India lives in several centuries at once, it has been said. What is true of peace will also be true if India and Pakistan go to war.
Yesterday, as Indian and Pakistani troops once again exchanged heavy artillery fire across Kashmir's ceasefire line, the Indian Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, held a war council in the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar, chairing a meeting of the Unified Command to review the preparations for war and the security situation along the border.
In Rawalpindi, Pakistan's corps commanders met to discuss operational strategy, and later announced that Pakistani troops were to be withdrawn from UN peace-keeping duties in Sierra Leone "in the wake of a grave Indian threat".
The world quakes at what will happen if the Pakistani leader, General Pervez Musharraf, or Mr Vajpayee press the nuclear button. Estimates of India's and Pakistan's nuclear strengths vary wildly, but at the low end of the scale Pakistan is estimated to have at least 40 nuclear bombs compared with India's 60 – quite sufficient for the task.
Friday, May 24, 2002
Two IDF soldiers were moderately wounded Thursday during heavy exchanges of fire with Palestinians in the West Bank town of Tul Karm.
The incident occurred inside the Palestinian-controlled zone (Area A), between the Tul Karm refugee camp and the Palestinian Authority offices in the town.
It appears that the soldiers, part of an infantry patrol inside the city, came under fire from Palestinians. The soldiers returned fire, and Palestinian sources reported that eight Palestinians, including a four-year-old girl, were injured. Palestinian hospital officials and witnesses said the Palestinians were wounded by an Israeli tank shell fired at a building in a refugee camp on the edge of town. Four were said to be from the same family and one was in critical condition.
In the no man's land between the Muslim and Jewish Quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem, a burping contest between two boys begins. Shlomo, an ultra-orthodox Jewish boy, says he doesn't know any Arabs and has no real interest in meeting them. A young Palestinian boy comes over to check out the scene. Standing right next to Shlomo, he lets out a burp. Shlomo tries hard to ignore him, but he can't resist and burps back. The two burp themselves into giggles.
This burping contest appears in Promises, which chronicles the lives of seven Israeli and Palestinian children, ages nine to thirteen, living in and around Jerusalem. First-time filmmakers B.Z. Goldberg and Justine Shapiro, along with co-director and editor Carlos Bolado, shot the documentary between 1997 and 2000, in the comparatively peaceful period between the first and second intifadas.
More a drama than a documentary, Promises visits an ultra-orthodox Jewish school and a school where the Koran is taught as a manifesto for Palestinian liberation. It goes into homes in the Deheishe refugee camp and Beit-El, an Israeli settlement. In a world without checkpoints, these children would live in the same community, just a twenty-minute drive from each other. But as it is, they are a society apart. Their differing perspectives, and their interactions, give the film its poignancy.
George Bush flies into Berlin tonight to face an array of European allies who have grown increasingly irritated and apprehensive about his leadership.
The last time he crossed the Atlantic, he was jeered as the "toxic Texan" for his withdrawal from the Kyoto global warming accord. This time, the stakes are much higher and the chanting crowds of European demonstrators are unlikely to be so polite.
Much has changed between last July's Genoa summit and the president's return to Europe today. The US was struck a terrible blow on September 11 and Europe rallied to its side with a degree of solidarity that surprised almost everyone. But the sense of common purpose has crumbled rapidly since the beginning of the year, and now the usually tetchy transatlantic relationship has reached a critical moment.
The first loud shots have been fired in a trade war, and there are profound disagreements over US plans to oust Saddam Hussein, and over policy in the Middle East.
Europe, meanwhile, has been shocked by Washington's withdrawal from a string of treaties on global warming, missile defence and on the establishment of an international criminal court (ICC).
Mutual prejudices have rarely been stronger: American perceptions of rampant anti-Semitism in the old continent are matched by European - especially French - scorn for the death penalty and unbridled capitalism. Hostility to Europe on the American right now matches traditional anti-Americanism on the European left.
Eric Visger's tale of political deceit is becoming a hot election-year topic, both in local and statewide political circles.
Michigan Democratic Party Chairman Mark Brewer said the Holton teen-ager's allegations are further evidence that Republican operatives have been conducting "an organized scheme" to interfere with Democratic state senate primary elections.
State Rep. Gerald VanWoerkom, R-Norton Shores, said he will try to contact the Republican staffers in Lansing who allegedly tricked Visger into filing as a Democratic candidate in the 34th State Senate district. As the only Republican running in the district where Visger was a candidate, VanWoerkom said he wants to make sure his campaign isn't tainted by such tactics.
And some political leaders are wondering whether the Republican staffers may have broken laws in their alleged dealings with Visger. They say regulations governing the conduct of notary publics may have been violated, as well as laws preventing state employees from engaging in partisan politics while using state facilities.
