“Conspiracy” Is the Only Word to Describe Conflating Israeli Fears of Iraq With 911

Blair attacks his critics’ tendency to ‘conspiracy theories’

Former Prime Minister takes swipe at Iraq Inquiry in TV interview with US Republican

By Nigel Morris, Deputy Political Editor

CHRIS OCKEN

Tony Blair and Mike Huckabee: ‘There’s always got to be a scandal,’ Mr Blair told his interviewer

Tony Blair took a swipe at the Iraq Inquiry last night, claiming that it was part of a British obsession with conspiracy, deceit and scandal.

He called for an end to speculation over his motives for taking the country to war in his first interview since his appearance before the inquiry last month.

Yesterday Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, ended the first phase of its investigation with a warning that some witnesses could be recalled where there were “gaps” in their evidence or official documents.

Mr Blair betrayed his frustration during a television interview in the United States. Mike Huckabee, a Republican who made a failed attempt to contest the presidency for his party in 2008, asked why there had been four “relentless” inquiries into the Iraq war.

The former Prime Minister smiled ruefully and replied: “I think it’s partly because we have this curious habit – I don’t think it’s confined to Britain actually – where people find it hard to come to the point where they say: ‘We disagree – you’re a reasonable person, I’m a reasonable person – but we disagree.’ There’s always got to be a scandal as to why you hold your view. There’s got to be some conspiracy behind it – some great deceit that’s gone on, and people just find it hard to understand that it’s possible for people to have different points of view and hold them reasonably for genuine reasons. So I think there’s continual desire to sort of uncover some great conspiracy when actually there’s a decision at the heart of it – but there it is.”

During his cross-examination at the Chilcot inquiry, Mr Blair defended his decision to back the invasion and denied that the intelligence used to support the war was manipulated. He also faced tough criticism for refusing to express regret for the conflict, in which 179 British soldiers died.

It is widely expected that Mr Blair will be among the witnesses who are summoned back before the inquiry. Yesterday, Sir John said his team was receiving new paperwork relating to the war all the time. He said: “Over the next few months we shall examine all the evidence we have received, including those documents.

“That will enable us to see where the evidence joins together and where there are gaps. Only then can we decide the further evidence we need, the issues and points which need to be clarified and the identity of the witnesses we may wish to question in the next round of public hearings in the summer.”

Making his second appearance before the inquiry, Jack Straw, who was Foreign Secretary, denied blocking detailed cabinet discussion on the Attorney General’s advice on the legality of military action.

He said: “The Cabinet were fully aware that the arguments were evenly balanced. It was impossible to open a newspaper without being fully aware of the balance of the arguments.”

He insisted he had no recollection of the claim by the then International Development Secretary, Clare Short, that she was “jeered” when she tried to question Lord Goldsmith’s opinion.

Mr Straw, who is now the Justice Secretary, said it was “simply untrue” to claim that the system of cabinet government had broken down under Mr Blair. He also defended his decision to overrule the advice of the senior Foreign Office legal adviser, Sir Michael Wood, that the use of force would be illegal without a specific mandate from the United Nations.

French Government Queries US on 50s Secret LSD Experiment

French Government Queries US re

50s Secret LSD Experiment

By F. William Engdahl

Author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian
Democracy in the New World Order

A major diplomatic and political scandal is erupting that could have significant import for French-American relations. It involves new research into the mysterious outbreak of “mass insanity” in a village in southern France that affected some 500 people and resulted in five deaths. According to reliable US sources, the US State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research has been given a confidential inquiry from the office of Erard Corbin de Mangoux, head of the French intelligence agency DSGE (Directorate General for External Security). According to the report the inquiry regards a recently-published account of U.S. government complicity in a mysterious 1951 incident of mass insanity in France in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France. The strange outbreak severely affected nearly five hundred people, causing the deaths of at least five, two by suicide. For nearly 60 years the Pont-St.-Esprit incident has been attributed either to ergot poisoning, meaning that villagers consumed bread infected with a psychedelic mold or to organic mercury poisoning. Scientists with the highly respected British Medical Journal were quickly drawn in September 1951 to what it dubbed the “outbreak of poisoning.” After initial thoughts that the cause was bread infection, they concluded that mold could not explain the event or the afflictions that struck hundreds of people in the village. Scientists dispatched to the scene from the Sandoz Chemical company in nearby Basle, Switzerland also stated that the mold was the cause, but many other experts disagreed with them. Over time the mystery of the outbreak only deepened and no answers were found to be satisfactory. A 2008 book about the history of bread published in France by Professor Steven Kaplan emphasizes that the “mystery remains unsolved” and at the time, still continued to perplex scientists. New revelations A book just released in the United States, detailing exhaustive interviews with now-retired US intelligence personnel who had direct knowledge of the 1951 French events, charges that the until-now unexplained “mass insanity” in the remote village were, rather, a top-secret CIA experiment conducted under the code-name Operation Span. Operation Span was a part of Project MK/NAOMI, itself an adjunct project to the more notorious Project MK/ULTRA, as in “ultra-top secret.” The book,  A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, by investigative journalist H.P. Albarelli Jr. documents that the Pont-St.-Esprit outbreak in 1951 was the result of a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Albarelli notes that the scientists who produced the bogus cover-up explanations of contaminated bread and or mercury poisoning to deflect from the real source of the events worked for the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the US Army and CIA with LSD for research. A French newspaper at the time of the bizarre events wrote, “It is neither Shakespeare nor Edgar Poe. It is, alas, the sad reality all around Pont-St.-Esprit and its environs, where terrifying scenes of hallucinations are taking place. They are scenes straight out of the Middle Ages, scenes of horror and pathos, full of sinister shadows.” The US Time magazine, whose publisher, Henry Luce was closely tied to CIA propaganda activities in the 1950’s wrote, “Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead. Pont-Saint-Esprit’s hospital reported four attempts at suicide.” As Albarelli notes, a Department of Justice website on the dangers of LSD states that in the early 1950s, “the Sandoz Chemical Company went as far as promoting LSD as a potential secret chemical warfare weapon to the US Government. Their main selling point in this was that a small amount in a main water supply or sprayed in the air could disorient and turn psychotic an entire company of soldiers leaving them harmless and unable to fight.” He claims that the CIA entertained a number of proposals from American scientists concerning placing a large amount of LSD into the reservoir of a medium-to-large city, but, according to former agency officials, “the experiment was never approved due to the unexpected number of deaths during the operation in France.” Indeed, Albarelli has discovered once secret FBI documents that reveal that the Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division, a year prior to the Pont St. Esprit experiment, had targeted New York City’s subway system for a similar experiment. States an August 1950 bureau memo, “[The] BW [biological warfare] experiments to be conducted by representatives of the Department of the Army in the New York Subway System in September, 1950, have been indefinitely postponed.” The memo goes on to cite FBI concerns about “poisoning of food plants” and the “poisoning of the water supply” of large cities in the U.S. In an interview with this author, Albarelli described how he developed the shocking details of the CIA secret drug programs: “My first tip-off was a 1954 CIA document that detailed an encounter between an official of the Sandoz chemical company (the producers of LSD) and a CIA official in which ‘the secret of Pont St. Esprit’ was referenced. The Sandoz official went on to say, ‘It was not the ergot at all.’” Albarelli says he then obtained through the Freedom of Information Act a partially redacted 1955 CIA report entitled, A CIA Study of LSD-25. “That seemingly comprehensive report contained detailed information on the manufacture, supply, and use of LSD and LSD-type products worldwide. However, nearly its entire section on France and Pont St. Esprit were blacked out.” Albarelli requested an un-redacted copy but CIA officials refused to provide one. He continued, “Then I came across a letter written by a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent who was working secretly for the CIA; this was George Hunter White, who ran the CIA’s New York City safe house in 1951-1954. White’s letter referenced the Pont St. Esprit experiment. At that point, 5 years into my investigation, I began interviewing former Army biochemists who became very evasive and refused to talk about their work in France. Finally two former intelligence employees confirmed the experiment took place under the auspices of the Army’s Special Operations Division and with CIA funding.” Lastly, Albarelli explained, “I was given an undated White House document that was part of a larger file that had been sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission formed in 1975 to investigate CIA abuses. The document contained the names of a number of French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct reference to the ‘Pont St. Esprit incident,’ linking the former OSS head of secret research projects and the chief of Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division,” Said Albarelli. “This, along with one other document, comprised the smoking gun.” In its quest to research LSD as an offensive weapon, Albarelli claims, the Army drugged over 5,700 unwitting American servicemen between the years 1953 and 1965, and, with the CIA, experimented widely with LSD and other drugs through secret contracts with over 325 colleges, universities and research institutions in the U.S., Canada and Europe, involving about 2,500 additional subjects, many of them hospital patients and college students. In 2005, Scott Shane, a reporter with the Baltimore Sun newspaper, wrote, “The Army has no records on MKNAOMI or on the Special Operations Division.” Asked formally for such records, the Army replied they “could find none.” In 1973 the CIA destroyed all of its records on MKNAOMI and its work with Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division. When Shane asked a former top ranking Special Operations officer to speak about the division’s projects in general, Andrew M. Cowan, Jr. said, “I just don’t give interviews on that subject. It should still be classified-if nothing else, to keep information the division developed out of the hands of some nut.” Other CIA drug projects In 1959, American writer, Ken Kesey, while a student at Stanford University volunteered to take part in the CIA-financed Project MK/ULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT on people. Kesey wrote detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs during the Project MK/ULTRA study. Kesey’s role as a medical guinea pig reportedly inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1962. From his days as a psychology graduate student, Harvard’s infamous LSD guru, Dr. Timothy Leary, whose motto to the 1968 “Flower Power” generation was “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out!,” was associated with the CIA’s Cord Meyer. Leary devised a special personality test, The Leary, used by the CIA to test potential employees and worked with Frank Barron, a CIA employee and former psychology classmate of Leary’s, at the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, and later with Barron’s Psychedelic Drug Research Center at Harvard. These are but two of the more known and detailed instances linking the CIA with LSD projects after the alleged French experiments. According to an official with the DGSE, who declined to be identified, “If the details of this book’s revelations prove to be true, it will be very upsetting for the people of Pont-St.-Esprit, as well as all French citizens. That agencies of the United States government would deliberately target innocent foreign citizens for such an experiment is a violation of a number of international laws and treaties.” Endnotes Erard Corbin de Mangoux, conseiller de Sarkozy, remplacera Brochand à la DGSE,. Le Monde. October 6, 2008, accessed in http://www.lemonde.fr/web/depeches/0,14-0,39-37199541@7-40,0.html. British Medical Journal, Ergot Poisoning at Pont St. Esprit, September 15, 1951, p. 650. Steven L. Kaplan, Le pain maudit: Retour sur la France des annees oubliees 1945-1958 (Paris: Fayard 2008), p. 1124. H.P. Albarelli, Jr., A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, (Walterville Oregon: Trine Day Inc., 2009). FBI Memorandum, August 25, 1950, Subject: Biological Warfare and NY Subway System, A.H. Belmont to C.E. Hennrich. H.P. Albarelli, Jr., interview with F. William Engdahl via email, February 6, 2010. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Scott Shane, Buried Secrets of Biowarfare, Baltimore Sun, August 1, 2004, p.1. Rob Elder, Down on the Peacock Farm, Salon magazine, November 16, 2001. Mark Riebling, Was Timothy Leary a CIA Agent?, 1994, Osprey Productions/Grand Royal, accessed in HYPERLINK “<http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html>http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html” <http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html>http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html.

The Social Costs of Deficit Spending

Greece hit by nationwide strike over austerity measures

PM Papandreou has faced down public opposition so far Public sector workers in Greece have launched a nationwide strike in protest at government measures to tackle the country’s huge budget deficit. Flights have been grounded, many schools closed, and hospitals are operating an emergency-only service. The government wants to cut pay, reduce pensions and revise the tax system. EU leaders will discuss the issue during a summit in Brussels on Thursday amid concern the Greek crisis could threaten the credibility of the euro. Financial markets around the world and politicians from across Europe will be watching the situation carefully, says the BBC’s Jonny Dymond, in Athens. Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou has already faced down a three-week protest by farmers demanding higher government subsidies. Public anger On Tuesday, his socialist government announced that it intends to raise the average retirement age in a bid to save the cash-strapped pensions system. The move comes on top of other planned austerity measures, including a public sector salary freeze and a hike in petrol prices announced last week. Public sector workers here will not be hit as hard as they have been in Ireland, but they complain some of the poorest paid will suffer while the rich dodge tax with impunity, our correspondent says. Further government measures include the non-replacement of departing civil servants, and tax collectors recovering billions of euros lost to tax evasion. Biggest threat Greece’s deficit is, at 12.7%, more than four times higher than eurozone rules allow. Its debt is about 300bn euros ($419bn; £259bn). The markets remain sceptical that Greece will be able to pay its debts and many investors believe the country will have to be bailed out. The uncertainty has recently buffeted the euro and the problems have extended to Spain and Portugal, which are also struggling with their deficits. The possibility of Greece or one of the other stricken countries being unable to pay its debts – and either needing an EU bailout or having to abandon the euro – has been called the biggest threat yet to the single currency.

The Problem With Habitual Lying Is Remembering the Old Lies

Why Does DOJ Say 300+ Terrorists Convicted?

February 8, 2010 – 6:44 PM | by: Mike Levine

Eric Holder

The “blogosphere” has been abuzz over whether Attorney General Eric Holder and others in the Obama Administration can accurately claim that more than 300 terrorists have been convicted in federal, civilian courts.

Holder employs the statistic in an effort to blunt criticism over the decision to try the five alleged 9/11 conspirators – and more recently, the alleged Christmas Day bomber – in a civilian court.

“We know that we can prosecute terrorists in our federal courts safely and securely because we have been doing it for years,” Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee in November. “There are more than 300 convicted international and domestic terrorists currently in Bureau of Prisons custody.”

And last week, in a letter to Republican leaders in the Senate, Holder used the statistic again, insisting that the handling of Umar F. Abdulmutallab, charged with trying to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day, comports with “long-established” practices.

“The Bush Administration used the criminal justice system to convict more than 300 individuals on terrorism-related charges,” Holder wrote in a letter to Republican leaders in the Senate.

But many online – and on Capitol Hill – wonder whether the Obama Administration is inflating numbers to make a political point.

One blog said the Obama Administration “appears to be creating a bit of mythology with their little list of imprisoned criminals with ‘histories’ and ‘nexuses.’”

So where did the Obama Administration get its “300″ statistic?

They insist they got it from the Bush Administration, and they say the information is readily available online.

“So those who say we just made up the number just need to go look at the old documents that were presented by the prior Administration,” a Justice Department spokesman told FOX News.

In fact, as part of a funding request submitted in 2008, the Bush Justice Department touted its “significant strides in the global war on terror,” noting that the department had already secured “319 convictions or guilty pleas in terrorism or terrorism-related cases” since the 9/11 attacks.

Two years before that, in September 2006, the Justice Department, then under the leadership of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, issued a “Terror Fact Sheet” stating that “288 defendants have been convicted or have pleaded guilty in terrorism or terrorism-related cases” since the 9/11 attacks.

And a year after that “Terror Fact Sheet” came out, Gonzales himself alluded to the statistic in a speech, telling a crowd at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that the Bush Administration’s successes against terrorism were based on two key factors.

First, he said, was the decision to treat the 9/11 attacks as “acts of war,” which he said “enabled us to remove enemy combatants from the field of battle and collect intelligence.”

Second, he said, was “traditional law enforcement.”

“Planning a terrorist attack is a criminal offense, and the Department of Justice, along with our state and local law enforcement partners have also pursued would-be terrorists as criminals, frequently disrupting their plots before they are viable,” Gonzales said. “We have enjoyed great success utilizing the prosecutorial tools available within our criminal courts to disrupt and prevent further terrorist attacks on American soil in the past six years. In fact, since the September 11 attacks, hundreds of defendants have been convicted of or have pleaded guilty to terrorism-related offenses.”

Numbers, though, apparently have a tendency to change – or at least what qualifies as a “convicted terrorist” does.

During a major national security speech at the National Archives in May 2009, President Barack Obama said federal prisons “hold hundreds of convicted terrorists.”

But despite that previous claim and despite Holder’s recent statements regarding “300″ convictions, President Obama told CBS this past weekend that the Bush Administration “prosecuted 190 folks in these [civilian] courts, got convictions, and those folks are in maximum security prisons right now.”

Likewise, in September 2003, on the eve of the second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush told a crowd at the FBI Academy in Virginia about his administration’s “solid results” against terrorism, including “more than 260 suspected terrorists [who] have been charged in the United States courts, [and] more than 140 [who] have already been convicted.”

But five years later, on the eve of the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush White House released a “Fact Sheet” saying, “Since 9/11, more than two dozen terrorists and supporters have been convicted in the United States of terrorism-related crimes.”

As for who comprises the Justice Department’s list of “convicted international and domestic terrorists” in U.S. prisons, the Justice Department spokesman wouldn’t say.

(The funding request submitted in 2008 can be found here:http://www.justice.gov/jmd/2009summary/html/004_budget_highlights.htm)

(The 2006 “Terror Fact Sheet” can be found here:http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2006/September/06_opa_590.html)

(The Bush White House’s “Fact Sheet” can be seen here: http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/09/20080910-5.html)

8 Bloodthirsty Dictators Who Benefited From U.S. Aid

by DAN BERRY

Posted under Augusto Pinochet, Dictators, Ferdinand Marcos, Hitler, Hugo Banzer, Ian Smith, Idi Amin, Lists, Pol Pot, Vinicio Cerezo

Many of the world’s most repressive dictators have been friends of America. Tyrants, torturers, killers, and sundry dictators and corrupt puppet-presidents have been aided, supported, and rewarded handsomely for their loyalty to US interests. Traditional dictators seize control through force, while constitutional dictators hold office through voting fraud or severely restricted elections, and are frequently puppets and apologists for the military juntas, which control the ballot boxes. In any case, none have been democratically elected by the majority of their people in fair and open elections.

They are democratic America’s undemocratic allies. They may rise to power through bloody ClA-backed coups and rule by terror and torture. Their troops may receive training or advice from the CIA and other US agencies. US military aid and weapons sales often strengthen their armies and guarantee their hold on power. Unwavering “anti-communism” and a willingness to provide unhampered access for American business interests to exploit their countries’ natural resources and cheap labor are the excuses for their repression, and the primary reason the US government supports them. They may be linked internationalIy to extreme right-wing groups such as the World Anti-Communist League, and some have had strong Nazi affiliations and have offered sanctuary to WWll Nazi war criminals.

They usually grow rich, while their countries’ economies deteriorate and the majority of their people live in poverty. US tax dollars and US-backed loans have made billionaires of some, while others are international drug dealers who also collect CIA paychecks. Rarely are they called to account for their crimes. And rarely still, is the US government held responsible for supporting and protecting some of the worst human rights violators in the world.

8.  IAN SMITH – Prime Minister of Rhodesia

Ian Smith promised the whites who elected him Prime Minister of Rhodesia in 1982 that he would keep Rhodesia white, at any cost. To stop the black guerrilla fighters trying to overthrow his regime, Smith rationed food for Africans whom he believed were feeding the guerrillas. This cruel measure only served to starve the already undernourished black population. Studies found that over 90% of Rhodesia’s black children were malnourished and nutritional deficiencies were the major cause of infant death. Smith rounded up blacks into concentration camps he called “protective” villages. Believing that ignorant people were less likely to revolt, he cut funding for black education, spending $5 on each black child compared to $80 on each white child. His all white Parliament passed a law protecting officials who took actions for the suppression of “terrorism”, enabling the police and military to commit atrocities. An international trade boycott against Rhodesia arose, but while the US publicly condemned the government, it continued to do business there. In 1971, President Nixon lifted the chrome embargo against Rhodesia at a time when there was a surplus of chrome in the US. Blacks were eventually given the right to vote for some officials, but the opposition to Smith’s government grew so strong that he was ultimately forced to give up some power to blacks. In 1979, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, a country primarily ruled by blacks.

7.  FERDINAND MARCOS – President of the Philippines

Ferdinand Marcos began his career with a bang. At age 21, convicted of gunning down Julio Nalundasan, his father’s victorious opponent in the Philippines first national elections, he went to prison. He was later release by a Supreme Court Justice who, like Marcos and his father, was a Nazi collaborator. Despite Marcos’s record as murderer, fake WWll hero and Nazi agent, he was elected Philippine President in 1965. Under Marcos, the Philippine national debt grew from $2 billion to $30 billion, but US corporations in the Philippines prospered, perhaps explaining why the US didn’t protest Marcos’s imposition of martial law in 1972. The Marcoses enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, and they salted away billions of dollars in the course of their US-backed rule between 1965 and 1986.

The Carter Administration engineered an $88 million World Bank loan to Marcos, increased military aid to him by 300%, and called him a “soft dictator”. But a 1976 Amnesty International report identified 88 government torturers, and stated that alleged subversives had their heads slammed into walls, their genitals and pubic hair torched, and were beaten with clubs, fists, bottles, and rifle butts. By 1977, the armed forces had quadrupled and over 60,000 Filipinos had been arrested for political reasons. Yet, in 1981, Vice President George Bush praised Marcos for his “adherence to democratic principals and to the democratic processes”. Marcos was overthrown in 1986 by followers of Corazon Aquino, widow of an assassinated opposition leader.

Ferdinand and Imelda fled to Hawaii, only to be indicted in 1988 for fraud and tax evasion. Marcos died in 1989. Imelda returned to the Philippines in 1991 and stood unsuccessfully in the Presidential elections of 1992. In 1993 she was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment for criminal graft and to other long sentences for corruption. She is still free while she appeals. She was elected to Congress in May 1995. Meanwhile, in it attempts to recover the lost Marcos billions from Swiss bank accounts and other shadier locations the Philippines Government has, after paying its US lawyers, recovered the princely sum of $2,000.

6.  COLONEL HUGO BANZER – President of Bolivia

In 1970, in Bolivia, when then-President Juan Jose Torres nationalized Gulf Oil properties and tin mines owned by US interests, and tried to establish friendly relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union, he was playing with fire. The coup to overthrow Torres, led by US-trained officer and Gulf Oil beneficiary Hugo Banzer, had direct support from Washington. When Banzer’s forces had a breakdown in radio communications, US Air Force radio was placed at their disposal. Once in power, Banzer began a reign of terror. Schools were shut down as hotbeds of political subversive activity. Within two years, 2,000 people were arrested and tortured without trial. As in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil, the native Indians were ordered off their land and deprived of tribal identity. Tens-of-thousands of white South Africans were enticed to immigrate with promises of the land stolen from the Indians, with a goal of creating a white Bolivia. When Catholic clergy tried to aid the Indians, the regime, with CIA help, launched terrorist attacks against them, and this “Banzer Plan” became a model for similar anti-Catholic actions throughout Latin America.

5.  VINICIO CEREZO – President of Guatemala

According to Amnesty International, arbitrary arrest, torture, disappearance, and political killings were everyday realities for Guatemalans during decades of US financed military dictatorship. In January 1986, Christian Democrat leader Vinicio Cerezo was elected President and said he had “the political will to respect the rights of man”, but it didn’t take long to find out that his political will was irrelevant in the face of Guatemala’s well-oiled military machine. Hopes for change were dashed when Cerezo announced that Guatemala would continue to provide amnesty for all past military offenses committed from General Elrain Rios Montt’s coup in 1982 through the 1986 elections. Although Ronald Reagan’s State Department asserted “there has not been a single clear-cut case of political killing, within months of Cerezo’s inauguration, opposition leaders attributed 56 murders to security forces and death squads, while Americas Watch claimed that “throughout 1986, violent killings were reported in the Guatemalan press at the rate of 100 per month”. Altogether, Americas Watch says, tens-of-thousands were killed and 400 rural villages were destroyed by government death squads during Reagan’s term in office. Colonel D’Jalma Dominguez, former army spokesman, explains “For convenience sake a civilian government is preferable, such as the one we have now. If anything goes wrong, only the Christian Democrats will get the blame. It’s better to remain outside. The real power will not be lost.” Today, the real power still resides with the military.

4.  GENERAL AUGUSTO PINOCHET – President of Chile

Augusto Pinochet deposed democratically elected President Salvador Allende in 1973, and buried Chile’s 150 year old democracy. “Democracy is the breeding ground of communism”, says Pinochet. The bloody coup, in which Allende was assassinated, was carefully managed by the CIA and ITT. Tens of thousands of Chileans have been tortured, killed, and exiled since then, according to Amnesty International. A U.S. congressional delegation was told by inmates at San Miguel Prison that they had been tortured by “the application of electric shock, simultaneous blows to the ears, cigarette burns, and simulated executions by firing squads.” Despite Chile’s bad human rights record, the U.S. government continued to support Pinochet with international loans. Even the state-sponsored car-bomb assassination of Chile’s former Ambassador to the U.S., Orlando Letelier, did not convince the U.S. to break with Pinochet. In 1988 a plebiscite refused to extend Pinochet’s rule, so he altered the constitution to reduce the powers of the incoming elected President, and left himself head of the armed forces. All the other South American dictators are gone but Pinochet has found the perfect solution: Chile now has the squeaky-clean sheen of democracy yet he still has his finger on the trigger.

3.  IDI AMIN – General of Uganda

Amin was one of the most notorious of Africa’s post-independence dictators. A former heavyweight boxing champion in Uganda and a non-commissioned officer in the British Army there, Amin caught the attention of his superiors because of his efficient management of concentration camps in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s, where he earned the title of “The Strangler”. Because of his loyalty to Britain and his strongly anti-communist stance, Amin was picked by the British to replace the elected Ugandan government in a 1971 coup. While in power, he earned a reputation as a “clown” in some circles in the West, but he was no joke at home. Amin brutalized his people with British and US military aid and with Israeli and CIA training of his troops. The body count of his friends, the clergy, soldiers, and ordinary Ugandans rose daily, but the West ignored his cruelty. As he continued to demand more aid and sophisticated weapons, he finally lost support. In 1979, his quest for more power lead him to invade Tanzania. In retaliation, he was overthrown by an invading Tanzanian / Ugandan army. Amin fled to Saudi Arabia, where he now lives a quiet life in a modest villa outside Jeddah, looking after his goats and chickens and cultivating his vegetable garden. Traditional Arab garb has replaced the bemedalled Field Marshal’s uniform of his heyday.

2.  POL POT – Commander of the Khmer Rouge

The bombing of Cambodia by the US from 1969 to 1972, left 600,000 civilians dead, millions of refugees, tens-of-thousands dying from disease and starvation, and the Cambodian economy and culture in ruins. Cambodians blamed the US and the puppet regime of Lon Nol for the country’s destruction, and gradually sided with the guerrilla army of the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot, which finally defeated Lon Nol, and took power in April, 1975. Once in power, Pol Pot emptied the cities, forcing the people into the countryside. Virtually all educated people were killed and more than 1.5 million people perished in this “holocaust”. Only when the Khmer Rouge was ousted by Vietnam in 1979, did the terror stop. Washington took steps to preserve the Khmer Rouge as a counter force to the Vietnamese. International relief agencies were pressured by the US to provide food and humanitarian assistance to the Khmer Rouge, which had fled to Thailand, and the US sent military aid as well. In 1982, in an effort to isolate the Vietnamese, the US forced together the three contending anti-Vietnamese groups, insisting that the Khmer Rouge be part of the negotiations. Cambodia continues to suffer from the devastation produced by both the US bombing and the Khmer Rouge atrocities. Pol Pot is considered to still be the power behind the Khmer Rouge, which has a strong presence in Cambodia today, thanks to the US.

