Free Internet Press Newsletter - Thursday July 5 2007 - (813)

Thursday July 5 2007 edition
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Construction Woes Add To Security Fears At U.S. Embassy In Iraq 2007-07-05 01:05:39 U.S. diplomats in Iraq, increasingly fearful over their personal safety after recent mortar attacks inside the Green Zone, are pointing to new delays and mistakes in the U.S. Embassy construction project in Baghdad as signs that their vulnerability could grow in the months ahead. A toughly worded cable sent from the embassy to State Department headquarters on May 29 highlights a cascade of building and safety blunders in a new facility to house the security guards protecting the embassy. The guards' base, which remains unopened today, is just a small part of a vast $592 million project to build the largest U.S. embassy in the world. The main builder of the sprawling, 21-building embassy is First Kuwaiti General Trade and Contracting Co., a Middle Eastern firm that is already under Justice Department scrutiny over alleged labor abuses. First Kuwaiti also erected the guard base, prompting some State Department officials in Washington and Baghdad to worry that the problems exposed in the camp suggest trouble lurking ahead for the rest of the embassy complex. The first signs of trouble, according to the cable, emerged when the kitchen staff tried to cook the inaugural meal in the new guard base on May 15. Some appliances did not work. Workers began to get electric shocks. Then a burning smell enveloped the kitchen as the wiring began to melt. Read The Full Story Australian Government Admits Oil Is Factor In Iraq War 2007-07-05 01:04:49 The Australian government has admitted the need to secure oil supplies is a factor in Australia's continued military involvement in Iraq. Defense Minister Brendan Nelson said Thursday that oil was a factor in Australia's contribution to the unpopular war, as "energy security" and stability in the Middle East would be crucial to the nation's future. Speaking ahead of a key foreign policy speech by Prime Minister John Howard, Dr. Nelson said defense was about protecting the economy as well as physical security, and it was important to support the "prestige" of the U.S. and U.K. "The defense update we're releasing today sets out many priorities for Australia's defense and security, and resource security is one of them," he told ABC radio. Read The Full Story U.K. Lowers Terrorist Threat Level As Investigation Looks At Foreign Connections 2007-07-05 01:04:14 The U.K.'s terrorist threat level was downgraded Wednesday night as the investigation into the attempted London car bombings and the Glasgow airport attack switched from Britain to overseas. The decision to lower the level from the highest grade, "critical", to "severe" was announced by Jacqui Smith, Britain's home secretary, after a meeting of the cabinet's Cobra emergency committee. She said: "There is no intelligence to suggest that an attack is expected imminently. However, the reduction of the threat level does not mean the overall threat has gone away - there remains a serious and real threat against the United Kingdom and I would again ask that the public remain vigilant." Read The Full Story Commentary: Bush, Cheney Should Resign 2007-07-04 12:48:00 Intellpuke: The following commentary is by Keith Olbermann, anchor of MSNBC's "Countdown" program. Among other reasons for calling for Bush and Cheney to resign, Mr. Olbermann cites: Lying America into the Iraq war, firing generals who told Bush and Cheney that their Iraq war plans were "disastrously insufficient" and subverting the U.S. Constitution, not to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent. Mr. Olbermann's commentary, which aired on the Countdown program Tuesday, July 3, 2007, follows: "I didn't vote for him," an American once said, "But he's my president, and I hope he does a good job." That - on this eve of the 4th of July - is the essence of this democracy, in 17 words. And that is what President Bush threw away yesterday (Monday) in commuting the sentence of Lewis "Scooter" Libby. The man who said those 17 words - improbably enough - was the actor John Wayne. And Wayne, an ultra-conservative, said them, when he learned of the hair's-breadth election of John F. Kennedy instead of his personal favorite, Richard Nixon in 1960. "I didn't vote for him but he's my president, and I hope he does a good job." The sentiment was doubtlessly expressed earlier, but there is something especially appropriate about hearing it, now, in Wayne's voice: The crisp matter-of-fact acknowledgement that we have survived, even though for nearly two centuries now, our Commander-in-Chief has also served, simultaneously, as the head of one political party and often the scourge of all others. We as citizens must, at some point, ignore a president's partisanship. Not that we may prosper as a nation, not that we may achieve, not that we may lead the world - but merely that we may function. But just as essential to the seventeen words of John Wayne, is an implicit trust - a sacred trust: That the president for whom so many did not vote, can in turn