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Mid-East ‘peace’ exploded by bombs, missile strikes

Compiled by Seán Marquis

Aug. 27 (AGR)— The US-sponsored “road map” for Middle East peace appears to be in shreds after the two biggest Palestinian terrorist groups called off their ceasefire last week.

The declarations by Hamas and Islamic Jihad came after Israel killed a senior Hamas leader and two bodyguards in a missile strike in Gaza City in response to a suicide bombing which killed 21 people in Jerusalem on Aug. 19 and injured over 100 including 40 children.

The attack prompted Israel to kill the Hamas leader, and Islamic militants in turn threatened a wave of new attacks.

Hamas ordered its fighters to avenge the killing of Ismail Abu Shanab “quickly and strongly”, raising the specter of a return to the tit-for-tat violence that has marked the three-year intifada. “It is jihad until victory or martyrdom,” it said.

Abu Shanab, a senior figure in Hamas’s political wing, was killed when four missiles fired by helicopter gunships struck his car, witnesses said. Israeli security sources said he was assassinated because he was involved in planning terrorist attacks.

Hours earlier, Israel approved tougher military action against Palestinian militants following the Jerusalem bus bombing, which Hamas said it carried out as retribution for the recent killing of its members during Israeli army raids.

Since being appointed last spring, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian prime minister, has resisted a general crackdown on militants, arguing that it could lead to civil war, but after protracted negotiations the militant groups declared a ceasefire on June 29.

Although Israel was not a formal party to that agreement, it had agreed to stop the raids on Palestinian cities to assassinate Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade activists.

But Israel said it reserved the right to stop “imminent” attacks on its citizens, which critics warned would doom the ceasefire from the outset.

Until last week militant faction spokesmen had insisted the truce remained in force and said three suicide bombings since Aug. 12 were solely one-off reprisals for Israeli army raids that netted or killed a handful of wanted men.

The security cabinet of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, said in a statement last week that progress on the peace plan was inconceivable unless Palestinian authorities took action against terrorists.

Palestinian officials have pointed out that while Israel’s government blamed the bus attack on Palestinian inaction over tackling terrorists, the suicide bomber came from Hebron, a city under the full control of the Israeli army.

In response to the bus bombing, on Aug. 23 the United States froze the assets of six Hamas leaders and five European-based organizations that it said raise money for the group.

A prominent Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, lashed out at President George W. Bush, calling him “Islam’s biggest enemy” in comments carried by Dubai-based satellite channel Al-Arabiya. He called the US decision to freeze assets “a theft of Muslim money by the Americans.”

‘The street backs Hamas’

The Aug. 22 funeral of Ismail Abu Shanab turned into a massive show of Palestinian solidarity in Gaza. All the Palestinian militias, in battle fatigues, masks and martyrs’ headbands, paraded their rifles and rocket launchers, brandishing their flags and vowing revenge.

While tens of thousands of angry mourners thronged the streets, militants fired rockets and mortar shells at an Israeli Gaza settlement and at southern Israel.

As the funeral crowds shouted for revenge, Abdelaziz Rantisi, whom Israel failed to assassinate in June, said: “We love martyrdom and we seek martyrdom.”

“If the Zionists knew they would see a volcano erupting in Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Hadera, they would never have thought of killing you, our hero,” shouted a masked man from a loudspeaker van. The crowd roared back, “Ezzideen, Ezzideen,” the name of the Hamas military wing.

Muhmmad Awad, 21, a building worker, was ready to take the consequences. “Hamas should avenge Abu Shanab, even if it means that Israel will destroy us,” he said. Rami Khalil, 21, who owns a cleaning materials factory, said: “The vicious circle of violence will not help us or the Israeli people. But if there is no revenge, the Palestinian people will feel humiliated.”

Brigadier Mohammed al-Masri, head of the political department of the Palestinian intelligence service said that the security services could not act against Hamas or Islamic Jihad until they made another attack on Israel. “I am not calling for bloodshed, but I am saying all the people have been united now against Israel. The street backs Hamas and the calls for revenge.”

Sources: Associated Press, Daily Telegraph (UK), Financial Times (UK), Independent (UK), Reuters

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

Bangkok, Thailand, Aug. 20 (IPS)— Asian activists have set their sights on converting next month’s World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting into a battlefield with a single aim in mind: destroying the relevance of this multilateral trade body.

For weapons, they will bring their newly sharpened ideas and razor-edged messages on why the Geneva-based WTO “should be got rid of” or “pushed back.”

This rage about the Fifth WTO Ministerial Conference to be held in the Mexican resort city of Cancun from Sep. 10-14 is being felt across activists’ and critics’ circles across East Asia, and reflected during a two-day meeting here.

Those representing non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Asia’s industrial powerhouse, Japan, are as livid about the debilitating impact that the WTO’s free trade agenda is having on people across the region as are activists from poverty-stricken Cambodia.

“It would be a victory on our side if this ministerial meeting gets nowhere and creates a retreat of the WTO,” Walden Bello, head of the Bangkok-based regional think tank Focus on the Global South, told the assembled activists on Wednesday.

“The WTO cannot be reformed. It must be destroyed by the people’s movement,” added Choi Yung-Chan of All Together, a Seoul-based NGO that is championing an anti-capitalist and anti-war movement in South Korea. “We will be sending 206 people to Cancun to achieve a victory for the people.”

As the activists see it, there is little that Asia’s developing countries stand to gain from the four main issues that are expected to dominate the discussions among trade ministers from the WTO’s 146 member countries, aimed at negotiating to further liberalize global trade.