In April, U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., got in a whole heap of trouble after she called for a thorough investigation of what George W. Bush knew before Sept. 11 about the potential for the sort of terrorist attacks that would shake the nation and the world on that fateful day.
McKinney is one of the most outspoken members of Congress and her statements were typically blunt.
"We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11th," she told a radio interviewer. "What did this administration know and when did it know it about the events of September 11th? Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered? ... What do they have to hide?"
McKinney's call for a real investigation of what Bush knew - along with her parallel suggestion that it was necessary to review possible war profiteering by members of the Bush family and corporations with close ties to the president - drew a firestorm from pundits and partisans.
SEAN PENN has been one of his most vocal critics. “We now have a president who thinks in terms of good and evil and that comes from watching too many Hollywood movies,” Penn said. “In the film aspect as well as the political aspect we have always had a bloodlust.”
Penn is one of 11 directors contributing to a film called “11-09-01: Eleven Minutes, Nine Seconds, One Frame,” which will be released on Sept. 11 of this year.
But the biggest Bush critic has been Michael Moore, whose “Bowling for Columbine” — about the culture of guns and violence in America — has received rave reviews and a 13-minute standing ovation. The documentary is widely considered to be the front runner for the prestigious Palme d’Or award, and Moore’s anti-Bush comments have been lapped up by the foreign press.
“To use the dead of that day as the cover to push their right-wing agenda, to shred our Constitution, to take away civil liberties ... to try and distract people from Enron, ‘because we need to focus on the war on terrorism,’ ” Moore said. “I think it’s immoral, I think it’s abhorrent. . . . You’re being hoodwinked — and it’s despicable.”
BERLIN (Reuters) - Intense security for George W. Bush restored some of the atmosphere of the Cold War to the heart of Berlin, turning the center of the city into a virtual fortress and bringing a busy district to an eerie standstill.
About 10,000 police officers cordoned off a 14-block area around the Brandenburg Gate for the American leader, shutting down a main east-west traffic artery and leaving hundreds of businesses without customers throughout the government quarter.
A ghostly silence descended upon the normally bustling Unter den Linden boulevard that runs though the center of the city, just east of where the Berlin Wall stood until 1989.
"When this was a communist police state only diplomats and people with passes could get down this street," said Guenter Wolf, head waiter at the Dressler Restaurant on the boulevard. "It's been a bit like that again."
"Our business is being wiped out," said restaurant manager Katrin Mehls. "Usually we have several hundred customers. Today we've had two, plus a couple of dozen cops who wanted to use the toilet."
Even the Unter den Linden underground station was closed, forcing passengers to stay on board trains as they glided through the darkened station, a spooky reminder of the Cold War era when West Berlin trains passed through heavily guarded East Berlin stations without stopping.
Under fire from Republicans for questioning the administration's handling of pre-Sept. 11 intelligence data, Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle (D-S.D.) yesterday accused the White House of hoarding information and vowed to pursue an independent inquiry to investigate the matter.
"There is an increasing pattern that I find in this administration that reflects an unwillingness to share information not only with us but within their own administration," Daschle said during the question-and-answer period after delivering a speech to mark the first anniversary of Democrats seizing the Senate majority.
The Majority Leader took shots at the FBI and CIA for failing to share information, singling out Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBIDirector Robert Mueller for criticism for withholding information from Bush following the attacks.
"One department not telling the other," Daschle said. "People in positions of responsibility not telling the President. I think we have got to ensure that we address that issue and I must say we are going to respect secrecy."
WASHINGTON (AP) - A judge on Thursday rebuffed a Bush administration effort to kill lawsuits aimed at revealing the inner workings of Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites)'s energy task force.
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U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said he will allow the private groups Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club (news - web sites) to take the first step in delving into the operations of the task force.
Run by Cabinet heads, the Cheney panel directed federal agencies in writing a plan last year that focused on expanding energy production — a position favored by the industry.
Sullivan said he may require that any material from the Cheney panel be turned over to him instead of to the private groups until he decides whether there is a legal basis for the case to proceed.
The administration maintains that only government employees were members of the task force, which disbanded last year. But the conservative group Judicial Watch alleges that former Enron chairman Ken Lay and lobbyists Mark Racicot, Haley Barbour and Thomas Kuhn were members.
Racicot is now Republican National Committee (news - web sites) chairman. The ex-Enron chairman and the three current and former lobbyists are defendants in the Judicial Watch case, with which the Sierra Club lawsuit has been combined.
Outside the courtroom, Alex Levinson of the Sierra Club said that "if Enron wrote part of the White House's energy policy, we want to know about it." The White House has acknowledged half a dozen meetings between Enron and Cheney or his aides on the task force.