suspend his political self long enough, and for matters imperative enough, to conduct himself solely for the benefit of the entire Republic. Read The Full Story Hundreds Surrender From Besieged Pakistani Mosque, Others Remain 2007-07-04 12:47:31 Some of the students inside a besieged mosque in the heart of the Pakistani capital Islamabad surrendered Wednesday, taking up an offer of 5,000 rupees (about $100) each from the government. But others remained holed up in the mosque, where militants clashed violently with security forces on Tuesday, and the army tightened its the cordon around the mosque. The security forces imposed a curfew overnight, and this morning sealed off the area surrounding the mosque complex, where the fighting a day earlier left at least nine people dead and scores more wounded. Barbed wire was strung across nearby streets this morning, and military trucks and armored personnel carriers moved into the streets. Outside the police cordon, parents gathered to collect some of the students who were leaving the mosque. The violent confrontation - which followed a months-long standoff between the Pakistani government and Islamic militant students holed up in the mosque - has exposed the normally placid capital to the wider divisions between moderates and militants in Pakistan, shattering the notion that the seat of government was immune from extremism. Read The Full Story Russia Issues Warning On Missiles 2007-07-04 12:46:44 Russia will take steps to ensure its security if Washington rebuffs its offer of cooperation on missile defense, local media quoted First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov as saying on Wednesday. "If our proposals are not accepted - and I cannot rule that out - Russia will continue to persistently and patiently explain its position on this issue," Itar-Tass news agency quoted Ivanov as saying. "But at the same time, we will take adequate measures to ensure security, we are already taking these measures, an asymmetrical and effective response has been found." Ivanov did not say what that response involved. Read The Full Story Storms Shift, Some Rivers Crest In Oklahoma But Many Still Can't Return Home 2007-07-04 12:46:04 Rain had stopped falling Wednesday and some bloated rivers had crested, but many evacuees were still unable to return to flooded homes in a three-state region and experts warned conditions may yet worsen. Flood warnings were remained Wednesday for the rain-swollen Neosho River, which forced hundreds of residents to evacuate and blocked key roads in northeast Oklahoma. The river crested at 29.2 feet at about 1 a.m. Wednesday but wasn't expected to fall below its flood stage of 15 feet at Miami, Oklahoma, until Sunday, said Chuck Hodges, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Tulsa. Read The Full Story Harsh For Libby But Not For Others 2007-07-04 01:13:27 Bush called 30 months "excessive", but the average term for obstruction of justice is twice that. In commuting the sentence of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, President Bush said the former vice presidential aide had suffered enough and that the 30-month prison term ordered up by a federal judge was "excessive." But records show that the Justice Department under the Bush administration frequently has sought sentences that are as long, or longer, in many cases similar to Libby's. Three-fourths of the 198 defendants sentenced in federal court last year for obstruction of justice - one of four crimes Libby was found guilty of in March - got some jail time. According to federal data, the average sentence the defendants received for that charge alone was 70 months. Just last week, the Supreme Court upheld a 33-month prison sentence for a decorated Army veteran who was convicted of lying to a federal agent about a machine gun he had purchased. The vet had a record of public service - fighting in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War - and had no criminal record. But Justice Department lawyers argued his prison term should stand because it fit within the federal sentencing guidelines. That Bush chose to make an exception for a political ally is galling to many career Justice Department prosecutors and other legal experts. Federal prosecutors said Tuesday the action would make it harder for them to persuade judges to deliver appropriate sentences. The critics include some Republicans who said Bush's decision does not square with an administration that has been ardently pro law-and-order. "It denigrates the significance of perjury prosecutions," John S. Martin, Jr., a former U.S. attorney and federal judge in New York, said of the commutation. Read The Full Story Iraqi Cabinet Approves Draft Oil Legislation 2007-07-04 01:12:07 Iraq's cabinet has again approved draft legislation establishing a framework to manage the country's vast oil resources, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Tuesday, but has not yet acted on a potentially more contentious companion law that would govern the distribution of oil revenue. At a televised news conference, Maliki also expressed disappointment that a "national unity government" has