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Editorial: The "Civil War" Industry
Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
13/12/2006
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| Men grieve over the three boys' bodies. The sons of a senior Fatah official
were murdered when their car was riddled with 60 bullets |
Two days ago in the Gaza strip, unknown gunmen deliberately targeted and murdered
3 Palestinian children as they were being driven to school. The Guardian reports:
'They were targeting the children': Gaza factions hit new level of horror
December 12, 2006
In their bedroom the boys' clothes were still hanging from hooks by the
door and matching pink blankets lay over their beds. From the windows of
the 12th floor family apartment, grieving relatives peered down at the point
just a few hundred yards away where the three young sons of a senior Fatah
security official were gunned down as they were driven to school yesterday
morning in an act of apparent factional Palestinian violence that was extraordinary
in its brutality even by Gaza's standards.
Sitting on one of the beds was Lydia Abu-Eid, six, the boys' cousin and the
only person to emerge from the car virtually untouched, aside from a handful
of small scratches on her face.
She explained how yesterday, as every morning, the bodyguards for
the Balousha family came first to her house before 7am to begin the school
run. She sat in the back seat, to the left just behind the driver. A second
armed bodyguard sat in the front passenger seat of the white Skoda saloon.
From the Abu-Eid family house, the Skoda drove up to the flat belonging to Baha Balousha in Rimal district of Gaza City and his three boys got in. Osama, nine, sat in the middle of the back seat, his brother Ahmad, six, sat on the right. The youngest, Salam, three, sat on the lap of the bodyguard in the front passenger seat.
They drove up the road to the first junction from where they would turn right and head across town to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate school, a respected private school catering for Christian and Muslim pupils. Lydia, Osama and Ahmad all studied there and were all wearing the school's simple uniform: white shirts and blue cardigans.
But the car never got past the junction. "Masked men fired one bullet and then we stopped," said Lydia. The car was then sprayed with dozens of bullets that flattened the tyres, shattered the windows and tore through the doorframes. [...]
In the back seat of the car, Lydia was barely touched but Osama and Ahmad were dead. In the front, Mahmoud Habeel, the bodyguard, and the youngest boy Salam were dead in the passenger seat and Ayman Ghoul, the driver, was seriously injured, with bullets to the neck and shoulder. Yesterday he was in intensive care in Gaza's al-Quds hospital, where doctors tried to make arrangements for him to be sent to Israel for more advanced medical care.
"Their father started to scream: 'the children, the children,' and I saw from the window the white car was stopped, its windows were broken."
There seemed little doubt among the family yesterday that the gunmen had purposely sought to kill the children, not the father. "It wasn't a mistake," said Mrs Balousha. "They were targeting the children. They tried before to kill my husband and they couldn't."
Many Fatah officials blamed Hamas, which denied any involvement.
That three innocent Palestinian children were deliberately and mercilessly shot
to death is an act of inhumanity almost beyond comprehension,
and it would be very easy to simply blame "man's inhumanity to man" or the
long-term and allegedly complex problems of the "Middle East crisis". Indeed,
this appears to be what official sources have done, as they accept
the "logical" explanation
that the children were the victims of an factional conflict between Fatah
against Hamas, an explanation that also happens to fit well with Israeli and
Western government propaganda that has long sought to demonise all Arabs as bloodthirsty
animals. If about 700,000 dead Iraqi civilians can be explained away with two
words, then the same two words will also suffice for Palestine.
The Guardian continues:
Fears of civil war
It is still not clear how determined the rival factions are to avoid all-out war. A gradual descent into factional violence has
been obvious in Gaza and the West Bank for months, but senior Palestinian figures repeatedly
insist no one wants a civil war and all acknowledge there would be huge casualties and no clear victor.
Hundreds of men marched in a funeral procession through Gaza yesterday, carrying the bodies of the three small boys wrapped in white sheets. Mr Balousha greeted mourners under the green awnings of a tent set up in the street a short distance from the scene of the killings, but he stopped short of assigning blame.
"I have no words," he said. "I am a father who has lost his children."
The Guardian reporter would have us believe that the "logical" and "obvious"
response to the 40 year-long occupation of Palestine and the continuous indiscriminate
murder of Palestinians by Zionists is for Palestinians to turn on, and kill each
other. It is the very same "logic" that we find being used to explain the massive
murder of civilians taking place in Iraq - a US military force of occupation
arrives, and within a few years Iraqi fighters decide that the best way to expel
the invader is to kill each other and Iraqi civilians. Makes sense to me, how
about you?
The official claim therefore is that it is "logical" that both Iraq and Palestine
should be on the brink of "civil war" because both situations are so complex.
We are meant to believe that in any modern pluralist society there is a complex
web of underlying religious, ethnic, political and social differences between
the members of that scoeity and that these differences are a time bomb
waiting to go off. Complexity begets chaos at least in potential.
The reality however, is much more simple, and the "complexity" lies in
the conscious efforts by Israeli and Western governments and the mainstream
media to place the otherwise simple truth of both situations beyond the understanding
of the ordinary Western civilian.
So what is the simple explanation?
As a result of direct experience in several foreign campaigns waged by Western militaries over the past 60 years, Western governments well understand that the occupation of one sovereign state by another inevitably gives rise to an armed insurgency among the occupied population that is dedicated to resisting and expelling the occupying power.
In such a situation, the insurgents enjoy widespread support from the local
population and, short of the complete annihilation
or ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, such a 'war' cannot
be won by the invading force, and an alternative strategy is called for.
Basically, the tried and tested counter-insurgency strategy followed by invading
forces of occupation is to first divide as a means to conquering
rather than conquering directly.
Counter-insurgency strategy is the strategy used to neutralise the expected grass roots resistance that invariably springs forth in response to an invading army.
In Northern Ireland, for example, British army intelligence and MI5 dedicated significant resources to what was called the "Ulsterisation" of the conflict. The goal was to subvert the core reason for the conflict - the occupation of a sovereign nation by an aggressor state - and make it appear that the conflict was in fact the result of long-standing ethnic or religious divisions within the Ulster community, hence "Ulsterisation".
In Northern Ireland this was relatively easy given that there
was indeed already a very clear religious divide between the Protestant and
Catholic communities. But the fact remained that the IRA was not fighting a
religious war against the Protestant community, but a war against the British
government, its military and the biased state institutions that it had set
up in the gerrymandered and then occupied 'statelet' of Northern Ireland.
The standard operating procedure of British civilian and military intelligence
in Northern Ireland during 'the troubles' then was to provoke the existing
divisions in Northern Irish society in order to turn the IRA's war against
the occupying British forces into a 'sectarian' conflict and, in doing so,
diminish criticism of the British government as the source of the conflict
and afford it the opportunity to present itself as a peacekeeping force in
an 'sectarian
war' scenario. The
ultimate aim was to deny the grass roots insurgency - the IRA - a chance
to present its fight against British occupation and discrimination as a fundamental
right as defined by the Geneva Convention, and therefore a just resistance.
Of course, the details of just how such a sectarian conflict is actively created
are far from honorable and, in the case of Northern Ireland, included the murder
of innocent Protestant civilians by undercover British SAS agents by way of
gun or bomb attacks with the blame "logically" falling on IRA insurgents.
These "false
flag" attacks then provoked reprisal attacks against the Catholic community
by Protestant paramilitary groups. In some cases, the "reprisal attacks" were
also carried out by agents of the British government.
In any occupying forces versus resistance scenario, all such counter-insurgency tactics are employed with the aim of:
a) manufacturing "evidence" that the conflict is internal and 'sectarian' in nature rather than the result of the occupation of one state and people by the military of another.
b) to divert the attention and firepower of the legitimate insurgency away from the forces of occupation.
c) to demoralise the local population and terrify them to the extent that
they withdraw their support for the insurgency and call for peace at any price.
The exact nature of the "peace" being decided by the benevolent "peace-keeping" force(s)
of occupation and the government(s) to which it is attached.
It should be obvious that the current state of the conflicts in Iraq and
Palestine is the result of the use of a counter-insurgency strategy very similar
to the one I have described, albeit on a significantly larger scale than in
Northern Ireland in respect of Iraq.
Few readers
will be un-aware of the thousands of murders of Iraqi civilians and the many
shrine bombings and alleged 'suicide bombings' that have occurred in Iraq more
or less since the beginning of the U.S. invasion of that country, but which
reached new heights in the 2nd and 3rd years of the occupation. Equally so,
most of the Western world is aware of the
concept of "Palestinian suicide bombers" and the many reports over
the past 6 years of such attacks occurring in Israel against Israeli
civilians. Most people are not aware however of the substantial
evidence suggesting that, in the case of Iraq, the vast majority of these attacks
are actually the work of U.S. and Israeli-funded and directed 'death
squads' working
out of the Iraqi interior ministry, and in the case of Palestine and Israel,
most are the work of agents of the state of Israel
Not-surprisingly, the US government and mainstream media has
claimed that evidence of Iraqi death squads is in fact evidence of "terrorist" infiltration
of the Iraqi government. Such a claim, however, does not stand up to even the
most basic scrutiny or logic, particularly in light of the evidence that the
Iraqi interior ministry continues to be totally controlled by representatives
of the US government (as are other arms of the Iraqi government).
The Bush government and the mainstream
media have also utilised the fact of daily mass murder of civilian in Iraq
to spread the lie that the entirely fictitious 'Islamic terror group' 'al-Qaeda
in Iraq',
is alive and well and trying to spread their extremist doctrine around the
world. At the same time, we are told that Iraq is "on the brink of civil war".
In Israel, "Palestinian suicide bombings" exhibit the uncanny ability
to present themselves at the most opportune times for the Israeli government
and the most inopportune times for the Palestinian leadership and people. The
bombings themselves are used as evidence that Palestinians cannot be negotiated
with, that they are inveterate "terrorists" and hate the Jewish people rather
than the Israeli government and it's brutal policies.
Missing from all such reports, however, is any explanation of the abiding
question of why Iraqi Shia and Sunni groups, who have lived together and intermarried
in relative peace and harmony for centuries, would suddenly, in response to
a U.S. military invasion of their country, decide to attack and kill each other.
Likewise in Palestine, no one seems to question the sanity of the idea that
Palestinans would willingly fight and kill each other under the noses of an
invading force of occupation.
The truly logical deduction is that Iraqi and Palestinian armed groups are
not attacking and killing each other, and if "civil war" breaks
out in Lebanon and Palestine, it will be the result of a deliberate and protracted
campaign by British, American and Israeli covert agencies to destroy those
two societies from within. The ultimate goal of the extremists in Tel Aviv
and Washington is to exacerbate the Iraqi conflict to the point where the
international community is forced to call for the physical break up of Iraq
along religious lines into three separate and easily manageable statelets
- the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the center and the Shia in the south.
