Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times24/11/2006
How easily our logic fails us in the face of the all-knowing mainstream media. ex-Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko has succumbed to the effects of a radioactive isotope polonium 210, one of the rarest substances on the planet and one few could obtain according to Dr Andrea Sella, lecturer in chemistry at University College London, which he may or may not have ingested at a sushi bar in London.
Litvinenko, a critic of Putin, had been investigating the killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, also a vocal critic of Putin, who was gunned down at a Moscow flat last month. There is also the fact that Litvineko had penned a piece back in July for the now-defunct Chechen press where he claimed that Putin was a pedophile. See here for the
google cached article.So, case closed? I mean, all the evidence would seem to point to Putin as the cause of Litvinenko's untimely demise. Well, no, actually. Thinking logically about it, or rather, thinking 'conspiratorially' about it (since this is, after all, a very clear case of conspiracy) it is far more plausible that Litvinenko's murder was carried out by an enemy of Putin. As with all cloak and dagger cases, in the absence of any empirical evidence, the closest approximation to the truth is generally achieved by asking "who benefits?"
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Labels: Litvinenko
Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times27/11/2006
One of the many strange things surrounding the murder of Alexander Litvinenko is the fact that it is being discussed at all. The exact details of the method used to assassinate him, his 3 week hospitalization, with pictures supplied by Lord Bell (more about him below) and Litvinenko's ultimate death have all been publicized to the greatest extent possible. This, it has to be said, is somewhat surprising given that covert intelligence matters (even those involving intelligence agencies of other nations) are usually kept covert.
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November 28, 2006 10:58am
IN what sounds like a scene from the 70s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, people in South Australia and western Victoria deluged police and media with reports of a spectacular meteor sighting.
The Bureau of Meteorology confirmed the object was a meteor.
Police in SA said they took calls from just after 8pm (CST) yesterday from Renmark and Loxton in the Riverland, most Adelaide suburbs and then from people living south of the city, with reports of a fireball in the sky.
In Victoria, callers to local radio from Bendigo to Horsham in the state's northwest down to Colac in the southwest, reported seeing a bright green object shooting westward in the sky.
One caller, Jeff, said he saw what he thought was a comet about 8.30pm (AEDT) as he was driving into Horsham.
"It was green like a meteorite or shooting star," he told ABC radio.
"It was really pretty bright and you could see something else coming down as well, but what it was I don't know."
Monty from Kaniva, near the SA border, said the object was bright and appeared to have debris trailing behind it.
"It was before sunset and normally you only see those things in the dark," Monty said.
"The trail hung in the sky for at least 15 minutes afterward like a jet stream."
Allen at Colac said: "I was sitting at the Shell servo at Colac and I was looking to the north and you could see the green light with the tail thing behind it."
Brian, who owns a farm at Laanecoorie, west of Bendigo, said he and his wife were outside when they saw the comet-like object streak across the sky.
"We looked up and there was a green comet-like thing dropping out of the western sky," Brian said.
"It dropped over the trees at the back of our property and it was making a tail as it went down."
LINK
Posted on 26 November 2006 - 20:33
KAMPALA (Reuters) - Climate change is melting a legendary ice field in equatorial Africa and may soon thaw it out completely, threatening fresh water supplies to hundreds of thousands of people.
The fabled, snow-capped Rwenzori mountains -- dubbed the "Mountains of the Moon" in travel brochures -- form part of the Uganda/Democratic Republic of the Congo border and are one of Uganda's top tourist destinations.
But warmer temperatures are melting the glaciers sitting on their peaks, with some scientists predicting the ice could be gone within two to three decades.
"Definitely, the glaciers are decreasing," James Magezi-Akiiki, a climate change specialist at Uganda's environment ministry told Reuters.
"They have already decreased by 60 percent since 1910. If temperatures keep going up as they have, there's a high chance of them disappearing."
Scientists say tropical glaciers like the snowy peaks of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa's highest mountain, are especially sensitive to climate change.
"The same thing is happening to Kilimanjaro...It's gone from white to brown," Magezi-Akiiki said.
A study in 2002 showed Kilimanjaro to have lost more than 80 percent of its ice cap in the past 100 years, reducing water supplies to people living around it.
"THE STREAMS WOULD DISAPPEAR"
Two U.N. reports coinciding with a conference on climate change in Kenya this week warned of disastrous consequences for Africa from global warming caused by CO2 emissions.
"Climate change threatens to intensify water insecurity on an unparalleled scale," the U.N. Human Development Report said.
Glaciers are often a crucial store of fresh water.
"The streams originating from the Rwenzori glaciers would disappear if they melt," said Magezi-Akiiki. "And during the dry season they are the only source of water."
He said measures needed to be taken to prepare people in western Uganda for future water shortages, including drilling bore holes to access water under the ground and building irrigation systems to conserve the region's rain.
The fabled status of the Rwenzoris stretches back to a remark by Greek geographer Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD, who described "Mountains of the Moon whose snows feed the lakes, sources of the Nile."
The passage is thought to refer to the Rwenzoris, whose glacial streams run into Lake Albert as it joins the Nile.
"If the glaciers go, it would definitely impact on tourism. With no snow, tourists wouldn't go," Magezi-Akiiki said. "And there would be no water for them."
By Tim Cocks
LINK
An ancient mega-catastrophe paved the way for the dinosaurs and spawned the Australian continent, new research suggests. (Image courtesy of Ohio State University)
Planetary scientists have found evidence of a meteor impact much larger and earlier than the one that killed the dinosaurs -- an impact that they believe caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history.
The 300-mile-wide crater lies hidden more than a mile beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. And the gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out.
Its size and location -- in the Wilkes Land region of East Antarctica, south of Australia -- also suggest that it could have begun the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent by creating the tectonic rift that pushed Australia northward.
Scientists believe that the Permian-Triassic extinction paved the way for the dinosaurs to rise to prominence. The Wilkes Land crater is more than twice the size of the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan peninsula, which marks the impact that may have ultimately killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The Chicxulub meteor is thought to have been 6 miles wide, while the Wilkes Land meteor could have been up to 30 miles wide -- four or five times wider.
"This Wilkes Land impact is much bigger than the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and probably would have caused catastrophic damage at the time," said Ralph von Frese, a professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University.