not been achieved as he had hoped. He said recent boycotts by some Sunni and Shiite members of parliament and cabinet ministers were "causing harm to the citizens and creating depression and disappointment." In February, Iraqi officials heralded the cabinet's approval of a draft oil law and said it was headed to parliament for review, but disagreement halted its progress. Read The Full Story	Pakistani Troops Bombard Students Holed Up In Mosque 2007-07-05 01:05:17 Pakistani troops fired shells and tear gas on a radical mosque in central Islamabad early Thursday morning, hours after the pro-Taliban chief cleric was caught trying to escape wearing a burka. A barrage of explosions rocked the city just before dawn as the two-day siege of Lal Masjid, or the Red Mosque, moved towards a climax. Soldiers on loudspeakers called on heavily armed militant students holed up inside to lay down their weapons or "face the consequences". Article continues Trucks carrying troops rushed through the deserted streets and terrified residents of the upmarket neighborhood were warned to stay inside. Several thousand people, including hundreds of radicalized women, are believed to be inside Lal Masjid, which has been subjected to an ever tightening government siege since Tuesday, when 16 people were killed and 150 wounded in a five-hour gun battle. Read The Full Story Biofuel Demand To Push Up Food Prices 2007-07-05 01:04:33 Food prices will rise in the next 10 years as nearly twice as much sugar cane, maize and oilseed rape is grown to fuel cars, and people in rapidly developing countries adopt meat-based diets, says the United Nations in its annual assessment of farming trends. The move to "agrofuels", which are expected to marginally lower climate change emissions and reduce U.S. and European oil dependency, is being led by the U.S., Brazil, Europe and China. Last year more than a third of the total U.S. maize (corn) crop went to ethanol for fuel, a 48% increase on 2005. Brazil and China grew the crops on nearly 20 million hectares (50 million acres) of land. This area could double in 10 years, says the U.N. report on trends up to 2016. The switch to growing fuel crops will take land out of food production and increase the price of commodities such as sugar, maize and palm oils, says the report, which was jointly prepared by the World Food Organization and theOrganization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). While higher food prices are profitable for the mainly large-scale farmers who grow them, they threaten the economies of food-importing countries as well as the urban poor, says the report. The higher food prices will also mean extra costs for livestock farmers who must buy feed. Read The Full Story Drought Saps U.S. Southeast - And Its Farmers 2007-07-04 12:48:16 Northern Alabama has become acre after acre of shriveled cornstalks, cracked red dirt for miles and days of unrelenting white heat. The region’s most severe drought in over a century has farmers here averting their gaze from a future that looks as bleak as their fields. The drought is worst here, in Toney, Alabama, but it is wilting much of the Southeast, causing watering restrictions and curtailed crops in Georgia, premature cattle sales in Mississippi and Tennessee, and rivers so low that power companies in the region are scrambling and barges are unable to navigate. Fourth of July fireworks are out of the question in many tinderbox areas. Hay to feed livestock is in increasingly short supply, watermelons are coming in small and some places have not had good rain since the start of the year. On Monday, Dennis Bragg, the biggest farmer in Madison County, the drought’s center, clutched a scrawny, leathery cornstalk half as high as it should be, barely reaching his waist. A healthy one should now be towering over him, according to the calendar. “This right here is going to be a zero,” said Bragg, pushing the puny thing away. “This is what we call a weed.” The field of muted green will be a loss. Read The Full Story Editorial: Origins Of Our Food 2007-07-04 12:47:43 Intellpuke: The following editorial appears in the New York Times edition for Wednesday, July 4, 2007. With imports of agricultural products rising sharply and sporadic scares about their safety, Americans surely have a right to know what country their food has come from. Unfortunately, they have little chance of finding out, due to the intransigence of meat importers and grocery retailers. Lobbyists for both groups have blocked implementation of a 2002 law that requires country-of-origin labels on fresh fruits and vegetables, red meats, seafood and peanuts. Only the seafood part of the law has been put into effect, largely because Alaskan fishermen liked some of its provisions and had a powerful champion in the Senate. With the recent questions about Chinese seafood, those labels mean that consumers can make informed choices at the seafood counter - something they should be able to do with all of their food purchases. Read The Full Story Venezuela To Supply Iran With Gasoline 2007-07-04 12:46:59 Venezuela agreed to sell Iran gasoline on Tuesday, less than a week after Iran