De la Françafrique à la Mafiafrique: François-Xavier Verschave. Entretien avec Enrico Porsia.

World News - Actualités Internationales

***EU Threatens Sanctions for States Operating Secret CIA Camps

Agence France-Presse

Tuesday 29 November 2005

European Union Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini threatened sanctions for any EU nation found to have allowed secret CIA prison camps to operate on their soil.

"Should the accusations be accurate, I would be forced to draw serious consequences," Frattini said at a security conference in Berlin.

He said that any EU country found to have harboured one of the reported prison camps could have their voting rights in the Council of Ministers, the body which groups the 25 EU heads of government, suspended.

Frattini said the operation of such camps on EU soil would violate the bloc's rules governing freedom and human rights.

The EU had made contact several days ago with the White House about possible secret CIA activities in Europe, but Washington had "unfortunately not yet given any formal assurance" that the reports were untrue, he said.

The US State Department said Monday it was ready to answer queries "in as complete and forthright a manner as we possibly can" as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced a trip to Europe next week.

"We have received inquiries from Europe concerning these press reports," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

"We're going to do our best to answer these questions in as complete and forthright a manner as we possibly can."

McCormack said that Rice, due to visit Germany, Romania and Ukraine before heading to Belgium for a NATO meeting, was prepared to discuss the reported secret prisons if asked by her country's allies.

But he gave no indication whether she would go beyond the US administration's line, neither confirming nor denying the existence of the interrogation centers.

The Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly had already announced a probe into reports of the CIA operating clandestine prisons in some European countries.

Germany and other EU countries are demanding the US government provide "clarifications" after reports that the CIA flew suspected Islamist extremists to secret prisons in Europe.

Germany has already opened an investigation into a case in which an Egyptian suspect was transported via Ramstein in western Germany, the largest US airbase in Europe, to Egypt where his supporters say he was tortured.

A number of other European countries have opened inquiries into alleged CIA plane landings, including Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden.

New German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier was expected to raise the issue of the flights when he meets Rice in Washington on Tuesday.

His deputy minister, Guenter Gloser, said he believed Steinmeier would push Washington for an explanation.

"Against the backdrop of this debate, we will be looking for ways to clear up this issue," Gloser told Bayerischer Rundfunk radio.

Steinmeier said in an interview published Sunday that he was concerned by the CIA plane accounts but would reserve judgment until Washington addressed the subject.

German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung, on a visit to Paris on Monday, said his country wanted to know if "acts of torture" had taken place.

"That's the point that worries us, legitimately I think. I hope that all this can be explained away," Jung said.

Meanwhile the German government's coordinator for transatlantic relations, Karsten Voigt, said US lawmakers could put more pressure on President George W. Bush than European politicians.

"We can count on the fact that this will be probed by the American public, particularly by the US Congress," Voigt told DeutschlandRadio Kultur.


***U.S. seeks to secure Sahara Desert

WORLD BRIEFINGS

By Jason Motlagh
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 17, 2005

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast -- The U.S. government will spend $500 million over five years on an expanded program to secure a vast new front in its global war on terrorism: the Sahara Desert.

Critics say the region is not a terrorist zone as some senior U.S. military officers assert. They add that heavy-handed military and financial support that reinforces authoritarian regimes in North and West Africa could fuel radicalism where it scarcely exists.

The Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI) was begun in June to provide military expertise, equipment and development aid to nine Saharan countries where lawless swaths of desert are considered fertile ground for militant Muslim groups involved in smuggling and combat training.

"It's the Wild West all over again," said Maj. Holly Silkman, a public affairs officer at U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, which presides over U.S. security and peacekeeping operations in Europe, former Soviet bloc countries and most of Africa.

Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Morocco, Nigeria and Tunisia take part in the TSCTI.

During the first phase of the program, dubbed Operation Flintlock, U.S. Special Forces led 3,000 ill-equipped Saharan troops in tactical exercises designed to better coordinate security along porous borders and beef up patrols in ungoverned territories.

Maj. Silkman said Africa has become the most important concern of the U.S. European Command (Eucom) because of rampant corruption, drug and human trafficking, poverty and high unemployment, which create a significant "potential for instability," particularly in the Saharan region, where 50 percent of the population is younger than 15. The TSCTI is "one of the franchises" to defeat ideological entrepreneurs trying to gain a foothold by reaching out to the "disaffected, disenfranchised, or just misinformed and disillusioned," she said.

Salafist group cited

The head of Special Operations Command Europe, Maj. Gen. Thomas R. Csrnko, said he was concerned that the terrorist network al Qaeda is assessing African groups for "franchising opportunities," notably the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (known as GSPC by its initials in French), cited on the U.S. State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations.

The Algeria-based GSPC, estimated to have about 300 fighters and said to be linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, was accused of kidnapping European tourists in 2003 and has taken responsibility for a spate of attacks in the Sahara this year.

Thirteen Algerian soldiers were killed and six were wounded when a GSPC bomb exploded under a truck convoy on June 8. Twelve troops died May 15 in an ambush 300 miles east of Algiers.

Fifteen Mauritanian soldiers were killed and 17 were wounded in a June 4 raid on a remote military outpost. Some victims reportedly had their throats slit.

The GSPC said the offensive was a "message that implies that our activity is not restricted to fighting the internal enemy, but enemies of the religion wherever they are."

Iraq training feared

Gen. Csrnko considers the group the No. 1 threat to security in the region, and has cited the potential for terrorist camps in the Sahara comparable to those once run by al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Eucom officials say there is evidence that 25 percent of suicide bombers in Iraq are Saharan Africans, and suspect that "fighters are being trained in Iraq and then transiting back to Africa with the ability to teach techniques" to recruits there.

The prospect of a transnational terror pipeline connecting Africa and Iraq, or even Europe via a "backdoor" pipeline through the Sahara, must be taken seriously and for the long term, said one top Eucom official.

Terrorist attacks such as the March 11, 2004, Madrid train bombings that killed 191 persons have been linked to North African militants.

The U.S. military and the State Department, which officially leads the program, are counting on an annual budget of at least $100 million for the TSCTI from 2007 until 2011.

This represents a big increase from the Pan-Sahel Initiative, a $7 million forerunner to the TSCTI begun last year in what Theresa Whelan, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for African Affairs, called "just a drop in the bucket" compared with the region's needs.

U.S. role may misfire

Some observers say terrorism in the Sahara is little more than a mirage and that a higher-profile U.S. involvement could destabilize the region.

"If anything, the [TSCTI] ... will generate terrorism, by which I mean resistance to the overall U.S. presence and strategy," said Jeremy Keenan, a Sahara specialist at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

A report by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, said that although the Sahara is "not a terrorist hotbed," repressive governments in the region are using the Bush administration's "war on terror" to tap U.S. largesse and deny civil freedoms.

The report said the regime of Mauritanian President Maaouiya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya -- a U.S. ally in West Africa deposed Aug. 3 in a bloodless coup -- used the threat of terrorism to legitimize denial of human rights. The dictator jailed and harassed dozens of opposition politicians under the pretext that they were connected to the GSPC.

This has made the TSCTI unpopular among some Mauritanians, said Princeton Lyman, director of African policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In June, hundreds of Mauritanians filled the streets of Nouakchott, the capital, to protest the start of the TSCTI.

Algeria's reports doubted

Mr. Keenan said the government of Algeria -- saddled with a history of state terrorism and disinformation campaigns -- is an even worse offender, misleading Washington about the GSPC threat to acquire modern weapons and shed its pariah status.

He added that U.S. intelligence about the Saharan region is sparse, and that officials and Western reporters have been gullible in their near-wholesale acceptance of dubious Algerian claims about GSPC activities, rendering suspect Washington's main justification for the TSCTI.

This uncertainty includes the actions and very existence of at-large GSPC second in command, Abderrazek Lamari, alias "El Para," thought to be the mastermind of the 2003 hostage kidnapping.

Mr. Keenan said contradictory Algerian intelligence reports and eyewitness testimonies suggest collusion between agents of Algeria's military intelligence services and the GSPC. The State Department declined to comment on the matter.

Oil may be factor

Aside from the 2003 kidnapping issue, U.S. and Algerian authorities have failed to present "indisputable verification of a single act of alleged terrorism in the Sahara," Mr. Keenan said.

"Without the GSPC, the U.S. has no legitimacy for its presence in the region," he added, noting that an escalating American strategic dependency on African oil requires that the United States bolster its presence in the region.

A report by the National Energy Policy Development Group anticipates that by 2015, West Africa will provide a quarter of the oil imported by the United States.

The Bush administration has called African oil a "national strategic interest." Nigeria is the fifth-largest source of U.S. imported oil; Algeria's 9 billion barrel reserves have been revised upwards; and Mauritania has begun offshore pumping that could make it Africa's No. 4 oil supplier by 2007.

Maj. Silkman, however, said cultivating security, not oil resources, is the prime objective of the TSCTI. She said it is vital that other members of the international community get involved -- especially France, which has a broad military-diplomatic network in the region.

Maj. Silkman also said that critics have overlooked the developmental "pillar" of TSCTI that makes up nearly half its annual budget, and she stressed that a "holistic" approach that had aid and educational components will succeed in the Sahara by focusing on prevention rather than response.

"Reducing the threat is not as much about taking direct action as it is in eliminating conditions that allow terrorism to flourish," she said.

As one special operations officer involved in the TSCTI put it: "It's not as much about killing alligators as it is about draining the swamp."


Source of Forged Niger-Iraq Uranium Documents Identified

By Elaine Sciolino and Elisabetta Povoledo

The New York Times

Friday 04 November 2005

Rome - Italy's spymaster identified an Italian occasional spy named Rocco Martino on Thursday as the disseminator of forged documents that described efforts by Iraq to buy uranium ore from Niger for a nuclear weapons program, three lawmakers said Thursday.

The spymaster, Gen. Nicolò Pollari, director of the Italian military intelligence agency known as Sismi, disclosed that Mr. Martino was the source of the forged documents in closed-door testimony to a parliamentary committee that oversees secret services, the lawmakers said.

Senator Massimo Brutti, a member of the committee, told reporters that General Pollari had identified Mr. Martino as a former intelligence informer who had been "kicked out of the agency." He did not say Mr. Martino was the forger.

The revelation came on a day when the Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed that it had shut down its two-year investigation into the origin of the forged documents.

The information about Iraq's desire to acquire the ore, known as yellowcake, was used by the Bush administration to help justify the invasion of Iraq, notably by President Bush in his State of the Union address in January 2003. But the information was later revealed to have been based on forgeries.

The documents were the basis for sending a former diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson IV, on a fact-finding mission to Niger that eventually exploded into an inquiry that led to the indictment and resignation last week of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.

Mr. Martino has long been suspected of being responsible for peddling the false documents. News reports have quoted him as saying he obtained them through a contact at the Niger Embassy here. But this was the first time his role was formally disclosed by the intelligence agency.

Neither Mr. Martino nor his lawyer, Giuseppe Placidi, were available for comment.

Senator Brutti also told reporters that Italian intelligence had warned Washington in early 2003 that the Niger-Iraq documents were false.

