The Devil made him say it: Mr. President's war on language

Mr. President has told the nation: "I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn't do my job." With God's guidance, he spent almost a month at his Crawford ranch cultivating his tan and avoiding a crowd of campers.

When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, Mr. President was touring the West trying to rescue his sinking Social Security plan and hyping his war in Iraq. When questioned about the flooding of New Orleans, Mr. President offered these divinely inspired words: "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." Perhaps he misunderstands God on occasion.

Or maybe the Devil messes with the celestial switchboard. In that case, maybe Mr. President's imperial slogans and clichés are Lucifer's fault. We know that Mr. President believes that human beings are in an never-ending wrestling match with evil.

FLASHBACK: United States War Crimes During the first Gulf War

International War Crimes Tribunal
United States War Crimes Against Iraq

Initial Complaint

Charging

George Bush, J. Danforth Quayle, James Baker,
Richard Cheney, William Webster, Colin Powell,
Norman Schwarzkopf and Others to be named

With

Crimes Against Peace, War Crimes, Crimes Against
Humanity and Other Criminal Acts and High Crimes in
Violation of the Charter of the United Nations,
International Law, the Constitution of the United States
and Laws made in Pursuance Thereof.

operation cover your ass

"President Bush has sent Vice President Dick Cheney down to New Orleans as part of a massive White House effort called 'operation cover your ass.' ... Cheney spent the day visiting the site of the disaster. FEMA headquarters." --Jay Leno

Call to Bolivians to stand up to Washington-backed military coup

LA PAZ, September 12.—The possibility of a coup d’état to prevent a left-wing victory in the Bolivian elections scheduled for December is currently the subject of charges and political and trade union concern.

The issue was broached by Jaime Solares, secretary of the Bolivian Labor Federation, and Deputy Antonio Peredo of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), whose group, according to various sources, is heading pre-election surveys, PL informs.

Solares stated that a military coup, backed by the United States, is being planned to prevent the possible victory of a left candidate in the December 4 elections, and affirmed that the people should be prepared to stand up to it.

US Encouraging Military Coup in Bolivia

La Paz, Sep 13 (Prensa Latina) Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) Executive Secretary Jaime Solares, and Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) Legislator Antonio Peredo, have called on the people to be ready to deal with a military coup engineered by the US to frustrate the December 4 presidential elections.

Solares said the US Embassy backs neoliberal ex President Jorge Quiroga and wealthy businessman Samuel Doria Medina and will go as far as necessary to prevent any other candidate´s victory.

The latest opinion poll conducted by Apoyo Opinion y Mercado late August showed leftwing congressman Evo Morales improving to 21 points, barely one point behind Quiroga, and with the potential to continue winning supporters.

The MAS leader´s opportunity to obtain a majority victory (more than 50 per cent) would catapult him straight to the presidency without the need for a second round, added Peredo.

He reminded that were calls in June for a military coup during the social crisis that toppled President Carlos Mesa.

What really worries the MAS, said its leader Evo Morales, is that a coup is just one of many right wing variations to foster chaos and postpone the elections until there is a more convenient atmosphere for the right-wing leaders.

Prominent politicians from various parts of the political spectrum and lawyers have similarly warned that postponing the elections would have a destabilizing effect, a possibility that the temporary government of Eduardo Rodriguez also views with extreme concern.

New FEMA boss is 'Duct Tape Man'

If Michael Brown’s resignation this afternoon as the head of FEMA was supposed to end the political controversy over the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, it probably won't.

In another gesture symbolizing the continued confusion of the federal response, the man President Bush immediately named to succeed “Brownie,” proves to have been the same FEMA official who, two-and-a-half years ago, suggested that Americans stock up on duct tape to protect against a biological or chemical terrorist attack.

Drowning by Numbers

Bush Will Hide the Number of Dead in New Orleans Through FuneralGate Redux. The Censorship of the Dead by the Busheviks Through the Contracting of Corrupt Mortuary Services.
"Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you." - Bob Dylan

New Orleans is beginning to look like Funeralgate, supersized.

FEMA has relieved volunteers of their emergency mortuary services in Louisiana only, and contracted out to Kenyon, a "wholly-owned subsidiary of Service Corporation International" of Houston, Texas.

Are the alarms sounding yet? LightUpTheDarkness reminds us why they should be:

Mediocre Frat Boy Theory

Political patronage is one of the world's oldest professions, but, like some other venerable practices, it needs to be kept within certain bounds of decency. When politicians pay off friends, financial supporters, campaign workers, and other assorted hangers on by giving them government jobs, the distributors of such gifts need to keep in mind that certain positions should be reserved for people who actually know what they're doing. In particular, any job where poor performance is likely to end up killing people ought to be staffed by someone who is qualified to do it, or who is at least competent enough to recognize that he isn't qualified, so that he can surround himself with people who are.

The Curious Incident of the Veep in the Summertime

For some time I've been wondering whether anyone is going to explain the true mystery of what happened after Hurricane Katrina struck. I read thousands of words on the subject in this morning’s New York Times, and I still don’t get it. Where was the President? And more to the point, where was the Vice President?

And don’t tell me Crawford Texas and on a ranch in Wyoming. For days there was an absolute vacuum at the top. Why? What was going on?

You’ll be happy to hear that I have a theory.

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/7/2005/1209

Today marks four years that George W. Bush has been a complete flop as a “War President,” the worst Commander in Chief in US History.

On September 11, 2001, Bush’s incompetence -- at very least -- allowed Osama bin Laden’s attacks on America to happen. Imagine the howl from the bloviating right wing if those disasters had happened on Bill Clinton or Al Gore or John Kerry’s watch.

Since then, Bush’s four-year mismanagement of military operations has been every bit as incompetent, dishonorable and gratuitously destructive as his performance in New Orleans. One can only shudder at what comes next.

Unwagging the Dog

Katrina knocks power out of Bush spin machine

For the Bush spin machine, the dual disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the official response to it presented a rare instance where the facts proved hard to manipulate.
The idea was to push blame away from the White House and toward Louisiana Democrats like Governor Kathleen Blanco. But suddenly, the dog wouldn’t wag. The props, the carefully stage-managed Bush photo opportunities, the anonymous White House quotes smearing local officials, kept unraveling just as fast as the spinners can issue them. And they just keep unraveling.

Hurricane Katrina and the meaning of September 11

September 11, 2005 marked the fourth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in US history, with nearly 3,000 innocent people killed as a consequence of the hijacking of the four jetliners that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon. It also marked two weeks since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, causing the worst natural disaster in US history and revealing the unpreparedness of the US government at all levels, federal state and local, for a tragedy that was widely forecast and predicted.

According to the official mythology, September 11 “changed everything.” The policies, methods and structure of the US government had to be radically revised in the light of the terrorist attacks, to prosecute what the Bush administration called its “global war on terrorism.”

170 CIA ‘prisoner’ flights have stopped off in Scotland

THE CIA has used Scottish airports 170 times in the past four years as secret refuelling stops for "Guantanamo Bay Express" flights suspected of carrying Islamic militants to interrogation and possible torture abroad.
Prestwick and Glasgow top the pit-stop league table north of the border with 75 and 74 visits respectively, followed by 14 for Edinburgh, six for RAF Leuchars, five for Inverness and two for Wick, according to records obtained from the US Federal Aviation Administration.

Finally fooling none of the people

THERE'S NEVER a terrorist around when you need one. Even a couple of suspicious-looking foreigners playing soccer near the Superdome as Katrina began to make landfall might have done the trick to get this easily distracted president focused. The war on terror is, after all, George W. Bush's obsession, obliterating any other consideration of the nation's well-being.

With a terrorist sighting, Bush likely would not have lingered on his Crawford ranch vacation, which he interrupted only for politicking and fundraising opportunities. Nor would Condoleezza Rice have gone shoe shopping while the world witnessed the sorry spectacle of the Gulf Coast in deadly disarray. And surely Donald Rumsfeld, who blithely attended a San Diego Padres game as New Orleans was filling with water, wouldn't have dithered for days before sending in troops to aid desperate Americans.

