http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Newsweek_puts_Obama_in_Vietnam_0131.html
Coming to newsstands Monday: 1965.
That's the year then-President Lyndon Johnson officially expanded America's involvement in Vietnam, expanding the number of US troops from 3,500 in March to 200,000 by December.
Newsweek invites the comparison with a bold cover, titled, "OBAMA'S VIETNAM," going to press less than two weeks after Obama takes office. Johnson, like Obama, inherited a troubled US conflict from his predecessor.
"A wave of reports, official and unofficial, from American and foreign (including Afghan) diplomats and soldiers, present and former, all seem to agree: the situation in Afghanistan is bad and getting worse," the magazine's Evan Thomas and John Barry write, in a news story that accompanies an opinion piece by Fahreed Zakaria. "Some four decades ago, American presidents became accustomed to hearing gloomy reports like that from Vietnam, although the public pronouncements were usually rosier. John F. Kennedy worried to his dying day about getting stuck in a land war in Asia; LBJ was haunted by nightmares about "Uncle Ho." In the military, now as then, there are a growing number of doubters. But the default switch for senior officers in the U.S. military is "can do, sir!" and that seems to be the light blinking now. In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, when in doubt, escalate. There are now about 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The outgoing Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration appear to agree that the number should be twice that a year or so from now."
Johnson escalated the Vietnam conflict after a purported attack on the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. A declassified NSA intercept, however, revealed that there was no attack at all. In the following year, America's involvement soared.
Newsweek's authors disparage liberals, to whom "all American interventions after Vietnam have been potential 'quagmires,'" and after saying "Vietnam analogies can be tiresome," go on to compare Afghanistan to Vietnam -- in detail.
"Vietnam analogies can be tiresome," they write. "To critics, especially those on the left, all American interventions after Vietnam have been potential "quagmires." But sometimes clichés come true, and, especially lately, it seems that the war in Afghanistan is shaping up in all-too-familiar ways."
And yet, the authors are also careful to draw the disconnects between Vietnam and the now-poppy state of Afghanistan (though not nearly as careful as the magazine's editors, who don't even place a question mark after their headline).
"Even 60,000 troops is a long way from the half million American soldiers sent to Vietnam at the war's peak; the 642 U.S. deaths sustained so far pale in comparison to the 58,000 lost in Vietnam," Thomas and Barry add.
"Still, consider this: that's a higher death toll than after the first nine years of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. And what is troubling is that no one in the outgoing or incoming administration has been able to say what the additional troops are for, except as a kind of tourniquet to staunch the bleeding while someone comes up with a strategy that has a chance of working. The most uncomfortable question is whether any strategy will work at this point."
If anything is for certain, it's that Obama's media honeymoon is over.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Governments across Europe tremble as angry people take to the streets
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/...europe-protests
Ian Traynor, Europe editor
The Guardian, Saturday 31 January 2009
France paralysed by a wave of strike action, the boulevards of Paris resembling a debris-strewn battlefield. The Hungarian currency sinks to its lowest level ever against the euro, as the unemployment figure rises. Greek farmers block the road into Bulgaria in protest at low prices for their produce. New figures from the biggest bank in the Baltic show that the three post-Soviet states there face the biggest recessions in Europe.
It's a snapshot of a single day – yesterday – in a Europe sinking into the bleakest of times. But while the outlook may be dark in the big wealthy democracies of western Europe, it is in the young, poor, vulnerable states of central and eastern Europe that the trauma of crash, slump and meltdown looks graver.
Exactly 20 years ago, in serial revolutionary rejoicing, they ditched communism to put their faith in a capitalism now in crisis and by which they feel betrayed. The result has been the biggest protests across the former communist bloc since the days of people power.
Europe's time of troubles is gathering depth and scale. Governments are trembling. Revolt is in the air.
Athens
Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old middle-class boy going to a party in a rough neighbourhood on a December Saturday, was the first fatality of Europe's season of strife. Shot dead by a policeman, the boy's killing lit a bonfire of unrest in the city unmatched since the 1970s.
There are many wellsprings of the serial protests rolling across Europe. In Athens, it was students and young people who suddenly mobilised to turn parts of the city into no-go areas. They were sick of the lack of jobs and prospects, the failings of the education system and seized with pessimism over their future.
This week it was the farmers' turn, rolling their tractors out to block the motorways, main road and border crossings across the Balkans to try to obtain better procurement prices for their produce.
Riga
The old Baltic trading city had seen nothing like it since the happy days of kicking out the Russians and overthrowing communism two decades ago. More than 10,000 people converged on the 13th-century cathedral to show the Latvian government what they thought of its efforts at containing the economic crisis. The peaceful protest morphed into a late-night rampage as a minority headed for the parliament, battled with riot police and trashed parts of the old city. The following day there were similar scenes in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital next door.
After Iceland, Latvia looks like the most vulnerable country to be hammered by the financial and economic crisis. The EU and IMF have already mounted a €7.5bn (£6.6bn) rescue plan but the outlook is the worst in Europe.
The biggest bank in the Baltic, Swedbank of Sweden, yesterday predicted a slump this year in Latvia of a whopping 10%, more than double the previous projections. It added that the economy of Estonia would shrink by 7% and of Lithuania by 4.5%.
The Latvian central bank's governor went on national television this week to pronounce the economy "clinically dead. We have only three or four minutes to resuscitate it".
Paris
Burned-out cars, masked youths, smashed shop windows, and more than a million striking workers. The scenes from France are familiar, but not so familiar to President Nicolas Sarkozy, confronting the first big wave of industrial unrest of his time in the Elysée Palace.
Sarkozy has spent most of his time in office trying to fix the world's problems, with less attention devoted to the home front. From Gaza to Georgia, Russia to Washington, Sarkozy has been a man in a hurry to mediate in trouble spots and grab the credit for peacemaking.
France, meanwhile, is moving into recession and unemployment is going up. The latest jobless figures were to have been released yesterday, but were held back, apparently for fear of inflaming the protests.
Budapest
A balance of payments crisis last autumn, heavy indebtedness and a disastrous budget made Hungary the first European candidate for an international rescue. The $26bn (£18bn) IMF-led bail-out shows scant sign of working. Industrial output is at its lowest for 16 years, the national currency - the forint - sank to a record low against the euro yesterday and the government also announced another round of spending cuts yesterday.
So far the streets have been relatively quiet. The Hungarian misery highlights a key difference between eastern and western Europe. While the UK, Germany, France and others plough hundreds of billions into public spending, tax cuts, bank bailouts and guarantees to industry, the east Europeans (plus Iceland and Ireland) are broke, ordering budget cuts, tax rises, and pleading for international help to shore up their economies.
The austerity and the soaring costs of repaying bank loans and mortgages taken out in hard foreign currencies (euro, yen and dollar) are fuelling the misery.
Kiev
The east European upheavals of 1989 hit Ukraine late, maturing into the Orange Revolution on the streets of Kiev only five years ago. The fresh start promised by President Viktor Yushchenko has, though, dissolved into messy, corrupt, and brutal political infighting, with the economy, growing strongly a few years ago, going into freefall.
Three weeks of gas wars with Russia this month ended in defeat and will cost Ukraine dearly. The national currency, at less than half the value of six months ago, is akin to the fate of Iceland's wrecked krona. Ukrainians have been buying dollars by the billion. In November the IMF waded in with the first payments in a $16bn rescue package.
The vicious power struggles between Yushchenko and the prime minister, Yuliya Tymoshenko, are consuming the ruling elite's energy, paralysing government and leaving the economy dysfunctional. Russia is doing its best to keep things that way.
Reykjavik
Proud of its status as one of the world's most developed, most productive and most equal societies, Iceland is in the throes of what is, by its staid standards, a revolution.
Riot police in Reykjavik, the coolest of capitals. Building bonfires in front of the world's oldest parliament. The yoghurt flying at the free market men who have run the country for decades and brought it to its knees.
An openly gay prime minister takes over today as head of a caretaker government. The neocon right has been ditched. The hard left Greens are, at least for the moment, the most popular party in the small Arctic state with a population the size of Bradford.
The IMF's bailout teams have moved in with $11bn. The national currency, the krona, appears to be finished. Iceland is a test case of how one of the most successful societies on the globe suddenly failed.
Ian Traynor, Europe editor
The Guardian, Saturday 31 January 2009
France paralysed by a wave of strike action, the boulevards of Paris resembling a debris-strewn battlefield. The Hungarian currency sinks to its lowest level ever against the euro, as the unemployment figure rises. Greek farmers block the road into Bulgaria in protest at low prices for their produce. New figures from the biggest bank in the Baltic show that the three post-Soviet states there face the biggest recessions in Europe.
It's a snapshot of a single day – yesterday – in a Europe sinking into the bleakest of times. But while the outlook may be dark in the big wealthy democracies of western Europe, it is in the young, poor, vulnerable states of central and eastern Europe that the trauma of crash, slump and meltdown looks graver.
Exactly 20 years ago, in serial revolutionary rejoicing, they ditched communism to put their faith in a capitalism now in crisis and by which they feel betrayed. The result has been the biggest protests across the former communist bloc since the days of people power.
Europe's time of troubles is gathering depth and scale. Governments are trembling. Revolt is in the air.
Athens
Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old middle-class boy going to a party in a rough neighbourhood on a December Saturday, was the first fatality of Europe's season of strife. Shot dead by a policeman, the boy's killing lit a bonfire of unrest in the city unmatched since the 1970s.
There are many wellsprings of the serial protests rolling across Europe. In Athens, it was students and young people who suddenly mobilised to turn parts of the city into no-go areas. They were sick of the lack of jobs and prospects, the failings of the education system and seized with pessimism over their future.
This week it was the farmers' turn, rolling their tractors out to block the motorways, main road and border crossings across the Balkans to try to obtain better procurement prices for their produce.
Riga
The old Baltic trading city had seen nothing like it since the happy days of kicking out the Russians and overthrowing communism two decades ago. More than 10,000 people converged on the 13th-century cathedral to show the Latvian government what they thought of its efforts at containing the economic crisis. The peaceful protest morphed into a late-night rampage as a minority headed for the parliament, battled with riot police and trashed parts of the old city. The following day there were similar scenes in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital next door.
After Iceland, Latvia looks like the most vulnerable country to be hammered by the financial and economic crisis. The EU and IMF have already mounted a €7.5bn (£6.6bn) rescue plan but the outlook is the worst in Europe.
The biggest bank in the Baltic, Swedbank of Sweden, yesterday predicted a slump this year in Latvia of a whopping 10%, more than double the previous projections. It added that the economy of Estonia would shrink by 7% and of Lithuania by 4.5%.
The Latvian central bank's governor went on national television this week to pronounce the economy "clinically dead. We have only three or four minutes to resuscitate it".
Paris
Burned-out cars, masked youths, smashed shop windows, and more than a million striking workers. The scenes from France are familiar, but not so familiar to President Nicolas Sarkozy, confronting the first big wave of industrial unrest of his time in the Elysée Palace.
Sarkozy has spent most of his time in office trying to fix the world's problems, with less attention devoted to the home front. From Gaza to Georgia, Russia to Washington, Sarkozy has been a man in a hurry to mediate in trouble spots and grab the credit for peacemaking.
France, meanwhile, is moving into recession and unemployment is going up. The latest jobless figures were to have been released yesterday, but were held back, apparently for fear of inflaming the protests.
Budapest
A balance of payments crisis last autumn, heavy indebtedness and a disastrous budget made Hungary the first European candidate for an international rescue. The $26bn (£18bn) IMF-led bail-out shows scant sign of working. Industrial output is at its lowest for 16 years, the national currency - the forint - sank to a record low against the euro yesterday and the government also announced another round of spending cuts yesterday.
So far the streets have been relatively quiet. The Hungarian misery highlights a key difference between eastern and western Europe. While the UK, Germany, France and others plough hundreds of billions into public spending, tax cuts, bank bailouts and guarantees to industry, the east Europeans (plus Iceland and Ireland) are broke, ordering budget cuts, tax rises, and pleading for international help to shore up their economies.
The austerity and the soaring costs of repaying bank loans and mortgages taken out in hard foreign currencies (euro, yen and dollar) are fuelling the misery.
Kiev
The east European upheavals of 1989 hit Ukraine late, maturing into the Orange Revolution on the streets of Kiev only five years ago. The fresh start promised by President Viktor Yushchenko has, though, dissolved into messy, corrupt, and brutal political infighting, with the economy, growing strongly a few years ago, going into freefall.
Three weeks of gas wars with Russia this month ended in defeat and will cost Ukraine dearly. The national currency, at less than half the value of six months ago, is akin to the fate of Iceland's wrecked krona. Ukrainians have been buying dollars by the billion. In November the IMF waded in with the first payments in a $16bn rescue package.
The vicious power struggles between Yushchenko and the prime minister, Yuliya Tymoshenko, are consuming the ruling elite's energy, paralysing government and leaving the economy dysfunctional. Russia is doing its best to keep things that way.
Reykjavik
Proud of its status as one of the world's most developed, most productive and most equal societies, Iceland is in the throes of what is, by its staid standards, a revolution.
Riot police in Reykjavik, the coolest of capitals. Building bonfires in front of the world's oldest parliament. The yoghurt flying at the free market men who have run the country for decades and brought it to its knees.
An openly gay prime minister takes over today as head of a caretaker government. The neocon right has been ditched. The hard left Greens are, at least for the moment, the most popular party in the small Arctic state with a population the size of Bradford.
The IMF's bailout teams have moved in with $11bn. The national currency, the krona, appears to be finished. Iceland is a test case of how one of the most successful societies on the globe suddenly failed.
BART shooting suspect's bail set at $3 million
http://www.mercurynews.com/crime/ci_11596120
OAKLAND — A judge set bail at $3 million Friday for the former BART police officer accused of killing a 22-year-old man at a BART station on New Year's Day.
Johannes Mehserle's explanation of how he shot Oscar Grant was inconsistent, and he was a danger to society and a flight risk, said Alameda County Superior Court Judge Morris Jacobson.
"That is the type of bail that will go a long ways toward ensuring future appearances in court," Jacobson said.
Mehserle's father whispered, "Oh my God" and shook his head from side to side as the judge spoke.
As of 8:30 p.m. Friday, Mehserle remained in the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin.
Mehserle, 27, is accused of murder in the killing of Grant on the Fruitvale Station platform as hundreds of passengers watched and recorded the event with cell phone cameras.
Those recordings show Mehserle standing over an apparently defenseless Grant, who is lying on his stomach with his hands behind his back. The videos show Mehserle pulling his pistol and shooting Grant in the back.
Mehserle's attorney argued his client had mistakenly believed that he was firing his Taser shock weapon, not his handgun. That made the crime, at most, involuntary manslaughter, argued attorney Michael Rains.
Rains said some witnesses said they heard Mehserle tell fellow officers, "get back, I am going to taze him."
Other witnesses and officers said that after the shooting Mehserle told fellow officers he thought Grant had a gun, court documents state.
The papers — obtained before Jacobson put a gag order on the parties — were the first explanation from either Mehserle or an attorney of the former officer's state of mind during the early hours of Jan. 1.
"The offense charged is serious," defense attorney Michael Rains wrote. "However, even a rudimentary and hasty examination of ... indicates that Mr. Mehserle did not act ... with malice against Mr. Grant when he fired his weapon."
According to the document, an officer said he heard Mehserle tell Grant to stop resisting and to put his hands behind his back, then saying, "I'm going to taze him, I'm going to taze him. I can't get his arms. He won't give me his arms. His hands are going for his waistband."
Instead of pulling his Taser, Mehserle pulled his gun and shot Grant in the back, the papers state. "Tony, I thought he was going for a gun," Mehserle told the officer, according to the document.
District Attorney Tom Orloff's office declined to release its own bail-hearing motion Friday afternoon, citing the gag order.
In court, Deputy District Attorney John Creighton focused on the conflict between saying he would use a Taser and later saying he thought Grant had a gun. If Mehserle thought Grant was trying to reach for a gun, he never would have said he was going to use his Taser, Creighton said.
Mehserle, he said, was trained to react to force with force, meaning he would have pulled his gun if he thought Grant had a gun.
Jacobson agreed.
"There appears to be a change in the story. His willingness to change his story appears to me that he would be willing to do so to avoid the consequences."
The conflicting reasons, coupled with a slaying "under the color of authority," made Mehserle a danger to society, the judge said.
He also said Mehserle's decision to go to Nevada after the shooting and his being unmarried contributed to his being a flight risk.
"When he felt under pressure, he didn't run to his parents' house in Napa, he ran to Nevada," the judge said.
Rains argued the prosecutors were too aggressive in charging murder instead of involuntary manslaughter, for which the bail would be, at most, $30,000.
Creighton argued that murder was the correct charge.
Describing the scene from the videos of the shooting, Creighton said Mehserle appears to have deliberately reached for his weapon.
"What we see in the video is an officer releasing his control of a suspect, standing up, drawing his weapon, with some difficulty, and shooting it," Creighton said.
Jacobson said he would not consider threats against Mehserle and his family, or public unrest in making his bail decision.
"Doing so would allow mob rule and public furor to set bail proceedings," the judge said.
While Rains' legal filing attempts to characterize Mehserle's state of mind, it does not quote Mehserle directly, instead using statements by others to describe the scene and the former officer's possible motives.
Mehserle resigned from the BART police force rather than give a statement about the slaying to BART officials who were investigating the death.
Outside the courthouse, a group of protesters set off on a march through downtown Oakland chanting slogans and holding signs that read "no bail, jail." Police arrested eight protesters after some minor scuffles.
OAKLAND — A judge set bail at $3 million Friday for the former BART police officer accused of killing a 22-year-old man at a BART station on New Year's Day.
Johannes Mehserle's explanation of how he shot Oscar Grant was inconsistent, and he was a danger to society and a flight risk, said Alameda County Superior Court Judge Morris Jacobson.