"At about the same time as the State of the Union address, they said that the dossier doesn't correspond to the truth," Senator Brutti said. He said he did not know whether the warning was given before or after President Bush's address.

He made the claim more than once, but gave no supporting evidence. Amid confusing statements by various lawmakers, he later appeared to backtrack in conversations with both The Associated Press and Reuters, saying that because Sismi never had the documents, it could not comment on their merit.

There had long been doubts within the United States intelligence community about the authenticity of the yellowcake documents, and references to it had been deleted from other presentations given at the time.

Senator Luigi Malabarba, who also attended Thursday's hearing, said in a telephone interview that General Pollari had told the committee that Mr. Martino was "offering the documents not on behalf of Sismi but on behalf of the French" and that Mr. Martino had told prosecutors in Rome that he was in the service of French intelligence.

A senior French intelligence official interviewed Wednesday in Paris declined to say whether Mr. Martino had been a paid agent of France, but he called General Pollari's assertions about France's responsibility "scandalous."

General Pollari also said that no Italian intelligence agency officials were involved in either forging or distributing the documents, according to both Senator Brutti and the committee chairman, Enzo Bianco.

Committee members said they were shown documents defending General Pollari, including a copy of a classified letter from Robert S. Muller III, the director of the F.B.I., dated July 20, which praised Italy's cooperation with the bureau.

In Washington, an official at the bureau confirmed the substance of the letter, whose contents were first reported Tuesday in the leftist newspaper L'Unità. The letter stated that Italy's cooperation proved the bureau's theory that the false documents were produced and disseminated by one or more people for personal profit, and ruled out the possibility that the Italian service had intended to influence American policy, the newspaper said.

As a result, the letter said, according to both the F.B.I. official and L'Unità, the bureau had closed its investigation into the origin of the documents.

The F.B.I. official declined to be identified by name.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Italy's military intelligence service sent reports to the United States and Britain claiming that Iraq was actively trying to acquire uranium, according to current and former intelligence officials.

Senator Brutti told reporters on Thursday that indeed Sismi had provided information about Iraq's desire to acquire uranium from Niger as early as the 1990's, but that it had never said the information was credible.

Thursday's hearing followed a three-part series in La Repubblica, which said General Pollari had knowingly provided the United States and Britain with forged documents. The newspaper, a staunch opponent of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, also reported that General Pollari had acted at the behest of Mr. Berlusconi, who was said to be eager to help President Bush in the search for weapons in Iraq.

Mr. Berlusconi has denied such accounts.

La Repubblica said General Pollari had held a meeting on Sept. 9, 2002, with Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser. Mr. Hadley, now the national security adviser, has said that he met General Pollari on that date, but that they did not discuss the Niger-Iraq issue.

"Nobody participating in that meeting or asked about that meeting has any recollection of a discussion of natural uranium, or any recollection of any documents being passed," Mr. Hadley told a briefing on Wednesday in Washington. "And that's also my recollection."

At the time, Mr. Hadley took responsibility for including the faulty information in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address.


***HURRICANE KATRINA, WASHINGTON REFUSES CUBA AID OFFER

After weeks of silence, the United States government formally refused Havana’s offer to send 1,500 doctors to tend to Hurricane Katrina’s victims in New Orleans.

According to a US State department spokesman, Washington has rejected the offer because it never requested additional doctors, given to the great response of the American medical community and that the needs have been overwhelmingly met by US doctors from around the country.

Aside from the medical personnel, Cuba had also offered 600 tonnes of food and medicine provisions for the thousands affected by the hurricane (Misna).

***NEWS FROM BEHIND THE FACADE

By John Pilger

09/14/05 "ICH" -- -- When I lived in the United States in the late 1960s, my home was often New Orleans, in a friend's rambling grey clapboard house that stood in a section of the city where civil rights campaigners had taken refuge from the violence of the Deep South. New Orleans was said to be cosmopolitan; it was also sinister and murderous. We were protected by the then District Attorney, Jim Garrison, a liberal maverick whose investigations into the assassination of John Kennedy were to make powerful enemies behind The Facade.

The Facade was how we described the dividing line between the America of real life - of a poverty so profound that slavery was still a presence and a rapacious state power that waged war against its own citizens, as it did against black and brown-skinned people in faraway countries - and the America that spawned the greed of corporatism and invented public relations as a means of social control; the "American Dream" and the "American Way of Life" began as advertising slogans.

The wilful neglect of the Bush regime before and after hurricane Katrina offered a rare glimpse behind The Facade. The poor were no longer invisible; the bodies floating in contaminated water, the survivors threatened with police shotguns, the distinct obesity of American poverty - all of it mocked the forests of advertising billboards and relentless television commercials and news sound-bites (average length 9.9 seconds) that glorify the "dream" of wealth and power. A word long expropriated and debased - reality - found its true meaning, if briefly.

As if by accident, the American media, which is the legitimising arm of corporate public relations, reported the truth. For a few days, a selective group of liberal newspaper readers were told that poverty had risen an amazing 17 per cent under Bush; that an African-American baby born within a mile of the White House had less chance of surviving its first year than an urban baby in India; that the United States was now ranked 43rd in the world in infant mortality, 84th for measles immunisation and 89th for polio; that the world's richest oil company, ExxonMobil, would make 30 billion dollars in profits this year, having received a huge slice of the 14.5 billion dollars in "tax breaks" which Bush's new energy bill guarantees his elite cronies.

In his two elections, Bush has received most of his "corporate contributions" - the euphemism for bribes totalling 61.5 million dollars - from oil and gas companies. The bloody conquest of Iraq, the world's second biggest source of oil, will be their prize: their loot.

Iraq and New Orleans are not far apart. On 13 April, 2003, Matt Frei, the BBC's Washington correspondent, reported the bloodbath of the American invasion with these words: "There's no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East... is now increasingly tied up with military power." Frei's apologies for the Bush regime from in front of the White House, and specifically for the architect of the slaughter in Iraq, Paul Wolfowitz, were consistent with his reporting from New Orleans, which was vivid. On 5 September, he described battle-ready troops of the 82nd Airborne trudging through the streets of New Orleans as the "heroes of Tikrit". Most of the killing in Tikrit and elsewhere in Iraq has been done not by "insurgents" but by such "heroes": a fact almost never allowed in the "coverage", whether it is on Fox or the BBC. Shaking his head in New Orleans, Frei wondered why Bush had done so little. Reality's intrusion was complete.

Before the moment passes, and Bush's atrocities and lies in Iraq are again allowed to proceed, it is worth connecting his disregard for the suffering in New Orleans with other truths behind The Facade. The unchanging nature of the 500-year western imperial crusade is exemplified in the unreported suffering of people all over the world, declared enemies in their own homes. The people of Tal Afar, a northern Iraqi town now in the news as "an insurgent stronghold", refused to be expelled from their homes, and as you read this, are being bombed and shelled and strafed, just as the people of Fallujah were, and the people of Najaf, and the people of Hongai, a "stronghold" in Vietnam, once the most bombed place on earth, and the people of Neak Loeung in Cambodia, one of countless towns flattened by B-52s. The list of such places consigned to notoriety, then oblivion, is seemingly endless. Why?

The answer largely is that so much of western scholarship has taken the humanity out of the study of nations, of people, congealing it with jargon and reducing it to an esotericism called "international relations", the grand chess game of western power that scores nations as useful or not, expendable or not. (Listen to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw talk about "failed nations": the pure invention of Anglo-American IR zealots.) It is this rampant orthodoxy that determines how power speaks and how its historians and reporters report.

Such orthodoxy, says Richard Falk, professor of International Relations at Princeton and a distinguished dissenter, "which is so widely accepted among political scientists as to be virtually unchallengeable in academic journals, regards law and morality as irrelevant to the identification of rational policy." Thus, western foreign policy is formulated "through a self-righteous, one-way, moral/legal screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence..." This is the filter through which most people get their serious news. It is the reason why the most obvious truths, such as the dominance of western state terrorism over the minuscule al-Qaeda variety, is never reported. It is the reason why America's destruction of 35 democracies in 30 countries (historian William Blum's latest count), is unknown to the American public.

More urgently, it is the reason why the historic implications of Bush's and Blair's assaults on our most basic freedoms, such as habeas corpus, are rarely reported. On 9 September, the American federal appeals court handed down a judgement against Jose Padilla, an alleged witness to an alleged "plot" inmate of Guantanamo Bay, allowing the US military to hold him without charge, indefinitely. Even though there is no case against him, the Supreme Court is unlikely to overturn this travesty, which means the end of the Bill of Rights and of the "very core of liberty... freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive", as an American jurist once famously wrote. This was hardly news in Britain, just as Lord Hoffmann's remarks passed most of us by. A Law Lord, he said that Blair's plans to gut our own basic rights were a greater threat than terrorism. Indefinite imprisonment for those innocent before the law and the intimidation of a minority community and of dissenters - these are the goals of Blair's "necessary measures", borrowed from Bush. Who challenges him? His Downing Street press conference is an august sheep pen, the baa-ing barely audible. In India, the other day, reported the London Guardian's political editor, "Mr Blair stood his ground when challenged over the Iraq war" - by Indian reporters, that is. The Guardian described neither their challenges nor Blair's replies.

Behind The Facade, the destruction of democracy has been a long-term project. The millions of poor, like most of the people of New Orleans, have no place in the American system, which is why they don't vote. The same is happening under Blair, who has achieved the lowest voter turnouts since the franchise. Like Bush, this is not his concern, for his horizons stretch far. Selling weapons and privatisation deals to India one day, preparing the ground for attacking Iran the next. Under Blair, the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, ran Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the media about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. Under Blair, young Pakistanis living in Britain were trained as jihadi fighters and recruited for the first of his wars - the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in 1999. According to the Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, they joined this terrorist network "with the full knowledge and complicity of the British and American intelligence agencies."

In his classic work, The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the godfather of American policies and actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, writes that for America to dominate the world, it cannot sustain a genuine, popular democracy because "the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion... Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation". He describes how he secretly persuaded President Carter in 1976 to bankroll and arm the jihadis in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a means of ensuring America's Cold War dominance. When I asked him in Washington, two years ago, if he regretted that the consequences were al-Qaeda and the attacks of 11 September, he became very angry and did not reply; and a crack in The Facade closed. It is time those of us paid to keep the record straight tore it down completely.

First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk

***HOLD THE USA ACCOUNATABLE: THE INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNISED RIGHTS OF “THE INTERNALLY DISPLACED”

By Ajamu Baraka, The Black Commentator

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the debate is already raging on how to deal with those displaced by the disaster and whether to rebuild New Orleans and other coastal communities. Competing interests combined with poor planning and a disjointed response from public and private agencies have created confusion about priorities, funding and other crucial details. It is imperative that a human rights and humanitarian law framework be applied to these discussions and form the basis for all future action.

The United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement provide just such a framework. The principles identify the internationally recognized rights and guarantees of people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes and communities due to a number of factors, including natural disaster. According to this set of principles, those who have been displaced from their homes but not crossed international borders are classified as “internally displaced persons,” not “refugees” or “evacuees.” This is not a mere question of semantics, but an essential definition that establishes the obligations that government has to protect and defend the rights of the Gulf Coast residents who have been dispersed across the country.

