Freddie Mac-Fannie Mae to Blow Billions

Editor's note: I qm moving to post at the secondary blog (also see new articles below).
See stories at the overflow blog.
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Freddie Mac to Refinance Loans

$20 Billion to Help Subprime Owners

By Dina ElBoghdady

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 19, 2007; D01

Freddie Mac, one of the nation's largest mortgage investors, plans to buy about $20 billion worth of mortgages that would primarily refinance the loans of people in danger of losing their homes.

The McLean company is targeting the loans of subprime borrowers, who typically have blemished credit records or other factors that make them risky to lenders. Since the housing market softened, many such borrowers have missed payments and defaulted at record rates in parts of the country.

Freddie Mac's announcement followed the unveiling earlier this week of a similar campaign by its larger rival Fannie Mae, which plans to allow lenders to qualify more subprime borrowers for refinancing.

Richard F. Syron, Freddie Mac's chief executive, announced his company's plan at a Capitol Hill briefing yesterday. The goal is to buy fixed and adjustable-rate mortgages with more affordable terms, starting midsummer, he said.

The idea is that if more troubled borrowers could refinance their homes, they would not lose them, and if investors such as Freddie Mac are willing to buy these loans, lenders would be willing to make them.

Freddie Mac is allocating money to this troubled sector "because it's needed and because, quite honestly, it's a good business opportunity," Syron said in an interview. Considering that the average mortgage is $150,000, the $20 billion Freddie Mac has allocated would cover about 130,000 mortgages, he said.

Freddie Mac has not decided exactly what terms it will set for the loans it will buy. Fannie Mae's program, HomeStay, would allow lenders to refinance without having to wait until the borrowers clear unpaid bills on their credit reports. It also would stretch the loan term to a maximum of 40 years from the current 30-year limit. Fannie Mae has not placed a dollar amount on how many such loans it would buy.

Neither government-sponsored enterprise has gained approval for its plan from federal regulators.

The heightened activity comes as both companies face pressure to demonstrate that they perform a public service. The House Financial Services Committee, led by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), has passed a bill to tighten regulation of the companies and to require them to contribute to an affordable housing fund. Frank said the public has not received enough value in return for the commercial advantages Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac get from their government ties.

Individual lenders are also under pressure to stem foreclosures. Yesterday, big lender Washington Mutual said it will refinance up to $2 billion in subprime mortgages.

Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac, created to promote homeownership, do not lend money to borrowers. Rather, they invest in mortgages and usually package them into securities for sale to investors.

Neither company buys many subprime loans from lenders, but they are fairly active in investing in securities backed by such loans.

Freddie Mac plans to keep the loans affected by yesterday's announcement in its portfolio, Syron said. That way, it can launch the program quickly and alter loan terms if necessary, which is difficult to do if the loans are sold to investors.

The loans Freddie Mac buys under this program would not be limited to refinancing, though refinancing is the initial focus now that millions of people have adjustable-rate mortgages with low teaser rates that will soon spike.

Staff writer David S. Hilzenrath contributed to this report.

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A Subprime Fix From Fannie and Freddie

By S.J. Caplan

April 18, 2007

Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE) made progress on their recent word that they would offer new subprime products when top execs from each government-sponsored enterprise testified on Tuesday before the House Financial Services Committee.

Fannie discussed a new three-pronged initiative, dubbed "HomeStay." The program involves working with lender partners to help homeowners stave off immediate foreclosure through financial incentives and workout solutions, expanding lending options to help refinance subprime borrowers out of ARMs and into long-term fixed rate products, and counseling future homeowners about making appropriate mortgage choices.

Freddie spoke about restricting subprime investments, eliminating no-income, no-asset verification loans ("liar loans"), and urging subprime lenders to escrow borrower funds for taxes and insurance. The GSE also announced the midsummer introduction of more consumer-friendly subprime mortgages in the form of 30-year and possibly 40-year fixed-rate mortgages and ARMs with reduced margins and longer fixed-rate periods. Freddie also called upon regulation that ensures uniform and consistent consumer disclosures.

Going forward, a combination of increased consumer education and regulation restricting predatory practices is vital. Certainly, swapping out of an ARM and into a long-term fixed-rate mortgage makes sense for most subprime borrowers. But while these suggestions are commendable, they will not serve as a panacea for all existing subprime ills. With close to 2.4 million homeowners facing default on their subprime mortgages over the next several years, foreclosures will mount despite sensible refinancing options and increased financial awareness.

Nor should Fannie and Freddie be charged with curing the system. Given their blemished accounting records, the GSEs provide easy targets for retribution by politicians seeking to capitalize on public clamor for subprime reform. Fannie and Freddie should not bear this blame. In the same congressional testimony, Fannie counted less than 2.5% of its business as subprime, and Freddie reviewed a litany of unilateral, voluntary steps taken since 2000 to improve subprime practices.

As Congress continues to debate regulation of the mortgage finance giants, it would be wise to bear in mind that the missions of the GSEs is to enhance liquidity, stability, and affordability in the housing market. Fannie and Freddie demonstrate their commitment to that goal, and should not be regulated as a proxy for the irresponsible practices of certain subprime mortgage lenders. While internal housekeeping issues at Fannie and Freddie remain, one hopes that regulatory measures will not be imposed which will hamper their ability to responsibly and flexibly meet the needs of the market.

Hypocrisy: Thy Name Is Bush

Related
A terrorist walks
Luis Posada Carriles has boasted of bombing Havana hotels, yet American justice lets him go free.
LUIS POSADA CARRILES - THE DECLASSIFIED RECORD
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consortiumnews.com

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)

George W. Bush likes to present the “war on terror” as a clear-cut moral crusade in which evildoers who kill innocent civilians must be brought harshly to justice, along with the leaders of countries that harbor terrorists. There are no grays, only blacks and whites.

But evenhanded justice is not the true core principle of the Bush Doctrine. The real consistency is hypocrisy: violence which Bush favors – no matter how wanton the slaughter of innocents – is justifiable, while violence that goes against Bush’s interests – even an insurgency against a foreign military occupation – must be punished without remorse as “terrorism.”

In other words, if Bush hates the perpetrators, they are locked up indefinitely without charge and, at his discretion, can be subjected to “alternative interrogation techniques,” what most of the world considers torture. The rule of law is out the window. Wild West hangin' justice is in. Even the ancient fair trial right of habeas corpus is discarded.

However, when the killers of civilians are on Bush’s side, they get the full panoply of legal protections – and every benefit of the doubt. Under this Bush double standard, therefore, right-wing Cuban terrorists Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, though implicated in a string of murderous attacks on civilians, get the see-no-evil treatment.

On April 19, the 79-year-old Posada was released on bail from federal custody for an immigration violation and allowed to fly to Miami where he will live at home while his case winds its way through the U.S. courts. Bosch, too, has been allowed to live out his golden years in south Florida with the help and protection of the Bush family.

But the evidence in U.S. government files is overwhelming that Posada and Bosch were the architects of the 1976 mid-air bombing of a civilian Cubana airliner, killing 73 people, including young members of the Cuban national fencing team.

Since the conspiracy was hatched in Caracas, Venezuela, where Posada worked as a Venezuelan intelligence officer, the Venezuelan government has sought Posada’s extradition. However, when a Posada friend testified at Posada’s immigration hearing that Venezuela practices torture, Bush administration lawyers let the unverified claim go unchallenged, leading the judge to forbid Posada’s deportation there.

So, the Bush administration, which has subjected its own terrorism suspects to such practices as painful stress positions and simulated drowning by “water-boarding,” wasn’t willing to take the chance that Posada might be abused in Venezuela, even though there was no real evidence that he would be.

Justifying Terrorism

The Bush administration also took no note a year ago when Bosch publicly justified the 1976 mid-air bombing. The stunning TV interview of Bosch by reporter Juan Manuel Cao on Miami’s Channel 41 was cited in articles on the Internet by José Pertierra, a lawyer for the Venezuelan government. But Bosch’s comments caused him no further difficulty. [For Pertierra’s story, see Counterpunch, April 11, 2006]

“Did you down that plane in 1976?” Cao asked Bosch.

“If I tell you that I was involved, I will be inculpating myself,” Bosch answered, “and if I tell you that I did not participate in that action, you would say that I am lying. I am therefore not going to answer one thing or the other.”

But when Cao asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the plane crashed off the coast of Barbados, Bosch responded, “In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.”

“But don’t you feel a little bit for those who were killed there, for their families?” Cao asked.

“Who was on board that plane?” Bosch responded. “Four members of the Communist Party, five North Koreans, five Guyanese.” [Officials tallies actually put the Guyanese dead at 11.]

Bosch added, “Four members of the Communist Party, chico! Who was there? Our enemies…”

“And the fencers?” Cao asked about Cuba’s amateur fencing team that had just won gold, silver and bronze medals at a youth fencing competition in Caracas. “The young people on board?”

Bosch replied, “I was in Caracas. I saw the young girls on television. There were six of them. After the end of the competition, the leader of the six dedicated their triumph to the tyrant. … She gave a speech filled with praise for the tyrant.

“We had already agreed in Santo Domingo, that everyone who comes from Cuba to glorify the tyrant had to run the same risks as those men and women that fight alongside the tyranny.” [The comment about Santo Domingo was an apparent reference to a strategy meeting by a right-wing terrorist organization, CORU, which took place in the Dominican Republic in 1976.]

“If you ran into the family members who were killed in that plane, wouldn’t you think it difficult?” Cao asked.

“No, because in the end those who were there had to know that they were cooperating with the tyranny in Cuba,” Bosch answered.

In an article about Bosch’s remarks, lawyer Pertierra said the answers “give us a glimpse into the mind of the kind of terrorist that the United States government harbors and protects in Miami; terrorists that for the last 47 years have waged a bloody and ruthless war against the Cuban people.”

CIA Files

Beyond Bosch’s incriminating statements, the evidence of his and Posada’s guilt is overwhelming. Declassified U.S. documents show that soon after the Cubana Airlines plane was blown out of the sky on Oct. 6, 1976, the CIA, then under the direction of George H.W. Bush, identified Posada and Bosch as the masterminds of the bombing.

But in fall 1976, Bush’s boss, President Gerald Ford, was in a tight election battle with Democrat Jimmy Carter and the Ford administration wanted to keep intelligence scandals out of the newspapers. So Bush and other officials kept the lid on the investigations. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Still, inside the U.S. government, the facts were known. According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in anti-communist Cuban extremists Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela’s intelligence agency, DISIP.

The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia “to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela.”

On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch’s honor during which Bosch requested cash from the Venezuelan government in exchange for assurances that Cuban exiles wouldn’t demonstrate during Andres Perez’s planned trip to the United Nations.

“A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details,’” the CIA report said.

“Following the 6 October Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory.”

The CIA report was sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as well as to the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies, according to markings on the cable.

In South America, police began rounding up suspects. Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who got off the Cubana plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb. They named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack.

A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents.

Posada and Bosch were charged in Venezuela for the Cubana Airlines bombing, but the men denied the accusations. The case soon became a political tug-of-war, since the suspects were in possession of sensitive Venezuelan government secrets that could embarrass President Andres Perez.

Lost Interest

After the Reagan-Bush administration took power in Washington in 1981, the momentum for fully unraveling the mysteries of anti-communist terrorist plots dissipated. The Cold War trumped any concern about right-wing terrorism.

In 1985, Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison, reportedly with the help of Cuban exiles. In his autobiography, Posada thanked Miami-based Cuban activist Jorge Mas Canosa for providing the $25,000 that was used to bribe guards who allowed Posada to walk out of prison.

Another Cuban exile who aided Posada was former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, who was close to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush and who was overseeing secret supply shipments to the Nicaraguan contra rebels, a pet project of President Ronald Reagan.

After fleeing Venezuela, Posada joined Rodriguez in Central America and was assigned the job of paymaster for pilots in the White House-run contra-supply operation. When one of the contra-supply planes was shot down inside Nicaragua in October 1986, Posada was responsible for alerting U.S. officials to the crisis and then shutting down the operation’s safe houses in El Salvador.

Even after the exposure of Posada’s role in the contra-supply operation, the U.S. government made no effort to bring the accused terrorist to justice.

By the late 1980s, Orlando Bosch also was out of Venezuela’s jails and back in Miami. But Bosch, who had been implicated in about 30 violent attacks, was facing possible deportation by U.S. officials who warned that Washington couldn’t credibly lecture other countries about terrorism while protecting a terrorist like Bosch.

But Bosch got lucky. Jeb Bush, then an aspiring Florida politician, led a lobbying drive to prevent the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from expelling Bosch. In 1990, the lobbying paid dividends when Jeb's dad, President George H.W. Bush, blocked proceedings against Bosch, letting the unapologetic terrorist stay in the United States.

In 1992, also during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, the FBI interviewed Posada about the Iran-Contra scandal for 6 ½ hours at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras.

Posada filled in some blanks about the role of Bush’s vice presidential office in the secret contra operation. According to a 31-page summary of the FBI interview, Posada said Bush’s national security adviser, Donald Gregg, was in frequent contact with Felix Rodriguez.

“Posada … recalls that Rodriguez was always calling Gregg,” the FBI summary said. “Posada knows this because he’s the one who paid Rodriguez’ phone bill.” After the interview, the FBI agents let Posada walk out of the embassy to freedom. [For details, see Parry’s Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth.]

More Attacks

Posada soon returned to his anti-Castro plotting.

In 1994, Posada set out to kill Castro during a trip to Cartagena, Colombia. Posada and five cohorts reached Cartagena, but the plan flopped when security cordons prevented the would-be assassins from getting a clean shot at Castro, according to a Miami Herald account. [Miami Herald, June 7, 1998]

The Herald also described Posada’s role in a lethal 1997 bombing campaign against popular hotels and restaurants inside Cuba that killed an Italian tourist. The story cited documentary evidence that Posada arranged payments to conspirators from accounts in the United States.

“This afternoon you will receive via Western Union four transfers of $800 each … from New Jersey,” said one fax signed by SOLO, a Posada alias.

Posada landed back in jail in 2000 after Cuban intelligence uncovered a plot to assassinate Castro by planting a bomb at a meeting the Cuban leader planned with university students in Panama.

Panamanian authorities arrested Posada and other alleged co-conspirators in November 2000. In April 2004, they were sentenced to eight or nine years in prison for endangering public safety.

Four months after the sentencing, however, lame-duck Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso – who lives in Key Biscayne, Florida, and has close ties to the Cuban-American community and to George W. Bush’s administration – pardoned the convicts.

Despite press reports saying Moscoso had been in contact with U.S. officials about the pardons, the State Department denied that it pressured Moscoso to release the Cuban exiles. After the pardons and just two months before Election 2004, three of Posada’s co-conspirators – Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon and Gaspar Jimenez – arrived in Miami to a hero’s welcome, flashing victory signs at their supporters.

While the terrorists celebrated, U.S. authorities watched the men – also implicated in bombings in New York, New Jersey and Florida – alight on U.S. soil. As Washington Post writer Marcela Sanchez noted in a September 2004 article about the Panamanian pardons, “there is something terribly wrong when the United States, after Sept. 11 (2001), fails to condemn the pardoning of terrorists and instead allows them to walk free on U.S. streets.” [Washington Post, Sept. 3, 2004]

Posada Arrives

Posada reportedly sneaked into the United States in early 2005 and his presence was an open secret in Miami for weeks before U.S. authorities did anything. The New York Times summed up Bush’s dilemma if Posada decided to seek U.S. asylum.

“A grant of asylum could invite charges that the Bush administration is compromising its principle that no nation should harbor suspected terrorists,” the Times wrote. “But to turn Mr. Posada away could provoke political wrath in the conservative Cuban-American communities of South Florida, deep sources of support and campaign money for President Bush and his brother, Jeb.” [NYT, May 9, 2005]

Only after Posada called a news conference to announce his presence was the Bush administration shamed into arresting him. But even then, the administration balked at sending Posada back to Venezuela where the government of Hugo Chavez – unlike some of its predecessors – was eager to prosecute.

At a U.S. immigration hearing in 2005, Posada’s defense attorney called as a witness a Posada friend who alleged that Venezuela’s government practices torture. Bush administration lawyers didn’t challenge the claim, leading the immigration judge to bar Posada’s deportation to Venezuela.

Venezuela’s Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez accused the Bush administration of applying “a cynical double standard” in the “war on terror.”

“The United States presents itself as a leader against terrorism, invades countries, restricts the civil rights of Americans in order to fight terrorism, but when it is about its own terrorists, it denies that they be tried,” Alvarez said.

As for the claim that Venezuela practices torture, Alvarez said, “There isn’t a shred of evidence that Posada would be tortured in Venezuela.” Alvarez added that the claim was particularly ironic given widespread press accounts that the Bush administration has abused prisoners at the U.S. military base in Guatanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Posada-Bosch cases point to one unavoidable and unpleasant conclusion: that the Bush family regards terrorism – defined as killing civilians for a political reason – as justified or at least tolerable in cases when their interests match those of the terrorists.

Terrorism is only a moral evil to the Bushes when the violence against civilians clashes with the Bush family’s interests.

This blatant hypocrisy often has been aided and abetted by the U.S. news media, which intuitively understands the double standard and acts accordingly. The U.S. press corps downplays or ignores cases in which terrorism has connections to U.S. government officials – and especially to the Bush family.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com.

101 WAYS TO MASSACRE STUDENTS

Related

Key 'No Child' Initiative Probed
Reading First officials profited off materials toward which federal government steered states.
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April 19, 2007

By Carolyn Baker

Once again, a horrific eruption of violence in the United States has been turned into a National Enquirer “blood and circuses” spectacle on every television network in the nation. Curiously, grotesque and ghastly as the carnage is, it seems that Americans are not impacted by bloodbaths until they occur in their own back yards. Juan Cole said it best yesterday when he stated, “the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech should give us a baseline for what the Iraqis are actually living through. They have two Virginia Tech-style attacks every single day”.

We seem incapable of coming to terms with violence: Either we distance ourselves from it as “something happening over there” or we voyeuristically wallow in it 24/7 with grisly images of a massacre or the incessant repetition of a video tape made by a perpetrator exuding psychotic rage from every pore. In neither case does America appear to be capable of asking the deeper, disturbing questions in relation to such incidents, but obsessively leaps to “the healing” which Gary Corseri so brilliantly slammed in his piece earlier this week, “Blacksburg: Let The Healing Not Begin.”