Among these four contentious issues are the setting of international trading rules for agriculture products, an agreement on the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and its impact on easy access to cheap medicines in the developing world and discussions on enforcing cuts in industrial tariffs.

The activists are also not falling for rosy accounts of the WTO’s significance to improving trade across Asia being advanced by the eight-year-old multilateral body’s first Asian chief, Supachai Panitchpakdi, former deputy prime minister of Thailand.

Last week, the WTO director-general talked up the potential his organization offered countries in the developing world to accompany the release of the “World Trade Report,” which stated that Asia’s volume of international trade towered over trade figures from other regions in the South.

“A lot of developing countries who supported Supachai get the top post are disappointed by him, “ Kingkorn Navintarakul, advisor to the Chiang Mai-based Northern Peasants Federation of Thailand, told IPS. “ He has been unable to affect real change and to make the WTO a place where developing countries can get a fair deal for trade.”

Such pessimism about the forthcoming round of international trade negotiations is not misplaced, says Aileen Kwa, author of the book Power Politics and the WTO. “There is no reason to have illusions that things will get better.”

On agriculture issues, for instance, most Asian countries are troubled by the way the U.S. and European Union farm sectors will stand to make significant gains if the Cancun meeting endorses an agriculture agreement promoting the liberalization of farm trade.

“It will not help the farmers in Asia’s developing countries, thus affecting their livelihoods and their country’s food security,” said Kwa, who has been following the trade negotiations at the WTO’s headquarters.

“Cheap farm products from the EU and the US will be dumped in Asia, where countries will have to drop any protective barriers for their farmers. Meanwhile, the EU and the US will be able to get away protecting their own farmers,” she said.

In the Philippines, activists have gathered evidence in agricultural sectors such as rice, corn and animal farming to amplify Kwa’s view that a grim harvest awaits more Asian countries if the agriculture agreement, which they say is weighted heavily in favor of the United States and the EU, is endorsed in Cancun.

The distortions and inequity created by the agricultural subsidies given by industrialized countries have been singled out in reports like United Nations Development Program’s “Human Development Report 2003.”

“Rich countries, to varying degrees, pay large subsidies to their domestic food producers. These subsides are so large — totaling 311 billion US dollars a year — that they affect world market prices of agriculture goods, causing direct harm to poor countries,” states the UN report.

There have been attempts by both European and US governments to show plans to reduce the subsidies.

Still, critics say, these subsidies stand in direct contrast to what the industrialized nations promised developing nations at the last WTO ministerial meeting, held in Dohar, Qatar, in 2001 — to eliminate subsidies for farm products as a way of making the global trade rules fairer to the developing world.

Asia’s poor, who were promised access to cheaper drugs at the Doha meeting, are also suspicious about the WTO, says Heather Grady, regional director of the East Asia office of the humanitarian agency Oxfam.

“The Doha agreement was to increase people’s access to cheaper medicines, but there has been a rollback since then,” she said.

She was referring to how all the big talk in Doha about public health being a reason to override intellectual property and patent concerns — a key plank of the WTO regime — has not led to concrete agreement among governments despite several rounds of mini-summits on this issue.

Most worrying, she said in an interview, are the conditions that the WTO has placed on Cambodia in its bid to become a member. This South-east Asian country’s admission into the trade body at the Cancun meeting would make it the first Least Developed Country (LDC) to become a member after the WTO was formed.

“It is a country that needs cheap, generic anti-AIDS drugs to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS. But Cambodia will have to give up depending on generic drugs almost immediately [when] it becomes a WTO member, due to new conditions being imposed about TRIPS,” added Grady.

“This is outrageous,” she said. “The case of Cambodia exemplifies an institution that favors the powerful.”

According to Bello, these clear contradictions lend weight to activists’ efforts to nail down the WTO as a failure. “We need to push back this form of false multilateralism advocated by US capital, and create a new open space for an alternative multilateralism.”

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United Nations, Aug. 25 (IPS)— The United States is holding up a proposed UN Security Council resolution that calls all future attacks on UN humanitarian workers “war crimes,” subject to jurisdiction by the recently created International Criminal Court (ICC).

The draft resolution, which urges all 191 member states to adopt new laws ensuring the safety of UN workers, is supported by the other 14 members of the Security Council.

Sponsored by Mexico, and co-sponsored by Bulgaria, France, Germany, Russia, and Syria, the resolution was to have been adopted Monday.

But it has now been temporarily shelved because Washington has sought a postponement of the vote apparently to exert pressure on Council members.

According to one published report, US Secretary of State Colin Powell has asked Mexico to delete references linking attacks on UN workers to jurisdiction under the ICC.

State Department spokesman Philip Reeker told reporters Monday that while Washington appreciates the need to protect UN humanitarian workers, “We have concerns about some of the language, particularly references to the International Criminal Court.”

The United States has strongly opposed the ICC, which came into force in March, because it fears its troops and senior officials could be hauled before the court in politically motivated prosecutions for alleged crimes committed in military conflicts.

The court was set up to investigate and prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in cases where countries with direct ties to the crimes are not able or willing to prosecute themselves.

Former US President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute that created the ICC but the administration of US President George W. Bush later renounced the move. That means, for example, that US soldiers and officials involved in the attack on Iraq last March are not liable for prosecution of “war crimes.”

“Regardless of the Bush administration’s ideological opposition to the ICC, the Rome Statute properly treats serious crimes against humanitarian workers as war crimes,” Bill Pace of the Coalition for the ICC, said Monday.