1.  ADOLF HITLER – Chancellor of Germany

As German bombs fell on London and Nazi tanks rolled over US troops, Sosthenes Behn president and founder of the US based ITT corporation, met with his German representative to discuss improving German communication systems. ITT was designing and building Nazi phone and radio systems as well as supplying crucial parts for German bombs. Our government knew all about this, for under a presidential order, US companies were licensed to trade with the Nazis. The choice of who would be licensed was odd, though. While the Secretary of State gave the Ford Motor Company permission to make Nazi tanks, he simultaneously blocked aid to German-Jewish refugees because the US wasn’t supposed to be trading with the enemy. Other US companies trading with the Third Reich were General Motors, DuPont, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Davis Oil Co., and the Chase National Bank. President Roosevelt did not stop them, fearing a scandal might lead to another stock market crash or lower US moral. Besides, the same companies that traded with Hitler were supplying the US with its armaments, and some corporate leaders threatened to withdraw their support if Roosevelt exposed them. Henry Ford was a good friend of Hitler’s. His book — The International Jew — had Inspired Hltler’s Mein Kampf. The Fuhrer kept Ford’s picture in his office, and Ford was one of only four foreigners to receive Germany’s highest civilian award. As for Sosthenes Behn, at the end of the war, he received the highest civilian award for service to his country – the United States of America.

THE TRUTH ABOUT US JUSTICE

By Yvonne Ridley

Many of us are still in a state of shock over the guilty verdict returned on Dr Aafia Siddiqui.

The response from the people of Pakistan was predictable and overwhelming and I salute their spontaneous actions.

From Peshawar to Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore and beyond they marched in their thousands demanding the return of Aafia.

Even some of the US media expressed discomfort over the verdict returned by the jurors … there was a general feeling that something was not right.

Everyone had something to say, everyone that is except the usually verbose US Ambassador Anne Patterson who has spent the last two years briefing against Dr Aafia and her supporters.

This is the same woman who claimed I was a fantasist when I gave a press conference with Tehreek e Insaf leader Imran Khan back in July 2008 revealing the plight of a female prisoner in Bagram called the Grey Lady.

She said I was talking nonsense and stated categorically that the prisoner I referred to as “650” did not exist.

By the end of the month she changed her story and said there had been a female prisoner but that she was most definitely not Dr Aafia Siddiqui.

By that time Aafia had been gunned down at virtually point blank range in an Afghan prison cell jammed full of more than a dozen US soldiers, FBI agents and Afghan police.

Her Excellency briefed the media that the prisoner had wrested an M4 gun from one soldier and fired off two rounds and had to be subdued. The fact these bullets failed to hit a single person in the cell and simply disappeared did not resonate with the diplomat.

In a letter dripping in untruths on August 16 2008 she decried the “erroneous and irresponsible media reports regarding the arrest of Ms
Aafia Siddiqui”. She went on to say: “Unfortunately,
there are some who have an interest in simply distorting the facts in an effort to manipulate and inflame public opinion. The truth is never served by sensationalism…”

When Jamaat Islami invited me on a national tour of Pakistan to address people about the continued abuse of Dr Aafia and the truth about her incarceration in Bagram, the US Ambassador continued to issue rebuttals.

She assured us all that Dr Aafia was being treated humanely had been given consular access as set out in international law … hmm. Well I have a challenge for Ms Patterson today. I challenge her to repeat every single word she said back then and swear it is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

As Dr Aafia Siddiqui’s trial got underway, the US Ambassador and some of her stooges from the intelligence world laid on a lavish party at the US Embassy in Islamabad for some hand-picked journalists where I’ve no doubt in between the dancing, drinks and music they were carefully briefed about the so-called facts of the case.

Interesting that some of the potentially incriminating pictures taken at the private party managed to find the Ambassador was probably hoping to minimize the impact the trial would have on the streets of Pakistan proving that, for the years she has been holed up and barricaded behind concrete bunkers and barbed wire, she has learned nothing about this great country of Pakistan or its people.

One astute Pakistani columnist wrote about her: “The respected lady seems to have forgotten the words of her own country’s 16th president Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865): “You
can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some
of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time”.

And the people of Pakistan proved they are nobody’s fool and responded to the guilty verdict in New York in an appropriate way.

When injustice is the law it is the duty of everyone to rise up and challenge that injustice in any way possible.

The response – so far – has been restrained and measured but it is just the start. A sentence has yet to be delivered by Judge Richard Berman in May.

Of course there has been a great deal of finger pointing and blame towards the jury in New York who found Dr Aafia guilty of attempted murder.

Observers asked how they could ignore the science and the irrefutable facts … there was absolutely no evidence linking Dr Aafia to the gun, no bullets, no residue from firing it.

But I really don’t think we can blame the jurors for the verdict – you see the jury simply could not handle the truth.    Had they taken the logical route and gone for the science and the hard, cold, clinical facts it would have meant two things.  It would have meant around eight US soldiers took the oath and lied in court to save their own skins and careers or it would have meant that Dr Aafia Siddiqui was telling the truth.

And, as I said before, the jury couldn’t handle the truth. Because that would have meant that the defendant really had been kidnapped, abused, tortured and held in dark, secret prisons by the US before being shot and put on a rendition flight to New York. It would have meant that her three children – two of them US citizens – would also have been kidnapped, abused and tortured by the US.

They say ignorance is bliss and this jury so desperately wanted not to believe that the US could have had a hand in the kidnapping of a five-month -old baby boy, a five-year-old girl and her seven-year-old brother.

They couldn’t handle the truth … it is as simple as that.

Well I, and many others across the world like me, can’t handle any more lies. America’s reputation is lying in the lowest gutters in Pakistan at the moment and it can’t sink any lower.

The trust has gone, there is only a burning hatred and resentment towards a superpower which sends unmanned drones into villages to slaughter innocents.

It is fair to say that America’s goodwill and credibility is all but washed up with most honest, decent citizens of Pakistan.

And I think even Her Excellency Anne Patterson recognizes that fact which is why she is now keeping her mouth shut.

If she has any integrity and any self respect left she should stand before the Pakistan people and ask for their forgiveness for the drone murders, the extra judicial killings, the black operations, the kidnapping, torture and rendition of its citizens, the water-boarding, the bribery, the corruption and, not least of all, the injustice handed out to Dr Aafia Siddiqui and her family.

She should then pick up the phone to the US President and tell him to release Aafia and return Pakistan’s most loved, respected and famous daughter and reunite her with the two children who are still missing.

Then she should re-read her letter of August 16, 2008 and write another … one of resignation.

* Yvonne Ridley is a patron of Cageprisoners which first brought the plight of Dr Aafia Siddiqui to the world’s attention shortly after her kidnap in March 2003. The award-winning, investigative journalist also co-produced the documentary In Search of Prisoner 650 with film-maker Hassan al Banna Ghani which concluded that the Grey Lady of Bagram was Dr Aafia Siddiqui

The Terror-Industrial Complex

AP / Fareed Khan

Mohammad Ahmed, son of Aafia Siddiqui, takes part in a demonstration arranged by Human Rights Network.

By Chris Hedges

The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill American military officers and FBI agents illustrates that the greatest danger to our security comes not from al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy mercenaries, kidnappers, killers and torturers our government employs around the globe.

The bizarre story surrounding Siddiqui, 37, who received an undergraduate degree from MIT and a doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis University, often defies belief. Siddiqui, who could spend 50 years in prison on seven charges when she is sentenced in May, was by her own account abducted in 2003 from her hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, with her three children—two of whom remain missing—and spirited to a secret U.S. prison where she was allegedly tortured and mistreated for five years. The American government has no comment, either about the alleged clandestine detention or the missing children.

Siddiqui was discovered in 2008 disoriented and apparently aggressive and hostile, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, with her oldest son. She allegedly was carrying plans to make explosives, lists of New York landmarks and notes referring to “mass-casualty attacks.” But despite these claims the government prosecutors chose not to charge her with terrorism or links to al-Qaida—the reason for her original appearance on the FBI’s most-wanted list six years ago. Her supporters suggest that the papers she allegedly had in her possession when she was found in Afghanistan, rather than detail coherent plans for terrorist attacks, expose her severe mental deterioration, perhaps the result of years of imprisonment and abuse. This argument was bolstered by some of the pages of the documents shown briefly to the court, including a crude sketch of a gun that was described as a “match gun” that operates by lighting a match.

“Justice was not served,” Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network and the spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family, told me. “The U.S. government made a decision to label this woman a terrorist, but instead of putting her on trial for the alleged terrorist activity she was put on trial for something else. They tried to convict her of that something else, not with evidence, but because she was a terrorist. She was selectively prosecuted for something that would allow them to only tell their side of the story.”

The government built its entire case instead around disputed events in the 300-square-foot room of the Ghazni police station. It insisted that on July 18, 2008, the diminutive Siddiqui, who had been arrested by local Afghan police the day before, seized an M4 assault rifle that was left unattended and fired at American military and FBI agents. None of the Americans were injured. Siddiqui, however, was gravely wounded, shot twice in the stomach.

No one, other than Siddiqui, has attempted to explain where she was for five years after she vanished in 2003. No one seems to be able to explain why a disoriented Pakistani woman and her son, an American citizen, neither of whom spoke Dari, were discovered by local residents wandering in a public square in Ghazni, where an eyewitness told Harpers Magazine the distraught Siddiqui “was attacking everyone who got close to her.” Had Siddiqui, after years of imprisonment and torture, perhaps been at the U.S. detention center in Bagram and then dumped with one of her three children in Ghazi? And where are the other two children, one of whom also is an American citizen?

Her arrest in Ghazi saw, according to the official complaint, a U.S. Army captain and a warrant officer, two FBI agents and two military interpreters arrive to question Siddiqui at the police headquarters. The Americans and their interpreters were shown to a meeting room that was partitioned by a yellow curtain. “None of the United States personnel were aware,” the complaint states, “that Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.” The group sat down to talk and “the Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot.” Siddiqui allegedly reached from behind the curtain and pulled the three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety. She pulled the curtain “slightly back” and pointed the gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, “Get the fuck out of here!” and fired twice. She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired “approximately two rounds” into Siddiqui’s abdomen. She collapsed, still struggling, and then fell unconscious.

But in an article written by Petra Bartosiewicz in the November 2009 Harper’s Magazine, authorities in Afghanistan described a series of events at odds with the official version. The governor of Ghazni province, Usman Usmani, told a local reporter who was hired by Bartosiewicz that the U.S. team had “demanded to take over custody” of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate. He proposed a compromise: The U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however, a “senior Ghazni police officer” suggested that the compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the police station, he said, and demanded custody of Siddiqui. The Afghan officers refused, and the U.S. team proceeded to disarm them. Then, for reasons unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the scene. The U.S. team, “thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her.”

Siddiqui told a delegation of Pakistani senators who went to Texas to visit her in prison a few months after her arrest that she never touched anyone’s gun, nor did she shout at anyone or make any threats. She simply stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain and startled the soldiers. One of them shouted, “She is loose,” and then someone shot her. When she regained consciousness she heard someone else say, “We could lose our jobs.”

Siddiqui’s defense team pointed out that there was an absence of bullets, casings or residue from the M4, all of which suggested it had not been fired. They played a video to show that two holes in a wall supposedly caused by the M4 had been there before July 18. They also highlighted inconsistencies in the testimony from the nine government witnesses, who at times gave conflicting accounts of how many people were in the room, where they were sitting or standing and how many shots were fired.

Siddiqui, who took the stand during the trial against the advice of her defense team, called the report that she had fired the unattended M4 assault rifle at the Americans “the biggest lie.” She said she had been trying to flee the police station because she feared being tortured. Siddiqui, whose mental stability often appeared to be in question during the trial, was ejected several times from the Manhattan courtroom for erratic behavior and outbursts.

“It is difficult to get a fair trial in this country if the government wants to accuse you of terrorism,” said Foster. “It is difficult to get a fair trial on any types of charges. The government is allowed to tell the jury you are a terrorist before you have to put on any evidence. The fear factor that has emerged since 9/11 has permeated into the U.S. court system in a profoundly disturbing way. It embraces the idea that we can compromise core principles, for example the presumption of innocence, based on perceived threats that may or may not come to light. We, as a society, have chosen to cave on fear.”

I spent more than a year covering al-Qaida for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East. The threat posed by Islamic extremists, while real, is also wildly overblown, used to foster a climate of fear and political passivity, as well as pump billions of dollars into the hands of the military, private contractors, intelligence agencies and repressive client governments including that of Pakistan. The leader of one FBI counterterrorism squad told The New York Times that of the 5,500 terrorism-related leads its 21 agents had pursued over the past five years, just 5 percent were credible and not one had foiled an actual terrorist plot. These statistics strike me as emblematic of the entire war on terror.

Terrorism, however, is a very good business. The number of extremists who are planning to carry out terrorist attacks is minuscule, but there are vast departments and legions of ambitious intelligence and military officers who desperately need to strike a tangible blow against terrorism, real or imagined, to promote their careers as well as justify obscene expenditures and a flagrant abuse of power. All this will not make us safer. It will not protect us from terrorist strikes. The more we dispatch brutal forms of power to the Islamic world the more enraged Muslims and terrorists we propel into the ranks of those who oppose us. The same perverted logic saw the Argentine military, when I lived in Buenos Aires, “disappear” 30,000 of the nation’s citizens, the vast majority of whom were innocent. Such logic also fed the drive to root out terrorists in El Salvador, where, when I arrived in 1983, the death squads were killing between 800 and 1,000 people a month. Once you build secret archipelagos of prisons, once you commit huge sums of money and invest your political capital in a ruthless war against subversion, once you empower a network of clandestine killers, operatives and torturers, you fuel the very insecurity and violence you seek to contain.

I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty. But I do know that permitting jailers, spies, kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule of law contaminates us with our own bile. Siddiqui is one victim. There are thousands more we do not see. These abuses, justified by the war on terror, have created a system of internal and external state terrorism that is far more dangerous to our security and democracy than the threat posed by Islamic radicals.

Blair Up To the Same Old Tricks to Silence Questioners

[Blair and Bush conspired against the Iraqi people--Period.  Sometimes "conspiracy theorists" are right on the money.] Blair attacks hunt for “scandal” over Iraq war decision Photos 1 of 1 Former British PM Tony Blair giving evidence to the Iraq Inquiry. LONDON: Former British prime minister Tony Blair has lashed out at the hunt for a “scandal” and a “conspiracy” over his controversial decision to back the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Speaking 10 days after he gave evidence at Britain’s latest inquiry into the war, Blair told US broadcaster Fox News on Monday that Britons had a “curious habit” which meant they could not accept others might hold different views. “There’s always got to be a scandal as to why you hold your view,” he said. “There’s got to be a conspiracy behind it, some great deceit that has gone on, and people just find it hard to understand that it is possible for people to have different points of view and hold them reasonably for genuine reasons.” The ex-head of government sparked anger in Britain when he told the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq conflict on January 29 that he had no regrets over removing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Relatives of British troops killed in Iraq shouted “liar” and “murderer” at him as he left the London hearing, and the British press attacked his defiant insistence that he had done the right thing. Britain provided the second largest contingent of troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, with a deployment that peaked at 46,000. It ended combat operations in Iraq in April 2009, when all but a handful of British troops started returning home. A total of 179 British service personnel were killed in the conflict. In Monday’s interview, Blair also rebuffed criticism that the removal of strongman Saddam from the region had emboldened Iran. “When people say that Saddam was the strongman that was the brake on Iran, I say that was our policy through the 1980s,” he told the broadcaster. “We supported Saddam against Iran. The result was an Iran-Iraq war in which there were one million casualties.” The best way to deal with Iran was to encourage freedom and democracy in its neighbours such as Iraq, he argued. “The very best way of dealing with (Iran’s) extreme ideas is to put before people a better idea,” added Blair, pointing to the example of democracy in neighbouring Iraq. Iran announced plans on Sunday to step up its uranium enrichment, a move that heightened tensions with Western nations which fear the Islamic republic is trying to develop its own nuclear weapon. Tehran insists its nuclear enrichment drive is purely peaceful.

Pakistan’s security forces accused of sabotaging ‘hearts and minds’ campaign

Tom Hussain, Foreign Correspondent

ISLAMABAD: A “hearts and minds” initiative by the Pakistani government to bring an end to a nationalist insurgency in the western province of Balochistan has been undermined by a shadowy “zero tolerance” campaign by security forces, it was claimed yesterday .

A public spat between Nawab Aslam Raisani, the chief minister of Balochistan, and the Frontier Constabulary, a paramilitary force commanded by army officers, erupted on January 15 when two Baloch students of the Government Degree College in Khuzdar were killed and four wounded in firing on a protest rally.

News reports and human rights activists said the shooting was carried out by the constabulary, but it denied even having deployed forces in Khuzdar at the time.

Khuzdar is an isolated district town some 350km south-west of Quetta, the provincial capital.

The shootings sparked a furore within the provincial assembly, as two cabinet ministers walked out in protest and strikes and angry demonstrations broke out across the province.

Mr Raisani, who heads the elected provincial government, was infuriated and accused the army commanders of the constabulary of “running a parallel government”, and by inference, of undermining federal government efforts to negotiate an end to a sporadic but vicious guerrilla war.

The insurgency has raged since the killing in April 2006 of Akbar Khan Bugti, a dominant tribal chief and former chief minister of the province, in a military operation ordered by the then president Pervez Musharraf.

Bugti and other tribal elders had clashed with the Musharraf administration over political autonomy and financial compensation for the exploitation of the province’s natural resources.

Mr Raisani has also ordered a judge of the Balochistan High Court to conduct an independent inquiry into the Khuzdar incident.

The chief minister’s comments were widely endorsed by other Baloch politicians.

“Such actions indicate that the provincial government is completely powerless,” Jahanzeb Jamaldini, president of the Balochistan National Party, told The Baloch Hal, an online English newspaper. “The province is in the control of the security forces, which are now hard for the provincial government to control.”

The Khuzdar shooting evoked a tit-for-tat response from nationalist guerrillas, who killed two soldiers and wounded two others in an attack on a constabulary vehicle in Khuzdar on January 23.

The Baloch Liberation Army, a notoriously violent guerrilla faction led by Barambagh Bugti, a grandson of the late Akbar Khan Bugti, later claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Khuzdar shootings and their political aftermath have come at an inopportune time – just weeks after landmark political and economic reforms aimed at assuaging wounded Baloch nationalist sentiment were unveiled.

Since general elections that restored parliamentary democracy to Pakistan in February 2008, the country’s major political parties have gone to extraordinary lengths to appease Balochi nationalists. Asif Ali Zardari, the president and an ethnic Baloch from Sindh province, publicly apologised on behalf of the federal government, shortly after assuming office in September 2008.

The positive sentiment the apology generated in Balochistan evaporated the following April, when three prominent nationalist leaders were reported detained by the constabulary and handed over to the intelligence agencies. Their corpses were found a week later.

A breakthrough was next achieved in September, when the Balochistan High Court ordered a police investigation into the circumstances of Bugti’s death, and the registration of a murder case against Mr Musharraf, who now lives in exile in London.

Further hopes of a negotiated political settlement were raised in November when the government unveiled a package of political and economic reforms.

Its reconciliatory tone was underlined by the withdrawal of cases against exiled insurgent tribal chiefs, who were also invited for talks; the issuing of a verified official list of nearly 1,000 missing political activists, most thought to have been detained by the military’s Inter Services Intelligence directorate and 20 of whom were released in December as a goodwill gesture; backdated compensation for federal exploitation of natural resources, including oil and natural gas, and increased provincial ownership of ventures involving the mining of copper and gold deposits, and the recruitment of 25,000 Balochs into various branches of the civil service.

The reforms, dubbed the Aghaz-i-Haqooq-Balochistan, or Beginning of Rights for Balochistan, package won the unanimous backing of the federal parliament on December 11.

In an unprecedented display of generosity on December 31, the governments of Pakistan’s three other provinces, including the opposition-led administration in Punjab, agreed to reduce their share of federal revenues to facilitate greater development spending in Balochistan.

Independent analysts said the federal government now had to act fast to prevent the political process from failing.

“It is not the first time that hawks in the establishment [meaning the army high command] are discouraging a political solution to the Balochistan conflict,” wrote Malik Siraj Akbar in an opinion article in the Daily Times, a liberal English-language newspaper published in Lahore.

“The government has to minimise the use of force by the security forces against the people of Balochistan in order to save the reconciliation process from being hijacked, and elements responsible for the Khuzdar firing incident must be brought to justice.”

thussain@thenational.ae

Islamabad’s ‘Gunboat’ Policy In Balochistan

Islamabad’s ‘gunboat’ policy

By Sanaullah Baloch

IN the past 60 years, the people of Balochistan have endured immense suffering. They have lost their sovereignty and identity, and have been ruthlessly exploited.

A peaceful, autonomous region before 1948, Balochistan now resembles the war-torn West African countries where resources have been turned into a curse rather than a cure for the native population.

The recent history of the Baloch people, particularly from 1948 onwards, has been marked by confrontation, segregation, exploitation and increasingly abysmal living conditions throughout the province. During this period, the central government’s priority has been to develop and expand the security network in Balochistan, in order to get what it wants. Put simply, Islamabad has adopted a clear and consistent ‘gunboat’ policy in order to remain in command of the province.

The establishment holds the Baloch people and their leadership responsible for the current state of affairs. Yet how can a region develop when it has more soldiers than teachers, more garrisons then universities, more naval bases than science and research centres? In Balochistan today, Frontier Corps (FC) cantonments outnumber colleges, there are more police stations than vocational training centres and more check-posts than government girls’ schools.

Neither politicians, nor the establishment in Islamabad, appear willing to understand and undo the colonial-style system that is the source of immense frustration for the people of this resource-rich province. Islamabad has always taken the approach of hiding Balochistan’s miseries behind empty packages and slogans. In reality, the central government has lost all moral and political command over Baloch land: it uses unethical methods such as fear and brutality to retain power in the region, in a manner that is reminiscent of the colonial era.

The killing recently of political activists in Khuzdar is not an exception: it represents a planned policy to decapitate the Baloch people’s leadership and terrorise the population. On Jan 15, a peaceful rally by the Baloch Students Organisation was fired upon by FC personnel and two young students-cum-political activists, Saddam Hussain and Ali Dost, were killed. Many other students were injured.

The protest was a democratic right of the Baloch youth to express their opposition to the killing of Baloch people in Karachi, and to lobby for the release of the soaring numbers of missing persons.

The broader aim underpinning the recent daylight murders of senior Baloch leaders is to prevent at all costs any mobilisation among the Baloch, or the raising of their political consciousness. Islamabad is using inhumane methods to intimidate Baloch political activists, seeking by such means to render impossible any organised struggle against the colonisation and exploitation of Baloch land and resources.

The establishment’s hidden motives are revealed by its policy of state-sponsored murder, such as that of Baloch leader Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti who was killed by Pakistani troops in August 2006. Other deaths include that of Balach Marri in November 2007 and Zahid Baloch in late 2008; prominent Baloch intellectual Jan Mohammad Dashti survived an attempt on his life last February.

In April last year, three prominent Baloch leaders — Ghulam Mohammad, chairman of the Baloch National Movement, Sher Mohammad Baloch, vice-president of the Balochistan Republican Party and Lala Munir Baloch, general-secretary of the Baloch National Front — were abducted and killed.

It appears, in fact, that certain sections of the establishment are making a deliberate attempt to irritate peaceful protesters and political groups: those who have opted for peaceful means of protest against military operations in the area and the human rights’ crisis. Although the conflict is inflicting immense pain and socio-economic losses on the Baloch masses, it translates to a source of power and monetary benefit for the institutions that represent the security establishment.

Who, after all, benefits from the prolonged conflict — the Baloch or the security establishment? The answer is simple: while replying to a question in the Balochistan Assembly on Jan 14 this year, the Balochistan home minister said that around Rs140m had been paid to the FC for performing duties related to maintaining law and order in the province. He added that millions of rupees were outstanding under this head. The FC is a federal force staffed largely by people from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Punjab.

The skimpy development budget of this impoverished province has been diverted towards the powerful FC and the security agencies, in order to allow them to continue their oppressive policies.

Meanwhile, due to the total absence of socio-economic development rural poverty in Balochistan has increased by 21 per cent between 1999 and 2008. Thousands of people have been killed, rendered missing or displaced during military offensives. The prolonged Balochistan-Islamabad conflict has, moreover, resulted in immense losses to the socio-economic development of the province, which have never been compensated for or even calculated by the central government.

Due to the appalling situation in the province, the Baloch youth has disassociated completely with the state and its policies. The recent deaths of their Baloch cousins in Lyari, Karachi, have rubbed salt on their wounds.

Balochistan’s youth is not only the victim of enforced disappearances and killings, it has also been deprived of all forms of contemporary education and employment. Compared to the 486 polytechnics, vocational institutes and computer science, commerce and law colleges in Punjab, Balochistan has just nine poorly developed centres for Quetta’s urban population.

The young people of Balochistan stand in dire need of schools, colleges, universities, professional and technical-training institutions. Above all, they need freedom and opportunities. They do not deserve to be repressed and killed. The writer is a Baloch leader and a former senator. balochbnp@gmail.com (Dawn, Karachi)

Wars sending U.S. into ruin

By ERIC MARGOLIS Obama the peace president is fighting battles his country cannot afford February 8, 2010 U.S. President Barack Obama calls the $3.8-trillion US budget he just sent to Congress a major step in restoring America’s economic health. In fact, it’s another potent fix given to a sick patient deeply addicted to the dangerous drug — debt. More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than invasion. The latest example was the Soviet Union, which spent itself into ruin by buying tanks. Washington’s deficit (the difference between spending and income from taxes) will reach a vertiginous $1.6 trillion US this year. The huge sum will be borrowed, mostly from China and Japan, to which the U.S. already owes $1.5 trillion. Debt service will cost $250 billion. To spend $1 trillion, one would have had to start spending $1 million daily soon after Rome was founded and continue for 2,738 years until today. Obama’s total military budget is nearly $1 trillion. This includes Pentagon spending of $880 billion. Add secret black programs (about $70 billion); military aid to foreign nations like Egypt, Israel and Pakistan; 225,000 military “contractors” (mercenaries and workers); and veterans’ costs. Add $75 billion (nearly four times Canada’s total defence budget) for 16 intelligence agencies with 200,000 employees. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars ($1 trillion so far), will cost $200-250 billion more this year, including hidden and indirect expenses. Obama’s Afghan “surge” of 30,000 new troops will cost an additional $33 billion — more than Germany’s total defence budget. No wonder U.S. defence stocks rose after Peace Laureate Obama’s “austerity” budget. Military and intelligence spending relentlessly increase as unemployment heads over 10% and the economy bleeds red ink. America has become the Sick Man of the Western Hemisphere, an economic cripple like the defunct Ottoman Empire. The Pentagon now accounts for half of total world military spending. Add America’s rich NATO allies and Japan, and the figure reaches 75%. China and Russia combined spend only a paltry 10% of what the U.S. spends on defence. There are 750 U.S. military bases in 50 nations and 255,000 service members stationed abroad, 116,000 in Europe, nearly 100,000 in Japan and South Korea. Military spending gobbles up 19% of federal spending and at least 44% of tax revenues. During the Bush administration, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — funded by borrowing — cost each American family more than $25,000. Like Bush, Obama is paying for America’s wars through supplemental authorizations — putting them on the nation’s already maxed-out credit card. Future generations will be stuck with the bill. This presidential and congressional jiggery-pokery is the height of public dishonesty. America’s wars ought to be paid for through taxes, not bookkeeping fraud. If U.S. taxpayers actually had to pay for the Afghan and Iraq wars, these conflicts would end in short order. America needs a fair, honest war tax. The U.S. clearly has reached the point of imperial overreach. Military spending and debt-servicing are cannibalizing the U.S. economy, the real basis of its world power. Besides the late U.S.S.R., the U.S. also increasingly resembles the dying British Empire in 1945, crushed by immense debts incurred to wage the Second World War, unable to continue financing or defending the imperium, yet still imbued with imperial pretensions. It is increasingly clear the president is not in control of America’s runaway military juggernaut. Sixty years ago, the great President Dwight Eisenhower, whose portrait I keep by my desk, warned Americans to beware of the military-industrial complex. Six decades later, partisans of permanent war and world domination have joined Wall Street’s money lenders to put America into thrall. Increasing numbers of Americans are rightly outraged and fearful of runaway deficits. Most do not understand their political leaders are also spending their nation into ruin through unnecessary foreign wars and a vainglorious attempt to control much of the globe — what neocons call “full spectrum dominance.” If Obama really were serious about restoring America’s economic health, he would demand military spending be slashed, quickly end the Iraq and Afghan wars and break up the nation’s giant Frankenbanks.