As I watched some of the coverage of the Virginia Tech incident this past week, I could not help but be reminded of another massacre that occurred thirty-seven years ago next month at Kent State University. On that day I was being pepper gassed as I marched in solidarity at Michigan State with my fallen comrades at Kent State who were massacred by a government which at that very moment was murdering thousands of Cambodians, dropping bombs it swore it wasn’t dropping and lying through its teeth to the American people in the throes of the Vietnam War. Today I teach with a colleague who on May 4, 1970 took a stray bullet at Kent State and became permanently disabled as a result.

But while Kent State and Virginia Tech are venues of physical assault on students, almost no one is aware of the myriad levels on which, in other venues and without the spilling of blood, students are being massacred. Another article this past week which escaped the notice of many but riveted my attention was Danny Schechter’s “A Student Crisis”. Writing, Schechter says, in the spirit of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly”, he reminds us of “the way student loans have become a noose around the necks of a whole generation of students making our colleges and universities likely sets for the next edition of one of those crime scene shows.” Furthermore, in recent weeks the corruption around student loans involving kickbacks, gifts, trips, and other perks to college and university officials involved in the lending process has been exposed and appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. California Congressman, George Miller, compares the corruption and abuse in the student loan industry to that of Halliburton. Moreover, Miller’s investigations have also revealed that as well as being deeply mired in corruption, the industry is also involved in datamining of students’ personal records, ostensibly to determine their eligibility for loans.

Meanwhile says Schecter:

Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest student loan company, announced yesterday that it would be bought by a group of private investors in a $25 billion deal that could reduce public scrutiny of the lender at a time when the student loan industry is under siege.

The enormous deal underscores the potential for profit that Wall Street sees in the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry, even as Congress considers slashing billions of dollars in federal loan subsidies and an expanding nationwide probe reveals fresh conflicts of interest in the student lending world.”

Schechter knows about these things as a result of his splendid documentary “In Debt We Trust” which illumines not only the student loan debacle but the seduction of financially unsophisticated college freshmen into the black hole of credit card debt—an average of $20,000 per college graduate.

To fully comprehend the economic plight of today’s college student/graduate, I strongly recommend Anya Kamenetz’s superb book Generation Debt and her article “Greed Aid” which was part of her 2004 “Generation Debt” series of articles in Village Voice. Kamenetz analyzes the student loan/debt issue and reveals the lifelong misery that it is inflicting on millions of students. Tragically, and God forbid, the seeds sown in this present economic assault on students could eventually produce the harvest of another literal massacre on some college or university campus somewhere in the future by some troubled graduate, buried in mid-life under a crushing mountain of debt.

But the economic warfare being waged on students is only one aspect of the massacre. Even more brutal, yet silent and seemingly benign, is the massacre of minds. Supposedly, students attend college and universities to get an education, and supposedly, even if they attend a community college, they are required to show up with basic skills. Yet anyone who has been teaching college students for the past twenty years knows that only a tiny segment of incoming freshmen are capable of writing an English sentence, and even more frightening is the reality that non-English speakers from other countries are often capable of doing so while students educated in the U.S. aren’t. Sadly, I’ve discovered that overall, college students do not like to read and have trouble concentrating on textbook or other reading assignments. It is not uncommon for them to purchase $150 textbooks and almost never open them. Faculty frequently report that they are only able to lecture 15 or 20 minutes and then must incorporate a Power Point presentation or utilize video or DVD material in order not to lose the attention of their students. In other words, the present generation of high school graduates often finds concepts without the dazzle of special effects, elusive and monotonous.

Increasingly, children in public schools are experiencing horrific levels of violence on a daily basis as they are forced to deal with physical or verbal bullying from other students and ineffectual school administrations with no funds to put bullies and their parents in programs that would adequately address the issue. Periodically, protracted bullying erupts in a Columbine or a Virginia Tech incident, perpetrated either by the bully or one of his victims. Then everyone rushes to “heal and move on”, never willing to explore the deeper roots of the violence.

Overwhelmingly, as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which Greg Palast has so appropriately named “No Child’s Behind Left”, students coming to college from a public school seem to excel in test-taking, but have virtually no critical thinking skills. In my experience, I find that students enjoy critically thinking once they have learned the skill, but they require training for it because it is a foreign concept.

NCLB is a gargantuan assault not only on the minds of public school and college students, but on the entire society. It is, in my opinion, the principal reason, besides skillfully-cultivated fear, that Americans could be lied into the Iraq War. When Colin Powell made his bogus case for war in front of the United Nations in 2003, a society of critical thinkers would have raised their eyebrows and asked more probing questions. As it was, a British news channel exposed his plagiarism of a graduate student’s essay as a fundamental piece of his presentation. (Students serve many purposes for the ruling elite, do they not?) When during that presentation Powell held up a vial of white powder, touting it as anthrax, critically thinking Americans should not have turned as white as the powder with fear, but rather demanded proof that the vial was not filled with baking soda. When Condoleeza Rice threatened that if we did not invade Iraq, a mushroom cloud would hang over America because Iraq was purportedly in the process of manufacturing a nuclear bomb, a country of critical thinkers would have unambiguously and boisterously insisted on proof beyond the whining, photo-op assertions of the former Chevron board member. But as one of my students naively asked later, “If it wasn’t true, why did they have it on CNN?”

My answer: Because CNN is corporate media whose job it is to act as stenographers for the regime and “sell” its agenda to a nation of citizens who are incapable of thinking analytically, and in 2003, the scam was successful beyond the wildest dreams of the necons who devised it.

Naturally, in my field I am constantly reminded of how trivial and irrelevant America’s public education system has rendered the study of history. Most college students have no sense of it and report enduring the mind-numbing boredom of high school history classes either by ditching, text-messaging, or falling asleep. Increasingly, as with art and music programs, funding for history is being slashed both in high schools and colleges and increased for engineering and computer technology programs.

Some years ago I heard John Judge remark that “a people who have no knowledge of their history are easily manipulated and dominated.” Deny students the ability to read, write, critically think, and study history, and you have a nation of sycophants who ask no questions and comply with virtually any directive in the name of patriotism or national security as they are almost certain to do when they are sold the regime’s propaganda regarding the National I.D. Act and the U.S. government’s plan to incorporate its provisions in 2009. After all, who among them is willing to have the privilege of obtaining or renewing a drivers license, opening a bank account, or boarding a plane denied?

So what is the destiny of this generation of students? Where will they end up besides unfathomably in debt? Sadly, they are facing a future hammered by global warming, global energy depletion, and global economic meltdown. They will go forth from the halls of academia, and if they are not well-connected, they will take the jobs they can get. They will graduate into a world of outsourced American jobs which will force them to accept mind and soul-numbing positions with insufficient pay, often with few or no benefits. Those in tech fields may fare better than those in other professions, I wouldn’t be willing to bet that in another decade they will be delirious with a sense of job satisfaction.

Many, wide-eyed with idealism, will enter the teaching profession, determined to teach differently than they were taught, but according to statistics from 2005, half of the teachers surveyed plan to be out of the profession by 2010. These hopeful education majors will vow to give students a genuine education, not just prepare pupils for NCLB tests, but unless they are teaching in private schools where NCLB is not incorporated and which also pay less than public schools, they will be discouraged and demoralized within less than a decade. In public schools they will soon discover that whether they like NCLB or not, their salaries will be tied to the test scores they produce, in which case, why not “teach to the test” instead of giving students an education? They may learn to live with a system that makes authentic teaching virtually impossible, in which case, they will become robotic moving parts in a nationwide dumbing-down mechanism, or choosing not to live with it, they will abandon the career for which they have trained in favor of remaining true to their calling as educators.

Increasingly, trade and tech schools will be the choice of many high school graduates, and a college education will ultimately become untenable financially for the middle-class student and impractical in terms of its value in securing lucrative employment. As the current housing bubble worsens and impacts the credit industry and interest rates, and as the Bush administration endeavors to eliminate the Mortgage Tax Credit, owning one’s home will not be in the future of many college graduates. And given the new bankruptcy laws of 2005, declaring bankruptcy in the face of grinding debt will not be an option, and this generation of graduates will never, ever get ahead financially.

So on the one hand, the carnage at Virginia Tech is equivalent to what innocent Iraqis and most U.S. combat troops experience at least twice a week, and therefore, brings home to our own soil the horrors of mass violence. But at the same time if we are among those critically thinking Americans to whom I alluded above, then we must also consider the full spectrum of assault being waged on today’s students which encompasses high schools, colleges, and universities across America, and we must consider the consequences of those assaults in terms of the misery, despair, and even violence that they are certain to evoke in the coming years.

In recent months I have been pleased to hear of a resurgence of chapters of SDS (Students For A Democratic Society) at U.S. colleges and universities. As well as protesting the Iraq War, some have been instrumental in organizing for wage increases and benefits for campus workers. Hopefully, they will also begin or have already begun to organize against the economic warfare being waged on students by the debt industry.

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Quote of the Week

"I found the situation worse than I expected. I spent time with the children and I was struck by their sense of hopelessness and despair. I have been in other regions where the conflict has been terrible but the children were more resilient and playful. Here they were less so, particularly in the Palestinian refugee camps," she said. Some 1,045 children have been killed in the conflict since 2000, 927 of them Palestinian. -- UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict

Report On Haditha Condemns Marines

Signs of Misconduct Were Ignored, U.S. General Says

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 21, 2007; A01

The Marine Corps chain of command in Iraq ignored "obvious" signs of "serious misconduct" in the 2005 slayings of two dozen civilians in Haditha, and commanders fostered a climate that devalued the life of innocent Iraqis to the point that their deaths were considered an insignificant part of the war, according to an Army general's investigation.

Maj. Gen. Eldon A. Bargewell's 104-page report on Haditha is scathing in its criticism of the Marines' actions, from the enlisted men who were involved in the shootings on Nov. 19, 2005, to the two-star general who commanded the 2nd Marine Division in Iraq at the time. Bargewell's previously undisclosed report, obtained by The Washington Post, found that officers may have willfully ignored reports of the civilian deaths to protect themselves and their units from blame. Though Bargewell found no specific coverup, he concluded that there also was no interest at any level in investigating allegations of a massacre.

"All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics," Bargewell wrote. He condemned that approach because it could desensitize Marines to the welfare of noncombatants. "Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get 'the job done' no matter what it takes."

Bargewell's sharp criticism of the Marine command appears to have been a contributing factor in subsequent efforts by top leaders to ensure that U.S. troops exercise appropriate restraint around civilians. Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, who was the top field commander in Iraq last year, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the top U.S. commander there, have emphasized the importance of protecting the civilian population in counterinsurgency operations and have ordered aggressive investigations of alleged wrongdoing.

Though Bargewell completed his secret report in June 2006, it has not been publicly released because of ongoing criminal investigations of three Marines on murder allegations and four Marine officers who allegedly failed to look into the case. Bargewell's report, now unclassified, focuses on the reporting of the incident and the training and command climate within the Marine Corps leadership; it does not address the actual incident in detail.

The investigation began in March 2006 after an initial inquiry concluded that the Marines did not intentionally kill civilians. Bargewell's team interviewed Marines in Asad in western Iraq and in the United States in April 2006. His final report was submitted to Chiarelli on June 15, 2006.

A Marine Corps spokesman declined to comment yesterday. Marine officials have generally not discussed the incident because it is under investigation.

In the Haditha incident, which has become one of the most notorious alleged atrocities of the Iraq war, Marines killed two dozen civilians after a huge roadside bomb ripped through a Humvee in their convoy, killing one Marine instantly and injuring two others. A Naval Criminal Investigative Service report found that the Marines then killed five unarmed civilians whom they ordered out of a car -- one Marine alleged that another got down on one knee and shot them one by one -- before storming several houses and killing women and children, some of them still in their pajamas and lying in bed.

The Marines have told investigators that they believed they were taking small-arms fire from the houses and that they were following their rules of engagement when they threw grenades and then shot everyone inside.

Bargewell found that, though the Marines were trained correctly, some "did not follow proper house and room techniques" by not positively identifying their targets. Lt. William T. Kallop, the only officer on the scene at the time, ordered the attack on the houses and told investigators that he did not believe the Marines did anything wrong. Kallop received immunity this month and will probably testify at the hearings for the other Marines.

The report notes errors and oversights at all levels of the Marine command in Iraq. Bargewell says that Marines at the squad level came up with a false story; that Kilo Company officers and the commander of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, passed along insufficient information to the regimental commander; and that regimental officers and officers at the 2nd Marine Division ignored signs of a problem and believed the incident to be insignificant. He also accuses the entire chain of failing to recognize the importance of civilian deaths.

Of particular concern to Bargewell was that nearly all Marines looked the other way when confronted with early reports that many civilians had been shot in fighting on the streets of Haditha after a roadside bomb killed a member of their unit. His investigation found that Marines and officers present that day immediately reported numerous civilian deaths to superiors but that the reports were "untimely, inaccurate and incomplete" -- failures he attributed to "inattention and negligence, in certain cases willful negligence."

Then, no one asked any further questions, Bargewell wrote, despite gruesome photographs circulating among junior Marines that showed that women and children had been killed in their beds. He cited several opportunities to investigate that were not taken, such as when more than $40,000 in condolence payments went to Iraqis after the killings.

"I found that the duty to inquire further was so obvious in this case that a reasonable person with knowledge of these events would have certainly made further inquiries," Bargewell wrote. "The most remarkable aspect of the follow-on action with regard to the civilian casualties from the 19 November 2005 Haditha incident was the absence of virtually any kind of inquiry at any level of command into the circumstances surrounding the deaths."

No one recommended an investigation until a Time magazine reporter began asking questions about the attack in January 2006. Maj. Gen. Richard A. Huck, the division commander, dismissed the allegations as insurgent propaganda, according to the report. The battalion commander, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, also refused to investigate, saying, "My marines are not murderers," according to two of his top subordinates. Bargewell called this "an unwillingness, bordering on denial," to examine an incident that could be harmful to his unit.

Chessani's attorneys have denied that he did anything wrong and have said that he informed his commanders about the incident.

The regimental commander, Col. Stephen Davis, was also not interested in investigating, according to the report. "The RCT-2 Commander, however, expressed only mild concern over the potential negative ramifications of indiscriminate killing based on his stated view that the Iraqis and insurgents respect strength and power over righteousness," the report says.

None of Chessani's superiors has been charged with a crime, but in addition to the battalion commander, two captains and a lieutenant have been charged with failing to investigate or with impeding the investigation.

Bargewell found that Huck's division staff viewed the allegations of inappropriate killings as part of insurgent "information operations" and an attempt to make the Marines look bad. He also noted a proclivity among senior officers to look past such allegations even if there was a chance they could be accurate. Bargewell called that approach "myopic and overly simplistic" and said it produced a tendency to judge credibility based on the source of the information rather than on the facts.

Shattered illusions: Azmi Bishara

If the fall of Baghdad exposed the dangers of identifying the state solely in its leader, Iraq's past four years show the folly of those -- especially Arabs -- who thought democracy could be imposed by foreign force, writes Azmi Bishara

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No amount of overstatement does justice to the significance of the fall of Baghdad. Yet stunned gasps at how easily the regime was toppled have little bearing on the subject. When you consider that the invasion was preceded by 10 years of war followed by 15 years of sanctions, the fall wasn't "easy" by any count. The importance of studying the fall of Baghdad resides in the insight it gives into how a regime that rested on a personality cult grew hollow. It sheds light on a type of regime that disengaged itself from the concerns, rights and interests of the people, that lumped its citizens into an amorphous body called "the masses", and that believed that slogans were enough to make this body move, as though it had a single head to process the information it was fed.

If the public can be spontaneously stirred to action by powerful emotions such as jubilation, pent up resentment or outrage, then the government's task would seem to be to create the agenda and institutions for channelling these energies. The kind of regime at hand, however, does not deal well with spontaneity. In fact, spontaneity is one of its greatest fears and it is very good at containing it and sapping it of its force. Such a regime cannot suddenly mobilise "the masses" behind a strategy for resistance, especially when those so-called masses realise that resistance is synonymous with defending the regime.

The people of the Soviet Union fought the Nazi occupation at a time when the Soviet order was at its most robust, in spite of Stalin's dictatorship. But even then, popular resistance alone could not have prevented the fall of Stalingrad and Leningrad. Those battles required the full and concerted strength of the entire army and the state. Contrary to the common impression, democracy doesn't come into it. Many dictatorships have emerged victorious from their wars, just as many democracies have lost theirs. What does come into it is an organised government, the loyalty of the army, current balances of power and the horizons of opportunity this offers. In the case of Iraq, the government and the army were in a disastrous condition.

Of course that regime appealed to the Arab people, who had spontaneously demonstrated their outrage at the invasion. However, as there was no alternative project to steer these energies towards the realisation of a political agenda, they quickly dissipated. In some instances, other regimes succeeded in co-opting these energies in the interest of reaping a quantity of popular kudos. In other cases, governments simply loosened the leash a bit to let their public vent itself in a direction that was not aimed at them.

In Iraq, the eruption of popular energies came after the collapse of the regime that had kept such a tight cap on them. The explosion took two trajectories: one directed inwards, as previously repressed conflicts between diverse social forces erupted; the other directed outwards, in the form of resistance against the occupation. Both trajectories influence and feed off each other, of course. Resistance under conditions of an intense and bloody domestic power struggle quickly descends to a conflict over the reading of the past and, hence, the definition of the future. This conflict, in turn, contributes to the deconstruction of existing identities and the reconstruction of new identities shaped by the current political struggle and by attendant images of the self as victim and the other as interloper or proxy of the interloper, all reinforced by the spiralling cycle of violence, vengeance and retribution. These volatile forces may inflict great moral and material damage on the occupation, as they are doing in Iraq, but they do not offer a viable national alternative to a united Iraq.

In like manner, today's sectarian conflict in Iraq has assumed the guise of a conflict between those with and those opposed to the occupation. Tomorrow, it may assume the shape of a race to oust the occupation and claim the laurels for liberating Iraq -- or for achieving the partition of Iraq, which appears to be the way the current dynamics are heading.

Perhaps the foregoing underscores why it is important to home in on the role and condition of the government and the army when studying the fall of Baghdad. After all, current social circumstances and the resistance have put paid to all studies and theories that preceded the war and that foresaw a victorious entrance of American troops, the clouds of dictatorship dispelled by the purifying forces of aerial and naval bombardment, and the rise of democracy from the devastation, like a phoenix from the ashes.

Democracy is not borne from chaos or from the destruction of a nation, that's for sure. Democracy in Germany and Japan did not emerge from the destruction of those countries, contrary to the ridiculous myth. Democracy is an expression of the sovereignty of a nation and a form of exercising this sovereignty -- the most ideal form of exercising sovereignty, according to advocates of democracy, because it reflects the will of the people. Democracy cannot come into effect by manacling the sovereignty of a nation and dismantling a country as is currently taking place in Iraq and as some mad theorists had envisioned.

