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So when Anderson signed up, he knew there would be a war and, as much as he thought about it at all, he supported it. "I thought I was going to free Iraqi people. I thought I was going to do a good thing. I didn't know anything about the politics of it."

For nearly all of them, the first time this patriotism was put to the test was also the first time they went abroad - to Iraq. Anderson recalls his initial thoughts while on patrol in Baghdad. "I just thought, what are we doing here? Are we looking for weapons of mass destruction? No. Are we helping the people? No, they hate us. What are we working towards, apart from just staying alive? If this was my neighbourhood and foreign soldiers were doing this, then what would I be doing?"

Initially appalled by what he describes as the racism and hatred of some of his fellow soldiers, he said within a few months he was "cocking my weapon at innocent civilians without any sympathy or humanity".

Like Anderson, Camilo Mejia was able to conform for only so long. Mejia worked in a prisoner of war camp in Al Assad. "The prisoners were barefoot, hooded, their hands tied with concertina wire, and we had to soften them up for interrogation," he says. "We had to keep them awake for 48 to 72 hours. They were so tired and occasionally they just couldn't stay awake. Then we would get a sledgehammer and hit the wall so it sounded like an explosion to scare the shit out of them. Sometimes we would put a 9mm pistol to their heads to make them think they were going to be executed. I didn't say anything because I was afraid and everybody else was doing it. Maybe they felt the same as I did, although some of them didn't really mind doing it. But I knew the prisoners were not all terrorists. One man had a rifle to protect his sheep. I said to myself, this guy's innocent. I thought, this is not a prisoner of war camp - this is a torture camp."

With the spell of Israeli invincibility shattered, the time has never been riper for the resistance to shift the locus of the struggle away from military, where it still cannot compete, to politics and legitimacy. Hamas, after years locked in a failed and immoral strategy of indiscriminate suicide bombings, made a very serious attempt to do so first by instituting a unilateral moratorium on terrorist attacks and second by using the legitimacy of democratic elections and indicating a new willingness, through moderate leaders like Ismail Haniyeh, to deal with Israel and to redefine its stances.

That approach was strangled at birth by a U.S.-initiated offensive with the rest of the world standing by indifferent. That often happens with first attempts. That's no reason not to try again.

If these organizations were to drop the "Death to Israel" language, renew a commitment not to attack even when provoked (up to a point), and most important make their case to the world in a universalist language of human rights and democracy without any of the standard nods toward Islamist irredentism, they might well find many more willing to listen to them. It won't be easy; tentative efforts in that direction, for example when Ismail Haniyeh said he would talk about recognizing Israel when Israel declared its borders, tend to get ignored by the rest of the world. But now, with the emergence of an Arab military counterweight to Israel, it will be easier than it was before. Sadly, these groups have been dealing with an enemy that only listens to and makes deals with those who have power; compare Israel's carrying out of its 1978 Camp David commitments to Egypt with its total lack or respect for its Oslo commitments to the Palestinians.

The Israeli government claims that it targets only Hezbollah, and that fighters from the group are using civilians as human shields, thereby placing them at risk.  Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack.  Hezbollah occasionally did store weapons in or near civilian homes and fighters placed rocket launchers within populated areas or near U.N. observers, which are serious violations of the laws of war because they violate the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties.  However, those cases do not justify the IDFs extensive use of indiscriminate force which has cost so many civilian lives.  In none of the cases of civilian deaths documented in this report is there evidence to suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack.

By consistently failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians, Israel has violated one of the most fundamental tenets of the laws of war: the duty to carry out attacks on only military targets.  The pattern of attacks during the Israeli offensive in Lebanon suggests that the failures cannot be explained or dismissed as mere accidents; the extent of the pattern and the seriousness of the consequences indicate the commission of war crimes.

...there's been little criticism [from congressional Democrats] over Bush's stance on Israel's campaign against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. That has freed him to stand firm against growing international pressure for an immediate cease-fire.

Even as much of the world expressed outrage Sunday over an Israeli airstrike that killed more than three dozen Lebanese children, a leading Democrat echoed Bush's defense of Israel.

"I have no criticism of the president on this issue because I think he is doing the right thing," Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told CNN. "I know some in the world have called for an immediate cease-fire. But that says Hezbollah has a gun to Israel's head; let's let them continue to keep the gun there, which they can use at will. It's just not fair to Israel."

...

"It's easier to stand firm when you have the political community behind you," said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif. "If anything, the criticism of Bush has come from those who said he hasn't been strong enough in supporting Israel."

Democratic congressional leaders criticized Bush last week for failing to demand that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki denounce Hezbollah. A handful of Democrats boycotted al-Maliki's speech to a joint session of Congress over al-Maliki's silence about Hezbollah's terrorist activity and his criticism of Israel's invasion.

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The bulk of the resistance and insurgency was Iraqi and they had different goals than Zarqawi. Often Zarqawi's fighters clashed with indigenous Iraqi fighters, who wanted only to liberate Iraq and regain political power, but who did not care for Zarqawi's puritan ways or his global jihad. It is likely that they may have provided the tip that cost Zarqawi his life. But in death Zarqawi struck one final blow for his cause. He had come to Iraq to fight the infidels and become a martyr, gaining entry to paradise. And so he did, the infidels finally killed him and his supporters now believe he is in paradise. This only proves that Iraq is the place to go to if you want to gain entry to paradise, kill infidels, and become a martyr. More will flock to replace him and avenge him. Expect to see a new group, naming itself after Zarqawi, claiming responsibility for attacks targeting Shia leaders or Shia shrines in Iraq, but also in Lebanon or Saudi Arabia, where tensions between Sunnis and Shias have been simmering since the war in Iraq.

We in the media are often pilloried for only reporting "the bad news" in Iraq. But there is no good news. Its too dangerous to even tell you how bad things really are, but they are worse than what you see on the media, not better. The insurgency is passe, Iraq is about the civil war, chaos, anarchy, random and deliberate violence everywhere. And it is spreading throughout the region. Instead of stabilizing the Middle East, the US war in Iraq is tearing it apart, destabilizing it, reviving radical Islam and jihadism and giving a bad name to reform and democracy.

I have come across scores of stories in the Iraqi press of unarmed civilians killed by US-led occupation forces, some backed up by video footage. But few make it into the western media. In this context, Haditha is made to seem exceptional, and is always diminished by the obligatory, nauseating ministerial comment that things were worse under Saddam.

Why we should welcome an inquiry led by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon is a mystery, given its determination to avoid investigating the involvement of senior officers in the torture and killing of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. The culture of indiscriminate violence that Iraqis have long insisted permeates the US-led occupation forces is in any case gradually being exposed by the testimony of US soldiers.

One such soldier, Specialist Jody Casey, a scout sniper in Baquba who witnessed civilians being killed by soldiers, said recently bombs "go off and you just zap any farmer that is close to you". Soldiers were told to carry shovels in vehicles so they could plant them on civilian victims, he said, to make it look like they were digging to set up roadside bombs. Specialist Michael Blake, who served in Balad, said it was common practice to "shoot up the landscape or anything that moved" after an explosion.

American veterans of the war in Iraq have described a culture of casual violence, revenge and prejudice against Iraqi civilians that has made the killing of innocent bystanders a common occurrence.

Some American veterans have expressed little surprise at the latest revelations. 'I don't doubt for one moment that these things happened. They are widespread. This is the norm. These are not the exceptions,' said Camilo Mejia, a US infantry veteran who served briefly in the Haditha area in 2003.

Some have tried to defend the killings by pointing to the stress that US soldiers - many of whom are on their second or third tour of duty - are under. But it is clear that there are other, deeper problems within the US military that point to a widespread failure of command.

From the shootings of civilians in Nasiriya by marines during the US advance to similar shootings by the Third Infantry Division on the outskirts of Baghdad during the so-called 'Thunder Run' into the city, the same pattern has reasserted itself. Indeed, within weeks of the fall of Saddam's regime it expressed itself in the moment that many now see as the starting point of the insurgency: the firing by US paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division into a noisy demonstration in Falluja.

The Hamas government must be recognized, not only because recognition of Hamas would be good for Israel, as the former Mossad head Ephraim Halevy recently argued, but because this is the right move by any criterion of justice and international law.

The U.S. and Europe decided, despite Israel's opposition, to permit the Palestinian people to hold democratic elections. According to Jimmy Carter's report in the "Herald Tribune", the elections were "honest, fair, strongly contested, without violence and with the results accepted by winners and losers. Among the 62 elections that have been monitored by... the Carter Center, these are among the best in portraying the will of the people."

In a just and well-ordered world, it would be unthinkable for a government that was elected in this way to be disqualified because Israel does not like the choice of the electorate in question. But in a world in which the U.S. rules, might is right, and might can define democracy as it chooses. Thus it was announced that the outcome of the Palestinian elections would not be recognized until the three "mantras" were fulfilled: Hamas must renounce terror, honour previous accords, and recognize the State of Israel. Meanwhile the Palestinian people would be punished and starved through an economic boycott, in the hope that this will lead to the collapse of the elected government.

In January 2005, Hamas announced its resolution to replace armed struggle with political struggle and agreed to a unilateral ceasefire ("calm"). In the 17 months since then, Hamas has not perpetrated a single terrorist attack. According to security sources, since the election, Hamas has not even participated in the launching of Qassam rockets from Gaza; most rocket launches are carried out by Fatah. What exactly is the substance of the demand that Hamas renounce terror?

Colombia's peasant, indigenous, and union organizations called for a major mobilization on May 15, 2006. With elections on May 28, 2006, the organizations sought to demonstrate their opposition to the Colombian regime's Free Trade Agreement with the United States, its civil war, its relationship with the paramilitaries, and its proposed constitutional changes. The election is very quickly coming down to a contest between the current President, Alvaro Uribe Velez, and the political left candidate Carlos Gaviria.

In a straight political contest, Carlos Gaviria's candidacy would win. But Uribe's campaign has been very dirty. Uribe recently said publicly that the election is between his program, which he calls 'Democratic Security', on the one hand, and 'Communism in Disguise' on the other. Calling the political opposition 'Communism in Disguise' is another way of calling them guerrillas, which, in a country where paramilitaries murder 'suspected guerrillas' and their families with impunity, amounts to a death threat. The paramilitaries themselves made have made similar statements in recent days.

In addition to the filthy campaigning, according to reports that are coming in, the Colombian regime reacted to the May 15 mobilizations with a demonstration that the political opposition will not be allowed to campaign or demonstrate for its position, and that opposition to the Colombian establishment will be punished.

It began with the government claiming that it had 'proof' that FARC was behind the mobilizations. The 'proof' was never produced. Next, the indigenous mobilizations were met with helicopters, military forces, and riot police, who used heavy doses of tear gas to clear the area of La Maria Piendamo. The riot police sprayed gasoline into the health centre at Piendamo and burned it.

Chávez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States. Like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on the English co-operative moment, and the moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the threat of an alternative way of developing a decent society: in other words, the threat of a good example in a continent where the majority of humanity has long suffered a Washington-designed peonage. In the US media in the 1980s, the "threat" of tiny Nicaragua was seriously debated until it was crushed. Venezuela is clearly being "softened up" for something similar. A US army publication, Doctrine for Asymmetric War against Venezuela, describes Chávez and the Bolivarian revolution as the "largest threat since the Soviet Union and Communism". When I said to Chávez that the US historically had had its way in Latin America, he replied: "Yes, and my assassination would come as no surprise. But the empire is in trouble, and the people of Venezuela will resist an attack. We ask only for the support of all true democrats."

When human rights activists claim that the U.S. is sabotaging any potential peace process, they don't mean just the stuff that reaches the headlines, like stopping crucial aid to the new Palestinian Authority government.This morning, Ha'aretz reports that the U.S. has blocked a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel's recent, continuous, indiscriminate shelling of the Gaza Strip.

Since last Friday, Israel has been pouring more than 300 artillery shells a day into Gaza, the most densely-populated region on the planet. That's 2,100 shells. At least 18 Gazans, including Khadeel Ghabeen, an 8-year-old girl, have been killed. Scores have been wounded, including 11 other members of Ghabeen's family.

The entire month of April so far has been marked by shellings and missile attacks by Israeli airships and naval vessels, including the destruction of PA President Mahmoud Abbas' helicopter pad in Gaza as he came to visit the strip.

Typical American coverage of Israel-Palestine conflicts tends to bend over backwards to appear "balanced," thus reinforcing the common myth that the conflict is a "tit-for-tat" cycle of violence. Thus The New York Times covers the shelling (under the ambiguous headline "Gaza Attacks Are On The Rise As Factions Vie For Power") as "an artillery duel," quoting Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz saying, "As long as it's not quiet here, it won't be quiet there."

In placing increased Qassam rocket attacks on Israel alongside Israel's pounding of Gaza, the Times never mentions that of the 360 Qassam rockets that have fallen on Israel this year--many fired fall on Palestinian territory-- not one has killed an Israeli. Only 8 Israelis have been killed by the rockets since the first Qassam landed in Israel in 2002. To use them, or the new Hamas government--which has maintained a cease-fire with Israel for the past year--as an excuse to ramp up attacks on Palestinians is grossly cynical on the part of Israel.

In November 2002, the US threatened to strike Iraq unless it cooperated with UN inspectors. The US invaded Iraq anyway, without Security Council backing. In January, the EU-3 called for Iran to be referred to the Security Council. Sanctions may be applied. If no diplomatic solution is found, the Pentagon may find the opening it seeks for the next stage of its Long War.

Iran is not to be easily intimidated. Few in Tehran take the threat of oil sanctions seriously. Iranians know that even if the US decided to bomb the country's nuclear sites, they are maintained by Russian advisers and technicians; that would mean in effect a declaration of war against Russia. Russia recently closed a US$700 million deal selling 30 Tor M-1 surface-to-air missiles to Iran - very effective against aircraft, cruise missiles and guided bombs. The missiles will be deployed at the nuclear-research center at Isfahan and the Bushehr reactor, which is being built by Russia.

Iranians know Shi'ites in the south and in Baghdad would turn extreme heat on the occupation forces in Iraq. Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, on an official visit to Iran, according to his spokesman, said that "if any Islamic state, especially the Islamic Republic of Iran, is attacked, the Mehdi Army would fight inside and outside Iraq".

Iranians also know they can bypass any trade sanctions by trading even more with China. Anyway, Mohammed-Nabi Rudaki, deputy chairman of the National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, which sits at the majlis (parliament), has already threatened that "if Europe does not act wisely with the Iranian nuclear portfolio and it is referred to the UN Security Council and economic or air travel restrictions are imposed unjustly, we have the power to halt oil supply to the last drop from the shores of the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz".

Up to 30% of the world's oil production passes through the strait. Were Iran to block it, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait would not be able to export their oil. The Pentagon may eventually get its Long War - but not exactly on its terms.

The moment when Iraq could be held together as a truly unified state has probably passed. But a weak Iraq suits many inside and outside the country and it will still remain a name on the map. American power is steadily ebbing and the British forces are largely confined to their camps around Basra. A 'national unity government' may be established but it will not be national, will certainly be disunited and may govern very little. 'The government could end up being a few buildings in the Green Zone,' one minister said. The army and police are already split along sectarian and ethnic lines. The Iranians have been the main winners in the struggle for the country. The US has turned out to be militarily and politically weaker than anybody expected. The real question now is whether Iraq will break up with or without an all-out civil war.

The Pentagon has requested hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency funds for military construction in Iraq, fanning the debate about US long-term intentions there.

Much of the 2006 emergency funding is earmarked for beefing up security and facilities at just a handful of large airbases in Iraq.

...those concerned include the US House Appropriations Committee, which has demanded a "master plan" for base construction from the Pentagon before the money can be spent.

In a 13 March report accompanying the emergency spending legislation, it said the money was "of a magnitude normally associated with permanent bases".

A week later, after top US General John Abizaid refused to rule out a long-term presence, the House of Representatives passed an amendment to the bill stating its opposition to permanent bases.

The official justifications for the war have been exposed as complete fallacies. Even conservative defenders of U.S. empire now complain that the situation in Iraq is a disaster.

Yet many people who opposed this unjust invasion, who opposed the 1991 Gulf War and the sanctions on Iraq for years before that, some of whom joined mass demonstrations against the war before it began, have been persuaded that the U.S. military should now remain in Iraq for the benefit of the Iraqi people. We confront the strange situation of many people mobilizing against an unjust war but then reluctantly supporting the military occupation that flows directly from it.

In part, this position is rooted in the pessimistic conclusions many drew after the February 15, 2003, day of international demonstrations -- perhaps the largest coordinated protest in human history -- failed to prevent the war. This pessimism was exacerbated by some of the leading spokespeople for the antiwar movement, who misled audiences by suggesting that the demonstrations could stop the war. As inspiring as the demonstrations were, it would have taken a significantly higher degree of protest, organization, and disruption of business as usual to do so.

The lesson of February 15 is not that protest no longer works, but that protest needs to be sustained, coherent, forceful, persistent, and bold -- rather than episodic and isolated. And it needs to involve large numbers of working-class people, veterans, military families, conscientious objectors, Arabs, Muslims, and other people from targeted communities, not just as passive observers but as active participants and leaders.

We will need this kind of protest to end the occupation of Iraq. But we will also need to be able to answer the objections and concerns of thoughtful, well-meaning people who have been persuaded by one or more of the arguments for why U.S. troops should remain in Iraq, at least until "stability" is restored. Below, I outline eight reasons why the United States should leave Iraq immediately, addressing common arguments for why the United States needs to "stay the course."

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The New York Times has reviewed the five-page [Jan. 31, 2003] memo in its entirety. While the president's sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

The January 2003 memo is the latest in a series of secret memos produced by top aides to Mr. Blair that summarize private discussions between the president and the prime minister. Another group of British memos, including the so-called Downing Street memo written in July 2002, showed that some senior British officials had been concerned that the United States was determined to invade Iraq, and that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration to fit its desire to go to war.

Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

At several points during the meeting between Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair, there was palpable tension over finding a legitimate legal trigger for going to war that would be acceptable to other nations, the memo said. The prime minister was quoted as saying it was essential for both countries to lobby for a second United Nations resolution against Iraq, because it would serve as "an insurance policy against the unexpected."

The memo said Mr. Blair told Mr. Bush, "If anything went wrong with the military campaign, or if Saddam increased the stakes by burning the oil wells, killing children or fomenting internal divisions within Iraq, a second resolution would give us international cover, especially with the Arabs."

Mr. Bush agreed that the two countries should attempt to get a second resolution, but he added that time was running out. "The U.S. would put its full weight behind efforts to get another resolution and would twist arms and even threaten," Mr. Bush was paraphrased in the memo as saying.

The document added, "But he had to say that if we ultimately failed, military action would follow anyway."

Q: Why do you think the US went to war against Iraq?

Chomsky: Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, it is right in the midst of the major energy reserves in the world. Its been a primary goal of US policy since World War II (like Britain before it) to control what the State Department called "a stupendous source of strategic power" and one of the greatest material prizes in history. Establishing a client state in Iraq would significantly enhance that strategic power, a matter of great significance for the future. As Zbigniew Brzezinski observed, it would provide the US with "critical leverage" of its European and Asian rivals, a conception with roots in early post-war planning. These are substantial reasons for aggression -- not unlike those of the British when they invaded and occupied Iraq over 80 years earlier, at the dawn of the oil age.

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The US military is investigating two incidents in which American soldiers killed at least 26 Iraqi civilians and then claimed that they were either guerrillas or had died in cross fire.

In the most recent incident, in the town of Ishaqi north of Baghdad last week, Iraqi police said that US troops had shot 11 people, including five children, in their home. The local police chief, Colonel Farouq Hussein, said that all the dead had been shot in the head, according to autopsies. "It's a clear and perfect crime," he said. In an incident in the town of Haditha in western Iraq on 19 November last year, US soldiers went on a rampage in a village after a bomb attack and killed at least 15 civilians, according to witnesses and local officials cited by Time magazine in an investigation.

The US military first claimed a roadside bomb had killed a US Marine, Miguel Tarrazas, along with 15 Iraqi civilians caught in the blast. Later, a military statement said "gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire" and in returning fire the Marines killed eight insurgents.

But after Time presented the US military with what Iraqis said had happened, an official investigation found that 15 of the civilians had been deliberately killed by US soldiers.

The bomb attack on the US Humvee took place at 7.15am. Eman Waleed, a nine-year-old child, lived in a house 150 yards from the explosion. "We heard a big noise that woke us all up," she recalled later. "Then we did what we always do when there's an explosion: my father goes in to his room with the Koran and prays the family will be spared harm."

The Marines claim they heard shots coming from the direction of Waleed's house. They burst in to the house and Eman heard shots from her father's room. They then entered the living room, where the rest of the family was gathered. She said: "I couldn't see their faces very well - only their guns sticking in to the doorway. I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny."

The US soldiers started shooting in to the corner of the room where Eman and her eight-year-old brother, Abdul Rahman, were cowering. The other adults in the room tried to protect the two children with their bodies and were all shot dead. Eman and her brother were both wounded.

I work in one of the largest hospitals in Baghdad. I stood by helplessly during the 13 years of sanctions and watched my people -- especially children -- die from lack of medicines and poor sanitation. UNICEF estimated that over 200 children died everyday as a direct result of sanctions.

Many people thought that after the U.S. occupied our country and the sanctions were lifted, the health care of the Iraqi people would improve. But the occupation has made it worse. Many of the Iraqi hospitals in cities like Baghdad, Al-Qaim, and Fallujah were bombed and destroyed. Many ambulances were attacked and health workers killed, despite the fact that it is illegal under international law to attack hospitals, ambulances and health workers.

Diseases that were under control under the regime of Saddam Hussein, diseases such as cholera, hepatitis, meningitis, polio, have now returned to haunt the population, especially the children. Death due to cancer has increased because treatment programs stopped and medicines are not available. The health of the Iraqi people is also devastated by environmental contamination due to the destruction of our water and sewage systems.

The U.S. invasion has killed our people, destroyed our lives, ruined our health care system. I want the U.S. troops to get out of my country. I want them to go home now. I think that if the Americans leave, we Iraqis will have more of a chance to come together to heal our wounded nation.

Since the day I arrived in the United States, people ask me if I have any hope. Of course. No one can live without hope. My one sliver of hope lies with the American people. No other force in the world can make the American troops leave our country. No other force in the world can make this government hear our cries. Please don't let us down.

The prospect that Europe and Asia might move towards greater independence has troubled US planners since the second world war. The concerns have only risen as the "tripolar order" - Europe, North America and Asia - has continued to evolve.

Every day Latin America, too, is becoming more independent. Now Asia and the Americas are strengthening their ties while the reigning superpower, the odd man out, consumes itself in misadventures in the Middle East.

Regional integration in Asia and Latin America is a crucial and increasingly important issue that, from Washington's perspective, betokens a defiant world gone out of control. Energy, of course, remains a defining factor - the object of contention - everywhere.

China, unlike Europe, refuses to be intimidated by Washington, a primary reason for the fear of China by US planners, which presents a dilemma: steps toward confrontation are inhibited by US corporate reliance on China as an export platform and growing market, as well as by China's financial reserves - reported to be approaching Japan's in scale.

From an article in the Times of London:

     Iran has threatened to defend itself if attacked.

I didn't realize a country could "threaten" to defend itself. I thought the threatening was done beforehand by the attackers, and it was pretty much taken for granted that the attacked would defend themselves.

There are few places in the world where governments construct a web of nationality and residency laws designed for use by one section of the population against another. Apartheid South Africa was one. So is Israel.

We are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of climate change and peak oil. Once we pass the planetary oil production spike (when oil begins rapidly to deplete and demand outstrips supply), there will be less and less net energy available to humankind. Petroleum geologists reckon we will pass the world oil spike sometime between 2006 and 2010. It will take, argues peak-oil expert Richard Heinberg, a second world war effort if many of us are to come through this epoch. Not least because modern agribusiness puts hundreds of calories of fossil-fuel energy into the fields for each calorie of food energy produced.

Catch-22, of course, is that the very worst fate that could befall our species is the discovery of huge new reserves of oil, or even the burning into the sky of all the oil that's already known about, because the climate chaos that would unleash would make the mere collapse of industrial society a sideshow bagatelle. Therefore, since we've got to make the switch from oil anyway, why not do it now?

If we are all still in denial about the radical changes coming - and all of us still are - there are sound geological reasons for our denial. We have lived in an era of cheap, abundant energy. There never has and never will again be consumption like we have known. The petroleum interval, this one-off historical blip, this freakish bonanza, has led us to believe that the impossible is possible, that people in northern industrial cities can have suntans in winter and eat apples in summer. But much as the petroleum bubble has got us out of the habit of accepting the existence of zero-sum physical realities, it's wise to remember that they never went away. You can either have capitalism or a habitable planet. One or the other, not both.

