THE MASSES ARE ASSES

Terror allegations against 19 men termed 'garbage'

Allegations that 19 young men behaved like terrorists and are a danger to national security are "absolute garbage," lawyers said yesterday as officials revealed the identities of the mostly Pakistani suspects.

The men, aged 18 to 33, were rounded up in predawn immigration raids around Toronto earlier this month. Authorities allege that many of them came to Canada on false pretenses, stating in their applications that they were attending a school called the Ottawa Business College, which later turned out not to be legitimate.

Yet the case has drawn worldwide attention, much more than that typically afforded an illegal-immigrant ring, because officials have drawn parallels between the suspects' behaviour and that of the Sept. 11, 2001 hijackers.

RCMP Inspector Steve Martin said that he could not elaborate on the facts of the case and that the investigation is continuing. Police say they are sifting through three vanloads of evidence gathered when the men were arrested on Aug. 14.

Later this week, full transcripts of last week's detention-review hearings are to be released. This is unusual, given that Canadian agencies generally don't like to tip their hands in cases involving alleged threats to national security. [...]


Although it's quite apparent the 'marketing department' is unhappy with how seriously Canadians are taking the War on Terrorism, they continue to ignore the value of a colour-coded threat level warning system.

Regulation-Haters Spreading More Lies

We don’t yet know the precise cause of the blackout, and perhaps we never will. But we now can say with certainty what we may only have suspected before: The people running our government and our energy industry believe that Americans are fools, because otherwise they wouldn’t dare to conduct politics and business as they do.

For many years, the conservative cant promoted by the energy corporations is that deregulation can relieve any shortages, reduce rising pressure on prices, deliver decent service to everyone, and secure the national energy supply in times of crisis. This might be termed the "Texas ideology," which is well represented in Washington not only by the usual lobbyists, but at the highest fulcrums of power. Politicians from Houston run both the White House and the Congress—and their notion of the best way to produce and market energy was symbolized, until not so long ago, by their friends, neighbors and contributors at Enron.

While Kenneth (Kenny Boy) Lay may no longer be in a position to raise money and conceive policy for George W. Bush and Tom DeLay, other influential executives remain eager to fulfill his role. Among them was Anthony J. Alexander of Ohio’s First Energy Corp., the firm whose failing transmission lines near Lake Erie seems to have kicked off the blackout. As a deregulation enthusiast and loyal Republican, Mr. Alexander raised more than $100,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000, thus earning distinction as a "Bush Pioneer." [...]

US crime hits 30-year low

Crime in the United States fell last year to the lowest level since records started being compiled 30 years ago, the US Justice Department has said.

About 23 million violent and property crimes were reported in 2002, compared with some 44 million in 1973, according to the annual survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The decline was seen in every category of crime measured by the department.

Attorney General John Ashcroft attributed the drop to the work of police and prosecutors. [...]


No word yet on what effect this bad news, bad news will have on the 'COPS' shooting schedule.

Xymphora

One of the mysteries about the current mess in Iraq is the identity of the people involved in the resistance against the occupation, and in particular, the UN bombing. It is fairly clear that no one really has the slightest idea as to who these people might be, and a major part of the reason for this is that the Iraqi people are doing all they can to shelter the operations of the fighters for national liberation.

The Americans don't want to admit that the resistance might be coming from the Iraqi people. In the absence of weapons of mass destruction, they have had to fall back on the argument that the attack on Iraq was to liberate the Iraqis from tyranny, and the presence of vast numbers of Iraqis fighting their 'liberators' makes that argument look as silly as it is. They are therefore claiming that the resistance is a combination of Baathists and outside forces, which of course they call 'terrorists'. Leaving aside the obvious point that terrorists are people who cause terror, i. e., the Americans, and not the people who are trying to remove the source of the terror, who would be more accurately described as the beginnings of a guerilla army of national liberation, this argument also has a major flaw for the Americans. If they admit that their Iraqi adventure has caused a resurgence of Islamic terrorist groups focused on removing the Crusaders from Iraq, they will eventually have to admit that the attack on Iraq actually damaged their bogus 'war on terror' by causing a revitalization in the international movement of Islamic fundamentalism.

