Elsewhere today (383)
Another Day in the Empire:
Fake Terror Obfuscates Lebanon and Iraq Failures
Kurt Nimmo, kurtnimmo.com
Thursday August 10th 2006, 7:10 am
Unable to window dress the obvious failure to eradicate growing resistance in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan—even with the mighty propaganda power of a complaisant media—the neocon intelligence apparatus has staged yet another terrorist event, or would be terrorist event.
“The 21 terrorist suspects arrested in the U.K. overnight had a ‘well-advanced plan’ to detonate electronic devices or liquid explosives disguised as beverages or onboard U.S.-bound aircraft, a sophisticated plot suggestive of al-Qaeda, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said,” reports Bloomberg. “The attacks were aimed at U.S.-bound planes of United Airlines, American Airlines and Continental Airlines at London’s Heathrow Airport, the Associated Press reported, citing unidentified [undoubtedly neocon] U.S. counter-terrorism officials in Washington.”
According to White House propaganda minister, Tony Snow (Job), “The president, prime minister and their key intelligence, law enforcement and security officials have been in close and regular contact. And as you would expect, he has spoken to Prime Minister Blair about these developments in recent days.”
Considering past events, including the “terrorist events” of seven-seven and nine-eleven, we can assume select “law enforcement and security officials” were “in close and regular contact” prior to this latest would-be attack as well.
In standard fashion, in order to apply the correct spin from the outset, we are told this latest operation has “global dimensions,” that is to say it will be billed as not only an “al-Qaeda” operation but other designated “global” enemies will be fingered as well.
“Last month, the global militant group al Qaeda called on Muslims to fight those who backed Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and warned of more attacks unless U.S. and British forces pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan,” reports Reuters.
In the coming hours and days, we can expect the corporate media, eager stenographers for the neocon plan, to connect the dots—blame will be affixed to Iran, Syria, and their “proxy,” Hezbollah, through “al-Qaeda,” now dedicated (or scripted) to help Hezbollah, not that the homegrown resistance group needs any help, especially from a CIA-ISI engineered terror group.
Finally, as attention has now shifted to Muslim bad guys (either imagined or a parade of patsies), Israel will likely increase the severity of its criminal behavior against the civilians of Lebanon and those of Gaza as well, as the American public will be navel gazing video footage of inconvenienced air travel passengers.
© Copyright Another Day in the Empire
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=513
Aljazeera:
Raids continue as Lebanon truce nears
Sunday 13 August 2006, 12:11 Makka Time, 9:11 GMT
Israeli forces have continued to strike deep into southern Lebanon, less than 24 hours before a ceasefire agreed by both sides is due to take effect.
In overnight raids by Israeli forces, Lebanese officials say at least seven civilians were killed and several more injured.
Other attacks have continued into Sunday morning, hitting homes, bridges and petrol stations, as Israeli troops clashed with Hezbollah fighters near the port city of tyre.
The expanded Israeli ground assault involves as many as 30,000 troops dropped into southern Lebanon in what military officials say is Israel's largest ever air operation.
The Israeli raids were followed on Sunday morning by a series of rockets fired from Hezbollah positions into northern Israel. Local reports say at least one Israeli was killed and six injured.
The rocket attacks came as the Israeli cabinet met to give its approval to the ceasefire plan.
On Saturday Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, announced that the the prime ministers of Lebanon and Israel had agreed to a cessation of hostilities at 0500 GMT on Monday, August 14.
The agreement reached appears to offer hope of an end to a four-week old conflict that has killed over 1,000 Lebanese and more than 130 Israelis.
"I am very happy to announce that the two leaders have agreed that the cessation of hostilities and the end of the fighting will enter into force on 14 August, at 0500 hours GMT," Annan said in a statement.
He urged both sides to halt the fighting immediately, and assured them that the United Nations force on the ground would work with them to monitor compliance of the Security Council resolution approved Friday to stop the hostilities.
The agreement paves the way for the UN to prepare for the deployment of up to 15,000 troops to help enforce the ceasefire.
'Pain and suffering'
"Preferably the fighting should stop now to respect the spirit and intent of the Council decision, the object of which was to save civilian lives, to spare the pain and suffering that the civilians on both sides are living through," Annan said.
Overnight on Saturday, at least seven civilians were killed and nine wounded as Israeli forces staged a series of attacks across Lebanon, officials said.
The dead included a mother, her three young children and their Sri Lankan maid, killed when Israeli bombs hit their home in the southern village of Burj el-Shemali.
Israel meanwhile said that 19 of its soldiers had died in fighting on Saturday - its heaviest losses in a single day since the start of the conflict.
Another five Israeli soldiers, missing after their helicopter was shot down, are also presumed to have died.
Bush speaks to leaders
Following the ceasefire agreement George Bush, the US president, spoke by telephone with the leaders of both Israel and Lebanon.
He spoke to Lebanese prime minister Fuad Siniora on Saturday, shortly after receiving a call from Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert late Friday. It was Bush's first direct contact with either leader in several weeks.
The White House said Bush pressed Siniora on the importance to "dismantle Hezbollah's state within a state" after the unanimous UN resolution called for a 15,000-strong UN-approved force in the south of the country, to be positioned alongside a proposed Lebanese force of the same number.
Yet the resolution does not call for an immediate Israeli withdrawal - and the White House said Olmert in his call to the White House "thanked President Bush for the work he had done on the UN resolution on the Lebanon crisis."
Israel has said that it will continue its offensive against Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon until the ceasefire begin on Monday.
Earlier on Saturday, Hasan Nasrallah, head of Hezbollah, said that his organisation, which has two cabinet ministers, would abide by the UN-brokered truce.
"We will not be an obstacle to any [government] decision that it finds appropriate, but our ministers will express reservations about articles [in the UN resolution] that we consider unjust and unfair," he said in a speech broadcast on Hezbollah's Al-Manar television on Saturday.
Aljazeera + Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8F02BCBD-035B-452A-A35E-E5FA0EFF61A6.htm
allAfrica: Nigeria Withdraws Troops From Border Area
With Cameroon As Part of UN-Sponsored Pact
UN News Service (New York) NEWS
August 11, 2006
Nigeria has completed withdrawing its troops from the Bakassi Peninsula, beginning the next phase in the implementation of the pact signed under United Nations auspices in June that ensures the border area's peaceful transfer to Cameroon.
The UN Office for West Africa (UNOWA) said in a statement issued in Dakar today that the two countries will use the next meeting of the Cameroon-Nigeria Mixed Commission to discuss how to delineate their maritime boundary.
The troop withdrawal follows the signing of the Greentree Agreement in New York in June in which Nigeria recognized Cameroon's sovereignty over the territory, in accordance with a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2002, and agreed to withdraw its forces and administration.
The accord was the culmination of the work of the Cameroon-Nigeria Mixed Commission, set up by Secretary-General Kofi Annan to peacefully resolve the Bakassi dispute and hailed as a dispute-resolution model for other conflicts in Africa.
The Secretary-General's Special Representative for West Africa, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, who described the troop withdrawal as "a very important step forward," also told the UN News Centre that the leaders of several other countries in the region have informed him they would now like to use a similar model to resolve their border disputes.
Mr. Ould-Abdallah said the UN will have at least a dozen civilian observers in place to monitor the situation on the Bakassi Peninsula following the troop withdrawal and to "give reassurance" to locals that there will be no retribution or revenge taken against them. He said he was also confident that Cameroon and Nigeria would address the concerns of those locals who demonstrated last week about the recent changes.
Located on the Gulf of Guinea, the Bakassi Peninsula had been the subject of intense and sometimes violent disputes between the two countries for dozens of years when Cameroon referred the matter to the ICJ in 1994.
Copyright © 2006 UN News Service. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
http://allafrica.com/stories/200608120001.html
allAfrica:
From Fear to Hope
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks NEWS
August 11, 2006
Nouakchott
At the end of an IRIN interview about child malnutrition a Mauritanian doctor paused, leaned over and whispered, "Be responsible how you quote me, things can happen to people here."
His fear of telling a foreign journalist the extent of the country's child health problems is a legacy of a reign of terror imposed on Mauritanians for 21 years - until August last year when Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall took power.
Vall seized the opportunity while President Mauouiaya Ould Sid Ahmed Taya, also a colonel, was on a state visit abroad. Taya himself gained power through a coup, in 1984, and ruled with an iron fist until he was deposed.
Under Taya, the doctor's comments about Mauritania's chronic social and environmental problems would have been considered as implicit criticism of the regime and could easily have landed him a stint in the central prison.
But outwardly at least, Mauritania has turned over a new leaf under Vall.
The new junta pledged to boost development, respect human rights and install democracy in less than two years before holding democratic elections. The two-year deadline was subsequently reduced to 19 months and presidential elections are now scheduled for March 2006.
Vall is the latest in a series of military men who have seized power and quickly set their countries on the track to democratic rule - breaking tradition with post-colonial coups that installed despots such as Mobutu Sese Seko of the former Zaire and Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo.
After the sudden death of President Sani Abacha in Nigeria in 1998, the military oversaw a transition that led to democratic elections in 1999.
That same year, members of the presidential guard assassinated President Ibrahim Bare Mainassara. The head of the guard led a transitional government that held a constitutional referendum in July and national elections the following November.
HAPPY DAYS
As the Mauritanian interim regime has shown its colours, enthusiasm for it has only grown.
"Before, we were dictated to," said Seide Ould Seide, representative of Terre Vivante, one of the largest Mauritanian NGOs. He compares the former repression in Mauritania to that in Iraq under Saddam Hussein or in present-day Turkmenistan.
But now, "there are no red lines or taboos," Seide said. "We can agree or not - that freedom is great. People like this freedom."
Accomplishments racked up by Vall's regime include a sweeping amnesty for "political crimes" one month after seizing power, and releasing from jail scores of people imprisoned during Taya's rule.
In a bid to slash corruption in the country, in December last year the government authorised an across the board 50 percent pay hike for civil servants. Income tax has been cut by 30 percent, and civil servant and military pensions increased by 15 percent.
Then, after saying he has no designs on power after the presidential elections, Vall set on the path to multi-party democracy.
In late June the government held a nationwide referendum on constitutional revisions meant to bring an end to military coups and pave the way for democratic elections.
A whopping 76 percent of the country's 3 million people turned out to vote. Ninety-seven percent of them agreed to the changes, which put limits of two terms on future presidents, ensuring that power changes hands every decade.
The junta has also set up a 15-member national electoral commission (CENI) which will supervise future elections.
ACCEPTANCE
After the coup, the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the United States, former colonial power France and the European Union all condemned the seizure of power, leery at the prospect of yet another military coup in an impoverished African country.
Even the African Union, the predecessor to which was once labelled the "dictators club" for its tolerance of political repression in 1970s and 1980s Africa, suspended Mauritania's membership of the 53-nation group "until the restoration of constitutional order in the country".
The AU has since said it supports Mauritania's transition.The changes Vall has made, combined with frantic diplomacy in the first days of the coup, have won over the international community as well. The World Bank and European Union have both restarted loans and grants to the cash-strapped country, which the UN deems among the poorest in the world.
The U.S. Ambassador in Nouakchott, Joseph LeBaron, told the Reuters news agency earlier this month that Mauritania could even become "an example to the rest of Africa and the Middle East" on how to make a transition from rule of the gun to rule of law.
Politicians gearing up for the country's first ever multi-party presidential elections in March are equally enthusiastic.
