Voice from the Commonwealth Commentary, World Views and Occasional Rants from a small 'l' libertarian in Massachussetts
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your council nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
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Praise for Voice
"A smart fellow...I do like, recommend and learn from Barbera's blog." -Roger L. Simon
"Your blog is bullshit"- anonymous angry French reader.
Yesterday the mild-mannered, mid-level cleric initiated a legal proposal aimed at turning back the power of the conservative clerical establishment. It is an effort to prevent a massive exodus out of his reform movement and into an as yet undefined opposition stance.
"If reform reaches a dead end, what route will the people take?" said an editor at a reformist newspaper recently shut down by the conservatives. "They’re never going to return to the right. They’re going to go outside the system."
Mr Khatami’s bill is aimed specifically at reducing the power of the Guardian Council, the religious board charged with vetting all laws and political candidates. Twice elected with massive majorities, Mr Khatami argues that the council’s rulings are arbitrary and illegal. His bill gives him the power to remove judiciary and parliamentary officials for breaking the law.
"The spirit of this bill is that if Khatami realises that the constitution has been violated, he can put a stop to it," said the vice-president, Mohammad Ali Abtahi.
The bill will sail through parliament. However, it will likely be rejected by a Guardian Council that is unlikely to reduce its own power. If that happens, Mr Khatami says he will put the issue before the people in a referendum. Mr Khatami has said that if the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, cancels the referendum, he will resign.
Such a resignation will leave the conservatives in direct confrontation with the people. "Everyone wants change," said one reformist activist. "The question is, what price are people going to pay for that change?"
Fifteen minutes into the city, it's evident that the battlegrounds of Kabul are now being turned into brick kilns. Kabul needs reconstruction: most houses seemed to be falling apart. ``Earlier, all I knew was how to fire an AK-47. Now I'm learning how to make bricks,'' says a Pathan soldier.
Amidst all this chaos, Kabul streets are full of life, with many smilingfaces. ``Now, we can laugh endlessly. We are very happy today,'' says Mir Azam Kaifar of the Handicraft Promotion Centre.
Indeed, there is a desire to make up for lost time. ``We want to learn computers. Will Niit come here to set up a centre?,'' asked a burkha clad women student inside the Kabul Polytechnic premises.
The markets are abuzz with activity with nothing forbidden any more. Goods flow in freely from Iran, Pakistan, China and Dubai. In the absence of a banking system the market accepts foreign currency everywhere. Money changers are everywhere, even under open skies.
European Union leaders at trade and diplomacy talks in Denmark have expressed their concern about China's human rights record. On the sidelines of the Asia-Europe meeting in Copenhagen, EU leaders told China's Prime Minister Zhu Rongji they are concerned about China's use of the death penalty, torture and its treatment of ethnic minorities.
"Wow! You mean China oppresses citizens and forces them into labor camps and just doesn't give a damn about all of the Human Rights Treaties they have signed and Human Rights Organizations they belong to? Why were we not informed of this sooner? We must pass some resolutions stating our concern and urging them to adhere to all of the treaties they have agreed to."
The Speaker of the Iranian parliment, President Khatami's brother speaking about possible action against Iraq
"The overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, through whatever means, will be the happiest day for all the Iranian people," Mohammad Reza Khatami said in the interview to be published Friday in Al-Rai Al-Aam. "I personally, like every Iranian citizen, consider Saddam Hussein to be an opportunist who respects no convention or treaty ... with no moral values, and in whom we have no trust," said President Mohammad Khatami's brother.
But he voiced doubts over US aims to oust Saddam, who fought a 1980-1988 war against Tehran. "If Saddam Hussein is a criminal, the biggest criminal is the superpower which provided him with all the weapons of mass destruction and the technology for these prohibited arms," said Khatami.
When two hijacked planes hit the twin towers over a year ago, Rob Schofield knew he had to abandon plans to travel back to Afghanistan. But a year on, Rob, 35, of Barnsbury, has just returned from Afghanistan, where he is continuing to help rebuild a land ravaged by twenty years of war and three years of drought. Rob is a consultant for UK aid agency Tearfund and has been active in assisting the drought-stricken areas of Afghanistan and dealing with the large numbers of refugees made homeless by the recent war and famine.
