Lula, it’s likely to become a lot worse. Indigenous people in South America, Asia and Africa are starting to complain about incursions onto their land by fuel planters. A petition launched by a group called biofuelwatch, begging western governments to stop, has been signed by campaigners from 250 groups(12).

The British government is well aware that there’s a problem. On his blog last year the environment secretary David Miliband noted that palm oil plantations “are destroying 0.7% of the Malaysian rain forest each year, reducing a vital natural resource (and in the process, destroying the natural habitat of the orang-utan). It is all connected.”(13) Unlike government policy.

The reason governments are so enthusiastic about biofuels is that they don’t upset drivers. They appear to reduce the amount of carbon from our cars, without requiring new taxes. It’s an illusion sustained by the fact that only the emissions produced at home count towards our national total. The forest clearance in Malaysia doesn’t increase our official impact by a gram.

In February the European Commission was faced with a straight choice between fuel efficiency and biofuels. It had intended to tell car companies that the average carbon emission from new cars in 2012 would be 120 grams per kilometre. After heavy lobbying by Angela Merkel on behalf of her car manufacturers, it caved in and raised the limit to 130 grams. It announced that it would make up the shortfall by increasing the contribution from biofuel(14).

The British government says it “will require transport fuel suppliers to report on the carbon saving and sustainability of the biofuels they supply.”(15) But it will not require them to do anything. It can’t: its consultants have already shown that if it tries to impose wider environmental standards on biofuels, it will fall foul of world trade rules(16). And even “sustainable” biofuels merely occupy the space that other crops now fill, displacing them into new habitats. It promises that one day there will be a “second generation” of biofuels, made from straw or grass or wood. But there are still major technical obstacles(17). By the time the new fuels are ready, the damage will have been done.

We need a moratorium on all targets and incentives for biofuels, until a second generation of fuels can be produced for less than it costs to make fuel from palm oil or sugarcane. Even then, the targets should be set low and increased only cautiously. I suggest a five-year freeze.

This would require a huge campaign, tougher than the one which helped to win a five-year freeze on growing genetically modified crops in the UK. That was important – GM crops give big companies unprecedented control over the foodchain. But most of their effects are indirect, while the devastation caused by biofuel is immediate and already visible.

This is why it will be harder to stop: encouraged by government policy, vast investments are now being made by farmers and chemical companies. Stopping them requires one heck of a battle. But it has to be fought.

You can join the campaign at www.biofuelwatch.org.uk.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. HM Treasury, March 2007. Budget 2007, Chapter 7.

2. Department for Transport, 21st December 2005. Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) feasibility report. Executive Summary.

http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/environment/rtfo/secrtfoprogdocs/renewabletransportfuelobliga3849?page=1

3. George W. Bush. 23rd January 2007. State of the Union Address. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070123-2.html

4. The US Energy Information Administration gives US gasoline consumption for October 2006 (the latest available date) at 287,857,000 barrels. If this month is typical, annual consumption amounts to 3.45 billion barrels, or 145 billion gallons. http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbbl_m.htm

In the state of the union address, Bush proposed a mandatory annual target of 35 billion gallons.

5. George Monbiot, 23rd November 2004. Feeding Cars, Not People. The Guardian. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

6. Nils Blythe, 23rd March 2007. Biofuel demand makes food expensive. BBC Online. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/business/6481029.stm

7. Eoin Callan and Kevin Morrison, 5th March 2007. Food prices to rise as biofuel demand keeps grains costly. Financial Times.

8. Keith Collins, chief economist, US Department of Agriculture. Quoted by Eoin Callan and Kevin Morrison, 5th March 2007, ibid.

9. Food and Agriculture Organisation, December 2006. Food Outlook 2. http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/j8126e/j8126e01a.htm

10. UNEP and UNESCO, February 2007. The Last Stand of the Orangutan. State of Emergency: Illegal Logging, Fire and Palm Oil in Indonesia’s National Parks. http://www.unep-wcmc.org/resources/PDFs/LastStand/full_orangutanreport.pdf

11. Wetlands International, 8th December 2006. Bio-fuel less sustainable than realised http://www.wetlands.org/news.aspx?ID=804eddfb-4492-4749-85a9-5db67c2f1bb8

12. http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/resources.php#2007Jan31



13. David Miliband, 14th July 2006. Malaysian Diary.

http://www.davidmiliband.defra.gov.uk/
blogs/ministerial_blog/archive/2006/07/14/1497.aspx

14. Commission Of The European Communities, 7th February 2007. Results of the review of the Community Strategy to reduce CO2 emissions from passenger cars and light-commercial vehicles. COM 19 final.

http://ec.europa.eu/environment/
co2/pdf/com_2007_19_en.pdf

15. HM Treasury, ibid.

16. E4Tech, ECCM and Imperial College, London, June 2005. Feasibility Study on Certification for a Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation. Final Report.

17. Robert F. Service, et al, 16th March 2007. Cellulosic Ethanol: Biofuel Researchers

Prepare to Reap a New Harvest. Science 315, 1488.
DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5818.1488


source:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/
2007/03/27/a-lethal-solution/#more-1051