The extent to which various aspects of the recovery should be funded will be a topic of much debate among policymakers, especially given the federal deficit and competing economic needs. But the rights of the displaced must be viewed as a separate and overriding issue. Receiving protection and humanitarian assistance from government authorities is not an act of benevolence, but rather is obligatory for displaced people – for the duration of their displacement. This will be especially important to remember after media coverage of Katrina has faded, and we must not compound the plight of the displaced by letting them fend for themselves once the dust has settled. If we accept that it will take years to rebuild New Orleans, we must also accept that it will take no less time to rebuild the lives of the displaced from New Orleans and throughout the Gulf Coast.

One of the most contentious issues that will emerge in the near future is the fate of the large numbers of people, largely poor and African American who may want to return to their homes and communities but may not have the resources to do so. But as the U.N. guidelines clearly state, “Authorities have the duty and responsibility to assist returned and/or resettled internally displaced persons to recover, to the extent possible, their property and possessions which they left behind or were dispossessed of upon their displacement.” We know that there are powerful forces in New Orleans and elsewhere on the coast who would prefer that the poor of those communities not be allowed to return. Low- and middle-income property owners will have particular difficulty meeting their financial obligations and will require protection from creditors; speculators are already targeting the most vulnerable and desperate property owners, offering cash for their holdings at pennies on the dollar. The sharks are circling, and we must ensure that they are not allowed to feed.

In fact, the problems the displaced will face in the future may well dwarf what they’ve already been through. Assessing and then meeting the individual needs of several hundred thousand people scattered in dozens of states will be a difficult and time-consuming task, the magnitude of which argues strongly for a coordinated response that must begin now. This might well include a role for the U.N. High Commission on Refugees, which has considerable experience with displacement issues, and other international agencies. Regardless of the mechanism, alternatives to dumping the entire recovery burden on FEMA or other already-overextended agency must be explored. Without a coordinated plan that specifically addresses critical long-term issues, the likelihood will only increase in coming months that the most powerless victims of Katrina will be left with nothing.

The disproportionate hardships shouldered by poor, mostly minority residents of the Gulf Coast in the wake of Katrina have been well-documented and acknowledged by most observers. It is not enough, however, to address this reality merely by issuing debit cards, formulating more equitable evacuation plans or otherwise better preparing for future disasters. Rather, as the U.N. principles clearly state, continued relief efforts must be viewed in the context of providing meaningful opportunities for the displaced and their families in the months and years to come. Stories of evacuees airlifted to destinations far from their families and friends, sometimes against their will, reinforce the importance of viewing the emergency measures as a temporary, not a permanent, solution. The idea that evacuees will remain where they’ve been dropped assumes that they have no other options; providing such options is an essential component of the government’s obligation according to the U.N. principles.

Missing from the press conferences and official statements has been any commitment to another of the U.N. principles: that the victims of Hurricane Katrina have the ability to decide for themselves how to reconstruct their lives. As the principles state unequivocally, the displaced have an inalienable right to participate in decisions about their future, and any recovery plan in Katrina’s aftermath must therefore include substantive input by those who have the most at stake. This is not a courtesy that can be discarded if it becomes inconvenient, but an absolute necessity.

It is important to note that the United States has consistently upheld the U.N. Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement when similar circumstances have arisen in other countries. If the fundamental rights of displaced people apply in countries far less able to cope with such disasters as Hurricane Katrina, they certainly apply here.

Ajamu Baraka is Director of the U.S. Human Rights Network, a coalition of more than 170 organizations working on the full spectrum of human rights issues. Formed to promote U.S. adherence to universal human rights standards by building links between organizations as well as individuals across the nation, the Network strives towards building a human rights culture that puts those directly affected by human rights violations in a central leadership role. The Network also works to connect the U.S. human rights movement with the broader U.S. social justice movement and human rights movements around the world. He can be reached at abaraka@ushrnetwork.org.

***VENEZUELAN LEADER LASHES AT US IN UN SPEECH

Agence France-Presse

Friday 16 September 2005

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez called the United States a "terrorist state" and said the United Nations headquarters should be moved away from New York.

The outspoken Chavez littered his speech to the UN world summit with anti-US comments which were strongly applauded. The ally of Cuba's President Fidel Castro followed this up with a press conference at which he accused the US administration of supporting terrorism. Tensions have been mounting between the United States and Venezuela for months.

President George W. Bush's government has accused Chavez of becoming a destabilizing influence in Latin America. Chavez has in turn threatened to cut off his country's valuable oil supplies to the United States.

Their dispute has been spiced up by a call from US conservative evangelist, Pat Robertson, for the United States to assassinate Chavez, a comment he later apologized for.

Chavez told the UN General Assembly that the United States was "a country that does not respect the resolutions of this assembly."

To loud applause he took up the call of Latin American revolutionary Simon Bolivar for the UN headquarters to be moved to "an international city" in the southern hemisphere.

"It is time to think about an international city," he said, just before being told that his speech had gone beyond the allotted 15 minutes for each of the 170 heads of state and government leaders at the summit.

Chavez took the opportunity to fire a new assault at the US leader, claiming that Bush had been given 20 minutes.

At a press conference after his speech, Chavez said that the United States was a "terrorist state" because of its actions in Iraq, Robertson's assassination call and for harboring Luis Posada Carriles, who is wanted for the bombing of a Cuban airliner.

"It is a terrorist state. It is a government that violates all rules and behaves shamelessly," he said.

"The United States is the champion of double standards. The United States' government defends terrorism. They talk of the fight against the terrorism, but they commit terrorism, state terrorism," said Chavez.

The Venezuelan president said the United States had used napalm in Iraq and protects Posada Carriles, who is being held in the United States on immigration charges.

The Venezuelan leader arrived in New York on Thursday morning having kept in doubt whether he would attend the summit at all.

Chavez charged Tuesday that the United States had denied visas to his security and medical teams. He also complained that his presidential jet had been ordered to an airport far from the UN building.

Stepping up the diplomatic hostilities, as Chavez arrived, the US administration released a report saying that Venezuela had "failed demonstrably" to meet its counter-narcotics obligations over the past year.

***PEOPLE WITH BLOOD-SOAKED HANDS

The following is the text of a controversial speech by Mahathir Mohamad at Suhakam’s Human Rights Conference on 09/09/05, which led to the walkout of a number of diplomats and made news all over the world.

By Mahathir Mohamad

09/16/05 "ICH" -- -- I would like to thank Suhakam for this honour to address you on a subject that you have more knowledge and experience than I do.

You are concerned with human rights or hak asasi manusia. And it is only right that as a civilised society and nation we should all be concerned with human rights in our country and in fact in the world.

But human rights should be upheld because they can contribute to a better quality of life. To kill 100,000 people because you suspect that the human rights of a few have been denied seem to be a contradiction. Yet the fanaticism of the champions of human rights have led to more people being deprived of their rights and many their lives than the number saved. It seems to me that we have lost our sense of proportion.

With civilisational advances it is only right that the human community try to distinguish itself more and more from those of the other creatures created by God which are unable to think, to reason and to overcome the influence of base desires and feelings. Submission to the strong and the powerful was right in the animal world and in primitive human societies. But the more advance the society the greater should be the capacity to think, to recognise and evaluate between right and wrong and to choose between these based on higher reasoning power and not just base feelings and desires.

The world today is, in the sense of the ability to make right choices, still very primitive. For example those who claim to be the most civilised still believe that the misfortune which befall them as a result of the actions by their enemies are wrong but the misfortune that they inflict on their enemies are right. This is seen from the concern and anger over the death of 1,700 US soldiers in Iraq but the death of a hundred times more of Iraqis as a result of the military invasion and occupation of Iraq and the civil war precipitated by the imposition of democratic elections are not even mentioned.

There is no tally of Iraqi deaths but every single death of a US soldier is reported to the world. These are soldiers who must expect to be killed. But the Iraqis who die because of US action or the civil war in Iraq that the US has precipitated are innocent civilians who under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein would be alive.

You and I read reports of the death of Iraqis with equanimity as if it is right and just. You and I do not react with anger and horror over this injustice, this abuse of the rights of the Iraqis to live, to be free from terror including state initiated terror.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq on false pretences, 500,000 infants died because sanctions deprived them of medicine and food/ Asked by the press, Madelene Albright, then US secretary of state, whether she thought the price was not too high for stopping Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, she said it was difficult but the price (death of 500,000 children) was worth it.

At the time this was happening where were the people who are concerned with human rights? Did they expose the abuses of Britain and America? Did they protest against their own governments? No. It is because they, the enemy, are killed. That is acceptable. But their own people must not be killed. To kill them is to commit acts of terror.

Yet what is an act of terror. Isn’t it any act that terrifies people? Are not the people terrified at the idea of being bombed and killed? Those who are to be killed by exploding bombs know they would have their bodies torn from their heads and limbs. Some will die instantly no doubt. But many would not. They would feel their limbs being torn from their bodies, their guts spilled on the ground through their torned abdomen. They would wait in terrible pain for help that may not come. And they would again experience the terror, expecting the next bomb or rocket. And those who survive would know the terror of what would, what could happen to them personally when the bombers come again, tomorrow, the day after, the week or month after.

They would know that they could be next to have their heads torn off from their bodies, their limbs too. They would know that they would die violently or they would survive in horrible pain, minus arms, minus legs, maimed forever. And yet the bombings would go on. In Iraq for 10 years between the Gulf War and the Iraq invasion, the people lived in terrible fear. They were terrorised. Have they any rights? Did the people of the world care?

The British and American bomber pilots came, unopposed, safe and cosy in their state-of-the-art aircrafts, pressing buttons to drop bombs, to kill and maim real people who were their targets, just targets. And these murderers, for that is what they are, would go back to celebrate ‘Mission accomplished’.

Who are the terrorists? The people below who were bombed or the bombers? Whose rights have been snatched away?

I relate this because there are not just double standards where human rights are concerned, there are multiple standards. Rightly we should be concerned whether prisoners and detained foreign workers in this country are treated well or not. We should be concerned whether everyone can exercise his right to vote or not, whether the food given to detainees are wholesome or not, indeed whether detention without trial is a violation of human rights or not.

But the people whose hands are soaked in the blood of the innocents, the blood of the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Panamanians, the Nicaraguans, the Chileans, the Ecuadorians; the people who assassinated the presidents of Panama, Chile, Ecuador; the people who ignored international law and mounted military attacks, invading and killing hundreds of Panamanian in order to arrest Noriega and to try him not under Panamanian laws but under their own country’s law, have these people a right to question human rights in our country, to make a list and grade the human rights record of the countries of the world yearly, these people with blood-soaked hands.

They have not questioned the blatant abuses of human rights in countries that are friendly to them. In fact they provide the means for these countries to indulge in human rights abuses.

Israel is provided with weapons, helicopter gunships, bullets coated with depleted uranium to wage war against people whose only way to retaliate is by committing suicide bombing. The Israeli soldiers were well-protected with body armour, operated from armoured tanks and armoured bulldozers, to rocket and bomb the Palestinian and demolish their houses while the occupants were still inside. Israel has nuclear weapons but it was provided with bombers to bomb so-called nuclear research facilities in other countries. And as with American and British actions, the Israeli bombs and rockets tore up the living Palestinians, Iraqis and soon Syrians and Iranians, without the slightest consideration that the people they killed have rights, have human rights to their lives, to security and peace.

