september 2004

CONGRATULATIONS TO pRESIDENT cHAVEZ !!!


Update: plus two articles :Neo-cons,Richter;
darfur,j.laughland

TWO ESSENTIAL ARTICLES RE. IRAQ BY
SAM HAMOD AND ROBERT FISK


http://aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/August/2o/Iraqi%
20Muslims%20Did%20Not%20Blow%20Up%20the%20Christian%20Churches%20By%20Sam%20
Hamod.htm
Iraqi Muslims Did Not Blow Up the Christian Churches

By Sam Hamod
Al-Jazeerah, August 2, 2004

Having discussed the matter in detail with other experts on the Middle East,Christianity in Iraq and on Islam in Iraq, we have all concluded this is not the work of any Muslim group. There has never been any animosity between the Christian and Muslim communities in Iraq, in fact, they have stood 'shoulder to shoulder ' against the American occupation and they have resisted efforts by the Israeli office in Baghdad to become allied with Israel.

With these matters in mind, it appears as if this new “attack on the
Christian churches” is just another attempt either by the American CIA orits operatives, or the Mossad of Israel, to paint Islam with terrorism and to split the Muslim and Christian communities in Iraq. They tried to do the same thing in Palestine, but the Palestinians wouldn’t buy it. You may remember the Israelis shelled the holy churches of the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher –both events were condemned by Christian and Muslim alike. Even today in Iraq, all Iraqis interviewed said they knew no Iraqi or Muslim would do such a thing. But, in America, where we are fed the news as it is planned by Bush and by Zionist influence, the story plays big to the evangelical group and to Christians who believe the U.S. propaganda media.

This is another sad chapter in the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Since the early days of the war, the Iraqis complained about the treatment of prisoners taken by the Americans. We all know the truth at this point; but, for over a year the American media and the U.S. government ignored these pleas to look into the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Unfortunately, no one would listen to the Iraqis or those of us who reported these atrocities. So, once again, we have to report to you, this is another American cover-up to create more chaos in Iraq, just as America did in Viet Nam to keep us in that war. In this case, it is to rally the Christians of America against Iraq and to justify more attacks on Muslims groups in Iraq. The U.S. also wants to justify the continued and immoral and unjust shelling of Fallujah to allegedly kill Zarqawi. The townspeople keep saying, “There is no Zarqawi here, and there never was” yet our U.S. military keeps lying in order to justify the bombings of civilians in order to punish the Fallujahns for having kept the American forces out.


At this point, there is no telling what the U.S. or the Israeli Mossad will do in Iraq in order to foment civil war among the Iraqis and to justify the continuation of an American occupation in Iraq. Some of you may remember that JFK felt he had to go into Viet Nam in order to protect the Christian Catholic leadership in the south—we have a replay of this today in Iraq.

As for me, I’ve just about given up on believing anything the Bush administration or the major American media tells us—there have been too many lies.


CAN'T BLAIR SEE THAT THIS COUNTRY IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE? CAN'T BUSH?
By Robert Fisk - The Independent (Britain)
Sunday, August 1, 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=546763


The Prime Minister has accused some journalists of almost wanting a disaster to happen in Iraq. Robert Fisk, who has spent the past five weeks reporting from the deteriorating and devastated country, says the
disaster has already happened, over and over again.

The war is a fraud. I'm not talking about the weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist. Nor the links between Saddam Hussein and
al-Qa'ida which didn't exist. Nor all the other lies upon which we went to war. I'm talking about the new lies.

For just as, before the war, our governments warned us of threats that did not exist, now they hide from us the threats that do exist. Much of Iraq has fallen outside the control of America's puppet government in Baghdad but we are not told. Hundreds of attacks are made against US
troops every month. But unless an American dies, we are not told. This month's death toll of Iraqis in Baghdad alone has now reached 700 - the
worst month since the invasion ended. But we are not told.

The stage management of this catastrophe in Iraq was all too evident at
Saddam Hussein's "trial". Not only did the US military censor the tapes of the event. Not only did they effectively delete all sound of the 11 other defendants. But the Americans led Saddam Hussein to believe - until he reached the courtroom - that he was on his way to his execution. Indeed, when he entered the room he believed that the judge was there to condemn him to death. This, after all, was the way Saddam ran his own state security courts. No wonder he initially looked "disorientated" - CNN's helpful description - because, of course, he was
meant to look that way. We had made sure of that. Which is why Saddam asked Judge Juhi: "Are you a lawyer? ... Is this a trial?" And swiftly, as he realised that this really was an initial court hearing - not a preliminary to his own hanging - he quickly adopted an attitude of belligerence.