He and Laramie Potts, a postdoctoral researcher in geological sciences, led the team that discovered the crater. They collaborated with other Ohio State and NASA scientists, as well as international partners from Russia and Korea. They reported their preliminary results in a recent poster session at the American Geophysical Union Joint Assembly meeting in Baltimore.
The scientists used gravity fluctuations measured by NASA's GRACE satellites to peer beneath Antarctica's icy surface, and found a 200-mile-wide plug of mantle material -- a mass concentration, or "mascon" in geological parlance -- that had risen up into the Earth's crust.
Mascons are the planetary equivalent of a bump on the head. They form where large objects slam into a planet's surface. Upon impact, the denser mantle layer bounces up into the overlying crust, which holds it in place beneath the crater.
When the scientists overlaid their gravity image with airborne radar images of the ground beneath the ice, they found the mascon perfectly centered inside a circular ridge some 300 miles wide -- a crater easily large enough to hold the state of Ohio.
Taken alone, the ridge structure wouldn't prove anything. But to von Frese, the addition of the mascon means "impact." Years of studying similar impacts on the moon have honed his ability to find them.
"If I saw this same mascon signal on the moon, I'd expect to see a crater around it," he said. "And when we looked at the ice-probing airborne radar, there it was."
"There are at least 20 impact craters this size or larger on the moon, so it is not surprising to find one here," he continued. "The active geology of the Earth likely scrubbed its surface clean of many more."
He and Potts admitted that such signals are open to interpretation. Even with radar and gravity measurements, scientists are only just beginning to understand what's happening inside the planet. Still, von Frese said that the circumstances of the radar and mascon signals support their interpretation.
"We compared two completely different data sets taken under different conditions, and they matched up," he said.
To estimate when the impact took place, the scientists took a clue from the fact that the mascon is still visible.
"On the moon, you can look at craters, and the mascons are still there," von Frese said. "But on Earth, it's unusual to find mascons, because the planet is geologically active. The interior eventually recovers and the mascon goes away." He cited the very large and much older Vredefort crater in South Africa that must have once had a mascon, but no evidence of it can be seen now.
"Based on what we know about the geologic history of the region, this Wilkes Land mascon formed recently by geologic standards -- probably about 250 million years ago," he said. "In another half a billion years, the Wilkes Land mascon will probably disappear, too."
Approximately 100 million years ago, Australia split from the ancient Gondwana supercontinent and began drifting north, pushed away by the expansion of a rift valley into the eastern Indian Ocean. The rift cuts directly through the crater, so the impact may have helped the rift to form, von Frese said.
But the more immediate effects of the impact would have devastated life on Earth.
"All the environmental changes that would have resulted from the impact would have created a highly caustic environment that was really hard to endure. So it makes sense that a lot of life went extinct at that time," he said.
He and Potts would like to go to Antarctica to confirm the finding. The best evidence would come from the rocks within the crater. Since the cost of drilling through more than a mile of ice to reach these rocks directly is prohibitive, they want to hunt for them at the base of the ice along the coast where the ice streams are pushing scoured rock into the sea. Airborne gravity and magnetic surveys would also be very useful for testing their interpretation of the satellite data, they said.
NSF and NASA funded this work. Collaborators included Stuart Wells and Orlando Hernandez, graduate students in geological sciences at Ohio State; Luis Gaya-Piqué and Hyung Rae Kim, both of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Alexander Golynsky of the All-Russia Research Institute for Geology and Mineral Resources of the World Ocean; and Jeong Woo Kim and Jong Sun Hwang, both of Sejong University in Korea.
LINK
Pierre Gemayel, a Lebanese cabinet minister and member of the Maronite Christian Phalange party, has been shot dead in Beirut.
His car was attacked in a Christian area on Tuesday.
Gemayel, son of ex-president Amin Gemayel, was a member of the anti-Syrian parliamentary majority, which is locked in a power struggle with pro-Syrian factions.
Analysts say Gemayel's death is likely to worsen tensions in the already divided country. Gemayel's vehicle was rammed in a Christian district before armed men riddled it with bullets. Al Jazeera's correspondent said there was panic in Beirut after the assassination, with people rushing to get home.
continues...
Teaching Tommy During an Era of Fascism
By Doug Soderstrom,
In looking back at that of my own education, I have come to the conclusion that much of what I learned was a matter of propaganda. And I am sorry to say that it wasn’t until “that sorrowful day in September” that I decided to take a serious look at the history of our country, and it was that which has made all the difference, that which no doubt changed my life.
Continue
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
18/11/2006
President Kennedy receives the flag of the cuba exiles (Brigade 2506) in Miami in Dec. 29, 1962 and declares: "I promise to return this flag in a free Havana." Kennedy had been misinformed about the exact details of the planned Cuban invasion.
On November 18th, 1963, John F. Kennedy predicted that the month of April, 1964, would bring "the longest and strongest peacetime economic expansion in our Nation's entire history." And he added: "The steady conquest of the surely yielding enemies of misery and hopelessness, hunger, and injustice is the central task for the Americas in our time . . . 'Nothing is true except a man or men adhere to it -- to live for it, to spend themselves on it, to die for it . . . '"
Time was slipping through his hands . . . he had four days to live.
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Signs of the Times
16 November 2006
On this day in 1841, in the French town of Langres, was born Jules Violle, celebrated French physicist, member of the French Academy of Sciences, and alchemist. Better known under his pen name Fulcanelli, Jules Violle wrote two important alchemical texts, The Mystery of the Cathedrals and The Dwellings of the Philosophers, as well as leaving the notes for a third volume, Finis Gloriae Mundi, a work that was withdrawn before publication.
Although there has been much speculation since the publication of these two books over the true identity of the Master Alchemist Fulcanelli, with answers ranging from his non-existence as an individual (according to this hypothesis, Fulcanelli was in fact a committee!), to his being a member of the Parisian occult circles of the late 19th and early 20th century, Patrick Rivière has settled the case in his book Fulcanelli: His True Identity Revealed. With painstaking research and ample evidence taken from the career of this illustrious French scientist, it is clear that not only did Fulcanelli exist, but that he was a physicist of great repute.
