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WTO protests continue
(Michelle MacAfee, Canadian Press, July 29, 2003)
Several hundred protesters were back on downtown Montreal streets Tuesday, hoping to disrupt a World Trade Organization meeting. . . . "We know when we come here as political dissidents against the WTO mini-ministerial (meeting), we face repression, we face possible police brutality, so of course it does have some effect on some people," Herman said. . . . "The message today that we're sending out on the street is that our presence alone is a disruption." . . . Herman said the arrest of more than 200 people on Monday may have put a chill on the number of demonstrators Tuesday. . . . Organizers said if police ordered the crowd to disperse, protesters would head to the courthouse to express solidarity with those already arrested. . . . Some of the protesters arrested Monday were fined $200 and others were kept behind bars. Those rounded up faced charges of mischief, obstructing justice and taking part in an illegal protest. . . .
"A lot of people will probably be completely frozen by the fact it could happen again," Khadir said Tuesday. "This is exactly what needs to be corrected."

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 12:40 PM

 

Is America supporting tyranny again with its ‘war-on-terror'
(Jamie Barton, Al Bawaba, June 6, 2003)
it is the American policy on human rights abroad that has become the first casualty of this new war on terror. . . . The U.S-led campaign against terrorism has brought a resurgence in realpolitik, as the very nature of this new war requires a great deal of cooperation from other countries. This provides an opportunity for many countries to attempt to take advantage of American desperation to respond to 9/11 . . . Pakistan, for example, was viewed with great mistrust by the U.S pre-9/11. Not only was it a military autocracy, it was supporting religious extremists in Kashmir and had tested nuclear weapons. But Washington needed Musharraf’s assistance in toppling the Taliban regime, so within days a new, close relationship between the two countries was forged. The U.S lifted its sanctions on the Central Asian country and gave it a guarantee of aid, arms and enduring friendship. . . . the U.S gets what it desires and the obliging regime is to be contracted more flexibility to handle its own internal opposition and struggles as it sees fit. This is not a pleasant development, especially for those minorities and political opponents who live under authoritarian regimes across the globe. . . . Pakistan’s newly unbound free hand allowed Musharraf’s military junta, who seized power in a coup, to launch a massive internal crackdown on radical Islamic opposition parties and a brutal suppression of popular dissent against the governments overt cooperation with the Bush administration. . . . Nationalist movements, including the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, are now increasingly able to be branded and labelled as Islamic terrorists and fundamentalists by certain regimes who have wandered into the American inner circle since 9/11 and are now able to brutally suppress them to somewhat muffled at best, if not inaudible criticism from Washington. . . . One of the most worrying state of affairs is the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has indicated that he sees the bloody battle against the Chechens as under the umbrella of the ‘war on terror’ and claiming that Russia is a target of Islamic extremism, warranting Washington’s silence on a subject which, along with human-rights organisations, it used to be very vocal about. . . . But with Putin equating his struggle with the Chechens with Bush’s fight against Al-Qaeda, consequent U.S acceptance will identify the United States with Russia’s ruinous war and feed the myth that America cares little about Muslim lives. . . . The U.S cannot afford to be seen to be doing this - as it already is in regard to Israel and the Palestinians; to conceitedly put its own security before that of the suppressed, disenfranchised poor people of the Arab world. By covering its eyes to acts of state terrorism and repression in certain nations that may prove useful in prosecuting the new war, the U.S will suffer in the long term, only serving to create even more angry young Muslims to carry on the struggle to be heard and to continue the jihad against the seemingly disinterested West.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 1:49 PM

 

