Colui Che Dubita

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Elsewhere Today 484

 Aljazeera:
 Taliban capture Afghan district

FRIDAY, MAY 30, 2008
10:36 MECCA TIME, 7:36 GMT

Taliban fighters have captured a remote district in central Afghanistan, taking prisoner the police and administration chiefs, officials and the Taliban have said.
 
The fighters attacked the district of Rashidan in the central province of Ghazni in a night attack, the provincial governor and a Taliban spokesman told the AFP news agency on Friday.
   
"Last night, Taliban attacked Rashidan district and it fell," Jan Mohammad Mujahed, a provincial police chief, said.
 
Mujahed said the plight of the seized officials was unknown.
   
'Under control'
 
Zabihullah Mujahed, a spokesman for the Taliban, confirmed the fighters were in control and said the district chief, acting police chief and eight policemen had been taken prisoner.
 
"They are alive and we have captured them. The district is totally under our control," he said.

Rashidan is a small district about 120km southwest of Kabul.

Teresa Bo, reporting for Al Jazeera in Afghanistan, said Ghazni - located along a major highway from Kabul, the capital, to the south - is one of the most complicated areas where fighting between Afghan, US and Taliban forces takes place almost everyday.

She said the Taliban hold power in strategic locations, adding: "Some of the police officers working here say they are afraid they will be the next target.

"Security is one of the major concerns for every one in the area; the soldiers know they can be attacked any minute."

Vicious circle

Bo said a vicious cricle of violence continues as the Taliban fight for the control of the country and the US-led coaliton struggles between re-construction and war.
 
The Taliban, in government between 1996 and 2001, last year overran several districts in remote parts of Afghanistan, but in most cases were ejected by government troops and soldiers attached to Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) and a separate US-led military coalition are fighting Taliban militants.

Taliban officials say they control a handful of districts, mostly in the south of the country.

Nato military force officials said in December that the Taliban held not more than five districts.

Source: Agencies

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/FD3789FB-DDF5-4B1C-A5CC-6BC3B8C32565.htm

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 AllAfrica: Abyei Conflict
 Threatens to Escalate into Full-Scale War

By David Mozersky
allAfrica.com GUEST COLUMN
29 May 2008

Sudan could be sliding back into a national civil war.

Renewed fighting in the oil-rich Abyei region over the past two weeks has destroyed the town of Abyei and displaced tens of thousands of local Dinka from their homes. The peace deal signed in 2005 - that incredible achievement ending a decades-long north-south civil war - could unravel in Abyei.

The fighting groups, the National Congress Party-controlled Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the ex-rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), are the same parties that signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement three years ago. Starting long before the Darfur crisis ever hit the headlines, this war lasted over 20 years and cost the lives of over two million people. The Agreement created an autonomous southern government that shares a significant portion of the country's wealth. It calls for national elections in 2009, and a southern self-determination referendum in 2011.

The deal has wobbled before, but the bloodshed in Abyei is the heaviest fighting between the two parties since the Agreement was signed. If that deal falls apart, Sudan likely falls apart.

What began over two weeks ago as a small clash between SPLA police and SAF-aligned militia had escalated by 14 May into a full scale military attack by SAF and allied militia on Abyei town. With the army currently in charge of what's left of the wrecked city and digging in, displaced civilians from the town and its surrounding villages are mostly now south of the River Kiir, along with SPLA forces, which are being reinforced.

Abyei remains the most volatile aspect of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. It is geographically, ethnically and politically caught between North and South Sudan. The peace agreement included an Abyei Protocol, granting the disputed territory, which has a significant percentage of Sudan's oil reserves, a special administrative status ahead of a 2011 referendum: it can opt between remaining with northern Sudan or joining a potentially independent South Sudan. The parties will need to open a new dialogue on oil issues, including a plan to establish a revenue sharing agreement between North and South beyond 2011, for the contingency that Abyei votes to join the new state in the south. They must also allow the political space for local dialogue between the Ngok Dinka and neighbouring Misseriya Arabs in order to reduce the risk of local conflict between communities and build confidence that all sides will benefit from the peace deal.

However, the situation continues to fester, mainly due to intransigence by the National Congress Party, which has been violating the peace agreement by refusing the "final and binding" ruling of the Abyei Boundary Commission report of July 2005, leaving a dangerous administrative and political vacuum in the region. This vacuum has allowed political tensions to multiply between both national and local actors, leading observers – including Crisis Group – to warn repeatedly about the need for the international community to hold the parties to the terms of the peace agreement and to urgently engage to find a solution in Abyei.

Clearly, if there is no ceasefire and implementation of the agreement, all that is left for Sudan is war. On 18 May, the parties agreed with the UN Mission in Sudan on an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of excess forces from both armies from in and around Abyei. However, the ceasefire failed to hold, and the SAF has failed to re-deploy its 31st Brigade from Abyei as agreed. On 20 May, the SPLA launched a counter-attack on the town, further escalating the situation. The parties have resumed discussions, yet the 31st Brigade continues to sit in burnt and looted remains of Abyei town, thereby undermining the chances of successful dialogue.

Given the fragility of Abyei and in order to avoid a new war in Sudan, the leadership of the Sudan People's Liberation Army based in Juba and the ruling National Congress Party leadership in Khartoum have to pull back their armies and avoid any further escalation. The international community should urgently press Khartoum to withdraw the SAF's 31st Brigade from Abyei, and both parties to abide by the terms of the 18 May ceasefire and subsequent agreements, and offer a beefed up UN force to monitor and patrol the area.

The recent destruction and the preparations for further mass violence should be ringing alarm bells. Now is the time for the international community to preventively engage with the leadership of both parties before the situation gets further out of hand. This requires more than press statements from foreign capitals. Tension in and around Abyei must be immediately de-escalated and such efforts should be led by the UN Mission in Sudan, with the full backing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement's international guarantors. The U.S. bears special responsibility because it brokered the Abyei Protocol in 2004. The Abyei issue should be considered by the UN Security Council as a priority and special effort should be made to visit the area during its upcoming trip to the region.

The Security Council has called for restraint, and UN Mission in Sudan has brought the two warring sides around the table several times. This is not enough. The influential UN member states need to urgently press the leadership on both sides to resolve the Abyei situation. Short term steps should be prioritised that allow the displaced to return home, but ultimately what is needed is an agreement on the borders and the appointment of a local administration as per the peace deal. Sitting by and watching Africa's largest country descend into another devastating civil war cannot be an option.

David Mozersky is Horn of Africa Project Director at the International Crisis Group.

Copyright © 2008 allAfrica.com. All rights reserved.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200805300647.html

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 AlterNet: McMafia:
 The New Face of Organized Crime

By Sandip Roy, New America Media
Posted on May 30, 2008

Editor's Note: If the idea of organized crime makes you think of The Sopranos or The Godfather, think again. The mob has had a makeover, says former BBC World News correspondent Misha Glenny, author of "McMafia: A Journey through the Global Criminal Underworld." Glenny was interviewed by NAM editor Sandip Roy.

Why do you say that the collapse of the Soviet Union is the most important event prompting the exponential growth of organized crime around the world in the last two decades?

When the state collapsed, it created a vacuum. As the planned economy moved over to the free market, law enforcement decided what was legal and what was illegal. If you were a businessman, you had to have a protection racket to ensure that any contract that you entered into would be honored by the other party. So essentially you had mob rule for 10 to 15 years.