Creeping Fascism

A few months after Tom Ridge stepped down as US Homeland Security chief, he set the record straight: the White House had repeatedly disregarded his advice and raised the government’s terror alert to orange, or “high,” without justification. Ridge wanted to “debunk the myth” that his department was needlessly frightening the American public with the alerts and told reporters “More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it . . . There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, ‘For that?’”

It’s no surprise that the Bush administration has fudged the terror warnings for its own benefit. Exploiting fears of terrorism is central to Bush’s presidency. His aides don’t even pretend otherwise, explaining to a Washington Post reporter in the 2004 election campaign that Bush’s strategy was “aimed at stoking public fears about terrorism, raising new concerns about Kerry’s ability to protect Americans and reinforcing Bush’s image as the steady anti-terrorism candidate.”

Desacato (QEPD)

Aun recuerdo la angustia que sentí cuando leí mi nombre en los titulares de prensa. «Pleno de la Corte Suprema de Chile se querella contra panelista de TV». La angustia se transformo en pánico cuando en el mismo artículo decía que seria procesado por violar la ley de seguridad del estado. Arriesgando una pena de cinco años de cárcel.

Aun recuerdo la angustia que sentí cuando leí mi nombre en los titulares de prensa. «Pleno de la Corte Suprema de Chile se querella contra panelista de TV».

La angustia se transformo en pánico cuando en el mismo artículo decía que seria procesado por violar la ley de seguridad del estado. Arriesgando una pena de cinco años de cárcel.

El difícil arte de la simultaneidad

Quiénes prefieren indagar las causas de los comportamientos humanos antes que juzgarlos, no logran comprender qué pasó con Bush, ignoran dónde estaban y qué hacían Cheney, el Presidente de la Junta de Jefes de Estado Mayor, el Secretario de Seguridad Interna, la Agencia Federal para el Manejo de Catástrofes...

Quiénes prefieren indagar las causas de los comportamientos humanos antes que juzgarlos, no logran comprender qué pasó con Bush, ignoran dónde estaban y qué hacían Cheney, el Presidente de la Junta de Jefes de Estado Mayor, el Secretario de Seguridad Interna, la Agencia Federal para el Manejo de Catástrofes, y todos los altos cargos del ejecutivo norteamericano, mientras la gobernadora de Luisiana, lloraba de impotencia ante la televisión y el alcalde de Nueva Orleáns suplicaba ayuda.

Pacelli-Pío XII y «el exterminio de los judíos de Europa»

¿La pélicula y el cartel han buscado desatar un escándalo? ¿O se trata más bien de un debate necesario? La polémica que vivió Francia sobre una película de Costa Gavras tomó como motivo un cartel en el que se confunden la cruz católica y la esvástica, símbolo antiquísimo pero utilizados por los nazis durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Es también la historia de un Papa y de los judíos en este último conflicto mundial.

106 Hours of Listening in the Mexican Southeast An Expanded Zapatista Movement Is On the Verge of Coming Out

AUTONOMOUS MUNICIPALITY OF JAVIER HERNANDEZ, CHIAPAS, MEXICO, SEPTEMBER 2005: In this sixth meeting in six weeks of the Other Campaign launched by the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, a rainbow began to form in the shape of a fist: a fist with a punch that rings in the ears.

Five previous meetings grouped rebels, like fingers, in five units: political organizations as one, social organizations as another, collectives, non-governmental and artistic organizations as yet another; individuals without organizational title brought new strengths and ideas together to constitute a fourth digit in this evolutionary leap. The thumb on this hand – the left hand, the one closer to the heart, of course – consists of indigenous organizations (what the Zapatistas have called the “spinal column” of the fight to come), themselves a diverse mix of 62 ethnic groups each bringing 513 years of experience resisting impositions from above.
Photo: D.R. 2005 Francisco Alvarez Quiñones

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING PRESIDENCY

Over the past three years, we have been watching the gradual unraveling of the integrity and credibility of President Bush and his entire administration. In the winter of 2002-2003, there was the calculated misuse of intelligence collection and analysis to justify the invasion of Iraq, the first preemptive war in the history of the United State. Then, there was the war itself with President Bush donning a flight suit on the USS Abraham Lincoln to make a premature declaration of "mission accomplished." The post-war period revealed the absence of any coherent plan, let alone strategy, for U.S. forces in Iraq. Finally, we have the tragic events of the past two weeks on America?s Gulf Coast, marked by the loss of a great American city and thousands of lives in the poorest and most powerless reaches of New Orleans. The president actually defended the government?s response to Hurricane Katrina, and his mother declared it a success for the evacuees who "were underprivileged anyway, so this is working well for them."

TODAY, PADILLA. TOMORROW, WHO?

Media coverage of Hurricane Katrina all but drowned out what may well be one of the most consequential court decisions in American history - and one that should focus even more attention on the ideological composition of the Supreme Court.

Last week, A three-judge federal appeals court panel ruled unanimously that President Bush has the authority to detain as an enemy combatant an American citizen who fought United States forces on foreign soil.

The panel threw out a ruling by a trial judge in South Carolina that Mr. Bush had overstepped his bounds by detaining Jose Padilla, a Chicago native, for three years.

Jose Padilla and The Death of Liberty

I had to sit down when I heard the Padilla case had been settled. I literally felt sick to my stomach, like I was gasping for air. The case of Jose Padilla is quite simply the most important case in the history of the American judicial system. Hanging in the balance are all the fundamental principles of American jurisprudence including habeas corpus, due process and "the presumption of innocence". All of those basic concepts were summarily revoked by the 3 judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court. The Court ruled in favor of the Bush administration which claimed that it had the right to indefinitely imprison an American citizen without charging him with a crime. The resulting verdict confers absolute authority on the President to incarcerate American citizens without charge and without any legal means for the accused to challenge the terms of his detention. It is the end of "inalienable rights", the end of The Bill of Rights, and the end of any meaningful notion of personal liberty.

Mercenaries guard homes of the rich in New Orleans

Hundreds of mercenaries have descended on New Orleans to guard the property of the city's millionaires from looters.
The heavily armed men, employed by private military companies including Blackwater and ISI, are part of the militarisation of a city which had a reputation for being one of the most relaxed and easy-going in America.

U.S. law professor proposes assassinating more suspected terrorists

In June, about 100 people gathered at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, to hear a lecture by John Yoo on "fighting the new terrorism." Mr. Yoo recommended an unusual idea: assassinating more suspected terrorists.

A law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, he said his proposal would require "a change in the way we think about the executive order banning assassination, which has been with us since the 1970s." Such a change is needed, he said, because it is wartime: "A nation at war may use force against members of the enemy at any time, regardless of their proximity to hostilities or their activity at the time of attack."

Mr. Yoo, 38 years old, is no ordinary ivory-tower theorist. During a two-year stint at the Justice Department from 2001 through 2003, he wrote some of the most controversial internal legal opinions justifying the Bush administration's aggressive approach to detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists.

America Is Bankrupt

A recent trip to the United States – after a three-year absence – showed me how far the country and its people have deteriorated in a short period of time. Americans are bankrupt. They are bankrupt at every possible level: spiritually, morally, educationally. The country’s economy has deteriorated to the level of a Philippines or a Thailand (and I mean no disrespect to the Philippines or Thailand – I love those places).

Human-to-human communication in the United States has also faltered greatly. People who would rank as the vilest of trolls on any Internet chat room are now on the air as TV and radio hosts, spewing forth hatred and even barefaced lies. These talking heads do this, of course, to make money, but the effect it has on the average listener is nothing short of devastating. It is devastating to a population not educated to think analytically; it is devastating to a people who – above all – need to open up communication with each other, not close it.

Every cloud has a silver lining. Hurricane Katrina has devastated New Orleans, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless, and plunging

Every cloud has a silver lining. Hurricane Katrina has devastated New Orleans, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless, and plunging the entire city into chaos. In the hurricane's wake, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and its director, Michael Brown, forced out of his former job at the International Arabian Horse Association, with no credentials in disaster relief, have become targets of withering criticism. Yet FEMA's relief efforts have brought considerable assistance to at least one man who stands to benefit from Hurricane Katrina perhaps more than any other individual: Pat Robertson.

