DISPATCH FROM DOWN UNDER
A Kick In The Pants
By Sheila Samples
02/22/05 "Information Clearing House" - -
It's unfortunate that Bush doesn't understand what is happening in the world he so arrogantly believes he owns. The European trip he's on now is a barely concealed attempt to strong-arm support for his upcoming invasion of Iran. An invasion, according to former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter, that Bush has already approved, and is slated for June 2005.
Although the mainstream media is steadfastly refusing to investigate or report this startling news, Ritter, speaking on Feb. 19 to a packed house in the Capitol Theater in Olympia, Wash., maintains that "an official involved in the manipulation" was his source. In a release from United for Peace of Pierce County, Wash., reporter Mark Jensen wrote that Ritter said this announcement would "soon be reported by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in a major metropolitan magazine -- an obvious allusion to The New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh."
For those who expect the media to interview Ritter -- the man at the top of their "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" list for shouting until he was hoarse before, during and after the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq -- it could be a long wait. However, it's been scarcely a month since Hersh laid out the entire nasty scenario in his piece, "The Coming Wars," in the January 24-31 issue of The New Yorker.
Hersh was told by a former high-level intelligence official, "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign ... Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign," the official said. "We've declared war and the bad guys wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah -- we've got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism."
According to Hersh, a government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told him that "in order to destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible," the administration "has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran since at least last summer."
Since Bush's hawkish handlers refuse to allow him to negotiate, the plan, Hersh says, is to "act" once it becomes clear that the European-negotiated approach cannot succeed. To act? What does "to act" mean? Does Bush actually believe this is some deranged Punch and Judy puppet show; that once the curtain falls on his last hurrah, the hundreds of thousands -- perhaps millions in four years -- of maimed and dead will rise up, brush themselves off and go out for coffee?
http://207.44.245.159/article8140.htm
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Did Israel Kill al-Hariri to Set the Stage for a Confrontation with Hezbollah?
Kurt Nimmo
02/22/05 --
I don’t know how many citizens of the Empire surf the web looking for the truth. It is sincerely depressing reading the corporate press in the United States, hacking through the chaff, looking for the wheat, reading between the lines in search of the truth. I scan the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, etc, looking for stories that make sense. It is comforting to know there are journalists out there—not in the United States—who tell it like it is. For instance, Eric Margolis of the Toronto Sun.
Margolis writes of the Rafik al-Hariri assassination:
A Syrian role in the crime defies logic, though not possibility. Syrian President Bashar-el-Assad’s regime is desperately seeking to avoid providing U.S. President George W. Bush with a pretext for war and has urgently sought improved relations with Washington.
But Bush, the Strausscons, and the scary Israeli Likudites—who provide the ideological foundation for Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East—are not interested in improved relations or peace for that matter. In fact, they want to destabilize Syria and go after Hezbollah. “Israel would welcome Syria’s implosion, as it did Iraq’s. Hence current Israeli efforts to press the White House and Congress to overthrow Syria’s unloved, isolated regime, whose only ally is Iran—itself a leading target on America’s Mideast hit list.”
Washington has totally adopted Israel’s view that Syria is a dangerous threat and a supporter of terrorists—meaning Palestinian resistance groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Lebanon’s welfare and resistance organization Hezbollah.
Israel is determined to take revenge on Hezbollah, which defeated its attempts to turn Lebanon into an Israeli protectorate and drove Israeli occupation forces from Lebanon—a small but vicious war this writer saw firsthand.
Israeli PM Ariel Sharon’s rightist Likud Party may be renewing previous efforts to bring Lebanon back into Israel’s sphere of influence. For the past quarter century, Syria and Israel have waged a dirty war of bombings and assassinations to dominate Lebanon and Jordan.
The White House is hoping its threats and economic siege of Syria will provoke the overthrow of the Assad regime. This strategy might work.
As Margolis points out, many Syrians want to get rid of Assad and the Ba’athists, “but fear sudden change will produce chaos or civil war.”
http://207.44.245.159/article8141.htm
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Doomed to fail
By Scott Ritter
02/22/05 "Baltimore Sun" - -
NORTH KOREA'S dramatic public revelation that it possesses nuclear weapons represents a stark challenge for the Bush administration. The North Korean claim, if true, underscores the failure of President Bush's nonproliferation policies that since the beginning of his first term had been subordinated to a grander vision of regime change. That policy was intended to transform strategically vital regions of the world into Western-style democracies supportive of the United States and the Bush administration's vision of American global dominance. The intermingling of nonproliferation and regime change policies was doomed to fail. One requires skillful multilateral diplomacy based on the principles of uniform application of international law, the other bold application of a unilateral doctrine of aggressive liberation rhetoric backed by the real threat of military power. When blended, as the Bush administration did, unilateralism trumps multilateralism every time. North Korea's announced accession to the nuclear club represents the inevitable result. The end of America's meaningful role as a promoter of global nonproliferation can be traced to decisions made in the 1990s regarding regime change in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The United Nations had embarked on a bold effort to roll back the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction through disarmament and, despite some initial difficulties, scored a dramatic success. It is now clear that Iraq, under pressure from U.N. weapons inspectors, was disarmed of its WMD by 1991 and had dismantled and destroyed the last vestiges of its weapons programs by 1996. But the United States had, since 1991, committed to a policy of regime change in Iraq, which required economic sanctions-based containment linked to a continued finding of Iraqi noncompliance with its disarmament obligation. Rather than embracing weapons inspections, three successive U.S. administrations denigrated and subverted the work of the inspectors in order to keep the primary policy objective of regime change in Iraq on track. The nail in the coffin of U.S. nonproliferation efforts came when the Bush administration willfully misstated the extent of the Iraqi WMD programs in order to justify its invasion of Iraq. North Korea and Iran concluded from events leading to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that the Bush administration did not regard nonproliferation as an endgame but a tool designed to weaken a target state to the point that it could succumb to the grander U.S. policy objective of regime change. Mr. Bush had stated that the world would be a better place with the regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran removed. Therefore, all diplomatic efforts - whether the six-party framework with North Korea or the European Union-brokered negotiations with Iran - were regarded as disingenuous fronts intended not to facilitate nonproliferation and stability but rather instability and regime change.
