US to get billion-dollar UN oil for food program

By Thalif Deen

United Nations, Nov. 19 (IPS)— The US-run Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) gained control of billions of dollars in Iraqi oil revenues beginning midnight last Friday when it formally took over the seven-year-old, UN administered “oil-for-food’’ program (OFFP).

The United Nations has already transferred three billion dollars from the program to the CPA-managed Iraqi Development Fund (IDF), and sent another 1.6 billion dollars Friday.

The program had been generating seven to 10 billion dollars annually in oil revenues, but proceeds from oil sales will now end up in the coffers of the CPA, headed by US Ambassador Paul Bremer.

The change has left many opponents of the US-led war on Iraq bitter, along with some UN officials who helped build and administer the successful program.

“The CPA has so far not inspired confidence that it can do anything right, much less administer a massive program of food aid to 25 million people,’’ Jim Jennings, president of Conscience International, told IPS Wednesday.

The program, which helped feed over 60 percent of the people in the sanctions-hit, war-ravaged country, was run by a network of some 44,000 Iraqi food agents under UN supervision.

“This is an enormous program with somewhere around 10 billion dollars in cash flow every year,’’ Jim Paul, executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS on Wednesday.

Paul said published reports have said the CPA has had about five billion dollars in oil revenues at its disposal since it was established more than six months ago but only one billion dollars have been accounted for.

“There are a number of delegations who have been talking about a black hole where the money disappeared,’’ Paul said.

Last month, the London-based charity Action Aid charged that four billion dollars was missing.

Soon after, the CPA began publishing a skeleton budget for the IDF online. It said it had received only one billion dollars from the oil for food program, 1.4 billion dollars from oil revenues since May and 200 million dollars from seized Iraq assets in a US Treasury Department fund.

It added that 1.5 billion dollars from seized assets was put in the CPA’s budget before the IDF was created.

“The predictable outcome is that food will be taken out of the mouths of babies, and many of Iraq’s impoverished people will be even worse off than before,’’ predicted Jennings, whose organization has been closely monitoring the humanitarian situation in Iraq.

“And that’s hardly a formula for winning hearts and minds or even suppressing Iraq’s increasingly violent resistance,’’ he added.

The OFFP was established by the UN Security Council in 1995 to relieve the humanitarian crisis that followed the rigid sanctions imposed on Iraq following its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Under the program, the United Nations used Iraqi oil revenues to purchase and manage some 46 billion dollars worth of humanitarian assistance, supplies and projects.

These included buying and providing food, medicine, water and electricity to Iraqis, as well as the construction of schools, medical clinics and houses.

In financial terms, the OFFP has been the largest program the United Nations has administered in its 58-year history. “The OFFP has also been one of the most efficient of UN programs operating through nine agencies with a 2.2 percent overhead,’’ the United Nations said in a statement released Wednesday.

A Security Council resolution adopted in May set Friday as the day the agency would terminate the multi-billion-dollar program.

Before the US-led attack on Iraq in March, some 893 international staff and 3,600 Iraqis worked for the OFFP. But since the bombing of the UN compound in Baghdad in August, the United Nations has pulled out virtually its entire international staff due to security reasons.

The CPA has said that it will maintain most of the ongoing projects — with Iraqi staff — and operations, eventually turning them over to Iraqi authorities.

But Paul was skeptical the CPA has the capacity and the political will to successfully administer the program.

‘’What is striking and shocking is that until two weeks ago the CPA didn’t really make any effort to coordinate with the United Nations and figure out what should go forward,’’ he said.

“The idea that you can take over a program like this with all its enormous complexities and somewhat make a carbon copy of it in two weeks’ time is simply ludicrous,’’ Paul added.

Having talked to senior UN officials, he said, he got the impression that no crisis will erupt immediately because most Iraqis have received their food baskets and some of the food is already in the pipeline or in storage.

“But what’s frightening is to see what would happen in a couple of months time when we will run into a crack up,’’ he predicted, pointing to insufficient storage facilities and other logistical problems.

For the last seven years, Paul said, the United Nations virtually ran the Iraqi economy. The agency, he added, was rightly proud of this accomplishment — and had never faced a charge of corruption.

“There is real bitterness at the United Nations now,’’ Paul said, ‘’particularly if you work hard to help the Iraqis and then you see the whole thing going down the drain.’’