U.N. Chief: N. Korea a Nuclear Threat
(Danica Kirka, Associated Press, July 18, 2003)
The U.N. atomic agency's chief called North Korea ``the most serious threat'' to nuclear proliferation . . . The North Koreans last week claimed to have finished extracting plutonium - a key ingredient for nuclear weapons - from 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods. ElBaradei urged renewed international efforts to pressure North Korea to honor the treaty designed to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. . . . ``In my view, the situation in the DPRK is currently the most immediate and most serious threat to the nuclear nonproliferation regime,'' ElBaradei said, using the initials for the country's formal name, Democratic People's Republic of Korea. . . . North Korea expelled nuclear inspectors from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency in December, shortly after it dismantled U.N. seals and monitoring cameras installed at the country's nuclear facilities. The facilities had been mothballed under the 1994 agreement. . . . ElBaradei also said he has urged the international coalition authority administering Iraq to do everything it can to recover up to 22 pounds of uranium compounds looted from the country's main nuclear complex at Tuwaitha. . . . The IAEA chief said he called upon the coalition authority ``to ensure the physical protection of the entire nuclear inventory in Iraq and to make every effort to recover, where possible, the looted material and place it under agency safeguards.''

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 1:14 PM

 

CIA: Assessment of Syria's WMD exaggerated
(Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay, Knight Ridder Newspapers, July 15, 2003)
In a new dispute over interpreting intelligence data, the CIA and other agencies objected vigorously to a Bush administration assessment of the threat of Syria's weapons of mass destruction that was to be presented Tuesday on Capitol Hill. . . . After the objections, the planned testimony by Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, a leading administration hawk, was delayed until September. . . . Syria has come under increasing U.S. pressure during and after the Iraq war for allegedly giving refuge to members of Saddam Hussein's regime, allowing foreign fighters to cross into Iraq to attack U.S. troops and for backing Palestinian militant groups that were conducting terrorist strikes on Israel. After Saddam's government fell, some Bush aides hinted that the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus might be the next U.S. target. . . . The objections by the intelligence community come as the Bush administration is defending itself over complaints that it embellished intelligence secrets to justify the war against Iraq. . . . Bolton's planned remarks caused a "revolt" among intelligence experts who thought they inflated the progress Syria has made in its weapons programs, said a U.S. official who isn't from the CIA, but was involved in the dispute. . . . The CIA's objections and comments alone ran to 35 to 40 pages, the official said. . . . The conflict appears to illustrate how battles over prewar intelligence on Iraq have spread to other issues and have heightened sensitivity among Bush aides about public descriptions of threats to the United States. . . . Bolton set off a controversy in May 2002 when he asserted in a speech that Cuba has a biological warfare program. A State Department intelligence expert, Christian Westermann, recently told a closed-door Senate Intelligence Committee hearing that available intelligence data don't support that assertion, U.S. officials have said. . . . In speeches and congressional testimony over the past year, Bolton has identified Syria among a handful of countries whose alleged pursuit of biological and chemical weapons makes them threats to international stability.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 6:41 PM

 

Looting. It is as American as apple pie.
[Click the above link for a flash presentation of American values.]

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 12:14 PM

 