Given current American attitudes towards the United Nations, and the general level of violence by the neocons, not to mention the machinations of neocon/Zionist propaganda/politics in the Middle East, it's odd that the first inclination of everybody seeing the UN bombing wasn't to blame the Americans. The Iraqis are convinced that it was an American operation, and they may very well be right. [...]

Four 9/11 Moms Battle Bush

In mid-June, F.B.I. director Robert Mueller III and several senior agents in the bureau received a group of about 20 visitors in a briefing room of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. The director himself narrated a PowerPoint presentation that summarized the numbers of agents and leads and evidence he and his people had collected in the 18-month course of their ongoing investigation. After the formal meeting, senior agents in the room faced a grilling by Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow whose cohorts are three other widowed moms from New Jersey.

"I don’t understand, with all the warnings about the possibilities of Al Qaeda using planes as weapons, and the Phoenix Memo from one of your own agents warning that Osama bin Laden was sending operatives to this country for flight-school training, why didn’t you check out flight schools before Sept. 11?"

"Do you know how many flight schools there are in the U.S.? Thousands," a senior agent protested. "We couldn’t have investigated them all and found these few guys."

"Wait, you just told me there were too many flight schools and that prohibited you from investigating them before 9/11," Kristen persisted. "How is it that a few hours after the attacks, the nation is brought to its knees, and miraculously F.B.I. agents showed up at Embry-Riddle flight school in Florida where some of the terrorists trained?"

"We got lucky," was the reply. [...]

Car Bomb Destroys UN HQ in Baghdad, 20 Die; We Talk To A Survivor

The United Nations headquarters in Baghdad has been destroyed by a truck bomb killing 20 people in one of the deadliest attacks ever directed at the United Nations. Among the dead was Sergio Viera de Mello, the top UN official in Baghdad. Dozens were also wounded.

The explosion happened at about 4:30 in the afternoon yesterday while hundreds of UN officials, workers and journalists were inside the converted hotel. A cement truck loaded with explosives is believed to have crashed into the building. The attack came less than two weeks after a car bomb destroyed the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad killing 17.

No group took responsibility for the attacks. Paul Bremer, who is overseeing the US. Occupation accused Syria of permitting militants into Iraq.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the UN officials had asked the U.S.-led coalition last week to expand its security realm to include foreign embassies and offices of nongovernment agencies in Iraq. But the U.S. said no. [...]


Mere months after risking 'irrelevancy' by opposing the U.S. attack on Iraq, the United Nations suffers a bomb attack that kills 23 people at its headquarters in Baghdad, including Chief Envoy Sergio Viera de Mello. The perpetrators are most likely:

a) Syrian

b) Baath loyalists

c) The Armed Vanguards of the Second Muhammad Army

d) 19 flight school 'grads' named Mohammed Atta

The Living Myths About Nuclear Murder
Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki

At 1:45 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a US B-29 bomber, named Enola Gay, took off from Tinian Island in the Mariana Islands. It carried the world's second atomic bomb, the first having been detonated three weeks earlier at a US test site in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The Enola Gay carried one atomic bomb, with an enriched uranium core. The bomb had been named "Little Boy." It had an explosive force of some 12,500 tons of TNT. At 8:15 a.m. that morning, as the citizens of Hiroshima were beginning their day, the Enola Gay released its horrific cargo, which fell for 43 seconds before detonating at 580 meters above Shima Hospital near the center of the city.

As a result of the blast, heat and ensuing fires, the city of Hiroshima was leveled and some 90,000 people in it perished that day. The world's second test of a nuclear weapon demonstrated conclusively the awesome power of nuclear weapons for killing and maiming. Schools were destroyed and their students and teachers slaughtered. Hospitals with their patients and medical staffs were obliterated. The bombing of Hiroshima was an act of massive destruction of a civilian population, the destruction of an entire city with a single bomb. Harry Truman, president of the United States, upon being notified, said, in egregiously poor judgment, "This is the greatest thing in history."

