coluichedubita: Elsewhere Today 449

Aljazeera:
Anger at Musharraf re-election bid

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2007
10:48 MECCA TIME, 7:48 GMT

Hundreds of protesters have gathered outside Pakistan's supreme court to demonstrate against plans by Pervez Musharraf to seek re-election as president.

The protest mark the start of what opposition activists say will be a day of protests against the president across the country.

About 800 people, mainly from the opposition religious party Jamaat-e-Islami, waved flags, chanted "al-Jihad" and called for the president to stand down in Islamabad on Friday, a day after the court ruled that the country's presidential election will be held on October 6.

Dozens of supporters of Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned politician, held a separate protest outside the court.

Court challenge

Both groups filed petitions to the court challenging the legality of Musharraf's eligibility to stand in the elections due to his dual role as civilian and military chief.

The court is expected to rule early next week.

Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad said although there was a heavy police deployment outside the court there were no "untoward incidents".

Larger opposition gatherings are expected to begin across Pakistan after Friday prayers.

Musharraf indicated on Tuesday that he would step down as head of the army if he is re-elected president, a move which would ostensibly restore civilian rule eight years after he took power.

Opposition parties say that for him to contest the election while remaining as head of the military would violate the constitution.

Musharraf reshuffled his senior military staff on Friday, appointing a new military intelligence chief.

Appointments 'monitored'

Nadeem Taj was director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and promoted him from major-general to lieutenant-general.

Taj was formerly the head of military intelligence and also served as Musharraf's military secretary after he came to power in a coup eight years ago.

The move will increase expectations that the replaced ISI chief, Lieutenant-General Ashfaq Pervez Kiani, will get one of the top jobs - either replacing Musharraf as chief of army staff, or becoming his vice chief.

Al Jazeera correspondent Kamal Hyder said the new appointments will be closely monitored.

"It will be interesting to see if this is a prelude to Musharraf announcing a successor before the election," he said.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/B7052413-F542-4E57-8D27-8BD595458756.htm

AllAfrica:
UN Report Warns of Food Crisis in Ogaden

By Brian Kennedy
allAfrica.com NEWS
20 September 2007

Parts of eastern Ethiopia could face a major food crisis if the shortage in the region is not immediately addressed, an inter-agency United Nations report released Wednesday concluded.

The humanitarian situation in Ethiopia's Somali Regional State has worsened considerably in recent months due to increased fighting between government forces and the rebel Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF). The government has placed commercial trade restrictions on areas where military operations are taking place which have "aggravated" the situation, according to the report. The price of food has nearly doubled, and livestock prices have decreased by as much as 33 percent.

The United Nations humanitarian assessment team visited the Somali Regional State from August 30 to September 5. Their much-anticipated report focused mainly on the humanitarian situation.

In the report, the assessment team "predicts rapid deterioration in the nutritional status of people within two to three months if commercial food continues to be available only in limited quantities."

To address the food shortage, the report calls for a substantial increase in commercial food deliveries and the immediate provision of emergency food aid for 600,000 people, stating that "food distributions should be impartial and should reach all intended beneficiaries."

The UN team also expressed concern at the "alarming" human rights situation, noting that "people in these areas fear for their individual safety and security and expressed trepidation at being caught in the middle of the ongoing conflict." It called on both sides in the conflict to respect the rights of civilians, especially women and children.

"I hope that the government of Ethiopia and the ONLF will do everything in their power to ensure immediate, safe, and full-access for humanitarian organizations into the region," said John Holmes, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Emergency Relief Coordinator. "It was a good sign that the mission was able to visit, and I hope that this cooperation can continue. We are currently discussing this with the government."

The UN team visited only three of the five administrative zones in the Somali Regional State where military operations are taking place. The report says that the regional government proposed that the UN team visit the other two administrative zones, the Fik and Warder Zones, but due to time constraints, the teams were unable to visit either area.

In a statement released Wednesday, the Ogaden Human Rights Committee accused the Ethiopian government of imposing restrictions on the UN team. The group said it "deplores its [the UN team's] inability to visit real crime scenes where gross human rights violations took place." In an interview with allAfrica last week, leaders from the OLNF said that the Fik and Warder zones were the areas where government forces have committed their worst human rights atrocities.

Copyright © 2007 allAfrica.com. All rights reserved.

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AllAfrica:
Free-for-All Rocks Panel Sitting

By Stanley Nkwazema, Abuja
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
21 September 2007

Mayhem took over the entire place. The House of Representatives Hearing Room 1, venue of the sitting of the panel investigating the controversial N529 million renovation contract in the House became a boxing arena of sort yesterday.

Lawmakers opposed to and rooting for the Speaker, Mrs. Patricia Etteh, openly fought each other. It was like a heavyweight contest.

It all began when the Speaker was asked to take the witness stand to take the oath for her appearance before the panel.

The speaker had arrived the venue of the panel's sitting at exactly 10 am along with some principal officers of the House including Chief Whip, Hon. Bethel Amadi, his deputy, Alhaji Aminu Bello Tambwal, and others, while the members of the panel came in few minutes later.

Etteh and some of the principal officers sat on the left side of the panel facing the high table while the panel members discussed in hushed tones over how the Speaker would give evidence before them.

But no sooner had the Chairman of the panel, Hon. David Idoko, called Etteh to take the witness stand and for the oath to be administered on her than many in the room began clapping.

Some members of the anti-Etteh group including Hon. Emmanuel Jime, former Speaker of the Benue State House of Assembly who were all seated behind the panel, however, started shouting "Ole, Ole," meaning "thief, thief" at the Speaker.

Undaunted, the Speaker's supporters, led by Chairman House Committee on Information, Hon. Dino David Melaye, continued their clapping.

This resulted in a commotion and exchange of blows between Melaye and Jime.

As the two fought each other, another anti-Etteh member, Mercy Almona-Isei and the Speaker's ally, Saudatu Sanni, also engaged each other in an exchange of hot words. In the process, Hon. Kayode Idowu from Oyo State was dragged with his agbada to the floor by Jime while some members rushed to rescue him from Jime who was fighting like a warrior.

The whole place erupted in violence with some members pulling chairs and others jumping on top of the panel's table.

But Etteh was calm as she sat down with a paper in her hand.

The continuous shout of 'order, order, order' by the panel chairman did not hold water as the noise continued.

At this stage and as the situation was getting out of hand, a horde of security personnel including the Speaker's personal security, State Security Service (SSS) members and mobile policemen, piloted Etteh out of the venue to safety.

The Speaker almost fell down as the security men encircled her and pushed their way through to the front door of the hearing room where they ferried her to safety.

Idoko, who by this time had lost control of the place, announced to everybody on top of his voice that the panel would now sit in camera following the commotion.

But some members of the House and some in the audience started shouting "no, no."

The Speaker, however, moved straight to the chambers where she presided over the plenary session, which started at about 11.05

After members had taken their seats, Hon. Leo Ogo raised a motion of Urgent National Importance referring to Order 1 rule 7 of the House Standing Rules.

Ogo said members who were involved in the fisticuff during the panel's sitting should be referred to the Ethics and Privileges Committee for appropriate disciplinary action.

"Let me emphasise here that am not here to defend anybody. But am trying to make sure that the rule of law that we emphasise is followed to the letter. We always talk about due process and we that are singing this due process are the one violating due process," he said.

But Hon. Olaka Nwogu from River State while speaking on the same issue said, "I seriously believe that it's wrong for any body to denigrate the office of the Speaker. We must not be offensive. I think that committee has the right to get back to the House and tell us what happened. I think members should stop attending the panel's session. The image of our parliament is at stake. We have to dignify ourselves. We have hurt the office of the Speaker."

In his own contribution, Hon. Austin Nwachukwu who represents Ihitte/Uboma Federal Constituency of Imo State said, "we have been dragged to the mud. We have maligned the Speaker. We should disband the job of the panel."

But George Daiken, the former Speaker of Plateau State House of Assembly, said the Speaker was the presiding officer.

"We elected her and those that fought at the panel should be suspended for three months."

The former Speaker of Abia State House of Assembly, Hon. Stanley Ohiajuruka, appealed to the members.

"I want to appeal that a time has come for us to rediscover ourselves. I hope that what happened will not be beamed to the international community. We should come together and talk to ourselves. Things are getting out of hand. So we should not let this country down," he said.

The Minority Leader of the House, Hon. Ali Ndume, stated that it was a trying moment for the House. "We should not allow our sentiments to rule our head. It is unfortunate. I have been thinking. I want to align myself with Olaka. We should invite the chairman of the panel and he should tell us what to do. Let us be careful. We should make suggestions. I beg all of us and we should take this thing easy"

But as the Speaker asked the chairman of the panel to address the House, noise started all over the chambers again.

Noise also erupted when Hon. Saada Saani from Jibbiya / Kaita Federal Constituency of Katsina State drew attention to what he called media reports on the N98 million body massaging machine request sent to the Speaker, which was turned down explaining that the news media did not reflect the statement by the Acting Clerk, Niyi Ajiboye.

"The reports really contradicted the testimony," he said.

After listening to the different positions, the Speaker asked that the gallery be cleared so that the House could go into an executive session.

Chairman House Committee on Media and Publicity, Hon. Eziuche Ubani, who spoke with newsmen after the executive session said, "it has been a momentous day, from the panel to the plenary session. The House noted that the issues were degenerating. We have resolved that the House should grant the panel unfettered enabling environment to work. This will ensure that they be seen to be working to get the truth.

"We have therefore resolved that every group should suspend and cease press wars, interviews, and publications, which can jeopardise the sittings of the panel.

"From yesterday's sitting, all pro and anti-Etteh nocturnal meetings should stop. Only members invited by the panel have business to be there," he said.

THISDAY also gathered that the panel, which has overshot the initial two weeks given it for the assignment, has asked for six days more to enable it round up.

On the two members involved in the altercation at the panel sitting, Ubani said both Dino and Jime had apologised.

"They apologised and expressed regrets and understood that they were putting the House in jeopardy. The earlier motion calling for their sanction by the Ethics and Privileges Committee has also been rescinded. The panel sought an extension and it was granted," he said.

Chairman House Committee on Rules and Business, Hon. Ita Enang, confirmed that the House had backed down from taking the unruly members to the Ethics Committee saying "I moved the motion to rescind the move and it was seconded by Leo Ogo."

Copyright © 2007 This Day. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200709210002.html

AlterNet: Hocus POTUS:
A Fictional Account of the Search for WMDs in Iraq

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet
Posted on September 20, 2007

Editor's Note: The following is an interview with author Malcolm MacPherson and an excerpt from his book Hocus POTUS.

In Malcolm MacPherson's fictional Iraq, Ambassador Taylor, head of reconstruction, is preoccupied with his image of "contrasting notes of Brooks Brothers and army gear" and Kristin, an executive assistant, is just glad the old ambassador is gone because he had no definable jaw line.

Rather than looking for real WMDs, the goal is to find something that at least looks like WMDs to justify POTUS' (President of the United States) foray into Iraq. In other words, MacPherson's fictional Iraq may be only a sip of moonshine from the truth.

Hocus POTUS is a thinly veiled satire based on MacPherson's time in Iraq immediately following the occupation. A veteran journalist and former Marine, MacPherson's fiction goes a remarkable way to capturing a truth about Iraq that you won't get from reading the daily news.

His story starts when Rick Gannon tries to steal 17 tons of U.S. currency off a C-130 military plane. Kristin, Ambassador Taylor and the other Kool-Aid-drinking members of the reconstruction team, use this to land him in prison. Not, mind you, to punish him for his crime, but rather to keep him out of their hair. Gannon has a big mouth and a propensity for calling a spade a spade. But in an environment where White House appointees, still wet behind the ears, are running the show, there's no room for Gannon's kind.

When Gannon escapes, Ambassador Taylor wants to call off the search for WMDs and look for him. Kristin, in an apoplectic fit, lets him know why that's all wrong: "Was he losing it? POTUS was why they had invaded Iraq, and POTUS was why they would find POTUS a reason for invading Iraq. Was that too fucking complicated?"

It isn't complicated, and Gannon, busy painting a rocket-ship kiddie ride so that it looks like a WMD, knows it. He plans on selling the fake to the ambassador and his crew. They just might buy it. By the end, readers are inclined to wonder whether MacPherson's satire is convenient euphemism for truth, or whether it's the other way around. MacPherson recently sat down with AlterNet to talk about his experiences in Iraq as well as the writing of Hocus POTUS.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri: You've covered a lot of wars. What was different about Iraq?

Malcolm MacPherson: I covered the occupation, not the war. The fighting itself was over by the time I got there. How many times have we really occupied a country after combat? You couldn't say that was true in Vietnam.

The last time was either Korea or WWII. It was a unique experience to be in a place that had been subdued militarily and was now being dealt with post-combat. We haven't done that very often, and we proved to be terrible at it in Iraq, We were brilliant at it in WWII. There are a huge number of on-the-ground differences in Iraq, including the sectarian hatred. But I believe that what we brought to Iraq has none of the genuine commitment to help, which contrasts with the post-WWII experience.

OR: What made you doubt the commitment?

MM: I'm sure there are people over there who are genuinely interested in doing the best that can be done for the Iraqi people, but a lot of what I saw were people doing the best they could possibly do for themselves. A lot of self-centeredness, a lot of ambition that had nothing to do with doing a good job for as long as needed. Some of the younger people who Bremer brought into the CPA reminded me of high school students who go down to Costa Rica to build a house in the summer. They hammer a nail and then they go to the beach and then they hammer another nail and they have a Mai Tai.

They never really get engaged with the people whose house they're building. They smile at them and pat them on the head. I saw a lot of that over there. And just as high school kids are trying to make their application look better for college, these young people were trying to make their resumes look better for the White House, so that they could get a better job.

OR: This reminds me of the character, Kristin, in your book. In one episode, she demands that her driver stop at a traffic light despite the fact that it's not functioning.

MM: I didn't have to make this stuff up. This actually happened. It's just a huge collision between idealism and reality, and what Kristin preferred was the idealism. Here's what actually happened. Me, my friend (the basis for Rick Gannon) and a Defense Intelligence Agency guy would meet at the front of the palace at night and go eat outside at one of the restaurants, pick up a bottle of whisky and just talk. It was us older guys.