The statute provides both added deterrence and protection to those taking tremendous risks to secure peace, such as the UN personnel who were killed in the Baghdad car bomb attack last week, he added.

“The US opposition to the new resolution protecting humanitarian workers is unacceptable,” said David Donat-Cattin of the international law program at Parliamentarians for Global Action, “especially considering the gravity of last week’s war crimes against the United Nations in Baghdad.”

A suicide car bombing on the UN compound last week killed 24 people, including several senior UN officials in charge of the Iraqi humanitarian program.

“After the tragic killing of aid workers in Baghdad, the US opposition to the proposed resolution is disgraceful,” added Richard Dicker, director of the international justice program at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

In a statement, he said the Bush administration should not let its ill-conceived and ideologically driven crusade against the ICC compromise efforts to protect humanitarian aid workers.

The contested passage merely states that attacks against humanitarian personnel and peacekeepers are a war crime under the Rome Statute, he added.

The proposed Security Council resolution supporting the safety of aid workers should be immediately placed before the body for a vote and adopted without delay, said Decker.

In recent months, the Bush administration has continued to undermine the authority of the ICC through several Security Council resolutions, including one last month exempting UN peacekeepers from the court’s jurisdiction.

It also cut off military aid to 35 states that supported the court and refused to exempt US soldiers from the ICC’s jurisdiction for alleged acts committed on their soil. Washington says it has also signed agreements with 51 countries that have promised to not turn over US soldiers or officials to the court.

Early this month, US officials successfully included a paragraph in a Security Council resolution that authorized a peacekeeping force for Liberia, providing immunity for peacekeepers serving in that country.

“This provision undercut the International Criminal Court treaty and other important aspects of international law. Security Council members were then forced to choose between deploying peacekeepers to Liberia and upholding established principles of law,” HRW said at the time.

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Bush’s secret war in Malawi

By Rory Carroll

Aug. 21— When security agents took away her husband in the middle of the night they did not tell Ellah Ulusam that Washington had just opened a new front in its war against terror. They said he would be back the next day. Arif Ulusam vanished along with four other Muslim men, all arrested at home, handcuffed and bundled into a car for a bizarre odyssey which has not yet ended.

This is a part of George Bush’s war which does not make it on to television news, for it is waged on a front so remote few know it exists. In less eventful times what happened would be considered extraordinary. As it is, their story has been barely reported.

On June 22, Malawi security agents seized five men in Limbe, outside Malawi’s commercial capital Blantyre, and spirited them out of the country on suspicion of belonging to al-Qaida, earning praise from the US ambassador.

Relatives were distraught.

“Taking Arif away was a big loss to me. I was stranded. I didn’t know what was going on,” said Ellah, 27, cradling her daughter Kardelen, not yet three. “Kardelen misses her father so much, she puts on his shoes, kisses his shirts.”

Following the script from Afghanistan and other countries where terror suspects have been snatched, it seemed these were more Muslims destined for orange jumpsuits, their guilt or innocence to be decided at a future date by a US military tribunal. Except a funny thing happened on the way to Guantanamo — they were released.

Some details remain murky but enough is known to illuminate dark corners of Washington’s anti-terror tactics: Without telling their own embassy, US intelligence agents appear to have bullied the Malawi government into a swoop which triggered Muslim riots. The abductions were illegal, and also, it seems, a blunder.

Malawi is a small land-locked country in southern Africa. Extremely poor, it was nonetheless peaceful, stable and a fledgling democracy. A fifth of its 10 million people are Muslim but no one pointed the finger when al-Qaida attacked in Tanzania and Kenya.

That changed in the early hours of June 22. Dozens of security agents arrested five suspects and carted away their files, books, mobile phones, photographs, floppy discs and computers in black bin-liners.

The men lived and worked in Limbe but were foreigners: Arif Ulusam, owner of Istanbul, a fast food restaurant, is Turkish; Ibrahim Itabaci, headmaster of the Bedir international school, is also Turkish; Mahmud Sardar Issa, coordinator for a charity called the Zakaat Fund Trust, is Sudanese; Khalifa Abdi Hassan, a scholar at the Muslim Association of Malawi, is Kenyan; Fahad Ral Bahli, director of the Malawi branch of Registered Trustees of the Prince Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz Special Committee on Relief, is Saudi Arabian.

“They said Arif would be released the next day,” said Mrs. Ulusam. “But when we went to the police station he wasn’t there and nobody could tell us anything.” All organs of the Malawi state refused to say why or where the men were taken.

Their relatives hired a team of lawyers led by Shabir Latif, who practised at the bar in the UK.

“Malawi has the best constitution south of the Sahara and guarantees basic rights which were denied my clients,” he said. A high court judge issued an injunction barring deportation, ordering the authorities to charge the men or release them on bail.

It made no difference. The five were spirited abroad.

“Who can I produce in court now? Their ghosts?” Fahad Assani, Malawi’s director of public prosecutions, asked the court in exasperation. “These people are out of reach for us. It’s the Americans who know where they are.”

Amnesty International noted the irony of the men being transferred on the day the state department released a report about US efforts to promote human rights worldwide. Colin Powell also recently lectured African leaders on respecting the rule of law.

“I’ve never been as depressed on a case as this one,” said Latif. “No evidence was ever produced.”

The closest the US came to admitting custody was a statement from its ambassador, Roger Meece, praising Malawi as a partner in the fight against terrorism. It was said the men were accused of channelling money to al-Qaida and had been on the CIA’s “watch list” since the 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Nothing more was heard until July 24 when lawyers heard that Fahad Ral Bahli had surfaced in Riyadh and the other four in Sudan, all free men. Hub-Eddin Abbakar, a colleague of the Sudanese suspect, said they had been handed over to their respective embassies in Khartoum after the CIA decided they were innocent.