Violle achieved his fame via his work on solar radiation and the establishment of the unit of luminous intensity which bears his name: the Violle. His research on the solar constant and atmospheric absorption led him to consider that the Sun's temperature was much lower than thought at the time, arguing that the higher the altitude, the less dense the atmosphere and lower the temperature. And this is precisely what Fulcanelli wrote in the following terms, in The Dwellings of the Philosophers:
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November 14, 2006
BAGHDAD: Victims of Iraq's sectarian slaughter are no longer being kept for relatives but photographed, numbered and buried in government cemeteries because the country's morgues can store no more bodies.
Men fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and phone numbers.
In October, a bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, its director, Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi, said.
The city's network of morgues, built to hold 130 bodies at most, now held more than 500, he said.
Bodies are sent for burial every three or four days just to make room for the daily intake, sometimes making corpse identification impossible.
"We can't remove all the bodies just so that one can be identified and then put them all back in again," Mr Obaidi said. "We simply don't have the staff."
Mr Obaidi said the daily crush of relatives was an emotional and logistical burden.
"Every day, there are crowds of women outside weeping, yelling and flailing in grief. They're all looking for their dead sons and I don't know how the computer or we will bear up," he said.
While no one knows how many Iraqis have died, the UN estimates about 100 violent deaths daily. Last week, the Iraqi Health Minister put civilian deaths over the entire 44 months since the US invasion at about 150,000 - close to the UN figure and about three times the previously accepted estimates of 45,000-50,000.
At some morgues, bodies are even being turned away.
"We have to reject them," said Hadi al-Itabi, of the morgue in Kut, southeast of Baghdad.
"We just don't have enough cold storage."
Increasingly, Iraqis are being killed far from home and in secret - the victims of kidnappers and sectarian death squads.
With nowhere else to look when a friend or loved-one goes missing, family members first check the local morgue.
Abbas Beyat joined the line outside Baghdad's central morgue after his brother Hussein disappeared a month ago while driving through the mainly Sunni town of Tarmiyah, 48km north of Baghdad.
"There were three piles, each with about 20 bodies," Mr Beyat, 56, said of the scene inside the morgue. "The clerk told me to dig through them until I found my brother. I had to lift them off until I found him," he said.
Health Ministry officials are discussing how to handle the overflow of bodies. One proposal under consideration is the use of refrigerated trucks, manned by staff entrusted specifically to help identify bodies.
AP
LINK
November 9th, 2006
Mark Glenn
Today, while driving through town, I wound up behind a minivan that had a big sticker on the back. The sticker had an Israeli flag in the middle of it, and under it the quotation from the book of Genesis that reads "I will bless those who bless thee."
I would like to take this time to list my own reasons for thanking and blessing Israel, our lone ally in the Middle East, for everything she has done for us, since I am quite sure most Americans are unaware of just what kind of friend she has been to us.
For extorting from me and my fellow Americans $4,000,000,000.00 a year for the last 4 decades, we bless thee.
For taking our most sophisticated weapons technology and stealing it for yourself without paying the American patent holders, we bless thee.
For taking that high-tech military technology and selling it to our enemies, such as the Russians and Chinese, thus further endangering us, we bless thee.
For using that weaponry in a sustained attack against a United States ship, the USS Liberty, in an attempt to sink her, thus preventing US servicemen from revealing to the rest of the world information concerning the war crimes they witnessed you commit against Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai Desert during the Six Day War, as well as for the purposes of dragging the US into yet another one of your murderous adventures, we bless thee.
For killing 35 and wounding 170 American sailors aboard the USS Liberty, we bless thee.
For bribing the United States government into covering it up, preventing any justice from being done for the benefit of the families of the lost sailors - as well as the American People, we bless thee.
For sending your agents into Egypt and blowing up American buildings for the purpose of blaming the Arabs in an event known as the Lavon Affair, we bless thee.
For sending your agents into Libya during the Reagan administration, and broadcasting radio messages in Arabic that were designed to sound like "terrorist cell planning" so that the US would initiate military strikes against Khadafi in an event known as Operation Trojan Horse, we bless thee.
For withholding information from us concerning the planned attacks against the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, attacks you knew about through your moles in the Islamic world and about which you deliberately refused to warn us in order to further your interests against the Arabs, we bless thee.
For employing Jonathon Pollard, an American serviceman paid to spy for Israel in order to steal even more of our National Security secrets for your parasitic purposes, we bless thee.
For blackmailing President Clinton through one of your sayanim, Monica Lewinsky, in order to prevent a coherent peace program from being pushed forward between yourself and the Palestinian people whom you have brutalized and murdered for the last 50 years, we bless thee.
For breaking every agreement you have made with your Arab neighbors, stealing their land, displacing, murdering, and treating them like the animals you see them as, we bless thee.
For using your agents within the first Bush administration to involve us in the first Gulf War, causing the deaths of American men and women, and exposing our servicemen to whatever bioweapons were and are responsible which have led to Gulf War Syndrome, we bless thee.
For your role in the September 11 attacks in this country, and for blackmailing and bribing the US government into deporting back to Israel the 100 or more intelligence agents that were arrested after the attacks, we bless thee.
For suppressing the information from the American people of your involvement in the September 11 attacks and sending us in the wrong direction in search of answers, we bless thee.
For using one of your agents in the US Army Weapons Lab to steal anthrax and distribute it into our mail system, terrorizing US citizens and killing several in order to blame the Arabs, we bless thee.
For using your agents in the US Government, namely, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, and the rest into initiating this war in the Middle East so that you could bring to heel all the enemies you have made during the last 50 years, we bless thee.
For using your agents in the media to lie to us on a minute by minute basis about the war, lying to us as to how "just" this cause is, and what the real reasons behind it are, we bless thee.
For using your agents in the Christian Evangelical community, such as Falwell, Graham, Swaggert, Robertson and the rest who praise you as God's chosen people and further keep Americans in the dark about who you really are what you have done, and what you are truly about, we bless thee.
For bringing idiots like Limbaugh, Liddy, Hannity, Beck, O'Reilly and Savage to the forefront as paid liars who will support you and further lead Americans astray, we bless thee.
For making America your attack dog, and for sending her sons and daughters to fight and die in all your future wars, we bless thee.
For using your influence in the media to hide the real statistics about the war, the dead and wounded on both sides, we bless thee.