But a year on there is some fresh hope, despite continuing tribal conflicts and political uncertainty. Rob says that more than at any time before he is cautiously optimistic about Afghanistan’s future. “Now is a unique and unusual opportunity for peace. I don’t think this will happen again in quite the same way, even though at the moment it’s still a messy business. Peace so often takes time to emerge.” Peace has also made it easier for many aid agencies to continue with their work and Rob can tell of many successful projects of local aid groups in his experience. “Thanks to the work of our partners in north-eastern Afghanistan, the countryside is glowing with fields full of golden wheat and now that the drought has lifted and rivers are flowing again, there is a sense of peace and stability after more than twenty years of war.”
The Rev. Curtis Gatewood, president of the Durham branch of the NAACP, is again telling blacks to stay out of U.S. military efforts to fight terrorists abroad, despite a reprimand from the national NAACP last year over similar comments by Gatewood four days after Sept. 11.
"The NAACP can no longer afford to be hypocritically silent as African-Americans are used/recruited to conspicuously perpetrate injustices abroad, as we cry for relief from similar injustices at home," Gatewood wrote in a letter Thursday to national NAACP president Kweisi Mfume.
Gatewood said he would rather step down from the organization than agree to silence on the potential for a war against Iraq. On Sept. 15, 2001, Gatewood issued a call to blacks to refuse to serve in the war in Afghanistan. That earned him a stern reprimand from Mfume and the threat of being stripped of his local post.
In a statement issued Sept. 18, 2001, Mfume distanced his organization from Gatewood. "This is a time for all Americans to stand united and defend the ideals of a free and open society where terrorism has no place."
Artifacts owned by Captain Bligh are up for auction at Christies.
The collection included William Bligh's own account of his 41-day journey with loyal seamen from Tahitian waters to Timor in an open boat with very little food or water — a voyage heralded as a tremendous feat of seamanship.
The items had been expected to bring about $310,000, but big interest and bids emerged at the Christie's auction.
The coconut shell used as a cup and bowl after Bligh and his small band of loyalists were cast adrift in 1789 sold for $111,135, about twice more than anticipated.
On it, Bligh had scribbled his name and the date, as well as the words, ``The cup I eat my miserable allowance out of.''
The bullet that Bligh used as a weight to ration out morsels of food sold for $58,900, again much more than expected.
Other items sold included a crude compass that Bligh used as he made his way through difficult waters after being ejected from the HMS Bounty by Fletcher Christian and the mutineers.
But, I thought poverty and hopelessness made people terrorists...or as Reuters would call them, 'activists'.
The 21 terrorists planning attacks in Singapore however do not seem to fit this profile (along with the 19 Sept 11th hijackers).
All earned decent wages and owned their homes, which ranged from four-room to executive Housing Board flats, he disclosed. Twelve of them earned between $1,500 and $2,500 a month, and one even took home more than $5,000. Their educational qualifications, released earlier, showed the bulk had secondary or technical education.
A four room flat in Singapore, by the way, is average. Dues to size constraints (being an island) owning a house involves enormous amounts of money (millions of dollars).
``I'm an Israeli citizen and also an Arab, but I acted as a human being in that moment.'' — Rami Mahamid, an Israeli Arab teenager who alerted police last week to a Palestinian suicide bomber whom he spotted at a bus stop in northern Israel. His tip saved the lives of passengers on a bus that was headed off by police.
This week, a field school for budding underwater archaeologists began excavating the wreck of a large stern-wheeler, believed to be the steamboat Montana. The Montana was the largest ever to travel the waters of the Missouri River, the archaeologists say. It now rests on the riverbank in Bridgeton, just south of the Highway 370 Discovery Bridge.
The boat's remains are revealing surprises about the state of technology during the last days of glory for river steamboats and may serve as a blueprint for rethinking the history of paddle wheel boats.
Someone out hunting trilobite fossils at an old airbase on the Utah/Nevada border found something a little more interesting.
When he scraped away the cracked soil, he realized he had found a World War II dog tag stamped with a military serial number and the name "Charles D. Albury."
Rush, 44, a casino marketing worker from West Wendover, Nev., and a history buff, wondered whether the dog tag belonged to one of the 50,000 U.S. Army wartime fliers who had passed through during World War II on what was a sprawling training base at Wendover on the Utah side of the border.
