Monday, December 31, 2007

Fidel: Marti taught us that "all of the world's glory fits in a kernel of corn".

National Assembly Address by Fidel Castro

National Assembly Address by Fidel Castro

http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=14620&sectionID=60 ZNet | Cuba December 31, 2007

Dear comrade Alarcon:

Please read the following message, addressed to the National Assembly, when you open the morning session.

A heartfelt embrace,

Fidel Castro Ruz

December 27, 2007 8:40 p.m.

Comrades of the National Assembly:

You have no easy task on your hands. On January 1st, 1959, surrounded by the accumulated and deepening grievances that our society inherited from its neo- colonial past under U.S. domination, many of us dreamed of creating a fully independent nation where justice prevailed. In the arduous and uneven struggle, there came the moment when we were left completely alone.

Nearly 50 years since the triumph of the Revolution, we can justifiably feel proud of ourselves, as we have held our ground, for almost half a century, in the struggle against the most powerful empire ever to exist in history. In the Proclamation I signed on July 31, 2006, none of you saw any signs of nepotism or an attempt to usurp parliamentary powers. That year, at once difficult and promising for the Revolution, the unity of the people, the Party and State were essential to continue moving forward and to face the declared threat of a military action by the United States.

This past December 24, during his visit to the various districts of the municipality which honored me with the nomination of candidate to parliament, Raul noted that all of the numerous candidates proposed by the people of a district famous for its combativeness, but with a low educational level, had completed their higher education. This, as he said on Cuban television, made a profound impression in him.

Party, State and Government cadres and grassroots organizations face new problems in their work with an intelligent, watchful and educated people who detest bureaucratic hurdles and inconsiderate justifications. Deep down, every citizen wages an individual battle against humanity's innate tendency to stick to its survival instincts, a natural law which governs all life.

We are all born marked by that instinct, which science defines as primary. Coming face to face with this instinct is rewarding because it leads us to a dialectical process and to a constant and altruistic struggle, bringing us closer to Marti and making us true communists.

What the international press has emphasized most in its reports on Cuba in recent days is the statement I made on the 17th of this month, in a letter to the director of Cuban television's Round Table program, where I said that I am not clinging to power.

I could add that for some time I did, due to my youth and lack of awareness, when, without any guidance, I started to leave my political ignorance behind and became a utopian socialist. It was a stage in my life when I believed I knew what had to be done and wanted to be in a position to do it!

What made me change? Life did, delving more deeply into Marti's ideas and those of the classics of socialism. The more deeply I became involved in the struggle, the stronger was my identification with those aims and, well before the revolutionary victory I was already convinced that it was my duty to fight for these aims or to die in combat.

We also face great risks that threaten the human species as a whole. This has become more and more evident to me since I predicted, for the first time in Rio de Janeiro, --over 15 years ago, in June 1992-- that a species was threatened with extinction as a result of the destruction of its natural habitat. Today, the number of people who understand the real danger of this grows every day.

A recent book by Joseph Stiglitz, former Vice-President of the World Bank and President Clinton's chief economic advisor until 2002, Nobel Prize laureate and bestselling author in the United States, offers up-to-date and irrefutable facts on the subject. He criticizes the United States, a country which did not sign the Kyoto Protocol, for being the largest producer of carbon dioxide in the world, with annual emissions of 6 billion tons of this gas which disturbs the atmosphere without which life is impossible. In addition to this, the United States is the largest producer of other greenhouse gases.

Few people are aware of these facts. The same economic system which forced this unsustainable wastefulness on us impedes the distribution of Stiglitz' book. Only a few thousand copies of an excellent edition have been published, enough to guarantee a margin of profit. This responds to a market demand, which the publishing house cannot ignore if it is to survive.

Today, we know that life on Earth has been protected by the ozone layer, located in the atmosphere's outer ring, at an altitude between 15 to 50 kilometers, in the region known as the stratosphere, which acts as the planet's shield against the type of solar radiation which can prove harmful. There are greenhouse gases whose warming potential is higher than that of carbon dioxide and which widen the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica, which loses as much as 70 percent of its volume every spring. The effects of this phenomenon, which is gradually taking place, are humanity's responsibility.