It wasn't just Baghdad that fell, not even at first glance. What also came crashing to the ground was the fairytale that one could build democracy just by pointing some mighty barrels at a dictatorship. The commonly held impression is that society without government is civil society. The notion has become something of a fad. But it is an illusion and a dangerous one at that. Society without government is a society at war, a society in which everyone is at the throats of everyone else. With the collapse of the state in Iraq the fires from "society's hell" flared out of control. The dual collapse of the dictatorship of Baghdad and the myth of building democracy on the ruins gave rise to the current Iraqi nightmare.

The current situation in Iraq marks a historic juncture in the Arab world; a juncture that raises a big question mark over the future of the Arab nation state as it currently stands. Iraq has driven home as never before that if this collection of nation states does not develop a higher level of cooperation on the basis of their common Arab identity it will disintegrate into a morass of warring sectarian and tribal groupings and revert to the pre-state era. Globalisation, as opposed to Americanisation and marginalisation, is a process that the Arabs must not allow themselves or their common identity to abandon in its wake. The Arabic language and culture are inherent media of communication and Arab satellite networks, television stations, newspapers, books, coffeehouses and all other public venues offer easily accessible channels for drawing the Arabs together and unifying their agendas. Unless they take advantage of these instruments to develop closer political, economic, social and supranational bonds, globalisation will bring nothing but the fragmentation of each nation state into sectarian and tribal pawns in the political and economic agendas of others.

Iraq's isolation from the rest of the Arab world stemmed, firstly, from the nature of the decision- making process in Iraq, itself; secondly, from the ability of an American-led coalition to corner the country, subject it to a prolonged blockade and then to pound it militarily on pretexts that would not legitimise a war even if they were true; and, thirdly, from the mechanisms that elevated sectarian and tribal groupings into political blocs that recruit allegiance either to or against the occupation on the basis of their various organic affiliations. Building a nation ultimately rests on the creation of a sense of the overriding bonds of citizenship. Yet, prior to this, in both the pre- and post-independence phases, there must exist a sense of common cause -- generally referred to as the right of self-determination -- for it is this that affirms that overriding bond as the primary cornerstone for building the nation. The Arabs, however, have produced neither the type of national entities that can serve as a basis for generating a sense of identification with a common cause or a foundation of citizenship that may be smaller than the Arab world combined but larger than the Arabs within a single sub-regional national entity. What is left and what is now forcefully advancing itself as the intermediary between the individual and tyranny is political unity based on ethnic, religious and tribal affiliations.

Even in the non-civil national entities we have, these same organic bonds form the primary units of affiliation within the state and army, in view of the absence of democratic institutions and the government's distrust of the loyalty of the individual to it. For the individual, meanwhile, these same units serve as the shield between him and the state. The irony is that what protects the individual from the despotism of the state forms one of the primary underpinnings of that despotism. The despotic regime justifies its existence on the grounds that it preserves the unity of the state, but in fact it sustains itself through its perpetration of and juggling with a vast diversity of centrifugal forces. But when the state and its army are defeated, these disparate disintegrative forces pounce upon the inheritance, in the course of which they exercise their own brand of tyranny as they fight it out with one another. Perhaps for this reason, some yearn for just plain tyranny.

Clearly, then, the Arabs' task is to find the ways to forestall the emergence of a situation that opens the way to such phenomena as the blockade of Iraq and the military intervention in that country. Surely this is the lesson to be derived from that tragic experience. One hopes, therefore, to hear again the voices of those who had appealed for outside intervention in the name of slogans that quickly proved themselves hollow, if not extremist -- slogans, for example, that espoused bringing democracy on the back of American tanks. One might expect to hear some honest self-criticism instead of the pieties spouted by those who have shown themselves to have no real interest in democracy.

There are a good many neo-liberals who parade beneath the banner of democracy, in spite of their general disregard for democratic methods and civil liberties, and who trumpet the need to prevent dictatorship only to retroactively justify a war that was waged on patently false pretences. If we add this behaviour to the actual crime of the dismantlement of the Iraqi state, we know that there was nothing unwitting in their complicity. The innocent ones blanched, admitted their mistakes and, at the very least, recognised the folly of American policies. The others never say what they mean and never mean what they say, and may well resort to the same theoretical hocus-pocus somewhere else in the future. No Arab state, at present, is immune to the spectre of fragmentation if it is subjected to the type of pounding visited upon Iraq.

Proponents of privatisation are not necessarily economic neo-liberals. The system of patronage, sectarianism and tribalism, and the corruption that pervades it, does not form the foundation for neo- liberal capitalism. Nor are economic neo-liberals necessarily politically liberal. Under the shadow of American interventionism in the region there have emerged forces that have called for change, but in fact are thirsty for power and numb to the cause of civil rights and liberties. The current Arab condition breeds the type of people who propel themselves to the fore on liberal platforms and then quickly reveal themselves liberal only in the amount of economic and political influence they seek to lavish on themselves.

Baghdad has fallen, but so to have all the illusions that had been pinned upon its fall. Here precisely is where an intensive reassessment must begin.

© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved

Al-Ahram Weekly Online

Video: James Yee, Islam, Guantanamo and his Ordeal

Chaplain James Yee on Guantanamo

Jump to segments on his becoming a Muslim
and on Guantanamo and his arrest and solitary confinement.

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April 20, 2007

Charles Jenks, Traprock Peace Center

"There are many female interrogators down at Guantanamo...there are very many who interrogate Muslim male prisoners after stripping all of their cloths off standing naked in front of these men."

Chaplain James Yee, former US Army Muslim Chaplain and Captain at Guantanamo, discusses how he became a Muslim and then goes into detail about psychological and physical at Guantanamo and his own arrest and solitary confinement while a US army chaplain.

He reveals Guantanamo's shocking interrogation technigues (such as sexual taunting from naked female interrogators), physical and psychological abuse, and desecration of the Koran by guards. He also discusses his own arrest, solitary confinement with sensory deprivation, and eventual total exoneration. All charges were dropped again him. He was returned to duty and given a commendation. He resigned his commission and received an honorable discharge.

Mr. Yee spoke on April 14, 2007 at the 3rd Annual Midwest Peace and Justice Summit held on the IUPUI campus in Indianapolis, IN.

Conference sponsors were: IUPUI Student Advocates for Global Equality; Indiana Peace & Justice Network; Plowshares Consortium of Peace Studies Programs; IUPUI Center for Service and Learning; Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center; and IUPUI Office of Campus and Community Life.


On Guantanamo and his arrest/solitary confinement


On his becoming a Muslim


Entire presentation at Google


Video recorded and edited by Charles Jenks; © 2007 Traprock Peace Center; all rights reserved.

Contact: charles@traprockpeace.org

Number Of White House Officials Allowed To Intervene In DoJ Cases Jumps By 10,325 Percent

April 20, 2007 Permalink WHITEHOUSE/GONZALES VIDEO: Number Of White House Officials Allowed To Intervene In DoJ Cases Jumps By 10,325 Percent Submitted by Amanda Lang

Yesterday in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Comm, AG Alberto Gonzales said that it was important that the Justice Dept "be independent from" the WH. But as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) pointed out, the firewalls that had existed during the Clinton admin have been ripped down. In the Bush admin, the rules have been rewritten so that 417 WH officials and and 30 Justice Dept officials are eligible to have discussions

Iraqi doctor denied visit to U.S. conference: civilian deaths specialist

Iraqi doctor denied visit to U.S. conference TheStar.com - News - Iraqi doctor denied visit to U.S. conference

April 20, 2007

associated press

SEATTLE–An Iraqi doctor who concluded that more Iraqi civilians have died in the war than has been reported has been prevented from attending a medical conference at the University of Washington.

Riyadh Lafta had been scheduled to give a lecture this evening at the Seattle campus but his visa to the United States has not been approved.

The State Department cited miscommunication as the reason for the delay.

Lafta is an epidemiologist who teaches at Al-Mustansiriya University College of Medicine in Baghdad. He co-wrote an October 2006 article that concluded nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died since the war began in March 2003. The article appeared in the British medical journal, The Lancet.

The findings were 10 times greater than other studies, said Tim Takaro, an associate professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

"The magnitude of that has been lost on the American people. Both the British and U.S. governments have discounted these figures," said Takaro, who conducts research with Lafta.

The School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the UW asked Lafta to discuss the study, as well as elevated cancer levels in southern Iraq.

Last July, Lafta applied for a visa with the U.S. Embassy in Amman, Jordan.

Officials there tried contacting the doctor twice by e-mail, but never received a response, State Department spokesman Steve Royster said. Incomplete visa applications can be held.

"This is a matter of a simple but unfortunate miscommunication," Royster said.

Amy Hagopian, a UW acting assistant professor who is conducting research with Lafta, believes the reason is more political.

"My hypothesis is the Bush administration was extremely threatened by The Lancet study," Hagopian said.

Hagopian said both Lafta and UW officials tried contacting federal officials when they hadn't heard anything about his visa. The university was assisted by staff from the offices of both U.S. Representative Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), who visited Iraq in 2002, and Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.)

"They were stonewalling us," she said. "Any comments to the contrary are obfuscation."

Lafta was invited to deliver his lecture today at Simon Fraser University so it could be broadcast by video to the UW. However, the British government this week denied him a four-hour transit visa for a stopover between the Middle East and Canada.

Les Roberts of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, who worked with Lafta on the Iraqi death estimates, was scheduled to speak in his place at the UW.

CRIMINAL Probe Opened in Pet Food Scare: YOUR Food Affected

Friday, 20 April 2007

Keep An Eye on Pet Food Recall Stories

UPDATE: "Criminal Probe Opened in Pet Food Scare: FDA Says Charges Possible; Tainted Pork Confirmed in Calif.," Washington Post, April 22: "The Food and Drug Administration has opened a criminal investigation in the widening pet food contamination scandal, officials said yesterday, as it was confirmed that tainted pork might have made its way onto human dinner plates in California." (I'm feeling prescient. This is just the TIP of the iceberg since labs still haven't gotten to the bottom of what's sickening pets and could sicken people. I suspect the Chinese add melamine (and more?) to cheaply boost protein numbers in glutens, and also that their factories are filthy cesspools of cross-contamination.)

ORIGINAL: Even if you don't have a pet, you'll be concerned by growing evidence that human foods could be contaminated. Further, the FDA is being barred by the Chinese government from investigating the Chinese plants that produced the tainted wheat gluten. This is KEY because the same Chinese plant that sold tainted wheat gluten (an additive in countless processed foods) also exports "carrots, garlic, ginger, corn protein powder, vegetables and feed." And now we've learned that rice and corn glutens are contaminated. Here's more new information:

• "Humans at risk from tainted pet food?," Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Federal officials confirmed Thursday they are investigating whether pork products intended for humans are contaminated with the same industrial chemical that prompted a massive pet food recall and sickened cats and dogs nationwide. Researchers also have identified three other contaminants in the urine and kidneys of animals sickened or killed after eating the recalled foods, including cyanuric acid, a chemical commonly used in pool chlorination, three researchers told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Cyanuric acid is what most likely sickened pets, one researcher said.

Melamine previously was found in the recalled pet food and two ingredients -- wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate -- as well as in the urine, blood, kidneys and tissues of infected animals. [...]

The Trib learned yesterday that melamine-contaminated feed was fed to hogs.The FDA, U.S. Department of Agriculture and the California Department of Food and Agriculture are investigating. [...]

[Some hogs] were slaughtered and sold as food before authorities learned their feed had been contaminated. ...

[T]he urine of some pigs at the 1,500-animal American Hog Farm in Ceres, Calif., tested positive for melamine, ...

The contaminated feed was bought April 3 and 13 as salvage pet food from Diamond Pet Foods Inc., which received contaminated rice protein concentrate. ...

Diamond Pet Foods Inc. is a large mass-producer of pet foods like Menu Foods. Diamond makes the Kirkland family of pet foods sold to Costco.

Melamine has been "found in South African Royal Canin products containing corn gluten from Chinese source." Via Itchmo blog, from SouthAfrica.com about the 30 pet deaths reported so far in South Africa:

An independent pathologist, Professor Fred Reyers said the outbreak may not be an isolated incident. He believed there was sufficient evidence to suggest a link between this outbreak and a similar one in Cape Town as well as one in the United States.

Itchmo blog's Ben adds:

We were tracking cases of the South African pet deaths before and have heard rumors of corn gluten contamination.

At this point, we believe that all corn gluten should be considered at risk for contamination and should be tested by every pet food manufacturer and the FDA.

The FDA "has yet to test corn gluten after South Africa’s findings of melamine in corn gluten from China," agency representatives conceded at yesterday's press conference.

The specific product recalls -- with more daily -- are too numerous to list here. The best thing to do is check Itchmo's site frequently because Ben has reliably and quickly posted all significant news. You can also sign up for Ben's safety alerts.

Howl911 is also doing a great job tracking recall news, and its staff has created a list of recalled products that is more accurate, and easier to follow, than the FDA's.

The Pittsburgh Tribune Review also has this report on the recalcitrance of the Chinese, "Chinese criticized in pet food probe."

The Chinese government and the company that supplied a contaminated ingredient are slowing the federal investigation into the nationwide recall of pet food, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration official said Tuesday.

[...]

Michael Rogers, director of the FDA's field investigations division, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review the agency has asked the Chinese government for help investigating the gluten and the supplier, Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Co. Ltd., based in Jiangsu province.

The FDA is disappointed with slow and incomplete Chinese responses, Rogers said.

"I usually don't speak in terms of cooperative or not cooperative," he said.

Federal investigators haven't determined whether Xuzhou Anying shipped other food products to the United States, or what other Chinese companies it sold wheat gluten to that, in turn, might have been shipped here, Rogers said.

Xuzhou Anying's Web site said it also exports carrots, garlic, ginger, corn protein powder, vegetables and feed. Rogers said Chinese officials have not responded to the U.S. government's question about whether any products other than wheat gluten were shipped here.

"We're certainly reviewing all products from this source," he said. Since the recall, the company has shipped only wheat gluten to the United States, but U.S. officials still are unsure what might have been shipped prior to the recall, Rogers said.

"From an operational standpoint, we still have questions about this company," he said.

The FDA is screening all wheat gluten imported from China and the Netherlands at U.S. ports and seizing all wheat gluten from Xuzhou Anying.

[...]

The FDA, Cornell and other researchers found melamine in high concentrations in the gluten -- up to 6.6 percent of the product.

Even so, they do not believe the melamine made the animals sick, although they said it is a marker for tracking the outbreak, because the crystal found in the melamine and in animals' urine and tissue is distinctive to this outbreak.

In other words, nobody knows yet what is killing cats and dogs, or may be harming humans.

The best advice I've seen, from reading many articles and blog posts, is to buy locally and organically.

Even reading labels isn't a guarantee because there is little oversight over what companies list in their labels.

Sen. Dick Durbin has been a leader in calling for greater oversight by the FDA over imported foods. From his Web site:

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) met with U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 in Durbin's Capitol office to discuss the latest recall of pet food, this time caused by contaminated rice protein imported from China.

In his press release on the meeting, Durbin says:

In the meeting, Durbin and DeLauro learned that the Chinese Government has blocked requests from the FDA to send personnel to China to inspect the facilities suspected of producing the contaminated products. The FDA first contacted the Chinese Government on April 4, 2007, but have not been granted permission to send food inspectors into the country. In response, Durbin and DeLauro sent a letter to the Chinese Ambassador to the United States, Zhou Wenzong, urging the Chinese Government to issue visas to U.S. food inspectors as quickly as possible.

"It is unacceptable that the Chinese government is blocking our food safety inspectors from entering their country and examining facilities that are suspected of providing contaminated pet food to American consumers," said Durbin. "We have asked for two things in our letter today -- that the Chinese government allow our inspectors in and that the Chinese ambassador to the United States meet with Congresswoman DeLauro and me to discuss the larger issue of contaminated food being sent to the U.S. These are reasonable requests and we hope that we can find a level of cooperation with the Chinese."

"At time when China is exporting more foods into the U.S., the Chinese are refusing to allow our inspectors in to the country to investigate the source of the pet food contamination. The FDA needs to be allowed to investigate this so we can better protect our pets and identify the source of the source of the problem. While we have a significant trade relationship with the Chinese, the investigation of the contaminated product comes first," said DeLauro.

Durbin calls for a single agency to oversee food safety:

Durbin and DeLauro have been actively engaged on food safety issues for over a decade. This Congress they introduced legislation that calls for the development of a single food safety agency and the implementation of a food safety program to standardize American food safety activities (The Safe Food Act - S. 654 and H.R. 1148 in the Senate and House respectively). The Illinois senator said legislation he has introduced to consolidate all federal food safety responsibilities into a single, independent agency has taken on new urgency because of a possibly heightened need to respond quickly and effectively to any acts of bioterrorism or agroterrorism. Currently, there are at least 12 different federal agencies and 35 different laws governing food safety. With overlapping jurisdictions, federal agencies often lack accountability on food safety-related issues.

The non-partisan U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) has been unequivocal in its recommendation for consolidation of federal food safety programs. In February of this year, the GAO deemed federal oversight of food safety as "high risk" to the economy and public health and safety. Over the past two decades, GAO has also issued numerous reports on topics such as food recalls, food safety inspections and the transport of animal feeds. Each of these reports highlights the current fragmentation and inconsistent organization of the various agencies involved in food safety oversight.

Posted by SusanUnPC, SusanUnPC@gmail.com, on Friday, 20 April 2007 at 13:16 | Permalink

Defining the enemy

Arab-Palestinian Knesset member Azmi Bishara explains to Amira Howeid the motives behind the Israeli media's campaign against him and how it affects the Arab community

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Israel, it seems, is at war with one man. The Israeli media and politicians from across the political spectrum are up in arms against him, the Shabak (intelligence) is said to be preparing a file on him and his fate could have an impact on 1.3 million Arabs living in Israel.

This might be the kind of attention someone as high-profile as Azmi Bishara expects when faced with accusations of treason. Then again, it might not. Bishara is, after all, not just an outspoken Arab-Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament the Knesset but an embodiment of Israel's paradoxes and its complex relationship with itself and its Arab-Palestinian community.

Over the past 11 years this Christian Arab- Palestinian politician, intellectual, novelist, philosopher and citizen of Israel has struggled to redefine the status and identity of the Palestinians whose lands, towns and villages were occupied by the Jewish state between 1948 and 1949 and who later became Israeli citizens. While Israel sought to assimilate them and "Israelise" their collective identity, Bishara and his National Arab Alliance party begged to differ.