http://207.44.245.159/article8138.htm
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McCain Calls for Permanent Afghan Bases
By STEPHEN GRAHAMAssociated Press Writer 02/22/05 "AP" --
KABUL, Afghanistan - A senior American lawmaker called Tuesday for permanent U.S. bases in Afghanistan to safeguard American security interests in a region that includes Iran as well as nuclear-armed Pakistan and China. Sen. John McCain, part of a five-strong U.S. Senate delegation which held talks with President Hamid Karzai, said he was committed to a "strategic partnership that we believe must endure for many, many years. "Not only for the good of the Afghan people, but also for the good of the American people because of the long-term security interests that we have in the region," McCain told reporters at the presidential palace in the Afghan capital. Asked what such a partnership would entail, he said: "Economic assistance, technical assistance, military partnership including — and this is a personal view — joint military permanent bases and also cultural exchanges." McCain, the No. 2 Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, didn't elaborate, and Karzai didn't address the issue at a joint news conference. Afghanistan's neighbors include Pakistan to the east, Iran to the west and China to the northeast. Officials from the Afghan government and the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan told The Associated Press earlier this month they are examining a military partnership which could include permanent American bases here. However, Afghan Defense Minister Rahim Wardak has also requested high-tech weaponry such as attack helicopters and special forces for the new U.S.-trained Afghan National Army to reduce the need for foreign troops. There are currently about 17,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan, hunting remnants of al-Qaida and the former ruling Taliban. The Afghan army, which currently numbers about 20,000 and is taking part in counterinsurgency operations in troubled areas near the Pakistani frontier, is to reach its full strength of 70,000 by the end of 2006. Other members of the U.S. delegation, which arrived in Kabul after stops in Baghdad and Islamabad, also backed long-term U.S.-Afghan ties but gave no specifics.
http://207.44.245.159/article8137.htm
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Americans and rebels begin talks on timetable for withdrawal from Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn
02/22/05 "The Independent" - -
American officials are talking to negotiators from the anti-US resistance in Iraq, whom they have denounced in the past as foreign fighters and remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime.Insurgent leaders and Pentagon officials have confirmed to Time magazine that talks have taken place for the first time in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.The Sunni guerrillas want a timetable for a US withdrawal, first from Iraqi cities and then from the country as a whole. American officials aim to see if they can drive a wedge between nationalist guerrillas and fanatical Islamist groups.Abu Marwan, a resistance commander, is quoted as saying that the insurgents want to "fight and negotiate". They are modelling their strategy on that of the IRA and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. This means creating a united political organisation with a programme opposed to the US occupation.US military commanders are now dubious about the chances of winning an outright military victory over the Sunni rebels who have a firm core of supporters among the five million-strong Sunni Muslim community. The US military has lost 1,479 dead and 10,740 wounded in Iraq since the invasion began in March 2003.The talks so far are tentative but they indicate a recognition on the part of the US that it will need a political solution. Those willing to sit down with US diplomats and officials are "nationalists" composed primarily of former military and security officers from Saddam's Hussein's government.The Iraqi resistance is highly fragmented and regionalised. Groups often only exist in a single city. In guerrilla warfare this may be an advantage since no command structure can be penetrated or disrupted.
http://207.44.245.159/article8136.htm
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General says U.S. sent too few troops to Iraq
The United States did not send enough troops into Iraq to stabilize the country after toppling Saddam Hussein's regime, a retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday in Omaha.
I'm afraid we went in a bit light for dealing with the aftermath," Army Gen. Hugh Shelton told an audience of 600 at the University of Nebraska at Omaha's ABC breakfast speaker series.
Iraqi rebels are targeting their countrymen and occupation troops in an attempt to destabilize the fledgling democracy, he said.
As chairman of the Joint Chiefs under President Bush and former President Clinton, Shelton was responsible for U.S. armed forces worldwide and was a chief architect of the ongoing war on terrorism. His second term as chairman ended less than three weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_pg=54&u_sid=1343186
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Iran readies military,
fearing a U.S. attack
Tensions with Bush administration surge
Tehran's disputed nuclear ambition
Tehran -- Iran has begun publicly preparing for a possible U.S. attack, as tensions mount between the Bush administration and this country's hard-line leaders over Tehran's purported nuclear weapons program.
"Iran would respond within 15 minutes to any attack by the United States or any other country," an Iranian official close to the conservative clerics who run the country's security and military apparatus said on condition of anonymity.
The Tehran government has announced efforts to bolster and mobilize recruits in its citizens' militia and is making plans to engage in the type of "asymmetrical" warfare that has bogged down U.S. troops in neighboring Iraq, officials and analysts say.