One night, these two young women were with the DIA guy. They had just gotten there, but they were connected, so he had to kowtow or thought he had to. He said, "They're coming with us." We just looked at him as if to say, "You've broken the rules here, pal." These two young women jump in the car. One got in the front passenger seat and one got in the back, which meant that my friend and myself, among a few others, were going to have to crunch into the back.

I thought, "I don't really want to do this." So I went back to my place with my friend to have some cashews and whisky. An hour later, this DIA guy came back and he looked miserable. We started laughing. We asked what happened. He said, "You wouldn't believe it. She started screaming at me at this intersection in the green zone." There are no cars there, because they couldn't get into the Green Zone. There are checkpoints. But she was screaming at him to "stop the fucking car" at the nonfunctioning traffic light.

OR: Was it frequently the case that the people who had experience and knew the realities on the ground were taking these orders from young upstarts? Are they running the show while the people who have experience are sitting there drinking and saying, "I can't believe this"?

MM: Yes. It's trickle down incompetence. Take the first leader of the reconstruction effort, Jay Garner, who was eminently qualified. He'd basically rescued the Kurdish nation in 1991. He had guys around him in Iraq, former generals who had come out of retirement to work with him.

One was up in the north in Irbil, one was down in Hillah and then there were a couple in Baghdad with him. These are men who had great experience and were smart. When Bremer came in, they were all told to leave. Garner told me that in a meeting with one of his generals in the north, Bremer said, "I want you tomorrow to disband the Kurdish army" and this guy said, "Wait a minute. We can't disband the Peshmurga. They're our allies. They've been our allies for ten years."

Bremer started to walk out of the room, and he turned over his shoulder and said dismissively, "Do it." The general refused to do it. He went back to Irbil; he never issued the order to disband the Peshmurga. But that's what Bremer wanted to have happen.

It was a clash of experience and inexperience. It was also a clash of ideologies. The military guys are used to working together to get things done. These other people are used to working against each other to try to outfox the other guy.

I felt that that was worth reflecting in the book. That's why I made these Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) people the antagonists. The character Kristin embodies this. She's also kind of hapless. She wasn't really mean; she just didn't know what the hell she was doing. She was probably scared like a lot of them were, and when people are scared, they tend to be a pain in the ass.

OR: In her fear, she tries to make a few desperate, and pathetic, attempts to regain control.

MM: Exactly. Anyone who has ever worked in the office has seen this behavior before.

OR: Who is Rick Gannon based on?

MM: This is a guy I know, a pal of mine. He could talk the birds out of the trees. He's a commodities trader and entrepreneur. He's made a huge amount of money over the years, and he's lost a huge amount of money. It doesn't seem to bother him.

A few years ago he cornered the market on sesame seeds. He had bought these sesame seeds from the brother of the King of Morocco while on a golf course. The character Rick Gannon is an archetype. He's the original capitalist. He doesn't need a company to work for. He's out there trading coal and sesame seeds. Whatever he can get his hands on. He's going to buy it low and sell it high.

OR: Given all these unsavory characteristics, how does he become the hero of the book?

MM: He's a hero because he's retaliating for something very underhanded that was done to him. Gannon is in Iraq because he's trying to escape some people he stole money from. But he can't keep his fingers off the machinery, so he's telling the ambassador how to do and not do things, and he always turns out to be right. The ambassador always turns out to be wrong. The ambassador basically banishes him and Gannon is pissed off about that. But he becomes this anti-hero because we're rooting for him. In fact we're rooting for the bad guy. What's more fun than that?

OR: The characters seem to have an interesting combination of incredible self-awareness and total self-delusion. There's Kristin's demand to stop at a nonexistent traffic light. But then, as we see with "Ambassador Taylor" and the rest of the CPA, they want to keep Gannon in prison not because of his crime, but because he won't drink the Kool-Aid. And they talk about themselves as drinking the Kool-Aid.

MM: Yes, they hate Gannon because he's not playing their game. The truth of the matter is that, in the Pentagon, in 2002, if you walked around offices, you would see signs posted in cubicles, saying, "I've drunk the Kool-Aid." In other words, "I've bought into this whole Bush deal."

I'd always heard of it as being the neocon thing and that these people were really proud of it. They didn't seem to get that, basically, "I drank the Kool-Aid" means you're dead. But I guess they didn't bring it back to Jim Jones.

OR: The neocon propensity to absorb a negative connotation and then spin it as positive is impressive. The book does a remarkable job of portraying this process.

MM: These neoconservative ideologues are not dumb by any means. They're as smart as whips. I think that anyone who is smart has to wake up in the middle of the night, has to have that moment of real self-evaluation. You have to know that what you're doing is illogical and defies reason. So you get up the next morning and go about your job of illogic and unreason.

I think this is really how a lot of these people are. That's why I think we have so much trouble with figuring out what they're all about. They're both intelligent and illogical. What they say and do sometimes makes absolutely no sense. I think that's probably true of most administrations. But I've never seen one like this before. When Clinton was saying, "I didn't have sex with this woman," I was thinking, "What are you talking about? How could you say that?" How could any man say that with a straight face? That's pretty funny stuff.

OR: That was discussion for grounds of impeachment. Compare that to the discussion for the grounds of impeachment of this president, and we're not even in the same world anymore. The fact anyone cared whether Clinton lied to us about his sex life now seems like pure satire. Now we're being lied to about a war, about torture and about domestic spying.

MM: The moral weight of each one is hugely different. There are also these people who are incredibly hysterical, like this guy Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, the guy doing the hand signals underneath the partition of the men's room. He's the one who's railing against homosexuality and gay marriage. Those people are really funny. They're scary, but funny. It makes me wonder if it's just now that this is happening, or has always been this way.

OR: It's seems like we're in a climate friendly to politicians with conservative beliefs, encouraging them to speak fervently about their causes. But then the most vocal of these folks turn out to be so fervent precisely because they themselves have a massive personal insecurity about something.

MM: Sure. They have something to hide. What better way to hide something than to throw up a huge smokescreen?

OR: Yes, but now it's become formulaic. Now any Republican who speaks heatedly against a particular kind of corruption or issue might be suspect. Maybe that itself should be grounds for investigation.

MM: It's true. If you want to suspect somebody of being a homosexual in the Senate, you look at the way they vote. I don't think that there's ever been this much hypocrisy alive as there is right now. And they're proud to be hypocrites. They think that's just the way you do business, rather than being embarrassed or shamed by it.

OR: One character in the book whose name isn't changed is Ammo Baba, the Iraqi soccer star. Does he know that he's been immortalized in your book?

MM: I doubt it. I can't imagine he does. I think he's in Amman right now. I hope he's safe. Everyone with any kind of standing or stature and money is out of there at this point. The only people who are left are these poor sods who just have no choice. It's Katrina. The ones who get hammered are the ones who can't leave. They don't have enough money to leave and that's what we've created over there: the perfect hurricane.

OR: The character Kristin, on behalf of Ambassador Taylor and the other CPA folk goes to the Iraqi soccer stadium, which is being used as a prison, where Rick Gannon is being held to see if the guards can "lose" Gannon in the system, so that he can be out of their hair indefinitely. The guard says, "That's not even a request. It's, like, our standard operating procedure."

MM: All those guys had over there was a laptop computer. They didn't have a clue how to spell these people's names. Sometimes they'd give them names. They used these yellow metal meat tags, about four inches long, and made out of plastic with a clip at the end of it. They're designed for sides of beef. You pinch into the meat with this tag to identify one part or another. They'd give the prisoners numbers, and then they would clip these tags to their shirts. On the back it would say, "Suspected Baathie."

A lot of these prisoners were taken out of the houses in the middle of the night - Ammo Baba was. I didn't get it. I just couldn't figure out what they were trying to accomplish by putting these people into a large prison or a soccer stadium. They had to know that most of these guys were not a problem. But what better irony than to put the soccer legend in a soccer stadium? I wouldn't ever have thought of that.

OR: I want to talk about the character of Ambassador Taylor. There's a point in the book where Kristin is telling Taylor about a fake WMD that they're hoping can be pawned off as real. "The president will think it's real. Don't you get it?" He did, and he didn't. He guessed maybe he did. He felt uncertain about who was telling the truth, to be honest." Talk about this fraught sense of honesty. Is Taylor really that witless, or is he conflicted about drinking the Kool-Aid?

MM: In the New York Times recently, we saw the letters Bremer sent to Bush about disbanding the army. Here was this incredibly important policy change, and the letter was three pages long. All but one sentence of this letter was kissing Bush's ass about how wonderful the people of Iraq thought he was, and what a great service he was providing the universe. It was just brown-nosing beyond brown-nosing.

How embarrassing to write this as a man in that position. I always saw Bremer as a guy who really wanted to be secretary of state and was willing to do absolutely anything. In fact, he was even willing to defy the powers and forces of logic and reason in order to satisfy the wishes of his master.

We see that a lot in people. They put up with stuff, they lie and they're dishonest, all for the sake of getting ahead. I think the worst thing you can do in this life is lie. In these public figures, honesty is just treated as a useful tool. When you lie, you have to have a very good memory. The thing with these people is that they lie so much they don't know where they are. They're confused about what they're supposed to be thinking and saying. I think the ambassador character reflects that confusion. He doesn't know what he believes in anymore. That's who he is, and that's who so many of these people are, including Bush.

OR: There's a passage in the book around the time that they're expecting Gannon to try to sell them a fake WMD: "They knew to distrust Gannon, but they understood how desperation could make an honest man of thieves." You're so successful in getting the reader to inhabit this alternate sense of truth that I first read this as meaning that the Kool-Aid drinkers were the thieves, and they thought the simple fact of their desperation, to find even fake WMD, would make them honest.

MM: Yes. And then, for all time, their minds would tell them that is was a real WMD. It's amazing what we can convince ourselves of when we're faced with ambition and profit and with making ourselves look good. I wonder whether these people bring this kind of a thing into their marriages and into their families. Do they lie to their wives, or else tell them these half-truths and treat them like idiots? I wouldn't doubt it. You've got to believe that Sen. Craig has been telling half-truths to his wife for years. I don't think I've seen a time when truth was so damaged as it is now. It's a pretty battered quality.

OR: In the book, Kristin certainly has her personal life intricately wrapped up in her career. In one scene, she's in the middle of the desert looking up at a constellation she recognizes from her childhood, and she wishes for WMDs. It's both humorous and heartbreaking.

MM: And they're all here in Washington. I remember meeting this guy on an aircraft carrier from the personnel office at the White House. He was a really good friend of Bush's. He was with three young women who were also from the personnel office. I've never seen people who struck me as being more entitled. I found these poor girls and this guy really sad, because when it's all over, nobody is going to pay any attention to them.

There was guy at Newsweek, a friend of mine. He used to go up to Marlon Brando's house and other movie stars' places. He really thought that they really liked him. Of course, he was in for a shock when he left Newsweek and nobody called him anymore. I always knew that people didn't invite me to parties and things and come up to me in restaurants because they liked me; they came up to me because I worked at Newsweek, and they thought I could do them some good. So I feel sorry for these young people, because they're going to find that out the hard way when they leave the White House. Like Bremer. He's found that out. Nobody will call him, and he can't get a job.

OR: Kristin's hunt for WMDs leads her to a book of hidden locations. When she finally uncovers the site, she finds hundreds of copies of a fantasy book by Saddam that never sold - a book that was supposedly a bestseller. What's the kernel of truth here?

MM: Saddam wrote this book called Zabibah and the King that was published. Zabibah is a young virgin princess, and she represents Kuwait. America represents the villain, and of course the king has got to save Zabibah from these nasty villains. He has all these anachronisms in the book, which is wonderfully hysterical. He doesn't know whether he wants to insert himself into this thing that's set in the 12th century. Kuwait didn't even exist in the 12th century, much less Iraq, so it's all over the place, and the CIA actually translated the book to see if it could lead to some better understanding of his character, motives and personality.

I know this sounds like I'm making it up, but its' absolutely true. Just before we invaded, Saddam was working on making Zabibah and the King into a musical. I firmly believe that he wanted to be a novelist. He didn't want to be a dictator anymore. It's hard to get out of that business once you're in it. He had to sneak writing because it would have been perceived as a weakness. I have a feeling that he liked to write a lot when he wasn't killing people. It's like Hitler. He would get all dreamy about Wagner, and then he'd order the liquidation of 2 million people. I think dictators always have this soft side, and it helps to maintain their sanity.

OR: While you were in Iraq, you yourself looked for a WMD.

MM: Jay Garner and I met a Shiite cleric down in Hillah and he said he knew where there were some, so I went down the next day and he told me where the location was. We drove out there, and it was nonsense. There was no way there were WMDs there. That's when I went back to the palace and the DIA guy started laughing and said, "You did what?!" He said, "They don't exist, get over it."

OR: Was that a general sentiment that early on when you were over there?

MM: Yeah. I don't think anyone believed they existed. There were millions of dollars being spent looking for this stuff. I think they had to maintain the charade. Anybody with a brain knew that they didn't exist, but they wanted to string it out long enough that people would forget that there were no WMDs. The idea was, if we keep looking and spending money, that means there could be something, and we'll just change the discussion.

I don't see how Americans can cut these guys that much slack. They really did lie to us about this again and again. If we had a parliamentary democracy, they would be thrown out in a minute. A vote of no confidence would come up in a second. Unfortunately, we don't. But how can we be so forgiving? I guess we don't have any emotional investment in this war. So what's to forgive if you don't give a damn?

The following is an excerpt from Hocus POTUS, by Malcolm MacPherson (Melville House, 2007)

© 2007 Malcolm MacPherson and reprinted with the permission of the author and Melville House Publishing.

In the Palace, along the red Security Corridor, the Ambassador was seated in a liberated Iraqi barber's swivel chair being prepped for a live interview on the "Today Show" with perky Katie Couric. A makeup artist from CENTCOM's Public Affairs staff stuffed a paper towel inside his Brooks Bros. shirt collar and was brushing his face with a soft brush and blush and pancake. Taylor was complaining to himself in a lighted mirror. His best conversations took place in mirrors, usually spoken out loud, and he did not hold back now, just because an Army corporal was fussing over him like a fairy.

"Five minutes, sir, to air," a voice from the doorway called.

