By Susan Jones
April 30, 2004

During a week when Iraqi war coverage has dominated the cable news shows and led the networks' evening news programs, newsman Ted Koppel said he thinks Americans need to be 'reminded' of what is going on in Iraq.

In a Friday morning interview, Koppel said that's why he plans to read the names of more than 700 American troops killed in Iraq on Friday night's "Nightline."

Not all ABC affiliates will air tonight's "Nightline," however.

Baltimore-based Sinclair Broadcasting is pre-empting the live "Nightline" program on its ABC affiliates, saying, "We find it offensive that Ted Koppel is trivializing the deaths of so many men and women. This is not a one-year anniversary of the war, or Memorial Day. This is 'sweeps week,' and he intends to use a news platform for a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq."

In an interview ABC's "Good Morning America" Friday, Koppel said he expected the show to be controversial - "but not this controversial."

He denied complaints that the show is "anti-war."

"It is a way of saying...let me explain it this way, Charlie [Gibson]. I was born and grew up in England. I was a small child in London during the Second World War. We used to spend our nights during bombing raids in an air-raid shelter in the back. There was rationing. There were blackouts. There was an awareness of the war, which I think is somehow a little bit lacking in the United States at this time.

"I'm not suggesting that people in this country don't know what's happening, but I think that periodically it is not unreasonable to remind everyone of who these young people are and what they look like."

Koppel was asked to recall the impact of a 1969 Life magazine - which published pictures of the servicemen who died in Vietnam in just one week. It was one of the things that turned the country against the Vietnam War, "Good Morning America" host Charlie Gibson said to Koppel.

Koppel admitted that his executive producer had brought up the Life magazine spread.
"That was one of the things that our executive producer...mentioned to me. He said, 'You remember the impact of that. What if we do something like that?' And I think it's an appropriate thing to do."

Koppel said if his show has received requests from parents asking him not to name their children, he's not aware of it.

The show will run for 40 minutes, Koppel said - longer than the usual 30 minutes. Koppel added that he'll be interested to hear reaction to the program after it airs.
CNS

Thursday April 29 2004
by Bev Harris

And by the way, they read every word. Hi, agent Mike. This "investigation" no longer passes the stink test.

He says not to tell folks about the "investigating" they are doing.

I have cooperated ad nauseum to this absurd investigation of the "VoteHere hack" which looks to me like it is something entirely different. I'll tell you what it looks like to me:

A fishing expedition.

It appears that they may be using the Patriot Act to circumvent some of the civil rights protections laid down in the 60s. You see, it is illegal for a government agency to go in and demand the list of all the members of a group. And you can't investigate leaks to journalists by going in and grabbing the reporter's computer.

After the Diebold memos were leaked, and my web site was shut down, around the time of the California recall election, I started getting solicited to accept VoteHere software. I didn't bite, because it was obvious that this was an entrapment attempt.

Okay, a word about VoteHere: This is the company that has no visible means of support. It doesn't seem to sell anything. Its board is heavily infested with defense industry types -- a former CIA director (Robert Gates, now heads George Bush School of Government); it had Admiral Bill Owens, also Vice-Chairman of SAIC and a member of the Defense Policy Board with Perle and Wolfowitz, a very close friend of Cheney; currently headed by former Washington Secretary of State Ralph Munro.

VoteHere announced that it would be releasing its software for review, back in July 2003. It was planning to release it in September, and was supposed to do so to Dr. David Dill's web site. It never released the code, just a bunch of literature about its product. (It did release some, but not all, of its code this month, making a big splash about it). About a week into October, I got solicited with an email "click this link" for VoteHere software.

Now who would fall for that? Why would anyone in their right mind grab the stuff in some clandestine manner when it was being released into the open momentarily? And this is a company that never sells anything. Who gives a shit anyway, what its software does? It now is trying to peddle yet another alternative to a voter verified paper ballot, an idiotic solution where we turn over auditing of the vote to a handful of cryptographers who work for a private company with defense industry ties. No one I know thinks that is even a viable concept, so why would we care to examine the software these cryptographers make up?

I was in the ending stages of writing my book, putting new chapters online every few days, at that time. Like I'm going to hack into VoteHere (those who know me realize that I couldn't hack my way out of a paper bag) -- this was just dumb.

I turned down the software. In early January this year, VoteHere does a press release that it was "hacked" in October and tries to blame it on the activism community. I published an article expressing doubt that we'd gotten the whole story.

Now, I have been interviewed by the Secret Service on this VoteHere "hack" story about five times. They never spend much time on the hack. Most of the time is spent on the Diebold memos, which they claim they are not investigating.

Here's the deal: The leaking of memos to journalists is not something the government can come in and demand to investigate very easily.

Under the Patriot Act, "hacking" crimes were turned over to a new division, called the CyberCrimes division, and placed under the auspices of the Secret Service. And let me tell you what they want from me now: They want the logs of my web site with all the forum messages, and the IP addresses. That's right. All of them. A giant fishing expedition for every communication of everyone interested in the voting issue. This has nothing to do with a VoteHere "hack" investigation, and I have refused to turn it over.

So, yesterday, they call me up and tell me they are going to subpeona me and put me in front of a grand jury. Well, let 'em. They still aren't getting the list of members of BlackBoxVoting.org unless they seize my computer -- which my attorney tells me might be what they have in mind.

Also, Agent Mike told me he just "happened" to be on the plane with me a couple weeks ago. What's that supposed to do? Scare me? "You were going to Oakland," he said. Yeah, and Diebold lawyer's memos appeared in the Oakland Tribune, but guess what, Mike: That was the first hop of three on my way to Dallas. I left that morning for a speech at the Dallas Democratic Forum that evening. Never even got off the plane. Better luck next time.

And if they were really investigating what they said -- a VoteHere "hack" can someone explain why they want the logs from the web site BlackBoxVoting.org -- it was SHUT DOWN due to Diebold cease & desists during the period of the supposed "hack."

And (you know who you are) -- consider this a heads up: If you start bumbling around in my house with U.S. marshalls, the very first thing that will happen is mainstream news coverage that you are misusing the Patriot Act to get at membership lists and private correspondence for a fishing expedition on stuff that isn't even the subject of a legitimate investigation.

Yeah, I'm not a happy camper. Taking the pulse of our democracy nowadays, it doesn't feel very healthy, does it?

Bev Harris

P.S. Everyone say hi to Mike.

Please pass this along, and/or get your group involved:

We need exactly 2,004 Clean-Up Crew members to volunteer as poll workers, election judges, and poll watchers, with a checklist of problems to hunt for and a hotline to litigators and the media. E-mail with "Volunteering!" in the subject line to join the Clean-Up Crew. BlackBoxVoting

I'm pretty good at smelling the smoke before the fire and this draft issue is beginning to smoke. I have been seeing at least one article a day on the subject.
Please read Ed Garvey: Only way to peace: Bring back the draft.
I'm interested in thoughts on his conclusion. He certainly ask the right questions.

I return to those from Falluja, and their stories that I heard from them. What will change if you listen or not? I don’t know. But if only for the trust invested in me, I will relate to you the picture. Perhaps it will provide you with some useful information, for those who haven’t heard

There were many families in that house, and all of them related – cousins, and their children. Two of them left their husbands there, because they heard that men were not allowed to leave.

So they left with their children, walking from nine 9 in the morning, and reached their relatives house at three in the afternoon, in Baghdad. The dust covered their children while they cried and screamed. The women’s eyes were wide open from shock, and often the words wouldn’t leave their throats. A Family in Baghdad

If you are interested in others blogging from Iraq visit Iraq Blog Count.

Thanks to Mohsan for pointing me to this.

Dad ... what's a terrorist?
By David Campbell

Surely even a child can understand the difference between good and evil.

Dad ... what's a terrorist?

Well, according to the Oxford dictionary a terrorist is "a person who uses violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims". Which means that terrorists are very bad men and women who frighten ordinary people like us, and sometimes even kill them.

Why do they kill them?

Because they hate them or their country. It's hard to explain ... it's just the way things are. For many different reasons a lot of people in our world are full of hate.

Like the ones in Iraq who are capturing people and saying that they'll kill them if all the soldiers don't leave?

Exactly! That's an evil thing called "blackmail". Those innocent people are hostages, and the terrorists are saying that if governments don't do what they want the hostages will be killed.

So was it blackmail when we said we'd attack Iraq and kill innocent people unless they told us where all their weapons were?

No! Well ... yes, I suppose. In a way. But that was an "ultimatum" ... call it "good blackmail.

Good blackmail? What's that?

That's when it's done for good reasons. Those weapons were very dangerous and could have hurt a lot of people all over the world. It was very important to find them and destroy them.

But Dad ... there weren't any weapons.

True. We know that now. But we didn't at the time. We thought there were.

So was killing all those innocent people in Iraq a mistake?

No. It was a tragedy, but we also saved a lot of lives. You see, we had to stop a very cruel man called Saddam Hussein from killing a great many ordinary Iraqi people. Saddam Hussein stayed in power by giving orders that meant thousands of people died or were horribly injured. Mothers and fathers. Even children.

Like that boy I saw on TV? The one who had his arms blown off by a bomb?

Yes ... just like him.

But we did that. Does that mean our leaders are terrorists?

Good heavens, no! Whatever gave you that idea? That was just an accident. Unfortunately, innocent people get hurt in a war. You can't expect anything else when you drop bombs on cities. Nobody wants it to happen ... it's just the way things are.

So in a war only soldiers are supposed to get killed?

Well, soldiers are trained to fight for their country. It's their job, and they're very brave. They know that war is dangerous and that they might be killed. As soon as they put on a uniform they become a target.

What uniforms do terrorists wear?

That's just the problem ... they don't! We can't tell them apart from the civilians. We don't know who we're fighting. And that's why so many innocent people are getting killed ... the terrorists don't follow the rules of war.

War has rules?

Oh, yes. Soldiers must wear uniforms. And you can't just suddenly attack someone unless they do something to you first. Then you can defend yourself.

So that's why we attacked Iraq? Because Iraq attacked us first and we were just defending ourselves?

Not exactly. Iraq didn't attack us ... but it might have. We decided to get in first. Just in case Iraq used those weapons we were talking about.

The ones they didn't have? So we broke the rules of war?

Technically speaking, yes. But ...

So if we broke the rules first, why isn't it OK for those people in Iraq who aren't wearing uniforms to break the rules?

Well, that's different. We were doing the right thing when we broke the rules.

But Dad ... how do we know we were doing the right thing?

Our leaders ... Bush and Blair and Howard ... they told us it was the right thing. And if they don't know, who does? They say that something had to be done to make Iraq a better place.

Is it a better place?

I suppose so, but I don't know for sure. Innocent people are still being killed and these kidnappings are terrible things. I feel very sorry for the families of those poor hostages, but we simply can't give in to terrorists. We must stand firm.

Would you say that if I was captured by terrorists?

Uh ... yes ... no ... I mean, it's very difficult ...

So you'd let me be killed? Don't you love me?

Of course! I love you very much. It's just that it's a very complicated issue and I don't know what I'd do ...

Well, if somebody attacked us and bombed our house and killed you and Mum and Jamie I know what I'd do.

What?

I'd find out who did it and kill them. Any way I could. I'd hate them for ever and ever. And then I'd get in a plane and bomb their cities.

But ... but ... you'd kill a lot of innocent people.

I know. But it's war, Dad. And that's just the way things are. Remember? The Age

I wonder if for one minute some people can step down from the soapbox and put themselves in this reality.





Photos found at: Al Jazeera

For the blind and ignorant what you see happening in Iraq today and will continue to happen, until the US crushes them with shock and awe, is resistance.
I'm past trying to understand how brave militants sitting in front of their pc's can continue to bravo the carnage happening in Iraq. George Bush is of course one of these although I doubt he actually uses a computer just as he doesn't bother to read.
Bush continues to utter such banality as 'Falluja is returning to normal' in spite of the news telling us the contrary. Those standing in defense of this man and his policies obviously don't read either. The racist underpinnings of this man and his followers is all too clear. Those that are massacred for daring to resist the occupation of their country have no value. Don't protest this fact! Ten, twenty, sixty, one hundred Iraqis die and outside of a few worthy news sites it's barely spoken of. One, two, four, six American soldiers die and it's the leading headline. It's easy to find stories of military men and the plight of their families. Try looking for personal stories on Iraqi families and the horrors they are experiencing. But, that might cause people to see this massacre in a different light so let's not go there. Actually I think it would make little difference. If people weren't horrifed enough with the photos taken during the initial invasion to protest they won't be moved by any they might see today.
Strange how easy it is for me to compare Bush and company to those said to 'hate our freedom.' Bush hates your freedom also. Of course, this depends on what freedoms you hold dear. If you no longer live as he once did, have seen the light you may have nothing to fear from his cherished Patriot Acts. But, I have a feeling one day in the future the blind mice will find themselves, friend or loved one facing the Ashcroft bullet. This is a thought that gives me pleasure. I believe in comeuppence, every dog has his day etc.
Bush and Osama would probably find they have much to agree on. Are you of the faith? You're either with us or against us! They would most certainly agree on women being covered. It's scandalous! Since Bush has given up that devilish alcohol they could probably reach a freedom loving agreement on this also. Fighting the infidels at all cost..they certainly agree on this.
If re-elected or maybe before he will reinstate the draft. Of course he will! His troops are stretched too thin. The resistance does manage to hit it's mark occasionally. If you won't volunteer for the massacre you will be enlisted.
Sadly because of American policy I could go to Iraq wanting to help the people and would probably be killed. Why? Because I'm American. The fault of this lies at the feet of George Bush and others I will save for another blog, and all those wonderful freedom lovers with bloody hands following him.

A Shiite cleric who fled Iraq for the U.S. returned, euphoric, after American troops invaded. Today, he just wants them gone.

By Teresa Watanabe, Times Staff Writer

Ayatollah Sayed Mortada Al-Qazwini should be one of America's best friends in Iraq.

A tall, turbaned man with a candid manner and commanding presence, Al-Qazwini was one of the first Shiite Muslim religious scholars to speak out against Saddam Hussein. He lost 15 relatives to Hussein's brutality, and in 1971 he fled Iraq to escape a death sentence.

He settled in Diamond Bar and built Shiite religious, cultural and educational centers in Pomona, Irvine, San Diego and Detroit over the next 18 years. All the while, he marveled at the freedom he enjoyed to practice the faith of his persecuted sect. After U.S. forces toppled Hussein a year ago, Al-Qazwini was ecstatic and went home to help.

"Ninety-nine percent of the people are so happy that Saddam has been put down. The coalition forces saved us," he said then.

Now, a year after his emotional homecoming, Al-Qazwini, 75, is deeply disillusioned. U.S. forces have worn out their welcome by failing to fulfill their promises for democracy, political empowerment and reconstruction, the ayatollah said. He wants them to leave Iraq as soon as possible.

Prices have soared, the streets are filled with trash, gasoline lines remain long and blackouts are still common, he said in a recent interview at his son's home in Rowland Heights.

"The coalition forces are not doing anything about it," he fumed. "With all their power and authority, they're staying silent.

"If the U.S. doesn't improve the situation soon, it's possible that powerful Shia scholars might tell people to resist," Al-Qazwini said. "Right now the Shias are choosing to cooperate, but patience has a limit."

Al-Qazwini represents a window into the heart of Iraqi aspirations — and mounting frustrations.

His disillusionment developed gradually. In an interview in September, after he had returned from an initial trip to Iraq, Al-Qazwini was still awed by the liberation of his homeland. He was tearful about the miracle that U.S. forces had delivered to him: a chance to set foot again on the sacred soil of Karbala, a southern Iraqi city of more than 1 million people that is home to the holy shrine of Imam Hussein.

For 300 years, his family members had preached and taught in Karbala. During the 20th century, they lived in a home next to the Imam Hussein shrine. During his exile, Al-Qazwini always carried a small cake of Karbala's holy soil in his pocket. It was a reminder of his heritage and the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, whom Shiites revere.

Karbala was more than a place; it was a spiritual touchstone where Al-Qazwini felt in direct commune with his beloved imam and where he claims to have received healing miracles. So it was no surprise that the moment Saddam Hussein's regime fell, Al-Qazwini insisted on returning, telling his wary sons that he would buy a rug and sleep in the shrine if need be.

"The first time I saw the dome of Imam Hussein's shrine, I could not control myself," he said, his voice cracking and eyes filling with tears. "I began to talk to him: 'Oh, Imam Hussein, I am your son. I have come from far away to guide my people and country. Please help me.' "

Word soon spread that the ayatollah had returned home. Crowds surrounded him, pulling at his clothes, kissing his forehead, demanding to know where he had been, pleading for speeches and sermons.

The people, he said, were hungry for spiritual teachings, which had been severely repressed under Hussein.

For the last year in Karbala, Al-Qazwini said, he has delivered his teachings twice daily — after noon and sunset prayers — at the shrine. He started classes on Islamic law and culture, revitalizing a private seminary that had lain dormant during the Hussein years.

According to Al-Qazwini's son, Moustafa, the family established an orphanage to serve 2,000 children. With friends, the Al-Qazwinis opened a university aimed at giving Shiites the higher education they had often been denied during Hussein's regime; already, 600 students have enrolled.

They dreamed of bigger ventures. The most urgent was a second hospital for the city. In September, the son said they had begun negotiating with potential donors in the Persian Gulf, grant makers in the U.S. government and Iraqi doctors.

"This is the least we can do to give back to Iraq," Moustafa said then. "Our horizons have been broadened in America, where we've seen so many charities and philanthropic institutions. We thought, why not bring them back to Iraq?"

His father added: "This is what brings people to religion — not just lectures and sermons and admonishing people to do right. It's when they see religion serving their basic needs that they become more compassionate in return."

Six months later, the ayatollah was back in Southern California for a family visit and was recovering from heart bypass surgery. But it was not his health that made him downcast.

His ebullience seemed gone as he plunged into the litany of grievances he had heard from his congregants in Karbala: escalating crime, massive unemployment, disrespectful treatment by U.S. forces.

Chaos has derailed the hospital plans, because security could not be guaranteed for potential donors and doctors. It has also discouraged many Iraqi Americans, an important source of money and expertise, from returning.

"Dreams have been shattered, unfortunately," said Moustafa, 42, who often acts as his father's spokesman. "Nothing has been improved. Nothing! Yet we hear of Halliburton receiving multimillion-dollar contracts and we wonder where the money is going. The mistrust of Iraqis toward Americans is evolving and increasing."

American promises of democracy also have fallen short, the ayatollah said. He said the U.S. position against an Iraqi constitution based on the Islamic law of Sharia "angered and insulted" many Iraqis.

The ayatollah supports a middle course between an Iranian-style theocracy and the U.S. model of separation of church and state. He believes that religious scholars should not hold office but should offer guidance to policymakers. He also believes that the nation's laws, if not based solely on Sharia, must not conflict with it.

"The majority of people want a government that conforms with Islam," Al-Qazwini said.

Provisions in the interim constitution that in effect would allow minority groups to veto laws favored by the Shiite majority would again deprive Shiites of their rightful leadership role, the Al-Qazwinis said. Iraqis must be allowed direct elections and the freedom to install the first Shiite government in the Arab world, despite the misgivings of neighboring Sunni Muslim countries, they said.

Some Iraqi Americans remain more positive about America's effect on their country. But asked whether the Iraqi people are happier today than before the war, the ayatollah replied, "No."

"The fear of religious persecution has been lifted," he said, "but people feel they are still unsafe and at any time their lives can be taken away.

"The U.S. needs to realize that they shouldn't take the Shiite majority for granted," he said. "It's within their power to put up resistance if they want."

Al-Qazwini speaks from family experience. His father participated in the 1920 revolt against the British occupation that was largely led by Shiites from Karbala and Najaf.

By the time he was 30, Sayed Mortada Al-Qazwini already was quarrelling with Iraq's secular leaders, opposing the communist alliances of Iraqi ruler Abdel Karim Qasim, an army officer who gained power in 1958.

In one exchange, Al-Qazwini said, he got into a heated argument with Qasim over a new law giving equal inheritance rights to women and men. The law violated Islamic tenets that give men twice as much, in keeping with their legal responsibility to provide for women, the ayatollah argued.

When Qasim tried to placate him with offers of financial support, Al-Qazwini said, he stormed out, headed to the mosque and told the crowd that the Iraqi ruler had just tried to bribe him. He was arrested a few days later.

It would be the first of several arrests. There would be two years of exile — in Zaho, a Kurdish region near the Turkish border, and Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's Sunni stronghold. Undaunted, Al-Qazwini directed his criticism at Hussein after the Baath Party took control in 1968 and continued to persecute Shiites.

By then, Al-Qazwini had become an ayatollah, Arabic for "sign of God," with authority to issue religious rulings, establish seminaries, teach and lecture.

The Shiite sect bestows the office on religious scholars who have taught — often for 15 to 20 years — and have been certified as competent by a grand ayatollah. Al-Qazwini is one of about 200 ayatollahs in the Shiite Muslim world today. His followers are mainly in Karbala, the Persian Gulf states and the United States.

In 1971, Al-Qazwini said, he was tipped off by the governor of Karbala that Hussein's forces planned to arrest and execute him. That night, the ayatollah told his family that they were going on a vacation. Only after leaving the country did he explain the real reason for the flight.

He continued to rail against Hussein. In 1980, when the family was living in Kuwait, the Iraqi dictator arrested Al-Qazwini's father in Karbala. Al-Qazwini says Hussein also sent assassins after him; they shot and missed. The next day, Al-Qazwini fled to Iran. Later he moved to London and in 1986 decided to make the United States his home.

It was here that Al-Qazwini found the freedom he had long dreamed of. At his urging, four of his nine children have followed his lead and started Shiite mosques.

Ali directs the Assidiq Foundation in Pomona, Moustafa heads the Irvine-based Islamic Educational Center of Orange County, Muhammad runs a mosque in San Diego and Hassan directs a center in Detroit. The sons are also active in American Muslim affairs, a new Shiite national organization and numerous interfaith groups.

"My father would often say, 'In this country, we were able to establish schools and convey the message of Islam and Shiism, even to non-Muslims, whereas in Muslim countries we were not able to do that,' " Ali said. "He was so happy."

Another son, Jafar, said a 1991 incident deepened his father's emotional connection to America. He arrived at Los Angeles International Airport from a visit to the Mideast, and an immigration officer asked where he had been.

The ayatollah said, "I was home."

"This is your home," the officer replied.

"Excuse me?" the ayatollah said.

"This is your home," the officer repeated.

When he picked up his father at the airport, Jafar said, the ayatollah was in tears.

"After living in exile, moving from one country to another for fear of assassination, to hear someone in America tell him that this was his home deeply touched him," Jafar said.

It pains the ayatollah now to see such hostility toward the U.S. forces that once symbolized freedom.

"In those first days, everyone was overwhelmed with celebration and joy," Al-Qazwini said. "But one incident after another took the hope away."

LA Times

Gaddafi talks of olive branches and business deals but the old threat of violence still remains
By Tim King in Brussels
28 April 2004

Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader who was once considered one of the world's most dangerous men, came to Europe for the first time in 15 years yesterday offering an olive branch and business deals, along with a veiled threat of a return to violence if provoked by "evil" from the West.

The pariah turned peace advocate swept through the normally staid headquarters of the European Union like a movie star in brown Bedouin robes, flanked by his trademark female bodyguards in blue camouflage. He gave a clenched fist salute to about 200 supporters outside the building while a smattering of protesters barricaded across the street shouted "Gaddafi, murderer!"

Inside, as Colonel Gaddafi and his host, the European Commission president, Romano Prodi, posed for photographers, a man pretending to be a security guard slipped forward and tried to hand Colonel Gaddafi a letter before being hustled away, shouting as the paper went flying overhead.

Col Gaddafi, stone-faced, ignored the bedlam and continued shaking hands with a grinning Mr Prodi. After three hours of talks Mr Prodi declared himself "very happy" about the historic visit, which he said he had worked for five years to arrange.

When Col Gaddafi spoke, he spoke as the new man, the self-styled man of peace. He acknowledged that Libya had trained fighters who had gone out "all over the world" and had unjustly been accused of "some kind of terrorism".

By this analogy, Nelson Mandela would be a terrorist, Col Gaddafi said. "We did our historical duty when duty had to be done by arms," he said. "Libya fought America and shot down its pilots and its aircraft. But now the time has come to reap the fruits of this armed struggle, namely peace, stability, development. Now we are facing new challenges, which are common enemies to all of us." Once, Libya had led a liberation movement in the Third World and Africa, he said. "Now Libya has decided to lead the peace movement all over the world."

Whereas Tony Blair seemed inhibited when he visited the once-shunned Libyan leader a month ago, Mr Prodi was enthusiastic in his welcome. "I am very happy about the visit of Colonel Gaddafi to the commission. This is the result of five years of personal contacts and discussions between the two of us," he said.

Once, Mr Prodi was reprimanded by EU governments for floating the idea of a visit to Brussels by the Libyan leader. Yesterday he was relishing the changed diplomatic climate. "Today is a great day for which I want to thank warmly Colonel Gaddafi and all his collaborators," he said.

Even the Commission president fidgeted uncomfortably, however, as Col Gaddafi rambled on for half an hour to hundreds of journalists gathered for their only scheduled chance to hear him speak during the two-day visit. Proclaiming Libya as a bridge between Europe and Africa, Col Gaddafi called on the EU to set up projects to stop the flow of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa through Libya to Europe. "We cannot be the guards of southern Europe." But he went on: "Britain and America who fought us one day now are looking for investments, trade, friendship, commerce. We need European and American companies to update and modernise the wells of oil and gas."

The prospect of Libyan oil was accompanied by a subdued threat. He concluded by saying that an upsurge in violence across the Middle East could undo Libya's conversion, apparently referring to the US-led occupation of Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "I hope we shall not be prompted or obliged by any evil to go back or look backward," he said.

There are still a few obstacles on Libya's path back to respectability. Germany is still negotiating with Libya over the 1986 bombing of a Berlin nightclub, La Belle, by Libyan agents, and is seeking acknowledgment and reparations. And when children in a Libyan hospital became infected with HIV, Bulgarian doctors and nurses working there were blamed. The Bulgarians were imprisoned and put on trial. A verdict is still awaited.

Mr Prodi said: "I am studying a possible initiative of the Commission to help in a meaningful way in this respect." That could mean that the European Commission will end up giving some disguised form of compensation to Libya.

Mr Prodi said he was fully confident that satisfactory solutions would be found "in the next few weeks" to outstanding issues. If they are, then the Commission hopes that Libya will submit a letter of application to join the European Union's programme of co-operation with Mediterranean and north African states.

The EU leader hosted a lunch for Col Gaddafi, which was attended by a handful of European commissioners, including Chris Patten and Neil Kinnock. Col Gaddafi also met Javier Solana and had talks with the Belgian Prime Minister. The visit continues today with further meetings with the Belgian parliament. Independent

What has been learned from the war in Iraq? Those of us who said, "no war, war is failure, war is the last resort, let the inspections continue, this war is against international law, it's all about oil, were and are right.

Now we hear the administration laying the fault at the feet of Iraqis rather than admit they were wrong. This is not hard to understand. The intrigue used to push this war cannot be cast aside with a simple apology. It will demand punishment for crime not only in the US but before an international tribunal if only by proxy.

Not only is the current administration in denial but many US citizens refuse to admit our leaderships wrongdoings even in the face of overwhelming evidence. This no doubt proves Americans are just as easily swayed by propaganda as anyone else. They continue to believe America knows best even in a country where they haven't a clue.

Perhaps Americans aren't seeing the footage we see here in Europe. There are no good reports coming out of Iraq. It's not improving. It's all bad. Deaths are now daily with the citizens paying a higher cost than the military.

Billions paid out for the war machine but essentials such as water, electricity and rebuilding the infastructure are not priority. "Let them eat cake!"

The Iraq people had no reason to trust American intervention in the first place. US dealings with their country has hardly been one of concern for the people. It has always been about American interest as it continues to be.

Bremer speaks of insurgents and former regime members. No doubt they are a problem. But, Iraqi citizens that now shout with joy at any victory against the coalition are not the problem. They are voicing opinion against an occupier they want to exit their country.
Their need for a strong voice has now caused many to get behind a leader who had little following and is seen by many to be little more than a thug.
But, with a governing council put in place by the US government whose interest are tied to said government the people are desperate for anyone who will unite and lead them in their battle for democracy over tyranny.

Yes, there is revolt going on today in Iraq but it is not made up of outsiders, taking advantage of the situation, alone. It is made up of everyday people like you and I who are living without the basic neccesities of life, who cannot speak their mind without taking the chance of being imprisoned or worse, whose free press has been taken from them, who have no voice in the leadership of their country, who have no voice in what companies are contracted to rebuild their country. Indeed, most Iraqis today cannot find work.
As I read today, the unemployment rate is above 50%.

It's no wonder they are in revolt. It's no wonder they are lining up behind an extremist who in earlier times they would have had little support for.

Iraqis have watched the US flip flop in their country for years. They know we supported Saddam and his terror for years. They lived under sanctions that brought misery and death for years. They now know, as we do, there are no weapon's of mass destruction. They know, as we do, they were invaded and are now living under occupation based on the desires of the US government. They see how little they are valued as a people. They live under the shame of being seen as a weak people whose leaders and military walked away when the bombardment came leaving them defenseless.

They clearly see America's priority is control of Iraq and all it's resources. We now see that the Iraq sovereignty of June 30 will be little more than a puppet authority whose strings will be pulled by the US administration. Iraq will be run under laws put in place during the US occupation. They will be unable to make new laws. This is called 'limited sovereignty.' Those that are unable to see with a clear eye what is happening in Iraq today are people with no vision.

By Dan Barry, Published: April 24, 2004

This is how Nicole Goodwin travels these days: with her 1-year-old daughter pressed to her chest in a Snugli, a heavy backpack strapped across her shoulders, and a baby stroller crammed with as many bags of clothes and diapers as it can hold. When you are a homeless young mother, these are the things you carry.

And tucked away somewhere are the documents attesting to Ms. Goodwin's recent honorable discharge from the United States Army, as well as Baghdad memories that are still fresh.

Two months ago, she returned to Bronx circumstances that were no less difficult than when she had left them three years earlier; no yellow ribbons greeted her. Now, every day, she soldiers on to find a residence where the rent is not covered by in-kind payments of late-night bus rides to shelters and early-morning rousting. All the while, she keeps in mind the acronym she learned in the Army: Leadership. L is for loyalty; D for duty; R for respect; S for selfless service; H for honor; P for personal courage. "And I is my favorite," she says. "It's integrity."

On Thursday morning, Ms. Goodwin wheeled her heavy-duty stroller into the Lower Manhattan office of the Coalition for the Homeless, a nonprofit organization that is trying to help her. For the last couple of nights it has put her and her nuzzling daughter, Shylah, up in a hotel.

"She needed a breather," said Mary Brosnahan Sullivan, its executive director.

Ms. Goodwin, 23, has perfect posture and a steady gaze. She graduated early from Morris High School in the Bronx, the alma mater of another soldier, Colin L. Powell ("They made sure we knew that," she says), then spent a couple of years attending college classes sporadically and quarreling with her mother.

One day in January 2001, she entered an Army recruiting station and signed up, giving little thought to the chance of war. "I needed to leave," she said. Life moved pretty quickly after that: basic training at Fort Jackson, S.C.; classes in supply support at Fort Lee, Va.; and then a flight to Germany, where she was attached to Company B of the 501st Forward Support Battalion at a post in Friedberg.

A relationship with another soldier ended after she became pregnant, and in early 2003 she flew to the California home of some friends from the military - the Bronx was not an option, she says - to give birth in March of that year. A few weeks later, she did the hardest thing she has ever had to do: she left Shylah with her California friends and returned to Germany to complete her service.

Four months after giving birth, Ms. Goodwin was sent to Iraq. She served food rations at Baghdad International Airport for several weeks, then spent a few more weeks at the sports arena known as the Olympic Stadium, helping to supply soldiers with things like toilet paper and small armaments.

These are among her memories: "the mortar rounds, the gunfights, the car bombings."

After nearly four months in Iraq, Ms. Goodwin returned to Germany to finish the tail end of her three-year hitch. "I wanted to get back to my daughter," she said, "but I didn't want to leave Iraq."

Her Army career now over, Ms. Goodwin returned to California to pick up Shylah, who looked "amazingly different," and headed to the Bronx, where her mother, two sisters and a 4-year-old nephew were now living in the two-bedroom apartment in the Patterson housing project. "We were good for a week," she said of her relationship with her mother. "But after that. . . ."

Ms. Goodwin and her daughter moved in with a good friend's mother, and she began planning her next step in life, one that would provide more than the $250 a week she was receiving in unemployment benefits. But a heated argument abruptly ended the living arrangement, and late on April 6 - a little more than two months after being honorably discharged as a private, second class - a war veteran and her small child hit the darkened streets.

She pushed her stroller a few blocks to the Emergency Assistance Unit, the city's flawed point of entry for homeless families. She explained her situation to a staff member who, she says, yelled at her for not having the proper paperwork handy. "I killed her with kindness," she said. "I've been yelled at before by the best."

"I got that attitude from Iraq," Ms. Goodwin added. "If this isn't life and death, it's not that serious."

She filled out an application for transitional housing, and after a while a bus arrived to take the Goodwins and other families to a one-night shelter on Powers Avenue. She thinks it was about 4 a.m.; she knows that Shylah's eyes were wide open.

For the next several days, the Goodwins rode the city bus of homelessness - two nights more at the Powers Avenue shelter, and then several nights at the Skyway Hotel in southeastern Queens - while the city determined whether she was eligible for housing. Her life became a blur of riding late-night buses, maneuvering the subway system, filling out forms and comforting Shylah.

On April 17, the Department of Homeless Services denied housing to the Iraqi war veteran on the grounds that she could live with her mother. Beyond the overcrowding that such a return would create (four women and two small children in a two-bedroom apartment), she says that the decision ignored the untenable situation between mother and daughter.

Moving back was not an option, she said. Not an option.

MS. GOODWIN immediately reapplied, thus entering a limbo world known as fast track, in which families who have already been denied housing return within 48 hours to the Emergency Assistance Unit to apply again, and to wait, again, for that late-night bus to somewhere.

City officials say that under the fast-track process, the applications of the recently rejected are expedited to see whether any new information might make them eligible. But according to Ms. Goodwin, fast track seems designed to generate so much frustration that the applicant gives up and goes away.

Two days into her fast-track odyssey, Ms. Goodwin got a four-hour pass from the Emergency Assistance Unit - keeping her application active - and made her way to the Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center. The Department of Veterans Affairs does not have housing for homeless veterans, but it does have a comprehensive plan for homelessness that includes assistance with employment and counseling.