Paul also said that when the Security Council adopted a resolution handing over the program to the CPA, it did not act in the interest of the Iraqi people.

“The members of the Security Council — not just the United States and Britain — were more concerned about ensuring contracts for companies in their own countries,’’ he said. ‘’And that’s a tragedy.’’

Jennings said the important question is what will follow in the wake of the OFFP.

“The unfortunate answer is that the US administration, under Bremer, intends to impose on Iraq the same disastrous ‘trickle down’ economic theory now being touted for the United States, which lost three million jobs since (US President George W.) Bush took office.’’

Contracts in Iraq leave local business out

By Peyman Pejman

Baghdad, Iraq, Nov. 21 (IPS)— US officials have shut Iraqis out of the business of reconstruction contracts, according to many local businessmen.

US officials and the contractors working for them favor a few high-profile Iraqi companies they trust, and set excessively high contract standards that most Iraqi companies cannot meet, they say.

US officials have reportedly allowed some companies closely associated with the former regime to win lucrative contracts.

US officials deny most of the charges. They say some of the frustration comes because Iraqis do not understand legal obligations.

Reconstruction contracts in Iraq are awarded through three sources: the US Army, US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) headed by Paul Bremer.

USAID contracts are awarded through the Bechtel Corporation. Army contracts are awarded primarily through the Halliburton Corporation which Vice President Richard Cheney headed until he moved to the White House. Some CPA contracts are awarded through Halliburton, but it has also signed some of its own agreements.

The total value of the contracts awarded has not been made public, but sources in Baghdad put the figure above 10 billion dollars.

For most Iraqis the two primary ways of learning about new reconstruction contracts are through a website set up by the CPA, and by attending a weekly meeting at the Convention Center in Baghdad.

The weekly meetings are organized by Kellog, Brown & Root, engaged by Halliburton to find subcontractors for its work.

Several Iraqis say they are frustrated by the process.

“We look at the website, it has some good information about each contract, but not enough,” Hend Adnan from an Iraqi engineering company told IPS. “They don’t give information over the phone, so you have to come and attend these meetings to know more.”

But coming to the meetings does nothing to end the Iraqis’ suspicion of the process.

“In colloquial Arabic we say things are done behind doors,” says contractor Haidar Abdel Kazem. “You don’t ‘feel’ the contracts, you feel it is decided before they are announced.”

Iraqis are often given less than a week to respond to bids, and asked to present lengthy documents.

“They give four, five days,” says Abdel Kazem. “How are you going to prepare for it, how are you going to answer it, how are you going to get the answer to them? The period is unreasonable.”

And when they do respond properly to the contracts, many say they go home empty-handed.

“I am not happy with their system,” says Adnan. “My company has been coming here for four months and has responded to at least 10 bids but has not won anything. You look at the list of the companies that win and see there are a few companies that are always on top of the list.”

Other Iraqis complain that US officials have let firms associated with the former regime enrich themselves once more.

Two such companies are Boniye & Sons and Mediterranean Global Holdings. The first belongs to an old Iraqi family which had diverse business interests during Saddam’s time. The family is widely reputed to have been close to Saddam and his son Uday.

The second is a London-based company headed by Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-British businessman who left Iraq in the early 1980s and has since accumulated a fortune estimated at more than a billion dollars.

The CPA awarded Boniye “a couple of fairly large” construction contracts, says a senior US official.

The question of fairness in contracting procedures has become a touchy point in Baghdad. It is likely to gain more attention as the United States plans to award about 25 billion dollars in reconstruction contracts next year, CPA officials say.

Asked for an official comment, a US spokeswoman said her colleagues in Iraq “have answered questions till they have become blue in the face. You want to trash them too, go ahead.”

All three sources of awarding reconstruction contracts receive funds from the US Congress, and they are legally obliged to give preference to US companies, US officials say.

But US companies are encouraged, though not obliged, to hire as many Iraqi subcontractors as possible, the officials say.

New Colombian military chief implicated in paramilitary massacre

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Nov. 21 (IPS)— The naming of an officer accused of long-standing ties to right-wing paramilitary forces as Colombia’s new armed forces commander is a “slap in the face” to the US administration, which has pressed Bogotá to improve its human rights record, says Amnesty International USA.