unveiled a rationing program to limit its dependence on gasoline imports. “The Iranian government has asked to buy gasoline from us, and we have accepted the request,” Rafael Ramirez, Venezuela’s energy minister, told the Iranian newspaper Shargh. He declined to specify the quantity of gasoline Venezuela would sell to Iran or at what price. Iran, a major oil exporter, imports 40 percent of its gasoline because of high consumption and limited refining capacity. While gasoline costs about $2 a gallon on world markets, the government sells it for 34 cents, a subsidy that costs it about $5 billion a year. Read The Full Story After 16 Weeks As Hostage, Alan Johnston Is Released Unharmed 2007-07-04 12:46:30 Alan Johnston, the BBC Gaza correspondent who was kidnapped March 12, was freed early Wednesday morning and is now in Israel, preparing to fly home to Britain. Johnston, looking wan and thin and dressed in a pair of blue jeans, his hair grown out over his ears, was released without violence after negotiations between Hamas, which now runs Gaza, and his kidnappers. Escorted by gunmen from Hamas, he was brought to the home of the Hamas leader in Gaza, the former prime minister, Ismail Haniya. He was embraced there by his colleagues from the BBC Gaza office, and he was seen to be smiling. He and Haniya then held a news conference, and Johnston appeared to be in excellent mental health. Read The Full Story Private Contractors Outnumber U.S. Troops In Iraq 2007-07-04 01:13:58 New U.S. data show how heavily the Bush administration has relied on corporations to carry out the occupation of the war-torn nation. The number of U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of American combat troops, newly released figures show, raising fresh questions about the privatization of the war effort and the government's capacity to carry out military and rebuilding campaigns. More than 180,000 civilians - including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis - are working in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense Department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times. Including the recent troop surge, 160,000 soldiers and a few thousand civilian government employees are stationed in Iraq. The total number of private contractors, far higher than previously reported, shows how heavily the Bush administration has relied on private corporations to carry out the occupation of Iraq - a mission criticized as being undermanned. "These numbers are big," said Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written on military contracting. "They illustrate better than anything that we went in without enough troops. This is not the coalition of the willing. It's the coalition of the billing." Read The Full Story Donors Give More To Democrat Than GOP Candidates 2007-07-04 01:13:06 Campaign contributors to the 2008 presidential candidates heavily favored Democrats in the three-month period that ended Saturday, giving three dollars to the party's leading contenders for every two dollars they gave to the top Republican candidates. Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's 258,000 contributors since January exceed the combined number of donors of former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain (Arizona), according to estimates provided by the campaigns. Romney announced Tuesday that he has lent his campaign $6.5 million from his personal fortune to supplement the $14 million he raised from April through June. Giuliani's campaign said it raised about $15 million during the quarter. Last week, McCain announced a dramatic staff shake-up after raising only $11 million, leaving him with just $2 million in the bank. During the quarter, Obama (Illinois) raised $32.5 million, $31 million of which can be used in the primaries. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-New York) raised $21 million for the primaries and a total of about $27 million in the same period. Read The Full Story Death Penalty Sought For Ex-G.I. In Rape, Slayings In Iraq 2007-07-04 01:11:40 U.S. Justice Department attorneys will pursue the death penalty against a former U.S. Army soldier accused of raping and killing an Iraqi teenager and slaying her family members last year, according to papers filed Tuesday in federal court. It could be the first capital case to proceed against a U.S. service member arising out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prosecutors revealed that they will seek death for former Pfc. Steven D. Green should he be convicted of the March 12, 2006, slayings of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, 14, her parents and her young sister - one of the worst homicide cases of the war. Green is accused of plotting the attack with three other U.S. soldiers in the hotly contested Mahmudiyah area south of Baghdad.  Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales approved seeking the death penalty in the case, in part because the crimes were "heinous, cruel and depraved," according to the documents filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky. Read The Full Story
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