It's still completely wild in places like Bulgaria, where, even though it's a member of the European Union, there have been 120 murders on the streets of Sofia in the last four or five years.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, did these different groups carve up the former Soviet bloc among themselves?

Hungary became a center of the money markets. Bulgaria, Serbia, and Kosovo were central to the transit of heroin from Central Asia into the European Union. And everyone got in on the trafficking of women.

But there were new jobs such as the sending of untaxed cigarettes from obscure parts of the world into the European Union, where they were sold for $6 or $7 cheaper than you could get in the shops. The profits that were made from that trade were funding the paramilitary organizations in Yugoslavia who were doing the killings during the war.

During the Balkan Wars, we saw the former Yugoslav states unable to get along with each other. Did the underground mafias also have trouble getting along with each other?

Ironically, the same people who were exhorting their fellow citizens to indulge in this slaughter were actually thick as thieves across national lines. So Serbs and Croats, Croats and Albanians, Albanians and Macedonians, were all working together.

This sounds like the Wild West, where everyone's at each other's throats and then they all have a drink together afterwards.

What's important is not so much loyalty through clan and family, which was the old mafia model. Now loyalty comes through transactional trust, and whether this person helps you make money.

What is the model of the new mafia?

It's more corporate, although very decentralized. What you have now are lots of little cells, shifting goods and services around the world.

In Colombia in the 1990s, both of the big cartels were decapitated. But the supply of cocaine to the United States didn't dry up. It is much more flexible.

Eastern Europe and Colombia are places people associate with crime and the global criminal underground, but Canada?

Canada is home, in my estimation, to the largest number of criminal syndicates in the world. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police there are now 25,000 marijuana-growing operations in the greater Vancouver area alone.

Couldn't people grow marijuana in Humboldt County, California? Why would you go through the danger of bringing it across the border?

They are growing it in Humboldt County, but not enough, apparently. There' s also branding. "B.C. Bud" is reckoned to be the finest there is. They are horticulturally very advanced. The development of B.C. Bud as a brand was a semi-conscious move by exporters. They also branded it as organic.

What is the future of drugs as you see it? In your book, you quote someone as saying, "Cocaine has no future."

It doesn't, because synthetic drugs are becoming superior in their effect, and are cheaper to manufacture. Production is slowly shifting from developing countries like Afghanistan and Colombia and moving into centers like Holland and Canada. The Balkans is a big operation where a lot of chemists make Ecstasy, for example.

But the drug enforcement policy isn't targeted against Canada.

No. The drug policy in the United States involves throwing a lot of people in jail. You can't do anything about Canada.

The war on drugs may eventually shift because it is politically unsustainable and it makes so much money for criminal syndicates that it renders law enforcement extremely difficult.

You focus on Brazil, Russia, India, China and Korea. What makes them particularly interesting in the global criminal underground?

These are countries with populations that have been denied access to the fruits of the industrialized world. Now they want a piece of the action.

One way to make big money is through cyber crime. Brazil, Russia, India, China and Korea are becoming the centers of cyber crime, where you can steal money from people in the United Kingdom or the United States without having to leave your local Internet cafe. The cyber sector is now the biggest growing sector of transnational organized crime.

How big?

It's worth about $100 billion annually and rising exponentially.

There are three types of underground cyber activity. One is the type where you and I have our bank accounts hacked into. At the moment banks will pay our money bank. But when it hurts the banks too much, they'll have to think of a way to be much more proactive in dealing with this problem.

Then there is corporate cyber crime. The other spin-off is attacks on military and government infrastructure, which is going on all the time.

About the infamous Nigerian emails that promise you all this money if you would help transfer the late dictator's money to your account - why did that happen in Nigeria?

You've got to take your hat off to the Nigerians, because they've put a lot of effort into the theatrical aspect of their criminal activity.

In the biggest advanced fee scam in history, they managed to persuade a banker in Sao Paulo to transfer $242 million, allegedly for the construction of a new airport in Abuja, the federal capital of Nigeria. This guy was a well-respected international banker.

If a banker in Sao Paolo is gullible enough to do this, how can we protect ourselves?

By not being stupid. You have to have anti-viral systems on your computer. You have to update it, clean it and only go to those sites that you trust. And don't open emails if you don't know where they come from.

Some sites you just should not go to at all.

You're asking for it if you visit pornographic sites. Music sites and file sharing sites are littered with viruses.

What can you do to avoid identity theft?

I'm now actually considering going off Internet banking altogether. Shred everything you get that has any significant details beyond your name and address. Take great care, because although it's not hugely prevalent, if you do get hit, it's very upsetting.

We've also got to insist that governments get real about how they handle our data. In the United Kingdom we have had a series of scandals where hugely sensitive information has gone missing - including all of the information from our driver's licenses that went missing in Wyoming, if you can believe it. What's my UK driver's license information doing in Wyoming?

Transcribed by Laurie Simmons.

Sandip Roy (sandip@pacificnews.org) is host of "Upfront," the Pacific News Service weekly radio program on KALW-FM, San Francisco.

© 2008 New America Media All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/86653/

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 Asia Times:    
 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA

How the Pentagon shapes the world

By Frida Berrigan
May 31, 2008

A full-fledged cottage industry is already focused on those who eagerly await the end of the George W Bush administration, offering calendars, magnets and t-shirts for sale as well as counters and graphics to download onto blogs and websites. But when the countdown ends and Bush vacates the Oval Office, he will leave a legacy to contend with. Certainly, he wills to his successor a world marred by war and battered by deprivation, but perhaps his most enduring legacy is now deeply embedded in Washington-area politics - a Pentagon metastasized almost beyond recognition.

The Pentagon's massive bulk-up these past seven years will not be easily unbuilt, no matter who dons the presidential mantle on January 19, 2009. "The Pentagon" is now so much more than a five-sided building across the Potomac from Washington or even the seat of the Department of Defense. In many ways, it defies description or labeling.

Who, today, even remembers the debate at the end of the Cold War about what role US military power should play in a "unipolar" world? Was US supremacy so well established, pundits were then asking, that Washington could rely on softer economic and cultural power, with military power no more than a backup (and a domestic "peace dividend" thrown into the bargain)? Or was the US to strap on the six-guns of a global sheriff and police the world as the fountainhead of "humanitarian interventions"? Or was it the moment to boldly declare ourselves the world's sole superpower and wield a high-tech military comparable to none, actively discouraging any other power or power bloc from even considering future rivalry?

The attacks of September 11, 2001, decisively ended that debate. The Bush administration promptly declared total war on every front - against peoples, ideologies, and, above all, "terrorism" (a tactic of the weak). That very September, administration officials proudly leaked the information that they were ready to "target" up to 60 other nations and the terrorist movements within them.

The Pentagon's "footprint" was to be firmly planted, military base by military base, across the planet, with a special emphasis on its energy heartlands. Top administration officials began preparing the Pentagon to go anywhere and do anything, while rewriting, shredding, or ignoring whatever laws, national or international, stood in the way. In 2002, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld officially articulated a new US military posture that, in conception, was little short of revolutionary. It was called - in classic Pentagon shorthand - the 1-4-2-1 Defense Strategy (replacing the Bill Clinton administration's already none-too-modest plan to be prepared to fight two major wars - in the Middle East and Northeast Asia - simultaneously).