Then there are other friends of these terrorist nations who abuse the rights of their own people, deny them even the simplest democratic rights, jailing and executing their people without fair trial but are not criticised or condemned.

But when countries are not friendly with these great powers, their governments claim they have a right to expend money to subvert the government, to support the NGOs to overthrow the government, to ensure only candidates willing to submit to them win. Already we are seeing elections in which candidates wanting to stay independent being rejected while only those ready to submit to these powers being allowed to contest and to win.

There was a time when nations pledged not to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. As a result many authoritarian regimes emerged which committed terrible atrocities. Cambodia and Pol Pot is a case in mind. Because of the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of countries, two million Cambodians died horrible deaths.

There is a case for interference. But who determines when there is a case? Is this right to be given to a particular superpower? If so, can we be assured the superpower would act in the best interest of the country concerned, in order to uphold human rights.

Saddam Hussein was tried by the media and found guilty of oppressing his people. But that was not the excuse for invading Iraq. The excuse was that Iraq threatened the world with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Specifically Britain was supposed to be threatened with WMD capable of hitting it within 45 minutes of the order being given by Saddam.

As we all know it was a lie. Every agency tasked with verifying the accusation that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction could not prove it. Even the intelligence agencies of the US and Britain said that there was no weapon of mass destruction that Saddam could threaten the US or Britain or the world with. And today, after months of thorough search without Saddam and his people getting in the way, no WMD has been found.

Yet the US and UK took it upon themselves to invade Iraq in order to remove an allegedly authoritarian government. The result of the invasion is that many more people have been killed and injured than Saddam was ever accused of. Worse still, the powers which are supposed to save the Iraqi people have broken international laws on human rights, by detaining Iraqis and others and torturing them at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

So can we accept that these big powers alone have a right to determine when to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries to protect human rights?

Malaysia is concerned about human rights within its borders. It does not need the interference of foreign powers before it sets up Suhakam, a body dedicated to overseeing and ensuring that there are no abuses of human rights within its borders.

People in Malaysia seem to be quite happy. They can work and do business and make as much money as they like. There is no restriction on the freedom to move about, to go abroad even.

They have political parties that they are free to join, whether these are pro-government or anti-government. They can read newspapers, which support or oppose the government. While the local electronic media is supportive of the government, no one is prevented from watching or listening to foreign broadcasts which are mostly critical of the government.

Foreign newspapers and magazines are freely available. In fact many foreign papers, like the International Herald Tribune and Asian Wall Street Journal are printed in Malaysia and are freely available to Malaysians. Then there is the Internet which no one seems able to stop even if libelous lies are screened.

Periodically, without fail there would be elections in Malaysia. Anyone and everyone can participate in these elections. The campaigns by both sides are vigorous and hard-hitting. And the results show quite clearly that despite accusations against the government of undemocratic practices, many opposition candidates would win. In fact several states were lost to the opposition parties. Not one of the winning opposition candidates has been charged in court and found guilty of some minor breaches of the election procedure and prevented from taking his seat in Parliament as happens in a certain country.

But all these notwithstanding, Malaysia is accused of having a totalitarian government during the 22 years of my premiership. That I had released detainees on assumption of office as prime minister and I had used the ISA sparingly does not mitigate against the accusation that I was a dictator, an abuser of human rights.

And not using the ISA, not detaining a person without trial would not help either. And so when a former DPM was charged in court, defended by nine lawyers and found guilty through due process, all that was said was that there was a conspiracy, the court was influenced and manipulated and the trial was a sham. So you are damned if you use the ISA, and you are damned if you don’t use the ISA.

In the eyes of these self-appointed judges of human behaviour worldwide, you can never be right no matter what you do, if they do not like you. If they like you, a court decision in your favour, even on laughable grounds, would be right.

Those are the people who now seem to appropriate to themselves the right to lay down the ground rules for human rights and who have appointed themselves as the overseers of human rights credentials of the world.

And now these same people have come up with what they call globalisation. In the first place who has the right to propose and interpret globalisation? It is certain that globalisation was not conceived by the poor countries. It was conceived, interpreted and initiated by the rich.

The globalised world is to be without borders. But if countries have no borders surely the first thing that should happen is that people would be able to move from one country to another without any conditions, without papers and passports. The poor people in the poor countries should be able to migrate to the rich countries where there are jobs and opportunities.

But it has been made clear that globalisation, borderlessness are not for people but for capital, for currency traders, for corporations, for banks, for NGOs concerned over so-called human rights abuses, over lack of democracy, etc. The flow is, as you can see, only in one direction. The border crossing will be done by the rich so as to be able to benefit their business, banks, currency traders, their NGOs, for human rights and for democracy.

There will be no flows in the opposite direction, from the poor countries to the rich, the flow of poor people in search of jobs, the NGOs concerned with human rights abuses in the rich and powerful countries where the media self-censors to promote certain parties, where dubious voting results are validated by tame courts. There will be no flow of coloured people to white countries. If they succeed they would be apprehended and sent to isolated islands in the middle of the ocean or if they manage to land, they would be accommodated behind razor-wire fence. It is all very democratic and caring for the rights of man.

If we care to look back, we will recognise globalisation for what it is. It is really not a new idea at all. Globalisation of trade took place when the ethnic Europeans found the sea passages to the West and to the East. They wanted trade, but they came in armed merchantmen with guns and invaded, conquered and colonised their trading partners.

If the indigenous people were weak, they would just be liquidated, shot on sight, their land taken and new ethnic European countries set up. Otherwise they would be made a part of empires where the sun never sets, their resources exploited and their people treated with disdain.

The map of the world today shows the effect of globalisation, as interpreted by the ethnic Europeans in history. There was no US, Canada, Australia, Latin America, New Zealand until the Europeans discovered the sea passages and started global trade.

Before the Europeans, there were Arab, Indian, Chinese and Turkic traders. There was no conquest or colonisation when these people sailed the seas to trade. Only when the Europeans carried out world trade were countries invaded, human rights abused, genocide committed, empires built and new ethnic European nations created on land belonging to others.

These are historical facts. Would today’s globalisation not result in weak countries being colonised again, new empires created, and the world totally hegemonised. Would today’s globalisation not result in human rights abuses?

In today’s world 20 percent of the people own 80 percent of the wealth. Almost two billion people live on one US dollar a day. They don’t have enough food or clothing or a proper roof over their heads. In winter, many of these people would freeze to death. The people of the powerful countries are concerned about our abuses of human rights.

But shouldn’t we be concerned over the uneven distribution of wealth which deprived two billion people of their rights to a decent living, deprived by the avarice of those people who seem so concerned about us and the unintended occasional lapses that has resulted in abuse of human rights in our country.

We should condemn human rights abuses in our country but we must be wary of the people who want to destabilise us because we are too independent and we have largely succeeded in giving our people a good life, and despite all the criticism, we are more democratic than most of the friends of the powerful nations of the world.

The globalisation of concern for the poor and the oppressed is sheer hypocrisy. If these people who appears to be concerned are faced with the situation that we in Malaysia have to face sometimes, their reactions and responses are much worse than us. At Guantanamo detention camp the detainees, some of whom are not even remotely connected with terrorism, are tortured and humiliated. At Abu Ghraib, the most senior officers actually sanctioned the inhuman treatment of the detainees.

When forced by world opinion to take action against those responsible for these reprehensible acts, the culprits were either found not guilty or given light sentences. They were tried by their own courts under their own laws. Their victims were not represented. The countries where the crimes were committed were denied jurisdiction. Altogether the whole process was so much eyewash. Yet these are the countries and the people who claim that Malaysian courts are manipulated by the government, that abuses of rights are rampant in Malaysia. And Malaysian NGOs, media and others lapped it up.

We must fight against abuses of human rights. We must fight for human rights. But we must not take away the rights of others, the rights of the majority. We must not kill them, invade and destroy their countries in the name of human rights. Just as many wrong things are done in the name of Islam and also other religions, worse things are being done in the name of democracy and human rights. We must have a proper perspective of things. Two wrongs do not make one right. Remember the community have rights too, not just the individual or the minority.

We have gained political independence but for many the minds are still colonised.

Dr Mahathir Mohamad is a former prime minister of Malaysia

***Revealed: Israel plans strike on Iranian nuclear plant

Uzi Mahnaimi

03/13/05 "The Times" - - ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans for a combined air and ground attack on targets in Iran if diplomacy fails to halt the Iranian nuclear programme.

The inner cabinet of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, gave “initial authorisation” for an attack at a private meeting last month on his ranch in the Negev desert.

Israeli forces have used a mock-up of Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant in the desert to practise destroying it. Their tactics include raids by Israel’s elite Shaldag (Kingfisher) commando unit and airstrikes by F-15 jets from 69 Squadron, using bunker-busting bombs to penetrate underground facilities.

The plans have been discussed with American officials who are said to have indicated provisionally that they would not stand in Israel’s way if all international efforts to halt Iranian nuclear projects failed.

Tehran claims that its programme is designed for peaceful purposes but Israeli and American intelligence officials — who have met to share information in recent weeks — are convinced that it is intended to produce nuclear weapons.

The Israeli government responded cautiously yesterday to an announcement by Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, that America would support Britain, France and Germany in offering economic incentives for Tehran to abandon its programme.

In return, the European countries promised to back Washington in referring Iran to the United Nations security council if the latest round of talks fails to secure agreement.

Silvan Shalom, the Israeli foreign minister, said he believed that diplomacy was the only way to deal with the issue. But he warned: “The idea that this tyranny of Iran will hold a nuclear bomb is a nightmare, not only for us but for the whole world.”

Dick Cheney, the American vice-president, emphasised on Friday that Iran would face “stronger action” if it failed to respond. But yesterday Iran rejected the initiative, which provides for entry to the World Trade Organisation and a supply of spare parts for airliners if it co-operates.

“No pressure, bribe or threat can make Iran give up its legitimate right to use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes,” said an Iranian spokesman.

US officials warned last week that a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities by Israeli or American forces had not been ruled out should the issue become deadlocked at the United Nations.

Additional reporting: Tony Allen-Mills, Washington

Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.


***Fears For Free Speech

By John Pilger

08/18/05 "New Statesman" -- -- If those who seek to understand what drives people to commit terrorist acts are vilified as "just one notch less despicable" themselves, we can say goodbye to freedom of speech. By John Pilger

Thomas Friedman is a famous columnist on the New York Times. He has been described as "a guard dog of US foreign policy". Whatever America's warlords have in mind for the rest of humanity, Friedman will bark it. He boasts that "the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist". He promotes bombing countries and says World War Three has begun.

Friedman's latest bark is about free speech, which his country's constitution is said to safeguard. He wants the State Department to draw up a blacklist of those who make "wrong" political statements. He is referring not only to those who advocate violence, but to those who believe US actions are the root cause of the current terrorism. The latter group, which he describes as "just one notch less despicable than the terrorists", includes most Americans and Britons, according to the latest polls.

