Blair seeks new powers to attack rogue
states
By Andy McSmith and Jo Dillon
13 July -- Tony Blair is appealing to the heads of Western
governments to agree a new world order that would justify the war in
Iraq even if Saddam Hussein’s elusive weapons of mass destruction
are never found.
It would also give Western powers the authority to attack any other
sovereign country whose ruler is judged to be inflicting unnecessary
suffering on his own people.
A Downing Street document, circulated among foreign heads of state who
are in London for a summit, has provoked a fierce row between Blair
and the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.
Schröder is in London for a summit of “progressive” governments,
convened by Mr Blair, which opens today.
Blair has involved British troops in five conflicts overseas in his
six years in office, and appears to be willing to take part in many
more.
The document echoes his well-known views on “rights and responsibilities”
by saying that even for self-governing nation states “the right
to sovereignty brings associated responsibilities to protect citizens”.
This phrase is immediately followed by a paragraph which appears to
give the world’s democracies carte blanche to send troops anywhere
there is civil unrest or a tyrant who refuses to mend his ways. It says:
“Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal
war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question
is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention
yields to the international responsibility to protect.”
A political row with Schröder will add to Blair’s difficulties
at a time when the American and British intelligence services have fallen
out with each other over the question of whether Saddam had been seeking
to construct a nuclear bomb.
In Washington, the US government has withdrawn the claim that Iraqi
agents were in Niger trying to buy uranium. The head of the CIA, George
Tenet, has accepted the blame for allowing this claim to be included
in President George Bush’s State of the Nation speech, in which
it was attributed to British intelligence. The former foreign secretary
Robin Cook has challenged Blair to publish any evidence Britain has
to back up the uranium story.
He told the Independent on Sun.: “The longer they delay coming
up with it, the greater the suspicion will become that they don’t
really believe it themselves.
“There is one simple question the Government must answer when the
Commons meets on Monday: why did their evidence not convince the CIA?
If it was not good enough to be in the President’s address, it
was not good enough to go in the Prime Minister’s dossier.
“A month ago I gave Tony Blair the opportunity to admit that in
good faith he had got it wrong when he warned of the uranium deal. Now
that President Bush has made just that admission it looks as if Tony
Blair would have been wise to get his in first.”
But Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, insisted yesterday the information
did not come from British intelligence but from some other, unnamed
country, and that it was accurate.
In a letter to the chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee,
Donald Anderson, Straw said: “UK officials were confident that
the dossier’s statement was based on reliable intelligence which
we had not shared with the US.”
This public disagreement with the CIA, coupled with anger in Britain
over the fate of British suspects held at the US base at Guantanamo
Bay in Cuba, forms an awkward background for Blair’s visit to Washington
on Thursday, when he will meet President Bush.
Dr .Hans Blix, the former head of the UN weapons inspection team in
Iraq, has told the IoS that he believes the British government “over-interpreted”
the available intelligence about Iraq’s weapons.
Blix was particularly scathing about the claim made in a British government
dossier, released last September, that Iraq had chemical and biological
weapons “deployable within 45 minutes”.
“I think that was a fundamental mistake. I don’t know how
they calculated this figure of 45 minutes. That seems pretty far off
the mark to me,” he said.
The Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, Menzies Campbell, said:
“Day by day the case for an independent scrutiny of the lead-up
to the war against Iraq becomes irresistible. Only full disclosure can
restore the reputation of this Government.”
The failure to find the weapons is damaging public trust in the Prime
Minister and his relations with the Labor Party, with many backbench
MPs who supported the decision to go to war now saying they might have
changed their minds if they had known that the weapons might never be
found.
The former international development secretary Clare Short will urge
the Prime Minister in an interview broadcast on GMTV today to resign
before things get “nastier”. This brought a strong rebuke
yesterday from the Home Secretary, David Blunkett. He said: “Clare
Short is being typically self-indulgent. It is important to get behind
the Prime Minister and focus on the things that matter to people, like
decent opportunities and economic prosperity. I do not understand why
people would plot to try to change the most successful leader in the
Labour Party’s history.”