Iran insists it needs nuclear technology to meet its burgeoning domestic energy requirements and bolster its scientific community. But the United States accuses it of using nuclear energy as a fig leaf for a weapons program.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/02/21/MNGHUBERIV1.DTL
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Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor
Tuesday February 22, 2005
The Guardian
The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, went further than any other senior international statesman yesterday when he pointed the finger of blame at Syria for the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri.
Mr Straw, speaking at a press conference in Brussels, said there was "a high level of suspicion of the potential involvement of Syria in the assassination".
He went beyond the US president, George Bush, who admitted he did not as yet know who was responsible but called anyway on the Syrian government to pull its troops out of Lebanon.
Mr Hariri was killed in an explosion along with other members of his cavalcade as he made his way along the Beirut waterfront on Monday last week.
A Foreign Office source said last night that Mr Straw's comments were in response to a reporter's question and not based on inside information from British or other intelligence agencies.
The foreign secretary said: "An international inquiry should be undertaken without delay to shed light on the circumstances and those responsible for this attack."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,13031,1419821,00.html?gusrc=rss
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Egypt:
Mass Arrests,
Torture Follow Taba Bombing
22 Feb 2005 12:30:08 GMTSource:
Human Rights Watch(Cairo, February 22, 2005)
The Egyptian state security forces arbitrarily arrested thousands of people and tortured detainees in the wake of the Taba Hilton bombing in October, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Four months later, as many as 2,400 detainees are still being held incommunicado. The 48 page report, "Mass Arrests and Torture in Sinai," documents how, in the weeks and months after the bombing that killed 30 people in the resort town of Taba, the State Security Investigation agency conducted mass arrests in northern Sinai without a warrant or judicial order as required by Egyptian law.
The Egyptian authorities have identified only nine suspects as responsible for the Taba attack, but the ministry of interior continues to hold an estimated 2,400 detainees. The government has not released information on the whereabouts of these detainees either to their families or lawyers representing them, and has not indicated if any have been charged with crimes.
"Egyptian security forces responded to the Taba atrocity by committing mass human rights abuses themselves," said Joe Stork, Washington director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa Division. "The Mubarak government still hasn't gotten the message that routine torture and arbitrary arrests violate the law and fail to address real security needs."
Human Rights Watch conducted this investigation in northern Sinai with two Egyptian human rights organizations, the Hisham Mubarak Law Center and the Egyptian Association against Torture.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/HRW/52fe7b753c9e9d1dd751d97f34e03c29.htm
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"Al-Qaida also Wants the Bomb
"United Nations chief weapons inspector Mohamed ElBaradei discusses the risks posed by potential new nuclear powers like North Korea and Iran, the chances of reining in a nuclear black market for terrorist organizations and the controversy surrounding his re-election
SPIEGEL: Mr. ElBaradei, North Korea announced two weeks ago that it is now a nuclear power. Does Pyongyang really have the bomb? And if so, how great is the risk that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il will use it?ElBaradei: I am extremely concerned about the development in North Korea, even though I cannot say with absolute certainty that Pyongyang already has a usable nuclear weapon. They certainly have the know-how and enough plutonium for at least six to eight bombs. A little more than two years ago, we had to shut down our last on-site monitoring activities and were thrown out of the country. This gave the North Koreans time to continue developing a military nuclear program. But they could also be exaggerating. The regime apparently sees the nuclear bomb as its only trump card for negotiations.
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,343030,00.html
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Rummy Dropped from the Loop?
By Nick Turse
02/22/05 - -
I first noticed the pattern last year with the Abu Ghraib torture scandal exploding. By now it's beyond a trend. Closer to an established fact. Plain for all to see -- and it suggests a significant breakdown of some unknown sort at the Department of Defense.
On April 28, 2004, with Sy Hersh about to scoop them, the journalists at CBS ran a story about crimes committed by American soldiers at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison on its 60 Minutes II program. It included the now infamous torture photographs as well as information on the military's own "scathing report" on the subject, which would later become known (by its author's name) as the Taguba Report.
About a week later, I began to notice the trend. During a briefing with reporters on May 4, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked if he had himself read the Taguba Report. He hemmed and hawed about seeing a summary of it before finally answering "no." Another question followed:
"REPORTER: …given the ramifications of not only what is in this report, the findings specifically, but the pictures, the photographs that you knew, as of a couple of weeks ago, were going to be broadcast, why did you not feel [it] incumbent upon you at that time to ask for the findings, to take a look at the pictures beforehand, so you could perhaps be prepared to deal with some of the world reaction?
"SEC. RUMSFELD: I think I did inquire about the pictures and was told that we didn't have copies.
"RUMSFELD (to staff): Is that correct?
"STAFF: We didn't have them here, that's for sure.
"SEC. RUMSFELD: Yeah, I didn't have them."
http://207.44.245.159/article8142.htm
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Video: Mosaic:
World News Reports from Middle East TV
For 02/21/05:
The nation's only uncensored compilation of daily television news reports from more than 15 countries in the Middle East. QuickTime Video.
http://snipurl.com/cz0i
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Clarke tries to rush through anti-terror law
By Joe Murphy,
Evening Standard,
Political Editor 22 February 2005
Charles Clarke ran into a wall of opposition today as he rushed out new laws to detain terror suspects without trial.
The Home Secretary faced a stormy confrontation with opposition parties and some of his own Labour MPs.
A Bill published this afternoon gives him emergency powers to restrict movement of terrorist suspects without any charges being laid.
Despite informal talks between the parties last night, both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats said they would oppose this.
There was fury that Mr Clarke intends to try to "ram" the controversial package through Parliament in barely a week. Under normal circumstances-similar laws would be debated over several months.