Indeed, in 2003, long before any talk of a "civil
war", the
Council on Foreign Relations detailed such a break up of Iraq.
As for
Palestine; we can only conclude that the Zionists in Israel and America
have simply been enjoying their vicious persecution
of a defenceless people over the past 60 years, yet it seems that they begin
now to tire of the game and
are maneuvering towards the final solution. Of course, while logic can go
a long way to explaining that Israeli deception is real source of the "Middle
East crisis" and the factional infighting in Palestine and Lebanon, there
also exists objective evidence to back up this thesis:
Lebanon's Army captures Israeli Mossad 'Terrorist Ring'
Wednesday, 14 June, 2006
Beirut - The Lebanese army has said it had captured members of a terrorist
network allegedly working for the Israeli Mossad and that a suspect confessed
to his role in assassinating Hezbollah and Palestinian officials.
Last Saturday, the army said it had arrested Mahmoud Rafeh, a 59-year-old
Lebanese citizen and retired police officer, for a May 26 car bombing that
killed Mahmoud Majzoub, a senior Islamic Jihad official, and his brother
in front of their home in the southern city of Sidon. Rafeh "had links to Israeli intelligence," a
statement said.
On
Tuesday, the army said that Rafeh ( left) had confessed to his role in killing
the Majzoub brothers, and to other operations ... including bombings that
killed two Hezbollah officials; Ali Hassan Dib in 1999 and Ali Saleh in 2003
and the 2002 killing of Jihad Jibril, the son of Ahmed Jibril, leader of
the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command
(PFLP-GC), which based in Syria with bases in Lebanon.
Rafeh was part of a "terror network working for the Israeli Mossad," and its members took "training courses in and outside Israel," the
statement said.
Investigators found Israeli computers, cameras, ammunition, military
uniforms and forged identity cards in ring members' hideouts ( shown below), it added.
The ring smuggled the booby-trapped door of the Mercedes car that killed the Majzoub brothers from Israel, the army said.
An investigation was underway to arrest remaining collaborators, it concluded.
As Safir newspaper said a manhunt is currently underway to catch another suspect whom it identified as Hussein Khattab, a Palestinian official in the PFLP-GC. Lebanese police and the security apparatus of the PFLP-GC had believed he was involved in Jibril's murder but he was later cleared of the crime, the paper said.
An Nahar newspaper reported that Rafeh had been working for the
Mossad since 1994. It said the army found in his house forged Lebanese papers that female Mossad agents used to enter the country as the alleged wives of the ring members.
Israeli intelligence agents stayed at the flat Rafeh had rented in Sidon near the residence of the Majzoub brothers to monitor their movements, the paper said.
Six ring members have already been arrested and another two are believed to have fled to Israel, An Nahar added.
President Emile Lahoud praised Lebanese forces for breaking up the terrorist
network, saying "solidarity is the real power that can stand in the face of Israel and prevent sectarian conflicts," according
to a statement released by his office.
Hezbollah's deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Qassem, called the arrest
and confession "a message" to all Lebanese that their country was not immune from "direct Israeli influence" --
despite Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.
"Israel still sees Lebanon as a field to achieve political and future gains," Kassem
told Hezbollah's Al Manar television late Tuesday.
Many people have previously been arrested in Lebanon on suspicion of spying for Israel. In 2004, a Tunisian woman of Palestinian origin and four accomplices were indicted on charges of plotting with Israel to assassinate Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.
Lebanese Army praised
Ahmad Yasseen a local political observer told Ya Libnan, "the fact that
the Lebanese army captured the Mossad terrorist ring is a prove that it should
be the only authority that should be responsible for Lebanon's security "
Yasseen added: "It is time all Lebanese and Palestinian armed militia put their faith in the Lebanese army, instead of acting as ' state inside a state', which is destabilizing the country".
Commenting on the statements of Lahoud and Hezbollah Yasseen told Ya Libnan" they both should have praised the army instead of trying to justify the existence of the resistance groups".
Lebanese army shows a picture of the Mossad documents and equipment captured
Arafat:
Israel Behind Suicide Bombings
August 25, 1995
Jerusalem Post
THE complex Israeli-Palestinian relationship has given birth to a nasty
new myth which began, like many such myths, with a lie so egregious that
it could only be considered laughable. Now it threatens to become conventional
wisdom.
Soon after the Beit Lid massacre, in which 21 Israeli soldiers were killed
by two Islamic Jihad suicide bombers, Palestinian Authority chief Yasser
Arafat told a group of visiting dignitaries that right-wing Israelis had
collaborated with the killers. Otherwise, he said, the killers could not
have passed through several army checkposts without being stopped.
The implications were mind-boggling: not only was Arafat implying that Israelis
would participate in the mass murder of Israeli soldiers. He was saying that
the Israeli conspirators were so powerful that they could exercise control
over the army units all along the route the killers took from Gaza to Beit
Lid.
The visitors who heard the story, knowing that it could only be interpreted
as the ravings of a lunatic, kept it mostly to themselves.
Being supporters of the peace process, they thought reporting it would embarrass
Arafat and harm his credibility. But at least one listener divulged its contents
privately, and it became known. To the amazement of many, Arafat kept repeating
it both before visitors from abroad and to visiting Israelis.
On Tuesday, the day after the bus bombing in Jerusalem, Arafat decided to
come out publicly with these "revelations." He not only announced
in Gaza that there was collaboration between what he called "Israeli
and Palestinian extremists," but that he had documents proving it.
One of his lieutenants, Secretary-General of the Palestinian Authority Tayeb
Raheem, went into details. He said that the Israeli army and other security
services contained secret organizations like the French OAS during Algeria's
war of independence. They and the Islamic fanatics have a common interest
to defeat the Oslo agreement, he said, repeating that the PLO has documents
to prove the allegation.
Portraits of Palestinian Resistance
Electronic Intifada
Rima Merriman
8 June 2006
Palestinian resistance to the occupation comes in many shapes and forms,
some of which involves armed resistance undertaken by organized groups
with various ideologies. These groups are composed of barely trained young
men who pit their meager and crude resources against one of the best trained
and best equipped military body in the world, the Israeli Occupation Forces.
Of the 76 Israeli soldiers who died in 2005, only six were killed as a
result of Palestinian attacks. The rest died of illness or accidents. Thirty
of them committed suicide.
The imbalance in the resources between the two sides of the conflict predictably
yields a steady mowing down on the part of the Israelis of one young Palestinian
martyr after another. Most Palestinian deaths, however, are of civilians
(and children) simply going about their daily lives, getting caught up in
Israeli ground and air attacks, Israeli indiscriminate fire and Israeli raids.
Israel's control of and entrenchment in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, its
continual attempts to stamp out Palestinian resistance to the occupation
at any cost, relies heavily on intelligence gathered by Shabak, the 5,000-strong
Internal General Security Service of Israel, whose motto is "Defender who shall not be seen".
With a cadre of well-trained, Arabic-speaking Israeli informants who are indistinguishable physically from the Palestinian population, Shabak has little problem gathering intelligence on a people whose every movement is regulated by hundreds of check points and by total Israeli control on their borders. These infiltrators prey on Arab innate hospitality and friendliness. The Palestinians call them "musta'ribeen",
i.e., "those who appear to be Arabs". Palestinians are not surprised
when someone, somewhere comes up to them and says: Got you!
PA police fire on undercover IDF unit in Bethlehem
Ha'aretz
11/30/2005
Palestinian policemen opened fire at undercover Israel Defense Forces soldiers during an operation in Bethlehem yesterday. No soldiers were hurt during the incident, and the IDF said its inquiry revealed that no policemen were hurt. However, the Palestinians said one policeman was wounded.
According to the army's initial inquiry, the Palestinian police had not been
informed about the army operation. Thus, when the soldiers, who were disguised
to look like Arabs, came to arrest a wanted man not far from City Hall, the policemen took them for members of an armed Palestinian gang.
Confusion in PA: Who launched Qassam?
Ynet
27/11/2006
There has been general confusion in the Palestinian Authority after a Qassam rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip into the western Negev. One of the cells of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Fatah's military arm, has taken responsibility for the firing.
However, Abu Ahmad, one of the group's senior officials in the northern Gaza Strip, said to Ynet that he had no knowledge that his people carried out the shooting.
"As of now, we continue to be committed to the truce, but are reserving our right to respond to Israeli infractions," said
Abu Ahmad.
Israeli agents accused of creating fake al-Qaeda cell
Sophie Claudet in Gaza City
AFP
December 9 2002
A senior Palestinian security official says his services have uncovered an Israeli plot to create a fake al-Qaeda cell in the Gaza Strip, a charge Israel has dismissed as absurd.
The head of preventive security in Gaza, Rashid Abu Shbak, said Israeli agents posing as operatives of al-Qaeda recruited Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
"Over the past nine months we've been investigating eight [such] cases," Mr Abu Shbak said.
His claims came after the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, said al-Qaeda militants were operating in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon, raising fears of an intensification of Israeli military occupations.
Furnished with an understanding of the long-standing tactics used by American,
British and Israeli government agencies in Iraq, Northern Ireland, Kenya, the
Philippines, Palestine, Lebanon and several other campaigns during the course
of the last century, we are in a position to make sense and logic out of the
current situation in Palestine and to answer some of the questions members
of the mainstream media dare not:
Question: Who employs undercover "Arab lookalike" assassination
and abduction teams in the occupied Palestinian territories and Lebanon?
Answer: The Israeli government
Question: Who in the past has deliberately murdered Palestinian and Lebanese
politicians and civilians, including children, as a way to collectively
punish the Palestinian people for resisting Israeli occupation and brutality
and to destablise Palestinian and Lebanese society?
Answer: The Israeli government
Question: Who has the most to benefit from "civil war" between
Palestinian and Lebanese factions?
Answer: The Israeli government
Question: Who is responsible for the horrific murder of three Palestinian
children yesterday?
Answer: The Israeli government.
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: The Darkest Corner of the Mind
George Monbiot
monbiot.com
Dec 12 06
Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for "a piece of furniture". The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for over three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don't mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.
The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he "does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation."(2) Jose Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not medically, but socially.
If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective: the authorities held him without charge for three and half years. Then, threatened by a supreme court ruling, they suddenly dropped their claims that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have now charged him with some vague and lesser offences to do with support for terrorism.
He is unlikely to be the only person subjected to this regime. Another "enemy combatant", Ali al-Marri, claims to have been subject to the same total isolation and sensory deprivation, in the same naval prison in South Carolina(3). God knows what is being done to people who have disappeared into the CIA's foreign oubliettes.
That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting its "war on terror" can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and human rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay(4). This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse themselves, forced to maintain "stress positions", and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.