But don't think we're going to learn much more about Saddam's future court appearances. Salem Chalabi, the brother of convicted fraudster Ahmad and the man entrusted by the Americans with the tribunal, told the Iraqi press two weeks ago that all media would be excluded from future court hearings. And I can see why. Because if Saddam does a Milosevic, he'll want to talk about the real intelligence and military connections of his regime - which were primarily with the United States.

Living in Iraq these past few weeks is a weird as well as dangerous experience. I drive down to Najaf. Highway 8 is one of the worst in Iraq. Westerners are murdered there. It is littered with burnt-out police vehicles and American trucks. Every police post for 70 miles has been abandoned. Yet a few hours later, I am sitting in my room in Baghdad watching Tony Blair, grinning in the House of Commons as if he is the hero of a school debating competition; so much for the Butler report.

Indeed, watching any Western television station in Baghdad these days is like tuning in to Planet Mars. Doesn't Blair realise that Iraq is about to implode? Doesn't Bush realise this? The American-appointed "government" controls only parts of Baghdad - and even there its ministers and civil servants are car-bombed and assassinated. Baquba,
Samara, Kut, Mahmoudiya, Hilla, Fallujah, Ramadi, all are outside government authority. Iyad Allawi, the "Prime Minister", is little more than mayor of Baghdad. "Some journalists," Blair announces, "almost want there to be a disaster in Iraq." He doesn't get it. The disaster exists now.

When suicide bombers ram their cars into hundreds of recruits outside police stations, how on earth can anyone hold an election next January?
Even the National Conference to appoint those who will arrange elections has been twice postponed. And looking back through my notebooks over the past five weeks, I find that not a single Iraqi, not a single American soldier I have spoken to, not a single mercenary - be he American, British or South African - believes that there will be elections in January. All said that Iraq is deteriorating by the day. And most asked why we journalists weren't saying so.

But in Baghdad, I turn on my television and watch Bush telling his Republican supporters that Iraq is improving, that Iraqis support the "coalition", that they support their new US-manufactured government, that the "war on terror" is being won, that Americans are safer. Then I go to an internet site and watch two hooded men hacking off the head of an American in Riyadh, tearing at the vertebrae of an American in Iraq with a knife. Each day, the papers here list another construction company pulling out of the country. And I go down to visit the friendly, tragically sad staff of the Baghdad mortuary and there, each day, are dozens of those Iraqis we supposedly came to liberate, screaming and
weeping and cursing as they carry their loved ones on their shoulders in
cheap coffins.

I keep re-reading Tony Blair's statement. "I remain convinced it was right to go to war. It was the most difficult decision of my life." And I cannot understand it. It may be a terrible decision to go to war. Even Chamberlain thought that; but he didn't find it a difficult decision - because, after the Nazi invasion of Poland, it was the right thing to do. And driving the streets of Baghdad now, watching the terrified American patrols, hearing yet another thunderous explosion shaking my
windows and doors after dawn, I realise what all this means. Going to war in Iraq, invading Iraq last year, was the most difficult decision Blair had to take because he thought - correctly - that it might be the wrong decision. I will always remember his remark to British troops in Basra, that the sacrifice of British soldiers was not Hollywood but "real flesh and blood". Yes, it was real flesh and blood that was shed - but for weapons of mass destruction that weren't real at all.

"Deadly force is authorised," it says on checkpoints all over Baghdad. Authorised by whom? There is no accountability. Repeatedly, on the great highways out of the city US soldiers shriek at motorists and open fire at the least suspicion. "We had some Navy Seals down at our checkpoint the other day," a 1st Cavalry sergeant says to me. "They asked if we were having any trouble. I said, yes, they've been shooting at us from a house over there. One of them asked: 'That house?' We said yes. So they have these three SUVs and a lot of weapons made of titanium and they drive off towards the house. And later they come back and say 'We've taken care of that'. And we didn't get shot at any more."

What does this mean? The Americans are now bragging about their siege of Najaf. Lieutenant Colonel Garry Bishop of the 37th Armoured Division's 1st Battalion believes it was an "ideal" battle (even though he failed to kill or capture Muqtada Sadr whose "Mehdi army" were fighting the US forces). It was "ideal", Bishop explained, because the Americans avoided damaging the holy shrines of the Imams Ali and Hussein. What are Iraqis to make of this? What if a Muslim army occupied Kent and bombarded Canterbury and then bragged that they hadn't damaged Canterbury Cathedral? Would we be grateful?