The nine-year-old girl's parents realised she was gone as they watched the election results on television. They do not know precisely what happened, but the Israeli army later said Aya was behaving in a suspicious manner reminiscent of a terrorist - she got too close to the border fence - and so a soldier fired several bullets into the child, hitting her in the neck and blowing open her stomach.

Aya was the second child killed by the Israeli army last week. Soldiers near Ramallah shot 13-year-old Munadel Abu Aaalia in the back as he walked along a road reserved for Jewish settlers with two friends. The army said the boys planned to throw rocks at Israeli cars, which the military defines as terrorism.

The two killings went unnoticed by the outside world amid the political drama, but they made their impact among Palestinians angered by demands from western leaders for Hamas to recognise Israel and renounce its armed struggle.

"Hamas has kept the calm for a year. Israel is still killing our civilians," said the Hamas leader in Gaza, Mahmoud al-Zahar. "Why is it that the Israelis can continue to kill our people, innocent people walking down the street, and there is no criticism from those who tell us we must give up our historic struggle against occupation? Why are they so afraid to criticise Israel but tell us what to do?"

The Astal family is politically divided. Aya's mother voted for Hamas. The child's aunt, Samir al-Astal, backed the losing party, Fatah. But there is little difference in their belief that there is a double standard at work in the foreign demands of Israel and of Palestinians.

"The Americans always give excuses for Israel," said Samir. "Israel is like a spoilt son. They never pressure them. They kill our children and no one says anything. If there is a reaction by Palestinians to these incidents they call us terrorists."

The International Republican Institute is one of several prominent nonprofit groups that receive federal funds to help countries develop the mechanisms of democracy, like campaigning and election monitoring. Of all the groups, though, the I.R.I. is closest to the administration. President Bush picked its president, Lorne W. Craner, to run his administration's democracy-building efforts. The institute, which works in more than 60 countries, has seen its federal financing nearly triple in three years, from $26 million in 2003 to $75 million in 2005. Last spring, at an I.R.I. fund-raiser, Mr. Bush called democracy-building "a growth industry."

These groups walk a fine line. Under federal guidelines, they are supposed to nurture democracy in a nonpartisan way, lest they be accused of meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations. But in Haiti, according to diplomats, Mr. Lucas [of the I.R.I.] actively worked against President Aristide.

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Haiti has had a long, tense relationship with the Dominican Republic, its more affluent neighbor on the island of Hispaniola. Haitians who work there are often mistreated, human rights groups say, and the country has been a haven for those accused of trying to overthrow Haitian governments.

In December 2002, the I.R.I. began training Haitian political parties there, at the Hotel Santo Domingo, owned by the Fanjul family, which fled Cuba under Mr. Castro and now runs a giant sugar-cane business. The training was unusual for more than its location: only Mr. Aristide's opponents, not members of his party, were invited.

Mr. Bazin, a moderate Aristide opponent, sent representatives to the Hotel Santo Domingo. They came away believing that more was going on than routine political training.

"The report I got from my people was that there were two meetings -- open meetings where democracy would be discussed and closed meetings where other things would be discussed, and we are not invited to the other meetings," said Mr. Bazin, who is now running for president as the candidate of a faction of Lavalas.

Mr. Bazin said people who had attended the closed meetings told him that "there are things you don't know" -- that Mr. Aristide would ultimately be removed and that he should stop calling for compromise.

For the "international community" -- principally the 'Quartet' made up of the United States, the European Union, Russia and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the election result is a major embarassment. They, and the coterie of well- funded NGOs and think tanks that generate so much of their intellectual guff have built their approach on the notion that Palestinian "reform" rather than an end to the Israeli occupation, is the way to resolve the conflict. While nominally committing themselves to a two-state solution, these powers dragged the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority into an endless game where Palestinians have to jump through hoops to prove their worthiness of basic rights, while at the same time no pressure has been applied to Israel to end the confiscation of land and expansion of settlements. This peace process industry chose to hail Israel's tactical withdrawal of eight thousand settlers from Gaza last summer, while ignoring the far larger number of settlers Israel has continued to plant all over the West Bank effectively rendering a two-state solution unachievable.

The principal purpose of this game is not to bring about a just and lasting peace but merely to inoculate the players from the charge that they were doing nothing to resolve a conflict that remains an enduring focus of regional and worldwide concern. A true peace effort would require confronting Israel and holding it accountable, something none of the Quartet members have the political will to do. There is no doubt that Fatah was entirely complicit in the game, to which it had become both a prisoner and an indispensable partner. Why else would the United States have desperately tried to shore Fatah up by spending millions of dollars on projects in recent months designed to buy votes, and why else would the EU have threatened to cut off aid if Palestinians voted for Hamas? Most Palestinians could see clearly that after years of negotiations and billions of dollars of foreign aid they are poorer and less free than ever before as more of their land has been seized. It is no wonder that this kind of bribery and blackmail had no power over them and probably had the opposite effect, increasing Hamas support.

The audit, released yesterday by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, expands on its previous findings of fraud, incompetence and confusion as the American occupation poured money into training and rebuilding programs in 2003 and 2004. The audit uncovers problems in an area that includes half the land mass in Iraq, with new findings in the southern and central provinces of Anbar, Karbala, Najaf, Wasit, Babil, and Qadisiya. The special inspector reports to the secretary of defense and the secretary of state.

Agents from the inspector general's office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.

The money, most from Iraqi oil proceeds and cash seized from Saddam Hussein's government, also easily found its way out of the compound and the country. In one case, an American soldier assigned as an assistant to the Iraqi Olympic boxing team was given huge amounts of cash for a trip to the Philippines, where the soldier gambled away somewhere between $20,000 and $60,000 of the money. Exactly how much has not been determined, the report says, because no one kept track of how much money he received in the first place.

Far from humiliating Iran and Syria - which was the Israeli-American plan - these two supposedly pariah states have been left untouched and the Hizbollah's reputation lionised across the Arab world. The "opportunity" which President George Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, apparently saw in the Lebanon war has turned out to be an opportunity for America's enemies to show the weakness of Israel's army. Indeed, last night, scarcely any Israeli armour was to be seen inside Lebanon - just one solitary tank could be glimpsed outside Bint Jbeil and the Israelis had retreated even from the "safe" Christian town of Marjayoun. It is now clear that the 30,000-strong Israeli army reported to be racing north to the Litani river never existed. In fact, it is unlikely that there were yesterday more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers left in all of southern Lebanon, although they did become involved in two fire-fights during the morning, hours after the UN-ceasefire went into effect.

Down the coast road from Beirut, meanwhile, came a massive exodus of tens of thousands of Shia families, bedding piled on the roofs of their cars , many of them sporting Hizbollah flags and pictures of Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's chairman, on their windscreens. At the massive traffic jams around the broken motorway bridges and craters which litter the landscape, the Hizbollah was even handing out yellow and green "victory" flags, along with official notices urging parents not to allow children to play with the thousands of unexploded bombs that now lie across the landscape. At least one Lebanese child was killed by unexploded ordnance and another 15 were wounded yesterday.

Israel dramatically defied a unanimous United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolution by escalating its ground war yesterday in southern Lebanon, asserting that it needed more time to 'clean up' Hizbollah.

Last night Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the UN, insisted that hostilities would end at 5am tomorrow, saying that both Israeli and Lebanese prime ministers had agreed to a ceasefire. But yesterday there was little sign of peace as Israel sent more armour and helicopters into Lebanon. Dozens of helicopters ferried infantry deep into Lebanon in a race to grab territory.

By the day's end, 30,000 Israeli soldiers had crossed the border. Despite reports that some troops had reached the Litani, it was also their bloodiest day of fighting, with at least 11 killed and 70 wounded. Israel claimed that it had killed 40 Hizbollah fighters.

For Hizbollah's part, while it has said that it will abide by the ceasefire and co-operate with the deployment of the Lebanese Army in areas it controlled, Nasrallah said it reserved the right to resist Israeli troops on Lebanese soil. 'We must not make a mistake - not in the resistance, the government or the people - and believe that the war has ended,' added Nasrallah in a television interview. 'The war has not ended. There have been continued strikes and continued casualties.

On Israeli television yesterday, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, appeared to condone the continued Israeli action, saying she hoped the shooting in the Israel-Lebanon war would end within 'a day or so'.

"Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared," Gerald Steinberg, a political science professor at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, told the San Francisco Chronicle (7/21/05). "By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board." The Chronicle reported that a "senior Israeli army officer" has been giving PowerPoint presentations for more than a year to "U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks" outlining the coming war with Lebanon, explaining that a combination of air and ground forces would target Hezbollah and "transportation and communication arteries."

Which raises a question: If journalists have been told by Israel for more than a year that a war was coming, why are they pretending that it all started on July 12? By truncating the cause-and-effect timelines of both the Gaza and Lebanon conflicts, editorial boards at major U.S. dailies gravely oversimplify the decidedly more complex nature of the facts on the ground.

Two weeks into the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, the United States stands with only two other countries--Israel and Britain--in opposing an immediate ceasefire. Even Iraqi Prime Minister Jawad al-Maliki, in Washington for reassurances that the Bush administration will "stay the course" in its Mesopotamian misadventure, demanded that the bombing be halted forthwith.

Today's Rome gathering of European leaders to discuss a ceasefire is exposing the United States' isolation in this conflict for all to see. While U.S. officials have begun admitting that a ceasefire is "urgent," they hasten to add that for such an agreement to be "enduring," it must address the "root causes" of conflict along Israel's northern border.

Those State Department wordsmiths hammered out some thoroughly unobjectionable language. It goes without saying that a ceasefire is inadequate to diffuse the underlying tensions that produced this war. But when the secretary of state explains what the new diplo-speak means, we know Lebanon and the Middle East are still in deep trouble.

[Please take a moment to read the whole article. -ed.]

"... the thing they need most, peace and a cease-fire, we cannot give," commented [United Nations undersecretary general for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan] Egeland. The UN has asked for humanitarian corridors within Lebanon to transport relief to all regions of the country. "Israel will allow us to bring human consignments to Beirut but we need to be able to bring it in to the people of the South." So far, Israel has not guaranteed the UN any safe passage from Beirut to the South of the country.

Speaking at a joint news conference with the Undersecretary general of Humanitarian Affairs, the Lebanese Health Minister Mohammad Khalifeh spoke directly to the press about their role in the conflict: "I have been hearing reports that civilians are not targets. Half an hour ago one of our Civil Defense workers was targeted in his ambulance, in Tyre."

[More accounts of Israel targeting fleeing civilians are in today's London Times. This violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention is a familiar one, as we have seen in Israeli assaults on towns in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as U.S. assaults on cities like Fallujah and Ramadi. -ed.]

Israel is raining destruction upon Lebanon in a purely defensive operation, according to the White House and most of Congress. Even some CNN anchors, habituated to mechanical reporting of "Middle East violence," sound slightly incredulous. With over 300 Lebanese dead and easily 500,000 displaced, with the Beirut airport, bridges and power plants disabled, the enormous assault is more than a "disproportionate response" to Hizballah's July 12 seizure of two soldiers and killing of three others on Israeli soil. It is more than the "excessive use of force" that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan decries. The aerial assault dwarfs the damage done by Hizballah's rocket attacks on Israeli towns. Entire villages in south Lebanon lie in ruins, unknown numbers of their inhabitants buried in the rubble and tens of others incinerated in their vehicles by Israeli missiles as they attempted to escape northward. As it awaits the promised "humanitarian corridor," Lebanon remains almost entirely cut off from the outside world by air, sea and land. As of July 20, thousands of Israeli troops have moved across the UN-demarcated Blue Line. Yet virtually the entire American political class actively resists international calls for an immediate ceasefire, preferring to wait for an Israeli victory.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert set the tone immediately after Hizballah struck, branding the cross-border raid as "an act of war" whose consequences would be "very, very, very painful." Moreover, Israel would hold the Lebanese government and the Lebanese nation as a whole responsible. Israel's determination to inflict pain upon Lebanon was fanned on the fourth day of Israeli bombardment when Hizballah Secretary-General Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah likewise declared "open warfare," and the Shiite movement's militia stepped up rocket fire that has taken 15 Israeli civilian lives. Though the Katyushas and larger projectiles are much deadlier than the Qassams of Hamas, Israel faces no existential threat from the rockets on either front. It is in Lebanon, to paraphrase Israeli army chief of staff Gen. Dan Halutz, where the clock has been turned back 20 years.

The American broadcast media nevertheless labor to fashion symmetry where there is none. There is balanced treatment of the casualties on both sides. The Israelis forced into bomb shelters are juxtaposed with the Lebanese politely warned to flee their homes. For competing renditions of the day's bloodletting, CNN's avuncular Larry King turns first to nonchalantly windblown Israeli spokeswoman Miri Eisen and then to a program director from Hizballah's al-Manar satellite channel, Ibrahim al-Musawi, who always seems to have one eye on the sky. The rock-star reporters who parachuted in to cover the story dispense dollops of confusion. CNN's Anderson Cooper in Cyprus explained that, since Hamas members are Sunni and Hizballah members Shi'i, they are "historic rivals." MSNBC's Tucker Carlson, sans bowtie to convey the seriousness of the occasion, wondered if Hizballah had rocketed Nazareth because its residents are all Christian, ignoring the images on the screen behind him from the attack victims' funeral at a mosque.

...

It is a war, an unjustified war. Israel's legal justifications -- protecting the sanctity of its borders and enforcing UN resolutions -- are disingenuous to the point of being dishonest, after Israel's own years of ignoring the will of the international community and crossing and erasing boundaries with impunity. The US is the only international actor with the power to stop this war, and instead has chosen to encourage the fighting. So the US, too, will be held accountable by history.

In the past 10 days, while the world has been absorbed by the war in Lebanon, sectarian massacres have started to take place on an almost daily basis, leading observers to fear a level of killing approaching that of Rwanda immediately before the genocide of 1994. On a single spot on the west bank of the Tigris river in north Baghdad, between 10 and 12 bodies have been drifting ashore every day.

The US is giving Israel a window of a week to inflict maximum damage on Hizbullah before weighing in behind international calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon, according to British, European and Israeli sources.

The Bush administration, backed by Britain, has blocked efforts for an immediate halt to the fighting initiated at the UN security council, the G8 summit in St Petersburg and the European foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels.

"It's clear the Americans have given the Israelis the green light. They [the Israeli attacks] will be allowed to go on longer, perhaps for another week," a senior European official said yesterday. Diplomatic sources said there was a clear time limit, partly dictated by fears that a prolonged conflict could spin out of control.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have named their relentless military operation in Gaza "Summer Rain" (gishmei ha-qeitz in Hebrew), which is cruel and sarcastic given the political, historical, and environmental context of the Eastern Mediterranean. It does not rain in the summer in this region. From early May to mid-September, one can expect clear skies and no precipitation. What is raining, though, is fire and metal, along with leaflets bearing chillingly familiar threats.

Any Palestinian in Gaza, or indeed anyone who knows what happened in Lebanon one scorching summer 24 years ago, will be appropriately terrified by those leaflets warning people of the firestorms to come. The metal rains of the summer of 1982 in Beirut were heavy and deadly. No one stopped the IDF then from committing massive crimes, directed against an Arab capital crowded with civilians. And sadly, no one will stop them now. Thursday morning, President G.W. Bush and the newly elected German leader Angela Merkel reiterated that Israel has the "right to defend herself."

Institutionalized Israeli impunity is an amazing phenomenon: The capture of one Israeli soldier, taken as a bargaining chip to ransom hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children held in administrative detention in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, now provides the unquestioned and self-righteous pretext for massive violations of international humanitarian law. Given the mainstream media's depiction of Palestinians as cruel, heartless terrorists, and Hamas as the most evil organization ever to exist, the IDF can safely assume they'll get away with crimes this summer that will rival those committed in 1982, when 17,000 civilians lost their lives in Lebanon and Beirut was put to a brutal siege during the hottest months of the year.

Israel's Operation Summer Rains has redefined the term collective punishment. After three armed Palestinian groups killed two Israeli soldiers and took Shalit prisoner, Israeli warplanes bombed the power plant, which serves most of Gaza's 1.4 million people, sealed tight the only commercial crossing into the coastal strip and, until July 1, shut off the fuel pipeline as well. What remains of the Gazan electric company struggles to channel six hours of power to Palestinian homes per day. Hospitals are running neonatal incubators and other equipment on their own generators, which guzzle the scarce fuel. Meanwhile, the Israeli air force regularly breaks the sound barrier above Gaza, usually in the wee hours of the morning, jangling Palestinians' nerves and terrifying children. Shrugs Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: "Nobody dies from being uncomfortable."

Watching the confrontation heighten from Washington, Bush officials have merely affirmed Israel's "right to self-defense" at every opportunity, while conspicuously declining to identify how properly functioning air conditioning in Gaza City poses a threat to Israeli civilians. In a nod toward balance, White House spokesman Tony Snow added: "We have urged and continue to urge the Israeli government to proceed with moderation."

This tiptoeing around the facts, while it sounds unusually absurd on this occasion, is in line with Bush (and Clinton) administration practice of long standing: Blame the Palestinians for starting the fight, exonerate Israel of any culpability, place the onus on the Palestinian leadership for Palestinian suffering at Israeli hands and hint at behind-the-scenes pressure on Israel to stand down. These last hints have grown steadily more delicate in the post-9/11 years. When the Bush administration decided that they, too, wanted to order missile strikes against Islamist militants on foreign soil, they stopped complaining about Israel's extrajudicial executions in Gaza and the West Bank. When President George W. Bush called for Israel's "immediate" withdrawal from reinvaded West Bank towns in April 2002, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice clarified that "now" did not mean "right away." The withdrawal, she said, should be "orderly," and not "helter-skelter."

If Mexican authorities continue to stonewall and impose Calderon as president, they will provoke 300 Comalcalcos at each of IFE's regional headquarters and its national seat, converting those offices, as occurred last night in Tabasco, into white collar prisons, from which the electoral delinquents will not escape. That kind of turn of events will bring with it Bolivian-style highway blockades, and the corresponding halt of the flow of food, oil and other necessities from fertile Southern Mexico to Northern Mexico (as dry season begins; provoking a massive exodus of immigrants across the border while simultaneously stopping the flow of food and goods to the United States). And, with the fresh history of the political rise of a Mexican-American immigrant protest movement on the U.S. side of the border, the conflict will not be containable only in Mexico.

The consequences of trying to impose a Mexican president by fraud have already grown out of anybody's control: Not Fox, not Bush, not even Lopez Obrador would be able to hold back the masses. What occurred last night in Comalcalco, Tabasco is a glimpse of the nightmare to come for those in power if they do not permit the Mexican electorate's will.

The IFE and the PAN are in check, soon to be checkmate. In that political reality, the only path for survival by those in power is to permit a recount of ballots, and hope that no more signs of tampering occur in its course. As of last night, the only feasible path for the system became to get out of the way of the presidency of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. This electoral game will soon be over. And then a whole "other" chapter will begin.

Her house was less than 1,000 ft. from a U.S. military checkpoint just outside the Iraqi town of Mahmudiyah, and soldiers manning the gate started stopping by just to look at her. Her mother, who grew concerned enough to make plans for Abeer to move in with a cousin, told relatives that whenever she caught the Americans ogling her daughter, they would give her the thumbs-up sign, point to the girl and say, "Very good, very good."

Abeer's brother Mohammed, 13, told TIME he once watched his sister, frozen in fear, as a U.S. soldier ran his index finger down her cheek.

As Mexico's leading newsweekly, Proceso, concluded from its own investigations:

"The decision by the IFE (Federal Electoral Institute) to leave the announcement of its PREP (Preliminary Elections Results Program) results in suspense, in spite of the fact it could have done so before midnight on Sunday, confirms that this agency has been an ally of the federal government in its goal of avoiding, at all costs, the arrival of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to the presidency."

...

It is objectively false to report, as major news organizations have done, that there was a "recount" of votes on Wednesday. There was no such thing. What occurred was the first actual counting of reported precinct results, something that occurs days after every election, and the results demonstrate the overwhelming evidence that a full recount is necessary in order to achieve an accurate result.

On Wednesday, there was partial recount of less than one percent of the ballots: a partial recount that lowered Calderon's supposed margin of victory by more than six percentage points, or more than 13,000 votes. In the context of the fraudulent results discovered in this sample of recounted ballots, it can therefore be projected that a recount of just 18.7 percent of the ballots would tie the race. A full recount - if the votes in the ballot boxes have not been tampered with or disappeared (as has already occurred in various parts of the Republic when marked ballots have been discovered in municipal dumps and garbage cans on the streets) - will show a victory by candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador by more than one million votes: 1,056, 900, more closely estimated.

Mexico's official vote count unfolded more like a suspense novel than an electoral process yesterday. Commentators and common citizens sat poised at television or computer screens as Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's two-and-a-half point lead gradually dwindled until--at four in the morning--the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderon, pulled ahead. The final tally showed an unbelievably thin margin of just over half a percentage point.

The operative word here is "unbelievable." Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and large parts of the population have publicly questioned the results. In a morning press conference, Lopez Obrador announced he will challenge the vote count in the Electoral Tribunal. "We cannot accept these results," he stated, citing "numerous irregularities--to put it mildly."

...

Even as the votes were still being counted, the PRD and reporters began presenting evidence of instances of alleged errors and manipulation in Sunday's election. Lopez Obrador mentioned two examples to the press: manipulation of preliminary results that showed a consistent but narrowing Calderon lead, and the omission of thousands of polling place results until after the opposition protested. He did not go into detail but promised a full explanation on Saturday at an informative assembly called to be held in Mexico City's central plaza.

Although Sunday's voting was peaceful and turnout high, reporters in the streets and letters to the press testify to the thousands of voters who waited in line for hours, only to be told that their polling place had run out of ballots. Thousands more were informed that their names had disappeared from the rolls. These people now complain that they were frustrated in the exercise of their civic duty by a system they suspect of bias. They are joined by millions more who are convinced that the whole process - from the campaigns to the count - was riddled with inequities.

Mexico's official vote count unfolded more like a suspense novel than an electoral process yesterday. Commentators and common citizens sat poised at television or computer screens as Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's two-and-a-half point lead gradually dwindled until--at four in the morning--the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderon, pulled ahead. The final tally showed an unbelievably thin margin of just over half a percentage point.

The operative word here is "unbelievable." Lopez Obrador's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and large parts of the population have publicly questioned the results. In a morning press conference, Lopez Obrador announced he will challenge the vote count in the Electoral Tribunal. "We cannot accept these results," he stated, citing "numerous irregularities--to put it mildly."

...

Even as the votes were still being counted, the PRD and reporters began presenting evidence of instances of alleged errors and manipulation in Sunday's election. Lopez Obrador mentioned two examples to the press: manipulation of preliminary results that showed a consistent but narrowing Calderon lead, and the omission of thousands of polling place results until after the opposition protested. He did not go into detail but promised a full explanation on Saturday at an informative assembly called to be held in Mexico City's central plaza.

Although Sunday's voting was peaceful and turnout high, reporters in the streets and letters to the press testify to the thousands of voters who waited in line for hours, only to be told that their polling place had run out of ballots. Thousands more were informed that their names had disappeared from the rolls. These people now complain that they were frustrated in the exercise of their civic duty by a system they suspect of bias. They are joined by millions more who are convinced that the whole processfrom the campaigns to the countwas riddled with inequities.

Following a series of bloody June attacks on Gaza by Israeli forces, including the weekend shelling of a beach that killed 8 Palestinian civilians, including 7 members of the same family and injured a further 32 civilians, including 13 children (9 June); a missile attack on a Gazan highway that killed eleven and injured 30 (13 June); and another missile attack that killed 3 children and wounded 15 others (20 June), Palestinian militants carried out a raid on Israeli military positions near Gaza on June 25th.

The raid resulted in the killing of two soldiers and the capture of one, Cpl Gilad Shalit. Israel had threatened an assault and the assassination of top Hamas leaders if the soldier was not freed, and has been deploying tanks along the border for several days. At 11:51PM* (Palestine time) on June 27th, Israel launched a large scale military assault on Gaza, as Israeli fighter planes carried out three airstrikes on Gazan bridges. Further strikes against Gazan power plants took place at 1:42AM, sending most of Gaza into darkness. At 2:24AM, Israeli forces began moving into Gaza to take control of the open areas east of Rafah.

At 5:08 a.m. Israeli fighter planes began flying low over Gaza, causing intentional sonic booms. According to Israeli PM Ehud Olmert the aim of the invasion was "not to mete out punishment but rather to apply pressure so that the abducted soldier will be freed. We want to create a new equation  freeing the abducted soldier in return for lessening the pressure on the Palestinians."