Asked to provide a summary of Vall's first and last full year in office, Moustapha Ould Bedreddine, secretary general of the Union of the Forces of Progress (UFP), said that everything has been "positive".
AFTER VALL
Although President Vall's regime has turned out to be a surprise success, a question mark hangs over the country's post-election future.
While many Mauritanians clearly trust Vall, he has promised that he will not be a candidate in the presidential race, and has strictly ruled out all the members of his cabinet from running too.
And as Vall has dominated discussion of politics in Mauritania for the last year, relatively little is known about his rivals from about 35 different parties, with just eight months to go before the election.
As the doctor's lingering nervousness about being quoted showed, many Mauritanians are wary about the long-term transformation of their country.
The country started pumping oil from reserves in February. Revenues are currently building up in an account outside Mauritania, with Vall's government committed to leaving the successor rulers to decide how to spend it.
That golden egg could provide a considerable incentive to any presidential hopeful.
But in the heady days of Vall's leadership, some still see a positive future, whatever March's election brings.
"Now we have seen what a military regime can do, we can demand much more of a civilian one," Terre Vivante representative Seide said.
"Now we are free, we can express what we want."
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations ]
Copyright © 2006 UN Integrated Regional Information Networks. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
http://allafrica.com/stories/200608110671.html
AlterNet:
Six Lessons from the London Airline Bombing Plot
By John Tirman, AlterNet
Posted on August 12, 2006
What we now know about the London-based plot to destroy ten civilian airplanes points to six conclusions.
First, what stopped this plot was law enforcement. Law enforcement. Not a military invasion of Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, or Iraq. Old-fashioned surveillance, development of human sources, putting pieces together, and cooperation with foreign police and intelligence services.
Second, the conspiracy — if it resembles the London bombings of last summer — will likely be home-grown, another of the growing jihad "fashion" in Europe that comprises the new street gangs of this world. It is not a religious movement, it is not fundamentalism. These are thin veneers. It is at root sheer violence undertaken by young men resentful of many things (not least the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Lebanon) and ready to kill in return. Under different cirucmstances, it could be Tamils or Red Brigades or Michigan Militiamen, and has been.
Third, if al Qaeda was involved (allegedly from Pakistan), we can thank the failure of the war in Afghanistan and the cozying up to Musharraf to destroy them.
Fourth, there was no involvement by any American-based “cells,” according the FBI Director Robert Mueller. As many of us have been saying http://www.ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2005a/011405/011405a.php
for nearly five years, and as the 9/11 Commission Report showed, there is virtually no plausible American jihad organization at work, and never has been.
Fifth, the plot again reveals how ill-equipped the U.S. Government has been in anticipating plausible attack scenarios and taking steps to prevent them. Liquid bombs were so hard to figure out? Al Qaeda already tried it. DHS has almost completely missed the threat, just as they are missing the vulnerability of cargo holds and God knows what else. Thomas Kean, the former GOP governor and co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, called this liquid bomb error “appalling” and wondered, on an NBC program four months ago, why no progress had been made. What are the tens of billions being spent on? This is Katrina II.
Sixth, and most important, we must end our involvement in Iraq and sharply refocus our presence in the region. The war president’s approach is not working. It’s a diversion from the real threat. It’s a spur to bitter revenge. It’s a big feedback loop that will endanger us for years, if not decades. Our lives are now at stake because the Bush catastrophe has created thousands of new terrorists.
Naturally, the politically expedient are trying to gain an edge. Defeated Senator Joseph Lieberman immediately attacked his victorious primary challenger Ned Lamont, saying that Lamont’s leave Iraq policy is somehow connected to this. It’s the opposite — the war distracts and inflames. We will see the crowing from the Bushies now, when in fact they were again asleep at the wheel, only this time the Brits saved the day. The war v. law enforcement contrast — remember how John Kerry was ridiculed by Cheney for uggesting that aggressive police work and human intelligence were anti-terror linchpins? — is now buried by conflating the “war against terror” in Iraq with this Scotland Yard and MI5 success.
Reversing America’s colossally destructive series of interventions in the Middle East — a cause, a trigger, a recruitment fountain, and a charity for jihad — will require an entirely different mindset, not just an adjustment or a measured retreat. When America responded, after being prodded, to the tsunami victims in Indonesia early last year, it profoundly changed Indonesians’ views of the United States. New attitudes of support and cooperation suddenly sprang forth. This “natural experiment” should be examined to learn from, possibly to emulate, in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.
We’re now viewed as destroyers, and destruction is the retort. This is the “new Middle East” that is aborning — one of relentless violence — if we do not end our own relentless violence there. The would-be bombers in London are a reminder of how close it is.
John Tirman is Executive Director of MIT's Center for International Studies. His most recent book is 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World (Harper Perennial, 2006).
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/40221/
Arab News:
Saying ‘Islamic Fascists’ May Defeat Bush’s Purpose
Parvez Ahmed, Arab News
Sunday, 13, August, 2006 (19, Rajab, 1427)
Shortly after 9/11 attacks on World Trade Center in New York and other places in the US, President George W. Bush described and later retracted our fight against terrorism as a “crusade.” In his first press conference after the thwarted terrorist plot to blow up several aircraft on Thursday, the president said, “this nation is at war with Islamic fascists.”
The use of the phrase “Islamic fascists” has drawn the ire of the American Muslim community. As Muslims we use “Islamic ethics” to mean ethics based on Islamic teachings that guide our behavior. Similarly “Islamic art” draws its inspiration from Islamic teachings that discourage certain types of art (immodest imagery or certain life forms). When the president uses “Islamic fascists” it conveys that fascism is rooted in Islam or fascism that is inspired by Islam. This is the way the Muslims will see it, regardless of what Bush may claim he really means.
President Bush on an earlier occasion said Islam is a religion of peace. Now, caving in to extreme right-wing pressure, he equated the religion of peace with the ugliness of fascism. Such rhetoric contributes to fear and backlash against American Muslims. A recently released Gallup poll shows four out of ten Americans feeling “prejudiced” against Muslims.
“Prejudice” against Islam and Muslims allowed our politicians to whip a frenzy in rejecting the approval of a Dubai firm to operate American ports. Conservative columnist David Brooks wrote, “But it is certain that the xenophobic hysteria will come back to harm the US. ... this (Middle East) is a region in the midst of traumatic democratic change. The strongest argument the fundamentalists have is that they are engaged in a holy war against the racist West, which imposes one set of harsh rules on Arabs and another set of rules on everybody else. Now comes a group of politicians to prove them gloriously right.”
Scholarly writings are delving deeper into the root causes of suicide terrorism. Robert Pape in his book “Dying to Win” uses over two decades of data to show the paucity of connection between suicide terrorism and any religion. The pioneering instigators and the largest purveyors of suicide terrorism are the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are overwhelmingly Hindu.
Pape writes: “From Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign have been terrorist groups trying to establish or maintain political self-determination by compelling a democratic power to withdraw from a territory they claim.” Occupation is the primary motivator and religion, at best, is an “aggravating” factor.
Today we all live in fear of terrorism. Equating terrorism with Islam makes the mainstream Muslim community doubly vulnerable to both the random acts of terror and the ensuing backlash.
In these trying times it is important our nation stands united. Muslims form an important part of the fabric of America. We are law-abiding citizens who have always been dedicated to the protection of our national security. We should not be targeted or singled out because of our faith. Nor should our faith be equated with the evils of terrorism or fascism. We do not control or have say over the actions of shadowy terrorist groups. But as taxpayers we certainly have a right to petition and expect our own government to do everything in its power to protect us by all means, including avoiding counterproductive rhetoric.
A recent policy brief by the Stanley Foundation states that Western powers “should not focus on the religious and cultural divisions between East and West when approaching this issue (of terrorism), as this plays into the existing grievances of Arab and Muslim populations and creates a sense of clash between civilizations, all of which hinder the resolution of differences.”
An attempt to institutionally and rhetorically dissociate Islam from terrorism is imperative.
— Parvez Ahmed is the chairman of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR is America’s largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy group. To find out more about CAIR go to: www.cair.com. E-mail: pahmed@cair.com
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=77812&d=13&m=8&y=2006
Arab News:
UK Terror Plot: Muslim Leaders Speak Out
Mushtak Parker, Arab News
Sunday, 13, August, 2006 (19, Rajab, 1427)
LONDON, 13 August 2006 — Downing Street yesterday rebuffed an open letter signed by a group of prominent British Muslims to Tony Blair strongly urging the prime minister to change his foreign policy regarding the Middle East and Afghanistan and warning that the policy is putting civilians at increased risk in the UK and abroad.
This comes in the wake of last Thursday’s foiling by British police of an alleged terror plot to blow up 10 planes departing from UK airports en route to major US cities using liquid explosives smuggled on to the planes disguised as soft drinks. Some British officials warned that the plotters had intended “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” Police arrested 24 suspects, of whom one has been released without any charges.
According to local reports a spokesman for Blair, responding to the letter, stressed: “We should always remember that the terrorism affecting the West today has blighted Muslim countries for several decades. It certainly predated our decision to support democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq and of course the Sept. 11 attacks. Our foreign policy is focused on supporting the people of those countries in their desire to live in a democracy just as we enjoy it in the UK.”
However, the government has been at pains to stress that of all the major world leaders, Blair has worked tirelessly to get a peace settlement in the Middle East and to promote democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Downing Street confirmed that Blair “stands ready” to meet Muslim representatives when he returns to the UK from his summer break in Barbados at the end of the month.
The British government has praised Pakistan’s role in pre-empting the terror plot, but privately politicians stress that Islamabad has still got to do much more to counter the danger of extremism in its midst, which is allegedly nurtured in some of the madrasas (religious schools) dotted around the country. Rashid Rauf, arrested on Friday by Pakistani officials, is related to Tayib Rauf, 22, who is one of the alleged plotters arrested in the UK and whose assets have been frozen by the Bank of England. Both are reported to have attended the same madrasa in Lahore as Shehzad Tanweer, one of the 7/7 bombers in London. Pakistan has also warned MI5 of an Al-Qaeda link to the alleged London terror plot.
The letter, whose signatories included Labour MPs Sadiq Khan (Tooting), Shahid Malik (Dewsbury) and Mohammed Sarwar (Glasgow Central); Dr. Muhammed Abdul Bari, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain; and peers Lord Patel of Blackburn, Lord Ahmed of Rotherham and Baroness Pola Uddin, could not have been more to the point.
“Prime Minister,” started the message. “As British Muslims we urge you to do more to fight against all those who target civilians with violence, whenever and wherever that happens. It is our view that current British government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad.
“To combat terror the government has focused extensively on domestic legislation. While some of this will have an impact, the government must not ignore the role of its foreign policy. The debacle of Iraq and now the failure to do more to secure an immediate end to the attacks on civilians in the Middle East not only increases the risk to ordinary people in that region, it is also ammunition to extremists who threaten us all.”
The letter goes on to stress that attacking civilians is never justified and urges the prime minister to redouble his efforts to tackle terror and extremism and change “our foreign policy to show the world that we value the lives of civilians wherever they live and whatever their religion. Such a move would make us all safer.”
The letter, unprecedented in British Muslim politics, is already being read by some analysts as the emergence of a distinct Muslim lobby in British domestic politics, akin to the Israeli lobby in Washington and the UK.