Mr Clarke tried to win round the Liberal Democrats last night by offering the minor compromise that his decisions would be reviewed by a judge.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/16784236
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GERMAN PAPERS
Europeans Ask:
Is Bush a Wolf in a Granny's Suit?
US President George W. Bush's goodwill spin through Europe garners all the news with commentators searching behind the platitudes for girth. How much of what this president -- known for his knack for hyperbole -- says will translate into deeds? And what of the looming crises in Iran, Iraq and over the EU's desire to lift its Chinese weapons embargo?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously said, "When ideas fail, words come in very handy." The iconic, albeit very dead German writer would have had a field day in Brussels on Monday, where US President George W. Bush delivered his first speech abroad since his second term began. The speech, billed as a chance to address Europe and start mending ties broken over the Iraq war and other policy conflicts took place in an 18th century bourgeois salon in front of a hand-picked crowd of 300-pro Bush supporters. It was laced with grand verbiage, but not with new ideas. By far, the president's favorite word of the night was "freedom," although "liberty" also got its fair play. Bush stood before the crowd and acted almost blissfully ignorant of the depth of Europe's frustration with him and his first administration. At one point, he went so far as to say that "no power on Earth will ever divide" Europe and America. http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,343107,00.html
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Realigning the global power game
By Gwynne Dyer
PRESIDENT George W. Bush leaves the flourishing metropolis of Mainz tomorrow evening, after meeting with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and flies to Bratislava for a dinner with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. (Mainz? Bratislava? Not Berlin and Moscow? Is Mr Bush avoiding European crowds?) The Russian and American presidents will doubtless maintain a polite facade, but it’s unlikely that Bush will emerge from this meeting to declare once again that "Pootie-Poot" is his soulmate.The Russian-American relationship is not thriving, and the proof of it is the fact that the United States granted political asylum a month ago to Alyona Morozova, a Russian citizen who claims that her life is in danger because of her role in investigating a series of “terrorist” bombing attacks that killed 246 Russians in September 1999. The chief suspect in the bombings, according to her, is Vladimir Putin.Three apartment blocks in Russian cities were destroyed by huge bombs that month, including one that left Alyona Morozova’s mother and boyfriend dead under the rubble. There had been peace between Russia and the breakaway republic of Chechnya since 1996, and no Chechen claimed responsibility for the bombings, but then-prime minister Vladimir Putin immediately blamed the atrocities on the Chechens and launched a second war against them that continues to this day.Boris Yeltsin was in the last year of his presidency then, and he was seeking a way to retire without facing prosecution for the fortunes he and his cronies had amassed in their years of power. Vladimir Putin, former head of the FSB secret police, had recently been appointed prime minister by Yeltsin but was still largely unknown to the Russian public.The deal was that Yeltsin would pass the presidency to Putin at the end of the year, and Putin would then grant Yeltsin an amnesty for all crimes committed while he was in office. But there was still the tedious business of an election to get through, and Russians who scarcely knew Putin’s name had to be persuaded to vote for him on short notice. How to boost his profile as Saviour of the Nation? Well, a war, obviously.Alyona Morozova (and many others) claim that Putin’s old friends at the FSB carried out the apartment bombings themselves, in order to give their man a pretext to declare war on Chechnya and make himself a national hero in time for the presidential elections. It would be just one more unfounded conspiracy theory – except that only days after the big Moscow bomb, a resident at a similar apartment building in the city of Ryazan spotted three people acting suspiciously and called the local police.
http://www.cyprus-mail.com/news/main.php?id=18517&cat_id=1
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Putin Says Russia Will Pursue Democracy on Its Own
MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites) said on Tuesday that Russia would pursue democratic change on its own and would not allow the issue to be used by other countries for their foreign policy goals.
"The fundamental principles of democracy and institutions of democracy must be adapted to the realities of Russian life today, to our traditions and our history. And we will do this ourselves," he told Slovak media ahead of summit talks with President Bush (news - web sites) in Bratislava Thursday.
"We are against the use of such an issue as an instrument for achieving foreign policy aims," he said according to a transcript of the interview released by the Kremlin.
Bush Monday criticized the state of democracy in Russia, saying the government must renew a commitment to democracy and the rule of law -- an apparent reference to Western concerns that Putin has become increasingly authoritarian.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20050222/wl_nm/russia_putin_dc
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In Pictures: Bush Not Welcome In Europe: http://www.indymedia.be/news/2005/02/93226.phpPage 2 - http://www.indymedia.be/news/2005/02/93213.phpPage3http://www.indymedia.be/news/2005/02/93254.php
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
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Suicide car bomb kills 11 Iraqi policemen
Allawi forms new bloc to vie for Iraqi prime ministry
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) --
As Iraqi politicians continued Thursday to jockey for the job of prime minister, insurgents kept up their attacks on Iraqi security forces.
A suicide car bomb exploded Thursday at an emergency police station in Tikrit, police officials in the city told CNN.
The blast killed at least 11 policemen and wounded 15 more.
Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, is about 100 miles north of Baghdad.
A roadside bomb killed two Iraqi policemen and wounded three others early Thursday in the northern city of Kirkuk, the city's police chief, Gen. Torhan Yousif, told CNN.
Eyewitnesses said the blast hit a police car near fuel depots in the center of the city not far from a primary school.
Kirkuk police also said gunmen attacked and killed one policeman and wounded another in the Almas area of north Kirkuk on Wednesday.