Take Haditha. It lies deep in the Sunni-dominated Anbar province, where several US troops have been killed by insurgents. On November 19 a 13-man squad of marines were about two miles from their base when a roadside bomb exploded, killing one soldier and seriously injuring two others.

Civilian survivors say the marines then went on the rampage, killing five unarmed men in a car and bursting into houses and shooting people at close range as they tried to protect their children or prayed for their lives. The death certificates describe well-aimed shots to the head and chest: a massacre by any definition of the word. "I think they were just blinded by hate ... and they just lost control," said James Crossan, one of the injured marines, referring to his colleagues.

The US squad leader now under investigation describes things differently. He says that after the bombing he saw young men jump out of a white car and run away. So he shot them, understanding that the rules of engagement allowed him to shoot men of military age running away from the site of a bombing.

Then, believing they were under fire from nearby houses, he says, they broke into a house. One threw a grenade into a room where they heard voices while another sprayed the room with gunfire. This is called "prepping the room". They murdered seven civilians, including a four-year-old boy.

They claim they then saw a back door open and, believing they were in "hot pursuit" of a gunman, broke into a second house and prepped another room, killing eight civilians, including two women and five children aged from three to 14. The imperialist "wears a mask", wrote George Orwell, "and his face grows to fit it".

Bear in mind that this is the marines' account, according to their lawyers - in other words, the account they feel puts them in the best possible light. Let's assume they were telling the truth. Given everything we know about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by the US, what military-aged Iraqi male in his right mind would not run from a battalion of American soldiers after a bomb has gone off? How does blindly spraying a room of civilians with gunfire square with winning hearts and minds?

After Haditha was exposed, the US military pledged to provide its troops with a course on "core warrior values" to ensure they were aware of battlefield ethics. But the problem is not just that these marines did not play it by the book - the book itself is the problem. These atrocities are not contrary to the ethics of this particular occupation but the natural and inevitable consequence of it.

In response to news of Haditha, George Bush said: "If, in fact, laws were broken, there will be punishment ... The challenge for us is to make sure the actions of a few do not tarnish the good work of the many."

International law was broken but there will be no punishment. The few who are responsible remain in the White House while the many who are embroiled in the conflict are brutalised or murdered, or both. "You've got to do whatever it takes to get home," said one marine. "If it takes clearing by fire where there's civilians, that's it." There is, of course, another option. Just go home. If the wanton murder of civilians is what it takes to complete your mission, there is clearly something wrong with the mission. You can only talk about a few bad apples for so long before you need to take a serious look at the barrel.

Photographs taken by American military intelligence have provided crucial evidence that up to 24 Iraqis were massacred by marines in Haditha, an insurgent stronghold on the banks of the Euphrates.

One portrays an Iraqi mother and young child, kneeling on the floor, as if in prayer. They have been shot dead at close range.

The pictures show other victims, shot execution-style in the head and chest in their homes. An American government official said they revealed that the marines involved had "suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership".

...

[76-year-old Abdul Hameed Ali] Hassan's granddaughter, Iman Waleed, 10, was in her nightclothes. "About 10 marines entered the house," she said. "They threw hand grenades and began firing in all directions. Grandpa was sitting close to the hall and they shot him dead."

In a nearby room, her father was reading the Koran. "The American soldiers went into the room and killed him too," Iman said. "They gathered all of us into one room -- my grandma, my mama, my brothers and my uncles. They threw in two handgrenades and started shooting at us."

The adults tried to protect the children with their bodies, but were slain. When Iman dared to look, she saw that "everyone was dead around me except for my brother and my uncle".

To be sure, the current conflict is historically rooted in the deposed regime's repression. "We unscrewed the lid on the jar," [former chief of Middle East intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency, Patrick] Lang reckons. But the extent of the mayhem was not inevitable.

"To a large extent the chaos is of U.S. making," says Iraqi scholar Isam al-Khafaji, who quit in disgust after serving two months in 2003 with the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council, a group of returned expatriates who advised the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). In the summer of 2003, the CPA dissolved the heavily Sunni Arab officer corps of the Iraqi army, just as the U.S. military was beginning the first of its indiscriminate sweeps in the "Sunni triangle." Together with the vengeful "debaathification" policies pushed by Ahmad Chalabi and other former exiles, these policies convinced Sunni Arabs that they would be treated as the enemy in post-Saddam Iraq.

The CPA made its most damaging decision in July, when it allocated seats in the Iraqi Governing Council to Shiite Arabs, Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Turkmen and Christians according to estimates of their share of the population. For the first time, sectarian and ethnic affiliation became the formal organizing principle of Iraqi politics, exacerbating the tendency of Iraqi factions to pursue maximum benefits for their own community at the expense of Iraq as a nation. Sectarian and ethnic divisions deepened and widened with each "milestone" in the U.S.-sponsored transition to electoral democracy.

Through ideological rigidity and incompetence, therefore, the United States has midwifed both an anti-occupation guerrilla war and an unconventional civil war over control of the country and its petroleum resources after the United States departs. The two wars are tightly intertwined.

---

The U.S. occupation may no longer be the biggest cause of violence in Iraq, but it is still one of the causes, and it cannot be the cure. The one partial blessing the United States can bestow on Iraq is to remove itself from the equation, and chances are it will have to do so unilaterally. No one should pretend, however, that this would be a noble course of action or a panacea for Iraq's ills. It would only be a very bad decision necessitated by the even worse decisions that were made before. [read the whole article]

So many bodies arrive at the morgue each day - 40 is not unusual on a "quiet" day - that it is impossible to let relatives in to identify them. Hence the slideshow in the yard outside. The bodies are dumped in sewage plants or irrigation canals, or just in the middle of the street. Many show signs of torture. Every morning a procession of pickup trucks, minibuses and cars line up with their coffins outside the concrete blast walls of the ministry of health to pick up their cargo. One death often courts another. Many Sunnis say the mourners are attacked en route. When they go to retrieve the body of a relative, family members often wait in the car clutching their weapons in anticipation.

After months of argument about whether Iraq is teetering on the verge of civil war, a "national unity" government is due to be inaugurated today. Legislators plan to swear in a new prime minister and cabinet, and much will be made in London and Washington of the fact that this completes a democratic transition that began in December with the election of its parliament. But the reality encountered during three weeks behind the barricades of Baghdad's increasingly bloody sectarian conflict has more in common with the "ethnic cleansing" of the Balkans than the optimistic rhetoric to be heard on the manicured lawns of the embassy compounds and in western capitals.

Suppose I were to leave my office here in Chicago and walk the short distance to the kidney dialysis unit down the road and pull out the tubes to which four elderly patients were attached, making them seriously ill or killing them. Suppose I said I did this because I disagreed with the Bush Administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq, its use of torture, and its countless other profoundly undemocractic and illegal policies. What would that make me? A murderer for sure, a monster and a new vicious kind of terrorist. Such an action would be unconscionable in any moral system.

And yet this is what the so-called "international community," a few powerful governments, feel entitled to do to Palestinians because those governments disagree with the policies of the elected Hamas authority. Ha'aretz reported on May 9 that "At least four people suffering from kidney diseases died in the Gaza Strip in April, after the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority Health Ministry cut the Shifa Hospital's budget for the necessary dialysis treatments." The Palestinian Authority is near to collapse due to a decision by the European Union, the largest donor to Palestinians under occupation, to cutoff vital aid. At the same time, the United States has moved aggressively to threaten anyone who tries to render assistance to suffering Palestinians, scaring banks from allowing cash transfers to the Palestinian Authority.

On one of the days when multiple car bombs drained the blood and souls of scores in Baghdad, my closest friend wrote from there: "Dahr, This is a very sad letter I'm writing you as a friend. My tears are coming down due to the humiliation, suffering, frustration, thwarting defeat and discomfiture we the Iraqi are living in. Please let people know some of the news of what is happening to my country, my people and my religion."

This past Saturday I received information from the main morgue in Baghdad from a doctor there, name withheld for security reasons. "Yesterday we received 36 bodies from the police pickups. All of them are unknown, without IDs, and we don't have refrigerators to put them in since all of ours are completely full already. So we had to keep them on the ground. 12 of them were handcuffed, most of them received between 2 and 10 bullets, some many more than 10. We are not going to put them into biopsy. Reason for their death is known. Most of them are between 20 to 30 years ... This is the number that was brought directly to us in one day, plus there are the dead who are sent to the hospitals. They will be put in the hospitals' morgues. We don't receive bodies from hospitals nowadays, because we don't have a place to keep them. I can't tell the exact number of killed people now, but it depends on the situation. But what I can assure you of is that since the shrine explosion, deaths have almost doubled. Daily, we receive between 70 to 80 bodies ... you can see within these 40 minutes that I've talked with you, we received 9 bodies. Nearly every morning the count will be doubled twice this number, for the police find them at night. Most are either found in the streets or killed without sending them to hospitals. Four days ago we received 24 bodies in just 2 hours."

By far and away the survey that comes closest to the true number of dead in Iraq to date was the one conducted for the Lancet. Yet even Les Roberts, the lead author of that report and one of the world's top epidemiologists with the Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said this February that there might be as many as 300,000 Iraqi civilian deaths generated by the US invasion and occupation. So as not to skew the results, it is important to note that the survey did not include areas where major combat had occurred such as Fallujah, Najaf, and Sadr City - home to roughly three million Iraqis.

Any news agency, government, or other organization reporting anything less are actively attempting to hide the level of slaughter and mayhem and thus aiding and abetting the ongoing war crimes in Iraq.

President Evo Morales of Bolivia ordered the military to occupy energy fields around the country on Monday as he placed Bolivia's oil and gas reserves under state control.

He gave foreign companies 180 days to renegotiate existing contracts with the government, or leave the country. "The time has come, the awaited day, a historic day in which Bolivia retakes absolute control of our natural resources," Mr. Morales declared, according to The Associated Press. "The looting by the foreign companies has ended."

The decree is the latest step by Latin America governments from Venezuela to Ecuador to assert greater control over the energy sector, moves that have sent shivers through foreign producers. Mr. Morales's decree, in effect to nationalize Bolivia's energy industry, which includes the second-biggest gas reserves in Latin America after Venezuela, quickly added to the nervousness of foreign producers.

Much of the current immigration debate is founded on a deep and arrogant mistake: the belief that hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Mexicans, cross undocumented into the United States each year in search of a better life. This view tells us that men, women, and children risk their lives crossing the United States-Mexico border because they have chosen to seek out something better.

After spending over three months traveling through 18 of Mexico's 31 states on the trail of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation's Other Campaign, I have documented a very different view of the forces behind mass migration to the United States--the view of Mexicans who have migrated and returned, of those whose families left and did not come back, of those who have resisted migration, and those who are readying their day packs for the long walk north.

In their experience, there is no real choice, no search for something better. There is only the option of playing their lives against the coyotes and the desert, or betting on the slow but certain destitution of sweatshop labor, dispossession, and the political violence of the government and local mafia groups. This is the cruel gamble that the neoliberal political model in Mexico and the United States calls free choice.

But the myth has it that Mexicans cross the border to reap the benefits of capitalism, to work hard and earn enough money to buy nicer cars and clothes than they could in Mexico, as if Mexico itself were not a capitalist country. As if Mexico and the United States were not co-signatories, along with Canada, to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Since passing NAFTA in 1994--the year of the Zapatista uprising--Mexico and the United States have officially shared the same model of capitalism, a model that seeks to eliminate communal land holdings in the Mexican countryside, forcing millions into a homeless flight to the fields of the United States' multi-billion dollar agriculture, construction and service industries.

Demonizing Western parallels of Iran enriching a few grams of uranium as akin to Adolf Hitler's march into the Rhineland is positively silly. So far Iran has only disregarded a non-binding request from the UN Security Council. The uranium-enrichment program may be under the operational control of the Pasdaran, but Ahmadinejad does not set Iran's nuclear policy: the supreme leader does, his guidelines followed by the Supreme National Security Council, which is led by the leader's protege, Ali Larijani. Khamenei and Larijani have both substantially toned down the rhetoric; Ahmadinejad hasn't.

The new clashes between Shi'ite militiamen dressed in Iraqi military and police uniforms and resistance fighters and residents from the Sunni Adhamiya district of Baghdad have convinced many that what Baghdad is witnessing is no less than a civil war.

Alvaro Uribe's procession to a second term as Colombia's President hit a stumbling block yesterday as he responded wildly to allegations that his government colluded with paramilitaries to kill civilians.

Mr Uribe, the last man standing among Washington's right-wing allies in South America, is riding high in the polls ahead of the presidential election on 28 May. His success is crucial to the White House, which has seen a succession of sympathetic governments defeated in the so-called "pink wave" of left-wing leaders who have swept to power in Latin America.

... allegations from Colombia's respected news magazine Semana ... includes evidence of a plot by the state security agency to destabilise Colombia's left-wing neighbour, Venezuela.

The fresh round of reports prompted Mr Uribe to launch a diatribe against the publication's editor, Alejandro Santos. "I'm not going to allow accusations to stand that the government assassinated labour leaders or was implicated in a conspiracy against Venezuela or somehow allowed me to steal the 2002 elections," he told a local radio station.

Mr Uribe named journalists and commentators, including Ramiro Bejarano, a lawyer who served on a commission appointed last year to investigate the state security agency (DAS). "Our investigation showed the paramilitaries had deeply infiltrated the DAS," Mr Bejarano told a news agency. "This is as serious as if, in the United States, the FBI had been infiltrated by the Mafia ... Uribe's reaction has been not to clean up the agency but to attack journalists covering the story." The President's critics point to his refusal to launch an investigation into the head of the DAS, Jorge Noguera, instead posting him out of sight in Milan after he resigned when the scandal broke last year.

Semana interviewed a former DAS official, now in jail on related charges, who confirmed there had been collusion between the security service and paramilitaries. He also alleged Colombian government involvement in a plan to "destabilise Venezuela".

Undaunted by the difficult war in Iraq, President George W. Bush reaffirmed Thursday his strike-first policy against perceived enemy countries while declaring that Iran may pose the biggest challenge of all for the United States.

In a 49-page national security report, the president said diplomacy is the U.S. preference in halting the spread of nuclear and other heinous weapons.

"When the consequences of an attack with weapons of mass destruction are potentially so devastating, we cannot afford to stand idly by as grave dangers materialize. ... The place of pre-emption in our national security strategy remains the same," Bush wrote.

What the corporate media overwhelmingly ignores in Milosevic's death is what they ignored in his life as well--his intimate knowledge of US war crimes in Yugoslavia. While Milosevic was undoubtedly a war criminal who deserved to be tried for his crimes, he was also the only man in the unique position of being able to expose and detail the full extent of the US role in the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In fact, that is precisely what he was fighting to do at his war crimes trial when he died.

Because of the rule of victors' justice in the ad hoc tribunal system (a poor and unfair substitute for a true international court), Milosevic's case would have been the only international trial to potentially expose the details of the illegal, US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia for 78 days in 1999. While the US-backed court consistently tried to limit Milosevic's right to speak, stripping him of his right to self-representation, Milosevic battled regularly to raise US war crimes. Sadly, with Milosevic will likely die the last hope the victims of these crimes in Yugoslavia had of getting their day (if it could even be called that) in court--a tragic and unjust reality to begin with--that speaks volumes about the twisted state of international justice.

Milosevic's cause, regardless of what one thinks of it, was a casualty of 9/11--an event that relegated him and his trial to the annals of history before it was even over. Most people in the world--with the exception of those in the Balkans where the proceedings were broadcast live, daily--probably didn't even know Milosevic was still on trial in the Hague. It became an obscure sideshow to the blood and gore unfolding constantly on the international stage.

Milosevic's death means that those who bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days beginning 7 years ago this month, killing thousands, will be, once and for all protected from any public scrutiny for their crimes. However opportunistic Milosevic may have been, he would have been one of the few people to appear at the Hague that could have--and would have--laid out these crimes in great detail. Now, there is almost certain to be no condemnation of the US bombing of Radio Television Serbia, killing 16 media workers, the cluster bombing of the Nis marketplace, shredding human beings into meat, the use of depleted uranium munitions and the targeting of petrochemical plants causing toxic and chemical waste to pour into the Danube River. There will be no condemnation of the bombing of Albanian refugees by the US or the deliberate targeting of a civilian passenger train or the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Milosevic also would have discussed how the US supports a regime in Kosovo that has systematically expelled Serbs, Romas and other ethnic minorities from their homes and burnt down scores of churches. He would have discussed the role of the US in funding and arming the Kosovo Liberation Army, which operates like a death squad and how the new prime minister of Kosovo, Agim Ceku, is a US-trained war criminal who gained infamy in both the Bosnian war and the 1999 Kosovo conflict. And Milosevic would have talked of the US interference in the Yugoslav elections in 2000 and the ultimate neoliberal takeover that was the aim of Clinton's sanctions and 78 days of bombing. In reality, it would have fallen on deaf ears, but it would have been stated for the record.

An SAS soldier has resigned from the army, describing the military intervention in Iraq as a "war of aggression" and "morally wrong". The soldier said he witnessed "dozens of illegal acts" by US forces there.

Ben Griffin, 28, who left after three months in Baghdad, is believed to be the first SAS soldier to refuse to go into combat and to leave the army on moral grounds. His decision comes at a time of growing disenchantment among British soldiers about their presence in Iraq.

He said he had witnessed dozens of illegal acts by US fighters who viewed Iraqis as "sub-human". Mr Griffin said: "I saw a lot of things in Baghdad that were illegal or just wrong. The Americans were doing things like chucking farmers into Abu Ghraib, or handing them over to the Iraqi authorities, knowing full well they were going to be tortured."

As the war in Iraq grinds into its fourth year, a growing proportion of Americans are expressing unfavorable views of Islam, and a majority now say that Muslims are disproportionately prone to violence, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The poll found that nearly half of Americans -- 46 percent -- have a negative view of Islam, seven percentage points higher than in the tense months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when Muslims were often targeted for violence.

According to the poll, the proportion of Americans who believe that Islam helps to stoke violence against non-Muslims has more than doubled since the attacks, from 14 percent in January 2002 to 33 percent today.

The survey also found that one in three Americans have heard prejudiced comments about Muslims lately. In a separate question, slightly more (43 percent) reported having heard negative remarks about Arabs. One in four Americans admitted to harboring prejudice toward Muslims, the same proportion that expressed some personal bias against Arabs.

What's happening is something completely new in the history of the hemisphere. Since the Spanish conquest the countries of Latin America have been pretty much separated from one another and oriented toward the imperial power. There are also very sharp splits between the tiny wealthy elite and the huge suffering population. The elites sent their capital, took their trips, had their second homes, sent their children to study in whatever European country their country was closely connected with. I mean, even their transportation systems were oriented toward the outside for export of resources and so on.

For the first time, they are beginning to integrate and in quite a few different ways. Venezuela and Cuba is one case. MERCOSUR, which is still not functioning very much, is another case. Venezuela, of course, just joined MERCOSUR, which is a big step forward for it and it was greatly welcomed by the presidents of Argentina, Brazil.

For the first time the Indian population is becoming politically quite active. They just won an election in Bolivia which is pretty remarkable. There is a huge Indian population in Ecuador, even in Peru, and some of them are calling for an Indian nation. Now they want to control their own resources. In fact, many don't even want their resources developed. Many don't see any particular point in having their culture and lifestyle destroyed so that people can sit in traffic jams in New York.

Furthermore, they are beginning to throw out the IMF. In the past, the US could prevent unwelcome developments such as independence in Latin America, by violence; supporting military coups, subversion, invasion and so on. That doesn't work so well any more. The last time they tried in 2002 in Venezuela, the US had to back down because of enormous protests from Latin America, and of course the coup was overthrown from within. That's very new.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened. Argentina is just essentially ridding itself of the IMF, as they say.  They are paying off the debts to the IMF. The IMF rules that they followed had totally disastrous effects. They are being helped in that by Venezuela, which is buying up part of the Argentine debt.

Bolivia will probably do the same. Bolivia's had 25 years of rigorous adherence to IMF rules. Per capita income now is less than it was 25 years ago. They want to get rid of it. The other countries are doing the same. The IMF is essentially the US Treasury Department.  It is the economic weapon that's alongside the military weapon for maintaining control. That's being dismantled.

All of this is happening against the background of very substantial popular movements, which, to the extent that they existed in the past, were crushed by violence, state terror, Operation Condor, one monstrosity after another. That weapon is no longer available. Furthermore, there is South-South integration going on, so Brazil, and South Africa and India are establishing relations.

Thousands of detainees held in Iraq are still being denied basic human rights with reports of torture rife, Amnesty International has said. (report pdf)

It said its interviews with ex-inmates across Iraq had shown the lessons of the Abu Ghraib jail scandal appeared to have been ignored.

The US and UK insist prisoners are treated to international standards.

It is not in our power stop Bush's visit. It is in our power to protest it, and we will. The government, the police and the corporate press will do everything they can to minimise the extent of our outrage. Nothing the Happy-news Papers say can change the fact that all over India, from the biggest cities to the smallest villages, in public places and private homes, George W Bush, incumbent president of the United States of America, world nightmare incarnate, is just not welcome.

From January 2004 to January 2005, I served in various places in Iraq (including Abu Ghraib) as an Army interrogator. Following orders that I believed were legal, I used military working dogs during interrogations. I terrified my interrogation subjects, but I never got intelligence (mostly because 90 percent of them were probably innocent, but that's another story). Perhaps, I have thought for a long time, I also deserve to be prosecuted. But if that is the case, culpability goes much farther up the chain of command than the Army and the Bush administration have so far been willing to admit.

Hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every month in Baghdad alone by death squads working from the Ministry of the Interior, the United Nations' outgoing human rights chief in Iraq has revealed.

John Pace, who left Baghdad two weeks ago, told The Independent on Sunday that up to three-quarters of the corpses stacked in the city's mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. Much of the killing, he said, was carried out by Shia Muslim groups under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.

...

One important development over the past few days is that it is clearly becoming very difficult to use American or British troops to keep the peace, undermining the argument that they are the only bulwark against civil war. The occupation forces lack the legitimacy to play the role of UN peacekeepers; it is almost impossible to have US soldiers defend a Sunni mosque against a Shia crowd, because if they open fire they will be seen as having joined one side in a sectarian struggle.

In Mr Pace's view, the violence in Iraq is being made worse by the seizing of young Iraqi men by US troops and Iraqi police as they move from city to city carrying out raids. "The vast majority are innocent," he said, "but they very often don't get released for months. You don't eliminate terrorism by what they're doing now. Military intervention causes serious human rights and humanitarian problems to large numbers of innocent civilians ... The result is that such individuals turn into terrorists at the end of their detention."

The shattered golden dome of Samarra is yet another milestone in George Bush's "long war" - in which a civil war in Iraq shows every sign of being a devastating feature. But what sort of civil war? I am convinced it is not the type of war that politicians in Washington and London, and much of the western media, have been anticipating.

The past few days' events have strengthened this conviction. It has not been Sunni religious symbols that hundreds of thousands of angry marchers protesting at the bombing of the shrine have targeted, but US flags. The slogan that united them on Wednesday was: "Kalla, kalla Amrica, kalla kalla lill-irhab" - no to America, no to terrorism. The Shia clerics most listened to by young militants swiftly blamed the occupation for the bombing. They included Moqtada al-Sadr; Nasrallah, leader of Hizbullah in Lebanon; Ayatollah Khalisi, leader of the Iraqi National Foundation Congress; and Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's spiritual leader. Along with Grand Ayatollah Sistani, they also declared it a grave "sin" to attack Sunnis - as did all the Sunni clerics about attacks on Shias. Sadr was reported by the BBC as calling for revenge on Sunnis - in fact, he said "no Sunni would do this" and called for revenge on the occupation.

...

For nearly two years, we have been inundated with US and British "exit strategies". So, why do you need a strategy to pack up, end the occupation and let the Iraqi people decide their own future? The "threat of civil war" of course. But that is to ignore the war unfolding in Iraq thanks to the continued occupation.

None of these exit strategies will work for the simple reason that they are based on an unrealisable ambition: to have the Iraqi cake and eat it. All the Bush and Blair strategies are based on maintaining a pro-US regime in Baghdad. Freed from this hated occupation, proud and independent Iraqis will never elect a collection of US- and British-backed proteges.

Iraq took a lethal step closer to disintegration and civil war yesterday after a devastating attack on one of the country's holiest sites. The destruction of the golden-domed Shia shrine in Samarra sparked a round of bloody sectarian retaliation in which up to 60 Sunni mosques were attacked and scores of people were killed or injured.

The bomb attack has enraged the majority Shia population, who regard the shrine in the same way that Roman Catholics view St Peter's in Rome.

Almost 100 prisoners have died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since August 2002, according to US group Human Rights First. Of the 98 deaths, at least 34 were suspected or confirmed homicides.

Human Rights First representative Deborah Pearlstein told Newsnight she was "extremely comfortable" that the information was reliable.