This may be premature given the diversity and complexities of the British Muslim demography. There is also a fear by some observers that the continual portrayal of Muslims as victims may precipitate a backlash from both other ethnic and faith minorities such as the Hindus, the Afro-Caribbeans and the indigenous White British communities. Recently, a right wing UK Hindu group urged fellow Hindus to demand the same privileges and attention from government agencies as Muslims are getting.
Already there are signs that the letter, although described by Lib-Dem MP Vince Cable as “moderate”, has attracted a mixed reaction from the political establishment. Cable warned that there was “a danger it (the letter) might give some comfort to the kind of people who say: ‘Well, change your foreign policy or we’ll blow you up’”. This suggestion was strongly denied by the signatories.
Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells was even more blunt stressing that no government would “formulate foreign policy on the basis of a threat that maybe a part of the population won’t like it and will resort to terrorism. We live in a democracy where Parliament makes decisions and the people have an opportunity, during general elections, if they don’t like the government, to get rid of it.”
Herein, perhaps, lies the challenge for Muslims in general living in the West — the challenge of fully participating in the political process and trying to change government policies and people’s attitudes through peaceful parliamentary and extra-parliamentary means.
UK Home Secretary John Reid speaking to chief constables yesterday warned against complacency and self-congratulation, and said: “The initial targets — the main suspects — have been successfully apprehended, but all of us know that this investigation hasn’t ended.”
However, some politicians and community leaders are wary that the government and police may have overreacted in their response to disrupting the alleged plot.
They are too aware of the public outcry and the negative publicity and fallout following the police raid against the two Muslim brothers in Forest Gate in June which resulted in one of the brothers being accidentally shot and which turned out to be a false alarm. They are also aware of the tragic shooting by police of Charles de Menezes after the failed 21/7 attack against the London underground. De Menezes, in a catalog of police errors and misunderstandings, was mistaken for one of the then alleged terror suspects.
As such Muslim leaders have reacted cautiously to the police action in the latest alleged terror plot. Leading human rights lawyer and chair of the Muslim Council of Great Britain’s legal affairs committee Khalid Sofi, speaking to the BBC, said that the Muslim community had felt “shock and disbelief” at the arrests.
Muslims would fully support and welcome the police action if the security services had indeed disrupted a genuine terrorist plot. But it was important any evidence against the suspects was presented to their lawyers as soon as practically possible.
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=79208&d=13&m=8&y=2006
Clarín: Continúan los combates entre Israel y Hezbollah
a pesar de los anuncios del cese del fuego
Los trompas israelíes intentaron avanzar por tierra pero encontraron una dura resistencia por parte de la milicia shiíta. Los bombardeos se concentraron en Tiro, donde hubo al menos cinco muertos. Hoy se reúne el gabinete del premier Ehud Olmert para aprobar oficialmente el fin de las hostilidades. Según el secretario general de la ONU, esto entraría en vigencia mañana.
Clarín.com, 13.08.2006
Pese a los anuncios diplomáticos, las fuerzas israelíes continuaron hoy con su ofensiva terrestre para tomar el control del Líbano, al sur del río Litani, pero tropezaron con una dura resistencia por parte del Hezbollah. Los combates se concentraron esta madrugada en torno a Ghanduriyé, una altura estratégica que domina el Litani, 22 km al este de Tiro, así como en torno a Yater, una colina situada apenas a 6 km al norte de la frontera.
Por su parte, la artillería, la aviación y la marina israelí bombardeaban la costa, al sur de Tiro, para cubrir el avance de su infantería y de los blindados en dirección de la ciudad portuaria. De esa manera, los alrededores de la ciudad sufrieron un bombardeo incesante durante toda la noche, dejando al menos cinco muertos: una madre, sus tres hijos y una empleada murieron cuando un misil impactó sobre el edificio de cuatro plantas en el que vivían.
Los aviones israelíes destruyeron, además, ocho estaciones de servicio en los suburbios de Tiro, indicó la policía. En Burj Chemali, en la entrada este de la ciudad, una de las bombas produjo un incendio que amenazó un hospital y un centro comercial.
La aviación israelí tomó como blanco asimismo la región de Nabatieh (sur), donde se cree que hay heridos en Kfar Ruman. En el valle oriental de la Beká, dos civiles perdieron la vida y otros diez resultaron heridos en la aldea de Ali an Nahri, en la región de Baalbeck.
Mientras tanto, el gabinete israelí se reunirá hoy para analizar el alto el fuego, que está previsto que entre en vigor mañana a las 8 (hora local). Todos los observadores descartan que el gabinete, presidido por el primer ministro Ehud Olmert, respaldará el cese de hostilidades.
Copyright 1996-2006 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2006/08/13/um/m-01251763.htm
Counterpunch: Hizbullah, Zionism
and the Ideology of late Imperial America
Awakening the Resistance
By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
08/10/06
Thousands of Lebanese, Palestinians and others made a kind of pilgrimage to Fatima’s gate in the summer of 2000 to celebrate the end of Israel’s 22 -year occupation of south Lebanon. ‘Fatima’s gate’ denoted a stretch of land on the Lebanon-Israel border newly controlled by Hizbullah after it pursued the retreating Israeli forces back into Israel. Yellow Hizbullah flags flew everywhere. The atmosphere was festive and light. People set up souvenir stands selling Hizbullah memorabilia – flags, key-rings, postcards, pens – to commemorate the historic event. Families strolled up and back along the road pa! rallel to the border, pointing out the Israeli towns in the distance. Friends strode along together talking politics and stopping to stare at the last wreckages of the event, the burned out jeeps and cars, the bullet holes and shrapnel wounds in the facades of the walls and buildings left behind by the retreating Israelis. Parents and children alike gazed at these remains; some took pictures posed next to them. Others passed by more solemnly, wary of disturbing the near-sanctity of these symbols of struggle and of the years of adversity they recalled.
Across a stretch of land demarcated by barbed wire and signposts stood a lone Israeli watch-tower. From Fatima’s gate one could just make out the shapes of helmeted soldiers within, behind a small rectangular window of bullet-proofed glass: the hapless targets of rocks hurled continually across the border by all who could manage to throw them and the cheering on-lookers applauding each lob.
The summer of 2000 has taken on the transient quality of a landscape brightened by a break in the clouds for an all too brief interlude.
That was the summer Lebanon began to awaken again; to bloom into a metropolis of culture and scandal, nightlife and slums, commerce and tourism, stretching, yawning and weeping with sorrow and relief. The stiflingly hot streets of Haret Hreik in the south suburbs were neighbors the of the Bourj al-Barajneh, Chatila and Mar Elias Palestinian refugee camps all full of the squalor and pulsing of life, the worlds within worlds of poverty, hope, despair and faith. There in the slums of the city a young, intelligent doctor from the camp hospital invited me to his home to meet his mother and sister and to explain why he, a Sunni Muslim and a Palestinian, had chosen to become a member of Hizbullah. Safwat was an anomaly then, or so I believed. But now, when I traverse the str! eets of Haret Hreik in my mind, the fruit and vegetable stands, the phone stores and electronics shops, the clothing stores, restaurants and cafes, the banks and Internet stops, the grocery and household supply marts where one could purchase all her daily necessities, it is clear that the seeds of a vast resistance had just begun to germinate. It was unclear to me then just how fully it would bloom; just how tenacious its roots would become.
Today, the bustling streets of Haret Hreik are gone. Where families lived and thrived, struggled and laughed, is an emptiness of rubble –the bombed ruins of a greedy imperial war that stops at nothing. Today Lebanon stands behind Hizbullah. The Lebanese have become the bitter, cheering on-lookers of the resistance which lobs its out-dated missiles relentlessly across the border as the Israeli war machine refuels again and again. But US precision guided bombs, cluster bombs, white phosphorus, unmanned aerial drones, drones to guide the bombs, helicopters armed with missiles, F-16s, gun ships and state-of-the-art armed and trained ground forces with night vision surveillance and combat goggles have succeeded in uniting far more than the Lebanese behind the daring defiance of Hassan Nasrallah.
Sixteen years of civil war, of murderous sectarian acrimony, of inter-ethnic killing, suspicion and paranoia and today –after 28 days of hell unleashed upon it by the arrogant racism of a militant and ideological Zionism— 89% of Lebanon’s Sunni Muslims, 80% of its Christians, 80% of its Druze and 100% of its Shiite populations support Hizbullah’s resistance against Israel and the United States.
At least as telling are statistics showing that 97% of Palestinians support Hizbullah’s position toward Israel including 95% of Christian Palestinians. Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories and Iran are not the only places where support for Hizbullah has increased dramatically in the last month. Among the populations of the American-backed Arab states, notably Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, there is also widespread support. Indeed, seizing ! upon the corruption and obsequiousness of these regimes and their tacit support of Israel, Nasrallah intoned in a recent address, “there will be no place for [you] if you abandon your moral and national responsibility…. For the sake of your thrones I say to you gather [up your humanity] and act for one day in order to stop this aggression on Lebanon.” He understands, as do they, that their unwillingness to condemn the insouciant murder of more than a thousand people will cost them dearly. Suddenly these merciless, sell-out regimes are left scrambling to help author a ceasefire agreement less embarrassing than the Bolton-Gillerman diktat that left the Israeli military in place in south Lebanon while seeking to disarm Hizbullah.!
Are we really surprised by the vast, Hizbullah-led resistance? By the linkage it makes with people across the boundaries of national insult, defeat and humiliation? Are we really surprised that 40 years after Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights and 6 years into its continued occupation of the Shebaa Farms in Lebanon that people are have had enough? Are we really surprised that 3 and a half years into the US occupation and devastation of Iraq, 5 years after the US invasion and destruction of Afghanistan and decades of killings, intrusions, violations, abductions, assassinations, meddling, economic sanctions, pilfering and exploitation of the people, lands and resources of the Middle East that the reckless, racist, power-drunk mercenaries of empire should finally be met with a legitimate popular resistance? –not an outgrowth of displaced fana! ticism, not an al-Qaeda gang of killers, but the beginnings of a grassroots pan-Arab and pan-Islamic movement seeking to heal the wounds of perpetual subjugation?
What message have the purveyors of state power brought with them that their listeners should wish to continue to bow in subservience? The conditions are not right for a ceasefire, say George Bush and Condoleeza Rice. First burn down the house and then we can discuss how to put out the flames. We are not just fighting Hizbullah, says Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, but Syria and Iran as well. Accept our vision of a Starbucked-MidEast; a Middle East with sanitized Muslims appointed by the corporate board of Ziocondriacs who break into hives at the words “Islam” and “Arab;” whose peace imposes fast food franchises; whose freedom is the right to purchase arms at the Great Mall of the Gulf States; whose riches are the oil w! ells mortgaged to Texas; and whose water resources run through the processing plants of the Ariel and Gush Etzion settlement blocs.
They tell you that a Jewish state is democratic but a Muslim state is evil; that Palestinians living in Palestine have no rights and no state but Jews living in the rest of the world can ‘return’ and live there as rights’-bearing citizens; that Jesus wants you in Palestine unless you are a Palestinian or a Muslim; that Washington, London and Tel Aviv can produce nuclear warheads but that Tehran is a global threat for daring to enrich uranium; that legitimate resistance is terrorism but state terrorism is “self-defense”; that the desert state of Syria is Nasrallah’s courier and puppeteer but that Washington is an honest broker and a partner for peace; that Iran is a rogue state for arming Hizbullah but that America is freedom-loving for arming Tel Aviv; that we cannot talk to Damascus or Tehran unless they ! renounce themselves out of existence first; that expansionism and regime change are necessary for American and Israeli national security but that the Arab and Muslim winners of free and fair democratic elections should be arrested in the middle of the night and imprisoned in secret police detention centers for attempting to rule.