The group’s condemnation of the appointment of Gen. Carlos Ospina Ovalle was echoed this week by US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Troops commanded by Ospina were implicated in a particularly grisly massacre by paramilitary units in the province of Antioquia in 1997 in which 11 villagers were killed. The incident was never formally investigated.

The general was named army commander by President Alvaro Uribe as part of a major cabinet and military reshuffle touched off earlier this month after his government fared unexpectedly poorly in regional elections.

“General Ospina’s appointment to the position of the commander of the Colombian armed forces is nothing short of outrageous,” said the executive director of Amnesty International USA, William Schulz.

“With so many questions raised about the general’s human rights record, President Uribe appears to be signaling once again his disdain for human rights and his willingness to tolerate abusive commanders.”

HRW’s chief Colombia specialist, Robin Kirk, agreed. The appointment, she said, “demonstrates that Colombia’s civilian leaders are not serious about cleaning out the human rights abusers still in positions of command; instead, they reward them with promotions.”

Ospina’s promotion comes just as the US Congress is putting the final touches on its 2004 foreign-aid appropriations bill which includes some 700 million dollars in mostly military aid for Colombia, which since 2000 has received about two billion dollars in US military assistance, more than any other country except Israel and Egypt.

Most of the aid is supposed to be tied to improvements in the government’s human rights record, particularly in ending all military support for paramilitary groups that have carried out most of the mass killings that have wracked Colombia’s countryside during the past decade.

Uribe, who as governor of Antioquia in the 1990s was accused of close ties to paramilitaries there, has been recently engaged in negotiating the terms of their disarmament and demobilization as part of a comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy against left-wing guerrillas.

The terms of those negotiations have worried foreign and Colombian human rights groups. One proposal, which reportedly has the tentative support of the administration of US President George W. Bush, would permit leaders of the paramilitary groups to return to normal life after paying fines or performing other acts of contrition.

In the 15 months of his rule, Uribe’s tough line toward left-wing guerrillas has won him substantial popular support in Colombia, but that popularity failed to translate into electoral gains in elections last month in which opposition figures, including leftists, won key local posts, including the mayoralty of the capital Bogotá.

Uribe was also set back when voters rejected a referendum that would have given him greater powers over government spending.

A number of ministers resigned, including Defense Minister Marta Lucia Ramirez, whose blunt manner and efforts to clean up corruption in the military reportedly alienated top officers. She was replaced by Alberto Uribe Echavarria, an insurance executive and friend of the president.

The electoral defeats and the reshuffle that followed them have weakened Uribe’s image as a strong, decisive figure, according to analysts, who say the Colombian economy is also under pressure from a ballooning government deficit, due mostly to the rapidly rising defense budget.

In those circumstances, Ospina’s appointment might well cast greater doubt on Uribe’s judgment.

Most of the concerns about the general’s human rights record date to 1997 and 1998, when he served as the commander of the Fourth Brigade. During his tenure, troops under his command committed a number of massacres, executions and torture, the most famous of which was the slaughter in the village of El Aro.

According to many accounts, soldiers from the brigade surrounded the town and then permitted approximately two dozen paramilitary units to enter and conduct a five-day reign of terror that included the torture and brutal murder of as many as 11 villagers, including three children.

When villagers tried to flee the area, Ospina’s troops turned them back.

The paramilitaries also reportedly burned most of the town’s houses and other buildings, including its church, looted homes and stores, destroyed pipes and ultimately made off with more than 1,000 head of cattle.

While the El Aro incident was the most notorious – the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights formally took it up in 2001 – it was not the only example of close cooperation between the Fourth Brigade and the paramilitaries, according to rights groups.

While Ospina himself was not directly involved, “the fact that the crimes were allegedly committed by subordinates would not relieve him of criminal responsibility if he knew or had reason to know that they planned or carried out the massacre,” said Kirk.

Ospina himself was never suspended, nor was any formal investigation of the incident ever launched.

Kirk noted that several of Ospina’s battalion commanders were later convicted by a civilian court for working with paramilitaries, but after being charged and supposedly detained, two of them simply left the brigade’s headquarters where they were under Gen. Ospina’s custody and joined paramilitary groups.

After serving as the Fourth Brigade’s commander, Ospina was actually promoted to head the Fourth Division and from there, to the high command.

“The general’s appointment is a slap in the face to the US, which has repeatedly reminded the Colombian government that US security assistance is conditioned on its meeting specific human rights criteria,” said AIUSA’s Schulz.