The report defines the 34 cases classified as homicides as "caused by intentional or reckless behaviour". It says another 11 cases have been deemed suspicious and that between eight and 12 prisoners were tortured to death.

But despite this, charges are rare and sentences are light, the report says.

The election of René Préval as president of Haiti can be a turning point in our government's relationship to the Haitian people. Préval clearly has a preference to help Haiti's poor, and it was the poor who gave him an overwhelming electoral victory that was four times larger than his closest rival.

Who Préval picks as a prime minister and members of his cabinet should be his own affair and not a ''litmus test'' for anything. Our efforts to force a government of national reconciliation in Haiti is an affront to Haitian sovereignty as much as it would be for the Chinese government to tell a Republican president that he had to include Democrats, Libertarians, Socialists and others in his government to show unity.

Similarly, we should not hamper efforts to allow all Haitians to return from abroad who have been forced into exile or interfere in the reconstruction of Fanmi Lavalas or any other party the Haitian people support.

Also, no funds from either the Agency for International Development or the International Republican Institute should be expended to undermine Haiti's political parties or to create new political parties. These are matters best left to the Haitian people to decide.

"The United States government should either expeditiously bring all Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial ... or release them without further delay," read the UN Commission on Human Rights report.

Among the findings are that detainees are subject to illegal "degrading treatment," "excessive violence" and "arbitrary detention." It says these practices violate international laws banning torture, among others.

The front-runner in last week's presidential election will be declared the winner as part of an agreement by leaders of Haiti's interim government to retabulate the votes, a high-ranking official of the Organization of American States said Wednesday night.

The agreement, to be announced Thursday, is a result of negotiations by the front-runner, Rene Préval, government officials, foreign diplomats and international observers, including the Organization of American States. Details were still being worked out, and a United Nations official cautioned that the deal could still fall apart.

The official from the Organization of American States, who insisted on anonymity because of the fragile nature of the agreement, said that loopholes in Haitian electoral law allow the government to discard an estimated 85,000 blank ballots included in the original tally. By excluding them, Mr. Préval's lead would increase from 48.7 percent of the votes to slightly more than 51 percent. Under election rules, the winner needs 50 percent plus one vote to avoid a run-off.

An adviser to Mr. Préval, who confirmed the agreement, said that electoral authorities had indicated they began recovering a large number of missing ballots that were believed destroyed or stolen, and that those ballots, estimated at 8 percent of all ballots cast, were overwhelmingly in Mr. Préval's favor.

...

International electoral officials acknowledged that poll workers could have improperly recorded unused ballots as blank ballots. In at least two polling places, said one such official, nearly 100 percent of the ballots were recorded as blank. But the international officials also said they suspected some cases of fraud, saying they found it had hard to believe that peasant farmers in rural areas would walk for hours, then stand in line for hours, to cast blank ballots.

Thousands protested after charred and still smoldering ballots were found on a garbage dump in Port-au-Prince, reinforcing the claims of fraud leveled by Rene Préval, a former president opposed by the same wealthy elite who helped drive Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile two years ago.

Crowds poured out on Wednesday from slums like Cite Soleil and Belair, where Préval has won the same passionate support among Haiti's poor masses that formed the backbone of Aristide's political power.

Haiti's elections on February 7 went well enough that the post-election vote counting should have been uncontroversial. The turnout was huge, there was almost no violence, and the people's choice was so clear that the second place finisher received less than 12% of the vote. But incredibly, a week later the final results have not been declared, and the Electoral Council is in disarray. The voters have taken to the streets to protect their vote, and the clear winner is alleging fraud.

The battle lines have been drawn around the 50% of the total vote that former President Rene Préval needs to avoid a runoff election against his distant nearest challenger. Initial official results and unofficial reports had Mr. Préval comfortably above that bar, but his official numbers crept steadily downward over the last week. As of Tuesday morning, with 90% of the votes counted, Mr. Préval was stuck at 48.7%, 22,586 votes shy of outright victory.

In a better world, Mr. Préval would be happy to go into a runoff with a 48.7% share, assured that he could attract 1.3% of the voters more easily than his opponent, Leslie Manigat, could attract 38%. Mr. Manigat might even save his country time and money by conceding an obviously futile contest. But this is Haiti, where electoral support does not always translate into political power. Mr. Préval and his supporters know that the vote only came close to 50% because the votes of Haiti's poor- who overwhelmingly voted for Mr. Préval- had been systematically suppressed through a series of irregularities, from the voter registration last summer through election day. They draw a line from this vote suppression through questionable tabulation practices, and see it pointing towards a second round somehow stolen from them.

...

The Electoral Council is supposed to be running the counting, but it is not. Jacques Bernard was appointed "Executive Director" of the Council- a position not previously recognized in Haitian law- by the Prime Minister late last year. He is running the show and has kept regular Council members out of the counting room. Councilor Pierre Richard Duchemin charges "manipulation," and "an effort to stop people from asking questions." Another Councilor, Patrick Fequiere, claims that Mr. Bernard is working without the Council and not telling them where his information is coming from. The UN Peacekeeping mission was forced to remove the doors to the tabulation center to prevent Mr. Bernard and his advisors from acting secretly.

A large number of tally sheets from polling centers are not being counted. 254 sheets were destroyed, reportedly by gangs from political parties opposed to Préval. 504 tally sheets reportedly lack the codes needed to enter them officially. The missing tally sheets probably represent about 190,000 votes- over 9% of the total votes cast- and according to the UN, disproportionately affect poor areas that support Préval.

...

Haiti's voters ... have seen enough stolen elections to qualify as world-class experts in the field. They can trace the pattern from registration through election day to the current calculations, and they can see their votes discounted at every step. They know that they did enough to win according to the rules of the game, which they believe in. But they know that voting, in Haiti, is not enough, so they are now out in the streets by the thousands, erecting barricades, protesting, even occupying the pool at the luxurious Montana Hotel, where the votes are counted and the journalists and other expatriots are lodged.

The IGH (Interim Government of Haiti) and the US government have responded by calling on Préval to call off the protests. He implored his supporters not to damage people or property, but also recommended that they keep demonstrating until the IGH stops trying to steal the election. Haiti's voters will undoubtedly take this recommendation. They have done their job in marking their ballots, but know that they need to make sure that the IGH counts them.

Two members of Haiti's electoral council on Sunday questioned vote counting procedures, while throngs of supporters of leading presidential candidate Rene Préval poured into the streets, chanting angry allegations of fraud. Préval, a former president widely supported by Haiti's poor masses, was falling short by less than a percentage point of winning February 7 elections outright without a runoff, with 75 percent of votes counted.

Electoral council member Pierre Richard Duchemin said he was being denied his rightful access to information about the tabulation process and called for an investigation. "According to me, there's a certain level of manipulation," Duchemin told The Associated Press, adding that "there is an effort to stop people from asking questions."

Patrick Fequiere, another electoral council member, said on local radio that Bernard was releasing results without notifying other council members, who did not know where Bernard was obtaining his information.

Jean-Henoc Faroul, the president of an electoral district with 400 000 voters northeast of the capital, accused the electoral commission of trying to force a runoff, saying ballot tally sheets from Préval strongholds have vanished. "The electoral council is trying to do what it can to diminish the percentage of Préval so it goes to a second round," said Faroul, who openly supports Préval's candidacy.

Of 2.2 million ballots cast, about 125,000 ballots have been declared invalid because of irregularities, raising suspicion among Préval supporters that polling officials are trying to steal the election. Another 4 percent of the ballots were blank but were still added into the total, making it harder for Préval to obtain the 50 percent plus one vote needed.

[Just adding the blank ballots to the vote total brings Préval's total below 50%. If ballots that were declared invalid were included, but blank ballots were not, Préval would win outright with 51.1 percent of the total. -ed.]

Last summer, Senator John McCain proposed an amendment to the must-pass Defense Appropriation Bill that would ban all "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment of detainees and set the U.S. Army Field Manual as the standard for any interrogation, whether by the military or the CIA. President Bush reacted by vowing to veto the bill, should it somehow pass the Republican-controlled Congress.

When Bush's bluff failed, the White House began lobbying for the insertion of loopholes into the proposed prohibition. First, Vice President Cheney pressed McCain to exempt the CIA from his ban. The senator refused. Next, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley weighed in, urging broad legal exemptions for CIA torturers. Again, the senator stood his ground. Suddenly, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon rewrote the Army Field Manual to teach interrogators, as the New York Times reported, "how to walk right up to the line between legal and illegal interrogation" -- changes one Defense official termed "a stick in McCain's eye."

To placate the White House, McCain eventually softened his prohibition by adding a legal defense for accused CIA and military interrogators that mimes the extreme exculpatory logic of the Justice Department's notorious August 2002 Bybee memo. Drafted to protect CIA interrogators after 9/11, this now-disavowed document argued that torture, as defined under U.S. law, required that the suffering inflicted "be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." In a section of McCain's amendment called "Protection of United States Government Personnel," the final legislation opened a little noticed but similarly cavernous legal loophole for future torturers. It allowed U.S. officials "engaging in specific operational practices that involve interrogation of aliens" to claim, if charged, that they "did not know that the practices [they used] were unlawful."

After the Senate passed McCain's torture ban by a resounding 90-9 vote, ending any hope of a presidential veto, the administration tried to further neutralize its impact by backing an amendment authored by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. As originally drafted, this amendment would have allowed the courts to consider all evidence collected under any but the most outrageous uses of "undue coercion." No less startlingly, it denied detainees in places like Guantanamo -- those "unlawful combatants" - any right to challenge their detention by filing writs of habeas corpus in U.S. courts. Complaining that "Non-Citizen Terrorists" at Guantanamo were filing cases over "the quality of their food," Graham urged passage of his amendment to spare "our troops fighting in the War on Terror" from being "sued in every court in the land by our enemies." For a mess of partisan pottage, the senator was bartering away this nation's constitutional birthright of habeas corpus, a foundational legal protection born of Parliament's long struggle to ban royal torture writs by the infamous Court of Star Chamber.

After the Senate approved Graham's amendment by a 49-42 vote on November 10, reformers led by Democratic Senator Carl Levin fought an uphill battle to moderate these extreme proposals -- replacing the bill's blanket acceptance of "coerced" evidence with ground rules for its evaluation by the courts and trying to limit the ban on habeas corpus appeals from Guantanamo to future cases, allowing those already filed to proceed.

But in the final legislation, titled "The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005," McCain's now-compromised ban on cruel treatment of detainees was effectively eviscerated by Graham's denial of legal redress. To nullify the landmark Supreme Court ruling that Guantanamo is, in fact, American territory and so falls under the purview of U.S. courts, Graham also stipulated in the final legislation that "the term 'United States,' when used in a geographic sense, does not include the United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay." In this way, he tried once again to deny detainees any legal basis for access to the courts. In effect, McCain's motion more or less bans torture, but Graham's removes any real mechanism for enforcing such a ban.

Angry crowds surged into cramped voting precincts in some of this city's poorest neighborhoods Tuesday, tussling with overwhelmed security guards and screaming their frustrations about long lines and delayed openings.

Voters are choosing among more than 30 candidates for president of this troubled nation, as well as selecting members of Haiti's national parliament. Former Haitian president Rene Préval is the front-runner in a race that seems to have narrowed in recent weeks to a handful of serious challengers, including former Haitian president Leslie Manigat and businessman Charles Henri Baker.

Préval's supporters were among the most outraged voters early Tuesday, arriving to find closed voting precincts in some neighborhoods. At a polling place near the sprawling slum, Cite Soleil, thousands of voters gathered hours before the 6 a.m. scheduled opening, but had yet to cast a single ballot by 11:30 a.m. Police and election officials there said they had no voting materials and, regardless, would not be able to start the balloting until they were able to control the unruly crowd.

While flash protests were assembling and disassembling in some of Port-au-Prince's most downtrodden areas, such as the downtown slum Bel-Air, voting appeared to be proceeding in an orderly fashion in more prosperous neighborhoods. But even in those sectors, many lines stretched for blocks and vendors pushing carts with the syrup-flavored crushed ice drink called Fresco were doing a brisk business.

Bands of voters marched through the streets, waving voting cards and complaining that their precincts were closed, leaving them with nowhere to vote.

"We need to vote," Emmanuel Noel, 31, screamed as he marched down a street in Bel-Air. "We have a card, but we can't find a place to vote. They're trying to keep out the people and give the election to bourgeoisie."

The Pentagon, readying for what it calls a "long war," yesterday laid out a new 20-year defense strategy that envisions U.S. troops deployed, often clandestinely, in dozens of countries at once to fight terrorism and other nontraditional threats.

Sharon, the father of Israel's unruly settlement enterprise and the person responsible for thousands of deaths in the Lebanon debacle, including the Sabra and Shatila massacre, altered his strategic thinking during the last couple of years. After leading Israel's efforts to expropriate Palestinian land for three decades, Sharon finally realized that as the messianic and militaristic visions of a greater Israel became reality and the border between Israel proper and the territories it occupied in 1967 was erased, the very idea of a Jewish state, where Jews are the majority, was being "threatened." While he considered the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza appealing from a geographic point of view, he joined the vast majority of Israeli Jews who feel endangered by the fact that today the majority of people living between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea are not Jewish.

For years this demographic "threat" was kept at bay by denying the occupied Palestinians Israeli citizenship and subjecting them to military rule. Israel, in other words, created an apartheid regime in the West Bank (and Gaza) in order to sustain the Jewish majority within its borders. It installed dual legal systems within a single territory, one for Jews, the other for Palestinians. This incongruence between Israel's geographic aspirations and demographic reality led to a political juncture whereby it had to choose one of two options: continue maintaining a system of apartheid or, conversely, give up the idea of a Jewish state.

Sharon decided to adopt a third way. He withdrew from the Gaza Strip and made plans to annex several parts of the West Bank so as to radically alter the region's demographic and geographic reality. He used the separation barrier--which is made up of electronic fences, barbed wire, patrol roads, trenches and massive concrete slates--as the means to unilaterally implement his political vision. Thus, even though the barrier is constantly presented as a "temporary" security apparatus, in reality its primary objective is to redraw the map between Israel and the Palestinian entity.

On January 16th, after having talked quite normally on the phone with at least two other people that same day, Douglas Barber, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) living in Lee County, Alabama, changed the answer-message on his telephone. "If you're looking for Doug," it said in his Alabama drawl, "I'm checking out of this world. I'll see you on the other side."

He then called the police, collected his shotgun, and went out onto his porch to meet them. From the sketchy reports we have now, it seems the police wouldn't oblige him with a "suicide by cop" and tried to talk him down. When it became apparent he wasn't able to commit cop-suicide, 37-year-old Douglas Barber did an about face, rotated the shotgun and killed himself.

We do know that he was a truck driver, and that his job in Iraq was driving supply convoys along the shooting gallery between Baghdad Airport and LSA Anaconda in Balad -- a giant military base -- a veritable city -- that is subject to so many mortar and rocket attacks that the troops have renamed it Mortaritaville. We do know, from Doug's interviews, that the stress of those convoys -- each confronting its participants with the possibility that this could be one's last road trip -- were hard on Doug. In July 2003, his convoy was hit with an improvised explosive device, and the mortar attacks at Anaconda were so regular that they were alomst a weather pattern. But Doug said there was something else that was even harder on him. When the grunts came in, they would describe how many civilians they'd killed.

When Doug was in a traffic jam one day, feeling very vulnerable, and the US units dismounted to clear the traffic jam -- angry and afraid and waving weapons at the civilians -- a woman in a bus held up her baby for them to see... like that window-sign we see in cars on American highways -- "Baby on Board." Only she wasn't cautioning other drivers to be careful. She was trying to prevent an armed attack that could kill her child.

U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) urged the United Nations to apply sanctions against Iran as it resumes its nuclear program and faulted the Bush administration for "downplaying" the threat.

And Clinton called for the United States to reduce the number of American troops in Iraq, leaving a smaller strike force. "This will help us stabilize their government and will send a message to Iran that they do not have a free hand despite their personal and religious connections," she said.

Clinton said that the United States has an important role in stabilizing the Middle East, in part because America offers a brand of optimism that can make a difference.

"History has weighed heavily on the Middle East. What we have tried to do over the last 30 years, starting with President Carter, moving through other presidents, including my husband, and now this president, is to send a uniquely American message: `It can get better. Just get over it."'

Both through the unofficial carbon market and by means of a provision of the Kyoto protocol called the "clean development mechanism", people, companies and states can claim to reduce their emissions by investing in carbon friendly projects in poorer countries. Among other schemes, you can earn carbon credits by paying people to plant trees. As the trees grow, they are supposed to absorb the carbon we release when we burn fossil fuels.

While they have a pretty good idea of how much carbon our factories and planes and cars are releasing, scientists are much less certain about the amount of carbon tree-planting will absorb. When you drain or clear the soil to plant trees, for example, you are likely to release some carbon, but it is hard to tell how much. Planting trees in one place might stunt trees elsewhere, as they could dry up a river that was feeding a forest downstream. Or by protecting your forest against loggers, you might be driving them into another forest. As global temperatures rise, trees in many places will begin to die back, releasing the carbon they contain. Forest fires could wipe them out completely. The timing is also critical: emissions saved today are far more valuable, in terms of reducing climate change, than emissions saved in 10 years' time, yet the trees you plant start absorbing carbon long after your factories released it. All this made the figures speculative, but the new findings, with their massive uncertainty range (plants, the researchers say, produce somewhere between 10% and 30% of the planet's methane) make an honest sum impossible.

In other words, you cannot reasonably claim to have swapped the carbon stored in oil or coal for carbon absorbed by trees. Mineral carbon, while it remains in the ground, is stable and quantifiable. Biological carbon is labile and uncertain.

On March 18, 1968, days before his murder, King told striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., "It is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis...getting part-time income." King said, "We are tired of working our hands off and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with daily basic necessities of life."

Two years earlier, on March 18, 1966, King had called for Congress to boost the minimum wage. "We know of no more crucial civil rights issue facing Congress today than the need to increase the federal minimum wage and extend its coverage," he said. "A living wage should be the right of all working Americans."

King did not dream that in the year 2006, he would be remembered with a national holiday, but the value of the minimum wage would be lower than it was in the 1950s and 60s. At $5.15 an hour, today's minimum wage is nearly $4 less than it was in 1968, when it reached its historic high of $9.09, adjusted for inflation.

The minimum wage has become a poverty wage instead of an anti-poverty wage. A full-time worker at minimum wage makes just $10,712 a year--less than $900 a month--to cover housing, food, health care, transportation and other expenses.

The connection between a set of policy reforms -- implemented at different times in different countries -- and the economic failure of the last 25 years cannot be proven in a scientific sense. And each country's story is different. But there is considerable evidence that many of the policy changes since 1980 that have been advocated by Washington have contributed to this economic disaster.

Fiscal discipline is a good idea, but when the economy is in recession, it may be better to run a budget deficit, as we do in the United States. Inflation is always something to watch out for, but central banks can get carried away and set interest rates too high, stifling economic growth. This is especially true if they are completely unaccountable to anyone outside the financial sector, or foreign financial markets.

Foreign capital can be useful, but opening capital markets completely can wreak havoc with a country's currency. This can hurt the investment climate - a manufacturer that imports parts and produces for export needs to have some idea of what the exchange rate will be. An overvalued currency can hurt domestic industry by making imports artificially cheap. So too, can indiscriminate opening to imports from all over the world. And there are times when a country is better off restructuring - even unilaterally, if necessary - an unsustainable debt burden, rather than sacrificing its economic future for many years or even decades just to pay off debt.

The economic landscape of Latin America is littered with the ruins of these and other policy mistakes that were supported, and sometimes implemented under considerable economic and political pressure from Washington and the institutions that it controls: the IMF, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank. Governments also abandoned most of the policies that have contributed to the development of nearly every country that has reached high income levels today - for example certain industrial and development strategies -- in favor of "market-driven" development.

As one American officer explained to New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins, the willingness to sacrifice local civilians is part of a larger strategy in which U.S. military power is used to "punish not only the guerrillas, but also make clear to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating." A Marine calling-in to a radio talk show recently stated the argument more precisely: "You know why those people get killed? It's because they're letting insurgents hide in their house."

This is, by the way, the textbook definition of terrorism -- attacking a civilian population to get it to withdraw support from the enemy. What this strategic orientation, applied wherever American troops fight the Iraqi resistance, represents is an embrace of terrorism as a principle tactic for subduing Iraq's insurgency.

In any media review of 2005, Israel's disengagement from the Gaza strip features prominently. Few can forget those powerful images of tearful, anguished Israeli settlers barricading themselves into synagogues, standing on rooftops hurling abuse, flour and paint at soldiers, or being reluctantly wrenched from their homes, acompanied by bewildered toddlers and screaming teenagers. The events in Gaza took over the international media in August. Since then, it has been cited as a bold move in the Israel/Palestine conflict, transforming the image of Ariel Sharon from a hawk to a brave man of peace.

"It was a masterpiece," says one picture editor of a large news agency. "Afterwards, we all felt we played a game and that we had been used, bought with great pictures." This editor is not alone in such sentiments. Other journalists involved refer to "a tremendous amount of manipulation" and "the biggest ever publicity stunt", or claim that the event was "definitely stage-managed."

The top line was of settler resistance in the face of inevitable evacuation by a strong but sympathetic army. Yet some reporters say this story was pre-negotiated.

David Ratner, a reporter for Israel's Haaretz newspaper, describes such an arrangement in Homesh, a former settlement in the northern West Bank. "They held meetings where the settlers would say, 'Let's keep to the agreement, we don't beat up the soldiers, we will lie on the ground holding hands', and the soldiers were saying, 'We will break you apart, in small squads of four soldiers but not using excessive force, and you are not allowed to kick at the military.' This is what one of the officers told me."

He adds that the showdown was agreed right down to the details of what the settlers could throw at the soldiers and police: flour was OK, acid was not OK. "An officer told me they agreed the settlers could throw any food they wanted, tomatoes, hummus, pickles - as long as the pickles had been removed from the cans."

...

The result, some journalists fear, is that settler and government objectives dovetailed into a common purpose of making the Gaza evacuation appear difficult (and therefore unrepeatable). [read more]

Hurricane Katrina may mark a watershed in Black perceptions of the African American presence and prospects in the United States. "It could very well shape this generation of young people in the same way that the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King shaped our generation," said Prof. Michael Dawson, of the University of Chicago whose team conducted a survey of Black and white reactions to the disaster between October 28 and November 17, 2005. "It suggested to Blacks the utter lack of the liberal possibility in the United States," said Dawson, the nation's premier Black social demographer.

Huge majorities of Blacks agreed that the federal government's response would have been faster if the victims of Katrina in New Orleans had been white (84 percent), and that the Katrina experience shows there is a lesson to be learned about continued racial inequality (90 percent).

But only 20 percent of whites believe that the federal government's failure to respond had anything to do with race, and only 38 percent think there is something to be learned about racial inequality from the Katrina disaster.

Haiti's best known prisoner is a Catholic priest, Father Gerard "Gerry" Jean-Juste. Born and raised in Haiti, he was the first Haitian ordained a priest in the United States. Inspired by liberation theology, Father Gerry has worked with the homeless, uprooted and poor. He directed Miami's Haitian Refugee Center from 1979 to 1989, which championed the rights of Haitian immigrants, most of them newly arrived "boat people" fleeing persecution and misery in Haiti.

But Father Gerry traded the comforts of Florida for the slums of his native country. Charismatic and warm, he turned his attention to feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and putting children in school. This work became more difficult following the February 2004 ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He was threatened, harassed and beaten. In October 2004, he was arrested illegally while feeding children their only meal of the day.

When the government could present no evidence of wrongdoing, a judge released Father Gerry after seven weeks in jail. The government then forced the judge out of office and found a more compliant substitute. The persecution was renewed last July 21, when he was arrested, again illegally, at a funeral. He has been imprisoned for five months despite the government producing no evidence against him.

I visited Father Gerry just before Christmas because I had heard reports that his health was deteriorating. He told me first to think of fellow prisoners who may be in worse shape. He also insisted on praying, then singing, then introducing me to some of his jailers. "Some of them are really quite nice," he said cheerfully. I finally examined him, obtained the necessary specimens and brought them to the laboratory.

When his neck first began to swell some months ago, he thought it was due to a beating he'd received in jail. But the swelling on both sides of his neck increased, followed by fatigue and swollen lymph nodes elsewhere.

A definitive diagnosis is in: Father Gerry has leukemia, possibly a rapidly progressive form. So he is not only a prisoner of conscience, one of hundreds in Haiti, but a sick prisoner who needs more than prayers and letters of support. He needs proper medical care and, probably, chemotherapy. As we know from long experience in central Haiti, it's hard enough to deliver chemotherapy anywhere in the country. It's simply not possible to do so in a Haitian prison.