Many myths have grown up around the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that have the effect of making the use of nuclear weapons more palatable. To restate, one such myth is that there was no choice but to use nuclear weapons on these cities. Another is that doing so saved the lives of in excess of one million US soldiers. Underlying these myths is a more general myth that US leaders can be expected to do what is right and moral. To conclude that our leaders did the wrong thing by acting immorally at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, slaughtering civilian populations, flies in the face of this widespread understanding of who we are as a people. To maintain our sense of our own decency, reflected by the actions of our leaders, may require us to bend the facts to fit our myths. [...]


The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the central international agreement guiding the elimination of nuclear weapons, is on the verge of collapse. The chief cause is a U.S. nuclear policy that, by openly declaring the possibility of a preemptive nuclear first strike and calling for resumed research into mini-nukes and other so-called 'useable nuclear weapons,' appears to worship nuclear weapons as God.
- Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba on the 58th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima



Lying about WMD - The day the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, August 9, 1945, President Harry Truman reported, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base." Truman went on to refer to the "awful responsibility which has come to us," and to "thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies."

US Wants Saddam, But Dead - Not Alive

The Bush administration will be delighted not to put Saddam on public trial. Dead dictators tell no tales.

The White House would much prefer to display a bullet-riddled Saddam as a trophy to divert mounting criticism over U.S. casualties in Iraq and the litany of falsehoods it used to drive America to war. If put on public trial, Saddam would have a field day revealing the embarrassing alliance between his brutal regime and Washington:

◙ The CIA's role in bringing the Ba'ath Party to power in a 1958 coup, opening the way for Saddam to take control.

◙ U.S., Israeli, and Iranian destabilization of Iraq during the 1970s by fueling Kurdish rebellion.

◙ Washington's egging on the aggressive shah of Iran in the Shatt al-Arab waterway dispute, a primary cause of the Iran-Iraq War.

◙ The U.S. secretly urging Iraq to invade Iran in 1980 to overthrow that nation's revolutionary Islamic government.

◙ Covert supply of Saddam's war machine by the U.S. and Britain during the eight-year Iran-Iraq conflict, plus biological warfare programs and germ feeder stocks, poison gas manufacturing plants and raw materials.

◙ Billions in aid, routed through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Italy's Banco del Lavoro and the shadowy BCCI. Heavy artillery, munitions, spare parts, trucks, field hospitals and electronics.

◙ Equally important, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA operated offices in Baghdad that provided Iraq with satellite intelligence data on Iranian troop deployments that proved decisive in the war's titanic battles at Basra, Majnoon and Faw.

◙ The murky role played by Washington just before Iraq's 1991 invasion of Kuwait. The U.S. ambassador told Saddam "The U.S. takes no position in Arab border disputes." Was this a trap to lure Saddam to invade Kuwait, then crush his army, or simple diplomatic bungling? Saddam could supply the awkward answers.

What Was Behind the Pentagon's Betting Parlor?

What was behind the Pentagon’s screwball scheme to establish an online futures market for acts of terrorism? The $8 million betting parlor was scuttled only three days before its scheduled debut on August 1. Was it just a one-time fluke? If so, it raises questions about who is running the Pentagon. If it was part of a pattern, then it raises some serious questions about the Bush administration.

This latest scheme simply exposes the tip of an ideological iceberg that is no less wacky or dangerous, but which has escaped such noisy condemnation because it floats in a sea of general acceptance. It is the ideology of privatization, carried to extreme.

At its most benign, this ideology rests on the very dubious assumption that every aspect of government, from elections to social institutions, to foreign policy, can be governed by the so-called free market. At its most vicious, it is simply monopoly capitalism masquerading as government: profoundly antidemocratic, as well as anti-competitive, with no thought beyond lining the pockets of the powerful.

The war on Iraq reflects this more vicious mode. The war was motivated by corporate greed, and sold with false advertising. Allies were bullied and bought. Underlying the administration’s steamroller approach was the arrogance of a monopoly. No alternatives would be considered. The largest-ever mass demonstrations around the world were brushed off like consumer complaints. [...]

Stealing The Internet

Ever stop to wonder what is really happening to the Internet these days?