Their vision, which has gained momentum within the Arab community (known as the 1948 Arabs) insists that Israel should be a state for all its citizens and not -- as it now perceives itself -- a Jewish state. A Jewish state, they argue, defies the logics of democracy because it does not equate between its Jewish and non-Jewish populations. Even more alarming for Israeli nationalists is the fact that such a position could represent the nucleus of a bi-national secular state.

Three weeks ago Bishara left Israel for an Arab tour. Given recent developments it is now unclear when, or if, he will be returning. A week after his departure, the Israeli press began a campaign of incitement against him, the opening shot being the publication of news reports that he will resign from the Knesset while in Qatar. This was followed by leaks to the media concerning a criminal investigation against him. But with a court-imposed gag on the nature of the investigation it is not clear what is actually being investigated though the Israeli press has hinted at charges involving "contact with the enemy during wartime".

Although Bishara is no stranger to prosecution based on similar allegations -- in the past he has always been found innocent - he now believes that "the rules of the game have changed" and that the target is not just him but the entire Palestinian-Arab community living in Israel.

"There is a decision to end our political stream and the unprecedented challenge it represents for them," he told Al-Ahram Weekly in a telephone interview from Doha. "The message is: Palestinian-Arabs who support us will be regarded as people working against Israel. And to do that they are targeting the head of the movement. They cannot tolerate an Arab Knesset member who refutes their claims of democratic practice and argues that Zionism defeats the notion of democracy."

By presenting Bishara's case as one with security dimensions, "Israel will have more tools to fight us with," he said, "and it is evident that they've been preparing a huge file for over a year now which involved monitoring all my moves and recording all my telephone conversations without a court order. It makes me wonder what parliamentary immunity means in practice."

It is rumoured that the secret police have records of phone conversations Bishara conducted with "hostile" Arab figures, including Hizbullah members, during Israel's war against Lebanon last summer.

Such "security fabrications", in Bishara's words, could affect international solid5arity with him since the suggestion being propagated "translates into providing the enemy with information which ultimately transforms me from a political, cultural and intellectual figure to an agent for a hostile state or terrorist organisation as they call it".

"This changes the logic of things because I have my political views, I publish articles, I give interviews and I talk on the phone but I do not enjoy a security position or have access to security information in the first place in order to deliver it. In fact, it is clear that these hostile states or organisations like Hizbullah and Hamas are more informed about Israel's security than we are. We are men of thought, culture and literature."

Bishara denies all the rumoured charges against him and says they "disgust" him. And because he realises the rules of the game have changed he has yet to decide if he will play by the new rules.

"It is out of the question that someone like myself should sit with prosecutors and answer their questions about my phone calls, what I say to my friends, what did I mean by this word or in this article with all the humiliation it involves."

The active involvement of the Israeli left alongside the extreme right in teaming up against Bishara in the current media campaign against him comes as no surprise. "The Israeli left and right stood together during the first weeks of the war on Lebanon last summer and the same scenario is repeating itself with me. They're all united against the path that we chose which rejects Zionism and the Zionist nature [of Israel], our emphasis on Arab identity, extending our cultural and civilisational roots to the Arab world and our emphasis on the fact that there are two nations and that we are not merely a minority."

A leading Palestinian intellectual, Bishara's popularity extends across the Arab world. Not only did his movement contribute to breaking many of the political taboos imposed on the 1948 Palestinian community, his eloquence and staunch pan-Arab stands helped redefine the term "Israeli-Arab" which for decades was treated with suspicion across the Arab world.

This might be good news for the Arabs, but why would Israel tolerate a vocal Arab- Palestinian who supports resistance?

"Israel has a problem of course," says Bishara, "and [its leaders] are not trying to redefine the borders and prevent us from expressing such views. But we do not ask anything of Israel in this regard. We are against the Israeli aggression on Lebanon and we support people's right in resisting occupation. We do not support a specific form of resistance and we oppose the targeting of civilians in this context. But in the context of citizenship and activism within a political framework we have to distinguish between people like us, Palestinians and Arabs, whose lands were occupied, and our right to express ourselves about resisting occupation and actually being directly involved in resistance. There is a difference between our liaisons as democratic Palestinians and Arabs with the rest of the Arab world and making our position known and being part of the resistance... Of course Israel cannot tolerate resistance but then freedom [fighters] do not want Israel's tolerance in the first place."

Israel, says Bishara, suffers from an identity crisis. "But then I have one too," he admits. "I have a problem tolerating them just as they have a problem tolerating me. In the past five years I feel I have grown 50 years older as a result of the conflicts and having to go to the Knesset every day and actually sit with people I regard as war criminals. I did it out of responsibility for my people even though it exhausted and drained me. But I'm not talking about predicaments here, I'm talking about equilibrium. They now want to change that equilibrium so that we no longer take the stands that we do."

When Bishara took what he considered a democratic stand following Israel's war on Lebanon last year by visiting Beirut's southern suburb Al-Dahia -- Hizbullah's stronghold, Israelis went berserk. "It's ABC political work for a Palestinian democrat like myself who exists as part of the political entity that launched the aggression to show solidarity with the victims of this aggression... [The Israelis] in turn decided this is participating in resistance. I reject that completely."

During a war, he said, people talk to each other on the phone and they talk about the war. "But if we talk about the war this could be contact with the enemy. Turning every triviality between human beings who are Arabs -- and are naturally connected -- into transferring information to the enemy is simply an attempt to quash us. There is a big cultural misunderstanding here, a huge gap in understanding who we are."

Israel, says Bishara, perceives its Arabs as a minority who immigrated to Israel, requested an Israeli card and became Israelis. "And therefore when we communicate with other Arabs we are in contact with the enemy. We have a different perception. We are Arabs and our brothers and sisters in the Arab world are Arab, and we were Arab long before Israel was created [in 1948] and imposed its identity on us. Now it wants to impose its enemies as our enemies. They're not."

According to Bishara, his decision to resign from the Knesset was taken a year ago but his party wanted him to postpone it for a while. But now he has to decide whether or not he will resign and have his immunity lifted, "or if I should throw this immunity at them anyway". He will "eventually" return to Israel and the occupied territories, he says, but only after he has decided how to handle the campaign against him and the 1948 Arab-Palestinian community.

C a p t i o n : Azmi Bishara

© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved

Amira Howeidy

Al-Ahram Weekly Online

GOP Sen. Snowe sponsoring Iraq withdrawal bill

From the Los Angeles Times

Maine moderate is third Senate Republican to take stance despite pressure from Bush.

By Noam N. Levey and James Gerstenzang

Times Staff Writers

April 20, 2007

WASHINGTON — In another sign of Republican unease with the president's Iraq policies, a third GOP senator expressed support Thursday for pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq under certain conditions.

Sen. Olympia J. Snowe announced she would sponsor a bill to require American commanders to plan a withdrawal within 120 days of the bill's enactment, unless the Iraqi government meets a series of benchmarks.

"The Iraq government needs to understand that our commitment is not infinite," said Snowe, a moderate from Maine who frequently departs from the party line.

President Bush has insisted that Congress not impose any limits on his conduct of the four-year-old war. But Snowe has taken issue with that view.

"It is our business as well," she said Thursday.

Snowe is not backing a Senate Democratic plan approved last month that would require the president to begin withdrawing troops within 120 days and would set a nonbinding goal of complete withdrawal by March.

But that plan did draw the support of two GOP senators, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Gordon H. Smith of Oregon.

The Senate proposal and a House version approved last month — which both include benchmarks for the Iraqi government — are being merged into one proposal.

Democratic leaders said they expected to have the compromise measure ready for a vote next week.

Bush, who has promised to veto the measure and has spoken out forcefully against it, took his campaign on the road Thursday at a town hall event in House Minority Leader John A. Boehner's western Ohio district.

Bush met with about 500 people from the Dayton area selected by the chamber of commerce and Boehner's office.

For the first time in more than a year, he engaged in a lengthy question session with an audience.

Bush repeated warnings that a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq would risk a wider war in the Middle East and allow extremists to "follow us here." He also cautioned that chaos in the region "could cause the Middle East to enter into a nuclear arms race."

Snowe's legislation marks another challenge to a White House that has worked to keep GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill from backing any congressionally mandated limits on the president's war powers.

The effort has been very successful. Only two GOP lawmakers in the House and two in the Senate crossed the aisle last month to vote for the Democratic withdrawal plans.

And congressional Republicans have repeatedly reiterated their support for the president in recent weeks, traveling to the White House to stand with the chief executive.

At the Capitol, Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-Miss.) dismissed the effect of Snowe's challenge to the president's leadership.

"It doesn't matter…. We've got plenty of votes," said Lott, whose 49-member caucus could sustain more than a dozen defections and still prevent Democrats from overriding a veto.

Republican leaders Thursday focused their attacks on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who said at a news conference that he believed "the war is lost."

"I can't begin to imagine how our troops in the field, who are risking their lives every day, are going to react when they get back to base and hear that the Democrat leader of the United States Senate has declared the war is lost," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

But Republicans face greater challenges to keeping their members in line as public impatience with the violence in Iraq mounts.

McConnell refused last week to say when he thought Americans would know whether Bush's surge had succeeded.

But some Republicans who voted with the White House last month are saying privately that the president has only a few more months to demonstrate success.

In her proposed legislation, which has no cosponsors, Snowe put her own limit at four months.

Under her bill, if the Iraqi government has not met the benchmarks — which include disarming militias, amending the constitution and passing legislation to equitably share energy resources — the U.S. commander in Iraq must submit a plan for withdrawing U.S. forces.

"Americans are losing patience with the failure of the leadership in Baghdad to end the sectarian violence and move toward national reconciliation," she said.

Confined to a dungeon above the ground

April 20, 2007 | Page 5

NICOLE COLSON reports on a new wave of hunger strikes by desperate detainees.

MORE DETAINEES at the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are so desperate to end their suffering that they are going on hunger strike--willing to risk death if it means an end to their imprisonment.

According to press reports, at least 13 prisoners are on hunger strike in protest of the harsh conditions at “Camp 6,” a new maximum-security section of the camp. Two have reportedly been refusing food since August 2005, while most of the others began striking in January or February.

Most are forced to undergo daily force-feedings at the hands of their U.S. captors--an often brutal and dehumanizing process that lawyers and human rights advocates say is meant to make detainees suffer more.

According to “Cruel and Inhuman: Conditions of Isolation for Detainees at Guantánamo Bay,” a report released earlier this month by Amnesty International, the situation inside Guantánamo is actually becoming worse for detainees--particularly the approximately 160 (out of a total of 385) detainees who are thought to be housed at Camp 6.

According to the report, Camp 6 “has created even harsher and apparently more permanent conditions of extreme isolation and sensory deprivation in which detainees are confined to almost completely sealed, individual cells, with minimal contact with any other human being.”

What else to read Amnesty International’s new report “Cruel and Inhuman: Conditions of Isolation for Detainees at Guantánamo Bay” can be read online. For more information on Guantánamo and the legal challenges against it, see the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Guantánamo Action Center. Former detainee Moazzam Begg’s book Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantánamo, Bagram and Kandahar is a powerful indictment of the hidden U.S. prison system around the world and the “war on terror.” Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray detail the facts about the U.S. prison camp in Guantánamo: What the World Should Know.

Prisoners in Camp 6 are confined to 8-by-10-foot cells for at least 22 hours a day, and are allowed out only infrequently to shower or to exercise in enclosed areas surrounded by high concrete-and-wire walls. They are not able to speak to each other except by shouting through a narrow gap at the bottom of their steel cell doors. There are no outside windows, and detainees have reported that air conditioning is left on high--making the metal cells intolerably cold.

Amnesty notes that U.S. authorities have described Camp 6 as a “state-of-the-art modern facility,” which is supposedly “more comfortable” for the detainees, but one detainee said Camp was a “dungeon above the ground.”

“They’re just sitting on a powder keg down there,” lawyer Sabin Willett recently told the New York Times. “You’re going to have an insane asylum.”

It’s no wonder that some detainees see a hunger strike as their only option. As 27-year-old Yemeni hunger striker Adnan Farhan Abdullatif reportedly told his lawyer in late February, “My wish is to die. We are living in a dying situation.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

RECENTLY RELEASED military documents showed that 13 detainees were on hunger strike--though last month there were at least 17, and lawyers for the prisoners say their clients report as many as 40 people on hunger strike.

Naval Cmdr. Robert Durand, a Guantánamo spokesman, dismissed the hunger strike and prisoners’ complaints as “propaganda,” telling reporters that hunger strikes are a tactic taught in the al-Qaeda training manual--and that the number of strikers has dropped in the past when the media stopped covering them.

But Durand left out the main reason the U.S. was able to break down hunger strikers previously--brutal force feedings.

There have been several hunger strikes at Guantánamo since the camp opened in 2001. The largest occurred in 2005, when at least 130 detainees were classified as hunger strikers--defined as having missed nine consecutive meals.

Most detainees were eventually broken from their strike through force-feeding techniques--in which they were strapped into restraint chairs, had feeding tubes inserted and then were left strapped down for lengthy periods of time.

Lawyers for some detainees described U.S. military personnel violently inserting feeding tubes to the point of drawing blood, and Physicians for Human Rights called the force feedings of inmates a “brutal and inhumane” tactic that violates international medical codes of ethics.

Sudanese detainee Sami al-Hajj, a former cameraman for al-Jazeera, had been on hunger strike for more than 95 days as Socialist Worker went to press--and was being routinely force-fed.

“At nine o’clock in the morning, they force feed him, and he is strapped to a chair,” his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, recently told Reuters. “They force a tube up his nose. It is excruciatingly painful. That lasts about an hour...Three times so far, according to what Sami has told me, they have put the tube in his lung...and that is effectively drowning him.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

IN RECENT weeks, the Bush administration has pointed to the supposed confessions of several high-profile detainees as proof that the system at Guantánamo is working.

During the start of Combat Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) for 14 “high-value” detainees last month, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged “number three” man in the al-Qaeda network, was said to have confessed to being involved in planning for more than 30 terrorist plots, including the September 11 attacks; personally killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002; and plotting the assassinations of former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, as well as Pope John Paul II.

Walid Mohammed bin Attash is said to have confessed at his tribunal to helping plan the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Australian detainee David Hicks also entered a guilty plea March 26 to a charge of providing material support to terrorists.

But as lawyers and human rights advocates point out, any confessions from detainees are questionable because of the conditions they’ve been exposed to in Guantánamo and elsewhere.

Both Mohammed and bin Attash, for example, were “rendered”--sent to other countries known to use torture for interrogations, before being brought to Guantánamo last year.

Additionally, though CSRTs are supposed to determine whether a detainee should be declared an “enemy combatant”--which means they then can be held indefinitely--the process is a kangaroo court. Defense lawyers and the media are barred from the proceedings, and prisoners aren’t allowed to see “classified” evidence against them.

Last month, after being held at Guantánamo for more than five years, David Hicks pleaded guilty to a single, relatively minor count in exchange for a plea bargain that will allow him to return to Australia to serve out the remaining nine months of a 7-year sentence.

To get his plea deal, however, Hicks--who has grown his hair to waist length in order to block out the bright lights that shine 24 hours a day in his cell--had to agree to withdraw allegations that he had been abused during his detention, to a one-year ban on speaking to the media, and never to sue the U.S.

“It’s a way to get home,” Hicks’ father Terry told Australian radio. “He was desperate, he just wanted to get out. He’s had five years of absolute hell, and I think anyone in that position, if they were offered anything, they would possibly take it

Another glimpse into the bizarre situation of the detainees came when Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, another “high-value” prisoner, went before his CSRT on March 14. U.S. authorities claim al-Nashiri confessed to having a role in the bombing of the USS Cole. Yet at his CSRT, al-Nashiri said he confessed only after being tortured.

Since the Bush administration doesn’t allow prisoners to detail allegations of torture publicly, however, the following appears in the “transcript” of al-Nashiri’s tribunal:

PRESIDENT [of the tribunal]: Please describe the methods that were used.

DETAINEE: [CENSORED] What else do I want to say? [CENSORED] There were doing so many things. What else did they do? [CENSORED] After that, another method of torture began. [CENSORED] They used to ask me questions, and the investigator after that used to laugh. And I used to answer the answer that I knew. And if I didn’t replay what I heard, he used to [CENSORED].

As the New York Times commented, “Officials defended this censorship by arguing that interrogation methods are so secret they cannot be discussed, even by the prisoner. But they also said that al-Qaeda members are trained to claim torture, and that Mr. Nashiri lied. If so, why censor the transcript?...

“Tragically, the most likely answer is to spare United States intelligence agents and their bosses, who could face charges if the Military Commissions Act is ever repealed or rewritten. The law gives a retroactive carte blanche to American interrogators for any abuse they may have committed.”

Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month decided not to hear a case brought by several Guantánamo detainees to determine whether the 2006 Military Commissions Act--which took away detainees’ right to a trial in U.S. courts--violates the Constitution.

As Vincent Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents several detainees, said in a statement, “The Supreme Court has once more delayed the resolution of the fate of these detainees--three-quarters of whom the military admits it will never charge--who have languished without any meaningful way to challenge their detention for more than five years.

“The processes the government put in place are a sham--they allow the use of evidence obtained through torture and no real review of the facts...We hope our clients survive until they finally get their day in court.”

Japan Cautiously Mulls Dumping Dollar

MoneyNews
Japan Mulls Moving Reserves from Dollar

Thursday, April 19, 2007 ABU DHABI -- Japan is cautious about shifting its foreign exchange reserves away from the dollar for fear of triggering a slide in the U.S. currency, Tokyo's top financial diplomat, Hiroshi Watanabe, said on Thursday.

At around $900 billion, Japan's reserves, held predominantly in dollars, are the world's second largest after China's and were built up mainly in 2003 and 2004 as the Bank of Japan bought dollars to check the Japanese currency's rise.

The dollar's slide against other currencies over the past three years has prompted central banks around the world to consider reducing their exposure to U.S. assets. The dollar tumbled to a two-year low against the euro this month.

"Most countries are diversifying their investments to non-U.S. dollar assets. But in the case of Japan, we are still cautious about shifting from the dollar to other currencies," Watanabe said in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.

"If we do that it goes towards the depreciation of the dollar. So why should we trigger such a stupid action?" Watanabe, vice finance minister for international affairs, said.

Photo Evidence that Virginia Tech Killer was a Marine (?)

According to the folks at Liberty Forum, the following image was up on Wikipedia, before it mysteriously disappeared . . .