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/02/24/iraq.main/index.html
By Sheila Samples
02/22/05 "Information Clearing House" - -
It's unfortunate that Bush doesn't understand what is happening in the world he so arrogantly believes he owns. The European trip he's on now is a barely concealed attempt to strong-arm support for his upcoming invasion of Iran. An invasion, according to former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter, that Bush has already approved, and is slated for June 2005.
Although the mainstream media is steadfastly refusing to investigate or report this startling news, Ritter, speaking on Feb. 19 to a packed house in the Capitol Theater in Olympia, Wash., maintains that "an official involved in the manipulation" was his source. In a release from United for Peace of Pierce County, Wash., reporter Mark Jensen wrote that Ritter said this announcement would "soon be reported by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in a major metropolitan magazine -- an obvious allusion to The New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh."
For those who expect the media to interview Ritter -- the man at the top of their "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" list for shouting until he was hoarse before, during and after the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq -- it could be a long wait. However, it's been scarcely a month since Hersh laid out the entire nasty scenario in his piece, "The Coming Wars," in the January 24-31 issue of The New Yorker.
Hersh was told by a former high-level intelligence official, "This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign ... Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign," the official said. "We've declared war and the bad guys wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah -- we've got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism."
According to Hersh, a government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told him that "in order to destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible," the administration "has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran since at least last summer."
Since Bush's hawkish handlers refuse to allow him to negotiate, the plan, Hersh says, is to "act" once it becomes clear that the European-negotiated approach cannot succeed. To act? What does "to act" mean? Does Bush actually believe this is some deranged Punch and Judy puppet show; that once the curtain falls on his last hurrah, the hundreds of thousands -- perhaps millions in four years -- of maimed and dead will rise up, brush themselves off and go out for coffee?
http://207.44.245.159/article8140.htm
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Did Israel Kill al-Hariri to Set the Stage for a Confrontation with Hezbollah?
Kurt Nimmo
02/22/05 --
I don’t know how many citizens of the Empire surf the web looking for the truth. It is sincerely depressing reading the corporate press in the United States, hacking through the chaff, looking for the wheat, reading between the lines in search of the truth. I scan the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, etc, looking for stories that make sense. It is comforting to know there are journalists out there—not in the United States—who tell it like it is. For instance, Eric Margolis of the Toronto Sun.
Margolis writes of the Rafik al-Hariri assassination:
A Syrian role in the crime defies logic, though not possibility. Syrian President Bashar-el-Assad’s regime is desperately seeking to avoid providing U.S. President George W. Bush with a pretext for war and has urgently sought improved relations with Washington.
But Bush, the Strausscons, and the scary Israeli Likudites—who provide the ideological foundation for Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East—are not interested in improved relations or peace for that matter. In fact, they want to destabilize Syria and go after Hezbollah. “Israel would welcome Syria’s implosion, as it did Iraq’s. Hence current Israeli efforts to press the White House and Congress to overthrow Syria’s unloved, isolated regime, whose only ally is Iran—itself a leading target on America’s Mideast hit list.”
Washington has totally adopted Israel’s view that Syria is a dangerous threat and a supporter of terrorists—meaning Palestinian resistance groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Lebanon’s welfare and resistance organization Hezbollah.
Israel is determined to take revenge on Hezbollah, which defeated its attempts to turn Lebanon into an Israeli protectorate and drove Israeli occupation forces from Lebanon—a small but vicious war this writer saw firsthand.
Israeli PM Ariel Sharon’s rightist Likud Party may be renewing previous efforts to bring Lebanon back into Israel’s sphere of influence. For the past quarter century, Syria and Israel have waged a dirty war of bombings and assassinations to dominate Lebanon and Jordan.
The White House is hoping its threats and economic siege of Syria will provoke the overthrow of the Assad regime. This strategy might work.
As Margolis points out, many Syrians want to get rid of Assad and the Ba’athists, “but fear sudden change will produce chaos or civil war.”
http://207.44.245.159/article8141.htm
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Doomed to fail
By Scott Ritter
02/22/05 "Baltimore Sun" - -
NORTH KOREA'S dramatic public revelation that it possesses nuclear weapons represents a stark challenge for the Bush administration. The North Korean claim, if true, underscores the failure of President Bush's nonproliferation policies that since the beginning of his first term had been subordinated to a grander vision of regime change. That policy was intended to transform strategically vital regions of the world into Western-style democracies supportive of the United States and the Bush administration's vision of American global dominance. The intermingling of nonproliferation and regime change policies was doomed to fail. One requires skillful multilateral diplomacy based on the principles of uniform application of international law, the other bold application of a unilateral doctrine of aggressive liberation rhetoric backed by the real threat of military power. When blended, as the Bush administration did, unilateralism trumps multilateralism every time. North Korea's announced accession to the nuclear club represents the inevitable result. The end of America's meaningful role as a promoter of global nonproliferation can be traced to decisions made in the 1990s regarding regime change in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The United Nations had embarked on a bold effort to roll back the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction through disarmament and, despite some initial difficulties, scored a dramatic success. It is now clear that Iraq, under pressure from U.N. weapons inspectors, was disarmed of its WMD by 1991 and had dismantled and destroyed the last vestiges of its weapons programs by 1996. But the United States had, since 1991, committed to a policy of regime change in Iraq, which required economic sanctions-based containment linked to a continued finding of Iraqi noncompliance with its disarmament obligation. Rather than embracing weapons inspections, three successive U.S. administrations denigrated and subverted the work of the inspectors in order to keep the primary policy objective of regime change in Iraq on track. The nail in the coffin of U.S. nonproliferation efforts came when the Bush administration willfully misstated the extent of the Iraqi WMD programs in order to justify its invasion of Iraq. North Korea and Iran concluded from events leading to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that the Bush administration did not regard nonproliferation as an endgame but a tool designed to weaken a target state to the point that it could succumb to the grander U.S. policy objective of regime change. Mr. Bush had stated that the world would be a better place with the regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran removed. Therefore, all diplomatic efforts - whether the six-party framework with North Korea or the European Union-brokered negotiations with Iran - were regarded as disingenuous fronts intended not to facilitate nonproliferation and stability but rather instability and regime change.