WASHINGTON (AP) - An FBI agent has accused Washington headquarters of mounting a ``roadblock'' to the pre-Sept. 11 investigation of terrorism defendant Zacarias Moussaoui. The rare letter immediately prompted an internal investigation.
Agent Coleen Rowley, a lawyer in the Minnesota office that arrested Moussaoui last August, divulged in her letter that local agents became so frustrated with FBI headquarters that they sought to break from their chain of command and notify the CIA.
The local agents were reprimanded for trying, she alleged.
``When, in a desperate 11th-hour measure to bypass the FBI HQ roadblock, the Minneapolis division undertook to directly notify the CIA's counterterrorist center, FBI HQ personnel chastised the Minneapolis agents for making the direct notification without their approval,'' she wrote in the 13-page letter, excerpts of which were obtained by The Associated Press.
Government officials familiar with her letter, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the agent alleged FBI headquarters did not fully appreciate the terrorist threat Moussaoui posed and hindered local agent's efforts to get warrants to gather more evidence.
President Bush continues to delude himself that Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is interested in peace. Mr. Sharon has no intention of ever seriously negotiating with the Palestinians.
First it was the violence, then it was Yasser Arafat, and now Mr. Sharon says he won't negotiate until the Palestinian Authority cleans up corruption and becomes more democratic — presumably according to his definition.
That's arrogant hogwash, of course. If democracy and no corruption were the conditions for negotiations, there wouldn't be a single treaty between any nations on the face of the earth. Sharon intends to just drag things out, as the Israelis have done for more than 10 years, and in the meantime take more Palestinian land and squeeze and harass the Palestinians even more.
ATHENS – The Bush administration may hesitate to give Arab allies public credit, but Washington investigators should consider warnings that at least two friendly Arab intelligence services sent to Washington just weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Jordan, beyond a doubt, and Morocco, with some certainty, advised US and allied intelligence that Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorists were preparing airborne terrorist operations in the continental United States.
What Washington's investigators should do now, after verifying the authenticity and content of those messages, is discover how seriously and at what levels of government, if any, they were considered or shared. And what, if any, operational conclusions were drawn.
First, the Jordan case: Since the early 1990s, the kingdom's well-organized and efficient intelligence service, called the GID (General Intelligence Division), reporting directly to the king, carefully tracked CIA- and Pakistani-trained Arab guerrillas both in and outside of Jordan. Many had fought in the victorious war to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan.
WASHINGTON -- A Phoenix FBI agent who wrote a memo last year warning about suspicious Middle Easterners at flight schools had developed detailed information before Sept. 11 linking Arizona students to Osama bin Laden and to a radical British Islamic group, and he shared some of his concerns with the CIA, law enforcement sources said Wednesday.
Agent Kenneth Williams suspected that a group of about eight Middle Eastern men in the Phoenix area were not merely studying at flight schools but also had shown a keen interest in airplane engineering and airport construction and security, according to sources familiar with the closed-door briefings Williams gave members of Congress this week.
His review also determined that one of the Arizona flight school students appeared to have communicated through a middleman with one of Bin Laden's top aides, Abu Zubeida, and that several of the students under suspicion had links to a radical group called Al-Muhajiroun. The Britain-based group is dedicated to the establishment of a global Muslim state and has vocally supported Bin Laden and other terrorists.
(YellowTimes.org) – George W. Bush is actually not stupid or illiterate as many of you may think and laughingly describe him as. But in that case then, what is he? Well, he's a full-fledged living characterization of himself, which has now reached the level of complete parody. Just as you confidently expect the Road Runner to dodge Wiley E's projectiles and to outrun semis and Bugs Bunny to bring himself to a stop one inch off the ground after a thousand foot freefall, you fully expect the President of the United States to make absolutely no sense, while embarrassing himself as he sounds like someone just beginning to grasp the verbal patterns of rudimentary American English.
His rhetoric, too, has reached the level of that of a satirical script. (Did a presidential speech writer pen the words that Bush just mangled or did a Saturday Night Live cast member?) This has been especially evident in the past few glorious days, which have brought us revelations in the form of reports and memos regarding terrorist warnings throughout the summer that explicitly and definitively expose the lies of the Bush administration.
In his initial response to the questions regarding what he knew before September 11, Bush said: "I'll do whatever it takes, and I know you'll join me in doing whatever it takes to prevent the enemy from attacking America again like they did and causing thousands to suffer and to mourn and to grieve." (CBS, May 17, 2002)
Aside from basely invoking American suffering, mourning, and grief for his own ends and creating a "link" between him and us, he completely fails to address what was known and what wasn't with regard to warnings of terrorist attacks last summer. Obviously, this shouldn't come as a surprise, it's the status quo for political answers; however, with regard to an issue of such gravity, as well as his convenient reference to the mysterious yet ubiquitous "enemy," Bush's comments can only be seen as being Orwellian on their face.