Theoretically, this strategy meant that the Pentagon was to prepare to defend the United States, while building forces capable of deterring aggression and coercion in four "critical regions" (Europe, Northeast Asia, East Asia, and the Middle East). It would be able to defeat aggression in two of these regions simultaneously and "win decisively" in one of those conflicts "at a time and place of our choosing." Hence 1-4-2-1.

And that was just going to be the beginning. We had, by then, already entered the new age of the mega-Pentagon. Almost six years later, the scale of that institution's expansion has yet to be fully grasped, so let's look at just seven of the major ways in which the Pentagon has experienced mission creep - and leap - dwarfing other institutions of government in the process.

1. The budget-busting Pentagon: The Pentagon's core budget - already a staggering US$300 billion when Bush took the presidency - has almost doubled while he's been parked behind the big desk in the Oval Office. For fiscal year 2009, the regular Pentagon budget will total roughly $541 billion (including work on nuclear warheads and naval reactors at the Department of Energy).

The Bush administration has presided over one of the largest military buildups in the history of the United States. And that's before we even count "war spending". If the direct costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the global "war on terror", are factored in, "defense" spending has essentially tripled.

As of February 2008, according to the Congressional Budget Office, lawmakers have appropriated $752 billion for the Iraq war and occupation, ongoing military operations in Afghanistan, and other activities associated with the "war on terror". The Pentagon estimates that it will need another $170 billion for fiscal 2009, which means, at $922 billion, that direct war spending since 2001 would be at the edge of the trillion-dollar mark.

As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has pointed out, if a stack of bills roughly six inches high is worth $1 million; then, a $1 billion stack would be as tall as the Washington Monument, and a $1 trillion stack would be 160 kilometers high. And note that none of these war-fighting funds are even counted as part of the annual military budget, but are raised from Congress in the form of "emergency supplementals" a few times a year.

With the war added to the Pentagon's core budget, the United States now spends nearly as much on military matters as the rest of the world combined. Military spending also throws all other parts of the federal budget into shadow, representing 58 cents of every dollar spent by the federal government on "discretionary programs" (those that Congress gets to vote up or down on an annual basis).

The total Pentagon budget represents more than our combined spending on education, environmental protection, justice administration, veteran's benefits, housing assistance, transportation, job training, agriculture, energy, and economic development. No wonder, then, that, as it collects ever more money, the Pentagon is taking on (or taking over) ever more functions and roles.

2. The Pentagon as diplomat: The Bush administration has repeatedly exhibited its disdain for discussion and compromise, treaties and agreements, and an equally deep admiration for what can be won by threat and force. No surprise, then, that the White House's foreign policy agenda has increasingly been directed through the military. With a military budget more than 30 times that of all State Department operations and non-military foreign aid put together, the Pentagon has marched into State's two traditional strongholds - diplomacy and development - duplicating or replacing much of its work, often by refocusing Washington's diplomacy around military-to-military, rather than diplomat-to-diplomat, relations.

Since the late 18th century, the US ambassador in any country has been considered the president's personal representative, responsible for ensuring that foreign policy goals are met. As one ambassador explained, "The rule is: if you're in country, you work for the ambassador. If you don't work for the ambassador, you don't get country clearance."

In the Bush era, the Pentagon has overturned this model. According to a 2006 Congressional report by Senator Richard Lugar, embassies as command posts in the anti-terror campaign, civilian personnel in many embassies now feel occupied by, outnumbered by, and subordinated to military personnel. They see themselves as the second team when it comes to decision-making.

Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates is aware of the problem, noting as he did last November that there are "only about 6,600 professional foreign service officers - less than the manning for one aircraft carrier strike group". But, typically, he added that, while the State Department might need more resources, "Don't get me wrong, I'll be asking for yet more money for Defense next year." Another ambassador lamented that his foreign counterparts are "following the money" and developing relationships with US military personnel rather than cultivating contacts with their State Department counterparts.

The Pentagon invariably couches its bureaucratic imperialism in terms of "interagency cooperation". For example, last year US Southern Command (Southcom) released Command Strategy 2016, a document which identified poverty, crime and corruption as key "security" problems in Latin America. It suggested that Southcom, a security command, should, in fact, be the "central actor in addressing ... regional problems" previously the concern of civilian agencies. It then touted itself as the future focus of a "joint interagency security command ... in support of security, stability and prosperity in the region."

As Southcom head Admiral James Stavridis vividly put the matter, the command now likes to see itself as "a big Velcro cube that these other agencies can hook to so we can collectively do what needs to be done in this region".

The Pentagon has generally followed this pattern globally since 2001. But what does "cooperation" mean when one entity dwarfs all others in personnel, resources, and access to decision-makers, while increasingly controlling the very definition of the "threats" to be dealt with.

3. The Pentagon as arms dealer: In the Bush years, the Pentagon has aggressively increased its role as the planet's foremost arms dealer, pumping up its weapons sales everywhere it can - and so seeding the future with war and conflict.

By 2006 (the last year for which full data is available), the United States alone accounted for more than half the world's trade in arms with $14 billion in sales. Noteworthy were a $5 billion deal for F-16s to Pakistan and a $5.8 billion agreement to completely re-equip Saudi Arabia's internal security force. U.S. arms sales for 2006 came in at roughly twice the level of any previous year of the Bush administration.

Number two arms dealer, Russia, registered a comparatively paltry $5.8 billion in deliveries, just over a third of the US arms totals. Ally Great Britain was third at $3.3 billion - and those three countries account for a whopping 85% of the weaponry sold that year, more than 70% of which went to the developing world.

Great at selling weapons, the Pentagon is slow to report its sales. Arms sales notifications issued by the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DISC) do, however, offer one crude way to the take the Department of Defense's pulse; and, while not all reported deals are finalized, that pulse is clearly racing. Through May of 2008, DISC had already issued more than $9.1 billion in arms sales notifications including smart bomb kits for Saudi Arabia, TOW missiles for Kuwait, F-16 combat aircraft for Romania and Chinook helicopters for Canada.

To maintain market advantage, the Pentagon never stops its high-pressure campaigns to peddle weapons abroad. That's why, despite a broken shoulder, Gates took to the skies in February, to push weapons systems on countries like India and Indonesia, key growing markets for Pentagon arms dealers.

4. The Pentagon as intelligence analyst and spy: In the area of "intelligence", the Pentagon's expansion - the commandeering of information and analysis roles - has been swift, clumsy, and catastrophic.

Tracing the Pentagon's takeover of intelligence is no easy task. For one thing, there are dozens of Pentagon agencies and offices that now collect and analyze information using everything from "humint" (human intelligence) to wiretaps and satellites. The task is only made tougher by the secrecy that surrounds US intelligence operations and the "black budgets" into which so much intelligence money disappears.

But the end results are clear enough. The Pentagon's takeover of intelligence has meant fewer intelligence analysts who speak Arabic, Farsi or Pashto and more dog-and-pony shows like those four-star generals and three-stripe admirals mouthing administration-approved talking points on cable news and the Sunday morning talk shows.

Intelligence budgets are secret, so what we know about them is not comprehensive - but the glimpses analysts have gotten suggest that total intelligence spending was about $26 billion a decade ago. After 9/11, Congress pumped a lot of new money into intelligence so that by 2003, the total intelligence budget had already climbed to more than $40 billion.