“The US should see his appointment as clear evidence that the government and military are not taking this mandate seriously and suspend the final allocation of US security assistance for 2003 on human rights grounds as US law requires.”

US hid vital war data from allies

By Marian Wilkinson

Washington, DC, Nov. 21— Australian officers were denied access to critical US intelligence during the Iraq war, potentially putting their lives at risk, under a policy described by a senior US Air Force intelligence officer as “damn silly.”

Australian and British officers were sometimes asked to leave the room during US intelligence briefings, even though some of the information came from Australian and British intelligence services, a conference in Washington was told this week.

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, at a joint news conference with Australian Defense Minister Robert Hill on Wednesday, conceded there was a problem but it was being fixed.

Senator Hill appeared completely unaware of the issue, which has been of serious concern to US, Australian and British intelligence officers.

Asked to comment, Senator Hill said: “I’m not sure what you’re talking about. I don’t know of any dissatisfaction in communication of intelligence between our agencies.”

The issue emerged at a conference attended by US, Australian and British military experts.

US Major-General Tommy Crawford told the conference he strongly opposed the policy that blocked Australian officers from getting intelligence on Iraq, even when some of it originated from Australian intelligence sources.

“Now that’s a silly damn policy,” he said after an RAAF officer attached to Australia’s Washington embassy, Wing Commander Alex Gibbs, asked why Australian and British officers were unable to access the intelligence.

The intelligence could have helped protect Australian special forces in Iraq, according to US security analysts.

General Crawford, head of the US Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Center, said the opposition to giving allies the intelligence came from US intelligence agencies outside the military.

The London Daily Telegraph quoted a US Air Force intelligence officer, Colonel Allen Roby, saying: “They gave us stuff and we labeled it secret and then they weren’t allowed to see it.”

Wing Commander Gibbs, according to The Daily Telegraph, said it was easy to spot British and Australian officers in the allied Combined Air Operations Center in Saudi Arabia during the war because they had to have an American sitting beside them accessing the computer.

Rumsfeld, who met Senator Hill during a visit to Washington on Wednesday, said intelligence problems had been raised during the war.

When Senator Hill said he was unaware of the problem, Rumsfeld explained to him the concerns about blocking access, especially when the intelligence came from the allies.

General Crawford told his Australian and British counterparts at the conference there were two solutions. The first was for the US “to change their doggone policy.” The second, he joked, “is to make the UK, Canada and Australia the 51st, 52nd and 53rd states.”

Security analyst Loren Thompson said one of the serious concerns of US commanders was keeping track of “friendly forces,” especially special forces, to prevent them being attacked by their own side.

Source: The Age (Australia)

200,000 march against Bush in London

Compiled by Seán Marquis

Nov. 25 (AGR)— Thousands of anti-war protesters cheered as an effigy of US President George W. Bush was toppled as part of a huge demonstration in London against his controversial visit to the UK.

As Bush was entertained in Buckingham Palace, a few hundred meters away in Trafalgar Square a papier-mâché statue was dragged to the ground.

The 18-foot tall effigy, which portrayed Bush holding a missile and with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in his pocket, was paraded at the head of the march before being placed in Trafalgar Square.

A group of protesters pulled down the statue in an echo of the US-staged toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad towards the end of the original bombing campaign in April.

The massive anti-Bush demonstration organized by the umbrella Stop the War Coalition, drew up to 200,000 marchers to the streets of London on Nov. 20.

The march was led off by disabled US Vietnam veteran-turned peace protester, Ron Kovic, behind the banner “Proud of My Country, Ashamed of My President”.

Kovic later led the countdown that ended with the toppling of the statue.

“I am against Bush and all his friends. He has got blood on his hands and is stirring up a lot of trouble,” said Andre Horbath, 80. “In my mind he is the world’s most dangerous man-- even Hitler only wanted to dominate Europe; this Bush wants to take on the whole world.

“I came to this country in 1956 as a political refugee after the Hungarian revolution, and I’ve never felt the world situation was as dangerous as it is now.”

Many in the crowd said that day’s bombings in Istanbul, Turkey, which killed more than two dozen people and injured hundreds, strengthened their resolve to oppose US-British policy in Iraq.