"That is the type of bail that will go a long ways toward ensuring future appearances in court," Jacobson said.
Mehserle's father whispered, "Oh my God" and shook his head from side to side as the judge spoke.
As of 8:30 p.m. Friday, Mehserle remained in the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin.
Mehserle, 27, is accused of murder in the killing of Grant on the Fruitvale Station platform as hundreds of passengers watched and recorded the event with cell phone cameras.
Those recordings show Mehserle standing over an apparently defenseless Grant, who is lying on his stomach with his hands behind his back. The videos show Mehserle pulling his pistol and shooting Grant in the back.
Mehserle's attorney argued his client had mistakenly believed that he was firing his Taser shock weapon, not his handgun. That made the crime, at most, involuntary manslaughter, argued attorney Michael Rains.
Rains said some witnesses said they heard Mehserle tell fellow officers, "get back, I am going to taze him."
Other witnesses and officers said that after the shooting Mehserle told fellow officers he thought Grant had a gun, court documents state.
The papers — obtained before Jacobson put a gag order on the parties — were the first explanation from either Mehserle or an attorney of the former officer's state of mind during the early hours of Jan. 1.
"The offense charged is serious," defense attorney Michael Rains wrote. "However, even a rudimentary and hasty examination of ... indicates that Mr. Mehserle did not act ... with malice against Mr. Grant when he fired his weapon."
According to the document, an officer said he heard Mehserle tell Grant to stop resisting and to put his hands behind his back, then saying, "I'm going to taze him, I'm going to taze him. I can't get his arms. He won't give me his arms. His hands are going for his waistband."
Instead of pulling his Taser, Mehserle pulled his gun and shot Grant in the back, the papers state. "Tony, I thought he was going for a gun," Mehserle told the officer, according to the document.
District Attorney Tom Orloff's office declined to release its own bail-hearing motion Friday afternoon, citing the gag order.
In court, Deputy District Attorney John Creighton focused on the conflict between saying he would use a Taser and later saying he thought Grant had a gun. If Mehserle thought Grant was trying to reach for a gun, he never would have said he was going to use his Taser, Creighton said.
Mehserle, he said, was trained to react to force with force, meaning he would have pulled his gun if he thought Grant had a gun.
Jacobson agreed.
"There appears to be a change in the story. His willingness to change his story appears to me that he would be willing to do so to avoid the consequences."
The conflicting reasons, coupled with a slaying "under the color of authority," made Mehserle a danger to society, the judge said.
He also said Mehserle's decision to go to Nevada after the shooting and his being unmarried contributed to his being a flight risk.
"When he felt under pressure, he didn't run to his parents' house in Napa, he ran to Nevada," the judge said.
Rains argued the prosecutors were too aggressive in charging murder instead of involuntary manslaughter, for which the bail would be, at most, $30,000.
Creighton argued that murder was the correct charge.
Describing the scene from the videos of the shooting, Creighton said Mehserle appears to have deliberately reached for his weapon.
"What we see in the video is an officer releasing his control of a suspect, standing up, drawing his weapon, with some difficulty, and shooting it," Creighton said.
Jacobson said he would not consider threats against Mehserle and his family, or public unrest in making his bail decision.
"Doing so would allow mob rule and public furor to set bail proceedings," the judge said.
While Rains' legal filing attempts to characterize Mehserle's state of mind, it does not quote Mehserle directly, instead using statements by others to describe the scene and the former officer's possible motives.
Mehserle resigned from the BART police force rather than give a statement about the slaying to BART officials who were investigating the death.
Outside the courthouse, a group of protesters set off on a march through downtown Oakland chanting slogans and holding signs that read "no bail, jail." Police arrested eight protesters after some minor scuffles.
Exxon Mobil now supports carbon tax
http://intelstrike.com/?p=310
The media is hailing Exxon Mobil’s announcement in favor of carbon tax proposals as a shocking, unbelievable move. But is it really that surprising? Could well meaning environmentalists be in for a shock to find that a seemingly “grass roots” movement has from the beginning been initiated from the top down?
As the Calgary Herald reports, “Exxonmobil corp., the world’s largest crude oil refiner, supports taxing carbon dioxide as the most efficient way of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, its chief executive said.”
The announcement came from Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, speaking at the Woodrow Wilson international center for scholars in Washington, which has served as a platform for discussing various globalist initiatives for many years. That Tillerson would make this announcement is interesting, due to the fact that the Rockefeller family, who built Standard Oil, recently identified him as “resistant” to “…take the threat of global warming more seriously”. Are we to accept this story? Was there any real resistance in the first place?
A May 2008 article from the International Herald Tribune painted a glowing picture of the Rockefeller family in their quest to “press for change at Exxon”. As reported, “David Rockefeller, retired chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and patriarch of the family, issued a statement saying, “I support my family’s efforts to sharpen Exxon Mobil’s focus on the environmental crisis facing all of us.”
The Rockefeller family has held a very special interest in environmental matters for decades. Population control and reduction is a central directive of many Rockefeller initiatives. The recent focus on Global warming is no different. Steven Rockefeller’s Earth Charter is an example.
There are countless real environmental issues such as genetically engineered organisms being released into the environment causing unknown mutations, consuming potentially dangerous cloned animal products, mass honey-bee die offs, etc. However, global warming was identified by the Club of Rome’s 1991 report The First Global Revolution as a unifier to funnel the energy of citizens and businesses alike into supporting globalist initiatives. The report states, “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. All these dangers are caused by human intervention… The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
Many of the “green” proposals to fight global warming will have a direct impact on your standard of living. Obama has admitted that sending “price signals” to change behavior is an option. Obama stated during a 2007 PBS interview, “We’re gonna have to cap the emission of greenhouse gasses. That means the power plants are gonna have to adjust how they generate power. They will pass on those costs to consumers.”
The media is hailing Exxon Mobil’s announcement in favor of carbon tax proposals as a shocking, unbelievable move. But is it really that surprising? Could well meaning environmentalists be in for a shock to find that a seemingly “grass roots” movement has from the beginning been initiated from the top down?
As the Calgary Herald reports, “Exxonmobil corp., the world’s largest crude oil refiner, supports taxing carbon dioxide as the most efficient way of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, its chief executive said.”
The announcement came from Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, speaking at the Woodrow Wilson international center for scholars in Washington, which has served as a platform for discussing various globalist initiatives for many years. That Tillerson would make this announcement is interesting, due to the fact that the Rockefeller family, who built Standard Oil, recently identified him as “resistant” to “…take the threat of global warming more seriously”. Are we to accept this story? Was there any real resistance in the first place?
A May 2008 article from the International Herald Tribune painted a glowing picture of the Rockefeller family in their quest to “press for change at Exxon”. As reported, “David Rockefeller, retired chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank and patriarch of the family, issued a statement saying, “I support my family’s efforts to sharpen Exxon Mobil’s focus on the environmental crisis facing all of us.”
The Rockefeller family has held a very special interest in environmental matters for decades. Population control and reduction is a central directive of many Rockefeller initiatives. The recent focus on Global warming is no different. Steven Rockefeller’s Earth Charter is an example.
There are countless real environmental issues such as genetically engineered organisms being released into the environment causing unknown mutations, consuming potentially dangerous cloned animal products, mass honey-bee die offs, etc. However, global warming was identified by the Club of Rome’s 1991 report The First Global Revolution as a unifier to funnel the energy of citizens and businesses alike into supporting globalist initiatives. The report states, “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. All these dangers are caused by human intervention… The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
Many of the “green” proposals to fight global warming will have a direct impact on your standard of living. Obama has admitted that sending “price signals” to change behavior is an option. Obama stated during a 2007 PBS interview, “We’re gonna have to cap the emission of greenhouse gasses. That means the power plants are gonna have to adjust how they generate power. They will pass on those costs to consumers.”
Friday, January 30, 2009
BART asks for help
this officer should get the friggin death sentence...just my opinion....
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/matierandross/detail?&entry_id=35185
Stay tuned -- BART plans to announce today it will hand off its internal affairs probe of the fatal police shooting of Oscar Grant to an outside law firm or public agency in an attempt to bring credibility to the investigation.
"The decision has been made to hand off the investigation to ensure its independence, and to ensure the outcome is more credible to the public," BART director Joel Keller confirmed this morning.
BART police were investigating reports of a fight early New Year's Day when officers pulled Grant and several other young men from a train at the Fruitvale station in Oakland. Grant, 22, was unarmed and lying on his stomach when Officer Johannes Meheserle, 27, pulled his gun and shot him to death.
Mehserle quit the force Jan. 7 rather than speak to internal affairs investigators, and six days later, prosecutors charged him with murder. His attorney is expected to ask an Alameda County Superior Court judge Friday to allow Mehserle to be released on bail from Santa Rita Jail.
The case has sparked a public furor and left BART brass on the defensive.
Keller said he was confident BART could conduct a "fair and thorough" investigation on its own, but acknowledged that both the agency and its police force needed to rebuild its public trust.
"One way to do that is to hand off the investigation to a third party, and let the facts take us wherever they go," Keller said.
Just which firm or agency will do the job has not been determined.
BART, by the way, also intends to hire a nationally recognized firm to do a top-to-bottom review of its police practices "to make sure they are consistent with the best practices across the country," Keller said.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/matierandross/detail?&entry_id=35185
Stay tuned -- BART plans to announce today it will hand off its internal affairs probe of the fatal police shooting of Oscar Grant to an outside law firm or public agency in an attempt to bring credibility to the investigation.
"The decision has been made to hand off the investigation to ensure its independence, and to ensure the outcome is more credible to the public," BART director Joel Keller confirmed this morning.
BART police were investigating reports of a fight early New Year's Day when officers pulled Grant and several other young men from a train at the Fruitvale station in Oakland. Grant, 22, was unarmed and lying on his stomach when Officer Johannes Meheserle, 27, pulled his gun and shot him to death.
Mehserle quit the force Jan. 7 rather than speak to internal affairs investigators, and six days later, prosecutors charged him with murder. His attorney is expected to ask an Alameda County Superior Court judge Friday to allow Mehserle to be released on bail from Santa Rita Jail.
The case has sparked a public furor and left BART brass on the defensive.
Keller said he was confident BART could conduct a "fair and thorough" investigation on its own, but acknowledged that both the agency and its police force needed to rebuild its public trust.
"One way to do that is to hand off the investigation to a third party, and let the facts take us wherever they go," Keller said.
Just which firm or agency will do the job has not been determined.
BART, by the way, also intends to hire a nationally recognized firm to do a top-to-bottom review of its police practices "to make sure they are consistent with the best practices across the country," Keller said.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
This Is Very Disturbing!
(from the tree of liberty board)
http://www.thetreeofliberty.com/vb/showthread.php?t=45498
Moderator: To me this is hard news but post where appropiate.
My son, who is in 1st grade, came home yesterday saying that he didn't want to go back to school anymore. So I asked him why? He said that during the Pledge of Allegiance the teacher put up a large image of Obama next to the flag. I asked him if he was sure of this and I suggested to him that maybe the teacher just put up an 8x10 photo of the president. He said, "No, it is a large picture of Obama and when we are done Ms. **** turns off the image." I also asked if they did this for Bush last year? He again said, "No." This was my sons first day back to school since before Christmas, he was on a 5 week track break.
My wife volunteers a couple of days each week with helping out with my sons teacher doing various duties. She said that she would come in early this morning to see what was going on. She just got back and reported that this was true and then some. She said she waited out in the pod area and could see inside 3 of the 5 class rooms in this section of school. She said that when the kids stand each teacher flips on the classroom overhead and a full body image of Obama, with six U.S. flags behind him, comes up about 4 feet away from the flag that hangs on the wall. She said that the image has Obama staring straight at you with no facial expressions, just a serious look. I asked my wife if Obama had his hand over his heart? She said that she was so taken aback by this that she didn't see it. What is worse is she said that all of the kids in each class faced Obama instead of the flag that hangs in the corner.
What the heck is going on?
Guys and gals, I need some advise on how to approach this. I can be somewhat hot headed so I need to plan accordingly with what to say to the principal when we go in to inquire about this. I am sure I will be brushed off so what is my next step? Obviously it will be the school district but then who? ACLU, Veteran groups, Christian groups? Who would be interested in this vile activity?
This is happening in the Clark County School District here in Las Vegas, Henderson area
http://www.thetreeofliberty.com/vb/showthread.php?t=45498
Moderator: To me this is hard news but post where appropiate.
My son, who is in 1st grade, came home yesterday saying that he didn't want to go back to school anymore. So I asked him why? He said that during the Pledge of Allegiance the teacher put up a large image of Obama next to the flag. I asked him if he was sure of this and I suggested to him that maybe the teacher just put up an 8x10 photo of the president. He said, "No, it is a large picture of Obama and when we are done Ms. **** turns off the image." I also asked if they did this for Bush last year? He again said, "No." This was my sons first day back to school since before Christmas, he was on a 5 week track break.
My wife volunteers a couple of days each week with helping out with my sons teacher doing various duties. She said that she would come in early this morning to see what was going on. She just got back and reported that this was true and then some. She said she waited out in the pod area and could see inside 3 of the 5 class rooms in this section of school. She said that when the kids stand each teacher flips on the classroom overhead and a full body image of Obama, with six U.S. flags behind him, comes up about 4 feet away from the flag that hangs on the wall. She said that the image has Obama staring straight at you with no facial expressions, just a serious look. I asked my wife if Obama had his hand over his heart? She said that she was so taken aback by this that she didn't see it. What is worse is she said that all of the kids in each class faced Obama instead of the flag that hangs in the corner.
What the heck is going on?
Guys and gals, I need some advise on how to approach this. I can be somewhat hot headed so I need to plan accordingly with what to say to the principal when we go in to inquire about this. I am sure I will be brushed off so what is my next step? Obviously it will be the school district but then who? ACLU, Veteran groups, Christian groups? Who would be interested in this vile activity?
This is happening in the Clark County School District here in Las Vegas, Henderson area
Law Enforcement: Ohio SWAT Team Kills Woman, Wounds Toddler in Drug Raid
this story is over a year old but i still felt it needed to be posted this is so wrong...
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/518/lima_ohio_swat_team_kills_young_mother
In the latest example of overzealous policing gone fatally awry, a member of a Lima, Ohio, police SWAT team shot and killed a young mother and wounded the child she was holding in her arms during a raid aimed at the woman's boyfriend, who was alleged to be selling drugs from the residence. Tarika Wilson, 26, was killed last Friday in an upstairs bedroom, shot twice by Lima police Sgt. Joseph Chevalia. Her one-year-old son, Sincere, was also shot, as were two pit bulls at the house. The child lost his left index finger, but his injuries are not life-threatening. One of the pit bulls was killed.
In the week since the incident, Lima police have failed to provide any details on what led up to the shooting, except to say they were executing a drug search warrant for Wilson's boyfriend, Anthony Terry. Terry was arrested at the scene and charged with possession of crack cocaine, which, along with marijuana, was found at the house.
Lima police did, however, engage in some preemptive apologetics. "This is a terrible situation that resulted from a very dangerous situation that occurs when a high-risk search warrant is executed," Lima Police Chief George Garlock said.
Garlock did not explain what made the search warrant "high-risk," nor did he explain why he sent a SWAT team to raid a home where officers knew children were present. In addition to her one-year-old, Wilson was the mother of five other children between 3 and 8 who lived at the house.
Officers tossed at least one stun grenade before charging the residence, but that explosion took place outside because officers knew children were present. "Because of the possibility that we had children in there, they were not lobbed inside," Garlock said.
Lima police have turned the investigation of the incident over to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation because the shooting involved a Lima police officer. That investigation is expected to take several weeks.
By mid-week, the FBI announced that it was joining the investigation. But angry family and community members are not waiting for answers. A crowd of more than 300 people marched with family members from a community center to the home where the killing took place to express their outrage and from there to the police station.
"Remember that baby who is in a hospital and that woman laying on a slab being dissected because the Lima police overstepped their bounds," Brenda Johnson, executive director of the community center, told the crowd before the march began. Ms. Johnson said it was reckless for police to raid a home with so many children inside. "This time it was someone else's child," she said. "Next time it could be your child, your grandchild."
According to next door neighbor and Wilson cousin Junior Cook, police "broke down the door and started shooting." He also denied that Terry sold drugs from the house. "No one ever came and knocked on that door or bought drugs there," Cook said.
"Not all the police are bad. Some of them have children," Pastor Arnold Manley of Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church told the crowd. "But the majority of the ones in Lima are."
Residents and community activists have vowed to march every Saturday until justice is done. On Monday, more than 200 of them showed up at a heated meeting with police officials and the city council to demand action.
"The man who shot her, he's not a suspect? What if that was me?" shouted Quintel Wilson, the victim's brother. "Where would I be? Locked up. No bond! Victim is the word here."
"We're going to see that justice is done," said Bishop Richard Cox, an official with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Councilman Tommy Pitts, chair of the council's safety services committee, said Lima police have long targeted blacks. "This comes as no surprise to me," he said about the shooting.
That the resort to heavily-armed, paramilitarized SWAT teams to do routine drug search warrants can result in civilian fatalities should come as no surprise to anyone who follows their use. In 2006, Cato Institute analyst Radley Balko produced an authoritative report on the topic, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, that showed dozens of cases of people killed or brutalized during such raids.
The raids continue despite little sign of public support for them. StoptheDrugWar.org (publisher of this newsletter) last October commissioned a Zogby poll that found that two-thirds oppose the use of SWAT-style teams in routine drug raids. Now, from Ohio, comes one more reason to oppose them.