"Kristin," he told his own image in the mirror, "I know that only the young hold the keys to the Kingdom anymore. You went to Yale and were a legacy, just like POTUS. I know you will do right by me. What is it I desire? You can tell him, once this is tied up with a neat bow, I'd like to take over in his second term for Balloonfoot, who isn't doing anybody much good, or for the Guru, who'll be moving on. We have our work cut out for us, Kristin, but the rewards are worth the work and the risk." He tried out a pained smile on the mirror, just as the reflection of Gen. Montoya loomed up behind him.

"Why general, welcome to my humble abode," he told Montoya.

Montoya stared at the enlisted man teasing the Ambassador's topknot. He hated primps and fops like Taylor. He could not pry his eyes off the kind of fine attention to detail that he was getting to his personal person, even knowing, as he surely did, the career benefits of looking the part of whatever the drama called for. What a contrast with the Ambassador's predecessor, the retired Army lieutenant general who was a good man, and every soldier in the theater thought he was great, too. He was given the boot because he would not be fussed over like a French poodle and he wouldn't suffer fools. Talk about the Right Stuff! He was long gone.

"What's up?" the Ambassador asked in the mirror.

"Just a couple of rollback issues," the general replied too offhandedly. "And this and that."

"I'm rather busy."

"I wish you had consulted me, at least, on the Iraqi army decision," he said.

"The minute after you announced you were firing their army, the RPGs began to fly, and they won't stop, if you ask me."

"Can't have Republican guards and Baathists wear the uniform."

"But, Ambassador, don't you see? You made a half million enemies in one stroke."

"They'll get over it."

"They have weapons that they know how to use."

"Nonsense. You wait and see."

Single-handedly and overnight, the idiot had created an insurgency that the Army was being forced to deal with.

"I beg you to roll back your decision and put the Iraqi Army to work on civilian projects. For God sakes, give these men back their dignity."

"Once they prove they aren't friends of Saddam."

"They never were. They are soldiers."

"Anything else, general?"

A voice called, "Three minutes to air time, sir."

"What's in three minutes?" Montoya asked, and Taylor told him. "What does she want to talk to you about?"

His tone reflected his attitude toward Katie Couric, who just about made him retch when he thought about her colonoscopy on live TV; it was way more than he knew - or ever wanted to know - about another human being, much less a female, including his wife of thirty-two years, Harriet, back in Tampa.

"WMD." The Ambassador said in the mirror. "The nincompoops in the media keep asking the same cockeyed question, and we keep answering them like we really don't know, wink wink, and the game goes on, and on."

"One minute to air," a voice called.

The Ambassador slid out of the chair, ready for prime time. He waved to Montoya, saying, "Stick around." In his office, he situated himself in his executive chair before the golden damask curtain and the set of American and Iraqi flags. An NBC technician had set up a camera, lights, and a monitor in which the Ambassador could see Katie on the screen and thus was meant to pretend she was in the room with him - the illusion helped interview subjects over the hurdle of distractions and was widely employed. He pulled at the back of his suit jacket and smoothed the lapels. The Army make-up corporal flicked the soft brush a last time over his cheeks, and the Ambassador folded his hands on the desk like he had seen POTUS do. He stared at his knuckles and concentrated on the moment. He had learned the tricks of television performance from a professional consulting firm that taught such techniques as shrinking the length of sound bites and the art of minimalism and how the smallest raising of an eyebrow, the curl of the lip, or minor cast of the eye communicated huge meaning to vast audiences on a subliminal level. He had to appear relaxed and confident but not too relaxed or the audience would think of him as a slacker.

While NBC-TV New York was cutting away for a commercial break, Katie Couric came on the monitor, smiling her big-sister smile - warm enough to make a snake purr. As TV's white Oprah, she was genuine and in touch with and trusted by the vast waist of Americans outside the major Metro regions. A few minutes on her show were worth a million times their weight in sales, and the Ambassador was very aware that he was as much of a huckster for the president's policies as George Foreman was for Double Knockout Grills.

"Hello, Ambassador," said Katie in the monitor. "Keeping your head down?" She flashed her patented smile. "We're ready to go in less than a minute. We have one segment, Ambassador. I'm going to ask you a few questions about progress in Iraq. From what we're reading in the New York Times, the reconstruction effort is going in reverse, and I want to set the record straight."

He did not like the sound of that. She was no pushover, which explained why Americans trusted her, but she was also an American. He felt immersed in the suspension of reality. He was talking to a head on a TV screen like it was a real person. "Fine with me, Katie," he told her, on a chummy basis, and the technician kneeling at the edge of his desk gave a thumbs-up for sound levels.

The segment started. Katie introduced him to her audience. He looked at the camera, waiting until she turned to him.

She asked finally, smiling, "What's going on over there, Ambassador?"

"We continue to make excellent progress, Katie," he replied, according to the script the White House had given him. "Day after day, conditions improve. The Iraqi people are seeing the fruits of freedom and democracy."

"This is not what we are hearing, Ambassador. What is the reaction of the Iraqi people to our invasion?"

"They love us." He gave a theatrical chuckle.

"They did not welcome us with open arms, as we expected, or did they?"

"Iraqis do not do open arms."

"What do they do then?"

"They shoot off their arms."

"At our soldiers?" Katie asked, incredulous.

"Sometimes our boys get in the way, but it's accidental, as far as I can tell."

"The casualties we are taking are a result of expressions of Iraqis' happiness with the occupation?" She sounded upset.

"Exactly right, Katie. You know the Arab people. As a whole, they shoot off their guns at weddings and funerals and parties."

"How many of our soldiers have been wounded at these festive Arabic occasions, Ambassador?"

"Some, but not as many as in the actual war."

"Sounds like an insurgency, sir."

She had used the I-word. "Just happy people, Katie, exercising their right to be happy and free, like the president promised."

Couric paused. She looked down at her hands as if she were summoning all her self-restraint. "Turning to another question, Mister Ambassador. Americans are asking why you fired the Iraqi army?"

This was a Gotcha meant to embarrass him, he could tell by the sudden melting of her smile. Journalists had to ask at least one Gotcha to prove their worth, and he was prepared. He'd already tried out one response on Montoya, whom clearly he had left unconvinced, and he decided on a new tack ... see how it floated. "Well, I'd think you would know the answer to that, Katie, without me telling you," he replied using a waspish tone. "I fired the army ... ah, for cause."

Her face dropped further. "What cause, Ambassador?"

He didn't like the sound of that. She was going toe-to-toe here. "Why, for not doing their job. That's what 'for cause' is. What other cause could there be, except for, like, violation of computer-use policy or sexual harassment? The army was simply incompetent. That should be obvious, too ..."

"But they're an army."

He wished she'd leave it alone. "I know that, Katie." He was going to turn it back on her, but decided to expand a rationale not so much for her, per se, as for her electronic audience. "Not doing the job you were hired to do is not doing your job, no matter what your line of work. Am I right, here? You either perform or you don't, and if you don't, you have to move on, perhaps into another career field. I moved the Iraqi army on."

"Into an insurgency," she said.

"What was that, Katie?"

"Their line of work, as you call it, Ambassador, was defending Iraq from invaders."

He sat back in his chair. "I rest my case."

"But, Ambassador, if they had done their job, they would have repulsed our invasion."

He was confused now. "Katie, there you go again, taking the negative. We did win. The transformation of Iraq into a democracy will succeed, as it is succeeding. I do foresee a time when we will rehire the Iraqi army, after they are chastised and warned and retrained. We must give them the confidence to succeed, so that the next time they will not have to be fired. Does that answer your question?"

She gave the camera a blank stare. "Let's move on," she said sharply. "What is the situation with electricity? I understand that ..."

"Looters," he said, cutting her off.

"The looters knocked out the electricity plants? What about our bombs?" she asked. "What about the lack of sewage treatment and drinkable water?"

"Looters," he said, staying on message. He was already complimenting himself on the amount of time he was staying on the bubble. A further question slipped past his hearing. What had she asked? "Could you repeat that, Katie?"

"You flopped on WMD, Ambassador," she said. "Is that looters, too?"

He could sense an edginess; PMS over WMD? "I have something I want to say about that," he said. "Please go ahead."

He had never seen her this snappish, like a peckish crocodile. "I think we will have an announcement for the American public soon on that." "On WMD?" she asked.

"Yes, quite."

"You have found one?"

"Not, quite."

"You haven't found one and won't ever find one?" asked Katie.

Was he wrong in his impression that the American media, to say nothing of the Dune Media, wanted the whole Iraqi experiment to flop? "That is simply not true," he retorted with perhaps a little too much vocal and body emphasis, lunging, as he did, at the camera lens. In the monitor, he could see white flecks of spittle foam in the corners of his mouth. "At the moment, I can only say that we are making rapid, and I mean rapid, Katie, progress. On other fronts, the few elements of resistance in Iraq are unorganized and ineffective. Ninety-nine percent of Iraq is at peace, and the process of rebuilding is going on. Peacefully."

As Katie's image on the screen went blank, the Ambassador wondered if he had gone too far in his rush to get her off the damned WMD question? He looked at the NBC technician and said, "She didn't even say goodbye."

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a San Francisco-based freelance writer. A former assistant editor of AlterNet.org, she has written for AlterNet, the American Prospect, MotherJones.com, In These Times, Huffington Post, Truthdig, PopMatters and Women's eNews.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/62290/

AlterNet: Why Can't the U.S. Have
the Debate about Naomi Klein's Book That Europe Has?

By Jan Frel, AlterNet
Posted on September 21, 2007

Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, tells the history of how the American version of "free market" capitalism has spread in moments of crisis and catastrophe, when societies are too traumatized and disoriented to challenge the introduction of radical economic policies that go against their own interests.

The Shock Doctrine has already been published and translated in several countries. Excerpts from Klein's book were published in the British newspaper, The Guardian, and discussion about the book has raged onThe Guardian's online site, Comment Is Free as well as in the German, French and Canadian press. I attended Klein's U.S. book launch event at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on September 17 where she described her work and her experiences dealing with a foreign press frequently hostile to her arguments.

At least the foreign press is willing to tangle with writers who offer critiques the capitalist system. There is plenty of economic coverage in the U.S., but fundamental questions on issues such as whether privatization of public assets benefits the public and if the focus on short-term economic growth is harmful in the long run are simply not discussed. I wondered how Klein's book, which has hit the best-seller lists all over Europe, would fare in the U.S. and what Klein's expectations were for the U.S. audience. I spoke with her on the phone about this and the issues she raises in The Shock Doctrine on September 19.

Jan Frel: Your book has 70 pages of footnotes and has citations from over 1,000 sources. At the book launch in New York, you referred to this as your "body armor." The thinking seems to be that if you can back up what you're saying, then it has to be accepted. Is this what will give it legitimacy in the mainstream media?

Naomi Klein: It's more for the debate about my work. In the attempts to dismiss my work as conspiracies theories, the footnotes help.

Frel: It's often times the case that books that make powerful and damning claims with complete accuracy still don't break into public debate or hit the audience that ought to confront them. Isn't there something else that prevents radical interpretations of society and economics and buried history from reaching public debate?

Klein: I think that's true - it's certainly true in this country. I wasn't talking about the problem my book would have getting into the mainstream, it's more about the debates around it. My books do get into the mainstream - outside the US. That doesn't mean they aren't contested, but in Canada for example, The Shock Doctrine is already at #3 on Amazon. [Currently at #43 in the U.S.]

Another book I did, No Logo was a mainstream book, in most of the countries where it was published, except for the US. In the U.S. it never was. The context I talked about the need for support for my arguments is in cases where my book is being debated and argued. So in the U.S., I totally agree that having solid footnotes are no guarantee that you can start a mainstream debate. I don't have any confidence that this book will be in the mainstream debate in the United States.

Frel: A lot of what you're taking on in The Shock Doctrine, is a concept that is fused in deep into a big part of the American psyche - that "the free market" and "free enterprise," which we don't typically debate or condemn in the mainstream but are to blame for a lot of the things the public does discern as problems, like our health care system. But how do you get people to see that they are being screwed by their own dominant economic beliefs?

Klein: It's actually not that hard. The hard part is getting past the media wall.

Frel: At your U.S. book launch on Monday you talked about getting past the "intellectual police lines" that prevent discussion.

Klein: That's a different kind of situation. In Britain, it's a mainstream book, being debated on the BBC, the Times of London, the Guardian and so on. It's being dismissed in part - part of the discussion is an attempt to dismiss it. When I was talking about "intellectual police lines" it was in reference to the kinds of questions I was getting from mainstream journalists in Europe and in Canada. But in the U.S., I would say that's not this is not really the issue - it's whether you get access at all.

Frel: Do you think that it's because in the States, there isn't really any debate about alternatives to our economic system in any form? In Europe, where your book has already been released, there is at least the residue of a public debate that is willing to debate fundamental questions on economic systems and the social contract.

Klein: In most parts of the world, it's easier to even identify the radical policies of capitalism as contested territory, as something to debate. Whereas in the United States, these policies are the air we breathe; they are invisible almost because they are so hegemonic. For example, when I talk about privatization in Canada, people understand what that means - it's about the drive to privatize our health care system and our education system, and there is a very clear grasp in the public mind about what the public sphere actually is. People understand there that this is something to defend against - that there is something to privatize, while in the U.S., the agenda to privatize has succeeded so fully that these ideas seem more abstract because the idea of the public sphere is almost abstract.

When I'm talking about these ideas in France or the U.K., people know what "public" is. There are large parts of their life that exist within a non-market space.

Frel: So do you think it's an issue here in America where people don't want to consider these questions or are unable to?

Klein: I think it's the issue of the media line, and there are a lot of issues around it. It's very hard to have discussion anything outside the parameters of partisan politics in this country.

Frel: It's been my experience that it's not always the issue that the media is preventing discussion, but rather that the media working on behalf of the public's general desire not wanting to get into an issue. For example, this Monday, AlterNet ran article about the recent report that 1.2 million civilians have died violent deaths since the U.S. invasion. It was our top story, and the number of people who read it (24,000) was far lower than we expected.

Klein: Really? And that's a progressive audience.

Frel: It seems to me that it's this kind of a phenomenon that has media, including the corporate media, acting on behalf the audience's "intellectual police lines."

Klein: I think it's a vicious cycle. The media acts as an amplifier.