There was also support for the Prime Minister from his old ally, Bill
Clinton. At a London conference organised by Peter Mandelson and attended
by the Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, the Canadian Prime Minister
Jean Chrétien and hundreds of Labour Party supporters, the former
US president urged the left to stop attacking Mr Blair or risk the renaissance
of conservatism.
“If we want to prevail we will have to learn how to make our case
better,” he said. “We’re living in a new world in which
we will be swallowed whole if we do not, and all the evidence of the
good we have done will be lost if we give in to inter-party squabbles
on the left and lay down in the face of attacks from the right.”
Independent (UK)
Companies profit amid genocide in Congo
By Jeff Shantz
July 9-- The death toll from the ongoing war in the Congo,
which began in 1998, is higher than in any other since World War II,
with an estimated 4.7 million killed in the last four years alone. The
International Rescue Committee (IRC), an aid agency based in New York,
reports that the mortality rate in the Congo is higher than any other
country on the planet.
According to IRC president George Rupp, the crisis in the Congo is “a
humanitarian catastrophe of horrid and shocking proportions. The worst
mortality projections in the event of a lengthy war in Iraq, and the
death toll from all the recent wars in the Balkans, don’t even
come close.”
Despite these horrible facts, the crisis has gone largely unnoticed
and unreported upon in the West. As David Johnson, the director of IRC
operations in eastern Congo, has stated: “This is the worst calamity
in Africa this century, and one which the world has consistently found
reasons to overlook.”
The war started in August 1998, when an uprising backed by the Ugandan
and Rwandan governments (which receive their main support from the US
and Britain) was launched in the country’s eastern regions against
the government of Laurent Kabila. The Ugandan government claimed it
was defending its western borders against rebels based in Rwanda, while
the Rwandan force claimed to be defending itself against Hutu militias
on the Congo border. Apparently this border protection required Rwandan
forces to occupy the diamond-rich town of Kisangani, 700 miles inside
the Congolese border.
The conflict quickly spread, as combatants from Angola, Namibia and
Zimbabwe entered the war, ostensibly in support of Kabila’s government.
There has been evidence of involvement by mercenary companies, including
the US company MPRI, Britain’s Sandline and the South African Executive
Outcome.
The responses to the crisis, or failures to respond, by Western governments
have been motivated by their interests in the vast mineral resources
of eastern Congo. Most of the Congo’s gold production comes from
the northeastern parts of the country that have experienced most of
the conflict.
The main gold exploration ventures in Congo are those of Banro, a Canadian
company cited for violations by the UN Security Council, and the Anglo-American/Barrick
joint venture. Banro, through its 93%-owned subsidiary, SAKIMA SARL,
controls 10 mining permits and 47 mining concessions covering an area
of 10,271 square kilometres of eastern Congo. After an agreement with
the government of Congo, Banro came to hold 100% title to the Twangiza,
Kamituga, Lugushwa and Namoya gold deposits.
South Africa’s AngloGold, the world’s largest gold producer,
and Barrick Gold of Canada, the second largest gold producer, joined
together on an exploration venture encompassing 57,000 square kilometres
of north-eastern Congo in the area along the Ugandan border which has
been torn by conflict. Barrick had succeeded, in 1996, in getting the
Gold Office of Kilomoto, the government monopoly of the country’s
former dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, to transfer mining rights over almost
all of its 82,000 square kilometres of land to Barrick. The area holds
an estimated 100 tons of gold in reserve. George Bush senior was instrumental
in winning the Barrick deal.
Another Canadian outfit, First Quantum Minerals, a firm with copper-mining
interests, was cited by a special UN panel for paying government ministers
to obtain mining rights. According to the report, First Quantum offered
the government a US$100 million down payment. The payment list included
the national security minister, the director of the national intelligence
agency and the former minister of the presidency.