El "punto final" a la chilena: Itinerario de una traición

El Presidente chileno Ricardo Lagos está concluyendo su mandato de seis años empeñado en imponer un proyecto de "punto final" que dejaría en libertad a los terroristas de Estado que -durante la dictadura de 17 años- cometieron los crímenes de lesa humanidad más repudiados por la ciudadanía y los organismos internacionales de derechos humanos.

Curiosamente, se trata del mismo Presidente que hace un año dijo lo contrario: "No sé si mucha gente desea una ley de punto final, pero creo que no hay ninguna viabilidad política para ello y, desde luego, no está en la idea del Gobierno llegar a una cosa de esa naturaleza, porque creo que sería tremendamente negativo para el bien del país" (Radio Cooperativa, 3 de octubre 2004). Y es la misma persona que en 1988 apuntó con el dedo índice al dictador por televisión, anunciándole que una vez que perdiera el Plebiscito de octubre -tal como ocurrió- Pinochet y los militares deberían responder por todos sus crímenes contra una parte de la sociedad. Y gracias a ese dedo acusador que hoy día indulta, fue cómo Lagos se convirtió en la figura política que alcanzó la presidencia de este país en enero del 2000.

The Accountability Contract with America

I hear so many people saying the same basic thing as Krugman — Bush must be held accountable — that I thought maybe it would be good to get a discussion going and unpack this....What one thing has to occur in order for it to be clear that Bush has been held accountable by voters or the opposition party?

Well, we'd all like to see the press keep their newfound spine, but I wouldn't count on that. And we'd certainly like to see Republicans pay a price at the polls in 2006, but that's more an objective than a strategy. The question is, how do we keep "accountability" front and center for the next year or so?

Winners and Losers: The Usual Suspects

Look who's getting off easy in 'rebuilding' the Big Easy: the same companies that have been getting fat off rebuilding Iraq.

We know who always loses when something goes wrong -- the poor. They're used to it. Only those with money expect the government to be Johnny-on-the-spot with help when life goes sideways on them. The poor, like those stuck in the muck in New Orleans, may be angry, but they are hardly disillusioned. Being left to drown and rot during a hurricane is just same-old, same-old for the losers among us.

Roberts Is Black Leaders' Reagan Deja Vu

The nominee refuses to meet with black leaders for the same reasons Reagan did.

Two weeks before Senate confirmation hearings on Supreme Court chief justice-designate John Roberts were scheduled to open, Roberts snatched a page from the playbook of his former boss, President Reagan, and refused to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus. Reagan's snub of the Caucus two decades ago was more than just presidential pique. During the Reagan years, black leaders were outcasts at the White House, and that most definitely included black Democrats. They, and civil rights leaders, fought back with an eight-year unrelenting war against Reagan's policies.

Bush tours New Orleans to repair damaged presidency

Facing the lowest approval ratings of his presidency, George Bush took his first close-up tour of a devastated New Orleans yesterday in what appeared to be as much a political damage-limitation exercise as an opportunity to size up the physical damage from Hurricane Katrina.

Almost all of his public remarks were defensive denying there was any racial bias in the way the federal authorities responded to the victims in a predominantly poor, black city, and denying that the war in Iraq had in any way drained away resources from rescue efforts.

Brasil - Cuando todo era para siempre y lo que todavía lo es: Tierra, pan y libertad

Los textos de las CPIs y de las revistas, los comunicados y los discursos serían suficientes para comentarios pertinentes e impertinentes sobre la actual coyuntura política en Brasil.

Pero más allá de las lógicas discursivas y de los lenguajes de la crisis, existe un conjunto de motivaciones y pasiones, compromisos y fidelidades que fueron empeñadas en la construcción de una alternativa de izquierda política, no simplemente porque fuese de izquierda, sino porque articulaba: tierra, pan y libertad (si no me equivoco, el primer slogan del PT en una de las elecciones de comienzos de la década del 80).

Santo magnicidio

Cuando los medios reseñaron unas declaraciones del “reverendo” estadounidense Pat Robertson, en las que pidió, a través de su programa de televisión, la eliminación física del presidente Chávez, recordamos que este llamado tiene rato rondando los espacios de opinión de los medios de EEUU, sin que nadie piense que se trate de un delito.

Las dos Americas

El pasado septiembre, un huracán de categoría 5 sacudió la pequeña isla de Cuba con vientos de más de 250 km/h. Más de un millón y medio de cubanos fueron evacuados a zonas alejadas del impacto directo. A pesar de que el huracán destrozó más de 20.000 casas, no hubo ninguna víctima mortal.

Telesur, hermano, telesur somos todos

Telesur es, sin dudas, un proyecto político y estratégico. Telesur es una herramienta creada por estados nacionales para coadyuvar a la integración latinoamericano-caribeña y es, a la vez, la alternativa a la hegemonía comunicacional, al pensamiento y la imagen únicos.

El objetivo es el desarrollo de una estrategia comunicacional televisiva hemisférica de alcance mundial que impulse y consolide los procesos de cambio y la integración regional, como herramienta de la batalla de las ideas contra el proceso hegemónico de globalización.

Grisly search for dead in New Orleans as Bush arrives in shattered region

The grim harvest of bloated bodies continued unabated in New Orleans as President George W. Bush began a fresh tour of the region devastated two weeks ago by Hurricane Katrina.

Under attack for his handling of the crisis, Bush was to make his third tour of the storm-battered Gulf Coast, where hundreds of thousands have been made homeless and an unknown number lie dead in the streets and their flooded homes.

Destination Cairo: human rights fears over CIA flights

It was only a matter of time before the CIA caught up with Saad Iqbal Madni.
A Pakistani Islamist and, allegedly, a close associate of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, he turned up in Indonesia in November 2001, just as the Taliban regime was crumbling and members of al-Qaida were fleeing Afghanistan. Renting a room in a Jakarta boarding house, he told locals he had arrived to hand over an inheritance to his late father's second wife.

Inhuman: Yes or No?

Mr. Torture

During a meeting at The Post late last month I asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a pretty simple question: Is it the policy of the Bush administration not to subject the foreign prisoners it is holding to "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment? The phrase I quoted refers to abuse falling just short of torture. It is banned by an international treaty negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified a decade ago by the Senate.

Gonzales started to reply, then hesitated. Then he said he wasn't sure, and would have to get back to me with an answer.

Cover-up: toxic waters 'will make New Orleans unsafe for a decade'

NO TOXIC COVERUP!!!
Toxic chemicals in the New Orleans flood waters will make the city unsafe for full human habitation for a decade, a US government official has told The Independent on Sunday. And, he added, the Bush administration is covering up the danger.

In an exclusive interview, Hugh Kaufman, an expert on toxic waste and responses to environmental disasters at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said the way the polluted water was being pumped out was increasing the danger to health.

The pollution was far worse than had been admitted, he said, because his agency was failing to take enough samples and was refusing to make public the results of those it had analysed. "Inept political hacks" running the clean-up will imperil the health of low-income migrant workers by getting them to do the work.

After Bush - the deluge

When the successful son of Barbara the First Lady is a first among unequals, one sometimes succumbs to feelings of panic, and wants to stop the world and get off. George Bush is without doubt the most terrifying president America has ever had. Now one can sit in the submerged streets of New Orleans and cry a river of tears over the fate of a human race that has him as its leader. After five years in office, it is possible to pass judgment on the legacy he is passing on, to the everlasting ignominy of the denizens of this world.

State Dept. Begins Weaponry, Explosives, Jungle Equipment Shopping-Spree

Predicting future actions of the U.S. State Dept. and its affiliated entities – at least with any degree of specificity or credibility – is a difficult and arguably hazardous task. In order to make such predictions, journalists typically would need inside sources on the order of magnitude of “Deep Throat” or else gain access to secret governent documents. As for me, I continue to follow the money trail and connect the dots, primarily by scrutinizing the buying habits of critical federal departments and agencies.