Frel: It's also responsive to the interests of the audience.

Klein: It is, but look at Lou Dobbs. Here you have a CNN news anchor who makes a concerted decision that he is going to put the disappearing American middle class and the effects of outsourcing on TV every night, and he's going to use his pulpit to drum up outrage, except that he decides that he's going to direct that outrage to the weakest people in society; to immigrants. But what's interesting about that, talking about outsourcing, talking about free trade, talking about the middle class - any media outlet in the past 20 years could have done a story on that, giving the audience permission to have outrage instead of ignoring it or normalizing it and saying this is just the way the world works. Lou Dobbs made the conscious decision to make his show a platform for outrage, and people were attracted to it because they really are upset and they had it validated back to them.

I think the same thing could happen with Iraqi casualties if you had the media saying night after night that this is a scandal, and really put a human face on those deaths.

Frel: Your book may encounter resistance at the mainstream level here in the States, but there is an audience of progressives and people who consume alternative media who are certain to embrace it. How does your book speak to their sensibilities, and how do you think they will receive it?

Klein: The book is an attempt to front burner the economic project and the economic ideology that I think is so much at the root of the front page stories of our time; climate change, preemptive war, the resurgence of torture. I believe we need an analytic framework and I think the book provides one - not the only one, but anything that draws connections - I think that progressives and readers of alternative media aren't going to be shocked by the information in the book. The hope is that the analysis is empowering. I know as a reader what's valuable is having connections made - you're often bombarded with information in an analytic vacuum you can feel terribly hopeless, but when you make those connections, even when the connections are grim, you're more oriented.

As a writer, I'm very pleased with the reception to the book. Already we've got people writing into the website citing examples of disaster capitalism: "Look at what's going on in Greece, they're handing over land after the forest fires. Look at what's going on in Peru." All you can hope for as an analyst is that people read the newspaper better.

Frel:And you have a daringly simple solution for events of disaster capitalism that you identify, which I summarize as: Society should be informed and aware of what governments are trying to do them after a catastrophe and apply this lens of analysis to their living context.

Klein: Shock only works if you don't know it's happening to you. Shock is a state of disorientation, which happens when we can't match events with analysis. For me, just understanding how shock affects our brains and that there is a philosophy of how to exploit that opportunity and push through economic policies people wouldn't normally accept in that window of time - just realizing that makes you more resistant. But this is not my solution. I provide examples in my book of societies that have learned from their history when they were exploited in moments of shock, and delegated authority to figures of security that promised to take care of them. Because they have learned those simple lessons, they've become more shock resistant. But it does require looking at history without the blinders of denial.

In the sense that the book is an alternative history, I do hope that it helps people become more oriented, both in terms of more connected to our recent past, our pre-9/11 past, and more aware of what is happening in a moment of crisis or disaster.

The timing of The Shock Doctrine's release in Canada is very relevant here because it just hosted a summit with George Bush and Mexican President Calderon to meet with Prime Minister Steven Harper to talk about the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) which is basically like NAFTA-plus; NAFTA plus security issues. The SPP is an example of the shock doctrine I outline, in the sense that this was an agenda that would have been unspeakable in terms of integration with the United States before 9/11, and in the panic after - in that shock - the SPP agenda moved forward in technocratic circles, and it was presented as a done deal.

Once Canadians began learning about the SPP they started rejecting it, and then they had this summit, where it was announced that, "don't worry, nothing's going to happen here." But they said in the final press conference at the summit in Montebello, Quebec at the end of August that the one exception that they would push for the SPP to be pushed through is if there's a disaster - if there's an avian flu outbreak or a terrorist attack or a natural disaster - then they would implement tightened integration between security forces in all these countries.

In Canada this was front-page news - in the US it wasn't reported on. When my book came out a week later people saw the connections immediately. They realized that what the Canadian government was saying was, the next time there's a disaster, we will use it as a moment of opportunity to push through these policies that you're rejecting where there isn't a disaster going on. It's incredibly naked.

Frel: There's an issue that I've seen a lot of critics and journalists already getting into about your book, and I've seen that you have a good term already to explain it. You don't argue that economic elites try to cause disasters they reap the benefits from, rather that they have "acute intellectual disaster preparedness" - they are only cynical enough to take advantage of catastrophe.

Klein: I think that's right. The think tank infrastructure in this country is organized to leap into the chasm right away after disaster has struck. The Heritage foundation and the American Enterprise Institute stockpile free market ideas in the way that people stockpile canned goods. I don't say that anyone is causing these disasters for their benefit, but in the book I do say that if there's anything the market delivers on is a stream of increasingly intense disasters. I think the current economic model in America is a slow motion disaster.

Now we're at the intersection of a weak public infrastructure that has been starved for two-and-a-half decades and increasingly heavy weather thanks to climate change, which I believe has a lot to do with this pursuit of short-term growth that is at the heart of the economic model, and we're going to have more and more of these disasters. If we aren't careful, each of these disasters offers the opening and a rationale for more disaster capitalism.

Frel: An economic feedback cycle, like the one scientists are warning about the compounding power of the effects of climate change.

Klein: If there's one thing we don't need on this planet it's disasters, because disaster capitalism will keep coming.

Frel: Since capital is not monolithic and has competing interests among economic elites, it seems as though the disaster capitalism model would have taught some of its adherents by now that it doesn't work in the long term, or at least have some elites who would fight against it. You write extensively on the free market laboratory implemented in Chile when Pinochet took over, which of course was a failure. Isn't there resistance to disaster capitalism at the levels of economic power and government that institute them?

Klein: Yes. In the Chile chapter I talk about how the country's manufacturing sector was furious that cheap products were flooding into the country, that people who were making the money in this case were the people involved in speculative finance. There are absolutely these competing interests. If you look at the Bush Administration, this is an administration that is particularly tied to the disaster capitalism complex: the arms dealing, homeland security, pharmaceuticals that treat pandemics and the oil industry, which benefits handsomely from each and every disaster.

Frel: There's also the phenomenon that the way the capital markets work is to search out weak points and opportunities in any circumstance in which they arise.

Klein: You can depend on capital to arrive at any vacuum and exploit any weakness. It is not the case that politicians need to facilitate this and fund it lavishly with taxpayer money. What is disturbing is the seamless alliance between government and capitalism.

Frel: You end the book with a quote from a declassified letter from Kissinger to Nixon where he says that the real threat of Allende wasn't what he was telling the public - that Allende wanted this totalitarian system. Kissinger wrote that the real threat was the problem of social democracy spreading. What was so scary about this idea to him?

Klein: I think it's always been the scary idea, because it's so popular. People like to have consumer choice and they also like to have basic necessities protected and to have a life with dignity; housing, water, electricity, health care. And with democratic socialism you can actually have both: a mixed economy that has an essentially controlled economic model but that has room for diversity within it and has these social guarantees. And that's always been the bigger threat to a radical vision of capitalism than totalitarian communism, because people don't actually like living in communist countries, but they really do like living in democratic socialist countries.

Jan Frel is AlterNet's senior editor.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/63178/

Asia Times:
French warmongering aids Iran's cause

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Sep 21, 2007

As if to symbolize the poor state of relations between the United States and Iran, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad this week was refused permission to lay a wreath at the World Trade Center site when he visits New York next week to attend a United Nations General Assembly meeting.

While officials said that Ahmadinejad's request to honor the site of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was because of ongoing construction, the US ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, was more candid, saying the US would not support the "photo op".

"Iran can demonstrate its seriousness about concern with regard to terrorism by taking concrete actions, such as dropping support for Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and suspending their uranium-enrichment program," Khalilzad said.

The atmosphere between Iran and some Western countries has certainly not improved since French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner made his provocative statement on the possibility of a war with Iran over its disputed nuclear program, and the negative fallout continues despite Kouchner's desperate attempt to "tone down" his warmongering diatribe.

Both the Iranian Parliament (Majlis) and France's senate have embarked on a common review of Kouchner's statement, and it is not far-fetched to anticipate a united front by Iranian and French parliamentarians on this matter in the near future.

Iranian government spokesperson Gholamhossein Elham characterized Kouchner's comments as "the dumb option of war", insisting that "everyone seeks peace and the Islamic Republic of Iran holds the flag of peace and equality". Iran may be constantly vilified, even demonized, in the West, particularly by right-wing politicians and media pundits, yet there have been stern reactions to Kouchner's undiplomatic anti-Iran outbursts. This is seen in various European capitals, in Moscow and by the reaction of Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who lambasted the war "hype". This leaves no doubt that the new French government has inflicted severe damage on its activist pursuit, together with the US, of a global consensus against Iran.

Lest we forget, during his pre-election campaign, French President Nicolas Sarkozy stated, "The important thing in this [Iranian nuclear] crisis is to maintain the firmness and the unity of the international community and its determination to contain the risks of proliferation. This will determine my action if elected."

Yet, in just a few months since his election, Sarkozy and his foreign-policy team have managed to spread the risks of proliferation, in part by continuing the previous French government's flawed nuclear-weapons policy and doctrine, tantamount to reneging on Paris's disarmament obligations, and in part by threatening other nations such as Iran.

Sarkozy's top concern, to "get France to be taken seriously again", per a recent editorial in the Economist, must now be declared on the wrong path, due to the simple yet inescapable fact that through their inadvisable statements on Iran, both Sarkozy and Kouchner have harmed France's international image.

"I don't want it to be said that I am a warmonger," Kouchner has reacted to the avalanche of European, Russian and Chinese criticisms of his televised comments on Iran on September 14, but the damage has been done and it will take much more effort on his and his government's part to fight that image.

Indeed, given Sarkozy's rush to forge new trans-Atlantic unity with the United States, it is hardly surprising that France today is afflicted with the same malady that has gripped the US over the past several years. In one of his important foreign-policy speeches, Sarkozy has stated, "It is unthinkable for Europe to forge its identity in opposition to the US." Yet, the reverse may be true as well, given the history of the US's interventionism, its blind support for Israel and its potentially disastrous arms-control policies.

Regarding the latter, former US president Jimmy Carter recently penned an article in the Guardian of London, lamenting the US's policies, worth reading by French officials:

By abandoning many of the nuclear arms agreements negotiated in the last 50 years, the United States has been sending mixed signals to North Korea, Iran and other nations with the technical knowledge to create nuclear weapons. Currently proposed agreements with India compound this quagmire and further undermine the global pact for peace represented by the nuclear non-proliferation regime.

Unfortunately, it is the US's and France's own nuclear policies and postures which have done much to undermine the cause of non-proliferation, given Sarkozy's statement at the Group of Eight summit in June that "the value of nuclear weapons is deterrence". He added that "France's nuclear strategy and nuclear doctrine are based on the protection of France's vital interests".

In other words, no "rupture" on this particular front with the self-described "activist" French president, rather the sad continuity of the same doctrine that arrogates to itself retaliation with nuclear weapons against conventional attacks; France retains a significant nuclear capability and has been an enthusiastic nuclear tester, with 210 tests to date.

Certainly, the French "want a president who acts and gets results", as Sarkozy promised during his election campaigns, but the net result of his government echoing Washington's and Israel's warmongering on Iran has been nothing but negative for France's standing in the international community, as well as for the much cherished "French values" that Sarkozy and company seem so intent on spreading globally.

Thus, instead of France's civilizing mission (la mission civilisatrice), what we have is right-wing rhetoric, warranting a scolding by Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who rightly told his French counterpart last week, "We are convinced no modern problem has a military solution, and that applies to the Iranian nuclear program as well."

Surprisingly, a top US retired general, John Abizaid, has indirectly criticized the French approach toward Iran by boldly stating that the world can learn to live "with a nuclear Iran". His argument is that the Iranians are not "suicidal" and would know that if they used their bombs against the US and/or Israel, there would be dire consequences. Abizaid insists those are his "private" views, yet given his high stature in the US military establishment they carry a great deal of weight, much to the chagrin of Washington's hawks seeking a war with Iran.

But then again, a problem with such statements is that they share with those hawkish politicians and pundits the same perception that Iran is attempting to develop nuclear weapons, irrespective of the lack of any viable evidence to substantiate that perception. In fact, this is the one question most of the world's media have not yet posed to Kouchner, who in his controversial comments categorically stated, "Our Iranian friends want to build a civil nuclear program. Everything they do seems to point to the contrary." [1]

But is this correct? Not so if one were to ask the IAEA officials who have made extensive inspection of Iran's nuclear and non-nuclear facilities, and who have placed under surveillance Iran's centrifuges in Natanz. Time and again, the IAEA has confirmed the absence of any evidence of military diversion, and this author has been told by a number of IAEA officials that as long as Iran abides by the terms of its agreements with the IAEA, the agency will be able to detect any diversion, such as misuse of the centrifuges for the production of highly-enriched uranium.

Yet, somehow, none of this seems to matter to the French, who are now trying to bandwagon with some elements in the US to legitimize yet another unprovoked war in the volatile Middle East in the name of combating weapons of mass destruction. Such "illiberal interventionism" hardly sits well with the very orientation of the Europe Union with respect to a peaceful foreign policy and international cooperation.

Kouchner is now seeking a unified European approach on Iran, but his quest for "precise sanctions" against the country may have become a casualty of what the BBC has described as "hardly diplomatic language". Already, Russia has gone on record as opposing any new UN sanctions on Iran. This alone means that the upcoming Security Council meeting on Iran could well experience a policy deadlock, given Iran's new nuclear transparency (a "tell-all" agreement with the IAEA) and the solid support of the majority of world's nations that are members of the Non-Aligned Movement.

Thus, come next week's gathering of global leaders at the UN, Iran can take advantage of the counter-French fallout of Kouchner's warmongering, for example by indirectly strengthening Tehran's bid to convince the world that it must accept Iran's rise to the status of a nuclear power.

Simultaneously, this new status confers on Iran a new challenge, that is, how to act as a great power without the benefit of nuclear might, deemed as a "weapon of the past" by Ahmadinejad. This Iran can manage by letting the world know that unlike the states that have nuclear weapons, Iran does not intend to utilize its knowledge to proliferate nuclear weapons and, while maintaining that capability for national-security reasons, is more determined to use its new clout to push vigorously for global nuclear disarmament.