“There have been more and more bombings since the action in Iraq and more terrorism,” said Mischa Gorris, a 37-year-old London lawyer. “You will never change the hearts and minds of terrorists by bombing them. This is what you will get.”

The march went past the House of Commons and Whitehall before finishing at Trafalgar Square.

When the march passed Downing Street, anti-war protesters booed and jeered at Bush and Blair inside number 10.

Many protesters carried banners with the single word “Bush” printed above a splatter of blood, blew whistles and chanted “George Bush, terrorist”. Others waved Palestinian flags.

“George Bush is simply the biggest terrorist in the world,” said Shamil Khan, 36. “Terror is about making people terrified, and raining bombs down on civilian populations -- women and children -- certainly achieves that. George Bush has used terrible violence on innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

It’s the devastation and misery in the Middle East that forced me to come today,” said Kath Fernand, 50.

“This has been caused by the man who is now an honoured guest in this country.

“Bush and his cronies in the multinationals are ravaging the region for profit. In my mind Bush is just a figurehead for his friends in big business, and this is all about the dollar.

Fernand added, “There were no weapons of mass destruction, and human rights abuses are occurring in many countries around the world; so why did we go into Iraq?”

Former Labor Minister of Parliament George Galloway spoke to the crowd at Trafalgar Square and described the march as “unbelievable.”

He said: “We’re speaking for the majority of people in the world who want Bush out and who want Blair out.”

“Tony Blair added insult to injury by bringing this ignorant, foolish and dangerous man to these shores and I think we are speaking for the majority of the country.”

Anas Altikriti, spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, told the crowd the event was a celebration of belief around the world.

“It is a night where once again we speak loudly, we stand proud and we stand shoulder to shoulder with our brothers around the world who are victims of the policies of Tony Blair and George W. Bush,” he said.

After darkness fell, protesters burned their placards and the Bush effigy.

Police deployed extra officers at airports and ferries ahead of Bush’s arrival Tuesday night, while roads in London were blocked and drivers stopped and searched.

The £5m security operation surrounding the president had done its job of keeping him out of sight and sound of the protesters.

“Freedom is beautiful,” Bush said Thursday, adding he was happy to be in a country where people were allowed to speak their minds freely. “All I know is that people in Baghdad weren’t allowed to do this until recent history.”

Street theater

George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth lookalikes in an open-top coach, a giant inflatable missile and a pink “peace tank” wound through London on Nov. 19 in a cavalcade of protest against the US president’s visit to Britain.

Hundreds of people gathered on the south bank of the River Thames where the “Alternative State Procession” began.

A black cab represented “taxi drivers against the war” and a red bus advertised its route as London-Baghdad. Some marchers were dressed as UN weapons inspectors or Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Airline worker Dawn Totten, 50, said she had flown from her home in the United States to join the protest. “I came all the way from San Francisco because demonstrations go unrecognized and unreported there.”

Asked if she had a message for Bush, she said: “I’d like to tell him to stay here.”

Blair’s hometown

On Nov. 21 Bush traveled to Blair’s home in Trimdon Colliery in northeast England for tea at Blair’s house and lunch at the Dun Cow Inn in nearby Sedgefield.

Scores of protesters greeted the president and his host. “Go home,” some chanted. “Eat more pretzels Bush” read one sign, referring to a January 2002 episode when Bush choked on a pretzel while watching TV at the White House and briefly lost consciousness.

Richard Wanless, coordinator of the “Sedgefield Against War’ protest” said: “No matter where he goes, there will be protests from London to the North-East to make sure he knows he is not welcome. To me, he is a war criminal that has illegal occupation of Iraq. To add to the insult, there are families here who lost their children to the war.”

“A lot of people here are very angry with the way the US administration is putting itself above the law,” said Rev. Martin King, rector of Sedgefield. “One person in my congregation said if President Bush wanted to look around the church, he would be welcome because it is a place for sinners, but he hoped his henchmen would leave their ironware at the door.”

“His policies are very unwelcome in the region,” added Rev. King. “I have not heard anyone voicing support for him.”

Sources: Associated Press, Daily Mirror (UK), Guardian (UK), ITV, Reuters, SkyNews, USA Today

FTAA goes ‘lite’ but US still trade heavyweight

By Emad Mekay

Miami, Florida, Nov. 21 (IPS)— The scaled down plan given the nod at the end of a meeting here Thursday on a proposed pan-American common market marks a US retreat on its ambitious trade policies in the western hemisphere but Washington’s new aggressive push for bilateral deals could be a greater threat to the region’s developing countries.