The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13 days with their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep(5). The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were "commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep" while kept, like Jose Padilla and the arrivals at Guantanamo Bay, "in black hoods or spray-painted goggles"(6).
Alfred McCoy, professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques: "stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation"(7). The famous picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once. Unable to see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress position - maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos. Everything else was done by the book.
Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much sweat in investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have been imprisoned; a few others have been fined or reduced in rank; in most cases the authorities have either failed to investigate or failed to prosecute. The DAA points out that no officer has yet been held to account for torture practised by his subordinates(8). US torturers appear to enjoy impunity, until they are stupid enough to take pictures of each other.
But Padilla's treatment also reflects another glorious American tradition: solitary confinement. Some 25,000 US prisoners are currently held in isolation - a punishment only rarely used in other democracies. In some places, like the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, they are kept in sound-proofed cells and might scarcely see another human being for years on end(9). They may touch or be touched by no one. Some people have been kept in solitary confinement in the United States for more than 20 years.
At Pelican Bay in California, where 1200 people are held in the isolation wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for twenty-two and a half hours a day, then released into an "exercise yard" for "recreation". The yard consists of a concrete well about 12 feet in length with walls 20 feet high and a metal grill across the sky. The recreation consists of pacing back and forth, alone(10).
The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals, 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric wing, and there's a waiting list(11). Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from "memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions ... under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy."(12) People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far - in Texas and Washington state - both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners(13). If we were to judge the United States by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.
From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man's mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds - physical or mental - produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man's power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.
President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the "values of civilised nations": terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation's interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.
Comment on this Editorial
Health, Science and Tech
Some ambidextrous have it both ways
They're likelier to be bisexual and suffer from asthma and dyslexia, research shows
ANNE MCILROY
Globe and Mail
13 Dec 06
People who can write with both their right and left hands are more likely to be bisexual, new research has found.
For years, scientists have been fascinated by left-handed people, and a number of studies have suggested that southpaws are more likely to be homosexual, or to suffer from certain illnesses and disorders.
Not true, according to University of Guelph psychology professor Michael Peters. He and his colleagues found no differences in the health or sexual preferences of right-handed and left-handed people.
"In fact, they were remarkably similar to each other in all of the comparisons we looked at," he said.
But those who were ambidextrous, at least when it came to writing, stood out.
Not only were they more likely to be bisexual, and to a lesser extent homosexual, they also reported suffering from asthma, hyperactivity and dyslexia more than individuals who were more definitive about which hand they prefer.
The study involved 255,000 people who answered questions on the BBC Science and Nature website. Participants were asked 150 questions about demographics, personality, sexuality, social attitudes and behaviours.
The study was not billed as being about left-handedness. That means it didn't attract a disproportionate number of left-handed people, who make up roughly 10 per cent of the population in North America and Europe.
It also did not ask people whether they were left- or right-handed, since people who use both tend to say they are lefties, Dr. Peters said. Instead, volunteers were asked to rate their preference for writing on a scale of one to five.
One meant they liked using their left hand and five meant they preferred their right.
Those who chose three -- about 1 per cent of the participants -- were comfortable with either hand. And they turned out to be the most interesting, Dr. Peters said.
For example, among men, only 4 per cent of right-handers and 4.5 per cent of left-handers reported that they were bisexual.
But among those who wrote with both hands that number was 9.2 per cent.
Among women, 6.2 per cent of right-handers and 6.3 per cent of left-handers reported they were bisexual, compared to 15.6 per cent among the more ambidextrous volunteers.
Dr. Peters and his colleagues, British researchers Stian Reimers and John Manning, published their findings in a recent edition of the journal Brain and Cognition.
They had no way to verify that participants were telling the truth. But they found the percentage of people who said they were left-handed, homosexual, or dyslexic mirrored the numbers found in other large studies.
Their research is the latest offering in a field full of contradictory findings.
For example, in 2000, researchers at the University of Toronto and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health found that being left-handed is more common among lesbians, and to a lesser extent among gay men.
Others have investigated whether being left-handed is associated with dyslexia, hyperactivity or asthma.
The ambidextrous have received much less scientific scrutiny.
Dr. Peters is ambivalent about the term, because it implies people can write equally well with both hands.
This is rare, he says, and usually people are more skilled with one hand than the other, even if they can use both.
He says it is hard to know whether baseball players who can hit both ways, such as Pete Rose or Mickey Mantle, are truly ambidextrous, or whether they have worked hard to acquire a difficult skill.
Same with soccer players who are adept at kicking the ball with both their feet, such as German Gerd Mueller.
Russian tennis player Maria Sharapova is so good with both hands that she played left-handed as a junior.
"At one point, I didn't know if I was going to play lefty or righty or both hands," she has said.
All young children experiment with both hands.
"There is a phase, that can be longer or shorter, in which the parents say, 'Oh, he's going to be left-handed,' or 'Oh, he's going to be right-handed,' " Dr. Peters said.
"In the end, it shakes down by three, four or five years and focuses on one or the other."
Left-handed kids can take longer to declare themselves, he says, but children who don't make a choice are likely to use both hands as an adult.
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Major Solar Eruption - Little Comment in Western Press
Sepp Hasselberger
Physics - Economy - New Energy
12 Dec 06
If you are into following events involving sol, our system's central star, you may have heard of a major event in progress right now, but chances are you haven't heard as the Western media is strangely silent about the event.
NASA has issued a communication about the event that plays down the importance of what is happening. Apart from an Item in Astronomy and Space News, the story was picked up - as far as I can tell - so far only by a paper in Brisbane, Australia.
But a more detailed account comes from Russia. The paper Commersant puts the event in perspective saying that the flare was classified an X-9, meaning an extremely powerful event. Except for its timing which directed the energy away from earth, the flare could have disruptive effects on both electronic communications and health. But we seem to be too preoccupied with the politics of man-made global warming to pay much heed to energetic phenomena that easily dwarf anything our technology could bring to bear. Or are we being purposely being kept in the dark?
Who would have thought that Russian scientists and press are more apt to discuss events likely to influence our lives than the media in the west? Times indeed seem to be a'changing...
The largest electromagnetic energy emission in the last 30 years has been recorded on the Sun, the Shternberg State Astronomy Institute said on Thursday. This energy outburst may damage equipment of space satellites, the scientists say. Doctors warn that the emission is dangerous for those afflicted with cardiovascular illnesses as well as for healthy people.
Scientists at the Shternberg Astronomy Institute of the Moscow State University have reported record-high emissions of electromagnetic energy on the Sun, the biggest since the 1970s. Over the past few days, the volume of sun radiation, or X9, has exceeded the normal level 1,000-fold. The scientists call this phenomenon an anomaly and say that the Sun is now in a stage when sunspots, sources of high electromagnetic radiation, are unusual. "Outbursts on the Sun like this have been extremely infrequent over the past 30 years," said Igor Nikulin of the Shternberg Institute. "What is more, we have never had a chance to observe such emissions with the sun at its minimal activity."
Here, for archive purposes, the reports:
- - -
This is the NASA release as quoted in Astronomy & Space News:
Sun unleashes major solar flare
The Sun is just past its low-point in an 11-year cycle of activity. But big eruptions can happen anytime. One just did.
A major X-9 flare erupted last week. It emanated from a large sunspot, numbered 929, which is just coming into view around the eastern limb of the Sun.
The flare lifted off the Sun and was directed away from Earth. But this sunspot will rotate toward the centre of the Sun over the next few days and could offer up more major blasts that could take direct aim at our planet, forecasters say. It may cause auroras in Tasmania later this week.
Flares of this magnitude (X-class flares are all major) can damage satellites and disrupt telecommunications on Earth. They can also threaten astronauts in space.
NASA sometimes orders astronauts aboard the International Space Station to retreat to the most well protected part of the orbiting outpost to avoid excess radiation exposure. Spacewalks are avoided during solar storms.
Sunspots are dark regions of the Sun where intense magnetic activity caps the upwelling of material from below. Sometimes a cap blows, and a visible flare results. The flares are loaded with X-rays and other radiation, all of which reaches Earth moments after the eruption and can be accompanied by a shower of protons.
These storms can arrive in moments with little warning and can be deadly. Many flares are accompanied by clouds of electrified gas called coronal mass ejections, which can slam Earth a day or so later.
Earth is somewhat shielded from solar storms, but some of the radiation leaks through our protective magnetic field. Experts say space radiation is one of the biggest threats to current and future space missions, including the effort to establish a lunar base.
NASA.
Kommersant in Russia has this report dated 8 December 2006:
Powerful Magnetic Storm Approaches the Earth
The largest electromagnetic energy emission in the last 30 years has been recorded on the Sun, the Shternberg State Astronomy Institute said on Thursday. This energy outburst may damage equipment of space satellites, the scientists say. Doctors warn that the emission is dangerous for those afflicted with cardiovascular illnesses as well as for healthy people.
Scientists at the Shternberg Astronomy Institute of the Moscow State University have reported record-high emissions of electromagnetic energy on the Sun, the biggest since the 1970s. Over the past few days, the volume of sun radiation, or X9, has exceeded the normal level 1,000-fold. The scientists call this phenomenon an anomaly and say that the Sun is now in a stage when sunspots, sources of high electromagnetic radiation, are unusual. "Outbursts on the Sun like this have been extremely infrequent over the past 30 years," said Igor Nikulin of the Shternberg Institute. "What is more, we have never had a chance to observe such emissions with the sun at its minimal activity."
Scientists say that the first indications of increased solar activity were recorded on Monday when four sunspots appeared on the eastern part of the visible side of the solar disk. First, the scientists observed flashes on the Sun which were classified as moderate. However, the flashes were followed on Tuesday by massive outbursts of electromagnetic energy. "Such a large cloud of hot plasma has been released into space that even electronic equipment on space satellites may be damaged," Vladimir Matveev at the Moscow Aviation Institute says.
The Sun's electromagnetic anomaly has not reached the Earth yet. However, the Earth is expected to reach the sunspots quite soon. The encounter may happen this weekend, scientists at the Shternberg Astronomy Institute report. Igor Nikulin says: "If the area of the sunspots does not diminish in three or four days and the emissions continue, it may have a serious influence on the magnetic field of the Earth." A cloud of hot plasma from the sunspots will make the Earth's magnetic field vibrate and will cause a powerful magnetic storm."
Doctors recommend their patients to keep to a special regime during the magnetic storm. People with cardiovascular illness are believed to be at a particular risk. However, quite healthy people should be on their guard as well. "One should not go overboard with drinking, going to the sauna or doing extra work," Vladimir Ryabinin, chief physician at the Sklifosovskiy Ambulance Institute, advises. Other doctors suggest that people pay close attention to their health conditions during the days of the magnetic storm and go to consult their doctors in case of any problem.