Jim Connell, a spokesman for the Bronx center, said staff members tried to find housing for the Goodwins. "They started calling alternative shelters, but a lot of them don't take women," he said. "One was full, another wouldn't take a child." He added: "They were not particularly successful."

Before the staff at the medical center could help Ms. Goodwin further, Mr. Connell said, she had to leave "because her pass was running out." But someone in Veterans Affairs managed to call her cellphone and refer her to the Coalition for the Homeless for legal help.

By last evening, officials in Veterans Affairs were vowing to make sure that Nicole Goodwin receives the assistance she needs, and Jim Anderson, a spokesman for Homeless Services, was delivering the official city explanation.

"It is a disgrace that soldiers experience instability as they return home and, sadly, hundreds of homeless vets today call municipal shelters their home," Mr. Anderson said. "That having been said, the facts support that this particular family has an alternative to shelter."

A war veteran wearing a backpack, pushing a stroller and carrying a baby stayed in another strange hotel room last night, mostly because the city of her birth does not know what to do with her. Welcome home.
NY Times

John Lichfield in Paris
24 April 2004

The French coal miner, a powerful symbol of social revolt and industrial strength for more than a century, passed into extinction yesterday.

The last lump of coal was ceremonially carved last night from the La Houve mine near Creutzwald in Lorraine. An industry that produced 60 million tons of coal and employed 150,000 people as recently as 40 years ago has ceased to exist.

Although several smaller European countries have already stopped coal mining, France is the first of the world's large industrial powers to abandon production of what remains the world's second largest energy source.

Paris decided10 years ago to close its remaining mines, rather than compete with cheap, open-cast coal from other countries. The last shipments of French coal cost €130 (£86) a tonne to extract. Coal imported from Australia costs €40 (£26) a ton, including transport costs.

French coal miners, once numbering 300,000, built a fearsome reputation as the spearhead of social revolt and the champion of workers' rights - illustrated by Emile Zola's novel Germinal, based on the strikes in the northern coal fields in the 1880s. The last pit closed yesterday with nostalgic ceremonies but not a single protest.

By agreement with the unions, all redundant miners are paid 85 per cent of their salary until they are 45 and then 80 per cent until they reach normal retirement age. They keep their free homes and generous health and other social benefits.

Although the end of the industry has been a cause for mourning in the once great coalfield near the German border, there has been none of the social unrest about the sudden destruction of communities that accompanied the demise of Britain's coal industry. Britain still has 16 pits and 4,000 miners, compared with 170 pits and 180,000 miners at the time of the 1984-5 strike, according to the National Union of Mineworkers.

The subsidised inactivity of tens of thousands of men in France's former mining regions has brought other social problems, such as alcoholism, suicide and higher rates of divorce. In the north, where the last mines closed in 1990, and in central France and the Marseille area, which ceased mining last year, former pit workers have found it hard to live without the companionship and almost military discipline of the mines.

Under the 1994 redundancy agreement, men as young as 35 can draw almost full salaries for life, provided they do not take another job. Other work in the ex-mining areas remains hard to find. Some have taken up hobbies; others voluntary work, but many find themselves slumped in front of the television all day. Although the active coal miner has ceased to exist, there are more than 380,000 former coal miners or their widows who have rights to benefits up to 2050.

The last few coal miners, who ceased work yesterday, had mixed feelings. Bernard Starck, 50, said: "When you're down there, you're useless as an individual. You live for, and through, your work mates."

"The redundancy terms are fair but the past few months have been a time of great suffering. It was as if we were working for nothing." Independent

The strong influence of the Christian right on US policy will only increase if George Bush wins a second term, says Philip James

Evangelical lobbyists used to talk about access to previous Republican administrations. Today, they can say with confidence: "Who needs access when we are already on the inside?"
The influence of the Christian right on the Bush White House is self-evident. As well as George Bush, cabinet members Condoleezza Rice, John Ashcroft and Don Evans all consider themselves to be born again.

This administration has embarked on a bold agenda to roll back liberalism in the US, and won't let up if it gets a second term.

The September 11 attacks, Afghanistan and Iraq have overshadowed Bush's conservative domestic agenda, but it should not go overlooked by voters as we approach the November elections.

Bush's self-description as a compassionate conservative belies a much harsher reality. And as America's attention has been focused on historic events overseas, the ground at home has shifted just as dramatically.

The administration is acutely aware of the power of the Christian voting block in the US. Gallup surveys consistently count 46% of the population as being self-described born again Christians, the bulk of whom live in middle America.

It is a stunning statistic, and one that escapes the attention of the chattering classes who populate the much less devout coastal strips.

Many of these churchgoers voted for Bush in 2000, and Carl Rove is determined that all of them should do the same this year. The latest data should put a spring in his step - Bush's job approval among grassroots Christian social conservatives hovers between 92% and 96%.

If Bush wins the election, it will mean that, after 30 years as the law of the land, a woman's right to choose to have an abortion will be under serious threat. The ultimate goal of the Christian right is to overturn Roe versus Wade, the landmark 1973 decision enshrining a woman's right to choose.

In the likely event of one of the ageing supremes stepping down in the next few years, the balance of power in the US supreme court will be up for grabs, and Bush will not hesitate to nominate a pro-life candidate. Having already signed a ban on late term abortions, he believes he has the momentum on this issue.

If he wins, he has four more years in which to push a constitutional amendment to "protect" marriage from same-sex unions. He will not have to weigh pre-election expediency against his belief that it is the right thing to do.

If Bush wins, it will mean four more years of Middle East policy influenced by the evangelical belief that the Messiah will not return until Israel rebuilds a temple on the site of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

It should come as no surprise that there is not much daylight between the beliefs of hardcore evangelicals and the Bush White House.

When asked, during the 1999 Iowa caucus debate, who his favourite philosopher was, Bush replied: "Jesus." At the time, pundits thought this was a canny signal to grassroots religious voters from a sophisticated campaigner. It was - but what people didn't realise at the time is that Bush actually believes it as well.

The story of how he found faith at the bottom of a whisky glass was thought to be a rote rallying yarn intended strictly for the Republican faithful during the campaign. However, Bush has passionately and consistently repeated the story at after-dinner speeches throughout his time in office.

He dispelled any doubts about the strength of his Christian faith during his last press conference on Iraq, when he made it clear that God was personally directing him to fundamentally reshape the Arab world.

As surely as fundamentalism has kept much of the Islamic world in a state of cultural regression, so the fundamentalists of the US threaten to do the same thing in the States.

John Kerry should steal a powerful line from Bush's speech on Iraq and rephrase it thus: "Now is the time, and America is the place, where the forces of fundamentalism are arraigned against the forces of enlightenment."

He should make this election about a choice between two visions: one that wants to take the country to a dark, puritanical tyranny, as opposed to one that wants to restore the US as a light unto nations, a place of freedom, diversity and opportunity.

And he should fire up women voters, the one voting block that rivals the size of the born-agains and tell them: "If you want to protect your right to choose, make sure you choose correctly in November." Guardian

Guy Dinmore, April 23 2004

Two images of American troops returning home from Iraq dominated US media this week: carnival celebrations at Fort Hood, Texas, for the 4th Infantry Division, which nabbed Saddam Hussein; and the first pictures provided by the Pentagon since the war began of flag-draped coffins.

Those pictures, from Dover air force base, Delaware, where the caskets arrive, were obtained by a First Amendment activist through a freedom of information act request, and posted on the internet at www.thememoryhole.org.

Since 1991, the Pentagon has prohibited news media from covering the arrival of war dead, saying it wants to protect their dignity and the privacy of grieving families.

Even so, spiralling violence and the Pentagon's U-turn over troop numbers are fuelling questions over how long American soldiers will have to stay.

Nancy Lessin, one soldier's mother, co-founded Military Families Speak Out with her husband in November 2002 to stop the looming war. Since then 1,500 other military families have joined their Bring Them Home Now campaign.

"We are flooded with e-mails from military families," she told the FT. "We certainly think there's a growing segment of the American population that sees this situation going downhill as long as there is a military occupation."

President George W. Bush may dismiss the Vietnam quagmire analogy, but ordinary Americans do not, Mrs Lessin insists. "Bush's statement that no one is dying in vain in Iraq is exactly what we said in Vietnam."

Opinion polls reflect complicated sentiments. A survey this month by the Pew Research Center showed 57 per cent of Americans believed the decision to invade Iraq was correct.

But the numbers calling for an immediate return of troops had risen to 44 per cent, from 32 per cent six months earlier. Half said troops should stay until a stable government was established.

The University of Pennsylvania found this month that a slim majority - 51 per cent - believed it had not been worth going to war, while 43 per cent said it was.

That poll showed 36 per cent wanted the troops home as soon as possible; 57 per cent said that they should wait for a stable government.

Karlyn Bowman, polling expert at the American Enterprise Institute, concedes Americans are anxious, but she also notes that "an awful lot of people" want to send more troops. Historically, the immediate response of Americans to events such as the fierce battles in Falluja is "not to retreat but to get tough", she says.

A Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll in mid-April, after Falluja erupted, showed that 33 per cent of Americans wanted more troops in Iraq - a sharp increase from January's 11 per cent.

But those demanding immediate withdrawal of troops also jumped, to 21 from 16 per cent.

Interestingly, mounting unhappiness over Iraq could benefit Mr Bush in the November election. Some pundits suggest that antiwar voters might abandon Senator John Kerry, the Democratic challenger whose position on Iraq is fundamentally the same, and back Ralph Nader, the independent.

This week, Mr Nader said the US should hand over security to "neutral countries" under UN auspices and get out. Some retired military figures also suggest it is time to start thinking of getting out. "I'm not in that camp yet [of immediate withdrawal]," said retired Lt Gen William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency. "But I can see a fairly strong case growing for it."

Pollsters point out a need for perspective. Fifty-eight per cent of Pew's respondents said the price of petrol was the news item they followed most closely. FT

By Stephen Castle in Brussels
24 April 2004

Supermarkets are to get the go-ahead to stock genetically modified sweetcorn from the United States and Canada next week, ending Europe's five-year moratorium on new licences for GM food.

Britain is backing the move to bring in the new corn, but critics say that such a decision could open the floodgates with at least 30 more GM applications in the pipeline.

With European Union ministers deadlocked over the application, a meeting on Monday in Luxembourg is almost certain to hand the decision back to the European Commission, which is committed to approving it. That means that shops in Europe will be able to stock the imported sweet corn - codenamed Bt-11 - providing it is labelled as GM produce.

Environmental groups yesterday appealed for the decision to be blocked on health and safety grounds.

Greenpeace said that Bt-11 maize has been genetically modified to produce a toxin that is naturally found only in bacteria and that the scientific assessment was undertaken according to outdated rules. The French Food Safety Authority, the Belgian Bio-safety Council and the Austrian Federal Environment Agency have all raised concerns about its assessment, it said.

Eric Gall of Greenpeace European Unit said: "To lift the moratorium now by authorising a highly controversial GMO with a flawed risk assessment is no way to win the trust of a public massively opposed to the use of GMOs in food and agriculture." He added: "Ministers should reject Bt-11 and instead take action to tighten up evaluation procedures which are opaque and inadequate. Consumers and the environment deserve better."

A rejection by ministers remains unlikely because the EU nations are split between those highly nervous about the import of GM goods, and those worried that continued opposition to the American produce will stoke a transatlantic trade war. The import of goods for consumption is not as controversial as the granting of licences for the cultivation of crops.

Nevertheless, the looming approval marks a symbolic step, bringing to an end a long, de facto moratorium.

The application procedure for Bt-11 has been tortuous and some EU countries have been hiding behind complex rules that mean the go-ahead can be given without them having to back it formally. Six countries, including the UK, back the licence, six oppose it and three plan to abstain.

Beate Gminder, the spokeswoman for David Byrne, the European Commissioner for health and consumer protection, said: "If the council does not have a majority for or against it comes back to the Commission for adoption." One diplomat said: "It will not happen and the moratorium will be broken."

No new GM licences have been granted since 1998, when a group of EU member states made it clear that they would block any new approvals.

In the meantime the European Commission has pushed through new laws on traceability and labelling of GM products. Independent

Only one vote counts and you must be in a country other than the U.S.A.

We'd love you to vote in the U.S. Election for the Rest of the World. We think it's pretty obvious to everyone but perhaps those inside America what the rest of the world thinks in the forthcoming U.S. Election.

Please spend 1 or 2 seconds voting at
World Peace Society and maybe another minute telling as many people as you can about it.

We need thousands of votes to make it meaningful, so we desperately need your help. Imagine how cool it would be to help the U.S. with their presidential selection, Lord knows, they 'help' every other country with theirs!

in peace,

Mideast Headlines

Palestinian children die in Israeli raid
Friday 23 April 2004

The Israeli attacks have left a trail of destruction

Five Palestinians including two young girls have been killed by Israeli occupation soldiers in the occupied Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Aljazeera

Bloody day in Iraq; American army accuses Iraqi police of supporting resistance
4/23/2004

Commander of the first American armored contingent in Iraq. Gen. Martin Dimpsy accused groups in the Iraqi police of helping members of resistance and of working against the American occupation forces, admitting that operations of the American forces on the Iraqi territories reached a very critical point. ArabicNews

‘Israel’s nuclear ‘secrets’ threaten global security’

Damascus: The official Syrian press on Thursday warned that Israel’s policy of ambiguity on its nuclear programme “dangerously threatened” global security.

“The policy of ambiguity followed by Israel with the agreement of the American administration is no longer applicable today because it dangerously threatens global and regional security,” government daily Tishrin wrote. “The Israeli nuclear arsenal is extremely dangerous and this question must be internationalised.”
Daily Times

Islamic nations meet to rally opposition to US policies

The world's Islamic nations have begun an emergency meeting here to rally international opposition to United States policies on Israel and Iraq. Yahoo Singapore

War costs to Pentagon approach $5bn a month
Peter Spiegel, April 22 2004

Senior Pentagon officials on Wednesday said the war in Iraq was costing $4.7bn per month, a price tag they said could rise with US troop levels higher than planned and combat intensifying.

General Richard Myers, the US's top uniformed commander, told a congressional hearing the decision to keep an extra 20,000 soldiers in Iraq through the summer would probably cost an extra $700m over the next three months. Financial Times

al-Sadr Threatens Suicide Bombings if Coaliltion Attacks Iraqi Holy Cities

23 Apr 2004

A radical Shi'ite cleric has threatened to unleash suicide bombers against coalition forces if they conduct military offensives in Iraqi cities holy to Shi'ite Muslims.
Moqtada al-Sadr issued the warning at Friday prayers in Kufa, just outside the holy city of Najaf. VOA

UN envoy condemns Israeli policy

The United Nations envoy to Iraq has sparked a row after describing Israeli policy towards the Palestinians as "the big poison in the region". BBC

Bush backs policy restricting war dead images
Fri 23 April, 2004

NAPLES, Florida (Reuters) - President George W. Bush has stood by an order that no more photographs be released of flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq, a restriction critics say is aimed at sanitising the war for the public. Reuters

Sharon issues another veiled threat against Arafat, as more Palestinians killed

JERUSALEM : Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon issued yet another veiled threat against Yasser Arafat, saying the Palestinian leader "no longer has immunity from attack" by the Jewish state.

His comments, in extracts from an interview on public television, came as four Palestinians were killed in botched arrests in the northern West Bank, while Israel wrapped up an operation in the Gaza Strip in which as many as 16 Palestinians died. ChannelNewsAsia

Bush recognized Mideast reality on Palestinian issue - Kerry

WASHINGTON, April 23
John Kerry, presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president in 2004, said on Friday he thought that what President George W. Bush said recently about parts of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute "recognized the reality" of what had been going on in negotiations for years. KUNA

Number of U.S. troops wounded in Iraq rises
By Robert Burns, April 23, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The number of American troops wounded in Iraq soared in the past two weeks as the insurgency flared in south-central Iraq and in the Sunni Triangle north and west of Baghdad.

The Pentagon announced Friday in its weekly casualty report that 3,864 troops have been wounded in action since the war began in March 2003, an increase of 595 from two weeks earlier. Boston.com

by Sarwar A. Kashmeri

“In Europe we approach the fight against terrorism with the penal code in one hand and general law and procedure in the other,” Ana de Palacio, Spain's outgoing foreign minister told me in a conversation earlier this year. The conversation was one of a series I have had with European and American leaders for a book on the future of the transatlantic alliance. Palacio felt that the detentions at Guantanamo Bay had been a major error on the part of the United States because America had disregarded laws and procedures in response to 9/11. Because it had declared itself at war, America had felt justified in imprisoning hundreds of people without charging them, giving them access to lawyers or accounting for them in a court of law. “You cannot simply disregard the penal code or laws and procedures,” she said, “the United States is based on the rule of law and is very respectful of human rights; you cannot use war as an excuse to suspend these principles.”

Tragically, the terrorism inflicted in Madrid on March 11, just a few weeks after I spoke to Palacio, provided an opportunity to test her claim that Europeans believed in fighting terrorism without sacrificing the precious individual rights of a democracy.

Spain's population is about one- fifth of America's. Without taking anything away from the horrific brutality of 9/11, the affect of seeing almost two hundred of their countrymen killed in Madrid must have been as terrible for Spain as the three thousand killed in New York was for the United States. Yet, the rule of law in Spain has not been suspended, there appears complete transparency in the arrests and detention of suspects, and no general “war” was declared or “Guantanamos” set up. Surely the Spaniards are as terrified as Americans were on that tragic day in September 2001 and their primal urge to retaliate is as strong. But in an exemplary demonstration of how democracies should operate in emergencies, Spaniards have conducted themselves—as Palacio had said they would—with the penal code in one hand and laws and procedures in the other.

The 25 countries of the European Union, meeting on March 21, 2004, barely two weeks after the terrorist attacks in Madrid, appointed a terrorism-czar to coordinate the European anti-terrorism efforts. But they made clear that Europe's heightened efforts to combat terrorism would not dilute their democratic institutions and free societies. "Europe is not at war," Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy czar told Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper. "We must oppose terrorism energetically, but we must not change our way of life. We are democrats who love freedom."

This fundamental difference in how each side views the nature of the fight against terrorism has serious implications for repairing the transatlantic rift. Unlike the widely supported containment strategy devised during the Cold War to stop the Soviet's Communist agenda, Europe and the United States are on different tracks when it comes to today's central geopolitical issue, the global fight against terrorism. Whereas the Soviet Union faced a united front of Europeans and Americans, unless the two can reconcile their differences on how to fight terrorism, they will not be able to make common cause against this threat. As Iraq clearly demonstrates, without a common transatlantic front, success in the fight against terrorism will be difficult and costly to achieve.

This disconnect over the conduct of the war on terrorism is but one symptom of the need for a European-American dialogue to renegotiate the building blocks of the transatlantic alliance. Conventional wisdom says the alliance will come roaring back when America becomes more multilateral again, and/or if there is a change in American leadership. This is too simplistic an analysis of today's serious rift between the allies. The fact is, the fifty- year- old alliance is still based on an obsolete compact between a war-ravaged Europe that was ready to accept the United States as leader of the free world to fight Communism. That is not the Europe of today.

The shattered nation-states of Europe are now members of the European Union—an increasingly powerful geopolitical entity. It has its own ideas about the future direction of the Western alliance, the nature and importance of the war on terrorism (even the word “war” is questioned by the Europeans) and the purpose and leadership of NATO, which is supposed to be the alliance's linchpin. In all of these issues European views are not synchronous with America's.

It is time to recognize this reality, renegotiate the rules of engagement between America and the European Union and reset the alliance for the 21st Century. As Secretary James A. Baker put it, “We have a big stake in maintaining the transatlantic alliance, it is still important to America and to Europe.” The United States took the initiative to create the alliance fifty years ago, and it should now assume the responsibility for rebuilding it. America, Europe and the world will be the better for it. FPA

by Raffi Khatchadourian

In the desert steppe of northwestern Uzbekistan, great dust storms lift toxic pesticides into the air, and a powdery, desiccated brine known as the "dry tears of the Aral Sea" contaminates the soil. Amid this bleak Central Asian landscape, one can find an instrument of terror that rivals any rebel attack in Uzbekistan's history: the Jaslyk detention complex, a vast vault of human misery that has earned its reputation as the country's worst political prison.

Anyone who wishes to understand better the spate of violence that recently tore through Uzbekistan--the suicide bomb blasts and gunfights that resulted in nearly fifty deaths--must consider the dark drama that regularly unfolds at Jaslyk, and institutions like it. These prisons form the backbone of President Islam Karimov's decade-long campaign to crush all forms of independent political and religious expression in Uzbekistan.

No roads lead to Jaslyk. But one can find a way into its horrific interiors by reading Human Rights Watch's latest report on Uzbekistan. It documents how inmates are housed sixteen to a room, and how they are often forced to spend their days crouching on their heels, with their hands held behind their heads. Prisoners must offer thanks to President Karimov with every request to stretch a muscle. Inmates are forbidden to speak to one another.

This setting is where the Uzbek government, a key US ally in Central Asia, tries to "break" its opponents. In the report, Jaslyk's director boasts that he coerced as many as 80 percent of his inmates to "write letters of repentance"--a statistic achieved by systematic torture. Sometimes the brutality extends beyond human endurance. Between 1998 and 2003, at least six inmates died from abuse; one was boiled to death.

Seven thousand political prisoners inhabit Uzbekistan's gulag. Karimov, who ran Uzbekistan when it was part of the Soviet Union--and who has continued to do so throughout its independence--is a firm believer in governing with an iron fist. "A leadership that abandons order and discipline can never return to power," he said in 1991, speaking out against Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to reform Communist rule.

Uzbekistan is a predominantly Muslim country, but the government is staunchly secular. Since Karimov's crackdown first began, in the early 1990s, it has targeted a network of militant Muslim insurgents, most notably the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan--a group of several hundred fighters who vowed to overthrow the government by force, and who have since joined with Al Qaeda forces.

But instead of concentrating just on the IMU, the Uzbek government has sought to root out all independent forms of piety. Uzbeks can go to prison for possessing unsanctioned Islamic literature, for praying at the wrong mosque or for praying at the right mosque but at the wrong time. They can go to prison for having a beard, or for being related to someone in prison because he had a beard. They can go to prison for no real reason at all.

This atmosphere of oppressiveness is compounded by Karimov's other policies. Freedom of association is curtailed (civic groups must be registered), the media are state-controlled (the 9/11 attacks were not broadcast until 9/12), electoral politics are a farce (in the last election, Karimov's sole opponent voted for Karimov), corruption is pervasive (bribes for college degrees can go as high as $10,000), unemployment is rampant.

It is no wonder that discontent in Uzbekistan is finding an outlet in the utopianism of Islamic extremists, and that some radical groups have turned to violence to achieve their aims. Last weekend, the Jihad Islamic Group--a new organization in Central Asia--stepped forward to claim responsibility for the attacks "These operations came as a response to the injustice and brutality practiced by the infidel leaders in this country," the group said in a statement, adding that Muslims in Uzbekistan are "tortured and imprisoned as a way to terrorize and degrade them."

At least, some of Karimov's advisers might have been able to predict this. An internal memo written by an Uzbek think tank linked to the government, and obtained by analysts at the International Crisis Group, noted: "Incompetent actions by the authorities turn legitimate use of law enforcement methods with regard to religious extremists into a struggle with Islam itself, which makes the ideology of Islamic extremism more attractive."

But instead of heeding these warnings, the Uzbek government has continued to do what it did in 1999, when Tashkent was shaken by spectacular bombings much like this month's: tighten the screws upon its beleaguered population. In 2001 I watched this system in motion when I visited a mass trial. After the verdicts, all guilty, visiting family members chanted Allah u-Akbar, or God is Great. Religion was their protest.

Over the past several years, experts say, this kind of defiance has been accompanied by an even more dangerous form of protest: suicide by self-immolation. "It doesn't take much to go from suicide by self-immolation to killing yourself--and others--with explosives," Fiona Hill, a Central Asia analyst at the Brookings Institution, told me. "It's a small step to take when the level of desperation is so severe."

The Uzbek government's reaction to the recent attacks is not promising. Foreign Affairs Minister Sodyk Safayev borrowed an expression from Vladimir Putin when he rushed to call the bombings "links in a single chain" of terrorist acts in Spain, Morocco, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and, of course, the United States. But the evidence so far suggests that the Uzbek bombings are notably dissimilar from these other acts of violence.

According to the investigation's preliminary analysis, a large majority of the deaths this month were either of police officers or of the attackers, who either accidentally detonated their explosives or were killed in gunfights with state security. Similarly, the 1999 attacks--six coordinated car bombs--targeted government buildings. Compare that with the recent bombings in Madrid, which were intended to maximize civilian casualties.



The recent bombings make it more difficult to make this argument. They demonstrate the inherent fragility of Uzbekistan's leadership, and point to the scope of future regional instability that could emerge if the domestic crisis Karimov is creating is ignored. To combat terrorism, it is not good enough to say, as Franklin Roosevelt once reputedly did of Nicaragua's dictator: "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch."

The United States should examine how it might better coordinate its Central Asia policy, so it is not at once criticizing the Uzbek regime for human rights abuses, while funneling it millions in aid. One year after American soldiers landed in Uzbekistan to set up a logistics, intelligence-gathering, and search-and-rescue base for Pentagon operations in Afghanistan, US assistance to Uzbekistan nearly quadrupled to $300 million.

That sends a loud message. Islamic radicals in Uzbekistan understood it and began printing leaflets that said the United States was the "brain center for Karimov." It did not help when Secretary of State Colin Powell said last week that, of all things, the United States would assist Karimov in his investigation into the attacks. Human rights groups are already calling Uzbekistan's investigation an unjust and largely indiscriminate dragnet.

Unquestionably, American policy-makers face a tough choice. Washington has so far tried to foster reform in Central Asia through numerous small-scale projects, and through back-channel dialogue with government officials. But in the coming weeks, it will have the opportunity to make a bold, and highly visible, gesture by holding back a significant portion of aid. It should do this, and it should make it clear why: The Uzbek government must take real--rather than cosmetic-- steps to dismantle the political tinderbox it has created before it can claim its share of American assistance.

Meanwhile, it is worth thinking about the man who was boiled to death at Jaslyk prison -- his name was Muzafar Avazov, and he also faced a difficult decision. His captors severely beat him in the head and neck, because he insisted that no amount of abuse could prevent him from praying as he wished. Avazov could have escaped torture, and ultimately his death, by capitulating. But for him, there was no compromise with tyranny. The Nation

UZBEKISTAN: Interview with Human Rights Watch representative

Botched 9/11 info, two botched wars, a gutted economy, global scorn. Why can't W be a man?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

There comes a time. There comes a time in every raw dumb imperfect beleaguered human's life when s/he has to face the music and pay the piper and fess up to his or her crimes and misdemeanors and blatant careening flubs and heartless gaffes and whoa where the hell was my brain that time sorry sorry sorry.

We all do it. We all smack our palms to our foreheads and trip on our own ideological shoelaces, and we are exasperating and thoughtlessly cruel without knowing it, running roughshod over our noble or ignoble intentions on a daily basis because, well, we are just wired this way. Just ask Mel "Spurtin' Blood" Gibson -- I mean, how much more wrong can you get?

But then comes the hard part: We apologize. Profusely and maybe even a bit meekly, we ask for forgiveness or at least offer an olive branch and recognize our shared messy humanness as the thing that differentiates us from the saccharine sexless drone people of the world -- like, you know, Laura Bush. Shudder.

But then there's Dubya. He is, apparently, immune. He is perfect and flawless and without the slightest taint of guilt or error, and, despite looking like a bowl of Jell-O salad in a universe of divine tiramisu, he is, apparently, an angel of purity and light. It's true.

For here is Dubya, mumbling his way through another shockingly insulting news conference just recently, screwing up both his face and his intelligence data (again) and still a-huntin' for nonexistent WMDs in Libyan turkey farms (?) as reporter after reporter asks him, point blank, why he won't simply come clean.

They ask him, repeatedly, why he cannot find a single mistake in any policy his slithery admin has unleashed upon the nation, much less confess to any rampant missteps and botched decisions and oily ulterior motives and blatant screw-ups regarding 9/11 and Saddam and WMDs and his fetish for warmongering and for rewriting intelligence data to suit his corporate needs, all while taking more vacations than any president in history.

His answer? Nope. Nossiree, no mistakes were made. In fact, we as a nation are more on track than ever and hey lookit my shiny new boots okey doke thanks fer comin' gotta run. Plants wilted, children cried, even semicomatose cats couldn't help but wince at Bush's weird deflections and alcoholism-grade denials. What a surreal and sad country we swim in.

Why won't Bush admit he got 9/11 at least partially wrong? Why won't he acknowledge, at the very least -- as even longtime egomaniacal terrorism wonk Richard Clarke had the calm cojones to do -- that the U.S. ain't perfect and the government could've done much (much, much) better and hey we're flawed and we're learning and sorry, everyone, for the bloodbath and the malevolence and the rampant ongoing death and the 100 dead U.S. soldiers in the past month alone?

It is not too much to ask. It is not wildly out of the question. Sure, everyone knows all politicians across the planet -- and U.S. Republican politicians in particular -- are genetically engineered to loathe truth, programmed from birth to shun responsibility and reject blame and screech at honest fact like Lynne Cheney denies her bodice-ripping lesbian fantasies.

But surely even politicians have limits. And surely one of his puppeteers must've told Dubya that, often, a politician's ratings actually rise when he admits to human error and faulty ideology. Richard Clarke's astounding contrition slapped the nation with the shocking proof that it can be done, gracefully and with potent honesty. Hell, even former FBI Director Louis Freeh admitted his bureau made mistakes and did the best it could, given the flawed info it had.

Maybe it's faux-macho Texas pride. Maybe it's dumb-guy humiliation, that feeling that if Bush admits to just one of his policy defects, it's a slippery slope toward admitting he hasn't had much of a clue as to what's going on in his administration since pronouncing our country's name as "'Murka" in his swearing-in ceremony.

Or maybe it's all about God. Maybe it's because Dubya still genuinely believes he's divinely inspired, that he's truly doing the Lord's work by sanctimoniously blowing the living crap out of ragtag nations and allowing American GIs to die for his administration's hollow and increasingly indefensible political stratagems, and to admit personal error is to admit error in his overall pseudo-religious worldview.

In other words: I am God's chosen one. I cannot possibly be wrong, because God cannot possibly be wrong. Dubya, have you met Mr. Gibson?

'Course, it doesn't stop with Bush. Who could help but recoil in savage colonic pain as a freeze-dried and well-crusted John Ashcroft plopped his pious, dance-free butt down at the 9/11 hearings and proceeded to spend three hours pointing his scraggy finger at the Clinton administration? Way to go, Johnny. Way to shoulder that intellectual acumen. Make this country proud, honey.

Who, furthermore, could not help but let out a groan of pathos as Condi Rice, friendless and alone and looking weirdly, increasingly mechanical and limp and completely drained of all feminine fire, dutifully lied her ass off and regurgitated policy and stood by her man?

Look. The ability to offer up honest apology is a gift. To apologize shows intelligence. It shows humanity. It is soft and honest and real, and to admit fallibility is entirely human and increasingly rare -- and, obviously, it is everything a hypocritical politician is not.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it is, after all, too much to ask. After all, we as a nation have become jaded beyond words and have come to expect this level of appalling denial from our leaders, come to understand this as the overriding maxim of our time: We can never admit our country might, just might, be wrong.

There is simply no room for apology in American politics. There is no room for showing strength of character by admitting that our shiny all-American armor is, in fact, full of cracks and rust holes and is actually made by exhausted 10-year-old girls in a Malaysian sweatshop.

This is the BushCo way: To apologize is to show weakness. To say you might've made some mistakes whilst tromping blindly down the warpath, well, that sort of humility doesn't sit well with the hawks and the corporate profiteers. There is only the push toward bigger, toward stronger, toward nastier and angrier and more troops and more weaponry and more draconian Patriot Acts and more enraged anti-U.S. fundamentalists and more dead soldiers in Iraq.

And there is, tragically, only more numb, shell-shocked citizens and weeping families of the dead, all begging for someone, somewhere, to offer up just a single note of apology, of contrition, of hope and common recognition of the sad tragicomic circus in which we all perform.

This is all anyone is really asking for from our leaders, finally. Just a glimmer of our shared messiness, a common understanding of our collective awe, a single hint of that most tragically rare of current commodities: humanity. SF Gate

Michael Kraig

Critics have panned the Bush administration’s decision to exclude key countries from Iraqi reconstruction projects as yet another example of Washington’s unilateral, hegemonic policies. Although critics focus on US policy in Iraq, this example is only a symptom of deeper contradictions underlying American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era. The US seeks to fashion a hegemony modelled on 19th century ‘realpolitik’ power, yet much of its influence is the result of a globalised world of growing interdependence. Simply put: there is a growing contradiction between what the US does in the security sphere and what it does in the economic sphere — between a mercantilist security strategy and a laissez-faire economic strategy.

During the glory days of ‘realpolitik’ in Europe (roughly the period 1648-1914), mercantilist political advisors believed that gold and arms went hand in hand. If another ruler or nation was your military enemy, they were also your economic enemy. The key was to amass superior power through alliances, colonies, and domestic production. Oftentimes even alliances were temporary and fleeting. The only constant was the will of every state to increase its power at the expense of others.

Today’s global trading and financial system has been built on ideas utterly antithetical to mercantilist strains of realpolitik. These new ideas were first given life by philosophers dating back to the 1700s, but they were not realised as policy until the US assumed global leadership after WW II. The basis of the current global economic system is ‘comparative advantage’: each nation produces what it can make most efficiently, and then it trades with others to secure goods it is less well-equipped to produce on it own. For instance, Japan might trade its superior electronics for Germany’s efficiently produced luxury sedans.

In a world based on economic integration and comparative advantage, each nation becomes utterly dependent on other nations for those things which are best produced elsewhere. Therefore, the welfare (and security) of any one state depends on the welfare of its largest financial and trading partners.

These two versions of global relations have been sparring for quite some time, and although the advocates of laissez-faire comparative advantage have made great gains, the contest is far from over. Differences in culture, nationalism, ethnicity, and ideology make it difficult to cement cooperative, win-win relationships between nations. These frictions are the reasons why mercantilist thinking and practice is still evident in security (and also economic) relations. China, for example, has expressed a willingness to launch a war and potentially destroy many of its valuable global economic ties in the event that Tawain unilaterally declares independence from the Mainland.

During the Cold War, both philosophies could sit easily side-by-side. Stalin’s decision to create an isolated system outside of traditional political economy meant that the United States and its allies could apply old mercantilist techniques against the Soviet bloc while still adhering to comparative advantage with all non-Soviet countries. US trade restrictions ensured that no advanced technologies flowed either way, except through spies. Little money, goods, or services exchanged hands. Economic power amassed by the US and its allies was completely distinct from and opposed to economic power amassed by the Soviet bloc. The same rule applied to military power, as each side competed to build up distinct defence capabilities. The economic and security strategies of US policy went hand in hand, as in centuries past. Meanwhile, the rest of the world moved forward on the laissez-faire agenda of free trade and economic (and hence political) interdependence.