Source: Green Left Weekly
WTO: Agricultural talks enter crucial
stage
By Eva Cheng
July 9-- On July 28-30, the World Trade Organisation (WTO)
will hold yet another “mini-ministerial” — its fourth
since the Doha ministerial summit in November 2001 launched a new round
of global trade talks.
The meeting, in Montreal, is an eleventh-hour attempt to cobble together
enough agreement among WTO member-states to avoid the September 10-14
mid-term review, to be held in Cancun, Mexico, looking like a flop.
The first post-Doha mini-ministerial was held in Sydney last November.
A month later, the first major deadline of the negotiations was missed.
Another mini-ministerial, held in Tokyo in February, failed to achieve
a breakthrough. Three more key deadlines failed to be met in the lead
up to a further mini-ministerial held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on
June 21-22. It, again, failed to turn things round.
The Doha-initiated round of talks were scheduled for completion in December
2004, with new trade rules set to take effect on January 1, 2005.
Make or break
While the negotiations cover about a dozen areas, agricultural trade
is widely viewed as the “make-or-break” issue. The round operates
on the basis that “nothing is agreed unless everything is agreed”.
It is widely believed that many countries will be willing to go easier
in other areas if they get what they want on agriculture.
However, the talks on agriculture are not going well. A basic framework
— “modality” in WTO-speak — on agriculture was scheduled
to be agreed upon by March 31. But that target wasn’t met. Three
months later, not only had the opposing negotiating positions not been
bridged, some of them had hardened.
The most widely reported dispute is between the US and the 17-member
Cairns Group of agricultural exporters on the one hand, and the European
Union (EU) and Japan, on the other. Australia chairs the Cairns Group,
which mainly supports US positions.
The US-Cairns camp is opposed to nominal export subsidies for farm products,
and holds the EU as the key culprit. Other forms of subsidies that indirectly
enhance exports are rarely scrutinised.
The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy provides about US$60 billion
in subsidies to EU agricultural producers, mainly in the form of export
subsidies. However, this is only a fraction of the $300 billion-plus
of farm subsidies of different shapes and forms that the rich countries
dish out each year to their richest farmers and agribusiness corporations.
The US has managed to massage the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), the
WTO framework which regulates agricultural trade, in such a way that
Washington’s huge farm subsidies are ruled “WTO-consistent”.
US farm subsidies act to depress world farm product prices, making imports
from the US and EU cheaper than homegrown products in many underdeveloped
countries, thus forcing local farmers out of business.
The US government will provide $180 billion in farm subsidies over the
next 10 years under a farm bill introduced by President George Bush
in 2002.
Crooked agreement
The US is not the only rich country to benefit from the crooked nature
of the AoA. Like the rest of the WTO trade rule regime, AoA builds on
the hypothesis that minimal trade restrictions will bring maximum benefits
to all countries. It was introduced in January 1, 1995, coinciding with
the formation of the WTO, and extended global trade rules for the first
time to agricultural products.
The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the WTO’s predecessor,
started in 1948.
The agricultural rules were structured under three main headings —
market access, domestic support, and export subsidies. The first was
to be expanded, and the other two minimized over time. All tariff and
non-tariff barriers to trade were to be converted to a composite total
— “aggregate measure of support” — and “bounded”
at that level, for forced reduction within a defined period (by 36%
within six years for developed member countries and by 24% within nine
years for underdeveloped member countries). Reduction is exempted for
the least developed member countries.
Domestic support is to be reduced by 20% and 13.3% respectively by the
developed and underdeveloped countries. Export subsidies must be slashed
by 21% in volume terms and 36% in value terms.
Throughout the agreement, concessions were incorporated nominally for
underdeveloped countries, giving the impression that their interests
and difficulties were given serious consideration. The reality is quite
different.
Some domestic farm supports are exempted from reduction or challenge
on the excuse that they are not “trade distorting”. Those
supposedly distorting trade only minimally receive “green box”
protection and those linked to production control can claim “blue
box” exemption, leaving only the output-enhancing measures —
labelled “amber box” — targeted for reduction.