To have a clear sense of this phenomenon, suffice it to say that the world produces an average of 4.37 metric tons of carbon dioxide per capita. In the case of the United States, the average is 20.14, nearly 5 times as much. In Africa, it is 1.17, while in Asia and Oceania it is 2.87.

The ozone layer, in brief, protects us from ultraviolet and heat radiation which affects the immune system, sight, skin and life of human beings. Under extreme conditions, the destruction of that layer by human beings would affect all forms of life on the planet.

Other problems, foreign to our nation and many others under similar conditions, also threaten us. A victorious counterrevolution would spell a disaster for us, worse than Indonesia's tragedy. Sukarno, overthrown in 1967, was a nationalist leader who, loyal to Indonesia, headed the guerrillas who fought the Japanese.

General Suharto, who overthrew him, had been trained by Japanese occupation forces. At the conclusion of World War II, Holland, a U.S. ally, re-established control over that distant, extensive and populated territory. Suharto maneuvered. He hoisted the banners of U.S. imperialism. He committed an atrocious act of genocide. Today we know that, under instructions from the CIA, he not only killed hundreds of thousands but also imprisoned a million communists and deprived them and their relatives of all properties or rights; his family amassed a fortune of 40 billion dollars - which, at today's exchange rate, would be equivalent to hundreds of billions - by handing over the country's natural resources, the sweat of Indonesians, to foreign investors. The West paid up. Texan-born Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy's successor, was then the President of the United States.

The news on the events in Pakistan we received today also attest to the dangers that threaten our species: internal conflict in a country that possesses nuclear weapons. This is a consequence of the adventurous policies of and the wars aimed at securing the world's natural resources unleashed by the United States.

Pakistan, involved in a conflict it did not unleash, faced the threat of being taken back to the Stone Age.

The extraordinary circumstances faced by Pakistan had an immediate effect on oil prices and stock exchange shares. No country or region in the world can disassociate itself from the consequences. We must be prepared for anything.

There hasn't been a day in my life in which I haven't learned something.

Marti taught us that "all of the world's glory fits in a kernel of corn". Many times have I said and repeated this phrase, which carries in eleven words a veritable school of ethics.

Cuba's Five Heroes, imprisoned by the empire, are to be held up as examples for the new generations.

Fortunately, exemplary conducts will continue to flourish with the consciousness of our peoples as long as our species exists.

I am certain that many young Cubans, in their struggle against the Giant in the Seven-League Boots, would do as they did. Money can buy everything save the soul of a people who has never gone down on its knees.

I read the brief and concise report which Raul wrote and sent me. We must not waste a minute as we continue to move forward. I will raise my hand, next to you, to show my support.

(Signed)

Fidel Castro Ruz

December 27, 2007

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Dennis Kucinich: A Peace-Seeking For A Larger World Peace

“I’m grounded in the practical everyday experience of people,” he says. “I see paths toward civic health that are practical…. I feel I’m a candidate of the mainstream because I’m not hobbled by those who would purchase or rent my opinion.”

a larger world peace.

“It’s possible to have your feet on the ground and your eyes looking toward the stars,” Kucinich says, in a car rushing to an interview on Fox News to discuss his anger at being excluded from the final Democratic debate in Iowa. “There was a time when the sailors of old sailed by the stars….

It’s our obligation to each other to catch the rhythms of the unfolding future which exist in present time, and to call forth, to name it, to set it in motion, to be as architects of new worlds.”

Dennis Kucinich: A Peace-Seeking Idealist To The Core

Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2007-12-31 21:22. Congress

By Amanda Paulson, Christian Science Monitor

To understand the importance Dennis Kucinich places on spirituality, scan his generally spare Capitol Hill office: a white cloth from the Dalai Lama, a bust of Gandhi, and a picture representing “conscious light” - a gift from Brahma Kumaris nuns.

There’s a Tibetan dragon washbowl and, on his desk, two heavy crucifixes once worn by Catholic nuns who taught him and who, he says, “saved my life.”