Trade ministers from the 34 Americas nations (minus Cuba) who assembled to forge ahead with the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) wrapped up talks one day ahead of schedule with a far less comprehensive draft agreement than originally envisioned —now dubbed “FTAA lite.”

When proposed in 1994, the FTAA was designed as a trading bloc that would encompass 800 million people and stretch from Alaska to the southern tip of South America, joining economies with a combined output of nearly 14 trillion dollars a year. The deadline for creating such a bloc is January 2005.

But analysts say the weeklong eighth ministerial meeting here barely managed to dodge a resounding collapse of the controversial talks that would have echoed September’s breakdown of negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Cancun, Mexico.

In Miami, negotiators also tiptoed around dealing with controversial issues such as intellectual property rights, rules protecting foreign investment and government purchases.

The watered down blueprint for the trade area now allows member countries to pick and choose which obligations they will commit to rather than having to sign on to an all-embracing pact.

“The FTAA is in such a state of crisis that at the Miami Ministerial the US was forced to choose between no FTAA and FTAA-lite,” said Lori M. Wallach, director of Global Trade Watch for non-governmental organization (NGO) Public Citizen.

“All that was agreed was to scale back the FTAA’s scope and put all of the hard decisions to an undefined future venue so as to not make Miami the Waterloo of FTAA,” she added in a statement Friday.

As officials from the office of the US trade representative continued Friday to insist the meeting was a success, economists said its outcome will certainly exasperate anxious US business executives who are pushing to open up Latin American markets to their products in a single strike, and buttress civil society groups and unions that opposed the deal from the onset.

“US negotiators may try to put a happy face on the Miami talks, but the ‘FTAA lite’ deal will not please the big business lobby that has been the driving force behind the proposed trade pact,” said Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.

“By allowing countries to opt out of obligations on investment and other contentious issues, US negotiators have dashed the Fortune 500’s hopes of gaining new investment opportunities and protections in Brazil, South America’s largest economy,” she added Friday.

But the National Association of Manufacturers, a powerful US business group, was more upbeat. In a statement the association said Thursday’s outcome avoided having “the door slam shut, and gives us a chance for what can still be a very high quality agreement.’’

Critics of the proposed FTAA say it threatens public health, the environment and workers’ rights by giving overwhelming powers to large corporations and by pushing a sell-off of essential public services like health care, education and water.

They also argue the agreement could force the less developed Latin American and Caribbean countries to accept provisions giving special rights to foreign investors, mostly from the United States and Canada, wishing to challenge domestic policies.

While forcing changes to the FTAA might be seen as a success by some developing countries, like Brazil, which oppose a sweeping one-size-fits-all agreement, this week’s meeting also marked the official birth of a more forceful US strategy of bilateral trade talks — potentially more dangerous for the economies of developing nations.

In Miami, US officials unveiled plans to hold talks with four Andean countries — Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia — and with Panama and the Dominican Republic. Washington also said it would start talks with Uruguay over a bilateral investment treaty early next year.

“Unfortunately, the US has violated the spirit of the ministerial declaration by undertaking a strategy of negotiating bilateral and mini-regional agreements containing exactly the horrific proposals on intellectual property, investment and other areas that the US has failed to ram through in the FTAA,” said Robert Weissman, co-director of Essential Action, a Washington-based organization that campaigns for health rights, in a statement Friday.

Smaller countries negotiating deals with Washington will be left without the support and protection of informal blocs of like-minded nations, add many observers.

“Left to fend for themselves, many fear that small countries will be so much chum for the sharks,” Eric Dannenmaier of the Tulane Institute for Environmental Law and Policy at Tulane Law School in New Orleans told media in Miami.

Yet, even with the specter of bilateral agreements lurking over Miami, some activists attributed the shift in US policy away from a comprehensive FTAA to campaigning by civil society groups and NGOs, many of which were here, either protesting on the streets or holding non-violent actions.

“The (US President) Bush trade team has gone to plan B for bi-lateral, forced to abandon negotiation for the FTAA as a whole because of Latin American nations’ opposition and the peoples’ resistance across the hemisphere,” said Sara DeSantis, an organic farmer and activist with Stopftaa.org.