In recent weeks I have come across multiple new documents indicating heightened activity by the State Dept. – activity, that is, apparently involving U.S. Special Forces. Based on a review of these documents, an increase in jungle-based Drug War conflict may be coming. Specifically, I have discovered that State is planning to purchase and distribute many thousands of replacement parts for weaponry designed for “close-quarters battle” situations, in addition to acquiring thousands of articles of U.S. Army-specification hot-weather combat uniforms.

FOIA Records Link U.S. Officials to Mass Murder in Mexico

Newly Released Documents Trace “House of Death” Cover-Up to Upper Levels of the Justice Department

A dozen people were tortured and murdered between August 2003 and mid-January 2004 in a house in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. The murders were carried out as part of a criminal enterprise overseen by Heriberto Santillan-Tabares, who U.S. prosecutors claim was a top lieutenant in Vicente Carrillo Fuentes’ (VCF’s) Juárez drug organization. The reason we know this is because federal agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in El Paso had an informant inside of Santillan’s criminal syndicate. The federal agents, along with a U.S. prosecutor in El Paso, were using the informant to snare Santillan.

A Rush of Stories

"I was in the attic for four days, with no food, water, nothing. Just roaches crawling all over me. And I seen a rat, too. I had to use a board to hold my head above the water, 'cause it was up to my neck. So help me, I thought I was going to die."

- Bernice Jones, 64, who finally managed to pry her way out of the attic and was taken by boat to the Superdome.

"They wanted to take my grandmother to Iowa. She's 90 years old and has Alzheimer's. What was she gonna do in Iowa?"

- Donald McCray, 52, who is looking after his grandmother, Susie Hudson, in a shelter in Gonzales, La.

"A huge percentage of the people who were left behind didn't have a way out. It makes me sick that our plan for them didn't work very well."

- Dr. Erin Brewer of Louisiana's Office of Public Health.
Lafayette, La.

All the President's Friends

The lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina revealed to everyone that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which earned universal praise during the Clinton years, is a shell of its former self. The hapless Michael Brown - who is no longer overseeing relief efforts but still heads the agency - has become a symbol of cronyism.

But what we really should be asking is whether FEMA's decline and fall is unique, or part of a larger pattern. What other government functions have been crippled by politicization, cronyism and/or the departure of experienced professionals? How many FEMA's are there?

Unfortunately, it's easy to find other agencies suffering from some version of the FEMA syndrome.

EBay to Buy Internet Phone Firm (Skype) for $2.6 Billion

EBay has agreed to buy Skype Technologies, the Internet phone company based in Luxembourg, for about $2.6 billion in cash and stock, the companies announced today.

Las cifras lo prueban: El desarrollo es demasiado lento, ciertas poblaciones están sufriendo una regresión

El informe del Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (PNUD) correspondiente al año 2005 muestra numerosos progresos, pero a un ritmo mucho más lento de lo previsto por causa de las reglas del comercio internacional y los problemas de seguridad. Dieciocho países están sufriendo una regresión, al igual que ciertas poblaciones de uno de los países más ricos del mundo: en Estados Unidos, al cabo de varios años de administración Bush, afronorteamericanos e hispanoamericanos están en camino de vivir como en el Tercer Mundo.

Las cifras lo prueban: El desarrollo es demasiado lento, ciertas poblaciones están sufriendo una regresión

El informe del Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (PNUD) correspondiente al año 2005 muestra numerosos progresos, pero a un ritmo mucho más lento de lo previsto por causa de las reglas del comercio internacional y los problemas de seguridad. Dieciocho países están sufriendo una regresión, al igual que ciertas poblaciones de uno de los países más ricos del mundo: en Estados Unidos, al cabo de varios años de administración Bush, afronorteamericanos e hispanoamericanos están en camino de vivir como en el Tercer Mundo.

Las cifras lo prueban: El desarrollo es demasiado lento, ciertas poblaciones están sufriendo una regresión

El informe del Programa de Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (PNUD) correspondiente al año 2005 muestra numerosos progresos, pero a un ritmo mucho más lento de lo previsto por causa de las reglas del comercio internacional y los problemas de seguridad. Dieciocho países están sufriendo una regresión, al igual que ciertas poblaciones de uno de los países más ricos del mundo: en Estados Unidos, al cabo de varios años de administración Bush, afronorteamericanos e hispanoamericanos están en camino de vivir como en el Tercer Mundo.

Cuando la tierra se convirtió en infierno

El pasado 6 de Agosto 2005 se recordó 60 años del acto terrorista mas grande de la historia, con la muerte de aproximadamente 300 mil personas, que eran madres, hermanos, abuelos, niños, discapasitadas, mujeres, la destrucción de la naturaleza, animales y desaparición literal de Hiroshima y Nagasaki.

El pasado 6 de Agosto 2005 se recordó 60 años del acto terrorista mas grande de la historia, con la muerte de aproximadamente 300 mil personas, que eran madres, hermanos, abuelos, niños, discapasitadas, mujeres, la destrucción de la naturaleza, animales y desaparición literal de Hiroshima y Nagasaki.

¡Bolivia reclama lo que es suyo a Chile!

En verdad después de varios años de ignominiosa y mal sana posición de Chile, es necesario revisar la historia de América del sur y en especial de nuestros países de Perú, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador y escribir la verdad no importa si por ello perdamos el olvido de los gobernantes, de los privilegiados «oligarcas o aristócratas» que abundan en nuestros países.

En verdad después de varios años de ignominiosa y mal sana posición de Chile, es necesario revisar la historia de América del sur y en especial de nuestros países de Perú, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador y escribir la verdad no importa si por ello perdamos el olvido de los gobernantes, de los privilegiados «oligarcas o aristócratas» que abundan en nuestros países, los mismo que gobiernan nuestras naciones utilizando para a ello a cuanto presidente se acomode como el anillo al dedo, y gobiernan para sus intereses o de lo contrario lo matan, lo difaman o no lo dejan gobernar conforme a la voluntad popular de sus pueblos.

Mozilla’s “magic pixie dust”

Open standards are just as important as open debate: Becky Hogge explains why openDemocracy recommends the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

It's funny the little things you judge people by. A couple of weeks ago one of openDemocracy’s new interns shocked me when he exclaimed “I really can't stand this Firefox thing”. He was referring to the web browser Mozilla Firefox, used as standard in the openDemocracy offices, yet new to him, a lifetime user of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. But Firefox is more than just a browser: it is a symbol of the democratic use of the internet.

Katrina’s triple failure: technical, ethical, political

The experience of disaster management around the world has three lessons for the United States, says Michel Thieren.

Political storms follow the management of natural disasters with the inevitability of flash floods after a hurricane. The “who to blame” question makes the most noise in a disaster’s aftermath, but immediate, finger-pointing reactions often identify the wrong culprits. To make accurate judgments about what went wrong is a matter of basic accountability to the victims, and this makes it even more important to pose two other questions: “what to blame, and what for”.

The Other Side of the Big Easy

Katrina has exposed decades of benign neglect, racism, and environmental injustice that can't be prettified with crawfish étouffé.

Much of the world -- including white America -- has been shocked by the devastation in New Orleans, and by the ongoing failures it has exposed at every possible level of government. Even normally unflappable TV news anchors and politicians have been moved to outrage, asking why those left behind were mostly black, poor, disabled, elderly.

Veterans of the environmental-justice movement, especially those working in New Orleans, are just as appalled -- but they are less surprised. Indeed, they're finding their most chilling fears confirmed.

''The Modernization of the Chinese Navy''

A number of advanced warships will gradually come into service in the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (P.L.A.N.) in the next two years. The bulk of these ships will belong to two new guided missile destroyer classes called 052B and 052C. The 052C will be fitted with an advanced integrated air defense system, supposedly similar to the U.S. Aegis phased-array radar display, with a high capability to engage multiple targets simultaneously.