“Obviously, I connect with all religions,” says Representative Kucinich (D) of Ohio, in the midst of his second presidential campaign. “All manners of belief and even non-belief come from a common font, and that is the transcendent power of the human heart…. All those things that would separate us are based on misunderstandings of our nature.”

They’re somewhat unusual religious views for someone who still considers himself essentially Roman Catholic. But then, little about Kucinich is orthodox.

While his colleagues in Congress recently voted for more military funds for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he is pushing for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and advocates cutting money from the defense budget. In the middle of the war on terror, he wants to establish a Department of Peace. He’s the only Democratic presidential candidate who wants a Medicare system for all Americans, supports gay marriage, and advocates repealing the North American Free Trade Agreement and withdrawing from the World Trade Organization.

The congressman is also, by all reckonings, a long shot for the nomination. The latest national polls have him hovering around 1 percent. (He often wins online polls with strong liberal leanings.)

But Kucinich, who projects supreme confidence in both his views and his abilities, is anything but discouraged.

Another item he keeps in his congressional office is an original script from “The Man of La Mancha,” a gift from a cast member. It’s an apt memento, since Kucinich has been tilting at windmills and dreaming impossible dreams most of his life.

Quoting the romantic poets

The eldest of seven children, he grew up in a household that was chronically short of money and often had trouble finding an apartment that would accept so many children. The family moved more than 20 times and, at one point, lived out of their 1948 Dodge. Kucinich worked to pay his tuition to the Catholic schools he attended and was one of the first in his family to graduate from high school. A sports lover despite his 5-foot, 7-inch frame, he played football and basketball - and endured brutal hazing from teammates - until he was diagnosed with a heart murmur and told to stop.

From the time he was young, Kucinich has been reading the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Browning, and the Romantic poets. He still quotes them and considers many of their ideas part of his broader sense of faith. A particular favorite is Percy Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” - whose final lines mirror Kucinich’s own belief that love and hope must challenge oppression. “Tennyson - ‘Come, My friends, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.’ Browning - ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,’ ” Kucinich says. “The romantic poets had this understanding of the power of the human spirit…. That to me corresponds to religion, and to me the power of the human heart is an article of faith.”

Those sentiments - that one should strive for the impossible, and try to create something better - were also drilled into him by the nuns in Kucinich’s high school, St. John Cantius. Those ideas influenced his desire to be a politician - and to start young. Kucinich first ran for political office when he was 20 and nearly defeated a longtime city council incumbent in Cleveland. He looked even younger than he was, and news stories at the time referred to him as “Dennis the Menace” and “Alfalfa.” Two years later he ran again and won.

In his 2007 memoir, “The Courage to Survive,” Kucinich writes of telling a high school friend that he would be mayor of Cleveland by the time he was 30. He wasn’t far off; in fact, he was elected mayor in 1977 at age 31, the youngest mayor of a major American city.

His term lasted just two years, and it was, by all accounts, tumultuous. “He gave the town a nervous breakdown and he wore them out,” says Brent Larkin, editorial page editor at The Cleveland Plain Dealer. “It was unlike anything I’ve seen in my rather long career of paying attention to things that happen in this city. He was a different Dennis then. He was extraordinarily combative.”

Kucinich was always at odds with the city council, vetoing dozens of bills it sent to him, which councilors then overrode. He plunged the city into fiscal default when he refused to sell Muny Light, the city-owned electric utility, despite extraordinary pressure from business and a hit placed on him by organized crime, according to police.

“It wasn’t mine to sell. It belonged to the people,” Kucinich says, explaining a decision that he credits with saving citizens hundreds of millions of dollars in utility rates. Others say it’s more complicated - that the city is still paying for the decision with a poor bond rating. One panel of experts included Kucinich in its list of the 10 worst big-city mayors of all time.

But Kucinich came back from the political wasteland - he barely survived a recall election and lost reelection in 1979 - in part based on new evidence that his stand on Muny Light was not only courageous, but, in hindsight, the best decision. “Because he was right” was the slogan that helped him win his 1994 election to the Ohio legislature. Two years later, he was elected to Congress.