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/518/lima_ohio_swat_team_kills_young_mother
In the latest example of overzealous policing gone fatally awry, a member of a Lima, Ohio, police SWAT team shot and killed a young mother and wounded the child she was holding in her arms during a raid aimed at the woman's boyfriend, who was alleged to be selling drugs from the residence. Tarika Wilson, 26, was killed last Friday in an upstairs bedroom, shot twice by Lima police Sgt. Joseph Chevalia. Her one-year-old son, Sincere, was also shot, as were two pit bulls at the house. The child lost his left index finger, but his injuries are not life-threatening. One of the pit bulls was killed.
In the week since the incident, Lima police have failed to provide any details on what led up to the shooting, except to say they were executing a drug search warrant for Wilson's boyfriend, Anthony Terry. Terry was arrested at the scene and charged with possession of crack cocaine, which, along with marijuana, was found at the house.
Lima police did, however, engage in some preemptive apologetics. "This is a terrible situation that resulted from a very dangerous situation that occurs when a high-risk search warrant is executed," Lima Police Chief George Garlock said.
Garlock did not explain what made the search warrant "high-risk," nor did he explain why he sent a SWAT team to raid a home where officers knew children were present. In addition to her one-year-old, Wilson was the mother of five other children between 3 and 8 who lived at the house.
Officers tossed at least one stun grenade before charging the residence, but that explosion took place outside because officers knew children were present. "Because of the possibility that we had children in there, they were not lobbed inside," Garlock said.
Lima police have turned the investigation of the incident over to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation because the shooting involved a Lima police officer. That investigation is expected to take several weeks.
By mid-week, the FBI announced that it was joining the investigation. But angry family and community members are not waiting for answers. A crowd of more than 300 people marched with family members from a community center to the home where the killing took place to express their outrage and from there to the police station.
"Remember that baby who is in a hospital and that woman laying on a slab being dissected because the Lima police overstepped their bounds," Brenda Johnson, executive director of the community center, told the crowd before the march began. Ms. Johnson said it was reckless for police to raid a home with so many children inside. "This time it was someone else's child," she said. "Next time it could be your child, your grandchild."
According to next door neighbor and Wilson cousin Junior Cook, police "broke down the door and started shooting." He also denied that Terry sold drugs from the house. "No one ever came and knocked on that door or bought drugs there," Cook said.
"Not all the police are bad. Some of them have children," Pastor Arnold Manley of Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church told the crowd. "But the majority of the ones in Lima are."
Residents and community activists have vowed to march every Saturday until justice is done. On Monday, more than 200 of them showed up at a heated meeting with police officials and the city council to demand action.
"The man who shot her, he's not a suspect? What if that was me?" shouted Quintel Wilson, the victim's brother. "Where would I be? Locked up. No bond! Victim is the word here."
"We're going to see that justice is done," said Bishop Richard Cox, an official with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Councilman Tommy Pitts, chair of the council's safety services committee, said Lima police have long targeted blacks. "This comes as no surprise to me," he said about the shooting.
That the resort to heavily-armed, paramilitarized SWAT teams to do routine drug search warrants can result in civilian fatalities should come as no surprise to anyone who follows their use. In 2006, Cato Institute analyst Radley Balko produced an authoritative report on the topic, Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, that showed dozens of cases of people killed or brutalized during such raids.
The raids continue despite little sign of public support for them. StoptheDrugWar.org (publisher of this newsletter) last October commissioned a Zogby poll that found that two-thirds oppose the use of SWAT-style teams in routine drug raids. Now, from Ohio, comes one more reason to oppose them.
Officials: Army suicides at 3-decade high
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090129/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/army_suicides
WASHINGTON – Suicides among U.S. soldiers rose last year to the highest level in decades, the Army announced Thursday. At least 128 soldiers killed themselves in 2008. But the final count is likely to be considerably higher because 15 more suspicious deaths are still being investigated and could also turn out to be self-inflicted, the Army said.
A new training and prevention effort will start next week. And Col. Elspeth Ritchie, a psychiatric consultant to the Army surgeon general, made a plea for more U.S. mental health professionals to sign on to work for the military.
"We are hiring and we need your help," she said.
The new suicide figure compares with 115 in 2007 and 102 in 2006 and is the highest since record keeping began in 1980. Officials calculate the deaths at a rate of roughly 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers — which is higher than the adjusted civilian rate for the first time since the Vietnam War, officials told a Pentagon news conference.
"We need to move quickly to do everything we can to reverse this disturbing ... number," Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said.
Officials have said that troops are under tremendous and unprecedented stress because of repeated and long tours of duty due to the simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The stress has placed further burdens on an overwhelmed military health care system also trying to tend to huge numbers of troops suffering from post-traumatic stress, depression and other mental health problems as well as physical wounds and injuries of tens of thousands.
Yearly increases in suicides have been recorded since 2004, when there were 64 — only about half the number now. And they've occurred despite increased training, prevention programs and psychiatric staff.
When studying individual cases, officials said they found that the most common factors for suicides were soldiers suffering problems with their personal relationships, legal or financial issues and problems on the job.
The statistics released Thursday cover soldiers who killed themselves while they were on active duty — including National Guard and Reserve troops who had been activated.
The previous year's rate of suicides — 18.8 per 100,000 soldiers — had also been the highest on record. But the new pace of 20.2 per 100,000 was the first time the rate surpassed the civilian number, when adjusted to reflect the Army's younger and male-heavy demographics.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the suicide rate for U.S. society overall was about 11 per 100,000 in 2004, the latest year for which the agency has figures. But the Army says the civilian rate is more like 19.5 per 100,000 when adjusted.
The new estimated rate of 20.2 is more than double the 9.8 in 2002 — the first full year after the start of the war in Afghanistan
The new Army statistics follow a report earlier this month showing that the Marine Corps recorded more suicides last year than any year since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
That report said 41 Marines were possible or confirmed suicides in 2008, or 16.8 per 100,000 troops. The Marine rate remained unchanged from the previous year.
Marine and Army units have borne most of duty in the two wars, which have required more use of ground forces to fight the insurgencies.
The numbers kept by the service branches don't show the whole picture of war-related suicides because they don't include deaths after people have left the military. The Department of Veterans Affairs tracks those numbers and says there were 144 suicides among the nearly 500,000 service members who left the military from 2002-2005 after fighting in at least one of the two ongoing wars.
The true incidence of suicide among military veterans is not known, according to a report last year by the Congressional Research Service. Based on numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the VA estimates that 18 veterans a day — or 6,500 a year — take their lives, but that number includes vets from all previous wars.
"The suicide numbers released today come as no surprise to the veterans' community who has experienced the psychological toll of war," said Paul Rieckhoff, director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "But we cannot let current trend lines continue. These are preventable deaths for which the Department of Defense and the VA can and must take bold action."
WASHINGTON – Suicides among U.S. soldiers rose last year to the highest level in decades, the Army announced Thursday. At least 128 soldiers killed themselves in 2008. But the final count is likely to be considerably higher because 15 more suspicious deaths are still being investigated and could also turn out to be self-inflicted, the Army said.
A new training and prevention effort will start next week. And Col. Elspeth Ritchie, a psychiatric consultant to the Army surgeon general, made a plea for more U.S. mental health professionals to sign on to work for the military.
"We are hiring and we need your help," she said.
The new suicide figure compares with 115 in 2007 and 102 in 2006 and is the highest since record keeping began in 1980. Officials calculate the deaths at a rate of roughly 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers — which is higher than the adjusted civilian rate for the first time since the Vietnam War, officials told a Pentagon news conference.
"We need to move quickly to do everything we can to reverse this disturbing ... number," Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said.
Officials have said that troops are under tremendous and unprecedented stress because of repeated and long tours of duty due to the simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The stress has placed further burdens on an overwhelmed military health care system also trying to tend to huge numbers of troops suffering from post-traumatic stress, depression and other mental health problems as well as physical wounds and injuries of tens of thousands.
Yearly increases in suicides have been recorded since 2004, when there were 64 — only about half the number now. And they've occurred despite increased training, prevention programs and psychiatric staff.
When studying individual cases, officials said they found that the most common factors for suicides were soldiers suffering problems with their personal relationships, legal or financial issues and problems on the job.
The statistics released Thursday cover soldiers who killed themselves while they were on active duty — including National Guard and Reserve troops who had been activated.
The previous year's rate of suicides — 18.8 per 100,000 soldiers — had also been the highest on record. But the new pace of 20.2 per 100,000 was the first time the rate surpassed the civilian number, when adjusted to reflect the Army's younger and male-heavy demographics.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the suicide rate for U.S. society overall was about 11 per 100,000 in 2004, the latest year for which the agency has figures. But the Army says the civilian rate is more like 19.5 per 100,000 when adjusted.
The new estimated rate of 20.2 is more than double the 9.8 in 2002 — the first full year after the start of the war in Afghanistan
The new Army statistics follow a report earlier this month showing that the Marine Corps recorded more suicides last year than any year since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
That report said 41 Marines were possible or confirmed suicides in 2008, or 16.8 per 100,000 troops. The Marine rate remained unchanged from the previous year.
Marine and Army units have borne most of duty in the two wars, which have required more use of ground forces to fight the insurgencies.
The numbers kept by the service branches don't show the whole picture of war-related suicides because they don't include deaths after people have left the military. The Department of Veterans Affairs tracks those numbers and says there were 144 suicides among the nearly 500,000 service members who left the military from 2002-2005 after fighting in at least one of the two ongoing wars.
The true incidence of suicide among military veterans is not known, according to a report last year by the Congressional Research Service. Based on numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the VA estimates that 18 veterans a day — or 6,500 a year — take their lives, but that number includes vets from all previous wars.
"The suicide numbers released today come as no surprise to the veterans' community who has experienced the psychological toll of war," said Paul Rieckhoff, director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "But we cannot let current trend lines continue. These are preventable deaths for which the Department of Defense and the VA can and must take bold action."
Zimbabwe's starving millions face halving of rations as UN cash dries up
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/29/zimbabwe-starving-food-aid-cut
The United Nations is to halve the food ration to millions of Zimbabweans, bringing it below what will keep an adult alive, as the numbers of people dependent on aid rises sharply and donations from foreign governments fall well short of demand.
The World Food Programme is to cut the core maize ration in February from 10kg to 5kg a month – or just 600 calories a day – for 7 million Zimbabweans, about 70% of the people left in the country. The recommended ration is 12kg a month.
As a result of the cuts, many Zimbabweans will be fortunate to eat once a day. Millions have been left dependent on food aid because of years of crop failures mostly caused by the knock-on effects of the government's seizure of white-owned farms and the collapse of the economy and infrastructure. Most shops sell food only for US dollars because hyperinflation has wiped out the value of the Zimbabwe currency, and what is available is relatively expensive imports beyond the reach of the mass of unemployed and desperate Zimbabweans.
The WFP says it has cut the ration to meet increased demand and cope with a shortfall in donations. It says it requires another $65m to keep feeding Zimbabweans until the end of March. But donors are reluctant to put more resources into the beleaguered African state and what aid there is has been partly diverted to the cholera crisis that has claimed 3,000 lives.
Zimbabwe maize rations
Richard Lee, a WFP spokesman in southern Africa, said that while the calorie count would be boosted by a ration of beans and vegetable oil, recipients of food aid would now have to find additional means to stay alive.
"The new ration falls below what is considered the survival ration. They will be sending their children to hunt for wild fruits or selling the possessions they haven't already sold to buy food," he said. "People will be more vulnerable, they will be more malnourished and they will be more susceptible to disease."
Oxfam is feeding 253,000 in Zimbabwe's Midlands province. One of its workers there, Caroline Gluck, said the organisation relied on food supplied by the WFP and so would be forced to halve the ration.
"Families are being stretched. They're selling livestock, they're selling household goods to buy staple foods," she said. "People told us they were having a meal a day. Sometimes adults are skipping a meal so the children can be fed. They are supplementing what they have with wild fruits.
"But now it's going to be a disaster because people have sold what they can sell. There's very little they can do to supplement their rations. I think it's going to be extremely hard for families, it's going to make them incredibly vulnerable. You look at people and they are already thin, their frames are skin and bone. When you look at the fields you see there's been no agricultural inputs. The soil is little better than sand."
The WFP is already feeding about 4.5 million Zimbabweans, with a coalition of non-governmental organisations distributing to another million. Next month, the total number of Zimbabweans reliant on food aid will rise by 1.5 million.
"We are concerned. The reason we are cutting the ration is so we do provide assistance to everybody who needs food assistance so that we can make sure they can get through these two hungriest and worst months of the year, February and March, before the harvest starts in April," said Lee.
"But on top of that we haven't received all the resources we had hoped for. The donors have been very generous. We've now received over $200m for our operations in Zimbabwe in 2008 and 2009. It's just that the scale of the crisis, the worsening crisis, means that we do require additional resources."
The food shortages are contributing to the rising number of cholera deaths. About 1,000 people have died in the past fortnight, many of them too weak for treatment because they have not had enough to eat. Nearly 58,000 people have been infected.
The food crisis has been compounded by the government's failure to meet a target of importing 800,000 tonnes of maize. It is believed to have bought only 200,000 tonnes.
The April harvest is unlikely to bring relief. Agriculturalists say it will again fail; they estimate it will provide less than a quarter of the country's needs and that drastic food shortages will continue into next year once the results of the harvest have been consumed.
The United Nations is to halve the food ration to millions of Zimbabweans, bringing it below what will keep an adult alive, as the numbers of people dependent on aid rises sharply and donations from foreign governments fall well short of demand.
The World Food Programme is to cut the core maize ration in February from 10kg to 5kg a month – or just 600 calories a day – for 7 million Zimbabweans, about 70% of the people left in the country. The recommended ration is 12kg a month.
As a result of the cuts, many Zimbabweans will be fortunate to eat once a day. Millions have been left dependent on food aid because of years of crop failures mostly caused by the knock-on effects of the government's seizure of white-owned farms and the collapse of the economy and infrastructure. Most shops sell food only for US dollars because hyperinflation has wiped out the value of the Zimbabwe currency, and what is available is relatively expensive imports beyond the reach of the mass of unemployed and desperate Zimbabweans.
The WFP says it has cut the ration to meet increased demand and cope with a shortfall in donations. It says it requires another $65m to keep feeding Zimbabweans until the end of March. But donors are reluctant to put more resources into the beleaguered African state and what aid there is has been partly diverted to the cholera crisis that has claimed 3,000 lives.
Zimbabwe maize rations
Richard Lee, a WFP spokesman in southern Africa, said that while the calorie count would be boosted by a ration of beans and vegetable oil, recipients of food aid would now have to find additional means to stay alive.
"The new ration falls below what is considered the survival ration. They will be sending their children to hunt for wild fruits or selling the possessions they haven't already sold to buy food," he said. "People will be more vulnerable, they will be more malnourished and they will be more susceptible to disease."
Oxfam is feeding 253,000 in Zimbabwe's Midlands province. One of its workers there, Caroline Gluck, said the organisation relied on food supplied by the WFP and so would be forced to halve the ration.
"Families are being stretched. They're selling livestock, they're selling household goods to buy staple foods," she said. "People told us they were having a meal a day. Sometimes adults are skipping a meal so the children can be fed. They are supplementing what they have with wild fruits.
"But now it's going to be a disaster because people have sold what they can sell. There's very little they can do to supplement their rations. I think it's going to be extremely hard for families, it's going to make them incredibly vulnerable. You look at people and they are already thin, their frames are skin and bone. When you look at the fields you see there's been no agricultural inputs. The soil is little better than sand."
The WFP is already feeding about 4.5 million Zimbabweans, with a coalition of non-governmental organisations distributing to another million. Next month, the total number of Zimbabweans reliant on food aid will rise by 1.5 million.
"We are concerned. The reason we are cutting the ration is so we do provide assistance to everybody who needs food assistance so that we can make sure they can get through these two hungriest and worst months of the year, February and March, before the harvest starts in April," said Lee.
"But on top of that we haven't received all the resources we had hoped for. The donors have been very generous. We've now received over $200m for our operations in Zimbabwe in 2008 and 2009. It's just that the scale of the crisis, the worsening crisis, means that we do require additional resources."
The food shortages are contributing to the rising number of cholera deaths. About 1,000 people have died in the past fortnight, many of them too weak for treatment because they have not had enough to eat. Nearly 58,000 people have been infected.
The food crisis has been compounded by the government's failure to meet a target of importing 800,000 tonnes of maize. It is believed to have bought only 200,000 tonnes.
The April harvest is unlikely to bring relief. Agriculturalists say it will again fail; they estimate it will provide less than a quarter of the country's needs and that drastic food shortages will continue into next year once the results of the harvest have been consumed.
US to comply with Iraq ban on Blackwater
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Blackwater_to_be_forced_out_of_0129.html
Guards will be able to keep jobs if they switch employers
"The Iraqi government has informed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that it will not issue a new operating license to Blackwater Worldwide, the embassy's primary security company, which has come under scrutiny for allegedly using excessive force while protecting American diplomats, Iraqi and U.S. officials said Wednesday," The Washington Post reported from Mosul early Thursday.
"Iraq's Interior Ministry conveyed its decision to U.S. officials in Baghdad on Friday, in one of the boldest moves the government has made since the Jan. 1 implementation of a security agreement with the United States that sharply curbed American power in Iraq," the Post added. "Blackwater employees who have not been accused of improper conduct will be allowed to continue working as private security contractors in Iraq if they switch employers, Iraqi officials said Wednesday...
"When the work of this committee ends," Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said, private security companies "will be under the authority of the Iraqi government, and those companies that don't have licenses, such as Blackwater, should leave Iraq immediately."
The US State Department said Thursday it will comply with Iraq's ban on controversial US security outfit Blackwater but still had to decide on the "next steps" to ensure security for its employees.
Iraq said Thursday it scrapped the license for Blackwater, the firm at the forefront of a booming private security business in Iraq, over a 2007 Baghdad shooting involving its guards in which 17 civilians were killed.