Anna Geroeva
See also:
Discovery Channel: Giant Plasma Tsunami Rolls Across Sun
A solar tsunami has been caught in the act of rolling across the face of the sun. The unusual shock wave, clocked at about 700,000 miles per hour, was triggered by a huge Dec. 6 flare that erupted from a rowdy Earth-sized sunspot during what is otherwise a relatively quiet time for the sun. "This is clearly a unique event," said Alexei Pevtsov, a solar physicist at NASA headquarters. "I don't think we've ever seen a wave of that magnitude."
Pravda - Another Russian paper has a report in the Italian edition:
E' in corso la piu' potente tempesta magnetica degli ultimi 30 anni
Another mention in the Azeri (Azerbaijan) press:
Intense solar flares to damage satellites, communications systems
Nasa's latest SOHO images of the sun (as of today, 12 December 2006) say "CCD Bakeout" - available images only go up to 25 November 2006:
NASAlatest.gif
Current information: Space Weather
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'Amazing' tool tracks earth's tiny changes - Twin satellites help in study of ice melts, earthquakes
By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg
Bee Staff Writer
December 13, 2006
Linked by a constant stream of microwave signals, a pair of satellites have been taking Earth's measure in a way the planet has never been measured before.
By tracking tiny changes in gravitational pull, the system known as the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, has been refining our understanding of polar ice melts and massive earthquakes.
Now, researchers are also improving the system's ability to monitor the way groundwater moves around the globe, so it can spot places where thirsty populations are draining aquifers faster than they can be replenished.
In addition, "we are starting to look very carefully at California," to see what the new technology might reveal about Sierra snowpack, said Jay Famiglietti, an earth system science professor at the University of California, Irvine. Later, he plans to turn his focus to the state's groundwater.
Famiglietti is one of many GRACE fans -- few can resist tossing around the word "amazing" to describe it -- who are gathering this week at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco to talk about what the system can accomplish.
"We have a new tool that can get at this completely hidden thing in the earth, and the sky's the limit in terms of applications," said Michael Watkins, project scientist for the system at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
Launched in 2002, what GRACE tracks best is change -- the way the Earth's gravitational pull in the exact same spot varies from month to month.
Water is the biggest factor that changes in such a short time frame, once analysts eliminate little distractions like the weather (a high pressure system will yank at a GRACE satellite a bit more than a low pressure one).
"Water weighs a lot. As water slogs around the Earth, we track it in any form. Water in the form of ice, in the ocean, in the ground," Watkins said.
Even before the satellites went up, Watkins and others anticipated GRACE would be able to measure how quickly polar ice is melting. It came through, producing data earlier this year on the dwindling of Antarctic ice and faster-than-expected losses in Greenland.
Several researchers are looking to GRACE as a way to monitor the effects of climate change, detecting changes in sea level that could affect how ocean currents move warm water around the globe.
Such insights are possible because gravity -- a force that in daily life seems pretty uniform -- actually varies from place to place. It's affected by changes in water movement, denser or lighter structures in the Earth's mantle, denser or lighter formations above ground, such as mountain ranges, and even the way the Earth flattens at the poles, putting everything there just a bit closer to the core. (If you want to lose weight, says Watkins, go to the equator. You'll drop a tiny fraction of an ounce.)
In theory, one satellite alone would have been enough to measure those varying pulls from orbit. GRACE uses two because it was easier and cheaper to have each satellite monitor the other than to set up a huge network of ground tracking stations.
For groundwater movements, the system today works best on vast basins covering 80,000 or more square miles. But Famiglietti and colleague Matt Rodell of NASA are combining it with other water models to sharply narrow its focus, perhaps down to levels useful to local water managers.
That would be critical, said California's chief hydrologist Maury Roos, because people want to know what's going on in individual watersheds.
And while GRACE doesn't have the precision to replace river gauges or snowpack testing, the big-picture data it produces should help water watchers refine their existing models, said JPL's Watkins.
Any little bit could help.
"We've got some holes up in the high Sierras," state hydrologist Roos said, where snowpack measurements can't be taken because of wilderness rules or other restrictions.
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Life beyond Google
Rebecca Armstrong
Independent UK
13 December 2006
Do you use the same search engine for everything? Whether you're after cheap music or breaking news; a look at the alternatives
ANOOX
www.anoox.com
WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?
The human touch - Anoox uses people power to generate search results, though of course computers come into it. It is also run on a not-for-profit basis - advertising covers its costs.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Users can join the Anoox Community and vote on the computer-generated search results. The votes are logged and help to determine the sites that are found in future. In other words, it operates via the democratic principle of majority rule.
HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?
Fully launched in April 2005, Annox was making waves as a pre-release "beta" site long before that, thanks to its focus on majority votes and advertising rates that are much cheaper than Google or Yahoo!. Based in San Francisco, most of the development for the site happens in Europe.
HOW DOES IT PERFORM?
Anoox gives 1,826 results for "Tony Blair" and returns the list in 0.048 seconds. These are results with personality - the first is for www.newleft.net, the second for www.impeachblair.org and the third for a Blair lookalike.
CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?
There is no option to search for images, and a request for "Tony Blair and images" seems to confuse it. It comes up with a different set of results to my earlier search but its findings aren't what I'm looking for.
IS IT EASY TO USE?
A plain site that is very basic, and the flashing circle of world flags that appears when a search is taking place is rather winning. Hi-tech fans may not be convinced.
WHO'S IT BEST FOR?
Socialist surfers - the not-for-profit stance may not spell the end of capitalism but the one-person, one-vote approach brings democracy to web searches.
LIVE.COM
www.live.com
WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?
Live.com provides more than just web searches - here you get shopping, e-mail, blogs and the latest information from the internet, too, all in one slick but heavily branded package.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Live.com is Microsoft's MSN with a make-over. It's billed as a combination of internet software and services designed to work together to give users everything they need from one site. Live.com lets users watch out for new content on their favourite sites by providing RSS feeds.
HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?
On 12 September 2006, Live.com officially came out of pre-release "beta" stage. In the following few days, MSN Search began redirecting to the new Windows Live Search.
HOW DOES IT PERFORM?
Predictable but fast. A search for Happy Feet , this year's big festive film, gave a list of the usual sites and trailers, then 10,711,177 pages of stuff, plus sponsored links. Happy Feet slippers, anyone?
CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?
Very good. I type in "The Horrors band" and get 97 images, mostly of the group I was looking for, who are pretty small. Move the cursor over each picture and it enlarges, giving information about the size and date of the picture. There is also a list of links to related topics on the right.
IS IT EASY TO USE?
Super-smooth. Anyone used to Microsoft's other sites will feel at home. It's very user-friendly, but Mac users may struggle.
WHO'S IT BEST FOR?
Windows lovers, online novices, people with MSN Messenger and anyone who still has a Hotmail account.
NEWSNOW
www.newsnow.co.uk
WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?
One of the UK's most popular news portals, NewsNow is a provider of internet press cuttings and real-time news from over 139 countries. It also has newsfeeds on topics such entertainment, football and business.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
NewsNow automatically searches 27,310 news sources every five minutes, including international, national and regional titles, newswires and press releases.
HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?
Set up in 1997, NewsNow has more than 1.1 million users worldwide. It also offers corporate services for companies that pay to receive market intelligence and competitor tracking.
HOW DOES IT PERFORM?
The free service can only search single words in headlines, so "Augusto Pinochet" gives no results but "Pinochet" yields four articles from the last 10 to 15 minutes, two of which are in English. There are 30 from the past hour.
CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?
There is no facility to search for images on NewsNow, although the websites it links to may include pictures. That said, some of the smaller organisations it links to don't seem to use pictures at all.
IS IT EASY TO USE?
The homepage of the site is busy but clear to use and read. Newsfeeds appear on the left of the page with search results in the centre.
WHO'S IT BEST FOR?
News junkies, students and freelance journalists. For those with corporate cash behind them, the paid-for searches are very in-depth.
QUINTURA
www.quintura.com
WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?
This is a visual search engine that returns results as a list but also as a "tag cloud". The cloud contains the search terms surrounded by related tags. The results closest to the terms are in bigger, bolder fonts.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Quintura's searches are based on advanced algorithms of artificial intelligence (neural networks). The algorithms simulate the way the of human brain works.
HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?
Powered by Yahoo, Quintura was released in November 2005. This year, new features were added, including personalised search preferences and access to other people's search scopes.
HOW DOES IT PERFORM?
Excellent. Type in La Scala Milan , and you get 119,000 results, and the top one takes you straight to a ticket website. You may end up looking at the list rather than using the cloud.
CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?
Not so hot. I type in "Christmas decorations Times Square" and get absolutely zero results. "Times Square" brings up 1,000, mainly old, pictures.
IS IT EASY TO USE?
It's simple to use, requires no sign-in and gives results that are comprehensive, though often off-the-wall. There are two search options, one for web searches and one for pictures - nothing too confusing here.
WHO'S IT BEST FOR?
Lateral thinkers who like to research around a topic and anyone who prefers a visual approach instead of merely a lists of links.
SWAMII
www.swamii.com
WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?
Sorts results with the latest sites at the top. It also keeps on searching - you can build a list of "interests", and every time you visit, it displays all the new information on that subject.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Instead of just indexing web pages, Swamii interweaves sources by searching the news, television, blogs and job sites for matches.
HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?
Swamii was in a pre-release "Beta" version from 1 September and was released to the public two weeks ago. CEO Kalem Fletcher wanted to call the site Yoda.com but found that the domain name had been taken by a cat owner whose pet was called after the Jedi master. Swamii business, a corporate site, will launch next year.
HOW DOES IT PERFORM?
Typing in "Litvinenko" gives me 336 results, the top two of which were posted online within the last minute.
CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?
Not directly, though you do find up-to-date pictures. Handy if, say, you're looking to copy a celebrity haircut.
IS IT EASY TO USE?
The interface is straightforward and user friendly, although users have to register to use the service and enter a password each time they go on to the site.
WHO'S IT BEST FOR?
Anyone who wants to keep track of a current event as it unfolds, or web users who want their searches absolutely up-to-the-minute.
ASK.COM
www.ask.com
WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?
A site that allows users to type in questions written in proper sentences, rather than just using search terms.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Ask.com answers questions posed in natural language, making it perfect for web novices, and uses the popularity of subject-specific links to gauge the authority of answers.
HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?
Founded in Berkley, California, in 1996 the site started life as Askjeeves.com, offering the services of a virtual butler. In February this year, he retired.
HOW DOES IT PERFORM?
Type in "What is the world's tallest mountain?" and 251,200 pages come back. The first tells me the answer is Everest while the second two say Mauna Kea, on Hawaii. So, not exactly fool-proof.
CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?
It's a bit confusing, but typing in "What does the latest Aston Martin look like" brings up a picture of the car from Casino Royale.