Seven years after they were allowed for, these exemptions were found
to be a major source of abuse, primarily to the advantage of the richer
countries.
In the January 1999 issue of Third World Insurgence, Bhagirath Lal Das,
the former director of international trade programs in the UN Conference
on Trade and Development, said the exempted subsidies “are generally
prevalent in developed countries… whereas subsidies which are generally
prevalent in developing countries, e.g., investment subsidy and input
subsidy, covered by Article 6, do not have such dispensation.”
These exemptions were tailored for the rich countries, since countries
which didn’t have them weren’t allowed to have them after
the AoA was introduced.
Writing in the July/August 2000 edition of the bulletin of the Federal
Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Stanford University’s Professor Timothy
Josling admitted it is “widely accepted” that the AoA “did
little to liberalize trade in agricultural products and improve market
access,” adding that “tariffs on agricultural goods are still
on average about three times as high as on manufacture goods”.
The ratio of agricultural to industrial tariffs in industrialised countries
was, in fact, nearly 10-to-1, indicating the rich countries’ greater
success in circumventing the WTO’s flimsy rules to maintain effective
barriers to agricultural imports.
Following a schedule decided during the Uruguay Round, the renegotiation
of the AoA started in March 2000. Three drafts have been put forward
so far (in December 2002, February and March, respectively). They have
essentially the same approach and have all been knocked back by the
majority of WTO member-countries. They were all drafted by pro-US WTO
bureaucrat Stuart Harbinson and had attracted no complaints from Washington.
The EU’s main objection to those drafts was that the US is too
aggressive in demanding the EU reduce its farm sector supports while
allowing US farm subsidies to hide behind the “WTO-consistent”
support categories, such as export credits and food aid. The EU accuses
the US of using “food aid” as a means to indirectly subsidise
its agricultural exports.
In a joint statement issued on March 18, EU agricultural commissioner
Franz Fischler and EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy wrote: “We
find the [March] draft unbalanced against those developed countries
like the EU that have pursued an internal reform path and in favour
of those who had increased trade-distorting support.”
The Third World’s concerns are more fundamental. After seven years
of implementation of the Uruguay Round agreements, the leaders of the
underdeveloped countries have come to realise that many of the benefits
that they have been promised within the AoA, and the trade-offs of benefits
between the AoA and other areas of the global trade rules, have not
been delivered.
Speaking to a February 19-21 NGO meeting in Geneva, Bhagirath Lal Das
said the Harbinson [February] draft is “grossly inadequate”
because it neither “addresses the basic problems in the trade in
agriculture”, nor does it “take into account the basic problems
of the developing countries in this area”.
Uneven ‘playing field’
Lal Das said the main problems were that “the playing field in
the international trade in agriculture is highly uneven and distorted”
and the underdeveloped countries suffered “additional handicaps”
due to “their weak economies and heavy dependence of their populations
on agriculture”. He said the AoA in fact enhanced those distortions
and handicaps.
On June 10, a group of 27 poor countries put forward a position paper
on the Doha Round, calling for a refocus on the promised “developmental
dimension” of the whole Doha package, the need for “overall
delicate balance” and the importance of all member countries participating
in the WTO’s decision-making processes. The WTO is infamous for
marginalising the input of Third World countries.
The statement said agriculture is of central importance but cannot be
taken as a “self-contained” issue. China, Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela,
India, Malaysia, Mexico, Argentina, and South Africa are signatories
to the statement.
In the Sharm el-Sheikh mini-ministerial, Singapore led the call for
a brand new draft on agriculture, supported by Japan, South Korea, and
Switzerland.
The rich countries’ bid to skew the AoA rules to their advantage
comes as no surprise. To maintain their domination of world farm product
trade, the US and EU seek to maintain and increase the underdeveloped
countries’ dependence upon food imports by driving local farmers
out of business.