"We're going to comply with the Iraqi decision. We have no choice but to do that," State Department acting spokesman Robert Wood told reporters.
"So we're just right now trying to formulate how we're going to go forward," he said.
"But I just wanted to make clear that we're going to do everything, you know, to make sure that our embassy employees have the security they need," Wood added. "We're looking at next steps."
When pressed on whether the next steps would involve another contractor, Wood replied: "We're looking at a variety of possibilities. But I'm not here to outline those possibilities at this point."
Blackwater Worldwide, a multi-million dollar US State Department contractor in Iraq, is being expelled over the deaths of civilians at Nisur Square, a busy Baghdad intersection, on September 16, 2007, the Iraqi interior ministry said.
An Iraqi investigation found that 17 civilians were killed and 20 wounded when Blackwater guards opened fire with automatic weapons while escorting a US diplomatic convoy through Baghdad.
US prosecutors say 14 civilians were killed.
The firm and its wealthy founder Erik Prince maintain its guards were responding to fire and acting in self-defense, but residents adamantly rejected such claims.
Guards will be able to keep jobs if they switch employers
"The Iraqi government has informed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that it will not issue a new operating license to Blackwater Worldwide, the embassy's primary security company, which has come under scrutiny for allegedly using excessive force while protecting American diplomats, Iraqi and U.S. officials said Wednesday," The Washington Post reported from Mosul early Thursday.
"Iraq's Interior Ministry conveyed its decision to U.S. officials in Baghdad on Friday, in one of the boldest moves the government has made since the Jan. 1 implementation of a security agreement with the United States that sharply curbed American power in Iraq," the Post added. "Blackwater employees who have not been accused of improper conduct will be allowed to continue working as private security contractors in Iraq if they switch employers, Iraqi officials said Wednesday...
"When the work of this committee ends," Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said, private security companies "will be under the authority of the Iraqi government, and those companies that don't have licenses, such as Blackwater, should leave Iraq immediately."
The US State Department said Thursday it will comply with Iraq's ban on controversial US security outfit Blackwater but still had to decide on the "next steps" to ensure security for its employees.
Iraq said Thursday it scrapped the license for Blackwater, the firm at the forefront of a booming private security business in Iraq, over a 2007 Baghdad shooting involving its guards in which 17 civilians were killed.
"We're going to comply with the Iraqi decision. We have no choice but to do that," State Department acting spokesman Robert Wood told reporters.
"So we're just right now trying to formulate how we're going to go forward," he said.
"But I just wanted to make clear that we're going to do everything, you know, to make sure that our embassy employees have the security they need," Wood added. "We're looking at next steps."
When pressed on whether the next steps would involve another contractor, Wood replied: "We're looking at a variety of possibilities. But I'm not here to outline those possibilities at this point."
Blackwater Worldwide, a multi-million dollar US State Department contractor in Iraq, is being expelled over the deaths of civilians at Nisur Square, a busy Baghdad intersection, on September 16, 2007, the Iraqi interior ministry said.
An Iraqi investigation found that 17 civilians were killed and 20 wounded when Blackwater guards opened fire with automatic weapons while escorting a US diplomatic convoy through Baghdad.
US prosecutors say 14 civilians were killed.
The firm and its wealthy founder Erik Prince maintain its guards were responding to fire and acting in self-defense, but residents adamantly rejected such claims.
Exclusive: CIA Station Chief in Algeria Accused of Rapes
"Ugly American"? Spy Boss Allegedly Drugged Muslim Women, Made Secret Sex Videos
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=6750266&page=1
By BRIAN ROSS, KATE McCARTHY, and ANGELA M. HILL
January 28, 2009
The CIA's station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.
The suspect in the case is identified as Andrew Warren in an affidavit for a search warrant filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. by an investigator for the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service.
Officials say the 41-year old Warren, a convert to Islam, was ordered home by the U.S. Ambassador, David Pearce, in October after the women came forward with their rape allegations in September.
According to the affidavit, the two women "reported the allegations in this affidavit independently of each other."
The affidavit says the first victim says she was raped by Warren in Sept. 2007 after being invited to a party at Warren's residence by U.S. embassy employees.
She told a State Department investigator that after Warren prepared a mixed drink of cola and whiskey, she felt a "violent onset of nausea" and Warren said she should spend the night at his home.
When she woke up the next morning, according to the affidavit, "she was lying on a bed, completely nude, with no memory of how she had been undressed." She said she realized "she recently had engaged in sexual intercourse, though she had no memory of having intercourse."
According to the affidavit, a second alleged victim told a similar story, saying Warren met her at the U.S. embassy and invited her for a "tour of his home" where she said he prepared an apple martini for her "out of her sight."
The second victim said she suddenly felt faint and went to the bathroom where "V2 [victim 2] could see and hear, but she could not move," the affidavit says.
She told investigators Warren "was attempting to remove V2's her pants." The affidavit states, "Warren continued to undress V2, and told her she would feel better after a bath."
The alleged victim said she remembers being in Warren's bed and asking him to stop, but that "Warren made a statement to the effect of 'nobody stays in my expensive sheets with clothes on.'" She told investigators "as she slipped in and out of consciousness she had conscious images of Warren penetrating her vagina repeatedly with his penis."
The second victim told investigators she sent Warren a text message accusing him of abusing her and he replied, "I am sorry," the affidavit says.
According to the affidavit, when Warren was interviewed by Diplomatic Security investigators, he claimed he had "engaged in consensual sexual intercourse" and admitted there were photographs of the two women on his personal laptop. He would not consent to a search or seizure of the computer, leading investigators to seek the warrant.
According to the affidavit, a search of Warren's residence in Algiers turned up Valium and Xanax and a handbook on the investigation of sexual assaults.
The affidavit says toxicologists at the FBI laboratory say Xanax and Valium are among the drugs "commonly used to facilitate sexual assault."
"Drugs commonly referred to as date rape drugs are difficult to detect because the body rapidly metabolizes them," said former FBI agent Brad Garrett, an ABC News consultant. "Many times women are not aware they were even assaulted until the next day," he said.
The CIA refused to acknowledge the investigation or provide the name of the Algiers station chief, but the CIA Director of Public Affairs, Mark Mansfield, said, "I can assure you that the Agency would take seriously, and follow up on, any allegations of impropriety."
State Departmentt Acting Spokesman Robert Wood issued a statement saying, "The U.S. takes very seriously any accusations of misconduct involving any U.S. personnel abroad. The individual is question has returned to Washington and the U.S. Government is looking into the matter."
U.S. officials were bracing for public reaction in the Muslim world, following the report of the allegation.
"It has the potential to be quite explosive if it's not handled well by the United States government," said Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in women's issues in the Middle East.
"This isn't the type of thing that's going to be easily pushed under the carpet," she said.
Both women have reportedly since given sworn statements to federal prosecutors sent from Washington to prepare a possible criminal case against the CIA officer.
Following the initial complaints, U.S. officials say they did obtain a warrant from a federal judge in Washington, D.C. in October to search the station chief's CIA-provided residence in Algiers and turned up the videos that appear to have been secretly recorded and show, they say, Warren engaged in sexual acts.
Officials say one of the alleged victims is seen on tape, in a "semi-conscious state."
The time-stamped date on other tapes led prosecutors to broaden the investigation to Egypt because the date matched a time when Warren was in Cairo, officials said.
As the station chief in Algiers, Warren played an important role in working with the Algerian intelligence services to combat an active al Qaeda wing responsible for a wave of bombings in Algeria.
In the most serious incident, 48 people were killed in a bombing in Aug. 2008 in Algiers, blamed on the al Qaeda group.
The Algerian ambassador to the United Nations, Mourad Benmehid, said his government had not been notified by the U.S. of the rape allegations or the criminal investigation.
Repeated messages left for the Warren with his parents and his sister were not returned.
No charges have been filed, but officials said a grand jury was likely to consider an indictment on sexual assault charges as early as next month.
"This will be seen as the typical ugly American," said former CIA officer Bob Baer, reacting to the ABC News report. "My question is how the CIA would not have picked up on this in their own regular reviews of CIA officers overseas," Baer said.
"From a national security standpoint," said Baer, the alleged rapes would be "not only wrong but could open him up to potential blackmail and that's something the CIA should have picked up on," said Baer. "This is indicative of personnel problems of all sorts that run through the agency," he said.
"Rape is ugly in any context," said Coleman, who praised the bravery of the alleged Algerian victims in going to authorities. "Rape is viewed as very shameful to women, and I think this is an opportunity for the U.S. to show how seriously it takes the issue of rape," she said.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=6750266&page=1
By BRIAN ROSS, KATE McCARTHY, and ANGELA M. HILL
January 28, 2009
The CIA's station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.
The suspect in the case is identified as Andrew Warren in an affidavit for a search warrant filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. by an investigator for the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service.
Officials say the 41-year old Warren, a convert to Islam, was ordered home by the U.S. Ambassador, David Pearce, in October after the women came forward with their rape allegations in September.
According to the affidavit, the two women "reported the allegations in this affidavit independently of each other."
The affidavit says the first victim says she was raped by Warren in Sept. 2007 after being invited to a party at Warren's residence by U.S. embassy employees.
She told a State Department investigator that after Warren prepared a mixed drink of cola and whiskey, she felt a "violent onset of nausea" and Warren said she should spend the night at his home.
When she woke up the next morning, according to the affidavit, "she was lying on a bed, completely nude, with no memory of how she had been undressed." She said she realized "she recently had engaged in sexual intercourse, though she had no memory of having intercourse."
According to the affidavit, a second alleged victim told a similar story, saying Warren met her at the U.S. embassy and invited her for a "tour of his home" where she said he prepared an apple martini for her "out of her sight."
The second victim said she suddenly felt faint and went to the bathroom where "V2 [victim 2] could see and hear, but she could not move," the affidavit says.
She told investigators Warren "was attempting to remove V2's her pants." The affidavit states, "Warren continued to undress V2, and told her she would feel better after a bath."
The alleged victim said she remembers being in Warren's bed and asking him to stop, but that "Warren made a statement to the effect of 'nobody stays in my expensive sheets with clothes on.'" She told investigators "as she slipped in and out of consciousness she had conscious images of Warren penetrating her vagina repeatedly with his penis."
The second victim told investigators she sent Warren a text message accusing him of abusing her and he replied, "I am sorry," the affidavit says.
According to the affidavit, when Warren was interviewed by Diplomatic Security investigators, he claimed he had "engaged in consensual sexual intercourse" and admitted there were photographs of the two women on his personal laptop. He would not consent to a search or seizure of the computer, leading investigators to seek the warrant.
According to the affidavit, a search of Warren's residence in Algiers turned up Valium and Xanax and a handbook on the investigation of sexual assaults.
The affidavit says toxicologists at the FBI laboratory say Xanax and Valium are among the drugs "commonly used to facilitate sexual assault."
"Drugs commonly referred to as date rape drugs are difficult to detect because the body rapidly metabolizes them," said former FBI agent Brad Garrett, an ABC News consultant. "Many times women are not aware they were even assaulted until the next day," he said.
The CIA refused to acknowledge the investigation or provide the name of the Algiers station chief, but the CIA Director of Public Affairs, Mark Mansfield, said, "I can assure you that the Agency would take seriously, and follow up on, any allegations of impropriety."
State Departmentt Acting Spokesman Robert Wood issued a statement saying, "The U.S. takes very seriously any accusations of misconduct involving any U.S. personnel abroad. The individual is question has returned to Washington and the U.S. Government is looking into the matter."
U.S. officials were bracing for public reaction in the Muslim world, following the report of the allegation.
"It has the potential to be quite explosive if it's not handled well by the United States government," said Isobel Coleman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in women's issues in the Middle East.
"This isn't the type of thing that's going to be easily pushed under the carpet," she said.
Both women have reportedly since given sworn statements to federal prosecutors sent from Washington to prepare a possible criminal case against the CIA officer.
Following the initial complaints, U.S. officials say they did obtain a warrant from a federal judge in Washington, D.C. in October to search the station chief's CIA-provided residence in Algiers and turned up the videos that appear to have been secretly recorded and show, they say, Warren engaged in sexual acts.
Officials say one of the alleged victims is seen on tape, in a "semi-conscious state."
The time-stamped date on other tapes led prosecutors to broaden the investigation to Egypt because the date matched a time when Warren was in Cairo, officials said.
As the station chief in Algiers, Warren played an important role in working with the Algerian intelligence services to combat an active al Qaeda wing responsible for a wave of bombings in Algeria.
In the most serious incident, 48 people were killed in a bombing in Aug. 2008 in Algiers, blamed on the al Qaeda group.
The Algerian ambassador to the United Nations, Mourad Benmehid, said his government had not been notified by the U.S. of the rape allegations or the criminal investigation.
Repeated messages left for the Warren with his parents and his sister were not returned.
No charges have been filed, but officials said a grand jury was likely to consider an indictment on sexual assault charges as early as next month.
"This will be seen as the typical ugly American," said former CIA officer Bob Baer, reacting to the ABC News report. "My question is how the CIA would not have picked up on this in their own regular reviews of CIA officers overseas," Baer said.
"From a national security standpoint," said Baer, the alleged rapes would be "not only wrong but could open him up to potential blackmail and that's something the CIA should have picked up on," said Baer. "This is indicative of personnel problems of all sorts that run through the agency," he said.
"Rape is ugly in any context," said Coleman, who praised the bravery of the alleged Algerian victims in going to authorities. "Rape is viewed as very shameful to women, and I think this is an opportunity for the U.S. to show how seriously it takes the issue of rape," she said.
Blackwater to be forced out of Iraq
Guards will be able to keep jobs if they switch employers
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Black...ut_of_0129.html
1/29/2009
"The Iraqi government has informed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that it will not issue a new operating license to Blackwater Worldwide, the embassy's primary security company, which has come under scrutiny for allegedly using excessive force while protecting American diplomats, Iraqi and U.S. officials said Wednesday," The Washington Post reported from Mosul early Thursday.
"Iraq's Interior Ministry conveyed its decision to U.S. officials in Baghdad on Friday, in one of the boldest moves the government has made since the Jan. 1 implementation of a security agreement with the United States that sharply curbed American power in Iraq," the Post added. "Blackwater employees who have not been accused of improper conduct will be allowed to continue working as private security contractors in Iraq if they switch employers, Iraqi officials said Wednesday...
"When the work of this committee ends," Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said, private security companies "will be under the authority of the Iraqi government, and those companies that don't have licenses, such as Blackwater, should leave Iraq immediately."
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Black...ut_of_0129.html
1/29/2009
"The Iraqi government has informed the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad that it will not issue a new operating license to Blackwater Worldwide, the embassy's primary security company, which has come under scrutiny for allegedly using excessive force while protecting American diplomats, Iraqi and U.S. officials said Wednesday," The Washington Post reported from Mosul early Thursday.
"Iraq's Interior Ministry conveyed its decision to U.S. officials in Baghdad on Friday, in one of the boldest moves the government has made since the Jan. 1 implementation of a security agreement with the United States that sharply curbed American power in Iraq," the Post added. "Blackwater employees who have not been accused of improper conduct will be allowed to continue working as private security contractors in Iraq if they switch employers, Iraqi officials said Wednesday...
"When the work of this committee ends," Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said, private security companies "will be under the authority of the Iraqi government, and those companies that don't have licenses, such as Blackwater, should leave Iraq immediately."
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Watergate and the Future: News for 2009
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Water..._2009_1222.html
Russ Baker
Published: Monday December 22, 2008
In this guest column, award-winning investigative reporter Russ Baker gives some background on his new book which, in part, explores former President George H.W. Bush's CIA ties and his little known connections to the Watergate scandal.
One of the fastest ways to raise eyebrows in politically savvy company is to suggest that Richard Nixon was not the villain of Watergate. Everyone knows that Nixon himself set loose the Watergate burglars and then oversaw the attempted cover-up that followed. We know this because the most famous journalists of the last fifty years – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – made their careers on that story. I thought I knew it too.
Then I began the research that led to my new book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. I had no intention, when I started, of re-opening the Watergate inquiries. But the trail led there, as I sought to answer a question that somehow has escaped careful attention. Why did Richard Nixon repeatedly promote George H.W. Bush (Bush Sr., or Poppy, as he is known) for important political posts despite both his apparent lack of qualifications and Nixon's own privately-expressed doubts about Bush's mettle? Why, even when Nixon became so wary of so many of his appointees that he fired cabinet members en masse, did he continue to be solicitous of Bush Sr.?
Nixon named the obscure Poppy to be UN ambassador in 1970 and then chairman of the national Republican Party in 1972. Even earlier, in 1968, Nixon actually put Bush Sr. on his list of vice presidential running mate prospects – this not long after Poppy was first elected to the House of Representatives. Similarly, Nixon's replacement, Gerald Ford, sent Poppy off as envoy to China and later made him CIA director, though by most accounts he was an odd choice for both of these sensitive jobs.
In short, in the Nixon era, Poppy Bush was the man who always seemed to be around, yet also managed to stay out of the main story. Digging way back, I came upon evidence that Nixon felt beholden to the Bush family and to the interests it represented. The reason: Bush Sr.'s father, Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, apparently helped launch Nixon's political career in 1946 as a way of destroying his first opponent, liberal congressman Jerry Voorhis, an outspoken critic of the excesses of bankers and financiers. Given the current Wall Street disasters, and the role of Prescott's grandson in enabling them, this revelation has obvious contemporary relevance.
Once I understood this special Nixon-Bush relationship, which is basically missing from all major Nixon biographies, I began to ask what exactly Poppy had been doing during the Watergate years. This led to the discovery that the Watergate break-in was almost certainly just one of a series of illegal acts that were engineered by people around Nixon, but not by Nixon himself. Far from defending Nixon's interests, these people had been privately frustrated with him on a variety of fronts and were now looking to take him down.