Friedman wants a "War of Ideas report" which names those who try to understand and explain, for example, why London was bombed. These are "excuse-makers" who "deserve to be exposed". He borrows the term "excuse-makers" from James Rubin, who was Madeleine Albright's chief apologist at the State Department. Albright, who rose to secretary of state under President Clinton, said that the death of half a million Iraqi infants as a result of a US-driven blockade was a "price" that was "worth it". Of all the interviews I have filmed in official Washington, Rubin's defence of this mass killing is unforgettable.

Farce is never far away in these matters. The "excuse-makers" would also include the CIA, which has warned that "Iraq [since the invasion] has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of 'professionalised' terrorists". On to the Friedman/Rubin blacklist go the spooks!

Like so much else during the Blair era, this McCarthyite rubbish has floated across the Atlantic and is now being recycled by the Prime Minister as proposed police-state legislation, little different from the fascist yearnings of Friedman and other extremists. For Friedman's blacklist, read Tony Blair's database of proscribed opinions, bookshops, websites. The human rights lawyer Louise Christian asks: "Are those who feel a huge sense of injustice about the same causes as the terrorists - Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib - to be stopped from speaking forthrightly about their anger? Because terrorism is now defined in our law as actions abroad, will those who support liberation movements in, for example, Kashmir or Chechnya be denied freedom of expression?" Any definition of terrorism, she points out, should "encompass the actions of terrorist states engaged in unlawful wars". Of course, Blair is silent on western state terrorism in the Middle East and elsewhere; and for him to moralise about "our values" insults the fact of his blood-crime in Iraq. His budding police state will, he hopes, have the totalitarian powers he has longed for since 2001, when he suspended habeas corpus and introduced unlimited house arrest without trial. The law lords have tried to stop this. Last December, Lord Hoffmann said that Blair's attacks on human rights were a greater threat to freedom than terrorism. On 26 July, Blair emoted that the entire British nation was under threat and abused the judiciary in terms, as Simon Jenkins noted, "that would do credit to his friend Vladimir Putin".

Should you be tempted to dismiss all this as esoteric or merely mad, travel to any Muslim community in Britain, especially in the north-west, and sense the state of siege and fear. On 15 July, Blair's Britain of the future was glimpsed when the police raided the Iqra Learning Centre and bookshop near Leeds. The Iqra Trust is a well-known charity that promotes Islam worldwide as "a peaceful religion which covers every walk of life". The police smashed down the door, wrecked the shop and took away anti-war literature which they described as "anti-western".

Among this was, reportedly, a DVD of George Galloway addressing the US Senate and a New Statesman article of mine illustrated by a much-published photograph of a Palestinian man in Gaza attempting to shield his son from Israeli bullets before the boy was shot to death. The photograph was said to be "working people up", meaning Muslim people. Clearly, David Gibbons, this journal's esteemed art director, who chose this illustration, will be called before the Blair Incitement Tribunal. One of my books, The New Rulers of the World, was also apparently confiscated. It is not known whether the police have yet read the chapter that documents how the Americans, with help from MI6 and the SAS, created, armed and bankrolled the terrorists of the Islamic mujahedin, not least Osama Bin Laden.

The raid was deliberately theatrical, with the media tipped off. Two of the alleged 7 July bombers had been volunteers in the shop almost four years ago. "When they became hardliners," said a community youth worker, "they left and have never been back, and they've had nothing to do with the shop." The raid was watched by horrified local people, who are now scared, angry and bitter. I spoke to Muserat Sujawal, who has lived in the area for 31 years and is respected widely for her management of the nearby Hamara community centre. She told me, "There was no justification for the raid. The whole point of the shop is to teach how Islam is a community-based religion. My family has used the shop for years, buying, for example, the Arabic equivalent of Sesame Street. They did it to put fear in our hearts." James Dean, a Bradford secondary-school teacher, said: "I am teaching myself Urdu because I have multi-ethnic classes, and the shop has been very helpful with tapes."

The police have the right to pursue every lead in their hunt for bombers, but scaremongering is not their right. Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, who understands how the media can be used and spends a lot of time in television studios, has yet to explain why he announced that the killing of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes was "directly linked" to terrorism, when he must have known the truth. Muslim people all over Britain report the presence of police "video vans" cruising their streets, filming everyone. "We have become like ghettoes under siege," said one man too frightened to be named. "Do they know what this is doing to our young people?"

On 26 July, Blair said, "We are not having any of this nonsense about [the bombings having anything] to do with what the British are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, or support for Israel, or support for America, or any of the rest of it. It is nonsense and we have to confront it as that." This "raving", as the US writer Mike Whitney observed, "is part of a broader strategy to dismiss the obvious facts about terror and blame the victims of American-British aggression. It's a tactic that was minted in Tel Aviv and perfected over 37 years of occupation. It is predicated on the assumption that terrorism emerges from an amorphous, religious-based ideology that transforms its adherents into ruthless butchers."

Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has examined every act of suicide terrorism over the past 25 years. He refutes the assumption that suicide bombers are mainly driven by "an evil ideology independent of other circumstances". He said: "The facts are that, since 1980, half the attacks have been secular. Few of the terrorists fit the standard stereotype . . . Half of them are not religious fanatics at all. In fact, over 95 per cent of suicide attacks around the world [are not about] religion, but a specific strategic purpose - to compel the United States and other western countries to abandon military commitments on the Arabian peninsula and in countries they view as their homeland or prize greatly . . . The link between anger over American, British and western military [action] and al-Qaeda's ability to recruit suicide terrorists to kill us could not be tighter."

So we have been warned, yet again. Terrorism is the logical consequence of US and British "foreign policy", whose infinitely greater terrorism we need to recognise, and debate, as a matter of urgency.

This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition.

© New Statesman 1913 - 2005

***Meanwhile, Israel grabs the rest of Jerusalem

By Hind Khoury International Herald Tribune

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/10/opinion/edkhoury.php

THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 2005

JERUSALEM After more than 38 years of its oppressive military occupation of the Gaza Strip, Israel will soon begin evacuating the few thousand settlers who have been denying freedom to more than a million Palestinians there. Israel has marketed the Gaza withdrawal as yet another historic opportunity to jump-start the peace process. But Israeli actions in occupied East Jerusalem indicate that Israel's unilaterally imposed disengagement was never meant to start a peace process, but rather to end one.

As the world's attention is diverted by scenes of the removal of settlers who had no right to be in Gaza in the first place, the real strategy behind disengagement is revealed by Israel's aggressive moves to consolidate its occupation of Jerusalem's eastern Palestinian sector.

At stake is the very basis of peace between Palestinians and Israelis - a negotiated two-state solution. Israel's plan is to use "concessions" in Gaza to remove Jerusalem from the negotiation table. But without Jerusalem as a shared capital for Palestinians and Israelis, there is no two-state solution.

In violation of President George W. Bush's May warning not to prejudice the status of Jerusalem, the Israeli cabinet recently approved a decision to complete Israel's wall in East Jerusalem by the end of August, while the world's attention is on the Gaza disengagement. The wall, which Israel is using to redefine Jerusalem's borders, is being routed through occupied territory in such a way as to maximize the number of Palestinian Jerusalemites behind the wall, while maximizing the amount of Palestinian land on the "Israeli" side. About 55,000 Palestinian residents of Jerusalem will be effectively cut off from the their city, forced to access their schools, hospitals and even families through Israeli military gates which, as Palestinians know from experience, can be closed at a soldier's whim.

These Palestinian Christians and Muslims will be denied free access to the holy sites in their own city. Already, Palestinian Christians and Muslims in the West Bank can no longer freely pray at the Old City's Church of the Holy Sepulcher or the Noble Sanctuary (Haram al Sharif).

Difficulty in accessing their own city will cause Palestinian Jerusalemites to go deeper into the West Bank for educational, medical and religious services. Israel will then have a pretext - "insufficient links" to the city - for revoking their Jerusalem residency rights. To date, more than 6,500 Palestinians have lost their residency rights in the Jewish state's unstated but measurable efforts to rid the Holy City of as many Christians and Muslims as possible.

Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in and around occupied East Jerusalem are increasingly common, with more than 50 homes destroyed so far this year. Sixty-four homes in a Palestinian neighborhood near Jerusalem's Old City have demolition orders pending against them, even though the homes were built on privately owned Palestinian land. According to the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, there are more than 10,000 outstanding demolition orders against Palestinian buildings in East Jerusalem. Such orders are usually enforced without warning and in the middle of the night.

As the homes of Christians and Muslims are destroyed, new Israeli settlements in and around East Jerusalem continue to expand. A few months ago, Israel announced plans to build 3,500 Israeli housing units to the east of Jerusalem - in an area which would complete the encirclement of occupied East Jerusalem by Israeli settlements. The Israeli press announced recently the planned construction of 21 new Jewish homes in the heart of the Old City's Muslim Quarter. Muslims have no equal right to build homes in the Jewish Quarter.

Israel greedily insists on retaining control over the whole of Jerusalem, rejecting Palestinian compromises to share the city on equal terms. Indeed, Israel, as a Jewish state, rejects the very idea of a pluralistic Jerusalem. But Jerusalem is sacred to all three of the world's monotheistic religions - it cannot be the monopoly of just one. The Palestinian Authority remains committed to a two-state solution based on international law. However, negotiations require an Israeli partner and Israel, as the more powerful party, realizes it can impose its own agenda rather than negotiate a solution. Israeli violations of U.S. policy and international law are annually funded by billions of dollars from the American taxpayer. Yet Israel repays American goodwill and financial support by adopting measures to which the United States is opposed and which risk destroying the very two-state solution to which President Bush is so publicly committed. America has so far not been willing to hold Israel accountable. Such inaction reduces U.S. credibility and alienates potential friends, undermining efforts to defeat terrorism and to build Middle East democracy.

(Hind Khoury is the Palestinian Authority's minister of state for Jerusalem affairs.)

***Iran warned on 14.08.2005, that it will hit back if George Bush eventually goes ahead with his panllked military attack against Iran if it acquires nuclear weapons.

***Ignoring the Intelligence: How New Labour Helped Bring Terror to London

Source: www.democratsdiary.co.uk/, Friday, July 22, 2005

The primary obligation upon any government is the duty of care towards its citizens, a duty best expressed by the phrase "first, do no harm". The least that citizens can expect of their government is that it will not actively pursue policies that harm them, or place them in harm's way. Any failure to honour this duty of care renders a government unfit to hold office in the most basic and fundamental sense.

The Prime Minister is not unaware of this obligation. During an interview with the BBC, when it was becoming obvious that banned WMD would never be found in Iraq, Blair said that, "You can only imagine what would have happened if I'd ignored the intelligence and then something terrible had happened". That Blair's government had twisted the WMD intelligence deliberately as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq is a matter of record. What should now be focused upon is the intelligence New Labour chose not to distort, but to ignore entirely; the intelligence telling them that the chances of "something terrible" occurring - i.e. a terrorist attack on the UK - would be greatly increased if Britain proceeded to invade Iraq.