Source: From Green Left Weekly
US appoints governing body in Iraq, troops
to stay indefinitely
Compiled by Eamon Martin
July 16 (AGR)— Facing mounting attacks in Iraq, the
US military said on Monday, July 14, that thousands of soldiers from
the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) would not return home by September
as expected and instead stay in Iraq indefinitely. The key Army division
was the first American unit to enter Baghdad during the war.
Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, the division’s commander, last week announced
plans for the division to return home during July and August after a
protracted deployment in the region. But the Army reversed itself on
Monday, saying the return of 9,000 of the division’s troops had
been put on hold.
The Pentagon is hard pressed to find ground force replacements, either
American or foreign, and the top commander in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid,
says it is important to maintain the current level of troops, which
include about 147,000 Americans and about 13,000 from Britain and other
countries.
On Sunday, Blount wrote in an e-mail message to soldier’s family
members that he had “disappointing news.” A decision was made
“at the highest levels,” he said, to maintain the current
force levels “due to the uncertainty of the situation in Iraq and
the recent increase in attacks on the coalition forces.”
“That means that part of 3ID [3rd Infantry Division] will be staying
here for a while longer. I wish I could tell you how long that is, but
everything I have told you before has changed.”
Earlier that day an American soldier was killed and six others were
wounded in a bold guerrilla attack in Baghdad.
Unidentified assailants had fired several rocket propelled grenades
at a military convoy of the Third Infantry Division.
American troops have been the target of daily sniper shootings, rocket-propelled
grenades and other attacks. Some 600 attacks on US troops have occurred
in the three months since the end of the war, with 32 US combat deaths
and over 1000 wounded. Each day sees between ten and 25 violent incidents,
retired General Tommy Franks’ woefully announced last Friday.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to expect this to go
on,” US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said two days later.
“Is it an important thing to be doing? Yes. Is it tough? You bet.
Are more people going to be killed? You bet. Does it cost some money?
You bet. Can we tell the world or anybody else precisely what it’s
going to cost or how long it’s going to last? No,” Rumsfeld
said.
The latest string of enemy attacks on US soldiers in Iraq had one Asheville,
NC couple on edge after their 25-year-old son, Jonathan Pruden, sustained
shrapnel injuries to the face and legs from a grenade attack in central
Baghdad on July 1.
Rumsfeld predicted Sunday that attacks on coalition troops in Iraq could
grow “more vicious” this summer. “We’re still in
a war,” he said.
That day, Iraqi civilian police and occupation forces exchanged fire
at a military checkpoint in the Iraqi capital.
Monday’s assault occurred on the first full day of private deliberations
by Iraq’s new 25-member, US-hand-picked Governing Council. The
Council held an inaugural ceremony which took place under heavy security
that included American soldiers in combat gear, CIA agents in plain
clothes and Iraqi security guards. An hour after the council members
finished meeting, an unknown assailant threw an explosive device from
a speeding taxicab at a car parked nearby, engulfing the vehicle in
flames.
Iraqi officials said the Council would send a delegation to New York
this month to claim Iraq’s seat at the United Nations. The delegation
will include Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the CIA-funded Iraqi National
Congress; Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations,
and Akila al-Hashemi, who worked in Iraq’s Foreign Ministry under
Saddam Hussein.
But final control of Iraq still rests with L. Paul Bremer — the
US occupation’s administrator of Iraq and a major architect of
the council. That reality, and the fact the council was selected rather
than elected, has led to criticism.
The council’s limits were laid out plainly on Monday by Bremer
after a meeting with representatives of the Iraqi business community,
the World Bank and members of the new Iraqi political body.
Asked whether the Council would have the authority to sign contracts
and make decisions about privatizing state corporations, Bremer responded,
“The coalition made it very clear in its discussions yesterday
with the Governing Council that we consider that the coalition has very
broad authorities to determine the direction of the Iraqi economy.”
Bremer said on Tuesday Iraq should consider privatizing its state-owned
sectors and allowing foreign investment in its oil industry before a
permanent sovereign government takes over.
Bremer said that the Governing Council needed to give clear backing
to the entry of foreign capital to reassure private investors.