In 2004, the 9-11 Commission highlighted the intelligence failures of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)and others in the alphabet soup of the US intelligence community charged with collecting and analyzing information on threats to the country. Congress then passed an intelligence "reform" bill, establishing the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, designed to manage intelligence operations. Thanks to stiff resistance from pro-military lawmakers, the National Intelligence Directorate never assumed that role, however, and the Pentagon kept control of three key collection agencies - the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Agency.

As a result, according to Tim Shorrock, investigative journalist and author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, the Pentagon now controls more than 80% of US intelligence spending, which he estimated at about $60 billion in 2007. As Mel Goodman, former CIA official and now an analyst at the Center for International Policy, observed, "The Pentagon has been the big bureaucratic winner in all of this."

It is such a big winner that CIA director Michael Hayden now controls only the budget for the CIA itself - about $4 or 5 billion a year and no longer even gives the president his daily helping of intelligence.

The Pentagon's intelligence shadow looms large well beyond the corridors of Washington's bureaucracies. It stretches across the mountains of Afghanistan as well. After the US invaded that country in 2001, Rumsfeld recognized that, unless the Pentagon controlled information-gathering and took the lead in carrying out covert operations, it would remain dependent on - and therefore subordinate to - the CIA with its grasp of "on-the-ground" intelligence.

In one of his now infamous memos, labeled "snowflakes" by a staff that watched them regularly flutter down from on high, he
asserted that, if the "war on terror" was going to stretch far into the future, he did not want to continue the Pentagon's "near total dependence on the CIA". And so Rumsfeld set up a new, directly competitive organization, the Pentagon's Strategic Support Branch, which put the intelligence-gathering components of the US Special Forces under one roof reporting directly to him. (Many in the intelligence community saw the office as illegitimate, but Rumsfeld was riding high and they were helpless to do anything.)

As Seymour Hersh, who repeatedly broke stories in the New Yorker on the Pentagon's misdeeds in the "war on terror", wrote in January 2005, the Bush administration had already "consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities' strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-World War II national-security state".

In the rush to invade Iraq, the civilians running the Pentagon also fused the administration's propaganda machine with military intelligence. In 2002, under secretary of defense Douglas Feith established the Office of Special Plans (OSP) in the Pentagon to provide "actionable information" to White House policymakers. Using existing intelligence reports "scrubbed" of qualifiers like "probably" or "may" or sometimes simply fabricated ones, the office was able to turn worst-case scenarios about Saddam Hussein's supposed programs to develop weapons of mass destruction into fact, and then, through leaks, use the news media to validate them.

Former CIA director Robert Gates, who took over the Pentagon when Rumsfeld resigned in November 2006, has been critical of the Pentagon's "dominance" in intelligence and "the decline in the CIA's central role". He has also signaled his intention to roll back the Pentagon's long intelligence shadow; but, even if he is serious, he will have his work cut out for him. In the meantime, the Pentagon continues to churn out "intelligence" which is, politely put, suspect - from torture-induced confessions of terrorism suspects to exposes of the Iranian origins of sophisticated explosive devices found in Iraq.

5. The Pentagon as domestic disaster manager: When the deciders in Washington start seeing the Pentagon as the world's problem-solver, strange things happen. In fact, in the Bush years, the Pentagon has become the official first responder of last resort in case of just about any disaster - from tornadoes, hurricanes and floods to civil unrest, potential outbreaks of disease or possible biological or chemical attacks.

In 2002, in a telltale sign of Pentagon mission creep, Bush established the first domestic military command since the civil war, the US Northern Command (Northcom). Its mission: the "preparation for, prevention of, deterrence of, preemption of, defense against, and response to threats and aggression directed towards US territory, sovereignty, domestic population, and infrastructure; as well as crisis management, consequence management, and other domestic civil support."

If it sounds like a tall order, it is.

In the past six years, Northcom has been remarkably unsuccessful at anything but expanding its theoretical reach. The command was initially assigned 1,300 Defense Department personnel, but has since grown into a force of more than 15,000. Even criticism only seems to strengthen its domestic role. For example, an April 2008, Government Accountability Office report found that Northcom had failed to communicate effectively with state and local leaders or National Guard units about its newly developed disaster and terror response plans. The result? Northcom says it will have its first brigade-sized unit of military personnel trained to help local authorities respond to chemical, biological or nuclear incidents by this autumn. Mark your calendars.

More than anything else, Northcom has provided the Pentagon with the opening it needed to move forcefully into domestic disaster areas previously handled by national, state and local civilian authorities.

For example, Northcom's deputy director, Brigadier General Robert Felderman, boasts that the command is now the United States's "global synchronizer - the global coordinator - for pandemic influenza across the combatant commands". Similarly, Northcom is now hosting annual hurricane preparation conferences and assuring anyone who will listen that it is "prepared to fully engage" in future Katrina-like situations "in order to save lives, reduce suffering and protect infrastructure".

Of course, at present, the Pentagon is the part of the government gobbling up the funds that might otherwise be spent shoring up America's Depression-era public works, ensuring that the Pentagon will have failure aplenty to respond to in the future.

The American Society for Civil Engineers, for example, estimates that $1.6 trillion is badly needed to bring the nation's infrastructure up to protectable snuff, or $320 billion a year for the next five years. Assessing present water systems, roads, bridges, and dams nationwide, the engineers gave the infrastructure a series of C and D grades.

In the meantime, the military is marching in. Katrina, for instance, made landfall on August 29, 2005. Bush ordered troops deployed to New Orleans on September 2 to coordinate the delivery of food and water and to serve as a deterrent against looting and violence. Less than a month later, Bush asked Congress to shift responsibility for major future disasters from state governments and the Department of Homeland Security to the Pentagon.

The next month, Bush again offered the military as his solution - this time to global fears about outbreaks of the avian flu virus. He suggested that, to enforce a quarantine, "One option is the use of the military that's able to plan and move."

Already sinking under the weight of its expansion and two draining wars, many in the military have been cool to such suggestions, as has a Congress concerned about maintaining states' rights and civilian control. Offering the military as the solution to domestic natural disasters and flu outbreaks means giving other first responders the budgetary short shrift. It is unlikely, however, that Northcom, now riding the money train, will go quietly into oblivion in the years to come.

6. The Pentagon as humanitarian caregiver abroad: The US Agency for International Development and the State Department have traditionally been tasked with responding to disaster abroad; but, from Indonesia's tsunami-ravaged shores to Myanmar after the recent cyclone, natural catastrophe has become another presidential opportunity to "send in the Marines" (so to speak). The Pentagon has increasingly taken up humanitarian planning, gaining an ever larger share of US humanitarian missions abroad.

From Kenya to Afghanistan, from the Philippines to Peru, the US military is also now regularly the one building schools and dental clinics, repairing roads and shoring up bridges, tending to sick children and doling out much needed cash and food stuffs, all civilian responsibilities once upon a time.

The Center for Global Development finds that the Pentagon's share of "official development assistance" - think "winning hearts and minds" or "nation-building" - has increased from 6% to 22% between 2002 and 2005. The Pentagon is fast taking over development from both the Non governmental organization-community and civilian agencies, slapping a smiley face on military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond.

Despite the obvious limitations of turning a force trained to kill and destroy into a cadre of caregivers, the Pentagon's mili-humanitarian project got a big boost from the cash that was seized from Saddam Hussein's secret coffers. Some of it was doled out to local American commanders to be used to deal with immediate Iraqi needs and seal deals in the months after Baghdad fell in April 2003. What was initially an ad hoc program now has an official name - the Commander Emergency Response Program (CERP) - and a line in the Pentagon budget.