“He is the most resilient political figure I have ever met,” says Mr. Larkin. “I cannot overstate enough how dead he was politically in 1979…. He really is a tenacious guy.”

Against the mainstream

Kucinich has a less combative style these days, but he still relishes standing alone against the political mainstream. He was the only member of Congress to vote against a bill this fall to establish Sept. 11 as a day of remembrance for those who died in the terrorist attacks and who have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Because the resolution didn’t make reference to “the lies that took us into Iraq, the lies that keep us there, the lies that are being used to set the stage for war against Iran, and the lies that have undermined our basic civil liberties here at home,” he chose not to support it, Kucinich said in a statement at the time.

In presidential debates, he calls attention to his solo positions - as the only Democratic candidate supporting a nonprofit single-payer healthcare system, the only one calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the only one who supports gay marriage and who voted against funding the war in Iraq.

This fall he introduced a bill to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. In one debate, Kucinich whipped out his pocket-size copy of the Constitution when questioned about his efforts.

“A lot of people don’t agree with Dennis on specific issues, but nobody ever doubts where he stands,” says Andy Juniewicz, Kucinich’s press secretary and a friend who worked as a copy boy with him at the Plain Dealer and has known him for more than 40 years. “He’s probably the most courageous elected official I’ve ever known. Whatever the odds, if he believes he’s right, he’ll buck those odds and push for what he believes is right.”

Kucinich himself explains those positions, which often go against the political mainstream, as simply coming from his internal convictions. “Emerson once wrote, ‘Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string….’ I’ve been reading that essay since I was 10 years old.”

Still, Kucinich’s critics often question whether his views are too extreme, too lacking in nuance and understanding of complexities, or so politically unpalatable as to make his election or the success of his proposals impossible.

“You have to mix the idealism with the practicality or you’re foolish,” says Timothy Hagen, president of Cleveland’s Board of County Commissioners and chairman of the local Democratic Party when Kucinich was mayor. “The question becomes, can you convince enough people that what you’re saying has validity and you can make it a reality. He hasn’t been able to do that.”

It’s a criticism that Kucinich is used to, and one he bristles at. A traditional politician who, colleagues say, has probably met everyone in his district three times and is effective at delivering services to his constituents, he believes his ideas are practical - even if they’re sometimes ahead of their time.

Kucinich still lives in the same small house he bought more than 30 years ago and still carries a union membership card - for the stagehand union - in his pocket.

His roots have helped him stay connected to the people he serves, he says.

And he credits the education he received from the Catholic nuns, and the sense of discipline his coach, Peter Pucher, instilled in him, with creating many of the bedrock values that inform his views today.

“He sincerely believes in the kinds of things he’s saying and stands for,” says Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western University in Cleveland. Professor Lamis remembers going out to lunch with Kucinich and Carl Stokes, the first African-American mayor of a big city and a friend of Kucinich’s until his death. The conversation turned to Tom Johnson, a Cleveland mayor at the turn of the 20th century and a leader of the Progressive movement. “They talked about how they considered themselves the only two Cleveland mayors to follow in the Tom Johnson mayoral tradition,” says Lamis. “Coming with that tradition is fighting against the well-to-do special interests. It’s just what Dennis believes.”

A transformational love

But if Kucinich believes he’s a candidate of the mainstream, he’s rarely treated that way by the media, which tend to highlight some of his wackier moments - his close friendship with actress Shirley MacLaine, for instance, and the fact that he says he has seen a UFO over her house, the subject of a question Tim Russert asked in a Democratic debate this fall.

These days, his marriage is also getting as much attention as his political views. After two failed marriages, Kucinich met Elizabeth Harper, a striking British beauty more than 30 years his junior, in 2005 when she visited his congressional office to talk about monetary policy. He fell instantly in love. They were married less than four months later.

Kucinich explains their meeting and their courtship in near-mystical terms, and says it has transformed his life.