Middle East Surprises for America
(John V. Whitbeck, Special to Arab News, 10 July 2003)
The determined resistance of some Iraqis to the Western occupation of their country seems to have been genuinely unanticipated. It should not have been. If the United States were conquered and occupied by Arab armies which announced their intention to stay for years and to restructure the country’s government and economy along Islamic lines, would no Americans resist, not even “hardcore Bush loyalists” or “Republican Party remnants”? . . . Before and after the conquest of Iraq, proponents of the war evoked the vision of a virtuous “domino effect” toppling authoritarian regimes in the region and replacing them with modernizing, Western-oriented “democratic” ones. As a genuine reason for war, such a democratic mission always lacked credibility with those who actually live in the region, who recognize that, so long as America and Israel act like Siamese twins joined at the brain, any government in the Arab world which actually reflected the will of its people would be fervently anti-American. . . . Of course, Americans do like elections — provided that they produce the “right” result. (Donald Rumsfeld has made clear that an Islamic government will not be permitted in Iraq even if most of Iraq’s people were to favor one.) However, few believe that the United States would really prefer a democratically elected government which is anti-American to an authoritarian regime which is pro-American. . . . So, what happened in the elections in Kuwait, the most pro-American country in the Arab world, with the most reason (by far) to be pro-American? The “liberals”, who seek a more open and modern society and had hoped to make significant gains, were almost wiped out, retaining only three seats (down from eight) in the 50-seat Parliament. The remaining 47 seats went to conservatives and Islamists, including radical fundamentalists. The “domino effect” has not worked out — at least not falling in the “right” direction — next door to Iraq. What would genuinely fair elections produce in other Arab countries, whose people are far less pro-American? A quiet burial for the “democratic mission” can be anticipated. . . . While the “road map” is widely described as a “peace plan”, in Arab eyes, “peace” in Israel/Palestine requires ending the occupation, not crushing all resistance to it, while, in most of the world, true “peace” is recognized to require some measure of “justice”, a word rigorously avoided by successive American governments in connection with their successive “peace plans”. . . . Arabs are not fools. Even if they have not read the “road map”, when they see both George W. Bush and Colin Powell insisting that a total cessation of Palestinian violence is not good enough and that the Palestinian leadership must also eliminate any capability for resuming violent resistance in the future, they can recognize that the true American objective is not “peace”, as they understand the word, but, at best, simply “quiet” — Palestinian acquiescence in the occupation and acceptance of whatever terms Israel may wish to impose on a defeated and demoralized people — and, at worst, provoking a Palestinian civil war. . . . In March 2002, the Arab League, in its Beirut Declaration, dramatically offered full peace and normal diplomatic and economic relations between Israel and all Arab states in return for a total end to the occupation of all Arab lands occupied in 1967. . . . The true “road map” confronting Iraq, Palestine and the region as a whole is not one of steady progress toward peace, prosperity, Western-style democracy and increasingly pro-American sentiments. Unless the world focuses soon on the real problem and its only real solution, and insists on the prompt implementation of that solution, we are all risking a rapid descent into hell.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 2:38 PM

 

Lawyers Furious as US Builds Death Chambers ... Horrors of the Nazis Remembered
(Frances Gibb and Tim Reid, Times UK Online, 05 July 2003)
LAWYERS expressed outrage yesterday at plans to put al-Qaeda suspects, including two Britons and an Australian, on military trial in Guantanamo Bay. . . . They would effectively be tried by a “kangaroo court”, stripped of all basic rights of due process that would be afforded in criminal courts in Britain or America, they said. . . . Matthias Kelly, QC, chairman of the Bar of England and Wales, said that the proposed trials were “totally illegitimate and a violation of every rule in international law”. . . . He said: “The construction of execution chambers makes virtually every lawyer in the Western world extremely angry. The idea that there is an artificial creation or enclave which, according to the Americans, is beyond the purview of all recognised systems of law is repugnant.” . . . Neal Sonnett, a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers, said: “The State Department issues a report every year in which it criticises those nations that conduct trials before secret military tribunals. What I’m hearing sounds alarmingly like something similar.” . . . Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, has delegated to his deputy, the hawkish Paul Wolfowitz, the final decision on whether the prosecutions will proceed.

[Comment: It looks like Rumsfeld, Bush, and Wolfowitz are building their own version of Auschwitz. First it is the hapless souls being held in Guantanamo ... but who will be next? ... People of Color? Drug Offenders? MP3 Downloaders? ... where will it end? ... the answer to that question is up to all of us.]

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 11:23 AM

 

Confess or die, US tells jailed Britons
(Martin Bright, Kamal Ahmed and Peter Beaumont, The Observer, July 6, 2003)
The two British terrorist suspects facing a secret US military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay will be given a choice: plead guilty and accept a 20-year prison sentence, or be executed if found guilty. . . . The news comes as Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, prepares to urge US Secretary of State Colin Powell to repatriate the two Britons. He will say that they should face a fair trial here under English law. Backed by Home Secretary David Blunkett, Straw will make it clear that the Government opposes the death penalty and wants to see both men tried 'under normal judicial process'. . . . According to US legal and constitutional experts, the Final Rule, the regulations that will govern the military commissions, has rendered a fair trial almost impossible. . . . The concerns follow allegations by Amnesty and other human rights groups that US detainees in Guantanamo Bay have suffered severe abuse, including beatings that may have led to the death of two men held at the US detention facility at Bagram. . . . In March, Amnesty wrote to President Bush to complain about the treatment of detainees after US military officials reportedly confirmed that post-mortem reports in the cases of the two men who died at Bagram gave cause of death as 'homicide' and 'blunt force injuries'.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 7:31 PM