:: Article nr. 63069 sent on 08-feb-2010 23:23 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=63069

Link: www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/eric_margolis/2010/02/05/12758511-qmi.html

China Taps New Gas and Oil in S. China Sea

Husky Energy Announces Third Discovery in South China Sea

CALGARY, ALBERTA–(Marketwire – Feb. 8, 2010) – John C.S. Lau, President & Chief Executive Officer of Husky Energy Inc. (TSX:HSE), is pleased to announce that Husky Oil China Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Husky Energy, has made its third significant gas discovery on Block 29/26 in the South China Sea.

The Liuhua 29-1 exploration well was drilled 43 kilometres northeast of the Liwan 3-1 Gas Field and 20 kilometres northeast of the LH 34-2 Gas Field in a water depth of 723 metres. The well encountered a gross gas column of 145 metres, with a significant thickness of high quality gas charged reservoir, and an oil zone was encountered in a deeper reservoir. The well tested natural gas at an equipment restricted rate of 57 million cubic feet (mmcf) per day, with indications that the future deliverability of the well could exceed 90 mmcf per day.

“The exploration discovery at Liuhua 29-1 is the third significant gas discovery in Block 29/26,” said Mr. Lau. “The three natural gas fields; Liwan 3-1, Liuhua 34-2, and Liuhua 29-1 have confirmed the resource potential as a major gas development project in the South China Sea and supports an earlier estimation of petroleum initially in place of 4 to 6 tcf (trillion cubic feet) for the Block.”

Beating the Drums of War In Lebanon

Beating the drums of war

Tension is escalating between Hezbollah and Israel hinting a new battle could likely break out this summer

• By Sami Moubayed, Special to Gulf News

• Israeli military drills, the thundering rhetoric of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, the aggressiveness of top officials in the Netanyahu government, and an indifferent Obama administration have all added to snowballing tension in the Middle East.
• Image Credit: Ramachandra Babu/©Gulf News

When the ceasefire went into effect on the Lebanese-Israeli border in 2006, nobody believed — not for a moment — that this was the end of conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. After all, none of Israel’s objectives were met in 2006: Israel Defence Forces’(IDF) soldiers were still held captive in Lebanon and far from being annihilated or weakened; Hezbollah emerged from the war stronger than before, even by testimony of the Israel army. Anybody familiar with the guiding ideology behind the Zionist State understands why 2006 was such a problem for Tel Aviv. The Israelis, simply said, cannot afford to “not win” a war with the Arabs.

Back in 1973, Israeli prime minister Golda Meir was forced to resign — not for losing a war, but simply, for not winning it. Much of that reasoning applied to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who stepped down in early 2009, having also not won, neither the 2006 war in Lebanon nor the 2008 war in Gaza.

Since then we have been hearing of a Phase II scenario between the two countries, speculated for the summers of 2006-2009. Why summer? One reason is that all of Israel’s wars have been in the summer, when the skies are clear and the soil is strong for Israeli army tanks, in 1967, 1982, and 2006. Only in March 1969 did the Israelis go into a winter battle with the Arabs — the Palestinians at Karameh in Jordan — and back then, bad weather prevented their air force from intervening, and led to a retreat of their ground forces, after a 10-hour battle. Once again, the drums of war are vibrating throughout the region, as tension escalates between Hezbollah and Israel, signalling that a new war will break out in the summer of 2010.

Israeli military drills, the thundering rhetoric of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, the aggressiveness of top officials in the Netanyahu government, and an indifferent Obama administration have all added to snowballing tension in the Middle East.

Neither the US nor Israel can tolerate the continuation of Hezbollah in Lebanon, a powerful player independent from their control, which has effectively shattered the myth of Israeli military supremacy, and lived to tell the story. The fact that the party is strongly represented in the Lebanese government and got its say on all crucial matters in Lebanese domestic affairs since 2006 only makes the reality harder to digest for the IDF.

Once again, this war would be a proxy one, with Israel serving as proxy for the US, and Hezbollah fighting with a fraction of the military might of Iran. The option of a US war on Iran, after all, still stands, although on-hold so long as the US remains grounded in Iraq. Hezbollah officials have been saying that unlike 2006, this won’t be a defensive war but one in which the party will use its full strength, hinting that they can delve deep into Israeli territory and occupy colonies along northern Israel, setting a precedent that would bring down the Netanyahu government, then strike at “Haifa and beyond Haifa.”

Last week, the crisis took a new turn as threats were fired back and forth between Damascus and Tel Aviv, with Syrian President Bashar Al Assad saying that Israel was not ready for peace, while his Foreign Minister Walid Al Mua’allem spoke of a “regional war” that would not spare Israeli cities, followed by a statement by the Syrian Prime Minister Mohammad Naji Al Otari, who said that Israel will strongly regret a war with Syria.

Who benefits from a regional war? Certainly, Hezbollah doesn’t want it and nor does Lebanon. The Saudis don’t want it, seeing that war would spell economic disaster for Lebanese Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri, along with political trouble, given that Hezbollah is strongly represented in his cabinet, which has pledged to “protect and embrace” the arms of Hezbollah.

Netanyahu agenda

Damascus has committed itself to peace following the Madrid Conference of 1991, based on the June 4, 1967 borders of Israel, and has repeatedly called for peaceful solutions in the Middle East, aimed at restoring the Golan Heights to Syria. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, wants this war to happen, for many reasons. One links directly to his Iran-o-phobia, seeing it as a prelude to a future confrontation with Iran.

Another is a desire from him to rank among Israeli leaders who fought wars and won with Arab states — another David Ben Gurion, Menachem Begin, or Ariel Sharon. He cannot afford to become another Ehud Barak or Olmert, helpless at crushing Palestinian resistance at home, or Hezbollah threats on Israel’s northern border. Fighting a war, and winning it, would empower Netanyahu in any peace talks with the Arabs and spare him the agony of engaging in any serious talks with the Palestinians.

The Israelis sound optimistic about this war, claiming that they learned from all their shortcomings in 2006 and are bent on never repeating them in 2010. For that matter, so has Nasrallah. The Israelis believe that there will be no Phase III for their conflict with Lebanon, claiming that this will indeed be the final battle, which will either bring down Nasrallah or Netanyahu.

Beneath the layers of Israeli rhetoric, everybody understands that the guerrilla tactics of Hezbollah, its lead advantage against the bulky Israel army, still stand. So does the difficult topography of South Lebanon, the grassroots popularity of Hezbollah, and the fact that Hezbollah has not been infiltrated by the Israelis — a factor that resulted in them being unable to strike at Nasrallah or any senior party commander in 2006. So is the religious drive of Hezbollah warriors, the stockpiles of sophisticated weapons, and the unwavering support of regional players like Iran and Syria.

Outcomes in war, however, are un-predictable, especially after 2006.

Sami Moubayed is editor-in-chief of Forward Magazine in Syria.

Four American Presidents and the Case Against Them for War Crimes In Iraq

PRESS RELEASE

STATEMENT ON THE CLOSURE OF THE LEGAL CASE FOR IRAQ IN SPAIN FILED AGAINST FOUR US PRESIDENTS AND FOUR UK PRIME MINISTERS FOR WAR CRIMES, CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY AND GENOCIDE IN IRAQ CALL FOR COORDINATED ACTION * SEE ALSO: LEGAL CASE IN SPAIN *INTRODUCTION TO THE LEGAL CASE, FILED BEFORE THE AUDENCIA NACIONAL ON 6 OCTOBER 2009.

For immediate distribution

Date: 7 February 2010

[Spanish] – [Arabic] - [Français]

MADRID/CAIRO: Public enquiries on the decision to wage war on Iraq that are silent about the crimes committed, the victims involved, and provide for no sanction, whatever their outcome, are not enough. Illegal acts should entail consequences: the dead and the harmed deserve justice.

On 6 October 2009, working with and on behalf of Iraqi plaintiffs, we filed a case before Spanish law against four US presidents and four UK prime ministers for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Iraq. The case presented spanned 19 years, including not only the wholesale destruction of Iraq witnessed from 2003, but also the sanctions period during which 1.5 million excess Iraqi deaths were recorded.

We brought the case to Spain because its laws of universal jurisdiction are based on principles enshrined in its constitution. All humanity knows the crimes committed in Iraq by those we accused, but no jurisdiction is bringing them to justice. We presented with Iraqi victims a solid case drawing on evidence contained in over 900 documents and that refer to thousands of individual incidents from which a pattern of accumulated harm and intent can be discerned.

When we brought our case, we knew that the Spanish Senate would soon vote on an amendment earlier passed by the lower house of parliament to curtail the application of universal jurisdiction in Spain. We were conscious that this restriction could be retroactive, and we took account of the content of the proposed amendment in our case filing. As we imagined, 2009 turned out to be a sad year for upholding universal human rights and international law in Spain. One day after we filed, the law was curtailed, and soon thereafter our case closed. Serious cases of the kind universal jurisdiction exists to address became more difficult to investigate.

One more jurisdiction to fall

Despite submitting a 110-page long referenced accusation (the Introduction of which is appended to this statement), the Spanish public prosecutor and the judge assigned to our case determined there was no reason to investigate. Their arguments were erroneous and could easily have been refuted if we could have appealed. To do so we needed a professional Spanish lawyer — either in a paid capacity or as a volunteer who wished to help the Iraqi people in its struggle for justice. As we had limited means, and for other reasons mostly concerning internal Spanish affairs, which were not our concern, we could not secure a lawyer in either capacity to appeal. Our motion for more time to find a lawyer was rejected.

We continue to believe that the violent killing of over one million people in Iraq since 2003 alone, the ongoing US occupation — that carries direct legal responsibility — and the displacement of up to a fifth of the Iraqi population from the terror that occupation has entailed and incited suggests strongly that the claims we put forward ought to be further investigated.

In reality, our case is a paramount example of those that authorities in the West — Spain included — fear. To them, such cases represent the double edge of sustaining the principle of universal jurisdiction. Western states used universal jurisdiction in the past to judge Third World countries. When victims in the global South began using it to judge Israel and US aggression, Western countries rushed to restrict it. Abandoning universal jurisdiction by diluting it is now the general tendency.

Call for wider collective effort to prosecute

We regret that the Spanish courts refused to investigate our case, but this will not discourage us. We have a just cause. The crimes are evident. The responsible are well known, even if the international juridical system continues to ignore Iraqi victims. Justice for victims and the wish of all humanity that war criminals should be punished oblige us to search for alternative legal possibilities, so that the crimes committed in Iraq can be investigated and accountability established.

At present, failed international justice allows US and UK war criminals to stand above international law. Understanding that this constitutes an attack — or makes possible future attacks — on the human rights of everyone, everywhere, we will continue to advocate the use of all possible avenues, including UN institutions, the International Criminal Court, and popular tribunals, to highlight and bring before law and moral and public opinion US and UK crimes in Iraq.

We are ready to make our experience and expertise available to those who struggle in the same direction. We look forward to a time when the countries of the global South, which are generally victims of aggression, reinforce their juridical systems by implementing the principle of universal jurisdiction. This will be a great service to humanity and international law.

Millions of people in Iraq have been killed, displaced, terrorised, detained, tortured or impoverished under the hammer of US and UK military, economic, political, ideological and cultural attacks. The very fabric and being of the country has been subject to intentional destruction. This destruction constitutes one of the gravest international crimes ever committed. All humanity should unite in refusing that law — by failing to assure justice for Iraqi victims — enables this destruction to be the opening precedent of the 21st century.

Ad Hoc Committee For Justice For Iraq

Press contacts:

Hana Al Bayaty, Executive Committee, BRussells Tribunal

+20 10 027 7964 (English and French) hanaalbayaty@gmail.com

Dr Ian Douglas, Executive Committee, BRussells Tribunal, coordinator, International Initiative to Prosecute US Genocide in Iraq

+20 12 167 1660 (English) iandouglas@USgenocide.org

Serene Assir, Advisory Committee, BRussells Tribunal (Spanish) justiciaparairak@gmail.com

Abdul Ilah Albayaty, Executive Committee, BRussells Tribunal

+20 11 181 0798 (Arabic) albayaty_abdul@hotmail.com

Dirk Adriaensens, Executive Committee, BRussells Tribunal

+32 494 68 07 62 (Dutch) dirkadriaensens@gmail.com

Web:

www.brusselstribunal.org

www.USgenocide.org

www.twitter.com/USgenocide

www.facebook.com/USgenocide

This statement:

http://brusselstribunal.org/LegalCaseSpain070210.htm

---

INTRODUCTION TO THE LEGAL CASE

FILED BEFORE THE AUDENCIA NACIONAL

ON 6 OCTOBER 2009

The following is the introduction to a legal case filed 6 October 2009 before the Audiencia Nacional in Spain against four US presidents and four UK prime ministers for commissioning, condoning and/or perpetuating multiple war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Iraq. The case was filed under laws of universal jurisdiction.

This case, naming George H W Bush, William J Clinton, George W Bush, Barack H Obama, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Anthony Blair and Gordon Brown, was brought by Iraqis and others who stand in solidarity with the Iraqi people and in defence of their rights and international law.

Introduction

The respondents herein identified in this complaint have all held or hold high public office in the administrations of the United States and the United Kingdom, and/or commanding authority in the respective armed forces of these countries, and whilst in command or in office actively instigated, authorized, supported, justified, executed and/or perpetuated:

1.              A 13-year sanctions regime on Iraq known and proven to have an overwhelmingly destructive impact on Iraqi public health, especially child mortality

2.             The use of disproportionate and indiscriminate military force, including numerous extra-legal strikes and bombing campaigns throughout the 1990s, entailing the purposeful destruction of Iraq’s water and health facilities, and defence capacities, and the widespread contamination of Iraq’s ecosphere and life environment by the unjustified and massive use of depleted uranium munitions

3.             The prevention by means of comprehensive sanctions, and/or military strikes, of the reconstruction of Iraq’s critical civil infrastructure, including its health, water and sanitation systems, and the decontamination of Iraq’s ecosphere/life environment, backed by the threat of Security Council veto where unanimity was not present for such strikes and/or the continuance of the sanctions regime

4.             The launching of an illegal war of aggression against Iraq based on deliberate falsification of threat assessment intelligence and systematic efforts to conceal from the general public in the United States and the United Kingdom, and other countries, along with parts of the military command structure of the respective armed forces deployed, the true aims and objectives of that war

5.             Establishing by design an occupation apparatus that by its incompetence, inexperience, corruption and/or ideological or sectarian alignment and actions would finalize the destruction of the Iraqi state and the attempted destruction of Iraqi national unity and identity, entailing an attack upon Iraqis as a whole and the intended destruction of the Iraqi national group as such.

The acts ordered and/or continued and perpetuated by the respondents identified in this complaint were unlawful in nature, were known to be and/or ought reasonably to have been known to be unlawful in nature, and were based on manifest and purposive lies, manipulations, deliberately misleading presentations of facts, and baseless assertions and other false justifications. The consistency of the propaganda effort that supported and contextualized these unlawful acts was such — and was aimed and known to be so — that it constituted an international campaign of demonization and dehumanization of Iraqis, the Iraqi nation, the Iraqi state, Iraq’s civil and military leadership, Iraq’s civil administrative apparatus, and Iraq in its Arab context. As such, and through actions taken and summarized below, the respondents:

1.              Deprived the Iraqi people of all or the majority of their fundamental rights as established and protected by international human rights law and international humanitarian law, expressed in the UN Charter and conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions, including the right of defence

2.             Structured and implemented policies that continue to deprive the Iraqi people of their sovereignty and the exercise of their freedom, human rights, and civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, as established and guaranteed by international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including the UN Charter and conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions

3.             Consistently gave political and legal cover to these acts, even as these acts were known to be and/or ought reasonably to have been known to be in violation of international law, including peremptory or jus cogensstandards of law

4.             Asserted and defended extra-legal immunity for all those engaged in acts that have attacked the protected rights of the Iraqi people, and established a pattern of impunity for those accused of such attacks by failing to adequately investigate and prosecute specific and general allegations of grave abuses, and/or to ensure responsibility is assumed throughout the chain of command that permitted or failed to prohibit such attacks, and/or dismissed or distorted numerous customary legal standards, including the laws of war and those that outlaw the preemptive use of force in international relations

5.             Abused and overran international law, the guarantor of international order, peace and security, which the United Nations System exists to protect and is deemed to embody, enshrined in the UN Charter, and upon whose foundation the Universal Declaration of Human Rights gains positive affect and final meaning.

Opportunity for redress for Iraqi victims in their own national jurisdiction is non-existent as Iraq remains occupied, its sovereign institutions dismantled and non-functioning. Despite numerous individual petitions submitted to its chief prosecutor, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has stated that it has no jurisdiction to hear cases of abuses and violations of human rights standards and international humanitarian law in Iraq. In light of US and UK threats to use permanent member veto power in the past, it is not foreseeable that the Security Council in the future will refer complaints in Iraq to the ICC, and nor can Iraqis wait for Security Council reform. Without effective investigation and prosecution of these abuses and violations, the international community runs the risk of allowing a precedent of unlawful action of such grave magnitude to be set without censure, thereby endangering the rights and dignity not only of Iraqis but also of people the world over. Such a precedent would be contrary to the UN Charter and the principles upon which the international order of states is deemed to be founded. The basis for public acceptance of a state of law is that it protects peace and defends the wellbeing of the people. Failure to investigate and effectively prosecute the catalogue of grave abuses and violations perpetrated by the respondents in Iraq, and against the Iraqi people, would constitute an ongoing and inherent threat to the basis of the international order in general and to international peace and security specifically.

Alongside those in official positions of authority, key political advisers, lobbyists, strategists and corporate representatives have also played a crucial role in the ideological and political justifications and legitimization sought and falsely proposed in order to execute the overall policy embraced, inclusive of an accumulated pattern of attacks, military and otherwise, that has lasted 19 years to date, culminating in the 2003 illegal war of aggression waged on Iraq and that continues to be executed despite wide and ongoing condemnation. Though there are nuances of responsibility inherent to the nature of policy construction and execution, the personal relations and interconnections between primary and secondary level individuals involved, and the groups or common circles to which they belong, testify to a large degree of cohesion present in intent and action among the respondents identified and those who support and benefit from the policies they have pursued. At the least, this shared intent is one of deliberate harm; at worst, it amounts to an objective intent to destroy for definable, and at times publicly enunciated, strategic, geopolitical and geo-economic reasons. Furthermore, none of the respondents can reasonably claim they did not have knowledge of the likely outcome of their policies, and those they supported, as all had not only participated in the design and execution of these policies, but they continued to execute said policies once their effects were widely known and had been proven to be detrimental to — and destructive of — the health, sovereignty and rights of the Iraqi people, and further have defended these policies and in majority continue to do so.

From the start of the implementation of a US-instigated and dominantly administered sanctions regime up to the present day, an approximate total of 2,700,000 Iraqis have died as a direct result of sanctions followed by the US-UK led war of aggression on, and occupation of, Iraq beginning in 2003. Among those killed during the sanctions period were 560,000 children. From 2003 onwards, having weakened Iraq’s civil and military infrastructure to the degree that its people were rendered near totally defenceless, Iraq was subject to a level of aggression of near unprecedented scale and nature in international history, occurring in parallel with the promotion of a partition plan for Iraq, the substantial direct funding of sectarian groups and militias that would play a key role in fragmenting the country under occupation, both administratively and in terms of national identity, the cancellation of the former state apparatus and the dismissal of its personnel entailing the collapse of all public services and state protection for the Iraqi people, the further destruction of the health and education systems of Iraq, and the creation of waves of internal and external displacement totaling nearly 5,000,000 Iraqis, or one fifth of the Iraqi population. By December 2007, the Iraqi Anti-Corruption Board reported that there were up to 5,000,000 orphans in Iraq, while the Iraqi Ministry of Women’s Affairs counts 3,000,000 widows as of 2009.

Such massive destruction of life, having as context a 19-year period of accumulated attacks, with numerous warnings and opportunities for remedy and a reversal of policy ignored, cannot be mere happenstance. Indeed, the paramount charge that must be investigated, and that plain fact evidence suggests, is that this level of destruction has been integral to the US and UK’s shared international policy for Iraq. The destruction in whole or in part of the Iraqi people as a national group, and depriving this group of all or the majority of its rights, appears from a reasoned account of the catalogue of violations, abuses and attacks to which the Iraqi people have been subject to be the unlawful means pursued purposely by the respondents in order to redraw by force the strategic and political map of the Arab region and Iraq’s place within that context, and to capture, appropriate and plunder, via the cancellation of the sovereignty of the Iraqi people and the destruction and fragmentation of their identity and unity as a national group, Iraq’s substantial natural energy resources. Historically, the Iraqi national group, variegated yet cohesive, was and continues to be, despite the aggression faced, firmly rooted in its overwhelming majority in the concept of citizenship of the Iraqi state — a state founded on public provision of services and a nationally owned energy industry. The policy that the respondents have sought and continue to seek to impose, that has entailed privatizing and seizing ownership of Iraqi citizens’ resources, along with the administrative and political partition of the former unitary state, is contrary to the basis of, and cohesion of, the Iraqi people as a national group.

Until prevented by effective legal investigation and precautionary action, it is highly likely that the combined US/UK strategy in Iraq will continue, though its tactics may change. Iraqis in the majority show no sign of surrendering their right to and belief in Iraqi citizenship, including sovereign control over Iraq’s natural resources. Between a belligerent foreign aggressor and a resilient, resistant people legal action is crucial to end the ongoing and by all likelihood perpetual slaughter of Iraqis and the destruction of their national identity and rights. We are before immoral and unlawful acts, contrary to the basis on which the international order of state sovereignty and peace and security rests, and that brought about and continue to pursue the destruction of the Iraqi state and attempted destruction of the Iraqi nation. Whereas 1,200,000 Iraqis, according to credible estimates, have lost their lives to violence since 2003 alone, the Iraqi people continue to lose their lives or at best live under constant fear of death, mutilation, detention, exile and lack of access to their rightful resources and freedoms. The sum of these conditions, the outcome of a pattern of purposeful action whose consequences could be foreseen, and of which detailed and compelling notice was served, situated in a context of false justifications, deceptions, and outright lies, and matched by the unlawful use of force, and disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force, amounts to substantive violations of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

As proof of the widespread impact of past and current US and UK policies, in 2009 the American Friends Service Committee, in collaboration with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), reported that some 80 per cent of Iraqis surveyed in Iraq had witnessed a shooting, 68 per cent had been interrogated or harassed by militias, 77 per cent had been affected by shelling/rocket attacks, 72 per cent had witnessed a car bombing, 23 per cent of Iraqis in Baghdad had had a family member kidnapped, and 75 per cent had had a family member or someone close to them murdered.

Military operations in Iraq from 2003 have already cost for the United States an estimated $800 billion, with long-term costs estimated at $1.8 trillion. By 2009, the estimated cost for the United Kingdom, according to figures released by the UK Ministry of Defence, was £8.4 billion ($13.7 billion). The United States continues to spend $12 billion on the war per month. There has been a total of 513,000 US soldiers deployed to Iraq since 2003. Some 170,000 were stationed during the “Surge” campaign of 2007, and 130,000 remain deployed as of June 2009. In addition to regular armed forces, the US administration is believed to employ up to 130,000 additional private security contractors and has refused to release official numbers in this regard. Security companies have been granted blanket immunity under Iraqi law. Equally, there is no effective mechanism, or hope, for Iraqis to hold US and UK forces to account directly.

The narration of facts that follows is substantiated with evidence detailed in the Annex. Other facts to be investigated while reported are not mentioned in the following.

[END]

Israel Coming Unhinged? A Loose Cannon in a Volatile Region

 

Sharmine Narwani

Senior Associate, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University

Another war is looming in the Middle East, say the pundits. It is hard to ignore the whispers — now louder — when they are regularly punctuated by hostile statements from various officials in the region, leading further credence to a possible conflagration.

The likely site of the newest regional battle is the Levant. Funnily enough, nobody can pinpoint exactly where, although it is clear that Israel will be involved. Which should tell us something right there.

Since the Jewish state’s military attack on Lebanon in 2006, it has been itching for a "do-over." Why? Because for the first time in its history, Israel did not win a war. The month-long bombardment of Lebanon resulted in a stalemate — an intolerable outcome by the standards of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

To add to the indignity, it was a mere few thousand men — not even a national army — that took the IDF by surprise.

The cornerstone of Israel’s military strategy is deterrence — whether though brandishing a nuclear arsenal to warn off threatening nation-states, or by Gaza-style intensive attacks that send a strong message to a weaker party. This is a highly militarized state that has lived under the legacy of conflict its entire existence. Loss — or even perceived loss — is not an option.

So instead of self-examination, Israel’s conflicted, and increasingly right-wing political body unleashed a belligerent tone — angry, defiant, threatening, unfocused like a petulant and wounded child. Diversionary tactics came into play to focus domestic and international attention elsewhere and fill the frustrating void — Hamas in Gaza, the potential nuclear aspirations of Iran, Palestinian intransigence on peace talks, Hezbollah’s weapons, Syria, Turkey, anti-Semitism, the Goldstone Report.

In recent weeks, Israeli officials have made inflammatory statements about conflicts on half a dozen fronts.

SYRIA:
"When there is another war, you will not just lose it, but you and your family will lose power," right-wing Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman challenged Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday, after Assad claimed that Israel is "driving the region towards war, not peace."

Lieberman went further and hit at the heart of any future Israeli-Syrian rapprochement: "We must bring Syria to realize that…it will have to give up on its ultimate demand for the Golan Heights." Israeli leaders have in the past accepted in principle that the Syrian Golan Heights, captured and occupied by Israel in 1967, would necessarily be part of any bilateral peace deal.

GAZA:
In January — one year after Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza that lead to the deaths of 1,400 Palestinians — Major General Yom Tov Samia, former head of the IDF’s Southern Command, told the Jerusalem Post: "We are before another round in Gaza… another war with Hamas is inevitable." And Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned Gaza’s leaders to "watch their step, and not to cry crocodile tears if they force [us] to take action."