Simply put, once Nixon attained the presidency, he struggled for his independence, and began doing things that displeased his former sponsors.
I explored in particular a little-known matter called the Townhouse Affair. It turns out to be an important precursor to Watergate. Townhouse and Watergate both had earmarks of involvement by CIA figures.
And I looked at something that has barely emerged in public, but which was discussed by Nixon and his advisers: his ongoing struggle with the CIA. Combined with other evidence I developed of Poppy Bush's longstanding involvement with the CIA (back to the 1950s), it becomes apparent that there was more to Watergate than Richard Nixon's paranoia. There is not space here for all the particulars I lay out in Family of Secrets. But a few highlights:
* Townhouse appears in retrospect to be an elaborate effort to frame Nixon for financial wrongdoing, by orchestrating a ridiculously shady-looking fundraising operation (and purported political blackmail scheme) headquartered in a basement office in a D.C. townhouse. The people who conjured up and ran Townhouse were tied to Poppy Bush.
* Wealthy independent oilmen who backed Bush felt anger and distrust toward Nixon, who proved to be less than entirely reliable on their key issues, such as a tax giveaway called the Oil Depletion Allowance.
* Many figures in Nixon's White House had CIA ties, and appear to have been keeping an eye on him, even as they worked for him. (The role of the security services raises suggestive questions as a new president prepares to take office – namely, how free is any president to pursue the agenda he promised the voters? The ghosts of the Bushes and what they represent will hang over a new President Obama in ways we have never imagined.)
* Poppy Bush had extensive secret ties to the intelligence apparatus before he became CIA director in 1976. This connection has not previously been reported, and it provides an answer to a question that puzzled observers at the time – namely, what had Poppy Bush ever done to prepare him to lead the nation's premier spy agency?
* After being named Republican national chairman, Poppy Bush used that position to monitor and help shape the unfolding Watergate affair.
* John Dean was much more than a whistleblower. It appears that he was aware of or even a key figure in the White House covert activities that brought Nixon down, yet encouraged Nixon to take the blame for them.
* There is evidence suggesting a connection between Poppy Bush and Dean. Records show that Bush actually called the then-obscure Dean from his UN office in New York during the earliest days of these events. Why would the UN ambassador be speaking to a White House counsel?
* The rookie reporter Bob Woodward began working at the Washington Post, and on Watergate in particular, with job recommendations from high officials in the White House who knew him from his days in Naval intelligence work.
* A handful of famous Watergate tape excerpts were misconstrued – or in some cases, misleadingly edited – by some in academic, media, legislative and judicial arenas to convey a false impression of what Richard Nixon actually knew – and of how culpable he was.
* Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, a key figure in the ousting of Nixon, was a close Texas friend of Poppy Bush – and steered clear of evidence that pointed to Poppy's involvement.
* Even the notion of "Deep Throat," purportedly Woodward's main source (identified as the recently-deceased FBI man W. Mark Felt), may have been part of a CIA-style "psyops" scheme to create the impression of Nixon's culpability. Some key figures claim that there was in fact no "Deep Throat" at all.
* Nixon suspected the CIA of surrounding him and then setting him up. From his own days supervising covert operations as vice president, he recognized that the Watergate burglars and their bosses were seasoned CIA hardliners with ties to the Bay of Pigs invasion and events linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nixon battled the CIA for files on what he called the "Bay of Pigs thing," but never could get access to them.
In sum, I found that the very people who created Nixon and used him to advance their own political interests ended up destroying him. Nixon's famous paranoia, in other words, had a basis in reality.
All of this, and much more, arose directly from my research, which is carefully documented in Family of Secrets and in more than 1000 source notes.
Copyright © 2008 Russ Baker
####
Russ Baker is the author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America (Published by Bloomsbury Press; 978-1596915572). For more information on his book and the research behind it, please visit www.familyofsecrets.com. As an award-winning investigative reporter, Baker has a track record for making sense of complex and little understood matters. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. He has also served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005 Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush's military record. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization, operating at whowhatwhy.com.
__________________
Russ Baker
Published: Monday December 22, 2008
In this guest column, award-winning investigative reporter Russ Baker gives some background on his new book which, in part, explores former President George H.W. Bush's CIA ties and his little known connections to the Watergate scandal.
One of the fastest ways to raise eyebrows in politically savvy company is to suggest that Richard Nixon was not the villain of Watergate. Everyone knows that Nixon himself set loose the Watergate burglars and then oversaw the attempted cover-up that followed. We know this because the most famous journalists of the last fifty years – Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – made their careers on that story. I thought I knew it too.
Then I began the research that led to my new book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America. I had no intention, when I started, of re-opening the Watergate inquiries. But the trail led there, as I sought to answer a question that somehow has escaped careful attention. Why did Richard Nixon repeatedly promote George H.W. Bush (Bush Sr., or Poppy, as he is known) for important political posts despite both his apparent lack of qualifications and Nixon's own privately-expressed doubts about Bush's mettle? Why, even when Nixon became so wary of so many of his appointees that he fired cabinet members en masse, did he continue to be solicitous of Bush Sr.?
Nixon named the obscure Poppy to be UN ambassador in 1970 and then chairman of the national Republican Party in 1972. Even earlier, in 1968, Nixon actually put Bush Sr. on his list of vice presidential running mate prospects – this not long after Poppy was first elected to the House of Representatives. Similarly, Nixon's replacement, Gerald Ford, sent Poppy off as envoy to China and later made him CIA director, though by most accounts he was an odd choice for both of these sensitive jobs.
In short, in the Nixon era, Poppy Bush was the man who always seemed to be around, yet also managed to stay out of the main story. Digging way back, I came upon evidence that Nixon felt beholden to the Bush family and to the interests it represented. The reason: Bush Sr.'s father, Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, apparently helped launch Nixon's political career in 1946 as a way of destroying his first opponent, liberal congressman Jerry Voorhis, an outspoken critic of the excesses of bankers and financiers. Given the current Wall Street disasters, and the role of Prescott's grandson in enabling them, this revelation has obvious contemporary relevance.
Once I understood this special Nixon-Bush relationship, which is basically missing from all major Nixon biographies, I began to ask what exactly Poppy had been doing during the Watergate years. This led to the discovery that the Watergate break-in was almost certainly just one of a series of illegal acts that were engineered by people around Nixon, but not by Nixon himself. Far from defending Nixon's interests, these people had been privately frustrated with him on a variety of fronts and were now looking to take him down.
Simply put, once Nixon attained the presidency, he struggled for his independence, and began doing things that displeased his former sponsors.
I explored in particular a little-known matter called the Townhouse Affair. It turns out to be an important precursor to Watergate. Townhouse and Watergate both had earmarks of involvement by CIA figures.
And I looked at something that has barely emerged in public, but which was discussed by Nixon and his advisers: his ongoing struggle with the CIA. Combined with other evidence I developed of Poppy Bush's longstanding involvement with the CIA (back to the 1950s), it becomes apparent that there was more to Watergate than Richard Nixon's paranoia. There is not space here for all the particulars I lay out in Family of Secrets. But a few highlights:
* Townhouse appears in retrospect to be an elaborate effort to frame Nixon for financial wrongdoing, by orchestrating a ridiculously shady-looking fundraising operation (and purported political blackmail scheme) headquartered in a basement office in a D.C. townhouse. The people who conjured up and ran Townhouse were tied to Poppy Bush.
* Wealthy independent oilmen who backed Bush felt anger and distrust toward Nixon, who proved to be less than entirely reliable on their key issues, such as a tax giveaway called the Oil Depletion Allowance.
* Many figures in Nixon's White House had CIA ties, and appear to have been keeping an eye on him, even as they worked for him. (The role of the security services raises suggestive questions as a new president prepares to take office – namely, how free is any president to pursue the agenda he promised the voters? The ghosts of the Bushes and what they represent will hang over a new President Obama in ways we have never imagined.)
* Poppy Bush had extensive secret ties to the intelligence apparatus before he became CIA director in 1976. This connection has not previously been reported, and it provides an answer to a question that puzzled observers at the time – namely, what had Poppy Bush ever done to prepare him to lead the nation's premier spy agency?
* After being named Republican national chairman, Poppy Bush used that position to monitor and help shape the unfolding Watergate affair.
* John Dean was much more than a whistleblower. It appears that he was aware of or even a key figure in the White House covert activities that brought Nixon down, yet encouraged Nixon to take the blame for them.
* There is evidence suggesting a connection between Poppy Bush and Dean. Records show that Bush actually called the then-obscure Dean from his UN office in New York during the earliest days of these events. Why would the UN ambassador be speaking to a White House counsel?
* The rookie reporter Bob Woodward began working at the Washington Post, and on Watergate in particular, with job recommendations from high officials in the White House who knew him from his days in Naval intelligence work.
* A handful of famous Watergate tape excerpts were misconstrued – or in some cases, misleadingly edited – by some in academic, media, legislative and judicial arenas to convey a false impression of what Richard Nixon actually knew – and of how culpable he was.
* Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, a key figure in the ousting of Nixon, was a close Texas friend of Poppy Bush – and steered clear of evidence that pointed to Poppy's involvement.
* Even the notion of "Deep Throat," purportedly Woodward's main source (identified as the recently-deceased FBI man W. Mark Felt), may have been part of a CIA-style "psyops" scheme to create the impression of Nixon's culpability. Some key figures claim that there was in fact no "Deep Throat" at all.
* Nixon suspected the CIA of surrounding him and then setting him up. From his own days supervising covert operations as vice president, he recognized that the Watergate burglars and their bosses were seasoned CIA hardliners with ties to the Bay of Pigs invasion and events linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nixon battled the CIA for files on what he called the "Bay of Pigs thing," but never could get access to them.
In sum, I found that the very people who created Nixon and used him to advance their own political interests ended up destroying him. Nixon's famous paranoia, in other words, had a basis in reality.
All of this, and much more, arose directly from my research, which is carefully documented in Family of Secrets and in more than 1000 source notes.
Copyright © 2008 Russ Baker
####
Russ Baker is the author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America (Published by Bloomsbury Press; 978-1596915572). For more information on his book and the research behind it, please visit www.familyofsecrets.com. As an award-winning investigative reporter, Baker has a track record for making sense of complex and little understood matters. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. He has also served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005 Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush's military record. He is the founder of WhoWhatWhy/the Real News Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organization, operating at whowhatwhy.com.
__________________
Miss. mayor indicted on Katrina fraud charges
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090128/ap_on_re_us/katrina_fraud_mayor;_ylt=Aio8uPH1ektfOuruz_nFx6ZvzwcF
JACKSON, Miss. – The mayor of a Mississippi city devastated by Hurricane Katrina pleaded not guilty Wednesday to charges he lied to get disaster assistance to repair his damaged beachfront home.
Gulfport Mayor Brent Warr is the highest-ranking public official so far to be charged with fraud related to the storm that slammed the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005.
He and his wife, Laura, pleaded not guilty in federal court to charges in a 16-count indictment that was issued Jan. 22 but not made public until Wednesday.
Brent Warr said in a statement the charges have nothing to do with his role as mayor and he will continue to run the coastal city of about 73,000 people 80 miles east of New Orleans.
The two are accused of seeking a homeowners assistance grant for a storm-damaged beachfront home they owned but did not live in. The government is seeking forfeiture of $222,798. Warr, 45, and his wife, 43, also are accused of making false claims to their insurance company.
"This inquiry has been going on for more than a year now, and we hope and pray for a much faster resolution," Warr said in his statement. "We have entered a plea of not guilty. Out of respect for the justice system and the government, I will not speak further about the claim made against us."
U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton declined comment and Warr's attorney did not immediately respond to a call from The Associated Press.
Warr, a first-term Republican mayor and wealthy businessman, had been praised for his leadership after the storm. He was mentioned in 2007 as a possible candidate for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican Trent Lott, but said at the time he had too much work to do helping Gulfport recover from Katrina.
Mississippi Rep. Steven Palazzo, R-Biloxi, said he prays Warr will be cleared of the charges.
"He wouldn't do anything intentionally to hurt the Gulf Coast," said Palazzo, who has known the Warr family for decades.
Gulfport is home to the State Port of Gulfport, which was heavily damaged by the killer storm. The area is best known for its manmade beaches and glitzy casinos.
JACKSON, Miss. – The mayor of a Mississippi city devastated by Hurricane Katrina pleaded not guilty Wednesday to charges he lied to get disaster assistance to repair his damaged beachfront home.
Gulfport Mayor Brent Warr is the highest-ranking public official so far to be charged with fraud related to the storm that slammed the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005.
He and his wife, Laura, pleaded not guilty in federal court to charges in a 16-count indictment that was issued Jan. 22 but not made public until Wednesday.
Brent Warr said in a statement the charges have nothing to do with his role as mayor and he will continue to run the coastal city of about 73,000 people 80 miles east of New Orleans.
The two are accused of seeking a homeowners assistance grant for a storm-damaged beachfront home they owned but did not live in. The government is seeking forfeiture of $222,798. Warr, 45, and his wife, 43, also are accused of making false claims to their insurance company.
"This inquiry has been going on for more than a year now, and we hope and pray for a much faster resolution," Warr said in his statement. "We have entered a plea of not guilty. Out of respect for the justice system and the government, I will not speak further about the claim made against us."
U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton declined comment and Warr's attorney did not immediately respond to a call from The Associated Press.
Warr, a first-term Republican mayor and wealthy businessman, had been praised for his leadership after the storm. He was mentioned in 2007 as a possible candidate for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican Trent Lott, but said at the time he had too much work to do helping Gulfport recover from Katrina.
Mississippi Rep. Steven Palazzo, R-Biloxi, said he prays Warr will be cleared of the charges.
"He wouldn't do anything intentionally to hurt the Gulf Coast," said Palazzo, who has known the Warr family for decades.
Gulfport is home to the State Port of Gulfport, which was heavily damaged by the killer storm. The area is best known for its manmade beaches and glitzy casinos.
IMF: UK economy will be hardest hit in worst recession since second world war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/28/ilo-global-unemployment-to-soar
Britain's economy will be the hardest hit in the developed world in what is expected to be the "deepest recession since the second world war," the International Monetary Fund said today.
The IMF now expects the UK economy to shrink by 2.8% this year, compared with the 1.3% it was forecasting in November. This is worse than the 2% average drop in output the organisation has estimated for advanced nations.
Global growth is expected to fall to 0.5% this year as the "scale and scope of the current financial crisis have taken the global economy into uncharted waters".
Official figures last week confirmed that Britain fell into recession at the end of 2008. The UK economy slumped by 1.5% in the final three months of the year – worse than expected and sparking fears of a deep and prolonged recession. Over 2008 as a whole, the British economy shrank by 0.7%.
Also today, a United Nations agency warned that more than 50 million jobs could disappear around the world this year. As the global economy battles its worst downturn since the Great Depression, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said its worst case scenario would see 51 million more jobs lost by the end of this year, taking the global unemployment rate to 7.1% from 6% last year.
More realistically, the organisation estimates that 30 million people could lose their jobs if financial turmoil continues through 2009, pushing the unemployment rate to 6.5%. Under its most optimistic scenario, this year would end with 18 million more people out of their jobs and a jobless rate of 6.1%.
"If the recession deepens in 2009, as many forecasters expect, the global jobs crisis will worsen sharply," the ILO said. "We can expect that for many of those who manage to keep a job, earnings and other conditions of employment will deteriorate."
Developing countries will suffer most, according to the organisation, whose governing structure includes governments, employers and workers' groups.
"Sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia stand out as regions with extremely harsh labour market conditions and with the highest shares of working poor of all regions," the report said.
The ILO estimates that North Africa and the Middle East had the highest unemployment rates at the end of 2008, at 10.3% and 9.4% respectively.
Central and south-eastern Europe and the former Soviet states ended last year with a jobless rate of 8.8%. In sub-Saharan Africa it was 7.9% and Latin America's rate was 7.3%. East Asia fared best of the world's regions at 3.8%.
Most job creation in 2008 came from south Asia, south-east Asia and east Asia, while developed economies and the European Union had a net loss of about 900,000 jobs
Britain's economy will be the hardest hit in the developed world in what is expected to be the "deepest recession since the second world war," the International Monetary Fund said today.
The IMF now expects the UK economy to shrink by 2.8% this year, compared with the 1.3% it was forecasting in November. This is worse than the 2% average drop in output the organisation has estimated for advanced nations.
Global growth is expected to fall to 0.5% this year as the "scale and scope of the current financial crisis have taken the global economy into uncharted waters".
Official figures last week confirmed that Britain fell into recession at the end of 2008. The UK economy slumped by 1.5% in the final three months of the year – worse than expected and sparking fears of a deep and prolonged recession. Over 2008 as a whole, the British economy shrank by 0.7%.
Also today, a United Nations agency warned that more than 50 million jobs could disappear around the world this year. As the global economy battles its worst downturn since the Great Depression, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said its worst case scenario would see 51 million more jobs lost by the end of this year, taking the global unemployment rate to 7.1% from 6% last year.
More realistically, the organisation estimates that 30 million people could lose their jobs if financial turmoil continues through 2009, pushing the unemployment rate to 6.5%. Under its most optimistic scenario, this year would end with 18 million more people out of their jobs and a jobless rate of 6.1%.
"If the recession deepens in 2009, as many forecasters expect, the global jobs crisis will worsen sharply," the ILO said. "We can expect that for many of those who manage to keep a job, earnings and other conditions of employment will deteriorate."
Developing countries will suffer most, according to the organisation, whose governing structure includes governments, employers and workers' groups.
"Sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia stand out as regions with extremely harsh labour market conditions and with the highest shares of working poor of all regions," the report said.
The ILO estimates that North Africa and the Middle East had the highest unemployment rates at the end of 2008, at 10.3% and 9.4% respectively.