Evolution of the Chinese Fleet

Chinese shipyards have already completed two 052C class ships, which are expected to be commissioned in 2005. It is probable that P.L.A.N. intends to bring at least six ships of this class into service, deploying them in the three main operative battle groups that form the bulk of Beijing's fleet. This strengthening of forces will constitute a notable improvement in the performance of China's high sea forces. The 052C class warship is equipped with an air defense system based on a sensor apparently similar to the Aegis device and equipped with an HQ9 surface-to-air missile (SAM), considered a long-range vertically launched missile with a 90 km range (56 miles).

TERROR IN TINY TOWN

In the War on Terror, we are all on the front lines. Now Southold has apparently been targeted by Al Qaeda. I'm not surprised.

Southold, if you look at a map, is situated at the ass end of nowhere. We are known for our Strawberry Festival and fire truck parade. According to the Census, this tiny place is made up almost entirely of inbred farmers, real estate speculators and volunteer firemen.

At one end of town is the "Brand Names Outlet Mall" and the water-slide park. At the other end, there's a ferry boat that takes those who feel lucky to the Indian casino in Connecticut. And in between, there's Main Street where we hold the Strawberry Festival. (The festival is a quaint and annoying white-folks' ritual, an opportunity for backstabbing, petty infighting and all-American small-mindedness. But that's another story altogether.)

COVERUP: The dynamiting of the New Orleans levy system

by
Ernesto Cienfuegos
La Voz de Aztlan

Los Angeles, Alta California - September 11, 2005 - (ACN) New evidence is surfacing concerning the sabotaging of the New Orleans levy system that resulted in the flooding of primarily Black neighborhoods. A significant number of New Orleans residents have come forward to say that the levies were breached on purpose by the authorities.

Also, this publication has located the original Associated Press article that reported on a gun battle between the New Orleans Police Department and US military contractors near the vicinity of the breached levy along the 17th Street Canal. The original report states that New Orleans police shot and killed 5 armed US military contractors in a gun battle. The original AP report was confirmed by a US Army Corps of Engineers spokesman. The AP story has now been deleted on pretty much all news websites and a different version substituted. Our publication was forwarded a link to the original report by one of our subscribers after reading our article, "The Great New Orleans Land Grab" This article argues that the gun battle was an attempt by the New Orleans police to stop further sabotaging of the levy system by US military saboteurs under high level secret orders. We have also provided a mirror link to the original AP report on our server in case the forwarded link gets deleted or the report is changed. The original AP report is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5256023,00.html Our mirror link to the report is at http://www.aztlan.net/police_kill_five_contractors.htm

Uri Avnery interviewed by Tikkun

Uri Avnery's opinions are not to be taken lightly. The most outspoken leader of Israel's peace movement, Avnery has in his own life mirrored the country he helped establish. Born in Germany in 1923, Avnery began his political life as a member of the Irgun, then served as an IDF commando in the 1948 war. For forty years the editor and publisher of Israel's now defunct newsweekly, Ha Olam Hazeh, Avnery served three terms in Israel's Knesset. With his wife Rachel, in 1993 he helped found Gush Shalom, one of Israel's most influential peace organizations. We spoke to Avnery two weeks before the withdrawal had formally begun.

TIKKUN: Media accounts of the drama of withdrawal from Gaza make it seem as though we now have a struggle going on between the forces of good, represented by Sharon, and the forces of evil, represented by the settlers.

The storms gather

Last week, which witnessed major tragedies in both Baghdad and southern coastal states of the US, might yet be the turning point in the Iraqi conflict, writes Hana Al-Bayaty
Just when the United States anti-war movement had found a focus for its energies in Cindy Sheehan, hurricane Katrina blew in from the Gulf of Mexico to expose the real nature of the Bush administration and the dangers of its plans for "full spectrum dominance".

The American people discovered, perhaps to their astonishment, that their successful economy had created an underclass of millions of disenfranchised citizens, the majority of them African-Americans.

Riverbend

Baghdad Burning

... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...

Sunday, September 11, 2005

September 11, 2005...
“R.- come in here! You have to see this!” It was September 11, 2001 and I was in the kitchen rinsing some dishes from lunch. I paused at the urgency in my brothers voice but continued rinsing, thinking there was some vaguely important news item on Iraq’s state controlled channel.

“I’m coming- a moment.” I called back. The phone began to ring and I stopped to answer it on my way out of the kitchen.

R: “Alloo?” I answered.
L: “Are you watching tv???” L., my best friend, cried out with no preliminaries.
R: “Uh… no- but…”
L: “GO WATCH TV!”

Cuban doctors say politics block Katrina aid offer

HAVANA, Sept 9 (Reuters) - Cuban doctors put on stand-by a week ago by President Fidel Castro to fly to the aid of the victims of Hurricane Katrina said on Friday they hoped the United States would put politics aside and accept their help.
So far, the word from Washington has been thanks, but no thanks. The White House snubbed Cuba's offer and said Castro would do better "freeing" his Communist-run country.
Meanwhile, the 1,500 doctors are taking English language classes and brushing up on their epidemiological skills.
"We are sad about the position the American government has taken. All of us have been waiting here for eight days," said Dr. Juan Carlos Dupuy, a general practitioner and chemical lab specialist.

The Mosquito and the Hammer - James Carroll on Our Post-9/11 World

Tomdispatch: In September 2003, only five months after the invasion of Iraq, you wrote in a column, "The war in Iraq is lost. What will it take to face that truth this time?" Here we are two years later. What has it taken, what will it take, to face that truth?

James Carroll: It's interesting to me that the tribunes of the truth right now are the people who have felt the loss of the war most intensely, the parents of the dead American soldiers. I find it astounding that facing the truth in the month of August has been the business almost solely of these parents, pro and con. Cindy Sheehan on the one side, clearly saying that, whatever its imagined values, this war's not worth what it's costing us and it's got to end immediately; on the other side, parents, desperately trying to make some sense of the loss of their child, who want the war to continue so that he or she will not have died in vain. Both are facing a basic truth of parental grief and, I'd also say, responding to the same larger phenomenon: the war being lost. I'm not certain we'd hear from any parents if the war were being won. Given the great tragedy of losing your child to a war that's being lost, nobody gets to the question of whether it's just or not.

The water is going down slowly. The President's popularity is sinking like a stone

The Bush administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina - lambasted on all sides of the political spectrum as disastrously slow if not also staggeringly insensitive - has sent the President's approval ratings plummeting.

A new poll published by AP put George Bush's popularity at below 40 per cent for the first time since he took office almost five years ago. Intriguingly, only 52 per cent of respondents said they specifically disapproved of his handling of the crisis along the Gulf coast. But 65 per cent - dismayed by soaring petrol prices and a whole panoply of other policy disappointments - said the country was heading in the wrong direction, up from 59 per cent a month ago. Even before the majority of the bodies have been fished out of the foul-smelling waters in New Orleans, the hurricane has triggered a knock-on political storm of rare intensity.

Firing Michael Brown Is Not Enough. How about Bush and Cheney?

Calls for firing Michael Brown are understandable. Aptly described as “the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA” by columnist Maureen Dowd a few days ago, he’s an easy and appropriate target.

President Bush met with Brown last Friday and publicly told him: “You’re doing a heck of a job.”
In the grisly wake of the hurricane, Brown’s job performance cannot be separated from Bush’s job performance. To similar deadly effect, the president has brought to bear on people in New Orleans the same qualities that he has inflicted on people in Iraq—refusal to acknowledge basic realities, lethally misplaced priorities, lack of compassion (cue the guitar), and overarching arrogance.

The Bush administration is guilty of criminal negligence that killed thousands of people last week.

Katrina: the horror emerges. However bad you (or I) thought it was, it was worse:

I wonder why Rick Santorum and Jeb Bush weren’t there to stop them:

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

In an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday, one New Orleans doctor told how she ‘prayed for God to have mercy on her soul’ after she ignored every tenet of medical ethics and ended the lives of patients she had earlier fought to save. [...]

The doctor said: “I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing. But I did not have time. I had to make snap decisions, under the most appalling circumstances, and I did what I thought was right.

“I injected morphine into those patients who were dying and in agony. If the first dose was not enough, I gave a double dose. And at night I prayed to God to have mercy on my soul.”