"If it had been my dog tag, I would have wanted it back," said Rush, an Army veteran. "The name didn't mean anything to me until I searched on the Internet and came up with 4,000 hits -- along with the word 'Nagasaki.' "
Charles Don Albury was co-pilot of the B-29 dubbed Bock's Car that dropped the atomic bomb over Nagasaki, Japan, three days after the first atomic blast leveled Hiroshima. Albury also had flown Great Artiste, the B-29 that accompanied the Enola Gay on its mission to Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.
The two main Kurdish factions are proposing a new regional government to be a part of a unified Iraq.
A joint committee set up after talks between KDP leader Massoud Barzani and PUK chief Jalal Talabani agreed this week on amendments to a constitution Barzani drew up earlier this year, KDP Ankara representative Safeen Dizayee said. "The draft constitution outlines the structure of a regional administration in the northern region, including legislative, judiciary and executive responsibilities," he told Reuters. It envisions the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as regional capital.
The document will be debated at a meeting of the joint Kurdish parliament Oct. 4 and will be presented at a gathering of opposition groups in Europe next month, Dizayee said. "What is important is the federal structure of Iraq, since the north has to be in concert with the rest of Iraq," he said. "The overall structure is for the Iraqi people and the Iraqi opposition to decide."
Tensions have simmered between NATO member Turkey and Iraqi Kurds over fears the Kurds would seize an opportunity to create an independent state bordering Turkey, which has a large, restive Kurdish population. Barzani and Talabani have sought to ease Ankara's fears, insisting they are for Iraq's territorial integrity and would like to see a federal, united state.
Nice to know that someone with vast knowledge of the oil industry agrees with what have said before. Unlike Afghanistan, reconstruction of a post-war Iraq would be much smoother and not a financial burden for the liberators (read:the US).
The notion that a war against Iraq might prove costly for the developed world because of the need to help rebuild the Middle Eastern nation once dictator Saddam Hussein is removed from power is unfounded, says energy expert and noted author Daniel Yergin.
Yergin told a September 25 panel, discussing the economic reconstruction of Iraq in a post-Saddam world, that Iraq's own oil "will play a large role, a very large role … [as] a very powerful facilitator of reconstruction." His comments were part of an all-day seminar titled "The Future of a Post-Saddam Iraq: A Blueprint for American Involvement," sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank.
Yergin told his audience that "Iraq would have no problem" paying for its development in a post-Saddam world. Once its production stepped up, he said, "it would be in a position to earn 20, 25, maybe 30 illion dollars a year from oil exports …[and] that's a lot of money or a country of 19 million people.
Who is Yergin?
...chairman of Cambridge Energy Associates, a consulting firm that analyzes oil trends worldwide for governments and international business clients. Yergin is also the Pulitzer-prize-winning author of "The Prize" -- a history of the last 100 years of the oil industry and its political, economic, and social effects on the modern world.
How Roman of the mayor of Rishon Letzion. As the soldiers in the Roman Legions times of service came up they were sent to newly built cities on the outskirts of Empire. Each of these outposts were miniature Romes and were farily self-sufficient. Immediate dangers could be faced by organized groups of veterans that had fought together for tweny years or more. In a similar tactic Realizing that his police force just couldn't handle the threat of terrorism on their own he turned to old special forces veterans. Meir Nitzan, the mayor, realized that his police force was not capable of handling the full threat of terrorism on their own. So he has recruited two 12 man squads of former special forces soldiers to help protect the city.
...he set up a well-equipped and well-manned municipal security service, Sayeret Harishonim, two months ago. "The police do not have enough manpower, so I learned though my own methods, which I cannot detail, what I need to do to prevent terror attacks," he said.
Sayeret Harishonim is comprised of veterans of elite Israel Defense Forces combat units. Prior to being hired, they undergo a battery of physical and psychological tests. Then they take a week-long course to train them in unarmed combat and police work as well as refresh their shooting skills. The force has two units of 12 men each. Some of them patrol the city in brand-new patrol vehicles, others are on foot or on bicycle. The Sayeret also combed flight schools for ultra-light pilots to patrol the city's skies and keep an eye out for potential terrorists - something unprecedented here. The pilots are in radio contact with the city's emergency hotline center.