For using us in such a way that not only further inflames the Arab world against us, but as well has succeeded in our alienating ourselves against those nations with whom we have been friendly for over a century, we bless thee.
And finally, for using your influence in our media and academia to flood our minds with pornography and lies, as well as inculcating in us a hatred for our history, religion, and culture, for dividing our nation between races and sexes, and for releasing into our society all of your plagues and filth that have left us a rotted out corpse of a once great nation, oh Israel, our friend,
we bless thee.
LINK
Monday, 13 November 2006
Robert Fisk
'GREAT NEWS from America," the cashier at my local Beirut bookshop shouted at me, raising her thumbs in the air.
"Things will be better after these elections?"
Alas, I said. Alas, no. Things are going to get worse in the Middle East even if, in two years' time, America is blessed with a Democrat (and democratic) president.
For the disastrous philosophers behind the bloodbath in Iraq are now washing their hands of the whole mess and crying "not us" with the same enthusiasm as the Lebanese lady in my book shop, while the "experts" on the mainstream US east coast press are preparing the ground for our Iraqi retreat - by blaming it all on those greedy, blood-lusting, anarchic, depraved, uncompromising Iraqis.
I must say that Richard Perle's version of a mea culpa did take my breath away.
Here was the ex-chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board Advisory Committee - he who once told us that "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform" - now admitting that he "underestimated the depravity" in Iraq.
He holds the President responsible, of course, acknowledging only that - and here, dear reader, swallow hard - "I think if I had been Delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies ..."'
Maybe I find this self-righteous, odious mea culpa all the more objectionable because the same miserable man a couple of years ago attacked me as a supporter of the Baathist regime. At the time I was reporting Saddam's mass rapes and mass hangings at Abu Ghraib prison while Perle and his cohorts were silent about Saddam's wickedness and their chum Donald Rumsfeld was cheerfully shaking the monster's hand in Baghdad in an attempt to reopen the US embassy there.
Not that Perle isn't in good company. Kenneth Adelman, the Pentagon neocon who also beat the drums for war, has been telling Vanity Fair that "the idea of using our power for moral good in the world" is dead.
This is not the worst to come from those who encouraged us to invade Iraq and start a war which has cost the lives of perhaps 600,000 civilians. A new phenomenon is creeping into the pages of The New York Times and those other great organs of state in America. For those journalists who supported the war, it's not enough to bash George. No, they've got a new flag to fly: the Iraqis don't deserve us. David Brooks - he who once told us that neocons such as Perle had nothing to do with the President's decision to invade Iraq - has been ransacking his way through Elie Kedourie's 1970 essay on the British occupation of Mesopotamia in the 1920s. And what has he discovered? That "the British tried to encourage responsible leadership to no avail", quoting a British officer at the time as concluding that Iraqi Shia "have no motive for refraining from sacrificing the interests of Iraq to those which they conceive to be their own".
But the Brooks article in The New York Times was also frightening. Iraq, he now informs us, is suffering "a complete social integration", and "American blunders" were exacerbated "by the same old Iraqi demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise, even in the face of self-immolation".
Iraq, Brooks has decided, is "teetering on the edge of futility" (whatever that means) and if American troops cannot restore order, "it will be time to effectively end Iraq", diffusing authority down to "the clan, the tribe or sect" which - wait for it - are "the only communities which are viable".
Nor should you believe that the Brooks article represents a lone voice. Ralph Peters, a USA Today writer and retired US army officer, says he supported the invasion because he was "convinced that the Middle East was so politically, socially, morally and intellectually stagnant that we had to risk intervention - or face generations of terrorism and tumult".
For all the US Government's errors, Peters boasts, "we did give the Iraqis a unique chance to build a rule-of-law democracy".
But those pesky Iraqis, it now seems, "preferred to indulge in old hatreds, confessional violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption".
Peters' conclusion?
"Arab societies can't support democracy as we know it." As a result, "it's their tragedy, not ours. Iraq was the Arab world's last chance to board the train to modernity, to give the region a future ..."
Incredibly, Peters finishes by believing that "if the Arab world and Iran embark on an orgy of bloodshed, the harsh truth is that we may be the beneficiaries" because Iraq will have "consumed terrorists" and the United States will "still be the greatest power on earth".
It's not the shamefulness of all this but the racist assumption that the hecatomb in Iraq is all the fault of the Iraqis, that their intrinsic backwardness, their viciousness, their failure to appreciate the fruits of our civilisation make them unworthy of our further attention. At no point does anyone question whether the fact that America is "the greatest power on earth" might not be part of the problem. Nor that Iraqis who endured among their worst years of dictatorship when Saddam was supported by the US, who were sanctioned by the UN at a cost of a half a million children's lives and who were then brutally invaded by our armies, might not actually be terribly keen on all the good things we wished to offer them.
Many Arabs, as I've written before, would like some of our democracy, but they would also like another kind of freedom - freedom from us.
But you get the point. We are preparing our get-out excuses. The Iraqis don't deserve us. Screw them.
That's the grit we're laying down on the desert floor to help our tanks out of Iraq.
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent of The Independent
LINK
UK Independent
10/11/2006
The children of the Grace Revival School do not have far to go when they need the lavatory. They get up from their ramshackle desks and move just outside their corrugated iron classroom to the vast dungheap that stands beside the building.
There are no latrines for the 74,000 people who live in their section of Kibera, the biggest slum in Africa, which lies either side of the main railway line between Nairobi and Mombasa in the Kenyan highlands.
People there use what, with dark humour, are called "flying toilets". They defecate in a plastic bag and then throw it into the street or on to one of the vast dung heaps. Some just visit the heaps and relieve themselves directly. The heap next to Grace school is about 20 feet high and the size of a quarter of a football pitch.
The stench is unimaginable. When it rains, a noxious black liquid runs off the heap, and through the school, over the dirt floor of the classrooms. It seeps into the drinking water supply pipes, which run beneath the dump.
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POSTED: 1514 GMT (2314 HKT), November 9, 2006
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- A new volcanic island has risen from the South Pacific near Tonga, according to reports from two vessels that passed the area.
The crew of the Maiken, a yacht that left the northern Tongan islands group of Vava'u in August, reported on their Web log on August 12 that they saw streaks of light, porous pumice stone floating in the water -- then "sailed into a vast, many-miles-wide belt of densely packed pumice."