After all, Iran has its own revolution-induced global mission, which sets it apart from the "world domineering powers", to use terminology popular with Ahmadinejad, who must nonetheless do more to propagate the peaceful mission and purpose of Iranian power, perhaps by directly involving Iran in the UN's peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts.

France's isolation due to its blunders on Iran is an opportunity for Iran to shine globally as a humanist leader in the crusade against the ultimate weapons of destruction. And that means making more explicit the Islamist humanist reservoir of the Iranian revolution of 1979, still pulsating in the country's policy hierarchy, and still serving as a compass for foreign policy action, partly buried under piles of militant rhetoric. The time for a new blossoming of Iran's language of peace has arrived, thanks partially to the opposite French rupture.

Note
1. In contrast to the US, which has no shared economic interests with Iran due to long-standing sanctions, France has strong ties with Iran. Several large French companies have projects in Iran, including Renault SA, which this year started production of its Logan model there, at an expected rate of 300,000 cars a year. Total SA, Europe's third-largest oil producer, owns a 30% stake in a liquefied natural gas venture in Iran called Pars LNG. French banks in 2005 accounted for US$5.9 billion of the $25.4 billion in loans made to Iran by lenders reporting to the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.

Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II21Ak04.html

Guardian: Enough is enough:
racial protest brings thousands to Southern town

Black Americans outraged at unequal treatment of pupils in high school dispute

Ed Pilkington in Jena
Friday September 21, 2007

Well before dawn it was already clear that Jena was waking up to a day unlike any other in its normally quiet Southern existence. Even in the dark, its narrow roads were gridlocked with a line of coaches and cars tailing back out of town.

The number plates in themselves told a story, of overnight rides made from all over the South - Alabama, Georgia, Texas - as well as New York, Illinois, Ohio, California. One man celebrated his long sleepless journey with a wry message across his T-shirt: "Have no fear, Birmingham is here."

Though they came from such far-flung places, the thousands of protesters who assembled in Jena yesterday had this in common: they all wore black, and most were black. They had descended on this tiny Southern town to show their anger for the injustice they believed had taken place here.

Another man's T-shirt told that part of the story: "I came to Jena to cut down the white tree of white supremacy."

The white tree in question - that was cut down recently - used to stand in the yard of Jena high school, its beautiful arched foliage offering respite from the Louisiana sun to the school's pupils. Or rather its white pupils, as black pupils never enjoyed its shade.

The events that culminated in yesterday's pre-dawn gridlock began under that tree in August last year when a black pupil, having first gained permission from the headmaster, dared to stand under it. The next day three nooses were found hanging from its branches. The incident brought to the surface tensions long present in Jena, a town with an 86% white population and a history of segregation. In Louisiana, a state where 335 black people were lynched between 1882 and 1968, even the number 3 bares the inevitable grim echo of the KKK. Yet the largely white school board chose merely to suspend the perpetrators from school for three days.

Emotions ran high. Fighting broke out sporadically among white and black pupils. In one incident a gun was pulled by a white teenager, in another bottles were cracked over the head of a black teenager, Robert Bailey.

Then on December 4 last year six black teenagers, Bailey among them, retaliated by kicking a white pupil unconscious. No charges were brought against the white pupils involved in the earlier violence; the six black youths, the Jena Six as they have come to be known, were accused of attempted second-degree murder with an upper sentence of 80 years in jail, even though their victim was back on his feet and at a school function on the same night of the fight.

The contrast in legal treatment of the pupils provoked a sense of raw injustice that began as a hushed murmur among the town's black residents. But it swelled with the amplifying affect of black radio stations and websites exhorting people to "get on the bus...again" until it became a roar.

Yesterday Jena looked as though it didn't know what had hit it. Its population of just 3,000 stood host to a crowd more than six times that size. Stood host, but reluctantly. Shops and public buildings were closed. The school board was shuttered up. One white shop owner taped up the front of his premises, telling a local paper that he feared "it's all going to be gone".

But he was wrong. By 8am the square in front of the local courthouse where the Jena Six were first charged was full to overflowing with peaceful protesters, many wearing "Enough is Enough" T-shirts and chanting "We shall overcome". By the time the Rev Al Sharpton, the Harlem-based black leader, stood up to speak the crowd was ecstatic. "This is the start of the 21st century civil rights movement," he said to a huge cry of "Yes!"

"In the 20th century we had to fight for where we sat on the bus, now we have to fight not to sit in court. We have gone from the plantation to the penitentiary."

History doesn't seem all that academic in a town like Jena, where houses still stand on wooden stilts and whose white town council unanimously voted against Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation in 1965. Mr Sharpton invoked those days when he alluded to Martin Luther King, who that year led the famous Selma to Montgomery march and whose eldest son of the same name was standing also on stage. "Martin Luther King faced Jim Crow. We come to Jena to face James Crow Junior."

Mr Sharpton had previously visited Mychal Bell, the only one of the Jena Six to have been tried. Bell was found guilty on reduced charges of second-degree battery and was due yesterday to be sentenced to up to 15 years in jail - hence the demonstration. But last Friday his verdict was overturned on appeal on the grounds that he was 16 when the fight happened and he should have been tried in juvenile court. He remains in jail until the legal authorities decide whether he should be tried in a such a court.

"Mr Bell was in handcuffs and leg irons," Mr Sharpton said. "That can't be right for a schoolyard fight."

As the sound of the preacher's voice boomed off the walls of the courthouse, you could only guess the thoughts of Jena's white residents. Few were visible on the streets; many had placed no-trespassing tape right around their homes. One group sat in rocking chairs on their porch watching the march pass by, but declined to say anything to reporters.

Frank Hennigan, a white man who lives about 50 miles from Jena, was less reticent. "This is all being overblown. We are being made out to be rednecked racists and that's not true. The Klan has been dissolved for years."

Mr Hennigan said the nooses from the tree was "just a prank" that happened every year.

Asked about the apparently harsh legal treatment he replied: "They are just trying to get these kinds of people off the streets so everybody who minds their own business can go on their happy little ways."

Reed Walters, the district attorney at the centre of the furore, avoided the demonstration, but before it took place accused the media of hyping the story. "This case is and never has been about race. It is about justice for the victim and holding people accountable for their actions."

But this was not Mr Walters' day. His words were drowned out by tens of thousands of black men and women who felt they had started, together, to find their voice once again.

"Our jails are overflowing with brothers and sons who shouldn't be there," said Michael Vaisden, a black radio star who has been seminal in spreading the story of the Jena Six across the US. "We will defend our children by any means necessary."

Vince Taylor, who had driven through the night from Durham, Georgia gave a whoop of approval. He knew what the talkshow host meant. "I saw a burning cross on my yard when I was 10 years old," he said. "That image is right here in my mind - it never goes away. It's become a part of my life, and I'm here today to stop it becoming a part of any other child's."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2174042,00.html

Guardian:
Labour tries to block new BAE inquiry

Request from US investigators is ignored by home secretary

David Leigh and Rob Evans
Friday September 21, 2007

British ministers are refusing to cooperate with the US criminal investigation into allegations of corruption against BAE, Britain's biggest arms company, the Guardian can disclose.

More than two months after an official request for mutual legal assistance (MLA) was received from Washington, the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, has not yet allowed it to be acted upon. The US investigators believe the British are being obstructive.

But legal sources said yesterday that the inquiry team had not been deterred by the UK government's hostile attitude. Some have already begun taking statements from key British witnesses.

The formal request for assistance came from the US department of justice earlier in the summer, but Ms Smith has refused to pass it on to the Serious Fraud Office for processing in the normal way.

This is unusual behaviour towards a major ally, with whom legal cooperation is normally automatic. Last night, the Home Office said its failure to pass on the request was "not unprecedented", but could not give any example of similar behaviour.

The SFO possesses important files on BAE gained from its own major inquiry into £1bn of payments to Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia and other Swiss bank accounts linked to the Saudi royal family. But SFO investigators are not allowed to speak to US authorities until Home Office officials forward the paperwork.

The agency was forced to halt a criminal investigation earlier this year by the then prime minister Tony Blair, who said it threatened the national interest and was upsetting the Saudi regime.

The Home Office's refusal to cooperate with the US followed a similar attempt earlier this year to conceal the payments to Prince Bandar from the international bribery watchdog, the Paris-based OECD, which says it fears Britain is breaching a worldwide anti-bribery treaty to which it is supposedly a signatory.

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat frontbencher, said last night: "There is no justification for delay. This information should be handed over immediately. Again, one is left with the suspicion that by refusing to cooperate, the government is more interested in securing arms deals than in the pursuit of justice.

"It makes a mockery of the government's assertion that they are robustly tackling corruption."

A fresh front against BAE was opened yesterday, when shareholders in the US launched a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the company's directors accusing them of corruption. A spokesman for BAE, which is 50% owned by US shareholders and holds lucrative contracts with the Pentagon, said : "The company intends to vigorously defend any such proceedings."

Prince Bandar, who is also named as a defendant, has not denied receiving cash and a free gift of an aeroplane, but he says it was for legitimate purposes.

Other defendants named in the US suit include former Conservative defence secretary Michael Portillo, who was given a post on BAE's board after helping negotiate an arms deal with Qatar; Sir Nigel Rudd, who recently joined BAE's board as a non-executive director; and Sir Dick Evans, the original architect of the £43bn al-Yamamah arms deal at the centre of the allegations.

The Washington claim has been made in the name of a small pension fund, the City of Harper Woods employees' retirement system, which only holds the equivalent of 14,000 BAE shares, less than 1% of the company's stock. But it is intended that other US shareholders will join in.

The suit claims that BAE's directors have wrecked the company's reputation and exposed it to heavy fines and penalties, by conniving at "improper and/or illegal bribes, kickbacks and other payments", while claiming all the while in public that BAE was a "highly ethical, law-abiding corporation".

They say these "imprudent and unlawful actions have had an inevitable damaging impact and a very negative one indeed for BAE's long-term future". The San Diego law firm won $7bn (£3.5bn) for investors in Enron after its collapse. Last year, it started a lawsuit against the board of BP, on behalf of shareholders, claiming that executives had been negligent in their handling of safety problems.

Evidence published by the Guardian shows that BAE and its corporate predecessors have been making secret payments to Saudi royals, with covert British government support from both major parties, for arms deals stretching back more than 30 years.

Last week, Saudi Arabia signed a fresh arms deal with Gordon Brown's administration worth up to £20bn for BAE's Typhoon aircraft.

The Saudis had been threatening to withdraw from the contract. King Abdullah has also been invited on a state visit to Britain next month.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/baefiles/story/0,,2173947,00.html

Jeune Afrique:
Emigration : le projet français de test ADN vu d'Afrique

AFRIQUE - 19 septembre 2007 - par AFP

"Ségrégationniste", liberticide, "horrible": en Afrique, beaucoup dénoncent le projet de loi français de test ADN pour les candidats au regroupement familial, rappelant que les liens familiaux ne se déterminent pas seulement par le sang sur ce continent.

L'instauration du test ADN est contenue dans un projet en débat depuis mardi à l'Assemblée nationale française, qui durcit les conditions d'entrée des étrangers en France.

Cette initiative n'a pas encore fait l'objet de commentaires officiels dans la plupart des pays d'Afrique, mais la société civile et la presse n'ont pas attendu l'issue du vote pour réagir.

Le projet fait partie d'une série de procédures "ségrégationnistes et avilissantes", accuse ainsi l'auteur d'un commentaire publié par le site GlobalNet de Tunisie et consacré à la politique d'immigration en Europe.

"L'ADN, test porte-malheur pour Nicolas Sarkozy", titrait mercredi le journal Aujourd'hui Le Maroc (privé), rappelant que la création en France d'un ministère de l'Immigration et de l'identité nationale avait déjà suscité "les plus vives réactions" au sein de la gauche et des intellectuels.

Pour Amina Bouayach, présidente de l'Organisation marocaine des droits humains (OMDH, indépendante), une telle initiative est simplement liberticide.

Ce projet "viole le droit fondamental des individus à être libres", a déclaré Mme Bouayach à l'AFP à Rabat, ajoutant que "les liens familiaux ne peuvent être limités à des liens de sang".

La même idée est défendue au Sénégal, dont le quotidien pro-gouvernemental Le Soleil parle d'une "bien vilaine tentative de tri dans la famille africaine, où les demi-frères sont des frères entiers, les cousins germains des frères pleins, les co-épouses des mères intégrales de tous les enfants d'un même père."

Alors, "vu d'Afrique, ce projet de test d'ADN, s'il était adopté, serait une horrible machine puisqu'elle sert à diviser ce qui, en Afrique, appartient à tout le monde: le sang de la famille", ajoute l'auteur de l'article.

En Algérie, pays qui n'est pas concerné par le projet en raison de la particularité des relations avec Paris, la presse s'est faiblement fait l'écho du tollé suscité en France par le projet de texte, dénoncé notamment par des ONG, des scientifiques et même au sein du parti au pouvoir.

Le quotidien L'Expression souligne cependant "l'absurdité" de la politique d'immigration de la France, qui va "jusqu'à demander des tests ADN aux simples demandeurs de visas touristiques (pour les pays du Tiers-Monde, bien sûr)" et "instaurer des quotas annuels d'expulsions".

Nicolas Sarkozy, qui avait déjà durci la législation alors qu'il était ministre de l'Intérieur, a promis une immigration "maîtrisée" et "choisie" lors de sa campagne pour l'élection présidentielle.

Après son élection, début mai 2007, son gouvernement s'est fixé un objectif de 25.000 expulsions par an et a accentué la pression policière sur les étrangers en situation irrégulière.

"Il n'y a pas que la France qui pense ainsi" en Europe, estime L'Expression.

Les ressortissants de la République démocratique du Congo (RDC) doivent, par exemple, se plier à un test ADN depuis des années dans le cadre du contrôle des regroupements familiaux en Belgique.

Ces tests ne sont pas effectués en RDC, faute de laboratoire et par précaution contre la fraude. "Nous recourons aux laboratoires d'autres pays", a précisé à l'AFP le médecin Dieudonné Diabeno, directeur de l'Hôpital général de Kinshasa.

Aujourd'hui Le Maroc prévient: la polémique autour du test ADN "a de fortes chances de mettre fin à l'idylle que vit Nicolas Sarkozy avec l'opinion publique depuis son élection."