 

Manufacturing ‘Terror’
(William Bowles, Information Clearing House, July 4, 2003)
The vast and overwhelming propaganda onslaught that we’ve been subjected to since 911, is indicative of the lengths to which the ruling elites are prepared to go to in order to gain our consent for their actions. Indeed, the nature and scope of the propaganda war indicates just how insecure they feel. Appeals to patriotism and scaremongering tactics (eg the Anthrax attacks) have only short-term effects on the population. Sooner or later, the population is going to demand results, if indeed ‘results’ are possible to produce. And then one has to consider the idea that ‘results’ might have to be manufactured. . . . It’s more than possible that 911, Anthrax attacks et al, are in fact, manufactured by the ruling elites themselves in order to justify increased repression at home and the overthrow of the international order. . . . there are more than enough examples from history that back up this claim, whether they’re faked provocations aka Tonkin Gulf that dragged the US into a war that cost millions of lives or the sacrifice of US sailors during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, so it’s by no means a far-fetched or outlandish assertion. . . . And of course, the mass media is, for the most part, complicit in the process of pouring scorn on the ‘conspiricists’ as it did for example, on the "it’s all about oil" argument. As the Goebbel’s doctrine so correctly says, repeat a lie often enough, eventually the lie will replace reality. And people are very reluctant to think of their political leaders as nothing more than a bunch of lying scumbags and ruthless opportunists, motivated either by simple greed (aka the Bush family) or by some fundamantal flaw in their personality ie, Tony Blair. After all, they all look so ‘normal’ and come across to us as reasonable, ‘civilised’ people, how could they actually deceive us? . . . Yet unless one does stand up and be counted, repression will only get worse. What is ‘normal’ discourse and debate slides off the scale. The ‘middle road’ is all of a sudden, the extreme. Reality shifts. Those of us who oppose our governments policies find ourselves ‘out on a limb’. The dominant culture is all-pervasive, all-powerful. It commands the mass media, it compromises vast armies of experts, from journalists to civil servants, from judges to soldiers. Maintaining the status quo, is more than simply ‘not rocking the boat’, it’s peoples lives and livelyhoods. . . . As time passes, it will be harder and harder to hide the reality of our situation. Lies and propaganda have a finite lifetime. Sooner or later, they will cease to work, as the underlying reality replaces the illusions.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 12:40 PM

 

You Are an Arab; Imagine That

(Ramzy Baroud, Tuesday, July 01 2003)

“Why are Arabs always angry?” a reader recently asked me, in a message filled with sarcasm and thoughtlessness. I refrained from replying right a way, because he seemed little interested in listening. I couldn’t help but wonder how he might feel if he himself was an Arab. So, I am writing back ..

Imagine for a moment that you are an Arab.

For years you watch Palestinians being slaughtered, their land invaded and reinvaded, and for years witnessing the United States government block any attempt to punish those who aggressed upon the people whom you call “my people”.

Not only have the United States’ vetoes at the United Nations Security Council suffocated any initiative to deploy even unarmed observers to provide badly needed protection for Palestinians, but, thanks to billions of annual US funds, Israel manages to expand illegal settlements and provide its army with the greatest killing machines of all time.

Your human rights are never brought up unless an outside power is using the subject to inflict political pressure on your ruler. You’re worth a press release by a human rights group once every blue moon, a release that no one bothers to read. You simply matter to no one.

You are an Arab and have been watching Iraq being invaded under the pretext that it possesses weapons of mass destruction, enough to annihilate civilization, as we know it. You are gripped by fear, not fearing the harm of the alleged weapons, but the disastrous attack and occupation of a battered country, one that you often called the center of your civilization.

