Free Internet Press Newsletter - Wednesday February 21 2007 - (813)

Wednesday February 21 2007 edition
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Iraq: The British Endgame - All Gone By End Of 2008 2007-02-21 02:11:59 All British troops will be pulled out of Iraq by the end of 2008, starting with the withdrawal of 1,000 in the early summer, the Guardian has learned. Tony Blair is to announce the moves - the result of months of intense debate in Whitehall - within 24 hours, possibly later Wednesday, according to officials. The prime minister is expected to say that Britain intends to gradually reduce the number of troops in southern Iraq over the next 22 months as Iraqi forces take on more responsibility for the security of Basra and the surrounding areas. Ministers have taken on board the message coming from military chiefs over many months - namely that the presence of British troops on the streets of Basra is increasingly unnecessary, even provocative. The reduction of just 1,000 by early summer cited by officials Tuesday is significantly less than anticipated in reports that British troops in southern Iraq, presently totalling 7,200, would be cut by half by May. Read The Full Story Commentary: West May Yet Come To Regret Bullying Of Russia 2007-02-21 02:11:28 Intellpuke: The following commentary was written by Guardian correspondent Simon Jenkins, reporting from Moscow, Russia, and posted on the Guardian Unlimited's website edition for Wednesday, February 21, 2007. Mr. Jenkins writes that Russian President Putin has no interest in a new cold war and is struggling to modernize his economy. Yet he is rebuffed and insulted. Mr. Jenkins' commentary begins here: Countries, too, have feelings. So I am told by a Russian explaining the recent collapse in relations between Vladimir Putin and his one-time western admirers. "We have done well in the past 15 years, yet we get nothing but rebuffs and insults. Russia's rulers have their pride, you know." The truth is that Putin, like George Bush and Tony Blair, has an urgent date with history. He can plead two terms as president in which he has stabilized, if not deepened, Russian democracy, forced the pace of economic modernization, suppressed Chechen separatism and yet been remarkably popular. But leaders who dismiss domestic critics crave international opinion, and are unaccustomed to brickbats. Hence Putin's outburst at the Munich security conference this month, when he announced he would "avoid extra politesse" and speak his mind. Putin's apologists ask that he be viewed as victim of an epic miscalculation by the west. Here is a hard man avidly courted at first by Bush, Blair and other western leaders. After 9/11 he tolerated U.S. intervention along his southern border with bases north of Afghanistan. Yet when he had similar trouble in Chechnya, he was roundly abused. When he induced Milosevic to leave Kosovo (which he and not "the bombing" did), he got no thanks. Read The Full Story In Baghdad, Scores Choke In Poison Gas Attack 2007-02-20 16:23:23 A cloud of deadly toxic gas engulfed an Iraqi town Tuesday, killing six people and leaving dozens of others choking on fumes after a tanker carrying chlorine exploded outside a restaurant. An Iraqi Interior Ministry official said the blast in the town of Taji, 12 miles (20 kilometers) north of Baghdad, was caused by a bomb on board the tanker. There were contrasting figures on the casualty toll. Baghdad security plan spokesman Gen. Qassim Atta told state-run al-Iraqiya TV that five people died in the blast and 148 were poisoned by the gas. Other attacks across the country pushed the daily death toll to at least 20. Several incidents occurred in Baghdad, where a major security crackdown has been launched to stem the bloodshed. Read The Full Story 22 Drowned As Children's Boat Sinks 2007-02-20 16:22:58 A river boat carrying children on a school trip capsized in southern India on Tuesday, and at least 18 children and four teachers drowned, a local official said. Sixteen children were missing as night fell. Three boats were carrying more than 100 students and staff down the Periyar River in the Thattekkad bird sanctuary when one boat capsized, said Mohammad Haneesh, a top official of the district. All the children were younger than 11. As darkness fell, 16 children were still missing, and 10 had been admitted to a local hospital, he said. Read The Full Story Israel Threatens To Ignore Abbas 2007-02-20 16:22:26 Israel said Tuesday it would stop dealing with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas if he goes ahead with plans to join Hamas in a new government, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Arab allies sought a way to break the Hamas logjam and push forward the stalled peace process. Jordan's King Abdullah II, after separate meetings with Rice and Abbas, urged the United States to continue seeking to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. Israel said it would stop dealing with Abbas on larger peace issues if he went ahead and formed the coalition government with Hamas. After the meetings Abbas acknowledged for the first time that sessions on Monday in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Rice had been "tense and difficult" but said "it was not a failure and it will be followed by other meetings." Abbas said Israel may have "misunderstood" the agreement reached in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, between his moderate Fatah faction and the militant Hamas group, according to Jordan's official Petra news agency. Read The Full Story Iran '6 Months' From Uranium Enrichment, 5 - 10 Years From A Bomb 2007-02-20 02:35:33 Iran could be as little as six months away from being able to enrich uranium on an industrial scale, having mastered the technology since last August, the head of the United Nation's nuclear watchdog warned in an interview published Tuesday. However, Mohamed ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general, stressed that Iran was still years away from developing a nuclear weapon. "The intelligence, the British intelligence, the American intelligence, is saying that Iran is still years, five to 10 years, away from developing a weapon," he told the Financial Times in an