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP94137emigreuqirf0

Jeune Afrique:
L'Afrique tend à abolir la peine de mort

AFRIQUE - 20 septembre 2007 - par AFP

L'Afrique tend, comme le reste du monde, à abolir la peine capitale, dans les textes ou dans les faits, mais des pays y exécutent encore des condamnés à mort de façon expéditive et parfois secrète.

Le Gabon vient de rejoindre le groupe des pays africains qui ont décidé l'abolition. Lorsque son Parlement aura entériné la décision adoptée le 14 septembre en Conseil des ministres, il deviendra le 15e pays africain à avoir renoncé à la punition capitale, selon Amnesty International.

En juillet 2007, le Rwanda avait, lui aussi, aboli la peine de de mort.

Le premier à l'avoir fait fut le Cap Vert, en 1981, suivi en 1992 d'un autre pays lusophone, l'Angola.

Du Sénégal au Liberia et à la Côte d'Ivoire, de l'Afrique du Sud au Mozambique et à Djibouti, le courant abolitionniste n'est pas marqué par des localisations géographiques. Chaque pays a ses raisons.

Ce sont parfois les changements radicaux de régime. Ainsi l'Afrique du Sud, où la peine capitale est abolie en juin 1995, un an après l'élection de Nelson Mandela.

Sous l'apartheid, 1.109 personnes furent exécutées de 1980 à 1989, selon le Centre pour l'étude de la violence et la Réconciliation.

Dans le cas de Kigali, le Tribunal pénal international pour le Rwanda (TPIR), mis en place par l'ONU, exigeait l'abolition avant d'accepter de transférer à la justice rwandaise des personnes accusées de génocide.

On constate un fort mouvement abolitionniste dans les faits, plus que dans les textes. Ainsi une vingtaine de pays, où la peine capitale est théoriquement toujours en vigueur, n'ont plus "tué légalement" des condamnés depuis dix ans, voire vingt ans.

Au Maroc, les tribunaux prononcent encore des condamnations à la peine capitale, dans les crimes de droit commun et ceux liés au terrorisme. Mais la dernière exécution, celle d'un commissaire de police condamné pour de multiples viols de femmes, remonte à 1994.

Certains pays n'appliquent plus la peine de mort depuis plus de 20 ans: Mali, Guinée, Burkina Faso, Mauritanie, Cameroun, Congo, Centrafrique Madagascar, Kenya...

Les pays secoués par des rébellions maintiennent la peine capitale. Mais en République démocratique du Congo (RDC), elle n'est plus appliquée depuis le début de la transition politique, en 2003. Même si elle est encore régulièrement prononcée.

Autre particularité, la distinction entre crimes de droit commun et d'Etat. La Guinée-Bissau, par exemple, n'applique plus la peine de mort pour les crimes de droit commun depuis 1985, mais, depuis, une dizaine de personnes ont été exécutées pour leur implication dans des tentatives de coup d'Etat.

Les mouvements de la société civile contre la peine capitale sont peu entendus. Parfois, la "vox populi" en réclame même le rétablissement, comme en Afrique du Sud, en raison de la montée de la criminalité. Mais l'abolition semble irréversible.

Reste une dizaine de pays qui exécutent toujours, régulièrement, parfois en nombre comme le Soudan qui, selon Amnesty, a exécuté 65 personnes en 2006.

Certains sont de petits pays, rarement à l'affiche, comme la Guinée équatoriale ou le Botswana. Souvent, il s'agit de régimes autocratiques, comme le Tchad, la Libye, l'Ethiopie, le Zimbabwe, l'Erythrée.

En Erythrée, au régime très secret, ce sont les cours martiales qui prononcent les peines, et aucun chiffre n'est publié.

Un autre pays se distingue: la Somalie, déchirée par une guerre civile interminable. Les exécutions y sont sommaires, extra-judiciaires. Et il existe toujours des zones grises du continent (est de la RDC, Darfour, Centrafrique, Somalie...) où il n'est même pas question de débattre ou non d'une abolition. On y exécute, la plupart du temps des civils, en toute impunité.

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/article_
depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP52717versutromed0

Mail & Guardian:
African deluge brings misery to millions

20 September 2007

The small plane banks steeply to the east and the extent of the floods in the low-lying Teso region of Uganda become clear: kilometre upon kilometre of low-lying pasture land submerged, tens of thousands of hectares of staple crops like cassava, millet and groundnuts waterlogged. There are impassable roads, overflowing rivers, stranded cattle and devastated bridges. Villages are cut off and mud houses and roads have been swept away.

But this is a fraction of the devastation caused by some of the heaviest rains in memory to have hit a great swath of the continent from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa.

According to the United Nations on Wednesday, 18 of the poorest and normally driest countries in Africa, from Senegal, Mauritania, Mali and Burkina Faso in the west, to Kenya, Sudan and Ethiopia in the east, have been seriously hit by months of torrential rains which, meterologists forecast, will continue in places for many more weeks.

"We believe at least 650 000 homes have been destroyed, 1,5-million people affected and nearly 200 people so far drowned," said Elisabeth Brys, at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) in Geneva. "This is harvest time for many countries and there are already food shortages."

The rains, linked to ocean temperature changes of El Niño, have caught governments off guard. Many of the worst affected regions are remote from capitals and assessments are still being made.

Burkina Faso, Togo and Ghana have declared an official disaster and appealed for emergency international aid. More nations are expected to follow.

On Wednesday local government officials in Uganda appealed for help and accused their government of neglect. "We told the government about the emergency two months ago but we have received no help so far. They have downplayed the problem," said Stephen Ojola, governor of Soroti district, where many areas are cut off and where thousands of subsistence farmers have lost their crops.

Ojola said: "The prolonged rains started months ago. Now the situation is getting worse. There's no food here, people are hungry. This is harvest time for peanuts, millet and cassava, but it has all rotted in the ground. Some areas are unreachable. We cannot get food in."

Ugandan health groups say the floods have led to nearly double the usual number of malaria and diarrhoea cases. Springs, wells and boreholes have been contaminated as latrines have overflowed. "Higher incidences of malaria, diarrhoea, coughs, and eye infections are being reported," said a local government report on Soroti this week. "The stagnant water is a breeding ground for mosquitoes."

The Ugandan government denied it was slow in responding, saying it was appealing to international organisations. "The situation has been worsening by the hour. We need boats and helicopters to deliver emergency aid," said Musa Ecweru, minister for disaster preparedness, after visiting Soroti last weekend. He said aid groups were now distributing food, drugs, shelter and household kits.

Meteorologists this week said the floods were likely to worsen in Uganda over the next two to three months.

The worst affected country may be Sudan, where 130 people have died since the rains started in early July, and more than 200 000 people have been made homeless. Justin Bagirishya, head of the southern Sudan office of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), told Reuters this week that 16 000 people were cut off with no access to humanitarian aid. "There are no usable roads or airstrips," he said.

In Ghana the floods have caused the deaths of at least 32 people and made 260 000 homeless, its government said. Some sources say the situation was worsened in Ghana by Burkina Faso opening a dam to cut dangerous water levels.

The floods have hit the most vulnerable people the hardest, the UN says.

According to Unicef most of the affected people were already living on a knife edge with food shortages before the floods arrived. A high percentage in some countries are living in refugee camps. A spokesperson for Christian Aid, which on Wednesday appealed for help, said: "In some cases the camps have also flooded."

The WFP said it was providing emergency food for seven countries and appealed internationally for more money. In Uganda $65-million is needed to feed 300 000 flood victims as well as refugees and displaced people for the next six months, said a spokesperson.

An initial assessment of Togo by the International Red Cross on Wednesday underlined the difficulty in delivering aid there.

The UN's World Meteorological Organisation warned in July that a disruptive La Niña pattern - unusually cold sea temperatures - was occurring in the Pacific. "The combination of tropical wind patterns over the Pacific and cooler than normal sea temperatures [off South America] generally has an impact on a planetary scale," said Rupa Kumar Kolli, a WMO scientist.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/
breaking_news__africa/&articleid=319766

New Statesman:
The great crusader

Ken Loach's blistering new film about Britain's migrant workforce attacks the culture of "flexible labour". Gordon Brown is enemy number one, he tells Amy Raphael

Amy Raphael
Published 20 September 2007

Ken Loach sits at an old wooden table, his corduroy suit crumpled, the collar twisted. The small back room of his Soho office is cluttered. Propped sideways along one wall sits a framed poster for Kes. The fireplace is filled with untouched boxes of champagne and cigars; on the mantelpiece sit a dozen awards, including, hidden inside an austere box, the Palme d'Or he won last year for The Wind That Shakes the Barley ("It's embarrassing that they keep it there. You can touch the holy relic, yes - it'll cure your rheumatism"). He talks softly, makes no assumptions that you have seen any of his films and, unusually, often asks questions back.

At 71, and after four decades directing, Loach is still driven to make films about people who remain largely invisible in society. His latest - It's a Free World . . . - goes out on Channel 4 this month before being released on DVD, having already picked up the Best Screenplay award at the Venice Film Festival. It looks at the world of migrant labour in Britain, which, says Loach, he had been discussing with his long-time collab orator and screenwriter Paul Laverty for some time. "We were trying to get into the mentality of the people who do the exploiting. We wanted to say, 'It's not an aberration - it is the way people think society should be run.'"

The story follows Angie (played with great energy by the newcomer Kierston Wareing), a feisty, sexy single mum in her early thirties who sets up a recruitment agency for migrant workers. Increasingly seduced by easy cash, she starts to bend the rules and break the law. Along the way, she slowly loses her compassion, starts seeing the illegal workers she employs as a means to an end, and finally lets her entrepreneurialism give way to exploitation. Loach says that his primary motivation was not to effect change, but to examine "why [exploitation] happens. Angie's logic is inexorable . . . The clothes are in the supermarkets. We're buying them. People are living in tin container sheds with no windows. That's central to our economy now. Families fall apart because of flexible labour - which is something Gordon Brown advocates."

Loach's disillusionment with Labour is well charted: he joined the party in the early 1960s and left in the mid-1990s - later, perhaps, than one might have expected, considering some of his views. "I stayed in the party throughout the 1980s because there was still a radical element that was critical of the leadership," he says. "Then, at some point in the late 1980s or very early 1990s, the party started paying subs by deducting money from members' credit cards or by direct debit. For me, it was the last vestige of the local organisation disappearing: no one was coming round to collect the payment and have a chat about politics any more. So it was a small but final straw that made me leave."

Naturally, Loach was a fierce critic of Tony Blair ("a right-wing careerist"), and is no more enamoured of his successor. "Gordon Brown is and always will be committed to the interests of big business, so there's no way I want to be involved in the Labour Party again. It would be of real benefit to those still left in the Labour Party to recognise it for what it is - as a party of business. I was also hugely disappointed by the failure of John McDonnell's camp to contest the leadership and by Brown's not even allowing his name on the ballot paper."

Loach still defends his association with the Respect party, which dates back years. "There seemed to be the possibility of a new left rising out of the anti-war movement, around the central ideas of opposing American imperialism, opposing privatisation and supporting publicly owned industries and public services. Around those central planks there was space for a movement of the left. So I was involved with Respect from the outset and am still a supporter." He does, however, hint at some distance between himself and Respect's figurehead, George Galloway. "When organisations are small, people come to the fore. In larger organs there is more space for a broad front." What did he make of Galloway's Big Brother appearance? "Well, it's not something I would have done. I think Galloway has made contributions. After all, he is the only person to have left the Labour Party in parliament because of the war. While people can sniff at his appearance on Big Brother, he's the only one who has left the party on principle. And accused Blair of telling lies, which he did, and the whole cabinet of being war criminals, which they are. So there are bigger issues, really."

Despite his political activism, Loach is reluctant to describe himself as a political director: "Just a director, please." But neither does he place himself squarely in the film world. "I'm not a great cinema-goer. I enjoyed The Lives of Others, and now I'm going to see Nick Broomfield's film about Morecambe Bay."

In addition to It's a Free World . . . a two-volume DVD box set of Loach's films has just been released, spanning the 40 years from Cathy Come Home to The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Yet, asked if he is proud of his back catalogue, he at first looks blank. "Well, I don't know." Then he smiles: "I can't pretend it wasn't nice to see the best films all together, because it was." Does he have one or two particular favourites? "No, not really. I couldn't say that. But the one I was glad to resurrect was The Gamekeeper, because very few people know about it." The Gamekeeper (1980) is a hauntingly beautiful film based on a Barry Hines novel (Hines also wrote the screenplay; he worked with Loach on five films, the most famous of which is still Kes) about a steelworker-turned-gamekeeper. While he revels in his new job, his son is bullied and his wife isolated. The poachers he chases off the estate are his former colleagues. Like much of Loach's back catalogue, it was dismissed by some critics as bleak, but in fact it has the signature romance and humour that are so often overlooked.

Loach's films have usually had a more sympathetic reception in continental Europe than they get at home. The Wind That Shakes the Barley was widely distributed in France, but received only art-house distribution in the UK. The director says he almost gave up film-making during the 1980s. "I did a whole series of documentaries that were banned. I did a play at the Royal Court [Jim Allen's Perdition, about Nazism and the Zionists] that was outrageously pulled by Max Stafford-Clark." In desperation, he turned to the most un-Loachlike pursuit of making television adverts for, among other things, Tetley's Bitter and the Guardian. "Fortunately for me, I wasn't very good at them so I wasn't asked to do a lot."

He resists, however, the temptation to moan about film budgets. "It's not really a struggle. Money beyond a certain point is just corrupting. If everyone knows that one or two people are getting huge amounts of money, it changes the relationship." In his work, he abides by socialist principles: no Winnebagos, everyone hangs out in the same little room together, and all cast members are treated as equals. "It's what they call a union crew and it's well above union rates. It's efficient, and everyone is much happier."

So what keeps him going? One important element, he says, is family. "I've been very lucky. I've been married for a very long time, very happily. I get told off on a regular basis, but who doesn't? There are lots of grandchildren I don't spend enough time with. But film-making for me is the human equivalent of that dog food, Pal - it prolongs active life."

"It's a Free World . . ." is broadcast on Channel 4 on 24 September (9pm); the two-volume "Ken Loach Collection" (Sixteen Films) is out now

Ken Loach: the CV

1936 Born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, only child of his mother and electrician father.

1963 Joins the BBC as a trainee television director after graduating from Oxford in law.

1965 Up the Junction (BBC), portraying life in impoverished south London, marks the start of Loach's creative partnership with Tony Garnett, the story editor and producer.