The Sayeret has one obvious Achilles' heel: its members have no more authority than an ordinary municipal inspector. They are armed, but they are bound by the same stringent rules of engagement as private security guards. What they can do, however, is detain suspects until the police come. "It's true that the new force has no special powers, but it is comprised of people who are very well trained and know that there is a lot one can do even without pointing a rifle," said Yossi Shetrit, one of the Sayeret's team leaders.
"I'm not interested in battles, assassinations, ambushes and killing terrorists. My job is to deter," said Nitzan. "To complement the Sayeret's work, we coordinate fully with the police. There are joint patrols and meetings. We don't work in a vacuum."
This should be the question central to the debate on Iraq.
For me, whether or not Washington should attack depends on the answer to one complicated question: Is that approach the best way of achieving the goal? That's a key issue not just for America's own course of action but for the precedent it sets. Bush's rationale for attack cannot be distinguished on principle from what, say, India might consider against Pakistan.
The only difference may be tactical: Does the move bring you closer to your goal of peace and security or further from it? That's the fundamental question Washington must grapple with now.
This is reasonable and I would like to see the two sides take this question on. For once forget the stupid attempts at scoring political points. Implying that oil and big business are pushing the war so they will profit. No chest beating and implying the other side just doesn't care about the security of Americans. That's all bullshit it gets us nowhere it distracts from the real issues and costs us precious time. If you try to hide other issues by talking war or are afraid to make you feelings on war public you don't deserve to be in charge of our defence.
Arab media is pretty sure everyone (namely America) hates them. Right now the object of their derision is Condoleeza Rice.
Al-Khaleej newspaper in the United Arab Emirates said "Queen Condoleezza is behaving as if she was the brains running the world, as if she can change the world and, more precisely, the Muslim world."
"This old-fashioned queen is behaving as if she was superior to one billion Muslim people and as if she was capable of deciding the fate of the Muslim world: this is a rare case of arrogance and insolence," it said.
I didn't notice any questions of the scholars or newspapers asking 'why do they hate us?'.
A german coroner has concluded that Saddam has at least three doubles.
"They have apparently undergone surgery to appear to look like the statesman," ZDF said. "The doubles have mastered Saddam's gestures and perfectly mimic Saddam, with only tiny details separating them from the real Saddam Hussein."
ZDF also quoted a physician, Moslem Al-Asadi, whom it said has been studying lookalikes for years.
"Between Saddam Hussein and another person who appeared in Iraqi television I was able to detect five different facial differences between the original and the double presented by Iraqi television," he was quoted telling ZDF.
Sheik Yassin is quoted on the Hamas website as telling Arafat the following: "You must stand tall and not surrender to this enemy who wants to put an end to the [Palestinian] struggle and the Intifada. Be strong; do not bow your head; die honorably; do not die defeated and humiliated. An end to the struggle will mean defeat for the Palestinian people. Therefore, one must
always endeavor to continue the struggle until the enemy is defeated."
Whew! That was close call. We can all pack up and go home now. Some nuclear/bio/chem/security experts (read reporters) with their very sophisticated equipment (pens and note pad) were admitted to two suspected WMD sites in Iraq and have declared them WMD-freezones. The brand new smocks and still-wet hand painted signs reading "MILK" is good enough for me.
Director general Sinan Sayed, 46, claimed he merely made gunpowder for small weapons and missiles that fell within UN guidelines. Mr Blair says the site makes phosgene, which can be used as a "precursor" to nerve agents. But Mr Sayed claimed it was produced legitimately as a by-product when the Iraqis made a substance to stabilise gunpowder. He added: "This dossier is making a ridiculous claim because we cannot get the phosgene out of the pipework even if we wanted to." Mr Sayed also denied Mr Blair's claims that the site, extensively bombed during the Gulf War, had been partly dismantled by weapons inspectors. He insisted: "There are no weapons of mass destruction here."
We also saw a rundown concrete-clad complex of pipework and steaming metal containers throwing smoke into a room, which had puddles of acidic-looking liquid splattered on the floor. Here the Iraqis claimed they made their gunpowder stabilising agent. But there were no scientists with us to verify that.