What, indeed, are we to make of a war which is turned into a fantasy by those who started it? As foreign workers pour out of Iraq for fear of their lives, US Secretary of State Colin Powell tells a press conference that hostage-taking is having an "effect" on reconstruction. Effect! Oil pipeline explosions are now as regular as power cuts. In parts of Baghdad now, they have only four hours of electricity a day; the streets swarm with foreign mercenaries, guns poking from windows, shouting abusively at Iraqis who don't clear the way for them. This is the"safer" Iraq which Mr Blair was boasting of the other day. What world does the British Government exist in?

Take the Saddam trial. The entire Arab press - including the Baghdad papers - prints the judge's name. Indeed, the same judge has given interviews about his charges of murder against Muqtada Sadr. He has posed for newspaper pictures. But when I mention his name in The Independent, I was solemnly censured by the British Government's spokesman. Salem Chalabi threatened to prosecute me. So let me get this right. We illegally invade Iraq. We kill up to 11,000 Iraqis. And Mr Chalabi, appointed by the Americans, says I'm guilty of "incitement to murder". That just about says it all.
Robert Fisk.

http://www.gilad.co.uk

Once, they exulted in the Iraq war. Now, with the setbacks in the region and the Chalabi spy probe, neoconservatives are feeling embattled.

By Paul Richter
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
8:35 PM PDT, June 9, 2004

WASHINGTON - As U.S. tanks surrounded Baghdad 14 months ago, an ardent group of war supporters in Washington toasted the success of an invasion they had done much to inspire, as commentators spoke of their virtual takeover of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Today, that same group, the neoconservatives, is itself under siege.

Many fellow conservatives have joined liberals in criticizing their case for the war. Rivals in the State Department and the Pentagon have taken charge of the U.S. effort in Iraq. And in a grave threat to their reputation, Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a longtime favorite of neoconservatives, is enmeshed in an FBI investigation of intelligence leaks that supplied secrets to Iran. "As these events have come one after the other, they've been feeling more and more embattled," said a Republican Senate aide.

"Neocons" - best known for advocating aggressive foreign and military policies - are in the painful zone between distinction and disfavor in Washington. They are losing battles on Capitol Hill. Their principles have stopped appearing in new U.S. policies. And where neoconservatives were once seen as having a future in Republican administrations, the setbacks in Iraq could make it difficult for the group's leading members to win Senate confirmation for top posts in the future

Fourteen months ago, Kenneth Adelman was one of the prominent neoconservatives who took part in a now-storied victory celebration at the home of Vice President Dick Cheney that was described in Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack." Since then, Adelman acknowledged, the group's influence has declined, because "Iraq didn't turn out to be as promising as it was billed." Adelman, a former Reagan administration offici! al, said that although he supports the rationale for the war, he is torn about what has happened since. "I still have to sort it all out. I'm just not settled yet," he said.

Other neocons worry that the real trouble for them could begin if President Bush is not reelected and, among conservatives, the finger pointing begins - in their direction. "Bush could end up looking like the worst president since Jimmy Carter because of Iraq, and people are going to say, 'You got us into this mess,' " said one Washington source who considers himself a neoconservative and asked to remain unidentified. "It's going to be nasty and bitter and brutal."

While definitions vary, "neoconservative" generally refers to formerly moderate policy advocates who favor a hawkish and assertive foreign policy to implant democracy and American values abroad. Neocons contrast with more traditional conservatives who are willing to deal with undemocratic regimes without necessarily changing them. Neoconservatives have been especially focused on the Middle East, and they have argued that building democracy in the heart of the Arab world could foster reform throughout a troubled region.

Although Bush campaigned in 2000 on a platform that opposed nonessential nation-building missions, he moved sharply toward the neocon view after the Sept. 11 attacks. His administration includes a number of officials considered neocons, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz; Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy; and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Cheney shares many views with the neocons, but many analysts argue that because of his background and views, he is a traditional conservative.

Neoconservatives had been pushing the United States to oust Saddam Hussein for years, and they exulted in his fall. But they grew concerned when officials in charge of the U.S.-led occupation in Iraq took steps the neocons did not favor. One group of neoconservatives, includin! g onetim e Reagan Defense official Richard Perle, was unhappy that the White House didn't move more quickly to turn sovereignty over to Iraqis and put the country in control of dissidents such as Chalabi.

Other neocons, including William Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and editor of the journal Weekly Standard, believed that the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had allowed security problems to spread by deploying too few troops. In general, neocons felt as if "they had created a brilliant screenplay, and it had fallen into the hands of the wrong director," said one self-described neoconservative, borrowing a line from political satirist Bill Maher.