They tell you that three soldiers captured by Hamas and Hizbullah are worth the collective destruction of Palestine and Lebanon but that civilians kidnapped by Israel are not worth the price of a printed page; that the tens of thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails and the hundreds of Afghanis, Pakistanis, Arabs and others at Guantanamo Bay are worth less than the abandoned pets of the residents of North Israel fleeing to the bomb shelters. They sing sanctimonious hymns to the glory of international law as they veto it into the oblivion of a million shell fragments.
Don’t count the blackened bodies of the peach farmers of Qaa laid out in the afternoon sun along the roadside. Don’t weep for the petrified, death-stolen children under the concrete rubble of Qana. Don’t suffer the incinerated of Marwaheen, the blasted of Srifa and Khiam and Tibnine. Don’t list the villages lost or the homes destroyed; don’t number the dead of Beirut and Tyre. Don’t listen to the wailing on the beaches of Gaza. Don’t mourn the lost lives of Khan Yunis or Beit Hanoun, people of the sand and the dust; of corrugated iron and uprooted orange groves. Don’t number the fallen in Nablus or Jenin: the old shepherds, the young rebels, the pregnant wives and weary husba! nds, the somber schoolgirls and the angry boys in the lost alleys of the camps. We will hear all of their voices again; see their likenesses in the shattered streets of the Levant. They will gather beneath the cedar and the minaret; carry with them the kuffiyeh and the Qur’an; they will speak the language of the resistance that we have breathed into them like fire.
Jennifer Loewenstein is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University's Refugee Studies Centre. She has lived and worked in Gaza City, Beirut and Jerusalem and has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, where she has worked as a free-lance journalist and a human rights activist. She can be reached at: amadea311@earthlink.net
http://www.counterpunch.org/loewenstein08102006.html
Global Research:
No dead Lebanese children on TV today
By Craig Murray
craigmurray.org.uk/weblog.html
August 11, 2006
George Bush is just following John Reid in ensuring any trials following today's arrests are irretrievably prejudiced.
It is a fact that only the closest Blair circle bothers to deny, that if young British Muslims are turning to terrorism, it is the Blair-Bush foreign policy of war on Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine that has driven them to it. The majority of British people share their outrage at our foreign policy. That is not to condone the response of irrational violence. Terrorism is plain wrong. But it is Blair who has, through his evangelical embrace of the neo-con foreign agenda, massively increased any current threat of terrorism to the UK.
But let us do what none of the 24 hour news channels are doing; draw breath and count up to ten. What has actually happened so far?
There have been, reportedly, 21 people arrested. There have been no terrorist attacks, no explosions. US sources are reported as saying that explosive devices have been found, but no news from the Police as yet.
I am reminded of the Forest Gate arrests and the notorious "Chemical weapon vest" which was threatening London and required 270 policemen and a four mile air exclusion zone to deal with. The media was shoving that out just as uncritically as it is shoving out this air attack, even though it made no sense. Anyone who knows anything about weapons knows that for a chemical weapon you want maximum dispersal - the last thing you are going to do is wrap it in fabric around a human body. And why the air exclusion zone? Were they going to throw the vest at a passing jet? The media never did ask any of those questions.
Similarly, I recall the famous ricin plot, where again police and the professional pundits said millions could have been killed. In the event, of course, it turned out there was no ricin and no plot.
And I remember Jean Charles De Menezes, the "suicide bomber", with his "bulky jacket", with "wires sticking out", who "leapt" the ticket barriers and "raced" onto the tube. All lies.
So I am waiting with a little healthy scepticism to see the truth of this "al-Qaida plot" bringing "Mass murder on an unprecedented scale".
Of course, it helps New Labour look Churchillian, and explains why Israel had to be supported in the ethnic cleansing of South Lebanon, part of the "Arc of extremism". it is interesting that the timing of these arrests exactly today, after "months" of surveillance, was determined by the Prime Minister - the CO in COBRA, the operational command, stands for Cabinet Office.
The political timing could not have been more convenient - a junior minister had resigned over arms to Israel, and the backbench rebellion demanding a recall of parliament over Lebanon will now be containable in the name of standing together in the War on Terror. And the news agenda has been seismically shifted. The public mood is instantly tilted from sympathy for the people of Lebanon, leading to questioning of the War on Terror, to renewed fear that "Islamic fascists" are planning to kill us all.
So to recap: Blair's crazed foreign policy has made us a genuine potential target for terrorist attack. The government manipulates and spins that threat to political advantage.
We wait for the court system to show whether this was a real attempted attack and, if so, it was genuinely operational rather than political to move against it today. But the police' and security services' record of lies does not inspire confidence.
As Britain's outspoken Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, Craig Murray helped expose vicious human rights abuses by the US-funded regime of Islam Karimov. He is now a prominent critic of Western policy in the region.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
© Copyright Craig Murray, craigmurray.org.uk/weblog.html, 2006
© Copyright 2005 GlobalResearch.ca
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MUR20060811&articleId=2946
Harper's Magazine:
One Flu Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
[Diagnosis]
Posted on Thursday, August 10, 2006. From “Potomac Fever,” a section of the White House website devoted to “The President and His Leadership Team.” The document is by Clay Johnson, deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget. Originally from Harper's Magazine, July 2006.
Potomac Fever is a significant health concern that may be impacting you or some of the people you love and respect. Following is some information to assist you in recognizing, preventing, and combating it.
General symptoms include: extreme disorientation, memory loss, and occasional delusions of grandeur.
The individual may have an inflated notion of self-worth and may use phrases such as:
“Let’s get one of the cars and drivers here to take us to dinner.”
“Hello, I’m the Assistant Secretary of -” (as opposed to “President Bush’s Assistant Secretary of -”).
“This issue is very important to my agenda.”
“I have the ugliest building in Washington.”
The individual may have more material and pictures on their “I love me” wall than paper in their policy files.
The individual may forget that they serve at the pleasure of the President.
Prevention/Treatment: Frequently listen to or read the President’s vision for America. Also review the writings and remarks of past presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush.
You’ve all known people afflicted with the illness. Please help us identify other symptoms and treatments for this debilitating disease.
This is One Flu Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, a reading, originally from July 2006, published Thursday, August 10, 2006. It is part of Power, which is part of Readings, which is part of Harpers.org.
Has Theme
Democracy
Permanent URL
http://harpers.org/OneFluOverTheCuckoosNest.html
il manifesto:
Un tempismo sospetto
Tariq Ali
Quando ho appreso del presunto complotto terroristico sventato a Londra, ho inizialmente pensato che le informazioni erano esagerate. Ora, finché non mi mostrano le prove, rimarrò scettico. I servizi di intelligence britannici hanno tante di quelle volte gridato al lupo da quando il Regno unito ha deciso di unirsi alla crociata di Bush contro l'Iraq, che è doveroso chiedere loro di rendere pubbliche le prove del complotto. Una volta, poco prima della guerra in Iraq, sono stati mandati i carri armati a Heathrow dalle 9 di mattina alle 6 di pomeriggio, in un giorno feriale. Ci hanno detto che c'era una «minaccia terroristica», ma abbiamo poi scoperto che si trattava di semplice propaganda di guerra atta a terrorizzare un'opinione pubblica scettica. Trovo incredibile che in Gran Bretagna ci sia un'organizzazione capace di attaccare dieci aerei contemporaneamente. Se questo fosse vero, sono felice che siano stati fermati, ma (e non c'è un solo ma) le domande devono comunque trovare risposte. Tre settimane fa, vari fughe di notizie di intelligence indicavano che si stava preparando un grande attentato terroristico. Poi l'altroieri le squadre anti-terrorismo lo hanno bloccato sul nascere. Non credo di essere l'unico a essere punto da un dubbio insistente. Tutto ciò accade nel momento in cui Blair e il suo governo hanno deciso di appoggiare ancora una volta una guerra sponsorizzata dagli Usa; nel momento in cui gli indici di gradimento di Blair sono al minimo storico; nel momento in cui i sondaggi d'opinione indicano che il 63% dell'opinione pubblica vuole che il Regno unito sia meno filo-Usa; nel momento in cui quello che resta del Labour comincia a domandarsi dove Blair stia portando il partito; nel momento in cui le televisioni mostrano quotidianamente immagini di morti in Libano. E all'improvviso un attacco terroristico è sventato a Londra. Il tempismo è davvero perfetto. Anche se questo fosse vero, ciò rivela (come già scrissi al momento degli attentati a Londra il 7 luglio dell'anno scorso) che interi strati della popolazione musulmana sono totalmente esclusi da ogni tipo di partecipazione politica. Questo è diretta conseguenza di quanto accade in Iraq, in Palestina e oggi in Libano. La guerra incoraggia un terrorismo individuale disperato, un anarchismo islamico che non può essere controllato. La lezione da trarre è ovvia, ma nessuno sta ad ascoltare.
http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/12-Agosto-2006/art19.html
il manifesto:
Dal Congo alla Cina la febbre del cobalto
Nei ricchi giacimenti di rame e cobalto del Katanga, le multinazionali estere si servono ormai a proprio piacimento, grazie a solide coperture politiche. Viaggio nella copperbelt, al confine con lo Zambia, tra intermediari asiatici, governatori corrotti e minatori artigianali sul piede di guerra
Stefano Liberti
Inviato a Lubumbashi
Un piccone, una maglietta piena di buchi, il volto coperto di polvere. Abbarbicati sul pendio della vasta collina, i minatori artigianali si muovono senza sosta come tante piccole formiche. I loro gesti sono meccanici: gli scavatori spalano ed estraggono il minerale; i trasportatori raccolgono i detriti in contenitori di plastica; i «pulitori» li lavano nell'acqua per eliminare le impurità più vistose; i «facchini» si caricano sulle spalle i grandi sacchi e si dirigono verso il camion che li porterà al deposito. C'è un po' di tutto in questa catena di montaggio che ha la precisione di un meccanismo ben rodato: scavatori esperti dalle mani rugose che spaccano la roccia in profondità; ragazzetti di tredici-quattordici anni che sfruttano la loro esile corporatura per infilarsi nei cunicoli e «attaccare i filoni più promettenti»; donne armate di pala che raccolgono i detriti; bimbi di otto-dieci anni che passano al setaccio le rocce estratte in una pozza d'acqua fangosa. Intorno a questa conca dall'aspetto un po' lunare, alcuni «addetti alla sicurezza» controllano che i creuseurs (gli scavatori) non battano la fiacca e assolvano senza attardarsi il compito loro assegnato. Del resto, è nel loro interesse: a fine giornata, ogni équipe di scavo viene pagata in base al numero di sacchi che è riuscita a riempire. Questa è la vita quotidiana alla miniera di rame e cobalto di Ruashi, a una quindicina di chilometri da Lubumbashi, capitale della provincia del Katanga e seconda città della Repubblica democratica del Congo (Rdc).