“Everybody knows we cannot wait until there is an elected government
here to start economic reform,” Bremer said.
Washington hopes the daily attacks on US troops will decline if Iraqis
feel the occupying powers are transferring authority to local leaders.
On the streets of Baghdad, some Iraqis felt the council had too many
former exiles, while others also feared the body was just a tool of
the United States.
“We cannot back the council. It is backed by America and it won’t
change anything. America has just made empty promises,” said Sabah
Kathim, an ice-seller.
In a newspaper office downtown, designer Hamid al-Gailani wept in front
of his colleagues. Gailani said he was upset by the preponderance of
exile leaders, like Chalabi and Pachachi, who had been abroad during
the painful years of sanctions.
‘’I don’t know them,’’ he said. “Lots
of them were wearing ties by Yves St. Laurent, Armani ... I’ve
seen their shoes. They’re European.’’
Raids and detentions increase
The US Army’s raids on Iraqi homes escalated on Saturday, July
12, with a fourth large offensive in central Iraq called Operation Ivy
Serpent. Ivy Serpent’s stated aim was to discourage potential anti-American
attacks ahead of holidays of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
The following day, the sudden debut of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing
Council asserted it’s authority by banning the holidays.
During Operation Ivy Serpent’s first few days of efforts to crush
insurgency, four Iraqis were killed and more than 226 people were arrested
in overnight raids in towns between Baqubah and Balad along the River
Tigris.
Ivy Serpent follows other robust-sounding operations such as Peninsula
Strike, Desert Scorpion and Desert Sidewinder, all of which were followed
by more and better-orchestrated attacks on American patrols.
About 3,500 Iraqis have been “retained” from Operations Desert
Scorpion and Sidewinder, Gen. Tommy Franks stated.
The army’s operations have been complex, high-tech nighttime affairs.
In Saturday’s night raids, AC-130 gunships flew over neighborhoods,
as Apache and Kiowa helicopters hovered. Tanks established security
cordons, and Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles carrying infantrymen
stormed houses. Unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicles gave commanders
and tacticians at headquarters a bird’s-eye view of the action.
In the village of Mutlaq Nayif, loudspeakers ordered residents to get
out of their homes.
Iraqi citizens who have been detained by coalition forces are complaining
bitterly about their treatment in the American-run prisons.
Qais Mohammed al-Saliman, 54, is an Iraqi engineer who returned to Baghdad
in early May after having lived in Denmark since 1990. On May 6, he
was arrested when the car he was in was stopped on a popular street
along the Tigris River. He said he was never told why he was being arrested.
“They treated me badly. It was very hot, and they put me on the
ground with a heavy shoe on my back,’’ he said. “Then
a TV truck came, and they pretended to arrest me again for the media.’’
Saliman was taken to “Camp Cropper,’’ a detention facility
at the Baghdad International Airport, where more than 1,000 Iraqi men
sit and sleep under tent canopies in the open air, receiving a single
meal per day.
“They asked me about Saddam Hussein, and I said that he was in
hell,’’ said Saliman, who speaks English well. “I showed
them my Danish passport, but it didn’t make a difference.’’
Saliman was held 33 days, and had no way of letting his elderly mother
know where he was.
“We Iraqis are people who have high culture. We are educated. I
told one of the guards: You may be a cowboy, but we are not Indians.
The Americans came here talking about cooperation, and I was treated
like an animal in a zoo in my own country.’’
Last week, human rights group Amnesty International issued a report
saying they had received repeated accounts of mistreatment of detainees,
including beatings and a lack of water and toilet facilities at detention
centers.
Low morale
Sitting ducks for snipers’ bullets, far from home and unable to
contact their families, US troops in Iraq are finding their morale slipping
away.
“We didn’t win this war, not at all,” said reserve infantryman
Eric Holt, on guard outside the Republican Palace in Baghdad. “I
don’t know what I’m doing here and I don’t like what’s
happening in this city,” continued the 28-year-old from New York
State. “It ain’t right for the folks here. You know, there
are a whole lot of our girls getting pregnant just so they can go home
quick.”