As the postwar problems deepened, many neocons found themselves in the strange position of criticizing the White House, while being blamed in various quarters around the world for provoking the war. An antiwar group in Brussels created a shadow international tribunal that convicted the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank founded by Kristol, for war crimes. "It's not fun to be accused of war crimes," said Gary Schmitt, the center's executive director.

Some neoconservatives see an element of anti-Semitism among their critics, because many prominent adherents are Jewish. Neocons also discount views that they are a "cabal" that wields improper influence over the administration.

"It's very popular in Washington to believe that the president's mind is an empty vessel that's been filled by an unholy cabal," said Danielle Pletka, vice president of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank associated with neoconservatism. But problems in Iraq have made administration neocons lightning rods for criticism. Without significant improvements in U.S. efforts there, many of them would be unlikely to remain for a second Bush term, neoconservatives and congressional Republicans said.

Last year, Wolfowitz, a former senior State Department official, was frequently mentioned as a leading candidate to replace Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in a second Bush term. Now, congressional officials and neoconservatives agree there is little chance that Wolfowitz, seen as a primary advocate of the war, could survive a Senate confirmation. "No way," said a senior Republican congressional aide.

Feith, the No. 3 Pentagon official, has been struggling to put to rest what he regards as unfair charges that he was trying to create a separate intelligence network in the Pentagon to guide administration decisions, and that he was an "intimate" of Chalabi. Feith met with Chalabi fewer than 10 times, said a spokesman. Feith also has drawn criticism for shortcomings in the postwar planning. A spokesman said there is no truth to persistent rumors that Feith plans to leave government. The allegations against Chalabi most threaten the reputation of neoconservatives, coming after the former financier was accused of putting forward defectors who offered phony evidence before the war on Hussein's alleged arsenals of banned weapons.

But the allegations have also exposed a deep rift between the
neoconservatives and others in the administration.

Perle and others have angrily charged that "wildly implausible" allegations against Chalabi were part of an effort by the CIA to try to discredit a longtime foe. "This is completely clumsy," Perle said of the alleged CIA effort in an interview. The CIA has not publicly commented on the leak investigation. Pletka, of the American Enterprise Institute, said "the intended aim of this entire operation" against Chalabi was to reduce the neocons' influence.

No matter how the allegations turn out, the influence of the neoconservatives is likely to continue to wane.

James Mann, author of "Rise of the Vulcans," which describes the long personal ties between members of Bush's war Cabinet, said that the neocons' influence has been greatest on Iraq policy, but that it has declined steadily over! the las t year as the problems in Iraq have deepened. "Some people have assumed that they're running the administration," Mann said. "That's never been true." In fact, Mann said the Bush administration has not followed neocon
recommendations regarding Russia, North Korea, China or even Iraq's neighbors of Syria and Iran. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz vaguely threatened force against Syria last year, but they have not done so lately. "Nobody's talking about force any more," Mann said.

Despite the gloom of recent weeks for neocons, many of them see signs of a turnaround that could help restore the reputation of the U.S. effort - and theirs. A new interim government in Baghdad could help do so by earning Iraqi public support and beefing up security.

In addition, many note that Bush has strongly emphasized his commitment to the neocon goal of building democracy. Schmitt, of the Project for a New American Century, was encouraged by Bush's words. "His speeches are no less neocon than ever," said Schmitt.

Times Staff Writer Johanna Neuman in Washington contributed to this
article.


Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

from Robert: togethernet@yahoogroups.com
Sudan: Oil will be driving factor for military intervention
The mask of altruism disguising a colonial war

John Laughland
Monday August 2, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sudan/story/0,14658,1274182,00.html

If proof were needed that Tony Blair is off the hook over Iraq, it came not during the Commons debate on the Butler report on July 21, but rather at his monthly press conference the following morning. Asked about the crisis in Sudan, Mr Blair replied: "I believe we have a moral responsibility to deal with this and to deal with it by any means that we can." This last phrase means that troops might be sent - as General Sir Mike Jackson, the chief of the general staff, immediately confirmed - and yet the reaction from the usual anti-war campaigners was silence. Mr Blair has invoked moral necessity for every one of the five wars he has fought in this, surely one of the most bellicose premierships in history. The bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998, the 74-day bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999, the intervention in Sierra Leone in the spring of 2000, the attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, and the Iraq war last March were all justified with the bright certainties which shone from the prime minister's eyes. Blair even defended Bill Clinton's attack on the al-Shifa pharmaceuticals factory in Sudan in August 1998, on the entirely bogus grounds that it was really manufacturing anthrax instead of aspirin.