Central and south-eastern Europe and the former Soviet states ended last year with a jobless rate of 8.8%. In sub-Saharan Africa it was 7.9% and Latin America's rate was 7.3%. East Asia fared best of the world's regions at 3.8%.
Most job creation in 2008 came from south Asia, south-east Asia and east Asia, while developed economies and the European Union had a net loss of about 900,000 jobs
Recruiting stand-down ordered Probe of Houston suicides prompts wide-ranging action
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2009/...uicides_012709/
By Michelle Tan - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Jan 27, 2009 10:17:04 EST
Army Secretary Pete Geren has ordered a stand-down of the Army’s entire recruiting force and a review of almost every aspect of the job is underway in the wake of a wide-ranging investigation of four suicides in the Houston Recruiting Battalion.
Poor command climate, failing personal relationships and long, stressful work days were factors in the suicides, the investigation found. The investigating officer noted a “threatening” environment in the battalion and that leaders may have tried to influence statements from witnesses.
“There were some things found that are disturbing,” said Brig. Gen. Del Turner, deputy commanding general for Accessions Command and the officer who conducted the investigation.
While he declined to discuss what action might be taken, Turner has recommended disciplinary action against battalion- and brigade-level commanders. He declined to discuss what action might be taken.
The report was not made public, with officials citing extensive personal information contained in the report.
The four recruiters who killed themselves were all combat veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan. The Army did not identify them.
The Army Inspector General’s office has been asked to conduct a command-wide assessment of Recruiting Command to determine if conditions uncovered in Houston exist elsewhere.
The one-day stand-down of all 7,000 active Army and 1,400 Army Reserve recruiters will be Feb. 13.
The soldiers will receive training on leadership, a review of the expectations of Recruiting Command’s leaders, suicide prevention and resiliency training, coping skills and recruiter wellness, Turner said.
“It’s significant,” Turner said about the stand-down. “It is not routinely scheduled. It normally occurs after some sort of major event like this.”
Turner was appointed to conduct the investigation on Oct. 14 by Lt. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, commanding general of Accessions Command. The investigation was sought by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who heard from soldiers and family members after the Houston Chronicle in 2008 reported the suicides.
“I think that when you have something like this happen that’s this serious and has such a huge impact on families and loved ones, of course people will ask what’s going on,” Freakley said.
Recruiters and soldiers who are going to be recruiters, their families and the public are going to want to know what’s happening and what’s being done, he said.
“We’re very aware of our soldiers’ concerns and we want to make it better,” Freakley said.
USAREC is a strong command with good leaders and exceptional soldiers, Freakley said.
“I do not believe for a minute that this is endemic of the entire command whatsoever, but I do believe that one [suicide] is too many, and we had four,” he said. “So let’s fix this and move forward and grow from this in a positive way. It’s hard work, but the whole Army has hard work right now.”
Turner’s investigation was completed Dec. 23, and Turner said his work revolved around the four suicides that occurred between January 2005 and September. Findings from the investigation were released Jan. 21.
“It’s a very tough and very tragic thing,” he said. “But I’m focused on what good can come out of this and that’s where our focus is right now.”
There were 17 suicides within Recruiting Command between fiscal years 2001 and 2008, said Col. Michael Negard, a Training and Doctrine Command spokesman.
There were more than 500 suicides by active-duty soldiers across the Army from Jan. 1, 2003, through Aug. 31, according to data from the Army G-1. Another 31 cases were pending final determination, as of Aug. 31.
The Army’s suicide rate increased from 12.4 for every 100,000 soldiers in 2003 to 18.1 in 2007, an all-time high for the service. Nationwide, the suicide rate for every 100,000 people was 19.5 in 2005, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gen. Pete Chiarelli, vice chief of staff of the Army, voiced his concern in a Jan. 23 interview with Army Times.
“We need to move out as quickly as we can to do those things that are going to lower the numbers,” Chiarelli said. “That’s the best we can do. We can’t eliminate suicide.”
“I believe there are certain things leaders can do in the short run to reverse the trend and I’m going to talk about those next week,” Chiarelli said.
Turner said he examined the four soldiers’ personal lives, from their financial and medical histories to their performance at work. He also studied organizational factors such as command climate, leadership within the battalion, brigade and Recruiting Command. He looked at screening soldiers for recruiting duty, the impact of assigning soldiers directly to that duty after they return from combat tours, the adequacy of the Army’s suicide prevention training, and soldiers’ access to mental health care.
Here is what Turner said he found:
• There was poor command climate in the recruiting battalion, one of 38 in the Army.
Morale was low among the unit’s 200-plus recruiters, who routinely worked 12- to 14-hour days. They had unpredictable work schedules, frequently working on weekends. There was a “threatening type of environment” established by certain leaders throughout the battalion’s chain of command.
Monthly missions assigned by USAREC were bumped up, violating Army regulations and adding stress. For example, in July 2008, the battalion’s 205 recruiters each had to recruit two new soldiers a month, even though the battalion’s mission was 360 contracts, which is roughly the equivalent of 1.5 or 1.6 new contracts each.
“I don’t think it was malicious necessarily,” Turner said, “but what that does is it artificially ups their work load.”
• All four soldiers who killed themselves suffered from “troubled” or “failing” personal relationships.
Turner said he did not find any common thread of significant financial stress among the four men and none had been diagnosed with PTSD.
At least seven months had passed between the time each man returned from combat to the U.S. and when they were assigned to USAREC.
• Regarding witness statements, Turner noted “inappropriate comments by leaders before investigations were done and before mine started.” He added: “It may have been construed by recruiters as attempts to influence their statements.”
Recruiters who felt their commanders may have been trying to influence their statements were given the opportunity to change their statements during Turner’s investigation.
• There were no inherent problems with assigning soldiers to recruiting duty after they returned from combat, but the assignment process must be improved.
Soldiers now can get approval from the first lieutenant colonel in their chain of command to waive the 90-day stabilization period required of them after returning from a deployment. Sometimes, problems stemming from a soldier’s experience in the war zone may not present themselves immediately, so the Army G-1 is reworking the waiver policy so that soldiers must now get approval from a general officer.
• Almost 50 percent of prospective recruiters were not fully vetted by their chain of command, as required by USAREC.
Soldiers who are nominated for recruiting duty must complete financial disclosure forms and statements declaring that they understand that recruiting is sensitive duty, they may be assigned to remote locations and they must be able to work independently.
They also must complete a mental health evaluation and be interviewed by their current battalion commander, command sergeant major and company commander, who must determine whether the soldier would be a successful recruiter. Input from this command team must include comments on the prospective recruiter’s leadership ability and potential, physical fitness, character, integrity, ability to perform in stressful situations and any incidents of abuse. All negative evaluations must include a full explanation.
Turner said he found that almost half the soldiers who went on to be recruiters did not have a complete nomination packet, and that soldiers were not taking a standardized mental health evaluation.
To correct that, HRC on Jan. 13 sent a message reinforcing the need for a complete nomination packet and instituted a policy that prohibits soldiers from being assigned to recruiting battalions until their completed packet has been reviewed, Turner said.
Also, the Army surgeon general, G-1 and USAREC are creating a mental health evaluation form specific to recruiters, Turner said, and officials are working on a catalog to track the adequacy of medical and mental health care and the access soldiers have, regardless of where they are stationed, to that care.
Turner said “the Army is moving in a very quick way in taking concrete action” and to “improve the climate and leadership inside that battalion and other organizational, institutional factors that will improve recruiting operations.”
Freakley said the Army is listening to Turner’s advice and taking immediate and long-term steps to correct any problems.
“I want to ensure we have a climate where our recruiters know how important they are, are well led in a positive command climate, are well supported by the systems that we put in place to help them in their very important mission of recruiting an all-volunteer force … and that we learn and really grow from this experience,” he said.
Recruiting is a very stressful job, said Bret Moore, a former captain and clinical psychologist who served twice in Iraq.
“I know that recruiting duty is one of the most stressful jobs, alongside drill sergeants,” he said. “They have quotas to meet and there’s a lot of pressure.”
Turner, who briefed the four soldiers’ families and Cornyn before releasing the findings of his investigation, said “all these [deaths] are tragic, but the one thing the Army does extremely well is learn from itself,” he said.
Maj. Gen. Thomas Bostick, commanding general of USAREC, will send a team to Houston this summer to conduct a follow-on assessment of the command, Turner said.
There also is a move to balance suicide prevention training with resiliency training and coping skills, he said.
“[Instead] of trying to recognize that [a soldier] is exhibiting risk factors, this is more toward helping [a soldier] cope with the stresses in his life,” he said.
Bostick is calling for a review of the current USAREC policies on duty hours for each of the five recruiting brigades and their 38 battalions.
For example, the Houston battalion’s policy called for a maximum work day of 13 hours, and recruiters had to seek approval from their chain of command if they worked beyond that, Turner said. However, the 13-hour maximum was interpreted as the expected norm, and the policy could have been written more clearly, Turner said.
Bostick also is directing a review of how missions are assigned to recruiters, so what happened in Houston, where commanders were assigning a higher mission to recruiters, would not be repeated, Turner said.
What is critical in all of this is leadership, Turner said.
“It requires compassionate leaders caring for their soldiers, hitting that sweet spot between accomplishing the mission and caring for soldiers.”
By Michelle Tan - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Jan 27, 2009 10:17:04 EST
Army Secretary Pete Geren has ordered a stand-down of the Army’s entire recruiting force and a review of almost every aspect of the job is underway in the wake of a wide-ranging investigation of four suicides in the Houston Recruiting Battalion.
Poor command climate, failing personal relationships and long, stressful work days were factors in the suicides, the investigation found. The investigating officer noted a “threatening” environment in the battalion and that leaders may have tried to influence statements from witnesses.
“There were some things found that are disturbing,” said Brig. Gen. Del Turner, deputy commanding general for Accessions Command and the officer who conducted the investigation.
While he declined to discuss what action might be taken, Turner has recommended disciplinary action against battalion- and brigade-level commanders. He declined to discuss what action might be taken.
The report was not made public, with officials citing extensive personal information contained in the report.
The four recruiters who killed themselves were all combat veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan. The Army did not identify them.
The Army Inspector General’s office has been asked to conduct a command-wide assessment of Recruiting Command to determine if conditions uncovered in Houston exist elsewhere.
The one-day stand-down of all 7,000 active Army and 1,400 Army Reserve recruiters will be Feb. 13.
The soldiers will receive training on leadership, a review of the expectations of Recruiting Command’s leaders, suicide prevention and resiliency training, coping skills and recruiter wellness, Turner said.
“It’s significant,” Turner said about the stand-down. “It is not routinely scheduled. It normally occurs after some sort of major event like this.”
Turner was appointed to conduct the investigation on Oct. 14 by Lt. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, commanding general of Accessions Command. The investigation was sought by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who heard from soldiers and family members after the Houston Chronicle in 2008 reported the suicides.
“I think that when you have something like this happen that’s this serious and has such a huge impact on families and loved ones, of course people will ask what’s going on,” Freakley said.
Recruiters and soldiers who are going to be recruiters, their families and the public are going to want to know what’s happening and what’s being done, he said.
“We’re very aware of our soldiers’ concerns and we want to make it better,” Freakley said.
USAREC is a strong command with good leaders and exceptional soldiers, Freakley said.
“I do not believe for a minute that this is endemic of the entire command whatsoever, but I do believe that one [suicide] is too many, and we had four,” he said. “So let’s fix this and move forward and grow from this in a positive way. It’s hard work, but the whole Army has hard work right now.”
Turner’s investigation was completed Dec. 23, and Turner said his work revolved around the four suicides that occurred between January 2005 and September. Findings from the investigation were released Jan. 21.
“It’s a very tough and very tragic thing,” he said. “But I’m focused on what good can come out of this and that’s where our focus is right now.”
There were 17 suicides within Recruiting Command between fiscal years 2001 and 2008, said Col. Michael Negard, a Training and Doctrine Command spokesman.
There were more than 500 suicides by active-duty soldiers across the Army from Jan. 1, 2003, through Aug. 31, according to data from the Army G-1. Another 31 cases were pending final determination, as of Aug. 31.
The Army’s suicide rate increased from 12.4 for every 100,000 soldiers in 2003 to 18.1 in 2007, an all-time high for the service. Nationwide, the suicide rate for every 100,000 people was 19.5 in 2005, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gen. Pete Chiarelli, vice chief of staff of the Army, voiced his concern in a Jan. 23 interview with Army Times.
“We need to move out as quickly as we can to do those things that are going to lower the numbers,” Chiarelli said. “That’s the best we can do. We can’t eliminate suicide.”
“I believe there are certain things leaders can do in the short run to reverse the trend and I’m going to talk about those next week,” Chiarelli said.
Turner said he examined the four soldiers’ personal lives, from their financial and medical histories to their performance at work. He also studied organizational factors such as command climate, leadership within the battalion, brigade and Recruiting Command. He looked at screening soldiers for recruiting duty, the impact of assigning soldiers directly to that duty after they return from combat tours, the adequacy of the Army’s suicide prevention training, and soldiers’ access to mental health care.
Here is what Turner said he found:
• There was poor command climate in the recruiting battalion, one of 38 in the Army.
Morale was low among the unit’s 200-plus recruiters, who routinely worked 12- to 14-hour days. They had unpredictable work schedules, frequently working on weekends. There was a “threatening type of environment” established by certain leaders throughout the battalion’s chain of command.
Monthly missions assigned by USAREC were bumped up, violating Army regulations and adding stress. For example, in July 2008, the battalion’s 205 recruiters each had to recruit two new soldiers a month, even though the battalion’s mission was 360 contracts, which is roughly the equivalent of 1.5 or 1.6 new contracts each.
“I don’t think it was malicious necessarily,” Turner said, “but what that does is it artificially ups their work load.”
• All four soldiers who killed themselves suffered from “troubled” or “failing” personal relationships.
Turner said he did not find any common thread of significant financial stress among the four men and none had been diagnosed with PTSD.
At least seven months had passed between the time each man returned from combat to the U.S. and when they were assigned to USAREC.
• Regarding witness statements, Turner noted “inappropriate comments by leaders before investigations were done and before mine started.” He added: “It may have been construed by recruiters as attempts to influence their statements.”
Recruiters who felt their commanders may have been trying to influence their statements were given the opportunity to change their statements during Turner’s investigation.
• There were no inherent problems with assigning soldiers to recruiting duty after they returned from combat, but the assignment process must be improved.
Soldiers now can get approval from the first lieutenant colonel in their chain of command to waive the 90-day stabilization period required of them after returning from a deployment. Sometimes, problems stemming from a soldier’s experience in the war zone may not present themselves immediately, so the Army G-1 is reworking the waiver policy so that soldiers must now get approval from a general officer.
• Almost 50 percent of prospective recruiters were not fully vetted by their chain of command, as required by USAREC.
Soldiers who are nominated for recruiting duty must complete financial disclosure forms and statements declaring that they understand that recruiting is sensitive duty, they may be assigned to remote locations and they must be able to work independently.
They also must complete a mental health evaluation and be interviewed by their current battalion commander, command sergeant major and company commander, who must determine whether the soldier would be a successful recruiter. Input from this command team must include comments on the prospective recruiter’s leadership ability and potential, physical fitness, character, integrity, ability to perform in stressful situations and any incidents of abuse. All negative evaluations must include a full explanation.
Turner said he found that almost half the soldiers who went on to be recruiters did not have a complete nomination packet, and that soldiers were not taking a standardized mental health evaluation.
To correct that, HRC on Jan. 13 sent a message reinforcing the need for a complete nomination packet and instituted a policy that prohibits soldiers from being assigned to recruiting battalions until their completed packet has been reviewed, Turner said.
Also, the Army surgeon general, G-1 and USAREC are creating a mental health evaluation form specific to recruiters, Turner said, and officials are working on a catalog to track the adequacy of medical and mental health care and the access soldiers have, regardless of where they are stationed, to that care.
Turner said “the Army is moving in a very quick way in taking concrete action” and to “improve the climate and leadership inside that battalion and other organizational, institutional factors that will improve recruiting operations.”
Freakley said the Army is listening to Turner’s advice and taking immediate and long-term steps to correct any problems.
“I want to ensure we have a climate where our recruiters know how important they are, are well led in a positive command climate, are well supported by the systems that we put in place to help them in their very important mission of recruiting an all-volunteer force … and that we learn and really grow from this experience,” he said.
Recruiting is a very stressful job, said Bret Moore, a former captain and clinical psychologist who served twice in Iraq.
“I know that recruiting duty is one of the most stressful jobs, alongside drill sergeants,” he said. “They have quotas to meet and there’s a lot of pressure.”
Turner, who briefed the four soldiers’ families and Cornyn before releasing the findings of his investigation, said “all these [deaths] are tragic, but the one thing the Army does extremely well is learn from itself,” he said.
Maj. Gen. Thomas Bostick, commanding general of USAREC, will send a team to Houston this summer to conduct a follow-on assessment of the command, Turner said.
There also is a move to balance suicide prevention training with resiliency training and coping skills, he said.
“[Instead] of trying to recognize that [a soldier] is exhibiting risk factors, this is more toward helping [a soldier] cope with the stresses in his life,” he said.
Bostick is calling for a review of the current USAREC policies on duty hours for each of the five recruiting brigades and their 38 battalions.
For example, the Houston battalion’s policy called for a maximum work day of 13 hours, and recruiters had to seek approval from their chain of command if they worked beyond that, Turner said. However, the 13-hour maximum was interpreted as the expected norm, and the policy could have been written more clearly, Turner said.
Bostick also is directing a review of how missions are assigned to recruiters, so what happened in Houston, where commanders were assigning a higher mission to recruiters, would not be repeated, Turner said.
What is critical in all of this is leadership, Turner said.
“It requires compassionate leaders caring for their soldiers, hitting that sweet spot between accomplishing the mission and caring for soldiers.”