Before the House Budget Committee last summer, Gordon England, the deputy secretary of defense, told members of Congress that the CERP was a "particularly effective initiative", explaining that the program provided "limited but immediately available funds" to military commanders which they could spend "to make a concrete difference in people's daily lives". This, he claimed, was now a "key part of the broader counter insurgency approach". He added that it served the purpose of "complementing security initiatives" and that it was so successful many commanders consider it "the most powerful weapon in their arsenal".

In fact, the Pentagon doesn't do humanitarian work very well. In Afghanistan, for instance, food-packets dropped by US planes were the same color as the cluster munitions also dropped by US planes; while schools and clinics built by US forces often became targets before they could even be put into use. In Iraq, money doled out to the Pentagon's sectarian-group-of-the-week for wells and generators turned out to be just as easily spent on explosives and AK-47s.

7. The Pentagon as global viceroy and ruler of the heavens: In the Bush years, the Pentagon finished dividing the globe into military "commands", which are functionally viceroyalties. True, even before 9/11, it was hard to imagine a place on the globe where the United States military was not, but until recently, the continent of Africa largely qualified.

Along with the creation of Northcom, however, the establishment of the US Africa Command (Africom) in 2008 officially filled in the last Pentagon empty spot on the map. A key military document, the 2006 National Security Strategy for the United States signaled the move, asserting that "Africa holds growing geostrategic importance and is a high-priority of this administration". (Think: oil and other key raw materials.)

In the meantime, funding for Africa under the largest US military aid program, Foreign Military Financing, doubled from $10 to $20 million between 2000 and 2006, and the number of recipient nations grew from two to 14. Military training funding increased by 35% in that same period (rising from $8.1 million to $11 million). Now, the militaries of 47 African nations receive US training.

In Pentagon planning terms, Africom has unified the continent for the first time. (Only Egypt remains under the aegis of the US Central Command.) According to Bush, this should "enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health, education, democracy and economic growth in Africa".

Theresa Whelan, assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, continues to insist that Africom has been formed neither to facilitate the fighting of wars ("engaging kinetically in Africa"), nor to divvy up the continent's raw materials in the style of 19th century colonialism. "This is not," she says, "about a scramble for the continent." But about one thing there can be no question: It is about increasing the global reach of the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, should the Earth not be enough, there are always the heavens to control. In August 2006, building on earlier documents like the 1998 US Space Command's Vision for 2020 (which called for a policy of "full spectrum dominance"), the Bush administration unveiled its "national space policy". It advocated establishing, defending and enlarging US control over space resources and argued for "unhindered" rights in space - unhindered, that is, by international agreements preventing the weaponization of space. The document also asserted that "freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power".

As the document put it, "In the new century, those who effectively utilize space will enjoy added prosperity and security and will hold a substantial advantage over those who do not." (The leaders of China, Russia and other major states undoubtedly heard the loud slap of a gauntlet being thrown down.) At the moment, the Bush administration's rhetoric and plans outstrip the resources being devoted to space weapons technology, but in the recently announced budget, the president allocated nearly a billion dollars to space-based weapons programs.

Of all the frontiers of expansion, perhaps none is more striking than the Pentagon's sorties into the future. Does the Department of Transportation offer a Vision for 2030? Does the Environmental Protection Agency develop plans for the next 50 years? Does the Department of Health and Human Services have a team of power-point professionals working up dynamic graphics for what services for the elderly will look like in 2050?

These agencies project budgets just around the corner of the next decade. Only the Pentagon projects power and possibility decades into the future, colonizing the imagination with scads of different scenarios under which, each year, it will continue to control hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.

Complex 2030, Vision 2020, UAV Roadmap 2030, the army's Future Combat Systems - the names, which seem unending, tell the tale.

As the clock ticks down to November 4, 2008, a lot of people are investing hope (as well as money and time) in the possibility of change at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But when it comes to the Pentagon, don't count too heavily on change, no matter who the new president may be.

After all, seven years, four months and a scattering of days into the Bush presidency, the Pentagon is deeply entrenched in Washington and still aggressively expanding. It has developed a taste for unrivaled power and unequaled access to the treasure of this country. It is an institution that has escaped the checks and balances of the nation.

Frida Berrigan is a senior program associate at the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative. She is a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus and a contributing editor at In These Times magazine. She is the author of reports on the arms trade and human rights, US nuclear weapons policy, and the domestic politics of US missile defense and space weapons policies. She can be reached at berrigan@newamerica.net.

(Copyright 2008 Frida Berrigan.)

(Used by permission Tomdispatch)
   
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JE31Df04.html

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 Clarín: Gabriel García Márquez
 ya tiene un título para su nuevo libro

El gran novelista colombiano está terminando de escribir otro libro y ya tiene un título posible: En agosto nos vemos. Lo dijo José Salgar, el periodista al que el escritor colombiano considera como su maestro de periodismo.

28.05.2008 | Literatura

"Me autorizó para decir que sí, que va a salir su próximo libro", aseguró Salgar, zanjando de forma rotunda los recientes rumores que apuntaban a que el Premio Nobel de Literatura 1982 no tenía ningún nuevo proyecto.

El periodista recibió la autorización de García Márquez, conocido como "Gabo" por sus amigos, en la conversación que ambos mantuvieron "la semana pasada" para comentar, entre otras cuestiones, la reaparición de El Espectador como diario en Colombia, algo por lo que "estaba muy contento".

Salgar añadió que "todavía más hay", en alusión a la existencia de "un intento de título de ese libro" que, aunque no es definitivo, podría ser el de En agosto nos vemos.

"No es definitivo -insistió-, pero parece que es un primer intento y él (García Márquez) tardará, como ha pasado con los libros anteriores de Gabo, por lo menos un año en su promoción".

Lo que sí está del todo claro, según el maestro del escritor, es el tema de ese libro que, "como siempre, es el amor".

Con esa obra, cerrará el ciclo que comenzó en 1985 con El amor en los tiempos del cólera, siguió con Del amor y otros demonios (1994) y con Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004).

José Salgar afirmó que desconoce cuál es el estado de salud actual de García Márquez, aunque su impresión es que ha mejorado.

"Hablamos con alguna frecuencia por teléfono y cada vez está más vigorosa la voz, pero desde luego él tiene que cuidarse mucho y se cuida mucho", indicó.

Debe llevar un régimen de vida "muy estricto" pero, al menos desde lejos, "se siente muy bien", insistió.

Salgar explicó que, cuando están cara a cara, como ocurrió recientemente en Guadalajara y en Monterrey, lo que pasa es que "entre viejos amigos, cuando uno se encuentra a través de los años y se sienta a conversar, no ha pasado nada de eso que ven los demás".

"No ves el Nobel, no ves nada más que los amigos que vuelven a conversar de los asuntos anteriores", subrayó.

El periodista colombiano, uno de los más reconocidos en su país por toda su trayectoria profesional, hacía estas declaraciones en el marco de un coloquio sobre periodismo latinoamericano que se celebra en la Casa de América de Madrid.