The crackdown by the music industry on illegal downloading tells just part of the story. Even with the dot-com bust, the digital boom is here, as high-speed connections, faster processors and new wireless devices increasingly become part of life. But the thousands of lawsuits are not just about ensuring record companies and artists get the royalties they deserve. They're part of a larger plan to fundamentally change the way the Internet works.

From Congress to Silicon Valley, the nation's largest communication and entertainment conglomerates -- and software firms that want their business -- are seeking to restructure the Internet, to charge people for high-speed uses that are now free and to monitor content in an unprecedented manner. This is not just to see if users are swapping copyrighted CDs or DVDs, but to create digital dossiers for their own marketing purposes.

The Internet's early promise as a medium where text, audio, video and data can be freely exchanged and the public interest can be served is increasingly being relegated to history's dustbin. Today, the part of the Net that is public and accessible is shrinking, while the part of the Net tied to round-the-clock billing is poised to grow exponentially.

One front in the corporate high-tech takeover of the Internet can be seen in Congress. On July 21, the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet held a hearing on the "Regulatory Status of Broadband." There, a coalition that included Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, Disney and others, told Congress that Internet service providers (ISPs) should be able to impose volume-based fee structures, based on bits transmitted per month. This is part of a behind-the-scenes struggle by the Net's content providers and retailers to cut deals with the ISPs so that each sector will have unimpaired access to consumers and can maximize profits. [...]

US reporter tells of life in Aceh

The military crackdown in the troubled Indonesian province of Aceh is not going as well as Indonesian officials claim, according to a US journalist recently deported from the province. "The picture that I have is somewhat different to that on Indonesian TV," William Nessen told the BBC's World Today programme. "It was almost as if I was in a different place," he said.

Mr Nessen was able to gain rare access to life in Aceh, when he spent three weeks with rebel fighters from the Free Aceh Movement (Gam) - the separatist movement which the government hopes to crush. His time with Gam came to an end on 24 June, when he was caught by the army, charged with immigration offences, and sentenced to more than a month in an Indonesian jail, before being deported from the country on Monday.

The Indonesian authorities have imposed strict restrictions on media access in Aceh since the military offensive began.

Mr Nessen said that the Achenese population were suffering heavily under the military crackdown, with the army resettling hundreds of people into refugee camps in order to keep tighter control on the population. "The Indonesian strategy now is to occupy every village in Aceh if they can," he said. "People are terrified." [...]

Double Standard
Big business welcomes globalization -- but only when big business benefits.

Item: The House passes legislation allowing consumers to import cheaper drugs from Canada.

Item: IBM plans to move thousands of computer programming jobs to India.

Question: Aren't both events logical consequences of globalization of commerce?

Answer: Not if you're big business, which loves moving cheap jobs offshore but hates competing with cheaper imported drugs.


If you notice a double standard here, you're right.

American industry wants to be free to shift labor around the globe. And it fiercely lobbies against any restrictions, such as trans-national labor standards. But when it comes to property, business lobbies just as hard for ground rules that make it impossible for consumers to benefit from product imports that allegedly breach property rules. [...]

Bush's oil move backfires

In a dream ending for the chapter of history being written now in Iraq, neo-conservatives fantasised before the war about a privatised, pro-American Iraqi oil industry. This would have access to the world's second largest hydrocarbon reserves and produce so much oil that Saudi Arabia, in charge of Opec, would lose its grip on petrol prices.

The world would then be swimming in inexpensive petrol - the cost of which would be dictated by the market, not by an anti-American price-fixing club run by Riyadh. Low prices would also mean falling revenues for oil-producers, which in the Middle East might precipitate the collapse of regimes hostile to the US. These hopes are now being dissipated like sand before the desert wind.

Oil is dribbling, rather than pumping, from Iraq's bomb-blasted oil industry. Sabotage and theft mean Iraq's oil production remains at a fraction of the levels achieved under Saddam. With reconstruction failing to take off, there is little sign of a post-Ba'athist dividend in the form of low oil prices. The result is that US action in Iraq has not weakened Opec, and hence Saudi Arabia, but strengthened it. [...]


The mainstream media continues a spin that ignores White House ties to Saudi Arabia's ruling family while telling us that an administration littered with oil industry executives is trying to ensure 'we' get "low oil prices."