IS IT EASY TO USE?
A simple page invites users to ask a question then either search the web or just UK pages.
WHO'S IT BEST FOR?
The nervous or easily frightened internet explorer. Ask.com steers clear of offering users endless services and is a gentle introduction to searching.
GOOGLE
www.google.com
WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?
The world's favourite search engine, so ubiquitous that it has its own verb. As well as web searches, Google offers images, instant messaging, news and "Froogle" shopping services, plus Google Earth, an interactive mapping service of the world, GMail free e-mail and Google Labs, a site devoted to beta-testing new products. The site even has its own shop, selling Google pens and shirts.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
It's based on the idea of bibliometrics: assessing the importance of any given article or piece of information purely by measuring how often other people mention it. Google does not search the internet - it searches the index of words on webpages for the relevant terms, measures the relevance, and lists the pages, with the highest score at the top.
HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?
Google began life in January 1996 as a research project created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students at Stanford University, California.The domain name Google.com was registered in 1997 and has made $7.14bn in revenue this year.
HOW DOES IT PERFORM?
Beth Ditto is set to hit the big time soon. Google shows 344,000 results in 0.08 seconds. Sounds promising.
CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?
A search for Zara Phillips gives me 628 hits in 0.06 seconds. It's everything a royal-watcher could want, and you can even select high, medium and low resolution images.
IS IT EASY TO USE?
Simple, uncluttered and very easy. When set as a home page, users can customise Google to give them news updates, horoscopes and weather forecasts. A site that can be as simple or as complex as your wish.
WHO'S IT BEST FOR?
It's the first port of call for most web users thanks to its fast, vast searches and wide range of services. Not so great for Chinese internet users, as Google has sided with the Chinese government in limiting freedom of speech in the country.
YAHOO
www.yahoo.com
WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?
Yahoo! is reportedly the most visited website around, with more than 412 million users. Offers a range of services including e-mail.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
By buying up previously independent companies, Yahoo! has become more than a web directory. It uses a free web-hosting service from GeoCities, and has partnerships with BT and AT&T.
HAS IT BEEN AROUND FOR LONG?
Started life in California in March 1995. It was originally called "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web", but became Yahoo! shortly afterwards and was launched to the public in April 1996. Was the No 1 search engine until Google stole its thunder.
HOW DOES IT PERFORM?
A search for "Nintendo Wii" returns 62,200,000 hits in 0.03 seconds. The first is a link to a Yahoo! site where people can try (and probably fail) to buy a Wii console, the second is Nintendo's site and the third is Wikipedia.
CAN YOU LOOK FOR PICTURES?
Looking for a picture of Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa brings up 19,155 results. The first page gives me what I need.
IS IT EASY TO USE?
Easy to use with a list of search options - including photos and sport - and links to Yahoo! mail and instant messaging.
WHO'S IT BEST FOR?
Like its arch-rival Google, Yahoo! isn't always the friend of democracy - it has also failed to challenge censorship in China. For everyone else, Yahoo! offers a reliable if unexciting way to navigate the internet.
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Ukraine babies in stem cell probe
BBC News
By Matthew Hill
Dec 12 06
Healthy new-born babies may have been killed in Ukraine to feed a flourishing international trade in stem cells, evidence obtained by the BBC suggests.
Disturbing video footage of post-mortem examinations on dismembered tiny bodies raises serious questions about what happened to them.
Ukraine has become the self-styled stem cell capital of the world.
There is a trade in stem cells from aborted foetuses, amid unproven claims they can help fight many diseases.
But now there are claims that stem cells are also being harvested from live babies.
Wall of silence
The BBC has spoken to mothers from the city of Kharkiv who say they gave birth to healthy babies, only to have them taken by maternity staff.
In 2003 the authorities agreed to exhume around 30 bodies of foetuses and full-term babies from a cemetery used by maternity hospital number six.
One campaigner was allowed into the autopsy to gather video evidence. She has given that footage to the BBC and Council of Europe.
In its report, the Council describes a general culture of trafficking of children snatched at birth, and a wall of silence from hospital staff upwards over their fate.
The pictures show organs, including brains, have been stripped - and some bodies dismembered.
A senior British forensic pathologist says he is very concerned to see bodies in pieces - as that is not standard post-mortem practice.
It could possibly be a result of harvesting stem cells from bone marrow.
Hospital number six denies the allegations.
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EU lawmakers adopt controversial REACH chemical bill
AFP
13 Dec 06
European lawmakers definitively have adopted tough new rules on the use of hazardous chemicals, passing one of the EU's most ambitious and hotly disputed legislative packages in years.
The bill, derided by ecologists and industry but praised by consumer groups, aims to ensure that 30,000 chemicals -- in products ranging from cleaners to toys to plastics -- no longer present risks to human health or the environment
The parliamentarians overwhelmingly approved the legislation on its second reading by a majority of 529 votes for and 98 against, ending more than three years of lobbying and political wrangling.
The main groups in the Strasbourg assembly -- the conservatives, socialists and liberal democrats all voted in favour, while the greens opposed the measures for being too favourable to industry.
After the vote, a beaming parliamentary rapporteur, Italian MEP Guido Sacconi, was handed a bouquet of flowers amid warm applause.
The so-called REACH regulation (registration, evaluation and authorisation of chemicals) will oblige companies to register all chemicals they use and provide information about them as well as any potential hazards.
It means that companies will now shoulder the burden of proving that their chemicals are safe. The current 40-year-old system has obliged public authorities to prove that such products are dangerous.
Of the estimated 100,000 substances on the European market, only those introduced since 1981 -- a mere 3,000 or so -- have been studied for their nocive effects.
The European Union's Finnish presidency applauded the yes vote.
"This is a historic day," said Finnish Trade and Industry Minister Mauri Pekkarinen.
"The chemicals regulation will reform the entire EU chemicals legislation and will turn Europe into a global forerunner and trailblazer," he said.
EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said REACH "will increase our knowledge about chemicals, enhance safety, and spur innovation while encouraging substitution of highly dangerous substances by safer ones."
But an alliance of environmental and women's groups said the final package was only a modest step in the direction of what was needed, and still contained loopholes that the chemicals industry could jump through.
"Major loopholes in REACH will still allow many chemicals that can cause serious health problems -- including cancer, birth defects and reproductive illnesses -- to continue being used in manufacturing and consumer goods." they said in a statement.
Greens MEP Caroline Lucas said: "This deal is an early Christmas present for the chemicals industry, rewarding it for its intense and underhand lobbying campaign."
"While the legislative text has been agreed, the devil will be in the detail of the implementation of these rules," she said.
Indeed the industry, led by German giant BASF, did push hard.
But non-governmental organisations also lobbied in spectacular fashion, at one stage taking blood tests of parliamentarians to show the presence of toxic substances even after they had been banned.
"We regret the unnecessary requirements added to the authorisation element of REACH," said Alain Perroy, head of the European Chemical Industry Council (Cefic), in a statement.
"The European chemical industry will see REACH as an opportunity to demonstrate that companies have a solid knowledge of chemicals and strong product management practices to ensure chemical safety," he said.
Europe's main consumer group BEUC generally welcomed the text itself but worried about how it would be implemented.
"The adoption of REACH is not the end of the story: what has been agreed must now be implemented properly and we will actively monitor the situation," warned director Jim Murray.
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Search for rare white Yangtze dolphin ends in failure, declaration of extinction
Herald Tribune/Associated Press
Dec 12 06
BEIJING: A rare, nearly blind white dolphin that survived for millions of years is effectively extinct, an international expedition declared Wednesday after ending a six-week fruitless search of the mammal's Yangtze River habitat.
The baiji would be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction since hunting and overfishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s. For the baiji, the culprit was a degraded habitat - busy ship traffic, which confounds the sonar the dolphin uses to find food, and overfishing and pollution in the Yangtze waters of eastern China, the expedition said.
"The baiji is functionally extinct. We might have missed one or two animals but it won't survive in the wild," said August Pfluger, a Swiss economist turned amateur naturalist who helped put together the expedition. "We are all incredibly sad."
The baiji dates back 20 million years. Chinese called it the "goddess of the Yangtze." For China, its disappearance symbolizes how unbridled economic growth is changing the country's environment, irreparably, some environmentalists say.
The damage to the baiji's habitat is also affecting the Yangtze finless porpoise, whose numbers have fallen to below 400, the expedition found.
"The situation of the finless porpoise is just like that of the baiji 20 years ago," the group said in a statement citing Wang Ding, a hydrobiologist and co-leader of the expedition. "Their numbers are declining at an alarming rate. If we do not act soon they will become a second baiji."
Pfluger said China's Agriculture Ministry, which approved his expedition, had hoped the baiji would be another panda, an animal brought back from the brink of extinction in a highly marketable effort that bolstered the country's image.
The expedition was the most professional and meticulous ever launched for the mammal, Pfluger said. The team of 30 scientists and crew from China, the United States and four other countries searched a 1,700-kilometer (1,000-mile) heavily trafficked stretch of the Yangtze, where the baiji once thrived.
The expedition's two boats, equipped with high-tech binoculars and underwater microphones, trailed each other an hour apart without radio contact so that a sighting by one vessel would not prejudice the other. If there was fog, he said, the boats waited for the mist to clear to make sure they took every opportunity to spot the mammal.
Around 400 baiji were believed to be living in the Yangtze in the early 1980s, when China was just launching the free-market reforms that have transformed its economy. The last full-fledged search, in 1997, yielded 13 confirmed sightings, and a fisherman claimed to have seen a baiji in 2004, Pfluger said in an earlier interview.
At least 20 to 25 baiji would now be needed to give the species a chance to survive, Wang, the Chinese scientist, said.
For Pfluger, the baiji's demise is a personal defeat. A member of the 1997 expedition, he recalls the excitement of seeing a baiji cavorting in the waters near Dongting Lake.
"It marked me," he said in an interview Monday. He went on to set up the baiji.org Foundation to save the dolphin. In recent years, Pfluger said, scientists like the eminent zoologist George Schaller told him to stop his search, saying the baiji's "lost, forget it."
During the recent expedition, an occasional online diary kept by team members traced a dispiriting situation, as day after day they failed to spot a single baiji.
Even in the expedition's final days, members believed they would find a specimen, trolling a "hotspot" below the industrial city of Wuhan where Baiji were previously sighted, Pfluger said. "Hope dies last," he said.
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E. Coli Outbreak Widens In Midwest
CBS
13 Dec 06
MINNEAPOLIS A suspected E. coli outbreak that began in Iowa widened in Minnesota on Tuesday, with health officials linking 14 apparent cases to Taco John's restaurants in two towns.