1966 Achieves national fame with Cathy Come Home, spurring public outrage at the state of housing in Britain.

1969 Makes his best-known film, Kes, the story of a troubled boy and his kestrel.

1984 A documentary about the miners' strike, Which Side Are You On?, is commissioned for The South Bank Show but because of its "highly partial view on a controversial subject" LWT never screens it.

2004 Elected to the Respect coalition's national council, having resigned from the Labour Party.

2006 Wins the Palme d'Or at Cannes for The Wind That Shakes the Barley and is awarded the Academy Fellowship at the Bafta Awards.

Hermione Buckland-Hoby

http://www.newstatesman.com/200709200030

Página/12:
Euro, refugio en lugar del dólar

La moneda europea alcanzó su máximo en relación con el dólar. La debilidad de EE.UU. animó una corrida internacional contra el verde.

Por Claudio Zlotnik
Viernes, 21 de Septiembre de 2007

El euro se vendió ayer en las casas de cambio a un promedio de 4,50 pesos. Ese nivel record estuvo en línea con lo ocurrido en los mercados internacionales, donde la moneda europea se cotizó a 1,41 dólar, máxima cotización desde el lanzamiento de la nueva divisa. La suba impulsó a grandes y pequeños inversores a incrementar su tenencia en euros. De hecho, algunas agencias del microcentro están vendiendo más euros que billetes verdes. El oro también se convirtió en vedette, al trepar a su máximo nivel en 27 años. El valor de cada onza orilla los 740 dólares.

La fiebre por el euro se potenció durante la última semana, con la escalada de su cotización a nivel internacional. Algunas casas de cambio llegaron a venderla ayer a 4,55 y 4,60 pesos. Como suele ocurrir en la city cuando sube el dólar, esta vez el pico de demanda se dio sobre la moneda europea. La agencia Arpenta, una de las líderes del mercado, colocó más euros que dólares. La relación fue que de cada diez operaciones de venta, seis fueron por euros y cuatro por dólares.

El retroceso del billete estadounidense, que se inició en el año 2002, se acentúo con la crisis hipotecaria y su impacto en los mercados financieros globales. Frente a la incertidumbre, grandes inversores desarmaron posiciones en dólares y se pasaron a euros. La tendencia se profundizó esta semana, luego de que la Reserva Federal (banca central estadounidense) decretó una baja de medio punto en la tasa de interés. Además, ocho de cada diez analistas de bancos de inversión líderes de Wall Street apuestan a que la FED volverá a bajar la tasa en su próxima reunión de directorio, el 31 de octubre.

Ahora, el costo de los préstamos interbancarios se encuentra en el 4,75 por ciento anual. Ese nivel resulta superior al 4 por ciento que rige en la zona del euro. A pesar de esta situación, los inversores prefieren el euro al dólar. “La expectativa mayoritaria es que la caída del billete verde se profundizará todavía más. No podría arriesgar cuál será el límite de esa desvalorización, pero nos encontramos en medio de una especie de corrida contra el dólar que se retroalimenta”, comentó, en diálogo con Página/12, el experto en finanzas internacionales José Siaba Serrate. Esa perspectiva es también refrendada por varias bancas centrales, que en los últimos meses incrementaron sus posiciones en euros. Una de esas bancas fue la argentina (ver nota aparte). Ayer, a la depreciación del billete verde contribuyó una versión, publicada por el periódico británico Daily Telegraph, de que Arabia Saudita abandonaría el vínculo de su moneda con el dólar.

A favor de la divisa europea también juega una mayor fortaleza económica del Viejo Continente. En los últimos cuatro trimestres, el PIB estadounidense creció a un promedio del 1,9 por ciento anual, en una clara señal de desaceleración. La zona del euro, en cambio, se expandió, en ese mismo período, al 2,5 por ciento anual. En esta ola especulativa en torno de las monedas, hay un dato inquietante: todavía se desconoce la dimensión real de la explosión de la burbuja inmobiliaria en los Estados Unidos.

En este contexto turbulento, el oro se convirtió en uno de los refugios favoritos de los inversores y ese fuerte incremento en la demanda impulsó su cotización. Cada onza ya vale 738,5 dólares, en lo que se constituyó como el precio más elevado desde enero de 1980.

También el petróleo de Texas alcanzó ayer un nuevo registro histórico, al negociarse en el mercado electrónico de Nueva York por encima de los 84 dólares el barril. Finalmente, el WTI –de referencia para el mercado argentino– cerró en 83,32 dólares, un 1,7 por ciento por encima de la jornada anterior.

© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/economia/2-91723-2007-09-21.html

Página/12:
Santa guerra entre Al Qaida y Pakistán

OSAMA BIN LADEN LLAMO A DERROCAR AL GOBIERNO DE PERVEZ MUSHARRAF

En un video emitido por la cadena Al Jazeera, Bin Laden hizo su tercera aparición en dos semanas para decir que la represión en la Mezquita Roja demostró que el presidente paquistaní es un lacayo de Washington y debe renunciar. El mensaje coincidió con el anuncio del gobierno fijando fecha para la próxima elección.

Viernes, 21 de Septiembre de 2007

El líder de Al Qaida, Osama bin Laden, llamó a los paquistaníes a rebelarse contra el presidente Pervez Musharraf en una grabación difundida ayer por la cadena árabe Al Jazeera, y dijo que el ataque de este año a una mezquita paquistaní y la alianza del mandatario con Estados Unidos demostraban que es un “infiel”. Por su parte, el ejército paquistaní, en respuesta al mensaje del líder de Al Qaida, aseguró ayer que eliminará a “los terroristas”. También el médico egipcio Ayman al Zawahiri volvió a aparecer ayer en un nuevo video en el que pidió “limpiar el magreb musulmán de los hijos de Francia y España”.

El asalto a la Mezquita Roja de Islamabad de julio “demuestra la insistencia de Musharraf en continuar su lealtad, sumisión y colaboración con los estadounidenses contra los musulmanes, y hace obligatoria la rebelión armada contra él y su remoción del cargo”, dijo Bin Laden en la grabación, emitida junto a un video. “Por tanto, cuando hay capacidad para ello, es obligatorio rebelarse contra el gobernante apóstata, como es el caso”, continúa el líder de Al Qaida. Musharraf, estrecho aliado de Estados Unidos en la lucha antiterrorista, pretende que el Parlamento de su país lo confirme en el cargo para un nuevo mandato el 6 de octubre.

La transcripción del mensaje fue elaborada por Laura Mansfield, una experta estadounidense en temas de terrorismo encargada de analizar los mensajes de los milicianos islámicos. La voz de Bin Laden se había escuchado previamente en una grabación en video difundida ayer por varias páginas de Internet islamistas. El anuncio se conoce el mismo día en que la comisión electoral paquistaní anunció las elecciones presidenciales. Se trata del tercer video de Bin Laden en el mes de septiembre. El pasado día 11, en el sexto aniversario de los atentados del 11-S, el líder de Al Qaida homenajeaba a uno de los terroristas que participaron en los ataques, Abu Musab Walid al Shehri. El prófugo saudita, a quien se supone escondido en las montañas entre Pakistán y Afganistán, se explayaba además contra los gobernantes musulmanes, a los que acusaba de ser unos “vasallos de los cristianos”, junto con los medios de comunicación y los ulemas (sabios islámicos).

El video del 11 de septiembre tenía una duración de 47 minutos y consistía en una foto fija de Bin Laden superpuesta sobre imágenes del atentado contra las Torres Gemelas de Nueva York. Su publicación había sido anunciada por el órgano informativo de Al Qaida, Al Sahab. El pasado 7 de septiembre el líder de Al Qaida apareció en un video en el que, aunque no amenazaba a Estados Unidos, sí advertía que es peligroso que el presidente George W. Bush se resista a reconocer que está perdiendo en Irak e invitaba a los estadounidenses a abrazar el Islam.

El “número dos” de Al Qaida, el egipcio Ayman al Zawahiri, volvió a aparecer ayer en un nuevo video en el que pidió “limpiar el magreb musulmán de los hijos de Francia y España”. Este nuevo video, dedicado sobre todo a alabar a los talibanes afganos, atacar al presidente paquistaní Pervez Musharraf y alabar a los “muyahidines” (combatientes islámicos) en Irak, contiene por vez primera amenazas contra los españoles y sus intereses dentro del magreb. El médico egipcio, prófugo de su país desde 1984, considera que es un deber de los combatientes “liberar el territorio de Al Andalus arrebatado”, una retórica que no es nueva en la red terrorista.

En respuesta al mensaje de Bin Laden, el ejército paquistaní aseguró que eliminará a “los terroristas”. “Tenemos el propósito, el objetivo y el deber nacional de eliminar a los terroristas y erradicar el extremismo”, señaló el portavoz del ejército, general Waheed Arshad, tras asegurar que las amenazas “vertidas a través de videos o de cualquier otro modo, no nos pueden disuadir” de cumplir con ese deber. El vocero añadió además que la fuerza “seguirá desempeñando su papel contra los terroristas donde quiera que se encuentren, ya sea en las zonas tribales –en el norte– o en cualquier otro sitio”.

© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-91699-2007-09-21.html

Página/12:
López

Por Sandra Russo
Viernes, 21 de Septiembre de 2007

Esta semana se cumplió un año de la desaparición de Julio López, y aunque los diarios reseñaron el aniversario del secuestro, y la televisión y la radio amplificaron la noticia, el caso López es un ejemplo de cómo los medios no siempre imponen la agenda de la sociedad, esto es, para aquellos que nunca cursaron Comunicación, los temas circulantes entre la gente: la gente habla de lo que hablan los medios. Pues bien, nadie habló de Julio López. Nadie habla de Julio López. Entre los casos resonantes que atraen y capturan la atención de la opinión pública, no podría incluirse el caso López. Es un desaparecido en democracia también desaparecido de la conciencia colectiva.

Se dice por ahí que el recuerdo es siempre el recuerdo de un recuerdo. Que la memoria actúa no sólo como reactivadora del pasado, sino que la evocación de un suceso se replica en el próximo recuerdo, con sus pequeñas desviaciones y sus agregados y sus recortes, y finalmente del hecho original queda poco, pero es eso la memoria: siempre reactualiza nuestros sentimientos, porque esas desviaciones y esos recortes se van adaptando a los que vamos siendo; es la estrategia de la memoria contra el olvido. El olvido corta lazos. La memoria los reconstruye.

No es de ahora, que se cumple un año. Desde hace mucho me pregunto, y escribí un par de notas al respecto, por qué el caso López escandalizaba tan poco. Por qué parecía haber una costra entre la sensibilidad de un/a argentino/a común y corriente, y el hecho de que haya desaparecido un testigo clave en un juicio cuyo acusado fue luego condenado a prisión perpetua por genocidio. La gente no quiere oír hablar de genocidio. La gente está harta. Vaya gente. La gente antes no se enteraba de nada. Un patrullero estacionaba en la cuadra, se escuchaban tiros, desaparecía un vecino, y nadie sabía lo que pasaba. Ok. Después la gente, cuando vino el juicio a las Juntas y se leyó el Nunca Más, lo hizo best seller. Allí se detallaba cómo, por ejemplo, se picaneaba a mujeres embarazadas delante de sus maridos, o se violaba por el ano a las prisioneras con la culata de un revólver. Y los tiraban al mar. Dios mío, decía la gente. Los tiraban vivos al mar. Y especialmente tiraban al mar a las mujeres que habían parido en los campos clandestinos. Las tiraban al río y se apropiaban de sus bebés. La gente no podía creer lo que había pasado en este país. Dios mío, repetían las señoras allá por el ’85, cuando la Justicia estaba todavía muy lejos, pero los hechos estaban claros. La gente no podía no decir Dios mío, porque no existía ningún discurso circulante para defender un exterminio como el que se había llevado a cabo. Lo clandestino de los asesinatos refrendó el pacto de silencio entre el poder y la gente. Y por gente, que ya va siendo hora de definir la palabra, entiendo en esta nota a todos aquellos y aquellas que carecen del mínimo sentido crítico de la realidad, y políticamente son el rociador de ideología favorito de todos: izquierda y derecha quieren germinar ahí, en lo que cualquiera entiende, en lo que cualquiera cree, porque ése es el único camino hacia la Meca. Pero cuando la Meca estuvo en manos de asesinos, la gente no se dio cuenta.

Después no hubo más gente y hubo ciudadanos. Eran los flamantes habitantes de un país democrático, que se proponía, como una quinceañera, tener un vestido de tul rosa para su fiesta, y poco después se desilusionó, porque la fiesta era en un pelotero y el vestido era alquilado.

Cuando se fueron los ciudadanos vinieron los clientes y los usuarios. Esos consumían a lo loco. Deliveries, viajes, plasmas en cuotas, heladeras que babean hielo, home theatres, pochoclo. Ellos mismos, con cada dólar que gastaban, estaban definiendo la suerte de muchos otros, algunos de los cuales después los asaltarían, y así son las cosas, amigos, circulares.

Tengo la sensación de que ha vuelto la gente. La gente que no cree que la desaparición de Julio López la involucre. Después de todo, ese albañil estuvo preso. Por algo la gente, cuando se puede dar un gusto, lee Gente.

© 2000-2007 www.pagina12.com.ar|Todos los Derechos Reservados

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-91721-2007-09-21.html

The Independent: Making a killing:
how private armies became a $120bn global industry

By Daniel Howden and Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 21 September 2007

In Nigeria, corporate commandos exchange fire with local rebels attacking an oil platform. In Afghanistan, private bodyguards help to foil yet another assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai. In Colombia, a contracted pilot comes under fire from guerrillas while spraying coca fields with pesticides. On the border between Iraq and Iran, privately owned Apache helicopters deliver US special forces to a covert operation.

This is a snapshot of a working day in the burgeoning world of private military companies, arguably the fastest-growing industry in the global economy. The sector is now worth up to $120bn annually with operations in at least 50 countries, according to Peter Singer, a security analyst with the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"The rate of growth in the security industry has been phenomenal," says Deborah Avant, a professor of political science at UCLA. The single largest spur to this boom is the conflict in Iraq.