To end up in a country on Washington’s terror list is only slightly more bizarre than reports that the Air Malawi plane chartered by the US stopped off in Zimbabwe on the way to a third country, possibly Djibouti or Uganda, where the men were questioned for a month.

US officials declined interview requests, but one western diplomat said the state department had been kept in the dark by the CIA and that the ambassador’s praise for Malawi was an attempt to save face.

Malawi’s Muslims are furious, said Altaf Gahi, president of Blantyre’s Muslim Jamaat, and some are likely to become radicalised. The resort town of Mangochi erupted in rioting which wrecked Christian churches and the offices of the US aid agency Save the Children, and left several people wounded.

“It was like doomsday to us. I ran away with my family, the mob could have killed us,” said Meleka Thom Phiri, pastor of the Assemblies of God church.

Three theories try to explain the fiasco. Malawi officials distrusted foreigners who mobilized Muslims, even for good works, and persuaded the US to intervene. “The US intelligence is too well equipped to make such a mistake. Somebody must have cooked the evidence for them,” said Hub-Eddin Abbakar.

Others say that the CIA knew the men were innocent but wanted to disrupt Malawi’s Muslim organizations, with skills and money coming from Arab countries, before it risked being infiltrated by Islamist terrorists. The same principle of pre-emption used to justify attacking Iraq, but on a micro-scale. “The work these guys were doing won’t resume,” predicted one Muslim businessman.

The third theory is of a cock-up. The day before the arrests, the Sudanese man and both Turks were questioned about stolen cars by men who said they were from Interpol. Ibrahim Itabaci had recently bought a second-hand car, according to Ellah Ulusam, which the detectives suspected of having been shipped from South Africa. Some of the Malawi officials investigating the cars were spotted among the agents who arrested the five men.

An impoverished country. Muslim men with money and means. Stolen vehicles. Al-Qaida active in the region. From the CIA’s viewpoint it could have added up to something sinister. It seems the agency was wrong. But for Malawi, now a land of kidnappings, riots and religious tension, that is exactly how things have added up.

Source: Guardian (UK)

By Sean Donahue

Aug. 19— The morning that Alvaro Uribe was inaugurated President of Colombia, Yolanda Becerra, the head of a women’s group in a city controlled by right wing paramilitaries, said that “We expect to see the consolidation of a totalitarian model with the blessing of the US.”

A year later, her prediction seems to have come true. Fascism’s first victims are always the poorest, most vulnerable, and most invisible people. In Barrancabermeja, where Yolanda Becerra lives, paramilitaries have been carrying out a campaign of “social cleansing” against gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. In the city of Pereira, the first victims were the street vendors.

Pereira was once the vital center of a coffee growing region. But throughout the 1980s and 1990s economic globalization forced the price of coffee to drop. The bottom finally dropped out of the market when international lending agencies encouraged Vietnam to start growing coffee, and the Vietnamese flooded the market with massive amounts of cheap coffee. The area around Pereira went from selling sixteen million bags of coffee a year to selling ten million bags a year. Many coffee farmers lost their land. The unemployed coffee vendors were forced to join those displaced by violence, selling anything they could — candy, jewelry, newspapers, books — to tourists on the streets of Pereira. But the local merchants didn’t like the competition from street vendors, and tourists hated to walk down streets full of desperately poor people trying to sell whatever they could find; so in November of last year the mayor took a page from Rudy Giuliani’s book and announced an “urban renewal plan” to chase the vendors off the streets. Throughout Colombia, there has been a crackdown on street vendors, with police in riot gear driving through the streets in big trucks, rounding up the vendors, jailing them for the night, and then extorting outrageous bribes from anyone who wants their confiscated merchandise back. But in Pereira, things took a deadlier turn this year. In late spring, the bodies of murdered street vendors began turning up in Pereira. Nobody knew and few cared who was responsible for the murders. (This is the same city where a few years ago a serial killer managed to kill over a hundred homeless children before being caught because the deaths of the homeless were taken for granted.) In June the killers went public. On June 17, Jhon Carmona, a 36-year-old man who had organized his fellow street vendors into a union, had his merchandise seized for the last time and was beaten by police before he was released. A few days later, he was picked up again when police swept the streets for vendors even though he wasn’t selling anything. A short while later, a group of men calling in street clothes came and began dragging vendors off the police truck and beating them with sticks. Jhon Carmona was beaten to death. The police did nothing to intervene.

The group issued a public statement, calling themselves the “United Ecological Foundation,” and announcing that they were going to “clean up” the streets of Pereira. Reacting to the news, economist and social critic Hector Mondragon, himself a survivor or torture, beatings, and multiple assassination attempts, said:

“That is Fascism. It is what Hitler’s and Mussolini’s people did. It’s not just the repression of the state, but the repression [by] the people who beat and kill [others]. And this has the support of the state and even part of society.” The beatings in Pereira grew out of an increasing tolerance for state violence on the part of the upper and middle classes and a dramatic escalation in repression. In the months leading up to the beatings, the military began using paid informants to root out suspected “guerilla sympathizers,” taking these hooded informants from door to door in the slums of Medellin to point out people who were immediately dragged away. Disappearances increased by 100 percent in the department of Cauca. New anti-terrorism laws were passed that were written so broadly that they were used to prosecute nonviolent activists with no ties to the leftist guerillas of the FARC and the ELN. Leaders of the oil workers union were suspended from work and forced to attend “attitude adjustment” classes. Paramilitaries parachuted from military planes into a town in Arauca where they publicly murdered a pregnant teenager and butchered the fetus they ripped from her body — and in the wake of the attack US Green Berets continued to provide training and support to the same brigade that flew the paramilitaries in. The military occupied hospitals, telecommunications facilities, and oil refineries to quell unrest in the face of imminent privatization of these state-run facilities and massive layoffs.