At the Sera Institute in Amiriya, the Iraqis claim the plant helps make chemicals that aid the analysis of blood, and typhoid and salmonella vaccine. Director general Dr Karim Obeid, 43, said: "There is nothing for the UN to be worried about here, absolutely nothing."
We saw two lines of steel silos, stinking of kerosene and carrying fire hazard warnings. Worryingly, we found hundreds of tiny unused and out-of-date phials of typhoid and salmonella vaccines lying in the 48C heat. Plastic containers of sulphuric acid lay nearby, alongside other bottles of suspicious-looking liquid. In Britain, all of this would alarm the Health and Safety Executive.
We went to the new building targeted by Mr Blair but found nothing to arouse suspicion - just empty fridges. Around us bored-looking workers waiting to go home asked: "What were you looking for?"
Still notconvinced? What are you some sort of racist Islam-Hating war monger who can so easily deny this hard evidence? I mean he told us right to our faces they don't have any WMD.
Well said. The question is if you don't think war on Iraq is necessary give us a workable alternative.
There are no good options when it comes to Iraq. But can we at least avoid the sanctimonious pretence that doing nothing is so morally superior? All the anti-US, anti-war sentiment tends to neglect one crucial point. It would be better for everyone - but most particularly the people of Iraq - if there were the "regime change" the Bush Administration is demanding.
The real arguments are whether to try to achieve that - in particular, whether even a short war is worth the risk to Iraqi civilian lives and the world's fragile grip on a stability of sorts. Despite the recent enthusiasm for the complicated politics of the United Nations and Security Council, it is evident that the UN has failed to counter reinvigorated Iraqi weapons programs over the past several years. Whether readmitted weapons inspectors can be any more effective now is still dubious. But it should be acknowledged that the only reason the UN is even making an attempt at this is precisely because of US belligerence and the threat to take military action alone if the Security Council does not. Otherwise, everyone would just conveniently ignore the whole thing. Again.
When the Clinton administration faced a similar impasse, it bellowed loudly and repeatedly, threatened huge military retaliation and - in the end - backed right off. Its apocalyptic warnings were reduced to supporting a continuation of the increasingly porous oil embargo and a brief bombing assault, followed up by regular but limited raids against military targets in the no-fly zones. The power reality was that Saddam Hussein had called the Americans' bluff and everyone knew it.
Now it is also consistent to insist that any tyrant - no matter how bad - is a problem for that country alone unless he is just such a threat to others. It's one reason why the Labor Party is insisting that there must be greater evidence to justify any military action. But in the end, these "facts" always come down to interpretations and judgements about credibility and intent.
It's also true that all such tests are selective. Pick your despot. The regime in North Korea, for example, is obviously a potential danger to the world, particularly given its obvious interest in building its weapons of mass destruction. Yet in the decades since the Korean War, the US has pursued diplomacy as its only option even if Bush now describes the country as part of the "axis of evil".
Double standards have always been the standard fare of international behaviour. Already, the new war on terrorism - as opposed to the old war on communism - means the US is again more willing to overlook any little problems with democratic values among its potential allies, for example. It is also even less likely to punish Israel for its self-declared "war on terror" despite the collateral damage the Israeli actions are causing the US.
But it is no longer willing to overlook a particularly vicious and unpredictable regime in Iraq. That means war remains more likely than not - and quite possibly without the backing of the Security Council. It's easy to criticise the likely results and the dangers involved. Finding an acceptable alternative - that will work - is much harder.
I didn't realize that Democrat hyporicy ran that deep.
The Clinton administration (not the wild unilateralist cowboy George W. Bush) and Blair's Government, with Australian support, cited that resolution as UN authority to attack Iraqi WMD facilities in 1998 after the weapons inspectors had been prevented from doing their work.
I'll have to look that up tomorrow.
Another good piece of the article.
The best speech in the debate – a speech strangely ignored in the reporting – was given by Kim Beazley, intellectually the best-equipped politician Labor has ever produced on strategic issues. To read his assessment of the Bush administration, and contrast it with the shrill and politically semi-literate anti-Americanism of those hitherto hidden Metternichs of the caucus such as Harry Quick, Tanya Plibersek and Carmen Lawrence, you would think they were living on different planets.