"I'm sure I'll be out of prison soon," he told me on Christmas Eve. "But what about all the others? They need help too." What is needed is to have those calling the shots in Haiti -- many of them in the United States -- reverse the policies that have filled Haiti's prisons with expediently chosen "suspects" against whom no charges have been presented. The way to start is to release Father Gerry for proper medical evaluation and care.

When the New York Times front page broke the story of the National Security Agency's domestic spying, the newspaper's editors had good reason to feel proud. Or so it seemed. But there was a troubling backstory: The Times had kept the scoop under wraps for a long time.

The White House did what it could - including, as a last-ditch move, an early December presidential meeting that brought Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office - in its efforts to persuade the Times not to report the story. The good news is that those efforts ultimately failed. The bad news is that they were successful for more than a year.

From all indications, the Times had the basic story in hand before the election in November 2004, when Bush defeated challenger John Kerry. In other words, if those running the New York Times had behaved like journalists instead of political players - if they had exposed this momentous secret instead of keeping it - there are good reasons to believe the outcome of the presidential election might have been different.

Much of the debate is taking place out of public sight, including an internal VA meeting in Philadelphia this month. The department has also been in negotiations with the Institute of Medicine over a review of the "utility and objectiveness" of PTSD diagnostic criteria and the validity of screening techniques, a process that could have profound implications for returning soldiers.

The growing national debate over the Iraq war has changed the nature of the discussion over PTSD, some participants said. "It has become a pro-war-versus-antiwar issue," said one VA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because politics is not supposed to enter the debate. "If we show that PTSD is Prévalent and severe, that becomes one more little reason we should stop waging war. If, on the other hand, PTSD rates are low . . . that is convenient for the Bush administration."

The Shi'ite religious parties in the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) were the big winners - from 70% to 95% of the vote in the impoverished southern provinces; 59% in Baghdad; and nationally, well over 40% of the total (they've won in nine of Iraq's 18 provinces plus the capital). It's a relatively unexpected success considering the dreadful record of Ibrahim Jaafari's Shi'ite-dominated government.

Bush's new Iraq is pro-Iran. It will not recognize Israel. And it wants the Americans out; one of the first measures of an emerging, powerful parliamentary alliance between roughly 38 Sadrists of Shi'ite nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and roughly 50 Sunni Arabs will be to call for an immediate end of the occupation.

Elections or no elections, Iraq enters 2006 mired in the same, usual, gruesome rituals. The Pentagon believes it can subdue the Sunni Arab resistance by bombing them to death while the resistance keeps bombing, suicide bombing and assassinating en masse.

So the endless, gory stream will continue, not even making headlines - explosions at police stations, assassinations of "Baghdad officials", executions of collaborators, mortars over the Green Zone, scores of innocent civilian victims of car bombings, Marines killed in the Sunni triangle, Shi'ite death squads, Turkmen fighting Kurd for Kirkuk ...

[Harold] Pinter observed [in his Nobel acceptance speech], "The United States supported and in many cases engendered every rightwing military dictatorship in the world after the end of World War II." He gave a lot of examples. But then, with devastating irony (a concept seemingly absent from the White House/Pentagon axis), he said: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

Just like the suffering of Iraqis never happened. Robert Fisk, in his masterful The Great War for Civilization (Fourth Estate, London) remarks, "The sanctions that smothered Iraq for almost 13 years have largely dropped from the story of our Middle East adventures ... When the Anglo-American occupiers settled into their palaces in Baghdad, they would blame the collapse of electrical power, water-pumping stations, factories and commercial life on Saddam Hussein, as if he alone had engineered the impoverishment of Iraq. Sanctions were never mentioned. They were 'ghosted' out of the story. First there had been Saddam, and then there was freedom'."

But Iraqis as a whole have not forgotten the sanctions - imposed by the US, carried out by the "international community" and responsible for the death of thousands of children. As much as the Shi'ites have not forgotten their betrayal by George Bush senior, who called for a Shi'ite uprising in early 1991 and then left thousands of men, women and children to be massacred by Saddam's gunships. There's no way these impoverished masses can trust anything related to American promises of "freedom".

... [President-elect Evo] Morales's economic team has already planned for the renationalisation of these [energy] resources, and for fresh rules of engagement with foreign companies. Taking a leaf from the new book of Latin American politics written by Hugo Chávez, Morales will seek to copy the example of Venezuela's reformed state oil company, which has secured advantageous deals with foreign companies without too much complaint.

Also following the Venezuelan example, he will concentrate in his first year on electing a constituent assembly and formulating a constitution that will recognise the preponderant role of the indigenous population in government. His relatively reformist programme ought to calm the fears of the white settlers and the US, and reassure indigenous voters, anxious for an immediate improvement in their condition, that a new future is within their grasp.

Yet the Morales programme, and his intention to deliver, has already led to the elaboration of many alarmist scenarios. Some see the oil-rich Santa Cruz province seceding from the republic and joining up with Brazil. Others envisage Chilean troops massed on the Andean frontier and waging war as they did in 1879. Still others talk of a US invasion from its new military base in Paraguay, evoking the prospect of another Chaco war.

The proponents of such drastic possibilities tend to ignore the practical problems of warfare in the Andes and the Amazon basin. They also skate over the fact that Morales is not alone. He joins a growing number of leftist governments in Latin America that are critical of the neoliberal economic recipes of the past 20 years and hostile to the hegemony of the US. Beyond them are the powerful indigenous movements of Ecuador and Peru, increasingly influential in politics. The US, already overstretched in other parts of the world, is now being openly challenged on its southern flank, an extraordinary and unprecedented development.

Evo Morales on Sunday won a landslide victory in Bolivia's presidential elections to become the country's first indigenous leader. The scale of the triumph, which was not anticipated by opinion polls, will cause consternation both in Washington and among foreign investors such as British Gas and Total.

The left-wing Mr Morales has pledged to decriminalise the cultivation of coca, the raw material for cocaine, and nationalise the country's gas industry. US right-wingers are also alarmed by his friendship with Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro.

Mr Morales, who had been predicted to win only about a third of the votes in most polls, received 51.1 per cent, giving him a comfortable first round victory. Jorge Quiroga, the conservative former president who was his closest rival, trailed by 19.8 per cent. Samuel Doria Medina, a local businessman who formed a new centrist party, scored just 6.7 per cent.

"The next government will have the greatest legitimacy of any administration since the return to democracy in 1982," said Eduardo Gamarra of Florida International University. In the past 25 years, no candidate had ever won a presidential election in the first round. "The government will have a clear mandate," added Reimy Ferreira, a local political analyst.

With presidential elections in Bolivia on Sunday, Washington is buzzing with talk that another Latin American country may be "lost."

Evo Morales, a former president of Bolivia's coca-growers' union and the leader of the Movement Toward Socialism party, is the current front-runner, according to the latest polls. If he wins the election, Mr. Morales will be the latest head of state to join the ranks of the region's burgeoning New Left, already comprised of Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. For the Bush administration and conservative pundits, this would qualify as an unmitigated catastrophe.

In Bolivia, democracy is now set to collide with the economic policies Washington prefers. American oil and gas companies doing business there reaped substantial profits from privatizing the country's gas industry in the early 1990s, and they had high hopes of being able to increase their windfalls by exporting Bolivia's gas to the energy-hungry US market. Corporate gains did not trickle down to Bolivia's poor, however, and massive protests against privatization have forced the resignation of two presidents in two years. They have also made a political star of Morales, a candidate who promises to redirect gas industry profits toward Bolivia's social needs.

The Bush administration has watched Morales's rise to prominence with a sense of quiet hysteria. Morales has been slandered by conservatives who label him a drug trafficker, a charge that has never been substantiated. He and other coca farmers point out that although coca is used to produce cocaine, the natural plant leaves have ancestral importance for Bolivia's indigenous people. State Department officials regard him as a puppet of Mr. Chávez and Fidel Castro. If their regular stream of insults has been muted of late, it is only because the administration is aware that its past criticism has boosted Morales's popularity in a region where Washington's policies are viewed with skepticism.

The Bush administration spin - faithfully reproduced by Western corporate media quoting the usual ("US officials") suspects - follows the same wishful script: a "large turnout" among the "disaffected Sunni Arab minority" that "could" produce a government "capable of winning the trust of the Sunnis", "defusing the insurgency" and thus leading the US "and other foreign troops" to start going home by 2006.

The favorite Anglo-American election candidate supposedly capable of pulling it all off is once again Allawi - a truculent secular Shi'ite who was once a Ba'athist (he has kept the good connections) before he became anti-Saddam and a US intelligence asset. The White House may forget it, but Iraqis don't; Allawi gave the go-ahead for the American leveling of Fallujah and the American bombing of holy Najaf in 2004

A few days ago he was bombarded with shoes and chased away from the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf. British Prime Minister Tony Blair supports him and considers him "the best hope" for Iraq. Pentagon analysts agree, as one of them told The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh that "he would allow us to keep Special Forces operations inside Iraq ... mission accomplished. A coup for Bush."

But no amount of feel good stories disguise the fact that the American project is doomed to fail because the premise itself is flawed - a semblance of democracy as the offspring of an illegal invasion and foreign occupation. Moreover, this White House-promoted and/or imposed "fast food democracy" has been sectarian-based from the start. It is inexorably leading to the Lebanonization of Iraq, a phenomenon parallel to the Iraqification of the occupation.

Leading Sunni clerics and insurgent organizations are unofficially encouraging Sunnis to vote in Thursday's parliamentary elections for a slate of candidates who are calling for a timetable for US troop withdrawal.

It's not only apologists for torture who ignore this history when they blame abuses on "a few bad apples"--so too do many of torture's most prominent opponents. Apparently forgetting everything they once knew about US cold war misadventures, a startling number have begun to subscribe to an antihistorical narrative in which the idea of torturing prisoners first occurred to US officials on September 11, 2001, at which point the interrogation methods used in Guantánamo apparently emerged, fully formed, from the sadistic recesses of Dick Cheney's and Donald Rumsfeld's brains. Up until that moment, we are told, America fought its enemies while keeping its humanity intact.

The principal propagator of this narrative (what Garry Wills termed "original sinlessness") is Senator John McCain. Writing recently in Newsweek on the need for a ban on torture, McCain says that when he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he held fast to the knowledge "that we were different from our enemies...that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them." It is a stunning historical distortion. By the time McCain was taken captive, the CIA had already launched the Phoenix program and, as McCoy writes, "its agents were operating forty interrogation centers in South Vietnam that killed more than twenty thousand suspects and tortured thousands more," a claim he backs up with pages of quotes from press reports as well as Congressional and Senate probes.

Does it somehow lessen the horrors of today to admit that this is not the first time the US government has used torture to wipe out its political opponents--that it has operated secret prisons before, that it has actively supported regimes that tried to erase the left by dropping students out of airplanes? That, at home, photographs of lynchings were traded and sold as trophies and warnings? Many seem to think so. On November 8 Democratic Congressman Jim McDermott made the astonishing claim to the House of Representatives that "America has never had a question about its moral integrity, until now." Molly Ivins, expressing her shock that the United States is running a prison gulag, wrote that "it's just this one administration...and even at that, it seems to be mostly Vice President Dick Cheney." And in the November issue of Harper's, William Pfaff argues that what truly sets the Bush Administration apart from its predecessors is "its installation of torture as integral to American military and clandestine operations." Pfaff acknowledges that long before Abu Ghraib, there were those who claimed that the School of the Americas was a "torture school," but he says that he was "inclined to doubt that it was really so." Perhaps it's time for Pfaff to have a look at the SOA textbooks coaching illegal torture techniques, all readily available in both Spanish and English, as well as the hair-raising list of SOA grads.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

[UN high commissioner for human rights Louise] Arbour's statement said that the "absolute ban on torture, a cornerstone of the international human rights edifice, is under attack. The principle once believed to be unassailable -- the inherent right to physical integrity and dignity of person -- is becoming a casualty of the so-called 'war on terrorism.'"

John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, criticized Arbour, calling it "inappropriate" for her to choose a Human Rights Day celebration to criticize the United States instead of such rights abusers as Burma, Cuba and Zimbabwe. He also warned that it would undercut his efforts to negotiate formation of a new human rights council that would exclude countries with bad rights records.

Arbour [a former Canadian Supreme Court justice] said that "moves to water down or question the absolute ban on torture, as well as on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" are "particularly insidious." She added that "governments in a number of countries are claiming that established rules do not apply anymore: that we live in a changed world and that there is a 'new normal.'"

The people of Venezuela have gone to the polls 11 times in seven years. Almost a superfluity of democracy, some might think, and signs of electoral fatigue could be detected in Sunday's elections for the National Assembly when only 30% of the electorate bothered to vote. The rest perceived the result as a foregone conclusion since in earlier elections President Hugo Chávez, or the candidates he backed, had stacked up substantial majorities. Sunday's poll followed the trend, and the Chávez list wiped the board.

This time, however, the once vocal opposition was strangely absent. Four of the small opposition parties decided to withdraw at the last minute, in a cynical manoeuvre designed to upset the hard-won stability achieved since the recall referendum in August 2004 (engineered by the opposition to try to secure the president's resignation). Handsomely won by Chávez with a margin of 59 to 41, the referendum was certified as free and fair by observers from the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the Carter Centre, but some of the opposition parties refused to accept the result. Their rejection did little to enhance their authority or popularity and when they withdrew from Sunday's poll they knew that they faced defeat and humiliation.

Their action irritated the mission sent by the OAS which believed it had negotiated a settlement over opposition complaints about the new automated voting system. The opposition then turned turtle and announced its withdrawal. It was not acting alone. In the background, at private meetings on the island of Aruba in the Dutch Antilles and in public declarations by Thomas Shannon, the US secretary of state for Latin American affairs, the opposition had been elaborating a strategy to overthrow Chávez. Its plan was to make people believe that "democracy in Venezuela is in grave peril", as Shannon put it to a Washington subcommittee two weeks ago.

For the fourth time, Venezuela's opposition parties are undergoing a bizarre process implosion. Like lemmings, they are committing mass political suicide by withdrawing from one of the country's most important elections in the past five years. Following their support for the April 2002 coup attempt, the 2002/2003 oil industry shutdown, and the 2004 recall referendum, this is the fourth time opposition parties make a strategic miscalculation and end up following the course of the most extremist elements amongst them in seeking a shortcut to defeating Chavez. One can only hope that this presumably last error (because they will be practically gone after that) will mean the rebirth of a responsible and constitutional opposition in Venezuela. No doubt this will be difficult with an almost entirely pro-Chavez National Assembly, but they will be left with no other option (other than foreign intervention). The greater danger, though, is that the boycott will open the door to more foreign intervention in Venezuela.

The decision of four opposition parties in Venezuela to withdraw from elections this weekend raises important questions for the media. It is clear to anyone familiar with the situation that this is an attempt to discredit the election, by parties that (according to opposition polling) were indisputably expected to do very badly in the election. This is despite their control over the majority of the broadcast and print media in Venezuela, as well as most of the country's national income and wealth.

Yet much of the international press coverage would convince the general reader, who is not familiar with the details of the situation, that these parties may have a case for their claim that the ballot couldn't be trusted. In this coverage it appears to be a matter of opinion, despite a strong statement to the contrary from the OAS, which is observing the election. As of this morning, almost none of the English-language press had reported the OAS comments, although they were reported in Spanish-language newspapers such as Clarin in Argentina.

It is clear that the opposition's attempt to discredit these elections will be joined by powerful figures in the United States, including some Members of Congress and - possibly, depending on how the media covers these events - the White House and State Department.

The Fourth Geneva Convention lays down specific provisions on delivery of healthcare services.. "The occupying power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate," Article 55 states.

Article 56 says: "The occupying power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the cooperation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics. Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties."

But the U.S. forces continue to target hospitals regardless. Dr. Qasim, who had come from al-Qa'im hospital to the Ramadi General Hospital to obtain medical supplies told IPS that the main hospital in al-Qa'im was targeted by occupation forces Nov. 7.

The American air war inside Iraq today is perhaps the most significant--and underreported--aspect of the fight against the insurgency. The military authorities in Baghdad and Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of the tonnage they drop, as was routinely done during the Vietnam War. One insight into the scope of the bombing in Iraq was supplied by the Marine Corps during the height of the siege of Falluja in the fall of 2004. "With a massive Marine air and ground offensive under way," a Marine press release said, "Marine close air support continues to put high-tech steel on target. . . . Flying missions day and night for weeks, the fixed wing aircraft of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing are ensuring battlefield success on the front line." Since the beginning of the war, the press release said, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more than five hundred thousand tons of ordnance. "This number is likely to be much higher by the end of operations," Major Mike Sexton said. In the battle for the city, more than seven hundred Americans were killed or wounded; U.S. officials did not release estimates of civilian dead, but press reports at the time told of women and children killed in the bombardments.

Meanwhile, as the debate over troop reductions continues, the covert war in Iraq has expanded in recent months to Syria. A composite American Special Forces team, known as an S.M.U., for "special-mission unit," has been ordered, under stringent cover, to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi insurgency across the border. (The Pentagon had no comment.) "It's a powder keg," the Pentagon consultant said of the tactic. "But, if we hit an insurgent network in Iraq without hitting the guys in Syria who are part of it, the guys in Syria would get away. When you're fighting an insurgency, you have to strike everywhere--and at once."

Most gallingly for the US, its reporters have told a story that Washington either disagrees with or would rather remain untold: that the kind of war America is prosecuting in Iraq is messy and heavy handed; that civilians are too often the victims, and that the insurgents are not shadowy sinister figures but ordinary men with more support than politicians would like to acknowledge.

As a result Al Jazeera has seen itself under almost constant attack by a White House whose instinct has been to control the media since the war in Afghanistan. The US military has harassed its reporters. Its offices in Baghdad and Kabul have both been bombed by the US and reporters have been detained, threatened and abused.

One constant in the long conflict over Palestine is that Israel and its backers always have an excuse to avoid the central issues that prevent peace. Israel is adapt at creating complications which then absorb and exhaust all available diplomatic and political energy, while it uses the time to entrench itself ever more deeply in the occupied territories.

By launching his Gaza "disengagement" plan in 2003, Ariel Sharon was able to skilfully exploit the hunger for political distractions that allow diplomats and politicians to appear to be deeply engaged in the "peace process" while actually doing nothing useful. Herds of them rushed to embrace the Gaza plan, which became supposedly the key to unlocking the 'stalled peace process.' New cliches were devised for the occasion: pulling out settlers from Gaza would break Israeli psychological taboos and would set a precedent for the West Bank. After all, it was claimed, only hawks can make true peace, as Menachem Begin did with Egypt, or Nixon did in China.

Meanwhile, just weeks after the Gaza settler pullout Sharon gave the go ahead for work to start on E-1, a project to double the size of Ma'ale Adumim, already the largest settlement in the West Bank, which when completed rules out any possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state. Dror Etkes, a settlement expert with the group Peace Now said that building in E-1 "is tantamount to standing over the Roadmap and pissing on it."

... we shouldn't forget that the use of chemical weapons was a war crime within a war crime within a war crime. Both the invasion of Iraq and the assault on Falluja were illegal acts of aggression. Before attacking the city, the marines stopped men "of fighting age" from leaving. Many women and children stayed: the Guardian's correspondent estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians were left. The marines treated Falluja as if its only inhabitants were fighters. They levelled thousands of buildings, illegally denied access to the Iraqi Red Crescent and, according to the UN's special rapporteur, used "hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population".

I have been reading accounts of the assault published in the Marine Corps Gazette. The soldiers appear to have believed everything the US government told them. One article claims that "the absence of civilians meant the marines could employ blast weapons prior to entering houses that had become pillboxes, not homes". Another said that "there were less than 500 civilians remaining in the city". It continued: "The heroics [of the marines] will be the subject of many articles and books ... The real key to this tactical victory rested in the spirit of the warriors who courageously fought the battle. They deserve all of the credit for liberating Falluja."

But buried in this hogwash is a grave revelation. An assault weapon the marines were using had been armed with warheads containing "about 35% thermobaric novel explosive (NE) and 65% standard high explosive". They deployed it "to cause the roof to collapse and crush the insurgents fortified inside interior rooms". It was used repeatedly: "The expenditure of explosives clearing houses was enormous."

"We lost control of the context," Rendon warned. "That has to be fixed for the next war."

Behind the daily reports of suicide bombings and attacks on coalition forces is a far more shadowy struggle, one that involves tortured prisoners huddled in dungeons, death-squad victims with their hands tied behind their backs, often mutilated with knives and electric drills, and distraught families searching for relations who have been "disappeared".

Baghdad is now a city in the shadow of gunmen. As I left the Hamra to replace what was lost in my bombed room, I had to negotiate checkpoints of the Badr militia, their Shia enemies, the Mehdi Army of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Kurdish peshmerga. The Iraqi police and the government paramilitaries have their own roadblocks.

And there are others: the Shia Defenders of Khadamiya - set up under Hussein al-Sadr, a cousin of Muqtada, who is an ally of the former prime minister Iyad Allawi - and the government-backed Tiger and Scorpion brigades. They all have similar looks: balaclavas or wraparound sunglasses and headbands, black leather gloves with fingers cut off, and a variety of weapons. When not manning checkpoints, they hurtle through the streets in four-wheel drives, scattering the traffic by firing in the air. Out of sight they are accused of arbitrary arrests, intimidation and extrajudicial killings.

The US and Britain, which trained many of the forces involved, and which still have ultimate responsibility for them, are implicated. But the pattern of illegality is also the continuation of a process that began with the questionable justification for the invasion. American and British forces have played their own part, from the abuses of Abu Ghraib to deaths in British military custody, from the deployment of white phosphorus as a chemical weapon in the assault on Fallujah to the wild use of overwhelming American firepower, which some have called almost as indiscriminate as the killings caused by Sunni insurgents' car bombings.

"I'm determined to have my application for discharge approved," she said. "But ultimately I'm not going to compromise my beliefs for any reason."

"We deeply regret that the United States government did not accept the standard terms of reference for a credible, objective and fair assessment of the situation of the detainees at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility," they said in a statement. "These terms include the ability to conduct private interviews with detainees." Special rapporteur Martin Nowak said that the US's stance compared poorly with that of China, which had allowed unrestricted access to its jails.

It was revealed this week that the US has detained more than 83,000 people in its four-year war on terror, of which 14,500 remain in jail. Some 108 are known to have died in US army and CIA custody, including 26 deaths which have been investigated as homicides.

Among the varied armed security men on Baghdad's streets these days, you can't miss the police commandos. In combat uniforms, bulletproof vests and wrap-around sunglasses or ski masks, they muscle through Baghdad's traffic jams in police cars or camouflage-painted pickup trucks, clearing nervous drivers from their path with shouted commands and the occasional gunshot in the air.

The commandos are part of the Iraqi security forces that the Bush administration says will gradually replace American troops in this war. But the commandos are being blamed for a wave of kidnappings and executions around Baghdad since the spring.

One such group, the Volcano Brigade, is operating as a death squad, under the influence or control of Iraq's most potent Shia factional militia, the Iranian-backed Badr Organization, said several Iraqi government officials and western Baghdad residents.

In the past six months, Badr has heavily infiltrated the Interior Ministry, under which the commandos operate, the sources said. Badr also was accused of running the secret Interior Ministry prison raided Sunday by U.S. troops.

About 2 a.m. on Aug. 23, men in Volcano Brigade uniforms and trucks rolled into the streets of Dolay, a mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhood of western Baghdad, residents say. "I got a call from my cousins" around the corner, said Ahmed Abu Yusuf, 33, an unemployed Sunni. "They told me to stay hidden because the Volcano were in the streets, arresting Sunnis."

For three hours, the raiders burst into Sunni homes, handcuffed dozens of men and loaded them into vans. They ended the assault and drove out of the neighborhood just before the dawn call to prayer, which would bring men into the streets, walking to the local mosques, Abu Yusuf said.

Two days later and 90 miles away, residents of the desert town of Badrah, near the Iranian border, found the bodies of 36 of the men in a gully, their hands still bound and their skulls shattered by bullets. Two were the cousins who had phoned him the warning, Abu Yusuf said.

Saddam, facing a possible death sentence, is accused of mass murder, torture, false imprisonment and the use of chemical weapons. He is certainly guilty on all counts. So, it now seems, are those who overthrew him.

Nearly a year after they occurred, a few of the war crimes committed in Fallujah by members of the US military have gained the attention of some major media outlets (excluding, of course, any of the corporate media outlets in the US).

On December 9th of 2004 I posted a gallery of photos, many of which are included in the new RAI television documentary about incendiary weapons having been used in Fallujah.