But the Berlin Wall no longer stands. In its absence, the disparities between these contending policy practices have become magnified, with harmful effects to both global and US interests. During the Clinton Administration, many American experts and politicians painted China, Iran, and Cuba as enemies in a traditional mercantilist sense, even while all three countries were being integrated into a global laissez-faire economy, without respect for ideologies or nationality. The results of these arguments were failed policies such as the Helms-Burton Act, which attempted to penalise other nations for daring to treat US-defined ‘rogues’ as part of the integrated economic order.

Today, Bush is viscerally uncomfortable with the word ‘globalisation’, given the interdependence it implies. This discomfort can be seen in the contradictory policies pursued by his administration. China owns an increasing share of US debt in the form of treasury bonds and pure dollars in reserve, and yet the United States is building missile defence systems (and potentially even space weapons) to protect against China’s rising power. Europe owns an even larger share of US debt (and together with China and Japan holds up the value of the dollar artificially), and the EU is America’s largest trading partner. Yet in keeping with the old mercantilist strategy, the United States has attempted to cut Europe off from mutually-beneficial economic activity in Iraq.

The growing international opposition to the US should serve as a wakeup call that the country has a hard choice to make. It cannot expect the global free trade system to move forward and expand if it continues to follow a mercantilist political philosophy. While these two philosophies could comfortably co-exist during the Cold War, it is now impossible to pursue both strategies and still have a coherent US foreign and national security policy.

Powerful countries can no longer exploit colonies to expand their markets. And the values of national currencies — on which national power increasingly depends — are now decided by free trade in currencies and bonds by individuals as well as national governments. Thus US economic power depends very much on Japan, China, and Europe deciding that the American dollar is actually worth what the United States says it is. That means that US power is increased when other countries agree with America politically, and it will inevitably be decreased when US actions rub partners the wrong way. When this occurs, partner countries are likely to call in their economic chits as a way of voicing their political disagreement — just as the United States is now doing against them.

Michael Kraig is a program officer at the Stanley Foundation, based in Muscatine, Iowa. He is currently managing several Foundation initiatives dealing with Persian Gulf regional security problems, US-Iran relations, weapons of mass destruction proliferation, and US national security strategy. Daily Times

By Adam Entous and Tom Doggett

Saudi Arabia said on Monday it will not use oil prices to try to sway the United States presidential election, denying an allegation that the kingdom would cut petroleum prices before November to boost President George Bush's re-election bid.

Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said in a television interview on Sunday that Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, promised Bush the Saudis would cut oil prices before November.

Woodward, author of a new book on Bush's preparations for the Iraq war Plan of Attack, said Prince Bandar pledged the Saudis would try to fine-tune oil prices to prime the US economy for November's presidential election, a move they understood would favour Bush.

'Saudi Arabia also does not interfere in elections'
A Saudi official issued a statement saying the kingdom - the world's largest oil exporter - will not interfere with US elections and will remain a reliable supplier of oil.

"We do not use oil for political purposes; it is too important a commodity, and its impact on the global economy (of which we are a part) is tremendous," said Adel Al-Jubeir, foreign affairs adviser to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

"Saudi Arabia also does not interfere in elections," he said.

White House spokesperson Scott McClellan declined to comment directly on Woodward's remarks.

But McClellan said Bandar, in recent talks at the White House, "committed to making sure prices remained in a range of, I believe, $22 (about R143) to $28 per barrel of oil, and that they don't want to do anything that would harm our consumers or harm our economy."

OPEC has an official price target band of between $22 and $28 for its oil. It was last in that range on December 1, after having been above it repeatedly for weeks before that. On Monday, US crude oil futures rose above $38 a barrel to a four-week high.

"Prices should be determined by market forces, and we are always in close contact with producers around the world on these issues," McClellan told reporters.

Woodward's assertion, meanwhile, drew criticism from Democratic presidential challenger Senator John Kerry.

Kerry said on Monday it would be "outrageous and unacceptable" if the Bush administration and the Saudis reached a "secret" deal to tie the price of gasoline and fuel supplies to the presidential election.

Democrats have attacked Bush for failing to stem rising domestic gasoline prices, which on Monday hit a high of $1,81 a gallon, a new record for the fourth week in a row, according to the US Energy Department.

Kerry has criticised Bush for not taking a tougher stand against OPEC, and the Saudis in particular, after the cartel decided to cut its oil production quota earlier this month.

OPEC's actual output is much higher than its quota, since members sell more oil to take advantage of high prices.

High crude oil prices are expected to net Saudi Arabia a $5,3-billion budget surplus this year and boost economic growth by one percent, the SAMBA Financial Group said in a report on Monday.

Prince Bandar has been the Saudi envoy to the United States for 20 years and is part of the Saudi royal family, which has had a close relationship with the Bush family for years. On April 1, after Saudi Arabia led OPEC's push to cut daily output by 1 million barrels, Bandar told the White House the kingdom would not allow shortages to hurt world economic growth. IOL

The quality of life for Iraq's poor has deteriorated since the defeat of the Saddam regime, according to a new survey commissioned by Christian Aid.

The Baghdad Vulnerability Survey concludes:

'Poor Iraqis suffered enormously under Saddam Hussein's regime, yet the present stage of reconstruction is in some ways even more difficult. During the Saddam years, the war was at the front line; now it has moved into their own streets.'

Christian Aid partner, the Iraqi Kurdish NGO Network, interviewed around 1,000 families in eight of Baghdad's poorest, predominantly Shia neighbourhoods. It is one of the first ever large-scale surveys of the living conditions of poor Iraqis.

'Before the fall of Saddam Hussein, the whole of Iraqi society suffered years of war and sanctions, but its poorest people were hit particularly severely,' said Christian Aid Middle East expert, Sue Turrel.

'In Baghdad, the Shia south was systematically deprived of services and investment as a way of suppressing local resistance to Saddam Hussein's regime.'

The survey looks at all aspects of the lives of families who depend on outside help - such as food handouts or cash donations from friends or relatives. It particularly looks at the situation of women and children.

The results present a stark picture of miserable living conditions - now greatly exacerbated by insecurity, crime, economic uncertainty, unemployment, inadequate public services and poor housing.

Mass redundancy and rising living costs mean more than half the families surveyed need financial help to survive. Families prioritised clothing, transport, health and education needs as most urgent.

Children's education is being severely disrupted. Almost two-thirds of school-age children in the families surveyed were not attending school full time.

The reasons given included poor standards of education, dilapidated school buildings and children forced to work to boost family income.

Poor water supply affects most of the families interviewed, many of which now have no functioning sewerage system. Years of neglect left many water supplies contaminated with sewage.

Most families surveyed live in just one or two rooms and many homes lacked basic facilities such as water, sanitation and ventilation.

'This increasing deprivation is likely to feed discontent and insecurity and increase the appeal of radical ideologies', said Ms Turrel.

'Decent provision for Iraq's poor is crucial to the country's security and to reconstruction.' Christian Aid

AMR MOUSSA, the Arab League's secretary-general, famously gave warning that an American invasion of Iraq would “open the gates of hell”. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, predicted a quagmire. And on the streets of pre-war Baghdad, a Palestinian resident assured your correspondent that ordinary Iraqis would sit tight for the invasion, give the Americans six months' grace, and then start shooting them.

Understandably, therefore, the region is chorusing “we told you so”. But beyond the grim satisfaction of feeling themselves proved right, Iraq's neighbours differ greatly in appraising the mess, though they are all, by and large, worried. None likes such untidiness next door.

The tarnishing of American prestige reflects directly and badly on the governments of its allies: Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. What is worse, from their point of view, is that by recharging the symbolism of popular resistance to alien rule, Iraq's creeping intifada risks empowering the Islamist extremists who, to varying degrees, threaten them all.

Israel, which was alone in backing the war wholeheartedly, has other reasons to be anxious. An American failure in Iraq could create a vacuum that Israeli analysts assume would be filled by forces hostile to the Jewish state. Zeev Schiff, a seasoned Israeli military correspondent, gives warning of eventual Iranian intervention, and with it the unspoken spectre of possible nuclear weapons close to Israel's own.

What Israel might do in such circumstances becomes, in turn, a worry for Iran and Syria too, a worry to be added to the existing fear they share with Turkey that a collapse in Iraq could lead to the creation of a breakaway Kurdish state that would stir up their own Kurdish minorities. Yet there are some within the Syrian and Iranian establishments for whom the gain of hurting America outweighs other factors. The shaky Baathist regime in Damascus is wise enough to keep silent, but must surely feel that America's woes in Iraq are one reason why the Bush administration has refrained from slapping long-threatened sanctions on Syria.

In a sermon last week, Mr Rafsanjani, who remains powerful among Iran's conservatives, praised Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, saying that it was made up of “enthusiastic, heroic young people”. But this does not mean that there is co-operation, let alone trust, between the Iranians and Mr Sadr. Iran sees him as a probable loser, and would rather have Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on its side—though this could change if Mr Sadr were to spurt forward in popularity and power.

Iranians want influence in Iraq, whichever Shia leader succeeds, but are not thinking of installing a carbon copy of the Islamic Republic. The Iraqis are cautious too. Mr Sadr's father, the late Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq, admired Iran's theocracy. But Mr Sistani, while favouring a strong guiding role for the clergy, follows a quietist brand of Islam, shared by many liberal Iranian clerics, that counsels the separation of religion and politics.

On the Arab street, emotions have risen to a pitch not seen since the war itself. Media coverage of the siege of Fallujah includes newspaper photos of stray dogs chewing on unburied corpses, and dramatic televised appeals from inside the stricken city. For a time after the deflatingly swift capture of Baghdad, public opinion on Iraq had been confused. But the mass killings in Fallujah, plus the stoking of pan-sectarian anger, have once again produced a seemingly clear narrative.

Press commentary, from the Gulf to Morocco, has noted, with striking uniformity, the parallels between the Fallujah carnage and Israel's efforts to crush Palestinian resistance. Mosque preachers across Saudi Arabia, ignoring government instructions, add to each of the five daily prayers a special supplication for God's aid to fellow Muslims in defeating the enemy. And a group of 67 senior independent clerics from some 20 Muslim countries has asked the international community to halt the “brutal genocide” that shows America's “blind hatred for Muslims”. Economist

by Uri Avnery

"It is said that Bush is the most pro-Israeli American president there ever was. I think that the opposite is true. I believe that he is the most anti-Israeli American president there ever was, because the Sharon-Bush plan is blocking the way to Israeli-Palestinian peace, our only hope for a normal life."

Question: Is the "Unilateral Disengagement" plan, which was so dramatically endorsed this week by President Bush, a bluff?

Answer: Yes and No.

If Ariel Sharon can avoid implementing it, he certainly will. He will implement it only if he has no alternative. The written plan says that it will be implemented "by the end of 2005" - and by then the situation in this country and in the Middle East as a whole may be changed beyond recognition.

Anyhow, up to now no preparations have begun. There is no answer to the dozens of questions that must be addressed before a meaningful plan for implementation can even begin to be formulated. For example: Where will the settlers go? How much compensation will they get? Who will control the Gaza strip after the withdrawal? To whom will the houses and public buildings be turned over? How will the army execute the evacuation? Where will the evacuated army forces be relocated?

Question: If this is the case, why has Sharon put the plan on the agenda at this time?

Answer: There are several explanations, all of them valid.

After several years of being accused of "having no plan" and of being old and tired, Sharon has taken a bold initiative. The country and the whole world is talking about the "Sharon Plan". The Geneva initiative, by comparison, has been pushed firmly to one side.

Also, Sharon wants to use the time left, as long as George Bush is in the White House, in order to get an American endorsement for several of the ingredients of his real, long-term plan.

Of course, Sharon also wants to put pressure on the new Attorney General, so that he would not dare to indict him, since this would mean sabotaging a historic step which will benefit Israel.

As always, all of Sharon's declarations and deeds are designed to meet the requirements of the moment. That was true when he was a general, and it remains so now, when he is a politician. He is a "tactical", rather than a "strategic" leader.

Question: Has Sharon really undergone a profound change? Has the "Ethiopian changed his skin", to use the expression of Jeremiah (13, 23)? Has he now turned his back on his lifetime accomplishments?

Answer: The Ethiopian has not changed his skin. An analysis of the plan, as endorsed by Bush and shown at long last to the Israeli ministers, reveals that it conforms exactly to the plan that Sharon has been propounding for decades. He just cut out a piece of it and is presenting it as an up-to-date plan.

What is his overall plan?

The maximum plan is to turn all of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River into a Jewish State, with no non-Jewish population. Since such an ethnic cleansing is not feasible for the time being, he is implementing his minimum plan: to enlarge the borders of the Jewish State as much as possible, without incorporating a further large Arab population.

Therefore he wants to get rid of the Gaza Strip with its 1.2 million Palestinian inhabitants. He is prepared to evacuate the 7,000 Jewish settlers who are living there, in return for the consolidation of the West Bank settlements, where 250,000 Jewish settlers live.

Sharon wants to incorporate in Israel 55% of the West Bank - the area where most of the settlers are located and the Arab population is relatively sparse. The plan spells it out: "It is clear that in the Judea and Samaria region there will remain areas that will be part of the State of Israel, including civilian localities, security areas and other places where Israel has additional interests" (Article 1c)*. This definition could include practically anything.

*Since the plan has been leaked only in Hebrew, I have made the translation.

Almost all the Palestinian population in the West Bank, some 2.5 million people, will be crowded into the remaining 45% of the area, which, together with the Gaza Strip, will constitute about 10% of the country called Palestine under the British mandate, before 1948. This area will be a kind of archipelago in the big Israeli sea. Each "island" will be cut off from the others and surrounded by Israeli areas. The islands will be artificially connected by new roads, bridges and tunnels, so as to create the illusion of a "viable, contiguous state", as the Americans demand. According to the written plan: "Israel will improve the transportation infrastructure in the Judea and Samaria region, in order to make possible uninterrupted Palestinian transportation" (4). In practice, these connections can be cut off within minutes at any time. Pretexts can always be found easily.

Sharon does not mind if this collection of enclaves is called a "Palestinian state" according to Bush's "vision".

Question: What is the connection between this and the "Separation Fence"?

Answer: The path of the fence - both the part that has already been built and the parts that will be built in the future - reflects this map well. That is how it was planned from the beginning. "Israel will continue building the Security Fence, according to the relevant government decisions" (5c). In his letter to Sharon, Bush said: "a security rather than a political barrier...temporary rather than permanent." Meaning, temporary until Sharon or his successors decide otherwise. Meaning: forever.

Question: Why does the Israeli army support the plan?

Answer: The evacuation of the forces from the Gaza Strip and the relocation of those in the West Bank will enable the army to save many resources, manpower as well as money. At present, a whole army division is guarding the Gaza Strip, and many battalions are guarding the dozens of isolated settlements in the heart of the West Bank. The plan allows the army to deploy its forces rationally and to put an end to the present dispersion of forces that is contrary to all military logic.

Question: Why does Sharon agree to evacuate four settlements in the north of the West Bank?

Answer: The Americans demand a symbolic gesture, in order to show that the plan does not apply to the Gaza Strip alone.

Actually, the evacuation of the four small settlements has only symbolic value. This is a negligible area with a few small and unimportant settlements. Sharon's settlement and annexation map in any case provides for the evacuation of dozens of small settlements in the areas that will be left to the Palestinians.

Question: What will happen in the Gaza Strip if Sharon indeed evacuates it?

Answer: The disengagement will be deceptive. The direct occupation will be changed into an indirect one that will be much cheaper and more efficient.

According to the plan, the Gaza strip will become a giant prison camp, cut off on all sides. It will have no seaport or airport and be cut off from its only neighbor, Egypt. There will be no entering the Strip or leaving it except through Israel. Much as now, Israel will be able to cut off the supply of food, raw materials, water, fuel, gas and electricity, as well as the exit of workers and goods. Israel will also be able to invade the Strip at any time in order to "prevent terrorist actions".

The plan spells it out: "Israel reserves to itself the basic right of self-defense, including the taking of preventive steps" (3). Not only did the President agree to this, but in his letter he extended this to the West Bank, too: "...control of airspace, territorial waters, and land passages of the West Bank and Gaza will continue." Meaning that according to the "Bush vision", the Palestinian State in the West Bank also will be a prison camp, completely cut off from the world. A hopeful vision, indeed.

The written text of the plan also argues that in the new situation to be created, no one will be able to hold Israel responsible for the welfare of the population. After all, the occupation will be terminated. This means that Israel will be able to choke the Strip, but the responsibility will fall on others.

Question: If this is so "good for Israel", why does Sharon not implement the evacuation of the Gaza Strip at once?

Answer: No politician looks for trouble. The evacuation of the Strip will entail violent clashes with the settlers, not only with the local ones but also with the West Bank settlers. That's why Sharon prefers to talk about the withdrawal rather than implement it.

Question: If Sharon thinks that the settlements in the Gaza Strip are a burden and a stumbling block, why did he put them there in the first place? Why did he declare, not so long ago, that Netzarim, a completely isolated settlement in the heart of the Gaza Strip, is as important as Tel-Aviv?

Answer: That declaration, like all his utterances, served only to satisfy a momentary need.

The Gaza Strip settlements were put up without much thinking, as a result of the settlement inertia and a complete contempt for the Arabs.

The people responsible believed that the Strip would never be given back, and, if the worst comes to the worst, they could keep at least the settlements.

All in all, the establishment of the Gaza Strip settlements was a crime that has cost much blood and billions of dollars. The Labor Party is responsible for this crime as much as Likud. But Israelis are quick to forget, and nobody will blame Sharon and Peres for the death of the soldiers and settlers who were killed there - and who are still being killed - for nothing.

Question: If the Ethiopian has not changed his skin, has the leopard changed his spots? Has the American position indeed changed dramatically this week?

Answer: The change lies mainly in the blatant and unequivocal support of Bush for Sharon, giving up all pretense of being an honest broker and mediator. Like Sharon, Bush is now completely ignoring the Palestinian people and its leadership. This has evoked an outburst of rage among the Palestinians and all over the Arab world. But as far as real content is concerned, the change is minimal.

Question: Is the negation of the 'Right of Return" not a big change?

Answer: Not really. In his last speech in office, on January 8, 2001, President Bill Clinton declared: "A solution...for the Palestinian refugees (will allow) them to return to a Palestinian state...Others who want to find new homes, whether in their current locations or in third countries, should be able to do so, consistent with those countries' sovereign decisions. And that includes Israel." This means that only Israel alone will decide whether refugees will be allowed to enter its territory - and that is what Bush said, too. Contrary to the official translation of his letter into Hebrew, Bush said that the refugees must be settled in the Palestinian state "rather than in Israel" (the Hebrew translation said "and not in Israel". A subtle but not unimportant difference.)

On the eve of Sharon's departure for his meeting with Bush, the "Geneva Initiative" group published a letter to Sharon, demanding that the US "recognize that Israel is sovereign to decide on the entrance of Palestinian refugees into its territory." That, too, means the same.

Question: But has not Bush endorsed now for the first time the incorporation of the settlement blocks into Israel?

Answer: No. Clinton preceded him in this matter, too. In the same speech he endorsed the "incorporation into Israel of settlement blocks". Bush, on his part, wrote in his letter that "In the light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is not realistic to expect...a full and complete return" to the pre-1967 Green Line.

All American plans, going back to the Nixon years, spoke about "insubstantial changes" in the pre-1967 borders. The famous Security Council resolution 242 also did not demand that the former border be reconstituted without any change. Bush's formula continues this line. He did not spell out the extent of the border changes envisioned.

It is worthwhile remembering that the whole idea of "settlement blocks" was born years ago in the fertile brain of Yossi Beilin and was included in the "Beilin-Abu-Mazen" agreement. Beilin hoped that by this means he would disarm the opposition of the settlers, who would sacrifice the isolated settlements in order to save the major settlement blocks, where 80% of the settlers live. This hope was proven false, and Beilin's trick served only to legitimize the idea of the annexation of the blocks. The settlers did not buy the trick, because they are afraid of the precedent that would be created by removing even one settlement. They will try to prevent this by all the means available to them.

Incidentally, in the same statement published by the "Geneva Initiative" group before Sharon's departure, he was urged to demand from Bush "the annexation of central settlement blocks like Gush Etzion, Ma'aleh Adumim and Giv'at Ze'ev, into sovereign Israel."

There is, of course, a difference: Beilin and Clinton proposed "territorial swaps", either on a 1:1 or a less equal ratio. But it is clear that the Palestinians were asked to give up their most fertile lands in return for stretches of the Negev desert.

Question: If so, where is the "dramatic change"?

Answer: The drama is in the notes rather than in the melody. Clinton knew how to pour honey on his proposals, which were clearly pro-Israeli. Bush repeats these positions in a much more strident, rough and arrogant tone. He speaks about the Palestinians in the style of a military governor, just like Sharon.

Question: If so, what will be the outcome?

Answer: As far as the Americans are concerned, the Muslim-Arab rage against them will become even stronger, thereby increasing the motivation to hurt the Americans in Iraq and everywhere.

So why did he do it?

It will be remembered that Henry Kissinger said that Israel has no foreign, but only domestic policy. That is true for the United States, too. In this matter, Bush is acting solely for his re-election. He needs the votes of the Jews and the evangelical Christian, who support the Israeli right-wing. He also needs the Jewish donations.
It is said that Bush is the most pro-Israeli American president there ever was. I think that the opposite is true. I believe that he is the most anti-Israeli American president there ever was, because the Sharon-Bush plan is blocking the way to Israeli-Palestinian peace, our only hope for a normal life. Media Monitors

Their beliefs are bonkers, but they are at the heart of power

US Christian fundamentalists are driving Bush's Middle East policy

George Monbiot
Tuesday April 20, 2004

To understand what is happening in the Middle East, you must first understand what is happening in Texas. To understand what is happening there, you should read the resolutions passed at the state's Republican party conventions last month. Take a look, for example, at the decisions made in Harris County, which covers much of Houston.
The delegates began by nodding through a few uncontroversial matters: homosexuality is contrary to the truths ordained by God; "any mechanism to process, license, record, register or monitor the ownership of guns" should be repealed; income tax, inheritance tax, capital gains tax and corporation tax should be abolished; and immigrants should be deterred by electric fences. Thus fortified, they turned to the real issue: the affairs of a small state 7,000 miles away. It was then, according to a participant, that the "screaming and near fist fights" began.

I don't know what the original motion said, but apparently it was "watered down significantly" as a result of the shouting match. The motion they adopted stated that Israel has an undivided claim to Jerusalem and the West Bank, that Arab states should be "pressured" to absorb refugees from Palestine, and that Israel should do whatever it wishes in seeking to eliminate terrorism. Good to see that the extremists didn't prevail then.

But why should all this be of such pressing interest to the people of a state which is seldom celebrated for its fascination with foreign affairs? The explanation is slowly becoming familiar to us, but we still have some difficulty in taking it seriously.

In the United States, several million people have succumbed to an extraordinary delusion. In the 19th century, two immigrant preachers cobbled together a series of unrelated passages from the Bible to create what appears to be a consistent narrative: Jesus will return to Earth when certain preconditions have been met. The first of these was the establishment of a state of Israel. The next involves Israel's occupation of the rest of its "biblical lands" (most of the Middle East), and the rebuilding of the Third Temple on the site now occupied by the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques. The legions of the antichrist will then be deployed against Israel, and their war will lead to a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. The Jews will either burn or convert to Christianity, and the Messiah will return to Earth.

What makes the story so appealing to Christian fundamentalists is that before the big battle begins, all "true believers" (ie those who believe what they believe) will be lifted out of their clothes and wafted up to heaven during an event called the Rapture. Not only do the worthy get to sit at the right hand of God, but they will be able to watch, from the best seats, their political and religious opponents being devoured by boils, sores, locusts and frogs, during the seven years of Tribulation which follow.

The true believers are now seeking to bring all this about. This means staging confrontations at the old temple site (in 2000, three US Christians were deported for trying to blow up the mosques there), sponsoring Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, demanding ever more US support for Israel, and seeking to provoke a final battle with the Muslim world/Axis of Evil/United Nations/ European Union/France or whoever the legions of the antichrist turn out to be.


The believers are convinced that they will soon be rewarded for their efforts. The antichrist is apparently walking among us, in the guise of Kofi Annan, Javier Solana, Yasser Arafat or, more plausibly, Silvio Berlusconi. The Wal-Mart corporation is also a candidate (in my view a very good one), because it wants to radio-tag its stock, thereby exposing humankind to the Mark of the Beast.

By clicking on www.raptureready.com, you can discover how close you might be to flying out of your pyjamas. The infidels among us should take note that the Rapture Index currently stands at 144, just one point below the critical threshold, beyond which the sky will be filled with floating nudists. Beast Government, Wild Weather and Israel are all trading at the maximum five points (the EU is debat ing its constitution, there was a freak hurricane in the south Atlantic, Hamas has sworn to avenge the killing of its leaders), but the second coming is currently being delayed by an unfortunate decline in drug abuse among teenagers and a weak showing by the antichrist (both of which score only two).

We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them. That their beliefs are bonkers does not mean they are marginal. American pollsters believe that 15-18% of US voters belong to churches or movements which subscribe to these teachings. A survey in 1999 suggested that this figure included 33% of Republicans. The best-selling contemporary books in the US are the 12 volumes of the Left Behind series, which provide what is usually described as a "fictionalised" account of the Rapture (this, apparently, distinguishes it from the other one), with plenty of dripping details about what will happen to the rest of us. The people who believe all this don't believe it just a little; for them it is a matter of life eternal and death.

And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John Ashcroft, the attorney general, is a true believer, so are several prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay (who is also the co-author of the marvellously named DeLay-Doolittle Amendment, postponing campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel last year to tell the Knesset that "there is no middle ground, no moderate position worth taking".

So here we have a major political constituency - representing much of the current president's core vote - in the most powerful nation on Earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelation (9:14-15) maintains that four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates" will be released "to slay the third part of men". They batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support for Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.

The electoral calculation, crazy as it appears, works like this. Governments stand or fall on domestic issues. For 85% of the US electorate, the Middle East is a foreign issue, and therefore of secondary interest when they enter the polling booth. For 15% of the electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to. Guardian

George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order is now published in paperback www.monbiot.com

By Bronwyn Lance Chester

There's grumbling from the lower decks of the Republican ship of state. More than a few previously loyal party members are unhappy with the direction their captain, President Bush, is steering. But the skipper's rival, Democrat John Kerry, is no Fletcher Christian; dissatisfied Republicans trust his leadership even less than Bush's. Therein lies the quandary for many GOP-ers.
Don't be surprised if you haven't heard about this silent sea change. Unlike Democrats, who often seem more like a gaggle of squabbling special-interest groups than a political party, we Republicans don't take kindly to those who break ranks.

Over the years, this rather iron-fisted party discipline has borne valuable fruit, including the takeover of both chambers of Congress, the White House and a slew of state capitals. But it has also resulted in a Republican propensity to push to the right of the next guy and to toe the party line, lest you be branded ''a squish'' or a RINO -- Republican In Name Only. Dissension from basic party norms -- let alone party leaders -- is tantamount to heresy, so dissenters tend to keep mum.

Those propensities have made what I'm hearing from some fellow GOP-ers intriguing: They will not vote for Bush in November.

Perhaps they think that I'm a sympathetic ear. For two years, Bush has become an increasingly irritating burr under my own libertarian-leaning Republican saddle.

To an ardent believer in free trade, sacrosanct civil liberties, fiscal prudence, government-free bedrooms and avoidance of unnecessary foreign entanglements, Bush's reign has been literally one disappointment after another.

The number of e-mail screeds I receive calling me part of ''the liberal media Bush-bashers'' after I've disagreed with Bush's stance on any of those policies merely reinforces why dissident Republicans rarely open their mouths. There is always a price to pay.

But some dissenters are beginning to quietly stir. My electronic inbox, a window through which the breeze of public opinion constantly blows, has lately been filled with missives from fellow party members loath to cast another ballot for Bush.

Why? ''Because I don't trust him to be honest,'' says a federal law-enforcement veteran who always has voted Republican.

``I feel the president is arrogant and the administration smug, and I wonder what the freedom of speech is worth in an administration that personally attacks people who speak the truth.''

Another GOP-er, a ''social conservative,'' writes that his White House dissatisfaction 'started when Bush stated that the campaign-finance `reform' bill he was about to sign 'is probably unconstitutional' -- and then signed it anyway. That's dereliction of duty.''

A reader from Mobile, Ala., writes: ''I voted for Republicans since Reagan, but I'm giving serious consideration to voting for a Kerry-Edwards ticket.'' A Florida reader says, ``I changed my registration the day Bush invaded Iraq.''

As for whom they'll vote this fall, many are flummoxed. A few say Kerry, but others, spooked by Kerry's liberalism, say that they'll just stay home. One reader thinks that he may ``write in Alan Keyes.''

''My friends tell me that I'm abandoning my party in its hour of need,'' he writes. ``I point out that my party abandoned me first.''

Are these dissenters a majority of Republicans? Certainly not. But the coming election is forecast to be neck and neck, with gadfly Ralph Nader fuzzing the picture. Democrats -- highly motivated to oust Bush -- are expected to hit the polls in droves. Even a small number of Republicans who choose to sit on their hands could swing the race.

Meanwhile, the Pitcairn Island of November is looming into view, and the window of opportunity is closing. But there's no indication that the captain will alter course even one degree. Miami Herald

Al-Jazeera has a track record of accurate reporting - which is why its journalists have been criminalised and its offices bombed

Arthur Neslen

When US forces recently demanded that a team from the Arabic TV station al-Jazeera leave Falluja as a condition for reaching a ceasefire with the local resistance, it came as no surprise at the network's headquarters in Doha. Reliable sources there say that coalition officials threatened to close down the al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad earlier this year and last week sent a letter accusing the network of violating the Geneva convention and the principles of a free press.
Since the "war on terror" began, al-Jazeera has been a thorn in the side of the Pentagon. "My solution is to change the channel," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said this month in Baghdad, "to a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station. The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources."

The trouble for Kimmitt is that millions of people in the Middle East disagree. Al-Jazeera has become the most popular TV network in the region - with a daily audience of 35 million - precisely because it has shown the human carnage that US military onslaughts leave in their wake. If it became a "legitimate, authoritative, honest news station" of the kind that routinely censors the realities of US military operations, it would lose its audience.

The al-Jazeera reports of US snipers firing at women and children in the streets of Falluja have now been corroborated by international observers in the city. Perhaps it is natural that a military force should seek to suppress evidence that could be used against it in future war crimes trials. But it is equally natural that a free media should resist.

Democratising the Middle East may have been the neo-cons' case for the conquest of Iraq. But on the ground, the US is acting against the flowering of Middle East media freedom, which al-Jazeera initiated.

The station was launched in 1996, by disenchanted BBC journalists, after Saudi investors pulled the plug on the Arabic TV division of the BBC News service. Since then, it has spawned a plethora of competitors such as EDTV, Abu Dhabi TV, the Lebanese Broadcasting Company and, most significantly, al-Arabiya. Like al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya has been banned by the US-appointed Iraqi governing council for weeks at a time for "incitement to murder", after airing tapes of Saddam Hussein. Two of its journalists were shot dead by US forces at a US checkpoint in March.

Last November, George Bush declared that successful societies "limit the power of the state and the military ... and allow room for independent newspapers and broadcast media". But three days earlier, an al-Jazeera camera man, Salah Hassan, had been arrested in Iraq, held incommunicado in a chicken-coup-sized cell and forced to stand hooded, bound and naked for up to 11 hours at a time. He was beaten by US soldiers who would address him only as "al-Jazeera" or "bitch". Finally, after a month, he was dumped on a street just outside Baghdad, in the same vomit-stained red jumpsuit that he had been detained in.

Twenty other al-Jazeera journalists have been arrested and jailed by US forces in Iraq and one, Tariq Ayoub, was killed last April when a US tank fired a shell at the al-Jazeera offices in Baghdad's Palestine hotel. It was an accident, the Pentagon said, even though al-Jazeera had given the Pentagon the coordinates of its Baghdad offices before the war began.

As the invasion was getting underway, aljazeera.net was taken offline by a hacker attack mounted from California by John William Racine III. With a maximum tariff of 25 years available, the US attorney's office agreed a sentence of 1,000 hours community service.

Ever since al-Jazeera broadcast videotapes of Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Washington has treated it like a fifth column. There have been allegations that intense pressure from the White House led the network to silence some of its more outspoken journalists, such as aljazeera.net's senior website editor, Yvonne Ridley, who was dismissed in November 2003.

In the weeks following 9/11, Colin Powell visited Emir al-Thani, the ruler of Qatar - and financier of al-Jazeera - to request that he rein in his country's free press. The emir went public about Powell's mission and, during the subsequent war in Afghanistan, al-Jazeera's offices in Kabul were bombed - by accident, the Pentagon said.

Sami al-Haj, an al-Jazeera cameraman seized in Afghanistan, remains detained in Guantánamo Bay to this day, and al-Jazeera's journalists in the west have been singled out. After attending the European social forum in Paris, I myself was detained for an hour by British special branch officers at Waterloo station. The questioning focused on my employer. The officers also wanted information about other al-Jazeera journalists in Paris and London, and asked if I would speak to someone in their office on a regular basis about my work contacts. I declined both requests.

The targeting of al-Jazeera is all the more remarkable, given that it is the only Arab TV network to routinely offer Israeli, US and British officials a platform to argue their case. The Israeli cabinet minister Gideon Ezra famously told the Jerusalem Post: "I wish all Arab media were like al-Jazeera". Kenton Keith, the former US ambassador to Qatar, commented: "You have to be a supporter of al-Jazeera, even if you have to hold your nose sometimes."

Al-Jazeera has a track record of honest and accurate reporting, and has maintained a principled pluralism in the face of brutal and authoritarian regimes within the region, and increasingly from those without. This is why it has been vilified, criminalised and bombed. It is also why it should be defended by those who genuinely believe that successful societies depend upon an independent media. Guardian

Dr. Moorcraft makes some interesting observations about terrorism and poses some intriguing questions.

Is it time for a deal?

by Paul Moorcraft

Osama bin Laden has reportedly offered Europe a truce if it "stops attacking Muslims" but the Home Secretary has branded the idea as "ludicrous." Defence expert Paul Moorcraft, who has had direct experience of working alongside Islamic fighters in several war zones, today asks whether the West is fighting an unwinnable war against al-Qaeda. President Bush has summoned the world to fight a global war on terrorism, but can it be won? Or should we opt for some kind of negotiated settlement with al-Qaeda and its allies?

WHAT KIND OF WAR?