In a sense, this is nothing new. For years, the Colombian military has collaborated with illegal right wing death squads to terrorize activists and massacre people who have the misfortune of living on land coveted by oil companies, timber companies, dam builders, cattle ranchers, or cocaine traffickers. But this has happened primarily in the countryside and in the poor areas at the edge of the cities. Mondragon says that Uribe is now “applying to the cities what had been applied to the countryside.” The wealthy and the middle class are no longer shielded from seeing what is done in their name, but they continue to support policies of repression designed to maintain their wealth, power, and privilege.

Uribe justifies these policies by invoking the war on terrorism, saying that he will do whatever is necessary to stop the FARC and the ELN from kidnapping people for ransom, sabotaging the infrastructure, and carrying out car bombings in the heart of Colombia’s cities. Meanwhile, he is in the process of “peace negotiations” with the most brutal terrorists in Colombia, the right wing paramilitaries, which many see as a thinly veiled attempt to legalize the death squads and bring their leaders into the political leadership of the country. His justifications bear a chilling resemblance to Fascist assertions that they had to suspend civil liberties in order to fight the Communist threat. But Uribe’s anti-terrorism legislation has a more modern model in the Patriot Act — he has adopted the basic principles of Bush and Ashcroft’s approaches to terrorism, and taken them ten times further because he can get away with it. Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans alike justify the US backing for Uribe by saying that he is a democratically elected leader carrying out a campaign against brutal terrorists. Certainly the FARC and the ELN are responsible for their share of brutality. And Uribe enjoys approval ratings in the high seventies. Of course those polls are taken by telephone or via the internet, luxuries in a country where over sixty percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. So what we know is that Uribe has the backing of the wealthy and the middle class. Mondragon, who has seen 5,000 friends murdered by the military and the death squads over the past thirty years, responds to the voices of Washington, saying:

“Is it not Fascism because there was an election? Weren’t Hitler and Mussolini elected? What was Hitler’s popularity during the Holocaust? This is what Fascism is like. Fascism is popular. The middle class loves it. The enemies of the state are being eliminated. The streets of Pereira are being cleaned. And the middle class applauds. The city has never looked so good. The tourists can say what they said when they went to Germany in 1937: ‘Why do people speak so poorly of the government? Germany has never been so beautiful.’ Or Colombia.’”

Mondragon’s words have a chilling resonance in the US; Uribe takes his cue from the Bush administration. He can push further, but are the polices that different? Giuliani succeeded in criminalizing homelessness in New York. Ashcroft, with the support of the Congress, has succeeded in stripping immigrants of the right to habeas corpus. The middle class is increasingly willing to give up its civil liberties in the war on terrorism, and the intelligentsia are eager to give elaborate legal and philosophical arguments justifying the end of freedom. The war on drugs has led to the gutting of the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches and seizures and the criminalization of young Black men.

Colombia has descended into Fascism. Can its sponsor be far behind?

Source: CounterPunch

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Aug. 20— The United States is resuming drug-interception flights over Colombia after a two-year hiatus, possibly signaling a desire by the Bush administration to become more heavily involved in the Colombian government’s military crackdown on drug dealers and left-wing guerrilla rebels.

The resumption of the flights, jointly operated by the US and Colombia and known by their military codename Airbridge Denial, was announced by Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary, who was in Bogota on a trip widely seen as an indication of greater US commitment to Colombia after the distractions of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“I think it [the air operation] is important,” Rumsfeld told reporters on the flight to Bogota. “It was helpful before and it’s helpful now. There are plenty of ways that illegal trade can move — land, sea or air — and if you are not attentive to the air, obviously it becomes a preferred method.”

Airbridge Denial was suspended in 2001 after a US pilot accidentally shot down a small plane over Peru carrying a US missionary and her baby. Despite repeated promises to the Colombians to revive flights, Washington has let a number of self-imposed deadlines come and go without acting. Establishing tight security rules to avoid more embarrassing accidents has been the main sticking point.

This month, the US-based lobby group Human Rights Watch wrote to the Colombian President, Alvaro Uribe, urging him to rein in the use of lethal force on the aerial surveillance flights.

“Suspect aircraft cannot simply be fired on as if they were combatants in an armed conflict,” HRW’s José Miguel Vivanco said. “While we are deeply concerned about the destructive impact of drug trafficking, we call on the Colombian government to fight trafficking using methods that do not violate human rights.” It was not immediately clear what new measures, if any, would now be introduced.

Washington is already heavily involved in Colombia, which receives more US aid than any other country except Israel and Egypt. Much of the $3 billion provided in the past three years has been military assistance, prompting widespread criticism because of the links between the Colombian armed forces and paramilitary groups responsible for kidnappings and murders, especially of union leaders and civilian critics of the Bogota government.

Rumsfeld’s visit follows close on the heels of a trip last week by Richard Myers, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff. He was overseeing a US-financed initiative to fumigate coca plants controlled by FARC rebels. He also visited US special forces who have been training the Colombian army.