Death marches at double in Iraq but US public unaware

United States military casualties in Iraq are running at more than twice the number most Americans have been led to believe they are. The public is largely unaware of a high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths.

Since May 1, when President George Bush called an end to combat operations, 52 of his troops have been killed by hostile fire, according to Pentagon figures. But the total of deaths from all causes is much higher at 112.

The number of US combat deaths since the start of the war is 166, which is 19 more than the toll in the first Gulf war. The passing of that benchmark last month scotched the perception that the US had scored an easy victory. The death toll this time is 248 when accidents and suicides are included.

The Pentagon figure for wounded in action in Iraq is 827, but here again the total of injuries appears much higher. The estimate given by central command in Qatar is 926, but Lieutenant-Colonel Allen DeLane, in charge of the airlift of wounded into Andrews Air Force Base, argues that too is understated. "Since the war has started, I can't give you an exact number because that's classified information, but I can say to you over 4000 have stayed here at Andrews, and that number doubles when you count the people that come here to Andrews and then we send them to other places," Colonel DeLane told National Public Radio. [...]

Hopeless
Did Bob Hope ever say anything funny?

To be paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny is not a particular defect or shortcoming in, say, a cable repair man or a Supreme Court justice or a Navy Seal. These jobs can be performed humorlessly with no loss of efficiency or impact. But to be paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly unfunny is a serious drawback, even lapse, in a comedian. And the late Bob Hope devoted a fantastically successful and well-remunerated lifetime to showing that a truly unfunny man can make it as a comic. There is a laugh here, but it is on us.

There were many cringe-making references last week to Hope's doggedness in entertaining the brave boys overseas. I have met more than one veteran who says that those USO concerts were the last straw. Here's the late Vincent Canby (New York Times obituary - written 3 years ago), extracting the last ounce of brilliance from a Hope gag in Saigon after an officers' billet had been blown up by the Vietcong. "I was on the way to my hotel, and I passed another hotel going in the opposite direction." Nobody had the bad taste to recall the moment at which Hope was openly booed by the grunts in Vietnam: He was to the comedy of the war what Nixon was to its negotiation and what Billy Graham was to its husky religiosity.

Even the most determinedly fawning obituarists had to concede that most of his movies and many of his "joke" anthologies were basically insulting in their unfunniness. Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times, stuck with writing an appreciation on the same day as Canby's labored obituary (and stuck by the newspaper with the exact same vaudeville photograph as illustration) fell back on the exhausted line that Hope always played the same character, which was Bob Hope. A fitting tautology. Hope was a fool, and nearly a clown, but he was never even remotely a comedian. [...]


How this soulless, filthy rich, script reading hack avoided becoming president is beyond me. And noting that he didn't have the decency to leave the golf club in the hotel room, I wonder how many of the 56,000 American boys killed in Vietnam were part of what is now being described as Bob Hope's 'humanitarian effort with our troops'?

Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?

This presidential credibility crisis is only the most recent one in our history, some far more important than others. For most Americans, taking responsibility for a lie means that they are ready to accept punishment for their sins. Punishment is meted out and all can get on with their lives. Ask two who did not take responsibility for the error of their ways: ask Bill Clinton about the impeachment that resulted from his lie to the American people about the sexual affair with "that woman, Monica Lewinsky." Or ask Richard Nixon who was forced out of office for committing an illegal act during the course of an election, covering it up, and nearly bringing the United States government down with him. Yet as egregious as these acts were, no lives were lost in either case. No proud American youth put on the uniform of our Armed Services and carried a gun into battle believing that s/he he fought for the honor of our country only to learn the bitter truth: That the president sent him/her to fight for a venal purpose. Or maybe he was picked off by a sniper, or an Iraqi dropped an explosive on his Humvee from an overpass and he never knew that his life was wasted.

Like salt in the wound is another fact: President Bush, who recklessly tells the Iraqis who are picking off our soldiers, "Bring 'em on," as he stands in front of a portrait of President Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, is all too willing to don the flyboy get-up for a campaign photo opportunity but when he was engaged as a pilot in the National Guard during the Vietnam war, he went AWOL. And still he is the president. How could that be? Could it be that the class privilege that allowed him to enroll in the best schools in the nation even though he was a mediocre student, also excused him from meeting the minimum standard required of members of the armed services? Apparently so.