The hue and cry about Hamas’ rockets hitting Israeli towns was Tel Aviv and Washington’s driving narrative in defense of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Still is. But just this week, the Jewish State announced that a new $200 million rocket defense system called the "Iron Dome" will not be deployed against Gaza as promised. Too expensive for Gaza, says the military, explaining that it will be deployed elsewhere where there is more of an "imminent" threat.

And this comes after months of Israeli insistence that Hamas has significantly boosted its military capabilities and has obtained long-range rockets, mostly from Iran. So which is it — either they do or don’t have weapons, either they do or don’t pose a threat?

LEBANON:
No two other parties have been more relentlessly subjected to Israeli threats than Iran and Hezbollah. Last summer, after it was clear that the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah would likely participate at the cabinet level in any unity government formed following Lebanon’s June elections, Israeli leaders fell over themselves in their rush to issue warnings. Netanyahu, Barak and Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon all threatened that any border attacks would be blamed on the Lebanese central government — with repercussions.

Just last month, Israeli Minister Yossi Peled opined, "Without a doubt we are heading for another round (of battle) in the North. No one knows when, but it’s clear that it will happen."

And so both Hezbollah and Israel have moved weapons systems closer to their mutual borders.

IRAN:
Iran, in turn, has been the recipient of non-stop bombing threats from Israel over its civilian nuclear program, which the Jewish State claims is really a clandestine plan to build nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Never mind that some two dozen IAEA reports over six years show no diversion of materials to weaponization. Or that Israeli military intelligence has been extending the date for a finished Iranian nuclear warhead since the 1990s. Last June,Mossad Chief Meir Dagan declared the new date for the first Iranian nuke would be in 2014. But Israel’s war drums have kept beating as though these weapons were already sitting on launch pads, ready to go.

TURKEY:
Relatively new on the scene in the game of belligerent words is Turkey. A rare Israeli ally in the Middle East both in political and military terms, Turkey has drawn away from the alliance since Israel’s widely-criticized Gaza attacks last year, when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan lashed out at the particularly brutal IDF campaign.

Things have gone from bad to worse since, culminating a month ago in the now-infamous Ayalon row when the Israeli deputy foreign minister publicly and deliberately humiliated Turkey’s ambassador in front of cameras. Israel has called Turkey anti-Semitic and very recently slammed the Turkish prime minister again when he drew attention to the continuing Israeli blockade of Gaza and its daily violations of Lebanese airspace.

**********

Some Israeli critics suggest that the destabilizing escalation in rhetoric may not just be as a result of Israel’s psychological loss in 2006, but more recently, because of an increased paranoia about international isolation — the result of war crimes allegations documented against Israel in the UN’s Goldstone Report about the Gaza war, and the country’s ongoing occupation of Palestinian lands.

In a stunning attack on his government two weeks ago, Israeli writer Gideon Levy wrote a commentary piece in Haaretz in which he takes to task their "cynical" use of Holocaust Remembrance Day to propagandize toward political ends:

"An Israeli public relations drive like this hasn’t been seen for ages. The timing of the unusual effort – never have so many ministers deployed across the globe – is not coincidental: When the world is talking Goldstone, we talk Holocaust, as if out to blur the impression. When the world talks occupation, we’ll talk Iran as if we wanted them to forget."

But the escalation of rhetoric from Israel’s right-wing government is not being viewed as simple political posturing — more, like a promise of battle. As concerned as the Jewish State may be about conflict on its borders, its neighbors — having been on the receiving end of superior Israeli weapons, and having suffered far larger numbers of civilian casualties — are taking these words very seriously.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, at a joint press conference with Spain’s Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos on Thursday pointed to this verbal escalation of hostilities by calling on Israel to "desist from making threats against Gaza, southern Lebanon, Iran and now Syria."

Because rhetoric after all creates a perception. And perception is 100% of politics — not to be played with when standing on a tinderbox. The Levant has always been rife with small-scale border skirmishes — that is the way of an area re-mapped by foreigners, with unnatural, artificial borders. But it is only Israel that has, since 1973, launched full-on military battles from these skirmishes. And without a doubt it is gearing up for a fight. Where, is anyone’s guess.

New Nuclear Power Plant for My Hometown?

Ohio, Duke considering nuclear plant

BY MIKE BOYER • MBOYER@ENQUIRER.COM

President Barack Obama’s call for a new generation of nuclear power plants could weigh on decisions about a possible new nuclear facility at the former uranium processing reservation in Piketon.

But nobody expects any significant activity soon.

It’s been more than six months since Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, U.S. Sen. George Voinovich, top officials from Duke Energy and other utility companies announced formation of the Southern Ohio Clean Energy Park Alliance.

The informal alliance was formed to explore development of a 1,600-megawatt nuclear generating plant at a "clean energy park," which could cost more than $10 billion, take more than a decade to build and create thousands of jobs.

"We are still in the initial stages of this project. We have a lengthy, methodical process we go through," said Sally Thelen, a Duke spokeswoman in Cincinnati.

The proposed Piketon facility, located about 95 miles east of Cincinnati, would be Ohio’s third nuclear power plant and the first since the Perry nuclear plant in Lake County came on line in 1987.

Duke, which is looking for cleaner sources of electric power, isn’t committed to building the plant but is seeking several million dollars in Department of Energy funding to study feasibility of the Piketon project and to initiate the lengthy site permitting process.

Obama singled out nuclear power in his State of the Union address, saying new nuke plants would create more clean-energy jobs.

The 104 nuclear reactors in operation in 31 states provide only 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. But they are responsible for 70 percent of the power from pollution-free sources, including wind, solar and hydroelectric plants, advocates say.

Duke said it is continuing to refine its timetable for the Piketon project and is talking to other utilities about participating in the project. The Southern Ohio Clean Energy Park Alliance also includes French-based nuclear plant builder Areva Inc. and USEC Inc., which manages the 3,700-acre site in Pike County.

The Energy Department said it is reviewing the proposal but wouldn’t comment further.

In the complex and costly world of nuclear power, such lengthy timetables aren’t unusual.

For example, Duke said, planning for its William States Lee III nuclear generating station, a 2,234-megawatt plant in Cherokee, S.C., started in 2005. A license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wasn’t filed until 2007.

"We likely won’t hear on our license acceptance or rejection until 2012-2013," Thelen said.

The Obama administration wants to triple the Energy Department’s loan guarantee program for nuclear power to $54 billion, enough to support seven to 10 new reactors.

If Duke does move forward, it could apply for some of the loan guarantees.

First Waves of Economic/Social Crisis About to Wash Over Europe

Eurozone ‘pigs’ are leading us all to slaughter

The financial crisis is coming to a new, potentially more deadly phase, says Jeremy Warner.

By Jeremy Warner

The ‘pigs’ of the Eurozone are causing worries for the other members Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Are we about to enter a third, and this time fatal, leg of the financial crisis? The problems of euroland which have so unsettled markets this week – and in particular those of Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain (the "pigs", as they have become known in financial circles) – are worrying enough in themselves.

But they are also a proxy for much wider concern about how national governments extract themselves from the fiscal and monetary mire they have created in fighting the downturn. It’s proving messy, though, and they are running the risk of provoking an even worse crisis in the process.

Think of the three phases of the economic implosion like this. The first was a fairly conventional, if extreme, banking crisis where a cyclical overexpansion of credit and lending suddenly, and violently, corrects itself in a great outpouring of risk aversion.

In the second phase, governments and central banks attempt to counter the economic consequences of this crunch with unprecedented levels of fiscal and monetary support. Temporarily, at least, it seemed to work.

Until now, investors have been happy to finance the resulting deficits, in part because government bonds have seemed the only safe place to put your funds, but also because central banks have, in effect, been creating money to compensate for the paucity of private-sector credit. The mechanism varies from region to region, but much of this new money has found its way into deficit financing.

We are now entering the third, inevitable phase of the crisis where markets question the ability of even sovereign nations to repay their debts. Unnerved by this loss of fiscal and monetary credibility, governments and central banks are being forced, much sooner than they would have wished, to start withdrawing their support.

I say earlier than they would have wished because the recovery is not yet assured. Private demand and credit provision remain subdued. Policy-makers knew they would eventually have to abandon their fiscal and monetary support, but the timing of it may no longer be a matter of choice.

The first tremors around these so-called "exit strategies" occurred in Dubai a few months back when the emirate, fearing for its own solvency, shocked markets by announcing that it no longer stood behind the debts of its financially stretched state-owned enterprises. In this case, Dubai’s fellow and richer emirate, Abu Dhabi, eventually came to the rescue.

It is much less clear that Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland can rely on similar support, either from richer members of the euro area or the European Central Bank.

For the "pigs", membership of the euro excludes the easy option, which is to devalue and turn on the printing presses according to local needs. Instead, monetary policy, and increasingly fiscal policy too, are dictated by Germany and France, the core euro nations.

Whether the fiscal consolidation demanded is politically feasible looks questionable. And even if these countries do succeed in making the necessary adjustments, they may face a classic deflationary debt spiral, where slashing the deficit causes the economy to shrink further which, in turn, increases the deficit.

Little surprise, then, that one of the big bets in markets right now is that these distressed members of the euro will be forced either into default, or rather like Britain with the ERM in the early 1990s, out of the single currency altogether. Serious knock-on consequences for creditor economies would follow.

Yet to true believers in the doomsday scenario, even an outcome as extreme as this would not be the end of the crisis. Fiscal ruin is not confined to the southern European nations. The hors d’oeuvre consumed, it would be on to the main course – the default of one or more of the big, triple-A rated sovereigns. Financial and economic chaos would follow quickly in its wake.

There’s a world of worry out there, fed by self-interested speculators, which is proving hard to counter. Yet things rarely work out as predicted, and though nobody should be in any doubt about the scale of the economic adjustment still to be made in Western economies, more benign outcomes are still possible. Bigger, advanced economies with their own currencies are better placed to manage their exits than the "pigs".

However, right now, both Washington and London seem gripped by the sort of political paralysis that can indeed prove lethal. We should not assume that the sudden loss of market confidence that has afflicted Greece – essentially a developing market economy that should never have been in the euro in the first place – will be confined to the "pigs". The burgeoning size of public indebtedness the world over makes all economies vulnerable.

Even so, this week’s tremors should be seen as more of a warning than the beginning of a fatal endgame. The austerity of tighter fiscal and monetary conditions is coming to all of us. With or without the compliance of policy-makers, the markets will impose it. But it doesn’t have to be a rout.

Just Gimme Some Truth–Get Us Past the Lies

[As the following article points-out, Obama is passing-up a historic opportunity to bond in common struggle with the people who elected him, and his only chance to obtain that cherished elusive second term.  SEE: Message to the Future]

Just Gimme Some Truth

By David Michael Green

The layers of the American political pathology are so multiple and so deep, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start.

It’s not so much that we’re a country with problems. Every country has its challenges, and compared to much of the rest of the world I’d take our particular batch hands-down. It’s just that so many of ours are self-inflicted.

Still, looking out across the panoply of peril, all the unfortunate ways in which we get it wrong as a society, I can’t help but think that what’s at the bottom of the stack, providing a foundation for the rest, is a profound national stupidity. Maybe it’s my professional bias as an educator, but I often think that our biggest single problem is our (often willful) ignorance. Moreover, that’s the single national characteristic that enables so many of our other maladies. If only we would allow ourselves to think, it seems to me, so much of the inanity that passes for normal in our politics would be laughed off the stage, and we’d all sure be a lot better off for it.

Honestly, this was the single thing I found most compelling about candidate Obama (as opposed to President Obama, who’s more or less been one disappointment after another). Whether he was talking about dumb wars, or the fear-marketing of guns, gays and god, or addressing the question of race in America, Obama would sometimes do something that America hadn’t seen in its political class since Jimmy Carter was in the White House: He would sometimes tell the truth.

Mind you, not often, and not even the whole truth. But the comparison was nevertheless startling, so long has it been since we’ve seen anything like this. Ronald Reagan not only began the era of “America, The Movie”, he personified it as president like no one else ever has. Why worry about national problems when you can have yellow ribbons, poignant sunrises, and kick-ass wars against mortal enemies like Grenada instead? America has never quite recovered from this turn to the fantastical, this Hollywood spectacle of a government. Indeed, so deeply rooted has it become that, in order to help hold onto our comforting delusions, we now have a tenacious mythology which has arisen around the Great Mythologizer himself. The mythmaker has become myth too. New lies promulgated to prop up the old ones.

Whatever. My guess is that if we can ever have a serious discussion of Reagan in the future, one of the great crimes that will be attributed to his presidency will be the same supposed virtue that our lame punditocracy ascribes to it now. They say it was a revival of the American spirit and a restoration of our national confidence. In fact, what it was instead was a grand journey of self-delusion taken by an entire country, and at great cost, much of which we continue to pay to this day.

Thirty years of this disastrous turn in American politics could make even the half-truths of someone like Barack Obama refreshing and welcome, sometimes even stunning. I had almost forgotten what it was like to have a politician talk to me like I was an adult with a brain, rather than some Sunday School kiddie in short pants, who could only distinguish between Mr. God and Mr. Satan, the one with the beard and the one with the horns. I had almost forgotten what it could be like to see a president describe the world in three dimensions, complete with nuances and complexities, rather than some silly faux dichotomy between Good and Evil, with our team always representing the former.

Since becoming president Obama has cracked that door open a bit once or twice, though far from sufficiently and even less than during his campaign. His Cairo speech had some of these elements. And then he did it again a couple of times last week, especially when he visited the Republican House retreat and held a televised Q and A with those scary monsters.

Much as I hesitate to say it, the changes in the Obama White House this last week are slightly encouraging. It’s even possible that they’ve recognized what a suicide mission they’ve been on this last year and have taken some baby steps in the only direction available to them for survival, let alone any sort of redemption. Obama doesn’t strike me as constitutionally able to throw a punch at an adversary. It’s just not in his character. But this week, at least, he flicked a couple of spitballs. For this White House, that’s progress.

In any case, there was much that was telling about the event. First, that this semi-hostile dialogue – which many have compared to the British weekly tradition of Prime Minister’s Question Time – transpired at all was a somewhat profound development. Of course, that statement says far more about the pathetic nature of the American political system than it does about Obama or the cavemen from the Valley of the Right who questioned him. It’s also enormously telling that the GOP resisted until the last moment allowing the cameras to roll during the question and answer period – they really didn’t want to go there. Think about that. You had a single meek politician going up against two hundred rabid bullies, and which side wanted to make sure the public didn’t see the engagement? Did Republicans know something in advance that made them fearful of public exposure, even when going up against President Neville O’Bambi?

Perhaps it was the same thing that caused FOCS (Frighten Old Children Silly) “News” to cut away from the broadcast in the middle of it, despite the food-fight event being the very epitome of what television loves to show in politics. Uh-oh. Not only was Obama occasionally holding Republican feet to the fire, but he was even doing it without a Teleprompter! Evidently, the sight of the nice, genteel, reasonable black man helping a bunch of white sharks make themselves look like the stupid liars they are was all too much for Mr. Ailes and company. Seeing this was causing smoke to pour out of the ears of robo-regressives all across America, their circuits frying all at once. Cut to American Idol reruns, boys! Fast!

Why? Because Obama was actually making these lying thugs own, even slightly, the consequences of their destructive deceits. Here he was with the Republicans at their retreat, for example: “There was an interesting headline in CNN today: ‘Americans disapprove of stimulus, but like every policy in it.’ And there was a poll that showed that if you broke it down into its component parts, 80 percent approved of the tax cuts, 80 percent approved of the infrastructure, 80 percent approved of the assistance to the unemployed. Well, that’s what the Recovery Act was. And let’s face it, some of you have been at the ribbon-cuttings for some of these important projects in your communities.” Similarly, the next day he was tweaking seven Republicans who actually walked away from their own proposal for a bipartisan debt-cutting commission, just because the socialist president had subsequently agreed with them on the idea.

The Kumbaya Kid is considerably more gentle about whacking these Joe McCarthy protégés than I would be. I’d like to see a lot more Harry Truman out of him, and a lot less Harry Reid. A lot more Betty Friedan, and a lot less Betty Crocker. Just the same, the Massachusetts election may go down as an inflection point in this presidency, the moment at which the White House figured out that standing by silently and watching yourself get your ass kicked by dress-up cowboy cowards unarmed with anything but lies and bullying tactics turns out to be, amazingly enough, something of a strategic error in national politics.

But what I find so astonishing about moments like this is how revealing they are of simple truths that somehow manage to get lost, particularly in the ranks of the Democratic Party. To begin with, Barack Obama has been hard at work for a year now, crashing an enormously promising presidency that just happens to also have his name attached to it, and the way forward has always seemed to me so transparently clear. Regressives in Congress (some from his own party), representing parasitical special interests, are sucking the blood from the American polity, even as the corpse begins to stiffen in rigor mortis. Maybe I’m just a sucker for that old fashioned democracy gospel, but I still believe that many times good policy can also be good politics. How much greater public fury at banks and other corporate predators does there need to be before the president realizes that actually taking on the malefactors of great wealth in this society also happens to be the best thing that could happen to him politically? How many times does he have to lose public support because of the astounding fabrications people are promulgating about him before he decides to stop playing nice and call the liars liars?

After seeing the president in action this week, the obnoxiously abrasive pundit Chris Matthews opined that Republicans should fear Barack Obama’s learning curve. That one gave me a real chuckle. As far as I can see, no one in America has more to fear from Obama’s learning curve than the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, who is currently slated to be very much on the housing market in January of 2013. Indeed, the single thing most utterly astonishing to me about the Obama presidency is how such a politically astute candidate could turn out to be such an absolutely lame, slow-to-get-it, president. And I’m not even talking about the guy’s policies or ideology, much of which I abhor, since they frequently amount quite literally to warmed-over Bushism.

I’m just talking about Obama’s lack of street smarts. The health care bill was paradigmatic, though hardly the only example. When it comes to selling his policies and strategic communications and winning the battle, he is decidedly not Bush-like. That reality is made all the more ironic by the fact that, unlike Bush, Obama doesn’t even need to resort to outrageous lies in order to pitch manifestly evil policies (even if his are considerably less than wonderful). Never has a president failed so dramatically to employ his best weapon – the bully pulpit – to market his proposals for the country. Never has a president gotten so little from such favorable conditions for presidential success as Obama did this last year.

All of which begs the question of what American politics might look like if we had a president who was out there swinging for the fence, telling big truths, and mobilizing the public behind some new, healthy, and not even necessarily so hard-to-swallow national choices? The results could be astonishing.

The lists of areas where honest political discourse combined with presidential leadership could produce huge effects is fairly endless, though there is of course the danger of overload and distraction with too many initiatives at once. Just the same, here’s my top ten:

* Start with campaign finance reform: No other single domain has more potential to unleash more necessary change in America. The simple truth is that American government is for sale, and about eight or nine tenths of what ails the country is attributable to these daily acts of treason, in which government officials sell out the national interest in favor of their own, and that of their political benefactors. This problem will never be solved by Congress. It requires a president who lays it out, pounds the drum incessantly in public, and humiliates the legislative branch into action. However, that would, of course, require telling a whole bunch of truth.

* America is in fiscal crisis right now, and the president’s current solution is to pretend to seriously cut spending, and to locate all those cuts in the domain of domestic spending, just as some folks argued long ago was the real conspiracy behind Reagan’s massive deficits. What astonishes me almost daily is that there is not a single serious actor in American politics who is talking about slashing ‘defense’ spending. The United States today drops twice what the entire rest of the world combined spends on their militaries, and there is not a single state actor anywhere in the world who does or could threaten us. There is no Nazi Germany or expansionary Soviet Union. And yet we spend like we’re in a great power death match, despite the fact that we are bleeding red ink in order to do so. Couldn’t somebody speak honestly about this, especially since our finances are in a meltdown, or must we all continue to tip-toe around the drunkard in the family, pretending not to notice all the damage?

* Deregulation has produced the all too predictable results almost everywhere it has been applied, but especially in the financial sector. There’s a reason we have jails and courts and police and laws against robbery, rape and murder, you know. There’s also a reason why, following the debacle of the Great Depression, we regulated banks and Wall Street. The reason for both is the same. If you make it easy for people to commit crimes (especially by no longer making the acts in question crimes at all), they will. How many times do we have to go down this path before we learn that greedy bastards will kill us all if we let them? And yet, even today, when there is so much anger at Wall Street, no prominent voices are seriously talking about the paradigm shift that is necessary to protect the society and indeed the world against these predatory sociopaths.

* The health care fiasco has (once again) been just that. But even if the administration had gotten its bill through Congress, it would have only been a fiasco of another sort. Democrats on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue looked like circus freak contortionists, trying to write a bill that brought positive change to the country’s massively broken system, but doing so without going anywhere near the systemic, fundamental source of the breakage. No one can quite come out and say the truth here, as simple as it is: Introducing private insurers into health care provision adds nothing in terms of care, and dramatically degrades the system in every respect, from cost to complexity to coverage to care. We don’t require people to buy insurance – or have a job which provides it – if they want national security from the military or home security from the fire and police departments. So why should we do health care that way? The short answer is because nobody with a platform has the guts to tell that truth.

* Education is another area with fundamental issues that nobody dares speak about. There are lots, actually, including the stupidity of making a college education increasingly out of reach for current and future generations. How brilliant is that, even if all you care about is global competitiveness or national security? There’s plenty more where that particular lunacy comes from, but the one that is the most sickening of all, and that most betrays our supposed commitment to equality of opportunity, is local funding of schools. While dollars spent don’t directly equate to quality of education, they sure do matter, especially in their absence. It is a national crime that kids growing up in one neighborhood get vastly greater educational resources than the (probably darker-skinned) kids from just down the street. It seems to me that a little public education, pardon the pun, on this issue might go a long way toward shaming America into living up to its professed values.

* Global warming is another area where an astounding vacuum in pedagogical leadership from our political class has created a planetary suicide pact in place of what should be a plethora of prudence preventing post-apocalyptic peril. It’s one thing to allow the tail of narrow interests like pharmaceutical, health insurance, sugar, tobacco or weapons industries to wag the dog of public policy and murder tens of thousands of people every year. It’s quite another to allow the short-term stock price of Exxon-Mobil to take out an entire planet. Where is the political leadership educating the country on the nature and imminence of this threat?

* It might be nice if we could have an honest conversation about some of our recent foreign policy crimes, too, especially now that other countries like the Netherlands and Britain are at least cracking that door open. There is already so much evidence out there proving the magnitude of lies we were told about Iraq and torture and 9/11 and more. Would it be too much to ask for a little bit of truth to come out? We spend countless hours and unending rolls of yellow ribbon trying to convince ourselves how much we care about our military personnel. In fact, by continuing to allow them to die for lies, we hide from ourselves how little we actually care.

* We could be a lot more honest about our foreign policies in general, as well, especially when it comes to the Middle East, where some pretty whopping ongoing lies cost us dearly, every day. Americans not only get just one side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represented in their media, they even get just one side of the debate within Israel. There’s a greater range of dialogue inside Israel about that country’s policies than there is in America. Supporting the paranoid Likud version of reality is not the same as supporting American interests in the world. Indeed, it’s not even the same as supporting Israel’s interests, truth be told. But how could most Americans ever figure that out, when they are limited to only one side, of one side, of the story?

* The United States has a sickening approach to world governance, as well. Whether it comes to land mines or the rights of children or global warming or family planning or just about any treaty, norm or initiative you could name, we are right there alongside Somalia and Libya as the outliers in international morality. Our attitude toward the United Nations and other global institutions is similarly self-reverential. These organizations are seen to exist for the purpose of supporting American interests (and those, worse yet, as defined in corporate boardrooms), and are ignored, defunded or otherwise trampled upon whenever they do not. How refreshing would it be if our political class might reeducate the country to start acting like we’re the five percent of the world’s population we actually are, rather than ninety-five percent?

* And while we’re at it, we could really make some profound changes to our attitudes about governance at home, as well. For thirty years now, regressives have been teaching Americans that it’s well and proper to hate their own government. Never mind that those same right-wingers most often have been the government over the last three decades. And never mind what it means to hate a government in a democracy, where the people doing the hating have chosen that government. The effects of this massively destructive impulse have been profound, and go a long way toward explaining the unraveling of American society and political culture we’re now living through and living with. Governments do some truly horrid things sometimes, it’s true, along with some pretty wonderful things as well. But policies, and the vehicle for those policies, are not the same thing. It’s time that we had some leadership who reminded Americans that government, for all its flaws, is not inherently evil. Indeed, it can profoundly impact people’s lives for the better, including protecting people from predators of all sorts. Which is precisely why the purveyors of unmitigated greed in America so badly want us to hate it.

I know, I know. It’s a lot to ask, talking honestly for once about all these issues and so many more not even listed here.

Actually, it is and it isn’t. So many people in America already get so much of this stuff. In so many cases, the public is ahead of its politicians.

The ground is fertile and the moment is pregnant with possibilities. Once you start talking about these things honestly, you can never go back. And creeps like just about every politician in the GOP, along with their enablers on radio and TV, can no longer commit their verbal and legislative outrages with impunity once people know better, and once they are regularly exposed to an alternative narrative.

People in this country are ready to seek solutions again. We just need a little honesty to make the critical difference, and prevail over the frightened Neanderthal tribe and their politics of fear.

Won’t somebody just give us a little truth?

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers’ reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

Tacoma Soldier Waterboards His 4-year Old Daughter

[Should we take from this the monstrously inhuman nature of some American soldiers or see it as proof that repeated use of such torture techniques desensitizes soldiers to the utter immorality of the men who give the orders?]

US soldier gives four-year-old daughter ‘waterboarding’ over alphabet

A soldier subjected his four-year-old daughter to waterboard-style torture when she failed to recite her alphabet, it has been claimed.

Published: 9:50AM GMT 08 Feb 2010

Joshua Tabor allegedly told police he had used the technique because he was angry and knew his daughter was scared of water.

The 27-year-old, who had recently gained custody of the young girl, said she “squirmed” as he pushed her under the water three or four times, it was claimed.

Waterboarding is a controversial torture technique used by the CIA to interrogate al Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay, where water is poured over detainees so they think they are drowning.

Mr Tabor, from the Lewis-McChord base in Tacoma, Washington, was arrested after he was seen wearing a Kevlar military helmet and threatening to smash windows.

When police went to his home in nearby Yelm, his girlfriend told them about the alleged torture.

Mr Tabor’s daughter was found hiding in a cupboard with bruises on her back and throat. When asked how she got her injuries, she replied: “Daddy did it.”

The soldier, who has been charged with assault and ordered to stay on the military base, will appear in court later this week.

He is not allowed any contact with his daughter and she has been taken into care.

• 
  

Afghan extremism will spread to India: Mottaki

Taliban-linked extremism in Afghanistan is blossoming because of the Western intervention there and is set to spread to India, Central Asia and Arab states, Iran’s foreign minister warned on Saturday.

Iran is deeply concerned to prevent the spread of the drugs trade and extremism from Afghanistan, but is also bitterly critical of the NATO-led and UN-sanctioned mission in the country.

“The policies imposed in recent years … in security, fighting against extremism and drug traffic – the policies in this respect are all defeated and failed,” Mottaki told a midnight session of the prestigious Munich Security Conference.

Taliban-linked extremism “can be divided into two (regional) branches: one is going to spread to the Arab countries, the other to India and Central Asia,” Mottaki warned.