Then, since you are still an Arab, you watch giant multinational corporations flood Iraq, to buy and sell its oil without the consent of its people. In fact, you witness Israelis flooding the “center of your civilization”, seeking cheap oil and demanding pipelines that would go through their ports.

Meanwhile, Israel still holds millions of your Palestinian brethren hostage to curfews and checkpoints amid the constant fears of endless deadly strikes and assassinations.

To your surprise, you learn that no weapons of mass destruction are even found in Iraq. You hear top American officials say that Saddam might have in fact destroyed his weapons prior to the invasion. You hear another say Iraq is swimming in oil. You knew it all along and were shunned when you tried to explain what you had discovered.

You watch thousands of right wing missionaries flooding the weakened Iraq, vowing to convert your people to a religion that is not theirs. Others call your prophet a “devil” and your religion “evil” and demand that your school curriculum change to fit the agenda of some think-tank 15,000 miles away from your home, alien to your culture, language and heritage.

You learn of occupation soldiers mass raping your brothers and sisters in Iraq. The British daily mirror tells you that soldiers enjoyed themselves to the point that they took photos of raped men to commemorate the occasion, and were only uncovered by a chance.

You watch your people’s history looted and set ablaze.

You cannot help but notice that American weapons were not only killing Iraqis, but Palestinians too. You learn that mostly American made weapons are the ones that claimed the lives of those Palestinian children you keep seeing on television.

You learned that the man who caused their death, Ariel Sharon has been granted a new title, “a man of peace” by President George Bush. You wonder if Bush realizes that Sharon’s last nickname was the “Bucher of Beirut.”

You try to escape. You invested in a small satellite dish and decide to watch mindless entertainment. To your surprise, you and your people are the hot topic for entertainment. In Hollywood, you are filthy, smelly, repulsive and backward. You deserve no respect. You are the bad “Ayrab”, the devious womanizer whose death in the end of a movie must symbolize a happy ending.

You try to once more escape, this time you run away from oppression, poverty and your bitter memories. You sneak into France, to Italy, to Spain, to Australia, to the US. You think your college degree will open doors for you. They are all sealed and you find your self handcuffed and “shipped” back.

You lose it one day, and escape to Tora Bora in Afghanistan with all the other “angry Arabs.” They are all killed when a “war on terrorism” is declared. You find your way through Pakistani villages to your home country and there you are caught and tortured. Once you even cross the desert to Iraq. There you are killed. Your body is left on the road leading to Baghdad for days.

Then your brother decides to chase after another destiny. He chooses another route for himself. He manages to live in the United States. He spends his nights writing letters to the editor expressing the rage you once felt. They are never published. He reflects on his feelings by keeping a journal filled with poetry, flags and pictures he draws of Palestinian children.

He hears US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice threaten other countries in your region that they will be dealt with through a “made in America” solution.

Later that night, he watches a program aired by BBC called “Israel’s Secret Weapons.” The program says that Israel is the “world's sixth largest nuclear arsenal with small tactical nuclear weapons ... as well as medium-range nuclear missiles launchable from air, land or sea.”

He also learns that Israel has undeclared biological and chemical capabilities and used an unknown gas against Palestinians in Gaza two years ago that sent hundreds of people to the hospital with severe convulsions.

No US official comments on the reports, except Mrs. Rice, who describes Israel as the United States’ partner and exchanges friendly smiles and warm handshakes with those who developed such deadly agents when she is in Tel Aviv. Also, the overwhelming majority of the US Congress just finishes signing a letter to Bush demanding that he never pressure Israel.

Your brother writes a letter to the editor expressing his dismay, as he never did before. No one responds and the letter is never published. Instead, he resorts to his journal. He writes a poem filled with curses and angry phrases that didn’t rhyme.

I still cannot help but wonder: If you were an Arab, wouldn’t you be angry?

[Ramzy Baroud is the editor-in-chief of Palestine Chronicle, and the editor of the anthology titled: Searching Jenin, Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion. He can be reached at editor@palestinechronicle.com ]

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 11:01 AM