Five weeks before the invasion Britain's intelligence chiefs warned Blair's government in strong terms that military action would increase the risk of terrorist attacks against Britain by groups such as al-Qaeda. As the UK Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee noted in 2003: "The JIC assessed that al-Qa'eda and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq".

As Britain's involvement in the occupation of Iraq continued, the government's advisers continued to warn of the possible consequences. A joint Home Office and Foreign Office dossier, ordered by Tony Blair following the train bombings in Madrid, identified Iraq as a "recruiting sergeant" for extremism. The analysis was that the Iraq war was acting as a key cause of young Britons turning to terrorism. It said: "It seems that a particularly strong cause of disillusionment among Muslims, including young Muslims, is a perceived 'double standard' in the foreign policy of western governments, in particular Britain and the US. The perception is that passive 'oppression', as demonstrated in British foreign policy, eg non-action on Kashmir and Chechnya, has given way to 'active oppression'. The war on terror, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, are all seen by a section of British Muslims as having been acts against Islam."

In 2005, the government was warned yet again. Just weeks before the London bombings, the Joint Terrorist Analysis Centre - including officials from MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the police - explicitly linked the Iraq war with an increased risk of terrorist activity in Britain. The report, leaked to the New York Times, said that "Events in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK".

Speaking in Parliament days after the brutal attacks on the UK's capital city, Blair rejected any link between foreign policy and the threat of terrorism. What Britain was facing, he asserted, was "a form of terrorism aimed at our way of life, not at any particular Government or policy". In saying this Blair was contradicting not only what his own intelligence services and government advisers had repeatedly told him, but also the consensus of mainstream expert opinion on the causes of so-called "Islamist" terror.

Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who headed its bin Laden unit from 1993 to 1996, is unequivocal in his rejection of Blair's stance. "It's a policy issue. Bin Laden is fighting against us, not because of who we are....that we have elections or women in the workplace.....[or that ] they hate us for our freedoms and our liberties. There's nothing further from the truth than that. Bin Laden has had success because he's focused on a limited number of U.S. foreign policies in the Muslim world, policies that are visible and are experienced by Muslims on a daily basis. Most of bin Laden's attacks since 2001 have been aimed at countries that supported the United States either in Afghanistan or in Iraq."

A recent study of suicide terrorist attacks conducted by Professor Robert Pape and the University of Chicago's Project on Suicide Terrorism came to the same conclusion. According to Pape, "what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective."

In an article praising the study, Michael Scheuer said that Pape "demolishes the relentlessly repeated assertion ....... that Islamist suicide attacks against America and other counties are launched by .....apocalyptic fanatics who are eager to kill themselves because [we] vote, have civil liberties, and allow women to drive cars. This assertion always has been transparently false....".

Pape's conclusion is that "The root cause of suicide terrorism is foreign occupation and the threat that foreign military presence poses to the local community's way of life. Hence, any policy that seeks to conquer Muslim societies in order, deliberately, to transform their culture is folly". Scheuer notes that "this reality, [as] Pape recognizes, will require changes in America's relations with the Persian Gulf states, getting our military out of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, and the implementation of an energy policy that makes Arab oil production substantially less important to our economy."

To turn return to the specific threat towards the UK, world renowned Middle East expert Juan Cole pointed out on the day after the London bombings that "The United Kingdom had not been a target for al-Qaida in the late 1990s. But in October 2001, bin Laden threatened the United Kingdom with suicide aircraft attacks if it joined in the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. In November of 2002, bin Laden said in an audiotape, "What do your governments want from their alliance with America in attacking us in Afghanistan? I mention in particular Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia." In February of 2003, as Bush and Blair marched to war in Iraq, bin Laden warned that the U.K. as well as the U.S. would be made to pay. In October of 2003, bin Laden said of the Iraq war, "Let it be known to you that this war is a new campaign against the Muslim world," and named Britain as a target for reprisals. A month later, an al-Qaida-linked group detonated bombs in Istanbul, targeting British sites and killing the British vice-consul."

Last year the International Institute for Strategic Studies' annual report said that al-Qaeda had been "spurred on" by the Iraq war, which had helped it recruit more members. The report said that the war had focused the energies and resources of al-Qaeda's followers, while diluting those of the global counter-terrorism coalition. It also noted the Bush administration's failure to recognise that the 9/11 attacks were a "violent reaction to America's pre-eminence".

Soon after the London bombings the Royal Institute of International Affairs, known as Chatham House, released a study which concluded that "There is no doubt that the situation over Iraq has imposed particular difficulties for the UK, and for the wider coalition against terrorism.......the UK is at particular risk [of terrorist attack] because it is the closest ally of the United States, [and] has deployed armed forces in the military campaigns ... in Afghanistan and in Iraq". According to the report, the Iraq war".

The blustering response of Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to the Chatham House report was that "the time for excuses for terrorism is over". As a lawyer and a former Home Secretary, Straw clearly does not himself believe that to establish a criminal’s motivation is to excuse the crime. But for him to acknowledge the link between a deeply unpopular government policy and the increased threat of terrorist attack would be to admit a connection between his own actions and the deaths of 52 UK citizens on 7 July 2005. Faced with an overwhelming body of expert analysis (including that of his own department) which draws exactly that connection, Straw is left only with the most moronic of arguments with which to defend himself.

Following the government line, Straw went on to say that, “the terrorists have struck across the world, in countries allied with the United States, backing the war in Iraq and in countries which had nothing whatever to do with the war in Iraq”. He and other government ministers have repeatedly cited attacks on countries such as Tanzania, Kenya, Indonesia and Turkey as proof that al-Qaeda will attack anywhere; not just western targets. But, as those ministers are well aware (and as their own list of previous al-Qaeda attacks shows), these terrorist strikes were not targeted directly at those countries but at western interests within them. The attacks in Tanzania and Kenya were on US embassies; the attacks in Indonesia were on US and Australian government buildings and tourists; and the attacks in Turkey were on British holidaymakers and institutions.

New Labour’s position is not enhanced by the fact that, along with other craven apologists for terror (such as MI5, MI6, GCHQ, advisers from the Home Office and the Foreign Office, CIA veterans and eminent independent experts) stood the Prime Minister himself, until very recently. In 2003, speaking to the Intelligence and Security Committee, Blair said that, "there was obviously a danger that in attacking Iraq you ended up provoking the very thing you were trying to avoid". But the risk was worth taking, he went on to say, to deal with the threat posed by WMD: a threat that, as we know, was non-existent.

Most people in Britain never accepted the government’s (current) argument, and never wanted to take these risks to begin with. On 15 February 2003, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in London against the coming war on Iraq. At the time, 79% of Londoners felt that British involvement in the invasion "would make a terrorist attack on London more likely". In the wake of the London bombings, two-thirds of Britons expressed the view that the invasion of Iraq and the attack on their capital were linked.

Now, after a second attack on London in as many weeks, Britons may wish to take another look at those to whom they have entrusted their safety and security. They may wish to reflect on the fact that their government is deliberately and repeatedly ignoring the advice of the UK’s intelligence services, departmental advisers and independent experts, and pursuing policies that are increasing the threat of terrorist attacks on Britain. They may wish to reflect that, with 52 innocent people dead, many more injured, and the threat of further atrocities hanging over the country, the government is strenuously avoiding any honest discussion of the problem, preferring to obscure the issues with self-serving mendacity. They may conclude, by uncontroversial reference to the plain facts, that New Labour is clearly failing to discharge its duty of care and is therefore fundamentally unfit to govern.

***Bush administration to keep control of internet's central computers

Gary Younge in New York and agencies

London July 2, 2005

The Guardian The Bush administration has decided to retain control over the principal computers which control internet traffic in a move likely to prompt global opposition, it was claimed yesterday.

The US had pledged to turn control of the 13 computers known as root servers - which inform web browsers and email programs how to direct internet traffic - over to a private, international body.

But on Thursday the US reversed its position, announcing that it will maintain control of the computers because of growing security threats and the increased reliance on the internet for global communications. A Japanese government official yesterday criticised the move, claiming it will lend momentum to the debate about who controls the information flow online.

"When the internet is being increasingly utilised for private use, by business and so forth, there is a societal debate about whether it's befitting to have one country maintaining checks on that ... It's likely to fuel that debate," said Masahiko Fujimoto, of the ministry of internal affairs and communications' data communications division.

The computers serve as master directories that contain government-approved lists of the roughly 260 suffices used, such as .com or .co.uk. Anyone who uses the web interacts with them every day. But a policy decision by the US could, at a stroke, make all sites ending in a certain suffix unreachable.

Despite many doomsday scenarios, the most recent US decision will have little if any immediate effect on internet users, and given the internet's anarchic nature it may simply represent a desire to assert state control even when it is not possible to do so.

Claudia Bernett, 32, a digital design analyst in New York, said: "Scary as it seems, because of the nature of the internet, I think they'll be hardpressed to create a coherent system that is capable of the kind of monitoring they hope for ... Eventually, the people participating in the system will find the technological means to evade the watchful eye."

Experts say that in the worst-case scenario, countries that refused to accept US control of the main computers could establish their own separate domain name system, with addresses in some places that others would not be able to reach, making the world wide web give way to discrete, regional web domains.

Mr Fujimoto said that is also unlikely because of its complexity, but the US decision will raise serious concerns that will not be assuaged easily. The announcement comes just weeks before a UN panel is set to release a report on internet governance. Some nations want international oversight of the issue but historically the US has maintained the role because it was such a key player in the early years of the internet's development.

***Truth Struggling

By John Pilger ZMag" , 07/21/05

In all the coverage of the bombing of London, a truth has struggled to be heard. With honourable exceptions, it has been said guardedly, apologetically. Occasionally, a member of the public has broken the silence, as an East Londoner did when he walked in front of a CNN camera crew and reporter in mid-platitude. "Iraq!" he said. "We invaded Iraq and what did we expect? Go on say it."

The Scottish MP Alex Salmond tried to say it on BBC radio. He was told he was speaking "in poor taste . . . before the bodies are even buried." The Respect Party MP George Galloway was lectured by BBC televison presenter that he was being "crass". The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said the diametric opposite of what he had previously said, which was that the invasion of Iraq would come home to our streets. With the exception of Galloway, not one so-called anti-war MP spoke out in clear, unequivocal English. The warmongers were allowed to fix the boundaries of public debate; one of the more idiotic, in the Guardian, called Blair "the world's leading statesman".

And yet, like the man who interrupted CNN, people understand and know why, just as the majority of Britons oppose the war and believe Blair is a liar. This frightens the British political elite. At a large media party I attended, many of the important guests uttered "Iraq" and "Blair" as a kind of catharsis for that which they dared not say professionally and publicly.

The bombs of 7 July were Blair's bombs.

Blair brought home to this country his and Bush's illegal, unprovoked and blood-soaked adventure in the Middle East. Were it not for his epic irresponsibility, the Londoners who died in the Tube and on the No 30 bus almost certainly would be alive today. This is what Livingstone ought to have said. To paraphrase perhaps the only challenging question put to Blair on the eve of the invasion, it is now surely beyond all doubt that the man is unfit to be prime minister.