And Iran has already had some 3,000 soldiers and police killed by drug traffickers moving from Afghanistan across Iran, he said.

After years of conflict in Afghanistan, the West is growing concerned that Islamist terrorist groups are looking to set up new bases in areas such as Yemen and Somalia.

Russia, meanwhile, warns that terrorists are launching new campaigns in the states of the North Caucasus.

The Munich Security Conference brings together top defence experts from around the world.

The weekend meeting was set to debate issues including the NATO mission in Afghanistan, in the presence of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

Germany Begs EU to Help American Terror Fight, Oblivious to Terror Source

[The world should not move one inch to help the United States to bail out of Afghanistan or fight terrorism, until the US comes right out and admits to the world that it is the primary source of all the terrorism running rampant in the world and for the situation that existed in Afghanistan before we were pulled back into in 2001.]

Munich security conference: fresh focus on Afghanistan,

nuclear weapons

The host of the Munich security conference, which opens today, says Europe must step up and help its main ally, the US, and tackle pressing global security needs like Afghanistan and Iran.

A police officer checks cars near the hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich on Friday, ahead of the annual Munich Security conference.

By Robert Marquand Staff writer

Munich, GermanyAfter a year of uncertainty, “there are no more excuses” for Europe not to put its shoulder to the wheel; help its main ally, the US; and tackle pressing global security needs like Afghanistan and Iran, according to Wolfgang Ischinger, host of a prestigious annual security conference opening here today.

Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Conference on Security Policy, gestures during his speech in Munich on Friday.

Michaela Rehle/Reuters

The “no excuses” theme comes amid hand-wringing and remonstration about European “relevance.” Following a White House decision that President Barack Obama will not attend an EU-US summit this spring in Madrid, the EU called off the whole summit. The White House cited scheduling problems.

Last year’s Munich conference saw the first rollout of American foreign policy in the new administration, including the famed “reset” on Russia and an emphasis on cooperation. But one year later, the White House is reportedly underwhelmed at what it considered mostly symbolic efforts by its chief ally on a range of difficult and costly issues it inherited. This year, Mr. Obama is represented by National Security Adviser James Jones and Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The election of Obama and his early visits to Europe brought a “political spring” in European-American relations and a host of good intentions to deal with problems ranging from nuclear proliferation to Iran and the Middle East. European leaders basked in the presence of the very popular Obama in numerous trips here. Yet White House officials are reportedly irritated with a lack of delivery on problems considered to be of mutual security interest.

“Last year’s promises are still waiting to be fulfilled and excuses are no longer acceptable,” Mr. Ischinger said in a Monitor interview on the eve of a meeting that brings together some 300 top world diplomats. It opened with a statement from Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi and brings a last-minute acceptance by Iran’s foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki.

“I find it not exactly helpful, but understandable, that Obama will not be at the regular EU meeting,” says Ischinger. “Europeans are the American partner in Afghanistan. We are his allies. Where are the Muslim country soldiers? Where are the Chinese? But Europe does need to make itself relevant to the White House. Obama has given us a wake-up call.”

Nuclear weapons

The 48-hour Munich meeting, with its rich set of sideline talks and bilateral meetings, also picks up a rising new focus on nuclear weapons. By May, Washington and Moscow are expected to sign the first strategic nuclear agreement in a generation, in time for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review. Senior statesmen like George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, and William Perry have in recent weeks been in London, Paris, and Berlin to push a “nuclear free” world.

After a week of headlines here about a Europe “snub” regarding Madrid by the US president, analysts played down any transatlantic rift. Le Monde ran the headline “Europeans shaken by Obama’s indifference,” though French President Nicolas Sarkozy described Obama’s decision as “not a drama.” Most comment on the skipped meeting has been self-critical – pointing to catfights between Spanish and EU officials over the location of the EU meeting. Disagreements arose between the three EU leaders – European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, and EU President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero – over protocol, and who would greet Obama and chair meetings.

Brussels is still sorting out a complex authority hierarchy after accepting a Lisbon Treaty late last year for a more powerful federal EU that installed Mr. Van Rompuy, along with a new foreign affairs chief, Catherine Ashton.

Obama was reportedly “unimpressed” with the EU summit he attended in Prague last June, according to the Wall Street Journal, quoting US officials.

Critics, however, say it was a diplomatic gaffe that European officials had to discover through news accounts that Obama would skip the Madrid event.

“You pick up the phone and call someone,” stated a retired US senior official now residing in Europe.

The White House is reluctant to spend time on glamour trips and photo opportunities at a unfocused EU meeting, analysts say, especially with domestic concerns and populist sentiment running high, symbolized by the ‘tea party’ initiatives and Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s election to the Senate.

“With resources on the line, with the presidency on the line,” an EU meeting that might not deliver much “is on the top of the chopping block” for the White House, says Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Despite Obama’s absence in Munich, the security meeting continues to be an important venue for nations to signal policy changes and concerns. During the 2007 meeting, Vladimir Putin signaled a newly assertive Russian policy, with US defense chief Robert Gates pushing back that “the cold war is over.”

Now, with Afghan President Hamid Karzai here, this meeting is expected to further clarify Afghan policy, following up a new policy to engage the Taliban announced in London last week. Officials will also look at disarmament, as US and Russian officials this week revealed sharp cuts in nuclear-weapons stockpiles.

“The important thing is to lay to rest the hand-wringing on both sides of the Atlantic and get down to work,” says Mr. Kupchan. “If we aren’t meeting expectations in Afghanistan, what should we be doing? The will is there and it is time to make it happen.”

Russia Moves to Create Palestinian Unity, Block US Sabotage of Palestinian Cause

Hamas leader holds talks in Moscow

(AFP) – 2 hours ago

MOSCOW — The leader of Palestinian Islamist group Hamas met here Monday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for talks on efforts to reunify the two main Palestinian independence movements.

“We met to pursue our discussions, and our principal goal is to build on efforts brokered by Egypt to secure Palestinian unity,” Lavrov told reporters at the start of talks with Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal.

Meshaal, who lives in exile in Damascus, praised Russia for seeking a “reconciliation” between Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and the rival Fatah movement of Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas.

Hamas seized power in Gaza in June 2007 after a week of vicious street battles with Fatah loyalists.

Since then, the two main Palestinian movements have been deeply divided, confining Abbas’ authority to the occupied West Bank and cleaving the Palestinians into hostile rival camps.

In a newspaper interview published Monday, Meshaal accused the United States of attempting to sabotage reconciliation efforts.

“We know that the US special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, has recently put pressure on Mahmud Abbas and Egyptian officials,” he told Russian daily Vremya Novostei.

“If Abbas reconciles with us than the United States will halt aid to the Palestinian administration.”

“Russia wants unity in the Palestinian ranks — the Americans don’t care about this,” he told the paper.

Hamas is classified as a terrorist organisation by the United States and the EU, but Russia has maintained official ties with the movement since it won elections and took power in Gaza in 2005.

Meshaal has visited Moscow on two previous occasions, in March 2006 and February 2007. He was scheduled to hold a news conference at 1300 GMT.

Pakistan: vindication on Afghanistan, assertive with India

NIRUPAMA SUBRAMANIAN

APA Pakistani paramilitary soldier monitors from a hilltop post near Shahi Koto in Lower Dir. Photo: AP

There is confidence in Islamabad that its new importance to international interests in the region can be leveraged to secure its own interests vis-a-vis India.

As New Delhi prepares to put the Mumbai attacks behind for a re-engagement with Pakistan, there is confidence in Islamabad that its new importance to international interests in the region can be leveraged to secure its own interests vis-a-vis India.

After years of being seen as part of the problem in Afghanistan, Pakistan is savouring what it calls a vindication of its position on how to end the conflict in that country, and is confident it holds the key to the proposed new plan of “reconciliation” with the Taliban.

As evident from two sets of remarks by the Pakistan Army chief last week about what it seeks in Afghanistan and how its perceives India, New Delhi will need to factor in a resurgent Pakistani military, assertive about its concerns and self-assured of the resonance these carry in the halls of power in the U.S. and Europe.

From Pakistan’s point of view, the flurry of recent diplomatic moves on the Afghan conflict, culminating in the London Conference, was definitely the game-changer. Certainly, the new international mood seems to have played some role in drawing India back to the negotiating table.

London Conference

The details of the new approach in Afghanistan formalised at the 60-nation conference are still hazy. A cash-for-peace plan aimed at weaning away non-ideological and “moderate” Taliban fighters is one part of it, but the broad consensus emerging from the conference was that there is no way forward in Afghanistan without engaging the Taliban in dialogue, perhaps towards its eventual participation in the governance of that country.

“The outcome of the London Conference has been overall positive. It is a vindication of Pakistan’s position that we need to focus on all aspects of the strategy of the three D’s [dialogue, development and deterrence],” Abdul Basit, spokesman of Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told The Hindu. “The international community now realises that without moving forward on the reconciliation aspect, it is not possible to achieve peace in Afghanistan.”

The decisions at the London Conference were not a total surprise. There were plenty of signals that the U.S. and its NATO allies in Europe no longer believed in the possibility a military victory over the Taliban, and were looking for a dignified exit. Except that the military operations in Afghanistan will now be aimed at persuading the Taliban to negotiation, the next steps in the new roadmap for “reconciliation” and “reintegration” of the Taliban are still hazy. The main actors themselves seem unclear about many things.

Is dialogue to take place with only “moderate” sections of the Taliban? How far have talks, already reported to have begun, progressed? What will be offered to the Taliban? Will there be other parties on the table?

The U.S. remains apprehensive about the idea of talking to the top Taliban leadership. In any case, the big question for any such effort is whether the Taliban can cut off their links with Al Qaeda, give up their extremist views and reconcile with the political and social values of a democratic set-up.

Still, it is hoped that by mid-2011, when U.S. troops will begin withdrawing, enough reconciliation would have taken place for Afghans to run their country themselves.

Two countries are thought to have sufficient influence on the Taliban to be able to deliver on the London Conference decisions. Saudi Arabia, one of only three countries that recognised the Taliban-run Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from 1996 until 9/11 — the other two were Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates — has already been asked by President Karzai to act as a mediator. The kingdom, which has no love lost for Osama bin Laden, has set the pre-condition that the Taliban must renounce Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda.

Pakistan still carries considerable clout with sections of the Afghan Taliban, some of whom were given safe haven on Pakistani soil when the U.S. started the war in Afghanistan after 9/11, and continue to remain in sanctuaries in the north-western frontier regions.

“Gatekeepers” to the Taliban

Described as the “gatekeepers” to the Taliban, Pakistan would have a crucial role in delivering the Taliban to the table, either through coercion or persuasion. But it is being careful not to be seen as muscling in to impose its own agenda in Afghanistan. The mantra in Islamabad is that the process should be “Afghan-led”.

“Pakistan is perhaps better placed than any other country in the world to support Afghan reintegration and reconciliation. Why? We speak the same language, we have common tribes, a common religion, we have a commonality of history, culture and tradition” Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told the Guardian. “But it [Pakistani mediation] depends on whether we are asked to do so. If asked, the government of Pakistan would be happy to facilitate.”

But suspicious of its intentions, President Karzai has not been keen to involve Pakistan as a mediator, while the rest of the international community too is aware that while Islamabad could play a positive role, it could also use its influence over the Taliban to play “spoiler.” But, most observers say, no country except Pakistan can guarantee an end to the conflict in Afghanistan.

“If any country other than Afghanistan has any role, it is Pakistan. It may not be explicit right now, but it is implicit and goes without stating. Whether it is maintaining peace, security and stability of Afghanistan,” said Mushahid Hussain Sayed, secretary-general of the Pakistan Muslim League (Q), “or providing a face-saving exit for American forces, it has to be Pakistan.”

A constructive role by Pakistan is likely to come attached with the demand that the international community address its “legitimate” concerns and issues in the region.

Some of those concerns were articulated by the Pakistan Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani when, in two meetings with journalists this week, he said India remains the primary threat to Pakistan and the focus of the Pakistani military. He spoke of the peace, security and stability of Afghanistan as the main element of Pakistan’s “strategic depth”, and said Pakistan had a more “legitimate” expectation in the matter of training the Afghan security forces than India.

A Foreign Ministry official, who wished not to be identified, was blunter: “We do not really see India playing any role in Afghanistan. Any role for India in Afghanistan can only be problematic”. On the other hand, he said, Pakistan could not be wished away from Afghanistan, and had “a more natural role” in Afghanistan, given the shared border and other links.

Also, U.S. demands to “do more” against the Afghan Taliban holed up in Pakistani territory no more hold any logic, said Imitiaz Gul, author of a book on Al Qaeda and head of the Islamabad-based Centre for Research: “These demands have to a back seat. If we have to talk to them, why antagonise them?”

The Pakistan military said last month it would not launch new offensives against militants for six months to a year as it was overstretched. The declaration was evidently meant to pre-empt any demand during the recent visit by the U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates for military operations in North Waziristan. Now, said Mr. Gul, the Pakistan Army would want to wait to see how the situation unfolds in Afghanistan.

As Pakistani observers see it, their country has never been better positioned in recent times. At a recent seminar in Lahore’s Punjab University, Mr. Sayed spoke of how the Obama Administration is dependent on Pakistan for its Afghanistan strategy, and on China, a close ally of Pakistan, to maintain regional stability, while India has been downgraded a couple of notches by the Obama Administration from its status during the Bush years..

“The regional situation is moving towards Pakistan’s advantage. We have a strategic opening and we should use it to our advantage,” Mr. Sayed told The Hindu. This, he said, should include reining in India from using Afghanistan for what he alleged were its covert activities in Pakistan, and pushing for a solution on the Kashmir issue.

So is Afghanistan going to turn into a battleground for the competing interests of India and Pakistan? Not necessarily, said Mr. Sayed.

“In my view, Pakistan and India do not have to compete in Afghanistan,” he said, suggesting that the two countries hold bilateral talks on Afghanistan, and “see how we can co-operate instead of compete” in that country.

At the moment, as India and Pakistan do a tug-of-war over what their renewed engagement should be called, that seems easier said than done.

Between Two Ages–Zbigniew Brzezinski

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How Mass Media Control You!

more about "How To Brainwash A Nation", posted with vodpod

How Mass Media Control You!

more about " How Mass Media Control You! ", posted with vodpod

How Mass Media Control You!

more about " How Mass Media Control You! ", posted with vodpod

NATO, the “Hub of a Broad Global Security Coalition”?–Like That Would Help.

NATO Chief For India’s Greater Role In Afghanistan (RTTNews) - The head of NATO has sought “a stronger, (and a) more inclusive security coalition” that includes countries like India, China and Russia to tackle terrorism in Afghanistan in view of the alliance’s troubled mission in the war-ravaged and land-locked south-west Asian nation. Anders Fogh Rasmussen was referring to the fact that NATO was a cold-war-era creature to prevent the take-over of Western Europe by the then Soviet Union. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Rasmussen said Sunday that a key lesson of the alliance’s woes in Afghanistan was that NATO “needs an entirely new compact between all the actors on the security stage.” “India has a stake in Afghan stability. China too. And both could help further develop and rebuild Afghanistan. The same goes for Russia. Basically, Russia shares our security concerns,” he said, adding all these countries had interests in the stability of Afghanistan, and could do more to help develop and assist the land-locked country. Rasmussen added that NATO should become the “hub of a broad global security coalition and a center for consultations” on such international security issues, including terrorism, cyber attacks, nuclear proliferation, piracy and climate-change. In an age of global insecurity, the threats to Europe and North America, including terrorism, cyber attacks, energy cut-offs, piracy and climate-change, were coming from far beyond NATO borders, he said. “Against such threats, the approaches of a bygone era simply no longer work. Static, heavy metal armies are not going to impress terrorists, pirates or computer hackers,” he added. Rasmussen’s call came as thousands of NATO and Afghan troops are poised to launch one of the biggest offensives of the eight-year-old Afghan war in the southern part of that country to wrest backin He Marjah lmand province, a key Taliban stronghold and center of opium-trafficking. It will be the first major operation by American-led coalition forces since U.S. President Barack Obama ordered 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan to counter Taliban resurgence. by RTT Staff Writer For comments and feedback: contact editorial@rttnews.com

Karachi, Pakistan’s Weakest Link

[The only way to get an honest appraisal of the situation in Pakistan is to consult an Indian analyst.]

KARACHI & AF-PAK POLICY OPTIONS

By B.Raman

Pakistani leaders often project Jammu & Kashmir as Pakistan’s jugular vein in justification of their supporting jihadi terrorist groups against India in an attempt to change the status quo in J&K. It is not.

2. Karachi is Pakistan’s jugular vein. It is the economic capital of Pakistan contributing a substantial part of Pakistan’s industrial production and tax revenue. It has Pakistan’s only functioning international port. The Gwadar port, on the Mekran coast of Balochistan, constructed with Chinese assistance and commissioned three years ago, has so far failed to come up to expectations as an alternative to Karachi as an international port due to the continuing Baloch freedom struggle and the inability of the Pakistani authorities to develop the subsidiary infrastructure to connect Gwadar with the other economic centres of Pakistan, particularly in Punjab.

3. Karachi is also of strategic significance not only to Pakistan, but also to the NATO troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is still Pakistan’s most important naval base. Gwadar is being developed as an alternate naval base to reduce the vulnerability of the Pakistan Navy in Karachi, but it is estimated that it will take another five to eight years before Gwadar as a naval base starts functioning in a satisfactory manner.

4. Karachi’s importance to the NATO forces in Afghanistan arises from the fact that the NATO continues to be dependent in a large measure on Karachi for providing logistic supplies to its forces in Afghanistan. While the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has been able to frequently disrupt the movement by road of these supplies across the Pashtun tribal belt, it has not so far succeeded in disrupting the landing of these supplies from ships in Karachi and their onward movement till they reach the tribal belt. This would show that security continues to be tight and satisfactory in the Karachi port itself as well as on the road axis from Karachi through which these supplies initially move before reaching the Pashtun tribal belt,

5. The TTP’s oft-reported plans to disrupt the unloading of the supplies at the Karachi port and their initial onward movement have not succeeded so far because it has not been able to build up local support in the large Pashtun community in Karachi, which is believed to have more Pashtuns than Peshawar, the capital of the Pashtun majority North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).The road transport economy of Karachi is largely in the hands of the local Pashtun businessmen, who own most of the truck fleets operating in the area and come foreward to help the NATO forces in maintaining their logistic supplies despite frequent attacks by the TTP as the convoys move through the Pashtun tribal areas in the NWFP and the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

6. Despite frequent allegations by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), the Mohajir organization headed by Mr.Altaf Hussain, living in political exile in the UK, about the increasing Talibanisation of Karachi, there is no reliable evidence to show that the TTP has been able to develop a foothold in Karachi. The Pashtuns of Karachi still largely support the secular Awami National Party (ANP), which is strongly opposed to the TTP.

7. The renewed wave of violence in Karachi in recent weeks is not due to the ingress of the TTP into the city. It is due to two of the three old animosities, which have always made Karachi the most violent city of Pakistan. These three animosities are— the Mohajirs vs the Sindhis, the Mohajirs vs the Pashtuns, and the Punjabi Sunnis vs the Mohajir Shias. After Pakistan became independent in 1947, the Mohajirs, who are the migrants from India and their descendents, replaced the Sindhis, the sons of the soil, as the largest ethnic group in Karachi. The resulting tensions between the Mohajirs and the Sindhis were exploited by the Zia-ul-Haq military regime to crush the Sindhi nationalist movement and to counter the influence of the Pakistan People’s Party. The Mohajir-Sindhi animosity, which led to a large number of violent incidents in the 1980s and the early 1990s, has since come down. The PPP and the MQM coming together in a coalition government in the Sindh province has contributed to the dilution of this animosity.

8. The Mohajir-Pashtun animosity was a bye-product of Zia’s policy of encouraging a large number of Pashtuns to migrate to Karachi in order to keep the Mohajirs as well as the Sindhis under control. Zia’s rule was marked by large street clashes between the Mohajirs and the Pashtuns, both of whom are migrants to Karachi—-the Mohajirs from India and the Pashtuns from the NWFP and the FATA. Despite the ANP, which commands the political support of large sections of the Karachi Pashtuns, being part of the ruling coalition in Sindh, the animosity between the Mohajirs and the Pashtuns has acquired a new virulence in recent months due to the ill-advised attempts of the MQM to reduce the political influence of the ANP in Karachi.

9. The MQM will never be able to replace the ANP’s influence in the Pashtun community. By seeking to undermine the ANP in Karachi, it will be only facilitating the Talibanisation of the Pashtuns of Karachi. The TTP will be the ultimate beneficiary of the increasing animosity between the Mohajirs and the Pashtuns.

10. The Punjabi Sunni-Mohajir Shia animosity has been an outcome of Zia’s policy of resettling a large number of Punjabi Sunni ex-servicemen in the rural areas of Sindh in order to reduce the rural influence of the Sindhi nationalists. While large sections of the Punjabi Sunni migrants support the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) of Mr.Nawaz Sharif, an increasing number has been supporting anti-Shia extremist organizations such as the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the mysterious Jundullah about which not much is known.

11. The increasing virulence of the Mohajir-Pashtun and Punjabi Sunni-Mohajir Shia animosities is once again making Karachi a bleeding city . Since the beginning of this year, over 50 persons are reported to have died in Mohajir-Pashtun clashes and about a hundred Shias have been killed in attacks on Shia religious gatherings by Sunni extremists.

12.If the increasing violence in Karachi is not controlled in time, it will further damage an already weak Pakistani economy, pave the way for the ingress of the Taliban into the city and create additional problems for maintaining the logistic supplies to the NATO troops in Afghanistan. There have been unconfirmed reports that the US has already started examining the feasibility of developing Gwadar as a fall-back option to bring logistic supplies by sea and transporting them by road to Afghanistan in order to reduce its dependence on Karachi. Even if these reports are correct, it will be some years before this idea could be given a concrete shape. Till then, law and order has to be maintained in Karachi and the efforts of the TTP to gain a foothold there thwarted.

13. Despite the deteriorating situation in Karachi, one has the impression that neither the federal Government of President Asif Ali Zardari nor the Pakistan Army nor the US-led NATO forces is paying serious attention to the important task of restoring law and order in Karachi. One sees a disturbing policy of drift which could prove dangerous. The importance of Karachi for the success of the US “war” against the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda has hardly been given any prominence in the discussions in Washington DC on Af-Pak policy options.

( The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com )

Screw You Obama, We’re Going Home.

[Canadian exit strategy for this year.]

As US begins Afghan surge, Canada plans its exit

By ERIC TALMADGE
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

	In this Jan. 25, 2010 photo an Afghan shepherd greets Canadian soldiers from Task Force 3-09 Battle Group at the start of operation Tazi, a village search and security operation in the Dand area of Kandahar Province, southern Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

KHADAN, Afghanistan — By the crack of dawn, the Royal Canadian Dragoons’ armor was in position, fanned out across a dusty vineyard for Operation Tazi to secure a key land route into Kandahar from the Taliban.

It was a mission the Canadians have done countless times before in other Afghan places. But, this time, they weren’t officially running the show. The local police chief was, and he wasn’t there yet.

“You have to work on Afghanistan time,” Master Cpl. Jason Dunnett, 27, of Oshawa, Ontario, said after the soldiers were issued their orders and briefed on what to expect. “We’ll go when they are ready.”

For Canada, Afghanistan has been a long slog.

Fighting its bloodiest conflict since the Korean War, Canada has paid a heavy price – 139 Canadian troops have died. With about 2,800 soldiers in the country, the third-largest contingent in the U.S.-led coalition, the Canadians have taken more casualties, proportionately, than any other.

But by the end of next year, they will be gone.

After four years of often-intense combat since moving down to Kandahar, the spiritual center of the Taliban, Canadian military planners are now fine-tuning their exit strategy, bringing the Afghans in as closely as possible to ensure that their hard-fought progress doesn’t evaporate after they leave.

“We are killing insurgents with our right hand, and killing the insurgency with our left,” said Capt. Jade Watson, a planning officer for the Canadian Battle Group in Kandahar. “We can offer a future. The insurgents can only offer a past.”

Even as new U.S. troops are flowing in to begin their surge, however, the Canadians have learned that progress can vanish as easily as footprints in the sand.

Their departure will be deeply felt. The Afghan police and army, who will be called upon to fill the gap, are understaffed and poorly trained. Their ranks are riddled with corruption, and they are often not respected or trusted by the Afghan people.

Out in the field, the shift toward winning hearts and minds – and giving local forces as big a role as possible – is striking, but problematic.

About three-quarters of the way through the Khadan compound search, the police chief, Shir Shah, said he had seen enough. A village woman had died, a grave was being dug, and he didn’t want to disrupt village life any further.

So the Canadians pulled back.

No weapons caches, explosives or suspected insurgents were found. No doors were kicked in, and the primary intelligence gleaned was about what the villagers needed – well pumps, and perhaps a school.

“We would have liked to see more, but it is his call,” said Maj. Mark Popov, the commander of the reconnaissance squadron behind the operation. “The Canadian combat mission is ending. I don’t have a crystal ball. But it’s not all about fighting. You can’t kill your way to victory.”

Shah, meanwhile, was encouraged by what his 30 Afghan National Police officers had accomplished.

“There are some bad guys here, but mostly they are receptive to us,” he said through an interpreter. “This isn’t the Russians all over again. The Canadians are here to help, to build roads and schools. Most people appreciate that.”

Though overshadowed by the Americans and British, Canada has played a crucial role in southern Afghanistan.

A key trade route to Iran, India and Pakistan, Kandahar is where the Taliban was born in the early 1990s. A city of 800,000, its population is mainly ethnic Pashtun, the same as the Taliban. And as the coalition shifts its strategy to securing population centers, Kandahar has come even more into focus.

Though it had in the past concentrated more on peacekeeping operations abroad, Canada’s choice to do the heavy lifting in Kandahar was deliberate.

After staking out a place near the relative quiet of Kabul in 2002, Canada decided its military was ready and able to do more. Kandahar, violent and insecure, was the perfect proving ground.

But the troops have faced huge obstacles.

Only about 500 are actually part of the infantry battle group that is at the center of the mission. That has left the Canadians spread dangerously thin.

“There are times when I just don’t have enough people to do the number of patrols I would like,” said Popov, who goes by the name Major Mark when dealing with local officials because he doesn’t want them to associate him with the Russians who invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and stayed for 10 years.

That equation is now changing.

The surge in U.S. and other coalition troops will concentrate on Kandahar and neighboring Helmand province because they must be stabilized if counterinsurgency is to move forward.

The Canadians here welcome the help.

“It’s all good news,” said Lt. Col. Simon Bernard of Task Force Kandahar. “The U.S. tsunami is coming. We talk a lot about the surge of troops, but it is also a civilian surge. The bottleneck will be the Afghan capacity to handle all the resources coming in.”

Bernard said maintaining momentum over the next four months will be key.

The safety bubble in and around Kandahar – strategists call it the rings of stability and security – is easily popped.

Just before Operation Tazi got under way, an insurgent rocket hit inside Kandahar Air Field, injuring eight Romanian and Bulgarian soldiers. Though rocket attacks are common and often ineffective, the blast was jarring – about 22,000 coalition troops and civilians work out of British-run Kandahar Air Field, the busiest single-runway military airfield in the world.

From the Canadian perspective, the U.S. surge also has its risks.