PBS: NSA could have prevented 9/11 hijackings
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/PBS_NSA_tracked_911_hijackers_but_0127.html
The super-secretive National Security Agency has been quietly monitoring, decrypting, and interpreting foreign communications for decades, starting long before it came under criticism as a result of recent revelations about the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. Now a forthcoming PBS documentary asks whether the NSA could have prevented 9/11 if it had been more willing to share its data with other agencies.
Author James Bamford looked into the performance of the NSA in his 2008 book, The Shadow Factory, and found that it had been closely monitoring the 9/11 hijackers as they moved freely around the United States and communicated with Osama bin Laden's operations center in Yemen. The NSA had even tapped bin Laden's satellite phone, starting in 1996.
"The NSA never alerted any other agency that the terrorists were in the United States and moving across the country towards Washington," Bamford told PBS.
PBS also found that "the 9/11 Commission never looked closely into NSA's role in the broad intelligence breakdown behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. If they had, they would have understood the full extent to which the agency had major pieces of the puzzle but never put them together or disclosed their entire body of knowledge to the CIA and the FBI."
In a review of Bamford's book, former senator and 9/11 Commission member Bob Kerrey wrote, "As the 9/11 Commission later established, U.S. intelligence officials knew that al-Qaeda had held a planning meeting in Malaysia, found out the names of two recruits who had been present -- Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi -- and suspected that one and maybe both of them had flown to Los Angeles. Bamford reveals that the NSA had been eavesdropping for months on their calls to Yemen, yet the agency 'never made the effort' to trace where the calls originated. 'At any time, had the FBI been notified, they could have found Hazmi in a matter of seconds.'"
Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer told PBS, "None of this information that we're speaking about this evening's in the 9/11 Commission report. They simply ignored all of it."
Not only was then-Director Michael Hayden never held accountable for the NSA's alleged failure, but he went on to oversee the Bush administration's vast expansion of domestic surveillance. In 2006, he was appointed as director of the CIA.
When asked whether the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping violated FISA law, Hayden insisted, "I have an order whose lawfulness has been attested to by the attorney general, an order whose lawfulness has been attested to by NSA lawyers who do this for a living. No, we're not violating the law. ... I'm asserting that NSA is doing its job."
NSA's power to eavesdrop on ordinary Americans has vastly increased since 2001, and the government's secret watch list now includes over a half a million names. PBS raises serious questions about whether important clues are still being missed simply as a result of the sheer volume of data being collected.
The Spy Factory will be shown over most PBS stations on February 3, 2009 at 8 pm.
VIDEO AT SOURCE
The super-secretive National Security Agency has been quietly monitoring, decrypting, and interpreting foreign communications for decades, starting long before it came under criticism as a result of recent revelations about the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. Now a forthcoming PBS documentary asks whether the NSA could have prevented 9/11 if it had been more willing to share its data with other agencies.
Author James Bamford looked into the performance of the NSA in his 2008 book, The Shadow Factory, and found that it had been closely monitoring the 9/11 hijackers as they moved freely around the United States and communicated with Osama bin Laden's operations center in Yemen. The NSA had even tapped bin Laden's satellite phone, starting in 1996.
"The NSA never alerted any other agency that the terrorists were in the United States and moving across the country towards Washington," Bamford told PBS.
PBS also found that "the 9/11 Commission never looked closely into NSA's role in the broad intelligence breakdown behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. If they had, they would have understood the full extent to which the agency had major pieces of the puzzle but never put them together or disclosed their entire body of knowledge to the CIA and the FBI."
In a review of Bamford's book, former senator and 9/11 Commission member Bob Kerrey wrote, "As the 9/11 Commission later established, U.S. intelligence officials knew that al-Qaeda had held a planning meeting in Malaysia, found out the names of two recruits who had been present -- Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi -- and suspected that one and maybe both of them had flown to Los Angeles. Bamford reveals that the NSA had been eavesdropping for months on their calls to Yemen, yet the agency 'never made the effort' to trace where the calls originated. 'At any time, had the FBI been notified, they could have found Hazmi in a matter of seconds.'"
Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer told PBS, "None of this information that we're speaking about this evening's in the 9/11 Commission report. They simply ignored all of it."
Not only was then-Director Michael Hayden never held accountable for the NSA's alleged failure, but he went on to oversee the Bush administration's vast expansion of domestic surveillance. In 2006, he was appointed as director of the CIA.
When asked whether the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping violated FISA law, Hayden insisted, "I have an order whose lawfulness has been attested to by the attorney general, an order whose lawfulness has been attested to by NSA lawyers who do this for a living. No, we're not violating the law. ... I'm asserting that NSA is doing its job."
NSA's power to eavesdrop on ordinary Americans has vastly increased since 2001, and the government's secret watch list now includes over a half a million names. PBS raises serious questions about whether important clues are still being missed simply as a result of the sheer volume of data being collected.
The Spy Factory will be shown over most PBS stations on February 3, 2009 at 8 pm.
VIDEO AT SOURCE
Israel retaliation likely as Obama envoy holds talks
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090128/ts_nm/us_palestinians_israel
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel warned on Wednesday of further violent retaliation for the killing of a soldier by Gaza militants, an Israeli security source said.
"Israel will respond very severely," the source said. The Israeli air force carried out strikes during the night but "we haven't seen it all."
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was quoted as telling senior officials on Tuesday evening that Israel's response would be "severe and disproportionate."
These warnings raised the prospect of further bloodshed in Gaza as President Barack Obama's visiting Middle East envoy, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, called for the current ceasefire to be extended.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said he had canceled a trip to the United States "to closely follow these developments," adding that "the Israeli army is ready, as always."
Israel and the Gaza Strip's Hamas rulers ordered separate ceasefires on January 18, when Israel ended a devastating 22-day assault. But fresh violence now threatens the de facto truce.
A little-known Islamist group claimed Tuesday's bomb attack which blew up an Israeli patrol jeep, killing one soldier and injuring three. The Hamas group defended the strike, citing the killing of two Palestinians by Israel last week.
After the bombing, Israeli forces killed one Palestinian, identified by Gaza medical workers as a farmer. An Israeli air strike later seriously wounded a militant on a motorcycle.
Aircraft returned to southern Gaza overnight to bomb tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border which were targeted aggressively during the offensive, but are being quickly repaired.
Obama's peace envoy, former Senator George Mitchell, said it was "of critical importance that the ceasefire be extended and consolidated."
He met Olmert and other leaders in Jerusalem after talks in Cairo with Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and was to hold talks on Thursday with Palestinian leaders, but not with Hamas.
Barak, in a statement, said he had stressed to Mitchell that Israel cannot accept any attack on its citizens and would act with determination against any attack by Hamas or its allies.
U.S. COMMITMENT TO TWO STATES
Mitchell said a durable truce must end smuggling into Gaza and reopen border crossings controlled by Israel, to relieve its economic blockade of the enclave where half the 1.5 million people depend on food aid.
He cited a U.S.-brokered 2005 agreement that calls for forces loyal to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to be deployed in Gaza, from where they were driven out by Hamas militants in 2007.
Mitchell planned to see Abbas on Thursday but Western diplomats said he would not meet officials of Hamas, which is shunned by Israel and the West for refusing to recognize the Jewish state, renounce violence and accept interim peace deals.
Israeli leaders, running in a February 10 national election, fear Hamas could rebuild tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border to replenish an arsenal of rockets used in attacks on its southern communities before and during the Gaza war.
Some 1,300 Palestinians, including at least 700 civilians, were killed in the offensive, the Hamas-run Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip said. Israel, which said it launched its assaults to stop rocket salvoes, put its death toll in the war at 10 soldiers and three civilians.
"President Obama has said the United States is committed to Israel's security and to its right to defend itself against legitimate threats," Mitchell said in Jerusalem.
"The president has also said the United States will sustain an active commitment toward reaching the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security," he added.
Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said in Israel the EU wanted Israeli authorities to increase the number of truckloads of aid entering the Gaza Strip from the current 130 a day to 400 a day.
In a report that coincided with the U.S. envoy's mission, Israel's Peace Now group said construction in Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land -- identified in Mitchell's report eight years ago as an obstacle to peace -- was stepped up last year.
According to Peace Now, 1,257 new structures were built in West Bank settlements in 2008, a 57 percent increase over 2007.
Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erekat said the settlements were a "virus" undermining peace and urged the Obama administration to press Israel to halt the expansion.
(Writing by Douglas Hamilton, editing by Myra MacDonald)
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel warned on Wednesday of further violent retaliation for the killing of a soldier by Gaza militants, an Israeli security source said.
"Israel will respond very severely," the source said. The Israeli air force carried out strikes during the night but "we haven't seen it all."
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was quoted as telling senior officials on Tuesday evening that Israel's response would be "severe and disproportionate."
These warnings raised the prospect of further bloodshed in Gaza as President Barack Obama's visiting Middle East envoy, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, called for the current ceasefire to be extended.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said he had canceled a trip to the United States "to closely follow these developments," adding that "the Israeli army is ready, as always."
Israel and the Gaza Strip's Hamas rulers ordered separate ceasefires on January 18, when Israel ended a devastating 22-day assault. But fresh violence now threatens the de facto truce.
A little-known Islamist group claimed Tuesday's bomb attack which blew up an Israeli patrol jeep, killing one soldier and injuring three. The Hamas group defended the strike, citing the killing of two Palestinians by Israel last week.
After the bombing, Israeli forces killed one Palestinian, identified by Gaza medical workers as a farmer. An Israeli air strike later seriously wounded a militant on a motorcycle.
Aircraft returned to southern Gaza overnight to bomb tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border which were targeted aggressively during the offensive, but are being quickly repaired.
Obama's peace envoy, former Senator George Mitchell, said it was "of critical importance that the ceasefire be extended and consolidated."
He met Olmert and other leaders in Jerusalem after talks in Cairo with Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and was to hold talks on Thursday with Palestinian leaders, but not with Hamas.
Barak, in a statement, said he had stressed to Mitchell that Israel cannot accept any attack on its citizens and would act with determination against any attack by Hamas or its allies.
U.S. COMMITMENT TO TWO STATES
Mitchell said a durable truce must end smuggling into Gaza and reopen border crossings controlled by Israel, to relieve its economic blockade of the enclave where half the 1.5 million people depend on food aid.
He cited a U.S.-brokered 2005 agreement that calls for forces loyal to Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to be deployed in Gaza, from where they were driven out by Hamas militants in 2007.
Mitchell planned to see Abbas on Thursday but Western diplomats said he would not meet officials of Hamas, which is shunned by Israel and the West for refusing to recognize the Jewish state, renounce violence and accept interim peace deals.
Israeli leaders, running in a February 10 national election, fear Hamas could rebuild tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border to replenish an arsenal of rockets used in attacks on its southern communities before and during the Gaza war.
Some 1,300 Palestinians, including at least 700 civilians, were killed in the offensive, the Hamas-run Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip said. Israel, which said it launched its assaults to stop rocket salvoes, put its death toll in the war at 10 soldiers and three civilians.
"President Obama has said the United States is committed to Israel's security and to its right to defend itself against legitimate threats," Mitchell said in Jerusalem.
"The president has also said the United States will sustain an active commitment toward reaching the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security," he added.
Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said in Israel the EU wanted Israeli authorities to increase the number of truckloads of aid entering the Gaza Strip from the current 130 a day to 400 a day.
In a report that coincided with the U.S. envoy's mission, Israel's Peace Now group said construction in Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land -- identified in Mitchell's report eight years ago as an obstacle to peace -- was stepped up last year.
According to Peace Now, 1,257 new structures were built in West Bank settlements in 2008, a 57 percent increase over 2007.
Palestinian peace negotiator Saeb Erekat said the settlements were a "virus" undermining peace and urged the Obama administration to press Israel to halt the expansion.
(Writing by Douglas Hamilton, editing by Myra MacDonald)
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Government must release cabinet minutes on lead-up to Iraq war
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/27/iraq-minutes
Secret government discussions about the Iraq war are to be disclosed after an information tribunal today ordered the release of cabinet minutes from 2003.
The decision follows a lengthy battle by campaigners, who have argued that the public interest in learning what was said about the planned invasion outweighs the public interest in cabinet discussions being kept secret.
Ministers have strongly opposed the request, arguing that the Freedom of Information Act was never intended to allow for the publication of information of this kind.
The tribunal upheld a decision by the information commissioner that details of the sessions on 13 and 17 March should be disclosed.
The meetings considered the highly controversial issue of whether the invasion was allowed under international law. Lord Goldsmith, who was attorney general at the time, initially suggested that the legality of the invasion was legally questionable before subsequently issuing legal advice saying that it would be compatible with international law.
This has given rise to persistent claims that ministers were not fully briefed on the possible legal pitfalls of an invasion.
Today's ruling does not necessarily mean the minutes will be published because the government has 28 days to appeal.The tribunal said that the exceptional circumstances relating to the two cabinet meetings meant that publication was justified and that it would not set a precedent for the publication of all cabinet minutes.
Last year Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, ordered the government to publish the minutes. The government appealed to the information tribunal, which adjudicates when official bodies are unwilling to comply with rulings from the commissioner.
Ministers will now have to decide whether to publish the minutes, to appeal to the high court, or to issue a ministerial veto banning publication. Under the Freedom of Information Act the government has the right to refuse publication as a last resort, but this veto power has not been used since the act came into force in 2005.
Thomas said today: "I welcome the careful consideration that the information tribunal has given to this important issue. I am pleased that the tribunal has upheld my decision that the public interest in disclosing the official cabinet minutes in this particular case outweighs the public interest in withholding the information. Disclosing the minutes will allow the public to more fully understand this particular decision. I am also pleased that the tribunal reached the same conclusion as I did in relation to the publication of the handwritten notes of the meetings."
In its ruling the tribunal said: "We have decided that the public interest in maintaining the confidentiality of the formal minutes of two cabinet meetings at which ministers decided to commit forces to military action in Iraq did not, at the time when the Cabinet Office refused a request for disclosure in April 2007, outweigh the public interest in disclosure. We have reached that decision by a majority and not without difficulty.
"We concluded that there was a strong public interest in maintaining the confidentiality of information relating to the formulation of government policy or ministerial communications (including, in particular, the maintenance of the long-standing convention of cabinet collective responsibility).
"However, this is an exceptional case, the circumstances of which brought together a combination of factors that were so important that, in combination, they created very powerful public interest reasons why disclosure was in the public interest."
Although the tribunal said that the minutes ought to be published, it also accepted that some sections should be redacted, or edited, "to avoid unnecessary risk to the UK's international relations".
The tribunal also ruled that "certain informal notes" taken alongside the formal cabinet minutes did not need to be published.
In its ruling, the tribunal said that the controversy about Goldsmith's legal advice was a factor in persuading it to come down in favour of publication.
"The decision to commit the nation's armed forces to the invasion of another country is momentous in its own right, and ... its seriousness is increased by the criticisms that have been made (particularly in the Butler report) of the general decision-making processes in the cabinet at the time," the tribunal said.
"There has also been criticism of the attorney general's legal advice and of the particular way in which the March 17 opinion was made available to the cabinet only at the last moment and the March 7 opinion was not disclosed to it at all."
The Cabinet Office now has 28 days to decide whether to appeal to the high court against the ruling.
A Downing Street spokesman said: "The information commissioner has just made an announcement on this and we are considering our response."
William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, said: "Rather than have items of evidence dragged into the public domain piece by piece the government should set up a full-scale privy council inquiry into the origins and conduct of the Iraq war.
"The sooner we can learn the lessons of the war the sooner we can apply them. It is imperative to begin an inquiry before memories have faded, emails have been deleted and documents have disappeared."
Edward Davey, the Liberal Democrats' foreign affairs spokesman, said: "This is a very welcome and long overdue decision. The public clearly has the right to see the minutes. Their publication may help answer some critical questions, and certain people may find themselves in an even more difficult position.
"The government must now accept this decision, and publish the minutes without delay."
Secret government discussions about the Iraq war are to be disclosed after an information tribunal today ordered the release of cabinet minutes from 2003.
The decision follows a lengthy battle by campaigners, who have argued that the public interest in learning what was said about the planned invasion outweighs the public interest in cabinet discussions being kept secret.
Ministers have strongly opposed the request, arguing that the Freedom of Information Act was never intended to allow for the publication of information of this kind.
The tribunal upheld a decision by the information commissioner that details of the sessions on 13 and 17 March should be disclosed.
The meetings considered the highly controversial issue of whether the invasion was allowed under international law. Lord Goldsmith, who was attorney general at the time, initially suggested that the legality of the invasion was legally questionable before subsequently issuing legal advice saying that it would be compatible with international law.
This has given rise to persistent claims that ministers were not fully briefed on the possible legal pitfalls of an invasion.
Today's ruling does not necessarily mean the minutes will be published because the government has 28 days to appeal.The tribunal said that the exceptional circumstances relating to the two cabinet meetings meant that publication was justified and that it would not set a precedent for the publication of all cabinet minutes.
Last year Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, ordered the government to publish the minutes. The government appealed to the information tribunal, which adjudicates when official bodies are unwilling to comply with rulings from the commissioner.
Ministers will now have to decide whether to publish the minutes, to appeal to the high court, or to issue a ministerial veto banning publication. Under the Freedom of Information Act the government has the right to refuse publication as a last resort, but this veto power has not been used since the act came into force in 2005.
Thomas said today: "I welcome the careful consideration that the information tribunal has given to this important issue. I am pleased that the tribunal has upheld my decision that the public interest in disclosing the official cabinet minutes in this particular case outweighs the public interest in withholding the information. Disclosing the minutes will allow the public to more fully understand this particular decision. I am also pleased that the tribunal reached the same conclusion as I did in relation to the publication of the handwritten notes of the meetings."