Is the global war on terrorism (GWT) merely a convenient substitute for hawks who lusted after a replacement for the Cold War? Will it end up as "another Hundred Years War," a phrase used by Jean-Louis Brugui re, the French judge and counter-terrorism expert?

And George Bush clumsily talked of a "crusade." Are we indeed facing "the clash of civilisations," prophesied by Professor Samuel Huntington - a continuation of centuries of Muslim v Judaeo-Christian conflict? There are equally numerous examples of co-operation and amity between these so-called civilisations. More dangerously, though, the GWT could make Huntington's forecasts self-fulfilling .

Terrorism is a political method; how do you fight something that is universal and timeless? Read the Old Testament for a variety of discussions on terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Above all, Islam is a belief system - how do you fight an idea? Hawks will say, however, that communism was an ideology that was fought and beaten.

Take a narrow military definition of the war on al-Qaeda: a small and loose coalition of dedicated Islamic extremists is fighting an asymmetric economic and armed conflict against a hyper-power. The war is vastly different from other terror campaigns. It is global, and - apparently - no chance of political compromise is offered. Operationally, the terror planners aim for simultaneous spectaculars, without warnings, and ideally with weapons of mass destruction (WMD), with volunteers who embrace death.

WHO IS WINNING THIS WAR?

If a traditional definition of terrorism is assumed, who is winning? As Secretary of State for Defence Donald Rumsfeld confessed, "We lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing."

But some assessment must be made. more at icWales

France 2 did a piece on this the other night and it's amazing to see these very large rats in their little harnesses sniffing and locating the mines. This is something that is so necessary and worth supporting.

Maryann Mott

Dogs have long been used to sniff out land mines in war-torn regions. But now they may have some welcome competition: rats and bees.
A Belgian company has trained African giant pouch rats (Cricetomys gambianus) to locate buried bombs, while researchers at the University of Montana are using honeybees to screen large areas for unexploded ordinance.

The efforts highlight the quest to find low-cost alternatives to safely detect underground explosives.

An estimated 80 million mines lay buried in more than 60 countries. Each day 50 people, many of them children, are killed or injured, according to the Landmine Survivors Network in Washington, D.C., an organization that provides peer counseling and prosthetics to victims throughout the world. The cost in human life is compounded by mines' impact on regional economies, where land is put off-limits to farming and development.

In Mozambique, an African country littered with land mines from decades of civil war, 20 rats were recently used to search for explosives. So far, they've been successful. In November, the animals found nine mines in one day along the Limpopo Railway, says Bart Weetjens, director of APOPO, the Belgian research company that trains the animals. more National Geographic

GOP hopes Mideast policy shift will help

By MARK Z. BARABAK
Los Angeles Times

When President Bush an-nounced a major shift this week in Middle East policy, the news was heralded on the Republican Jewish Council Web site with smiling photos of Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and a headline declaring: "President Bush backs Israel, yet again."

Bush's recognition of permanent Israeli settlements in the West Bank was "a watershed event" in the long, fraternal relationship between the United States and Israel, said William Daroff, the group's executive director.

Republicans are hoping the shift will mark a watershed in presidential politics as well.

Bush lost roughly 80 percent of the Jewish vote to Democrat Al Gore in 2000, a performance consistent with patterns through much of the 20th century. But GOP strategists and some independent analysts believe Bush could markedly improve that showing in November.

Few expect Bush to draw more Jewish votes than Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who is a long-standing friend of Israel and was quick to second the policy shift.

However, even a marginal improvement in Bush's showing could make a difference, given the expected closeness of November's election in several states with significant Jewish populations, such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Shopping Gallery:

Noting the slim margin by which Bush carried Florida, Daroff said "changing one vote per condominium in one square mile" of the state's heavily Jewish "Gold Coast" could make the difference in November.

David Harris, head of the nonpartisan American Jewish Committee, agreed. "There is an elastic band of undecided voters that may be somewhere in the range of 20 to 25 percent of American Jews,"Harris said. "Capturing that undecided group is the name of the game for both parties."

The test, he added, "will really be the interplay between the president's perceived strong support for Israel and the war against terrorism . . . versus the traditional American Jewish support for the Democratic Party's domestic agenda."

Jews make up just about 2 percent of the U.S. population and only about 4 percent of the electorate nationwide. But they are routinely among the most certain to show up on election day, with turnout averaging about 80 percent of eligible voters.

Jewish donors - clustered in the population centers of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and New York - also have been among the most generous givers to Democratic candidates and causes. That presents Republicans with an added incentive to woo Jewish supporters away from Kerry.

(The White House also is working hard to make inroads among Latinos and union members, two other important Democratic constituencies.)
While statistics are sketchy, experts say most Jews voted Republican in presidential elections from around Abraham Lincoln's time until the 1920s.

Lincoln won Jewish support not just for his fight against slavery, but also for rescinding an 1862 order by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant that sought to remove from the Tennessee River Valley all Jews conducting business as peddlers or merchants. It was "the first and only occasion where a specific (U.S.) government action was directed against the Jewish community," according to Stephen Windmueller, a scholar at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles.

Jewish loyalties began shifting nationally under the administration of Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who placed the first Jew, Louis Brandeis, on the Supreme Court, and took a strong international stand against anti-Semitism and in favor of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East. By the time Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt began to enact his New Deal, with its far-reaching social welfare programs, Jewish voters were among his most loyal constituents.

With just a few exceptions, Jews since then have voted overwhelmingly Democratic.

"They have high education and relatively high income levels. They don't own guns. They're (pro-abortion rights) in overwhelming numbers," said Ira Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council. "They are the quintessential 'blue'American community," he summed up, using the political shorthand from 2000's color-coded election maps.

That year, Bush had a particularly tough time winning Jewish support. Gore made history by picking Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, an Orthodox Jew, as his running mate. Bush also put off some Jews by invoking his Christian faith, as both a personal matter and guide to policy.

He once said that only people who accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior could enter heaven, retracting the statement after a 1998 visit to Israel. "I believe that God decides who goes to heaven," he said. "Not George W. Bush."

As president, Bush has made no secret of his religiosity. He has invoked God in justifying the war with Iraq and pushed to make it easier for religious groups to provide government-funded services. Even though Bush is careful to mention adherents of all faiths, the matter of church-state separation remains a concern for many Jews, Harris and others said.

And while many Christian conservatives are deeply sympathetic toward Israel, a significant percentage of Jews remain suspicious of the religious right, which is an important part of Bush's political base. An American Jewish Committee survey last fall found that 20 percent of American Jews believed that most members of the religious right were anti-Semitic, and another 21 percent believed that many were. Only 17 percent said there was little or no anti-Semitism within the religious right.

The same survey - conducted among 1,000 people who identified themselves as Jews - also found that 40 percent described themselves as at least somewhat liberal, 33 percent as moderate and 27 percent as at least somewhat conservative. That compares to roughly 27 percent of adults nationwide who described themselves as liberal and 41 percent as conservative in a Los Angeles Times Poll last month .

Still, Bush has won many friends in the Jewish community with his consistently strong support of Israel and Sharon. On Wednesday, Bush embraced the prime minister's plan for seeking Middle East peace, which includes a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and rejection of Palestinian claims of a "right to return" to Israel.

While no one - Democrat or Republican - suggests Bush took that step for domestic political reasons, allies said the move would only enhance his standing with Jewish voters. "There has never been a more pro-Israel president of the United States," Daroff asserted

(Optional add end)

Nine states with significant Jewish populations account for 212 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House, according to an analysis by Windmueller of Hebrew Union College. Among those, most handicappers predict the two most populous states - California and New York - will back Kerry, along with Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Maryland.

Up for grabs are Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, which account for 68 electoral votes.

And the Jewish vote in Michigan, Missouri, Nevada and Arizona - though smaller than in these other states - could be crucial in determining November's winner in each. Concord Monitor

Women lead the way in the new Spanish government
By Elizabeth Nash in Madrid

Of Spain's 16 socialist ministers who swore their allegiance to King Juan Carlos yesterday, eight are women. It is Spain's first government with an equal number of men and women, the first in Europe after Sweden. Independent

France to push privatisations despite protests

PARIS : French Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy will press on with sales of state holdings despite threatened mass protests in the coming months, economists say.

Sarkozy needs to boost the economy without increasing spending in order to cut a huge public deficit that has repeatedly breached European Union limits. News Asia


More U.S. troops die as Bremer acknowledges Iraq is not ready to protect itself
By LEE KEATH

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi security forces will not be ready to protect the country against insurgents by the June 30 handover of power, the top U.S. administrator said Sunday - an assessment aimed at defending the continued heavy presence of U.S. troops here even after an Iraqi government takes over.

The unusually blunt comments from L. Paul Bremer came amid a weekend of new fighting that pushed the death toll for U.S. troops in April to 99, already the record for a single-month in Iraq and approaching the number killed during the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein last year. Jackson Sun

Corsica nationalist faces charges

Talamoni's arrest sparked outrage among Corsican nationalists
The French authorities have opened criminal proceedings against a prominent Corsican nationalist leader.
Jean-Guy Talamoni, 43, is being investigated for "extortion of funds in connection with terrorist activities".

Mr Talamoni is head of the pro-independence Unione nazionale party in Corsica's regional assembly. He denies any wrongdoing.

He was released on Sunday. His arrest three days earlier had sparked protests on the troubled Mediterranean island. BBC

France, Germany criticise Israel for Hamas leader's assassination

France and Germany on Sunday criticised Israel's assassination of Hamas leader Abdelaziz Rantissi and said that the European Union viewed such murders as a violation of international law.

"France condemns the attack perpetrated against the head of Hamas, Abdelaziz al-Rantassi, which caused his death," a statement issued by the French foreign ministry said.

"It states once again that extra-judicial executions are contrary to international law and unacceptable. Each state in the (Middle East) region has the right to protect its citizens, but not with contempt of the law," it said. EU Business

France: Muslim Population Flexing its Muscles

Like the U.K., France is one of the EU's biggest melting pots. The largest waves of immigrants in France originated from neighboring Italy, Portugal and Spain as well as its former colonies, including Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Like Britain, France shares a long history with Muslims and other cultures for which French has also been the mother tongue. It has also traditionally considered itself a country of immigration, and about 6.3 percent of the country's 58 million population are immigrants. In recent decades, the inward migration trend has shifted from its direct neighbors in Europe to those of Northern Africa and Turkey, significantly increasing France's Muslim population and making it easily the largest in Europe with 5 million. Deutsche Welle

Turkey EU entry distant, but don't slam door-France

PARIS, April 18, (Reuters) - Turkey will not be able to join the European Union any time soon but the EU should not slam the door in its face, French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said on Sunday.

EU leaders are due to decide in December whether Turkey has made sufficient progress on human rights to begin long-delayed entry negotiations. Leaders of France's ruling conservative UMP party oppose rapid accession. Forbes

Why police kept tabs on Picasso, 'the anarchist'
By John Lichfield in Paris

The records of 40 years of police surveillance of one of the most celebrated, "subversive" foreign residents of Paris go on display for the first time this week.

The object of suspicion, regarded at first as an anarchist terrorist and then an anti-French Communist, was Pablo Picasso, who was spied on constantly, even after he became rich and famous.

The best efforts of undercover police agents, informers and bribed concierges yielded meagre results. The early reports, soon after the unknown Spanish artist arrived in the French capital in May, 1901 record only that the 19-year-old Picasso got drunk a great deal and "sometimes even stays out all night". Independent

By Robert Jensen

I helped kill a Palestinian today. Via Je Blog

If you pay taxes to the U.S. government, so did you.

And unless the policies of the U.S. government change, tomorrow will be no different.

It is easy for Americans to decry the "cycle of violence" in Palestine, but until we acknowledge our own part in that violence, there is little hope for a just peace in Palestine or the Middle East.

The first step is to abandon the mythology that the United States is a "neutral broker for peace" in the conflict. A new report by the Institute for Southern Studies shows that in the one-year period after the Sharm el-Sheikh peace agreement in September 1999, the U.S. government pumped $3.6 billion worth of arms into Israel -- an odd policy for a country playing a supposedly neutral role.

So, when we hear on the news that Israeli tanks are rolling through the cities and refugee camps of the West Bank, we should remember those tanks were made in the United States and purchased by Israel with U.S. aid. The Israeli jets and helicopters used in the assault are American F-16s, Blackhawks and Apaches. Machine guns, grenade launchers, missiles and bombs -- made in the USA, paid for with our tax dollars -- are being used to crush the Palestinian people. That means we must face two realties:

First, the current Israeli attack on West Bank towns is not a war on terrorism, but part of a long and brutal war against the Palestinian people for land and resources. If Israel is serious about ending terrorism, it would end its 35-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Until it demonstrates a willingness to do that, Israeli calls for peace ring hollow and its attempts to achieve security through force will only make it less secure.

Second, Israel's war against the Palestinians would not be possible without U.S. military and economic support -- $3 billion a year in direct aid. While the whole world stands against Israel's occupation, our government provides the political and diplomatic cover that allows Israel to flout international law. Specific Israeli policies sometimes draw mild criticisms from U.S. leaders, and those criticisms have grown stronger in recent days as Israel has ignored calls for a pullback of forces. But Israel can continue to ignore the international consensus -- and the U.N. Security Council resolutions calling on it to end the occupation -- because of U.S. support. More CounterPunch

by Remco de Jong, 18 March 2004

Belgian investigating magistrate Jacques Langlois, the man who led the investigation into Marc Dutroux and his co-suspects for many years, was clearly irritated and upset as he finished his testimony before the court in the town of Arlon this week. "It seems like I'm the one on trial here," he snapped as he faced yet another round of critical questioning from lawyers representing the victims in the Dutroux case.

The lawyers acting for Laetitia Delhez - one of the girls that survived her ordeal after being abducted by Marc Dutroux - and the parents of An Marchal have been accusing Mr Langlois of failing to carry out a proper investigation into possible paedophile networks in Belgium. They believe Marc Dutroux was part of such a network, and that the authorities have failed to round up all its members.

Retractions and accusations
In recent weeks, Jacques Langlois has found himself being forced to admit that he was indeed unable to come up with all the answers: "Where some facts are concerned, I can only rely on what the accused have said". And the initial weeks of the proceedings have clearly shown that the words of prime suspect Marc Dutroux are, in any event, totally unreliable. He has already retracted some of his earlier statements, and chosen the court as the venue to suddenly name one of his co-accused, Michel Nihoul, as the network's leader.

Marc Dutroux maintains that Michel Nihoul was present when he was – as he puts it – "surprised" to find the eight-year-old girls Melissa and Julie in his house in 1995. The Belgian prosecutors say this is not true, and that it was Marc Dutroux himself who abducted the girls.

Marc Dutroux also testified this week that Michel Nihoul played a role in abducting Laetitia Delhez in 1996. Magistrate Langlois doesn't believe a word of that, and suspects this is an attempt by Marc Dutroux to divert attention from his own involvement.

Opponents on the same side
What's remarkable about all of this is that the lawyers acting for Marc Dutroux and those representing the victims now find themselves on the same said as regards the theory that a larger network of paedophiles was involved. Laetitia's lawyers are attempting to establish that other people were involved who have never been traced and are still free to walk the streets. And Marc Dutroux's lawyers are trying to establish that their client was just a small cog in a much larger wheel. In this way, they hope to save their client from the life sentence which he seems almost certain to face if they fail.

Also on trial is Michelle Martin, the former wife of Marc Dutroux, and she has contradicted his new testimony. She still maintains that her ex-husband was the one who abducted and later killed four young girls.

Mystery of the keys
This - the third - week of the trial saw yet more commotion when staff at the jail in Arlon found handcuff keys hidden in a packet of salt. The keys in question turned out not to fit the kind of handcuffs used on Marc Dutroux during his trips to and from the courthouse. Nonetheless, Belgian Justice Minister Laurette Onkelinx has launched an investigation into the surprising discovery. The country's opposition parties have called for an explanation and summoned the minister to appear in parliament to answer their questions.

A ministerial spokeswoman confirmed that the salt in question was the "personal property" of Marc Dutroux, who told his lawyer on Thursday morning that he knew nothing about the keys. He claims that he only learnt about the keys when he heard a news report on the radio.

Strange incidents
The "keys mystery" is the fourth strange incident to occur since the trial began on 1 March. During its first week, a French magazine published photos of Marc Dutroux in jail; photos which can only have been taken with the assistance of prison staff. Then there was the day when a door of the van used to take the accused to court flew open in transit. On Wednesday this week, the driver of the same van refused to move the vehicle when one of the doors refused to shut properly.

Jan Fermon, the lawyer acting for Laetitia, has dismissed the key incident, saying that it merely: "diverts attention from the questions that really need to be asked." Radio Netherlands

By Michael Tomasky

It's amazing how often first impressions -- in love, in friendship, and in politics -- end up being exactly right. Relatedly, how often people live up (or down) to what seem to be, based on those impressions, their destinies.

When Bill Clinton first emerged in the summer of 1991 as someone who was likely to seek the presidency the next year, the first impression was of a brilliant man who was at times too clever by half; the first thing we heard about him was that he had a woman... thing. Sure enough, seven years later, that personality trait and that penchant combined to help create the crisis of his presidency (although I should stress that I'm of the school that believes that crisis was chiefly driven by his fanatical ideological enemies and a mainstream media that lost all sense of perspective and priority).

Likewise, when we first got a look at George W. Bush in the spring and summer of 1999, the first impression was of an amiable and colossally pliable lightweight. And, where conservatives had fed the story line about Clinton's womanizing in 1991 and 1992, liberals in 1999 and 2000 tried to advance the story line that Bush wasn't intellectually up to the job of being president. The charge soaked into the culture, becoming the basis for Letterman and Leno motifs about Bush. But politically, it didn't work all that well, because such charges tend to come out sounding elitist; throughout history, they have always been countered with an assertion that the person in question may not be a deep thinker, but he has core convictions that give him a special bond to the masses and so on.

But it was true about George W. Bush. My overwhelming reaction to the 60 Minutes segment on Bob Woodward's new book and the reports and leaks about the book over the weekend is that Woodward's account shows a man who just doesn't have the intellectual capacity to do this job. This may not strike some readers as a newsflash, I know, but Woodward does shed some new light on the question. Bush took this country in a radically new foreign-policy direction without really thinking through the consequences of his actions; without reckoning in a serious way with the question "What if we're wrong?"; without seeking the input of aides who might have disagreed or painted a more complex picture than the one he wanted painted for him. It's a profoundly irresponsible way to govern. What his defenders will continue to call his "idealism" -- the belief that God put him in the Oval Office to spread liberty's bounty across the globe and so on -- is in fact a rather shocking shallowness. It's fine and indeed admirable for a world leader to speak this way, to aspire to greatness and fairness for his nation and for the world; Tony Blair did so in the run-up to the war, and his pro-war speeches were considerably more convincing than Bush's. But clearly, Bush actually believes this and looks at global geopolitics this way. This, too, might be fine, if it were balanced by more hard-headed and skeptical assessments, but Bush seems to have embraced it as a totalizing explanation. And as such, it has barred other interpretations of world events at the door.

Even this might be fine, if the consequences had not been so tragic. But once Bush transformed himself in his mind into God's messenger of liberty, things like the State Department's multi-volume report on post-war Iraq -- a report that predicted many of the tragedies that have come to pass -- became irrelevant. What was the research of mere mortals next to the fiery inscriptions of God, emblazoned across his welcoming mind?

And so hundreds are dead today who didn't need to die, because the possibility of their deaths was not supposed to be part of the great plan and therefore was not contemplated in its mandated fullness. There exists no acceptable definition of "idealism" by which the above qualifies as such. Neither is it quite malevolence. Dick Cheney is malevolent, all right, but he's not the president, at least officially; not the one making the final call. It is incompetence. It is shallowness. To put it more colloquially, it’s trying to wish something true; we've all done it in our private lives, so we all know how irresponsible it is.

And it's happening because the guy in charge doesn't know any better. Our first impression was, catastrophically, right. The AMerican Prospect

Peter Preston
Monday April 19, 2004

Why is America such a "weak democracy"?
The problem, of course, is best posed by an American. Enter Bob Ivie, professor of communication and culture at Indiana University. It's he who teases out and delineates the "weakness".

That began (in my free-wheeling and fallible extrapolation of his thesis) with the founding fathers. Read Madison and see. They were nervous about "distempered" democracy, about too many roughnecks rocking their elitist boat. So the constitution - far from being one man, one direct part in the action - was a cautious edifice of checks and balances: a lower house, an upper house, a president, all forced to wheel and deal and, at the end, deliver what the system ordained rather than what the voter crudely demanded.

And the years have not been kind to that constitution. It has frozen in mythic immobility. No ferment about reform, no movement. The alterations to the superstructure of this superpower are external, shifts in context. Consider the explosion in media spending; consider the zillions you need to run for anything; consider the dependence on corporate power. Greenback elitism.

The people have a vote (if registered). They can be, and often are, involved in community politics. But real politics is the preserve of the few. And the few, like Marie Antoinette reaching for the ginger biscuits, are perennially edgy about their authority. Television and radio have given the president the added aura of supreme power. They have helped to free him from the web the founding fathers wove. He has a digital bully pulpit now. But he runs what Ivie calls a "rhetorical presidency" - full of "images, phantasms, tropes and insecurity". That means "governance by crisis".

Modern history makes the case. First the mutual phantasm of the cold war, then the dominoes of Vietnam falling. If no more suitable dragon than General Noriega presented itself, there was always a "war on drugs" to wage or forget, as necessary. And today there is that "war on terror". If war is crisis, then war is also the stifling of debate in weak democracies.

Those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty" while criticising the Bush administration's methods of fighting terror at home and abroad provide "aid to terrorists". That's attorney general John Ashcroft testifying to the Senate after 9/11. "See how dissent terrorises democracy while political quiescence promotes peace and security," says Ivie dryly. "Democratic dissent has turned oxymoronic."

So today's headlines take over. There stand Messrs Bush and Blair on the White House lawn, vowing eternal devotion to the "historic struggle" for democratic victory in Iraq. They've been there before. Last time Bush declared that "every nation in every region has a decision to make - either you are with us or you are with the terrorists". But now we're beyond nations and shadowy forces lurking in Tom Clancy's dreams. Who are these unwelcome, individual Iraqis on our TV screens, protesting, rampaging, shooting and often dying? Why, says George, they're terrorists. Yes indeed, echoes Tony. He who is not for us is a terrorist. He can and will be killed unless he falls silent. He can and may be locked up indefinitely (like the 762 aliens in US jails) so that silence enfolds him.

Let's be clear where the blank rhetoric of good and evil, white and Arab, democracy and utter destructiveness, is leading us. It is designed to make democratic dissent seem treacherous. It renders argument damnable or deluded. It makes zapping Falluja or Najaf a no-brainer. It means the force-feeding of democracy, or else. And its feebleness - nay, feeble-mindedness - is manifest.

There, just before Tony on the lawn, was Ariel Sharon, an elected leader fighting his patch in a vibrant, often miasmic democracy. He sees Washington's vacuous conflation of terrorist campaigns into some world menace and takes his chance. Easy-peasy. Abdel-Aziz Rantissi equals Osama equals a blind man in a wheelchair, and destroying them all by hi-tech visitation is equally justified. He may not get his perversion of the road map through the Knesset. He may be turfed out for corruption. But at least dissent in Israel is expected, part of life: at least nobody says brute survival in crisis means disengaging brain and hearing aid.

But that is exactly what George Bush says. Crisis means mute obedience. To protest is to betray the master rhetorician reading Dick Cheney's script. He is a leader defined and protected by "war". He must not be troubled by voters protesting in Ashcroft's "free speech zones". Nuance is his enemy. He dare not stop to think.

It won't do. It's a grotesque, creeping parody of democracy. It hangs Blair out to dry because, even in Britain's elective dictatorship, the democratic climate has not yet grown so choking. Blair does have to explain and justify. He cannot just proclaim.

And there's one more oxymoron pending. Bringing democracy to Iraq? What democracy is that? One mullah, one vote? One pipeline, one ministry? One assassination, one empty seat? Will there be TV ads for Ahmed Chalabi, rubber chicken suppers and hanging chads? Will dissent be our mortal enemy there, too? Greetings from Piran. The clouds over Istria are hanging heavy. Guardian

For those that know my views there's no need to speak of my reaction to the murder of Rantisi. I cannot but speak out against it as I did the murder of Yassin.
The powerful of the world continue to tread on the weak and I'm quite sure the weak will show at sometime in the future they are not defenseless. The circle of violence continues to turn and none in power will stop it. They make pretty speeches about how wrong the action is without taking any action themselves.
I wonder how many actually know or bother to find out what the Palestinians want? All are not radical, Islamic fundamentalist just as all Jews are not part of the Zionist movement. There are many today, on both sides, working toward a peaceful co-existence between the two peoples.
There will be a day in the future when the truth will be told about George Bush, Arial Sharon and many that have gone before them. Truth will have it's day.
In the meantime, Cabinet Minister Gideon Ezra said that Mashaal, the Damascus-based overall head of Hamas, was also being targeted.
"The fate of Khaled Mashaal is the fate of Rantisi. The minute we have the operational opportunity we will do this," Ezra said. DowJones
Since Mr. Bush and the world has now been told beforehand about Sharon's plans Bush will not be able to deny any action he does or does not take.

Reaction to al-Rantisi assassination

Dr Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi died within minutes of arriving at Gaza City hospital, where thousands of angry supporters congregated after the Apache helicopter gunship attack on his car.

Regional and international reaction has followed swiftly after the air raid on Saturday that killed the 56-year-old Hamas spokesman and the two passengers - one of whom was al-Rantisi's son - travelling in his car.

"The British government has made it repeatedly clear that so-called 'targeted assassinations' of this kind are unlawful, unjustified and counter-productive."
Jack Straw, British Foreign Secretary

"We ask the international community to enforce the Geneva Convention and send an international protection force to the Palestinian territories immediately."
Saib Uraiqat, the Palesitnian negotiation minister

"Al-Rantisi's blood will not flow in vain."
Ismail Haniya, a possible contender to replace al-Rantisi

"We cannot fail to be pleased with this operation for it is necessary to continue to eliminate the terrorists as we did with Yasin."
Uzi Landau, Israeli minister without portfolio

"The mercy of God upon al-Rantisi ... Israel commits crimes and is rewarded by the American president. When it commits state terrorism, it gets promises."
Nabil Shaath, Palestinian minister

"We condemn this. It is state-terrorism and this is clear proof that Israel cannot live in a climate of stability. They do not want a climate of stability. They need a climate of tension and violence."
Hussam Zaki, Arab league spokesman

"Israel has been given a free hand by the United States to continue its policy of destruction, of siege, of assassination. Right now what is happening is very dangerous. You are closing off all options. You are saying to the Palestinians: 'You have no political recourse, no recourse to the law, no justice anywhere'."
Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian law maker

"Al-Rantisi's only crime was to say things Israel does not want to hear. Just like Shaikh Yasin's murder, al-Rantisi's death proves Israel does not accept freedom of speech. Your tongue can make you a 'terrorist'."
Demonstrator outside Palestinian hospital in Gaza City

"Our revenge will be swift and strong"
Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades supporters Al Jazeera

Hamas vows to avenge Rantissi killing 100 times

Reaction to Rantissi's assassination was swift: tens of thousands of Palestinians surged onto the streets of Gaza, vowing to avenge his death. Hamas leader Ahmed Bahar: "The answer, God willing, is near and they will see it before they hear about it. but I don't want to talk about it. The actions will do the talking."

Palestinian Labour minister Ghassan Khatib added: "The timing of this Israeli assassination is a little bit suspicious because it comes immediately after the visit of Sharon to Washington." The Israeli government has defended its action, describing it as part of its strategy to put an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Israeli government spokesman Raanan Gissin: "Abdelaziz Rantissi was clearly one of those who was leading the battle against Israel, against the Jews, coordinating the actions between the various terrorist organisations in Gaza and since we failed to bring him to justice we brought justice to him today and so we will do with the rest of the heads of the terrorist organisations."

But the Israeli public is wary of retaliation on the part of Hamas or other militant groups. "If it means that tomorrow we'll have another explosion in Jerusalem, so it will be very sad," said a young Israeli woman. Her friend added: "It's like keeping the circle of violence going on and on. I don't think that violence will achieve anything for either side of the conflict." EuroNews

Hamas Unshaken By Assassination: Official

"Hamas is not Yassin or Rantissi. We drive our force from our faith in the legitimacy of our cause and the support of thousands of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims," he underlined.

The Hamas official stressed that the retaliation of the group’s military wing, Al-Qassam Brigades, is "inevitable," and "will definitely match the level of the Israeli crimes."

Ghazal said that U.S. President George Bush’s unwavering support for Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon was tantamount to a green light to pursue his assassination policy against Palestinian resistance leaders.

Breaking with a decades-old U.S. policy, U.S. President George W. Bush told a joint press conference with Sharon Wednesday that the return of the 1949 armistice lines was now "unrealistic".

Arguing that Israel should never be forced to withdraw from the entire West Bank, Bush said that the Palestinian refugees -- around 6 millions - should be settled within a future Palestinian state and not inside what is now Israel, in what is dubbed as a “Bushfour Promise”. Islam Online

by Robert Fisk

What better recruiting sergeant could Bin Laden have than the President of the United States?

So President George Bush tears up the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan and that's okay. Israeli settlements for Jews and Jews only on the West Bank. That's okay. Taking land from Palestinians who have owned that land for generations, that's okay. UN Security Council Resolution 242 says that land cannot be acquired by war. Forget it. That's okay.

Does President George Bush actually work for al-Qa'ida? What does this mean? That George Bush cares more about his re-election than he does about the Middle East? Or that George Bush is more frightened of the Israeli lobby than he is of his own electorate. Fear not, it is the latter.

His language, his narrative, his discourse on history, has been such a lie these past three weeks that I wonder why we bother to listen to his boring press conferences. Ariel Sharon, the perpetrator of the Sabra and Shatila massacre (1,700 Palestinian civilians dead) is a "man of peace" - even though the official 1993 Israeli report on the massacre said he was "personally responsible" for it. Now, Mr Bush is praising Mr Sharon's plan to steal yet more Palestinian land as a "historic and courageous act".

Heaven spare us all. Give up the puny illegal Jewish settlements in Gaza and everything's okay: the theft of land by colonial settlers, the denial of any right of return to Israel by those Palestinians who lived there, that's okay. Mr Bush, who claimed he changed the Middle East by invading Iraq, says he is now changing the world by invading Iraq! Okay! Is there no one to cry "Stop! Enough!"?

Two nights ago, this most dangerous man, George Bush, talked about "freedom in Iraq". Not "democracy" in Iraq.
No, "democracy" was no longer mentioned. "Democracy" was simply left out of the equation. Now it was just "freedom" - freedom from Saddam rather than freedom to have elections. And what is this "freedom" supposed to involve? One group of American-appointed Iraqis will cede power to another group of American-appointed Iraqis. That will be the "historic handover" of Iraqi "sovereignty". Yes, I can well see why George Bush wants to witness a "handover" of sovereignty. "Our boys" must be out of the firing line - let the Iraqis be the sandbags.

Iraqi history is already being written. In revenge for the brutal killing of four American mercenaries - for that is what they were - US Marines carried out a massacre of hundreds of women and children and guerillas in the Sunni Muslim city of Fallujah. The US military says that the vast majority of the dead were militants. Untrue, say the doctors. But the hundreds of dead, many of whom were indeed civilians, were a shameful reflection on the rabble of American soldiery who conducted these undisciplined attacks on Fallujah. Many Baghdadi Sunnis say that in the "New Iraq" - the Iraqi version, not the Paul Bremer version - Fallujah should be given the status of a new Iraqi capital.

Vast areas of the Palestinian West Bank will now become Israel, courtesy of President Bush. Land which belongs to people other than Israelis must now be stolen by Israelis because it is "unrealistic" to accept otherwise. Is Mr Bush a thief? Is he a criminal? Can he be charged with abetting a criminal act? Can Iraq now claim to Kuwait that it is "unrealistic" that the Ottoman borders can be changed? Palestinian land once included all of what is now Israel. It is not, apparently, "realistic" to change this, even to two percent?

Is Saddam Hussein to be re-bottled and put back in charge of Iraq on the basis that his 1990 invasion of Kuwait was "realistic"? Or that his invasion of Iran - when we helped him try to destroy Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution - was "realistic" because he initially attacked only the Arabic-speaking (and thus "Iraqi") parts of Iran?

Or, since President Bush now seems to be a history buff, are the Germans to be given back Danzig or the Sudetenland? Or Austria? Or should we perhaps recreate the colonial possessions of the past 100 years? Is it not "realistic" that the French should retake Algeria - or part of Algeria - on the basis that the people all speak French, on the basis that this was once part of the French nation? Or should the British retake Cyprus? Or Aden? Or Egypt? Shouldn't the French be allowed to take back Lebanon and Syria? Why shouldn't the British re-take America and boot out those pesky "terrorists" who oppose the rule of King George's democracy well over 200 years ago?

Because this is what George Bush's lunacy and weakness can lead to. We all have lands that "God" gave us. Didn't Queen Mary die with "Calais" engraved on her heart? Doesn't Spain have a legitimate right to the Netherlands? Or Sweden the right to Norway and Denmark? Every colonial power, including Israel can put forward these preposterous demands.

What Bush has actually done is give way to the crazed world of Christian Zionism. The fundamentalist Christians who support Israel's theft of the West Bank on the grounds that the state of Israel must exist there according to God's law until the second coming, believe that Jesus will return to earth and the Israelis - for this is the Bush "Christian Sundie" belief - will then have to convert to Christianity or die in the battle of Amargeddon.

I kid thee not. This is the Christian fundamentalist belief, which even the Israeli embassy in Washington go along with - without comment, of course - in their weekly Christian Zionist prayer meetings. Every claim by Osama bin Laden, every statement that the United States represents Zionism and supports the theft of Arab lands will now have been proved true to millions of Arabs, even those who had no time for Bin Laden. What better recruiting sergeant could Bin Laden have than George Bush. Doesn't he realise what this means for young American soldiers in Iraq or are Israelis more important than American lives in Mesopotamia?

Everything the US government has done to preserve its name as a "middle-man" in the Middle East has now been thrown away by this gutless, cowardly US President, George W Bush. That it will place his soldiers at greater risk doesn't worry him - anyway, he doesn't do funerals. That it goes against natural justice doesn't worry him. That his statements are against international law is of no consequence.

And still we have to cow-tow to this man. If we are struck by al-Qa'ida it is our fault. And if 90 percent of the population of Spain point out that they opposed the war, then they are pro-terrorists to complain that 200 of their civilians were killed by al-Qa'ida. First the Spanish complain about the war, then they are made to suffer for it - and then they are condemned as "appeasers" by the Bush regime and its craven journalists when they complain that their husbands and wives and sons did not deserve to die.