Bernard said the fresh flow of U.S. troops will be a bigger target for insurgents. Increased skirmishes and bombings could – at least initially – burst the perception of safety among the local population that is essential for development projects to make headway.

“We are at a tipping point,” Bernard said. “One of our concerns in long-term planning is that we see a seamless transition to the U.S. or whomever takes over.”

But even if the fragile pockets of security hold, it is not certain that the progress Canada has made – particularly in development and reconstruction projects – will have a lasting effect.

Sheila Fraser, Canada’s auditor general, said during a recent visit to the Canadian troops in Kandahar that the Canadian departure could leave a void.

“One of my questions is what are the political consequences of the decision to withdraw, who is going to take care of the projects that the Canadians are now doing,” Fraser said. “These aren’t things that can be done in a few months. Who is going to continue this?”

The Canadians are deeply involved in a dam project, are building schools, clinics and developing irrigation. At the outset of Operation Tazi, an officer was designated to seek out village elders and ask them what their village needed most – a practice which is typical of the Canadian presence.

President Barack Obama has said the U.S. also plans to begin its own withdrawal by July 2011, adding a further sense of urgency to getting the Afghans themselves to take a leadership role.

“2010 will be a pivotal year for Afghanistan,” said Canadian Ambassador William Crosby. “I can’t predict what the place will be like 18 months from now. My focus over the next 18 months is to deliver on Canadian promises.”

Still, he said Canada’s decision to set a date for the end of combat involvement was a good one.

“It takes away the argument that we are an occupying force. It sends a good message to Afghans that we are here to help, but we are not going to be here forever.”

A graveyard of military follies

By The Daily Star

The story of Afghanistan is as intricate as it is painful. It is a story of flagrant abuse at the hands of a procession of superpowers, each one learning nothing from the previous. The British, the Russians and now the United States have each left a terrible mark on the country. The Afghan people barely had a chance to rebuild their nation after each invasion before the next one commenced, and as a result of these political and military interferences it is the fifth least developed country in the world today.

If the US has not learned lessons from the past, it seems the Taliban have. Rumors of UN-led peace talks with the Taliban leadership were quashed in a statement released by the group on Saturday, severely dashing hopes for a diplomatic solution in the near future.

On January 25, the head of US central command General David Petraeus expressed his commitment to the long-haul in Afghanistan, saying that it would be perhaps the longest fight in the “war on terror.” Petraeus spoke also of the surge to come, and of the vast sums of money that will be spent in an effort to do what the Russians could not. The threat of destruction at the hands of NATO forces was not enough to entice the Taliban into talks, the reason being that they do not believe Petraeus when he says the US will not turn its back on Afghanistan. 

The Taliban need not look far into their own history to predict the outcome of this conflict, they need not look into their own history at all. The US has a long list of experiments and military adventures which they have committed to wholeheartedly, only to later walk away. In our region especially, the resoluteness that Petraeus is so keen to portray is not compatible with most people’s experience of US foreign policy.

Many will remember the resolute support George Bush Senior expressed for Iraqi Shiites and Kurds following the Gulf War, only for US forces to watch them annihilated when they rose up against Saddam. Successive American presidents have announced their steadfast resolve to foster peace between Palestinians and Israelis – the result of this resolve is an absence of negotiations and a continuation of Israeli land-grabs. 

The Middle East is littered with the remains of American experiments since left behind and forgotten. The Taliban rejection of Western peace advances is hinged on this historical experience and the mistrust that has followed from it. One could make a guess that the Taliban believe the United States will abandon this project as they have done with many before.

The onus is on this US administration to show that Afghanistan is not just another one of its follies, this means doing more than throwing money and dropping bombs. This is the only way to convince the Taliban that jaw-jaw, not war-war, will bring this conflict to an end.

Jewish Mouthpiece Slams Goldstone as Race “Traitor”

[This isn't about race, it is about a colonizing power incrementally sweeping the inhabitants off the land.  This is about the sixth most powerful military force in the world sweeping into an area of a few square miles with all its might, pretending that civilian collateral deaths are being avoided.  Look at the destruction left in the wake of Cast Iron and the medieval siege that the Palestinian people have been barely living under ever since.  Construction materials are weapons--SURE, RIGHT. The Zionist state only knows a dialogue of weapons, yet it expects the world to treat everything that it does with kid gloves.] Dershowitz Slams Goldstone: “He’s An Evil Man”

by Hillel Fendel – Israel National News Jan. 31, 2010 Following his scathing critique of the Goldstone Report, for which Israel is preparing a response, Harvard Law School’s Professor Alan Dershowitz calls Goldstone an “evil man.” Speaking with Army Radio on Sunday morning, Dershowitz said that Goldstone – whose report to the United Nations on Israel’s anti-terrorism Operation Cast Lead accused Israel of war crimes – “is a traitor using his Jewishness to malign Israel… He is an evil man, one who allowed himself to be used against the Jewish people, an absolute traitor.” In his internet-publicized analysis of the Goldstone report, Dershowitz wrote that it is “much worse than most of its detractors (and supporters) believe. It is far more accusatory of Israel, far less balanced in its criticism of Hamas, far less honest in its evaluation of the evidence, far less responsible in drawing its conclusion, far more biased against Israeli than Palestinian witnesses, and far more willing to draw adverse inferences of intentionality from Israeli conduct and statements than from comparable Palestinian conduct and statements.” Goldstone’s report, Dershowitz wrote, “is worse than any report previously prepared by any other United Nations agency or human rights group. As Maj.-Gen. Avichai Mandelblit, the advocate general of the Israeli Defense Forces, aptly put it: ‘I have read every report, from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the Arab League. We ourselves set up investigations into 140 complaints. It is when you read these other reports and complaints that you realize how truly vicious the Goldstone report is. He made it look like we set out to go after the economic infrastructure and civilians, that it was intentional: It’s a vicious lie.’” Methodology Worse than Conclusions Dershowitz said that though the conclusions are harmful and unfavorable to Israel, it is Goldstone’s “methodology, analysis and substantive findings” that should be criticized. Dershowitz wrote that he has offered to debate Goldstone about his findings, but that Goldstone “has refused, as he has generally refused to respond substantively to credible critics of the report.” Different Standards for Israel, Hamas Prof. Dershowitz chiefly targets two aspects of the report. One is the fact that it uses different criteria for judging Hamas actions and Israeli actions: “Its writers applied totally different standards, rules and criteria in evaluating the intent of the parties to the conflict.” For instance, when faced with doubts about various incidents, in Israel’s case they were resolved against Israel, “concluding that its leaders intended to kill civilians,” while doubts regarding Hamas activities were resolved in favor of Hamas, “concluding that it did not intend to use Palestinian civilians as human shields.” “Moreover, when it had precisely the same sort of evidence in relation to both sides – for example, statements by leaders prior to the commencement of the operation – it attributed significant weight to the Israeli statements, while entirely discounting comparable Hamas statements. This sort of evidentiary bias, though subtle, and perhaps not readily apparent to the non-legal reader, permeates the entire report.” The Goldstone report also “takes a completely different view regarding the inferring of intent from actions. When it comes to Israel, the report repeatedly looks to results and infers from the results that they must have been intended. But when it comes to Hamas, it refuses to draw inferences regarding intent from results. For example, it acknowledges that some [Hamas] combatants wore civilian clothes, and it offers no reasonable explanation for why this would be so other than to mingle indistinguishably from civilians. Yet it refuses to infer intent from these actions.” Conclusions are Wrong Secondly, Dershowitz writes that the two central conclusions reached in the report are “demonstrably wrong.” The report’s two conclusions are that 1) Israel used the 8,000 Hamas rocket attacks on its citizens as an [excuse] for the real purpose of the operation, which was to target innocent Palestinian civilians for death, and 2) Hamas was not guilty of deliberately and willfully using the civilian population as human shields. It found “no evidence” that Hamas fighters “engaged in combat in civilian dress,” “no evidence” that “Palestinian combatants mingled with the civilian population with the intention of shielding themselves from attack,” and no support for the claim that mosques were used to store weapons… As we will see, the report is demonstrably wrong about both of these critical conclusions.” Dershowitz told Army Radio that he feels Israel should respond to the report by conducting its own inquiry, by a committee headed by a former Supreme Court judge. He said that he and Goldstone were friends and colleagues for a long time, “but now I see him as a traitor… It’s as if they would have taken a Jew to edit the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He uses his Jewish last name to kosher his slander of the Jewish People.” www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/135780

MQM, ANP preparing the ground for martial law: Siraj

[The Pakistani people share a common problem with the American people, besides the terror war that is consuming us both, that is, that neither of our great Nations will survive if we don’t rid ourselves of the two corrupt political parties that dominate us.  In the US, both Democrat and Republican parties are dominated by a foreign entity, the Zionist entity and its powerful political lobby; Pakistan is dominated by the same power, flowing through American hands, right into the pockets of MQM and ANP politicians.  Your survival requires their elimination, or at least, their disempowerment.]

PESHAWAR: Expressing grave concern over the bomb explosion and incidents of target killings in Karachi, Jamaat-e-Islami leader Sirajul Haq Saturday claimed that the Awami National Party and Muttahidda Qaumi Movement were preparing the ground for martial law.
Addressing a news conference, he said 45 people were killed during the last five days in Karachi including 35 from different areas of the Frontier province. He alleged that the hands of both ANP and MQM were stained with the blood of innocent Pakistanis, particularly the Pakhtuns.
He said that innocent Pakhtuns were being massacred in Karachi, while the so-called Pakhtun nationalist party was enjoying power. Had the ANP had the slightest concern for the Pakhtuns, it would have quit the Sindh government, he added.
The JI vice-president alleged that both the ANP and MQM were dancing to the tunes of their foreign masters and the possibility of US security agency, Blackwater, in the Friday’s Karachi blasts cannot be ruled out. He said with the increase in the US involvement in the internal affairs of the country, the terror activities have shown a considerable surge. He said that the US had deployed its security personnel under different titles at all the sensitive spots from Karachi to Khyber. He said that Malakand division too was on the hit list of the US.
Sirajul Haq said a JI delegation would visit Karachi to analyse the situation, meet families of the victims of the terror wave and hold meetings with different political parties to think over restoration of peace in the economic capital of the country.
He also criticised the Sindh government for its failure to restore peace in the port city. “If the Sindh government is unable to control the situation, it should better quit power,” he stressed.

Pakistan to take up rivers’ low flow issue with Indian team

By Munawar Hasan
LAHORE: Pakistan will take up the issue of low flows of western rivers on the sidelines of the routine site inspection being conducted by the visiting Indian delegation.
Talking to The News here on Saturday, Syed Jamaat Ali Shah, Indus Water Commissioner, said as per the treaty, both India and Pakistan were permitted to routinely inspect various water-related sites.
He added though there was no scheduled meeting during the five-day visit of the Indian delegation, Pakistan would take up the issue of low flows with India on the sidelines. “We will ask them to share facts about the rivers’ low flows,” he maintained.
To a question, he said Pakistan had decided to raise the construction of Kishanganga Hydropower Project with a third party as this issue could not be resolved at the commissioner level.
Low inflows have been witnessed in the Rivers Chenab and Jhelum for the past several months. Particularly, the flow of the Chenab is very low after construction of Baglihar Hydropower project by India in held Kashmir.
In recent months, flows of the River Jhelum are also not consistent, raising concerns in the country. Pakistan has demanded river flow data from India time and again. Despite a series of correspondence and meetings in the past, India is not willing to share data of western rivers.
According to the 1960 Indus Water Treaty, India was bound to share river flow data with Pakistan.
Meanwhile, a three-member Indian delegation, headed by Indus Water Commissioner of India Auranga Nathan, arrived from Delhi.
The Indian delegation will undertake a routine inspection of four different sites at rivers Ravi and Sutlej to review the water flow situation. These sites include Baloki Headworks, Sidhnai Headworks, Islam Headworks and Sulemanki Headworks. A delegation of Pakistan will also visit India for inspecting sites later.
APP adds: Jamaat Ali Shah said Pakistan would propose setting up of a court of arbitration and appointment of neutral experts over India’s Kishanganga hydropower project.
Speaking in a programme of Radio Pakistan, he said the proposal would soon be forwarded to New Delhi after getting complete information. He said the shortage of water is mainly due to less rains both in India and Pakistan and added at the same time the Indian commissioner has been contacted to verify any obstruction on their side.
Jamaat also proposed setting up of telemetry system by a neutral agency to monitor the distribution of water between the two countries under the Indus Water Treaty.

More Nonsense From SecDef Gates

[What passes for world government these days has largely been shaped by American hands, this includes the negotiations regime for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, more than any other.  The United States has claimed for itself the privilege of determining who shall have nuclear weapons, but, since the Bush Administration, we have pursued non-proliferation by the path of confrontation, over cooperation.  To call upon the world to unite in the quest to make the Iranian people more miserable than they already are, by hurting their government, is just the same old pig-headed bullying tactic that we have always relied on.  To solve the issue of Iranian nuclear power, eliminate the nuclear fire at their backs that compels them to seek balance in the equation.

The Obama Administration has proven itself to be the mirror-image of the Bush/Cheney regime.  Obama and Gates should stop lying to the world about our benevolent intentions.  In the face of the monstrous nuclear arsenal of Israel, Iran and Saudi Arabia would both be suicidal to NOT seek nuclear weapons as fast as possible.  (Anyone who thinks that the Saudis do not have the same intentions is delusional.)  That is the only issue here, the danger presented by Israeli nukes to everybody in the Middle East, all the way to Pakistan.  Solve the problem of Israel’s “ambiguous” arsenal and you will end the compulsion of Islamic regimes to seek nuclear weapons in the Middle East.]    

US calls for greater world pressure on Iran

ROME: U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates on Sunday urged the international community to work together to bring pressure on the Iranian government rather than its people to curb Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
"If the international community will stand together and bring pressure to bear on the Iranian government, I believe there is still time for sanctions and pressure to work," he added. "But we must all work together," Gates told a news conference in Rome.
"Pressures that are focused on the government of Iran, as opposed to the people of Iran, potentially have greater opportunity to achieve the objective," he said.

Blackwater present in NWFP, admits Bilour

TIMERGARA: NWFP Senior Minister Bashir Ahmad Bilour on Saturday said the guards of Blackwater were present in the province to provide security to US officials.
“Yes, Blackwater is responsible for providing security to the international non-governmental organisations and the US embassy staff in the province,” the minister told reporters after his visit to the hospital, where he met those injured in the recent suicide bombing in Dir Lower district that killed, among others, three US soldiers.
The ANP leader said his party had launched an all-out war against the militants and there would be no deal with the enemies of peace.
Bashir Bilour, however, also condemned the US drone strikes in the tribal areas and termed the attacks a blatant violation of the country’s sovereignty. He added that unity was essential for the defeat of the militancy in the region.
He said the security situation in the Malakand region had improved and it would be further strengthened in the next six months. He said talks would be held with only those militants, who renounce militancy, as there would be no leniency towards those fighting against the state.
During his visit to the District Headquarters Hospital, he directed the doctors to provide best possible treatment to the victims of the blast.
The senior minister distributed compensation cheques among the families of the blast victims, including the four schoolgirls, who were killed.

An intolerant society

[I hate to say this, but it seems to be true, in my conversations with Pakistanis, that everybody in Pakistan hates someone else.  I blame most of this intolerance upon the intense Islamisation of Pakistan by Zia and those who followed him, to feed the CIA/ISI "mujahidin" program.  I think that the rest can be described as leftover hostility from the religious divisions that were amplified in the struggle for Pakistani statehood.]

By Huma Yusuf

Women weep for relatives, who were killed in the attack on a bus travelling to a religious procession, during their funeral in Karachi February 6, 2010. – Photo by Reuters.

Coming on the heels of the Ashura tragedy, the two blasts in Karachi on Friday are a reminder that sectarian violence poses one of the greatest threats to Pakistani society. Well over 4,000 people have been killed in the past two decades in sectarian — involving primarily Shias and Sunnis — violence.

Although no group has claimed responsibility for Friday’s attacks, fingers are pointing at banned sectarian outfits such as Jundullah and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi. No doubt, radicalised militants are behind the kinds of anti-Shia attacks we saw on Dec 28, and again on Friday. But the time has come to put sectarian violence in a broader perspective.

Such violence can no longer be denounced as the work of fringe elements, an accident of history or politics. Instead, it must be recognised as a symptom of an increasingly intolerant and divisive society.

Indeed, intolerance is very much a characteristic of Pakistani society, a fact obvious to anyone who follows the media. Take, for instance, the highly sensationalised, racist jibe at Senator Babar Ghauri by Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf chief Imran Khan. Khan resorted to racism as a response to Ghauri’s accusation that he had an illegitimate child. But the ease with which he opted for the race card — and the resounding applause that met his comment — indicates that intolerance is thriving here.

Khan’s one-off insult cannot, however, compare with the consistent intolerance preached by other prominent personalities. Pakistani bloggers have made much of self-proclaimed strategic analyst Zaid Hamid’s Wake Up Pakistan campaign, which is explicitly anti-India. Although the campaign calls for an “ideological revolution” that restores the Muslim identity of the Pakistani state, Hamid’s dream of Radio Pakistan broadcasting from New Delhi has come to symbolise the no-compromises attitude of this particular movement.

Meanwhile, Pakistani grievances against US government policies such as escalating drone attacks and the use of private security firms may be justified. But anti-Americanism is slowly becoming conflated with anti-white sentiments: local websites, for example, publish photographs of any white person spotted here, identifying them as Blackwater or CIA agents.

Similarly, in the last year or so, public disdain for the Taliban has been expressed through discriminatory attitudes towards all Pushto-speaking people, who are being pushed out of jobs and increasingly find themselves the victims of arbitrary arrests and harassment.

Returning to a religious context, there is no shortage of examples of intolerance. Sunni-Shia sectarian violence seems to be on the rise in Karachi. Religious parties and the opposition PML-N hushed up calls for the repeal of the controversial blasphemy laws — long identified as anti-minority — after eight Christians were killed in Gojra last year. In September 2008, popular televangelist Aamir Liaquat declared that Islam sanctioned the murder of Ahmadis. Subsequently, at least two Ahmadis were murdered in cold blood. Need one go on?

The government has fuelled this widespread intolerance by employing vague terminology and heaping all the country’s problems on ‘non-state actors’ and ‘foreign elements’. This language has perpetuated a belief in an amorphous, elusive enemy that is defined by one characteristic alone: not being Pakistani. This allows anyone who believes they can define the traits of a Pakistani (increasingly synonymous with Sunni Muslim) to fill in the vague outline of the enemy with that which is considered the ‘other’: Hindu, American, Israeli, Shia, Ahmadi, Christian, Sikh.

And this practice is no longer confined to political, extremist or media circles: the trend is proliferating among Pakistan’s urban, educated middle classes. Just this week, I heard of two incidents that betray the extent of xenophobia and religious intolerance in our society. After an intense medical examination, a friend was using yogic breathing to compose herself when another patient in the waiting room asked her contemptuously if she were Hindu.

Across town, incidentally in another hospital waiting room, an aunt decided to say her prayers. When she was done, a woman spitefully asked her if she belonged to the Ahmadi community. When she responded that she was not, the woman asked, “how can you not be, if you pray with nail polish on?”

In other words, we now live in a society in which any evidence of divergent beliefs or differing practices invites judgment. Rather than embrace diversity and pluralism, or respect people’s personal choices, we are becoming a people who label, despise and even attack that which is deemed to be variant.

A 2005 International Crisis Group report concluded “sectarian conflict in Pakistan is the direct consequence of state policies of Islamisation and marginalisation of secular democratic forces”. But, as the above examples suggest, sectarianism and other forms of intolerance have gone well beyond the political realm, and are now in danger of becoming social norms.

Indeed, a January 2010 report by the Legatum Institute, a London-based think tank, argues that Pakistani society will become more Islamist in the coming years. The report says that religious parties will not win more votes, but will exercise more ‘soft power’ through participation in political coalitions. This power will manifest itself in a move towards ‘Islamic values’, which will be articulated in increasingly conservative and intolerant legislatures; for example, Sharia-compliant laws to govern the banking system, limited women’s participation in the public sphere, public displays of piety, and the further marginalisation of minorities.

This means that the horrors Karachi saw on Friday, and that the country has grappled with for decades, will no longer be the extreme activities of militant groups — they will be an expression of public sentiment. We can already see how incitement to hatred is a prerequisite for representing Pakistanis, while religiously, racially and ethnically motivated violence is becoming intertwined with nationalism.

If our politicians, public figures and media personalities do not make a concerted effort to preach and practise tolerance, Pakistan will continue to head down an explosive path.

huma.yusuf@gmail.com

Iran says CIA agents arrested ahead of Feb. 11 rally

Iran said Saturday it arrested seven people, including two Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives, who planned to stoke unrest and violence on a march scheduled for February 11.

The rally on Thursday will commemorate the 31st victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Intelligence forces, according to Borna News Agency, arrested the men who had plans to leave the country for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and then head to the United States.

According to the report, some of those arrested work for the US-backed Radio Farda, a Persian language station based in Prague and Washington.

Indian govt hails test of nuclear-capable missile

The Agni-III missile was fired from Wheeler Island, off the coast of the eastern state of Orissa

Indian govt hails test of nuclear-capable missile

By Pratap Mohanty (AFP) – 8 hours ago

BHUBHANESWAR, India — India successfully tested a nuclear-capable missile on Sunday, a defence ministry spokesman said, days after the government proposed a resumption of talks with arch-rival Pakistan.

The surface-to-surface Agni-III missile with a range of more than 3,000 kilometres (2,000 miles) was fired from Wheeler Island, off the coast of the eastern state of Orissa.

“It hit the target with pin-point accuracy and met all the mission objectives,” ministry spokesman Sitanshu Kar told reporters in New Delhi.

The trial meant “now the missile system will be fully inducted into the armed forces,” he said.

It was the fourth test of the weapon, which can carry conventional or nuclear payloads of 1.5 tonnes and uses solid fuel.

Defence Minister A.K. Antony congratulated organisers on the “remarkable success” of the project, which came as a breakthrough appeared possible in India’s fraught relations with Pakistan.

India on Wednesday said it was open to foreign secretary-level talks with its neighbour, signalling an improvement in ties badly damaged by the 2008 attacks in Mumbai.

The two nuclear-armed nations launched a peace dialogue in 2004 that helped lower tensions but India halted talks after the Mumbai siege and steadfastly refused to restart them until Islamabad brought those behind the attacks to justice and cracked down on militant groups on its soil.

India blamed the assault on its financial hub on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group.

Observers said India’s latest proposal of talks would not amount to a resumption of the full-scale dialogue, but would be a step in that direction.

The United States, battling the Taliban in Pakistan’s neighbour Afghanistan, is keen to calm friction between New Delhi and Islamabad to prevent any further regional instability.

Pakistani officials have pushed Washington to persuade India to resume the dialogue, claiming the perceived threat from India limits Pakistan’s capacity to fight Al-Qaeda and its own Taliban insurgency.

The rival countries have fought three wars since their independence in 1947, two over Muslim-majority Kashmir, which is divided between them but claimed in full by both.

Large separatist protests have erupted in Indian Kashmir over the last week, sparked by allegations that the police were responsible for the deaths of two teenage boys.

The Indian-built Agni-III missile — Agni means fire in Sanskrit — was first tested in 2006 and brings major cities in China, such as Shanghai, within striking distance, defence analysts say.

The missile tested on Sunday was fired from a mobile rail launcher, government sources said.

Copyright © 2010 AFP.

Taliban dig in for big assault, say Afghan villagers

Abdul Malek

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan

LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Taliban militants are massing and preparing for a big fight ahead of a major NATO offensive in an insurgent stronghold in southern Afghanistan, villagers fleeing the area said on Sunday.

U.S. Marines are set to launch a massive operation within days to take Marjah, a dense warren of canals and lush farmland in the center of Helmand, the country’s most violent province.

Military commanders are dubbing the area the last big Taliban enclave in the province. The offensive, one of the biggest of the eight-year-old war, will mark the first major show of force since U.S. President Barack Obama ordered in 30,000 extra troops.

Washington hopes the Marine operation will help decisively turn the momentum this year in a war that commanders accept has not been going their way. They have also not kept the planned offensive a secret, hoping the militants will give up the fight.

“It has to do with letting people know what’s coming in the hope that the hardcore Taliban, or a lot of the Taliban, will simply leave, and maybe there will be less of a fight,” U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in Turkey on Saturday.

According to some of the villagers escaping Marjah in fear of their lives, fighters are digging in rather than fleeing.

“The Taliban are not going to leave Marjah. We have seen them preparing themselves. They are bringing in people and weapons. We know there is going to be a big fight,” said Abdul Manan, a man from Marjah who had fled to Helmand’s capital, Lashkar Gah.

“The Taliban are very active in Marjah. They are planting mines there and in the surrounding areas,” said another villager, Abdul Khaleq, after arriving in Lashkar Gah with his family.

The Taliban have stepped up their fight against Afghan and foreign troops in recent years. They have largely shied away from face-to-face combat, relying instead on deadly homemade bombs.

Abdullah Nasrat, a Taliban commander in Nad Ali district where Marjah is located, told Reuters by telephone there were some 2,000 insurgents there ready to fight to the death.

“We are well prepared and will fight until the end. We don’t have sophisticated weapons like the Americans with tanks and air planes, but we have Islamic zeal. That is the power we have to fight against the infidels,” he said.

“WRATH OF AMERICANS”

Around one hundred families have fled Marjah and surrounding areas, seeking refuge in Lashkar Gah over the last week, the provincial governor’s spokesman Dawood Ahmadi said. Afghan families average around six members.

Some of those had fled from areas around Marjah where British “shaping” operations have been taking place ahead of the Marine offensive.

“On the government side, we are ready to help these people. We are ready to help up to 50,000 displaced people,” he said, adding there was a possibility of more people fleeing. Those who fled said they feared for their lives.

“We know that the wrath of the Americans is coming upon us. We left Marjah to save our lives and our families’ lives,” Khaleq said.

“We have no shelter, no property. We left our farms. We appeal to the government to help us,” he said, adding that other families had fled to nearby Sangin and Nawa districts.

Many of those arriving in Lashkar Gah told Reuters they had set up in open-air compounds normally used for storage in the city. Helmand has a harsh desert climate where temperatures can soar in summer and drop below freezing in winter.

“We don’t know what will happen to Marjah and to our property. This could go on for months,” said Manan..

(Additional reporting by Jonathon Burch in KABUL, Ismail Sameem in KANDAHAR and Adam Entous in ANKARA; Writing by Jonathon Burch; Editing by Myra MacDonald)

Iran Has Laser Enrichment Technology

Iran says to start work on 20 percent nuclear fuel

Reza Derakhshi

TEHRAN

TEHRAN (Reuters) - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday told Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization to start work on producing nuclear fuel for a Tehran research reactor, further raising the stakes in a dispute with the West.

Ahmadinejad’s announcement is likely to irritate Western powers which want Iran to send most of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) abroad in return for higher-refined fuel for the Tehran reactor producing medical isotopes.

Last year, Iran and six major powers discussed making such a swap as a way to ease international concern about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, but they have failed so far to agree on how to implement the plan.

Iranian officials have repeatedly said the Islamic Republic can make fuel enriched to 20 percent itself if there is no agreement on obtaining the material from abroad.

“We had told them (the West) to come and have a swap, although we could produce the 20 percent enriched fuel ourselves,” Ahmadinejad said in a televised speech.