How much more evidence is needed? Before the invasion, Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that "by far the greatest terrorist threat" to this country would be "heightened by military action against Iraq". He was warned by 79 per cent of Londoners who, according to a YouGov survey in February 2003, believed that a British attack on Iraq "would make a terrorist attack on London more likely". A month ago, a leaked, classified CIA report revealed that the invasion had turned Iraq into a focal point of terrorism. Before the invasion, said the CIA, Iraq "exported no terrorist threat to its neighbours" because Saddam Hussein was "implacably hostile to al-Qaeda".

Now, an 18 July report by the Chatham House organisation, a "think tank" deep within the British establishment, may well beckon Blair's coup de grâce. It says there is "no doubt" the invasion of Iraq has "given a boost to the al-Qaeda network" in "propaganda, recruitment and fundraising" while providing an ideal targeting and training area for terrorists. "Riding pillion with a powerful ally" has cost Iraqi, American and British lives. The right-wing academic, Paul Wilkinson, a voice of western power, was the principal author. Read between the lines and it says the prime minister is now a serious liability. Those who run this country know he has committed a great crime; the "link" has been made.

Blair's bunker-mantra is that there was terrorism long before the invasion, notably 11 September. Anyone with an understanding of the painful history of the Middle East would not have been surprised by 11 September or by the bombing of Madrid and London, only that they had not happened earlier. I have reported the region for 35 years, and if I could describe in a word how millions of Arab and Muslim people felt, I would say "humiliated". When Egypt looked like winning back its captured territory in the 1973 war with Israel, I walked through jubilant crowds in Cairo: it felt as if the weight of history's humiliation had lifted. In a very Egyptian flourish, one man said to me, "We once chased cricket balls at the British club. Now we are free."

They were not free, of course. The Americans re-supplied the Israeli army and they almost lost everything again. In Palestine, the humiliation of a captive people is Israeli policy. How many Palestinian babies have died at Israeli checkpoints after their mothers, bleeding and screaming in premature labour, have been forced to give birth beside the road at a military checkpoint with the lights of a hospital in the distance? How many old men have been forced to show obeisance to young Israeli conscripts? How many families have been blown to bits by America-supplied F-16s with British-supplied parts? The gravity of the bombing of London, said a BBC commentator, "can be measured by the fact that it marks Britain's first suicide bombing". What about Iraq? There were no suicide bombers in Iraq until Blair and Bush invaded. What about Palestine? There were no suicide bombers in Palestine until Ariel Sharon, an accredited war criminal sponsored by Bush and Blair, came to power. In the 1991 Gulf "war", American and British forces left more than 200,000 Iraqis dead and injured and the infrastructure of their country in "an apocalyptic state", according to the United Nations. The subsequent embargo, designed and promoted by zealots in Washington and Whitehall, was not unlike a medieval siege. Denis Halliday, the United Nations official assigned to administer the near-starvation food allowance, called it "genocidal".

I witnessed its consequences: tracts of southern Iraq contaminated with depleted uranium and cluster bomblets waiting to explode. I watched dying children, some of the half a million infants whose deaths Unicef attributed to the embargo - deaths which US Secretary of State Madeline Albright said were "worth it". In the west, this was hardly reported. Throughout the Muslim world, the bitterness was like a presence, its contagion reaching many young British-born Muslims.

In 2001, in revenge for the killing of 3,000 people in the Twin Towers, more than 20,000 Muslims died in the Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan. This was revealed by Jonathan Steele in the London Guardian and was never news, to my knowledge. The attack on Iraq was the Rubicon, making the reprisal against Madrid and the bombing of London entirely predictable: the latter "in response to the massacres carried out by Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan ...", claimed a group called the Organisation for El Qaeda in Europe. Whether or not the claim was genuine, the reason was. Bush and Blair wanted a "war on terror" and they got it. Omitted from public discussion is that their state terror makes al-Qaeda's appear miniscule by comparison. More than 100,000 Iraqi men, woman and children have been killed, not by suicide bombers, but by the Anglo-American "coalition", says a peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet, and largely ignored. In his poem "From Iraq", Michael Rosen wrote: We are the unfound We are uncounted You don't see the homes we made We're not even the small print or the bit in brackets . . . because we lived far from you, because you have cameras that point the other way . . .

Imagine, for a moment, you are in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. It is an American police state, like a vast penned ghetto. Since April last year, the hospitals there have been subjected to an American policy of collective punishment. Staff have been attacked by US marines, doctors have been shot, emergency medicines blocked. Children have been murdered in front of their families. Now imagine the same state of affairs imposed on the London hospitals that received the victims of the bombing. When will someone draw this parallel at one of Blair's staged "press conferences", at which he is allowed to emote for the cameras about "our values outlast [ing] theirs"? Silence is not journalism. In Fallujah, they know "our values" only too well. And when will someone invite the obsequious Bob Geldoff to explain why his hero, Blair's smoke-and-mirrors "debt cancellation" amounts to less than the money the Blair government spends in a week, brutalising Iraq?

The hand-wringing over "whither Islam's soul" is another distraction. Christianity leaves Islam for dead as an industrial killer. The cause of the current terrorism is neither religion nor hatred for "our way of life". It is political, requiring a political solution. It is injustice and double standards, which plant the deepest grievances. That, and the culpability of our leaders, and the "cameras that point the other way", are the core of it.

On 19 July, while the BBC governors were holding their annual general meeting at Television Centre, an inspired group of British documentary filmmakers met outside the main gates and conducted a series of news reports of the kind you do not see on television. Actors played famous reporters doing their "camera pieces". The "stories" they reported included the targeting of the civilian population of Iraq, the application of the Nuremberg Principles to Iraq, America's illegal rewriting of the laws of Iraq and theft of its resources through privatisation, the everyday torture and humiliation of ordinary people and the failure to protect Iraqis archaeological and cultural heritage.

Blair is using the London bombing to further deplete our rights and those of others, as Bush has done in America. Their goal is not security, but greater control. The memory of their victims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere demands the renewal of our anger. The troops must come home. Nothing less is owed to those who died and suffered in London on 7 July, unnecessarily, and nothing less is owed to those whose lives are marked if this travesty endures.

***London Attacked Again; Police Confirm 4 Blasts

MSNBC News Services

Thursday 21 July 2005

3 subway stations, bus hit by small explosions; Blair appeals for calm. London - Explosions struck three London Underground stations and a bus at midday Thursday in a chilling but less deadly replay of the suicide bombings that killed 56 people two weeks ago.

Only one person was reported wounded, but the lunch-hour explosions caused major shock and disruption in the capital and were hauntingly similar to the July 7 bombings by four attackers.

The London police commissioner confirmed Thursday that four explosions took place in what he described as "a very serious incident."

"We've had four explosions - four attempts at explosions," Metropolitan Police Commissioner Ian Blair said outside police headquarters at Scotland Yard.

"At the moment the casualty numbers appear to be very low ... the bombs appear to be smaller" than those detonated July 7.

At a news gathering, Prime Minister Tony Blair appealed for calm. He said the people behind the incidents are trying to "scare people" and "make them anxious."

Blair said police were hoping to get the city's transit system "back to normal as quickly as possible."

Chase

Minutes before the prime minister spoke, police with their weapons drawn escorted a man away from the gates at the end of Downing Street.

A police officer drew a firearm and aimed it at a target beyond the range of television cameras. Another officer then led away a man whose black shirt was undone. The man also wore black trousers and appeared to be of Asian or Middle Eastern origin.

Meantime, police were searching a London hospital Thursday for a man wearing a blue shirt with wires protruding from a hole in the back, a TV report said.

An internal memo at University College Hospital in north London urged staff to watch for the man, described as a black or Asian male, about 6-feet-2, Sky News television reported.

No Chemicals

One witness told Sky TV that a fellow subway passenger told him a backpack exploded at the Warren Street station and there were reports of smoke.

Sky TV reported that police said no chemical agents were involved in the explosions.

Explosions also were reported at the Shepherds Bush and Oval stations.

Emergency teams were sent to all three stations after the incidents, which began at 12:38 p.m.

Witnesses said they had seen what could have been a would-be bomber running away after dropping a rucksack on one of the trains.

"We all got off on the platform and the guy just ran and started running up the escalator," one witness who gave her name as Andrea told the BBC.

"Everyone was screaming for someone to stop him. He ran past me...and he ran out of the station. In fact he left a bag on the train," she said.

Bus Blast

Passengers were evacuated off a bus in Hackney, east London, and police cordoned off streets nearby. The bus company said a blast blew out the windows of the bus but a police officer on the scene said there were no signs of damage.

A police officer told Reuters: "The bus driver heard a bang at the back of the bus. He thought it was probably a vehicle that had hit him.

"He stopped at a nearby bus stop and saw a suspect package at the back of the bus."

The fire brigade put on protective clothing before moving towards the bus. Closed-circuit TV cameras on Hackney Road showed the No. 26 bus immobilized at a stop with its indicator lights flashing. The area around the bus had been cordoned off.

Haunting Similarities

The incidents paralleled the blasts two weeks ago, which involved explosions at three Underground stations simultaneously - quickly followed by a blast on a bus. Those bombings, during the morning rush hour, also occurred in the center of London, hitting the Underground railway from various directions. Thursday's incidents, however, were more geographically spread out.

London Ambulance said it was called to the Oval station at 12:38 p.m. and Warren Street at 12:45 p.m. The July 7 attacks began at 8:51 a.m.

"People were panicking. But very fortunately the train was only 15 seconds from the station," witness Ivan McCracken told Sky news.

McCracken said another passenger at Warren Street claimed he had seen a backpack explode. The bombs which killed 56 people on board three underground trains and a bus in London on July 7 were carried in backpacks, police said.

Smell of smoke

McCracken said he smelled smoke and that people were panicking and coming into his carriage. He said he spoke to an Italian man who was comforting a woman after the evacuation.

"He said that a man was carrying a rucksack and the rucksack suddenly exploded. It was a minor explosion but enough to blow open the rucksack," McCracken said.

"The man then made an exclamation as if something had gone wrong. At that point everyone rushed from the carriage."

Services were shut across the Underground system, which serves 3 million Londoners daily.

"I was in the carriage and we smelt smoke -- it was like something was burning," said Losiane Mohellavi, 35, who was evacuated at Warren Street.

"Everyone was panicked and people were screaming. We had to pull the alarm. I am still shaking," Mohellavi said.

He told The Associated Press he did not see smoke but rather smelled something similar to an electrical fire (The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report).


***G8 debt deal under threat at IMF

By Steve Schifferes

BBC News economics reporter

Even before the ink has dried on proposals to relieve poor countries' debts to international lenders, the deal agreed by the G8 at Gleneagles is under threat.

A number of European governments are apparently having second thoughts about proposals for debt relief which formed a key part of the help world leaders offered to Africa at last week's summit.

These proposals are in direct contradiction to what millions of campaigners and poor people were told by the G8

The Belgians have apparently proposed changing the terms of the deal to give lenders more leverage over poor countries than they would have if they simply wrote off 100% of their debt.

In a document that has been leaked to the activist group Jubilee Debt Campaign, Belgian IMF representative Willy Kierkens is quoted as telling the IMF executive board that "rather than giving full, irrevocable and unconditional debt relief... countries would receive grants".