If this is to be their fate, excuse me, but I would like to have a Spanish passport so that I can share the Spanish people's "cowardice"! If Mr Sharon is "historic" and "courageous", then the murderers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad will be able to claim the same. Mr Bush legitimised "terrorism" this week - and everyone who loses a limb or a life can thank him for his yellow streak. And, I fear, they can thank Mr Blair for his cowardice too.

Robert-Fisk.com

Evil does often triumph
John Chuckman

America's court-appointed President, the remarkable man who spent a hundred billion dollars to set Iraq in flames, characterized Sharon's initiative as "historic" and "courageous," two words whose meanings there is no objective evidence he even understands.

During the carefully-staged ceremony in Washington, Bush suggested the U.S. will support Israel's annexation of parts of the West Bank. How is Bush entitled to grant land he neither owns nor occupies to a third party without so much as consulting those who lived there for centuries and still often hold deeds? Apparently, through no principle more dignified than might makes right.
YellowTimes

Bush-Sharon Deal a 'Roadmap to War'
Marty Logan

President George W. Bush's closest international ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, arrived in Washington on Friday arguing he can still make sense of the "roadmap" to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. But U.S. peace groups say all traces of that route were lost in a Bush deal with Israeli leader Ariel Sharon earlier this week.

"Instead of telling Prime Minister Sharon that it's OK now to violate international law and United Nations resolutions, President Bush should be pressuring both sides to stem the violence and start talking again," said Jim Winkler, general secretary of the United Methodist Church General Board of Church and Society.

"President Bush has effectively told the world that what Israel has taken by force from the Palestinians is now acceptable. This is a roadmap to war," he added in a statement Thursday signed by more than a dozen churches united as the Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP).

EU rejects US-Israeli policy

Differences in EU and US Middle East policies increasingly clear

French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier warned Bush to
"respect" Europe, saying that the quartet for a roadmap peace settlement was just that - a quartet.

The roadmap is a peace plan endorsed by the United States, the EU, the United Nations and Russia.

EU ministers recalled that the bloc "will not recognise any change to the pre-1967 borders [created by the Six Day War] other than those arrived at by agreement between the parties".

"The Union emphasises that no declared views on the possible shape of a final settlement can pre-empt the negotiation of that settlement."

EU Warns About Dangers of Sharon Plan
By CONSTANT BRAND

President Bush's endorsement of Israel's unilateral withdrawal plans damaged the peace process and could play into the hands of Palestinian extremists, European Union foreign ministers warned on Saturday.

"There are an awful lot of people in the Arab world on the whole who take the view that what this week means is that America has turned its back on what has been its policy for almost 40 years," said EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten.

"There is an awful lot of damage to repair," Patten said, "and I think we in Europe have to assist in doing that."

In the name of freedom for all, the current administration has trained it's gunsights on any not sharing it's views. This should be a redlight for all of coming international catastrophe.
Those that are so wrapped up in the red, white and blue they can't see the forest for the trees are in for a horrible awakening. I have no idea when or how but President Bush won't be able to stop it. Even now I think he must be feeling the fire but because he justifies his actions to himself according to his feelings he plunges America deeper into the morass. His followers cling on tightly believing he his leading them to some future utopia. It's not hard when the bombs are falling in faroff places.
George Bush believes America has been called to change the world. “As long as I'm the President, I will press for freedom. I believe so strongly in the power of freedom.” I also have this strong belief that freedom is not this country's gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man, woman and child in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom.”
Note the words called, obligation and belief. Mr. Bush has no strategy because he bases his form of governing on intangibles. Unless you are religious 'calling' should make you, at the very least, skeptical.
America are you feeling your calling? Do you believe? Are you feeling your duty?
If so, cancel your travel plans. The only place you may be safe is behind the wall Mr. Bush will have to build around the US in order to protect it's citizens. Those of us having to live outside this hallowed wall will have to take our chances.
If you are not one of those caught up in Mr. Bush's impossible dream, I suggest you get behind those trying to impeach this President. November may be too late.

“Peace cannot be established without the total end of the Israeli occupation and the settlements,” Arafat said in an uncompromising televised speech here.

“The Palestinian people will never give up its target of achieving freedom, independence, national sovereignty in the independent state of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital,”

Bush’s declarations were also denounced by Hamas, which said in a statement that it would “not prevent our people from continuing the resistance until the end of the occupation and restoring the rights of the Palestinian people,” in particular the right of return.

The movement said Bush’s announcement was “evidence that the position of the American administration is hostile to the Palestinian people and their just cause.”

Mohammed Al Hindi, a senior official in another armed faction, Islamic Jihad, said that Bush had “delivered the coup de grace” to the road map.

Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Arafat’s Fatah movement, said Bush’s “biased policy in favour of injustice and oppression will reinforce the hatred” towards the Americans throughout the world.

PARIS: Arab leaders condemned Bush’s Middle East policy shift yesterday as a dangerous move that could stir violence and the European Union showed it was wary by rejecting unilateral border changes.

The EU, which drew up an international peace “road map” with the United States, avoided direct criticism of Bush. But it said any border changes must be agreed with the Palestinians and any peace deal must include a fair and just deal for refugees.

“This position will have dangerous repercussions on all levels,” Lebanese President Emile Lahoud said in a statement. “It undermines hope for a just and comprehensive peace, inflames feelings of enmity toward America and opens the door towards retaking these rights by force, through all legitimate means of resistance,” he said.

In Damascus, a Syrian official said Bush’s position would not help peace, stability or US interests in the Middle East and that it “closed the door on the road map”.
“The region needs serious and sincere efforts to install peace ... not irrational drifting behind Israeli requests,” the official said, describing it as a “blow to Palestinian rights that is used as an election tactic” to win Bush votes.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said on Wednesday solutions must not be forced on the Palestinians. “To impose anything, they are going to reject it,” he said.

NEW YORK: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan criticised Bush for ignoring the Palestinians’ wishes in implicitly recognising Israel’s claim to some West Bank settlements.

A UN spokesman said that the U.S. policy shift appeared to circumvent negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians necessary for any final peace settlement.
Bahrain Tribune

By Bruce Johnston

The Italian foreign minister, Franco Frattini,...

"I have been authorised by the [victim's] family . . . to reveal the final words of this boy who died what I would call a courageous death, I would say like a hero," Mr Frattini said.

"When his assassins were pointing a gun at him, this boy tried to remove the hood and shouted: 'Now I'll show you how an Italian dies.' And they killed him."

Mr Quattrocchi's abductors shot him in the neck at close range. Al-Jazeera said that he had been forced to dig his own grave.

Mr Quattrocchi was born in Sicily and moved to Genoa with his family. He had become a bodyguard after doing a stint as a nightclub bouncer then signed up to work in Iraq.

He was said to have accepted a job as a security guard working in Iraq for an American company, to earn enough for a home in Italy and to get married.

"Fabrizio was a wonderful man, a man of iron but who had never hurt a fly," his fiancee, Alice, told Italian television yesterday. "He was supposed to come back to me and we were to be married.

"The only consolation is that he died with honour."

But relatives of one of the other hostages, Salvatore Stefio, 34, reacted with despondency and despair. "He may have died a hero but he is still dead," said Mr Stefio's younger brother Christian. Mr Stefio's wife Emanuala, said: "With the murder of Fabrizio Quattrocchi, part of us has also died." Telegraph

By Mark Lavine

A US geophysicist has set the scientific world ablaze by claiming to be able to accurately predict earthquakes - and warning a big one will strike southern California this year.

University of California at Los Angeles professor Vladimir Keilis-Borok says he can foresee major quakes by tracking minor tremors and historical patterns in seismic hotspots that could indicate more violent shaking is on the way.

He has made a chilling prediction that a quake measuring at least 6.4 on the Richter scale will hit a 31,200sqkm area of southern California, including the Mojave desert and the resort town of Palm Springs, by September 5.

The team at UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics accurately predicted a 6.5-magnitude quake in central California last December as well as an 8.1-magnitude quake that struck the Japanese island of Hokkaido in September. news.com.au

Nicholas Watt and Suzanne Goldenberg in

Less than 48 hours after Mr Bush spurned his plea for an "even-handed" approach to the Middle East, the prime minister will make clear in private that Britain cannot sign up to Ariel Sharon's unilateral plan which was all but endorsed by the president.

It emerged yesterday Britain was consulted in general terms by the White House before Wednesday's announcement. Downing Street's influence appeared to be negligible as attempts to rein in Mr Bush were ignored.

"The Palestinians made a very strong plea to the British before Sharon's visit - 'please use your influence with the Bush administration so that they don't change the fundamental positions'. They made a strong pitch to Tony Blair directly, and to Jack Straw," said Ed Abington, a former US consul general in Jerusalem and a consultant to the Palestinian Authority. "Quite clearly, the British have no influence or didn't even try ... I suspect they have no influence."

Britain was not the only power shut out of the decision making process that produced a shift in US policy towards the Middle East. During the weeks of diplomacy, it became increasingly clear that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her aides were the driving force behind the move to endorse Mr Sharon's vision of the future.

Their growing influence came at the expense of the secretary of state, Colin Powell, who reportedly was opposed to this break with tradition, as were career diplomats.

Instead, power shifted toward the leading neo-conservative in Ms Rice's office, Eliot Abrams, remembered for his role in the Iran-Contra affair.

The final accord between Mr Sharon and Mr Bush were not finalised until Tuesday, following talks with the Israeli leader and Ms Rice. Guardian

Judy Dempsey

European governments on Thursday condemned President George W. Bush's backing of Israel's plans to retain settlements in the occupied West Bank, saying it would weaken prospects for peace.

Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said Europe would not accept any change to the borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war - in which Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip - unless it had been agreed by both Palestinians and Israelis.

"The EU remains committed to a negotiated agreement resulting in two viable, sovereign and independent states as the only way to achieve a permanent peace and an end to the occupation that began in 1967," Mr Solana said. "Final status issues can only be resolved by mutual agreement between the parties."

After meeting Ariel Sharon, Israeli prime minister, at the White House on Wednesday, Mr Bush endorsed Israeli plans to evacuate Jewish settlements from Gaza. But for the first time Washington accepted that Israel need not respect pre-1967 borders.

In another setback for Palestinians, Mr Bush also supported Israel's opposition to any right of return to Israel for Palestinian refugees - one of the most sensitive issues in negotiations.

European diplomats said the announcement by Mr Bush in effect spelled the end of the "road map" in which the US, the EU, Russia and the UN had agreed to a schedule that would, through negotiations, lead to an independent Palestinian state by 2006.

Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister, warned against marginalising the Palestinians. "The interests of both sides have to be considered and any solution must be within the framework of the road map that would guarantee peace and security for the region," he said in a statement. FT

Leaders of Australia's indigenous people have condemned the abolition of their elected national commission by the conservative government. Prime Minister John Howard said the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission body or ATSIC had failed to deliver basic services to the Aboriginal Australians despite its 1.3 billion dollar budget and after what he described as a 15-year "experiment". Prime Minister Howard accused the body of focusing too much on what he called "symbolic" issues. The commission's acting chairman Lionel Quartermain said the move was a "sell out". He blamed existing laws for the plight of Aborigines. Numbering 400,000, they remain the nation's poorest, sickest and least educated citizens in a population of 20 million. Last month, the opposition Labor party said it too would abolish the commission. Labor leads in surveys ahead of an election expected later this year. Howard has proposed a substitute, purely advisory council. Deutsch Welle

Faiza Saleh Ambah

Just this week, six security officers and several suspected terrorists were killed in a series of shootouts in and around Riyadh, according to the official Saudi Press Agency.

"These events make it clear that [Al Qaeda is] still capable of getting new recruits, of convincing a certain segment of society of their point of view, and of getting logistical support from sympathizers," says Abdullah Bjad al-Otaibi, a writer and expert on extremists.

"The picture the authorities had of Al Qaeda's strength in Saudi Arabia was not accurate. They have more sympathizers and fighters than they thought, and their language of violence continues to find takers here and support among a segment of Saudi society that shares the common religious ideology of Wahhabism," says Adel al-Toraifi, a columnist at the newspaper Al Watan.

"The problem is that we're not dealing with the extremist thought that makes these men fertile ground for the call to violence; we're only dealing with the violence," says Mr. Toraifi.

The absence in Saudi Arabia of means for clear and peaceful freedom of thought and expression, coupled with the violence against Arabs and Muslims in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq, makes it easier for Al Qaeda to gain recruits, says Mr. Otaibi.

"With the daily television images of soldiers killing Arab women and children in cold blood in Palestine and Iraq, there is growing anti-American feelings among the man in the street, and these guys paint the Saudi government as allies of the United States," says Otaibi. "We must raise the roof on freedom of thought and expression so that these tensions and emotions are dealt with in a peaceful manner."

And the situation will not improve unless reforms are implemented in Saudi Arabia, a solution is found in Palestine, and stability comes to Iraq, says Mr. Nogaidan.

CSM

French ambassador to U.S. speaks
By Hoorig Santikian

His Excellency Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador to the United States, emphasized the importance for France and the United States to move past previous disagreements regarding the war in Iraq and proceed with rebuilding efforts together.

He discussed U.S. and European relationships in a speech in Macgowan Hall on Wednesday.

Levitte, whose foreign service includes French Permanent Representative at the United Nations, outlined the disagreements between the French and U.S. governments on the Iraq war.

In his speech, Levitte recalled the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, emphasizing the global support for the United States and the fight against terrorism.

"On that day, I felt I was indeed an American and the whole world felt the same way," he said.

In a joint effort to eradicate terrorism, the French participated in the war in Afghanistan, an area where French forces still remain, he added.

Levitte said he supported U.N. Resolution 1441 to send inspectors, for the first time in four years, to disarm Saddam Hussein.

While the deployment of some forces to regions surrounding Iraq was a good idea to show Hussein that he must comply with disarmament efforts or face consequences, the U.S. deployment of 300,000 troops enticed the split in the U.N. Security Council and the U.S. and French positions, Levitte said.

Despite previous disagreements, Levitte stressed the need to assess the current situation and rebuilding efforts, saying the French want to help.

"What is at stake in Iraq is huge. We cannot fail," he said.

The situation in Iraq will affect the future of the Muslim and Western worlds and their relationship, he said.

In his discussion of the Iraq war, Levitte also addressed the change in American perception of the French people.

While it's accurate to say the French were against the war and the U.S. leadership, who they felt led the war, the French were not anti-American, Levitte said.

In addition, American criticism, particularly through the media, of the French people was a significant problem, he said.

"I think it is fair to criticize the (French) president, the government of France, but it was unfair and dangerous to insult the French because they were French," he added.

Throughout the speech Levitte stressed the historical relationship between France and the United States.

"We should never forget that French and American forces were together fighting since the early days in the War of Independence," he said.

Levitte's comments on the European Union and the maintenance of international bodies such as the United Nations enticed an outburst from an audience member, who felt that the involvement of international forces in Haiti was an intrusion.

The approach to the Haiti conflict marked a difficult choice, Levitte said.

"To win a war is quite easy, but to build lasting peace and, even more difficult, democracy and market economy needs at least one or two generations," he said.

Levitte's response and composure impressed audience member Mick McCullum, a third-year law student.

"He defined the term 'being very diplomatic' in his handling of the audience," he said.

Vikram Kapoor, a third-year political science student, also appreciated Levitte's comments.

"Until now, I was very misinformed. I learned a lot from this speech about French involvement," he said.
Daily Bruin

A Strategic Shift in the Palestinian Struggle
15-04-2004
By Dr. J.A. Morrow, Ph.D.

After over 50 years of struggle, the time has come for Palestinians to make a strategic shift in their struggle, break the impasse, and move from the bullet to the ballot. Rather than fighting for a fractured Palestinian state, Palestinians should demand their rights as citizens of the single state of “Israel/Palestine” and wage their battle through the ballot.

In the Palestinian context, the path of violence has been proven ineffective and incapable of leading to a lasting solution. Moreover, the military destruction of Israel is an unrealistic ambition. The Arabs do not have the might to defeat Israel. Not only does Israel have the most powerful army in the Middle East, it is also a nuclear power under the protection of most of the Western world. If the recent history of the Palestinian problem has taught us anything, it is that it cannot be resolved by force. Both Israelis and Palestinians have cornered themselves into untenable ideological trenches engendering an unending spiral of violence and suffering. It is time for both parties to start from scratch and come up with a more creative compromise: the creation of a liberal secular democratic state where all people; Jews, Christians and Muslims, are equal before the law and can coexist in freedom, mutual respect, peace and harmony. This single state, which would certainly be supported by the immense majority of the world population, may be the only viable solution to the Palestinian problem and the only approach that can bring peace to Israel and Palestine. Al Bawaba

"We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower in his Farewell Address, January 17, 1961

Chip implanted in cop's hand would allow only officer to fire the gun

By Jill Barton

Palm Beach - A new computer chip promises to keep police guns from firing if they fall into the wrong hands.

The tiny chip would be implanted in a police officer's hand and would match up with a scanning device inside a handgun. If the officer and gun match, a digital signal unlocks the trigger so it can be fired. But if a child or criminal would get hold of the gun, it would be useless.

The technology is the latest attempt to create a so-called "smart gun'' and could be marketed to law enforcement agencies within a year, according to Verichip Corp., which has created the microchip.

[image]DianneMaire_751819 920.jpg[/image]

Sun-Sentinel

VeriChip RFID Technology

VeriChip Corporation, has entered into a memorandum of understanding ("MOU") with FN Manufacturing a leading gun manufacturer to develop a first in the world of firearms. The team's objective is an integrated User Authorization System for firearms using VeriChip RFID technology.

Located in Columbia, South Carolina, this firearms manufacturer produces small arms for military and police forces, as well as the commercial market. The company is engaged in R&D efforts to study and develop various technologies (commonly referred to and understood in industry and the private sector as "smart gun") that could limit the use of a gun to one or more authorized or recognized users.

VeriChip is a miniaturized, radio frequency identification (RFID) device that can be used in a variety of security, financial, emergency identification and other applications. About the size of a grain of rice, each VeriChip product contains a unique verification number and will be available in several formats, some of which will be insertable under the skin. The verification number is captured by briefly passing a proprietary scanner over the VeriChip. A small amount of radio frequency energy passes from the scanner energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal transmitting the verification number. In October 2002, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that VeriChip was not a regulated device with regard to its security, financial, personal identification/safety applications but that VeriChip's healthcare information applications are regulated by the FDA. VeriChip Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions. For more information about VeriChip, visit ADSX

BusinessWire

The ID SNIPERTM rifle designed by EMPIRE NORTH

[image]DianneMaire_133726 8377.jpg[/image]

What is the ID SNIPERTM rifle?

It is used to implant a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. The microchip will enter the body and stay there, causing no internal damage, and only a very small amount of physical pain to the target. It will feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second. At the same time a digital camcorder with a zoom-lense fitted within the scope will take a high-resolution picture of the target. This picture will be stored on a memory card for later image-analysis. Empire North

By Jill Tucker

An Internet activist from Berkeley-based MoveOn.org has taken his online political prowess to John Kerry's presidential campaign.

Zack Exley will direct national online communications for Kerry, bringing with him cutting-edge experience in gathering supporters and cash with computer keystrokes.

Exley was the project director for MoveOn, nationally recognized for raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few days and mobilizing political activism through hundreds of thousands of e-mails, faxes and phone calls.

Eli Pariser, MoveOn's executive director, said Exley left the nonprofit empty-handed, returning his laptop, e-mail address and all other organizational material behind.
In addition, Pariser said, all MoveOn staff will sever all ties with Exley until after the November election.

Bush campaign spokeswoman Susan Whitson said Exley's knowledge about MoveOn alone raises coordination questions. "It's something we're going to watch very carefully," she said

Exley also brings a personal history of mixing it up with Bush.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Exley bought the rights to the Web address GWBush.com and created a satirical Internet page spoofing Bush's real campaign site.

And, when asked about the site during a news conference, Bush responded with the now infamous line, "There ought to be limits to freedom."
The Argus

By Hadi Yahmid, IOL Correspondent

PARIS, April 14 - This year’s conference of the Union of French Islamic Organizations, Paris-le-Bourget, has attracted a cohort of France’s secular, political and cultural elite, who found it a podium of free speech.

Also showing up was Jean Bauberot, member of the Stasi commission, an ad hoc committee set up by French President Jacques Chirac last June to recommend on secularism and religion in the European country.

Bauberot was the only member who refused to endorse the commission’s report, which recommended last December banning hijab and religions insignia in state schools.

Up to 50,000 veiled women sent their unmistakable message through the conference, concluded Monday, April 12, which also saw a fund-raising campaign to build private schools for Muslim students, who refuse to take off their hijabs.

The conference’s seminars have primarily focused on the problems facing the Muslim community in France and Europe, with Islamophobia taking central stage.

Geisser said that Islamophobia is real and not a mere "propaganda" as portrayed by some people.
Islam Online

Betty Freauf

This Broad Band Over Power Lines (BPL) technology has the potential of making George Orwell's prediction seem like nothing in comparison. Orwell portrayed a world in which the individual was helpless against the will of the superstate with "thought police" and surveillance cameras watching our every move making us believe we are safe and this is to make us happy.

You've heard the story about the frog in the pan of cold water with the heat gradually being turned up?

And now, imagine every single electrical outlet in your home or your business serving as a conduit to report every move you make to some corporation or government entity. Farmer Jones miles out of town may not have cable television or a phone because it isn't economically viable but there is a good chance he has electricity

What if you were told this BPL is not science fiction but that it is already being deployed in 30 cities on a trial experimental basis? NewsWithViews

15:34 14 April 04

One of the biggest batches yet of software bugs in Microsoft's Windows software was revealed on Tuesday, prompting users to scramble to install patches to secure home and office computers against potential attack.

A total of 20 individual vulnerabilities were announced by Microsoft in four security bulletins. Three of the bulletins, containing all but one of the bugs, were classified as "critical", the most severe category. Software downloads to rectify all of the problems were released along with details of the flaws.

"This is simply an unprecedented number of vulnerabilities," said Vincent Gullotto, of Network Associates, speaking to TechWeb. Microsoft took the unusual decision to bundle many of patches together, saying this should simplify the update process for users.

The 14 bugs described in the first of bulletins affect all Windows operating systems to some degree. The bugs reside in the peripheral programs that Windows calls upon to perform certain tasks, and many of these are switched on by default when Windows is installed.

Forced crash

Most of the bugs are "buffer overrun" flaws. This means program code is not properly protected while stored in a section of memory known as the buffer, potentially allowing an attacker overwrite it with code of their own.

This could force the program to crash or make it carry out new tasks. Buffer overruns are often exploited by hackers in order to gain control over a targeted system. The peripheral programs affected by this type of bug include the Windows login process, as well those that handle encrypted communications. New Scientist

Inside the fire
Jo Wilding
13 - 4 - 2004

A brave and harrowing report from inside the besieged city of Falluja where ordinary people are trapped in the cross-fire.

11 April, Falluja

Trucks, oil tankers, tanks are burning on the highway east to Falluja. A stream of boys and men goes to and from a lorry that is not burnt, stripping it bare. We turn onto the back roads through Abu Ghraib, Nuha and Ahrar singing in Arabic, past the vehicles full of people with few possessions heading the other way, past the improvised refreshment posts along the way where boys throw food through the windows into the bus for us and for the people still inside Falluja.

The bus is following a car with the nephew of a local sheikh and a guide who has contacts with the Mujahedin and has cleared this with them. The reason I am on the bus is that a journalist I know turned up at my door at about 11 at night telling me things were desperate in Falluja. He had been bringing out children with their limbs blown off. The US soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or they would be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were stopped at the US military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.

He said aid vehicles and the media were being turned away. He said there was some medical aid that needed to go in and there was a better chance of it getting there with foreigners, westerners, to get through the American checkpoints. The rest of the way was secured with the armed groups who control the roads we would travel on. We would take in the medical supplies, see what else we could do to help and then use the bus to bring out people who needed to leave.

I’ll spare you the whole decision making process, the questions we all asked ourselves and each other, and you can spare me the accusations of madness, but what it came down to was this: if I don’t do it, who will?

Either way, we arrived in one piece.

We pile the stuff in the corridor and the boxes are torn open straightaway; the blankets most welcomed. It is not a hospital at all but a clinic, a private doctor’s surgery treating people free since air strikes destroyed the town’s main hospital. Another has been improvised in a car garage. There is no anaesthetic. The blood bags are in a drinks fridge and the doctors warm them up under the hot tap in an unhygienic toilet.

Screaming women come in, praying, slapping their chests and faces. Ummi, mother, one cries. I hold her until Maki, a consultant and acting director of the clinic, brings me to the bed where a child of about ten is lying with a bullet wound to the head. A smaller child is being treated for a similar injury in the next bed. A US sniper, they said, hit them and their grandmother as they left their home to flee Falluja.

The lights go out, the fan stops and in the sudden quiet someone holds up the flame of a cigarette lighter for the doctor to carry on operating by. The electricity to the town has been cut off for days and when the generator runs out of petrol they just have to manage till it comes back on. Dave quickly donates his torch. The children are not going to live.

“Come,” says Maki and ushers me alone into a room where an old woman has just had an abdominal bullet wound stitched up. Another in her leg is being dressed, the bed under her foot soaked with blood, a white flag still clutched in her hand and the same story: “I was leaving my home to go to Baghdad when I was hit by a US sniper.” Some of the town is held by US marines, other parts by the local fighters. These people’s homes are in the US controlled area and they are adamant that the shooters were US marines.

Continue reading at openDemocracy. If you are one that believes the current US administration is right in it's actions in Iraq please re-think your position. US operations in Iraq are not about democracy.

HOLLIS - Family members of a military police unit deployed 17 months ago and sent to Iraq last April met Monday night to plan a campaign to get the soldiers home.

"Our soldiers served well, they fought valiantly in the Sunni Triangle. It is now time for them to come home," said Gerri Whittredge, at whose home about 30 family members met.

Whittredge, mother of Sgt. Steven R. Whittredge, 35, member of the 94th Military Police Company headquartered in Londonderry, said the unit was sent to Kuwait two weeks ago to prepare to go home.

During the weekend, she said, its members were preparing to board buses for planes to head home but on Sunday their departure was put on hold at the last minute.

"This is mental torture - the Army has managed to do what the enemy couldn’t" Whittredge said. "The Army is mentally torturing the soldiers and is terrorizing their families," she said.

"Until now their morale was high. Not anymore," she said.

She added that "we supported President Bush but that may come to a halt soon. We will respond where it counts, at the voting booth," she said.

Whittredge said the group plans a letter-writing campaign to Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, cabinet members and members of Congress.

"We will go before every media we can think of, we will hang banners from bridges, we will go before Congress - whatever it takes," she said.

"These are volunteer reservists who were supposed to serve for a year," she said, adding "that in Vietnam soldiers came home after one year."

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has been asking the Pentagon for information about the 150-plus unit that includes soldiers from Maine.

After being moved from Iraq to Kuwait two weeks ago, the unit has been "put on hold indefinitely," said Jennifer Stegeman of Dayton, Maine, wife of a member of the 94th.

Collins on Sunday said in a statement that quoted a Pentagon official as saying all troops scheduled for rotation out of the region have been frozen in place pending a unit evaluation.

Stegeman said she received a call Saturday from her husband, Sgt. 1st Class Rick Stegeman, who outlined three possible scenarios for the soldiers: return to Iraq, return home or continue to stay in Kuwait.

Nancy Durst, wife of Staff Sgt. Scott Durst from southern Maine, said it was unfair to ask more of the part-time soldiers.

"These guys are exhausted," she said. "They shouldn’t send beaten up soldiers back into combat. I don’t know what this administration’s thinking."

The 94th was deployed in December 2002 but didn’t arrive in Iraq until the following April. A combat MP unit, the company is trained to keep supply lines secure and other military units safe.

The unit originally was to come home last fall, one year after its deployment. But under a new Army policy, reserve and National Guard units can spend 12 months in the country to which they are deployed.

The company spent nine months on a peacekeeping mission in Bosnia before being sent to the Middle East.
Portsmouth Herald

This war in Iraq is still a vital issue in this country. The administration is talking about extending the tour of duty for our men and women who have served. They are talking about sending troops on a second rotation. They have National Guardsmen and Guardswomen and reservists who will soon constitute 40% of the people who have served in Iraq.

Right now, neither the leading Democrat nor the Republican Administration is willing to commit to a plan to bring our troops home. And I say it's time that we take a strong stand and say that we need to bring in UN peacekeepers and bring our troops home and end this sorry adventure in Iraq.

The war in Iraq was wrong. While the United States has won a military victory in Iraq, the Administration never justified the war, rendering it a diplomatic and foreign policy failure.

With its policy in Iraq, the Administration has isolated the United States from the international community and threatens to make our country less safe not more safe. The United States troops have become the targets of criminals and terrorists who are flowing into Iraq for the chance to kill Americans. U.S. military casualties in Iraq continue to rise, and the media has begun comparing the figure to the number of U.S. dead in Vietnam in 1965 prior to the significant expansion of U.S. operations there.

Meanwhile the cost of this occupation continues to escalate. The president has already asked for $155 billion to pay for it, and there is no end in sight. The Administration is ordering top-shelf technology from U.S. corporations for Iraq, paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Sweetheart deals have been awarded with billions of dollars to top corporations and political contributors. This is precisely what corrupts the Administration's reconstruction efforts today. Instead, Iraqis should be employed to repair Iraq, and U.S. taxpayers should pay only for the damage caused by the U.S. invasion, including compensation for its victims. U.S. taxpayers should not be asked to furnish Iraq with what we do not have here!

America must make a dramatic reversal of course: we must acknowledge that the continued U.S. military presence in Iraq is counterproductive and destabilizing. We have a choice in front of us: either we change course, withdraw our troops and request that the UN move in, or we sink deeper into this occupation, with more U.S. casualties, ever higher financial costs, and diminished security for all Americans.

We are now past the one-year anniversary of the invasion. Last year, I stood on First Avenue in New York and looked out at a half a million people who were protesting what was then the prospective involvement of the United States in Iraq. Since then, we have seen that there has been nothing but a trail of lies that led the United States into its involvement in Iraq. That Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Iraq had nothing to do with Al Qaeda's role in 9/11, nor with the anthrax attack upon this country. Iraq had neither the intention nor the capability of attacking the United States. Iraq was not trying to get uranium from Niger. In fact, Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction.

It was wrong to go in, it is wrong to stay in. We need to get the UN involved and bring in UN peacekeepers. We need to turn over to the UN control of the oil to be handled on behalf of the Iraqi people until the Iraqi people are self-governing, control of the contracts so there will be no more Halliburton sweetheart deals, no more privatization of Iraq, and no trying to run the government of Iraq by remote control. We need to help rebuild Iraq to the extent that we destroyed it, pay reparations to the families of innocent civilians and noncombatants who have lost their lives, help to rebuild Iraq, help to pay for a UN peacekeeping mission, and BRING OUR TROOPS HOME.

BRING THEM HOME!

We must work to bring Iraq back into the community of nations, not through destruction, but through constructive action worldwide. America, with the international community, can help negotiate a resolution with Iraq that encompasses unfettered inspections, the end of sanctions, and the cessation of the regime-change policy. America can do this. We have the power to do this. We must have the will to do this. It must be the will of the American people expressed through the direct action of peaceful insistence, and this is the place to begin that. If we begin this in any place in America, begin it here! Kucinich For President

By John F. Kerry
Tuesday, April 13, 2004

To be successful in Iraq, and in any war for that matter, our use of force must be tied to a political objective more complete than the ouster of a regime. To date, that has not happened in Iraq. It is time it did.

In the past week the situation in Iraq has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. While we may have differed on how we went to war, Americans of all political persuasions are united in our determination to succeed. The extremists attacking our forces should know they will not succeed in dividing America, or in sapping American resolve, or in forcing the premature withdrawal of U.S. troops. Our country is committed to help the Iraqis build a stable, peaceful and pluralistic society. No matter who is elected president in November, we will persevere in that mission.

But to maximize our chances for success, and to minimize the risk of failure, we must make full use of the assets we have. If our military commanders request more troops, we should deploy them. Progress is not possible in Iraq if people lack the security to go about the business of daily life. Yet the military alone cannot win the peace in Iraq. We need a political strategy that will work.

Over the past year the Bush administration has advanced several plans for a transition to democratic rule in Iraq. Each of those plans, after proving to be unworkable, was abandoned. The administration has set a date (June 30) for returning authority to an Iraqi entity to run the country, but there is no agreement with the Iraqis on how it will be constituted to make it representative enough to have popular legitimacy. Because of the way the White House has run the war, we are left with the United States bearing most of the costs and risks associated with every aspect of the Iraqi transition. We have lost lives, time, momentum and credibility. And we are seeing increasing numbers of Iraqis lashing out at the United States to express their frustration over what the Bush administration has and hasn't done.

In recent weeks the administration -- in effect acknowledging the failure of its own efforts -- has turned to U.N. representative Lakhdar Brahimi to develop a formula for an interim Iraqi government that each of the major Iraqi factions can accept. It is vital that Brahimi accomplish this mission, but the odds are long, because tensions have been allowed to build and distrust among the various Iraqi groups runs deep. The United States can bolster Brahimi's limited leverage by saying in advance that we will support any plan he proposes that gains the support of Iraqi leaders. Moving forward, the administration must make the United Nations a full partner responsible for developing Iraq's transition to a new constitution and government. We also need to renew our effort to attract international support in the form of boots on the ground to create a climate of security in Iraq. We need more troops and more people who can train Iraqi troops and assist Iraqi police.

We should urge NATO to create a new out-of-area operation for Iraq under the lead of a U.S. commander. This would help us obtain more troops from major powers. The events of the past week will make foreign governments extremely reluctant to put their citizens at risk. That is why international acceptance of responsibility for stabilizing Iraq must be matched by international authority for managing the remainder of the Iraqi transition. The United Nations, not the United States, should be the primary civilian partner in working with Iraqi leaders to hold elections, restore government services, rebuild the economy, and re-create a sense of hope and optimism among the Iraqi people. The primary responsibility for security must remain with the U.S. military, preferably helped by NATO until we have an Iraqi security force fully prepared to take responsibility.

Finally, we must level with our citizens. Increasingly, the American people are confused about our goals in Iraq, particularly why we are going it almost alone. The president must rally the country around a clear and credible goal. The challenges are significant and the costs are high. But the stakes are too great to lose the support of the American people.

This morning, as we sit down to read newspapers in the comfort of our homes or offices, we have an obligation to think of our fighting men and women in Iraq who awake each morning to a shooting gallery in which it is exceedingly difficult to distinguish friend from foe, and the death of every innocent creates more enemies. We owe it to our soldiers and Marines to use absolutely every tool we can muster to help them succeed in their mission without exposing them to unnecessary risk. That is not a partisan proposal. It is a matter of national honor and trust. John Kerry Blog

The pre-9/11 blunder you’ve probably never heard of
by David Corn

The real question for the 9/11 commission — and the American public — is not whether George W. Bush considered al Qaeda an urgent threat before 9/11, but this: How did the U.S. government let Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi get away with it?