A spokesman for the Wyoming-based chain confirmed that two southern Minnesota restaurants get their produce from the same supplier as the Taco John's in Cedar Falls, Iowa, where nearly three dozen people developed E. coli symptoms earlier this week after dining there. The restaurants are in Albert Lea and Austin.
Those infected all ate at the three restaurants in roughly the same time period, the last few days of November and the first few days of December, said Kirk Smith, supervisor of the Minnesota Department of Health's food borne disease unit.
Separately Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said its analysis had shown so far that "onions of any type are probably not linked to this outbreak."
On Monday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it could not confirm that scallions were the cause of the problem, as previously suspected, and that it was not ruling out any food as a possible culprit.
Meanwhile, Taco Bell Corp. launched a newspaper ad blitz and sent its president on a string of media interviews Tuesday to persuade customers that its food is safe - even as the cause of the E. coli outbreak linked to the fast-food chain remained a mystery.
In an open letter to customers published in USA Today, The New York Times and other newspapers, Taco Bell President Greg Creed said he would support the creation of a coalition of food suppliers, competitors, government and other experts to explore ways to safeguard the food supply chain and public health.
On Tuesday, all but four of Taco Bell's 86 New Jersey restaurants were back in business.
Half of the 14 Minnesota victims ate at the Albert Lea restaurant, the other half in Austin, Smith said. He said he wouldn't be surprised to see at least a few more cases crop up in the next day or two.
Taco John's spokesman Brian Dixon identified the produce supplier for the three restaurants as St. Paul-based Bix Produce. But he stressed that the restaurant chain doesn't yet know if the produce was the source of the E. coli. The disease can also be carried by undercooked meat, and Dixon said the chain is testing samples of all types of food from the restaurants in question.
"We're still trying to pinpoint exactly what happened," Dixon said. The company may decide to switch suppliers, he said.
Bix Produce Chief Operating Officer Duane Pfleiger stressed that produce has not been implicated in the illnesses and that the investigation is ongoing.
"There is no conclusive evidence pointing toward produce or any other item that might be the cause of this," he said, adding that Bix Produce has a strong safety record.
E. coli is a common, usually harmless bacteria, but certain strains can cause abdominal cramps, fever, bloody diarrhea, kidney failure, blindness, paralysis, even death.
It is found in the feces of humans and livestock. The germs can be spread by people if they do not thoroughly wash their hands after using the restroom.
Five of the Minnesota cases have been confirmed as E. coli at local hospitals, Smith said, but the Department of Health plans to make its own confirmation in each case. He said DNA testing will also be used to independently confirm that the Minnesota and Iowa contaminations came from the same source.
One of the Minnesota victims has developed kidney complications and has been hospitalized, Smith said.
In the Iowa cases, preliminary test results showed that E. coli was the likely culprit for symptoms that sickened about 40 people and sent 18 people to the hospital in late November and early December.
The restaurants in Albert Lea and Austin have remained open. Both sites threw out their entire food supplies, and Dixon said both are entirely replacing their produce stock every four hours. He said the company has also sent in a trainer to check on restaurant conditions.
The company also said it has taken steps to sanitize equipment at the restaurants in question.
Dixon said employees company-wide are being reminded of the company's "well-defined safety standards" including cooking temperatures, hand-washing and other personal health requirements.
"We're taking every possible aggressive posture we can," Dixon said. "It's sickening for us to see anybody in the public suffer in this way, especially if they got ill from eating at Taco John's."
Just a handful of people were eating at a Taco John's in St. Paul during the lunch hour Tuesday. Gary Hanson, a Taco John's regular in town on business, made a cross with his index fingers and pointed inside the restaurant when asked about the E. coli outbreak.
"That's why nobody's here," he joked. But he said he wasn't too worried, as he dug into his chicken fajitas.
"They're probably more cautious than they ever were," he said.
Federal health officials say there's still no indication that the outbreak in Minnesota and Iowa is connected to an outbreak in the Northeast that sickened 64 people who ate at Taco Bell restaurants, but they haven't ruled out a link. Scallions were initially identified as the likely source of that outbreak, but federal testing of samples turned up negative for E. coli.
The two taco chains are not affiliated with each other.
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MySpace tops Yahoo in November
By Danny Schechter
AlterNet
December 13, 2006
China may be violating trade agreements, but the savings-poor U.S. lacks the power to do anything about it.
Who has real power over U.S. decision-making?
If you think it is the White House, or even the Congress, think again. There has been a power shift underway for years and, believe it our not, our future and fortune rest in the hands of bureaucrats on the other side of the world. Sorry folks, but our red, white and blue economy is afloat today because of help from members of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.
Yes, the Red Menace that we spent so many years fearing as a military threat now represents a far more serious economic threat. Mao must be turning in his grave with the news that no less than six U.S. Cabinet Ministers are on their way this week to the Middle Kingdom to beseech, beg, lobby and try to persuade the new mandarins not to sell off their vast reservoir of dollars.
There's an old saying that a person can be in trouble when he owes a bank $100. But if he owes $l00 million, the bank could be in trouble. We owe China billions but they realize that collapse of American capitalism -- once their revolutionary goal -- could also trigger a collapse of Chinese "communism." That's how mutually intertwined we have become, and how complicit we are with a government which the Committee to Protect Journalists says now jails more journalists than any other.
The New York Times reports on the big trip later this week that will bring Treasury Secretary and company on their ballyhooed 'excellent adventure' to Beijing. Yet it doesn't look like much will happen.
"As Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. prepares for his passage to China with six Cabinet members and the chairman of the Federal Reserve," reports the New York Times, "pressure is mounting on him to produce results or face a wave of protectionist measures in the new Congress next year.
"Mr. Paulson conferred this week with business leaders urging him to bring about changes in China's economic practices, particularly its regulated economy, manipulation of currency levels to spur exports and its failure to crack down on piracy of software, pharmaceuticals and other items.
At the same time, Mr. Paulson 's aides were also conferring with Chinese representatives preparing for his Dec. 13-15 trip. Both sides cautioned not to expect breakthroughs on the big issues, in part because the Chinese cannot be seen as kowtowing to American pressure."
So we will hear a lot of rhetoric in the days to come about China's failures to honor agreements and violations of trade regimes. They will all be true -- but beside the point. Who has the power to bring China into line? We don't. We are as much of a paper tiger in Beijing as we are in Baghdad.
The Financial Times reports that "Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organization, said in a recent interview: 'There are constituencies and vested interests. You can't deal with the Chinese by banging on the table, going to the balcony and saying, 'This is what I want.' "
What's really going on? It looks like this could be the opening stages of a new war, a trade war, revolving in part around the shrinking power of the dollar.
And that war could do more damage to the United States than the defeat in Iraq.
Already, as I have reported, the Treasury Department has opened a global crisis management center that sounds very much like an economic war room. It is headed by none other than Jim Wilkinson, the GOP info warrior who ran the Coalition Media Center during the opening days of the Iraq War, when great victories were all we read about in the news.
What we are not reading today is how serious this is. And how our national and consumer debt is at the center of it.
Reports the Economist, "America's growth has been driven by consumer spending. That spending, supported by increased BORROWING, is clearly UNSUSTAINABLE; and the consequent economic and financial imbalances must INVARIABLY UNWIND. As that happens, the country could face a PROLONGED period of slower growth." (Emphasis mine.)
The bill is coming due. The piper will be paid. And all the financial wonks and gnomes and commissars worldwide know it. In many quarters, the Euro looks like a better bet than the dollar. Why? The Economist says productivity growth is going down in the United States and up in Europe. The U.S. structural budget deficit has widened and American savings has disappeared into the negative column.. Their cover story speaks of illusions in Washington. Sound familiar?
A slump in the American economy is likely to be cushioned by banks and investors overseas because it could bring them down too, What this means is that we are DEPENDENT on what others do or fail to do. Washington is actually undermining the dollar in hopes it will make our exports cheaper and thus ease the deficit. It's our way of pressuring the Chinese and try to get them lower the value of their currency.
Clever? Don't be so sure. They are not fools.
If China's wise men decide that propping up the dollar is not in their interest, they can move more money into Euros. And then the real battle begins. Already their Finance Minister said they are "diversifying" their currencies. That's not in "our interest" and yet our monetary manipulations could backfire as Robert Sinche of the Bank of America suggests. Listen to this:
"Let's say China revalues by 10 percent overnight. The prices at Wal-Mart go up ten percent. So we then see worse inflation, the Fed tightens monetary policies and we end up with higher inflation, higher prices and higher interest rates. Remind me again why that's what we want."
Forget the Beijing Olympics. This is the real game in town, a battle fought with calculators and strategy. We are playing Monopoly. They are playing GO, the game created in Asia 4,000 years ago.
So if you didn't trust this Administration on the war, why should you trust them on economics? When you know the war casualty figures have been downplayed, why do you think the jobless figures and "misery index" are not? Would you give your money and your destiny over to con men? Of course not, if you knew what the con is.
Unfortunately, the real news about these manipulations is buried in the labyrinth of business sections where many are afflicted by the economics "MEGO" effect. (MEGO stands for 'My Eyes Glaze Over.)
So that's why its time to pay attention to the dropping dollar, the impending diplomatic China dance, and the domestic housing "train wreck," as experts call it. All feed into a global credit crunch affecting us all. We urgently need our media to track these developments and explain them more clearly with less of a big business bias and more of a "who wins and who loses" framework.
While we watch one war go up in flames, the matches are being lit for another one.
Danny Schechter writes a blog for MediaChannel.org. He is the author of "Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Media Failed to Cover the War on Iraq" (Prometheus).
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The Meaning of Spam
By Annalee Newitz
AlterNet
December 12, 2006
An inside look at the "arms race" between spammers and anti-spam technology.
I spend an inordinate amount of time wondering why my spam looks the way it does. Until quite recently, I received about 20,000 spam e-mails every day. The poor little Bayesean filter in my Thunderbird e-mail program couldn't keep up and would routinely barf when confronted with such huge piles of crap from "Nuclear R. Accomplishment" with the subject line "$subject" and a message body full of random quotes from Beowulf.
Before I finally fixed my spam problem -- oh blissfully small inbox! -- I developed a few vaguely paranoid theories. Briefly, I imagined spammers were spying on my inbox and culling sender names from it that matched those of my friends. In my saner moments, I would wonder why exactly spam evolved to look the way it does. Why do spammers keep sending me pictures of pink, bouncy letters that spell "mortgage," followed by text from a random Web site? And why, oh why, do they send me e-mails containing nothing but the cryptic line, "he said from the doorway, where she"? How can that be good business sense?
So I called expert Daniel Quinlan, who is an antispam architect at Ironport Systems as well as a contributor to open-source antispam system Spam Assassin. He patiently listened to me rant about my e-mail problems -- I think antispam experts are sort of like geek therapists -- then explained why I receive spam from random dictionary words strung together into a name like Elephant Q.