Beazley argued that since September 11 the US "has enjoyed unprecedented success in mobilising an enormous coalition around the globe". He lists some of the successes: "The relationship between the US and China has not been as good as it is now during the entirety of George W. Bush's presidency and for a fair bit of the Clinton presidency . . . Relations with Russia are better now than they have been at any time since [World War II]. Probably, too, the US has the best relationships it has ever enjoyed with all players in South Asia . . . This is a formidable diplomatic achievement which, when allied to the fact that the Taliban has been overthrown in Afghanistan, constitutes a nine-month period in American history for which you cannot find an equivalence of more effective American action around the globe."
Where the hell are the lead stories about Zimbabwe on ABC CNN CBS or NBC? If this were taking place anywhere else to anyone but a bunch of white farmers. There would be aid concerts, grand international summits in exotic locals to bewail the fate of the people, and world leaders would be tripping over themselves to denounce the racist regime of oppression.
The wife of Zimbabwe's army commander threatened to kill a white farmer, telling him as she occupied his farm that she had "not tasted white blood" for 22 years, according to court documents obtained here on Wednesday.
When Staunton offered a handshake, "she told me she had no intention of shaking hands with a white pig," the farmer said.
"She stated that she had not tasted white blood since 1980 (independence) and missed the experience, and that she needed just the slightest excuse to kill somebody," said Staunton.
"She ordered one of her guards to 'kill the white bastards'," he said. The gunman cocked his weapon, but did not open fire.
General Chiwenga is reported to have been allocated another highly sophisticated farm in the Marondera district, in an area where one of his neighbours is Air Marshal Perence Shiri, the commander of the air force who has forced about 300 previously resettled peasants to get off the farm he has seized.
During the occupation, Mrs Chiwenga declared herself to be "the new Mbuya Nehanda," a woman spirit medium venerated in Zimbabwe as the leader of an uprising against white occupation in 1896.
Staunton said she also boasted she was "filthy rich."
Even the UN Commission on Human Rights finally had to say something about what is happening in Zimbabwe.
Developments in Zimbabwe have been identified as a threat to democracy and the rule of law and as a key reason for the flight of capital from the regional economy. In a hard-hitting statement, the Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, Dat'o Param Cumaraswamy, expressed "outrage over the further deterioration of the rule of law in Zimbabwe".
The Kurds are claimingthat the al-Qaeda linked group in Northern Iraq is on its last legs.
"There has been a complete internal collapse since the arrest of their leader," a PUK official said, speaking by telephone from the Syrian capital, Damascus. "There were five more yesterday," he added.
Dutch police earlier this month arrested Mullah Krekar, whose real name is Najmuddin Faraj Ahmad, an Iraqi Kurdish refugee who heads Ansar al-Islam. PUK officials have accused the group of links to al Qaeda, blamed by the United States for last year's Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Another small step. Arianna Airlines today inaugurated its first Europe to Kabul route.
Using an Airbus A300, Ariana Afghan Airlines will offer one flight per week from Frankfurt to Kabul via Istanbul (Turkey) and Sharja (United Arab Emirates). Along with this Wednesday service, Ariana Afghan Airlines intends to add soon a second weekly flight on Sundays.
Positive sighs of a slow but suremove toward economic gains in Afghanistan.
Treasury Undersecretary John Taylor praised Afghanistan's efforts to end inflation and spur economic development but acknowledged Tuesday that rebuilding the nation has lagged.
Taylor talked about some of the gains.
...new safeguards should ensure that money sent to Afghanistan winds up where it is supposed to go and is not skimmed off by warlords or government middlemen.
The Afghan government plans to introduce a new currency beginning Oct. 7, the one-year anniversary of when the first U.S. bombs fell on the country. Once the currency exchange is underway -- it is to last two months -- the Finance Ministry will launch reforms in the way customs revenue is collected and distributed, Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani said.
Taylor praised steps the Finance Ministry has taken to create an economic base. ''The Finance Ministry has put into place a financial accountability system to track revenue and spending. The currency exchange is ready. The new investment law will help to attract investors, and the government will cut export taxes,''
He pointed to a recently announced project to rebuild the road from Kabul south to Kandahar and then west to Herat as an example of a ''measurable goal.'' Roads are a priority, he said. And the formula used to get money and sign contracts for roads can be used for schools, hospitals and other national priorities. He also said security for reconstruction appears fine in Kabul and other large cities but in more remote areas, it is ''something to be addressed.''