“We gave them two-to-three months’ time for such a deal. They started a new game and now I (ask) Dr Salehi to start work on the production of 20 percent fuel using centrifuges,” he said, referring to atomic energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi.

But he added at a ceremony marking Iran’s laser technology achievements: “The doors for interaction are still open.”

CONTRADICTORY SIGNALS

Ahmadinejad also said Iran had the capability to enrich uranium using laser technology, without elaborating.

On Tuesday, the president had appeared for the first time to drop long-standing conditions Tehran had set for accepting the U.N.-brokered fuel proposal, saying Iran was ready to send its enriched uranium abroad in exchange for nuclear fuel.

But the United States and Germany said on Saturday they saw no sign Tehran would make concessions on its nuclear program, despite upbeat comments from Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki over prospects for a deal.

An accord on exchanging fuel could mark a breakthrough in the long-running dispute over Iran’s nuclear program, which the West fears could be used to produce an atomic bomb. Iran, a major oil producer, says it only aims to generate electricity.

Mottaki said on Friday he saw good prospects for agreement, but restated two conditions that could be stumbling blocks — that any fuel exchange must be simultaneous and that Iran would determine quantities involved.

He said on Saturday he had “a very good meeting” with the head of the U.N. nuclear agency on the fuel swap plan.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Yukiya Amano said he wanted dialogue with Iran to speed up.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told ISNA news agency on Sunday: “Iran’s stance on the nuclear fuel swap has not changed. Iran is still ready to do such an exchange and if the other side is ready we can negotiate over the details of such a deal.”

(Writing by Fredrik Dahl; editing by Dominic Evans)

Ahmadinejad Asks Iran Agency to Start Enriching Uranium to 20%

By Ladane Nasseri

Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) — Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked his country’s Atomic Energy Organization to start enriching uranium to 20 percent, the level needed to power its Tehran research reactor.

“Dr. Salehi, start making 20 percent with the centrifuges,” Ahmadinejad said today, addressing the head of the country’s Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Akbar Salehi.

Ahmadinejad also said his country is still willing to negotiate a deal with Western powers to send low-enriched uranium abroad and have it refined into nuclear fuel. “Even recently we told them let’s swap,” Ahmadinejad said in remarks broadcast live on state television. “We can enrich up to 20 percent, but let’s swap. They made a fuss about it.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Feb. 5 that his country was “approaching a final agreement” on having nuclear fuel produced outside the Islamic Republic. The U.S., the other four permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany are working to persuade Iran to give up enrichment of uranium, which could be used to produce fuel or make a bomb.

“The road is still open,” Ahmadinejad said today. “If they say we will swap without any conditions and cooperate then we will say very well.”

Iran has a stockpile of 1,500 kilograms of low-enriched uranium and needs to refine it to 20 percent purity to operate a research reactor in Tehran. Iranian officials say the facility, which makes medical isotopes used to diagnose and treat cancer, will run out of fuel in about a year.

Most modern atomic weapons contain about 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of the heavy metal enriched to 90 percent purity.

–Editor: Louis Meixler, Peter Hirschberg.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ladane Nasseri in Beirut at +961-398-6076 or lnasseri@bloomberg.net.

Interventionist Democrats Want NATO To Be Center of the World

NATO should be global security forum: Rasmussen

By David Brunnstrom and Mark Trevelyan

MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) – NATO should develop closer ties with China, India, Pakistan and Russia and become the forum for consultation on global security, the alliance’s head said on Sunday, but a senior Russian politician reacted with scepticism.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen speaks during a news conference at the end of the Informal meeting of NATO Defence Ministers in Istanbul February 5, 2010. (REUTERS/Murad Sezer)

The four countries all had interests in stability in Afghanistan and could do more to help develop and assist the country, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said.

“What would be the harm if countries such as China, India, Pakistan and others were to develop closer ties with NATO? I think, in fact, there would only be a benefit, in terms of trust, confidence and cooperation,” he said.

NATO should become the global forum with other nations on a host of security issues extending from terrorism, cyber attacks, nuclear proliferation, piracy, climate change and competition for natural resources as well as Afghanistan, he said.

“NATO can be the place where views, concerns and best practices on security are shared by NATO’s global partners. And where … we might work out how to tackle global challenges together,” he told a conference in Munich ahead of discussion of a new NATO Strategic Concept due to be approved in November.

Rasmussen said NATO was already working with Pakistan, and other countries stood to gain from a stable Afghanistan. “India has a stake in Afghan stability. China too. And both could help further develop and rebuild Afghanistan. The same goes for Russia,” he said.

RUSSIAN SCEPTCISM

A senior Russian politician reacted sceptically to the proposals, saying NATO first had to think globally, and complained that Russia had not been involved in the process.

“I believe the problem of NATO today is that NATO develops in reverse order — it tries to act globally more and more but continues to think locally,” said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Russian Duma’s International Affairs Committee.

“As soon as NATO starts to reach beyond its borders this is no longer just an internal matter for NATO,” said Kosachev, who was also speaking the annual Munich Security Conference.

Moscow still views NATO, its Cold War adversary, with deep suspicion. Ties were severely strained by the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia and by U.S.-backed plans to invite more former Soviet states to join the alliance.

Kosachev accused the alliance of provoking the Georgia-Russia conflict by promising Tbilisi eventual membership and of failing to tackle the drugs problem in Afghanistan. He urged NATO to show it was serious by having proper discussions with Russia about Moscow’s security concerns and proposals.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, chair of a group of experts drawing up the Strategic Concept, and Canadian Defence Minister Peter MacKay backed Rasmussen’s vision of NATO as the preeminent forum for global security discussion.

“I think we are talking about how we can have some coordinating mechanism for all the various organisations that exist in the world,” Albright said, adding that the question was “which organisation can make the biggest difference.”

“While I am a great admirer of the United Nations, I know what it can and cannot do,” she said, noting that it was NATO cooperation that halted the killing in Kosovo in the 1990s.

Rasmussen said he did not see the Western military alliance, which groups 26 European nations, Canada and the United States, becoming a competitor to the United Nations.

“We are talking here about a group of nations consulting, formally or informally, on security. Nothing more.

“In fact, I think it would actually benefit the UN. NATO is operating almost without exception in support of UN resolutions. Allies are all strong and active UN members,” he said.

(Editing by Dave Graham and Dominic Evans)

Copyright © 2008 Reuters

Russia, NATO wrangle over military doctrine

Lavrov wants to see a new approach to security in Europe

Russia used the stage at the Munich Security Conference to lash out at NATO’s eastward expansion, but the Western alliance was quick to dismiss Moscow’s position as not being sufficiently anchored in the real world.

Europe and the United States should end their “bloc approach” to security based on NATO and instead sign up to Russian proposals for a new security system, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told delegates at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, January 6.

According to the Russian foreign minister, the end of the Cold War gave the opportunity to make the 56-member Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which includes both Russia and the US, the main security organization in Europe.

“Unfortunately, this opportunity was missed, since the choice was made in favor of NATO’s expansion policy, dividing Europe into zones but moving these lines deliberately to the East,” Lavrov said.

His criticism came a day after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev approved a new Russian military doctrine that singles out NATO expansion, describing it as a military threat that undermines efforts to improve ties between the Western military alliance and Moscow.

Common interests

NATO’s Rasmussen has dismissed the Russian military doctrine

NATO’s leadership was quick to reject the new Russian military doctrine and insist that the two sides share common interests.

“I have to say that this new doctrine does not reflect the real world,” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the conference. “NATO is not an enemy of Russia,”

The Western alliance froze ties with Moscow in 2008 over Russia’s intervention in Georgia. But since then, NATO has gradually resumed formal contacts.

“I think Russia and we share the same interests in success in Afghanistan,” Rasmussen said.

Mending fences

Visiting Moscow in December, Rasmussen had rebuffed the Kremlin’s call for new defense arrangements in Europe, saying he saw no need for a new security treaty as proposed by Russia.

Medvedev had published a draft post-Cold War security pact on November 29, saying this could replace NATO and other institutions and restrict the ability of any country to use force unilaterally. It is a reiteration of Russian calls made since 2008 to outlaw “one state enhancing its security at another’s expense.”

NATO countries reacted skeptically, seeing the Russian plan as an attempt to divide the alliance and saying that the existing Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe was the right place to discuss security issues.

nt/Reuters/dpa/

Editor: Toma Tasovac

Obama Ending Harry Reid’s Anti-Nuclear Distress–Who Cares About Utah?

[Obama slight-of-hand to save Harry Reid's hide from anti-nuclear constituents by ending plans for Yucca Mountain, opting for untested site in Utah.  SEE: Utah accepting nuclear waste before review ;

View Larger Map ; Depleted Uranium Trains to Move from Savannah River to Clive, Utah]

Harry Reid leads push to end nuke waste project Nevada never wanted

STEVE MARCUS / FILE

The Obama administration promised Monday it would withdraw the application to open a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

By Lisa Mascaro (contact)

WASHINGTON — After all the years spent fighting the proposedYucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, a phone call on a Wednesday in July between the Senate majority leader and the new energy secretary turned the tide.

The Senate was facing a late-night vote on the Energy Department’s 2010 spending plan, and Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, had the backing of his colleagues to slash funding for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s review of a license for the nuclear waste dump.

Reid picked up the phone and got Energy Secretary Steven Chu on the line.

Although President Barack Obama was no friend of Yucca Mountain, Chu was intrigued by the scientific lessons that could be learned studying the nation’s 25-year attempt to build a nuclear waste repository in the Nevada desert. Chu, a Nobel laureate, had said repeatedly since joining Obama’s Cabinet that although Yucca Mountain was no longer an option, he saw value in pressing on with its license application before the commission — a prospect that sent shudders through Nevada’s anti-dump contingency.

Reid had other plans. He believed the licensing process had to end and wanted to pare Obama’s budget for that review.

The conversation between Reid and Chu was brief, as they often are with the majority leader. When the call ended, Reid told his staff what had transpired.

“Chu’s on board to zero out Yucca,” he said, referring to the coming year’s budget.

From that moment on, the cards were stacked against a dump at Yucca: no money, no project.

Much later, Chu’s office would say it came to understand that pursuing a license for the sake of science wouldn’t be worth the cost.

Like so many decisions in Washington, the one made last week to pull the plug on Yucca Mountain’s license application was the product of painstaking deal-making, crafted with carrots and sticks needed for compromise.

It was forged in part by political pressures — a new president keeping his vow to a state that helped elect him, while boosting a chief ally, the majority leader, who faces a difficult re-election race.

The decision also highlights Obama’s pragmatic streak as he forced the powerful nuclear industry to accept demise of a dump at Yucca while also handing out major sweeteners to the industry, a key ally.

As the Obama administration unveiled plans for Yucca last week, it also announced $36 billion in new federal loan guarantees for construction of nuclear plants. Moreover, the industry was given a seat on the administration’s new commission that will spend 18 months studying alternatives.

Kevin Kamps, a longtime anti-nuclear watchdog at Beyond Nuclear, said the exchange was a reminder that “the nuclear power industry is one of the most powerful players in Washington.”

“In my mind, that’s kind of a trade-off: The Obama administration is following through on its promise to Nevada on Yucca while giving this windfall to the nuclear industry,” Kamps said.

•••

When Chu first began expressing desire to keep the Yucca license intact, his comments were considered missteps by a politically naive professor-turned Washington player — a new Cabinet secretary not adhering to the talking points.

But Chu’s belief there was value in pursuing a license for a Yucca repository appeared deeply felt.

“Even as we bring an orderly end to the Yucca Mountain project, the department believes that the license application process can offer useful guidance on how the NRC will approach future applications that could help us toward securing alternatives to Yucca Mountain,” Chu said in a May statement as the president unveiled his first budget.

That worried Yucca Mountain’s foes, particularly staff at Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, which had fought the dump for decades. If the license were allowed to proceed, a new administration, perhaps without Reid as majority leader, could revive the project.

Chu’s task was complicated by the fact that the government, by law, is responsible for the waste under a deal reached with industry in 1982. Companies have been successfully suing the federal government for failing to open Yucca Mountain, and killing the project could cost billions more.

Meanwhile, the nuclear industry needed to reassure investors that the death of a Yucca dump would not impede the construction of nuclear plants or reverse the government’s commitment to take nuclear waste off the industry’s hands.

But waste was only part of the industry’s problem. New plants are expensive, costing as much as $10 billion each, and the industry needed money to finance construction at a time when Wall Street credit had dried up.

Federal loan guarantees for nuclear plant construction had been a topic of conversation between the industry and Obama long before he became president. During the presidential campaign, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s main lobby, brought candidate Obama its wish list.

“Industry was well engaged with the administration on loan guarantees,” institute spokesman John Keeley said.

Obama, from Illinois, is in favor of nuclear power. Unlike Nevada, Illinois is home to nuclear power plants and has more waste stored at plants than any other state.

Obama’s first budget, presented in 2009, was a lesson in compromise. He slashed Yucca Mountain’s budget, allowed the licensing process to continue and called for a national panel to study alternatives.

It didn’t take the dramatic steps some had expected, but pro- and anti-Yucca forces seemed satisfied.

Reid initially accepted the administration’s path, deferring to the Nobel-winning energy secretary’s pursuit of scientific inquiry. But Reid quickly understood that route was not good enough for Nevada and the license must be pulled to guarantee the project’s demise.

Reid pushed to end the project and ensure Allison Macfarlane, a George Mason University professor who has conducted extensive nuclear waste research, was appointed to the panel studying alternatives. Macfarlane is a respected expert who has raised crucial questions about the storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.

These decisions combined to create a Washington chess game — each side finding ways to advance its goals as the other positioned itself.

Reid wasn’t involved in the loan guarantees for the industry. He has the needed leverage. If the industry hopes to win congressional approval for the beefed-up loan package in Obama’s budget, it will need to go through the majority leader.

Reid is not opposed to incentives for nuclear power “if they’re provided in the context of significant progress on national renewable energy development and part of a compromise clean energy and climate bill that creates jobs and makes us more energy independent,” his spokesman said.

•••

After Reid secured Chu’s commitment to kill Yucca’s budget, his staff asked whether the White House was also onboard.

Reid sealed the deal with Obama’s senior advisers. The next day, the senator’s office issue a news release stating that Obama would zero out dump development funding in 2011.

When the president unveiled his proposed 2011 budget last week, Yucca’s funding had been eliminated and the administration would “take steps” to withdraw the license. Again, the president had made a pragmatic decision to please all sides: Yucca’s license would be pulled but the industry’s loan guarantees, with the addition of $36 billion, would triple.

The energy secretary played his role by announcing simultaneously that the license application would be withdrawn within 30 days, sooner than some had expected.

Chu, who had balked in December at having the project’s budget eliminated, succeeded in shifting as much as $55 million to another Energy Department office so he could close the Yucca project in an orderly way that preserves the scientific research.

As for Chu’s earlier intent to allow the repository process to play out? A spokeswoman said Friday the department decided it was not worth it.

“During the budget process, the department concluded that any information gained from continuing the license application would not outweigh the cost,” spokeswoman Stephanie Mueller said.

“We have begun the process of withdrawing the application to focus our resources on closing down the Yucca site and charting a new path forward through the blue-ribbon commission.”

Who burnt 4,500 shops in Karachi?

By Kazim Aizaz Alam

After a bomb attack on the Ashura procession on December 28 in Karachi that killed 43 people, ‘unidentified’ arsonists let loose a spree of carnage in Bolton Market. They burnt 4,500 shops, set ablaze hundreds of godowns and destroyed the entire wholesale market. According to the traders, the total financial loss amounted to Rs40 billion. The market kept burning for three days (so much for the city government’s efficiency). This is one of the biggest scandals of Pakistan’s history. Let’s try to put things in perspective.

As soon as the bomb blast occurred it was called a suicide attack. After two days the FIA said it wasn’t so. The electronic media, however, started dancing to the MQM’s tune and the attack was given the sectarian/Taliban dimension. In the ensuing violence the mobsters wearing mourners’ black cloths burnt property of billions of rupees, and the police, the rangers and other law-enforcement agencies didn’t stop them.

The MQM said it was a reaction to the bombing. The only representative group of Shias with a known history of violence is Imamia Students Organisation (ISO). The Sipah-e-Mohammad, which was the Shia counterpart of the Sipah-e-Sahaba, could not be involved in this organised crime since it has long been disbanded and in any case it was never a mass party and had a very small cadre. So that leaves us with the ISO – the only organised body of Shia youths with militant leanings. Could the ISO burn 4,500 shops and confront the huge contingents of the police and the rangers deployed to provide security for the annual Ashura procession? Only an idiot would believe it. Also the police didn’t fire even a single teargas shell to disperse the arsonists. The fire-brigade department, which comes under the city district government, could not contain the fire in 72 hours with its fleet of 32 fire-tenders. There was no immediate release of any CCTV camera footage of the rampage, and after a couple of days when the selective bits of the footage were finally released they mainly showed Pakhtuns running amok and damaging public property. Moreover, within three hours of the blast banners and posters were put up by the MQM in every nook and cranny of the eighth largest city of the world condemning the attack as well as the Talibanisation of Karachi. How did the MQM have thousands of banners and posters ready across the city on a three-hour notice – that too on a public holiday when all businesses, including printing houses, were closed on account of Ashura?

The thing is: for years the MQM wanted to relocate the wholesale market to a suburb (around Northern Bypass) and get hold of the prized land in the heart of the city whose price runs into billions of rupees. In fact the city government had officially floated this proposal some years back which met resistance from the business community. The land mafia – a euphemism for the MQM and the city government – had its eyes on the prime real estate for years. MQM leader Farooq Sattar visited the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industries along with Interior Minister Rehman Malik after the looting spree where both of them were booed off the stage by angry KCCI members. Traders rejected the government’s ‘offer’ to relocate the market outside the city and protested against it. Meanwhile, some odd phone caller told the media that the TTP accepted the responsibility for the bombing. The MQM heaved a sigh of relief upon hearing this. But who indulged in looting and burning of thousands of shops in the heart of the city in broad daylight in the heavy presence of the police and rangers is, at least to the MQM spokesman, unclear. The MQM supremo supported the shutter-down/wheel-jam strike on Moharram 11 despite the fact that it was his city government, his provincial government and his federal government that failed to stop the mayhem that went on for hours and couldn’t put out the fires whose thick, black smoke hovered over the city skyline for three days. You are in government at all levels and still call for a wheel-jam/shutter-down strike against the unseen Taliban in the city that you literally remote-control from London. And on Friday (tomorrow) the MQM would ‘support’ another wheel-jam/shutter-down strike called by the Sunni Rahbar Council. Shrewd politics indeed.

Explore posts in the same categories: Karachi, MQM, Mass media, Taliban, War against the Pakhtuns, War on terror This entry was posted on December 31, 2009 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Karachi, MQM, Mass media, Taliban, War against the Pakhtuns, War on terror.

KARACHI: Witnesses term Tahir Plaza attack ‘pre-planned arson’–

[The Tahir Plaza attackers used the same "white powder" (white phosphorus?) that was used in the Bolton Market arsons.

THE FOLLOWING EXCERPT FROM: MQM apologists

"So the moral of the story is that if you want your ‘liberty’ intact in Karachi you will have to support the MQM. OK, but may I ask her who burnt half a dozen lawyers alive after locking them up in Tahir Chambers on main M A Jinnah Road on April 11, 2008? And who held the whole swathes of Karachi hostage on May 12, 2007, and killed at least 52 people in broad daylight? And what to talk of ‘liberty’ when just a couple of months ago, the MQM instigated a pogrom in certain Pakhtun-dominated areas of Karachi and blatantly killed innocent people?"]

By S. Raza Hassan
KARACHI, April 10: When an armed mob set fire to Tahir Plaza in what appears to be a pre-planned attack, the horrifying deaths suffered by six people who were unfortunate enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time illustrate that it is always ordinary citizens who bear the brunt of politically-triggered unrest.

Once the inferno had died down, rescue workers recovered five bodies from the sixth floor office of advocate Haji Aftab Abbasi, who occupied room 616 in the building which housed various lawyers’ offices and lies adjacent to the City Courts. A sixth body was found late Wednesday night and rescue workers told Dawn that it had apparently been wearing bangles, suggesting that at least one woman died in the blaze.

Charred beyond recognition, the bodies were taken to the Sohrab Goth Edhi morgue. While two were taken away by their heirs for burial, Dawn witnessed a number of people at the morgue on Thursday, endeavouring to find in the blackened corpses some evidence identifying them as their missing loved ones.

Amongst these grieving people was Rasheeda Begum, who feared that her relatives Razia Batool (wife of Nadeem) and Sobia (wife of Shoaib Raza) died in the Tahir Plaza arson attack. The sisters-in-law left their Gulistan-i-Jauhar block 9 home on Wednesday afternoon to visit Mr Abbasi in connection with a bail application for a relative. “Razia left her three-year-old child at home,” said Rasheeda Begum in a trembling voice. “It is not possible to identify the bodies by simply looking at them. The investigation officer said that he is in possession of some rings and bangles recovered from these remains – perhaps they will help us in the identification process.”

Waiting outside the morgue on this sombre business, Rasheeda Begum nevertheless held on to a slim ray of hope – that the two women were rescued and taken to some hospital. “I keep praying that their cell phones start working again,” she told Dawn.

Needless deaths

No such hope is available to the family of 23-year-old Danish Akhtar and his brother-in-law Syed Dawar Hussain Rizvi, who are confirmed to have been burnt alive during the arson attack.

“Danish was married just a day before his death,” his cousin Ghulam Haider told Dawn. “On Wednesday, he and Dawar went to advocate Aftab Abbasi’s office to collect the marriage certificate. They left home at about noon and at around 3:30pm or so, Danish called his mother and told her that they were soon about to head home. That was the last we heard from him.”

When Haider reached the scene of the arson attack, he found the qazi who had performed Danish’s nikah also there. “He told us that Danish and Dawar were still in the building,” said Haider. “The bodies were burnt beyond recognition. We were able to recognise Danish from a fragment of his trousers and his melted cell phone. He also had a missing tooth, which proved to be key evidence in establishing his identity.”

Danish was laid to rest in Orangi Town on Thursday night. Meanwhile his brother-in-law Dawar was also identified through personal belongings found on the body. “Perhaps it was Dawar’s turn to be called to his Maker yesterday,” said his grieving father Syed Yawar Hussain as family members attempted to console him at the Rizvia Imambargah in the afternoon.

Advocate Abbasi, meanwhile, remained with his clients to the end as he too died in the blaze and was laid to rest in Lyari. The sixth body was identified as that of 35-year-old Basit Mehmood, who the Muttahida Qaumi Movement claims was the brother of one of the party’s workers. His funeral prayers were offered in Azizabad.

Pre-planned terror

Witnesses to Wednesday’s torching of Tahir Plaza termed it a “well-planned and coordinated attack.”

An eyewitness told Dawn that following the clash at the City Courts, about a hundred young men on motorcycles arrived at Tahir Plaza and first ransacked an eatery located on the ground floor. “About half of them entered the building and started beating the caretaker,” he said. “As they entered, some of the people who sensed danger in the air ran out of the building despite being roughed up by the attackers.”

The witness said that the young men went first to the third floor office, room 309, of Naeem Qureshi. “They were carrying China-made padlocks and sacks of what appeared to be a highly-inflammable powder,” he said, a conclusion confirmed by the chief fire officer who said that such a powder had been used in most of the incidents of arson that took place on Wednesday.

“They would first padlock the doors to each office and then break the glass panes with the butts of their pistols and throw in the powder,” said the witness. “After that, a burning match tossed into the room was enough to ignite a full-blown fire.”

The witness told Dawn that in this way, the youths set fire to rooms 309, and 308 which belonged to advocate Tasuvar Hussain, rooms 116 and 117 which belonged to advocate Ali Qureshi as well as rooms 105 and 109 on the first floor.

They repeated the same procedure on the sixth floor, first locking the grille with a china lock and then throwing in the inflammable powder followed by a light. But advocate Aftab Abbasi and five of his clients were trapped in room 616; they were burnt alive by the arsonists’ actions.

Witnesses said that after the building had been thoroughly gutted, the arsonists made good their escape while resorting firing into the air, forcing everyone in the vicinity to dive for cover.

COMMENTS FROM: MQM apologists

kazimalam Says:
March 6, 2009 at 11:29 am

I AM COPYING BELOW EXCERPTS FROM THE NEWS REPORTS OF NEXT DAY’S DAWN AND THE NEWS.
Six lawyers burnt alive in Karachi

Two women among those killed in building housing lawyers’ chambers; five others die in city violence; rival lawyers clash

The News

April 10, 2008

By Salis bin Perwaiz

KARACHI: Eleven people were killed, at least six of them feared to be lawyers, and several others injured when violence broke out in various parts of the city following a clash between two groups of lawyers outside the City Courts on Wednesday afternoon.

The most horrifying incident took place at Tahir Plaza, where six charred bodies including those of two women were recovered. The police said that the six bodies were of lawyers. The rioters also torched around 50 vehicles in different parts of the metropolis.

The clash between the lawyers at the City Court left eight members of the MQM Legal Aid Committee injured, who were taken to the Civil Hospital. They were identified as Javed Hashmi, Aurangzeb, Shagufta Ijaz and others. Soon after, violence gripped the city, with masked armed men roaming around firing in the air and torching vehicles.

There was unprecedented violence in the vicinity of the City Courts, where unidentified miscreants locked the main gate of the Tahir Plaza, situated opposite the courts. There are more than 200 offices of lawyers in the building. The miscreants opened indiscriminate fire at the building and later set it ablaze.

AND NOW FROM DAWN.
The five people who were burnt beyond recognition were trapped for four hours inside Tahir Plaza, a building near the City Courts housing lawyers’ offices. “We had to break the lock to enter the room and during search we found the charred bodies.”

Fives bodies were recovered from the sixth floor, where Aftab Abbasi, an advocate, had an office.

chchu-mukkar Says:
March 8, 2009 at 5:47 am

I am baffled that educated people of Karachi can only take an X-cabbie as a leader?
Kaloo is a parasite and a traitor; for starting the ethnically supercharged political environment in our lovely city Karachi.
Last thing I want to hear is ignorant people talking about greatest scarify made by people of Karachi in 1947. It was Punjabis coming across the border who got slaughtered; educated Indian Muslims, that now Kaloo seems to tell every one he belongs to, came on the boat. You ignorant, parasitical morons go read your history; you cell phone snatchers!
Kaloo is in state of paranoia and is an incidental learner; he does not seem to get it right the first time:
He starts a party MQM calls it Muhajir movement (I dare to disagree with this term – what about others who migrated and did not speak Urdu? Are they not Muhajir; who gave Kalo the authority to reduce sons and daughters of finest Muslims of India who moved from India to be called Muhair for rest of their life; even after their sons and daughters have born in Pakistan? ).
Then kaloo learns it’s not flying well with everyone nationally or internationally, kalo tries to fit in and changes with is decree to Mutahida. I truly believe it Mustaqill Quomi Musibet!
From the 83’s onwards a truly peaceful city and its people have been stuck with the fool! I want to know who killed Azeem Tariq; Hakeem Saeed and other nobilities. Who threatens living nobilities like Edhi? Who reduces a well trained and groomed (Musharaf) brave national hero an army general to an Urdu speaking only general, an ethnic hero?
I firmly believe that when people can not see beyond their feet they can not get much far, and this is the story of MQM. They are as much to blame of current Pakistani mess as are the Taliban and any other kind of mafia. What was the judgment of the Canadian court?
We will take Karachi (Pakistan Juggler v) back from kalo and his thugs. Remember, when you have small dreams you become a small person/nation. To achieve big things you have to dream big and that includes thinking beyond ethnicity.
Long live Pakistan; Log live Karachi!
Kaloo murdaba

Watch the truth: How people been kept hostage!