Like the torture "scandal" of Abu Ghraib that for people in the west didn't become "real" until late April of 2004, Iraqis and journalists in Iraq who engaged in actual reporting knew that US and British forces were torturing Iraqis from nearly the beginning of the occupation, and continue to do so to this day.

All of this makes me wonder how much longer it will take for other atrocities to come to light. Even just discussing Fallujah, there are many we can choose from. While I'm not the only journalist to have reported on these, let me draw your attention to just a few things that I've recorded which took place in Fallujah during the November, 2004 massacre. [read more]

The Senate voted Thursday to strip captured "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of the principal legal tool given to them last year by the Supreme Court when it allowed them to challenge their detentions in United States courts.

If approved in its current form by both the Senate and the House, which has not yet considered the measure but where passage is considered likely, the law would nullify a June 2004 Supreme Court opinion that detainees at Guantánamo Bay had a right to challenge their detentions in court.

In early November George W. Bush, struggling to claw his way upward in polls that had acquired the consistency of quicksand after two months of blunders and disasters, launched a new PR blitz. The Administration declared it was taking charge of the nation's health and security with an all-out war on the flu (to be conducted with vaccines provided by well-connected pharmaceutical companies). "Our country has been given fair warning of this danger to our homeland," Bush declared. "It's my responsibility as President to take measures now to protect the American people."

But if Bush hoped to wipe away the stain of Katrina--and the memory of a hapless Michael Brown steering FEMA in circles while New Orleans drowned--he should have thought twice about bringing up the specter of a public health emergency, because the man responsible for coordinating the federal response to a flu pandemic or bioterror attack could well be the next Michael Brown.

Meet Stewart Simonson. He's the official charged by Bush with "the protection of the civilian population from acts of bioterrorism and other public health emergencies"--a well-connected, ideological, ambitious Republican with zero public health management or medical expertise, whose previous job was as a corporate lawyer for Amtrak. When Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently speculated, "If something comes along that is truly serious...like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence," many of those professionally concerned with such scenarios couldn't help thinking of Simonson. They recalled his own unsettling words at a recent Homeland Security subcommittee hearing on government response to a chemical or biological attack: "We're learning as we go."

Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon.

In December the US government formally denied the reports, describing them as "widespread myths". "Some news accounts have claimed that US forces have used 'outlawed' phosphorus shells in Fallujah," the USinfo website said. "Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. US forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes.

"They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters."

But now new information has surfaced, including hideous photographs and videos and interviews with American soldiers who took part in the Fallujah attack, which provides graphic proof that phosphorus shells were widely deployed in the city as a weapon.

[W]hat of the idea that most of the violent deaths in Iraq are caused by coalition troops? Well according to the Houston Chronicle, even Blair's favourite data source, the Iraqi health ministry, reports that twice as many Iraqis - and most of them civilians - are being killed by US and UK forces as by insurgents. When the Pentagon claims that it has just killed 50 or 70 or 100 rebel fighters, we have no means of knowing who those people really were. Everyone it blows to pieces becomes a terrorist. In July Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the US army, claimed that coalition troops had killed or captured more than 50,000 "insurgents" since the start of the rebellion. Perhaps they were all Zarqawi's closest lieutenants.

We can expect the US and UK governments to seek to minimise the extent of their war crimes. But it's time the media stopped collaborating.

Like their counterparts in past wars, Iraq veterans are choosing traditional patriotic symbols -- U.S. flags, eagles, names of units -- for their tattoos. But some images are strikingly personal. Aided by improved pigments and more sophisticated equipment, they reveal in graphic detail the pain and permanence of war.

Mike Ergo, 22, a former Marine, had specific instructions for his tattoo artist. The enemy's hair had to be curly and dark, the beard thick. This was part of a face etched into his memory, that of the first insurgent he killed during the battle of Fallujah last November.

Ergo wanted it to come out just right.

In the tattoo, inked onto the inside of his left forearm in April, the enemy fighter is being slain by Saint Michael, the archangel, who stands, sword drawn, with his foot on the back of the man's head. The image is a reminder, Ergo said, that he survived one of the deadliest, bloodiest battles of the war -- and the other guy didn't.

"The tattoo kind of just helps me to see that this guy got what was coming to him," said Ergo, who lives near San Francisco.

According to a report Wednesday in the Washington Post [linked below -ed.], the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al-Qaida captives at Soviet-era compounds in eastern Europe.

The European Commission said Friday it would encourage governments in Eastern Europe, and those seeking membership, to comment publicly on allegations that the CIA set up secret prisons in the region to interrogate al-Qaida suspects. The allegations have already triggered a flurry of denials from governments in the former Soviet bloc and prompted European Union officials, the continent's top human rights organization and the international Red Cross to say they would look into the issue. Such prisons, European officials say, would violate the continent's human rights principles.

Human Rights Watch in New York said Thursday it had evidence indicating the CIA transported suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan to Poland and Romania. The conclusion is based on an analysis of flight logs of CIA aircraft from 2001 to 2004 obtained by the group, said Mark Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the organization. Human Rights Watch said it matched the flight patterns of the CIA aircraft with testimony from some of the hundreds of detainees in the war on terrorism who have been released by the United States.

The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA's internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.

Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

The hunger strikers are protesting their lengthy confinements in the island prison, where some have been kept for nearly four years and most have never been charged with a crime. The most recent hunger strike came after detention officials allegedly failed to honor promises made during a previous hunger strike.

Three U.N. experts said yesterday that they would not accept a U.S. government invitation to tour Guantánamo unless they are granted private access to detainees, a concession the U.S. has not been willing to make, citing the ongoing war on terror and security concerns. Last week, the United States invited the U.N. representatives on torture and arbitrary detention to the facility, and the experts said yesterday that they hope to visit in early December. But they described their demand for access to the detainees as "non-negotiable."

"They said they have nothing to hide," Manfred Nowak, U.N. special rapporteur on torture, said yesterday at a news conference in New York. "If they have nothing to hide, why should we not be able to talk to detainees in private?"

It took the brothers three years to convince the Americans that they posed no threat to ... the United States, and to get released -- a struggle that underscores the enormous odds weighing against innocent foreign Muslims caught in America's military prisons.

In recent months, scores of Afghans interviewed by Newsday -- including a dozen former U.S. prisoners, plus human rights officials and senior Afghan security officials -- said the United States is detaining enough innocent Afghans in its war against the Taliban and al-Qaida that it is seriously undermining popular support for its presence in Afghanistan.

"Fortunately, we were not tortured," Badr said, "but we heard torture." At Bagram, "We heard guards shouting at people to make them stand up all night without sleeping." At Kandahar, prisoners caught talking in their cells "were punished by being forced to kneel on the ground with their hands on their head and not moving for three or four hours in hot weather. "Some became unconscious," he said. The U.S. military last year investigated abuse at its prisons in Afghanistan but the Pentagon ordered the report suppressed.

Parks is mostly remembered as a symbol of ordinary blacks' determination to resist the indignities of the Jim Crow system, the woman whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger sparked the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. But she was much more than a seamstress with tired feet. Parks was a veteran of political activism dating back to the 1930s. Her career underscores not only the role of individual acts of courage in the struggle for racial justice, but the movement's now-forgotten pre-history of local activism in which communists, socialists, unionists, Garveyites and the NAACP cooperated, sometimes uneasily. This was Rosa Parks's world.

Like King, frozen in memory on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial delivering his "I Have a Dream Speech," Parks is now forever recalled as the simple woman who helped to bring down segregation-an inspiring image, and one wholly unthreatening to white America. A fuller picture of her life should make us also remember the many unsung heroes and heroines who came before and after her.

The number of Iraqis who have died violently since the U.S.-led invasion is many times larger than the U.S. military death toll of 2,000 in Iraq. In one sign of the enormity of the Iraqi loss, at least 3,870 were killed in the past six months alone, according to an Associated Press count.

Civilians made up more than two-thirds of the Iraqis killed in war-related violence since the country's first elected government took power on April 28, according to the AP count. The rest were Iraqi security personnel. [U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Steve] Boylan said the U.S. military keeps its own tally of Iraqi dead, but does not release it. He said he had asked U.S. authorities to see the estimates of Iraqi dead himself, and was refused.

Confidence in the US and Britain that soldiers are dying to protect the great majority of Iraqis from a minority of insurgents will be damaged by a leaked Ministry of Defence poll. It shows 45 per cent of Iraqis think attacks on occupying troops are justified. The poll, commissioned by senior British military officers and published by The Sunday Telegraph, reveals a very high level of hostility towards the occupation. It is striking that resistance is common to Shia and Sunni communities.

The survey, carried out across Iraq in August, shows that 82 per cent of Iraqis say they are "strongly opposed" to coalition troops in Iraq. Less than 1 per cent say the troops are responsible for an improvement in security. The figures help to explain why the armed resistance has found so many sympathisers. Some 72 per cent of Iraqis say they feel no confidence in the coalition forces, 67 per cent feel less secure because of their presence, and 43 per cent say conditions for peace and stability have got worse.

The figures on Iraqis' views about attacks on coalition troops came from a nationwide opinion survey, commissioned by the Ministry of Defence and leaked to the Sunday Telegraph.

According to the report, fewer than one in 100 respondents felt the presence of American, British and other allied troops was improving security in the country.

Forty-five per cent countrywide were said to believe that the attacks on the troops were justified - a figure that rose to 65 per cent in the Maysan, one of the provinces policed by the British. No fewer than 82 per cent, according to the report, declared themselves 'strongly opposed' to the presence of coalition troops.

A Spanish High court judge on Wednesday issued international warrants for the arrest of three US soldiers who are connected to the death of a cameraman in Iraq. Judge Santiago Pedraz has issued the warrants against Sergeant Thomas Gibson, Captain Philip Wolford and Lieutenant Colonel Philip de Camp for their involvement in the death of José Couso, who died when Baghdad's Hotel Palestine, where he was staying, was shelled by US forces on April 8, 2003.

Couso, 38, was a cameraman for Spanish channel Tele 5. He died along with Taras Protsyuk, 35, a Reuters cameraman who was also in the Hotel Palestine, where many journalists were lodged. According to reports and interviews that have emerged since the deaths, a US tank manned by Gibson and Wolford fired on the hotel after an individual using binoculars was sighted at a window.

[This story is also covered today on Democracy Now. -ed.]

[Rory Carroll, whose reporting on Iraq has been appreciated by the editor of this website, has been abducted by gunmen in Baghdad. -ed.]
[**update Oct. 20** Rory Carroll has been released. -ed.]

The stage is set, the actors are ready, but the audience is distracted. Saddam Hussein's trial starts tomorrow, trailing words such as momentous and historic, a courtroom drama with a gallows in the wings. The former president is expected to play his part, defiant and confident even if denied a tie lest he make a premature noose. The prosecution and defence have studied transcripts from Nuremberg and The Hague and rehearsed their lines. Five judges will determine the final act.

"People here don't think it will be a fair trial. But they will do nothing because they don't care about him," said Fawzi Mohammad, 48, a cement plant manager in Falluja, a city of ruins and a symbol of resistance to the Americans. "Saddam now is the past for us. He is like an old currency, worthless."

Saddam packed his regime with fellow Sunni Arabs, perpetuating the sect's historic dominance over Shias and Kurds, but that did not purchase loyalty from Falluja's tribal sheikhs, said Lieutenant Colonel Pat Carroll, a US marine political officer based in the city. "They never bring him up. He is yesterday's man. They have too many other things to worry about."

In Kurdistan and Shia cities such as Najaf and Basra people, when prompted, express satisfaction, sometimes glee, when imagining the despot in the dock. When not prompted they discuss the lack of jobs, electricity and security.

Strangely, the Americans and the British never seem to have understood the extent to which the occupation outraged Iraqi nationalism, though anger might take a different form in the Sunni and Shia communities. In Sunni areas anybody resisting the occupation - including bigoted and fanatical Sunni groups - could expect a degree of protection. Former members of the Baath party and the security services - never popular institutions in Iraq - may have provided a skeleton organisation for the resistance. But this would not have been enough to mount a widespread uprising if it had not enjoyed popular support.

A private poll conducted for the coalition, in effect the US and Britain, in February this year showed that 45 per cent of Iraqi Arabs supported armed attacks on the coalition forces. For the first time in Iraq, resistance groups sharing the same ideology as al-Qa'ida were able to flourish. Many Sunni did not like them but they loathed the Americans even more. It is significant that al-Qa'ida was not able to launch an effective guerrilla war against the government and its American allies in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had long been based, after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. It was in Iraq, from where Saddam Hussein had long excluded them, that they found a welcome.

In August 2003 there began the most sustained suicide bombing campaign in history. The bombers may have been mostly pious young men from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, but their organisation is Iraqi. It is they who provide the explosives, vehicles, safe houses and intelligence. Merciless and directed primarily against civilians, the suicide bombing has proved savagely effective in demoralising and destabilising the country.

Two and a half years after the US occupation began, there stood President Bush at his podium in the White House -- in front of a massive plasma TV, holding an earpiece to his head (out in the open this time). Before him, beamed in by satellite, were the ten handpicked soldiers. They sat in three rows, fawning over Bush and delivering glowing assessments of the situation on the ground.

At one point, it seemed as if one of the soldiers, Master Sergeant Corine Lombardo, was lifting from one of Bush's "major addresses" on Iraq when she told the president, "We began our fight against terrorism in the wake of 9/11, and we're proud to continue it here."

It turns out that the soldiers had actually been coached by Pentagon official Allison Barber before the event, and were given Bush's questions in advance. At one point during the coaching, which was caught on videotape, Barber asked, "Who are we going to give that [question] to?" At another point, she suggests the phrase, "Sir, together we are working on..." for a response to a question on cooperation between US and Iraqi troops.

"There is a growing consensus that there can be no free and fair elections in Haiti under the violent conditions that exist today. Nevertheless, the interim government is determined to hold elections in November of this year, despite rampant violence and the continuing imprisonment of Lavalas party leaders. Under these circumstances, it is hard to believe that the Haitian people would ever accept the results of the elections."

- Congresswoman Maxine Waters, August 23, 2005

We are inclined to believe that elections are a key step in creating democracy. Yet the United States government has used rigged elections as an instrument to maintain control and domination for many years. In their 1984 book, Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador, Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead explain the manipulative use of such elections to:

- "oppose and defeat popular movements"
- "ratify ongoing U.S. intervention strategies"
- "reassure the U.S. home population" that the latest Washington-backed foreign war is justified.

The authors could have written this very book about the upcoming elections in Haiti this fall.

... the two potential candidates for president from Fanmi Lavalas, both of whom would easily win a fair election, sit as political prisoners in Haitian jails.

Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste, a hero to the Haitian community in the United States and the poor in Haiti, has been designated a political prisoner by Amnesty International and Human Rights First. Former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune has been incarcerated on trumped-up charges for more than 14 months, and even former U.S. Ambassador James Foley called for Neptune's release before he left Haiti.

The CEP, controlled by the Group 184 that led the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Haiti, has barred Jean-Juste from running for president on the grounds that he must "personally appear" to register as a candidate.

The interim Haitian government also has done its part in this farce by keeping both Jean-Juste and Neptune in jail on no or baseless charges. They have also arrested most of the leadership of Fanmi Lavalas, banned all demonstrations until after the elections and allowed the Haitian National Police to work with death squads for the purpose of executing thousands of Fanmi Lavalas supporters since the coup against Aristide.

Two-and-a-half years into the occupation, Baghdad - which during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s was one of the world's cleanest cities - remains an archipelago of rubble, garbage and fetid lakes. Writing for the Saudi-financed al-Sharq al-Awsat, Maad Fayyad, a London-based Arab journalist, captured the mood, "I wonder - did the Mongols descend on it only yesterday, led by the captain of catastrophe and devotee of death, Hulagu Khan, such that [Baghdad] was transformed into debris?"

The Black Code prohibited the torture of slaves in the French colonies. But it wasn't to torture them but to educate them that slaves' masters whipped their blacks and cut their tendons when they fled.

The Laws of the Indias, which protected the Indians in the Spanish colonies, were quite moving. But the gallows and pillory set up in the center of every Main Square were even more affecting.

The reading of the Request for Obedience was very convincing. This occurred on the eve of the assault on each village. It explained to the Indians that God had come to the world and left Saint Peter in his place, and that the successor of Saint Peter was the Holy Father, and that the Holy Father has shown favor on the Queen of Castilla who rules all this land, and that for this reason they should go from here or pay tribute in gold. If they didn't, war would be declared on them, and they would be made slaves along with their wives and children. But the Request was read in the middle of the night from the mountain in Spanish and without an interpreter, in the presence of the notary but no Indians, as they were asleep, miles away, and hadn't the faintest idea what was awaiting them.

For Washington, the real enemy is not Islamic fundamentalism: it's Arab nationalism. For decades the ultimate target of Israeli foreign policy has been to sow disunion among Arabs. Secular Arab nationalism is the ultimate threat to Israel, thus to the US, in neo-con thinking. The crux is not religious: it's political.

Historically, over the past 20 years, radical Islam has been the key channel for expressing rage against Western exploitation - because every progressive channel of expression failed, or was thwarted, by corrupt, American-supported regimes. Radical Islam spent a long time fighting the rise of progressive nationalist movements in the Arab world: it became anti-Western only after the end of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and the first Gulf War.

Progressive, secular Arab intellectuals stress that Washington-Jerusalem will never tolerate united Arab lands. They stress that the Greater Middle East package is pure "strategic intimidation" designed to "eliminate any form of Arab or Muslim unity considered as a threat to the US strategy, and that of its strategic ally, Israel", as Mahua Daoudi, a Syrian intellectual and scholar at the CNRS think tank in Geneva, put it.

As for the US, only the interfering methods diverge, not the objectives. The neo-cons writing in the Weekly Standard keep assuring the faithful that the only solution is total war in the Middle East, with more troops in Iraq and the bombing of Syrian villages suspected of supporting the Iraqi resistance. Francis "end of history" Fukuyama - a NED administrator - and former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, president of the Democrat branch of NED, for their part promote more docile methods.

There may be a debate raging within the American elites between the gung-go, armchair warrior neo-cons and the "exporting democracy" gang, but meanwhile the Greater Middle East concept keeps accumulating facts on the ground. The divisive project for the new Iraqi constitution, to be voted in the end of next week, is a mechanism to soften the partition of Iraq.

...our president is almost certainly not an overt racist. He's just a run-of-the-mill overly privileged American who appears to have no soul. I'm reasonably sure he doesn't harbor ill will for anyone based solely on race. Instead -- like many people in similar positions and status -- he's incapable of understanding how race and class structure life in the United States. His privilege has not only coddled and protected him his whole life, but also has left him with a drastically reduced capacity for empathy, and without empathy one can't be fully human.

This is not a partisan attack; such a soulless existence is not a feature of membership in any particular political party. Nor is it exclusive to men. Though we tend to assume women will be more caring, this deficiency among the privileged crosses gender lines; probably the most inhuman comment by a public figure after Katrina was made by the president's mother, Barbara Bush. After touring the Astrodome stadium in Houston, where many who were displaced by the disaster were being warehoused, she said, "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them."

In our president all we see is an extreme version of a more general problem in an affluent but highly unequal society, in which people on the top have convinced themselves they are special and therefore deserve their positions.

"We are dying a slow death in here," wrote the inmate, British resident Omar Deghayes. "We have not been charged with any crime. I do not understand what America is doing."

Deghayes, 35, was chronicling a six-week hunger strike in June and July among scores of inmates protesting conditions at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The strike resumed in early August and today entered its ninth week, posing the latest challenge to the Pentagon's already controversial handling of suspects in its war on terror.

Military officials won't say what prompted the strike or explain why their numbers dropped. Nor will they allow relatives, independent medical teams and most defense lawyers to visit or telephone striking prisoners, saying national security concerns preclude such access.

US troops returning from Iraq are for the first time to be offered state-of-the-art radiation testing to check for contamination from depleted uranium - a controversial substance linked by some to cancer and birth defects.

Campaigners say the Pentagon refuses to take seriously the issue of poisoning from depleted uranium (DU) and offers only the most basic checks, and only when it is specifically asked for. But state legislators across the US are pushing ahead with laws that will provide their National Guard troops access to the most sophisticated tests.

The CIA coup plan went like this: if Unscom inspections could somehow be used to trigger a crisis, that would create a pretext for a US military attack against the Special Republican Guard, then Saddam's personal security force could be decapitated. This would clear the way for the plotters, led by Mohammad Abdullah al-Shawani, a former commander of Iraqi Special Forces who had defected to Amman in Jordan and been recruited by the CIA, to make their move.

Car bombings and other insurgent attacks, as unknown in Baghdad before the invasion as suicide subway bombings were in London until this summer, have killed more than 3,000 people in the capital since late spring.

Leaving the house for work each day has become a matter of turning the key and consigning one's fate to God, said Jassim Mohammed, 41, a Karrada merchant who has lost two of his closest friends and one of his lighting shops in car bombings since the Americans came.

"Now in Iraq, no one and nothing can protect you but that. Every morning you kiss them goodbye," Mohammed said, referring to his wife and children, "because you don't know if you will be back or not. Everyone in Iraq does that now."

...

Mohammed, a courtly, gentle-mannered man, carefully chose the harshest word he could think of for urine. In Karrada this summer, Mohammed and the neighborhood watched as American soldiers on patrol grew irritated at an Iraqi who had left his car in the street to run inside a store on an errand, blocking their armored convoy.

The Americans took one of the empty plastic water bottles they use to relieve themselves when on patrol, Mohammed said. When the Iraqi driver ran out to move his car, an annoyed American plunked him with the newly filled bottle and rolled on, Mohammed said.

"He started crying," Mohammed said of the Iraqi driver, humiliated in front of the neighborhood. Mohammed, who said he had been one of the happiest people in Karrada to see the Americans when they came in April 2003, retrieved the bottle and handed it to the weeping man. "I said, 'Give this to the Iraqi government,' " Mohammed said. " 'Tell them this is the sovereignty the Americans have brought us.'"

"We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them," one sergeant told Human Rights Watch researchers during one of four interviews in July and August. "This happened every day."

The sergeant continued: "Some days we would just get bored, so we would have everyone sit in a corner and then make them get in a pyramid. This was before Abu Ghraib but just like it. We did it for amusement."

Some soldiers beat prisoners to vent their frustrations, one sergeant said, recalling an instance when an off-duty cook showed up at the detention area and ordered a prisoner to grab a metal pole and bend over. "He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini-Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat."

Even after the Abu Ghraib scandal became public, one of the sergeants said, the abuses continued. "We still did it, but we were careful," he told the human rights group.

[Naomi Klein was interviewed about this piece today on Democracy Now.]

I had interviewed New Orleans' top corporate lobbyist, Mark Drennen. As president and CEO of Greater New Orleans Inc., Drennen was in an expansive mood, pumped up by signs from Washington that the corporations he represents--everything from Chevron to Liberty Bank to Coca-Cola--were about to receive a package of tax breaks, subsidies and relaxed regulations so generous it would make the job of a lobbyist virtually obsolete.

Listening to Drennen enthuse about the opportunities opened up by the storm, I was struck by his reference to African-Americans in New Orleans as "the minority community." At 67 percent of the population, they are in fact the clear majority, while whites like Drennen make up just 27 percent. It was no doubt a simple verbal slip, but I couldn't help feeling that it was also a glimpse into the desired demographics of the new-and-improved city being imagined by its white elite, one that won't have much room for Nyler or her neighbors who know how to fix houses. "I honestly don't know and I don't think anyone knows how they are going to fit in," Drennen said of the city's unemployed.

...

The citywide numbers are staggering: In the areas that sustained only minor damage and are on the mayor's repopulation list, there are at least 11,600 empty apartments and houses. If Jefferson Parish is included, that number soars to 23,270. With three people in each unit, that means homes could be found for roughly 70,000 evacuees. With the number of permanently homeless city residents estimated at 200,000, that's a significant dent in the housing crisis. And it's doable. Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, whose Houston district includes some 150,000 Katrina evacuees, says there are ways to convert vacant apartments into affordable or free housing. After passing an ordinance, cities could issue Section 8 certificates, covering rent until evacuees find jobs. Jackson Lee says she plans to introduce legislation that will call for federal funds to be spent on precisely such rental vouchers. "If opportunity exists to create viable housing options," she says, "they should be explored." [read more]

The Iraqi official was visibly flustered and embarrassed when questioned in Baghdad about the storming of the police station in Basra by British troops. "It is a very unfortunate development that the British forces should try to release their soldiers the way it happened," Haydar al-Abadi, the Prime Minister's press secretary, told The Independent.

Climate-change denial has gone through four stages. First the fossil-fuel lobbyists told us that global warming was a myth. Then they agreed that it was happening, but insisted that it was a good thing: we could grow wine in the Pennines and take Mediterranean holidays in Skegness. Then they admitted that the bad effects outweighed the good ones, but claimed that climate change would cost more to tackle than to tolerate. Now they have reached stage four. They concede that climate change would be cheaper to address than to neglect, but maintain that it's now too late. This is their most persuasive argument.