Colombia’s Defense Minister, Martha Lucia Ramirez, said if Washington provides the army with real-time [satellite] intelligence, “we will have the absolute certainty that in the next 18 months we will turn things around in favor of the Colombian state.”

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Aug. 27 (AGR)— After a week in which Iraq’s main export oil pipeline to the north was set on fire, the central water supply to Baghdad was sabotaged, and the United Nation’s chief envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello, was murdered along with at least 22 other people in what many are calling the worst attack on the UN in its history, no one doubts any more that the United States’ occupation is in trouble.

Fear has taken hold of Baghdad. Westerners are leaving town, and humanitarian organizations such as the International Red Cross are following the UN’s lead and cutting their staff.

The evacuation of the British embassy signaled that the only safe place for a Westerner is behind the massive fortifications the Americans have built around military bases. The American administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, insisted the bombing of the UN did not mean Iraq was in chaos. But it certainly looks that way.

Until last week the Americans blamed the attacks, now occurring every other hour on their patrols, on “remnants” of the Saddam Hussein regime and “diehard loyalists.” But this time Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary, claimed that hundreds of foreign Islamic militants along the lines of al-Qaida had arrived in Iraq and were behind the bombing. But no one has produced any evidence for that yet.

Meanwhile the Americans still refuse to acknowledge the existence of Iraq’s own homegrown resistance groups, for which there is plenty of evidence: the videotaped announcements from them which appear several times a week on the Arab news networks; and the graffiti proclaiming their messages which have begun to appear on the walls along Baghdad’s streets.

One or more of these groups could have been behind the bombing. One group, which calls itself the Iraqi National Islamic Resistance Movement, released a tape shown on al-Jazeera the day the water pipe was sabotaged, in which it vowed “to kick out the occupiers as a matter of principle.”

A previously unknown group calling itself the Vanguard of a Second Mohammed Army issued a tape claiming responsibility for the bombing of the UN building -- but it is not clear whether the claim was genuine. Its message vowed to fight “every foreigner” in Iraq.

Unless the Americans produce some evidence to the contrary, it appears entirely possible that the UN bombing was the work of a homegrown Iraqi opposition to the occupation.

Bremer told ABC television this week that “probably several hundred ... international terrorists” have entered Iraq.

“We can’t duck this fight. It’s against us; it’s a fight against the West. It’s a fight, as we saw on Tuesday, against the international community and against the world,” Bremer said.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s official tally showed this week that more US troops have lost their lives in Iraq since President George W. Bush declared the end of major combat operations on May 1 than during the initial invasion. On May 1, the US death toll stood at 138. Since then, 140 more soldiers have died.

Instead of facing gradually diminishing resistance, which the administration had expected to find after overthrowing Hussein’s government, US troops have encountered increasingly organized and violent opposition.

The combat death rate has been averaging one soldier about every other day since Bush flew to the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and announced that, “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”

The attacks come every two hours on average.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned Friday that the United States’ attempts to bring in soldiers from other countries to bolster its troops were likely to fail unless Washington agrees to a UN-authorized force that shares decision-making with the occupying powers.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on a visit to the United Nations on Thursday that the United States would not cede any military power as France and other nations have demanded.

Yet for countries that may send troops to Iraq, the question of a broader UN mandate is not the only qualm holding them up. Signs are multiplying that anyone associated with the occupation will be targeted. Last Wednesday, Polish troops withdrew from a high-risk area amid fears of a “new Vietnam.”

With this in mind, countries are reluctant to sign on to something that is still seen too much as America’s war and not enough of a campaign to help Iraqis.

Countries such as France and Germany now consider the US as “trapped,” and that its failure there would not be in the world’s interest. At the same time, there is sneaking anxiety that Iraq is only the beginning of a wider and longer civilizational war.

“It seems to be dawning on people that Iraq, instead of the end of something, is only the beginning of a very long global struggle between Western modernity and a more traditional identity,” says Philippe Moreau Defarges, a senior fellow at the French Institute for International Relations in Paris. “But in Europe, people are just now digesting that, so what action to take about it remains up in the air.”

Halliday: UN an ‘arm of the US’

As for the specific reason the United Nations’ headquarters in Baghdad was bombed, according to one of the UN’s most internationally respected former leaders, it was because the UN has been taken over by the US and turned into a “dark joke” and a “malignant force.”

Denis Halliday, the former UN Assistant Secretary-General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, criticized the UN this week for being an aggressive arm of US foreign policy in the immediate aftermath of the truck bomb attack which killed at least 23 people -- many of whom were Halliday’s former friends and colleagues.

“The West sees the UN as a benign organization, but the sad reality in much of the world is that the UN is not seen as benign,” said Halliday, who was nominated for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. “The UN Security Council has been taken over and corrupted by the US and UK, particularly with regard to Iraq, Palestine and Israel.

“In Iraq, the UN imposed sustained sanctions that probably killed up to one million people. Children were dying of malnutrition and water-borne diseases. The US and UK bombed the infrastructure in 1991, destroying power, water and sewage systems against the Geneva Convention. It was a great crime against Iraq.

“Thirteen years of sanctions made it impossible for Iraq to repair the damage. That is why we have such tremendous resentment and anger against the UN in Iraq. There is a sense that the UN humiliated the Iraqi people and society. I would use the term genocide to define the use of sanctions against Iraq. Several million Iraqis are suffering cancers because of the use of depleted uranium shells. That’s an atrocity. Can you imagine the bitterness from all of this?”

He warned that “further collaboration” between the UN and the US and Britain “would be a disaster for the United Nations as it would be sucked into supporting the illegal occupation of Iraq”.