Questo buco in fondo al mondo è la stazione di partenza di un lungo viaggio che vedrà queste rocce dalle venature bluastre finire - dopo migliaia di chilometri e varie trasformazioni - all'interno dei nostri cellulari: il cobalto è un componente fondamentale delle batterie ricaricabili dei telefonini, oltre che di varie altre applicazioni nell'aeronautica e nell'industria automobilistica. Con circa un terzo delle riserve mondiali, il Katanga è un vero e proprio forziere di questo minerale strategico. La cosiddetta copperbelt («cintura di rame») che attraversa la parte sud della provincia a cavallo con il confine con lo Zambia, è una specie di immenso groviera. Visto dall'alto dell'aereo per arrivare a Lubumbashi, lo spettacolo è impressionante: in tutto il territorio sono stati aperti crateri per estrarre l'eterogenite, la roccia che contiene allo stato di minerali il rame e il cobalto. Le miniere si susseguono, con poche soluzioni di continuità: molte sono sfruttate in modo artigianale, con eserciti di creuseurs armati di pala e piccone che riempiono sacchi da 50 chili; altre sono lavorate in modo industriale, con grandi scavatrici che rosicchiano la roccia con i loro denti d'acciaio.
Una gallina dalle uova d'oro
Gli alti corsi del rame e del cobalto, gonfiati dalla crescita mostruosa e dalla crescente domanda della Cina, rendono lo sfruttamento di questi due minerali altamente redditizio: favorite dall'ondata di privatizzazioni del governo di Joseph Kabila, decine di società straniere si sono gettate a corpo morto su questa gallina dalle uova d'oro. Belgi, canadesi, sudafricani, zimbabwani, libanesi, australiani, statunitensi, cinesi, coreani: i ricchi giacimenti della copperbelt fanno gola a molti. E il governo accontenta tutti: in cambio di qualche ricca mazzetta, autorizza questi nuovi predatori a venirsi a servire a proprio piacimento al supermarket minerario del Katanga. Perché i minerali non vengono lavorati sul posto: sono estratti e trasportati via, in una specie di allegro saccheggio che procede impunito sotto gli occhi di tutti. «La filosofia di queste società è chiara: guadagnare molto, investire poco, in poco tempo», riassume Jean-Claude Katende, presidente del'Associazione per i diritti umani del Katanga (Asadho/Katanga).
Con qualche importante eccezione, quelle che operano nella regione sono infatti aziende di medie dimensioni, che si limitano per lo più a raccogliere l'eterogenite e trasportarla verso lo Zambia, e da qui in Tanzania o in Sudafrica. Dai porti di Durban e Dar Es Salam, i sacchi di eterogenite prendono le direzioni più diverse per essere infine trasformati in metallo e utilizzati nelle varie applicazioni: a titolo d'esempio la Cina, che detiene il 23 per cento della produzione mondiale di cobalto, non ha alcun giacimento sul proprio territorio e, secondo stime indipendenti, trarrebbe l'83 per cento del suo cobalto dall'Rdc.
Alcuni di questi gruppi hanno ottenuto i diritti di concessione su singole zone minerarie; altri sono semplici società di intermediazione, che si limitano a comprare l'eterogenite dagli scavatori o da intermediari minori, i cosiddetti négociants. La filiera è ben organizzata e va dal semplice scavatore fino alla grande società, passando per una pletora di intermediari. Ogni gradino è sfruttato da quello superiore: gli scavatori sono in balia dei négociants, i négociants soffrono delle condizioni imposte dalle società di intermediazione più grandi, e così via. Ma sono quelli in fondo alla scala a patire più di tutti: i circa 150mila creuseurs del Katanga riescono appena a mettere insieme, dopo una dura giornata di lavoro, tra i 500 e i 1000 franchi congolesi (uno o due dollari). Il loro organo di rappresentanza - l'Emak (Entreprise minière artisanale du Katanga) - si limita a regolare l'accesso alle miniere per conto degli intermediari, in cambio di ulteriori gabelle mascherate da quote di iscrizione. Unica prestazione di questo sindacato giallo è la copertura delle spese per i funerali: i crolli delle gallerie sono frequenti, e le morti sul lavoro all'ordine del giorno. «Spesso non ci si rende nemmeno conto che un cunicolo è collassato e si lascia il minatore soffocare», racconta Thomas Paul Banze, direttore della Radio Communautaire du Katanga (Rck), un'emittente che segue con attenzione le vicende dei creuseurs.
Lo smantellamento delle holding statali
Frutto della deregolamentazione del settore minerario avviata già verso la fine del suo regno dal maresciallo Joseph Mobutu, gli scavatori artigianali sono una vera e propria costante del panorama sociale del Congo, soprattutto nella parte orientale: dai giacimenti d'oro di Mongbwalu (in Ituri), ai diamanti di Mbuji Mayi (in Kasai), passando per la cassiterite del Kivu e all'eterogenite del Katanga, circa 950mila persone lavorano nelle miniere in modo informale. Lo smantellamento delle grandi holding parastatali - che gestivano fino all'inizio degli anni '90 lo sfruttamento delle risorse - ha gettato sul lastrico centinaia di migliaia di persone, che non hanno trovato altro da fare che imbracciare pala e piccone e prendere il cammino delle miniere. In Katanga, dopo aver assistito alla privatizzazione della Gécamines, l'industria di stato che garantiva a tutti i suoi lavoratori alloggi, scuole per i figli e assistenza sanitaria, oggi vedono con angoscia l'arrivo delle società straniere, che tenderanno sempre più a optare per lo sfruttamento industriale.
Le prove generali di questo cambiamento sono già state fatte: un tentativo di sloggiare i creuseurs da una miniera a Kolwezi, a 300 chilometri da Lubumbashi, ha scatenato ad aprile una rivolta, che ha causato cinque morti. Diverse manifestazioni si sono susseguite nei vari siti, prima che il governo chiedesse alle compagnie minerarie di congelare le operazioni in vista delle elezioni. Ma, una volta chiusa la parentesi del voto, è del tutto prevedibile che le società torneranno all'attacco. «Da un punto di vista aziendale, è del tutto logico: lo sfruttamento artigianale è molto meno redditizio di quello industriale», conferma il signor Lounjji, vice-presidente della Ruashi Mining, filiale della società sudafricana Motorex. Il suo gruppo ha ottenuto dal governo la concessione sul sito di Ruashi, ma non sembra ancora del tutto padrone della situazione. «Per il momento abbiamo le mani legate: cacciare i minatori artigianali non è praticabile. Ci sarebbero rivolte e sabotaggi» aggiunge, prima di rispondere alla richiesta di delucidazioni sulla presenza di minori nelle zone minerarie sotto il controllo della sua società. «Disapproviamo fortemente l'uso di bambini, ma non possiamo imporre ai minatori di non utilizzarli. È tutto il sistema che andrebbe cambiato. Bisognerebbe offrire loro valide alternative: per questo abbiamo chiesto al governo delle terre per convertirle all'agricoltura e cederle ai creuseurs». Intanto, in mancanza di alternative migliori, la Ruashi mining versa ai minatori artigianali paghe da fame per estrarre l'eterogenite dalla sua concessione.
Carne da macello
«La verità è una sola - si infiamma Jean-Claude Katende dell'Asdho/Katanga - le società minerarie straniere non vogliono fornire alcuna copertura sociale ai minatori: li usano come carne da macello, pagandoli a cottimo, per moltiplicare i loro profitti. E il governo non ha la minima intenzione di difendere gli interessi dei cittadini congolesi, che vedono le loro risorse prendere la strada dell'estero al di fuori di ogni controllo». Le file di camion carichi di eterogenite che si allontanano da Lubumbashi in direzione della frontiera con lo Zambia, a un centinaio di chilometri di distanza, sembrano confermare le parole dell'attivista. Quando raggiungeranno i porti del Sudafrica e della Tanzania, dopo aver subìto una prima lavorazione per aumentare la concentrazione in minerale, questi carichi avranno visto crescere il proprio valore, gonfiando a dismisura i profitti delle società minerarie che - in cambio di tasse irrisorie - stanno sottoponendo il Congo all'ennesimo saccheggio della sua storia. Ignari di tutto ciò, i bambini di Ruashi continuano a infilarsi dall'alba al tramonto nei cunicoli per portare a casa i loro 1000 franchi quotidiani.
http://www.ilmanifesto.it/Quotidiano-archivio/12-Agosto-2006/art12.html
The Independent:
Tea and rockets: café society, Beirut-style
This week: A close shave in downtown Beirut and why you'll never find our man in a flak jacket
Robert Fisk
Published: 13 August 2006
Sunday, 6 August
In the early hours, motor-cycle riders have been racing down the Corniche outside my home. Petrol is cheap for motor-cycles, and at first I curse the roar of their machines. Then I realise that their insouciance is a form of resistance. In their special way, they are denying the war, refusing to be cowed.
A friend calls from Tyre where Palestinians are welcoming Shia refugees from the hill villages of southern Lebanon into their homes. One old Palestinian lady turned on her guest with memories of her own endless exile since 1948. "Better to die in your home than run away," she shouts.
Too many journos are wearing flak jackets and helmets, little spacemen who want to show they are "in combat" on television. I notice how their drivers and interpreters are usually not given flak jackets. These are reserved for us, the Westerners, the Protected Ones, Those Who Must Live.
I used to wear a flak jacket in Bosnia, but no more. Ever since a bullet penetrated the neck of a colleague and was kept within his body by the iron jacket - going round and round until it had destroyed his kidneys, liver and heart - I have refused to touch these things. Better to die in shirtsleeves.
Monday, 7 August
A pilotless drone buzzes over my home at 4am. To Mar Elias Palestinian refugee camp to talk to Suheil Natour, the human rights man for the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A book-crammed room that smells of paper and cups of tea - always a good sign - and he goes through the options of the Israelis and Hizbollah.
Do the Israelis want to draw the Palestinians into their battle, to help destroy Hamas? "Do you realise that the largest community in Lebanon - the Shias - are now spread as refugees in every other area of Lebanon for the first time ever?" he asks.
As I leave his office, I hear the drone again, surveying the camp. I do an interview with New Zealand television on the Beirut seafront and a group of young Shia men and women - the latter all in brown scarves - stand behind the camera to listen.
I talk about Lebanese history, the Ottoman empire, the disasters of the Shias, the Israeli invasions/bombardments of 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and now. Even the threats of the PLO, Hizbollah and the Israelis are the same.
When I've finished, one of the young men translates for his extended family. He is from Qana, he says. They fled after last week's massacre of 28 civilians who were hiding from Israel's bombing in a basement. The Israelis dropped a bomb that exploded in the basement.
Tuesday, 8 August
Ed Cody and I pick up Hassan and the "Death Car" to race to the southern suburb of Shiyah, where the Israelis have fired two missiles into an apartment block. Rubble, muck, body parts, shrieking men and women - the death toll of 20 soon to rise to 63, all civilians.
Some idiot had heard a drone over the street and opened fire on it. and within minutes an Israeli plane - or maybe the drone itself, so wonderful is American technology - had demolished the nearest building.
We drive across to the Mount Lebanon Hospital to talk to the wounded. How different it all is from Europe or America, where a journalist visiting a hospital is regarded as a vulture feasting on human misery. In Lebanon, we are always greeted by the head doctor, taken immediately to the wards, encouraged to talk to any of the patients.
And the patients brighten up when the foreigners arrive and talk happily. They want to shake hands and try to discuss their torment and pain and misery. It is always the same, at every hospital in the Middle East. We are welcome. Dr Nazih Gharios orders tea and asks his secretary to find out the name of the little boy in the mortuary who was brought dead to the hospital after the bombing.
The morning papers carry an odious speech by an American diplomat visiting Beirut. He is David Welch and he manages to express his love for a country his nation is helping Israel to destroy while avoiding any journalists' questions.