Thursday, May 23, 2002
RAMALLAH: Marwan Barghouti, member of the Palestinian Legistlative Council was visited by members of the LAW society on May 21. At that visit, LAW determined that Mr. Barghouti is suffering torture at the hands of the Israelis.
According to LAW, Yesterday Barghouti was taken to the prison clinic. He suffers from pain in his back and hands, caused by position abuse. Barghouti's hands and legs are shackled to a small chair, angled to slant forward so that he cannot sit in a stable position. Due to nails sticking out of the chair on which is he is forced to sit for prolonged hours his back is bleeding. This position abuse, also known as 'shabeh' is the most common method of physical abuse applied by the Israeli General Security Service ('Shin Bet').
Acccording to LAW, Barghouti is held in solitary confined and is deprived of sleep for twenty hours a day since he was transferred to the Russian Compound. LAW stated that abusive body positioning, and sleep deprivation are common tactics used by the Israeli General Security Service, for they undermine a detainee's concentration and self-control.
More than a decade ago, on Earth Day 1990, millions of people joined together around the country to protest the rapidly declining health of our planet -- forcing corporations to realize that even the average Joe had started to take an interest in the well-being of the environment.
Predictably, the level of "greenwashing" has spiked sharply since that eventful Earth Day. Greenwashing is what corporations do when they try to make themselves look more environmentally friendly than they really are.
Arguably, the greenwashers get away with it more often than not. But their deceptions do not go entirely unnoticed. Every year for the past decade, the watchdog group Earth Day Resources for Living Green has released a report called "Don't Be Fooled." The report calls attention to the year's 10 worst greenwashers, the 10 companies that have made the most misleading claims about the environmental benefits of their products and industries. This year, www.ecopledge.com, a coalition of environmental organizations that uses boycotts to put pressure on environment-abusing companies, has joined Earth Day Resources in putting out the report (available online at www.earthdayresources.org.)
"Don't Be Fooled" accuses corporations of deceiving consumers with false claims of environmental responsibility and all-natural wholesomeness. Not only does the report focus on deceptive claims made by corporations, it also highlights specific sins, falling into two main categories: producing genetically engineered foods and polluting the environment.
MEDFORD, Mass. (AP) - Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (news - web sites) on Sunday accused President Bush (news - web sites)'s foreign policy team of suffering from "untreated bipolar disorder."
Albright said the Bush administration is projecting contradictory messages on a broad range of global conflicts, including the Middle East and Afghanistan (news - web sites).
"They talk about the importance of the rule of law, but seem allergic to treaties designed to strengthen the rule of law in areas such as money-laundering, biological weapons, crimes against humanity, and the environment," Albright said in a commencement speech at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
"This split personality is also evident in Afghanistan, where one day they are ridiculing nation-building and the next proposing a new Marshall Plan," Albright told the 189 graduates. "And in the Middle East, where the signals have varied day by day."
The United States has a $6 trillion national debt, a growing deficit and is borrowing money from the Social Security Trust Fund in order to fund government services.We can no longer afford to provide more than $125 billion every year in corporate welfare--tax breaks, subsidies and other wasteful spending--that goes to some of the largest, most profitable corporations in America.
One of the most egregious forms of corporate welfare can be found at a little-known federal agency called the Export-Import Bank, an institution that has a budget of about $1 billion a year and the capability of putting at risk some $15.5 billion in loan guarantees annually.At a time when the government is underfunding veterans' needs, education, healthcare, housing and many other vital services, more than 80 percent of the subsidies distributed by the Export-Import Bank goes to Fortune 500 corporations.Among the companies that receive taxpayer support from the Ex-Im are Enron, Boeing, Halliburton, Mobil, IBM, General Electric, AT&T, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, FedEx, General Motors, Raytheon and United Technologies.
A Senate panel voted on party lines Wednesday to issue Congress' first subpoenas to the Bush White House, seeking information on staff contacts with Enron Corp. officials.
The vote was 9-8 to subpoena staff members in President Bush's executive office and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. The vote followed a two-hour debate that at times turned bitterly partisan.
The vote grew out of the Governmental Affairs Committee's investigation of Enron, which filed the biggest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history last year. The Houston-based company has been among Bush's biggest campaign contributors.
Some Republican senators accused Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., chairman of the committee, of being politically motivated in requesting the subpoenas and unfairly giving the impression that wrongdoing in the Enron affair had occurred in the White House.
Republicans noted that the White House had indicated it would deliver material to the panel on Wednesday and asked Lieberman to hold off the subpoenas. "Are we doing this to attract the attention of the public?" Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., asked. "It makes me very suspicious about the motivation of asking for a subpoena."