Don’t know who al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi are — or were? Their names should be household words; they should be as famous as Lee Harvey Oswald. They were two of the 9/11 hijackers who took control of Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon. But they were

different from the other 19 hijackers. The CIA had been watching them as early as January 2000. Yet the CIA failed to let the FBI know that these two men — who had attended an al Qaeda summit in Malaysia in early 2000 — were in the United States or heading toward it. Consequently, the FBI lost what probably was the best opportunity it had to unravel the 9/11 plot.

This episode is important to keep in mind as Washington partisans and commentators dissect the face-off between Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, and the Bush White House, particularly National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. (This column was written before Rice’s much-anticipated public testimony to the 9/11 commission.) The Clarke dustup focused on a matter that shouldn’t be a subject of dispute. Clarke accused George W. Bush of having failed to consider the al Qaeda threat a top priority before September 11, 2001, and the White House cried did-not. But Bush told journalist Bob Woodward (for Woodward’s book Bush at War) that before 9/11, when it came to Osama bin Laden, “I didn’t feel that sense of urgency.” So where’s the argument? Other evidence uncovered by the 9/11 commission and a separate 9/11 investigation conducted by the House and Senate intelligence committees support Bush on this point. Why not take him at his word? LA Weekly

Not long ago, April 4th to be exact, I posted an article,
'U.S. Muslims Seek Pentagon Probe of Iraq Photo.'
This article has been picked up by quite a few sites outside tblog. Doing a follow-up on this story took me to Marine Corps Times.

Their heading for this story:

'Islamic group demands inquiry into ‘gag’ photo'

Reservist under investigation for claims in image

By Laura Bailey
Times staff writer

An Islamic civil liberties group has called for a Pentagon investigation into an apparent gag photograph of a Marine in Iraq taken during the last year.

Ms. Bailey obviously has her own views on this photo which she shares in her title and first paragraph. Reading the rest of the article there is no reference that this is a gag photo only that the Pentagon has been asked to look into the matter and the marine is under investigation as to the truthfulness of the sign and his actions, which were deplorable even if it was done as a joke.
Reaching the end of the article I noticed there was a forum for discussion on the article. I couldn't resist having a look. I was hopeful that I might find people just as disgusted as I was about this matter. But no, one man makes excuses and talks of how sad it is we've lost our sense of humor. Another person posted the following.

"C.A.I.R. has ties to terriorists. C.A.I.R.'s ultimate goal is to turn the U.S.A. into a Muslim nation."

I was really tempted to join this group if only to have my say to them but decided to have it here.

Cair (Council on American-Islamic Relations)
is a Muslim civil liberties group located in Washington D.C. Several months ago I joined their mailing list in order to gain better understanding of a people I knew next to nothing about. The news I read daily was filled with Islam. My television was filled with pictures of women in veils. I remember especially being interested when reading about the women of Afghanistan and the Taliban. I remember being horrified by many of the scenes I saw during that time. But, I would also hear many Muslims speaking out against this kind of abuse.
I realized I needed to know more and made it my business to do so.

Here is an example of the mail out I receive without the news included. Many times there are articles pointing out the kind acts some Americans have shown Muslims. It's not all about racism and it's certainly not about supporting terrorist.

In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful

AMERICAN MUSLIM NEWS BRIEFS - 4/12/04

* HADITH OF THE DAY: THE PROPHET'S ORDERS
* 300 TURN OUT FOR CAIR-NY FUNDRAISING DINNER
* MARINE UNDER INVESTIGATION FOR IRAQ PHOTO (MC Times)
- U.S. Muslims Seek Pentagon Probe of Photo (CAIR)
* IL: ARABS AND JEWS TO PROTEST JACKIE MASON (NIMN)
* PA STUDENTS OPEN ABOUT ISLAM AT OPEN HOUSE (Pitts News)
- FL: An American As Well As a Muslim (Sun-Sentinel)
* NY: THREE COUSINS KILLED ON RETREAT IN PA (AP)
* TRIAL IN IDAHO WILL TEST ANTITERROR TACTIC (WSJ)
* INDIAN MUSLIMS SKEPTICAL AT RULING HINDUS' PITCH (AFP)
- Court Orders Retrial of Gujarat Case (Reuters)
* ONE FALLUJAH FAMILY'S HARROWING TREK (USA Today)

For any interested in learning more about this organization: Cair

Gaza - The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) today stopped distributing emergency food aid to some 600,000 refugees in the Gaza Strip, or approximately half of the refugees receiving UNRWA food aid in the occupied Palestinian territory, following restrictions introduced by Israeli authorities at the sole commercial crossing through which the Agency is able to bring in humanitarian assistance. Stocks of rice, flour, cooking oil and other essential foodstuffs that UNRWA provides to refugees reduced to poverty, or otherwise affected by a humanitarian crisis now in its 42nd month, have been fully depleted. UN Relief and Works Agency

To: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
We are appalled to hear that UNRWA has been forced to suspend its food aid in Gaza as a result of new Israeli regulations. The severe economic hardship of the children and adults in Gaza is well documented by US AID and other sources. Preventing the access of humanitarian aid will exacerbate already existing conditions of starvation and malnourishment.

Therefore, we individuals and organizations concerned with peace, justice, and human rights -- Israeli and international -- call upon the Israeli government to ensure that UNWRA and other relief agencies are able to continue their work or, alternatively, that Israel replace this aid with its own, and thereby ensure the well-being of the population, as mandated by the Fourth Geneva Convention.

We demand that the Israeli government address this matter with the utmost urgency, as human lives are at stake. We call upon the governments of other countries to lend weight to this humanitarian appeal, which is intended to secure Israel's compliance with its obligations under law as well as basic humanitarian values.

Sincerely,
Sign petition to open gates to allow food into Gaza

by Fred Reed

Help me puzzle out Iraq. I’m just a country boy, and don’t understand Advanced Thought, or high strategy, or anything else. I admit it. Tell me about Iraq – quick, 'cause it seems to be blowing itself all to flinders, and it’s hard to study something the which there ain’t no more.

Now, as I understand it from the White House itself, it’s all because of three diehard Saddamites, two terrorists, and an outside agitator. Yes. The White House says ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent of Iraqis love us, and want us to bomb them and invade them, and starve them with embargos, and only a few soreheads don’t like it. And I believe the White House. You can only lie so long before you slip up and tell the truth. I figure they’re about due.

What I think is, those rascally diehards and the outside agitator must be fast. I mean, they get from city to city so quick they make it seem like the whole country wants us to go somewhere else, anywhere else, when really they all love us. If I worked for them Nike shoe people, I believe I’d get those terrorists to sign an advertising contract. Michael Jordan was swift, but compared to these guys he’s a federal program.

But I want to understand about strategy. Yesterday, it said on CNN, the White House bombed a mosque full of people and killed forty of them, to make them democratic. It was because the two terrorists or maybe the outside agitator was inside. Being as I am unwashed and don’t know much, I’d have said it wasn’t the shiniest thought in the idea basket. You got a country full of people who take religion real serious, and so you bomb a church in the middle of services.

But what do I know? Somebody called Mark Kimmitt, a brigadier general, said to CNN, "When you start using a religious location for military purposes, it loses its protected status.” If they hid in mosques again, we’d bomb them again, he said.

Now that he has explained it, it makes sense to me. If bombing one church doesn’t make them democratic, and love us, then bombing some more churches will. It wouldn’t fly in West Virginia, but that’s a different culture. Arabs like being bombed.

Some folks would say Kimmitt has to be dumber than a bucket of catfish. I’m less sanguine. I’ve known catfish. Kimmitt makes a catfish look like Fifth Century Athens. If I were part of the Iraqi Resistance, I couldn’t think of anything I’d like more than some damn fool blowing up mosques. It would save fortunes on recruiting expenses.

When I lived in Alabama, which never invaded Arab countries – we figured it was none of our business – people used to say as how the two greatest Confederate generals were George McClellan and Ambrose Burnside. I reckon the two most effective outside agitators must be Kimmitt and Paul Bremer.

Granted, I don’t know much about the White House. I never get calls from Mr. Bush, or his ventriloquists. Still, I figure he must know a lot about the Middle East. I guess he must speak several languages as well as a little English. General Sanchez in Baghdad and all the American officials speak good Arabic of course. They must. Bush especially must speak Arabic. Why, it’s practically a second language in Texas. It wouldn’t make sense to send people to Iraq who couldn’t talk a lick of the local lingo and barely knew where they were. Don’t you think?

One thing the White House has done real well is housetrain the press. Even I can see that. Reporters today are well behaved suckups, like those fuzzy little lapdogs you could glue to a stick and use for a duster. Notice how we never hear anything about old Saddam? (Note that I’m on first-name terms with him.) I guess it’s not our business, and the papers aren’t going to ask. Ever hear honest interviews with the troops in Iraq? Naw. That’s not our business either. I mean, they’re not our sons, brothers, husbands and neighbors or anything.

But you can bet that ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent of our soldiers love what they’re doing, and care deeply about democracy in Iraq, wherever it is.

I see hope, howsomever. I have read that we are getting advice from Israel on pacifying Moslems. You know: When we think one of the three diehards, two terrorists, or the outside agitator might own a house, we bulldoze it and punish the entire town. (It’s starting to look as if diehards own most of the houses in Iraq. I guess we’re fighting a war against real-estate magnates. Maybe if we raised mortgage rates….)

Skeptics and other traitors say that the Israelis are the most provably clueless people alive when it comes to pacifying Moslems. They’ve been at it for fifty years and some guy still blows up in a shopping mall every twenty seconds. This isn’t fair. Americans are impatient people. Things take time. Given that there are more Iraqis than Palestinians, I figure we’ll get the job done in about three hundred years. If we send more troops.

Now, some people tell me that I’m all soft and squishy on terrorism and need to learn about realpolitik. They may be right. As best I can see, realpolitik is a mood of self-congratulatory pugnacity accompanied by complete witlessness about how people work. It is usually associated with paranoia and the empathy of a table-leg. And it isn’t spelled well.

Anyhow, realpoliticky friends tell me that what we need to do is teach these people a sharp lesson. If somebody shoots at us from the town of Falafel, we should destroy the city. That’ll show’em, bowwow, grr, woof. There is a certain logic to this. Dead people are inherently peaceful. In classical antiquity armies put cities to the sword, adults, children, dogs, and gold fish. It sure enough pacified them.

Maybe that’s what we’re doing. As I write this, CNN says Mr. Bush is attacking Falafel, or maybe it was Wahabi, with an AC-130 Spectre gunship. Spectre makes a pretty good sword. In another life as a military columnist I flew in those things, then the H model though they’re probably U’s now. If memory serves, they now have a 105 howitzer, 40mm Bofors, and 25mm Gatling stuck out one side. Spray a city with those, and they’ll love freedom, I say. And us, too. I always love people that blow up my neighborhood. Don’t you?

What I think is, the Iraqis need to learn that democracy isn’t easy, and doesn’t come cheap. LewRockwell.com

This is especially for all of you who shout from the rooftops on the merits and even righteousness of war, no matter what side you're on.

I saw someone repeat a shameful phrase from America's past, only changing the first word to fit the times.."Nuke em all, let God sort them out."
This was a phrase used for Indians and Negros not so many years ago. It seems to keep popping up in this racist society.
I'm sick to death of racism and any of you that try to hide your racism behind patriotism or religion be warned. I will do my best to reveal what you really are at heart.

View Anniversary

The 9/11 commission should ask who authorized the evacuation of Saudi nationals in the days following the attacks
By Craig Unger, 4/11/2004

IN ITS TOUGH QUESTIONING of Richard Clarke and Condoleezza Rice, the 9/11 commission has already shown itself to be more resolute than some skeptics predicted. Many Americans now realize that multiple warnings of an Al Qaeda attack on American soil crossed the desks of Bush administration officials in the months leading up to 9/11. The administration's previously unchallenged narrative has begun to unravel.

But when hearings resume on Tuesday, we may learn exactly how tough the commission is prepared to be. This time the stars will be Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, among others. When they testify -- especially Mueller -- we will see whether or not the commission has the stomach to address what may be the single most egregious security lapse related to the attacks: the evacuation of approximately 140 Saudis just two days after 9/11.

Let's go back to Sept. 13, 2001, and look at several scenes that were taking place simultaneously. Three thousand people had just been killed. The toxic rubble of the World Trade Center was still ablaze. American airspace was locked down. Not even Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who were out of the country, were allowed to fly home. And a plane bearing a replacement heart for a desperately ill Seattle man was forced down short of its destination by military aircraft. Not since the days of the Wright Brothers had American skies been so empty.

But some people desperately wanted to fly out of the country. That same day, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States and a long-time friend of the Bush family, dropped by the White House. He and President George W. Bush went out to the Truman Balcony for a private conversation. We do not know everything they discussed, but the Saudis themselves say that Prince Bandar was trying to orchestrate the evacuation of scores of Saudis from the United States despite the lockdown on air travel.

Meanwhile, a small plane in Tampa, Fla. took off for Lexington, Ky. According to former Tampa cop Dan Grossi and former FBI agent Manny Perez, who were on the flight to provide security, the passengers included three young Saudis. Given the national security crisis, both Grossi and Perez were astonished that they were allowed to take off. The flight could not have taken place without White House approval. Boston Globe

"You Are a Liar"

by Catherine Austin Fitts
Former Assistant Secretary of Housing

Hon. Condoleezza Rice
National Security Advisor
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

April 9, 2004

Dear Ms. Rice:

I am writing to communicate four points regarding your testimony yesterday under oath before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

Point #1: You are a liar.

Attorney General Ashcroft sits on the National Security Council. Warned by his FBI security detail, the head of law enforcement for the United States knew to avoid commercial airlines on September 11, 2001.

It was your job as National Security Advisor to make sure that the people who flew on American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, United Airlines Flight 93 and American Airlines Flight 77 had the benefit of the same warnings as those they paid to protect us.

You knew. You kept silent. They died.

You had numerous warnings of the risks of 9-11 – sufficient to let the American people know and use their best judgment as to how to protect themselves from a possible attack. It was your job as National Security Advisor to make sure that the people in the South Tower of the World Trade Center had the knowledge they needed to evacuate their building upon seeing the North Tower hit by a plane.

You knew. You kept silent. They died.

Point #2: Your motives are transparent.

The World Trade Center is in the heart of New York City – one of the great financial capitals of the world. The Pentagon is in the heart of Washington -- the appropriation and accounting capital for the US federal budget and credit and the US Treasury – the largest issuer of securities in the world.

Unlike many other terrorist attacks, these attacks killed people whose family, friends and neighbors understand how these financial systems work. Victim families, friends and the residents of the communities directly harmed can calculate who made money on 9-11 profiteering. They can trace the flow of money into the 2004 Presidential campaign coffers from the profits your supporters made as a result of 9-11 profiteering. They can calculate how 9-11 profiteering connects to the financing and silence of corporate media.

Those personally impacted and the global researchers they network with have the intellectual power and personal courage to ask and answer, “Cui Bono?” (Who Benefits?) They understand that your success as National Security Advisor is as a direct result of your failure to stop 9-11. They can see how your lies about 9-11 made money for the investment syndicate that put you in power and for the buyers of US Treasury securities who are so richly paid to finance the US military, intelligence and enforcement apparatus and the defense contractors and oil interests it serves.

All the campaign ads in the world can not now convince the American people that you have their best interests at heart.

Point #3: You are going down.

The richest and most powerful people in the world pay for performance. They pay you to make the US governmental apparatus look legitimate while they use it to centralize economic and political power. That means they need liars who are better at lying than you.

The myth that you had no idea that Americans deserved to be warned about the risks of flying or planes being used as weapons is now in the dust heap with the notion that the United States attacked Iraq and our soldiers are dying to protect us from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Your lies of 9-11 – like your lies about the Iraqi war – have been profitable for the military-banking complex you represent. These lies, however, have not misled the crowd. The American people and global citizens are looking for the truth. We demand the changes that will give meaning and honor to those who died on 9-11 and in the ensuing wars. We demand an end to further bloodshed. We demand a refund of all that you and your backers have stolen from those of us who remain alive.

Point #4: You are guilty of criminal gross negligence.

If you want to catch a terrorist today, you need look no further than your own mirror.

Many Americans gather this weekend to give thanks that Jesus died for our sins and gave us the covenant of grace. In the spirit of our Lord's crucification and resurrection, may God have mercy on your soul.

Sincerely Yours,
Catherine Austin Fitts
Former Assistant Secretary of Housing, Bush I

From the Wilderness

Newsweek Poll

Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president? * 18288 web responses

RESPONSES WEB Newsweek Magazine

Approve 19% 49%
Disapprove 80% 45%
Don't know 1% 6%

Do you think the U.S. military action against Iraq has done more to INCREASE the risk or DECREASE the risk that large numbers of Americans will be killed or injured in a future terrorist attack--or that it hasn't made much difference either way? * 18224 web responses

RESPONSES WEB Newsweek Magazine

Increase 76% 42%
Decrease 16% 29%
No difference 7% 24%
Don't know 2% 5%

How concerned about you that Iraq will become another Vietnam in which the United States does not accomplish its goals despite many years of military involvement? Are you ... * 18304 web responses

RESPONSES WEB Newsweek Magazine

Very 64% 40%
Somewhat 17% 24%
Not too 6% 14%
Not at all 12% 20%
Don't know 0% 2%

Given what each administration knew at the time, do you think the Bush administration or the Clinton administration is more to blame for not preventing the September 11, 2001 attacks--OR that the two administrations are equally to blame? * 18336 web responses

RESPONSES WEB Newsweek Magazine

Bush administration 62% 18%
Clinton administration 15% 24%
Both equally 16% 39%
Neither 6% 11%
Don't know 1% 8%

Has Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the commission made you more likely or less likely to think the Bush administration did all it could to prevent the September 11 attacks--or has her testimony not made much difference? * 18366 web responses

RESPONSES WEB Newsweek Magazine

More likely 18% 21%
Less likely 66% 15%
Not made much difference 16% 46%
Don't know/No opinion 1% 18%

Newsweek

by Naomi Klein April 9 2004

April 9, 2003 was the day Baghdad fell to U.S. forces. One year later, it is rising up against them.

Donald Rumsfeld claims that the resistance is just a few "thugs, gangs and terrorists." This is dangerous, wishful thinking. The war against the occupation is now being fought out in the open, by regular people defending their homes and neighbourhoods — an Iraqi intifada.

"They stole our playground," an eight-year-old boy in Sadr City told me this week, pointing at six tanks parked in a soccer field, next to a rusty jungle gym. The field is a precious bit of green in an area of Baghdad that is otherwise a swamp of raw sewage and uncollected garbage.

Sadr City has seen little of Iraq's multi-billion-dollar "reconstruction," which is partly why Muqtader Sadr and his Mahadi army have so much support here. Before U.S. occupation chief Paul Bremer provoked Sadr into an armed conflict by shutting down his newspaper and arresting and killing his deputies, the Mahadi army was not fighting coalition forces, it was doing their job for them.

After all, in the year it has controlled Baghdad, the Coalition Provisional Authority still hasn’t managed to get the traffic lights working or to provide the most basic security for civilians. So in Sadr City, Sadr's so-called "outlaw militia" can be seen engaged in such subversive activities as directing traffic and guarding factories from looters. In a way, the Mahadi army is as much Bremer’s creation as it al Sadr’s: it was Bremer who created Iraq's security vacuum — Sadr simply filled it.

But as the June 30 “handover” to Iraqi control approaches, Bremer now sees Sadr and the Mahadi as a threat that must be taken out — along with the communities that have grown to depend on them. Which is why stolen playgrounds were only the start of what I saw in Sadr City this week. At Al -Thawra Hospital, I met Raad Daier, a 36-year-old ambulance driver with a bullet in his lower abdomen, one of 12 shots fired at his ambulance from a U.S. Humvee. According to hospital officials, at the time of the attack, he was carrying six people injured by U.S. forces, including a pregnant woman who had been shot in the stomach and lost her child.

I saw charred cars that dozens of eye-witnesses said had been hit by U.S. missiles, and confirmed with local hospitals that their drivers had been burned alive. I also visited Block 37 of the Sadr City's Chuadir District, a row of houses where every door was riddled with holes. Resident said U.S. tanks rolled down their street firing into their homes. Five people were killed, including Murtada Muhammad, age 4.



And yesterday I saw something that I feared more than any of this: a copy of the Koran with a bullet hole through it. It was lying in the ruins of what was Sadr's headquarters in Sadr City. A few hours earlier, witnesses say that two U.S. tanks broke down the walls of the center while two guided missiles pierced its roof, leaving giant craters in the floor and missile debris behind.

The worst damage, however, was done by hand. The clerics at the Sadr office say that U.S. soldiers entered the building and crudely shredded photographs of the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the top Shiite cleric in Iraq. When I arrived at the destroyed center, the floor was covered in torn religious texts, including several copies of the Koran that been ripped and shot through with bullets. And it did not escape the notice of the Shiites here that hours earlier, U.S. soldiers had bombed a Sunni mosque in Fallouja.

For months the White House has been making ominous predictions of a civil war breaking out between the majority Shiites, who believe it's their turn to rule Iraq, and the minority Sunnis, who want to hold on to the privileges they amassed under Hussein's regime. But this week the opposite appears to have taken place. Both Sunni and Shiite have seen their neighbourhoods attacked and their religious sites desecrated. Up against a shared enemy, they are beginning to bury ancient rivalries and join forces against the occupation. Instead of a civil war, they are on the verge of building a common front.

You could see it at the mosques in Sadr City on Thursday: thousands of Shiites lined up to donate blood, destined for Sunnis hurt in the attacks in Fallouja. “We should thank Paul Bremer,” Salih Ali told me. “He has finally united Iraq. Against him.” No Logo

There’s nothing bashful about Jewish organizations, but in 2004, many suddenly go mute if the subject involves potential conflict with the Bush administration.

The silence epidemic has been particularly evident in the ongoing Capitol Hill battles over President Bush’s proposals for new tax cuts and some of his archconservative nominees to the federal bench. But it has also shown up on a host of other issues, including one traditionally close to the hearts of many Jewish activists: church-state separation.

The reasons for this uncharacteristic reticence can be summed up in one word: fear. Jewish leaders fear that clashing with the president on his top domestic priorities might affect his support for Israel, and they fear losing precious White House access. Jewish Journal

BY ERIN TEXEIRA

American military leaders should not target Iraqi mosques, and should bring U.S. soldiers home and allow the United Nations to lead the effort in Iraq, according to a letter to President George W. Bush signed by hundreds of Long Island Muslims Friday.

The letter, drafted by officials with the Islamic Center of Long Island in Westbury, follows an upsurge in violence in Iraq, including deadly attacks outside a mosque in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, on Wednesday, killing several dozen Iraqis.

"We don't believe it's in America's best interest to get near a house of worship," said Ghazi Khankan, communications director of the Islamic Center, who wrote the letter Thursday. "It's a very sensitive issue and it could create an anti-American backlash."

More than 300 signed the letter Friday after regular services at the Islamic Center. Organizers also forwarded it to more than 150 other mosques in the state, and plan to send it to Bush next week, Khankan said.

The letter calls for the United Nations to lead reconstruction efforts in Iraq going forward, urged the president to "bring home our boys and girls" and condemns American troops for firing rockets on the mosque in Fallujah.

The letter comes as part of an effort by area Muslims to voice their political views and encourage voting in November's presidential contest.

New York City area Muslim-American activists have an ongoing voter registration campaign, and organizers are working to get more community members involved, said Dr. Faroque Khan, president of the Islamic Center. Today at 3 p.m., the New York Chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations will hold a news conference on the role of Muslim-Americans in the elections at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in East Elmhurst.

"Currently, there is no input of the Muslim-American community in policy-making, yet most of the events overseas are happening in Muslim countries," Khan said. "So there's a disconnect." Newsday

Those who fled the city describe increasing sympathy for fighters despite U.S. claims.

By Alissa J. Rubin, Times Staff Writer

BAGHDAD — Crowded together on sagging couches in the Baghdad living room of a distant cousin, Umm Samir and 25 other female relatives and their children clamored Saturday to tell their stories of U.S. troops' weeklong siege of Fallouja.

The women, some of whom had just fled the city that morning, spoke of small victories, such as having stockpiled enough water, and painful defeats, like the sight of neighbors shot dead in the street and ambulances pocked with bullet holes. But above all, their accounts suggested empathy with the insurgents who had been fighting tenaciously to keep Marines from taking control of their city of 300,000 people. LA Times

The United States is extremely fond of labeling its opposition with nasty adjectives like 'strong man', 'radical Islamic militant' and so o­n. All along they refer to their leadership as being the people that 'love freedom', where people can enjoy the happiness of a 'free press' and the 'rule of law'. The president has repeatedly referred those that oppose his will in Iraq as people that 'hate freedom'. I wonder if the United States prisons are also full of people that 'hate freedom'. Yes, the United States spends a lot of money in Iraq o­n getting its side of the story out but what is less popularly known is their efforts to suppress the 'series of lies' that they claim that the anti-American coverage purveys.

Two major events are often cited as triggering events for the current crisis in Iraq. One is an order by the current 'strong man' in Iraq, Paul Bremer, in which he ordered the closing of the newspaper of the radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The other event was the arrest of a lieutenant of Muqtada al-Sadr. Even though these events sparked widespread protests by the Iraqi's, it was the subsequent 'crack down' by the United States that has caused the widespread violence.

Foreign Aid Watch

By David Usborne in New York
11 April 2004

Pressure continued to mount on George Bush to explain why more was not done to counter terrorist threats prior to the strikes of 11 September, 2001, as it emerged he was told in the month before of multiple indications of new activities by al-Qa'ida, including plans to hijack aircraft.

The fresh embarrassment for Mr Bush centres on an intelligence briefing he received on 6 August 2001. The page-and-a-half memo, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States", was released late last night.

Mr Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, insisted in her public testimony to the 9/11 commission last week that the memo contained mostly historical information and did not warn of any coming attacks inside the US. Her account could be contradicted by the fact that the memo included information from three months beforehand that al-Qa'ida members were trying to enter the US for an attack with explosives. Independent

Just a small post to let those that read my blog know I have been unable to access it for almost 2 days. It's truly frustrating but it seems nothing can be done but wait.
Again let me say I have started another blog that seems to have no problems and will post there when I am unable to reach tblog. Current Affairs
[image]DianneMaire_142683 475.jpg[/image]

By Rahul Mahajan blogging from Baghdad

April 9, 9:22 am EST. Baghdad, Iraq -- Everybody except for the adventure-seekers is lying low today. Many Iraqis have been keeping their children home from school for the past couple days. Traffic on the normally busy Karrada St. is way down. The sound of Apache helicopters fill the air -- except in Fallujah, where they are attacking the town with AC-130 Spectre gunships.

I want to follow up on some of my earlier thoughts. In a post about Moqtada al-Sadr's movement, I mentioned that his younger followers, who are far more zealous, are "children of the sanctions" -- products of the 12-year-long breakdown of a society.

I also posted about the mass relief effort for Fallujah, which we chanced upon at the Abu Hanifa mosque in Aadhamiyah. The effort was entirely coordinated through the mosques. Empire Notes

Being a cat lover, I have 3 at the moment, I found this article very interesting especially as this little beauty looks so much like my T-Rex. He's appropriately named and probably does have African wildcat genes.

Jean-Denis Vigne of the French research organisation CNRS and the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and his colleagues have discovered the remains of a Neolithic cat at the ancient village of Shillourokambos in Cyprus, and the manner of its burial suggests the animal was a pet.

[image]DianneMaire_131295 1474.jpg[/image]

The cat belonged to the species Felis silvestris, the wild cat from which domestic cats descended. Its remains lie just 40 centimetres from a 9500-year-old human grave containing valuable offerings such as polished stones and seashells.

Furthermore, the human and cat skeletons have identical states of preservation. The skeletons were positioned symmetrically, with both heads pointing west, which may have been intentional.

The cat died when it was about eight months old, and while the cause of death is a mystery, there are no signs on the bones that the animal was butchered for food.

Vigne thinks the proximity of the human skeleton suggests a strong bond with the cat, which might have been killed to go to the grave with its master. It would have made sense for early agricultural societies to mingle with cats, he adds, because cats could have killed the mice that nibbled precious grain supplies.

NewScientist

Although the Bush administration would have us beleive the current rebellion in Iraq is from a 'small' group of insurgents, this is clearly not true. It's propaganda being espoused to support the continued occupation of Iraq directed to the American people whom Bush is dependant on if he hopes to remain president.

Because the US invasion and occupation is dependant on this propaganda being believed by the American citizenry there is no way the US can pull out. This would require an aknowledgement of the lies and have possible repercussions for the current administration.

Therefore the continued statesment calling those fighting for their freedom from American occupation, insurgents, the enemy, rebel factions, terrorists, those that hate freedom etc. must be continued in order to bolster the propaganda and give creedance to continued bombings of the population of Iraq in the minds of Americans.

At least Jack Straw one of the staunchest US allies is showing a bit of common sense.

Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, acknowledged in a radio interview that "there is no doubt that the current situation is very serious and it is the most serious that we have faced." Significantly, Straw countered suggestions from the Bush administration's supporters in Washington that the sudden spike in violence, drawing in both the Sunni minority and the Shiite majority, had been provoked by small numbers of opponents of the U.S.-led occupation or non-Iraqi Muslim fighters.

"It is plainly the fact today that there are larger numbers of people, and they are people on the ground, Iraqis, not foreign fighters, who are engaged in this insurgency," he said.

Bravo Mr. Straw!

Other statements of interest:

"We have to first pull our forces and this would show the hawks in the United States that they have to abandon their position," said Senator Stefano Boco of the Green Party.

But Russia, a steadfast opponent of the war, issued a strongly worded statement on Friday demanding a halt to military operations to stop what Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov called "a humanitarian catastrophe" in some cities that "look very much like a civil war." In a separate statement the Russian Foreign Ministry said: "Russia calls for an end to military operations and restraints." "Hospitals, civilian buildings and religious establishments are being attacked. Completely innocent people are being killed as a result, including the elderly, women and children," the statement said, referring to fighting in the Sunni Muslim stronghold of Falluja.

It's obvious the allies are very concerned as well they should be.

I chose this article as my first of the morning because it's so outrageous. What is happening in America? This is sickening. I'm a mother and I can tell you, swift punishment would have been dealt to the daughter who obviously has some real problems but also to the policeman who dared touch and handcuff her.
I would have been going to jail also.

A nine-year-old girl was arrested, handcuffed and questioned at a Florida police station on Tuesday after she was accused of stealing a rabbit and $10 from a neighbour's home.
According to the arrest report, a Pasco County sheriff's deputy found the black-and-white rabbit, Oreo, hopping around in the girl's living room. She was read her rights and taken away in a patrol car. Guardian

The Society of Professional Journalists, the nation's most broad-based organization of journalists, has called on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to respect the First Amendment rights of journalists to gather news when he speaks at public events.

A federal marshal required news reporters in Hattiesburg, Miss., Wednesday to hand over a tape recording and erase a digital recording of Scalia's speech at a high school. Marshals ordered broadcast journalists to turn off their cameras at two appearances in the city. Ascribe

[image]DianneMaire_598802 123.jpg[/image]

Outlawed Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has told US President George W Bush to withdraw his troops from Iraq or face a revolution.

Sadr, who remains surrounded by his private army in the holy city of Najaf, addressed President Bush in a message read by an aide in Sadr's mosque in the nearby town of Kufa.

"I address my enemy Bush," the message said.

"We are now fighting an entire nation from south to north, from east to west and we advise you to withdraw from Iraq.

"I call on America not to confront the Iraqi revolution."

Another aide said Sadr had begun a hunger strike in protest at the American massacres in his country.

By Foreign Affairs editor Peter Cave in Iraq ABC

Lieutenant-General Richard Sanchez admitted today that the coalition has lost the Shi'ite cities of Najaf and Kut. He has vowed to "destroy" al-Sadr and his militia in a move which threatens to take the military deeper into a quagmire.

The dramatic collapse of law and order in Iraq is now spreading shockwaves through Washington, where President Bush is facing accusations that he has dragged the US into a new Vietnam.

In Britain Robin Cook said the US had to stop "behaving like warriors" if it had any hope of bringing peace to Iraq. This Is London

There is no hope for peace in Iraq under US occupation, although I appreciate Mr. Cooks words. The advance on Baghdad was not one of peace but of shock and awe and for what? America never was nor is it now in danger from Iraq. The US has toppled a government and left a vacuum. They are now reaping what they've sown.

“I saw the destroyed villages, I saw lives destroyed by what happened there and by what people did”

U.S.M.C. Lance Corporal Mike Hoffman participated in the invasion stage of the Iraq war and is now a member of Philadelphia Veterans for Peace. He spoke to Traveling Soldier’s Tom Barton at the March 20th rally in Fayetteville, N.C. at Fort Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne.

Excerpt:

B: The media have reported that since the 3rd Infantry Division really raised hell about not going home, there’s been a clamp down that soldiers are not free to express opinions against the war. Does this apply to Marines also?
H: It applies to everyone. There was a clamp down before that happened. They told us what we could and couldn’t say to the media and the media was told what they could and couldn’t report. And on top of that there was an unspoken pressure on everyone not to say the wrong thing. We all knew what the wrong thing was – anything critical of war or about what we thought was happening over there. Traveling Soldier

Mr Badran, a Shia who was responsible for the country's 50,000 strong police force, said he was resigning because he his performance had been criticised by Paul Bremer, the top US official in Iraq, who had also said that the defence minister and interior minister should not both be Shia Muslims. FT

Yes, government bodies should have a fair mix in order to have a true representation of the people. Perhaps Mr. Bremer should council President Bush on the hazards of government being in the hands of one party.

Via Je Blog

[image]DianneMaire_229894 410.gif[/image]

Joe at American Leftist has created this stunning collage of our Commander-in-Chief. It is called "War President" and is created from the faces of the US war dead in Iraq. You can see the faces in detail by looking at the full-sized version,
here.

Sovereignty: Government free from external control.

"They will be sovereign, but I think as a result of agreements, as a result of hopefully resolutions that are passed, there will be some constraints on the power of this sovereignty," Powell said of any new Iraqi government. Reuters Alert Net

In Washington, the Bush administration continued to downplay the Iraqi uprising. At a press conference on Wednesday Donald Rumsfeld said, the fighting was just the work of "thugs, gangs and terrorists," and not a popular uprising. General Myers added that "it's not a Shiite uprising. Sadr has a very small following."