I have no way of verifying that this is actually him. But, his eyes sure do resemble those of the "killer" whose images were plastered all over the media this week.

Notice his jacket says "HU", "U.S. MARINES."

If true, and he was actually trained as a US Marine, it goes a long way to explain his expertise as a killer.

Hopefully, this image can get out to enough people that the truth will emerge.

Do your part and pass it on.

May the truth set us free and bring justice to the victims.

________________________
Thanks, Joanna Francis

Posted in

• covert acts
• death squads
• evidence
• image
• massacre
• secret
• US marines
• Virginia Tech

Submitted by qrswave on Sat, 2007-04-21 08:27. qrswave's blog

Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/ Palestine

cover > Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine by Joel Kovel >

Author Kovel, Joel
Publisher Pluto Press
ISBN 0745325696
Binding PB
List Price £15.99
Discount Price £12.79 (20% off!)
Categories Middle East, Politics

buy this book

• A call to transform Israel into a secular democracy by a leading writer

• 'This book is absolutely fundamental for those who reject the unfortunate confusion between Jews, Judaism, Zionism and the State of Israel -- a confusion which is the basis for systematic manipulation by the imperialist power system. It convincingly argues in favour of a single secular state for Israelis and Palestinians as the only democratic solution for the region.' Samir Amin, director of the Third World Forum

Joel Kovel argues that the inner contradictions of Zionism have led Israel to a 'state-sponsored racism' fully as incorrigible as that of apartheid South Africa and deserving of the same resolution. Only a path toward a single-state secular democracy can provide the justice essential to healing the wounds of the Middle East.

Kovel is well-known writer on the Middle East conflict. This book draws on his detailed knowledge to show that Zionism and democracy are essentially incompatible. He offers a thoughtful account of the emergence and disintegration of Zionism that integrates psychological, political, cultural, economic, and ideological levels.

Ultimately, Kovel argues, a two-state solution is essentially hopeless as it concedes too much to the regressive forces of nationalism, wherein lie the roots of continued conflict.

CONTENTS:

Prologue

Part One COMING TO ZION

1. A People Apart

2. The Unnatural History of a Bad Idea

3. The Spectre of Shoah

Part Two THE JEWISH STATE

4. The Only Democracy in the Middle East

5. Facts on the Ground

6. Partners in Zion

7. Bad Conscience and State Racism

8. Slouching Toward Jerusalem

Part Three ZIONISM OVERCOME

9. Beyond the Two-State Solution

10. Palesrael: A Secular and Universal Democracy for Israel/Palestine

Bibliography

Index

Joel Kovel has served as a professor in Psychiatry, Anthropology, Political Science, Social Studies and Communications. He is currently editor-in-chief of Capitalism Nature Socialism (www.cnsjournal.org/). Kovel has developed his distinctive approach, which draws on both psychoanalysis and Marxism, across a wide range of publications. His ten books include The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (2002), White Racism: A Psychohistory (1970) and Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America (1994). Kovel is also a political activist and a media commentator.

NATO chief cannot confirm Iranian arms in Afghanistan

Thu Apr 19, 12:59 PM ET

The commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, US General Dan McNeill, said Thursday he was unable to confirm the interception Iranian-made mortars and explosives in the country.

"I don't deny that position and I'm very interested how the insurgents might be helped and who might have helped the insurgents," McNeill told reporters in the Afghan capital.

"Obviously, the US Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff have far more information than I do right now," he added.

General Peter Pace, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, said Tuesday that coalition forces had intercepted Iranian-made mortars and explosives in Afghanistan destined for the Taliban.

After 30 years of war, Afghanistan is awash with weapons of all kinds and of different origins. Iran, in particular, furnished the Northern Alliance with weapons during their struggle against the Taliban government.

Mcneill, the head of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), also said he had no hard intelligence on the existence of training camps for Afghan insurgents in Iranian territory.

"There is no report of that fact," he said.

A number of American officials have accused the Iranian Revolutionary Guards of training and arming Shiite militants in Iraq.

March Home Foreclosures Up 47 Percent Year-on-Year

MoneyNews
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

NEW YORK -- U.S. home foreclosures rose 7 percent in March from February to 149,150, reflecting the struggle of subprime borrowers to keep their homes, real estate data firm RealtyTrac said Wednesday.

The figure, which comprises default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions, was 47 percent higher than a year ago, the Irvine, California-based company said.

Nevada posted the highest foreclosure rates of the 50 U.S. states for a third straight month, with Las Vegas posting the second-highest foreclosure rate among cities monitored by RealtyTrac.

Nevada reported 4,738 foreclosure filings, more than triple the number in March 2006. Its foreclosure rate showed 1 filing for every 183 households, more than four times the national rate of 1 per 775 households, according to RealtyTrac.

Default rates in the subprime segment of the U.S. mortgage market have jumped in recent months as the housing industry has slowed and prices have fallen.

At least 20 lenders in the subprime mortgage sector, which serves borrowers with poor credit histories at high interest rates, have gone out of business as a result.

The crisis has triggered broader concerns that the fallout may spread to mainstream lenders and damage the economy.

"While foreclosures are causing a major disruption in the subprime sector of the lending industry and saturating pockets of some local markets, it's important to note that U.S. foreclosure activity overall is not far above historical norms," James Saccacio, RealtyTrac's chief executive officer, said in a statement.

It is unclear whether the surge in foreclosures in the first quarter would continue. Last year, a spike in foreclosures in the first quarter leveled off through the second and third quarters, the company said.

"However, if that pattern does not repeat itself, and foreclosure activity continues to accelerate, we may see more widespread consequences," Saccacio said.

© Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.

Nobel peace laureate Corrigan injured in anti-fence protest

Noble Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan was treated for injury in leg sustained by rubber bullet

Ali Waked

Published:

04.20.07, 16:47 / Israel News

Nobel Peace Prize Mairead Corrigan has been injured during confrontations between security forces and left-wing activists protesting the security fence route near Bilin, activists said.

Corrigan, who won the prize in 1976 for her work in encouraging a peaceful solution to the Northern Ireland dispute, was hit in the leg by a rubber bullet and was transferred to a hospital for treatment. She was also said to have inhaled large quantities of teargas.

Policemen and soldiers used teargas grenades and rubber bullets to disperse the routine Friday protest against the security fence near the Palestinian village of Bilin and were confronted by a hail of stones.

Two Border Guard policemen were lightly injured by stones.

The security forces say the area where activists hold their protest is a no-access military zone which they have to evacuate of Palestinian and Israeli protesters every Friday.

Activists say the fence route near Bilin was designed to expropriate Palestinian farm land which will be used to expand a Jewish settlement in the area.

Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti and Deputy Prime Minister Assam al-Ahmad also took part in the protest.

"I salute the residents of Bilin for their peaceful struggle in a region that is so violent and I call on the Israeli public, whom I know

is for justice and peace, to support the residents' struggle," Corrigan told Ynet.

Tito Kayak was also there

"I want to say that this separation wall, contrary to what the Israeli say, will not prevent attacks and violence. What will prevent attacks and violence is a peace agreement between the two peoples, and I sure the Israeli people, like the Palestinian people, wants peace," Corrigan added.

Puerto Rican peace activist Tito Kayak climbed a tower on which the army had planted security cameras and hoisted a Palestinian flag.

"All I did was to express my identification with the villagers against the wall which is believed to evil and illegal by the whole world and many leaders like Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter and the United Nations," Kayak said.

Kayak, who was arrested in 2000 for climbing to the top deck of the Statue of Liberty in New York, was apprehended along with six other activists by policemen.

Kayak was a key figure in the 1999 Navy-Vieques protests in Puerto Rico against the US Navy's use of the Vieques Island for bombing exercises. The protests forced the US to end its activities on the Island.

Robert Fisk: Caught in the deadly web of the internet

"US and Canadian officials now appear to be detaining the innocent on the grounds of hate postings on the internet."
---

Robert Fisk

Any political filth or personal libel can be hurled at the innocent

Published: 21 April 2007

Could it possibly be that the security men who guard the frontiers of North America are supporting Holocaust denial? Alas, it's true. Here's the story.

Taner Akcam is the distinguished Turkish scholar at the University of Minnesota who, with immense courage, proved the facts of the Armenian genocide - the deliberate mass murder of up to a million and a half Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish authorities in 1915 - from Turkish documents and archives. His book A Shameful Act was published to great critical acclaim in Britain and the United States.

He is now, needless to say, being threatened with legal action in Turkey under the infamous Law 301 - which makes a crime of insulting "Turkishness" - but it's probably par for the course for a man who was granted political asylum in Germany after receiving an eight-year prison sentence in his own country for articles he had written in a student journal; Amnesty International had already named him a prisoner of conscience.

But Mr Akcam has now become a different kind of prisoner: an inmate of the internet hate machine, the circle of hell in which any political filth or personal libel can be hurled at the innocent without any recourse to the law, to libel lawyers or to common decency. The Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was misquoted on the internet for allegedly claiming that Turkish blood was "poisonous"; this total lie - Dink never said such a thing - prompted a young man to murder him in an Istanbul street.

But Taner Akcam's experience is potentially far more serious for all of us. As he wrote in a letter to me this month, "Additional to the criminal investigation (law 301) in Turkey, there is a hate campaign going on here in the USA, as a result of which I cannot travel internationally any more... My recent detention at the Montreal airport - apparently on the basis of anonymous insertions in my Wikipedia biography - signals a disturbing new phase in a Turkish campaign of intimidation that has intensified since the November 2006 publication of my book."

Akcam was travelling to lecture in Montreal and took the Northwest Airlines flight from Minneapolis on 16 February this year. The Canadian immigration officer, Akcam says, was "courteous" - but promptly detained him at Montreal's Trudeau airport. Even odder, the Canadian immigration officer asked him why he needed to be detained. Akcam tells me he gave the man a brief history of the genocide and of the campaign of hatred against him in the US by Turkish groups "controlled by ... Turkish diplomats" who "spread propaganda stating that I am a member of a terrorist organisation".

All this went on for four hours while the immigration officer took notes and made phone calls to his bosses. Akcam was given a one-week visa and the Canadian officer showed him - at Akcam's insistence - a piece of paper which was the obvious reason for his temporary detention.

"I recognised the page at once," Akcam says. "The photo was a still from a 2005 documentary on the Armenian genocide... The still photo and the text beneath it comprised my biography in the English language edition of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia which anyone in the world can modify at any time. For the last year ... my Wikipedia biography has been persistently vandalised by anonymous 'contributors' intent on labelling me as a terrorist. The same allegations has been repeatedly scrawled, like gangland graffiti, as 'customer reviews' of my books at Amazon."

Akcam was released, but his reflections on this very disturbing incident are worth recording. "It was unlikely, to say the least, that a Canadian immigration officer found out that I was coming to Montreal, took the sole initiative to research my identity on the internet, discovered the archived version of my Wikipedia biography, printed it out on 16 February, and showed it to me - voilà! - as a result."

But this was not the end. Prior to his Canadian visit, two Turkish-American websites had been hinting that Akcam's "terrorist activities" should be of interest to American immigration authorities. And sure enough, Akcam was detained yet again - for another hour - by US Homeland Security officers at Montreal airport before boarding his flight at Montreal for Minnesota two days later.

On this occasion, he says that the American officer - US Homeland Security operates at the Canadian airport - gave him a warning: "Mr Akcam, if you don't retain an attorney and correct this issue, every entry and exit from the country is going to be problematic. We recommend that you do not travel in the meantime and that you try to get this information removed from your customs dossier."

So let's get this clear. US and Canadian officials now appear to be detaining the innocent on the grounds of hate postings on the internet. And it is the innocent - guilty until proved otherwise, I suppose - who must now pay lawyers to protect them from Homeland Security and the internet. But as Akcam says, there is nothing he can do.

"Allegations against me, posted by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, Turkish Forum and 'Tall Armenia Tale' (a Holocaust denial website) have been copy-pasted and recycled through innumerable websites and e-groups ever since I arrived in America. By now, my name in close proximity to the English word 'terrorist' turns up in well over 10,000 web pages."

I'm not surprised. There is no end to the internet's circle of hate. What does shock me, however, is that the men and women chosen to guard their nations against Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'ida are reading this dirt and are prepared to detain an honourable scholar such as Taner Akcam on the basis of it.

I don't think the immigration lads are to blame. I once remember listening to a Canadian official at Toronto airport carefully explaining to a Palestinian visitor that he was not required to tell any police officer about his religion or personal beliefs, that he should feel safe in Canada.

No, it's their bosses in Ottawa and Washington I wonder about. Put very simply, how much smut are the US and Canadian immigration authorities taking off the internet? And how much of it is now going to be flung at us when we queue at airports to go about our lawful business?

After Tillman Death, Army Moved Quickly to Clamp Down and Destroy Evidence

After Tillman death, Army clamped down

By SCOTT LINDLAW, Associated Press Writer Fri Apr 20, 2:28 PM ET

Within hours of Pat Tillman's death, the Army went into information-lockdown mode, cutting off phone and Internet connections at a base in Afghanistan, posting guards on a wounded platoon mate, and ordering a sergeant to burn Tillman's uniform.

New investigative documents reviewed by The Associated Press describe how the military sealed off information about Tillman's death from all but a small ring of soldiers. Officers quietly passed their suspicion of friendly fire up the chain to the highest ranks of the military, but the truth did not reach Tillman's family for five weeks.

The clampdown, and the misinformation issued by the military, lie at the heart of a burgeoning congressional investigation.

"We want to find out how this happened," said Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., chairman of the House oversight committee, which has scheduled a hearing for Tuesday. "Was it the result of incompetence, miscommunication or a deliberate strategy?"

It is also a central issue as the Army weighs punishments against nine officers, including four generals, faulted in the latest Pentagon report on the case of the NFL star-turned-soldier. Military offocials said those recommendations could come in the next several weeks.

It is well known by now that the circumstances of Tillman's April 22, 2004, death were kept from his family and the American public; the Army maintained he was cut down by enemy bullets in an ambush, even though many soldiers knew he was mistakenly killed by his own comrades. The nearly 1,100 pages of documents released last month at the conclusion of the Army Criminal Investigation Command's probe reveal the mechanics of how the Army contained the information.

For example, the day after Tillman died, Spc. Jade Lane lay in a hospital bed in Afghanistan, recovering from gunshot wounds inflicted by the same fellow Rangers who had shot at Tillman. Amid his shock and grief, Lane noticed guards were posted on him.

"I thought it was strange," Lane recalled. Later, he said, he learned the reason for their presence: The news media were sniffing around, and Lane's superiors "did not want anyone talking to us," he said.

Inside Forward Operating Base Salerno, near Khowst, Afghanistan, a soldier heard the dreaded call come across the radio: "KIAs." There were two killed in action, one allied Afghan fighter and one Army Ranger, identified only by his code name.

The soldier checked a roster and discovered the fallen American was Tillman. He rounded up four others and broke the news but withheld Tillman's name.

Had this soldier wanted to share the news outside the tactical operations center, it would have been difficult. "The phones and Internet had been cut off, to prevent anyone from talking about the incident," he told investigators.

Nearby on the same base, a staff sergeant was in his tent when a captain walked in and told him to burn Tillman's bloody clothing.

"He wanted me alone to burn what was in the bag to prevent security violations, leaks and rumors," the staff sergeant testified. The superior "put a lock on communications" in the tent, he testified. Other Army officers said this was probably a directive to the staff sergeant to keep the conversation to himself.

Then he left the staff sergeant to his work: placing Tillman's uniform, socks, gloves and body armor into a 55-gallon drum and burning them.

Several Army officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan said pulling the plug on base phones and e-mail was routine after a soldier died. The practice was meant to ensure the family was notified through official channels, said Army Maj. Todd Breasseale, chief spokesman for ground forces in Iraq until last August.

But the truth was quickly becoming evident to a small group of soldiers with direct access to the evidence.

Two other sergeants who examined Tillman's vest noticed the bullet holes appeared to be from 5.56-caliber bullets — signature American ammunition. An awful realization dawned on the sergeants, whose names, like those of others who testified in the investigation, were deleted from the recently released testimony.

"At this time was when I had realized Tillman may have been killed by friendly fire," one of them said.

The other sergeant, who was higher-ranking, told him to "keep quiet and let the investigators do their job," the subordinate sergeant testified. He was not to go "informing unit members that Spc. Tillman was killed by friendly fire."

This was the same reason top-ranking officers cited in trying to explain why they waited to tell the Tillman family: They wanted to have the definitive investigation results. Army regulations, however, dictate that the next of kin be informed of additional information about a service member's death as it becomes available.

Then-Col. James C. Nixon, Tillman's regimental commander, ordered an investigation but directed that the information gathered be shared with as few people as possible until the results were finalized, acting Defense Department Inspector General Thomas Gimble found in a separate probe also completed last month.

Nixon, now a brigadier general and director of operations at the Center for Special Operations at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, said that he was not aware of all regulations governing such a case, and that his missteps were unintentional.

Among the top brass at the Pentagon, Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger, a now-retired three-star general in charge of special operations, represented the Army at Tillman's memorial service almost two weeks after the soldier's death. "He decided to withhold notification from family members until all facts concerning the incident could be verified," Gimble found.

Kensinger denied that he knew on the day of the memorial service that friendly fire was suspected. But investigators dismissed his claim as not credible and Kensinger could be punished under military law for making false official statements.

Congressional investigators will try to determine how high up the chain of command the information lockdown went. The Army delivered several thousand pages of new documents on Thursday, military officials said.

Gen. John Abizaid, then chief of Central Command, in charge of all American forces in the Middle East and Central Asia, testified that he did not learn of the likelihood of friendly fire until sometime between May 6 and May 13 — two or three weeks after Tillman died — because he was traveling in the Middle East.

And a lieutenant colonel testified that he delayed briefing Central Command lawyers until more than a month after Tillman had died, in part because he feared leaks and did not want to be blamed as the source.

But Abizaid visited Afghanistan within a week of Tillman's death and spoke to Tillman's platoon leader, then-Lt. David Uthlaut. Uthlaut has testified he did not suspect friendly fire until later.

Abizaid's trip to Afghanistan was not examined by Gimble's investigators, according to spokesman Gary Comerford.

Abizaid had no immediate comment.

The new testimony and other documents do not identify who, if anyone, orchestrated the clampdown. Nor do they address whether there was a concerted effort to conceal the truth about the best-known casualty in the war on terrorism.

Gimble said last month he found no evidence of such a cover-up. But when asked by a reporter whether he probed why the Army had not told the family in a timely fashion, Gimble said no.