http://207.44.245.159/article8138.htm
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McCain Calls for Permanent Afghan Bases
By STEPHEN GRAHAMAssociated Press Writer 02/22/05 "AP" --
KABUL, Afghanistan - A senior American lawmaker called Tuesday for permanent U.S. bases in Afghanistan to safeguard American security interests in a region that includes Iran as well as nuclear-armed Pakistan and China. Sen. John McCain, part of a five-strong U.S. Senate delegation which held talks with President Hamid Karzai, said he was committed to a "strategic partnership that we believe must endure for many, many years. "Not only for the good of the Afghan people, but also for the good of the American people because of the long-term security interests that we have in the region," McCain told reporters at the presidential palace in the Afghan capital. Asked what such a partnership would entail, he said: "Economic assistance, technical assistance, military partnership including — and this is a personal view — joint military permanent bases and also cultural exchanges." McCain, the No. 2 Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, didn't elaborate, and Karzai didn't address the issue at a joint news conference. Afghanistan's neighbors include Pakistan to the east, Iran to the west and China to the northeast. Officials from the Afghan government and the U.S.-led military coalition in Afghanistan told The Associated Press earlier this month they are examining a military partnership which could include permanent American bases here. However, Afghan Defense Minister Rahim Wardak has also requested high-tech weaponry such as attack helicopters and special forces for the new U.S.-trained Afghan National Army to reduce the need for foreign troops. There are currently about 17,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan, hunting remnants of al-Qaida and the former ruling Taliban. The Afghan army, which currently numbers about 20,000 and is taking part in counterinsurgency operations in troubled areas near the Pakistani frontier, is to reach its full strength of 70,000 by the end of 2006. Other members of the U.S. delegation, which arrived in Kabul after stops in Baghdad and Islamabad, also backed long-term U.S.-Afghan ties but gave no specifics.
http://207.44.245.159/article8137.htm
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Americans and rebels begin talks on timetable for withdrawal from Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn
02/22/05 "The Independent" - -
American officials are talking to negotiators from the anti-US resistance in Iraq, whom they have denounced in the past as foreign fighters and remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime.Insurgent leaders and Pentagon officials have confirmed to Time magazine that talks have taken place for the first time in the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.The Sunni guerrillas want a timetable for a US withdrawal, first from Iraqi cities and then from the country as a whole. American officials aim to see if they can drive a wedge between nationalist guerrillas and fanatical Islamist groups.Abu Marwan, a resistance commander, is quoted as saying that the insurgents want to "fight and negotiate". They are modelling their strategy on that of the IRA and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. This means creating a united political organisation with a programme opposed to the US occupation.US military commanders are now dubious about the chances of winning an outright military victory over the Sunni rebels who have a firm core of supporters among the five million-strong Sunni Muslim community. The US military has lost 1,479 dead and 10,740 wounded in Iraq since the invasion began in March 2003.The talks so far are tentative but they indicate a recognition on the part of the US that it will need a political solution. Those willing to sit down with US diplomats and officials are "nationalists" composed primarily of former military and security officers from Saddam's Hussein's government.The Iraqi resistance is highly fragmented and regionalised. Groups often only exist in a single city. In guerrilla warfare this may be an advantage since no command structure can be penetrated or disrupted.
http://207.44.245.159/article8136.htm
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General says U.S. sent too few troops to Iraq
The United States did not send enough troops into Iraq to stabilize the country after toppling Saddam Hussein's regime, a retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday in Omaha.
I'm afraid we went in a bit light for dealing with the aftermath," Army Gen. Hugh Shelton told an audience of 600 at the University of Nebraska at Omaha's ABC breakfast speaker series.
Iraqi rebels are targeting their countrymen and occupation troops in an attempt to destabilize the fledgling democracy, he said.
As chairman of the Joint Chiefs under President Bush and former President Clinton, Shelton was responsible for U.S. armed forces worldwide and was a chief architect of the ongoing war on terrorism. His second term as chairman ended less than three weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_pg=54&u_sid=1343186
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Iran readies military,
fearing a U.S. attack
Tensions with Bush administration surge
Tehran's disputed nuclear ambition
Tehran -- Iran has begun publicly preparing for a possible U.S. attack, as tensions mount between the Bush administration and this country's hard-line leaders over Tehran's purported nuclear weapons program.
"Iran would respond within 15 minutes to any attack by the United States or any other country," an Iranian official close to the conservative clerics who run the country's security and military apparatus said on condition of anonymity.
The Tehran government has announced efforts to bolster and mobilize recruits in its citizens' militia and is making plans to engage in the type of "asymmetrical" warfare that has bogged down U.S. troops in neighboring Iraq, officials and analysts say.