Fuente: EFE

Copyright 1996-2008 Clarín.com - All rights reserved

http://www.clarin.com/notas/2008/05/28/01681881.html

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 Guardian: China earthquake:
 200,000 flee from growing Sichuan lake

Jonathan Watts in Beijing
Friday May 30 2008

China's contingency plan to evacuate up to 1.3m flood-threatened survivors of the Sichuan earthquake got under way today with the movement of almost 200,000 people.

The relocation to higher ground was started as fears grew that a huge lake may flood down from the mountains where water has built up behind an unstable landslide.

It is the first stage of a plan to move up to 1.3 million people who live downstream of the Tangjiashan "quake lake", the largest of the 34 bodies of water formed by the seismic disruption on 13 May.

Chinese engineers have been trying to dig and blast a channel that would allow the lake to drain safely, but their efforts have been hampered by rainfall and the inaccessibility of the location.

Despite flying 30 giant earthmovers to the site by army helicopter, the water has continued to build up behind the newly formed dam. At one point below the barricade, it is 23 metres (72ft) deep.

Officials said it was unlikely to burst today but the risks will increase in the days ahead as heavy rain and big aftershocks are forecast.

According to the Mianyang government information office, the authorities have started implementing a two-stage evacuation plan. The first stage - which has been under way for several days - will see the moving of 197,500 people living in areas likely to be inundated if a third of the dam collapses.

The town of Beichuan - one of the worst affected areas downstream of the lake - is now out of bounds for everyone but soldiers.

Under the second stage, 1.3m people will be moved to higher ground in case more than half the dam gives way. The Xinhua news agency reported today that this had been put into practice, but officials in Mianyang denied this.

"We haven't started the full evacuation, but we will conduct a rehearsal at headquarters from tomorrow until 2 June," said an information officer who declined to give his name. Separate reports suggested the drill will focus on communications and the public will not participate.

The authorities are trying to complete the drainage operation before the barrier collapses. Hundreds of troops have managed to dig a third of the channel.

"The work on the blocked lake is going smoothly and, at this pace, it should be completed soon," Zhou Hua, an official involved in the effort, told Reuters news agency.

"At this stage, the situation is under control, but we've set in place this contingency plan to minimise any possible damage."

The death toll from the 7.9 magnitude quake continues to climb. There are 68,858 confirmed deaths and another 18,618 people are missing, many of them presumed buried under the rubble.

The emergency services have won public respect for the relief operation, but there is fury at officials and construction firms responsible for building shoddy schools that collapsed in the quake, killing at least 9,000 pupils and teachers.

Grieving parents have asked why neighbouring structures remained upright and accused officials of corruption and skimping on materials.

The government has promised an investigation and punishment for anyone found to have been negligent.

An official investigator told the Guardian that one of the reasons for the collapse of Juyuan middle school was that builders used cheap polyporous slabs.

"It would have been better if they used a different material. Of course, it was to do with the price," said Chen Baosheng, an expert from Tongji University in Shanghai.

"If the Juyuan middle school collapsed, it shouldn't be to the extent that it kills people. There needs to be a uniform standard. It is not good if there is no uniform standard."

Some of the parents of the dead children have contacted lawyers to press their case in the courts.

"They have volunteered to represent us for free," said Gan Tinfo, whose child died at Juyuan middle school. "I want the responsible officials to be punished by the law and fired from their posts."

Better news is that social workers and volunteers have helped to reunite 7,000 children with their parents. In the chaotic first few days after the quake, 8,000 children were separated. Many of them were presumed orphaned, prompting a surge of adoption offers.

Now only a thousand children are alone and the civil affairs department said it would continue to look for their mothers and fathers before considering fostering.

Millions of people are still sleeping in tents and temporary accommodation.

Among the most famous of the damaged structures is the world's biggest panda reserve at Wolong, where the buildings have been so badly damaged that the institution may have to be moved.

"It's better to move, I think," said Zhang Hemin, the head of the reserve, told the China Daily.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/30/chinaearthquake.china1

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 Jeune Afrique: Prostitution africaine:
 Paris veut lancer une "action concertée"

FRANCE - 29 mai 2008 - par AFP

La ministre de l'Intérieur française Michèle Alliot-Marie a annoncé jeudi que la présidence par la France de l'Union européenne (pour six mois à partir du 1er juillet) entendait "lancer une action concertée" contre la prostitution et l'exploitation sexuelles des femmes africaines.

Intervenant à l'issue de la première des deux journées d'un séminaire international consacré à ce sujet qui se tient à Paris à l'initiative de son ministère, Mme Alliot-Marie a fait part de sa "détermination" à renforcer l'action dans ce domaine.

"La présidence française (...) sera l'occasion de lancer une action concertée pour combattre ce fléau", a-t-elle assuré. A cet égard, elle "encouragera l'adoption d'accords bilatéraux renforcés entre pays d'Europe et pays d'Afrique".

Selon elle, l'action "ne peut se mener qu'au niveau international" pour être efficace et "développer notre capacité de prévenir, d'empêcher" le développement des réseaux.

De même, elle veut une "approche plus harmonisée de la prostitution et du proxénétisme" entre les Etats membres de l'Union, et "recourir à tous les instruments de (leur) coopération".

"Je souhaite que soit étendu le recours aux équipes communes d'enquête judiciaire ainsi qu'au mandat d'arrêt européen", a-t-elle souligné, alors que, selon la directrice centrale de la police judiciaire française Martine Monteil, "plus de 60.000 jeunes femmes d'Afrique sont recensées, mais en fait, il y en a plus de 100.000 dans nos pays", prostituées par les réseaux de proxénètes.

Si cet état "repose sur le cynisme des trafiquants qui s'enrichissent sur la détresse des individus", a noté la ministre, c'est aussi "sur le désespoir de jeunes femmes migrantes, (...) dans leur recherche d'une vie meilleure", a-t-elle relevé.

Aussi a-t-elle appelé à "définir ensemble les voies d'un développement économique et social plus harmonieux et plus protecteur" pour lutter contre "les inégalités entre le Nord et le Sud".

http://www.jeuneafrique.com/jeune_afrique/
article_depeche.asp?art_cle=AFP93428prostetrecn0

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 Mail & Guardian:
 Bemba arrested

Stephanie Wolters | The Hague   
29 May 2008 11:59

The arrest this week of Congolese rebel leader and former vice-president Jean-Pierre Bemba on charges of crimes against humanity could be a significant blow for the leaders of myriad armed groups that terrorise the continent.

Bemba was arrested on Sunday by Belgian authorities acting on an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

He is being charged with crimes committed by his troops in the Central African Republic (CAR) in 2002-2003, when he deployed his Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC) rebel group to the CAR to defend his close ally, President Ange-Felix Patasse, against rebel attack.

The main charges against Bemba are of rape and looting, allegedly committed on a large scale by MLC troops, a fact which Bemba has conceded, but for which he has refused to take responsibility because, he has argued, he did not order them to commit such acts.

But the ICC charges do hold him responsible, even if there is no suggestion that he necessarily directed his troops to rape and loot: “The preliminary chamber … is of the opinion that there are reasonable motives to believe that Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo, in his quality as president and commander-in-chief of the MLC, was invested with a de jure and de facto authority by the members of his movement to take all political and military decisions.”

The court adds that “there are reasonable motives to believe that the execution of this plan [to deploy troops to CAR] would lead, in the normal course of events, to the commission of crimes, and that he accepted this risk by his decision to send the MLC troops to the Central African Republic, and by maintaining them there despite the commission of the crimes, of which he was informed.”