"I am late for another meeting," he pants. But get this for a quote: "Much has happened [sic] in the past three weeks, but the commitment of the United States to Lebanon remains firm; it remains enduring and it is not negotiable. The relationship of the United States with Lebanon is based on mutual respect..."
At no point does he mention the word "Israel". Of course not. The US embassy in Ulan Bator would beckon if he did.
Wednesday, 9 August
Oil from the burning fuel storage depot at Jiyeh is washing up on the shore opposite my home, dead birds, black fish and the smell of a refinery. It's broken up into thick black balls that lie on the rocks and sand when the tide goes out.
In the Chouf, the Druze are now caring for 100,000 Shia refugees. "There is not a single man between 25 and 40 among them," the wife of a Druze official remarks. I have a shrewd idea where all those men have gone.
To a hubble-bubble café in the evening where the oil-sogged waves slosh around the feet of a Lebanese fisherman perched on an old concrete pillar in the water. He wears a straw hat and I think at first he's a statue for tourists until he turns to put an oily fish into the basket on his back. "We have no food and we have stopped selling alcohol," the waiter proudly tells me. Well, I say, that's really going to bring in the customers!
The BBC is back to its old craven self, referring in a report from Israel to the tiny sliver of Lebanese territory taken at great cost by Israeli troops as Israel's "security zone" - Israel's own preposterous title for what must be the most insecure piece of land on earth.
It is, of course, an "occupation zone" but not, it seems, if it's occupied by the Israelis. Had Hizbollah seized Israeli territory - they did after all provoke this savage conflict with their own reckless crossing of the border - would the BBC be calling it Hizbollah's "security zone" in northern Israel? Would they hell.
Thursday, 10 August
To the City Café to meet Leena Saidi, Lebanese journalist and formerly one of the national television station's top newsreaders. City Café is definitely upmarket, opposite a traffic circle but filled with boring old men smoking cigars and discussing the future of Lebanon and elegant ladies in silk skirts, and one or two women whom my Mum used to describe as "mutton dressed as lamb".
We order green tea and then there's the roar of an explosion in the sky. An Israeli missile screeches right past us and crashes into the old French Mandate lighthouse, a brown-stone tower built in 1938 from which the Vichy French once sent out their propaganda.
Never have I seen the great and the good of Beirut society hurl themselves from their seats at such speed, overturning tables amid splintered glass, racing from the café for their chauffeur-driven cars, crashing into each other's vehicles - and failing to pay their bills. I see a panic-stricken motor-cyclist thrown on to the road. He rolls down the side of the traffic island, then runs for his life.
A second missile streaks past us into the tower. Do the Israelis think that Hizbollah's television station is broadcasting from here?
"Fisk!" Leena roars, almost as loudly as the rocket. "Why do you always bring trouble with you?" We finish a second cup of green tea and The Independent pays the bill. I am left wondering: what has Israel got against the French Mandate?
Friday, 11 August
I visit the barber. "Thanks to the God!" cries George when he sees me. It is lunchtime, and I am his first customer. Every Lebanese believes that we journos know the future, and we have to pretend that we do so that they will tell us what they know.
Ceasefire? Will Hizbollah fire more rockets into Israel? Photographs on the Lebanese front pages show burning Israeli tanks near Khiam. Shortage of newsprint. One of my morning papers is now only four pages - it was blown off my balcony by the wind this morning and I had to run down the street to retrieve it. But a bad thought. I like small newspapers. Less to read. More time to report.
Saturday, 12 August
A long radio interview with an Israeli professor who says "the number of people killed [in this war] doesn't reflect morality". Well, at more than a thousand Lebanese civilians dead against a few dozen Israelis, it can't reflect morality because, if it did, that would suggest Israel was committing war crimes.
But Hizbollah will also have their day of reckoning. Who gave them the right to bring this cruelty down upon the head of every Lebanese? Who gave the Shias permission to go to war for Lebanon? There will be questions in Israel too. How come the Israel Defence Forces, famous in legend and song, could not defend the people of Israel, despite slaughtering so many Lebanese civilians?
Cody has invented a great new word: to "flamboozle". It's what politicians do to their people when they go to war. Ehud Olmert has been flamboozling the Israelis and Sayed Hassan Nasrallah has been flamboozling Lebanon's Shias. We may have a ceasfire at the weekend. So the end of the flamboozling may be nigh.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1218882.ece
The Independent: Hizbollah's Iron Discipline
is Match for Military Machine
Robert Fisk
August 11, 2006
A column of Israeli armour, which crept into the Lebanese Christian town of Marjayoun - largely populated by the Lebanese collaborators of Israel's occupation from 1978 to 2000 - turned north yesterday towards Khiam, a village already largely depopulated, to find that the Hizbollah guerrillas there refused to surrender.
Israel's frustration - and its sense of loss since 15 of its soldiers were killed in just the fraction of the south Lebanese border area which it "controls" over the past 24 hours - was evident in a potentially criminal document which it dropped over Beirut yesterday. Signed "the State of Israel" - which at least makes its origins clear - the tracts announced that "the Israeli Defence Forces intend to expand their operations in Beirut".
Ouch, we all said when we read this, anticipating more civilian deaths. And we were not without proof. The Israeli decision, announced in this Israeli document - a square of paper that fluttered on to shoppers and office workers, and myself, in Riad Solh Square - had been taken because Hizbollah rockets had continued to fall on Israel and because of "their leader's statements" last night. On Tuesday evening, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah chairman, had boasted of the 350 missiles he claimed his members had fired on Israel over the previous 48 hours, and urged Israeli Arabs to leave Haifa.
And it should be said that the Israeli army are not winning their war in southern Lebanon. Within two kilometres of their own border, they lost their 15 soldiers on Wednesday. Many others were wounded. The furthest the Israelis could reach in an armoured column yesterday was the edge of Khiam, the site of their own notorious torture prison from 1978 to 2000. It is still only two miles from the border and they are fighting a far more determined and disciplined enemy than in 1982, when their "incursion" took them as far as Beirut.
The Israelis have crossed the same border to find that their enemies, Hizbollah, are prepared to die in battle - indeed, seek to die in battle - unlike the secular PLO over whom they proclaimed an easy victory in 1982. Hizbollah is a different enemy, one which turns the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert's, claims that he is pursuing the same "war on terror" as George Bush into dust. The Hizbollah is officered by men who spent 18 years fighting Israeli occupiers, and who learned the hard way that improved weaponry and iron discipline are more important than nationalist rhetoric. Since the Israeli retreat in 2000, they have had six years to bury their arms caches underground amid extraordinary secrecy.
Amazingly, the Hizbollah television station, al-Manar, is still on air. Israel's anger at this amazing bit of technological initiative may have led to its preposterous attack on the old French mandate semaphore and radio station transmitter in west Beirut. The structure, built by the French in the 1930s, had been a repeater station for Radio France during and after the Vichy French regime but had lain derelict since 1946. Yet at 11.20am yesterday, the Israelis wasted two missiles on the tower, thus proving the "war on terror" - in which they insist they are "our" allies - goes back to an era before Israel existed.
Yesterday's air-dropped Israeli document ordered Shia Muslims in Beirut's Hay al-Selloum, Bourj al-Barajneh and Shiyah districts to abandon their homes "immediately". In other words, the Israeli army wishes to "cleanse" every civilian out of the 12 square miles between Beirut airport and the old Christian civil war frontline at Galerie Semaan. This malicious document ends with a sinister threat - which breaks all the relevant rules of the Geneva Conventions - that "each expansion of Hizbollah terrorist operations will lead to a harsh and powerful response and its painful response will not be confined to Hassan's gang of criminals".
So what does "not be confined to" mean? That it is the civilians who will pay the price - this time in Beirut - as they have in the Israeli air force massacres of southern Lebanon over the past three weeks?
Well, stand by for more Hizbollah atrocities and more Israeli atrocities.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://www.robert-fisk.com/
The New Yorker:
WATCHING LEBANON
Washington’s interests in Israel’s war
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2006-08-21
In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”
The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.
Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized that the country’s immediate security issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel’s foreign-intelligence service, from 1989 to 1996, told me, “We do what we think is best for us, and if it happens to meet America’s requirements, that’s just part of a relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just a matter of time. We had to address it.”
Hezbollah is seen by Israelis as a profound threat—a terrorist organization, operating on their border, with a military arsenal that, with help from Iran and Syria, has grown stronger since the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended, in 2000. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has said he does not believe that Israel is a “legal state.” Israeli intelligence estimated at the outset of the air war that Hezbollah had roughly five hundred medium-range Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets and a few dozen long-range Zelzal rockets; the Zelzals, with a range of about two hundred kilometres, could reach Tel Aviv. (One rocket hit Haifa the day after the kidnappings.) It also has more than twelve thousand shorter-range rockets. Since the conflict began, more than three thousand of these have been fired at Israel.
According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July 12th kidnappings. “It’s not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into,” he said, “but there was a strong feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it.”
The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several reasons for supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the State Department, it was seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese government so that it could assert its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah. He went on, “The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy.”
Administration officials denied that they knew of Israel’s plan for the air war. The White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions. In response to a separate request, a National Security Council spokesman said, “Prior to Hezbollah’s attack on Israel, the Israeli government gave no official in Washington any reason to believe that Israel was planning to attack. Even after the July 12th attack, we did not know what the Israeli plans were.” A Pentagon spokesman said, “The United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran’s clandestine nuclear weapons program,” and denied the story, as did a State Department spokesman.
The United States and Israel have shared intelligence and enjoyed close military coöperation for decades, but early this spring, according to a former senior intelligence official, high-level planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the Israeli Air Force.
“The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, ‘Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.’ ” The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.
“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”
A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah.” He added, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it.” (As this article went to press, the United Nations Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, although it was unclear if it would change the situation on the ground.)
According to Richard Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term—and who, in 2002, said that Hezbollah “may be the A team of terrorists”—Israel’s campaign in Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. “If the most dominant military force in the region—the Israel Defense Forces—can’t pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million,” Armitage said. “The only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis.”
Several current and former officials involved in the Middle East told me that Israel viewed the soldiers’ kidnapping as the opportune moment to begin its planned military campaign against Hezbollah. “Hezbollah, like clockwork, was instigating something small every month or two,” the U.S. government consultant with ties to Israel said. Two weeks earlier, in late June, members of Hamas, the Palestinian group, had tunnelled under the barrier separating southern Gaza from Israel and captured an Israeli soldier. Hamas also had lobbed a series of rockets at Israeli towns near the border with Gaza. In response, Israel had initiated an extensive bombing campaign and reoccupied parts of Gaza.
The Pentagon consultant noted that there had also been cross-border incidents involving Israel and Hezbollah, in both directions, for some time. “They’ve been sniping at each other,” he said. “Either side could have pointed to some incident and said ‘We have to go to war with these guys’—because they were already at war.”
David Siegel, the spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said that the Israeli Air Force had not been seeking a reason to attack Hezbollah. “We did not plan the campaign. That decision was forced on us.” There were ongoing alerts that Hezbollah “was pressing to go on the attack,” Siegel said. “Hezbollah attacks every two or three months,” but the kidnapping of the soldiers raised the stakes.
In interviews, several Israeli academics, journalists, and retired military and intelligence officers all made one point: they believed that the Israeli leadership, and not Washington, had decided that it would go to war with Hezbollah. Opinion polls showed that a broad spectrum of Israelis supported that choice. “The neocons in Washington may be happy, but Israel did not need to be pushed, because Israel has been wanting to get rid of Hezbollah,” Yossi Melman, a journalist for the newspaper Ha’aretz, who has written several books about the Israeli intelligence community, said. “By provoking Israel, Hezbollah provided that opportunity.”