Morale among troops has plunged, not least because of new orders that
could see them there for a year instead of six months. Many troops and
officers interviewed this week were scathing in their opinions of top
US officials, right up to the commander-in-chief.
“George Bush goes on the television last week telling whoever’s
shooting at us to ‘bring it on’,” said one commanding
officer bitterly. “Easy for him when he ain’t here.”
Soldier after soldier spoke of being demoralized, of tolerance stretched
to breaking point. Many soldiers are beyond desperate to get home.
The Pentagon has nearly doubled the estimated military cost of the war
on Iraq to $3.9billion a month as the former US military commander for
the country warned troop levels would not be reduced “for the foreseeable
future.”
US troops were grumbling Friday at retired General Franks’ prediction
that soldiers could be stationed on Iraq’s boiling desert plains
for up to four years.
In Washington, congressional critics kept up their questioning of the
administration’s justifications for going to war and its characterizations
of the current outlook in Iraq.
“I’m deeply disturbed by the kind of happy face we’re
trying to put on this situation,” Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif.,
said during a sharp exchange with Franks, who stepped down Monday as
head of the military command overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan.
More than 70 American soldiers have died in Iraq since Bush declared
major combat over May 1.
The growing death toll has intensified pressure on the Bush administration
to defend itself against charges that it misled the public by using
dubious intelligence to justify the war.
Sources: Agence France-Presse, Associated Press, Black
Mountain News, Boston Globe, Guardian (UK), Independent (UK), International
Herald Tribune , Los Angeles Times, NBC, New York Times, Reuters, San
Jose Mercury News, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, Times (UK)
US blocks Tehran-Tokyo oil deal
By Doug Lorimer
July 9-- Claiming that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons
program, US government officials have pressured Japan to abandon the
development of a huge oil project there. According to a report in the
July 2 edition of the Tokyo daily Mainichi Shimbun, US national security
adviser Condoleeza Rice and deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage
issued the “request” in late June via Japan’s US ambassador.
The Japanese government and a consortium of Japanese companies had been
negotiating with Tehran to develop the Azadegan oil field, one of the
largest in Iran with an estimated 26 billion barrels in reserves.
Iran is Japan’s third biggest oil supplier and the Azadegan project
was expected to yield 300,000 barrels of crude oil per day — almost
doubling Iran’s supply of oil to Japan, which has no oil reserves
of its own and imports 4 million barrels a day.
According to the Mainichi Shimbun report, Tokyo had expected the $2.5
billion project to become a new source of energy supply for Japan after
the Arabian Oil Company, Japan’s top oil field developer, lost
its oil-drilling rights in Al Khafji, Saudi Arabia, in 2000.
“Given recent revelations about Iran’s nuclear programs and
efforts being made through the International Atomic Energy Agency to
deal with the threat Iran poses, this would be a particularly unfortunate
time to go forward with major new oil and gas deals”, US State
Department spokesperson Richard Boucher told reporters on June 30.
With Russian assistance, Iran is building a nuclear power plant at the
port city of Bushehr. Washington claims the plant is part of a secret
Iranian nuclear weapons program. Tehran claims that the Bushehr plant
will enable Iran to reduce the amount of oil that is needed for domestic
energy consumption, thus increasing the amount that can used to earn
export revenues.
After receiving the “request” from Washington, the Japanese
government decided to postpone the signing of the Azadegan deal.
Meanwhile, Iranian officials have revealed that more than 4000 people
were arrested during last month’s pro-reform protests. On June
28, the state-run Iran daily newspaper reported that Iran’s prosecutor
general, Abdolnabi Namazi, said about 800 students and 30 key student
leaders were among the 4000 arrested as a result of the June 10-14 protests.
Namazi said about 2000 people remained in jail.
Officials had earlier said only 520 people, mostly “hooligans”,
had been detained.