The reservists who make up the post-Vietnam all-volunteer army are primarily working-class men and women, augmenting their incomes by going to reserve meetings one weekend a month. Many of them are immigrants who wish to shorten the path to citizenship by joining the armed services...One does not see well-educated Wall St. brokers or lawyers or physicians lining up to donate a weekend a month to our national security. Are there any Harvard or Yale graduates in Iraq? As French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre drolly observed, "When the rich wage war it's the poor who die." [...]

Former Green Party President Candidate Ralph Nader Gives His First Major Address on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

...Until that balance of power is restored by the United States in that equation over there, no matter what words you hear from administration officials, and they're getting a bit hackney, they're going nowhere. They're going nowhere because one side has too much military power and doesn't have an even greater military and political power restraining it. Israeli combat veterans over a year ago started a refusenik movement. They said they would never serve with the Israeli Army, they're called up every year, will never serve in the West Bank in Gaza.

In a statement in the leading Israeli newspaper announcing this courageous action they said the following, we will no longer fight beyond the green line for the purpose of occupying, deporting, destroying, blockading, killing, starving and humiliating an entire people, end quote. They were referring to the Palestinian people.

They now number over a thousand. They're not getting much publicity now. But you can imagine the courage it took, you can imagine the pressure they're under. You can imagine how many of them have already gone to jail. This is their statement. They said they would defend Israel proper as they have in the past. They will not be an instrument of oppression of the Palestinian people. The website is Seruv.org.

Now I want to just go very briefly in making this point. Israeli Premiere at the time, Ehud Barak, was quoted in Haaretz 3 June 1998, quote, if I were a Palestinian I'd also join a terror group, end quote.

I'm sure he's not justifying that kind of activity against his people. What he meant was, that he would be fighting for the liberation of his people if he was on the other side. David Ben-Gurion first Israeli prime minister, quoted by Nehum Goldman in the book "The Israeli Paradox" quote, if I were an Arab leader I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal, we've taken your country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing, we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that? End quote. Ben-Gurion. [...]


The Nader address includes commentary on U.S. foreign policy and the invasion/occupation of Iraq (the full transcript is a must read).

Why the US fears Cuba
Hostility to the Castro regime doesn't stem from its failings, but from its achievements

Bush is, of course, only the latest of 10 successive US presidents who have openly sought to overthrow the Cuban government and Batista's heirs in Florida have long plotted a triumphant return to reclaim their farms, factories and bordellos - closed or expropriated by Castro, Che Guevara and their supporters after they came to power in 1959. But international hostility towards the Cuban regime has increased sharply since April, when it launched its harshest crackdown on the US-backed opposition for decades, handing out long jail sentences to 75 activists for accepting money from a foreign power and executing three ferry hijackers.

It's not hard to discover the origins of this dangerous standoff, which follows a period in which Amnesty International had noted Cuba's "more open and permissive approach" towards dissent. In the aftermath of September 11, the Bush administration - whose election depended on the votes of hardline Cuban exiles in Florida - singled out Cuba for membership of a second-tier axis of evil. The Caribbean island, US under-secretary of state John Bolton insisted menacingly, was a safe haven for terrorists, was researching biological weapons and had dual-use technology it could pass to other "rogue states". He was backed by Bush, who declared that the 40-year-old US trade embargo against Cuba would not be lifted until there were both multi-party elections and free market reforms, while Cuba was branded a threat to US security, overturning the Clinton administration's assessment.

And however grim the Cuban crackdown, it beggars belief that the denunciations have been led by the US and its closest European allies in the "war on terror". Not only has the US sentenced five Cubans to between 15 years and life for trying to track anti-Cuban, Miami-based terrorist groups and carried out over 70 executions of its own in the past year, but (along with Britain) supports other states, in the Middle East and Central Asia for example, which have thousands of political prisoners and carry out routine torture and executions. And, of course, the worst human rights abuses on the island of Cuba are not carried under Castro's aegis at all, but in the Guantanamo base occupied against Cuba's will, where the US has interned 600 prisoners without charge for 18 months, who it now plans to try in secret and possibly execute - without even the legal rights afforded to Cuba's jailed oppositionists.