interview on the eve of Wednesday's deadline for Tehran to suspend its enrichment work. ElBaradei said he expected Iran to ignore the deadline. He said Iran could install a network of 3,000 centrifuges - enough to begin producing fissile material for a bomb - within months. "It could be six months, it could be a year," said ElBaradei. However, he added, "there's a big difference between acquiring the knowledge for enrichment and developing a bomb". Since August last year Iran has been using centrifuges at a pilot plant in the town of Natanz to enrich uranium. It has refused to halt this process, insisting its purposes are purely peaceful. Read The Full Story Commentary: 9/11 Fantasists Pose A Mortal Danger To Popular Oppositional Campaigns 2007-02-20 02:34:54 Intellpuke: The following commentary is written by Prof. George Monbiot, who writes that 9/11 "...conspiracy idiots are a boon for Bush and Blair..." Prof. Monbiot's column, which appears on the Guardian Unlimited's website edition for Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007, follows: "You did this hit piece because your corporate masters instructed you to. You are a controlled asset of the new world order ... bought and paid for." "Everyone has some skeleton in the cupboard. How else would MI5 and special branch recruit agents?" "Shill, traitor, sleeper", "leftwing gatekeeper", "accessory after the fact", "political whore of the biggest conspiracy of them all". These are a few of the measured responses to my article, a fortnight ago, about the film "Loose Change", which maintains that the United States government destroyed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Having spent years building up my leftwing credibility on behalf of my paymasters in MI5, I've blown it. I overplayed my hand, and have been exposed, like Bush and Cheney, by a bunch of kids with laptops. My handlers are furious. I believe that George Bush is surrounded by some of the most scheming, devious, ruthless men to have found their way into government since the days of the Borgias. I believe that they were criminally negligent in failing to respond to intelligence about a potential attack by al-Qaeda, and that they have sought to disguise their incompetence by classifying crucial documents. I believe, too, that the Bush government seized the opportunity provided by the attacks to pursue a longstanding plan to invade Iraq and reshape the Middle East, knowing full well that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Bush deliberately misled the American people about the links between 9/11 and Iraq and about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. He is responsible for the murder of many tens of thousands of Iraqis. Read The Full Story Terrorist Networks Lure Young Moroccans To Iraq 2007-02-20 02:34:08 In the Arab world, this hilly North African city is about as far as you can get from Iraq. But for many young men here in Tetouan, Morocco, the call to join what they view as a holy war resonates loudly across the 3,000-mile divide. About two dozen men from Tetouan and nearby towns in the Rif Mountains have traveled to Iraq in the past 18 months to volunteer as fighters or suicide bombers, according to local residents and officials. Moroccan authorities said the men were recruited by international terrorist networks affiliated with al-Qaeda that have deepened their roots in North Africa since the invasion of Iraq four years ago. To stanch the flow, U.S. intelligence and military officials have tried to trace the fighters' steps. On the basis of DNA evidence recovered from the scenes of suicide attacks, as well as other clues, officials have confirmed that at least two bombers came from Tetouan, a city of more than 320,000 across the Strait of Gibraltar from southern Spain. One of them, Abdelmonaim el-Amrani, a 22-year-old laborer, abandoned his wife and infant child in Tetouan to go to Iraq. On March 6, 2006, just before sunset, he drove a red Volkswagen Passat stuffed with explosives into a funeral tent in a village near Baqubah, Iraq, according to witnesses. Six people were reported killed and 27 injured. It was months before Amrani's family in Tetouan learned of his fate from Moroccan police. Read The Full Story	McCain: Rumsfeld 'One Of Worst Secretarys of Defense In History' 2007-02-21 02:11:44 John McCain, in an effort to reinvent himself as the candidate of the Republican establishment in the 2008 elections, has denounced the former Pentagon chief, Donald Rumsfeld, as one of the worst in history. McCain's comments, made during a campaign swing through South Carolina, were seen today as part of a delicate balancing act for the senator from Arizona, who is trying to shed his image as a maverick and win over conservatives and the religious right. In that vein, McCain has positioned himself as a strong supporter of the war on Iraq - as are the majority of Republican primary voters, but he accused Rumsfeld of compromising that mission by failing to send enough troops for the invasion. "We are paying a very heavy price for the mismanagement - that's the kindest word I can give you - of Donald Rumsfeld, of this war," McCain told a community for retired people near the resort area of Hilton Head. "The price is very, very heavy and I regret it enormously." He added: "I think that Donald Rumsfeld will go down in history as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history." Read The Full Story Guantanamo Detainees Lose Federal Court Appeal 2007-02-21 02:11:06 A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that hundreds of detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, do not have the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal courts, a victory for the Bush administration that could lead to the Supreme Court again addressing the issue. In its 2 to 1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld one of the central components of the Military Commissions Act, the law enacted last year by a then-Republican-controlled Congress that stripped Guantanamo detainees of their right to such habeas corpus petitions. Lawyers have filed the petitions on behalf of virtually all of the nearly 400 detainees still at Guantanamo, challenging President Bush's right to hold them