But the New York Times reports otherwise. Experts within the intelligence community said the U.S. is facing a broad-based Shiite uprising even if the rebellion has not been explicitly supported by the country's chief Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Sistani. Democracy Now!

Rice said Dick Clarke told her in a memo -- just a line or two -- that there were al Qaeda cells in the United States. "The question is, what did we need to do about that?" Rice said.

"I don't remember the al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about," she said. CNS

24 hours after they were murdered in the streets of Fallujah, the four dead Americans are still being called "contractors" by the Bush Adminstration, which is calling for vengance, and by the corporate media, which is faithfully echoing those calls.

When most of us think of "contractors", we automatically think of people building or remodeling a house. In truth though, the four "contractors" butchered in Fallujah, were far from being such builders.

What is not being reported in the corporate media is that the four Americans killed in Fallujah on Wednesday were all working for Blackwater USA, a firm that recruits ex-military types, like discharged Navy SEALS, to form what is essentially a private army, outside of public knowledge and accountability. Nor is the corporate media reporting that the U.S. military is relying more and more on such private mercenary armies, as resistance intensifies within Iraq. Arkansas Indymedia

In the Florida community of Windermere Louise Hogberg is fighting a legal battle to keep the Australian flag flying.

Last year -- two years after Mrs Hogberg and her husband Clarence, 82, moved into their home north of Tampa -- the Windermere Garden Villas Home Owners Association board passed a community bylaw banning any flag apart from the US Stars and Stripes.

The Hogbergs applied to keep their Australian flag but were refused. A request from their neighbours, retired US Lieutenant Colonel Dick Jones and his wife, to fly the US Marine Corps flag, was granted immediately. Herald Sun

The UPI, not some rag worried more about customers than truth, has published a telling article that reveals the determination and anger behind the uprising against the coalition in Iraq. It behooves us all to read and pay attention rather than scorn those that are fighting just because Bush, Rumsfeld and Bremer call them the enemy of freedom.

Sadr -- a young cleric from the city of Najaf -- called on his followers to fight the Americans after the arrest of one of his followers and a violent clash outside Najaf. His militia and its followers have joined forces with the long-running Sunni resistance effort to turn much of Iraq into open civil war against the American occupation.

But first he brings out his newborn son, named Moqtada, whose tiny form is wrapped tight in a white shroud and hood. Mohammed's mother brings out the infant on a silver platter and gently places baby Moqtada at the feet of his 25-year-old father, their faces lit by a lantern.

"The only thing that made us happy was that the Americans removed Saddam," he says. "But after the first month, we saw how they killed people. They do this because the Americans are just fighting anybody. We only fought when Moqtada said to fight. Before that we just did the peaceful demonstrations but the Americans killed us at those."

UPI

I thought I would share a little of what I could pick up on the Iraq situation from France 2 tonight. This was done from notes and then had to be translated so it was a bit difficult and at times may read a little strange.

Kidnappers threatened to burn three Japanese captives, two aid workers and a journalist, alive if Tokyo did not withdraw troops within 3 days.
Japanese spokesman response, "we will remember them. We will not pull out."

The al-Mahdi Army is now in full or partial control of at least three cities in the south.

Fedaeens are everywhere. They attacked an American convoy with grenade launchers and automatic weapons. Footage was shown of an oil tanker and trucks burning.

All the Imans of Baghdad called for Jihad to support Fallujah.

A convoy of thousands headed toward Fallujah mostly with food and medicine. One Iraqi shouted from a passing truck, "all the Iraqis are with Fallujah. We're going to eat Americans soon."

Coming from Baghdad suddenly an American convoy found itself trapped in the traffic. Panic stricken the Americans called for reinforcements but were forced to retreat.

The Iraqi convoy arrived at the American barricade and the religious dignitaries came out to negotiate with the soldiers. The soldiers said, "too many people." They were told the convoy was only carrying food and medicine and after being searched were allowed to go through. It was a tense situation. The soldiers looked very vulnerable.

"Let the bastard dog Bush know he will never destroy Fallujah" one man shouted.

After getting through the last checkpoint the convoy entered the deserted town. Three days of fighting had emptied the streets. The first stop was the hospital, which was like a war zone, to deliver badly needed medicine.
The head of the hospital overcome with emotion told of 3 days of personally treating 140 wounded. He cursed the US and the UN.

Every street corner in downtown Fallujah is filled with armed guerrillas..faces covered and carrying rocket launchers. These are the ones who for 3 days have stopped the Americans from entering Fallujah.
"By attacking one of our mosques it's the whole of Islam that Americans have insulted and attacked. We are ready to welcome them."

Bertrand Coq reporting live from Baghdad was asked if the Americans were controlling the guerrillas?

To speak only of what I've seen today which covers 80 km of Sunni country, I can affirm and guarantee you that tonight the situation is explosive and that the Americans are in control of very little.

Fedaeens are everywhere in this area. They are on the back of the Americans, harrassing them all the time. They try to cut off US reinforcements coming from Baghdad to service American troops, with grenade attacks.

One wonders how the Americans are going to get out of this mess. Fighting an enemy which is in the middle of the population, which has the support of it, which you could say is the population.

It's been a year since US intervention, in the beginning it was said the US had support for it's intervention. Does it no longer have this support and if so why?

Yes, absolutely, tomorrow is the anniversary. If Bush has won Iraq he has not won the Iraqis. You could say he has lost them.
I was here a year ago and I can assure you that most Iraqis rejoiced in the departure of Saddam and that they were quite willing to welcome the Americans because they were expecting the greatest power in the world to bring them democracy and freedom and improvement in their lives.
But, after 1 yr. their hopes are so cruelly shattered I can assure you the majority of Iraqis are openly saying they are anti-American from the humblest shoe shiner to the prominent intellectual and most serious for America, all are rejoicing over the success of the guerrillas.
In spite of American military might Fallujah is now a symbol of resistance for all Iraqis.

Final word from one commander: "In spite of appearances things are going well."

Despite the widespread unrest, L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, said there was no question coalition forces were in control of the country.
Whew! I was starting to get worried considering headlines of the past few days...33 soldiers dead and 170 Iraqis. I'm sure this figure has grown even as I write this.

"I know if you just report on those few places, it does look chaotic," Bremer said.

"But if you travel around the country ... what you find is a bustling economy, people opening businesses right and left, unemployment has dropped."
I guess I've missed this good news. In fact, everything I read paints an entirely different story.Someone want to send me the links about Iraq's bustling economy?

Bremer described al-Sadr as "a guy who has a fundamentally inappropriate view of the new Iraq."
Bremer, an American, says al-Sadr, an Iraqi, has a inappropriate view of Iraq?

"He believes that in the new Iraq, like in the old Iraq, power should be to the guy with guns," Bremer said. "That is an unacceptable vision for Iraq."
In the new Iraq power should be to the guys with the guns as long as their American?

Bremer should be sent home for a long rest. He obviously is suffering from mental fatigue.

Senator Robert Byrd today called for the US to withdraw from Iraq. Senator Byrd has been a leading critic of the Iraq war and Bush policies in the past.
Byrd laid blame for the recent US troop casualties resulting from the spiralling violence at the doorstep of US President George W Bush. "America needs a road map out of Iraq." news.com.au

The news from Iraq is not good. Those that predicted civil war 'if' the US pulled out of Iraq were wrong. Civil war has begun.

Shiite and Sunni religious and tribal figures put aside their differences and publicly aligned against the occupation, vowing to rid Iraq of the American-led invaders.
"The letter (to Moqtada Sadr) declares that we are the Army of Mohammed and all of Ramadi and Fallujah (offer) our army and people and souls and hearts and weapons under your command," he told UPI. "There is no more Shiite and Sunni, only Muslims and now we will fight each other no more and together fight the same enemy." Khilafah

"After American forces ended the regime, we wanted to welcome them," Mohsin Ghassab, a 42-year-old unemployed resident of the district, said Monday. "But now there is no stability. They have to withdraw."
"Freedom under the gun is no freedom at all," said Abdel Karim al-Shara.
"The Americans have no more business here," said Juma Majed. IHT

US-led forces battled Sunni guerrillas in two cities on Wednesday and grappled with a radical Shi'ite uprising in a two-front war that has killed at least 33 soldiers and 170 Iraqis in three days. deepika global

U.S. marines in a fierce battle for this Sunni Muslim stronghold bombed a mosque compound filled with worshippers Wednesday and witnesses said as many as 40 people were killed. Meanwhile, an uprising by a Shiite militia spread the fighting to nearly all of Iraq. GlobeAndMail

The whites told only one side. Told it to please themselves. Told much that is not true. Only his own best deeds, only the worst deeds of the indians, has the white man told. Yellow Wolf of the Nez Percés

"They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it."

90 tribes, in addition to the Cherokee, were removed from their homes to Indian Territory, now Kansas and Oklahoma. They suffered atrocities, attacks on their children, race, culture and religions.

Ignoring US heavyhanded tactics against the Iraqi people when they dare to demand the foreigners leave their country seems to be acceptable for many Americans, even the right thing to do. The Iraqis have somehow become the enemy in their own land.

"America has the ability to stay, fight an enemy and defeat an enemy," said Colin Powell.

The Fallujah rebellion on the corporate enemy may have been mad and barbaric but they are not alone in these acts of madness.

[image]DianneMaire_849378 651.jpg[/image]

Are Iraqis celebrating the deaths of their enemies any worse than the segregationist lynchers of 20th century America?

By Bernard Weiner

April 7, 2004—In the face of imminent scandal-eruptions, it's surprising to see Bush&Co. moving so forcefully in so many domestic-policy areas, rather than pulling back and trying to ease their way through the November 2 election.

This aggressive attitude suggests a firm belief on their part that they'll still be residing in the White House after January inauguration day. What do they know that we don't? Rigged computer-voting machines with no way to double-check manipulated vote tallies? Osama bin Laden already in the can? Photos of John Kerry in flagrante delicto with a parakeet?

Online Journal

Before I log off tBlog for tonight I want to let those who may be interested in keeping up with my blogging about yet another blog I have signed up with.
Due to a frequent problem I have accessing tBlog I find it necessary to have what you might call a mirror site.

Some may have noticed or not, there are times when I am not around. As updating my blog is part of my morning ritual when you don't see me it's because I'm a victim of the famous 'can't access remote server' syndrome.
Support has told me I seem to be the only one with this problem and has no idea of a fix. Therefore the new site.
It is up now but in it's beginning stage so don't expect much. But, do bookmark it if you are interested.
I'm posting this now as there's a very good chance I may not be here tomorrow.
If not look for me at Current Affairs.

I will continue with Bouillabaisse when it's available to me.

In a PNS article today Amy Ross explores the ways the 9/11 hearings can be understood from within the context of like commissions in other nations responding to demands for official accountability.
Truth commissions is what she calls them and is what they should be but will truth, the whole truth be forthcoming considering a few facts she points out.

The Bush administration fought the commission from the start and only acquiesced in the face of complaints from the victim's families.
She points out the appointment of Henry Kissinger as the chairperson as evidence of the lack of the White House desire for transparency.

She asks pertinent questions.
Who has the power to determine the truth about the past? How will this "truth" about past atrocities influence power in the future? What does it mean to have such discussions relegated (and possibly confined) to a commission? How do the politics that create such commissions influence their results?

The victims and society at large deserve the truth but can they get it as long as those in power hold the keys to the Pandora's box?

Is the process as important as the product?
Pacific News service

Avant-Garde jazz musician Daniel Carter was interviewed by Nils Jacobson from All About Jazz on the subject of anarchy. Although I'm a big jazz fan I'm not familiar with Mr. Carter. But, I found his words interesting. I'll share just a few excerpted paragraphs and leave it to you to read further if so inspired.

Tell me about anarchy

I guess I was attracted to it in high school. In high school I had a Russian history teacher. You know, at this moment, I can't say for sure he mentioned the word anarchist, but it seems that somewhere in high school, and it was related to people who didn't think they needed a government, didn't think they needed someone to tell them what was the right thing, the "must" to do.

But then there's this idea that the idea of democracy and anarchism (in its ideal sense) are not so far away from each other.

The idea of people freely associating, and deciding for themselves individually and collectively, what it is they want to do, rather directly... Might even be more of a democracy than a democracy, certainly as we know it

...it seems like the government is largely an agent of the corporations, and a huge global financial industry.

Jeff Gates...He was talking on the radio, and he was talking about capitalism, and he was saying that one of the problems with capitalism in this country, and probably in the world, is that there's not enough of them. In this country, there are probably only a handful of people who are benefiting from the profit, whereas the vast majority of us are wage-earners, if we're that.

And that's where I think the voting system should be changed, so people can write in who they want. And I think that would be closer to democracy.

Because in a way we're getting less people voting. How many people voted in the last presidential election? A large percentage did not vote, and apparently it keeps going in that direction... I would prefer to think that these people are voting too. They're voting by not voting. And you have to look to see what they are doing in their lives. And I would dare say that most American people, whether they officially are Republican or Democrat, or Independent --whatever, some other party--they are voting for material security. Even though they are probably working more hours, they're probably trying to steal some hours away for themselves and their family and their friends. More and more of them want to get cell phones and pagers and be on the internet. And if they have to work more hours, they want to have a guaranteed at least two-week vacation, where they can just get away from it all. And probably a lot of them would vote for not having to go to work for near as many hours to get the amount of money they've got. If we could find out from most people, they'd probably transform the government. You wouldn't have to look to any wild crazy anarchist who would want to totally innovate the government. Just the majority of the people...

Read more
All About Jazz

There are so many in the world today seeking a better way than war. Someone today reminded me that not enough is said about those that are fighting and even dying for peace.

We remember Rachel Corrie Rachel Corrie Memorial Web Site

We remember Tom Hurndall Thomas Hurndall Fund

We remember James Miller Justice for James Miller

Below are a few links and I mean only a few. There are so many more if you are truly interested in doing the research. They remind us there are some wonderful people in this world who care about those that they do not know, those that are not of their race or skin color. Those that do not hold the same religious beliefs as they do. They are the people of heart who use their talents to make a difference in areas where people are oppressed, hungry, homeless, lacking medical care, clean water, I could go on and on. Many are working in places that are under military bombardment and put their lives at great risk.

Make a difference from where you are. Share what you have where you can. Share a smile and a kind word with someone who is alone. Peace!

The Carter Center

Peace Corps

United For Peace

Peace Action

Veterans For Peace

Carnegie Endowment For International Peace

Jewish Voice for Peace

Peace Brigades International

[image]DianneMaire_193521 369.jpg[/image]

Can you see the baby?

Miscounts are no longer a theory. Electronic voting is great but there must be a papertrail due to machine and software problems, hackers and crooks.

Broward County, Florida - January 6, 2004
In a Special Election for a vacated state House Seat, 134 voters’ votes were not counted. They went to the polls, they signed in, and they went to the DREs; but their votes were never counted.

Hinds County, Mississippi - November 2003

On the ballot was a full slate of candidates and issues, including a State Senate race and a County Tax Assessor race.
Almost immediately, the machines began to fail.

Read more
Verified Voting

A bill to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy under title III of such Act, and for other purposes.

Thomas - US Congress on the Net

Rioting Across Iraq Kills Nearly 60
45 minutes ago
By KHALID MOHAMMED, Associated Press Writer

NAJAF, Iraq - Supporters of an anti-American Shiite Muslim cleric rioted in Baghdad and four other Iraqi cities, sparking fighting that killed at least 50 Iraqis, eight U.S. troops and a Salvadoran soldier, in the worst unrest since the spasm of looting and arson immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein

Read more
Yahoo News
NY Times
SMH
rediff

Now file swappers can get 3 to 6 years jail time.
The bill is sponsored by Reps. Howard Berman and Lamar Smith and targets heavy users of peer-to-peer networks.
No doubt this will end up with more friends who share files behind bars than pirates who copy and sell in mass quantity.

Read more
Wired News

Robert Fisk while not denying the atrocities that occurred in Fallujah a few days ago were, as Paul Bremer described, "barbaric and inexusable" looks at the other side of the coin.
Something many fail to do before coming to judgement on those that use violence to express themselves, especially in Iraq.
Without excusing he understands.

Read more:
iol

Mark Magnier of the LA Times writes: After decades of iron rule by Saddam Hussein, many ordinary citizens distrust the perceived unruliness of Western freedom and democracy.
Cultural factors may play a role as Iraqis mull over filling Hussein's huge shoes. For centuries, Iraqis — indeed, much of the male-dominated Arab world — have respected or endured larger-than-life authoritarian figures. A common mantra is that tough geography and tough neighbors require equally tough leaders.

Read More
LA Times

Fareed Zakaria has written an interesting article entitled [u]Terrorists Don't Need States[/u]. State sponsored terrorism has now given over to terrorist unconnected with any state, harbored in other countries, he says. They get their support not from any state but private individuals. Terrorism he says is not state sponsored but society sponsored. This is the new face of terror: dozens of local groups across the world connected by a global ideology.

Read more
MSNBC.

A couple of interesting articles on Googles new GMail service, a search based email service set to come out at an unknown time in the future. I signed up to be updated when it's available but after reading a bit more on it I think I will pass. The 1 GB of storage is enticing but not at the expense of my privacy.

Read about it:
The Register

Globe Technology

Infowars.com
April 2, 2004

A couple years ago, Alex saw Ridge on C-Span Talking about this. You won't be able to get a job without your driver's licence, which will be a deFacto National ID card. You will also be rated.

Underreported
Thursday, April 01, 2004

According to a Mar. 26, 2004 Washington Times article (emphasis added):
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are developing a database that will allow private companies to submit lists of individuals to be screened for a connection to terrorism, the FBI Terrorist Screening Center Director Donna A. Bucella told legislators yesterday.
The database "will eventually allow private-sector entities, such as operators of critical infrastructure facilities or organizers of large events, to submit a list of persons associated with those events to the U.S. government to be screened for any nexus to terrorism," Miss Bucella said at a joint hearing of the House Judiciary and Homeland Security subcommittees.

That phrase "nexus to terrorism" is ominous. dictionary.com defines "nexus" as:
A means of connection; a link or tie
Recall the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was sent by the U.S. to Syria to receive torture, simply because an acquaintence happend to witness a lease agreement Arar signed. According to a Nov. 2003 article from the Toronto Globe and Mail (emphasis added):
The riddle of Maher Arar's captivity now seems to centre on a mysterious acquaintance: Abdullah Almalki, a fellow Syrian-Canadian also in his early 30s.
The two men knew each other in Ottawa, before their inextricably linked fates led them to meet up again in a hellish Middle Eastern prison only a few weeks ago.

Back in 1997, both men lived relatively normal lives. They were naturalized Canadians living in Ottawa. In a choice that would later come back to haunt him, Mr. Arar had Mr. Almalki act as a witness for a lease he signed.

[...] A few months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, RCMP national-security agents went looking for Mr. Arar and Mr. Almalki to ask them questions. It's not clear what exactly police wanted from the men.

By early 2002, Mr. Almalki's travels to Malaysia and Indonesia were noticed by intelligence agencies, who regard the countries as places where al-Qaeda has footholds. And back at home, continued Canadian interest in Mr. Almalki was clear.

"The RCMP was interested in Abdullah. And when Abdullah went to Malaysia, they basically did a sweep of his family and they questioned them all," said Riad Saloojee, who heads an Ottawa-based Muslim association. "There was a ripple effect in the community -- many people who knew Abdullah socially or worked with him were also questioned."

Even Mr. Almaki wasn't a known terrorist -- his travel patterns just exhibited terrorist patterns. And Mr. Arar was just a casual acquaintence of Mr. Almaki. For this, the U.S. government sent him to Syria to be tortured.
So now that the U.S. government is going to be sharing its "list" with private companies, where torture is condoned by the government for being on the list, it's no far stretch to imagine that private companies will refuse to hire anyone on the "list" and the U.S. will condone or encourage such use of the "list".

And it's not just casual acquaintences that are making the "list" -- political activists are already on it. Recall the case of Nancy Oden from the Sep. 29, 2002 UnderReported.com story Want to fly? What's your "risk score"?. She was a Green Party official who was refused to board a plane.

Soon, only non-blogging registered Republicans and Democrats will be able to get jobs.

Infowars

by Mike Banks Valentine ©Copyright 2004

Consumers are being tracked, catalogued surveilled and their "data" is being warehoused, filed and mapped with increasing detail. This is happening without our
knowledge or consent.
This invasive spying is currently confined to loading docks at WalMart, Target and Metro Future stores, but is ready to follow you home if you aren't careful about RFID technology.

RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification and is a term that will become increasingly well known as usage of the new technology becomes pervasive. There is no question that the tiny chips, which enable tracking of physical goods from the assembly line to warehouse to retail outlet to checkstand, will replace the barcodes previously used for that purpose.

Some RFID chips are so tiny, they are nearly indistiguishable from dust in many cases.
Photo link: RFID

These dust sized RFID chips are capable of transmitting their own SKU (Sales Keeping Unit), the same info currently encoded in barcodes, distances of up to 20 feet to an "RFID Reader".
But that's not all these diminuitive little chips can do. They are capable of sending a unique serial number that can identify the item it's embedded in - down to it's date and location of manufacture. Barcodes were limited to carrying information that identified classes of products. RFID carries information equivalent to the product DNA, while allowing a number for every item on the planet!

More
SiteProNews

I've posted a few of Zinn's comments. Follow link for full text article.

Historian: Bush is worst president ever
By Ed Tant

Radical historian Howard Zinn gives his unique take on life and politics to a sold-out crowd in Georgia Hall at the University of Georgia.

''We have to become not just a military superpower, but a humanitarian superpower,'' radical historian Howard Zinn told a standing-room-only audience at the University of Georgia on Thursday night.

''Terrorism is the extreme fanatical edge of an ocean of resistance.''

A lively and good-humored 81-year-old, Zinn answered questions about a wide range of issues.

When asked about the differences between liberals and radicals, Zinn smilingly replied, ''A liberal thinks that the system is basically good but that it has a few flaws.
A liberal will say that we made a mistake in Vietnam, while a radical will say that we didn't make a mistake - it was deliberate.

''Liberals think that you can work within the system, maybe get a better president. Radicals think that the whole system is so corrupt that it will swallow you up and spit you out.
Radicals also think that you need to create powerful social movements outside the system that will put pressure on the system, a permanent culture of resistance.''

Often billed as the historian of the underdog, Zinn said that his philosophy was an evolution, not an epiphany. He cited his experiences growing up in a working-class environment, going to war, teaching at a predominately black college and becoming involved in the civil rights and antiwar protests as ''making it clear to me that so much history, such as the history of black people, had been ignored.''

When told that independent president candidate Ralph Nader had spoken at the University recently, Zinn said that he admired the longtime consumer advocate but that ''if he really understood the problems with Bush, he wouldn't run.''

On the Bush administration's motivations for the war on Iraq, Zinn listed three reasons why he feels that the conflict is raging.

''The oil in the Middle East has been at the center of American foreign policy there since the end of World War II,'' he said. ''Everything that the U.S. does in the Middle East is based on a desire to control the oil resources.

''A second reason is to have another military base in the region. Military bases are like money to some people. They can never have enough. The third reason is political. Bush knows that if he gets the nation into war there will be a kind of rallying around the president.''

Calling Bush ''the worst American president,'' the historian called Franklin D. Roosevelt the best.

Contrasting Franklin Roosevelt with Bush, Zinn maintained that ''Bush has aligned himself with the most reactionary elements in the country, with corporate wealth, with Christian fundamentalists. He sees as our enemies the Islamic fundamentalists and here he is representing the Christian fundamentalists.''

America's greatest danger, he said, ''is our becoming a warfare state where the wealth of the country is sacrificed for military adventures abroad with less money for children and the environment and a movement toward a kind of American fascism.

OnlineAthens

Soldier's sign says he killed boy's father, impregnated sister

(WASHINGTON, D.C., 4/2/04) - The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called for a Pentagon investigation of a photograph circulating on the Internet that apparently shows an American soldier mocking an Iraqi child.

The photo sent to CAIR seems to be of an American soldier standing next to two Iraqi children who are giving the thumbs-up sign. One child holds a hand-lettered sign in English that reads: "Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad,
th(en) he knocked up my sister!" ("Knocked up" is American slang for making someone pregnant out of wedlock.)

[image]DianneMaire_126494 1724.jpg[/image]

"If the United States Army is seeking to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, this is the wrong way to accomplish that goal," said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. "Defense Department officials must take
action to let military personnel know that such offensive behavior harms America's image and will not be tolerated."

Awad said CAIR has also received an anonymous letter from a soldier who recently returned from Iraq that claims a commanding officer engaged in inappropriate conduct with prepubescent Iraqi girls. The letter states that the officer, who was named by the writer, referred to the girls as "pre-ragheads" and coerced local Iraqi leaders to provide them in exchange for protection by American soldiers. (The officer's military unit was also
named in the letter.)

The letter-writer indicated revulsion at the officer's alleged actions. He or she wrote: "The thought of all this makes me sick to my stomach. I am afraid to bring this to anyone in the Army, because I am doubtful that they
would believe a soldier over the Battalion Commander."

"These reports point to a disturbing pattern of behavior that needs to be addressed by our military," said Awad.

CAIR, America's largest Islamic civil liberties group, has consistently condemned all terrorist acts, whether carried out by individuals, groups or states.

CONTACT: Ibrahim Hooper, 202-488-8787 or 202-744-7726, E-Mail:
cair@cair-net.org

The following are only excerpts from the article. Follow the link for the full text.

By Fiona O'Brien

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The people who burned and kicked the corpses of four American contractors in the Iraqi town of Falluja this week were not armed insurgents or foreign fighters.

"There's an increasing feeling of anti-Americanism definitely," said Paola Gasparoli of Occupation Watch, an independent organization that monitors the occupation.

"It's like all their hopes were destroyed. Families who had some hope the Americans would help Iraq now have sons who were killed or arrested, houses destroyed. This hope has died."

The U.S. authorities in Iraq cite polls showing that a vast majority of Iraqis are happy to have them in the country.

But one survey of 2,500 Iraqis released in March found that while they were happy to be rid of Saddam Hussein, 41 percent said they were humiliated by the invasion, four in 10 had no confidence in occupation troops, and one in five believed attacks on foreign soldiers in Iraq were justified.

Rights groups say that in the so-called battle for hearts and minds, the occupying forces are often their own worst enemy.
One tank rumbles through Baghdad with "Bloodlust" painted on its barrel. Another says "Kill them all."

"They come and destroy our houses, it's the duty of all Muslims to fight them," Ahmad Muhammad, a Falluja resident who watched the carnage on Wednesday said. "We're happy to see this...This is the democracy that Bush was waiting for."

The U.S. army has increasingly linked the insurgency to foreign terror networks, but Wednesday's killings showed their No. 1 enemy within Iraq is hatred of the occupiers.

Reuters

Uzbekistan is a Central Asian nation bordering Afghanistan. It's about the same size as Iraq and also has 25 million people. It lies in the center of a region with rich, untapped oil and gas reserves that U.S. energy companies are surely eager to exploit.
Its president, Islam Karimov, is a holdover from when Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union, but he got on America's good side by allowing his country's bases to be used for the war in Afghanistan.
After Monday's violence which killed 19 people the Uzbek authorities began carrying out raids blaming Muslim fundamentalists and Wahhabis for the violence. The Karimov regime says it is conducting a "war on terror" similar to that of the US.
Human Rights Watch reports that for the past decade the Uzbekistan government has persecuted independent Muslims who preach or study outside official institutions. Their report details torture, brutality and imprisonment of an estimated 7000 people, who are not dangerous terrorist aligned with Al Qaeda as the government would have us believe.
Americans should not be unaware of their part in this situation. They help pay for it. In 2002, the U.S. gave more than $500 million to the Uzbek government. $79 million went directly to those that are accused by human rights organizations of abuses, the police and intelligence services. Bush has more recently increased military and economic aid to Uzbekistan.

This seems to be a repeat of America's history of compromising with dictators in the cause of their own interest. Saddam Hussein a U.S. ally, personally wooed by Donald Rumsfeld to help the U.S. combat what it saw as Iran's attempts to spread Islamic revolution. And many of Osama bin Laden's followers were U.S.-trained "freedom fighters" against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Why is this administration excusing, accommodating and funding yet another brutal dictator who is robbing millions of people of their basic freedoms?

JERUSALEM (AP)--Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu is seeking to renounce his citizenship as a way to prevent the government from confining him to the country after his release from prison, Israel's Channel Two TV reported Saturday.

April 21, Vanunu is to be freed from a prison in the southern city of Ashkelon after serving 18 years for treason and espionage. Israel's Mossad spy agency captured him in Europe in 1986, after he disclosed details and photos of Israel's top-secret nuclear plant and the country's reputed nuclear weapons arsenal to the Sunday Times of London.

Israeli officials say Vanunu might still possess information that could harm Israeli security and are taking steps to limit his freedom of movement after he is freed, possibly confiscating his passport.

Vanunu recently issued a statement through his brother saying he has no more nuclear secrets to disclose.

The TV report said that Vanunu has sent a letter from prison to the Interior Ministry asking to give up his citizenship.

Vanunu, who worked at the plant, served more than a decade in solitary confinement after being convicted in an Israeli court.

Vanunu has become a hero of anti-nuclear weapons activists during his years in prison and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Based partly on photographs that Vanunu provided the U.K. newspaper, it is widely believed Israel has the sixth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. The U.S's Central Intelligence Agency recently estimated Israel has between 200 to 400 nuclear weapons.

Israel has an official policy of "nuclear ambiguity," saying only that it won't be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.

DJ Newswires

From correspondents in Berlin
April 4, 2004

UP to a million people have poured onto the streets of Berlin, Paris and Rome to voice their anger at European governments' plans to reform their pensions, health and labour market systems.

More than 400,000 people marched in Berlin and other German cities, police and organisers said, while similar rallies, called by trade unions, old-age pensioners' groups and anti-globalisation movements, were held in Rome and Paris.

The demonstrations followed an appeal by the European Trade Union Confederation for two days of Europe-wide action against the tough reform plans being introduced by governments across Europe.

The head of the French communist General Confederation of Labour (CGT), Bernard Thibault, joined about 250,000 people who marched in brilliant sunshine in Berlin to the slogan, "Stand Up for Work and Social Justice".

Police said the march was generally disciplined, but a handful of masked agitators hurled paint at the headquarters of an employers' association.

About 120,000 people demonstrated in the industrial city of Cologne in western Germany, and another 100,000 took to the streets of Stuttgart, a major car-manufacturing centre in the south-west.

The German parliament this month approved a far-ranging reform package notably designed to save the state pensions budget from bankruptcy, but at the cost of lower payments for millions of elderly.

A majority of German voters believe the government's reform drive unfairly strikes at the elderly and the poor with pension cuts, weaker job protection laws, new co-payments for state health care and tax cuts for top earners.

The German services union, Ver.di, has threatened to stage public sector strikes in protest at plans to lengthen the civil servant working week.

Meanwhile central Rome was flooded with demonstrators as hundreds of thousands of people, many of them elderly, staged the latest in a series of protests against pension reform plans by Italy's centre-right government.

Italy's main unions claimed 500,000 people had demonstrated in Rome.

Last week, similar numbers marched in cities across Italy during a general strike called in protest at Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's pension reform plans, which have yet to be approved by parliament.

Italy has Europe's highest population of elderly people, with about 16.4 million retired people to a working population of 23 million.

"More than 4 million pensioners have no more than 1 million lire (about $800) a month," Silvano Miniati of the Italian Federation of Trade Unions (UIL) told a crowd of thousands on a central Rome piazza.

Some demonstrators held banners asking, "Taxes: Who pays more? - the poor. Who pays less? - the rich" - a reference to government plans for tax cuts which are set to benefit high earners.

In Paris, thousands of demonstrators marched through the city centre behind a banner reading "Together in Paris and Europe for jobs, social rights, the welfare state and public services".

Police estimated the turnout in Paris to be about 5000, while organisers said between 10,000 and 15,000 people had joined the rally.

France's right-wing government suffered a landslide defeat in regional elections last month, leading to a major cabinet reshuffle, in what was largely attributed to a backlash over reform plans seen as too market-orientated.

The government plans to overhaul the pensions system, cut taxes, pare back the state sector, liberalise employment laws and reform the social security system, which has an annual deficit of 11 billion euros ($17.8 billion).

Protesters in Paris voiced anger at the plans, which are seen as favouring business at the expense of the most vulnerable citizens, with slogans such as, "Chiraffarin, out! We want our money back!" - a play on the names of President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin.

The head of the socialist French Confederation of Labour (CFDT), Francois Chereque, called for the harmonisation of company taxes in Europe and "financial policies to encourage job creation and investment in research".

"The message we want to send to European governments and the French government in particular is, we need a genuine French and European policy for employment."

Smaller demonstrations were reported across France, with several thousand marching in southeastern Lyon, in the southwestern wine capital of Bordeaux and in the Mediterranean city of Montpellier.

NEWS.com.au

BAYONNE, France : A swoop by anti-terror police in southwestern France has netted explosives and arms belonging to Spain's Basque separatist organisation ETA, police said.

The raid by French and Spanish police on the apartment of Felix Ignacio Esparza Luri, alias Navarro, the current logistics chief of ETA, in Bagneres-de-Bigorre on Friday unearthed weapons, explosives, a computer and computer material, police said, without giving further details.

In Madrid, Spanish Interior Minister Angel Acebes said the raid had turned up four explosive devices.

"Two bags, one carrying two explosive devices prepared in pressure cookers and the other two limpet bombs ready to be used" were found, Acebes said.

The two explosive devices were "ready to be used shortly," he said.

A French police officer said the use of limpet bombs by ETA commandos was not unusual but bombs in pressure cookers were less frequently used by Basque extremists.

The arrest of five people in France on Friday, including two members of ETA's "current leadership", was a "very important blow in the fight against ETA terrorism," Acebes added.

French police on Friday also detained former ETA leader Felix Alberto Lopez de la Calle, regarded in Spain as the current coordinator of the separatist group.

Luri, 41, was expected to be transfered to Paris from a police station in Bayonne on Sunday while de la Calle, 43, was still being questioned by police on Saturday.

Last year French police arrested around 50 suspected ETA members.

ETA has been waging a violent campaign since 1968 to achieve an independent homeland covering the French and Spanish Basque regions and the adjacent Spanish region of Navarra. More than 800 people have died in the conflict.

CNA

A few of Bush's statements, in chronological order concerning weapons of mass destruction. He was very explicit and unequivocal.
These are but only a few such statements. Many more have been made by other members of the Bush team that have been pointed out on many web sites. I choose these as they are from the head honcho himself.

"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."

United Nations Address
September 12, 2002

"Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons."

"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."

Radio Address
October 5, 2002

"The Iraqi regime . . . possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."

"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."

"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States."

"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his "nuclear mujahideen" - his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."

Cincinnati, Ohio Speech
October 7, 2002

"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."