They posted photos of huge "pumice rafts" that they encountered after passing Tonga's Late island while sailing toward Fiji.
"We were so fascinated and busy taking pictures that we plowed a couple of hundred meters into this surreal floating stone field before we realized that we had to turn back," wrote a crewman identified only as Haken.
The next day they spotted an active volcanic island, Haken wrote.
He said they could see the volcanic island clearly. "One mile in diameter and with four peaks and a central crater smoking with steam and once in a while an outburst high in the sky with lava and ashes. I think we're the first ones out here," he reported.
There was no official confirmation of a new island, either from Tonga's Ministry of Lands or the Tonga Defense Service.
Separately, fishing boat captain Siaosi Fenukitau reported seeing the volcanic island, the Matangitonga news Web site reported.
Richard Wunderman, editor of the Washington-based Bulletin of the Global Volcanism Network, said "a large pumice raft presumably from Tonga has been sweeping across Fiji, and we are trying to learn about its origins."
A previous eruption in the area generated a small island and similar fields of floating pumice, he said.
Pumice rafts drifted to Fiji in 1979 and 1984 from eruptions around Tonga, and some were reportedly 30 kilometers (19 miles) wide, the Matangitonga reported.
Secret draft of the Iraq WMD dossier written by a Foreign Office spin-doctor
by Martin Bright
Global Research, November 10, 2006
New Statesman "I made the point before it was published that the dossier was not supported by the intelligence. I was overruled. I have always found it hard to believe that the explanation for this was the incompetence of those in intelligence who approved the dossier. But if the government spinners were doing more than polish a final product, if they were driving the drafting to meet the policy requirement from the start, that might explain it."
(Dr Brian Jones, former head of the branch of the Defence Intelligence Staff)
A secret first full draft of the Iraq WMD dossier, which shows how Tony Blair persuaded parliament of the case for war, is being concealed by the government. This draft was not written by the intelligence services, as Whitehall claims, but by a Foreign Office spin-doctor.
The government is withholding a secret draft of the Iraq WMD dossier that was never disclosed to the Hutton inquiry, the New Statesman can reveal. In a development that will stoke demands for a full parliamentary inquiry into the events that led up to the war, we can confirm that the draft was written not by the intelligence services, which had responsibility for the accuracy of the information contained in the dossier, but by a senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office press officer, whose name has previously featured only on the fringes of the controversy over Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. It raises the possibility that the dossier originated with the government's spin machine rather than the intelligence services. This secret draft may even turn out to be the foundation of the government's ill-fated presentation of the threat from Saddam's WMD, which Tony Blair used to persuade parliament of the case for war.
The existence of the secret draft has been confirmed by the Foreign Office, but it has refused to release it despite repeated freedom of information requests.
The draft was written on 9 September 2002 by John Williams, director of news at the Foreign Office. Williams is a former Daily Mirror political journalist, who was cleared to work closely with the intelligence services along with a number of other Whitehall civil servants during the run-up to war.
Had it not been for the doggedness of a Surrey-based charity researcher, Christopher Ames, the draft might have remained buried in the Foreign Office forever. Ames had followed the Hutton inquiry closely, and noticed that, although the draft was referred to in the Hutton evidence, the document itself was never disclosed. Ames contacted the Foreign Office, asking for disclosure of the draft. It has taken two years to force the Foreign Office to admit that the draft even exists, and Ames's complaint about the continued failure to disclose it is currently with the Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, who has the final say on the matter. Meanwhile, the Foreign Of fice has confirmed to Ames that it was Jack Straw's pers onal decision not to release the draft when he was foreign secretary and his successor, Margaret Beckett, has chosen to uphold this.
Ames contacted the New Statesman, and, in response to my inquiries, the Foreign Office wrote: "As you set out, the Williams draft was the subject of an FOI request in 2005. The FCO did not disclose the draft and that decision was upheld by the subsequent internal review . . . The FCO remains satisfied that its application of the FOI Act was correct and has no plans to release the draft pending the outcome of the case before the Information Commissioner."
Who had "ownership"?
According to the documents disclosed to Hutton, the first full draft of the dossier was produced on 10 September, and signed off by John Scarlett, chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the man in charge of the drafting process and who now heads MI6. It was at this point that it was presented to Downing Street. The government's case during the Hutton inquiry and since has been that Scarlett always had "ownership" of the dossier. The existence of an earlier version suggests that this account may not be accurate.
From the spring of 2002, there had been considerable media speculation that the government was working on a document to persuade parliament and the British public of the danger of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. By the summer, this was thought to have been shelved because the evidence was not compelling. However, at a July meeting in Downing Street, it was decided that it was necessary to wage an information campaign "to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam".
What happened next is crucial to an understanding of the events that led to war.
A paper was commissioned by the JIC, speculating on Saddam's potential military capabilities. During this period, new intelligence emerged that became central to Blair's case for war. At the end of August, the government received a small number of top secret "CX reports" from MI6 which contained, among other things, the now notorious claim that the Iraqi military could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes.
On 3 September, the Prime Minister announced from his Sedgefield constituency that a public dossier would be presented to parliament when it was recalled on 24 September. The drafting of the dossier began immediately. In a parallel process, the JIC staff worked on its report assessing the possible WMD threat and on the dossier.
When the Joint Intelligence Committee met a day after Blair's speech, it asked its assessment staff to insert the 45-minute claim into its latest report but, crucially, the JIC staff decided not to include it in the dossier at this stage: the information was regarded as insufficiently conclusive. The question remains: who noticed the significance of the claim between 4 September and the 10th, at which point it made its first official appearance in the dossier?
Media-friendly offer
Williams was closely involved in the drafting process. An email disclosed during the Hutton inquiry shows that on 6 September, he wrote to Alastair Campbell, director of communications at No 10, to tell him that he had Straw's permission to carry out a "media-friendly editorial job" on the dossier. Until now, it has always been suggested that the offer was not taken up.
Two meetings on the dossier took place on 9 September, both of which were attended by Williams. During the Hutton inquiry, questions were raised about Williams's involvement at this point, following the disclosure of an email from Daniel Pruce, a Downing Street official, promising "some quick thoughts on John's draft of 9 September". The email was circulated on 10 September to several individuals involved in the government's media operation, including Alastair Campbell. The email also suggests that Pruce was expecting to see a further draft from Williams on the 11th.