The significance of this is huge on a continent where men with weapons, whether they belong to national armies or illegal armed groups, regularly terrorise, rape, torture and kill civilians and rarely face the consequences of their acts.

Although Bemba is charged with crimes committed in the CAR, he is Congolese and the MLC was a Congolese rebel group. All Congolese armed groups, including the Congolese army, have been accused of rape and extrajudicial killings, but, with the exception of a few showcase cases, there has not been a serious attempt to discipline these ragtag groups of armed men or to impose the rule of law.

This is so because there has not been any incentive to do so. Civilian victims are usually poor and defenceless and their poverty and fear of retribution make it unlikely that they will ever appeal to the legal system.

Armed groups - especially the Congolese army - are poorly and irregularly paid and it is unofficial policy that soldiers will supplement their meagre incomes by preying on the civilian population.

The size of the Democratic Republic of Congo (equivalent to that of Western Europe), the lack of infrastructure and the cancer of corruption and decay have so undermined the legal system that, even if victims of violence wanted to lay charges, they would be unlikely to see any real justice.

All these factors have created rampant impunity, of which rebel and military leaders have taken advantage. But the arrest of Bemba could just be the rude wake-up call that these leaders need to jolt them out of their complacency about, and complicity in, horrible acts of violence.

The fact that Bemba is being held accountable for crimes committed by men under his command - even if he did not command them to commit such crimes - means that anyone could be next.

Whether they are the former leaders of the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD) rebel movement, Tutsi rebel Laurent Nkunda, whose troops are accused of ongoing atrocities, or Congolese President Joseph Kabila, who, as commander-in-chief of the Congolese Army and head of state, bears responsibility for the actions of one of the world’s most undisciplined armies, Bemba’s arrest paves the way for them to be held accountable.

In the best of all worlds this would dawn on the rebel and military leaders and they would begin to feel less untouchable and more afraid that they, too, might face consequences. Their fear of facing the law would then translate - gradually, of course, but steadily - into more disciplined armies, properly applied military law, regularly paid salaries and a growing respect for the rights of civilians. This is the hope.
It is probably a long way off, but the first step has been taken.

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?
articleid=340532&area=/insight/insight__africa/

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 New Statesman:
 After Bobby Kennedy

Bobby Kennedy's campaign is the model for Barack Obama's current bid to be the Democratic nominee for the White House. Both offer a false hope that they can bring peace and racial harmony to all Americans, writes John Pilger

John Pilger
Published 29 May 2008

In this season of 1968 nostalgia, one anniversary illuminates today. It is the rise and fall of Robert Kennedy, who would have been elected president of the United States had he not been assassinated in June 1968. Having travelled with Kennedy up to the moment of his shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June, I heard The Speech many times. He would "return government to the people" and bestow "dignity and justice" on the oppressed. "As Bernard Shaw once said," he would say, "'Most men look at things as they are and wonder why. I dream of things that never were and ask: Why not?'" That was the signal to run back to the bus. It was fun until a hail of bullets passed over our shoulders.

Kennedy's campaign is a model for Barack Obama. Like Obama, he was a senator with no achievements to his name. Like Obama, he raised the expectations of young people and minorities. Like Obama, he promised to end an unpopular war, not because he opposed the war's conquest of other people's land and resources, but because it was "unwinnable".

Should Obama beat John McCain to the White House in November, it will be liberalism's last fling. In the United States and Britain, liberalism as a war-making, divisive ideology is once again being used to destroy liberalism as a reality. A great many people understand this, as the hatred of Blair and new Labour attest, but many are disoriented and eager for "leadership" and basic social democracy. In the US, where unrelenting propaganda about American democratic uniqueness disguises a corporate system based on extremes of wealth and privilege, liberalism as expressed through the Democratic Party has played a crucial, compliant role.

In 1968, Robert Kennedy sought to rescue the party and his own ambitions from the threat of real change that came from an alliance of the civil rights campaign and the anti-war movement then commanding the streets of the main cities, and which Martin Luther King had drawn together until he was assassinated in April that year. Kennedy had supported the war in Vietnam and continued to support it in private, but this was skilfully suppressed as he competed against the maverick Eugene McCarthy, whose surprise win in the New Hampshire primary on an anti-war ticket had forced President Lyndon Johnson to abandon the idea of another term. Using the memory of his martyred brother, Kennedy assiduously exploited the electoral power of delusion among people hungry for politics that represented them, not the rich.

"These people love you," I said to him as we left Calexico, California, where the immigrant population lived in abject poverty and people came like a great wave and swept him out of his car, his hands fastened to their lips.

"Yes, yes, sure they love me," he replied. "I love them!" I asked him how exactly he would lift them out of poverty: just what was his political philosophy? "Philosophy? Well, it's based on a faith in this country and I believe that many Americans have lost this faith and I want to give it back to them, because we are the last and the best hope of the world, as Thomas Jefferson said."

"That's what you say in your speech. Surely the question is: How?"

"How . . . by charting a new direction for America."

The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may well "chart a new direction for America" in specious, media-honed language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the best damned democracy money can buy.

Embarrassing truth

As their contest for the White House draws closer, watch how, regardless of the inevitable personal smears, Obama and McCain draw nearer to each other. They already concur on America's divine right to control all before it. "We lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good," said Obama. "We must lead by building a 21st-century military . . . to advance the security of all people [emphasis added]." McCain agrees. Obama says in pursuing "terrorists" he would attack Pakistan. McCain wouldn't quarrel.

Both candidates have paid ritual obeisance to the regime in Tel Aviv, unquestioning support for which defines all presidential ambition. In opposing a UN Security Council resolution implying criticism of Israel's starvation of the people of Gaza, Obama was ahead of both McCain and Hillary Clinton. In January, pressured by the Israel lobby, he massaged a statement that "nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people" to now read: "Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel [emphasis added]." Such is his concern for the victims of the longest, illegal military occupation of modern times. Like all the candidates, Obama has furthered Israeli/Bush fictions about Iran, whose regime, he says absurdly, "is a threat to all of us".

On the war in Iraq, Obama the dove and McCain the hawk are almost united. McCain now says he wants US troops to leave in five years (instead of "100 years", his earlier option). Obama has now "reserved the right" to change his pledge to get troops out next year. "I will listen to our commanders on the ground," he now says, echoing Bush. His adviser on Iraq, Colin Kahl, says the US should maintain up to 80,000 troops in Iraq until 2010. Like McCain, Obama has voted repeatedly in the Senate to support Bush's demands for funding of the occupation of Iraq; and he has called for more troops to be sent to Afghanistan. His senior advisers embrace McCain's proposal for an aggressive "league of democracies", led by the United States, to circumvent the United Nations.

Amusingly, both have denounced their "preachers" for speaking out. Whereas McCain's man of God praised Hitler, in the fashion of lunatic white holy-rollers, Obama's man, Jeremiah Wright, spoke an embarrassing truth. He said that the attacks of 11 September 2001 had taken place as a consequence of the violence of US power across the world. The media demanded that Obama disown Wright and swear an oath of loyalty to the Bush lie that "terrorists attacked America because they hate our freedoms". So he did. The conflict in the Middle East, said Obama, was rooted not "primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel", but in "the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam". Journalists applauded. Islamophobia is a liberal speciality.