"At the Porto Alegre World Social Forum last January different personalities asked for the United Nations to move outside the United States if the repeated violations to international rule of law continue. Today we know that there were never any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The people of the United States have always been very rigorous in demanding the truth to their leaders; the people of the world demand the same thing. There were never any weapons of mass destruction; however, Iraq was bombed, occupied and it is still occupied. All this happened over the United Nations. That is why we propose this Assembly that the United Nations should leave a country that does not respect the resolutions taken by this same Assembly. Some proposals have pointed out to Jerusalem as an international city as an alternative. The proposal is generous enough to propose an answer to the current conflict affecting Palestine. Nonetheless, it may have some characteristics that could make it very difficult to become a reality. That is why we are bringing a proposal made by Simón Bolívar, the great Liberator of the South, in 1815. Bolívar proposed then the creation of an international city that would host the idea of unity."

Haiti's electoral council barred ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's party from registering jailed priest Gérard Jean-Juste as its presidential candidate, saying he has to enter his candidacy in person. Louis Gérard Gilles, a former senator with Aristide's Lavalas Family party, said he showed the council a letter from the jailed priest authorizing party members to register his candidacy, but the council refused to enroll him. Provisional Election Council official Jaccillon Barthélemy said Tuesday Jean-Juste had to register his candidacy in person.

Sunni and some Western commentators say that the current campaign being waged against Tal Afar is meant to punish Sunni Turkomen for supporting Sunni Arab resistance against the occupation. When the US and Iraqi troops entered Tal Afar on Sunday, they found most Iraqi insurgents had fled and there were few foreign fighters based there. Iraqi troops carried out house to house searches to collect any weapons and gain intelligence on insurgents, looting and ransacking homes.

Although most of Tal Afar's inhabitants had left ahead of the onslaught, men who remained to secure their homes were rounded up and confronted by masked informers who identified alleged militants and their sympathisers. They were taken away in lorries to a US camp for interrogation in spite of the fact that US military sources say that few of those chosen by informers are insurgents or provide useful information.

As in the case of Fallujah, Iraqi army units deployed in the Tal Afar operation are ethnically based. They come from the Peshmerga, the Kurdish militia which has no love for ethnic Turks (Turkomen) and is fighting Turkomen for control of the oil city of Kirkuk. The informers are mainly Shiite Turkomen, who make up 30 per cent of the inhabitants of Tal Afar, and are settling disputes and old scores with the 70 per cent Sunni Turkomen majority.

The Tal Afar campaign was clearly timed to give the US and George W. Bush, whose approval rating is plummeting, the illusion of a 'victory' ahead of the United Nations General Assembly summit. The US' trumpeting the participation of 'Iraqi forces' in connection with this offensive is meant to create the impression that troops involved belong to a national army rather than to an ethnic militia with a grudge against Turkomen.

A suicide bomber sparked Baghdad's worst day of slaughter since the fall of Saddam 30 months ago when he lured labourers desperate for work towards his van by offering them jobs and then detonated explosives that killed 114 and injured 156 of them.

On a day when more than a dozen co-ordinated attacks thundered across Baghdad from dawn into the late afternoon - claiming 152 lives and wounding 542 - al-Qa'ida in Iraq said it was retaliating against a US-Iraqi operation directed at the insurgents' northern stronghold of Tal Afar. And as the hours passed with car and roadside bombs shattering the relative calm of the past few days, fears of civil war intensified.

With oil prices near record highs and a U.S.-backed free-trade pact for the Western Hemisphere on hold, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is offering cash-strapped Caribbean countries affordable fuel, debt relief and anti-poverty funding. Thirteen countries have signed on to Chávez's PetroCaribe initiative, which some leaders say is an attempt by the Venezuelan populist to boost his influence in a region where his nemesis, the United States, has long been the main trading partner.

"We have an opportunity to break from the imposed path of domination and servility," said Chávez, alluding to U.S. investment and influence in the Caribbean.

Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson has insisted there are "no strings attached" to Venezuela's provision of 21,000 barrels of oil a day to Jamaica, which can be partially financed on cheap credit and paid for in goods and services. Jamaica also will get a $200-million expansion of its Petrojam refinery in Kingston, the capital, and low-interest loans to retire debt, whose servicing consumes 67% of the national budget. Oil costs have tripled in Jamaica over the last four years, to $1.2 billion this year, or about what the country will gross in tourism.

PetroCaribe offers each Caricom country, as well as Cuba, the opportunity to finance 40% of negotiated oil quantities at 1% interest over 25 years, with a two-year deferral of payments. Chávez has also pledged $50 million a year to a social development fund along the lines of his own "missions," which subsidize groceries and offer adult education and Cuban-staffed medical clinics in Venezuela's sprawling slums.

The U.S. government has cast Chávez as a regional troublemaker, accusing him of fomenting leftist unrest and anti-U.S. sentiment in Latin America. A State Department official, who said no one was authorized to discuss PetroCaribe on the record, would say only that the Venezuelan initiative had "a strong dose of politics" and that free-trade advocates in the Western Hemisphere were concerned about the influence of what amounts to a state subsidy on the international market.

[Journalist and filmmaker Kevin Pina is scheduled to show his film "Haiti: The Untold Story" and take questions afterward on October 27 at 7pm at the Alamo Drafthouse downtown.]

A Haitian and American journalist were detained by police searching the church of a jailed priest who is considered a potential presidential candidate. Kevin Pina of the United States was detained Friday after filming the police as they searched the church of the Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste. Jean Ristil, a Haitian who was working for the Associated Press, was detained as he tried to photograph the arrest.

Pina has been reporting from Haiti for 10 years for "Flashpoints," a daily program produced by radio station KPFA in Berkeley, Calif., and distributed to other stations by the Pacifica Radio Network, said Dennis Bernstein, the show's executive producer.

It's a radical concept: the $10.5bn released by Congress and the $500m raised by private charities doesn't actually belong to the relief agencies or the government - it belongs to the victims. The agencies entrusted with the money should be accountable to them. Put another way, the people Barbara Bush tactfully described as "underprivileged anyway" just got very rich.

Except relief and reconstruction never seem to work like that. When I was in Sri Lanka six months after the tsunami, many survivors told me that the reconstruction was victimising them all over again. A council of the country's most prominent businesspeople had been put in charge of the process, and they were handing the coast over to tourist developers at a frantic pace. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of poor fishing people were still stuck in sweltering inland camps, patrolled by soldiers with machine guns and entirely dependent on relief agencies for food and water. They called reconstruction "the second tsunami".

Here's a better idea: New Orleans could be reconstructed by and for the very people most victimised by the flood. Schools and hospitals that were falling apart before could finally have adequate resources; the rebuilding could create thousands of local jobs and provide massive skills training in decent paying industries. Rather than handing over the reconstruction to the same corrupt elite that failed the city so spectacularly, the effort could be led by groups like Douglass Community Coalition. Before the hurricane, this remarkable assembly of parents, teachers, students and artists was trying to reconstruct the city from the ravages of poverty by transforming Frederick Douglass senior high school into a model of community learning. They have already done the painstaking work of building consensus around education reform. Now that the funds are flowing, shouldn't they have the tools to rebuild every ailing public school in the city?

Though apparently no final decision has been made, the United States federal government appears ready to turn down the offer of hurricane relief from the Cuba, which is world-renowned for its health-care system. Cuba's president, Fidel Castro, said he would send 1,100 doctors to aid in relief efforts, despite the four-decade-old economic embargo the US maintains against the tiny island nation. The first doctors could have begun arriving the day after an acceptance from the US.

In a statement Friday, Castro outlined a plan that included immediately flying 100 medical professionals to Houston or another nearby city, and then transporting them to New Orleans where they would work in small teams or alone to provide medical care to people suffering from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. Over the next two days, Castro proposed, Cuba would send two more teams of 500 similarly equipped doctors to the US. The workers would remain, "as long as is necessary," Castro said, and were proficient enough in English to communicate with patients.

In the past, Cuba has sent medical brigades to other hurricane-ravished countries. For instance, following Hurricane Mitch and Hurricane Georges in 1998, Cuba sent medical relief teams to Guatemala, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and other hard-hit nations.

The move is the latest -- and one of the most colorful -- uses of oil as a political tool by Chávez, a pugnacious populist who has fashioned himself as Latin America's leading critic of U.S. foreign policy and American-style capitalism.

With his government's coffers bulging with oil revenue, Chávez has poured billions of dollars into programs for the poor, such as state-subsidized grocery stores, and struck generous oil deals with neighbors including Argentina, Brazil and Caribbean nations. His friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro has particularly rankled the White House; the antipathy that conservatives harbor toward him boiled over when Robertson, citing Chávez's claims that Washington wanted him assassinated, said on his television show last month that "we really ought to go ahead and do it." (The religious broadcaster later apologized for the remarks.)

The plan to ship gasoline -- which has been supplemented by Venezuelan proposals to provide low-cost heating oil and other aid to the poor in the Gulf region -- does not mean Chávez is trying to smooth things over with President Bush. He has repeatedly excoriated the administration for bungling the humanitarian emergency on the Gulf Coast, saying on TV Sunday: "How many children were killed because they could not be evacuated? ... And Mr. Bush on holiday."

Toxicologists and public health experts warned yesterday that pumping billions of gallons of contaminated water from the streets of New Orleans back into the Gulf of Mexico - the only viable option if the city is ever to return to even a semblance of its former self -would have a crippling effect on marine and animal life, compromise the wetlands that form the first line of resistance to future hurricanes, and carry deleterious consequences for human health throughout the region.

The full extent of the danger is unknown and unknowable, but the polluted waters are known to contain human and animal waste, the bodies of people and animals, household effluence, and chemical and petrochemical toxins from the refineries that dot the Gulf coast in and around New Orleans.

Even before the pumping is complete, a process city officials said yesterday would take at least three weeks (some engineers believe it could last months), the consequences for all living creatures - humans, animals, fish and micro-organisms - are likely to be dire.

In the high-stakes nuclear poker game between Iran and the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany), Tehran has decided to call the EU's bluff and turn the game around.

On top of it Ali Larijani, the new head of the Supreme National Security Council - appointed by President Mahmud Ahmadinejad - and now Iran's top nuclear negotiator, stressed on Iranian TV that the criticism expressed in Saturday's report by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Mohammad ElBaradei was "neither legal nor technical" and distorted by political motives. ("The nuclear issue is a national issue. They [a reference to the EU-3, not the IAEA] should not talk to Iranian people with bullying language.")

Larijani once again stressed that as a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran had the right to develop the nuclear fuel cycle for civilian purposes. Right on cue, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi added that "access to peaceful nuclear technology is our inalienable right and we will not forsake such a right. The Isfahan issue is irrevocable." This a reference to uranium conversion being resumed at the Isfahan plant. According to Larijani, "If the IAEA was seeking to resolve Iran's nuclear issue, it could have already done so by now."

...

Tehran's new global diplomatic thrust is now evident. The strategy insists on Iran's inalienable nuclear rights according to the IAEA charter; stresses a close, respectful cooperation with IAEA inspectors; and actively courts support from non-aligned countries like India, Malaysia and South Africa (that's the spirit of Larijani's high profile visit to India last week). As far as Tehran is concerned, the EU-3 are now history. Unless they table a realistic proposal.

Tehran stresses that both Israel and Pakistan totally ignored the NPT and built their own nuclear weapons, without giving any explanation to the "international community". So why should Iran be punished when it is actually complying with the NPT?

More than 8 months ago, one of the worst natural disasters in a human history destroyed substantial part of a province under Indonesian control - Aceh. Although exact number will never be known, close to 250 thousand people lost their lives during the under-ocean earthquake and consequent tsunami; tens of thousands died in Sri Lanka, India and Thailand combined. It is now clear that tens of thousands more people died due to inadequate response of Indonesian government and military, stranded in remote areas with no food, drinking water, shelter and medical care.

Months ago, your correspondent mistakenly claimed that what happened in Aceh could never happen in any developed country. The government which would show such incompetence would be forced to resign. His analyses were proven wrong by recent events in his own country.

In Washington, there are no calls for impeachment and it seems that no heads will roll as a result of what this outrageous failure which took lives of many men, women and children. Criticism in the US mainstream press is half-hearted and when it appears, it is diluted by the stories (always so much in demand and on offer) about the heroism and self-sacrifice of the rescue workers. It may appear that although some mistakes were made, society is still governed by the sound principles; that in essence everything is correct.

In reality almost nothing went right for the citizens of New Orleans, especially for the poor; and nothing is going right even as these words are being written. White bags are covering corpses of those who recently died on the streets of New Orleans; those who died after the disaster - long after. Men, women and children are spread on the ground, many almost motionless, in the center of the city. They are hungry and thirsty; they have no place to wash and to urinate. And they are supposed to stay where they are; they are not suppose to "loot" and if they, by any chance, decide to break into some store and take food and water, there are orders to shoot and kill them!

One of the premiere Black cities in the nation faces catastrophe. There is no doubt in my mind that New Orleans will one day rise again from its below sea level foundations. The question is, will the new New Orleans remain the two-thirds Black city it was before the levees crumbled?

Some would say it is unseemly to speak of politics and race in the presence of a massive calamity that has destroyed the lives and prospects of so many people from all backgrounds. But I beg to differ. As we have witnessed, over and over again, the rich and powerful are very quick to reward themselves as soon as disaster presents the opportunity. Remember that within days of 9/11, the Bush regime executed a multi-billion dollar bailout for the airline industry. By the time you hear this commentary, they may have already used the New Orleans disaster to bail out the insurance industry - one of the richest businesses on the planet. But what of the people of New Orleans, 67 percent of whom are Black?

New Orleans is a poor city. Twenty-eight percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Well over half are renters, and the median value of homes occupied by owners is only $87,000. From the early days of the flood, it was clear that much of the city's housing stock would be irredeemably damaged. The insurance industry may get a windfall of federal relief, but the minority of New Orleans home owners will get very little - even if they are insured. The renting majority may get nothing.

If the catastrophe in New Orleans reaches the apocalyptic dimensions towards which it appears to be headed, there will be massive displacement of the Black and poor. Poor people cannot afford to hang around on the fringes of a city until the powers-that-be come up with a plan to accommodate them back to the jurisdiction. And we all know that the prevailing model for urban development is to get rid of poor people. The disaster provides an opportunity to deploy this model in New Orleans on a citywide scale, under the guise of rebuilding the city and its infrastructure.

In place of the jobs that have been washed away, there could be alternative employment through a huge, federally funded rebuilding effort. But this is George Bush's federal government. Does anyone believe that the Bush men would mandate that priority employment go to the pre-flood, mostly Black population of the city. And the Black mayor of New Orleans is a Democrat in name only, a rich businessman, no friend of the poor. What we may see in the coming months is a massive displacement of Black New Orleans, to the four corners of the nation. The question that we must pose, repeatedly and in the strongest terms, is: Through whose vision, and in whose interest, will New Orleans rise again.

Beneath the dispute between Iran and the European Union Troika (EU-3) on uranium enrichment rests a far more fundamental issue: Do Third World countries have the right to develop and use all nuclear technology, including enrichment, as authorized by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), or not?

Iran says, categorically, "Yes," and the 116-member Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) agrees. The EU-3 -- consisting of Britain, France and Germany -- does not deny the right. But it wants Tehran to give up its prerogative forever in return for the Europeans' commitment to build nuclear power plants in Iran and upgrade trade ties with the Islamic Republic. As a result, when the last round of the Iran/EU-3 negotiations started last November, the two sides ended up at a stalemate.

To make sure the United States did not sabotage their diplomatic effort, the Europeans kept Washington abreast of their plans. By contrast, they paid little heed to the Iranians' repeated statements that they would not countenance the prospect of permanently abdicating their right to complete the whole nuclear cycle -- enriching uranium, which is abundant in Iran, using it as fuel for power plants and reprocessing the spent fuel -- as allowed in Article IV of the NPT.

By design or happenstance, Iran has emerged as a champion of the developing world with the courage and conviction to stand up to the Western world. This has won it quiet admiration by NAM governors, who fear that the limitations imposed on Iran could be extended to them eventually.

Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela, is a genial fellow with a good sense of humour and a steely political purpose. As a former military officer, he is accustomed to the language of battle and he thrives under attack. He will laugh off this week's suggestion by Pat Robertson, the US televangelist, that he should be assassinated, but he will also seize on it to ratchet up the verbal conflict with the United States that has lasted throughout his presidency.

A lot of what sounds like opposition to the war is more like opposition to losing the war. Consider how Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin concluded a piece on Sunday that disparaged Bush and his war policies. The column included eloquent, heartrending words from the mother of a Marine Corps Reserve member who died in Iraq early this year. And yet, the last quote from her was: "Tell us what it is going to take to win, Mr. Bush." In a tag line, the columnist described it as a question "we all need an answer to."

But some questions are based on assumptions that should be rejected - and "What is it going to take to win?" is one of them. In Iraq, the U.S. occupation force can't "win." More importantly, it has no legitimate right to try.

Earlier this year, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the guardian of international humanitarian law, sent the Israeli government a confidential position paper making clear that the removal of the Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza will not end the occupation. The paper stated: "Israel will retain significant control over the Gaza Strip, which will enable it to exercise key elements of authority. Thus ... it seems at this stage the Gaza Strip will remain occupied for the purposes of international humanitarian law."

It is a view backed by the highly respected Harvard Programme on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research. In a legal brief prepared for the donor community, the programme's director wrote: "The partial redeployment of Israel's military presence in and around the territory is not the controlling factor in international law to determine the end of occupation ... The end of occupation rests essentially on the termination of the military control of the Occupying Power over the Government affairs of the occupied population that limits the people's right to self determination."

Why this matters is made clear in the disengagement resolution passed by the Israeli government last summer. That states: "The completion of the [disengagement] plan will serve to dispel claims regarding Israel's responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip." But if it is still the occupying power, then in law Israel has very specific responsibility for the welfare of the population of Gaza. If the occupation is seen to have ended, then it can wash its hands of all 1.3 million of them.

And what, exactly, would a liberal patriotism look like? When confronted with a conflict between the interests of your country and those of another, patriotism, by definition, demands that you choose those of your own. Internationalism, by contrast, means choosing the option that delivers most good or least harm to people, regardless of where they live. It tells us that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington, and that a policy which favours the interests of 100 British people at the expense of 101 Congolese is one we should not pursue. Patriotism, if it means anything, tells us we should favour the interests of the 100 British people. How do you reconcile this choice with liberalism? How, for that matter, do you distinguish it from racism?

Occasionally I speak publicly about the racial disparities that afflict the prison-industrial complex. I often end my talks with an observation about how racial lynching once was accepted by white Americans because they assumed that the mostly black male victims were guilty.

African Americans had been so thoroughly demonized by the media of those days many whites considered lynching a public service. We marvel at our former acceptance of such racist injustice. But in the future we'll look back on our current apartheid system of criminal justice and shake our heads in disbelief.

The fact that America does implement a public policy of racially selective mass imprisonment is well documented and beyond dispute. With under 5 percent of the world's people, the US accounts for 25 percent of the planet's prisoners. More than half its 2.2 million prisoners come from the one eighth of its population which is black. Today, an astounding 3 percent of all African Americans languish in prisons and jails, and nearly as many more are on probation, parole, bail, house arrest or court supervision. Tens of thousands of jobless, skill-less, often anti-socialized inmates are released into black communities each month in which jobs, medical care, educational opportunities and family or official support are almost completely absent. Unsurprisingly, many are back behind the walls in a matter of months. Right now, the shadow of prison squats at the corners of, and often at the center of nearly every black family's life in this nation.

Since 1970, the US prison population has multiplied more than six times. The explosive growth of America's incarceration and crime control industries have occurred despite essentially level crime rates over the last four decades. This has only been possible because the public policies which enable and support locking up more people longer and for less have until now been exempt from analyses of their human, economic and social costs or any reckoning of the relationships of spiraling imprisonment to actual crime rates or public safety. Most tellingly, while public discussions of these policies are deracialized, their racially disparate impacts are a seldom discussed but widely known fact. Thus even though the damning numbers are widely reported and well known, mass incarceration is practically invisible as a political issue, even in those heavily black communities which suffer most from its implementation.

Haitians are still on the streets -- rejecting the planned sham elections, opposing privatization and holding up photographs of their president. And just as Washington's experts could not fathom the possibility that Aristide would reject their advice a decade ago, today they cannot accept that his poor supporters could be acting of their own accord -- surely Aristide must be controlling them through some mysterious voodoo arts. "We believe that his people are receiving instructions directly from his voice and indirectly through his acolytes that communicate with him personally in South Africa," [Roger Noriega, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs,] said.

Aristide claims no such powers. "The people are bright, the people are intelligent, the people are courageous," he says. They know that two plus two does not equal five.

We may know that the great boxing champ Muhammad Ali refused to fight in Viet Nam. But we don't know he consciously stood with the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, - the resistance - saying, "The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice freedom, and equality."

We may know about the famed Black Power Salute, of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics. But we don't know that they wore beads to protest lynching, went without shoes to protest poverty, or that John Carlos wore his shirt open because as he said to me, "I was representing shift workers, blue-collar people, and the underdogs. The people whose contributions to society are so important, but don't get recognized."

By speaking out for the political soul of the sports we love, we do more than just build a fighting left that stands for social justice. We also begin to impose our own ideas on the world of sports - a counter morality to compete with the rank hypocrisy of the pro leagues. These are ideas that can embrace and cheer competition. That can appreciate the artistic talents of athletes and the strategy of coaches and players alike. That can thrill to seeing Barry Bonds swinging a bat, or Michael Vick shredding a defense, or Mia Hamm kicking a soccer ball. But unlike the mainstream sports jabber, it's a morality that recognizes male and female athletes - and all women - as human beings with minds as well as bodies.

It also needs to understand that the incentive of athletes to speak out for social justice lies not in their individual brilliance but in our ability to build a struggle outside the arena and in the streets. If we want more Muhammad Alis, more John Carlos', and more Billie Jean Kings - if we want to see a gay male athlete have the courage to risk his neck by coming out - then we need to build a broader movement for social justice outside the arena, so our "heroes" will also have people to look up to.

In that fight we need every drop of history, experience, and tradition we can get our hands on. As Tommie Smith himself said about his famed Black Power salute, "It's not something I can lay on my shelf and forget about. My heart and soul are still on that team, and I still believe in everything we were trying to fight for in 1968. [It] has not been resolved and will be part of our future."

There are no registration centers in the poor neighborhoods and no plans to open any either. Poor Haitians have been terrorized in their own homes by police and ex-militaries backed up by U.N. forces. They have been fired upon by those same forces when they gather in peaceful demonstrations demanding the return of the president they elected last time, with 92% of the vote, Jean Bertrand Aristide. Neither Aristide, nor his party, Fanmi Lavalas, is on the ballot this fall, thanks to the U.S./French/Canadian supported coup, which removed him to Africa last year, and Lavalas has sensibly refused to join the elections unless the attacks against it stop.

Of course this is not to be discussed. With Aristide out of the way, the whys and wherefores are of little interest to the international community, who treat the democratic Haitian elections of 2000 and the coup that overturned them as though it were all a bad dream, better forgotten. Time to move on!

When Paul Bremer, the American pro consul in Baghdad until June last year, arrived in Iraq soon after the official end of hostilities, there was $6bn left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and at least $10bn from resumed Iraqi oil exports. Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on May 22 2003, all these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), and intended to be spent by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) "in a transparent manner ... for the benefit of the Iraqi people".

The US Congress also voted to spend $18.4bn of US taxpayers' money on the redevelopment of Iraq. By June 28 last year, however, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20bn of Iraqi money, compared with $300m of US funds. The "reconstruction" of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan - but the US government funded the Marshall Plan. Defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the "liberated" country, by the Iraqis themselves.

The 450 changes that Washington is demanding to the action agenda that will culminate at the September 2005 United Nations summit don't represent U.N. reform. They are a clear onslaught against any move that could strengthen the United Nations or international law.

The upcoming summit was supposed to focus on strengthening and reforming the U.N. and address issues of aid and development, with a particular emphasis on implementing the U.N.'s five-year-old Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Most assumed this would be a forum for dialogue and debate, involving civil society activists from around the world challenging governments from the impoverished South and the wealthy North and the United Nations to create a viable global campaign against poverty and for internationalism.

But now, there's a different and even greater challenge. This is a declaration of U.S. unilateralism, uncompromising and ascendant. The United States has issued an open threat to the 190 other U.N. member states, the social movements and peoples of the entire world, and the United Nations itself. And it will take a quick and unofficially collaborative effort between all three of those elements to challenge the Bush administration juggernaut.

Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow of occupation. Whatever the parliamentarians in Iraq do to try to prevent total meltdown, their efforts are compromised by the fact that their power grows from the barrel of someone else's gun. When George Bush picked up the phone last week to urge the negotiators to sign the constitution, he reminded Iraqis that their representatives - though elected - remain the administrators of his protectorate. While US and British troops stay in Iraq, no government there can make an undisputed claim to legitimacy. Nothing can be resolved in that country until our armies leave.

And there is a reason why soldiers like Nicolas Prubyla come home and join organizations like Iraq Veterans Against the War.

"Up until five days ago, I had large amounts of blood in my stool," he told me recently, "I've felt tired all the time, I have had loss of hair...loss of the feeling in my right arm...I'm battling this stuff."

What he is battling is exposure to uranium munitions in Iraq. He is battling radiation sickness as the result of the most recent nuclear war waged by the United States of America. There is a reason why over 11,000 veterans from the '91 Gulf War are dead today, and over 250,000 others are on medical disability. That reason (hundreds and hundreds of tons of uranium munitions dropped on Iraq) is the same thing Prubyla is battling today.

"As the years go on this is going to effect a hell of a lot more people than we think...radioactive dust and the clouds of smoke and dust from firing the DU [depleted uranium] is getting to us now," he said, "And I know I'm not the only person in my unit-my boss got diagnosed with cancer, one of my other buddies who is 23 years-old is getting rashes....every time I do more research on DU-I'm seeing that I have all the side effects."

America's controversial new ambassador to the United Nations is seeking to shred an agreement on strengthening the world body and fighting poverty intended to be the highlight of a 60th anniversary summit next month. In the extraordinary intervention, John Bolton has sought to roll back proposed UN commitments on aid to developing countries, combating global warming and nuclear disarmament.

Mr Bolton has demanded no fewer than 750 amendments to the blueprint restating the ideals of the international body, which was originally drafted by the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan.

The amendments are spelt out in a 32-page US version, first reported by the Washington Post and acquired yesterday by The Independent. The document is littered with deletions and exclusions. Most strikingly, the changes eliminate all specific reference to the so-called Millennium Development Goals, accepted by all countries at the last major UN summit in 2000, including the United States.

The Americans are also seeking virtually to remove all references to the Kyoto treaty and the battle against global warming. They are striking out mention of the disputed International Criminal Court and drawing a red line through any suggestion that the nuclear powers should dismantle their arsenals. Instead, the US is seeking to add emphasis to passages on fighting terrorism and spreading democracy.

Robertson: "You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if [Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez] thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don't think any oil shipments will stop. But this man is a terrific danger and the United ... This is in our sphere of influence, so we can't let this happen. We have the Monroe Doctrine, we have other doctrines that we have announced. And without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."

A three-day visit by a reporter working for the Guardian last week established what neither the Iraqi government nor the US military has admitted: Haditha, a farming town of 90,000 people by the Euphrates river, is an insurgent citadel.

That Islamist guerrillas were active in the area was no secret but only now has the extent of their control been revealed. They are the sole authority, running the town's security, administration and communications.

A three-hour drive north from Baghdad, under the nose of an American base, it is a miniature Taliban-like state. Insurgents decide who lives and dies, which salaries get paid, what people wear, what they watch and listen to.

Haditha exposes the limitations of the Iraqi state and US power on the day when the political process is supposed to make a great leap - a draft constitution finalised and approved by midnight tonight.

For politicians and diplomats in Baghdad's fortified green zone the constitution is a means to stabilise Iraq and woo Sunni Arabs away from the rebellion. For Haditha, 140 miles north-west of the capital, whether a draft is agreed is irrelevant. Residents already have a set of laws and rules promulgated by insurgents.

Within minutes of driving into town the Guardian was stopped by a group of men and informed about rule number one: announce yourself. The mujahideen, as they are known locally, must know who comes and goes. The Guardian reporter did not say he worked for a British newspaper. For their own protection interviewees cannot be named.

There is no fighting here because there is no one to challenge the Islamists. The police station and municipal offices were destroyed last year and US marines make only fleeting visits every few months.

[read the article]

In response to a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and a number of medical and veterans groups demanding release of 87 new videos and photographs depicting detainee abuse at the now infamous prison, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, said the release would result in "riots, violence and attacks by insurgents."

[Remarks at St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, Austin, TX, August 14, 2005.]

Cindy Sheehan has been forced to do something the mere mention of which produces panic in me: She has buried her own child. I will pray -- to any god and all gods that anyone has ever dreamed of -- that I never have to face what she has faced, that I never have to look down into the grave of my own child.

Cindy Sheehan and all the others who have lost loved ones in the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq belong to our community, to our nation. It is easy to grieve for them and with them, and we should. That is what decent people do.

But as we mark our belonging by sharing her grief, we are called to a becoming, to become something more, to see that as we grieve there are thousands of Iraqis, tens of thousands, who have buried their children, buried their parents, buried their friends. Buried those who they have touched and who have touched them.

Somewhere in Iraq right now, there is a mother looking into the grave of her child. There is a friend weeping over his loss. There is a community that gathers, much like we gather here, to find meaning in a world of suffering. In Iraq right now, there are people grieving in exactly the same way that Cindy Sheehan grieves, that we all grieve.

Hussain Osman, one of the men alleged to have participated in London's failed bombings on July 21, recently told Italian investigators that they prepared for the attacks by watching "films on the war in Iraq," La Repubblica reported. "Especially those where women and children were being killed and exterminated by British and American soldiers...of widows, mothers and daughters that cry."

It has become an article of faith that Britain was vulnerable to terror because of its politically correct antiracism. Yet Osman's comments suggest that what propelled at least some of the bombers was rage at what they saw as extreme racism. And what else can we call the belief--so prevalent we barely notice it--that American and European lives are worth more than the lives of Arabs and Muslims, so much more that their deaths in Iraq are not even counted?

When asked on Tuesday about a possible exit strategy for American troops, Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters it depended on many "variables," including:

"What are the Iranians doing? Are they going to be helpful or unhelpful? And if they're increasingly unhelpful, then obviously the conditions on the ground are less advantageous. Same thing with the Syrians."

Got that?

Cindy Sheehan, 48, is camped outside George Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, demanding to see the president. "I want to ask him why did my son die? What was this noble cause you talk about? And if the cause is so noble, when are you going to send your daughters over there and let somebody else's son come home?"

While a meeting with the president remains unlikely, Ms Sheehan has captured the nation's attention. Early yesterday she addressed Good Morning America; CBS and CNN have been to see her already. A magazine photoshoot was followed by an interview for a New York radio station. Her message has resonated. Other bereaved mothers are on their way to join her.

The interest in Ms Sheehan's efforts seems to reflect a shift in national mood. More than 60% of the country is in favour of withdrawing troops, and a recent poll by AP-Ipsos showed approval of Mr Bush's handling of Iraq at 38%, its lowest level yet. The death last week of 20 marines from one battalion has also raised public concern about the mounting number of US casualties.

The deaths last week of 20 Marines from a single battalion has focused public attention on the unremitting pace of casualties in Iraq, providing her an opening to deliver her message that no more lives should be given to the war. At the same time, polls that show falling approval for Mr. Bush's handling of the war have left him open to challenge in a way that he was not when the nation appeared to be more strongly behind him.

It is not clear how the White House will handle Ms. Sheehan. Mr. Bush usually comes and goes from the ranch by helicopter, but he might have to drive by her on Friday, when he is scheduled to attend a Republican fund-raiser at a ranch just down the road from where Ms. Sheehan is camped out. She will no doubt get another wave of publicity on Thursday, when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice join Mr. Bush at the ranch to discuss the war.

Tomorrow at 8.15am, a minute's silence will reverberate around the world. The people of Japan will commemorate the victims of the first atomic bomb, which was dropped by an American B-29 on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

The review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by 189 states collapsed two months ago amid recriminations and accusations that the nuclear five had no intention of living up to their treaty commitments to pursue nuclear disarmament.

All signs are that the treaty intended to protect the world from nuclear peril is dead. Pyongyang has pulled out, boasting that it now has nuclear weapons, and other members such as Iran, Egypt and South Korea have been caught cheating.

But the regime had already been seriously undermined by states that remained outside the NPT and became nuclear powers: Israel, India and Pakistan. The NPT review at the UN in the spring provided a timely opportunity to tighten nuclear safeguards. Instead, the month-long conference turned into a bitter slanging match in which the US administration ignored its own record and turned up the heat on Iran and North Korea.

At the heart of the four-decades-old NPT is a "grand bargain". The five nuclear powers - US, Britain, France, Russia and China - agreed to work towards nuclear disarmament. In return, the non-nuclear states gave up any ambition to develop nuclear weapons; they agreed to open up all their facilities to inspection; and in return they were guaranteed the benefits of peaceful nuclear technology.

The big five have always been open to the charge of hypocrisy. Behind the rhetoric of disarmament, they have tried everything in their power to prevent second-tier powers from obtaining nuclear arms, while clinging on to their own nuclear arsenals despite strategic cuts. Both the US and Britain are upgrading: the Bush administration is developing nuclear "bunker busters" that can strike deep underground, while Britain has ordered a new generation of Trident missiles.

As the blood of US soldiers continues to drain into the hot sands of Iraq over the last several days with at least 27 US soldiers killed and the approval rating for his handling of the debacle in Iraq dropping to an all-time low of 38%, Mr. Bush commented from the comforts of his ranch in Crawford, Texas today, "We will stay the course, we will complete the job in Iraq."

Just a two hour drive away in Dallas, at the Veterans for Peace National Convention in Dallas, I'm sitting with a roomful of veterans from the current quagmire.

I type furiously for three hours, trying to keep up with the stories each of the men shared ... about the atrocities of what they saw, and committed, while in Iraq.

Camilo Mejia, an army staff sergeant who was sentenced to a year in military prison in May, 2004 for refusing to return to Iraq after being home on leave, talks openly about what he did there:

"What it all comes down to is redemption for what was done there. I was turning ambulances away from going to hospitals, I killed civilians, I tortured guys ... and I'm ashamed of that. Once you are there, it has nothing to do with politics ... it has to do with you as an individual being there and killing people for no reason. There is no purpose, and now I'm sick at myself for doing these things. I kept telling myself I was there for my buddies. It was a weak reasoning ... because I still shut my mouth and did my job."

"It wasn't until I came home that I felt it-how wrong it all was and that I was a coward for pushing my principles aside. I'm trying to buy my way back into heaven ... and it's not so much what I did, but what I didn't do to stop it when I was there. So now it's a way of trying to undo the evil that we did over there. This is why I'm speaking out, and not going back. This is a painful process and we're going through it."

In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan almost 60 years ago, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included footage shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. In addition, for many years all but a handful of newspaper photographs were seized or prohibited.

The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for 25 years, and the U.S. military film remained hidden for nearly four decades.

Six weeks ago, E&P broke the story that articles written by famed Chicago Daily News war correspondent George Weller about the effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki were finally published, in Japan, almost six decades after they had been spiked by U.S. officials. This drew national attention, but suppressing film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was even more significant, as this country rushed into the nuclear age with its citizens having neither a true understanding of the effects of the bomb on human beings, nor why the atomic attacks drew condemnation around the world.

President Karimov of Uzbekistan has served notice to quit on the US base in his country. This completes a process of diplomatic revolution as Karimov turns away from the west and back into the embrace of Russia, with coy sideways glances at China. The US is trying to cover its retreat behind a smokescreen of belated concern for human-rights abuse in Uzbekistan. Suddenly one of their most intensively courted allies has been discovered - shock horror - to be an evil dictator. (Remember Saddam?) But the reality is much more complex.

The first and most obvious point is that the US didn't jump, it was pushed. The Andijan massacre of May 13, in which at least 600 demonstrators were killed, was carried out by Uzbek forces that in 2002 alone received $120m in US aid for the army and $82m for the security services. Prior to Karimov kicking it out, there was no indication at all that the US was going to review its military links with Uzbekistan - in fact General Richard Myers had specifically stated that they would continue.

Saturday is the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The nuclear powers are commemorating it in their own special way: by seeking to ensure that the experiment is repeated.

In May the US government launched a systematic assault on the [Nuclear non-proliferation treaty]. The summit in New York was supposed to strengthen it, but the US, led by John Bolton - the undersecretary for arms control (someone had a good laugh over that one) - refused even to allow the other nations to draw up an agenda for discussion. The talks collapsed, and the treaty may now be all but dead. Needless to say, Bolton has been promoted: to the post of US ambassador to the UN. Yesterday Bush pushed his nomination through by means of a "recess appointment": an undemocratic power that allows him to override Congress when its members are on holiday.

Bush wanted to destroy the treaty because it couldn't be reconciled with his new plans. Last month the Senate approved an initial $4m for research into a "robust nuclear earth penetrator" (RNEP). This is a bomb with a yield about 10 times that of the Hiroshima device, designed to blow up underground bunkers that might contain weapons of mass destruction. (You've spotted the contradiction.) Congress rejected funding for it in November, but Bush twisted enough arms this year to get it restarted. You see what a wonderful world he inhabits when you discover that the RNEP idea was conceived in 1991 as a means of dealing with Saddam Hussein's biological and chemical weapons. Saddam is pacing his cell, but the Bushites, like the Japanese soldiers lost in Malaysia, march on. To pursue his war against the phantom of the phantom of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, Bush has destroyed the treaty that prevents the use of real ones.

It gets worse. Last year Congress allocated funding for something called the "reliable replacement warhead". The government's story is that the existing warheads might be deteriorating. When they show signs of ageing they can be dismantled and rebuilt to a "safer and more reliable" design. It's a pretty feeble excuse for building a new generation of nukes, but it worked. The development of the new bombs probably means the US will also breach the comprehensive test ban treaty - so we can kiss goodbye to another means of preventing proliferation.

"When I volunteered to assist with this process and was assigned to this office, I expected there would at least be a minimal effort to establish a fair process and diligently prepare cases against significant accused," [Captain John Carr] wrote. "Instead, I find a half-hearted and disorganised effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged."

Capt Carr says that the prosecutors have been told by the chief prosecutor that the panel sitting in judgment on the cases would be handpicked to ensure convictions.

"You have repeatedly said to the office that the military panel will be handpicked and will not acquit these detainees and that we only needed to worry about building a record for the review panel," he said.

Senior military lawyers lodged vigorous and detailed dissents in early 2003 as an administration legal task force concluded that President Bush had authority as commander in chief to order harsh interrogations of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, newly disclosed documents show.

Despite the military lawyers' warnings, the task force concluded that military interrogators and their commanders would be immune from prosecution for torture under federal and international law because of the special character of the fight against terrorism.

The documents include one written by the deputy judge advocate general of the Air Force, Maj. Gen. Jack L. Rives, advising the task force that several of the "more extreme interrogation techniques, on their face, amount to violations of domestic criminal law" as well as military law.

General Rives added that many other countries were likely to disagree with the reasoning used by Justice Department lawyers about immunity from prosecution. Instead, he said, the use of many of the interrogation techniques "puts the interrogators and the chain of command at risk of criminal accusations abroad." Any such crimes, he said, could be prosecuted in other nations' courts, international courts or the International Criminal Court, a body the United States does not formally participate in or recognize.

The resolution marks a watershed moment in modern US labor history. It is the product of grassroots action at the bottom of the US labor movement, not a directive from top leaders. The call for bringing the troops home echoes the sentiments of thousands of ordinary workers and rank-and-file union members, whose children and family have been called on to fight the war. A growing number, who now form a majority in US unions, believe the best way to protect them is to bring them home.

Facing a court-imposed deadline to release photographs and video documenting numerous instances of torture and abuse at the now infamous US-run Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq, lawyers for the Department of Defense Thursday sent the court a letter stating their intention to file papers explaining why it will not adhere to the judge's orders, civil liberties groups announced Friday.

The legal brief explaining the reasoning behind the decision will be sealed, meaning most of the information will not be made public, the letter said.

People who have seen the videos, including members of Congress and reporter Seymour Hersh, have reported they include scenes involving far worse abuses than have so far reached the public, including rape and lewd acts committed against and in front of prisoners.

The bombers have paralysed Baghdad. I have spent half my time living in Iraq since the invasion. The country has never been so dangerous as today. Some targets have been hit again and again. The army recruiting centre at al-Muthana old municipal airport in the middle of Baghdad has been attacked no fewer than eight times, the last occasion on Wednesday when eight people were killed.

The detonations of the suicide bombs make my windows shake in their frames in my room in the al-Hamra hotel. Sometimes, thinking the glass is going to shatter, I take shelter behind a thick wall. The hotel is heavily guarded. At one time the man who looked for bombs under cars entering the compound with a mirror on the end of a stick carried a pistol in his right hand. He reckoned that if he did discover a suicide bomber he had a split second in which to shoot him in the head before the driver detonated his bomb.

The bombers, or rather the defences against them, have altered the appearance of Baghdad. US army and Iraqi government positions in Baghdad are surrounded by ramparts of enormous cement blocks which snake through the city. Manufactured in different sizes, each of which is named after a different American state such as Arkansas and Wisconsin, these concrete megaliths are strangling the city by closing off so many streets.

For all the newspaper and television coverage of Iraq, the foreign media still fail to convey the lethal and anarchic quality of day-to-day living. The last time I drove into west Baghdad from the airport in early July we were suddenly stopped by the sound of volleys of shots. This turned out to be the police commandos, a 12,000-strong paramilitary force which is meant to be the cutting edge of the government offensive against the insurgents. On this occasion they had loaded coffins wrapped in Iraqi flags, containing the bodies of two of their officers murdered that morning, on to the backs of their pick-ups and were weaving through the traffic, firing over our heads. Drivers slammed on their brakes since people detained by the commandos, often for no known reason, are often found later in rubbish dumps, having been tortured and executed.

The government, whose members seldom emerge from the Green Zone, make bizarre efforts to pretend that there are signs of a return to normality. Last week a pro-government newspaper had an article on the reconstruction of Baghdad. Above the article was a picture of a crane at a building site. But there are no cranes at work in Baghdad so the paper had been compelled to use a photograph of a crane which has been rusting for more than two years, abandoned at the site of a giant mosque that Saddam Hussein was constructing when he was overthrown.

Telesur, a Venezuelan government initiative undertaken in association with Argentina, Cuba and Uruguay, has already drawn the wrath of the United States even before it goes on the air this Sunday.

The station's goal is to foment regional integration with newscasts, films, documentaries and music by Latin American and Caribbean producers, and to provide a counterweight to programming from the United States, like what is offered by CNN.

The U.S. lower house of Congress passed an amendment Wednesday "to initiate radio and television broadcasts that will provide a consistently accurate, objective, and comprehensive source of news to Venezuela" to counter Telesur's "anti-Americanism," in the words of Republican Rep. Connie Mack of Florida, who sponsored the amendment.

"It is a preposterous imperialist idea that should not surprise us because we know what the U.S. government is capable of," said Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, referring to the amendment. "There is nothing more dangerous than a desperate giant." [read more]

The slaughter of hundreds of civilians by suicide bombers shows that a "genocidal war" is threatening Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most influential Shia cleric, warned yesterday.

The radical Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militia twice fought US troops, has called for restraint. "The occupation itself is the problem," he said. "Iraq not being independent is the problem. And the other problems stem from that - from sectarianism to civil war. The entire American presence causes this."

In one of the bloodiest days since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a suicide bomber in a fuel truck yesterday killed 55 people near a Shia Muslim mosque and market in a town south of Baghdad. The attack, which heightened fears of all-out sectarian conflict, also wounded 82 people in the town of Musayyib.

A new record was set by suicide bombers in Baghdad on Friday when there were no fewer than 12 suicide attacks which killed at least 28 people. The police said yesterday that they had arrested a Libyan who planned to blow himself up amid crowds mourning the 27 people, 18 of them children, killed by a bomber who drove a car packed with explosives at a US patrol on Wednesday.

The suicide bombings and death squads have created an atmosphere of terror in Baghdad. There is limited traffic in the streets. Many people with money to travel have left the country. The torrid heat, often in excess of 45C (115F), in a city where there is little air-conditioning due to lack of electricity, is also fuelling a mood of anger and despair.

Iraqi civilians and police officers died at a rate of more than 800 a month between August and May, according to figures released in June by the Interior Ministry. In response to questions from The New York Times, the ministry said that 8,175 Iraqis were killed by insurgents in the 10 months that ended May 31.

The issue of civilian deaths in Iraqi has been a delicate one, with some contending that the Bush administration and the Pentagon have deliberately avoided body counts to deprive their critics of a potent argument against the war. Estimates have ranged from the 12,000 offered by Mr. Jabr to as many as 100,000 in a widely reported study last year. The new figures are likely to add to that debate.

The figures, released by e-mail through an American official after multiple requests, are a significant milestone, for while the Iraqi government tallies Iraqi deaths, figures on the overall totals have been tightly guarded. But the numbers do not account for civilian deaths caused by American and Iraqi soldiers in military offensives, at checkpoints or on raids.

Faced with the greatest crisis humanity has ever encountered, the most powerful men in the world have meekly resolved to "promote" better practice and to "encourage" companies to do better. The R-word is half-mentioned twice: they will "improve regulatory ... frameworks". This could mean anything: most of the G8 governments define better regulation as less regulation. Nowhere is there a clear statement that they will force anyone to do anything to stop destroying the conditions which sustain human life.

Our problem is that ... meaningful action on climate change has been prohibited by totalitarian capitalism. When I use this term I don't mean that the people who challenge it are rounded up and sent to break rocks in Siberia. I mean that it intrudes into every corner of our lives, governs every social relation, becomes the lens through which every issue must be seen. It is the total system which leaves no molecule of earth or air uncosted and unsold. And, like Soviet totalitarianism, it allows no solution to pass which fails to enhance its power. The only permitted answer to the effects of greed is more greed.

[Jason Burke is the author of Al Qaeda: the True Story of Radical Islam]

Early last week I was in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, where 1,400 Palestinians were massacred in 1982 by Christian gunmen with the tacit consent of the Israelis, and got into a discussion with three brothers. Did they back the executions of Westerners in Iraq? Mohammed said that such deeds were unIslamic and totally unjustified, Bassam maintained that the murders were legitimate given the oppression of Muslims by the West and Hassan was undecided. Hassan's view - and that of his counterpart in Bradford or the East End - is critical. If he decides that the attacks, in Iraq or London, are entirely unjustified, the global 'al-Qaeda' insurgency will wither and die within a decade or so. If he throws in his lot with the militants, we will be plunged into a welter of violence for the foreseeable future.

In our interconnected world, the people who now count most are not our security and emergency services, brave and competent though they are, but the hopes, fears, expectations and views of 1.3 billion Muslims, whether in Beirut, Bradford, London, Riyadh or Kuala Lumpur. They will decide who are martyrs and who are murderers.

In summary, the Court concluded that the West Bank and Gaza, including East Jerusalem, are occupied territories under international law, and Israel is an occupying power with consequent legal obligations. Furthermore, Israeli settlements breach international law. Finally, Israel's occupation practices violate both international human rights and humanitarian law obligations.

In short, the Court made clear that the construction of the Wall and the settlements were illegal. Israel should not only immediately stop with its construction, but also begin dismantling them and to pay reparations to those who had lost their property as the result of the Wall's construction.

The Court also pointed out that signatories to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (including The Netherlands) had "additional obligations to ensure Israel's compliance" with the Conventions. Finally, the Court declared that United Nations General Assembly and Security Council ought to "consider further actions" against Israel to bring an end to the "illegal situation".

A remarkable proportion of the violence taking place in Iraq is regularly credited to the Jordanian Ahmad al-Khalayleh, better known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and his organization Al Qaeda in Iraq. Sometimes it seems no car bomb goes off, no ambush occurs that isn't claimed in his name or attributed to him by the Bush administration. Bush and his top officials have, in fact, made good use of him, lifting his reputed feats of terrorism to epic, even mythic, proportions (much aided by various mainstream media outlets). Given that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be based upon administration lies and manipulations, I had begun to wonder if the vaunted Zarqawi even existed.

In Amman, where I was recently based, random interviews with Jordanians only generated more questions and no answers about Zarqawi. As it happens, though, the Jordanian capital is just a short cab ride from Zarqa, the city Zarqawi is said to be from. So I decided to slake my curiosity about him by traveling there and nosing around his old neighborhood.

The US and Britain are putting the multinational corporations that created poverty in charge of its relief.

At the Make Poverty History march, the speakers insisted that we are dragging the G8 leaders kicking and screaming towards our demands. It seems to me that the G8 leaders are dragging us dancing and cheering towards theirs.

The detainees' claims, released by their lawyers following declassification, are impossible to verify because the military restricts access to detainees and records.

In many cases, they pale when compared to other forms of alleged physical and psychological misconduct at Guantanamo,