In the beginning there was the Flying Spaghetti Monster

In recent weeks, a satirical attack on the teaching of Creationism in American schools has become the world's fastest growing 'religion'. The Noodly Saviour looked at the furore He had created and pronounced it good, writes James Langton

For a growing band of devoted followers, He is the Supreme Being; creator of the universe and all living things. To the rest of us, the Flying Spaghetti Monster looks like a giant heap of pasta and meatballs topped with eyeballs on stalks. As it turns out, both interpretations are correct.

In the past few weeks, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has become perhaps the world's fastest-growing "religion" and maybe its most improbable. While no one can be sure of the exact numbers of "Pastafarians", as acolytes are called, they may number in the millions.

US Moves for Preemptive Use of Nukes

The Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

The document, written by the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs staff but not yet finally approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, would update rules and procedures governing use of nuclear weapons to reflect a preemption strategy first announced by the Bush White House in December 2002. The strategy was outlined in more detail at the time in classified national security directives.

The George Bush White House has presided over three national debacles: 9/11, the war in Iraq, and now Katrina's destruction

After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington four years ago today, U.S. President George Bush insisted "there was no way we knew they were coming." Just before the attacks, the White House cut spending on anti-terrorism.

Last week, Bush insisted, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breaching of the (New Orleans) levees." Last year, the administration cut spending on levee heightening.

Welcome to no-fault government.

GAO Report Criticizes 9/11 Health Program

WASHINGTON (AP) - A federal probe concluded that a government program to monitor the health of federal employees at the World Trade Center disaster site in New York ``accomplished little'' even though city and state programs screened more than 30,000 people.

A report by the Government Accountability Office found that the health-screening program conducted only about 400 exams, a small fraction of the thousands of federal employees who worked on the hazardous debris pile in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The Lies of (CIA Asset) "Reporters without Borders"

French NGO Reporters without borders, dedicated to the defense of press freedom, is today at the center of a controversy. To some people, it is an efficient vector for freedom in the world, but to others – and we are among those – it has evolved into a transmission cable for the State Department, and it is instrumenting a cause to support the United States’ strategy.

Overkill: Feared Blackwater Mercenaries Deploy in New Orleans

Blackwater mercenaries are some of the most feared professional killers in the world and they are accustomed to operating without worry of legal consequences. Their presence on the streets of New Orleans should be a cause for serious concern for the remaining residents of the city and raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here. Some of the men now patrolling the streets of New Orleans returned from Iraq as recently as 2 weeks ago.

A Letter to All Who Voted for George W. Bush from Michael Moore

To All My Fellow Americans Who Voted for George W. Bush:

On this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11, I'm just curious, how does it feel?

How does it feel to know that the man you elected to lead us after we were attacked went ahead and put a guy in charge of FEMA whose main qualification was that he ran horse shows?

That's right. Horse shows

Exiles from a city and from a nation by Cornel West

It takes something as big as Hurricane Katrina and the misery we saw among the poor black people of New Orleans to get America to focus on race and poverty. It happens about once every 30 or 40 years.

What we saw unfold in the days after the hurricane was the most naked manifestation of conservative social policy towards the poor, where the message for decades has been: 'You are on your own'. Well, they really were on their own for five days in that Superdome, and it was Darwinism in action - the survival of the fittest. People said: 'It looks like something out of the Third World.' Well, New Orleans was Third World long before the hurricane. It's not just Katrina, it's povertina.

Requiem for a Nation

What do you think of these words: “Unable to win hearts and minds, the invaders now aim lower. The overwhelming evidence is that …the occupiers widened the war to destroy food production in rebel-held areas. The report lists indiscriminate bombings, reprisal against villages and villagers, summary executions, … theft of civilian property, desecration of mosques, killing prisoners of war, wreckage of hospitals, assaults on journalists, training children as spies - all violations of Geneva conventions to which the Soviet Union has solemnly subscribed.”

It seems these are words from some “Islamist” web site, which spew venom against the allied forces’ noble mission in Iraq to motivate and recruit “terrorist” insurgents. Surprisingly, these are words from an editor ial of the New York Times — an editor ial in which it reminds the occupier of “all violations of Geneva conventions to which” the it “has solemnly subscribed.”

Our Neighbor - The Enemy

Four years before his death on December 17th 1830 at the age of 47 in Santa Marta, now in modern day Colombia on the Caribbean coast, the Liberator of South America from the Spanish Empire, Simon Bolivar, made the following prophesy:

"The United States of North America are destined by providence to plague America with misery in the name of freedom"

For something said in 1826, almost 170 years ago, it could not have been more accurate. Bolivar sensed from his dealings with the US at that time what the future held for the newly formed independent countries of the continent. He also saw it in light of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine which made it legal for the US to invade any country south of the Rio Grande and to ensure that "America is for the Americans" - in other words the Americas are for North Americans and no one else in the western hemisphere. Cental and South America would never belong to the people who inhabited them if the United States had their way. The US only nominally recognized these countries independence from Spain several years after Spain itself had recognized it!

Activists plan 9/11 Katrina protest

Activists are organizing plans for Katrina survivors to march in Washington D.C. on and plan to stage an act of civil disobedience by building an encampment on the Washington D.C. mall on Sept. 11, RAW STORY has learned. The encampment would serve as a center for Katrina activism.

Two websites have been established to support the cause: www.campkatrina.org and www.bushville.org. In the past day, unique hits on Bushville.org have risen from 239 to 3,562, organizers said.

The term "Bushville" was inspired by encampments of homeless people dubbed "Hoovervilles" that sprang up following the Great Depression.

Will Bush wriggle out of this one?

IT'S AN ILL wind that blows no good. But how will the political winds shift as the enormity of the Katrina disaster sinks in?

We face two opposite prospects. The first is that Americans will finally grasp that what connects the catastrophes in New Orleans and Iraq is a witches' brew of self-delusion, deliberate deception, cronyism, and staggering incompetence on the part of the Bush administration. Republicans, meanwhile, will desert a president who is becoming a plain embarrassment even to his staunchest backers.

But there is a darker possibility. The Karl Rove team is gradually getting Republicans back ''on message." The message: There's no point in playing a ''blame game," as Scott McClellan said 15 times at Thursday's press briefing. The New Orleans disaster just proves the unreliability of government in general rather than this feckless president in particular. We should be looking forward to rebuilding -- with the private sector taking the lead.

POLICE STATE IN AMERICA: Now Bush can lock up anyone forever without charge

As if the official ineptitude of the Bush administration in the aftermath of Katrina and the callousness of the Bush family were not enough to digest, a U.S. Federal appeals court has just delivered this bombshell in the Jose Padilla case:


"The Congress of the United States, in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Joint Resolution, provided the President all powers necessary and appropriate to protect American citizens from terrorist acts by those who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001... [T]hose powers include the power to detain identified and committed enemies such as Padilla, who associated with al Qaeda and the Taliban regime, who took up arms against this Nation in its war against these enemies, and who entered the United States for the avowed purpose of further prosecuting that war by attacking American citizens and targets on our own soil..."

The Posada Case When Injustice is Justice

In George Orwell's prophetic novel "1984" the Rulers of Oceania, by their language of newthink and process of doublethink, convinced the masses that statements formerly considered irrational were rational. In other words, virtual reality became actual reality. The Party's slogans, accepted by the ruled, were WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Our US Rulers seem to have us well along these same paths, with new realities surfacing added each year. Another one, INJUSTICE IS JUSTICE, became apparent to some of us in the press who were permitted to attend the Luis Posada Carriles asylum hearing before Homeland Security immigration judge William Abbott last week in El Paso, Texas.

Business Elite Ethnically Cleanse the Poor in New Orleans

Christopher Cooper’s War Street Journal article (Old-line families plot the future) is worth excerpting at length because it so shamelessly reveals how the rich elite “business” sociopaths of New Orleans think and operate:

The mostly African-American neighborhoods of New Orleans are largely underwater, and the people who lived there have scattered across the country. But in many of the predominantly white and more affluent areas, streets are dry and passable. Gracious homes are mostly intact and powered by generators. Wednesday, officials reiterated that all residents must leave New Orleans, but it’s still unclear how far they will go to enforce the order.