Apologies for the light posting recently. Given the choice between FDIC auditors or blogging, I would surely choose blogging. It is, however, not really a choice per se. So, It could be another week or so till posts resume normal frequency.
Kids having trouble understanding the words of the Star Spangled Banner? Easy public school solution? Change the words. I mean, after all, what should they do? Teach them the meaning of the words? Yes? What are you, some kind of fascist?
Next up. Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence.
Want to know some more about Saddam. This piece by Mark Bowden is excellent. I know it was in the Atlantic Monthy a few months ago but, somehow I missed it then.
This is old but, still pretty amusing. The overthrow of the Taliban meant sprouting sattelite dishes which meant men watching porn.
Despite their lurid names - one is called "100 percent hardcore" - the porn channels are mild by Western standards, showing topless women gyrating around poles or reclining languorously as telephone numbers for sex chat-lines and mail-order videos scroll across the screen. But most Kandahar men, cut off from the outside world by decades of conflict and warlordism and then by the harsh rules of the Taliban, have never seen anything like it.
Many are uneasy. "This is not good for our society," said a 26-year-old man who works for an educational foundation. "People should not be watching such things. It's not right." But there is no shortage of viewers. In one guesthouse a group of bearded Afghan men sit glued to the screen, one of them frantically stabbing at the remote control to change the channel when a female Western aid worker walks into the room.
Abdul Wasi runs one of the many satellite television shops that have emerged in Kandahar since the Taliban left. He sells six-foot dishes for about $100 and eight-foot dishes with a digital receiver for about $250, importing the equipment from Pakistan. The small brick shop is surrounded by dozens of dishes littering the pavement. "I've been in business a month, and I have sold nearly 400 dishes," Wasi said. "My shop is always busy. Everybody wants to watch satellite television."
Navy Seals and their role in the war in Afghanistan.
Between October and the end of March, K-Bar - named for a military knife used by SEALs - took 107 detainees and tallied at least 115 confirmed enemy deaths, Harward said from his office at Naval Special Warfare headquarters in Coronado.
In Harward, K-Bar had a well-traveled commander who learned fluent Farsi in his youth in Tehran, Iran, where his father worked in the U.S. embassy. During a summer off from high school, he had hitchhiked through Afghanistan, but the land he saw during Operation Enduring Freedom had become much harsher, drier and poorer.
"It just seems like it had worn very hard," he said. "I think hope did not exist in their vocabulary."
In its size and scope, K-Bar - the vision of Rear Adm. Bert Calland, now in charge of Navy SEALs - added a new page to the playbook of the U.S. military, which in the past typically used Army, Navy and Air Force commandos in small numbers with limited support roles.
Missions included a search-and-destroy operation in January against a honeycomb complex of 70 caves near the Pakistani border. Inside, troops found piles of ammunition, tanks, rockets and communication equipment along with al-Qaida recruiting posters.
Hostile fighters fled the caves to nearby hills and K-Bar forces called in carrier-based Navy airstrikes, killing an unknown number of al-Qaida members.
"It's what I call the 'Gilligan's Island' operation. It started out as seven hours and ended up being nine days," said Harward, a rock-ribbed 46-year-old with deep-set blue eyes.
In late February, K-Bar captured Mullah Khairullah Kahirkawa, a former Taliban governor, Harward said. The night operation was put together with 30 minutes' notice when unmanned aircraft spotted a convoy leaving a compound where Khairullah was believed to be, he said.
As they struck deeper into al-Qaida's power structure, K-Bar began to see a new kind of enemy emerge.
Pointing to a photo his men took of an al-Qaida surveillance post high in the mountains, Harward said matter-of-factly: "We saw here, for the first time, when we killed these guys, these were not the dark-skinned Afghans. These were the red-haired, white-faced Chechens." The suspected al-Qaida members, who appeared to be well-funded and well-equipped, wore Adidas shoes as they manned an anti-helicopter weapon, Harward said.
K-Bar attracted some unwanted attention in a Jan. 23 nighttime raid at Hazar Qadam that killed about a dozen people, who turned out not to be al-Qaida or Taliban. But who they were remains unclear. Harward said Afghanistan is a place where the line between friend and foe is often blurred.