One soldier carried a particularly heavy burden of secrecy.

Ranger Spc. Russell Baer had witnessed Rangers shooting at Rangers. Afterward, he was directed to travel from Afghanistan to the United States with his friend Kevin Tillman. But he was ordered not to tell Pat Tillman's brother and fellow Ranger that friendly fire was the likely cause of the former football player's death.

He kept the secret, fearing he did not know the whole story. But in a personal protest, Baer later went AWOL and was demoted as punishment.

"I lost respect for the people in charge of me," Baer testified in an earlier Tillman investigation. He had gleaned "part of the puzzle" of Tillman's death, but lamented that "I couldn't tell them about it."

Five investigations and three years later, that information gap is what's driving the congressional probe, which is also looking into misinformation surrounding the capture and rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch in Iraq.

House Republican leader says Gonzales should go

Fri Apr 20, 2007 6:32 PM ET

By Donna Smith

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A congressional Republican leader on Friday joined bipartisan calls for U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign but the White House reaffirmed its confidence in President George W. Bush's long-time friend.

Rep. Adam Putnam of Florida, chairman of the Republican conference in the House of Representatives, said it was important for the head of the U.S. Justice Department to have "unwavering" credibility.

"For the good of the nation, I think it is time for fresh leadership at the Department of Justice," Putnam said in a brief telephone interview. He said a lack of credibility by the Justice Department chief puts in jeopardy the president's legislative agenda.

Putnam is joining a growing list of U.S. lawmakers expressing a lack of confidence in Gonzales a day after he testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the firing of eight U.S. prosecutors last year. The dismissals raised concerns among Democrats that they were politically motivated.

The White House of Friday reiterated Bush's support for Gonzales.

Spokeswoman Dana Perino said Bush talked with Gonzales after Thursday's hearing and believes he answered lawmakers' questions "honestly and forthrightly."

Perino added: "Hopefully people will be able to take a step back, realize that there is no credible evidence of wrongdoing, that the attorney general has apologized for how it was handled, that he has a job to do and he's been doing it very well and the president has full confidence in him."

Bush and Gonzales have been friends since their days together in Texas where Gonzales served as counsel to then-Texas Gov. Bush. Gonzales was Bush's White House counsel before becoming attorney general in 2005.

At Thursday's Senate hearing, Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, told Gonzales he should resign, while Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, said the nation's top law enforcement official had lost his credibility.

Democrats have vowed to keep pushing their investigation into the firing, regardless if Gonzales resigns.

But Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who sits on the Judiciary Committee, told CNN that Gonzales should stay.

"I think he should because, frankly, I don't think the Democrats are going to be satisfied with resignation by Al Gonzales," Cornyn said.

(additional reporting by Thomas Ferraro)

Mogadishu war escalates, hundreds dead

Sat Apr 21, 2007 9:33 AM ET

By Sahal Abdulle

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Shells pounded Mogadishu on Saturday, killing at least 73 people to swell a death-toll already in the hundreds from this week's battles between militant Islamists and allied Somali and Ethiopian troops.

The escalating war has also sent more than 321,000 residents -- nearly a third of Mogadishu's total population -- fleeing in the biggest refugee movement in Somalia since the 1991 fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre ushered in 16 years of anarchy.

Even by Somali standards, Saturday's carnage was shocking.

"I counted 20 dead in the street and the sidewalk. Some were missing heads, others were so mutilated you couldn't tell if they were men or women," resident Suleman Mohammed said from the Al Barakah market area where more than seven mortars landed.

Residents and medical staff interviewed by Reuters confirmed a minimum of 73 casualties from the incessant shelling and gunfire across the city on Saturday, adding to an estimated 131 others from the previous three days' violence.

The week's final death-toll is expected to soar and may come close to the estimated 1,000 casualties from a similar four-day flare-up at the end of March. Most of the victims are civilians.

The Islamists ruled most of south Somalia for the second half of 2006, before being defeated in a brief war over the New Year. But Islamist fighters -- backed by some disgruntled Hawiye clan elements -- have regrouped to rise up against President Abdullahi Yusuf's administration and his Ethiopian backers.

"There are a lot of deaths. I am carrying the bodies of two family members into my car now," one distraught resident, who asked not to give his name, told Reuters.

Another, Abdi Mohammed, said: "Six shells hit our neighborhood. One hit our neighbor's house killing five of the six family members who live there. My seven-year-old son and his friend were wounded."

REFUGEE CATASTROPHE

The United Nations and aid agencies say the massive refugee exodus is also creating a looming humanitarian catastrophe, with diseases already striking. Many refugees are living under trees and beside roads, short of food, water and any basic amenities.

Inside the city, residents described a terrifying night of near-constant shelling mixed with thunder from a storm.

Mortars, apparently from Ethiopian positions, hit the offices of the private broadcaster HornAfrik on Saturday morning, wounding several journalists inside, witnesses said.

"We are in a state of shock, I see no end to this," said Ali Haji, 50, a resident who took his family out of Mogadishu last month but came back to protect his house and belongings.

"I've had enough. I'm abandoning the house. I am caught between two groups -- Ethiopians trying to kill me because I am Somali, and insurgents not happy because I am not picking up a gun and fighting with them. I have lost all hope."

With even a cemetery under bombardment on Saturday, residents buried their dead in makeshift graves.

The only operating hospital, Madina, was packed with wounded, screams echoing through the corridors. Tents were set up in the hospital garden to deal with the influx, with many people nursing injuries unattended under trees in the heat.

"Unless we get massive international help, we cannot cope," a doctor said. "Our beds and tents are full."

Access to the hospital involved a dangerous journey through streets ricocheting to gunfire and explosions, witnesses said.

Insurgents barricaded themselves behind makeshift sandbanks and raced through streets on the backs of pickups turned into battle-wagons, while Ethiopian and Somali troops made forays into rebel strongholds with armored cars.

A small African Union peacekeeping force of 1,500 Ugandan soldiers has failed to stem the conflict.

The United States, Ethiopia and Somali government say the rebels are linked to al Qaeda, but Islamist leaders deny that, saying they are being deprived of a say in Somalia's future.

(Additional reporting by Andrew Cawthorne in Nairobi)

Panel discusses Holocaust's role in Middle East conflict

Front Page

By Alison Channon, Editor

Brandeis hosted a panel Thursday called “The Public Framing of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: How the Holocaust Underlines Realities of Fear, Intimidation, and Denial. The panel, moderated by Professor Gordon Fellman (Soc), featured Dr. Sara Roy, Senior Research Scholar of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, Dr. Alice Rothchild, physician and cofounder of Jewish Voice for Peace-Boston, and Dr. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, author of Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel.

Instead of drawing a large student turnout, the event drew an audience almost exclusively of older adults. Fellman began the discussion with a comment about Jimmy Carter’s visit to Brandeis. Carter’s visit, Fellman said, “helped us to open the real debate [on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] at Brandeis…it helped to crack open the taboo.” He added that in the discussion of the conflict, the “elephant in the middle of the room is the Holocaust.” He continued, “the left doesn’t have a good way of dealing with feelings.”

Roy was the first to speak. She explained an essay she wrote entitled “A Jewish Plea” that appeared on counterpunch.org. Roy characterized the essay as “an ethical response” to Israel’s policies regarding last summer’s war with Lebanon and the Palestinians. She then conducted into her discussion of the Holocaust. “The Holocaust is part of who we are as a people,” she said, “what have we as a people made of our suffering?”

Roy, whose parents are Holocaust survivors, said her parents “stood as a moral challenge among us.” But, she said, “Zionism has denigrated” the memory of the Holocaust. Roy, arguing that the Holocaust should be used to promote morality and justice, relayed her mother’s story of liberation from the concentration camps. According to Roy, after her mother and sister were liberated by the Russians, the prisoners were given free range to exact revenge upon the prison guards. However, Roy’s mother resisted the temptation to “ravage the guards.” Instead, Roy’s mother said, “we cannot do this. We must seek justice, not revenge.”

Roy also addressed the issue of intimidation and accusations of anti-Semitism. “Why is it anti-Semitic to argue against the misuse of the Holocaust? Why is it anti-Semitic…to defend the dignity and rights of all human beings? Why is it anti-Semitic to envision a future…that allows both peoples to live with dignity, equality, and peace.”

Rothchild followed Roy’s speech. “We’re all searching for meaning in the tragedy of the Holocaust,” she said. “How do [victims of the Holocaust] get to a place where they can do this to another people?” Rothchild asked. Moreover, “the Holocaust undermines and distorts the realities in the Israel-Palestine conflict.”

Rothchild then discussed issues of determination. She explained that “evoking the Holocaust” is a tool often used by what she deemed “right-wing” groups. As examples she pointed to the David Project Center for Jewish Leadership. According to Rothchild, the David Project has equated the threat of a nuclear Iran with Hitler’s Final Solution and the current times with the 1930s.

Rothchild then referenced the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which she accused of employing similar rhetoric. Then, in particular reference to Brandeis, Rothchild cited the alleged loss of five million dollars in donations from Brandeis alumni as a result of Carter’s visit to campus. These acts of intimidation, Rothchild asserted, “muzzles the academic community” and the Jewish community in general.

Last to speak was Beit-Hallahmi, who discussed at length the culture around victimization. “We all want to be victims,” he explained, “because it gives us the moral high ground.” In actuality he argued, “suffering does not ennoble anyone.” Moreover, he said, “being a victim is an objectionable reality. Victims should not be idealized or romanticized.” “We have to recognize that there are many victims,” Beit-Hallahmi argued that “victims should be given their rights without idealization or romanticization.”

Beit-Hallahmi commented that Jews have little reason to feel like victims in current times in light of the prominent positions to which Jews have risen. “There is a psychological gap between reality and a tradition of insecurity.” He then addressed the concept that Zionism came out of the Holocaust. This is the not case, he said, as “Zionism…was around long before the Holocaust.” He also discussed the need for changes in thinking. “Changes in consciousness come slowly…but they’re coming [in Israel]. Changes come about because of many, many small struggles.”

The discussion was then opened to questions. The first came from a man who said “even paranoids have enemies.” He then asked how Israel ought to deal with “avowed enemies of the state.” All three panelists agreed that “the occupation” is responsible for violence. Beit-Hallahmi said “the rules of the game create oppression…it’s not surprising that you have resistance.” Roy commented, “we are occupying another people. We have engaged in a process of oppression that is quite severe…there is a humanitarian denial of a people. If you take away all possibility…what do you expect…giving unabated oppression?” She added, “allow people to live as we live…then the violence will stop.”

Another audience member asked, “how do we break through the Holocaust inflected barrier?” Rothchild explained, we must “constantly challenge stereotypes and reframe issues. We must get people to ask different questions.” Moreover, “we must humanize the other…we must try to reproduce the situation for students…give it a context that is denied. De-educate, re-educate.”

Beit-Hallahmi said, “you can see a lot of movement [in opinion in Israel] even if the government is not.” There is a recognition that the “present situation is too costly.”

When asked about the implications of this discussion for Brandeis in light of the loss of funding resulting from Carter’s visit, Fellman said that the five million dollar figure “is a very casual figure.” He explained that some donors have stopped donating while others have donated for the first time. Moreover, “it’s up to the President to explain to donors what a university is.” Roy commented, this discussion “shouldn’t be perceived as a threat.”

Friday April 20, 2007

America up to its old tricks again

Editorial

Published: 21/04/2007 12:00 AM (UAE)
Gulf News

The US has persuaded Nato that in their best interests, a missile shield should protect them from the danger of attack. The supposed source of such a deadly attack would, according to US intelligence, be both Iran and "others" in the Middle East.

As if things weren't bad enough through US policy, the thought of having armed missiles pointing towards the Arab world - just in case - is fearful. It is also more likely to lead to a rethinking and escalation of strategic defence in the region than a deterrent.

It also underlines the US attitude to foreign policy. Namely, to seek out and undermine all perceived threats, whether imagined or real. Such bravura performance reinforces the danger of the ill-conceived policies that emanate from the White House and the Pentagon.

Russia has already expressed alarm, and quite rightly so, at the prospect of 10 interceptor missiles being based in Poland, with an associated radar station in the Czech Republic.

Russia maintains that as there are no Iranian ICBMs, the installation of the missiles is primarily aimed as at Russia. Considering the US defence system will not protect all Nato members - Turkey and parts of Greece - it is likely that Russia's concerns are valid.

Zionism equals colonisation

By As'ad Abdul Rahman, Special to Gulf News

The fact is that [there can be] no Zionism without settlement [colonisation], nor a Jewish state without ousting the Arabs, seizing and fencing the land."

These are the words of former Knesset member Yesheayaho Ben Fort in Yediot Ahranot, July 14, 1972. This was the basis of the idea of colonisation, and the concrete implementation of the Zionist strategic plan of usurping Palestinian land after having "cleansed" it from its indigenous people by various forms and means.

To draw on the Jewish Diaspora, and to eventually create a state for them in place of the Palestinian people, the Zionists based their arguments on far-fetched, fictitious, religious and historical claims, with a view of attracting Jews from all over the world to Palestine. Among other slogans, we heard of "a land without people for people without land"!

Ever since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, its leaders have been trying to demonstrate that their occupation of Palestinian lands was a "reclamation" of barren, wasteland where nobody had ever trod.

But this is nonsense. What about the hundreds of thousands of internationally recognised Palestinian refugees, many of whom still keep the keys to their houses and documents of land ownership?

New form

However, as it has become crystal clear to the whole world, colonisation is nothing other than usurpation of Palestinian lands given to them through many generations.

This kind of colonisation has nowadays assumed a new form - the exclusion and deportation of Palestinians and siege of the Palestinians in enclaves with barbed wire, and with gates that open and close at Israeli whims, in violation of the fourth Geneva Convention: Article 49 which stipulates that the occupying power should not evict or transfer the civilians of the territory it occupies.

Besides, international law regards colonisation as illegal and as a flagrant violation of human rights.

In the recent past, even more decisions have been taken by the Israeli government on the expansion of colonies in the West Bank, combined with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's adoption of the the separation Wall route that will include neighbourhoods in Occupied Jerusalem.

This huge barrier, which Israel began building in June 2002, cuts through the West Bank and fragments it into cantons.

In spite of Palestinian and international opposition, including the International Court of Justice's Advisory Opinion on the legality of Israel's Wall in the Occupied Territories, Olmert's government is going ahead, like the previous government, with this ominous venture, adding to the suffering of the Palestinian people.

During Israel's war on Lebanon last summer, colony-building was hastened. In mid-February, the Israeli Peace Now group released a report in which it asserted that "the settlers [colonists] spare no effort to expand the existing colonies".

It further underlined that "between April and August 2006, the number of colonists in the West Bank increased by 5 per cent to reach the total of 268,000, while the construction of housing units on Palestinian land continued".

The group added that contrary to public statements, only one isolated colony near Ofra was dismantled in 2006, whereas 101 other colonies remain.

The group pointed out that the colonisation project was not limited to plundering public Palestinian land, but also included usurping registered private property.

In November 2006, the group's report showed clearly that 40 per cent of the West Bank's land, where 130 colonies are erected on slots of 60,000 dunums, is privately owned, registered real estate, according to the Israeli Civil Department registrar.

As these colonies have clearly become the embodiment of racist, extremist anti-Palestinian policies, some Israelis began warning against expanding and building new colonies.

Architects Rafi Sigal and Eyal Weisman emphasise in their book Civil Occupation: Israel's Architecture Policies that Israel's essential plan was, and still remains, to disrupt connectivity in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The two authors demand that many of the Israeli architects and their employers be tried by an international court on charges of collusion with an illegal occupation, and of contributing to the infliction of further injustices upon an occupied people.

Sigal and Weisman conclude that "the successes achieved so far by the settlement [colonist] movement in disrupting connection among the Palestinian territories have created a nightmare that Israel never dreamt of".

The same conclusion was reached by Arnon Sofir, who wrote in Maariv, on August 11, 2005, that the colonists posed a threat not only to the Palestinians but also to the future of the Jews themselves.

He addressed Israeli officials saying: "You are knowingly leading us to a catastrophic disaster for the sake of a handful of aberrants on the settlements [colony] council, who have carried out terrible actions."

So by building colonies and proceeding with the Wall, Israel is creating "concrete facts" in the West Bank with a view to drawing imposed borders there, and thus undermining the basic exigencies of a viable Palestinian state.

These Israeli ventures are disdainful of international law and subsequently deepen the conflict and kindle the the fires of resistance by all possible means.

They also undermine peace, as they swallow the territories of the Palestinian state, providing a fresh reminder of the South African "Bantustans".

No Palestinian would accept that. Now would anyone negotiate on this premise.

Professor As'ad Abdul Rahman is the Chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopedia.

'Open battle' being waged for Iraq: PM

20th April 2007, 15:38 WST

Iraq's prime minister says an "open battle" is being waged for control of his nation, as a suicide bomber slipped past security barriers to kill 12 people in a surge of violence that has dealt a heavy blow to hopes for a US-led military operation to pacify the capital.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's assessment on Thursday came a day after more than 230 people died in the worst wave of mass killings since US President George W Bush announced his plan in January to increase American troop levels in Iraq by 30,000.

Meanwhile, the US announced three more troop deaths - two soldiers killed on Wednesday by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, and another killed the same day in a small arms fire attack in a southwestern area of the capital.

At least 46 Iraqis were killed or found dead nationwide on Thursday.

Maliki said militants had "proven their spite by targeting humanity."

"It is an open battle and it will not be the last in the war we are fighting for the sake of the nation, dignity, honour and the people," he said at a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the founding his Islamic Dawa Party.

"This is Iraq. They sabotage and we build and continue the reconstruction."

Three of the five brigades ordered into Iraq by Bush to stem Baghdad violence have arrived, bringing the US forces in the country to 146,000. Officials want the rest in place by June, for a total of 160,000, and US commanders urged patience, saying the nine-week operation was still just beginning. But already it showed holes.

One week ago, a suicide bomber penetrated several layers of security to hit inside parliament, in the heart of US-guarded Green Zone. An Iraqi lawmaker was killed and the country shaken.

The same day, a truck bomber collapsed a more than 50-year-old bridge, killing 11 people and sending cars careening into the Tigris River below.

At the Pentagon, a top general predicted the pattern was likely to continue.

"We saw an initial drop in their (militants') activity" after the start of the Baghdad security operation, said Major General Michael Barbero, an operations official for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"And now lately, we've seen an increase - the bridge, this ... It's action on our part and now we're seeing the reaction on their part. And it will be like that until we can defeat these forces."