Iran insists it needs nuclear technology to meet its burgeoning domestic energy requirements and bolster its scientific community. But the United States accuses it of using nuclear energy as a fig leaf for a weapons program.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/02/21/MNGHUBERIV1.DTL
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Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor
Tuesday February 22, 2005
The Guardian
The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, went further than any other senior international statesman yesterday when he pointed the finger of blame at Syria for the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri.
Mr Straw, speaking at a press conference in Brussels, said there was "a high level of suspicion of the potential involvement of Syria in the assassination".
He went beyond the US president, George Bush, who admitted he did not as yet know who was responsible but called anyway on the Syrian government to pull its troops out of Lebanon.
Mr Hariri was killed in an explosion along with other members of his cavalcade as he made his way along the Beirut waterfront on Monday last week.
A Foreign Office source said last night that Mr Straw's comments were in response to a reporter's question and not based on inside information from British or other intelligence agencies.
The foreign secretary said: "An international inquiry should be undertaken without delay to shed light on the circumstances and those responsible for this attack."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/syria/story/0,13031,1419821,00.html?gusrc=rss
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Egypt:
Mass Arrests,
Torture Follow Taba Bombing
22 Feb 2005 12:30:08 GMTSource:
Human Rights Watch(Cairo, February 22, 2005)
The Egyptian state security forces arbitrarily arrested thousands of people and tortured detainees in the wake of the Taba Hilton bombing in October, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Four months later, as many as 2,400 detainees are still being held incommunicado. The 48 page report, "Mass Arrests and Torture in Sinai," documents how, in the weeks and months after the bombing that killed 30 people in the resort town of Taba, the State Security Investigation agency conducted mass arrests in northern Sinai without a warrant or judicial order as required by Egyptian law.
The Egyptian authorities have identified only nine suspects as responsible for the Taba attack, but the ministry of interior continues to hold an estimated 2,400 detainees. The government has not released information on the whereabouts of these detainees either to their families or lawyers representing them, and has not indicated if any have been charged with crimes.
"Egyptian security forces responded to the Taba atrocity by committing mass human rights abuses themselves," said Joe Stork, Washington director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa Division. "The Mubarak government still hasn't gotten the message that routine torture and arbitrary arrests violate the law and fail to address real security needs."
Human Rights Watch conducted this investigation in northern Sinai with two Egyptian human rights organizations, the Hisham Mubarak Law Center and the Egyptian Association against Torture.
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/HRW/52fe7b753c9e9d1dd751d97f34e03c29.htm
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"Al-Qaida also Wants the Bomb
"United Nations chief weapons inspector Mohamed ElBaradei discusses the risks posed by potential new nuclear powers like North Korea and Iran, the chances of reining in a nuclear black market for terrorist organizations and the controversy surrounding his re-election
SPIEGEL: Mr. ElBaradei, North Korea announced two weeks ago that it is now a nuclear power. Does Pyongyang really have the bomb? And if so, how great is the risk that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il will use it?ElBaradei: I am extremely concerned about the development in North Korea, even though I cannot say with absolute certainty that Pyongyang already has a usable nuclear weapon. They certainly have the know-how and enough plutonium for at least six to eight bombs. A little more than two years ago, we had to shut down our last on-site monitoring activities and were thrown out of the country. This gave the North Koreans time to continue developing a military nuclear program. But they could also be exaggerating. The regime apparently sees the nuclear bomb as its only trump card for negotiations.
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,343030,00.html
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Rummy Dropped from the Loop?
By Nick Turse
02/22/05 - -
I first noticed the pattern last year with the Abu Ghraib torture scandal exploding. By now it's beyond a trend. Closer to an established fact. Plain for all to see -- and it suggests a significant breakdown of some unknown sort at the Department of Defense.
On April 28, 2004, with Sy Hersh about to scoop them, the journalists at CBS ran a story about crimes committed by American soldiers at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison on its 60 Minutes II program. It included the now infamous torture photographs as well as information on the military's own "scathing report" on the subject, which would later become known (by its author's name) as the Taguba Report.
About a week later, I began to notice the trend. During a briefing with reporters on May 4, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked if he had himself read the Taguba Report. He hemmed and hawed about seeing a summary of it before finally answering "no." Another question followed:
"REPORTER: …given the ramifications of not only what is in this report, the findings specifically, but the pictures, the photographs that you knew, as of a couple of weeks ago, were going to be broadcast, why did you not feel [it] incumbent upon you at that time to ask for the findings, to take a look at the pictures beforehand, so you could perhaps be prepared to deal with some of the world reaction?
"SEC. RUMSFELD: I think I did inquire about the pictures and was told that we didn't have copies.
"RUMSFELD (to staff): Is that correct?
"STAFF: We didn't have them here, that's for sure.
"SEC. RUMSFELD: Yeah, I didn't have them."
http://207.44.245.159/article8142.htm
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Video: Mosaic:
World News Reports from Middle East TV
For 02/21/05:
The nation's only uncensored compilation of daily television news reports from more than 15 countries in the Middle East. QuickTime Video.
http://snipurl.com/cz0i
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Clarke tries to rush through anti-terror law
By Joe Murphy,
Evening Standard,
Political Editor 22 February 2005
Charles Clarke ran into a wall of opposition today as he rushed out new laws to detain terror suspects without trial.
The Home Secretary faced a stormy confrontation with opposition parties and some of his own Labour MPs.
A Bill published this afternoon gives him emergency powers to restrict movement of terrorist suspects without any charges being laid.
Despite informal talks between the parties last night, both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats said they would oppose this.
There was fury that Mr Clarke intends to try to "ram" the controversial package through Parliament in barely a week. Under normal circumstances-similar laws would be debated over several months.