Scarlett was questioned by Lord Hutton about the 9 September draft and asked to whom the "John" referred in the email. "I am virtually certain this is a reference to work put forward by John Williams from the Foreign Office," he said. Pressed further by the Hutton inquiry's lawyers as to whether Williams's work could be seen as the beginnings of a foreword to the dossier, Scarlett said the Foreign Office's head of press had redrafted not just the foreword but the text itself. Despite this, the inquiry never asked to see the document. Scarlett went on to imply that Williams had not been operating with the full authority of the JIC chairman. "So he was really on his own initiative working on that and had circulated it to No 10 inter alia probably . . . on the 9th," he said.
The issue of Williams's involvement was also raised with Campbell during the Hutton inquiry. Asked whether anyone had offered to help with the writing, Campbell said: "John Williams offered to write it full time." But he later added that Williams's "kind offer" had been refused. "I emphasised that the credibility of this document depended fundamentally upon it being the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee; and that was the touchstone of our approach right through this from that moment."
The inquiry's lead lawyer asked directly: "We have not been given a copy of a dossier on 9 September. Do you recall whether or not at 9 September there was a dossier?" Campbell replied: "No there was not". (In his evidence he then appears to confuse the 9th and 10th, and so it may be the case that he simply did not remember the earlier draft.)
In his own evidence to the Hutton inquiry, Williams made no mention of his draft, although he confirmed his presence at meetings on 5, 9 and 17 September on the dossier.
John Williams has since left the Foreign Office and was travelling in Romania when contacted by the New Statesman. In a telephone interview, he said he could not give definitive answers without the relevant papers in front of him, but confirmed his involvement in the drafting process in early September after the PM's Sedgefield speech. "As the FCO communications officer I would write it up and see how it looked. I just took the material and put it together," he said. The key question, impossible to answer without the disclosure of the draft is: which material? Pressed on this, Williams said: "I was looking at material that was already there. When I took that material away, it didn't have the 45 minutes in it."
Challenge to government story
It is also impossible to know how closely Williams's draft (said to number 50 pages) resembles John Scarlett's draft of a day later. Asked what he thought of the failure to disclose his draft, Williams told the NS: "I'm very happy with the Foreign Office's decision." Asked if he knew the reasons for that decision, he said he was not prepared to comment.
The former FCO director of news said he was "absolutely sure" the 45-minute claim was not in his draft. So what exactly did it contain and why is the Foreign Office so afraid to release it? Whatever the case, the close involvement of Williams in this key period of the drafting is a challenge to the government's story that the intelligence services retained "ownership throughout".
Millions of pounds of taxpayers' money has already been spent on inquiries into why we went to war in Iraq . The government has been adamant that there will be no further inquiry, at least while British troops remain in action. After four inquiries, Downing Street might have hoped that existence of the "Williams draft" might never have come to light, but it could provide a cheap and simple way to reassure the public that it has nothing to hide. The release of the Williams document would resolve one of the central mysteries of the dossier: who wrote the first draft and how much deeply suspect intelligence did it already contain?
The government's problem is that the very existence of the secret draft suggests that its spin machine was more deeply involved in the production of the dossier than it has previously admitted.
Last night critics of the government's use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war reacted angrily to news of the secret draft. Adam Price, the Plaid Cymru MP who has led calls for a full Parliamentary Inquiry into the war said: "The entire Iraq debate essentially hangs on one central question – were the facts massaged or manipulated to suit a predetermined policy? If the first draft of the now infamous dossier was indeed penned not by a spook but a spin doctor then all the Government’s denials in Hutton, Butler and beyond are exposed as just another layer of mendacity."
Meanwhile the former BBC journalist, Andrew Gilligan, whose report on the WMD dossier was a key part of the chain of events that led to the Hutton Inquiry, commented: "This is potentially extremely significant: a missing link in what we understand about the dossier".
And Dr Brian Jones, former head of the branch of the Defence Intelligence Staff dealing with WMD added: "I made the point before it was published that the dossier was not supported by the intelligence. I was overruled. I have always found it hard to believe that the explanation for this was the incompetence of those in intelligence who approved the dossier. But if the government spinners were doing more than polish a final product, if they were driving the drafting to meet the policy requirement from the start, that might explain it."
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November 09, 2006 — By Associated Press
BEIJING — Many species of shark are facing a serious threat to their existence because of worldwide fishing trends, environmentalists said Wednesday.
Fishermen "used to cut the lines and let sharks go," said Pete Kinghts, executive director of WildAid, a San Francisco-based conservation group, told a shark conservation conference. In recent years, however, fishermen have kept the sharks to sell their lucrative fins.
One-third of the more than 500 shark species are threatened with extinction or are close to being threatened, said Sarah Fowler of the World Conservation Union.
"Fisheries can remove 50 to 90 percent of an entire shark (species) in only 10 years," said Fowler, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
Fowler told The Associated Press later that the projections were based on an ongoing study by the Conservation Union's shark research group.
She and other experts at the conference said governments and non-governmental organizations must work together to educate the public and fishermen about overfishing.
WildAid, which co-sponsored the conference, persuaded NBA star Yao Ming in August to pledge to give up eating shark's fin soup, a Chinese delicacy, as part of a campaign to promote wildlife protection in his homeland.
WildAid says China is the world's biggest importer of shark's fins, which conservationists say are cut from sharks that are thrown back into the ocean to die. WildAid put the worldwide trade in shark's fins at 10,000 tons a year.
Fowler estimated that 38 to 70 million sharks are killed each year for their fins.
"It is difficult to change people's dining habits, but we can educate and engage the public to achieve sustainable development of the sharks and people's dining culture," Li Yanliang, deputy general director of Agriculture Ministry's Aquatic Wild Fauna and Flora Administrative Office, told the conference.
Knights said that as the Chinese economy has grown, shark fin consumption has risen, exacerbating pressures on shark populations that were already vulnerable to overfishing because they breed so slowly.
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Robert Gates, the former director of the CIA during the presidency of George H.W. Bush who was tapped Tuesday by the president to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, is part of Texas's good ol' boy network. He may be best known for playing a role in arming Iraq's former dictator Saddam Hussein with American-made weapons in the country's war against Iran in the 1980s.