“The UN has been drawn into being an arm of the US -- a division of the state department. Kofi Annan was appointed and supported by the US and that has corrupted the independence of the UN. The UN must move quickly to reform itself and improve the Security Council. It must make clear that the UN and the US are not one and the same.

“Bush and Blair have misled their countries into war. By invading Iraq and placing the US inside the Islamic world, America is inviting terrorists to come on the attack.”

US recruiting Hussein’s spies

According to US and Iraqi officials, the US-led occupation authorities have begun a covert campaign to recruit and train agents with Saddam Hussein’s once-dreaded Iraqi intelligence service to help identify resistance to American forces after months of increasingly sophisticated attacks and bombings.

Authorities have stepped up the recruitment over the past two weeks, said one senior US official quoted in the Washington Post this week, despite sometimes adamant objections by members of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, who complain that they have too little control over the pool of recruits. While US officials acknowledge the sensitivity of cooperating with a force that embodied the ruthlessness of Hussein’s rule, they claim that an urgent need for better and more precise intelligence has forced unusual compromises.

Officials are reluctant to disclose how many former agents have been recruited since the effort began. But Iraqi officials say they number anywhere from dozens to a few hundred, and US officials acknowledge that the recruitment is extensive.

The emphasis in recruitment appears to be on the intelligence service known as the Mukhabarat, whose name itself inspired fear in ordinary Iraqis.

“We’re reaching out very widely,” said one occupation official quoted in the Post.

Sources: Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, Christian Science Monitor, Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), (Scotland) Sunday Herald, Washington Post

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Tehran, Iran, Aug. 20— Ignoring international law, Britain and the US opted for the high-risk strategy of regime change in order to pre-empt a volatile enemy in the Middle East. It was not Iraq, however, that was in the firing line, but Iran, and the aftershocks are still being felt.

Fifty years ago this week, the CIA and the British SIS orchestrated a coup d’etat that toppled the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh. The prime minister and his nationalist supporters in parliament roused Britain’s ire when they nationalized the oil industry in 1951, which had previously been exclusively controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Mossadegh argued that Iran should begin profiting from its vast oil reserves.

Britain accused him of violating the company’s legal rights and orchestrated a worldwide boycott of Iran’s oil that plunged the country into financial crisis. The British government tried to enlist the Americans in planning a coup, an idea originally rebuffed by President Truman. But when Dwight Eisenhower took over the White House, cold war ideologues — determined to prevent the possibility of a Soviet takeover — ordered the CIA to embark on its first covert operation against a foreign government.

A new book about the coup, All the Shah’s Men, which is based on recently released CIA documents, describes how the CIA — with British assistance — undermined Mossadegh’s government by bribing influential figures, planting false reports in newspapers and provoking street violence. Led by an agent named Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, the CIA leaned on a young, insecure Shah to issue a decree dismissing Mossadegh as prime minister. By the end of Operation Ajax, some 300 people had died in firefights in the streets of Tehran.

The crushing of Iran’s first democratic government ushered in more than two decades of dictatorship under the Shah, who relied heavily on US aid and arms. The anti-American backlash that toppled the Shah in 1979 shook the whole region and helped spread Islamic militancy, with Iran’s new hardline theocracy declaring undying hostility to the US.

The author of All the Shah’s Men, New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer, argues that the coup planted the seeds of resentment against the US in the Middle East, ultimately leading to the events of Sept. 11.

While it may be reaching too far to link Mossadegh’s overthrow with al-Qaida’s terrorism, it certainly helped unleash a wave of Islamic extremism and assisted to power the anti-American clerical leadership that still rules Iran. It is difficult to imagine a worse outcome to an expedient action.

The coup and the culture of covert interference it created forever changed how the world viewed the US, especially in poor, oppressive countries. For many Iranians, the coup was a tragedy from which their country has never recovered. Perhaps because Mossadegh represents a future denied, his memory has approached myth.

On yesterday’s anniversary, there was no official government ceremony honoring Mossadegh’s legacy. Deemed too secular for the Islamic Republic, the conservative clergy never mention him. But at a time when the Bush administration expresses impatience with diplomacy and promotes “regime change” as a means of reshaping the Middle East, the anniversary recalls some unwelcome parallels.

The mindset that produced the coup is not so different from the premises that underpin the current doctrine of “pre-emption” or the belief that the war on terror can justify ignoring the Geneva convention, diplomacy and the sentiments of a country’s population.

Veterans of the cold war in President Bush’s administration are cultivating relations with Iranian monarchists in exile while Congressmen are calling for a campaign to undermine Iran’s clerical leadership. Washington’s tough rhetoric and flirtation with the Shah’s son are a kind of nightmarish deja vu for the embattled reformists and students struggling to push for democratic change in Iran.

“Now it seems that the Americans are pushing towards the same direction again,” said Ibrahim Yazdi, who served briefly as foreign minister after the Shah fell. “That shows they have not learned anything from history.”

The reformists allied with President Khatami believe their country now faces another choice between despotism and democracy, and they worry that the combination of outside interference and internal squabbling within their own ranks could once again defer their dream. The more neo-conservatives attempt to pile pressure on Iran, the more ammunition they provide for the most hardline elements of the regime.

Beyond Iran, America remains deeply resented for siding with authoritarian rule in the region. It would be comforting to think “reshaping the Middle East” means promoting democratic rule. But if it merely allows for the ends to justify the means, then the specter of Operation Ajax will continue to haunt the region.

Aug. 27 (AGR)— David Kelly would probably be found “dead in the woods” if Iraq were invaded, he told a diplomat before the US-led action began.