Thermodynamic. It's done to fool any spam filter that refuses to receive e-mail from somebody who has already sent you spam in the past. "They want to create a name that your spam filter has never seen before," Quinlan said. It turns out every weirdness in my spam is "probably there for a good reason," he said. In the arms race between spammers and antispammers, spammers try every trick they can to circumvent filtering software.
Often, the spam you get is the result of months or years of this arms race. For example, spammers of yesteryear started sending images instead of text, so that spam filters looking for text like "viagra" would be fooled. Instead, the image would contain the word "viagra," but filters would see only an image and let it through. In response, antispam software began tossing e-mails that contained only an image, since spam containing an image typically has some text with it like "check out my pictures from Hawaii" or whatever. Rarely does a real person send just an image.
Quinlan said spammers figured out their pictures were being chucked, so they started adding a few random words to their mail and got through the filters again. Then antispammers started chucking e-mails with images that also contained random words that didn't make sentences. And that's why, today, you get images with chunks of text taken from random books and Web sites. As long as the text fits into sentences and isn't random words strung together, spam filters have a harder time figuring out if the mail is spam or ham. Spammers also send slightly different images every time, so that spam filters can't identify the image itself as spam. And they fill the images with bouncy, pink letters advertising their crap because character recognition software can't read bouncy letters. So any spam filter that uses character recognition software to look at text in images to find spam will be fooled.
OK, so there is a reason behind the madness. But how could Quinlan explain the spam I get that contains no advertisement for anything, no links nor images, and instead merely quotes some random passage from Dostoyevsky? Quinlan said there's no way to know for sure, but the reigning theory among antispam experts is that it's part of what's called a "directory harvest attack" in which the spammer tries to figure out if there's a real person behind a randomly chosen e-mail address. The spammer sends out millions of innocuous e-mails and may get a slightly different response from the mail server if the mail has reached an actual person. Once the spammer has established that certain addresses are valid, he can send his real spam and be sure that he's reaching an inbox.
All of this sounds perfectly reasonable. Spammers are doing bizarro things to get their messages out. But why do I sometimes get a spam with the subject line "$subject"? Why would I ever be fooled into thinking that was a piece of legitimate e-mail? "That's just some spammer who doesn't know how to use his spamware," Quinlan said. "Sometimes spammers do things that are -- for lack of a better word -- dumb."
Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com) is a surly media nerd who is in recovery from receiving spam.
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Bush-Whacking
Bush so-called "listening tour" delays decisions on Iraq. He needs more time to learn about the war he started.
by Joe in DC
12 Dec 06
If this wasn't so deadly serious, it would be comical. Because really, you cannot make this stuff up. Bush doesn't know enough about Iraq to make any decisions. That the White House can say this with a straight face defies any kind of rational thinking. It's absurd. And Tony Snow is spinning away as evidenced in The New York Times:
The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, acknowledged today that Mr. Bush had wanted to deliver his speech before Christmas. But he said it would be wrong to interpret the delay as a sign of presidential indecision.
"That would be the wrong inference to draw," Mr. Snow said. "It's a complex business, and there are a lot of things to take into account.
"You would expect and desire a commander in chief, in looking at a situation, to examine military concerns, security concerns, diplomatic concerns, internal political concerns within Iraq, regional ramifications, how you get people to work in concert with one another," Mr. Snow said. "It is enormously complex."
Mr. Snow said the president continues to get the best advice possible. "And so, as he considers the options, he's not going to get rushed on it," Mr. Snow said. "He wants to make sure it's done right."
Actually, Tony, we would expect and desire our commander in chief to already know the military concerns, security concerns, diplomatic concerns and every other concern. You see, Tony, this war was Bush's idea. He should know the options. He should have known them four years ago.
It is absurd that the President is spinning the media and the public by saying he's on a "listening tour." It is ludicrous that the media accepts it. In the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll, it's clear the American people have given up on Bush's war. They've been spun too many times to believe anything Bush says about Iraq anymore.
By the time Bush makes a "decision" based on his "listening tour," the US death toll in Iraq will far exceed 3,000. God only knows how many more Iraqis will have to die. That's beyond absurd. To use the words of Senator Gordon Smith, that's criminal.
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Stalling for Time: Bush Delays Speech on Iraq Until January
By JIM RUTENBERG
NY Times
December 12, 2006
WASHINGTON - President Bush will wait until after the holidays to speak to the nation about a new strategy in Iraq, a strategy he said today will be designed to establish a free and self-sufficient country that will be an ally in the battle against extremists.
"Our objective is to help the Iraqi government deal with the extremists and killers, and support the vast majority of Iraqis who are reasonable people who want peace," Mr. Bush said after an Oval Office meeting with the Iraqi vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, the leader of the most powerful Sunni Arab party in Iraq.
Mr. Hashemi, sitting next to Mr. Bush in the Oval Office, said he and Mr. Bush agreed on the overall goal. "We have no other option in Iraq but to achieve that success," Mr. Hashemi said. "And with the cooperation of with our friends, Mr. President and the American administration, we will join forces to achieve that success in the pursuit of peace."
The Iraqi leader acknowledged that his country is enduring great suffering but said, "There is a light in the corridor."
Neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Hashemi offered a hint on what the new strategy might be, or how deeply they had discussed it. Neither man used the word "victory" in describing their aspirations, although Mr. Hashemi said he was confident of Washington's commitment to "the unforgettable, the long-awaited success."
Mr. Bush had been expected to speak to the American people about Iraq before Christmas. But a spokesman for the National Security Council said today that the talk will now take place after the New Year.
The spokesman, Gordon Johndroe, said the president is continuing to ask detailed questions of his advisers, many on operational details involving military considerations under review, and that the answers will not be ready until after Christmas.
Mr. Johndroe's announcement that Mr. Bush will address the American people in early January, rather than before Christmas as White House officials had indicated earlier, came shortly after the president held a video teleconference with several American commanders, the departing secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Iraq.
The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, acknowledged today that Mr. Bush had wanted to deliver his speech before Christmas. But he said it would be wrong to interpret the delay as a sign of presidential indecision.
"That would be the wrong inference to draw," Mr. Snow said. "It's a complex business, and there are a lot of things to take into account.
"You would expect and desire a commander in chief, in looking at a situation, to examine military concerns, security concerns, diplomatic concerns, internal political concerns within Iraq, regional ramifications, how you get people to work in concert with one another," Mr. Snow said. "It is enormously complex."
Mr. Snow said the president continues to get the best advice possible. "And so, as he considers the options, he's not going to get rushed on it," Mr. Snow said. "He wants to make sure it's done right."
But Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the incoming Democratic majority leader, said there should be no delay. "It has been six weeks since the American people demanded change in Iraq," Mr. Reid said in a statement, referring to the results of the November election. "In that time, Iraq has descended further toward all-out civil war, and all the President has done is fire Donald Rumsfeld and conduct a listening tour. Waiting and delaying on Iraq serves no one's interests."
The internal administration debate is focusing acutely on whether - and how - the United States should press the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to take more aggressive steps to crack down on militias, among other issues, following a specified timeline.
That course was among those recommended last week by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, which called on the United States to link continued political and military support for Mr. Maliki's government to benchmarks it would have to meet.
The administration has been generally opposed to putting overt pressure on Mr. Maliki, but on Monday Mr. Snow left open the possibility that the United States would seek a way to get Mr. Maliki's government to achieve stability faster and get American troops home.
"There are going to be the best efforts to succeed as quickly as possible," Mr. Snow said. "The president has made it clear to Iraqis and to the United States that we want to have this succeed, and we want it to succeed as quickly as possible."
Mr. Snow refused to say whether the president remained firmly opposed to establishing timetables for American withdrawal - which would presumably coincide with Iraqis' reaching certain benchmarks in securing the country. However, he indicated during his regular afternoon briefing with reporters that the president would address the issue during an expected speech laying out his plan. He later said he had meant to imply only that the president was open to various options.
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Contradicting Bush, Rumsfeld Claims He Was Replaced Because Of 'The Outcome Of The Election'
Judd
ThinkProgress
12 Dec 06
Yesterday on Hannity and Colmes, outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that he was removed as a direct result of the "outcome of the election." Watch it
On November 8, Bush said explicitly that, regardless of the outcome of the election, Rumsfeld was out:
BUSH: And so he and I both agreed in our meeting yesterday that it was appropriate that I accept his resignation. And so the decision was made - actually, I thought we were going to do fine yesterday. Shows what I know. But I thought we were going to be fine in the election. My point to you is, is that, win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee.
Someone isn't telling the truth.
Transcript:
HANNITY: What happened this time, though?
RUMSFELD: I think that this time the outcome of the election, just to put it right up on the table, created a situation where I personally believe, and the president agrees, it is better for someone else to be leading this department with that new Congress. And it's better for the military; it's better for the department; and it's better for the administration. And I feel comfortable with that.
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Reading Isn't Fundamental
By Will Durst
AlterNet
December 12, 2006
If we had a president with a penchant for the written word, perhaps he would have given the Iraq Study Group's report a brief scan.
Right about now is when it could come in real handy to have a President who reads. A book learning wonk. A guy not allergic to the printed word. George W. Bush even admitted it himself. I think his exact quote was: "I don't read." And you know what, I believe him. Then this summer, something happened. I think it was part of that midterm campaign thing, when the President claimed his beach reading list included Camus' "The Stranger" and what he referred to as "Three Shakespeares." Three Shakespeares? Sounds like a customer at Baskin- Robbins ordering up a triple scoop of smart. And very suspicious coming from a man famous for struggling through the same page of "My Pet Goat" for 10 minutes.
The whole reading deal is important here because he should have been tempted to give the Iraq Study Group Report a brief scan before repeating "The Study Group agrees with me." Unh. No. They don't. He said this during a joint press conference with Tony Blair that could have been a Tivo of any of his previous eighty gazilliion press conferences with Tony Blair. Tony looks and sounds like a statesman and George like an eighth grader trying to fake his way through a book report on a classic he didn't bother to skim. Does the term "Cliff Notes" have any meaning here?
At the risk of switching milieus, we're stuck in "Groundhog Day." Doesn't matter what happens, we wake up the next morning and instead of hearing Sonny & Cher singing "I Got You Babe" we get the president playing the same lame game he has for three years: "Its a tough time. Going to take some hard work. We're working hard." His supporters say he's resolute. You know what, resolute isn't always a good thing. Butt cancer is resolute.
We won't even get into the ironic nature of his "hard work" mantra. How odd to be coming from a guy who pre- president was the poster child for social promotion. But an exhortation to hard work isn't the only blunted arrow in his nebulous quiver. In response to what measures he might take based on the report, he gravely intoned, "We will take every proposal seriously and will act in a timely fashion," which is Presidential Dismissal Speak for, "yeah, whatever."