Gates, who currently is president of Texas A&M University, came under intense fire during confirmation hearings in the early 1990s for being unaware of the explosive situation in Iraq in the 1980s, and the demise of the Soviet republic.
Gates joined the CIA in 1966, and spent eight years there as an analyst before moving over to the National Security Council in 1974. He returned to the CIA in 1980, and a year later was appointed by Ronald Reagan to serve as deputy director for intelligence. Five years later, he was named deputy director for the agency, the number two post in the agency. In 1989, he was appointed deputy director of the National Security Council and in 1991, when the first Bush administration was in office, he was named director of the spy shop.
During contentious Senate confirmation hearings in October 1991 - which are bound to come up again - Gates's role in cooking intelligence information during the Iran-Contra scandal was revealed. It was during those hearings that senators found out about a December 2, 1986, 10-page classified memo written by Thomas Barksdale, the CIA analyst for Iran. That memo claimed that covert arms sales to the country demonstrated "a perversion of the intelligence process" that is staggering in its proportions.
The Barksdale memo was used by Gates's detractors to prove he played an active role in slanting intelligence information during his tenure at the agency under Reagan. Eerily reminiscent of the way CIA analysts were treated by Vice President Dick Cheney during the run-up to the Iraq war three years ago, when agents were forced to provide the Bush administration with intelligence showing Iraq was a nuclear threat, Barksdale said he and other Iran analysts "were never consulted or asked to provide an intelligence input to the covert actions and secret contacts that have occurred."
Barksdale added that Gates was the pipeline for providing "exclusive reports to the White House," intelligence that was "at odds with the overwhelming bulk of intelligence reporting, both from U.S. sources and foreign intelligence services."
In testimony before the Senate on October 1, 1991, Harold P. Ford, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, described an aspect of Gates's personality that mirrors many of the top officials in the Bush administration today.
"Bob Gates has often depended too much on his own individual analytic judgments and has ignored or scorned the views of others whose assessments did not accord with his own. This would be okay if he were uniquely all-seeing. He has not been ..." Ford said.
At the hearing, other CIA analysts said Gates forced them to twist intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by the former Soviet Union. Analysts alleged a report approved by Gates overstated Soviet influence in Iran that specifically led the late President Ronald Reagan into making policy decisions that turned into the Iran-Contra scandal.
Jennifer Glaudemans, a former CIA analyst, said at the 1991 Gates confirmation hearings that she and her colleagues at the CIA believed "Mr Gates and his influence have led to a prostitution of [Soviet] analysis."
Melvin Goodman, Glaudemans's former boss at the CIA, also said that under Gates, the CIA was "trying to provide the intelligence analysis ... that would support the operational decision to sell arms to Iran."
Gates testified at his confirmation hearing in October 1991 that he was aware the United States was selling arms to Iran in exchange for hostages. But he denied that he had any knowledge that Oliver North, the former National Security aide, was diverting money from arms sales to Iran to secretly aid the Nicaraguan contras.
But White House memos released at the time showed that North and John Poindexter, the national security adviser at the time, engaged in classified briefings with Gates on numerous occasions about Iran-Contra. Poindexter testified that he discussed the situation with Gates, but Gates said at his Senate confirmation hearings he had "no recollection" about those conversations.
Alan Fiers, a former CIA officer who served as an agency liaison along with North and met weekly with Gates, testified at Gates's confirmation hearings that he discussed specific details of the covert operation with Gates.
"Bob Gates understood the universe, understood the structure, understood that there was an operational - that there was a support operation being run out of the White House," and "that Ollie North was the quarterback," Fiers said at Gates's confirmation hearing in 1991. "I had no reason to think he had great detail, but I do think there was a baseline knowledge there."
If confirmed, Gates would arguably be overseeing a war that removed a dictator he personally helped to prop up. Tom Harkin, a senator from Iowa, described Gates's role in intelligence sharing operations with Iraq during a time when the United States helped arm Saddam Hussein in Iraq's war against Iran.
"I also have doubts and questions about Mr. Gates's role in the secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq," Harkin said during Gates's confirmation hearings on November 7, 1991. "Robert Gates served as assistant to the director of the CIA in 1981 and as deputy director for intelligence from 1982 to 1986. In that capacity, he helped develop options in dealing with the Iran-Iraq war, which eventually evolved into a secret intelligence liaison relationship with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Gates was in charge of the directorate that prepared the intelligence information that was passed on to Iraq. He testified that he was also an active participant in the operation during 1986. The secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq was not only a highly questionable and possibly illegal operation, but also may have jeopardized American lives and our national interests. The photo reconnaissance, highly sensitive electronic eavesdropping, and narrative texts provided to Saddam may not only have helped him in Iraq's war against Iran, but also in the recent gulf war."
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Rory McCarthy in Beit Hanoun
Thursday November 9, 2006
The Guardian
Sanaa Athamna lies dead with the bodies of her relatives Maysa and Maram. Eighteen members of the same family died in an Israeli artillery attack. Photograph: Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images
Sanaa Athamna lay as if she slept, dead on a steel tray in the morgue of Beit Hanoun hospital. Across her forehead was a single, hairline fracture and beneath her eye a smudge of blood, the only visible marks of the destruction brought by the wave of Israeli artillery shells that struck her street in Beit Hanoun before dawn yesterday.
In her arms, hospital staff laid the bodies of her relatives: two sisters, Maysa, one, and Maram, three. Their mother Manal was also killed in yesterday's attack, but lay in a morgue at another hospital awaiting burial.
In all, 18 members of the extended Athamna family died when Israeli artillery struck their houses on Hamad Street. At least 14 of the dead were women and children. It was the biggest single Israeli strike in the Palestinian territories for four years and came only a day after the military had ended a six-day incursion in Beit Hanoun, a heavy battle which claimed more than 50 lives.
read more
By Patrick Cockburn in Arbil, Northern Iraq
Published: 01 November 2006
Sunni insurgents have cut the roads linking the city to the rest of Iraq. The country is being partitioned as militiamen fight bloody battles for control of towns and villages north and south of the capital.
As American and British political leaders argue over responsibility for the crisis in Iraq, the country has taken another lurch towards disintegration.
Well-armed Sunni tribes now largely surround Baghdad and are fighting Shia militias to complete the encirclement.