Disaster disinformation (Wayne Madsen Report)

September 10, 2005 -- Disaster disinformation. How the United States lied about its military casualties from the Indian Ocean tsumani. According to informed sources in Thailand, the Bush administration largely succeeded in covering up at least 300 U.S. military and paramilitary deaths from last December's Indian Ocean tsunami. The American deaths resulted from the destruction by the surging sea of a joint U.S.-Thai Naval Intelligence Command on Phi Phi island, just north of Phuket on the Indian Ocean coast. A focus of the joint command was Thailand's indigeneous population of Chao Le ("sea gypsies') who are about 90 percent Muslim. The Chao Le, a Malay people, ply the Andaman Sea and maintain commerce with fellow Chao Le along the coasts of Malaysia and Myanmar (Burma). The intelligence command also provided protection for increased (and secretive) U.S. and British oil and gas exploration activity in the Andaman Sea off Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, and east India. A number of private military contractors (PMCs) working with the U.S.-Thai command and oil companies, were also killed by the tsunami but there are no hard figures on their total death count.

“The US plan to militarize the region is their strategic need.”

Interview with Argentine journalist and researcher Víctor Ducrot

Víctor Ducrot is a journalist, writer, university professor and the director of the News Agency of Mercosur (Southern Common Market), which works with the Department of Journalism and Communication in La Plata National University in Argentina. He is also the author of Bush & Ben Laden SA (2001) and Recolonizacion o Independencia. America Latina en el siglo XXI (2004) — co-authored with journalist Stella Calloni — which sheds light on some little-known aspects about the US-led "war against terror".

Ho Chi Minh y la lucha contra los imperialismos japonés, francés y estadounidense

En ocasión de la próxima celebración del XXX aniversario de la liberación de Saigón, publicamos una presentación de la vida y obra del fundador del Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh. Rechazando todos los compromisos en los que se extravió una parte de su generación, combatió al imperialismo sin descanso, ya fuera japonés, francés o estadounidense. Ha trascendido como uno de los mayores símbolos de la lucha por la libertad en el siglo XX.

Montaner, terrorista

A la hora del almuerzo, el sábado 24 de diciembre de 1960, a unas horas de la celebración de Navidad, la popular tienda por departamentos Flogar, calle Galiano esquina a San Rafael, en La Habana, se encuentra llena de clientes. Juan René Maragosa, de 13 años de edad, sale de la cafetería con su hermana, Marta, y su mamá, Alicia, cuando, de repente, una fuerte explosión les proyecta al suelo.

Los hospitales iraquíes se desmoronan bajo la ocupación

Este informe ilustra de forma muy clara el fracaso absoluto de EEUU a la hora de cumplir incluso los más mínimos deberes humanitarios como potencia ocupante. Y más importante aún, ofrece un cuadro de un sistema sanitario que se ha deteriorado desde el comienzo de la guerra, habiendo fracasado a la hora de revertir esa decadencia. Desde el punto de vista de la sanidad pública, el fin de la ocupación, con una retirada programada de todas las tropas extranjeras, se constituye en la necesidad más urgente.

Trabajadores médicos de Faluya declararon que los francotiradores de los marines dispararon deliberadamente contra varias ambulancias que operaban en Faluya durante el asedio de EEUU a la ciudad. En la foto, ambulancia en el estacionamiento del Hospital General de Faluya con agujeros de bala en el lado del parabrisas del conductor

US-Installed Iraqi Health Ministry Said To Be Operating Torture Cells

The “Ministry of Health” in the US-appointed regime in Baghdad operates detention and torture cells inside the “Health Ministry” building to interrogate those employees whose loyalty comes into question according to a report by Quds Press.

Sources told the London-based Quds Press news agency that four Iraqi physicians had been arrested by the Iraqi puppet police in Medical City Hospital on Wednesday, 31 August 2005. Medical City in Baghdad is one of the largest hospitals in the country.

The sources reported that the Iraqi puppet police locked up the doctors in a cell inside the “Ministry of Health” building on the pretext that they were “Wahhabi” fundamentalists – even though two of the four were Shi‘ah.

Riverbend is back!

Baghdad Burning

... I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend...

Friday, September 09, 2005

Back to Blogging...
It has been a long blog vacation I’ve taken. There have been several reasons behind it but the main one has been that I simply have not felt like blogging.

Technically, it’s the summers end… But realistically, we have at least another month of stifling heat ahead of us. It’s almost mid-September and the weather is still hot and dry in Baghdad. There are a few precious hours in the very early morning when the sun seems almost kind. If you wake early enough, you can catch a solid hour of light breezes and a certain summer coolness.

Iran takes over Pipelineistan

TEHRAN - The black chador-clad secretaries behind rows of flat computer monitors at the Petroleum Ministry building in central Tehran are all smiles. Not to mention their bosses. No wonder. According to the ministry's latest estimates in August, Iran will export at least US$60 billion in oil in 2005 - more than $10 billion more than the June estimate. And with oil hovering about $70 a barrel, it could be even more.

New Orleans and the Third World

The devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina is being compared to disasters in the “Third World” but with no specific countries or disasters named. And if not compared to this black hole or repository of disaster that is the “Third World,” a comparison to Africa is as specific as it gets. “New Orleans is a scene from the Third World”, “like the Third World”, “US Handles the crisis like a third world country”, “bodies floating on water reminiscent of Africa” etc. This has been a constant with news commentators, analysts, members of the senate and congress and other sections of America commenting on New Orleans. The accompanying statements to this have been “I cannot believe this is America” or “This is not supposed to happen in America”. It is supposed to and can only happen somewhere else. Attending a food festival event in Madison, Wisconsin I overheard a joke – “Where is New Orleans again?” New Orleans is next to Somalia”.

Private Security & Mercenary Companies Patrol New Orleans Reaping the Profits of a Humanitarian Disaster

"Blackwater USA is a guns-for-hire training-and-recruitment outfit on a 6,000 acre military training compound on the northern coastal plain of Moyock, North Carolina, a stone's throw from the Virginia border."

"What differentiates them from the crazed, ex-military flotsam that rampaged through Congo in the 1960's is that they are (1) incorporated, (2) they use legally recognized financial/contract instruments, and (3), they work for recognized governments. The latter is a very finely drawn point, because governments frequently hire these legalized mercenaries at the insistence, and with the support, of multinational corporations who just happen – as it turns out – to be in the same place these outfits are doing their security.

"On the combat end, Blackwater USA is mostly ex-SEALs with a few former SWAT cops thrown in, run by a blustering hyper-macho ex-SEAL named Gary Jackson. One of the victims of the Fallujah ambush – a WWF-looking body-builder-type – had boasted to a reporter staying in his hotel in Baghdad that he preferred hand-to-hand combat so he could see his quarry eye to eye. When I was running a Special Forces A-Detachment, this kind of talk would have sent me seeking a way to reassign you out of my team."

Gulf War III: Why is Blackwater USA patrolling New Orleans with M-16s?

How do you know that we're finally taking the situation in New Orleans seriously? We're sending in the private mercenaries -- the very same folks we've called on to do the dirty work in Iraq. Reports are beginning to surface that New Orleans and environs are crawling with armed private commandos from Blackwater USA, the North Carolina-based security firm that has risen to prominence with its highly visible role in Iraq. The slide show at the top of this entry comes from their Web site.

A Georgia-based doctor and military veteran who blogs under the name Otter has been down in the disaster zone the last few days, and he has seen the private Blackwater security forces everywhere. He wrote yesterday from a police precinct house in New Orleans:

Blackwater Security is here--clean, well-equipped, and armed to the teeth.

The New York Times has seen them too:

No civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns or other firearms, said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police. "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons," he said.

But that order apparently does not apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property. The guards, employees of private security companies like Blackwater, openly carry M-16's and other assault rifles. Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards, but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons.

Pastor Niemöller in the 21st Century

What would he say?

“When the Neo-Conservatives came into power, they disenfranchised a large number of American citizens of their vote, but I was neither black nor from Florida, so I said nothing.