Last month’s protests began with students demonstrating against
rumoured government plans to privatise universities. They quickly snowballed,
however, into broader public demonstrations of opposition to the control
exercised over Iran’s political system by reactionary clerics led
by “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“The confirmation of 4000 arrests shows how insincere the rulers
are and how the crisis has deepened in Iran”, student leader Saeed
Allahbadashti told the Associated Press.
Iranian authorities are trying to prevent a new round of student protests
to mark the fourth anniversary of a July 9, 1999, attack on Tehran University
dormitories by pro-clerical thugs, in which one student was killed.
The attack triggered six days of nationwide, anti-government protests,
the biggest since the 1979 popular revolution that toppled the pro-US
dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Authorities have banned any pro-reform marches to commemorate the July
1999 events. Student leaders have vowed to defy the ban.
Source: Green Left Weekly
ARTICLERumsfeld’s revisionist history:
US changes reason for invading Iraq
By Christine Boyd,
July 10-- The US administration has abruptly revised its
explanation for invading Iraq, as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
asserted that a changed perspective after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks
— not fresh evidence of banned weapons — provoked the war.
“The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic
new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass murder,”
Rumsfeld testified yesterday before the Senate armed services committee.
“We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light,
through the prism of our experience on 9/11.”
It was an about-face from a man who confidently proclaimed in January:
“There’s no doubt in my mind but that they [the Iraqi government]
currently have chemical and biological weapons.” (He was seconded
in March by Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said of former Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein: “We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear
weapons.”)
And in London Thursday, the BBC reported senior British government sources
saying that Whitehall had virtually ruled out finding weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, which they now believe were destroyed or hidden
permanently before the war began.
Rumsfeld’s reversal came as the administration scrambled to defend
itself from accusations that it deliberately used false or misleading
information to bolster one of its primary justifications for the war.
On Monday, the White House acknowledged that U.S. President George W.
Bush was wrong when he said in his State of the Union address in January
that Iraq had recently tried to purchase large quantities of uranium
from Africa to build nuclear weapons. He cited British intelligence
reports of documents that purported to show an Iraqi attempt to buy
a form of raw uranium known as yellowcake. The documents were later
discredited as forgeries.
While the White House justified the invasion to topple Hussein on the
ground that his biological, chemical and nuclear weapons posed a threat,
no such arms have been uncovered in the 10 weeks since the war ended.
Bush unapologetically defended the war while in the middle of his five-day,
visit to Africa.
“Saddam Hussein was a threat to world peace. And there’s no
doubt in my mind that the United States, along with allies and friends,
did the right thing in removing him from power,” he said yesterday
at a joint news conference with South African President Thabo Mbeki.
Questioned for the first time about the uranium, he said: “There’s
going to be a lot of attempts to rewrite history. But I am absolutely
confident in the decision I made.”
White House officials said information that the documents may have been
forged had not reached top-level policymakers before the public statements.
Rumsfeld said he found out “within recent days” that the information
had been discredited, but he defended the U.S. intelligence throughout
the Iraq conflict as “quite good” and said Iraq “had
12 years to conceal” weapons programs. “Uncovering those programs
will take time,” he said.
Several Democrats heightened calls for a full-scale investigation on
whether intelligence was manipulated.
“It’s bad enough that such a glaring blunder became part of
the President’s case for war,” Senator Edward Kennedy said.
“It’s far worse if the case for war was made by deliberate
deception. ... We cannot risk American lives based on shoddy intelligence
or outright lies.”
With U.S. and British forces facing almost daily assaults, he and other
senators grilled Rumsfeld on whether more troops were needed in Iraq.
Rumsfeld told the committee that talks were under way to increase NATO
involvement in Iraq peacekeeping efforts. He maintained that most of
Iraq is safe after the war, with most of the recent attacks against
U.S. and British forces concentrated in Baghdad and surrounding areas.
Kennedy expressed skepticism, saying he was “concerned that we
have the world’s best-trained soldiers serving as policemen in
what seems to be a shooting gallery.”
Source: Toronto Globe and Mail