The IMF would then be able to withdraw the grants if countries failed to meet IMF conditions such as implementing the Poverty Growth Reduction Strategy which is a pre-requisite for receiving debt relief.

The head of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, Stephen Rand, says: "These proposals are in direct contradiction to what millions of campaigners and poor people were told by the G8."

The proposals have also alarmed African officials at the IMF, if the leaks are accurate. The three African directors representing sub-Saharan Africa say any change to the G8 debt deal "would delay benefits" and that it "does not seem appropriate that debt cancellation would reintroduce conditionality".

Britain is against changing the terms of the deal agreed at Gleneagles, a UK spokeswoman said.

The Gleneagles deal aims to foster good governance and root out corruption among governments receiving aid, she added.

Mr Kierkens was travelling in Europe and unavailable for comment, his Washington office told the BBC.

The IMF had been expected to approve its part of the deal at its annual meeting in Washington in September.

If the G8 countries stick to their guns, it is unlikely that the smaller nations on the IMF can derail the deal.

But as it only takes 15% of the votes on the IMF to block a deal, the attitude of larger G8 countries like Germany and Japan will be crucial.

Although they signed the debt deal at a meeting of G8 finance ministers in June, the Germans in particular were known to be unhappy with the plan for complete debt cancellation.

They are believed to have argued that this would create a moral hazard, with the poor countries who borrowed irresponsibly being rewarded, while other countries like Botswana who prudently avoided international borrowing receiving less aid.

While the G8 finance ministers agreed to fully fund the World Bank and African Development Bank portion of the deal, there was a fudge when it came to paying for debt relief in relation to the IMF.

The finance ministers' statement says that the IMF debt relief "should be met by the use of existing IMF resources".

But, it adds, "in situations where other existing and projected debt relief obligations cannot be met form existing resources, donors commit to provide the additional resources necessary" on a "fair-burden sharing basis".

At the G8 press conference, UK Chancellor Gordon Brown suggested that the IMF had found additional resources by revaluing its gold reserves.

And indeed the Belgians say that the total cost of the deal may be as much as 4.1bn SDR ($2.4bn) and suggest selling up to 2bn SDR ($1.2bn) worth of IMF gold to finance debt relief.

This is likely to be blocked by the US and Canada, who fear it will hurt their domestic gold producers.

Many activists have been disappointed by the slow pace of debt relief since campaigning began a decade ago. That it has taken so long to get agreement on the multi-lateral deal is a reflection of the deep disagreements among the major industrial countries - and the slow pace at which such relief has been administered. And the US has been reluctant to put up additional funds to pay for the World Bank's share of any debt relief. It took high-level negotiations between Tony Blair and US President George W Bush to change this position - and open the way to a deal. It probably helped that sums involved in debt relief are relatively modest - with the US, for example, expected to put in just $175m a year over 10 years.

The debt deal is worth around $1.5bn - critical sums to some very poor countries, but only 3% of total aid flows of $50bn per year.

And the amount is also modest because so few poor countries - just 18, perhaps rising to 27 in a few years - qualify for debt relief under the Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative.


***Chinese General Threatens Use of A-Bombs if US Intrudes in Taiwan

By Joseph Kahn, The New York Times, Friday 15 July 2005

Beijing - China should use nuclear weapons against the United States if the American military intervenes in any conflict over Taiwan, a senior Chinese military official said Thursday.

"If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition on to the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons," the official, Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu, said at an official briefing.

General Zhu, considered a hawk, stressed that his comments reflected his personal views and not official policy. Beijing has long insisted that it will not initiate the use of nuclear weapons in any conflict.

But in extensive comments to a visiting delegation of correspondents based in Hong Kong, General Zhu said he believed that the Chinese government was under internal pressure to change its "no first use" policy and to make clear that it would employ the most powerful weapons at its disposal to defend its claim over Taiwan.

"War logic" dictates that a weaker power needs to use maximum efforts to defeat a stronger rival, he said, speaking in fluent English. "We have no capability to fight a conventional war against the United States," General Zhu said. "We can't win this kind of war."

Whether or not the comments signal a shift in Chinese policy, they come at a sensitive time in relations between China and the United States.

The Pentagon is preparing the release of a long-delayed report on the Chinese military that some experts say will warn that China could emerge as a strategic rival to the United States. National security concerns have also been a major issue in the $18.5 billion bid by Cnooc Ltd., a major Chinese oil and gas company, to purchase the Unocal Corporation, the American energy concern.

China has had atomic bombs since 1964 and currently has a small arsenal of land- and sea-based nuclear-tipped missiles that can reach the United States, according to most Western intelligence estimates. Some Pentagon officials have argued that China has been expanding the size and sophistication of its nuclear bombs and delivery systems, while others argue that Beijing has done little more than maintain a minimal but credible deterrent against a nuclear attack.

Beijing has said repeatedly that it would use military force to prevent Taiwan from becoming a formally independent country. President Bush has made clear that the United States would defend Taiwan.

Many military analysts have assumed that any battle over Taiwan would be localized, with both China and the United States taking care to ensure that it would not expand into a general war between the two powers.

But the comments by General Zhu suggest that at least some elements of the military are prepared to widen the conflict, perhaps to persuade the United States that it could no more successfully fight a limited war against China than it could against the former Soviet Union.

"If the Americans are determined to interfere, then we will be determined to respond," he said. "We Chinese will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese."

General Zhu's threat is not the first of its kind from a senior Chinese military official. In 1995, Xiong Guangkai, who is now the deputy chief of the general staff of the People's Liberation Army, told Chas W. Freeman, a former Pentagon official, that China would consider using nuclear weapons in a Taiwan conflict. Mr. Freeman quoted Mr. Xiong as saying that Americans should worry more about Los Angeles than Taipei.

Foreign Ministry officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment about General Zhu's remarks. General Zhu said he had recently expressed his views to former American officials, including Mr. Freeman and Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the former commander in chief of the United States Pacific Command.

***Lest We Forget; These Were Blair's Bombs

By John Pilger

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Sunday 10 July 2005

In all the coverage of last week's bombing of London, a basic truth is struggling to be heard. It is this: no one doubts the atrocious inhumanity of those who planted the bombs, but no one should also doubt that this has been coming since the day Tony Blair joined George Bush in their bloody invasion and occupation of Iraq. They are "Blair's bombs", and he ought not be allowed to evade culpability with yet another unctuous speech about "our way of life", which his own rapacious violence in other countries has despoiled.

Indeed, the only reliable warning from British intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was that which predicted a sharp increase in terrorism "with Britain and Britons a target". A House of Commons committee has since verified this warning. Had Blair heeded it instead of conspiring to deceive the nation that Iraq offered a threat the Londoners who died on Thursday might be alive today, along with tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

Three weeks ago, a classified CIA report revealed that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq had turned that country into a focal point of terrorism. None of the intelligence agencies regarded Iraq as such a flashpoint before the invasion, however tyrannical the regime. On the contrary, in 2003, the CIA reported that Iraq "exported no terrorist threat to his neighbours" and that Saddam Hussein was "implacably hostile to Al-Qaeda".

Blair's and Bush's invasion changed all that. In invading a stricken and defenceless country at the heart of the Islamic and Arab world, their adventure became self-fulfilling; Blair's epic irresponsibility has brought the daily horrors of Iraq home to Britain. For more than a year, he has urged the British to "move on" from Iraq, and last week it seemed that his spinmeisters and good fortune had joined hands. The awarding of the 2012 Olympics to London created the fleeting illusion that all was well, regardless of messy events in a faraway country.

Moreover, the G8 meeting in Scotland and its accompanying "Make Poverty History" campaign and circus of celebrities served as a temporary cover for what is arguably the greatest political scandal of modern times: an illegal, brutal and craven invasion conceived in lies and which, under the system of international law established at Nuremberg, represented a "paramount war crime".

Over the past two weeks, the contrast between the coverage of the G8, its marches and pop concerts, and another "global" event has been striking. The World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul has had virtually no coverage, yet the evidence it has produced, the most damning to date, has been the silent spectre at the Geldoff extravaganzas.

The tribunal is a serious international public inquiry into the invasion and occupation, the kind governments dare not hold. Its expert, eyewitness testimonies, said the author Arundathi Roy, a tribunal jury member, "demonstrate that even those of us who have tried to follow the war closely are not aware of a fraction of the horrors that have been unleashed in Iraq." The most shocking was given by Dahr Jamail, one of the best un-embedded reporters working in Iraq. He described how the hospitals of besieged Fallujah had been subjected to an American tactic of collective punishment, with US marines assaulting staff and stopping the wounded entering, and American snipers firing at the doors and windows, and medicines and emergency blood prevented from reaching them. Children, the elderly, were shot dead in front of their families, in cold blood.

Imagine for a moment the same appalling state of affairs imposed on the London hospitals that received the victims of Thursday's bombing. Unimaginable? Well, it happens, in our name, regardless of whether the BBC reports it, which is rare. When will someone ask about this at one of the staged "press conferences" at which Blair is allowed to emote for the cameras stuff about "our values outlast [ing] theirs"? Silence is not journalism. In Fallujah, they know "our values" only too well.

While the two men responsible for the carnage in Iraq, Bush and Blair, were side by side at Gleneagles, why wasn't the connection of their fraudulent "war on terror" made with the bombing in London? And when will someone in the political class say that Blair's smoke-and-mirrors "debt cancellation" at best amounts to less than the money the government spent in a week brutalising Iraq, where British and American violence is the cause of the doubling of child poverty and malnutrition since Saddam Hussein was overthrown (Unicef).

The truth is that the debt relief the G8 is offering is lethal because its ruthless "conditionalities" of captive economies far outweigh any tenuous benefit. This was taboo during the G8 week, whose theme was not so much making poverty history as the silencing and pacifying and co-opting dissent and truth. The mawkish images on giant screens behind the pop stars in Hyde Park included no pictures of murdered Iraqi doctors with the blood streaming from their heads, cut down by Bush's snipers. Real life became more satirical than satire could ever be.

There was Bob Geldoff on the front pages resting his smiling face on smiling Blair's shoulder, the war criminal and his knighted jester. There was an heroically silhouetted Bono, who celebrates men like Jeffrey Sachs as saviours of the world's poor while lauding "compassionate" George Bush's "war on terror" as one of his generation's greatest achievements; and there was Paul Wolfowitz, beaming and promising to make poverty history: this is the man who, before he was handed control of the World Bank, was an apologist for Suharto's genocidal regime in Indonesia, who was one of the architects of Bush's "neo-con" putsch and of the bloodfest in Iraq and the notion of "endless war".For the politicians and pop stars and church leaders and polite people who believed Blair and Gordon Brown when they declared their "great moral crusade" against poverty, Iraq was an embarrassment. The killing of more than 100,000 Iraqis mostly by American gunfire and bombs -- a figure reported in a comprehensive peer-reviewed study in The Lancet -- was airbrushed from mainstream debate.

In our free societies, the unmentionable is that "the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people", as Arthur Miller once wrote, "and so the evidence has to be internally denied." Not only denied, but distracted by an entire court: Geldoff, Bono, Madonna, McCartney et al, whose "Live 8" was the very antithesis of 15 February