State of the Union Address
January 28, 2003

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

Address to the Nation
March 17, 2003

Let me add here that on January 9, 2003, Ari Fleischer stated, "We know for a fact that there are weapons there."

Considering no weapons of mass destruciton have been found.
Considering they existed in large quantites "thousands of tons" one would think this vast amount would have been located by now.
Considering Mr. Powell's words today that his detailed presentaion at the UN of evidence proving that Iraq was indeed in possession of horrible weapons of mass destruction and was producing more was inaccurate LA Times
one would think Mr. Bush would be in pretty deep trouble in the eyes of the American public. No doubt, he wouldn't stand a chance here in Europe.
President Lyndon Johnson's distortions of the truth about Vietnam forced him to stand down from reelection.
President Nixon's false statements about Watergate forced his resignation.
Clinton was impeached over a sex scandal.

Why is George Bush not being held accountable?
Why does he continue to hold his own in national polls?
Why are Americans not marching in the streets for the impeachment of this man?

Svend White

The French parliament’s decision to ban conspicuous displays of religious belief in schools – including the Muslim headscarf – has outraged many liberals and believers, while gaining the support of a majority of French people. An American Muslim critically examines the principles at stake on both sides.

The escalation of the long-simmering headscarf affair in France in the early months of 2004 should be cause for concern among all who cherish freedom, regardless of creed or nationality.

Patrick Weil, a member of the presidential commission that recommended the banning of religious apparel in French schools, argues for the government’s policy in openDemocracy on the basis of the country’s secular tradition and its need to adapt to new circumstances, especially pressure - some imagined by nervous French officials, and others real - to force Muslim girls attending school to cover their hair.

I remain opposed to the ban, both as a democrat and as a Muslim.

openDemocracy

AMMAN, April 3 (Reuters) - Jordan said on Saturday any Israeli attempt to harm Palestinian President Yasser Arafat would be a crime with unpredictable consequences.

"Killing President Yasser Arafat would be an escalation with hard to predict consequences," government spokeswoman Asma Khader told Reuters.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made his most explicit threat yet against Arafat in newspaper interviews on Friday, calling him a poor insurance risk.

Khader said of Israel's assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders:

"We condemn these actions that are against all laws and we warn against any attempt to target President Arafat."

She said killing Arafat would harm the peace process in the region and would be "a new deliberate crime".

More than half of pro-Western Jordan's population is of Palestinian origin.

Reuters AlertNet

Don't exile or kill Arafat, says U.S.
By Anwar Iqbal

WASHINGTON, April 2 (UPI) -- The United States urged Israel Friday not to exile or assassinate Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

"Our position on such questions, the exile or assassination of Yasser Arafat, is very well known. We're opposed and we've made that very clear to the government of Israel," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told reporters in Washington.

He was commenting on Israeli media reports that quoted Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as saying that Arafat and Lebanese militant leader Hassan Nasrallah could become targets for assassination.

Sharon's comments follow a decision by the Israeli Cabinet in September to "remove" Arafat, a statement which was interpreted by international observers as the desire to either expel or kill the Palestinian leader.

"There's no question that the government of Israel knows our view on this matter," said Armitage, responding to questions about when and how Washington conveyed its position to Israel.

Later, deputy spokesman Adam Ereli told a briefing at the State Department that Armitage was reiterating "a long-standing U.S. position regarding Arafat.

"We do not support either the elimination or the exile of Mr. Arafat. It's not our position, hasn't been, and the Israeli government knows that," said Ereli.

Ereli also rejected speculation that Washington's failure to strongly condemn the assassination last week of the founder of the militant group Hamas, Sheik Ahmad Yassin, had encouraged Sharon to issue similar threats against Arafat.

Borrowing a phrase used by one of the reporters about U.S. position on the Hamas leader's assassination, Ereli said: "There is no green light, there has been no green light, there will be no green light."

He said the United States had no advance knowledge of the attack on Yassin and was "deeply disturbed by it, and we urge Israel to bear in mind the consequences of its actions."

"There was no advance knowledge, there was no advance coordination. So there should be no supposition or presumption of anything remotely resembling a green light," he added.

Earlier Friday, in interviews to three Israeli newspapers -- Maariv, Yediot Ahronot and Haaretz -- Sharon explained his plans for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. A key point of the plan is his offer for unilateral withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank settlements of Ganim, Kadim, Homesh and Sanur by late next year. He said the final decision will be taken by his Likud Party.

Sharon also plans to hold a referendum among his party members after his April 14 meeting with President George W. Bush in Washington and has pledged to implement the plan for withdrawal if the party members endorse it.

According to the plan, Israel will withdraw from all of Gaza but retain a narrow corridor along the Egyptian border to prevent Palestinians from acquiring weapons from Egypt.

Sharon said if the Palestinians continued to carry out attacks against Israel after the withdrawal, he would cut off water and electricity to Gaza as a punishment to the militants.

But the comments he made in his interview to the Haaretz newspaper caused alarm in the world capitals. Asked whether Arafat and Lebanese guerrilla Nasrallah were targets for assassination, Sharon said the two leaders "should not feel immune. ... Anyone who kills a Jew or harms an Israeli citizen, or sends people to kill Jews, is a marked man."

In his interview to Maariv, Sharon said insurance companies shouldn't write policies on Arafat whom he described as "the obstacle" to peace.

Palestinian leaders said they were taking Sharon's threats seriously.

UPI

Massoud Shadjareh

Seyf's a smart-looking guy, Mediterranean looking. If you're clued up about these things you'd guess he's of Turkish origin. Buying milk at his local supermarket he and his American flatmate of Pakistani origin were approached by a loud, white English shopper, who yelled in the middle of the dairy aisle: "Are you terrorists?"
This was an example of what passes as humour in Middle England at the moment. Before she burst out laughing and carried on what turned into a tirade, other shoppers stood by, nervously looking for staff and indicating that the two Muslim lads might be trouble.

Forget about the latest arrests around London. Forget about police profiling of Muslims (and of that there's plenty) - the general public now categorises all things Muslim as terror-orientated. Why? It's easy to blame victims of prejudice for their demonisation - it's a practice with a long pedigree. But the unending calls on Muslims, from rightwing shock jocks to former archbishops of Canterbury, to condemn terrorism reveal a level of conditionality that no other community has been asked to bear.

Throw into this mix the continuous police raids and arrests since 9/11 under various pieces of anti-terrorist legislation, the fanfare of media attention when Muslims of various origins are arrested and the deafening silence when most (some 450 out of 540) are released. Add the recent analysis of stop and search figures that shows a disproportionately high number of the 32,100 people who were stopped and searched in the last year (or more accurately 71,100 people when you take into account the misreporting of some police forces, according to Statewatch) were of Asian origin. Do not forget to include Islamophobic media coverage of an increasingly anti-Muslim "war on terror", and stir. The result?

More
Guardian Unlimited

By Firas Al-Atraqchi

(YellowTimes.org) – So, a mob of Iraqis torch, beat, mutilate and hang corpses belonging to four American defense contractors on the same day that five U.S. soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing.

U.S. media was shocked and awed. Despicable, horrible, horrifying.

While the killings are indeed gruesome and God help the families of those killed, I would like to ask what on earth do you expect? These are people who suffered under 13 years of sanctions, constant and consistent bombing throughout the 1990s and persistent random trigger-happy killing of civilians by U.S. troops in the last year. Depleted Uranium is destroying children and the future of Iraq. Joblessness, power outages, lack of communications -- no phones in 80 percent of the country -- and lawlessness. You want candy and flowers?

Grow up. Occupation begets every single form of violence to reject, deject, and eject the occupier. Take how the human body functions; enter a virus and white blood cells kick into action, surround the virus and eat it, adding to the body's catalogue of immunity victories.

Jim Clancy of CNN says pictures of the bodies dragged through the streets were shocking to everyone, including the Iraqi people. I beg to differ. The problem here is the westernized, ethnocentric, Judeo-Christian, and downright racist approach to Iraq. Missing are the pictures of U.S. soldiers with their boots on the necks of detainees who have yet to be questioned. It seems U.S. soldiers believe everyone in Iraq is guilty till proven dead. How about Nic Robertson's documentary which aired on CNN on Wednesday, March 31; did you catch the U.S. soldier who told an Iraqi, "Say yes, when I tell you to eat my ass...I want to shove my foot in his ass."

Lovely. Now Coalition Provisional Authority king Paul Bremer tells us that there will be retribution in Fallujah, which has already seen its fair share of massacres for which the U.S. military absolutely refuses to take responsibility. Has the U.S. military taken responsibility for even one of the 21 journalists it killed in Iraq? Is it a coincidence that journalists who film the U.S. military taking a beating get killed? Propaganda, anyone?

So, Bremer will send in the tanks and the fighter jets and anything else he has. Countless civilians will die while Iraqi police look on. They will be called insurgents, terrorists, Islamic fanatics, Saddam supporters. What they will not be called is the Iraqi people! The civilian population will take up arms and likely cannibalize the next U.S. soldiers they get their hands on. The Iraqi police will have to choose sides soon enough.

Tip of the iceberg, U.S. media is short-sighted and ignorant of facts on the ground in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Basra is brimming with anger. If the Shiite community declares it is fed up, well...reminds me of a Kiss song -- All Hell Breaking Loose.

YellowTimes

By Pamela Hess
Pentagon correspondent
Published 4/1/2004 6:43 PM

A panel of independent advisers is counseling the Pentagon to develop smaller, specialized nuclear weapons using money saved from cutting back on the number of older nuclear warheads and their attendant maintenance costs.

I think smaller and specialized is supposed to somehow make them more acceptable. They will still be NUCLEAR WEAPONS. But then, they will be in the hands of the US government. Aww it will be alright then. They're the good guys..you know the Christians.

The Pentagon has already earmarked $500 million over the next five years for research into a "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator," a nuclear missile that could burrow into underground bunkers to attack an enemy's nuclear or chemical missile programs.

The program is controversial: The United States has not produced a new nuclear weapon in more than a decade, and has not tested its warheads with an actual explosion since 1992.

This is right up Bush alley. The first president to test a nuclear weapon in years. Imagine the photo opt.

Because the warhead would, notionally, be buried, the radioactive fallout and collateral damage to surrounding civilian areas would be far less than a standard surface detonated nuclear weapon.

This certainly makes me feel better.

There would be some fallout, however, Brooks told PBS in a television show to be aired April 2.

"This will be a weapon that will still cause collateral damage. It will still cause fallout. It will still be a hugely serious decision. But it will be quantitatively and qualitatively different from conventional weapons," Brooks told "Now, with Bill Moyers."

This government is off it's brain. It's called nuclear proliferation folks. If the US can do it why not the rest of the world?

More
UPI

by Naomi Klein

Do you have any rooms?" we ask the hotelier.

She looks us over, dwelling on my travel partner's bald, white head.

"No," she replies.

We try not to notice that there are sixty room keys in pigeonholes behind her desk--the place is empty.

"Will you have a room soon? Maybe next week?"

She hesitates. "Ahh... No."

We return to our current hotel--the one we want to leave because there are bets on when it is going to get hit--and flick on the TV: The BBC is showing footage of Richard Clarke's testimony before the September 11 Commission, and a couple of pundits are arguing about whether invading Iraq has made America safer.

They should try finding a hotel room in this city, where the US occupation has unleashed a wave of anti-American rage so intense that it now extends not only to US troops, occupation officials and their contractors but also to foreign journalists, aid workers, their translators and pretty much anyone else associated with the Americans. Which is why we couldn't begrudge the hotelier her decision: If you want to survive in Iraq, it's wise to stay the hell away from people who look like us. (We thought about explaining that we were Canadians, but all the American reporters are sporting the maple leaf--that is, when they aren't trying to disappear behind their newly purchased headscarves.)

More
The Nation

President Bush has repeatedly said he is committed to doing whatever it takes to "cut off terrorist finances" in order to win the War on Terror1. But according to a new report, the president is trying to kill a desperate request by his own officials to increase the number of investigators needed to disrupt the finances of Al Qaeda.

The New York Times reports the president is trying to eliminate a $12 million request by the IRS, which says it needs the small injection of new money "to increase by 50% the number of criminal financial investigators" necessary to do its part in the fight against terrorism2. The president could easily fund the program by reducing the tax cuts he wants to give to the 200,000 millionaires in America: instead of giving these millionaires an average tax cut of $88,326 he could simply reduce that tax cut by $60, giving them instead $88,266, while using the savings to fully fund the IRS request3. Instead, President Bush is pushing more than $1 trillion in new tax cuts, while ignoring the request4.

More
The Daily Mis-Lead

One wonders if there will ever be a good time for Mr. Bush. I have to admit I'm no great Kerry fan thus the lack of articles or links on this blog. Perhaps I should rectify this since I would definitely prefer Kerry in the White House over Bush.
I am struck with a bit of the apathy syndrome. It's a shame all we have that can give George a run for his money is Kerry. But, he is what we have and I don't think he's so blind that he can't be brought to the light on some issues as is George Bush.
Yes, a debate would be a good thing. I wonder what George is frightened of? Since he's so sure God is on his side surely a little debate isn't going to make a difference.

Kerry Again Challenges Bush
Bush Campaign Says It's Not Time for Debates Yet

WASHINGTON (April 1) - John Kerry's presidential campaign on Thursday again challenged President Bush to one-on-one debates, saying the fiercely negative tone of the White House race has clouded the issues.

In a letter Thursday to Bush campaign chairman Marc Racicot, Kerry campaign chairwoman Jeanne Shaheen said holding debates now would allow voters "the honest dialogue they deserve.''

The Bush campaign did not take up the offer, with spokesman Scott Stanzel saying now was not the time for debates.

AOL News

'I saw papers that show US knew al-Qa'ida would attack cities with aeroplanes'
Whistleblower the White House wants to silence speaks to The Independent
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
02 April 2004

A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.

She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".

Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege".



She added: "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used ­ but not specifically about how they would be used ­ and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities ­ with skyscrapers."

To try to refute Mr Clarke's accusations, Ms Rice said the administration did take steps to counter al-Qa'ida. But in an opinion piece in The Washington Post on 22 March, Ms Rice wrote: "Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack planes to try and free US-held terrorists."

Mrs Edmonds said that by using the word "we", Ms Rice told an "outrageous lie". She said: "Rice says 'we' not 'I'. That would include all people from the FBI, the CIA and DIA [Defence Intelligence Agency]. I am saying that is impossible."

More
The Independent

Why Colin Powell and George Tenet aren't bashing Richard Clarke.
By Fred Kaplan

In the short story "Silver Blaze," Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery of a stolen racehorse by observing that the stable's guard dog didn't bark—hence, the intruder was not a stranger.

The mystery of whether Richard Clarke is telling the truth about President Bush's counterterrorism policies might be solved the same way: Which dogs aren't barking? Amid all the administration officials bombarding the airwaves with denunciations, who has stayed mum?

The answer: Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet, and their silence speaks loudly.

Tenet is central to Clarke's case that Bush was negligent on terrorism. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others have said many times—in what they present as a defense against Clarke's charges—that Bush received an intelligence briefing from Tenet every morning and was therefore well aware of the threat from al-Qaida. But Clarke's point is that Bush didn't take Tenet's warnings seriously. Here's a key passage from Clarke's book, Against All Enemies (Page 235):

[Tenet] and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration. Sometimes I would walk into my office and find the Director of Central Intelligence sitting at my desk or the desk of my assistant, Beverly Roundtree, waiting to vent his frustration. We agreed that Tenet would ensure that the president's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda.

This is where the famous "swatting flies" story appears.

President Bush, reading the intelligence every day and noticing that there was a lot about al Qaeda, asked Condi Rice why it was that we couldn't stop "swatting flies" and eliminate al Qaeda. Rice told me about the conversation and asked how the plan to get al Qaeda was coming in the Deputies Committee. "It can be presented to the Principals [the Cabinet secretaries] in two days, whenever we can get a meeting," I pressed. Rice promised to get to it soon. Time passed.


Tenet is not the only quiet dog. One of the hounds that the White House did unleash—Secretary of State Powell—not only declined to growl, but practically purred like a kitten. Interviewed on Jim Lehrer's NewsHour, Powell said:

His choice of words here is fascinating. Note: He did not say "There is no campaign," but rather "I'm not aware of any campaign." As has been widely observed, Powell truly is out of the loop in this administration; it's conceivable he is unaware. He then went on to say,
"[A]nd I am not a member"—suggesting there might be a campaign, but he's not part of it.

It may be a stretch to parse these words so closely. This was an interview, after all, not a written statement. Then again, Powell must have given some careful thought to what he would say. In any case, his answer doesn't exactly amount to a denial of an anti-Clarke campaign. In fact, it's a textbook case of the "non-denial denial."

Powell also circled around an answer when Lehrer asked if Clarke was right in saying the Bush administration did not give "urgent priority" to fighting al-Qaida. He replied:

We knew that al-Qaeda was a threat to our country. We knew that the Clinton Administration understood this and was working against al-Qaeda. We did not ignore al-Qaeda. We spent a lot of time thinking about terrorism, what should we do about it. … We were working on terrorism and trying to understand it.

You don't need to be a literary critic to realize that this is an amazing statement. In a few sentences, Powell tells us that Clinton "understood" and "was working against" al-Qaida—while the Bush administration "did not ignore" al-Qaida (not quite the same thing) and "spent a lot of time thinking" about it and "trying to understand it."

In the middle of all this, Powell managed to throw in the following: "I met with Mr. Clarke four days after I was named to be the Secretary of State." Clarke has said, in his book and in many interviews, that he didn't get a chance to brief Bush's Cabinet secretaries on al-Qaida until one week before 9/11. In this context, Powell is telling Jim Lehrer that he met with Clarke even before the administration got underway.

Powell's implicit support of Clarke is significant. In his book, Clarke portrays Powell as his ally in the administration's internecine disputes over terrorism. He writes that when he briefed Bush's transition team in January 2001, "Colin Powell took the unusual step … of asking to meet with … the senior counterterrorism officers from NSC, State, Defense, CIA, FBI, and the military. … When we all agreed at the importance of the al Qaeda threat, Powell was obviously surprised at the unanimity" (Page 228).

Three months later, at the first deputies meeting on terrorism, when Paul Wolfowitz challenged this view and insisted that Iraq posed the greater threat, Clarke writes, "Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage came to my rescue. 'We agree with Dick. We see al Qaeda as a major threat and countering it as an urgent priority.' The briefings of Colin Powell had worked" (Page 232).

Finally, the day after 9/11, when Donald Rumsfeld advocated "broadening the objectives of our response and 'getting Iraq,' " it was Powell who "pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda." Clarke writes, "Relieved to have some support, I thanked [Powell and Armitage]. 'I thought I was missing something here,' I vented. 'Having been attacked by al Qaeda, for us now to go bombing Iraq in response would be like our invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.' Powell shook his head. 'It's not over yet' " (Pages 30-31).

If Powell has any disputes with this account—of his role, his position, the positions of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, or the conversations he and Armitage had with Clarke in January, April, or September 2001—he could have noted them in response to several of Lehrer's questions during the NewsHour interview. Powell, too, didn't bark.
Slate

By T.K.Maloy

WASHINGTON, March 31 (UPI) -- Either free or pay, Americans are tapping the Internet for tunes.

In a report released Tuesday, research firm Ipsos-Insight said that by the end of last year, pay-per-song downloading had markedly increased. Ipsos said that paying downloaders nearly tripled in December of 2003 compared with the same period a year ago.

But a study by two researchers, one at Harvard Business School and the other at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, reports that sharing digital music files has no effect on CD sales.

The academicians said Wednesday this was the first study that directly compares actual downloads of music files and store sales of CDs.

Study authors, Associate Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee of Harvard and Professor Koleman Strumpf of UNC, noted that most files downloaded for free from swapping sites appear to be downloaded by individuals who would not have bought the albums that they downloaded.

The study looked at file sharing for the second half of 2002.

The report said that file sharing cannot explain the decline in music sales during this period. Even in the professors' most pessimistic statistical model, it takes 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by a single copy.

The joint report added that the more popular category of CDs, in fact, benefited from file sharing.

The effect of file sharing on sales depends on the popularity of a release, according to the researchers. For the least popular albums (with sales of less than 36,000 copies) the authors found a small negative effect. In contrast, for the top 25 percent of albums (with sales of more than 600,000 copies) they found a positive effect.

According to the study, "150 downloads increase sales by one copy. This effect is particularly important because the profitability of the music industry depends almost entirely on the success of the most popular albums."

More
UPI

How long is this going to go on?
Looking at the photos at the LA Times I am sickened and outraged. What is it going to take for George Bush to get America out of Iraq?

Excerpt from NY Times:

The violence was one of the most brutal outbursts of anti-American rage since the war in Iraq began more than a year ago. And the steadily deteriorating situation in the Falluja area, a center of anti-American hostility west of Baghdad, has become so precarious that no American or Iraqi forces responded to the attack against the civilians, who worked for a North Carolina company.

Instead, Falluja's streets were thick with men and boys and chaos.

Men with scarves over their faces hurled bricks into the blazing vehicles. A group of boys yanked a smoldering body into the street and ripped it apart. Someone then tied a chunk of flesh to a rock and tossed it over a telephone wire.

"Viva mujahedeen!" shouted Said Khalaf, a taxi driver. "Long live the resistance!"

Nearby, a boy no older than 10 ground his heel into a burned head. "Where is Bush?" the boy yelled. "Let him come here and see this!"

Masked men gathered around him, punching their fists into the air. The streets filled with hundreds of people. "Falluja is the graveyard of Americans!" they chanted.

What does WhiteHouse spokesman have to say but the usual.

"This is a despicable attack," Scott McClellan, told reporters, adding that "there are some that are doing everything they can to prevent" a transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30.

American military officials said the violence in Falluja, however chilling, would not scare them away. "The insurgents in Falluja are testing us," said Capt. Chris Logan, a marine. "They're testing our resolve. But it's not like we're going to leave. We just got here."

Someone want to tell me why they are there outside, of the Bush rhetoric?

NY Times

Following yesterday's killings in Fallujah, the WP browsed the Coalition Provisional Authority's Web site and didn't spot mention of the killings nor any other violence. The site's fourth headline: "IRAQI POLICE EQUAL TO TASK OF PUBLIC SAFETY, KIMMITT SAYS."

Right brain - left brain co-operate?

[image]DianneMaire_134158 6718.jpg[/image]

by Katha Pollitt

Single women under 65--those separated, widowed, divorced or never married--represent at least 24 percent of the voting-age population and a whopping 46 percent of voting-age women. According to an influential study by the Democratic pollsters Stan Greenberg and Celinda Lake, they tend to be progressive and to lean Democratic. Indeed, if the nation's 45 million single women voted at the same rate as married women--52 percent versus 68 percent--there would be 6 million more voters in the electorate, and Gore would be in the White House today. Had they turned out at the same rate as other voters in Florida in 2000, there would have been an additional 202,640 votes cast in that state--and no razor-thin 537-vote margin. Party leaders like Ann Lewis, national chair of the DNC's Women's Vote Center, want the Democratic Party to cultivate single women and connect them with the polling booth; Page Gardner and Christina Desser have founded "Women's Voices. Women Vote" http://www.wvwv.org, to reach out and register them. You've probably read about attempts to woo these "Sex and the City voters" in one of the dozens of nearly identical articles that have come out since Greenberg and Lake's study was released in December.

It's about time! The silly nickname aside--most unmarried women live for a month on what Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte spend on lunch and taxis--single women are a natural constituency for the Democratic Party: They tend to be pro-choice, anti-gun, socially liberal and supporters of "big government." Single women's main issues are, theoretically, Democratic strong suits: healthcare, employment, education. Certainly it makes more sense to cultivate them than the other demographic superstars pollsters have come up with: the suburban soccer moms that were supposed to save the party's bacon in the late 1990s but have since morphed into security moms, keen on defense; or the NASCAR dads--blue-collar white men from rural and Southern parts, who tend to be conservative, live in "red" states and drawn to the racial-gender politics of the Republican Party. (Whatever happened to the waitress mom? I kind of liked her.)

More http://www.thenation.com/doc.... The Nation

By PAUL KORING

Washington — The risk of a terrorist attack by radical Islamic extremists has grown in Canada and elsewhere because the United States and its Western allies failed to crush al-Qaeda completely during the war in Afghanistan, says Richard Clarke, the former top White House counterterrorism adviser whose dire warnings went unheeded before Sept. 11, 2001.

"We've had more major terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups in the 30 months since 9/11, than we had in the 30 months before 9/11 . . . a lot more," Mr. Clarke said yesterday in an interview with The Globe and Mail.

He called it the grim consequence of Washington's failure to completely destroy al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, where more than 2,000 Canadian troops are stationed to defend the pro-U.S. government.

Mr. Clarke, who served in President George W. Bush's administration but is now a fierce public critic, said a greater, more sustained effort by coalition troops in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 might have crushed al-Qaeda, rather than allow many of its leaders to escape.

The terrorist network has since dispersed, becoming an even more dangerous, loose coalition of scattered cells and affiliates taking aim at the United States and its allies, he said. "Canada is as likely to be hit as anyplace else," he said.

More http://www.theglobeandmail.co...
Globe and Mail

Doctors Without Borders
Why you can't trust medical journals anymore.

By Shannon Brownlee

With financial ties to nearly two dozen drug and biotech companies, Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff may hold some sort of record among academic clinicians for the most conflicts of interest. A psychiatrist, a prominent researcher, and chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral science at Emory University in Atlanta, Nemeroff receives funding for his academic research from Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Wyeth-Ayerst--indeed from virtually every pharmaceutical house that manufactures a drug to treat mental illness. He also serves as a consultant to drug and biotech companies, owns their stocks, and is a member of several speakers' bureaus, delivering talks--for a fee--to other physicians on behalf of the companies' products.
But it was just three of Nemeroff's many financial entanglements that caught the eye of Dr. Bernard J. Carroll last spring while reading a paper by the Emory doctor in the prominent scientific journal, Nature Neuroscience. In that article, Nemeroff and a co-author reviewed roughly two dozen experimental treatments for psychiatric disorders, opining that some of the new treatments were disappointing, while others showed great promise in relieving symptoms. What struck Carroll, a psychiatrist in Carmel, Calif., was that three of the experimental treatments praised in the article were ones that Nemeroff stood to profit from--including a transdermal patch for the drug lithium, for which Nemeroff holds the patent.

Carroll and a colleague, Dr. Robert T. Rubin, wrote to the editor of Nature Neuroscience, which is just one of a family of journals owned by the British firm, Nature Publishing Group, pointing out the journal's failure to disclose Nemeroff's interests in the products he praised. They asked the editor to publish their letter, so that readers could decide for themselves whether or not the author's financial relationships might have tainted his opinion. After waiting five months for their letter to appear, the doctors went to The New York Times with their story--a move that sparked a furor in academic circles, and offered the public yet another glimpse into conflict of interest, one of the most contentious and bitter debates in medicine.

More http://www.washingtonmonthly.... Washington Monthly

I wouldn't want to be in Eric Ruff's shoes. Imagine leaving obviously classified notes lying around Starbucks.

"Stay inside the lines. We don't need to puff this (up). We need (to) be careful as hell about it," the handwritten notes say. "This thing will go away soon and what will keep it alive will be one of us going over the line."

The Starbucks notes, printed on paper titled "Eric's Telephone Log" with a notation indicating the points came from a conference call, counseled to "rise above Clark" and "emphasize importance of 9-11 commission and come back to what we have done."

More http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?S... UPI

Compiled by Our Staff From Dispatches Reuters, AFP
Thursday, April 1, 2004

Arrests fuel fears of homegrown attack and spark a call to duty

LONDON British Muslim leaders on Wednesday urged prayer leaders to help the police fight terrorism after the arrest of eight men stoked fears that British Muslims may be as much of a threat as foreign militants.

The appeal for vigilance was being sent to more than 1,000 mosques following the arrests and seizure of explosives on Tuesday in Britain's biggest antiterrorism operation since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"We will not tolerate terrorism," Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said in a letter to imams after the arrest of the eight, believed to be British Muslims of Pakistani origin.

"It is important that we exercise extra vigilance in terms of fulfilling our duty," he said. "If there is anything we become aware of, it is our duty to ensure that this is reported immediately to the police."

Security sources have said that those arrested are not thought to be connected to Al Qaeda or to foreign groups. But inquiries into their backgrounds continued as police officials began questioning the suspects.

"I think it has always been on the cards that it had a propensity to become homegrown," said Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at St. Andrew's University in Scotland. "I think the concept of nationality has meant very little when it comes to those gravitating towards the Islamic extremists."

The police believe the suspects could have been planning a truck or car bomb aimed at civilians.

Some of the suspects were arrested near Heathrow and Gatwick Airports, but there was no evidence to indicate any possible target, police sources said.

The police said the British operation was not linked to investigations into the coordinated train bombings in Madrid on March 11, which killed more than 190 people, or to Irish extremists.

The police have also stressed they are not targeting Muslims, but some groups have accused officers of adopting an "arrest first, ask questions later" approach.

A Muslim Council spokesman, Inayat Bunglawala, said their leaders feared there could be a backlash against the country's two million Muslims if an attack were launched in Britain. British newspapers warned Wednesday of the danger of an "enemy within" because of the arrests.

The rightist Daily Express tabloid said in an editorial that the arrests were a "wake-up call" for British Muslims.

"The enemy within must be rooted out," it said. "The vast majority of peaceful, moderate Muslims here must now summon every ounce of courage to speak out against extremists and speak up when they find them."

http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint .tmplh&ArticleId=512804" title="http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint .tmplh&ArticleId=512804" target="_blank"http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/ge... IHT

By Mark John

PARIS, April 1 (Reuters) - French media attacked President Jacques Chirac on Thursday for keeping familiar faces in top positions in a cabinet reshuffle, despite a heavy defeat for his ruling conservatives in regional elections.

Newspapers echoed the criticisms of opposition leaders who said they did not believe the new government would be able to push through reforms and may not last beyond a European Parliament election in June.

"Here they are again!" Le Parisien daily said of Wednesday's cabinet shake-up in which the popular Nicolas Sarkozy was promoted from the Interior Ministry to the Finance Ministry to take charge of Chirac's economic reform drive.

"Musical Chairs for Raffarin III," said Catholic daily La Croix, referring to Chirac's decision to keep his unpopular Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin as head of the third government line-up since Chirac was re-elected in May 2002.

Chirac also named his friend Dominique de Villepin as interior minister and replaced him as foreign minister with another close ally, Michel Barnier.

Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, who has been patching up ties with Washington damaged by France's opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, kept her post.

The more government-friendly Le Figaro was almost alone in defending the reshuffle. It said the new team should be given a chance after Raffarin acknowledged he had not properly explained painful government cost-cutting and other reforms to voters.

Left-wing Liberation doubted the government would survive after the European Parliament election in which Chirac's party is expected to face another beating.

"A government worn out before it starts," it wrote.

SOFTER FACE

The new team is designed to provide a softer face and includes the appointment of Labour Minister Jean-Louis Borloo, reputed for his popular touch, to tackle unemployment stuck at just under 10 percent.

Several government ministers quickly denied the government would change after the June vote. "This government is not here for three months," Budget Minister Dominique Bussereau said.

Bussereau said the government's priorities were jobs and economic recovery. Chirac is hoping that the popular and highly driven Sarkozy, as head of a vast finance, economy and industry "super ministry", will inject new life into the reform drive.

The 49-year-old Sarkozy, who made a name battling crime, accepted the post even though it could be a poisoned chalice from Chirac, with whom relations are strained by Sarkozy's overt presidential ambitions.

He now faces a mammoth task trying to overcome public discontent over stubbornly high unemployment -- which is above the European Union average -- pension reform and budget cuts.

On his "to do" list are a big overhaul of public healthcare services to cut costs, altering job-protective labour laws, curbing strikes in transport, cutting civil service staff and privatisations including a partial sale of power utility EdF.

His room for manoeuvre is restricted by a still-timid economic recovery, after France flirted with recession last year, and a pledge by Paris to reduce its public deficit to within EU limits in 2005.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L015 09694.htm" title="http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L015 09694.htm" target="_blank"http://www.alertnet.org/thene... AlertNet

Compiled by Mark Wilson
01 April 2004

In April 1904, Britain and France signed an agreement settling long-standing disputes over colonial territories. The Entente Cordiale was to mark the end of centuries of conflict and usher in a new era of co-operation. In the 100 years since, the shared experience of two world wars, the creation of the European Union and the Channel Tunnel have seen our ties grow ever stronger. But how well have we really come to understand our nearest neighbours? Has the historic divide between our cultures truly been bridged? In this special centenary issue, we take a close look at a unique, often complex, relationship - starting with a grande bouffe of Anglo-French facts, figures and frippery.

Education

Start 'em early: in France, school starts at the age of two (for 52 per cent of children) or three (for almost all). In Britain, the starting age is four or five.

University education in France is virtually free at all levels (tuition costs £100 a year at the Sorbonne) except for private and business schools. UK tuition fees are £3,000 per year.

All French students study philosophy in their last year of senior school to enable them to answer such burning questions as: "Is dialogue the path to truth?" and: "Why are we sensitive to beauty?"

Food

During the week, 70 per cent of French people eat lunch at home; 70 per cent of Britons eat their lunch al desko.

France produces more than 400 varieties of cheese. The French eat more cheese than any other nation in the world - a total of 20kg per person per year.

Britain's favourite cheese is cheddar: 280,000 tonnes each year out of a total cheese consumption of 590,000 tonnes (10kg per person)

More very interesting statistics comparing the UK and France http://news.independent.co.uk... Independent

Watching French politics is interesting to say the least. My husband was disgusted as he watched the news last night but I reminded him of the state of things in the US and he brightened up.
At least the French have a voice. M. Chirac can only ignore it for so long and he knows it. I happen to like M. Chirac in spite of my socialist leanings. Again, it's probably due to what I am use to coming from the states. Although some say he's a wolf in sheep's clothing I see him as a wiley, old fox and for this he at least get's my respect.
I was surprised to see M. de Villepin stepping down from his diplomatic position. It seems to fit him well. I can only believe he is being lined up for Prime Minister.
For many outside France M. de Villepin's face is a reminder of things they would rather not think about concerning the invasion of Iraq. This also may be a reason he is being pulled from the diplomatic arena. The news is he asked for the position but one never knows. Chirac is a wiley, old fox.
Sarkozy will not go away in spite of M. Chirac. He is the type that will keep coming back. He's young and smart and sure to be on the French political scene for years to come. He's one of France's new 'American wannabe's.'
Since economics is not his forte I can't imagine how he's going to improve things. But, perhaps the fox knows this.
I don't think Sarko will be bothered by the heat. He's a bit like Bush and le Pen in believing 'the people' don't have the sense to know what's good for them.
I'm enjoying French politics. It's good to see democracy
in action.
Dianne Maire