America’s Silent War In Pakistan Unmasked

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

06 February, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Three US Marines were killed and another two injured in a suicide attack in Dir, northern Pakistan on Wednesday. The Americans, disguised in traditional Pakistani dress, were traveling with Pakistani military officers in a five-car convoy to attend the inauguration of a girl school, which had been renovated with the U.S. humanitarian assistance. Four schoolgirls and a paramilitary soldier were also killed in the attack while more than 120 school girls were injured.

To many Pakistanis the most shocking aspect of the latest Taliban suicide bombing the question was: What was a team of American soldiers doing in a volatile corner of North West Frontier province?

According to Pakistan’s leading newspaper, The News, the three US soldiers were apparently in the area to train the paramilitary Frontier Corp personnel engaged in the military operations against the Taliban in the area.

The suicide bombing on Wednesday was the first against the US soldiers in Pakistan. And it was the first time that so many American soldiers were killed and injured in Pakistan. A US Embassy statement said they were the US military personnel in Pakistan to conduct training at the invitation of the Frontier Corps.

The News reported that the slain US soldiers were part of a 100-member strong special American military training unit which was dispatched to Pakistan in 2008 to raise a 1,000-member strong well-trained paramilitary commando unit which could conduct guerrilla operations against the Taliban militants active in the Pak-Afghan tribal belt.

The military training program was never officially announced by Pakistan to avoid a possible backlash by the masses which are opposed to the American military presence on the Pakistani territory. Interestingly, the US-funded training course for the largely under-equipped and under-trained Frontier Corps included both classroom and field sessions.

The News said that besides dispatching American marines to train the Frontier Corps personnel, the Pentagon had also sent a special team of its Special Forces military advisers, communication experts, technical specialists and combat medics to help establish coordination centers on Pak-Afghan border so that the American and Pakistani officials could share intelligence about al-Qaeda and Taliban elements in and around the tribal areas.

In the beginning, the American military trainers confined themselves to training compounds due to security concerns in Pakistan. However, they had now started accompanying Pakistani troops on special guerrilla operations against the Taliban, eventually leading to the Wednesday incident in Dir Lower which shares a border with Afghanistan and with the restive Swat district, where the Army had carried out a massive military operation last year.

Pakistani press reports indicated that the American soldiers were part of a $100 million Pentagon-funded training program which is meant to equip the Frontier Corps with new body armor, vehicles, and surveillance equipment, and plans to spend $75 million more during the next year. As per the program, the Pentagon intended to spend around $400 million more in the next few years to train and equip the Frontier Corps. This is in addition to a 7.5 billion dollars US assistance for the next five years announced last year under controversial the Kerry-Lugar Act. But behind the scenes the US is engaged in other ways. Over the past decade it has given over $12bn in cash directly to the military to subsidize the costs of fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida. Ominously, part of the money doled out to Pakistan’s mercenary army by the Pentagon is for what United States Special Operations Command (USSOC) calls Foreign Internal Defense (FID) a key pillar of Special Forces’ Unconventional Warfare doctrine.

El Salvador Option:

Unconventional or irregular warfare is conducted “by, with, or through surrogates.” According to Unconventional Warfare doctrine: Irregulars, or irregular forces, are individuals or groups of individuals who are not members of a regular armed force, police, or other internal security force. They are usually nonstate-sponsored and unconstrained by sovereign nation legalities and boundaries. These forces may include, but are not limited to, specific paramilitary forces, contractors, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistance or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political “undesirables.” (Unconventional Warfare, Defense Department, September 2008, p. 1-3)

Significantly, as in El Salvador, Colombia and a score of other global “hot spots” tagged for resource extraction or geopolitical control by America’s corporatist masters, the USSOC manual calls for the direct training of paramilitary forces.

United States Special Operations Command (USSOC) touts the “success” of their “mission” in El Salvador as an applicable model for countering insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For 12 years, beginning in 1979, the United States assisted the El Salvador military in becoming a more professional and effective fighting force against the Communist-backed Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). A U.S. military group assisted the El Salvadoran army by establishing a facility for basic and advanced military training. SF advisors, primarily from the 7th Special Forces Group, served with El Salvadoran units to support small-unit training and logistics. The advisors helped the El Salvadoran military become more professional and better organized, while advising in the conduct of pacification and counter guerrilla operations. Advisors were also present at the brigade levels assisting in operations and intelligence activities. From 1985 to 1992, just over 140 SF officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) served as advisors to a 40-battalion army. From a poorly staffed and led force of 8,000 soldiers in 1980, SF trainers created a hard-hitting (counter insurgency force) COIN force of 54,000 by 1986. U.S. forces supported U.S. interests by creating an effective COIN force that fought the guerrillas to a standstill and established the groundwork for a negotiated settlement by 1991. (Foreign Internal Defense (FID) document p A-6)

Translation: between 1980-1991 Special Operations Forces “assistance” to the brutal Salvadoran military produced 75,000 civilian deaths, by and large the result of Army massacres carried out in tandem with far-right narco-trafficking death squads who ruled the roost with an iron fist.

The “hard-hitting COIN force,” while shying away from battles with tough FMLN guerrillas, kidnapped and “disappeared” peasants, labor organizers, students, Catholic priests and nuns, or just plain folks caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, often subjecting them to hideous torture before lining the roads with their brutalized corpses.

Today, Pentagon planners and their cheerleaders in the corporate media are touting these tactics as a “fresh approach” to beat back the Taliban. In Afghanistan and Pakistan today, to ensure that effective measures of “populace and resource control” (PRC) are brought to bear to stem the insurgent tide, FID theorists recommend widespread political repression and panoptic methods of surveilling the “target” population.

The authors’ aver: Rights on the legality of detention or imprisonment of personnel (for example, habeas corpus) may be temporarily suspended. This measure must be taken as a last resort since it may provide the insurgents with an effective propaganda theme.

PRC measures can also include the following:

* Curfews or blackouts.
* Travel restrictions.
* Restricted residential areas, such as protected villages or resettlement areas.
* Registration and pass systems.
* Control of sensitive items (resources control) of critical supplies, such as weapons, food, and fuel.
* Checkpoints, searches, and roadblocks.
* Surveillance, censorship, and press control.
* Restriction of activity that applies to selected groups (labor unions, political groups, and so on). (FID, op. cit. p. A-12)

We see implementation of these measures in the current Pakistan army military operations in South Waziristan as well as in Swat which is occupied by the army in the aftermath of last year’s military operation that displaced more than three million people, killed thousands of innocent people and destroyed neighborhoods and economic centers. At least 400,000 people have been displaced in the current operation in South Waziristan while millions of so-called Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) on return find their homes, shops and neighborhoods damaged by the indiscriminate air strikes and shelling by the army.

If the army atrocities in May-July 2009 operation against the militants in Swat are any indication then we may find extra-judicial killings and mass graves in South Waziristan as uncovered in Swat. Returning residents of Swat displaced by the army operation often found unclaimed bodies dumped in agricultural fields, by the roadside or on the banks of Swat River. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) sent a fact-finding mission to Swat which documented accounts of not only extrajudicial killings but also the discovery of mass graves.

While the Swat displaced people are still clamoring for rehabilitation, the South Waziristan operation has created another humanitarian problem. More than three months after the Pakistani military launched the US-financed offensive, humanitarian aid organizations are only now gaining access to the people who have fled the fighting in the region.
Not surprisingly, according to the Defense of Human Rights of Pakistan, between 8,000 to10,000 people disappeared in Pakistan since General Parvez Musharraf government joined the US “global war on terror.”

Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan claims responsibility

A Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) spokesman Azam Tariq has claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s bombing, saying the dead Americans belonged to the Iraq-ill famed US mercenary army Blackwater – now known as Xe. “We claim responsibility for the blast,” Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan spokesman Azam Tariq said in a call from an unspecified place. “The Americans killed were members of the Blackwater group. We know they are responsible for bomb blasts in Peshawar and other Pakistani cities,” he said.

Pakistan’s government could now face further anti-American feeling as the deaths disclosed the extent of the unpopular US military involvement. Tensions over American Predator drone missile strikes against Taliban and al-Qaeda militants on Pakistani soil have already led to widespread anti-American protests. In the most intense barrage yet an estimated eight drones fired at least 17 missiles at different compounds and vehicles in North Waziristan on Tuesday which killed at least 31 people.

The American soldiers were probably made targets as a result of the drone strikes, according to Syed Rifaat Hussain, professor of international relations at Islamabad University. “The attack seems a payback for the mounting frequency of the drone attacks,” Professor Hussain said.

If the American soldiers were the targets, the attack raised the question of whether the Taliban had received intelligence or cooperation from within the Frontier Corps. Pakistani analysts said Wednesday’s bombing underscored the strength of militant networks in the area despite the military presence and last year’s bloody offensive. “The attack shows maybe they had some advance information that the convoy had some foreigners… and that the militants’ intelligence is still active, and this is a matter of concern,” said retired intelligence officer Saad Khan. “The situation in the area is still not normal and it is not going to be over soon.”

According to Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of the North-West Frontier Province, which includes Swat and Dir, it was odd that American soldiers would go to such a volatile area where Taliban militants were known to be prevalent even though the Pakistani army insisted that they had been flushed out.

The killing of the three US soldiers was a deep embarrassment to the US client Pakistani government of President Asaf Ali Zardari. The Pakistani public has been increasingly upset about the alleged activities of the US military and Blackwater (Xe) in their country. There is a general impression among Pakistanis that the wave of bombings besetting their country, blamed by the mainstream on the Taliban, is secretly carried out by American agents, in order to destabilize Pakistan and justify a US imperial presence.

A survey last August for international broadcaster al Jazeera by Gallup Pakistan found that 59 percent of Pakistanis felt the greatest threat to the country was the United States. A separate survey in August by the Pew Research Center, recorded that 64 percent of the Pakistani public regards the U.S. “as an enemy” and only 9 percent believe it to be a partner.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine
American Muslim Perspective: www.amperspective.comEmail: asghazali@gmail.com

‘TTP Paying Militants Over $42 Million a Year

Latest Exchange Rates: 1 United States Dollar = 84.95734 Pakistani Rupee

Rs.3.6 billion = $42,352,941/1 year

‘TTP spending Rs.3.6 billion on its fighters’

Governor of the NWFP Owais Ghani. – APP (File Photo)

PESHAWAR: The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan are spending almost Rs.3.6 billion on around 15,000 of its fighters in the country, said Governor of the NWFP Owais Ghani, on Saturday.

Ghani said that the militant group is able to spend extraordinary amounts of money due to the funds it receives from the opium trade in Afghanistan. He claimed that opium being smuggled out of Afghanistan amounts to approximately 93 per cent of the world’s supply.

The governor also stated that Pakistan is situated at the geo-political fault line and the prevailing circumstances are the destiny of our country. He said that only a political solution can deliver in the region, military action was no more a realistic solution

What You Need to Know so We can Change the World!

What You Need to Know so We Can Change the World: Part 1

 

Sabeel’s 5th International Young adult Conference: 12 Days in Israel- Palestine: July 21st – August 1st Jerusalem 2010

For young adults between 18-35 years of age with an open mind and ready for a REALITY TOUR of Israel Palestine and an alternative pilgrimage experience to the Holy Land that emphasizes active engagement with NONVIOLENT Palestinian Muslims, Christians and Israeli Jews, please check it out asap for application deadline is June 1st and you may just qualify for Financial Aid to help pay your way, so don’t delay:

http://sabeel.org/

A few of my SABEEL experiences and related articles follow. 
On November 3, 2006, Reverend Naim Ateek, a modest soft-spoken man, 21st century prophet and the Founder and Director of Sabeel/The Way Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem, addressed over 330 international ecumenical Christians who had gathered in Jerusalem in the Notre Dame Conference Center for Sabeel’s 6th International Conference: The Forgotten Faithful.
He sent chills through me when he stated, “Israel will not survive unless it does justice! The situation is deteriorating and we must frustrate Israel’s plans and actions because they are not built on justice. All we are asking for is that they honor International Law! Israel is afraid of International law and this proves something is very wrong with Israel. We want Israel to live in peace and with security. The only way is honoring International law. That is the bottom line and what we work and pray for.”
Reverend Ateek’s classic Justice and Only Justice laid the foundation of a theology that addresses the conflict over Palestine and explores the political as well as the religious, biblical and theological dimensions. From a position of faith, Reverend Ateek seeks solutions based on justice, peace, nonviolence and reconciliation.
On November 8, 2006 Reverend Ateek spoke again, “In Israel officially speaking of Palestinians is taboo: we are referred to as Arab Christians. When I say the Holy Land I include both Israel and Palestine. Ultimately only God knows about the future of Christianity in this place. We live in the scientific world and God has given us wisdom, knowledge, technology to be used for good and our future and destiny are in Gods hands.
“There are many red lights; external and internal dangers. What can we do at the grass roots level? The Palestinian Christian community must rise above petty denominational differences. The impending dangers force us to ask what can we do, what must we do?
“There is no future in isolation or passivity. Our futures are all linked together. There is an urgent need to articulate and work with other faiths, especially Islam. Our future depends on good relations with all our brothers and sisters. We need a Committee of Christian and Muslim leaders to dialogue and work together to confront militant extremist fundamentalism.
“Our relation with Israel is the most important issue for there can be no peace without justice. There can be no effective policy without ending the occupation in accordance with all UN Resolutions. The city of Jerusalem must be shared and there must be a just solution for refugees.
“Pressure on Israel must be done with nonviolent needs and the way is the way Christ taught: nonviolent and forgiving. The achievement of peace is not the end; but the beginning of reconciliation. The survival of Christianity in the Holy land is through true democracy. We must avoid the minority complex. We cannot depend on the good will of people in power. We want to be protected by a constitution with full citizenship and nationality must be combined. Only in Israel is there a distinction between nationality and citizenship. Only good democracy can guarantee all citizens are treated equally under the same law.”
“What can the West do? There is an urgent need for education about the roots of Christians in Palestine and to challenge the myths. Seek out Palestinian Christians in your midst and relate to them. Be aware of Palestinian concerns for justice and human rights. Work for a just solution of the conflict which is equal human rights for all. Support projects to increase the Christian witness: visit the Holy land and meet with Palestinian Christians. Forge closer links with churches in the West and in the Holy Land. Challenge Christian Zionism. Think Creatively!
“In the beginning the Jesus movement was very small. It began with 12 committed citizens. It began with love and Christ addressed his followers: FEAR NOT little flock! You are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. To capture the essence of what Christians should be is to be salt and light. You don’t need a lot of salt to add flavor and even a small light can illuminate the way for many.
“To be salt and light is to be truthful, honest, have integrity and to be of service and do it with humility. Salt affects change: it is active, never passive. To be a light is a global challenge and when the light is seen clearly so is the glory of God. Sabeel means the way, and the way is to love all your neighbors and labor on with God.”
Every birth begins with labor and pain but joy and love follow. Only when there is justice for Palestinians will there be security for Israelis and that will be the beginning of the way to win the “war on terrorism.”
The morning of March 18, 2006, began with a tour of the Old City of Jerusalem.
A sacred hush filled the cypress canopied stone streets of The Noble Sanctuary that lead us to the Dome of The Rock, the site where Abraham offered to sacrifice his son and where it is reported Mohammed ascended to heaven.
We all removed our shoes and all the women covered their hair with scarves, then we silently tread the crimson carpet inside the Mosque.
I was awed by the domed mosaic ceiling, geometric designed stained glass and massive crystal chandeliers above my head and the silence although the mosque was filled with people.
Our group was split into two: some took the basic tour but a few Dutch, Japanese, Canadians, two Brits and I went the political route.
Our guide is Mahmoud whose father was from Chad, his mother Palestinian and he was born in Jerusalem.
Mahmoud tells us with a smile, “I was at the Ambassador Hotel for the public meeting the other day and was arrested and detained for eight hours. The Israelis will not allow Hamas and the PFLP to have public meetings at all. At that same time they claim this is a democracy, but how can that be if they do not allow political groups to meet and discuss the situation and search for solutions?
“When I was nineteen I was arrested for being a member of the PFLP/Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and spent the next 17 years in jail. I was nervous when I got there and I was tortured for months. Then a strange thing happened. They gave me a shower, clean clothes, then put me in a clean room and spoke to me like a human being. Then the French Ambassador came in and told me he could get me out because my father had French citizenship. He asked me where did I want to go and I answered; Jerusalem! He said it was impossible, I was not allowed. I told him I would rather remain in prison if I could not go home and so I spent 17 years and that is where I learned there is no justification for anyone to take another life. Those who kill are not Muslims.
“I was an eyewitness on October 8, 1990 when a group came to put a cornerstone where they want to rebuild the Temple. The Dome of The Rock is also what the Israelis call The Temple Mount, [the site where Abraham went to sacrifice his second born son, Isaac]. They want to destroy our Holy site but no archeologist has been able to say exactly where The Temple had originally been and they have been digging for seventy years.
“On that day they came I heard women shouting and crying. They were fainting from the tear gas! People got angry and threw stones at the soldiers and guards. Then hundreds of guards came onto The Noble Sanctuary and started shooting and 17 people were killed and 1,500 injured. They claimed we were throwing stones at the Wailing Wall but a Rabbi who had been over there said it wasn’t true at all.”
We walked the narrow stone streets that wind around and into an alley and come to a site known as the “Little Western Wall”, which is in the heart of the Muslim quarter. Construction had begun for a synagogue for women that will also prevent access in and out of the inner area, which is an apartment building where two or three Muslim families share one toilet.
Throughout the tour of the Muslim quarter Mahmoud points out the many cameras on the ancient stone walls and where the colonists/settlers have illegally confiscated Palestinian homes.
“Within the Muslim and Christian quarters there are 70 locations where 1,000 Jews now live. We are under occupation and trying to have a better life and we have had some success. Before 1967 we had no universities and now we have twelve in the West Bank. I am a citizen of the Universe, but I live in Jerusalem.”
We climbed to the roof of Al Quds University in Jerusalem where short courses in Arabic are taught. The ancient stone buildings are marred by satellite dishes and lookout towers.
After saying goodbye to my Sabeel group at our final dinner at The Tent Restaurant on March 20, 2006, I traveled alone three hours away from the Little Town in Occupied Territory of Bethlehem to the Mount of Beatitudes in Israel.
This awe inspiring site sits above the shimmering Sea of Galilee where Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount. The Sabeel Reality Tour had concluded and I needed to be alone and silent.
But I ended up delivering my own Sermon on the Mount!
Four Franciscan Sisters, one each from Syria, Jordan, Malta and Italy care for the shrine and the pilgrim guests at the Hospice Center where I spent two nights and a day of silent reflection of all I had witnessed the previous nine days.
At dinner a Catholic Pentecostal from Scotland introduced himself and asked me why I was there and what church I was from. I responded I have Irish Roman Catholic, Polish Jew, Russian Orthodox and Episcopal roots but that my rock is The Beatitudes.
He looked even more perplexed when I told him I came to the Mount of Beatitudes to decompress and reflect upon my nine days in Occupied Territory. I asked him if he were aware of the work of Sabeel, the Palestinian founded organization that promotes a theology of liberation based on justice, peace, non-violence and reconciliation for all, regardless of faith path or nationality.
He sternly admonished me, “God gave this land to the Jews! The Bible never mentions Palestine, and that is that! God gave this land to the Jews and that is that!”
I responded just as fervently that the Palestinian Christians are the descendants of those who first followed Christ and they have been denied inalienable human rights by the Israeli government. I told him the Christians in the Holy Land have shrunk from 20% of the total population to less than 1.3% since 1948 and if things don’t change soon, there will be no Christian witness in the land where Christ promised that it is the peacemakers who are the children of God.
He sputtered, “But the Jews have suffered! God gave this land to the Jews and that is that!”
This really got my Irish up and I retorted, “Yes they did because good people did nothing for far too long, and now the oppressed have become the oppressors. In the 21st century good people are unaware, ignoring or are in total denial of the injustice in the Holy Land. And what about all the Hebrew prophets, such as Micah who reminded the Jews of what the Lord requires: To be just, to be merciful and to walk humbly with your God!”
I could NOT shut up although I knew that that Scotsman was trying to get away-he also looked a bit terrified! But, I was on a tear and barely took a breath as I told him that instead of staying in Israel for his entire visit, he should go and witness life in the occupied territories; go and see the effects of The Wall on his spirit and see what it has done to the Palestinian economy. I told him he should go and tour some of the 58 year old refugee camps and see the ruins of all the uncompensated home demolitions. I brought it on home by telling him that I also doubt that God was ever in the real estate business!
His eyes had bugged out and his mouth had dropped open while the torrent of words spewed out of me. After I finally shut up, he stammered, “But there is suffering everywhere!”
“Yes there is and Christ always stood up for the poor and the oppressed. And he told us what ever we do or don’t do for the least and the outcast; we do it or don’t do it unto God.”
He shook his head and turned and walked quickly away and never again looked my way. Nobody else spoke to me the rest of the evening or the next day. That was fine with me, for I was listening to the voice within and what I kept hearing was Luke 23:34: “Father forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”
But when you know, if you are of good will, you must do something. The fastest growing cult in the USA-and also perhaps in Scotland: is the cult of Christian Zionism.
What is Christian Zionism?
Christian Zionism is an extremist Christian movement which supports the claims of those who believe that the State of Israel should take control of all of the land currently disputed between Palestinians and Israelis. It views the creation and expansion of the modern state of Israel as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy toward the second coming of Jesus.
Christian Zionism is a modern theological and political movement that embraces the most extreme ideological positions of Zionism, thereby becoming detrimental to a just peace within Palestine and Israel. The Christian Zionist program provides a worldview where the Gospel is identified with the ideology of empire, colonialism and militarism. In its extreme form, it laces an emphasis on apocalyptic events leading to the end of history rather than living Christ’s love and justice today.
What is the Christian Zionist connection with the Holy Land?
Believing that God fights on the side of Israel, Christian Zionists call for the unqualified support for the most extreme political positions related to the Holy Land. Christian Zionist spokes persons have attributed Hurricane Katrina to God’s wrath over our failure to stop Israel from pulling out of Gaza. They consistently oppose any moves towards a solution to the conflict which would validate the political aspirations of both Palestinians and Israelis.
Who Supports Christian Zionism?
Christian Zionism has significant support within American Protestant fundamentalists, who number between 10 and 20 million. Its reach is broad, by virtue of its favorite themes related to the “End Times” and an Israel-fixated Christian media.  Christian Zionism is both a political movement and a way of interpreting current events. Its focus is on Israel and the Middle East, as much an ideology as a “movement.” Its promoters share many beliefs but are not organized through any one institution.
Throughout history Christians have at times twisted scripture to justify violence: for the Crusades, for Anti-Semitism, and for slavery. Too often the church has been slow to respond to these biblical distortions with disastrous results.
Today Christian Zionists – particularly those with dispensationalist leanings – are at it again. Although their motives are couched in terms of compassion toward the Jewish people based on a literal reading of scripture the political agenda of territorial expansion advocated by Christian Zionists has given rise to injustice against Palestinians and added fuel to the fire of conflict in the Middle East. For some time, individuals, and theologians have spoken out against Christian Zionism. In the past few years, whole church bodies are adding their official voices to the distortions and injustices perpetuated by Christian Zionism.
The GOOD NEWS is that some mainstream churches have spoken out against this inherently anti-Semitic theology. What follows are but a few words from some of those who have.
The Presbyterian Church in the USA at its July 2004, National General Assembly issued a statement on Confronting Christian Zionism: “Christian Zionism promotes a theology that justifies grievous violations of basic rights of people who are also made in the image of God, and is contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
The United Church of Christ in July 2003, at its National General Synod offered An Alternative Voice to Christian Zionism: “We believe that the tenets of Christian Zionism neither reflect the intention of the teachings of Jesus and the prophets, nor promote peace in the Middle East, and respectfully recommend …an alternative voice to this theology.”
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, in June 2005 at its Chicago Metropolitan Synod issued a Resolution to Encourage the Study of Christian Zionism: “the movement of Christian Zionism based on these biblical interpretations seeks to influence U.S. policy toward Israel in a manner that would arguably facilitate mistreatment of Palestinians, continued occupation of the land, opposition to a two-state solution, and exclusive Israeli control of Jerusalem.”
The United Methodist Church, in June 2005 at its Illinois Conference on Unwrapping the Rapture warned, “Every household should give prayerful consideration as to how God will actually judge us for our silence about and complicity in the crushing of the Palestinian people.”
The Episcopal Church, in November 2004 at its Diocese of Chicago Confronted Christian Zionism: “A partial response to Christian Zionism would be to say that we read Scripture in light of [Jesus’] two great commandments – to love God and our neighbor.”
In 2006, The Nation reported that Christians United For Israel/CUFI pressed White House officials to adopt a more confrontational posture toward Iran, to refuse aid to the Palestinians and to give Israel a free hand as it ramped up its military conflict with Hezbollah.
The White House has not revealed the names of the officials who met with the CUFI lobbyists, which is a venomous tentacle from the Armageddon-based foreign-policy view of its founder, John Hagee.  Hagee is a fundamentalist, fire-and-brimstone preacher and a leader of the fastest growing cult in America: Christian Zionism, which is inherently anti-Semitic.
While Jewish Zionism began with the hope that all Jewish people would have a safe and peaceful dwelling place, these corruptors of the gospel Christ preached, adhere to a 200 year old convoluted interpretation of disparate scriptures that they have chosen to weave together to support their fear based judgmental narrow minded doctrine.
Hagee has mesmerized nearly 18,000 misled Christians at his Cornerstone Church with his take on whom the anti-Christ is. He also hosts a major TV ministry where he explains his views of how the end times will unfold. He blatantly corrupts and denies the message that Christ preached. Hagee, Hal Lindsay and the Left Behinder’s are doomsday false prophets who believe that the only way to defeat-what they and the Bush Administration refer to as- “Islamist fascists” is with a full-scale military assault.
LEARN MORE:

John Hagee CUFI
conference in Miami
The cult of ‘Christian’ Zionism is what the concept of the Anti-Christ is all about.
This heretical theology of Premellenial Dispensation worships a god of Armageddon and not the God of love, forgiveness and compassion that Jesus/AKA The Prince of Peace modeled even while being nailed to a cross.
The Left Behind series of fiction is the epitome of what millennium of theologians have always understood to be what the term anti-Christ is truly about.
The term “antichrist” only appears five times in the Bible, but a cult not based on sound theology has created an urban legend that seeks Armageddon. The term “antichrist” never appears in John’s Revelation or Daniel, two disparate works of literature written three centuries apart and under very different circumstances, yet the Left Behinder’s weave them together.
The small texts that mention the “antichrist” were written to attack the Gnostic understanding of who Christ was. A Gnostic relies on intuition and not on dogma and doctrine. Gnostic’s were most certainly free spirits and most all of the writings we have about Gnostics, have been the attacks upon them. That all changed when the Nag Hamadi Library was translated and published, for what had been deemed heretical by those in power in the fourth century can now be read in most every language.

Only in Solidarity do "we have it in our power to begin the world again."-Tom Paine
Eileen Fleming,
Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org