Wallach predicted that the future of the modified FTAA might not be any brighter than the original plan, as social movements in many FTAA-target countries are gaining strength. Those groups will also fight bilateral deals, she added.

There is a real possibility, Wallach said, that elections occurring before the FTAA deadline of Jan. 1, 2005 in several countries could add to the growing bloc of nations who will either have to represent their public’s interests at the FTAA table or face electoral or governing crises.

“Our goal is to replace it (FTAA) altogether, not allow for its expansion either through a watered down FTAA or via bilaterals,” she added.

Photos courtesy ftaaimc.org

A diplomatic thorn removed in Mexico

By Diego Cevallos

Mexico City, Mexico, Nov. 21 (IPS)— The abrupt resignation of Mexico’s UN ambassador, Adolfo Aguilar, erases the last leftist presence in the Vicente Fox government, and relieves the United States of a diplomat who steadfastly fought notions of Mexican subordination to its northern neighbor.

The 54-year-old ambassador, whose statements and stances rankled Washington, announced Thursday that he was leaving the post in the UN Security Council immediately, and not at the end of the year, as Mexico’s foreign ministry had arranged.

In an open letter to Fox, who Aguilar had supported since 1994 when the politician was just beginning to dream about reaching the presidency, the diplomat said he had been treated unfairly by the Mexican government for stating in a speech last week that “the political and intellectual class of the United States” see Mexico as merely a “backyard”.

“I was surprised by the reactions to my saying something that to me seemed obvious,” something that everyone knows, the now former ambassador said in an interview Friday morning with the Red radio network in Mexico.

Aguilar, who had told IPS in August that he was working towards building a mature relationship with the United States, one free of traits of inferiority, was Mexico’s diplomatic face in the country’s opposition to the Washington-led war against Iraq.

As a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, Mexico was one of the thorns in US efforts to build consensus for attacking the Saddam Hussein regime.

But it was Aguilar’s recent statements about the United States, made early this month in an address to Mexican university students, that triggered a diplomatic storm.

The repudiation came first from Washington, through Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, who assured that Mexico “is a partner of the United States, a neighbor of the United States, a great friend of the United States, and we would never, ever in any way treat Mexico as some backyard or as a second-class nation.”

Then Fox himself spoke out, saying that Aguilar’s comments were “an offence” against Mexico.

The nation’s relationship with the United States is one of partners and friends, assured the president.

“You are wrong, Vicente. Your statements are unfair [to me]. I am a patriot, and it is not I who has offended the Mexicans. It is not I who sees and treats Mexico like a backyard,” Aguilar said in his letter to Fox.

Fox’s former adviser said, “While I was Mexico’s representative on the Security Council, [the country] was not anyone’s backyard.”

Last week the Fox administration made it clear that it did not share the opinion of its ambassador and announced that Aguilar would leave his post in December, when Mexico’s two-year term on the Security Council comes to an end.

The Mexican government renewed dialogue with the United States on Nov. 12 after a prolonged cool period that began in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against New York and Washington, and grew frostier with the US-led invasion of Iraq in March of this year.

With Aguilar’s resignation, Fox, of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), has been left without high-level associates from the political left.

In his open letter to Fox, Aguilar admits that perhaps the ideas he expressed about the United States “constitute a transgression of the standards of diplomatic discretion. That is what many think... and as such perhaps I deserved to be reprimanded.”

“I am not a very diplomatic diplomat, there is little doubt. In the United Nations I have met many others. In this era, and faced with the events that have been our fate to participate in, diplomacy can no longer be the art of lying,” wrote the former ambassador.

“To achieve peace in the world we must not lie, we must not hide or act out fictitious realities.”

“My actions in the UN bothered the United States, which exercises its power above collective agreement and international law,” added Aguilar.

“You (Fox) realize that what is at stake is the country’s independence, its prestige, its credibility, its ability to negotiate and, certainly also, the possibility that Mexico is never again seen as a backyard.”

UK Parliament urged to probe ‘disinformation operation’

By Andrew Woodcock

Nov. 21— A former senior member of US intelligence today urged the British Parliament to hold an inquiry into what he alleges was a campaign of disinformation by British secret agencies in the run-up to war in Iraq.

Former United Nations (UN) weapons inspector Scott Ritter said he was involved with MI6 officers working on a secret operation codenamed Mass Appeal, designed to secure public support for action against Iraq by leaking dodgy intelligence to the media suggesting that Saddam Hussein continued to possess weapons of mass destruction.