Thursday's bombing hit when security would have been tightest, hours before US Defence Secretary Robert Gates arrived on an unannounced visit. Gates said he was "sympathetic" to challenges the Iraqis face, but that "the clock is ticking."

The suicide bomber blew himself up next to a fuel tanker within half a kilometre of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's home, in the mostly Shi'ite Karradah district where one of Wednesday's bombs exploded as well. Talabani, a Kurd, was not believed to have been the target.

The attack killed at least 12 people, including two Iraqi soldiers, wounded 34 people and set fire to the tanker, police said.

Britain's defence ministry also said two British soldiers died and three others were wounded by an explosion in southeastern Iraq. The attack occurred in Maysan province, a day after British troops transferred control of the area to Iraqi forces.

At least 3,314 members of the US military have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians. The British military has reported 144 deaths.
AP

Israeli troops kill Palestinian policeman

Last update - 15:14 21/04/2007

Palestinians: IDF troops kill policeman in West Bank raid

By News Agencies

Israel Defense Forces troops operating in a village outside the West Bank town of Jenin shot dead a Palestinian policeman, Palestinian security sources said on Saturday.

Palestinian sources said that an IDF army force operating in the village of Kafr Dan had surrounded the family home of Muhammad Abed before breaking into the home and shooting in all directions.

Witnesses said the man was not involved in the fighting and he was shot through the window of his house.

The soldiers killed Abed, 23, a member of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the military wing of the mainstream Fatah movement, the sources said, and later left the village taking five people with them.

An IDF spokeswoman said troops operating in the village had come under attack from Palestinian militants.

"(The troops) shot at an armed militant," the spokeswoman said, adding they saw he had been hit.

Dems Warn Olmert About Playing Politics

Despite Concilliatory Talk, Tension Remains Over Criticism of Pelosi

Nathan Guttman | Fri. Apr 20, 2007

Washington - Israeli officials and Democratic lawmakers are working to mend fences after the fallout between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi following Pelosi’s visit to Damascus. But Democrats are still angry about what they see as Olmert’s desperate attempts to align himself with President Bush even if it means wading into American political controversies.

The latest flap erupted two weeks ago, after Olmert’s office released a statement — based on partial reports from a press conference that Pelosi had held in Damascus — suggesting she had done a poor job of delivering an Israeli message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Israeli criticism of the speaker came as Bush administration officials were blasting the Democratic leader for visiting Syria.

Since then, Olmert is said to have apologized to Pelosi, and Israel’s ambassador to Washington has praised the speaker. But some Democrats are still upset at Olmert’s actions and attribute them to his weakened political standing at home.

“It’s all politics,” said Rep. Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat who chairs the House Subcommittee on the Middle East. When asked what led Olmert to criticize Pelosi’s trip to Damascus, Ackerman said that the Israeli premier had “kissed President Bush’s ass.”

“All the criticism of Pelosi is a stupid, idiotic political bube moyse that the Republicans made up here in Washington,” Ackerman said, stressing that the entire debate had nothing to do with Israel but rather with American partisan politics.

“Bush is the only friend Olmert has left,” said a Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill. “Our impression is that Olmert does want a good relationship with the Democrats, but he feels that he needs to support the administration.”

Despite his harsh comments, Ackerman, who just returned from a visit to the Middle East in which he met with Olmert, said he did not sense any tension in the relations between the Israeli leadership and the House Democrats.

In a speech Tuesday at the convention of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Pelosi insisted that her bipartisan delegation “delivered the message” — that Israel is ready for peace talks if Syria ceases its support for terrorism — “as we were requested.”

Pelosi, and other members of the delegation, said that in their meetings with leaders of the Syrian regime, they also stressed that Democrats join the Bush administration’s demand that Syria stop sponsoring terror and discontinue its meddling in the political life in Lebanon.

Rep. Tom Lantos, the California Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and joined Pelosi on the trip, called Olmert upon returning to the United States and told the Israeli leader that the delegation had conveyed to the Syrian leader the exact message that it was asked by Olmert himself to pass on. Pelosi telephoned Dalia Itzik, speaker of the Knesset, to make the same point.

Israeli officials have been working to clear the air after it became obvious that Olmert’s remarks were seen as a slap in the face to the Democratic leadership.

Olmert called Pelosi last week and thanked her for her efforts in Syria. According to sources who were briefed on the conversation, Olmert was apologetic and made clear that he did not mean to accuse Pelosi or other members of the delegation of mishandling the diplomatic mission.

Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Sallai Meridor, issued a statement thanking Pelosi for her support of Israel and for raising the issue of captured Israeli soldiers in her meetings in Damascus. He described Pelosi’s efforts as “a unique manifestation of the strong bipartisanship friendship and alliance between our two countries.”

Another California Democrat in the delegation, Rep. Henry Waxman, said he does not see any long-lasting damage to the relations that Democrats have with Olmert, now that the disagreement over the Damascus trip has been settled.

“In my opinion, there is no problem between the Democrats and the Israeli government,” Waxman, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, told the Forward. “There may be differences of opinion, but on the central issue of supporting Israel and its security, there is no difference.”

But some Democratic activists do not see the flap over Pelosi’s trip to Syria as an isolated incident.

A month before her trip, Olmert spoke at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and warned against a hasty withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. Olmert’s direct call on pro-Israel activists to support Bush’s Iraq policy came only hours after Vice President Dick Cheney warned the same forum of the dangers that setting a deadline for withdrawal would pose to Israel.

The backdrop for both speeches was the beginning of Democratic efforts in Congress to set a timetable for pulling American forces out of Iraq.

Olmert also praised Bush’s policy in Iraq after the two leaders had a White House meeting last November, days after the midterm elections in which the Democrats won control of Congress.

A Democratic staffer speculated that Olmert’s criticism of Pelosi came after “he got a call from the White House.” Lantos, in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, also suggested that the White House was behind drawing Olmert’s attention to the activities of Pelosi’s delegation in Damascus.

Israeli sources, however, told the Forward that while Israel does not wish to enter the American political fray, it has genuine strategic concerns relating to a possible rushed withdrawal of American forces from Iraq and sees a need to express these concerns in a variety of forums.

Tense relations between Israeli leaders and American politicians from either side of the aisle are not new. During the Reagan administration, Israel worked with the Democratically controlled Congress against the White House in a failed attempt to stop a sale of surveillance aircrafts of the Airborne Warning and Control System to Saudi Arabia. When Bill Clinton was in the White House, then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu forged relations with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich in what was seen as an attempt to counter the administration’s peace efforts in the region.

In contrast, Ariel Sharon, Olmert’s political predecessor and patron, maintained an excellent working relationship with President Bush but strictly refrained from taking any position that could be seen as explicitly siding with the Republicans, and he never made any public remarks about the conduct of the war in Iraq.

While the debate over Iraq has apparently created some discord between Jerusalem and Democratic leaders in Congress, on legislative issues there is no daylight. Democrats were responsible for curbing attempts by the Bush administration to provide support to the Palestinian Authority, and they have forced the State Department to cut back an aid package intended to bolster the forces of P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas. They have also insisted that the administration not establish ties with the new Palestinian government.

In Democratic circles, Olmert’s low approval ratings — down to 3%, according to one poll — have become a source of comic relief and in some cases have taken the edge off the anger at the Israeli leaders. “Olmert and Bush put together have less than 50% support,” Ackerman said.

Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who is the first Muslim to be elected to Congress and is also a member of Pelosi’s delegation to the Middle East, was a bit more colorful in making the same point during his appearance at this week’s convention of Reform activists. “There are,” Ellison said, “more people who believe that Elvis is alive than those who support Olmert.”

Mr. Renzi Offers Field To Mining Companies; Grand Jury Is Active

US Congressman under FBI investigation
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JOHN R. WILKE
April 21, 2007; Page A1

SUPERIOR, Ariz. -- As they dig for nickel, copper and other commodities in the far corners of the earth, the world's largest mining companies, Rio Tinto PLC and BHP Billiton Ltd., are used to solving geological problems. Here, though, the problems they encountered were political.

North America's largest copper lode is believed to be buried more than a mile beneath Apache Leap, the stark red cliffs that loom above this storied Old West town about an hour east of Phoenix. Resolution Copper Co., a joint venture between Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, wants to mine it. But first it needs Congress to approve a federal land exchange, under which Resolution would swap 5,000 acres of private land for 3,000 acres of public land near its planned mine.

In exchange for supporting the bill, the local congressman, Rick Renzi, a Republican, insisted on something in return: He wanted Resolution to buy, as part of the land swap, a 480-acre alfalfa field near his hometown of Sierra Vista, according to documents and people involved in the deal.

Resolution executives refused. For starters, they thought the land was overpriced, people close to the deal say. More troubling, they discovered it was owned by Mr. Renzi's former business partner, these people say.

Resolution wasn't the only party troubled by the congressman's demands. His chief of staff resigned and began cooperating secretly with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to witnesses and others close to the case. The FBI began a preliminary inquiry that was first reported in October, just before Mr. Renzi was elected to a third term.

That investigation has now become a formal public-corruption probe by a federal grand jury in Tucson. On Thursday, the grand jury authorized a search warrant of a Renzi family business. Investigators have uncovered evidence that Mr. Renzi received a cash payment from his former business partner, funneled through a family wine company, after a second investor group pursuing an unrelated land swap agreed to pay $4 million for the alfalfa field, according to people contacted in the course of the two-year investigation.

Mr. Renzi denies any wrongdoing and says that he intends to cooperate with the investigation. The search of the family business, he said in a statement Friday, is "the first step toward getting the truth out." His lawyer says the cash payment he received was to settle an unrelated debt.

The case could add fuel to the firestorm over the Bush administration's firing of federal prosecutors late last year. Paul Charlton, the U.S. Attorney who had been overseeing the case, was among those dismissed at the behest of the White House. A spokesman for Mr. Renzi dismissed as "a political hatchet job" the suggestion that Mr. Charlton's firing was connected to the probe of Mr. Renzi. On Thursday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told Congress that none of the dismissals were politically motivated, and said the Justice Department is committed to battling corruption.

The Renzi case is the latest in a wave of public-corruption investigations of local and federal officials. At least five members of Congress -- three Republicans and two Democrats -- are now under federal criminal scrutiny. Two former members, both Republicans, have gone to prison in the past year. Voter polls have suggested that the investigations were one reason Republicans lost control of Congress last November.

The Renzi case spotlights the potential for abuse in the murky world of legislated land swaps, which have become more common in recent years. Thousands of acres of public land worth hundreds of millions of dollars change hands each year through narrow special-interest bills. There is little public scrutiny, and often no vote is recorded in Congress. Some swaps serve public goals, such as protecting wild habitat. Others enrich private interests at taxpayers' expense, sometimes sidestepping federal rules in the process.

The proposed Arizona land exchange would sweep aside a 1954 order by President Eisenhower protecting national forest in the area, including Oak Flats, a campground located above the proposed mine. "Yet another piece of land that was being 'permanently' protected is being put on the block because a private interest has use for it," Janine Blaeloch, director of the nonprofit Western Lands Project, complained to Congress last year.

Resolution, which declined to comment about its contacts with Mr. Renzi, has said it hopes to sink 7,000-foot shafts into the ground to reach the rich vein of copper ore. It has worked for years to win support for the mine, reaching out to local officials, environmentalists and rock-climbing groups. Arizona's governor and most members of its congressional delegation are backers. The governor told a Senate hearing last year the project could bring 1,000 jobs and $1 billion or more to the state's economy.

Although Superior has long been a mining town, it has escaped some of the ravages of open-pit mining that have scarred nearby towns. It is rich in natural beauty, including otherworldly rock formations and steep cliffs that draw thousands of climbers each year. Mayor Michael Hing sees the new mine as a way to escape the boom-and-bust cycles that have whipsawed the town for more than a century, ever since silver was discovered in 1875 at the Silver Queen mine and hundreds flocked to town, including famed gunslingers Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp.

In order to secure the use of the government land for mining, Resolution has proposed buying a number of parcels elsewhere and transferring them to government entities for uses completely unrelated to mining. The town of Superior, for example, would get title to the town graveyard, now on federal land. Climbers would get another place to explore. Resolution says the vast Apache Leap rock escarpment -- so named because Apache warriors on horseback are said to have jumped to their deaths to evade capture -- would be protected. The San Carlos Apache tribe opposes the mine, citing concerns that culturally significant areas would be disturbed.

Mr. Renzi told Resolution in 2005 that his support for the land swap would hinge in part on whether it helped fulfill a goal to cut water consumption along the San Carlos River, which slices through the desert far from the mining area, in southern Arizona, participants in the deal say. Fort Huachuca, a big U.S. Army base nearby, was under court order to cut water consumption, and it had been seeking help to retire farmland near the river. Mr. Renzi has longstanding ties to the base, the economic engine of the area. He grew up near it, and his father, retired U.S. Army Gen. Eugene Renzi, is its former commandant, now employed by one of its largest contractors, ManTech Corp.

Resolution proposed buying and handing over to the government thousands of acres of bird and wildlife habitat along the banks of the San Carlos, which would further the water-conservation goal.

In early 2005, however, Resolution balked at buying the 480-acre alfalfa field owned by Mr. Renzi's business partner, James Sandlin. Mr. Renzi then turned to another investment group, called the Petrified Forest group, that was looking to put together a unrelated land swap. That group, which included Bruce Babbitt, the former governor, agreed that April to buy the patch of farmland for nearly $4 million, says Philip Aries, a land-swap expert that was part of the group.

"Congressman Renzi told me that the purchase of the Sandlin parcel was a matter of national security, and that it was key to ensuring the viability of Fort Huachuca," Mr. Aries says. "He said that if we were to buy it before" upcoming hearings about the possible closure of the base, "he would give our swap priority -- a 'free pass,' he said, would be sure to get through the Natural Resources Committee," thereby ensuring its approval.

Mr. Aries says that after his group's purchase of the alfalfa field went through in 2005, Resolution complained that the Petrified Forest group had gotten priority treatment, and Mr. Renzi dropped his support for that group's land swap.

Mr. Aries, Resolution executives and others involved in the proposed transactions have been interviewed about the matter by the FBI, people close to the case say. Mr. Aries declines to discuss those conversations, or other details of his group's dealings with Mr. Renzi. Mr. Sandlin, the former owner of the alfalfa field, declines to comment.

Public records show that Mr. Sandlin and Mr. Renzi became business partners in 2001, when Mr. Sandlin bought shares of Fountain Realty & Development, one of Mr. Renzi's companies. In 2002 and 2003, Mr. Sandlin paid his partner between $1 million and $5 million for Mr. Renzi's stake in that business, according to House financial-disclosure records.

In 2004, a Federal Election Commission audit found that Mr. Renzi had received a total of $369,000 in illegal corporate funds from Fountain in the 2002 election cycle. It found that Fountain had shifted $131,000 of this through Mr. Renzi's personal accounts to the Renzi for Congress campaign account -- and that at least $70,000 of it was put back into Mr. Renzi's personal account.

Mr. Sandlin bought the alfalfa field in 2003 for about $1 million, land records show. The farmland, more than a mile wide, with mountains rising on two sides, lies fallow today.

One focus of the FBI's current investigation is whether Mr. Renzi profited from the sale of Mr. Sandlin's land to the Petrified Forest group, people close to the case say. Federal investigators have been asking questions about a May 2005 payment of $200,000 from Mr. Sandlin to Mr. Renzi, which was sent the same day that Mr. Sandlin received the first payment from the Petrified Forest group, these people say. The payment went to a wine company owned by Mr. Renzi, which was sold to his father days later, public records show.

Phoenix lawyer Grant Woods, one of Mr. Renzi's attorneys, said Friday that Mr. Sandlin sent Mr. Renzi the $200,000 to settle a debt stemming from a previous business transaction involving land in northeast Arizona. "The note was due, and he had to pay it off," Mr. Wood said. He said Mr. Renzi was not pushing the sale of the Sandlin property to help his former business partner. "He was working to solve the water problems of the San Pedro River and help save Fort Huachuca," Mr. Woods said. When Mr. Renzi was pressing Resolution and then the Petrified Forest group to buy the land, "he did not know Mr. Sandlin had an interest in that land," Mr. Wood said.

Executives of Resolution and participants in the Petrified Forest group are cooperating with the FBI in its investigation, people close to the case said. The Petrified Forest group is not being investigated for any possible wrongdoing.

The FBI is also looking into the congressman's dealings with Fort Huachuca, these people say.

Mr. Renzi said Friday he would take a leave of absence from the House intelligence committee "until the matter is resolved." John Boehner, the House Republican leader, had warned colleagues in a letter earlier this year that "clear likelihood of serious transgressions will lead to suspension from important committee positions; guilt will lead to immediate and severe consequences," according to Congressional Quarterly.

Mr. Renzi continues to serve on the House Natural Resources Committee, which handles land-swap legislation.

Resolution is pressing ahead with its effort to line up congressional support for a land swap. Bruno Hegner, who was Resolution's president when Mr. Renzi proposed that the company buy the alfalfa field, was so troubled by the incident that he wrote a letter detailing what happened and mailed it to himself, people close to the case said. He wanted a postmarked record of what occurred, these people say. That letter is now in the hands of the FBI, they say.

Write to John R. Wilke at john.wilke@wsj.com

Mogadishu war rages, shells kill civilians

Sat Apr 21, 2007 2:40 PM IST

By Sahal Abdulle

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Shells rocked Mogadishu throughout the night, killing more civilians on Saturday and swelling a vast exodus from an escalating war between militant Islamists and allied Somali-Ethiopian troops.

"There are a lot of deaths. I am carrying the bodies of two family members into my car now," one distraught resident, who asked not to give his name, told Reuters.

Battles since Wednesday have killed at least 131 people, a local rights group said late on Friday. The deaths overnight will push up the toll.

A similar four-day flareup in March killed 1,000 people, adding to the city's history of anarchy and bloodshed since the 1991 fall of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

The United Nations says 321,000 residents -- or nearly a third of Mogadishu's estimated one million population -- have fled since February in what it and aid agencies are calling a looming humanitarian catastrophe.

Many refugees are living under trees and beside roads.

In Mogadishu, residents described a terrifying night of near-constant shelling mixed with thunder from a storm.

"At one point you couldn't tell the difference. My windows were shaking," a Reuters witness said, half a dozen shells exploding within earshot as he spoke by telephone to his head office in Nairobi.

Mortars, apparently from Ethiopian positions, hit the offices of the private broadcaster HornAfrik on Saturday morning, wounding some journalists inside, witnesses said.

"I HAVE LOST HOPE"

"We are in a state of shock, I see no end to this," said Ali Haji, 50, a resident who took his family out of Mogadishu last month but came back to protect his house and belongings.