“We were facing a dilemma,” an Israeli official said. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “had to decide whether to go for a local response, which we always do, or for a comprehensive response—to really take on Hezbollah once and for all.” Olmert made his decision, the official said, only after a series of Israeli rescue efforts failed.
The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told me, however, that, from Israel’s perspective, the decision to take strong action had become inevitable weeks earlier, after the Israeli Army’s signals intelligence group, known as Unit 8200, picked up bellicose intercepts in late spring and early summer, involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader now living in Damascus.
One intercept was of a meeting in late May of the Hamas political and military leadership, with Meshal participating by telephone. “Hamas believed the call from Damascus was scrambled, but Israel had broken the code,” the consultant said. For almost a year before its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, Hamas had curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late May intercepted conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership said that “they got no benefit from it, and were losing standing among the Palestinian population.” The conclusion, he said, was “ ‘Let’s go back into the terror business and then try and wrestle concessions from the Israeli government.’ ” The consultant told me that the U.S. and Israel agreed that if the Hamas leadership did so, and if Nasrallah backed them up, there should be “a full-scale response.” In the next several weeks, when Hamas began digging the tunnel into Israel, the consultant said, Unit 8200 “picked up signals intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah, saying, in essence, that they wanted Hezbollah to ‘warm up’ the north.” In one intercept, the consultant said, Nasrallah referred to Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz “as seeming to be weak,” in comparison with the former Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, who had extensive military experience, and said “he thought Israel would respond in a small-scale, local way, as they had in the past.”
Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, “to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear.” The consultant added, “Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.” After that, “persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board,” the consultant said.
The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official. The airport, highways, and bridges, among other things, have been hit in the bombing campaign. The Israeli Air Force had flown almost nine thousand missions as of last week. (David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that Israel had targeted only sites connected to Hezbollah; the bombing of bridges and roads was meant to prevent the transport of weapons.)
The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was “the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran.” (The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran, have been resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, according to current and former officials. They argue that the Air Force plan will not work and will inevitably lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion of troops on the ground.)
Uzi Arad, who served for more than two decades in the Mossad, told me that to the best of his knowledge the contacts between the Israeli and U.S. governments were routine, and that, “in all my meetings and conversations with government officials, never once did I hear anyone refer to prior coördination with the United States.” He was troubled by one issue—the speed with which the Olmert government went to war. “For the life of me, I’ve never seen a decision to go to war taken so speedily,” he said. “We usually go through long analyses.”
The key military planner was Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the I.D.F. chief of staff, who, during a career in the Israeli Air Force, worked on contingency planning for an air war with Iran. Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, and Peretz, a former labor leader, could not match his experience and expertise.
In the early discussions with American officials, I was told by the Middle East expert and the government consultant, the Israelis repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve. The NATO forces commanded by U.S. Army General Wesley Clark methodically bombed and strafed not only military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia, for seventy-eight days before forcing Serbian forces to withdraw from Kosovo. “Israel studied the Kosovo war as its role model,” the government consultant said. “The Israelis told Condi Rice, ‘You did it in about seventy days, but we need half of that—thirty-five days.’ ”
There are, of course, vast differences between Lebanon and Kosovo. Clark, who retired from the military in 2000 and unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for the Presidency in 2004, took issue with the analogy: “If it’s true that the Israeli campaign is based on the American approach in Kosovo, then it missed the point. Ours was to use force to obtain a diplomatic objective—it was not about killing people.” Clark noted in a 2001 book, “Waging Modern War,” that it was the threat of a possible ground invasion as well as the bombing that forced the Serbs to end the war. He told me, “In my experience, air campaigns have to be backed, ultimately, by the will and capability to finish the job on the ground.”
Kosovo has been cited publicly by Israeli officials and journalists since the war began. On August 6th, Prime Minister Olmert, responding to European condemnation of the deaths of Lebanese civilians, said, “Where do they get the right to preach to Israel? European countries attacked Kosovo and killed ten thousand civilians. Ten thousand! And none of these countries had to suffer before that from a single rocket. I’m not saying it was wrong to intervene in Kosovo. But please: don’t preach to us about the treatment of civilians.” (Human Rights Watch estimated the number of civilians killed in the NATO bombing to be five hundred; the Yugoslav government put the number between twelve hundred and five thousand.)
Cheney’s office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’ ”
Cheney’s point, the former senior intelligence official said, was “What if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it’s really successful? It’d be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon.”
The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”
The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition—including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. “But the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it,” the consultant with close ties to Israel said. Some officials in Cheney’s office and at the N.S.C. had become convinced, on the basis of private talks, that those nations would moderate their public criticism of Israel and blame Hezbollah for creating the crisis that led to war. Although they did so at first, they shifted their position in the wake of public protests in their countries about the Israeli bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed when, late last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came to Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President to intervene immediately to end the war. The Washington Post reported that Washington had hoped to enlist moderate Arab states “in an effort to pressure Syria and Iran to rein in Hezbollah, but the Saudi move . . . seemed to cloud that initiative.”
The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, “is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”
Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.”
In the White House, especially in the Vice-President’s office, many officials believe that the military campaign against Hezbollah is working and should be carried forward. At the same time, the government consultant said, some policymakers in the Administration have concluded that the cost of the bombing to Lebanese society is too high. “They are telling Israel that it’s time to wind down the attacks on infrastructure.”
Similar divisions are emerging in Israel. David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that his country’s leadership believed, as of early August, that the air war had been successful, and had destroyed more than seventy per cent of Hezbollah’s medium- and long-range-missile launching capacity. “The problem is short-range missiles, without launchers, that can be shot from civilian areas and homes,” Siegel told me. “The only way to resolve this is ground operations—which is why Israel would be forced to expand ground operations if the latest round of diplomacy doesn’t work.” Last week, however, there was evidence that the Israeli government was troubled by the progress of the war. In an unusual move, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky, Halutz’s deputy, was put in charge of the operation, supplanting Major General Udi Adam. The worry in Israel is that Nasrallah might escalate the crisis by firing missiles at Tel Aviv. “There is a big debate over how much damage Israel should inflict to prevent it,” the consultant said. “If Nasrallah hits Tel Aviv, what should Israel do? Its goal is to deter more attacks by telling Nasrallah that it will destroy his country if he doesn’t stop, and to remind the Arab world that Israel can set it back twenty years. We’re no longer playing by the same rules.”
A European intelligence officer told me, “The Israelis have been caught in a psychological trap. In earlier years, they had the belief that they could solve their problems with toughness. But now, with Islamic martyrdom, things have changed, and they need different answers. How do you scare people who love martyrdom?” The problem with trying to eliminate Hezbollah, the intelligence officer said, is the group’s ties to the Shiite population in southern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut’s southern suburbs, where it operates schools, hospitals, a radio station, and various charities.
A high-level American military planner told me, “We have a lot of vulnerability in the region, and we’ve talked about some of the effects of an Iranian or Hezbollah attack on the Saudi regime and on the oil infrastructure.” There is special concern inside the Pentagon, he added, about the oil-producing nations north of the Strait of Hormuz. “We have to anticipate the unintended consequences,” he told me. “Will we be able to absorb a barrel of oil at one hundred dollars? There is this almost comical thinking that you can do it all from the air, even when you’re up against an irregular enemy with a dug-in capability. You’re not going to be successful unless you have a ground presence, but the political leadership never considers the worst case. These guys only want to hear the best case.”
There is evidence that the Iranians were expecting the war against Hezbollah. Vali Nasr, an expert on Shiite Muslims and Iran, who is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and also teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, said, “Every negative American move against Hezbollah was seen by Iran as part of a larger campaign against it. And Iran began to prepare for the showdown by supplying more sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah—anti-ship and anti-tank missiles—and training its fighters in their use. And now Hezbollah is testing Iran’s new weapons. Iran sees the Bush Administration as trying to marginalize its regional role, so it fomented trouble.”
Nasr, an Iranian-American who recently published a study of the Sunni-Shiite divide, entitled “The Shia Revival,” also said that the Iranian leadership believes that Washington’s ultimate political goal is to get some international force to act as a buffer—to physically separate Syria and Lebanon in an effort to isolate and disarm Hezbollah, whose main supply route is through Syria. “Military action cannot bring about the desired political result,” Nasr said. The popularity of Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a virulent critic of Israel, is greatest in his own country. If the U.S. were to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, Nasr said, “you may end up turning Ahmadinejad into another Nasrallah—the rock star of the Arab street.”
Donald Rumsfeld, who is one of the Bush Administration’s most outspoken, and powerful, officials, has said very little publicly about the crisis in Lebanon. His relative quiet, compared to his aggressive visibility in the run-up to the Iraq war, has prompted a debate in Washington about where he stands on the issue.
Some current and former intelligence officials who were interviewed for this article believe that Rumsfeld disagrees with Bush and Cheney about the American role in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said that “there was a feeling that Rumsfeld was jaded in his approach to the Israeli war.” He added, “Air power and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy.”
A Western diplomat said that he understood that Rumsfeld did not know all the intricacies of the war plan. “He is angry and worried about his troops” in Iraq, the diplomat said. Rumsfeld served in the White House during the last year of the war in Vietnam, from which American troops withdrew in 1975, “and he did not want to see something like this having an impact in Iraq.” Rumsfeld’s concern, the diplomat added, was that an expansion of the war into Iran could put the American troops in Iraq at greater risk of attacks by pro-Iranian Shiite militias.
At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on August 3rd, Rumsfeld was less than enthusiastic about the war’s implications for the American troops in Iraq. Asked whether the Administration was mindful of the war’s impact on Iraq, he testified that, in his meetings with Bush and Condoleezza Rice, “there is a sensitivity to the desire to not have our country or our interests or our forces put at greater risk as a result of what’s taking place between Israel and Hezbollah. . . . There are a variety of risks that we face in that region, and it’s a difficult and delicate situation.”
The Pentagon consultant dismissed talk of a split at the top of the Administration, however, and said simply, “Rummy is on the team. He’d love to see Hezbollah degraded, but he also is a voice for less bombing and more innovative Israeli ground operations.” The former senior intelligence official similarly depicted Rumsfeld as being “delighted that Israel is our stalking horse.”
There are also questions about the status of Condoleezza Rice. Her initial support for the Israeli air war against Hezbollah has reportedly been tempered by dismay at the effects of the attacks on Lebanon. The Pentagon consultant said that in early August she began privately “agitating” inside the Administration for permission to begin direct diplomatic talks with Syria—so far, without much success. Last week, the Times reported that Rice had directed an Embassy official in Damascus to meet with the Syrian foreign minister, though the meeting apparently yielded no results. The Times also reported that Rice viewed herself as “trying to be not only a peacemaker abroad but also a mediator among contending parties” within the Administration. The article pointed to a divide between career diplomats in the State Department and “conservatives in the government,” including Cheney and Abrams, “who were pushing for strong American support for Israel.”
The Western diplomat told me his embassy believes that Abrams has emerged as a key policymaker on Iran, and on the current Hezbollah-Israeli crisis, and that Rice’s role has been relatively diminished. Rice did not want to make her most recent diplomatic trip to the Middle East, the diplomat said. “She only wanted to go if she thought there was a real chance to get a ceasefire.”