Although in each case the pretext for war has been proved false or the war aims have been unfulfilled, a stubborn belief persists in the morality and the effectiveness of attacking other countries. The Milosevic trial has shown that genocide never occurred in Kosovo - although Blair told us that the events there were worse than anything that had happened since the second world war, even the political activists who staff the prosecutor's office at the international criminal tribunal in The Hague never included genocide in their Kosovo indictment. And two years of prosecution have failed to produce one single witness to testify that the former Yugoslav president ordered any attacks on Albanian civilians in the province. Indeed, army documents produced from Belgrade show the contrary.

Like the Kosovo genocide, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as we now know, existed only in the fevered imaginings of spooks and politicians in London and Washington. But Downing Street was also recently forced to admit that even Blair's claims about mass graves in Iraq were false. The
prime minister has repeatedly said that 300,000 or 400,000 bodies have been found there, but the truth is that almost no bodies have been exhumed in Iraq, and consequently the total number of such bodies, still less the cause of their deaths, is simply unknown.

In 2001, we attacked Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden and to prevent the Taliban from allegedly flooding the world with heroin. Yet Bin Laden remains free, while the heroin ban imposed by the Taliban has been replaced by its very opposite, a surge in opium production, fostered by the warlords who rule the country. As for Sierra Leone, the United Nations human development report for 2004, published on July 15, which measures overall living standards around the world, puts that
beneficiary of western intervention in 177th place out of 177, an august position it has continued to occupy ever since our boys went in: Sierra Leone is literally the most miserable place on earth. So much for Blair's promise of a "new era for Africa".

The absence of anti-war scepticism about the prospect of sending troops into Sudan is especially odd in view of the fact that Darfur has oil. For two years, campaigners have chanted that there should be "no blood for oil" in Iraq, yet they seem not to have noticed that there are huge untapped reserves in both southern Sudan and southern Darfur. As oil pipelines continue to be blown up in Iraq, the west not only has a clear motive for establishing control over alternative sources of energy, it has also officially adopted the policy that our armies should be used to do precisely this. Oddly enough, the oil concession in southern Darfur is currently in the hands of the China National Petroleum Company. China is Sudan's biggest foreign investor.

We ought, therefore, to treat with scepticism the US Congress declaration of genocide in the region. No one, not even the government of Sudan, questions that there is a civil war in Darfur, or that it has caused an immense number of refugees. Even the government admits that nearly a million people have left for camps outside Darfur's main towns to escape marauding paramilitary groups. The country is awash with guns, thanks to the various wars going on in Sudan's neighbouring countries. Tensions have risen between nomads and herders, as the former are forced south in search of new pastures by the expansion of the Sahara desert. Paramilitary groups have practised widespread highway robbery, and each tribe has its own private army. That is why the government of Sudan imposed a state of emergency in 1999.

But our media have taken this complex picture and projected on to it a simple morality tale of ethnic cleansing and genocide. They gloss over the fact that the Janjaweed militia come from the same ethnic group and religion as the people they are allegedly persecuting - everyone in Darfur is black, African, Arabic-speaking and Muslim. Campaigners for intervention have accused the Sudanese government of supporting this group, without mentioning that the Sudanese defence minister condemned the Janjaweed as "bandits" in a speech to the country's parliament in March. On July 19, moreover, a court in Khartoum sentenced six Janjaweed soldiers to horrible punishments, including the amputation of their hands and legs. And why do we never hear about the rebel groups which the Janjaweed are fighting, or about any atrocities that they may have committed?

It is far from clear that the sudden media attention devoted to Sudan has been provoked by any real escalation of the crisis - a peace agreement was signed with the rebels in April, and it is holding. The pictures on our TV screens could have been shown last year. And we should treat with scepticism the claims made for the numbers of deaths - 30,000 or 50,000 are the figures being bandied about - when we know that similar statistics proved very wrong in Kosovo and Iraq. The Sudanese government says that the death toll in Darfur, since the beginning of the conflict in 2003, is not greater than 1,200 on all sides. And why is such attention devoted to Sudan when, in neighbouring Congo, the death rate from the war there is estimated to be some 2 or 3 million, a tragedy equalled only by the silence with which it is treated in our media?

We are shown starving babies now, but no TV station will show the limbless or the dead that we cause if we attack Sudan. Humanitarian aid should be what the Red Cross always said it must be - politically neutral. Anything else is just an old-fashioned colonial war - the reality of killing, and the escalation of violence, disguised with the hypocritical mask of altruism. If Iraq has not taught us that, then we are incapable of ever learning anything.

· John Laughland is an associate of Sanders Research Associates

jlaughland@sandersresearch.com