The American media love both Obama and McCain. Reminiscent of mating calls by Guardian writers to Blair more than a decade ago, Jann Wenner, founder of the liberal Rolling Stone, wrote: "There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline . . . Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama challenges America to rise up, to do what so many of us long to do: to summon 'the better angels of our nature'." At the liberal New Republic, Charles Lane confessed: "I know it shouldn't be happening, but it is. I'm falling for John McCain." His colleague Michael Lewis had gone further. His feelings for McCain, he wrote, were like "the war that must occur inside a 14-year-old boy who discovers he is more sexually attracted to boys than to girls".

The objects of these uncontrollable passions are as one in their support for America's true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. "Seven of the Obama campaign's top 14 donors," wrote the investigator Pam Martens, "consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages." A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people of colour in the United States. "Washington lobbyists haven't funded my campaign," said Obama in January, "they won't run my White House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president." According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.

What is Obama's attraction to big business? Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy's. By offering a "new", young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party - with the bonus of being a member of the black elite - he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell's role as Bush's secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.

Piracies and dangers

America's war on Iran has already begun. In December, Bush secretly authorised support for two guerrilla armies inside Iran, one of which, the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, is described by the state department as terrorist. The US is also engaged in attacks or subversion against Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Bolivia and Venezuela. A new military command, Africom, is being set up to fight proxy wars for control of Africa's oil and other riches. With US missiles soon to be stationed provocatively on Russia's borders, the Cold War is back. None of these piracies and dangers has raised a whisper in the presidential campaign, not least from its great liberal hope.

Moreover, none of the candidates represents so-called mainstream America. In poll after poll, voters make clear that they want the normal decencies of jobs, proper housing and health care. They want their troops out of Iraq and the Israelis to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbours. This is a remarkable testimony, given the daily brainwashing of ordinary Americans in almost everything they watch and read.

On this side of the Atlantic, a deeply cynical electorate watches British liberalism's equivalent last fling. Most of the "philosophy" of new Labour was borrowed wholesale from the US. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were interchangeable. Both were hostile to traditionalists in their parties who might question the corporate-speak of their class-based economic policies and their relish for colonial conquests. Now the British find themselves spectators to the rise of new Tory, distinguishable from Blair’s new Labour only in the personality of its leader, a former corporate public relations man who presents himself as Tonier than thou. We all deserve better.

http://www.johnpilger.com

http://www.newstatesman.com/north-america/
2008/05/obama-pilger-mccain-kennedy

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 Página/12:
 La vida de un cabecita negra

Por Luis Bruschtein
Viernes, 30 de Mayo de 2008

El domingo pasado se agotó la película de Pino Solanas Los hijos de Fierro, que distribuyó Página/12. Todos los argentinos son devotos del Martín Fierro, pero hay muchos que no lo entienden.

Hay un país sonámbulo. Un país que declama su devoción por el Martín Fierro sin darse cuenta de que es su propia historia. El mismo país que reniega de sus cabecitas negras, que levanta monumentos a los genocidas de la conquista del desierto, ama sincera y ciegamente, esa historia de un cabecita negra que se pasa la mitad de su vida exiliado entre sus hermanos, los indios. La devoción por el Martín Fierro es un monumento a la esquizofrenia cultural argentina.

Pero la historia camina con los ojos abiertos, aunque la mayoría la lea con los ojos cerrados para tropezarse una y otra vez con los cordones que la van trenzando. Porque la historia de ese gaucho también fue escrita en el exilio, en Brasil, por José Hernández.

Hernández fue proclamado como el escritor emblemático de la cultura nacional. Pero si algo representaba era una cultura que había sido derrotada por la que finalmente lo entronó. ¿Poder de síntesis o de negación? Porque se ocultó prolijamente que el autor del Martín Fierro había sido el rostro intelectual de la montonera más vilipendiada de la historia oficial, la del general entrerriano Ricardo López Jordán, una montonera con ideas de avanzada que se oponía al centralismo porteño y al mismo tiempo luchaba por la patria grande latinoamericana. En 1871, López Jordán fue derrotado por Sarmiento y se exilió en Brasil, junto a José Hernández. En 1872 se publicó la primera edición del Martín Fierro y se vendieron 20 mil ejemplares, un éxito editorial espectacular. El triunfo de un derrotado.

En 1978, Pino Solanas presentó su película Los hijos de Fierro. También estaba en el exilio. Pero la había filmado entre 1973 y 1975 para hablar de una victoria y no de una derrota. Quería contar el fin de los 18 años de exilio de Perón y debió terminarla él mismo en el exilio. Cuando terminó la película, tres de los actores, entre ellos Julio Troxler, el “Hijo Mayor” de Fierro, ya habían sido asesinados. Como si la película no pudiera escapar a la realidad, como si fuera imposible hablar de ella sin sufrirla, como si estuviera maldecida por hablar de lo que se reniega.

En la película, la resistencia peronista, el sindicalismo rebelde, la gloriosa Jotapé son los hijos de Fierro. En 1978, esos hijos de Fierro eran buscados para la tortura y la desaparición, para asesinar a sus familias, para apropiarse de sus hijos, para borrar del mapa el más mínimo testimonio de que alguna vez hubieran existido. Otra vez la ferocidad y la sangre con ropa civilizada, otra vez el genocidio patriótico y occidental. La misma ola brutal que en la historia del país se había alzado una y otra vez.

Es difícil entender la forma en que se las han arreglado para contar la historia argentina ocultando la sangre y la ferocidad que la atraviesa. Es tan fuerte esa idea que hasta los mismos protagonistas de la historia de los ’70 no se daban cuenta de que eran producto de esa matriz. Es tan fuerte esa idea que después de la dictadura se habló de dos demonios porque decían que el grueso de los argentinos y su historia eran pacíficos.

Julio Troxler, el “Hijo Mayor”, era uno de esos demonios que crucificó el sentido común de la época. Militante de la resistencia peronista, sobrevivió a los fusilamientos de José León Suárez. Tras el ’73, fue por un breve período jefe de la policía que antes había intentado fusilarlo. En 1975 fue acribillado a mansalva por la Triple A. Era un tipo cálido, reflexivo y muy querido por sus compañeros. Antes de morir había actuado como actor de su propia historia en la película Operación Masacre y en Los Hijos de Fierro, haciendo de un perfecto Hermano Mayor. Es una de las tantas historias de este país que siempre fue tan pacífico si no fuera por sus demonios. Hablar de los demonios siempre resulta cómodo aunque deje la sensación de que alguien se perdió una parte de la película, por cerrar los ojos, por dejar hacer, por no haber hecho lo necesario, o por el odio secreto a los que sí hicieron.

Los Hijos de Fierro es el contradiscurso, como lo fue el Martín Fierro, y duele porque habla de nuestra historia.


http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/contratapa/13-105113-2008-05-30.html

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 The Independent: The Amazonian tribe that hid
 from the rest of the world – until now

By Daniel Howden, Deputy Foreign Editor
Friday, 30 May 2008

Three near-naked figures are visible in the forest clearing. Two of them are men, their bodies daubed with a red dye, and they are aiming their bows at the sky. A third figure appears to be a woman, her body blackened and only her pale hands and face betraying her natural colour.

This remarkable photograph is the first proof of the existence of one of the world's last uncontacted tribes. Taken from a plane that was flying low over the canopy of the Amazon rainforest near the border between Brazil and Peru, it c