In its ruling the tribunal said: "We have decided that the public interest in maintaining the confidentiality of the formal minutes of two cabinet meetings at which ministers decided to commit forces to military action in Iraq did not, at the time when the Cabinet Office refused a request for disclosure in April 2007, outweigh the public interest in disclosure. We have reached that decision by a majority and not without difficulty.
"We concluded that there was a strong public interest in maintaining the confidentiality of information relating to the formulation of government policy or ministerial communications (including, in particular, the maintenance of the long-standing convention of cabinet collective responsibility).
"However, this is an exceptional case, the circumstances of which brought together a combination of factors that were so important that, in combination, they created very powerful public interest reasons why disclosure was in the public interest."
Although the tribunal said that the minutes ought to be published, it also accepted that some sections should be redacted, or edited, "to avoid unnecessary risk to the UK's international relations".
The tribunal also ruled that "certain informal notes" taken alongside the formal cabinet minutes did not need to be published.
In its ruling, the tribunal said that the controversy about Goldsmith's legal advice was a factor in persuading it to come down in favour of publication.
"The decision to commit the nation's armed forces to the invasion of another country is momentous in its own right, and ... its seriousness is increased by the criticisms that have been made (particularly in the Butler report) of the general decision-making processes in the cabinet at the time," the tribunal said.
"There has also been criticism of the attorney general's legal advice and of the particular way in which the March 17 opinion was made available to the cabinet only at the last moment and the March 7 opinion was not disclosed to it at all."
The Cabinet Office now has 28 days to decide whether to appeal to the high court against the ruling.
A Downing Street spokesman said: "The information commissioner has just made an announcement on this and we are considering our response."
William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, said: "Rather than have items of evidence dragged into the public domain piece by piece the government should set up a full-scale privy council inquiry into the origins and conduct of the Iraq war.
"The sooner we can learn the lessons of the war the sooner we can apply them. It is imperative to begin an inquiry before memories have faded, emails have been deleted and documents have disappeared."
Edward Davey, the Liberal Democrats' foreign affairs spokesman, said: "This is a very welcome and long overdue decision. The public clearly has the right to see the minutes. Their publication may help answer some critical questions, and certain people may find themselves in an even more difficult position.
"The government must now accept this decision, and publish the minutes without delay."
Turley: Obama 'accessory' to war crimes if no prosecution
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Turley_Obama_accessory_to_war_crimes_0127.html
A few weeks ago, George Washington University Constitutional Law professor Jonathan Turley, while appearing on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, essentially said that the Obama administration would "own" any war crimes -- such as the reported waterboarding of 9/11 suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- if it chose to look the other way. On Monday's show Turley went a little further and suggested that if Obama impedes investigations or prosecution that he wouldn't just be an "apologist," but also an "accessory."
Olbermann started the segment by reading a statement released by the Obama administration in response to last week's allegations from a former NSA analyst that President Bush's national security agency targeted news organizations for surveillance and even pried into personal records like finance and travel."
The response stated, "As the president made clear [last week] his administration is ensuring that all programs are conducted in accordance with our values and the rule of law. There will be no exceptions."
Olbermann noted that that was similar to claims made by Bush the last few years, insisting that "all programs were conducted consistent with our values and rule of law," even though most experts have pointed out that methods such as waterboarding are considered torture, inhumane and against the law.
"How much daylight might there be between that and any of the analogs from the Bush White House?" Olbermann asked Turley, who immediately responded, "Not much."
Turley pointed out that the Obama administration response was written "in the future tense. You weren't asking whether he would do these things. Nobody thinks that Obama is George Bush. I think we believe that he's better than these past programs. But people are not asking about the future. We are asking about the past."
"It takes a lot to avoid a very simple truism," Turley argued. "That, if true, these would be crimes and we prosecute crimes. We call people criminals who commit them. It is very easy to say. All you need is the principals and the courage to say it."
Turley said that he had "very little sympathy for the people that committed this torture. I've heard President Obama say we don't want talented people at the CIA looking over their shoulders. Well those talented people in this circumstance would be torturers."
"But in reality nobody thinks that they're going to be prosecuted," Turley continued. "They have something called the estoppel defense where they can say that they were told by people like John Yoo and others that what they did was legal. That does not protect the president and the vice president, and they're the ones and the people just below them who deserve to be investigated and they must be prosecuted if they've committed war crimes or we will shred four treaties and at least four statutes."
[Turley has more background about the estoppel arguments at his blog.]
"And the problem here is it wouldn't make Obama an apologist it would make him an accessory," Turley argued. "He would be preventing the investigation of war crimes. How could he go from that and say that he's all about the rule of law?"
Referring to the fresh Rove subpoena, Turley said that "we could have an interesting fight where George Bush comes in and says 'I'm still claiming executive privilege' when the current president is saying we don't recognize it. Indeed. Obama's people could prosecute Rove and others and I think that the federal courts would give much greater rate to the man currently in the Oval Office than the man who just left it."
Olbermann agreed that "the current executive is the one who gets to decide what executive privilege is."
VIDEO AT SOURCE
A few weeks ago, George Washington University Constitutional Law professor Jonathan Turley, while appearing on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, essentially said that the Obama administration would "own" any war crimes -- such as the reported waterboarding of 9/11 suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- if it chose to look the other way. On Monday's show Turley went a little further and suggested that if Obama impedes investigations or prosecution that he wouldn't just be an "apologist," but also an "accessory."
Olbermann started the segment by reading a statement released by the Obama administration in response to last week's allegations from a former NSA analyst that President Bush's national security agency targeted news organizations for surveillance and even pried into personal records like finance and travel."
The response stated, "As the president made clear [last week] his administration is ensuring that all programs are conducted in accordance with our values and the rule of law. There will be no exceptions."
Olbermann noted that that was similar to claims made by Bush the last few years, insisting that "all programs were conducted consistent with our values and rule of law," even though most experts have pointed out that methods such as waterboarding are considered torture, inhumane and against the law.
"How much daylight might there be between that and any of the analogs from the Bush White House?" Olbermann asked Turley, who immediately responded, "Not much."
Turley pointed out that the Obama administration response was written "in the future tense. You weren't asking whether he would do these things. Nobody thinks that Obama is George Bush. I think we believe that he's better than these past programs. But people are not asking about the future. We are asking about the past."
"It takes a lot to avoid a very simple truism," Turley argued. "That, if true, these would be crimes and we prosecute crimes. We call people criminals who commit them. It is very easy to say. All you need is the principals and the courage to say it."
Turley said that he had "very little sympathy for the people that committed this torture. I've heard President Obama say we don't want talented people at the CIA looking over their shoulders. Well those talented people in this circumstance would be torturers."
"But in reality nobody thinks that they're going to be prosecuted," Turley continued. "They have something called the estoppel defense where they can say that they were told by people like John Yoo and others that what they did was legal. That does not protect the president and the vice president, and they're the ones and the people just below them who deserve to be investigated and they must be prosecuted if they've committed war crimes or we will shred four treaties and at least four statutes."
[Turley has more background about the estoppel arguments at his blog.]
"And the problem here is it wouldn't make Obama an apologist it would make him an accessory," Turley argued. "He would be preventing the investigation of war crimes. How could he go from that and say that he's all about the rule of law?"
Referring to the fresh Rove subpoena, Turley said that "we could have an interesting fight where George Bush comes in and says 'I'm still claiming executive privilege' when the current president is saying we don't recognize it. Indeed. Obama's people could prosecute Rove and others and I think that the federal courts would give much greater rate to the man currently in the Oval Office than the man who just left it."
Olbermann agreed that "the current executive is the one who gets to decide what executive privilege is."
VIDEO AT SOURCE
Invoking Obama, House Judiciary Chairman subpoenas Rove
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/CONYE..._ROVE_0126.html
John Byrne
Published: Monday January 26, 2009
Invoking President Barack Obama, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) has subpoenaed former Bush Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove about his alleged involved in the political prosecution of an Alabama governor and the firings of nine US Attorneys.
The subpoena, approved by an earlier vote of the House, was issued pursuant to "authority granted in H.R. 5 (111th Congress), and calls for Mr. Rove to appear at deposition on Monday, February 2, 2009."
Specifically, it enjoins Rove "to testify regarding his role in the Bush Administration’s politicization of the Department of Justice, including the US Attorney firings and the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman."
"Mr. Rove has previously refused to appear in response to a Judiciary Committee subpoena, claiming that even former presidential advisers cannot be compelled to testify before Congress," Conyers' office wrote in a release. "That 'absolute immunity' position was supported by then-President Bush, but it has been rejected by U.S. District Judge John Bates and President Obama has previously dismissed the claim as 'completely misguided.'"
This is the second time Conyers has subpoenaed Rove. It's uncertain whether Rove will be compelled to testify, as Obama's attorney general has not yet been confirmed.
“I have said many times that I will carry this investigation forward to its conclusion, whether in Congress or in court, and today’s action is an important step along the way,” Conyers said in a release. “Change has come to Washington, and I hope Karl Rove is ready for it. After two years of stonewalling, it’s time for him to talk.”
The subpoena delegates authority to US marshals to enforce, like any Congressional subpoena, and was copied to Rove's Washington, D.C. attorney, Robert Luskin.
Luskin could not immediately be reached for comment.
John Byrne
Published: Monday January 26, 2009
Invoking President Barack Obama, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) has subpoenaed former Bush Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove about his alleged involved in the political prosecution of an Alabama governor and the firings of nine US Attorneys.
The subpoena, approved by an earlier vote of the House, was issued pursuant to "authority granted in H.R. 5 (111th Congress), and calls for Mr. Rove to appear at deposition on Monday, February 2, 2009."
Specifically, it enjoins Rove "to testify regarding his role in the Bush Administration’s politicization of the Department of Justice, including the US Attorney firings and the prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman."
"Mr. Rove has previously refused to appear in response to a Judiciary Committee subpoena, claiming that even former presidential advisers cannot be compelled to testify before Congress," Conyers' office wrote in a release. "That 'absolute immunity' position was supported by then-President Bush, but it has been rejected by U.S. District Judge John Bates and President Obama has previously dismissed the claim as 'completely misguided.'"
This is the second time Conyers has subpoenaed Rove. It's uncertain whether Rove will be compelled to testify, as Obama's attorney general has not yet been confirmed.
“I have said many times that I will carry this investigation forward to its conclusion, whether in Congress or in court, and today’s action is an important step along the way,” Conyers said in a release. “Change has come to Washington, and I hope Karl Rove is ready for it. After two years of stonewalling, it’s time for him to talk.”
The subpoena delegates authority to US marshals to enforce, like any Congressional subpoena, and was copied to Rove's Washington, D.C. attorney, Robert Luskin.
Luskin could not immediately be reached for comment.
UN official: Enough evidence to prosecute Rumsfeld for war crimes
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/UN_official_Enough_evidence_to_prosecute_0126.html
David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
Published: Monday January 26, 2009
Monday, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak told CNN's Rick Sanchez that the US has an "obligation" to investigate whether Bush administration officials ordered torture, adding that he believes that there is already enough evidence to prosecute former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"We have clear evidence," he said. "In our report that we sent to the United Nations, we made it clear that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld clearly authorized torture methods and he was told at that time by Alberto Mora, the legal council of the Navy, 'Mr. Secretary, what you are actual ordering here amounts to torture.' So, there we have the clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but, nevertheless, he ordered torture."
Asked during an interview with Germany's ZDF television on Jan. 20, Nowak said: "I think the evidence is on the table."
At issue, however, is whether "American law will recognize these forms of torture."
A bipartisan Senate report released last month found Rumsfeld and other top administration officials responsible for abuse of Guantanamo detainees in US custody.
It said Rumsfeld authorized harsh interrogation techniques on December 2, 2002 at the Guantanamo prison, although he ruled them out a month later.
The coercive measures were based on a document signed by Bush in February, 2002.
This video is from CNN's Newsroom, broadcast Jan. 26, 2009.
Video At Source
David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
Published: Monday January 26, 2009
Monday, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak told CNN's Rick Sanchez that the US has an "obligation" to investigate whether Bush administration officials ordered torture, adding that he believes that there is already enough evidence to prosecute former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"We have clear evidence," he said. "In our report that we sent to the United Nations, we made it clear that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld clearly authorized torture methods and he was told at that time by Alberto Mora, the legal council of the Navy, 'Mr. Secretary, what you are actual ordering here amounts to torture.' So, there we have the clear evidence that Mr. Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but, nevertheless, he ordered torture."
Asked during an interview with Germany's ZDF television on Jan. 20, Nowak said: "I think the evidence is on the table."
At issue, however, is whether "American law will recognize these forms of torture."
A bipartisan Senate report released last month found Rumsfeld and other top administration officials responsible for abuse of Guantanamo detainees in US custody.
It said Rumsfeld authorized harsh interrogation techniques on December 2, 2002 at the Guantanamo prison, although he ruled them out a month later.
The coercive measures were based on a document signed by Bush in February, 2002.
This video is from CNN's Newsroom, broadcast Jan. 26, 2009.
Video At Source
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Angry protests over 16 dead Afghan civilians
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Angry_...__01252009.html
Published: Sunday January 25, 2009
About 1,000 demonstrators on Sunday shouted slogans against US troops in Afghanistan to condemn an operation which President Hamid Karzai said killed 16 civilians, including women and children.
The angry men marched in the small town of Mihtarlam, about 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of the capital Kabul, chanting "death to the Americans" and demanding an end to US-only operations, officials and witnesses told AFP.
Some of the protesters threw stones at US military vehicles, witnesses said, putting the number of demonstrators at 1,000.
The US military said Saturday that an operation against a Taliban network had taken place near Mihtarlam, killing "15 armed militants". But locals said civilians were also killed and they were investigating to find out how many.
A statement from Karzai's office Sunday said: "An air and ground operation in Garoch area on the outskirts of Mihtarlam town took place midnight Friday resulting in the death of 16 civilians including two women and three children."
It condemned the latest alleged civilian casualties in the fight against Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan, saying such incidents "weaken government rule and empower the terrorists."
Karzai "once again reminds the coalition forces that bombing Afghan villages will not yield anything in the war against terror except civilian casualties," it said.
Officials say such casualties are often the result of US forces not properly coordinating their operations with their Afghan counterparts, sometimes resulting in them being led astray by poor intelligence.
US military spokesman Colonel Greg Julian said Sunday the force had no information to support Karzai's statement but planned to travel to the area next week with Afghan officials to "determine the ground truth."
The US forces have said they targeted a Taliban commander known for trafficking foreign fighters and weapons into the region to attack coalition forces, including in an assault that killed 10 French troops in August 2008.
"As coalition forces approached the wanted militant's compound, several groups of armed militants exited their homes and began manoeuvring on the force," the US military said in a statement.
"Armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, the militants engaged coalition forces from multiple directions," it said, adding one of the killed militants was a woman who had been carrying a rocket-propelled grenade.
The Taliban, an extremist Islamic group, ran the government in Kabul from 1996 to 2001 before being removed in a US-led invasion and are now waging a deadly insurgency that has picked up pace in the past three years.
There are nearly 70,000 international soldiers in Afghanistan, including 34,000 US troops, helping the government to fight the insurgents.
They run the air power that is regularly called in to help in operations across the rugged land, where commanders have long called for more soldiers.
There are regular allegations of civilian casualties in operations, most often air strikes, but there are conflicting statements about how many.
International commanders have said they could confirm that just over 200 ordinary Afghans died in operations last year but the figure given by the United Nations is about four times as high.
Published: Sunday January 25, 2009
About 1,000 demonstrators on Sunday shouted slogans against US troops in Afghanistan to condemn an operation which President Hamid Karzai said killed 16 civilians, including women and children.
The angry men marched in the small town of Mihtarlam, about 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of the capital Kabul, chanting "death to the Americans" and demanding an end to US-only operations, officials and witnesses told AFP.
Some of the protesters threw stones at US military vehicles, witnesses said, putting the number of demonstrators at 1,000.
The US military said Saturday that an operation against a Taliban network had taken place near Mihtarlam, killing "15 armed militants". But locals said civilians were also killed and they were investigating to find out how many.
A statement from Karzai's office Sunday said: "An air and ground operation in Garoch area on the outskirts of Mihtarlam town took place midnight Friday resulting in the death of 16 civilians including two women and three children."
It condemned the latest alleged civilian casualties in the fight against Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan, saying such incidents "weaken government rule and empower the terrorists."
Karzai "once again reminds the coalition forces that bombing Afghan villages will not yield anything in the war against terror except civilian casualties," it said.
Officials say such casualties are often the result of US forces not properly coordinating their operations with their Afghan counterparts, sometimes resulting in them being led astray by poor intelligence.
US military spokesman Colonel Greg Julian said Sunday the force had no information to support Karzai's statement but planned to travel to the area next week with Afghan officials to "determine the ground truth."
The US forces have said they targeted a Taliban commander known for trafficking foreign fighters and weapons into the region to attack coalition forces, including in an assault that killed 10 French troops in August 2008.
"As coalition forces approached the wanted militant's compound, several groups of armed militants exited their homes and began manoeuvring on the force," the US military said in a statement.
"Armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, the militants engaged coalition forces from multiple directions," it said, adding one of the killed militants was a woman who had been carrying a rocket-propelled grenade.
The Taliban, an extremist Islamic group, ran the government in Kabul from 1996 to 2001 before being removed in a US-led invasion and are now waging a deadly insurgency that has picked up pace in the past three years.
There are nearly 70,000 international soldiers in Afghanistan, including 34,000 US troops, helping the government to fight the insurgents.
They run the air power that is regularly called in to help in operations across the rugged land, where commanders have long called for more soldiers.
There are regular allegations of civilian casualties in operations, most often air strikes, but there are conflicting statements about how many.
International commanders have said they could confirm that just over 200 ordinary Afghans died in operations last year but the figure given by the United Nations is about four times as high.
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