"I've had enough. I'm abandoning the house. I am caught between two groups -- Ethiopians trying to kill me because I am Somali, and insurgents not happy because I am not picking up a gun and fighting with them. I have lost all hope."

Other residents confirmed incessant bombardments. "We are under heavy shelling, 15 have fallen into our neighbourhood within the last hour," one said in Towfiq district.

With even a cemetery under bombardment on Saturday, Mogadishu residents were burying their dead in makeshift graves by the side of the road. Parts of the city were like a ghost-town of deserted streets and shattered buildings.

The only operating hospital, Madina, was packed with wounded, screams echoing through the corridors. But access to the hospital involved a dangerous journey through streets ricocheting to gunfire and explosions, witnesses said.

Insurgents barricaded themselves behind makeshift sandbanks and raced through streets on the backs of pickups turned into battle-wagons, while Ethiopian and Somali troops made forays into rebel strongholds with armoured cars.

Soldiers blocked off roads to military bases after an Islamist suicide attacker blew himself up on Thursday at a former prison now used by the Ethiopians.

The Islamists ruled most of south Somalia for the second half of 2006, before being defeated in a brief war over the New Year. But Islamist fighters -- backed by some disgruntled Hawiye clan elements -- have regrouped to rise up against President Abdullahi Yusuf's administration and his Ethiopian backers.

A small African Union peacekeeping force of 1,500 Ugandan soldiers has failed to stem the conflict.

The United States, Ethiopia and the Somali government say the Islamists are closely aligned to al Qaeda, but leaders of the movement deny that, saying they are being deprived of a say in Somalia's future.

U.S. Exposed Personal Data

Census Bureau Posted 63,000 Social Security Numbers Online

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 21, 2007; A05

For more than a decade, the Census Bureau posted on a public Web site the Social Security numbers of 63,000 people who received financial aid, officials said yesterday. The apparent violation of federal privacy law prompted concerns about identity theft.

Government officials removed the data from the Web site on April 13, the day they were alerted to the breach by an Illinois farmer who discovered the numbers while surfing the Internet. They did not publicize the matter until yesterday, saying they needed the delay to enable information-security officials to contact those whose numbers were revealed and to contact "at least a half-dozen" mirror sites.

"We take full responsibility for this and offer no excuses for it," said Terri Teuber, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "We absolutely do not think it was appropriate."

A watchdog group countered that officials tried to suppress the news.

"The bottom line is the government screwed up," said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch. "What's really important is that they now try to rectify the problem. Thousands of research groups have copies of this site."

Government officials said they knew of no misuse of the personal data, but the breach underscores the ease with which such data can be exposed in the digital age.

Last month, Los Alamos National Laboratory discovered that a subcontractor working on a security system in 1998 had posted the names and Social Security numbers of 550 lab workers on the subcontractor's Web site. The site was removed that day, a spokesman said.

In the current incident, Marsha Bergmeier said she was bored April 12, so she did an Internet search for her farm's name. It brought up a link to FedSpending.org, a site created by OMB Watch to allow monitoring of federal spending.

The site includes a searchable database of federal contract information, and her farm loan amount, under an Agriculture Department program, was listed. Also listed, Bergmeier discovered, were the Social Security numbers of 28,000 farmers.

"I was in disbelief," she said.

Teuber said the USDA had been using Social Security numbers as part of a 15-digit federal contract identifier number. The practice dates back more than 25 years, she said, to when Social Security numbers were printed on checks. She said the USDA's information-security division was not aware of this continuing practice until last week.

The loans database was part of a larger public Web site run by the Census Bureau, which collects all federal loan and grant data. The site has been up since 1996.

Bureau spokeswoman Ruth Cymber said the site hosts data from about 33 federal agencies. On Tuesday, the agency removed all contract identifier numbers from the site. A review is underway to see if other agencies exposed personal data.

The USDA's action "would seem to violate the Privacy Act," said Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology. "Social Security numbers should not be used as an identifier for account purposes."

The USDA is offering one year of free credit monitoring to those affected.

Staff researchers Robert Lyford and Richard Drezen contributed to this report.

Haditha Report Blasts Marines

Haditha Report Blasts Marines

"Obvious" signs of misconduct ignored in 2005 slayings of two dozen Iraqis, Army probe finds.

Josh White

• Excerpts: 'Simple Failures' and 'Disastrous Results'

Bank investigates contracts linked to Wolfowitz

Richard Adams in Washington
Saturday April 21, 2007
The Guardian

Paul Wolfowitz's grip on his job as president of the World Bank was shaken yesterday after the bank's governing council declared it had "great concern" and ordered an investigation into the contracts of staff connected to him.

After an emergency meeting, the bank's executive directors set up a wide-ranging inquiry into alleged breaches of the bank's code of conduct and ethical rules, and into statements about the controversy made by Mr Wolfowitz's office.

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The decision increases the pressure on Mr Wolfowitz, since the board's move widens the investigation to include the employment contracts of two of Mr Wolfowitz's advisers. Robin Kellems and Robin Cleveland moved from working for the Bush administration to the World Bank alongside Mr Wolfowitz in 2005, and have formed part of his inner circle, leading to accusations by bank staff members of special treatment.

The investigation will also look into the revelations that Shaha Riza, a bank employee and Mr Wolfowitz's girlfriend, was given a large pay rise and promotion on his orders when she was seconded outside the bank to avoid rules barring employees in a relationship from working together.

Mr Kellems and Ms Cleveland are also thought to have received open-ended contracts with salaries substantially above their level of experience. They are said to have started on $250,000 (about £125,000) net of tax.

The bank's board said it would establish a working party "to consider immediately the arrangements made for the secondment of the staff member closely associated with the president" - a reference to Ms Riza. "In addition, the executive directors identified other issues that will need to be addressed, including the various public communications made by the bank on the matter and issues around employment contracts made in the office of the president," the statement concluded.

White House support for Mr Wolfowitz has been ebbing in recent days.

No fairytales allowed

Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has 36 clients in Guantánamo and has visited many times. In this powerful extract from a new book he argues that secrecy in the camp is a disease

Saturday April 21, 2007
The Guardian

I had visited several times and there was something nagging at me. I could not work out what left me uniquely unsettled about the place. It was not the depressing environment; few prisons are inspirational. It was not the occasional intimidation. Eventually it came to me: I could not remember being lied to so often and so consistently. In Guantánamo, lying was a disease that had reached pandemic proportions.

Former "detainee" Binyam Mohamed [British resident arrested in Pakistan] viewed the whole military commission process as a con, a lie that was meant to deceive the world. In June 2006 the supreme court said the same, in more temperate terms, and struck down the commissions as illegal. It rejected Donald Rumsfeld's assurance that the trials would be fair, accusing the administration of "jettisoning" legal rights.

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In Guantánamo, the military began with smaller lies and worked upwards. I was visiting Camp Echo one day and they had messed up the visitation schedule. The client I was meant to see was not there, although I had sent the schedule for my visits several weeks before. I thought I might as well go ahead and see Shaker Aamer [British resident captured in Afghanistan], whom I was not meant to meet until later in the week. So I asked the SOG (the sergeant of the guard, in charge of the camp) whether Shaker was in his normal cell. "No, he's not here," the SOG replied. I settled down for another wasted hour, waiting for the military to bring over someone I could see. It was hot even under the umbrella at the "picnic table" - the area behind one of the cells in Camp Echo where they made lawyers wait. I watched a lizard crawling up the green mesh on the wire fence. I thought about the spider in Robert the Bruce's cave, continually battling to spin its web and teaching patience to the early Scottish nationalists.

The next day I saw Shaker. "Were you here yesterday?" I asked. "Yeah, of course. I've been here for weeks," he replied. So why did the SOG lie to me? He could have said, "Sorry, sir. I am not permitted to speak about that," or "Yes, sir, he is here, but I am afraid we cannot deviate from the schedule." Instead he looked me in the eye and lied. It was unsettling. He had seemed a clean-cut, well-mannered sort of person.

The dissembling disease got worse as time passed. First there was the effort to suppress the truth, with censorship or silence rather than any overt falsehood. Then there was the lie by semantics, where the US military redefined the language to provide plausible deniability. Finally, there was the bare-faced lie. This kind of culture does not germinate in a vacuum. Rumsfeld is responsible for a reconstitution of the English language. I set about compiling a glossary of the Gitmo-speak. The language was so deceptive that I found it appalling and amusing in equal measure.

In a December 2004 press conference, the US navy secretary Gordon England tried to defend conditions in Guantánamo by producing the novel argument that the camp was rehabilitative: "People have learned to read and have learned to write, and so it's not just being incarcerated. We do try to get people prepared for a better life." Prisoners had some difficulty exercising their new-found abilities. Indeed, contrary to England's statement, prisoners in Guantánamo were certainly not considered "people" and the guards were not even allowed to call them "prisoners". One of the escorts told me that, on pain of punishment, soldiers are required to call them "detainees". He wouldn't even say the word "prisoner" out loud. The Pentagon had come to the conclusion that it sounds better for us to "detain" someone for several years, given that he has not been offered a trial. Naturally I set about avoiding the word "detainee".

Meanwhile the authorities exercised rigid control over any information that the prisoners received. Each time I went to visit, I would take a suitcase full of reading materials. I maintained a log reflecting the fate of each publication. Magazines awarded the stamp DENIED included National Geographic, Scientific American and Runner's World. On one occasion it seemed justified, since that month's National Geographic had a story about building an atomic bomb, but the editions about whales and African tribes hardly seemed a threat to national security. One soldier explained the censorship of Scientific American to me: the prisoner might learn about some hi-tech weapons system. Banning Runner's World was less obvious, given the naval base was surrounded on one side by a Cuban minefield and on the other three by ocean.

I was surprised - and Shaker Aamer was incensed - that they would not let in The African-American Slave by Frederick Douglass. Uncle Tom's Cabin was also barred. I dropped off an anthology of first world war poetry for Omar Deghayes that included Wilfred Owen's poem Futility, about the ghastly violence of war. It was returned DENIED.

Omar was born in 1969 and was a British refugee from Libya. His father was tortured and killed by Muammar Gadafy in 1980, and as a teenager Omar moved with his family to Brighton and studied law. He had not completed his law exams, so I brought his books so he could study, ready for his release. Law books, though, were not permitted, least of all a subversive tome about the legal rights of prisoners.

The Save Omar campaign auctioned off an autographed copy of John Pilger's book Hidden Agendas to raise funds. The highest bidder donated it back, so I could try to get it in to Omar. It was written in 1998 and the index had no references to Islamic extremism. The most controversial statement I could see in the book was Pilger's comment that most of the victims of terrorism were Muslims. It never got through.

At this point British political authors began to vie for the status of having a book banned. The New Statesman editor John Kampfner gave me a signed copy of his book Blair's Wars for Omar. Clare Short signed a copy of An Honourable Deception? New Labour, Iraq and the Misuse of Power with a dedication: "Hope you will be back with us soon, Omar.". An inverted snobbery began to develop: if your book slipped through the censors, perhaps that would cast doubt on the credibility of your opinions. I worried that Jeremy Paxman would be disappointed that his book The English was allowed in.

The only Australian left in Guantánamo, David Hicks, was facing a military con-mission, like Binyam, and his lawyer was banned from giving him Scott Turow's legal thriller Presumed Innocent. The basis for censoring The New Dinkum Aussie Dictionary was less clear. Perhaps the strangest decision involved four books returned with the notation: "These Items were not Cleared for Delivery to the Detainee(s)." They were Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Beauty and the Beast - all in Arabic translation. As one FBI agent admonished me: "You know that Arabic script is full of squiggles, and it can easily hide messages to the prisoners." Could it be, I wondered, that Cinderella was secretly an enemy combatant? Eventually the military barred us from bringing books for our clients altogether. So much for education.

Next there was the senseless secrecy. Every word that my Guantánamo clients said to me was deemed classified and I had to get permission from censors to reveal it. To violate them would be a criminal offence and I could end up in jail. Whenever I met with a client I would take notes, but I could not take them with me when I left. I was obliged to put them into an envelope, seal them with SECRET stickers and give them to the military escort to mail to Washington. The notes went by normal mail, which seemed far from secure. Indeed, the first time I visited the military lost my notes for weeks.

This procedure prevented the lawyers from revealing the truth about Guantánamo for a long time after any visit. This meant that I would visit Guantánamo, fly back to England, then return to Washington three weeks later to review my own notes. Meanwhile I was forbidden from saying anything to anyone about what my clients had said. Once the notes arrived in Washington, I would get notice that I could come to the "secure facility" to review them and submit facts for classification review. Even today I cannot repeat some of what my clients told me, but nothing I learned in Guantánamo would be classified in a sane world. I never saw anything that was relevant to US national security, unless it would make the US less secure to admit the truth about torture committed by American personnel.

All this was to control the flow of bad news out of Guantánamo. From the beginning Joe Margulies, the other civilian lawyer working for Binyam Mohamed, encapsulated the proper response to this: if we could open up the prison to public inspection, the government would close it down. The awkward truth about what was happening there would outweigh any perceived benefit of keeping the prison open. Meanwhile, the government wrote the rules. The military censor was dogged in defence. It was not his fault; he was merely applying the rules and trying to do it as politely as possible when we met in the secret Washington facility.

In November 2004, I met Moazzam Begg in Camp Echo. Moazzam was from Birmingham, and we talked for hours and he poured out his desperate experiences. He impressed me from the beginning with his understated eloquence. He had been with his family in Afghanistan, working on a charitable project that involved schools and water wells. When he and his family fled the war to Pakistan, he became one of hundreds sold for bounties to the Americans. Later, he ended up in Guantánamo, tarred as a major terrorist.

When my notes got back to Washington, in January 2005, I wrote a 40-page memo about how Moazzam had been abused by the US military in Afghanistan. Every word was censored. The way the military had pretended to torture his wife in the next room, even information about American soldiers murdering two prisoners in front of Moazzam, was considered a "method of interrogation" that could not be revealed. I was not allowed to reveal how my clients' mental health was crumbling either. Moazzam had been tortured, then held in solitary confinement for 18 months; he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder; he had nightmares, flashbacks, all the symptoms. But this, the military said, was a privacy issue.

The effort to suppress this backfired. Had they come out immediately, the facts of Moazzam's abuse would have soon have slipped into obscurity. The cover-up ran and ran. I wrote one letter to Tony Blair which began with a title, Re: Torture and Abuse of British Citizens in Guantánamo Bay. The next two pages were the highlights of the torture committed against Moazzam and other British citizens. I put in a paragraph saying, "Anything that has been censored or blacked out in this letter, your close allies in the United States don't think you should be allowed to hear." I then attached the 40-page memo detailing Moazzam's abuse. What I got back from the censor was extraordinary. Every word about torture was declared to be classified, except the title, but the last sentence made it past the hovering black marker.

By now there were perhaps a dozen on our team of volunteer lawyers and each one was running into similar problems with the censorship regulations. We tried to press the issues systematically, and eventually the government was persuaded to relax the rules. At last we could get information out to prove how the clients had been mistreated, and the memos about Moazzam's mistreatment were cleared. Indeed, with the threat of this evidence of torture making it into the public eye, the pressure on the Bush administration increased, and at the end of January, Moazzam and the three British prisoners who remained in the prison (Feroz Abbasi, Richard Belmar and Martin Mubanga) were set free.

Moazzam and Feroz had been among the six prisoners originally charged in the military commissions, supposedly the very worst terrorists on the base. Their release, and the fact that the British government found no charges to bring against them, illustrated the extent of the US military's delusion.

Gaining trust

Gaining trust is not easy. When we won the right to visit the prisoners the military tried to outflank us. They began by sending in interrogators pretending to be lawyers. They said all the lawyers were Jewish, relying on perceived Muslim prejudices to drive a wedge.

The next gambit was arguably even sillier. "They have been saying ..." Usama Abu Kabir hesitates, not wanting to go on. "They say ... " By this time Usama is scarlet. He is a courteous man. "Well ... that you like having sex with men!" I want to say that it should make no difference to him. I can't afford to, as so many of my clients here have been brought up in conservative Islamic countries, and we don't have time for a debate. I have to wave my wedding ring about and issue a denial.

There are valid reasons for mistrust. What is to distinguish the lawyer from an interrogator after years of deception? To represent a prisoner here you must be an American citizen. "Hi! I'm from America and I'm here to help you." When a prisoner has a legal visit it is called a "reservation", the euphemism used for interrogation.

Some lawyers say the meetings are confidential. The prisoners laugh. Everyone knows that there are cameras in the cell and microphones by the door.

There are other problems. One saw a client for the first time with a translator whom the prisoner had previously seen working with US military intelligence.

· Extracted from Bad Men by Clive Stafford Smith, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson on April 26th priced £16.99.

· In tomorrow's Observer: read about the journalist interned at Guantánamo in another extract from Bad Men

The unsung hero of the Virginia Tech massacre

Why haven't you heard about this brave person, but get endless coverage of the American professor who left Israel 20 years ago? Simple. He's a Muslim.
---
Waleed Shaalan

muslimmatters.org

Waleed Shaalan, a 32-year-old graduate student, came to the United States from northern Egypt last year to study engineering. He lived among other Egyptian students in Blacksburg, Va., and was planning on bringing his wife and one-and-a-half-year-old son to America in May to live with him.

He was gunned down on Monday while he was studying in Norris Hall, but witnesses say he died a hero.

According to Randy Dymond, a civil engineering professor at Virginia Tech, Mr. Shaalan was in a classroom with another student when the gunman entered and opened fire.

Mr. Shaalan was badly wounded and lay beside the other student, who was not shot but played dead, as the gunman returned two times searching for signs of life. Just as the gunman noticed the student, Mr. Shaalan made a move to distract him, at which point he was shot a second time and died. The student believed that Mr. Shaalan purposefully distracted the shooter to save him, Mr. Dymond said.

"Waleed was bright, energetic and caring," Mr. Dymond said. "The reason we are in higher education is because there are students who are the bright light to the future. Waleed was one of them."

Equally social and studious, Mr. Shaalan was active in the Muslim Student Association at Virginia Tech, and he especially enjoyed participating in the group's community activities.

The Egyptian Consul has notified Mr.Shalaan's wife and parents, all of who live in Egypt. Mr. Shaalan's body will be flown back to his country in the near future, the vice consul, Mohamed Elghazawy, said.

"This is a very emotional time for his entire family, but especially his mother and father," Mr. Elghazawy said.

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Editor's note: also see some of yesterday's articles at the secondary blog

And more coming up here.

The secondary blog.

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