Then, after receiving well over twenty specific warnings from both foreign and domestic intelligence sources, and enjoying a month-long vacation, they read a children’s book about a pet goat as two jet liners crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. However, I didn’t work there, nor did a loved one, nor was I a fireman or cop, or even from New York or New Jersey, so I swallowed the official explanation without question.

Will FEBAR Bring Down the House?

With Friday's news that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Director Michael Brown had been relieved of managing the storm clean-up, a bit of reality settled in to Washington. Brown, you probably know, is a man who couldn't manage a horse breeder's association, and yet who was waved through hearings by an eager Joe Lieberman. It was an admission that New Orleans had been Federal Emergencied Beyond All Recognition. But this action does not stop the growing scandal. According to Spencer Hsu of the Washington Post, five of the top FEMA officials "came to their posts with virtually no experience handling disasters," and the "ranks of seasoned crisis managers have thinned dramatically since the September 11, 2001, attacks."

The Katrina catastrophe and the failure of response - FEBAR - have primed the pump of a deep well, that of liberal and Democratic anger. It isn't just that traffic on liberal blogs has spiked. It isn't just that the images have been so shocking, the reality of a nation unprepared for disaster so outrageous. It is that it cuts in sharp relief how out of power the Democrats are, and what that really means.

The final outrage may have been the formation of a "bipartisan committee" without telling the Democratic leadership of either house, without assuring equal representation, and without giving bipartisan subpoenas power. Publicly and privately, Democratic office holders exploded. When Scott McClellan went through an entire press conference saying that "we shouldn't play the blame game" and the press did not challenge him, it was a sharp, stiff shock to the systems of more than a few representatives who at long last realized what, exactly, Rove's Republic meant to them.

Baghdad on the Bayou

In the Houston Astrodome last Saturday, I met a man named Robert. He invited me to take a seat beside him on a cot pushed against the wall — his home for the previous three days and the foreseeable future. Robert had lived in New Orleans for all of his 55 years, and was in the St. Bernard projects when Katrina washed it all away. “After the storm,” he told me almost as soon as I sat down, “they blew the levees up so they could flood New Orleans.”
I asked him who “they” were.

“The money people,” he answered. “The big money.”

“Why?” I asked.

Robert shook his head at my naiveté. “They had to get the poor people out so they could get the space.” He gestured to the thousands of people in the dome around us, almost all of them African-American, crammed onto cots a few inches apart. “Now they got their space.

Second Amendment Nixed in New Orleans

New Orleans is no longer part of America. It is a brave new world devised by FEMA and the Ministry of Homeland Security. In the new New Orleans, there are no constitutional rights. Not only are soldiers allowed to break down doors (as they do in Iraq) in violation of the Fourth Amendment and even “shoot to kill” if they believe they are threatened (as soldiers in Iraq “shoot to kill” grandmothers and kids at Israeli-styled checkpoints), now the Second Amendment no longer exists.

“Waters were receding across this flood-beaten city today as police officers began confiscating weapons, including legally registered firearms, from civilians in preparation for a mass forced evacuation of the residents still living here,” reports the New York Times. “No civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns or other firearms, said P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police. ‘Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons,’ he said.”

Of course, the trashing of the Second Amendment is restricted to poor people. Rich people will be allowed to hire armed guards. Nixing the Second Amendment “apparently does not apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property. The guards, employees of private security companies like Blackwater, openly carry M-16’s and other assault rifles. Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards, but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons.”

Why America can't cope

We know, now, that there was not even a Prescott in charge in Washington. President Bush was exorcising heaven-knows-what demons by furiously riding his mountain bike in Texas - nobody, not even the Secret Service or a visiting Lance Armstrong, is allowed to pass him - while Vice-President Cheney was fly-fishing in Wyoming. Condoleezza Rice, next in charge, was shopping for shoes at Ferragamo's and watching Spamalot on Broadway and catching the US Open in New York; while Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, who is supposed to keep it all together, was taking in the sea breeze with much of the rest of the Bush crowd in Maine.

Rats gnawing at corpses floating down the streets three days after Katrina struck, bodies left to decompose in the stairwells of New Orleans's main hospital because its basement mortuary was flooded, tens of thousands still trapped, hungry and thirsty: only then did the inquests into what the Los Angeles Times called the "surreal foreignness" of it all start. But then the questioning was imbued with a peculiarly American self-righteousness and aggressive need to pin blame on the guilty: on the inattentiveness of the Bush administration, its lack of foresight, the racial and class divisions within the US, and so on.

Sen. Rick Santorum Blames National Weather Service For Katrina Damage, Warnings “Not Sufficient”...

Santorum has critical words for forecasters in wake of Katrina 09/09/2005
Damon Boughamer
(Washington) -- U.S. Senator Rick Santorum is suggesting that early mistakes in predicting the path of Hurricane Katrina may be a symptom of lost focus at the National Weather Service. Santorum, who introduced legislation earlier this year to curb the output of government weather forecasters, says tracking life-threatening weather must be central to what the agency is doing.

Asked about Katrina by WITF, Santorum described weather service warnings for Florida, where the storm first made landfall, as, quote, “not sufficient.”
Santorum’s bill instructs the government to abandon weather prediction and data reporting efforts that duplicate private-sector activity. He came under fire when it was revealed that the head of State College-based AccuWeather, which would benefit, has given his campaigns thousands of dollars.

Se venden candidatos

Con la Revolución Industrial, la producción en serie exigió motivación para el consumo. Los bienes dejaron de tener sólo valor de uso y pasaron a tener, sobre todo, valor de cambio. Poco a poco, la producción dejó de apuntar estrictamente a las necesidades de los consumidores. El mercado se volvió un fin en sí. Se pasó a producir, no para satisfacer carencias, sino para obtener lucros exorbitantes. Así, se amplió el mercado de productos superfluos, lo cual exige mayor empeño publicitario, de modo de convertir, a los ojos del consumidor, lo superfluo en necesario.

El capitalismo todo lo reduce a la condición de mercancía. Es lo que Marx calificó de reificación. Productos agrícolas e industriales, servicios y actividades culturales, ideas y creencias, todo se transforma en mercancía a ser tratada según las leyes del mercado. Políticos y políticas pasan a recibir el mismo tratamiento. Salen los cientistas políticos para ceder paso a los mercadotécnicos.

Blackwater Mercenaries Deploy in New Orleans

New Orleans - Heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, are openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans. Some of the mercenaries say they have been "deputized" by the Louisiana governor; indeed some are wearing gold Louisiana state law enforcement badges on their chests and Blackwater photo identification cards on their arms. They say they are on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and have been given the authority to use lethal force. Several mercenaries we spoke with said they had served in Iraq on the personal security details of the former head of the US occupation, L. Paul Bremer and the former US ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte.

"This is a totally new thing to have guys like us working CONUS (Continental United States)," a heavily armed Blackwater mercenary told us as we stood on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. "We're much better equipped to deal with the situation in Iraq."

Eight Big Lies About Katrina

Big Media has given ample space for administration officials and conservatives to spread falsehoods about relief efforts.

In the past week, Bush administration officials and conservative commentators have repeatedly used the national media to spread misinformation about the federal government's widely criticized response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.

Can we learn from Cuba's lesson?

Although it is a small, poor country in the heart of hurricane alley, Cuba is widely acknowledged to do an exemplary job of protecting its 11.3-million residents from natural disasters. Its record is even more impressive in light of the catastrophic loss of life that the United States - the world's richest and most technologically advanced nation - is experiencing from Hurricane Katrina.

Cuba can offer lessons to the United States, especially in evacuation procedures, the Oxfam study says. Hurricane Katrina is thought to have killed thousands of residents who refused to leave or lacked the resources to do so.

The U.S. and Cuban governments do not have diplomatic relations, and President Fidel Castro typically rejects American offers of aid to protest the U.S. trade embargo on his nation. The most recent offer - and refusal - came after Hurricane [Dennis, Ivan] struck Cuba in July and caused a high death toll by local standards - 16 people.