The workings of this industry have come under intense scrutiny this week in the angry aftermath of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US-owned Blackwater corporation in Baghdad. The Iraqi government has demanded the North Carolina-based company is withdrawn. But with Blackwater responsible for the protection of hundreds of senior US and Iraqi officials, from the US ambassador to visiting congressional delegations, there is certainty in diplomatic and military circles that this will not happen.

The origins of these shadow armies trace back to the early 1990s and the end of the Cold War, Bob Ayers, a security expert with Chatham House in London, explains: "In the good old days of the Cold War there were two superpowers who kept a lid on everything in their respective parts of the world."

He likens the collapse of the Soviet Union to "taking the lid off a pressure cooker". What we have seen since, he says, is the rise of international dissident groups, ultranationalists and multiple threats to global security.

The new era also saw a significant reduction in the size of the standing armies, at the same time as a rise in global insecurity which increased both the availability of military expertise and the demand for it. It was a business opportunity that could not be ignored.

Now the mercenary trade comes with its own business jargon. Guns for hire come under the umbrella term of privatised military firms, with their own acronym PMFs. The industry itself has done everything it can to shed the "mercenary" tag and most companies avoid the term "military" in preference for "security". "The term mercenary is not accurate," says Mr Ayers, who argues that military personnel in defensive roles should be distinguished from soldiers of fortune.

There is nothing new about soldiers for hire, the private companies simply represent the trade in a new form. "Organised as business entities and structured along corporate lines, they mark the corporate evolution of the mercenary trade," according to Mr Singer, who was among the first to plot the worldwide explosion in the use of private military firms.

In many ways it mirrors broader trends in the world economy as countries switch from manufacturing to services and outsource functions once thought to be the preserve of the state. Iraq has become a testing ground for this burgeoning industry, creating staggering financial opportunities and equally immense ethical dilemmas.

None of the estimated 48,000 private military operatives in Iraq has been convicted of a crime and no one knows how many Iraqis have been killed by private military forces, because the US does not keep records.

According to some estimates, more than 800 private military employees have been killed in the war so far, and as many as 3,300 wounded.

These numbers are greater than the losses suffered by any single US army division and larger than the casualties suffered by the rest of the coalition put together.

A high-ranking US military commander in Iraq said: "These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There's no authority over them, so you can't come down on them hard when they escalate force. They shoot people."

In Abu Ghraib, all of the translators and up to half of the interrogators were reportedly private contractors.

Private soldiers are involved in all stages of war, from training and war-gaming before the invasion to delivering supplies. Camp Doha in Kuwait, the launch-pad for the invasion, was built by private contractors.

It is not just the military that has turned to the private sector, humanitarian agencies are dependent on PMFs in almost every war zone from Bosnia to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Which raises the next market the industry would like to see opened: peacekeeping. And the lobbying has already begun.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2984818.ece

The Independent: Bomb kills deputy
and threatens to topple Lebanese government

By Robert Fisk in Beirut
Published: 20 September 2007

Antoine Ghanem was an easy target. Few bodyguards, no one would think that a member of parliament who represented the Armenians of Lebanon was a target. The little street in which he lived – tall tower blocks, boutiques, flower shops, was not a place where you would try to kill an enemy of Syria – if he was an enemy of Syria – but Antoine was blasted to pieces in his car as he left his home yesterday evening.

And that means there is one left in the government to make up the numbers. In other words, it only takes one more murder for the democratically elected government of Lebanon to fall.

Only a few weeks ago, Walid Jumblatt called me after Ghanem's predecessor was murdered. "Two more to go, Robert," Walid said. And so, tonight, it is one.

To describe the tangled wreckage of the car bomb, the vile, obscene, traces of Mr Ghanem and his bodyguards, has become a kind of routine horror in Lebanon.

Those of his cortege who did not die took me last night to the revolting remains of his death.

Lebanon is not a democracy in our Western sense of the word. Nor, for that matter, is Israel. "Democracy", as we like to call it in the West, does not sit easily in this part of the world.

But Lebanese politicians – for the most part but not always, men, are brave folk – who know the cost of standing up for their country against its more powerful neighbours, be those neighbours Israel or Syria.

There will be few in this country last night – and today – and tomorrow – who will not see Ghanem's murder as another attempt by the Syrians to destroy any form of freedom in this little country. There will be equally little proof that shows Syria to blame.

The French President, Nicolas Sarkozy – not to mention Gordon Brown – will not "tut-tut" this outrageous killing, but it is only a few days before the Lebanese must vote for their next president, and now they will have one less member of parliament to vote for that president.

And that is what yesterday's massive car bomb was about. Mr Ghanem, who was a 60-year-old member of the right-wing Christian Phalange Party – founded in Lebanon when its leader, Pierre Gemayel, was inspired by the Nazi Olympics of 1936 – was the eighth anti-Syrian politician murdered since 2005. His assassination occurred only six days before parliament in Beirut was to elect a new president.

At least 22 people were wounded in the explosion of the bomb which killed him in the capital's Sinal-Fil district. It appeared that the car bomb was detonated by remote control.

Ghanem's car was blown at least 150ft away by the explosion. One of the pro-government ministers Ahmed Fatfat, later said that it was "clear that lawmakers from the majority party are being liquidated".

It was, he said, "The only regime that does not want presidential elections in Lebanon to be held. The only response to the crime should be for parliament to convene on 25 September and to elect the president.

"Every member who does not take part would be a direct or indirect participant in the crime."

Lebanese parliamentarians, who now take part in a bidding for next month's parliamentary elections, were outdone yesterday by the former president Amin Gemayel, whose son was assassinated last year. "It's no more a question of presidential elections," he said. "It's a question of the survival of this country and democracy in the country that's at stake for the time being. This criminal act aims at undermining efforts paid by Syria and others to achieve Lebanese national accord."

http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2979878.ece

The Nation:
The Mercenary Factor

Truthdig by Robert Scheer
[posted online on September 19, 2007]

Please, please, I tell myself, leave Orwell out of it. Find some other, fresher way to explain why "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is dependent upon killer mercenaries. Or why the "democratically elected government" of "liberated" Iraq does not explicitly have the legal power to expel Blackwater USA from its land or hold any of the 50,000 private contractor troops that the US government has brought to Iraq accountable for their deadly actions.

Were there even the faintest trace of Iraqi independence rising from the ashes of this failed American imperialist venture, Blackwater would have to fold its tents and go, if only in the interest of keeping up appearances. After all, the Iraqi Interior Ministry claimed that the Blackwater thugs guarding a US State Department convoy through the streets of Baghdad fired "randomly at citizens" in a crowded square on Sunday, killing eleven people and wounding thirteen others. So the Iraqi government has ordered Blackwater to leave the country after what a government spokesman called a "flagrant assault...on Iraqi citizens."

But who told those Iraqi officials that they have the power to control anything regarding the 182,000 privately contracted personnel working for the US in Iraq? Don't they know about Order 17, which former American proconsul Paul Bremer put in place to grant contractors, including his own Blackwater bodyguards, immunity from Iraqi prosecution? Nothing has changed since the supposed transfer of power from the Coalition Provisional Authority, which Bremer once headed, to the Iraqi government holed up in the Green Zone and guarded by Blackwater and other "private" soldiers.

They are "private" in the same fictional sense that our uniformed military is a "volunteer" force, since both are lured by the dollars offered by the same paymaster, the US government. Contractors earn substantially more, despite $20,000 to $150,000 signing bonuses and an all-time-high average annual cost of $100,000 per person for the uniformed military. All of this was designed by the neocon hawks in the Pentagon to pursue their dreams of empire while avoiding a conscripted army, which would have millions howling in the street by now in protest.

Instead, we have checkbook imperialism. The US government purchases whatever army it needs, which has led to the dependence upon private contract firms like Blackwater USA, with its $300-million-plus contract to protect US State Department personnel in Iraq. That is why the latest Blackwater incident, which Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki branded a "crime," is so difficult to deal with. Iraqis are clearly demanding to rid their country of Blackwater and other contractors, and on Tuesday the Iraqi government said it would be scrutinizing the status of all private security firms working in the country.

But the White House hopes the outrage will once again blow over. As the Associated Press reported on Monday: "The US clearly hoped the Iraqis would be satisfied with an investigation, a finding of responsibility and compensation to the victim's families-and not insist on expelling a company that the Americans cannot operate here without." Or, as Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified to the US Senate last week: "There is simply no way at all that the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security could ever have enough full-time personnel to staff the security function in Iraq. There is no alternative except through contracts."

Consider the irony of that last statement-that the US experiment in building democracy in Iraq is dependent upon the same garrisons of foreign mercenaries that drove the founders of our own country to launch the American Revolution. As George Washington warned in his farewell address, once the American government enters into these "foreign entanglements," we lose the Republic, because public accountability is sacrificed to the necessities of war for empire.

Despite the fact that Blackwater USA gets almost all of its revenue from the US government-much of it in no-bid contracts aided, no doubt, by the lavish contributions to the Republican Party made by company founder Erik Prince and his billionaire parents-its operations remain largely beyond public scrutiny. Blackwater and others in this international security racket operate as independent states of their own, subject neither to the rules of Iraq nor the ones that the US government applies to its own uniformed forces. "We are not simply a 'private security company,' " Blackwater boasts on its corporate website. "We are a professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations firm....We have become the most responsive, cost-effective means of affecting the strategic balance in support of security and peace, and freedom and democracy everywhere."

Yeah, so who elected you guys to run the world?

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071001/truthdig

The Nation:
'Jena Is America'

beneath the radar by Gary Younge
[from the October 8, 2007 issue]

In the alleyway between de jure and de facto, Jim Crow conceived a son. Even though the deed took place in broad daylight, everybody tried not to notice, and in time some would even try to pretend it hadn't happened. For most of his long life, Jim Crow Sr. had been a powerful and respected man. His word was law, his laws were obeyed and those who transgressed were punished without mercy. But in his dotage these crude and brutal ways became a liability. Finally, and after some protest, he was banished. Some claimed he had died. But nobody found the body.

Junior, meanwhile, was adopted by a local family and raised with all the refinement and courtesy that his father never had. While the father had railed against the changes that ousted him, the son adapted to them. But he cultivated the same allies and pursued the same goals, and in time he too would become powerful and respected. With little use for curse words or ostentatious displays of authority, he was most effective when not drawing attention to himself.

Over the past year the small town of Jena, Louisiana, has vividly established the genealogical link between the two generations of Jim Crow. Paradoxically it has taken the symbolism of the old-complete with nooses and all-white juries-for the nation to engage with the substance of the new: the racial inequalities in America's penal and judicial systems. For what is truly shocking about Jena is not that it has happened here but that the most egregious aspects of it are happening all across America every day. Go into any courthouse in any city and you will see it playing out. Like Rodney King, Hurricane Katrina or Sean Bell, it has revealed to the rest of the country what black America already knows. "If the media wasn't watching what was going on then every last one of those kids would be in jail right now," says Tina Jones, the mother of Bryant Purvis, who was there when the recent round of trouble started.

Fittingly for a post-civil rights story, it began with the discrepancy between what you are allowed to do and what you can do. In August last year, Kenneth Purvis asked the principal at Jena High School if he could sit under the "white tree"-a place in the school courtyard where white students hung out during break. The principal said Purvis could sit where he liked. So the next day he went with his cousin Bryant and stood under the tree. The morning after that three nooses dangled from the tree.

The overwhelmingly white school board judged the nooses a youthful prank and punished the culprits with brief suspensions. Black parents and students were angry, and months of racial tension followed. Police were called to the school several times because of fights between black and white students.

The principal called an assembly at which the local district attorney, Reed Walters, warned, "See this pen? I can end your lives with the stroke of a pen." The black students say he was looking at them when he said it; Walters denies it.

In an unsolved arson case, a wing of the school was burned down. A few days later, Justin Sloan, a white man, attacked black students who tried to go to a white party in town. Sloan was charged with battery and put on probation. A few days after that a white boy pulled a gun on three black students in a convenience store. One of the black students wrestled the gun from him and took it home, only to find himself charged with theft of a firearm, second-degree robbery and disturbing the peace. The white student who produced the gun was not charged.

On December 4, in school, a group of black students attacked a white student, Justin Barker, after they heard him bragging about a racial assault his friend had made. Barker, 17, had a concussion and his eye was swollen shut. He spent a few hours in the hospital and on his release went to a party, where friends described him as "his usual smiling self."

The six black students were arrested and charged with attempted second-degree murder-a charge that requires the use of a deadly weapon. Walters argued that the sneakers used to kick Barker were indeed deadly weapons. Mychal Bell, 17, became the first of what are now known as the Jena Six to be convicted on reduced charges by an all-white jury, and he faced up to twenty-two years in jail. His black court-appointed attorney called no witnesses and offered no defense. Bell's conviction was overturned by an appeals court, which ruled that he shouldn't have been tried as an adult. At the time of this writing he sits in jail waiting to hear his fate, and a huge civil rights march is set to descend on Jena.

These incidents have turned Jena into a national symbol of racial injustice. As such it is both a potent emblem and a convenient whipping boy. Potent because it shines a spotlight on how race and class conspire to deny black people equality before the law. According to the Justice Department, blacks are almost three times as likely as whites to have their cars searched when they are pulled over and more than twice as likely to be arrested. They are more than five times as likely as whites to be sent to jail and are sentenced to 20 percent longer jail time. This would not be a problem for the likes of Kobe Bryant, but in Jena's "quarters" high-powered legal teams are hard to come by.

Convenient because it allows the rest of the nation to dismiss the incidents as the work of Southern redneck backwoodsmen without addressing the systemic national failures it showcases. According to the Sentencing Project, the ten states with the highest discrepancy between black and white incarceration rates include Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York and none from the South. What took place in Jena is not aberrant; it's consistent. The details are a local disgrace. The broader themes are a national scandal. Jim Crow Jr. travels well-unencumbered by historical baggage.

"Jena is America," says Alan Bean, executive director of Friends of Justice, who has been working with the Jena Six. "The new Jim Crow is the criminal justice system and its impact on poor people in general and people of color in particular. We don't always get the exotic trimmings like the nooses."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071008/younge

coluichedubita

Friday, September 21, 2007

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