Harward said his men opened fire only after an Army Special Forces soldier was shot and wounded in the ankle.
"There were allegations that we shot people in their sleep, that we assassinated people," said Harward, who dismisses such claims. "If we want to assassinate someone, we just put two bullets in their head."
The Cuban Lobby now has its claws into the Czech Republic, apparently. Or maybe someone who is now liberated from the horrors of Communist rule knows a little something about life under people like Castro.
Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel, after meeting with President Bush in Washington, visits Miami. Why? Because he wants Cubans to regain their freedoms.
Florida International University very judiciously offered him an honorary doctorate but, after thanking the school for its gesture, Havel declined the distinction. That ceremony would have detracted from his objective: to show his solidarity with those who are politically persecuted in the last communist dictatorship in the West.
Havel has asked that the Nobel Peace Prize be awarded to Oswaldo Payá and wishes to keep media attention focused on the Cuban engineer who created the Varela Project. Havel does not want to be revered; he wants to be useful. That is his life sign.
A Somali woman living in the Netherlands has been put under police protection, after allegedly receiving death threats from extremist Muslims. On Dutch television earlier this week, Ayaan Hirsi Ali criticised fundamentalist Islamic communities for their treatment of women. Other Dutch Muslims who have been campaigning for women's rights say they too have been threatened, and that the Muslim community here in the Netherlands is increasingly divided.
So, remind me again why Pim was an extreme-right wing anti-immigration reactionary.
“Kuwait is the best ally of the Americans in the region and under no circumstances would Kuwait undermine that relationship,” says Abdullah Bishara, president of the Diplomatic Center for Strategic Studies and a former advisor to Kuwait’s Foreign Ministry. “The people here value the American umbrella and value our strategic partnership."
“Islamists understand the requirement of Kuwait’s security and the needs of the United States,” says Shafeeq Ghabra, head of the Center of Strategic and Future Studies at Kuwait University. “They support ousting Saddam Hussein yet at the same time they are critical of the American policy in Palestine and Afghanistan.”
Mohammed Mulaifi, a student of Islamic law and a member of the Salafist sect, said he supports bin Laden’s efforts to oust the US from the Gulf but admitted that Kuwait was a different case.
“Kuwait is an American base and I oppose this. But most Kuwaitis support the US military presence here,” he says.
“Saddam is a liar, he’s just playing for time,” says Tareq al-Adwan, a manager of an insurance company.
“Diplomacy won’t work with Saddam,” agrees Khaled al-Ustez, an employee at the Kuwait Port Authority. “The Americans should attack straight away.”
For many Kuwaitis, the presence of American troops has helped dispel fears that Saddam might attack the country again.
“I definitely feel safer with the Americans here,” says Mariam al-Hilel, a lawyer. “The Iraqis are cowards. Saddam Hussein would never attack us while the Americans are here.”
Palestinian security chief's men torture people accused of being collaborators? Where is the UN? Where is the media? Where is Robert Fisk?
He said that for the first month, he was tortured almost daily inside his small cell. "They beat me with telephone cables all over my body. For many days my head was covered with a stinking bag. They would also tie me to the ceiling by my arms. On other occasions, they made me stand for several hours on a small cup." He said his interrogators threatened several times to shoot him if he did not confess. Last April, he added, his interrogators informed him that a decision had been taken "on the highest levels" to kill him. He was blindfolded, handcuffed, and asked for his final words. He was then taken into the back yard. There, the cover was removed from his eyes, and he saw a firing squad of five masked, uniformed policemen.
"They tied me to an electricity poll and pretended that I was about to be executed," he said. "I shouted out that I'm innocent and that Islam does not permit killing innocent people, but they only looked at me with smiles. Then the policemen aimed their rifles at me and waited for the order. Seconds later one of the officers shouted: 'Fire.' I could hear them pulling the triggers, but I didn't feel the pain.
"For a moment, I didn't know if I was alive or dead. I heard shots, but there was no pain or blood. I quickly realized that it was a mock execution. It was the worst experience in my life. For a while, I thought I was dead. Only when I heard them laughing did I understand that they were just trying to intimidate me.
"They agreed to release me for health reasons; that's what they wrote in the papers they gave me. If it wasn't for the bribe, I would have been dead by now."
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