indefinitely without charges. Tuesday's ruling effectively dismisses the cases. Attorneys for the detainees vowed to quickly petition the Supreme Court to hear the case. Read The Full Story Prosecutors: Libby Case Is About Lying 2007-02-20 16:23:11 I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby lied to investigators about his role in disclosing the identity of a CIA officer in order to protect his job and insulate the White House from political embarrassment, the prosecution said this morning in its closing argument in the perjury trial of the vice president's former chief of staff. "This is a case about lying," prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg told jurors. "It's not a case about conspiracy. It's not a case about scapegoating." Speaking in a deliberate, measured style as Libby watched raptly from the defense table, Zeidenberg said that Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff "is here because of his own choices and his own decisions. He decided to lie to the FBI and the grand jury." Zeidenberg, in the first phase of day-long closing statements scheduled in the celebrated trial, asserted that the prosecution had amply proven its case. He said that, based on the testimony and evidence the jurors have heard, Libby had nine conversations about undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame with eight different people during a tumultuous four-week period in the White House during the spring and early summer of 2003. In addition, Zeidenberg said, the trial has demonstrated that Libby "absolutely fabricates two conversations that never happened." Taken together, he said, the prosecution's case proves that Libby was, at the behest of Cheney, working intensely to learn about Plame and tell journalists about her and her husband, a former ambassador who was a harsh critic of the administration's justification for the Iraq war. Read The Full Story U.S. Supreme Court Throws Out $79.5 Million Tobacco Ruling 2007-02-20 16:22:41 The Supreme Court threw out a $79.5 million punitive damages award to a smoker's widow Tuesday, a boon to businesses seeking stricter limits on big-dollar jury verdicts. The 5-4 ruling was a victory for Altria Group Inc.'s Philip Morris USA, which contested an Oregon Supreme Court decision upholding the verdict. In the majority opinion written by Justice Stephen Breyer, the court said the verdict could not stand because the jury in the case was not instructed that it could punish Philip Morris only for the harm done to the plaintiff, not to other smokers whose cases were not before it. States must "provide assurances that juries are not asking the wrong question ... seeking, not simply to determine reprehensibility, but also to punish for harm caused strangers," said Breyer. Read The Full Story Iran's President Defiant As Enrichment Deadline Looms 2007-02-20 16:22:13 Iran’s president remained defiant Tuesday on the eve of a United Nations deadline for his country to stop enriching uranium, as tensions between Iran and the United States continued to mount in various ways. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country will halt its uranium enrichment program, a prerequisite for building nuclear weapons, only if Western powers do the same. The U.N. Security Council has imposed limited sanctions on Iran, and has said it would consider further sanctions if the enrichment program is not stopped by tomorrow. The United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet said Tuesday that another American aircraft carrier group arrived in the Sea of Oman south of Iran. The carrier, the U.S.S. John C. Stennis, and its accompanying strike group of ships joined the U.S.S. Dwight D. Eisenhower in a move widely interpreted as a warning to Tehran. Even so, Robert Gates, the Defense Secretary, said, “We are not looking for excuse to go to war with Iran, we are not planning a war with Iran.” Read The Full Story Walter Reed's Former Aid Director Investigated 2007-02-20 02:35:21 For the past three years, Michael J. Wagner directed the Army's largest effort to help the most vulnerable soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. His office in Room 3E01 of the world-renowned hospital was supposed to match big-hearted donors with thousands of wounded soldiers who could not afford to feed their children, pay mortgages, buy plane tickets or put up visiting families in nearby hotels. While he was being paid to provide this vital service to patients, outpatients and their relations, Wagner was also seeking funders and soliciting donations for his own new charity, based in Texas, according to documents and interviews with current and former staff members. Some families also said Wagner treated them callously and made it hard for them to receive assistance. Last week, Walter Reed launched a criminal investigation of Wagner after the Washington Post sought a response to his activities while he ran the Army's Medical Family Assistance Center, a position he left several weeks ago. Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, the commander at Walter Reed, said the probe by the Criminal Investigation Command (CID) "reflects the seriousness with which we take these allegations." Weightman's legal adviser, Col. Samuel Smith, said that "it would clearly be a conflict of interest" prohibited by federal law, Army regulations and Defense Department ethics rules if Wagner used his position to solicit funds for his own organization. Read The Full Story Rescuer: Velvet, The Dog, May Have Saved Climbers 2007-02-20 02:34:32 Three climbers who tumbled off a ledge on Mount Hood were taken away in an ambulance after they hiked down much of the state's highest peak with their rescuers - and a dog who may have saved their lives. "We're soaking wet and freezing," said one of two rescued women as she walked from a tracked snow vehicle to an ambulance. One of the women, whose name was not released, was taken to a Portland hospital and being treated for a head injury, said Jim Strovink, spokesman for the Clackamas County Sheriff's Department. "She's going to be fine," he said, noting that she had walked most of the way down the mountain. Read The Full Story
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