The Sunni insurgents seem to be following a plan to control all the approaches to Baghdad. They have long held the highway leading west to the Jordanian border and east into Diyala province. Now they seem to be systematically taking over routes leading north and south.
Dusty truck-stop and market towns such as Mahmoudiyah, Balad and Baquba all lie on important roads out of Baghdad. In each case Sunni fighters are driving out the Shia and tightening their grip on the capital. Shias may be in a strong position within Baghdad but they risk their lives when they take to the roads. Some 30 Shias were dragged off a bus yesterday after being stopped at a fake checkpoint south of Balad.
In some isolated neighbourhoods in Baghdad, food shortages are becoming severe. Shops are open for only a few hours a day. "People have been living off water melon and bread for the past few weeks," said one Iraqi from the capital. The city itself has broken up into a dozen or more hostile districts, the majority of which are controlled by the main Shia militia, the Mehdi Army.
The scale of killing is already as bad as Bosnia at the height of the Balkans conflict. An apocalyptic scenario could well emerge - with slaughter on a massive scale. As America prepares its exit strategy, the fear in Iraq is of a genocidal conflict between the Sunni minority and the Shias in which an entire society implodes. Individual atrocities often obscure the bigger picture where:
* upwards of 1,000 Iraqis are dying violently every week;
* Shia fighters have taken over much of Baghdad; the Sunni encircle the capital;
* the Iraqi Red Crescent says 1.5 million people have fled their homes within the country;
* the Shia and Sunni militias control Iraq, not the enfeebled army or police.
No target is too innocent. Yesterday a bomb tore through a party of wedding guests in Ur, on the outskirts of Sadr City, killing 15 people, including four children. Iraqi wedding parties are very identifiable, with coloured streamers attached to the cars and cheering relatives hanging out the windows.
Amid all this, Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President, has sought to turn the fiasco of Iraq into a vote-winner with his claim that the Iraqi insurgents have upped their attacks on US forces in a bid to influence the mid-term elections. There is little evidence to support this. In fact, the number of American dead has risen steadily this year from 353 in January to 847 in September and will be close to one thousand in October.read more
By Paul Craig Roberts
11/02/06 "
Information Clearing House" -- -
-Compared to the current Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s former president Muhammad Khatami is regarded in Western foreign affairs circles as a moderate. When Khatami visited the US in September, he called on the US and Iran to stop verbally assaulting each other in the interest of dialogue that could build trust and eliminate the frictions between the two countries. Khatami said that the precondition for dialogue was “to eliminate the language of threat.”
In an attempt to “resolve conflicts by talking, rather than by aggression,” the venerable Scottish University of St. Andrews invited Khatami to the United Kingdom for an honorary degree, followed by a speech at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. However, a spanner was thrown into the works by two Iranian exiles, who claim to have been unlawfully imprisoned and tortured in Iran during the period of Khatami’s presidency. Under Section 134 of Britain’s Criminal Justice Act of 1988, torture wherever committed in the world is criminal under British law and triable in the UK. Thus, Khatami might still be arrested as he tours the UK in the interest of opening communication.
If Khatami can be arrested in the UK for torture, how does British Prime Minister Tony Blair escape arrest for the torture of Afghans and Iraqis by coalition forces? Why are not US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Richard Cheney, and President George W. Bush arrested when they visit the UK?
Does the British law excuse Anglo-Americans from its reach? Does it exclude government officials while they are in office and pursue them only when they have become private citizens?
Or are we witnessing the operation of the neoconservative assumption that there is one rule of law for the US and its allies and another rule for countries that do not support the neocon agenda? Neocons maintain that whatever the US and its allies or puppets do in the interest of US hegemony is defensible and permissible but is a crime if any other country does it.
When the president and vice president of the United States publicly defend and advocate torture and ram torture legislation through the US Congress, it is hypocrisy for the US to condemn others for torture.
Perhaps Americans don’t notice, but the rest of the world does see the double standard applied when Saddam Hussein is put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, while US, UK, and Israeli government officials commit far greater crimes by illegally invading countries, targeting civilian populations, and torturing detainees.
Considering the enormous bloodshed and destruction of civilian lives and infrastructure in Afghanistan and Iraq by US and UK troops, why do British left-wing academics and human rights activists want to help the neoconservatives in the US and UK spread the war to Iran? Helping to spread war is what the British left is doing when they agitate for the arrest of Khatami while leaving Labour Party PM Tony Blair free to commit more crimes against humanity. Could it be that the two Iranian exiles are acting as neoconservative agents to block any possible rapprochement with Iran? This is not a wild speculation in view of the role Iraqi exiles played in deceiving the the American public and making false accusations against Iraq that Bush used to justify his invasion.
The Iraq and Afghanistan invasions have turned out to be a catastrophe for the US and UK as well as for the Iraqis and Afghans. Only a totally deranged political leadership would want to spread the catastrophe to Iran.
According to a BBC news report (October 30), British private security firm personnel--mercenaries to some--outnumber British soldiers in Iraq six to one. A British charity group accuses PM Tony Blair of “allowing mercenary armies to operate completely outside the law.” In Britain it is no longer permissible to hunt foxes, because it is “cruel and inhumane,” but it is perfectly alright for private mercenaries and British soldiers to murder Iraqi and Afghan men, women, and children for the sake of Anglo-American-Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.
Saddam Hussein was overthrown and indicted, and Iraq largely destroyed, in part because Saddam is “an evil man who tortured political opponents.” Evidence of US torture of Iraqis is all over the Internet in vivid photos. According to Amnesty International, “Adequate safeguards against torture and ill-treatment are not in place in Multinational Force detention facilities, and thousands continue to be held without charge or trial.” The president and vice president of the US advocate torture not only of Iraqis but also of everyone declared, correctly or incorrectly, by some US government official to be a “terrorist suspect.”
Why are not Bush, Cheney and Blair on trial? Their crimes dwarf any that could possibly be attributed to Khatami.
The only possible answer is that “might makes right.” Yet, Bush, Cheney and Blair parade around draping themselves in moral justifications for their inhumane deeds and despicable acts.
The fact that Americans tolerate crimes against humanity by their own leaders is evidence that Americans are exceptional only in their hubris.
Paul Craig Roberts , was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington ; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice
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