And he said that disinformation was also supplied by a little-known body within the Defense Intelligence Staff called the Rockingham Cell, which provided intelligence officers to work as inspectors with the UN’s UNSCOM (UN Special Commission)team.

Government scientist David Kelly told a closed hearing of the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee days before his death in July that he liaised with Rockingham when working for UNSCOM.

A former US marine and military intelligence officer who worked on the staff of General Norman Schwarzkopf in the Gulf War, Ritter became a prominent opponent of war on Iraq after quitting UNSCOM in 1998.

He today said that ample intelligence was available to the UK and US governments before the war to show that Iraq’s WMD programs were eliminated within a short period after the 1991 conflict, but that they chose to ignore this.

Operations like Mass Appeal – which has never before been publicly discussed – and Rockingham existed to support the case for continued sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s and war earlier this year, he argued.

Ritter said he personally supplied Mass Appeal with information about WMD in the late 1990s which was not considered strong enough for UNSCOM to act upon, often because it came from a single, unreliable source.

As a senior inspector, he had access to “a body of data that was not actionable but was sufficiently sexy that if it could appear in the press would make Iraq look bad,” he said.

Mass Appeal took this information and “peddled it to the media, allowing inaccurate information to appear on the front pages of newspapers,” said Ritter.

“The Government would feed off those reports to promote the notion that Iraq was a nation ruled by a dictator addicted to WMD.”

Meanwhile, Rockingham “cherry-picked” intelligence to construct the strongest possible case for the British Government’s policy of continued sanctions, and then war.

“Operation Rockingham was more than just an intelligence cell that massaged information,” said Ritter. “It was an organization designed to support a pre-ordained conclusion of the British Government that Iraq will never be found in compliance with UN Security Council resolutions.”

Its officers also fed dubious information back to UNSCOM in order to prompt inspection activity in Iraq, he alleged.

The activity turned up no proof of WMD, but gave the impression to the public that programs were being concealed.

Speaking at Westminster today, Ritter said: “I want to encourage the British Parliament to hold an investigation, with open hearings, into the role of British intelligence before the war.

“I leave it to the British Parliament to find who authorized this and how it happened. Are British soldiers serving in Iraq now because of a lie perpetrated by the British Government?”

He was backed by former minister Michael Meacher, who used an article in the British daily The Guardian to call for “a full-scale independent inquiry into the operation of the intelligence services around the top of their command and their interface with the political system”.

Ritter declined to name his contacts in Mass Appeal and Rockingham or to identify individual pieces of misinformation which had been placed in the public domain.

He did not say whether he was referring to the notorious claims in last year’s government dossier on Iraqi arms that Saddam had weapons ready to fire within 45 minutes and that Baghdad had sought to buy uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons.

But he said he was ready to set out all his information before a parliamentary inquiry, which he said should be able to subpoena members of MI6 to establish the truth.

Ritter was backed by Ray McGovern, who was a senior CIA analyst until 1990, preparing the US president’s daily intelligence brief and chairing the National Intelligence Estimates.

McGovern said: “We have here what I would call a structural fault. You can’t have an intelligence service that is responsible both for objective analysis ... and that same intelligence outfit responsible for propaganda and Mass Appeal-type activities for rallying support and advocacy of a particular policy.

“I do believe that there is ample evidence that your government cooked up this Mass Appeal evidence ... and deliberately deceived your populace and your Parliament into giving the go-ahead for an illegal and very ill-advised war.”

Similar problems had arisen in Washington with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s creation within the Pentagon of an Office for Special Plans, which provided President George Bush with an alternative intelligence assessment on Iraq to that coming out of the CIA, he said.

Both men warned that yesterday’s terror attacks in Istanbul were a clear sign that the war had not prevented terrorism but fostered it.

“What happened in Turkey was a tragedy, but it was predictable and it could have been stopped,” said Ritter.

“It could have been stopped in many ways, and the best way would have been not to have given the terrorists enhanced credibility by going to war in Iraq.”

McGovern added: “Your government and mine would not listen to the intelligence experts who warned that, far from a diminution of terrorism, an invasion of Iraq will increase terrorism to the Nth degree. That is what we saw yesterday in Turkey.”

Source: The Scotsman