The Baker-Hamilton Group's report was not the chronicle of clarity itself. It came to the considered opinion that ... Iraq is messed up and mostly, its our fault. For this we spent a million dollars? Too bad they didn't have time to get into other blistering exposes like, the Pacific Ocean is moist. Wood is not your foremost option for conducting electricity. Wine- peanut butter -- not a match. The board goes back.
The President refused to comment on specifics in the report by dipping into his bottomless bag of vague generalities. "My message is this: I want to work with the Congress, I want to work with people in both parties." Yeah, sure he does, the same way a five year old with a magnifying glass wants to work with ants. The bi- partisan Study Group provided 79 recommendations for alleviating the chaos in Iraq. Unfortunately none of them involved the President and his entire Cabinet resigning, proving perhaps, this study group should've studied more.
Will Durst is a political comic, syndicated columnist, AM radio talk show host and defense liability.
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Iran's Smackdown on Dubya
By Matt Taibbi
RollingStone.com
December 12, 2006
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad had a feast this week and his main course was George Bush with an apple in his mouth.
Q: The other sensitive issue that people want to know your position is on, because this has come up often, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rejection that there was a Holocaust. Do you believe that there was a Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed?
A: I am currently thinking about the Iraqi issues.
-- CNN's Wolf Blitzer, interviewing Iraqi Shiite leader Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, who was in the U.S. for a meeting with George W. Bush. Al-Hakim repeatedly declined to answer the Holocaust question.
The Bush administration's Iraq adventure is beginning to remind me of that section in Catch-22 when mess officer extraordinaire Milo Minderbinder buys up the entire Egyptian cotton crop. At first Milo thinks he's getting the deal of the century, but in the end he just gets stuck with a shitload of cotton that he can't sell. Next thing you know, he's covering raw cotton with melted chocolate and trying to serve it as a dessert to the guys in the mess hall. People are choking everywhere, throwing up, and Milo just keeps smiling, pretending it's delicious...
The Iraq war is sort of the same thing. Bush and Rumsfeld and all of those clowns went into that country with their heads full of idiot fantasies -- Arab kids joyously throwing flowers at GIs, liberated Bedouins buying Dockers slacks in bulk and quoting Thomas Jefferson in cyber-cafes, young Muslims packing meeting halls in Mosul and Tal Afar to hear Tom Friedman preach about globalization. That exactly didn't work out, and now four years later George Bush is in the unenviable position of having to invite to the White House a Holocaust denier and proud love slave of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, and then shake his hand, smile, and sell him as America's best hope for democracy in "free" Iraq.
A pessimist would call that a real shitty situation, but I'm counting on Bush to balk at that suggestion and take the optimistic course, the obvious chocolate-covered cotton move. Which is this: instead of making some craven apology for getting in bed with a Holocaust denier, Bush should just deny the Holocaust himself!
I'm not saying there's no downside to this move for Bush -- he'd never be rid of Abe Foxman, for one thing -- but if he made Holocaust denial official U.S. policy, just peevishly said something like "Heck, it's not like it's ever been proven" at an afternoon press conference, then he could at least have pretended that he wasn't forced into this devil's alliance with Al-Hakim. Throw your arm around him and smile: Things are going exactly as planned! Nothing is fucked here!
That's what the old Bush would have done, anyway. The old Bush, the guy we all learned to love in the early part of this decade, he and Karl Rove would have seen this situation as an opportunity, an intellectual challenge. The pre-indictment Rove anyway would never have backed down. He would have issued the appropriate Holocaust talking points, and after three weeks of Rush and Hannity and Savage taking shots at Hamptons liberal Steven Spielberg and the big-foreheaded Irish Kinsey-lover Liam Neeson and the sexually ambiguous pickle-slurping creep Adrian Brody, and everyone else who's ever been in a Holocaust movie, the polls even on that issue would have come around eventually, no doubt about it.
Because the old Karl Rove understood that there's only one real sin in American politics, and that's apologizing. You act like you know what you're doing, people in this country will buy whatever you're selling. They'll eat chocolate-covered cotton. They'll eat worse. They'll crawl on their knees to eat wet dogshit and beg for more. You just can't ever flinch as you ladle it onto their plate.
The old Bushies understood this, but this newest incarnation is too broken and demoralized to remember the strategies that got them to the top. They are being held back now, ironically, by the tiny, anemic quotient of restraint and decency parasitically embedded in their policies. If Bush had simply invaded Iraq, ransacked the place in search of WMDs, seized its oil wells, captured Saddam Hussein and impaled him on a pike, and then declared victory and pulled the troops out, leaving the non-oil-producing regions of the country to tear themselves apart in an insane chaos of civil war and religious violence, his approval rating would still be in the high sixties, maybe even the seventies.
Instead, Colin Powell's "You break it, you own it" prophesy has sadly come to pass -- but why was that inevitable? Why couldn't we just break shit and then saunter out of the store, both middle fingers trained at the cashier's face? After all, we're America! Who would stop us? The world would have been horrified, but to hell with the world; here in America, all people care about is American casualties and American taxes. If our soldiers were out of Iraq now and we weren't still spending a billion bucks a minute on this war, most of America would still be on board with the original decision to go in -- even if the Iraq we eventually left behind was a Rwanda-like, smoldering-cemetery of a state. After all, the American population has successfully blown off plenty of massacres before -- even ones we helped cause, like Indonesia in the '60s and Guatemala in the '70s and '80s. Iraq could have been the same kind of easily-ignored little coffee stain on the American conscience.
But that train has left the station, and the reason for that is that this administration apparently really is wedded to its nutty dream of building a Switzerland full of happy neo-capitalist Muslims in the middle of Asia minor. If Bush had been just a little more evil, just a little more of the cheap vicious fuckhead we all thought he was for so long, we'd be out of Iraq right now and engaged in the next policy "success" -- i.e. a "Tehran Spring" and a subsequent taxidermy of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, with the "Mission Accomplished" money-shot cued up for the first Monday in November 2008.
Instead, it's Ahmedinejad who is toying with us, as the Bush administration flounders in the lethal middle ground between mindless military bravado and reluctant, halfhearted consideration for the constraints of civilization and international law. Having entered Iraq without any semblance of an occupation plan, our blockheaded leader is belatedly acting like a man concerned with his legacy as a nation-builder, a Dr. Frankenstein who cannot bring himself to kill his monstrous dream of Iraqi democracy. And it's this fatal weakness that is producing perhaps the very worst consequence of this war, the stunning international political victory of Ahmedinejad, the Holocaust-denying Iranian reptile.
Last week, two things happened. The first is that Bush received Al-Hakim, a leading Iraqi Shiite cleric who has very close ties to Iran and Ahmedinejad. Bush is cozying up to Al-Hakim because he can't afford to kiss Ahmedinejad's ass publicly and Al-Hakim is the next best thing, a person whose cooperation will be necessary if the security situation in Iraq is to be improved. By itself this was a kind of humiliation for Bush, a recognition that he can't provide for Iraq's security by himself, even with the world's mightiest army, and still needs to play supplicant to some prehistoric ascetic in a beard and cape.
The second thing that happened is that the nation of Iran hosted an "academic conference" held to consider the "scientific question" of whether the Holocaust took place. Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, opened the conference by attacking what he termed "Western restrictions on scientific and scholarly study," saying that the West did not allow Holocaust denial because it would lead to questions about the nature of the Israeli state. Following Mottaki was our own David Duke, who claimed that the West had a "Holocaust mafia" that squelched dissent on the issue.
Let it be noted for the record that one very good reason that the United States did not recognize this excellent event by dropping a MOAB in the middle of it is that our President Bush was more or less exactly at that moment meeting with an important Iranian ally to beg for help in untangling America's hopeless political mess in Iraq. And while we can't give Ahmedinejad credit for planning this sequence of events -- the Holocaust conference was announced long before Al-Hakim's visit -- there's no doubt that the general trend of his diplomacy in the past years, as opposed to Bush's anyway, laid the foundation for this incredible political checkmate. Conceived as a blow to the heart of Islamic extremism, Bush's insane pursuit of the Iraqi democratic mirage has instead forced the United States into the role of a formal appeaser of some of the vilest state ideology seen on earth since Hitler's time. And it couldn't have worked out any better for Ahmedinejad, who in just four years has not only seen the United States take out his most dangerous military enemy in Saddam Hussein, but has seen the conditions laid for both a Shiite resurgence in Iraq and the dealing of a crippling blow to American geopolitical ambitions in the Middle East. It makes one wonder how much the Iranians helped us along down this path to begin with, whether those reports of Ahmed Chalabi chilling in Tehran in the weeks before the war might actually be true. Perhaps future historians will find an alternate source for some of our original "solid information" about Iraqi WMDs.
Who knows. What we do know is that as of last week, we have officially been played like a fiddle by one of the world's all-time evil bastards. And we also now can say for sure that the famed cold-blooded ruthlessness of the Bush-Rove-Cheney crew has been proven to be a crock. Those guys are ruthless when it comes to winning American elections. But when it comes to war and diplomacy, they're a bunch of kittens. You can't Swift-Boat Moqtada Al-Sadr. When it comes to real enemies, our leaders are useless.
Mahmoud Ahmedinejad had a feast this week and his main course was George Bush with an apple in his mouth. Has it ever been more embarrassing to be an American?
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Bush cancels Iraq withdrawal speech
The Daily Mail
13th Dec 06
George Bush has postponed a key speech setting out a new approach to the Iraq war, it emerged today.
The president had promised he would give his formal response to the Baker Report before the Christmas holiday.
But in a sign of the deepening confusion at the heart of White House over Iraq, a spokesman said the speech would not be ready until the New Year.
The Baker Report last week warned the situation in Iraq was 'grave and deteriorating' and warned the present US policy was no longer viable.
Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, said there were several reasons for the delay including the recent rise in insurgency and the need to allow time for new defence secretary Robert Gates to settle in.
At a meeting with the Australian foreign minister in Washington, Ms Rice said Mr Bush wanted to present his people with a 'new way forward'.
She said: "It makes sense for him to take whatever time he needs to have confidence in the course that he will put forward."
Comment: Sure, a "New way forward" means that Bush can take whatever time he needs to create civil war in Iraq, cream off any corporate and ideological dividends and drive the Middle East further into Chaos. No change there, nor should we be surprised, psychopaths generally do not deviate from their course, even when their destruction comes home to roost.
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Bush's Last Chance to Salvage His Reputation
EDITORIAL
The Daily Star, Lebanon
7 Dec 06
"It's hard for anyone to accept that they have championed a path of folly, least of all the leader of the world's most powerful country. There is no other way, though, for Bush to salvage his presidency."
The long-awaited report of t