Bush’s strongest supporter in Europe continues to be British Prime Minister Tony Blair, but many in Blair’s own Foreign Office, as a former diplomat said, believe that he has “gone out on a particular limb on this”—especially by accepting Bush’s refusal to seek an immediate and total ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. “Blair stands alone on this,” the former diplomat said. “He knows he’s a lame duck who’s on the way out, but he buys it”—the Bush policy. “He drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in Washington.” The crisis will really start at the end of August, the diplomat added, “when the Iranians”—under a United Nations deadline to stop uranium enrichment—“will say no.”
Even those who continue to support Israel’s war against Hezbollah agree that it is failing to achieve one of its main goals—to rally the Lebanese against Hezbollah. “Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it,” John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success, to change the way America fights terrorism. “The warfare of today is not mass on mass,” he said. “You have to hunt like a network to defeat a network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result.”
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060821fa_fact
The Observer:
These ludicrous lies about the West and Islam
Leader
Sunday August 13, 2006
The first Islamist terrorist plot against New York's World Trade Centre was carried out on 26 February 1993 with a car bomb under one of the twin towers. It killed six people but failed in its aim of bringing the whole building down. To achieve that, another plot was hatched.
Meanwhile, British and American foreign policy was focused not on the Islamic world, but on the unstable transition of former communist countries to democracy. Twice during the Nineties, Nato launched military interventions in the Balkans, both aimed at protecting Muslim populations in Bosnia and Kosovo. What Middle East policy there was focused on diplomatic efforts, led by President Clinton, to negotiate lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
This was hardly a Western war against Islam. Britain and America spent much of the Nineties trying to prevent conflicts or to resolve them. At worst, as shamefully in Rwanda, they simply ignored them. They were transparently not running a conspiracy to trample the Muslim faithful underfoot. The people who depicted it that way were a tiny minority telling lies to justify murder.
But things have changed. The argument that terrorism is, in fact, a response to Western actions overseas has gained currency. It was voiced most recently on Saturday in an open letter by a number of influential British Muslim leaders to Tony Blair. The Prime Minister's policy in the Middle East, they said, puts British lives at risk. The implication is that the young Britons who last week were accused of plotting to blow up passenger planes in mid-air would have been less susceptible to al-Qaeda recruitment had Britain not fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Policy should be changed, they said, to avoid giving ideological 'ammunition to extremists'.
There is indeed a plausible argument that military action in recent years has made Britain less, not more, secure. In particular, the conduct of the war in Iraq, regardless of the virtues of removing Saddam Hussein from office, has been riddled with error. The absence of weapons of mass destruction, removal of which was the premise for war, has undermined trust in the Prime Minister. Meanwhile, engagement in Iraq has made it harder to secure victory in Afghanistan, where the anti-terror justification for war was rock solid.
But even within the bleakest possible analysis of Mr Blair's foreign policy, it is still simply not true that the West is waging war on Islam. Just as it is not true that the CIA was really behind the 11 September attacks or any other arrant conspiratorial nonsense that enjoys widespread credence in the Middle East and beyond. It is also a logical and moral absurdity to imply, as some critics of British policy have done, that mass murder is somehow less atrocious when it is motivated by an elaborate narrative of political grievance.
If young British Muslims are alienated, that is sad and their anger should be addressed. But anyone whose alienation leads them to want to kill indiscriminately has crossed a line into psychopathic criminality. Policy cannot be dictated by the need to placate such people.
British Muslim leaders are entitled, along with everybody else, to raise questions about the conduct and consequences of Mr Blair's foreign policy. But they have a more immediate responsibility to promote the truth: that Britain is not the aggressor in a war against Islam; that no such war exists; that there is no glory in murder dressed as martyrdom and that terrorism is never excused by bogus accounts of historical victimisation.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1843562,00.html
The Observer: Nobody's victory, but in the end
Israel could not defeat Hizbollah
Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday August 13, 2006
A month of fighting, more than 1,000 dead, upwards of 800,000 Lebanese displaced and $2bn worth of damage - for what? Who wins in this bloody debacle, assuming it is coming to an end? Given the continued fighting, that is still a big assumption. Not Israel, certainly. Even while the authors of this military adventure continue to try to carve out some notion of victory to sell the Israeli public, increasingly fewer people are buying it.
The likes of deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres have tried to promote the notion that Israel has got everything it wants out of the war - and from Friday's disgracefully late UN resolution calling for an immediate cessation of violence (on which Israel is still being permitted by the US to drag its feet) - but the reality is that the prosecutors of this war have lost more than they have won.
Whatever Israel does now, it is seriously diminished. In military terms it has been confronted successfully for a second time by the guerillas of Hizbollah. Again and again, its heavily-armoured Merkava tanks have been rocketed to a standstill. All its technology and its large army have been shown lacking the deftness and determination of a vastly smaller force lacking armoured vehicles, bombers and aircraft. Most seriously, its vulnerability to missile attack has been amply demonstrated to any enemy, despite its possession of US anti-missile batteries. Israel has lost one of its most powerful weapons - the psychological sense of its military invulnerability.
It is something for which Israelis are unlikely to forgive those behind a war which evidence now suggests was being planned long before the kidnap of two Israeli soldiers. Even before the UN resolution was agreed, support for the conflict, though still substantial, was steadily beginning to erode, confronted by a constant stream of casualties from the fighting for little geographical and strategic gain. Indeed, Israel's only major victory thus far was the 'capture' of the largely Christian town of Marjayoun - peopled with its former collaborators with Israel's allies from the South Lebanese Army - a few kilometres across the border.
Instead, in the past two weeks both the Israeli military and its political masters have come under attack for their prosecution of the war. And if one figure now appears most at risk it is Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a cold fish who tried and failed to be tougher than his mentor, Ariel Sharon. For what Israelis have not been slow to notice is that Olmert has signally failed to achieve what he set out to do: destroy Hizbollah. The victory being claimed is diffuse and very partial: in securing a UN resolution sort-of-on-its-terms and by reducing (by who knows what amount) Hizbollah's capability. Beyond that Hizbollah has survived largely intact, but pushed back a little further from Israel's border.
Then there are the imponderables. The nature of the Israeli campaign in Lebanon, with its scorched-earth policy designed to drive out local populations, its mendacious claim that it had allowed humanitarian corridors when it had not, its lack of concern for the killing of civilians (and callous explanation that dead civilians should have fled when threatened) has amplified the increasing sense abroad that this is a country which does not care about international law.
Though the world has long demonstrated a habit of forgetting Israel's misdemeanours, this war has dramatised the urgent need for a return to a proper Middle East peace plan, a negotiated process that will be less generous to Israel than its own unilaterally-applied 'convergence' plan. There is a danger too that if America's unconditional support for Israel in this affair damages its wider policy in the Middle East - in Shia-majority Iraq, where there are tens of thousands of US troops, and over Iran - Israel may feel that it squandered a high point in its relationship with Washington for little real advantage.
So who has won? Not Israel. Certainly not Lebanon or its fragile democracy, the development of both of which will have been pushed back half a decade and more. But what about Hizbollah? What can be said is that, on its own terms, it has not lost. Not yet. It has resisted Israel and thus far at least has survived, which was all it had to achieve. If it continues to survive until an international force is deployed - which seems likely - then the issue of its disarmament will have disappeared again into some vague future. In psychological terms, it can claim that its few fighters have inflicted disproportionate damage on the Israelis for a second time, and put the issue of the Shebaa farms on the negotiating table.
But the real test for Hizbollah will be applied not by the international community but by Lebanon itself, which must decide if the price it paid for Hizbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah to claim bragging rights was far, far too high.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1843521,00.html
Trinicenter:
Dehumanising our youth
By Terry Joseph
August 11, 2006
Although commanding an incalculably large viewing audience, MTV hasn't made proportionate contribution to the sum of human dignity it met at first airing 25 years ago, except there is value hidden somewhere in the dehumanisation of black youth.
Globally famous as the ultimate party source, the station quietly marked its silver anniversary, which fell on Emancipation Day, perhaps fearing increased attention to the role it plays in enslaving black youth, who now refer to each other as "pimp" and "bitch" rather than "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" as was the language of their forbears in the pre-MTV era.
Interestingly, it took MTV fully 17 months after coming on air, before the first black performer was featured, probably unavoidably, since it was Michael Jackson's double-entendre blockbuster, "Beat It", which meanwhile introduced crotch-grabbing as a music-video fundamental.
The channel exponentially increased its black audience in 1986, premiering "Yo! MTV Raps!" to milk the genre's rising popularity. The same station that, five years earlier, was fending off charges of discrimination against blacks suddenly became champion of the tribe, using its lowest common denominator as both shield and spear.
As rap music and MTV grew, the station bombarded our youth with videos portraying blacks as dope-dealers, whores and pimps, highlighting invariably angry young men with gaudy "bling" from tooth to toe, glorifying gang-warfare and entrenching ghetto values through constant repetition, tantamount to subliminal injection; promulgating the myth that black people are destined to anti-social conduct and profligate lifestyles.
Presiding over the pathetic, MTV enjoys allegiance from the very blacks it portrays as hopeless, deluding them into thinking mainstream television is an end in itself although once there, women get to do nothing more than shake their backsides, convinced it is a worthwhile showbiz pursuit, even as they help ensconce the thug and drug black stereotype.
The classic irony is that MTV's president, Christina Norman, is black. Don't rush to excuse her on the premise she's only been absolute boss since May last year and needs time to reverse so powerful a trend, because she helped create it during her many years as head of marketing.
Listed everywhere among America's 100 most powerful women, Miss Norman consciously assisted in fashioning the "bitch" and "pimp" imagery urban youth internalised worldwide and, when the template became irretrievably ingrained, successfully retailed it as "cultural reality," provoking comparison with the role of loathsome African mercenaries who acted as procurers for the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
To be fair, she pioneered MTV's "Break the Addiction" campaign, a 12-month environmental recovery programme geared to help contain global-warming. She also spearheaded "Choose or Lose", persuading more than 20,000 new voters to register and, by the same opportunity, made her station the highest rated network for viewers 12 to 24 years old. "This is what our audience expects of us," she said loftily, "We shed light on issues that impact their lives."
As MTV president, Miss Norman's executive portfolio includes development of business strategies, research, marketing and promotion for the flagship station, MTV2, mtvU, MTV EspaNol, MTV Hits and MTV Jams. In short, were it part of her agenda, she could single-handedly change the way the world views black people.
But apparently, that isn't going to happen anytime soon, although intra-tribal pressure on her dichotomous position is mounting. On Wednesday this week, Reuters reported the first major flak-attack on Miss Norman's long-revered leadership qualities, condemning as "poor judgement," MTV's airing of the cartoon Where My Dogs At? Highly respected New York Daily News correspondent, Andre Crouch was equally critical.
The offending episode, which aired at noon on Saturday, depicted in one sequence two black women squatting on all fours and tethered by dog leashes who, for the piece-de-resistance, defecated on the floor. The show provoked universal outrage among prominent African Americans.
Acting as corporate pimp, MTV's parent company, Viacom defended it as "social satire." Payne Brown, a high-ranking executive at cable giant Comcast Corp, said he personally complained to Miss Norman but found her response "unsatisfying."
Clearly, along the road to success, she became one of the very black bitches she created and, for that, was rewarded with the opportunity to make more.
Copyright © 1999-2005 Terry Joseph
http://www.trinicenter.com/Terryj/2006/Aug/11.htm
posted by attilav at 22:26
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