Mr Clarke tried to win round the Liberal Democrats last night by offering the minor compromise that his decisions would be reviewed by a judge.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/16784236
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GERMAN PAPERS
Europeans Ask:
Is Bush a Wolf in a Granny's Suit?
US President George W. Bush's goodwill spin through Europe garners all the news with commentators searching behind the platitudes for girth. How much of what this president -- known for his knack for hyperbole -- says will translate into deeds? And what of the looming crises in Iran, Iraq and over the EU's desire to lift its Chinese weapons embargo?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously said, "When ideas fail, words come in very handy." The iconic, albeit very dead German writer would have had a field day in Brussels on Monday, where US President George W. Bush delivered his first speech abroad since his second term began. The speech, billed as a chance to address Europe and start mending ties broken over the Iraq war and other policy conflicts took place in an 18th century bourgeois salon in front of a hand-picked crowd of 300-pro Bush supporters. It was laced with grand verbiage, but not with new ideas. By far, the president's favorite word of the night was "freedom," although "liberty" also got its fair play. Bush stood before the crowd and acted almost blissfully ignorant of the depth of Europe's frustration with him and his first administration. At one point, he went so far as to say that "no power on Earth will ever divide" Europe and America. http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,343107,00.html
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Realigning the global power game
By Gwynne Dyer
PRESIDENT George W. Bush leaves the flourishing metropolis of Mainz tomorrow evening, after meeting with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and flies to Bratislava for a dinner with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. (Mainz? Bratislava? Not Berlin and Moscow? Is Mr Bush avoiding European crowds?) The Russian and American presidents will doubtless maintain a polite facade, but it’s unlikely that Bush will emerge from this meeting to declare once again that "Pootie-Poot" is his soulmate.The Russian-American relationship is not thriving, and the proof of it is the fact that the United States granted political asylum a month ago to Alyona Morozova, a Russian citizen who claims that her life is in danger because of her role in investigating a series of “terrorist” bombing attacks that killed 246 Russians in September 1999. The chief suspect in the bombings, according to her, is Vladimir Putin.Three apartment blocks in Russian cities were destroyed by huge bombs that month, including one that left Alyona Morozova’s mother and boyfriend dead under the rubble. There had been peace between Russia and the breakaway republic of Chechnya since 1996, and no Chechen claimed responsibility for the bombings, but then-prime minister Vladimir Putin immediately blamed the atrocities on the Chechens and launched a second war against them that continues to this day.Boris Yeltsin was in the last year of his presidency then, and he was seeking a way to retire without facing prosecution for the fortunes he and his cronies had amassed in their years of power. Vladimir Putin, former head of the FSB secret police, had recently been appointed prime minister by Yeltsin but was still largely unknown to the Russian public.The deal was that Yeltsin would pass the presidency to Putin at the end of the year, and Putin would then grant Yeltsin an amnesty for all crimes committed while he was in office. But there was still the tedious business of an election to get through, and Russians who scarcely knew Putin’s name had to be persuaded to vote for him on short notice. How to boost his profile as Saviour of the Nation? Well, a war, obviously.Alyona Morozova (and many others) claim that Putin’s old friends at the FSB carried out the apartment bombings themselves, in order to give their man a pretext to declare war on Chechnya and make himself a national hero in time for the presidential elections. It would be just one more unfounded conspiracy theory – except that only days after the big Moscow bomb, a resident at a similar apartment building in the city of Ryazan spotted three people acting suspiciously and called the local police.
http://www.cyprus-mail.com/news/main.php?id=18517&cat_id=1
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Putin Says Russia Will Pursue Democracy on Its Own
MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin (news - web sites) said on Tuesday that Russia would pursue democratic change on its own and would not allow the issue to be used by other countries for their foreign policy goals.
"The fundamental principles of democracy and institutions of democracy must be adapted to the realities of Russian life today, to our traditions and our history. And we will do this ourselves," he told Slovak media ahead of summit talks with President Bush (news - web sites) in Bratislava Thursday.
"We are against the use of such an issue as an instrument for achieving foreign policy aims," he said according to a transcript of the interview released by the Kremlin.
Bush Monday criticized the state of democracy in Russia, saying the government must renew a commitment to democracy and the rule of law -- an apparent reference to Western concerns that Putin has become increasingly authoritarian.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20050222/wl_nm/russia_putin_dc
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In Pictures: Bush Not Welcome In Europe: http://www.indymedia.be/news/2005/02/93226.phpPage 2 - http://www.indymedia.be/news/2005/02/93213.phpPage3http://www.indymedia.be/news/2005/02/93254.php
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
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Suicide car bomb kills 11 Iraqi policemen
Allawi forms new bloc to vie for Iraqi prime ministry
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) --
As Iraqi politicians continued Thursday to jockey for the job of prime minister, insurgents kept up their attacks on Iraqi security forces.
A suicide car bomb exploded Thursday at an emergency police station in Tikrit, police officials in the city told CNN.
The blast killed at least 11 policemen and wounded 15 more.
Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, is about 100 miles north of Baghdad.
A roadside bomb killed two Iraqi policemen and wounded three others early Thursday in the northern city of Kirkuk, the city's police chief, Gen. Torhan Yousif, told CNN.
Eyewitnesses said the blast hit a police car near fuel depots in the center of the city not far from a primary school.
Kirkuk police also said gunmen attacked and killed one policeman and wounded another in the Almas area of north Kirkuk on Wednesday.
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/02/24/iraq.main/index.html
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 6:32 AM
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