On Aug. 21Britain’s Lord Hutton parliamentary inquiry into the death of Dr. Kelly was given a poignant insight into the mind of the weapons expert who allegedly killed himself in the woods near his home after being named as the source for allegations that the government “sexed up” its dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

David Broucher, a Foreign Office official, recalled what he thought at the time was a “throwaway” remark Kelly made at a conference in Geneva in February. The former weapons inspector, who was still in contact with senior Iraqis at the time, told Broucher he had assured the Iraqis “that if they co-operated with the weapons inspections, they had nothing to fear.”

But Broucher said Kelly was worried he might have lied to his contacts. “My impression was that he felt he was in some personal difficulty or embarrassment about this because he felt the invasion might go ahead anyway and somehow it was putting him in a morally ambiguous situation.” He added: “As Dr. Kelly was leaving I said to him: ‘What will happen if Iraq is invaded?’ And his reply was, which I took at the time to be a throwaway remark, ‘I will probably be found dead in the woods’.”

Kelly traveled to Cornwall to avoid the press, but returned for his appearance before the Foreign Affairs Committee on July 15.

Kelly said the claim in the dossier that Saddam Hussein could deploy WMD in just 45 minutes was “unwise” and was included for “impact.”

Three days after he gave testimony questioning the Blair government’s use of manipulated intelligence to push for war on Iraq, he was found dead in the woods near his home.

Document release

A staggering 6000 pages of documents released Aug. 23 by the Hutton Inquiry include e-mails from Number 10, Britain’s White House, and briefing papers that confirm Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s communications chief, had been actively involved in discussions on the compilation of the Iraq dossier with John Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelligence committee (JIC). Campbell wrote: “I had many discussions with the chairman of the JIC on presentational issues arising from the dossier and, in common with other officials, made drafting suggestions as the document evolved through various drafts.”

That contradicts the evidence he gave to the inquiry last week, when Campbell had been at pains to play down the role he and other officials played in compiling the dossier, stressing that it was essentially the work of the JIC. He had said that he had “no input, output, or influence” on the dossier at any stage and that his own contributions had been “observations” rather than “suggestions” while e-mails from other officials commenting on the dossier had been no more than “office chatter.”

In an e-mail to Scarlett, dated Sept. 18, 2002 -- days before the dossier was published -- Campbell appeared to acknowledge the degree of pressure coming from Number 10.

“Sorry to bombard on this point, but I do worry that the nuclear section will become the main focus and as currently drafted is not in great shape,” he said.

Australia inquiry

Richard Butler, a former Australian diplomat who headed the Iraqi weapons inspection program between 1995 and 1998, told an Australian parliamentary committee on Aug. 22 that he was “fascinated” by the silence of the US government on what it had been told by former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, oil adviser Gen Amir Rashid and former presidential scientific adviser General Amir al-Saadi.

Aziz and al-Saadi “knew everything,” he said. “I don’t know why we’ve not heard what they have told while in captivity,” he added.

Australia, like Britain and the US, is now facing accusations their governments skewed intelligence information to justify invading Iraq.

While Butler avoided direct criticism of Prime Minister John Howard -- who personally pushed for war, the committee grew agitated when Andrew Wilkie, a former senior analyst with the Office of National Assessments (ONA) — Australia’s key international intelligence agency — gave evidence after Butler.

In a blistering opening statement to the committee, Wilkie accused the government of lying to the Australian public by misrepresenting the intelligence it was provided from the ONA.

“The government lied every time it skewed, misrepresented, used selectively, and fabricated the Iraq story. The government lied when it associated Iraq with the Bali bombing; the government lied when it associated Iraq with the ‘war on terror’,” he said.

When Wilkie resigned in March in protest against the Australian government policy on Iraq, the government misleadingly claimed he had little direct access to intelligence material from US or British sources.

In an effort to discredit Wilkie, government advisers initiated a vicious whispering campaign around the press gallery claiming that he was mentally unstable. Wilkie said: “I have learned that this government plays really hard.”

He said there was a huge gap between the pre-war claims by the government that Iraq had a massive arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and links with al-Qaeda, and the post-war reality that no weapons or substantive links had been found.

Wilkie agreed with the proposition by committee chairman David Jull that the Australian government’s rationale for the war had been “sexed up” and the cautious wording in assessments by the intelligence agencies was removed.

“Most often the government deliberately skewed the truth by taking the ambiguity out of the issue. Key intelligence assessment qualifications like ‘probably,’ ‘could,’ and ‘uncorroborated evidence suggests’ were frequently dropped. Much more useful words like ‘massive’ and ‘mammoth’ were included,” he said.

“Sometimes the exaggeration was so great it was clear dishonesty,” he said.

The committee, which was set up by the Australian Senate, will hear four days of submissions over the next two months and is due to report by Dec. 2.

Australia contributed 2,000 special forces troops to the US-led invasion.

Sources: BBC, Financial Times, Independent (UK), Inter Press Service, Sunday Herald (Scotland)

Blair slips in polls

More than two thirds of voters believe, from what they have heard so far in the Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr. David Kelly, that they were deceived by the government about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

The findings of an ICM poll for The Telegraph are a severe blow to Tony Blair four days before he is due to appear before the inquiry. The poll also shows that 56 percent of voters blame the government for Dr. Kelly’s believed suicide.

The poll shows that 58 percent of all voters have less trust in the Prime Minister as a direct consequence of the Kelly inquiry: 52 percent of Labor voters said that they have now lost trust in Blair. (Daily Telegraph (UK))