Which only goes to reinforce what has long been obvious: that US hostility to Cuba does not stem from the regime's human rights failings, but its social and political successes and the challenge its unyielding independence offers to other US and western satellite states. Saddled with a siege economy and a wartime political culture for more than 40 years, Cuba has achieved first world health and education standards in a third world country, its infant mortality and literacy rates now rivalling or outstripping those of the US, its class sizes a third smaller than in Britain - while next door, in the US-backed "democracy" of Haiti, half the population is unable to read and infant mortality is over 10 times higher. Those, too, are human rights, recognised by the UN declaration and European convention. Despite the catastrophic withdrawal of Soviet support more than a decade ago and the social damage wrought by dollarisation and mass tourism, Cuba has developed biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries acknowledged by the US to be the most advanced in Latin America. Meanwhile, it has sent 50,000 doctors to work for free in 93 third world countries (currently there are 1,000 working in Venezuela's slums) and given a free university education to 1,000 third world students a year. How much of that would survive a takeover by the Miami-backed opposition? [...]

US Debates Bid to Kill Hussein and Avoid Trial

Trying Hussein before an Iraqi or international criminal court would present an opportunity to hold the Ba'ath Party regime accountable for its repression and murder of thousands of people over the past three decades.

But as US troops step up the hunt for Hussein near his hometown of Tikrit, the prospect of an open trial that puts him on a public stage has given pause to some in the administration, according to government officials with knowledge of the high-level meetings. Among those said to have taken part in the discussions are Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

One worry is that a host of embarrassing charges might be leveled at the United States. Washington supported (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Hussein's regime during Iraq's war against Iran between 1980 and 1988 -- including providing satellite images of Iranian military formations [and "prepar(ing) detailed battle planning for Iraqi forces" - NY Times, Aug. 18, 2002] -- at a time when Iraqi forces used chemical weapons against troops and civilians. [...]


Pre-1991 - period of U.S. relations with Iraq
- Iraq goes to war with other nations
- Iraq acquires and uses 'weapons of mass destruction'
- Iraq is considered 'dangerous'

Post-1991 - period of no U.S. relations with Iraq
- Iraq attacks no one
- Iraq lacks 'weapons of mass destruction'
- Iraq is considered one of the weakest nations in the region

"We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence."
- Joseph Roux


Goodbye Jon...we love you too.

The Lunatic Fringe of Capitalism

If anyone even suggested publicly the idea of putting a bounty on the head of a Bush Administration official you can bet they'd at least be jailed on felony charges promptly. Yet incredibly, the Bush administration initiated (and then cancelled in the face of immediate opposition) a scheme that would have provided financial incentives for would-be terrorists to assassinate political leaders in the Middle East -- the "Policy Analysis Market," or PAM.

A graphic on PAM's website on Monday displayed several hypothetical futures contracts. Investors could bet on the likelihood that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would be assassinated or Jordan's King Abdullah II overthrown. One less violent investment apparently was suggested -- the U.S. recognizing Palestine as a political entity. Those hypothetical investments were promptly taken off the website, but were archived at ReclaimDemocracy.org/pam.html.

The Pentagon office that devised PAM, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), said PAM arose from research "to investigate the broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks."

PAM proposed to let traders buy and sell futures contracts just like commodities, but the contracts would be speculating on events in the Middle East. These events could have included economic trends, wars, even assassinations and terrorist attacks. Traders believing certain events would occur could buy a futures contract; those thinking the event unlikely could sell theirs. The site had planned to register investors, who supposedly could sign up anonymously this Friday.

"This appears to encourage terrorists to participate, either to profit from their terrorist activities or to bet against them in order to mislead U.S. intelligence authorities," said Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) in a letter to John Poindexter, the director of the Terrorism Information Awareness Program. [...]


While being grilled about the governments's 'terror trading market', Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz described the Pentagon office that came up with the project as "brilliantly imaginative in places where we want them to be imaginative." No word yet on what 9/11 paid out during beta testing.