“When you’re in a profound loving relationship, that’s when the heart has wings and the spirit soars and there’s a feeling of everything being right with the world,” he says. “It’s almost a fulfillment of Spirit and some of St. Paul’s epistles when he writes about love.” The couple recited the Prayer of Saint Francis at their wedding - the well-known verse that begins, “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” He still hopes that his political career can be a way to work toward a larger world peace. But is this idealistic view of human nature at odds with the realities of a world in which peace often seems impossibly distant?

“It’s possible to have your feet on the ground and your eyes looking toward the stars,” Kucinich says, in a car rushing to an interview on Fox News to discuss his anger at being excluded from the final Democratic debate in Iowa. “There was a time when the sailors of old sailed by the stars…. It’s our obligation to each other to catch the rhythms of the unfolding future which exist in present time, and to call forth, to name it, to set it in motion, to be as architects of new worlds.”

Amanda Paulson is a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor.

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Why Not Give a Vegetarian Diet a Try for the New Year?

by Bruce Friedrich
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/31/6089/
Published on Monday, December 31, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

The New Year is upon us, and at PETA, we’re encouraging people to, for their new year’s resolution, give a healthy vegetarian diet a try.

Just last month, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta celebrated that the average cholesterol level in this country has fallen to 199, which is below (just barely) their stated target of 200. It’s too bad the CDC is happy with a 199 average in this country, since at 199, people are still dropping like flies from heart disease.

Heart disease kills more people in North America than does any other cause of death. Up until the 1980s, it was assumed that as people get older, their arteries inevitably become clogged. If you didn’t get hit by a bus or die of cancer or something else, your arteries would eventually close, causing either your brain or your heart to give out, and that would be it. Enter Doctors Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn, two doctors with 100 percent success in preventing and reversing heart disease, using a low-fat vegan diet.

If you know someone who has had a heart attack or suffers from heart problems, please stop listening right now and buy them Dr. Esselstyn’s book, Prevent & Reverse Heart Disease, which details his work at the top heart clinic in the world, The Cleveland Clinic. He covers both the skepticism of his colleagues, and also his 100 percent success taking people with advanced stages of heart disease, people who were told by their cardiologists that they were going to die, and stopping the disease in its tracks and even, in most instances, reversing it . The book will change, and perhaps save, their life.

The average vegan American’s cholesterol level is about 133, while the average vegetarians cholesterol level is 161. And the average meat-eater’s cholesterol level is now at 199. Although the medical establishment may say, “Well, you’ve done your best,” at 199, people are still dying in droves. As Dr. Charles Attwood pointed out, this is insane: If people were being run down by trucks at the same rate that they’re dying from heart attacks induced by meat, eggs, and dairy products, drastic steps would be taken.

And it’s not just heart disease that a vegetarian diet is good for. The American Dietetic Association, the world’s largest organization of nutrition professionals, performed an extensive review of all the scientific studies about vegetarian diets. They found that vegetarians have lower rates of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, and obesity than meat-eaters, and wrote a position paper on vegetarian and vegan diets which concludes that vegetarian and vegan diets are appropriate for all stages, including infancy and pregnancy, and that in fact they have, “health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.”

And it’s not just disease prevention that a vegetarian diet helps — most vegetarians report increased energy and concentration, among other advantages. Consider a study from a school for troubled youth in Miami. Dr. Antonia Demas from Cornell University put kids there on a vegan diet, resulting in a The Miami Herald headline, “Brain Food: Student Vegans See Boost in Grades, Energy.” School Principal Mary Louise Cole explained that the students “seem to have a lot more energy — they don’t have the down times.” Gabriel Saintvil, stated that “I used to get tired when I ran laps or lifted weights. Now I get endurance and keep on doing it.”

It works for adults, too. Carl Lewis, named “Olympian of the Century” by Sports Illustrated, says, “[M] y best year of track competition was the first year I ate a vegan diet. Moreover, by continuing to eat a vegan diet, my weight is under control, I like the way I look.”

And Atlanta Hawks guard Salim Stoudimire reports that his veganism, “does amazing things for my basketball game. I essentially never get tired [so] I have certainly became much more of a pain to guard because I have a lot of energy. And at the end of games, when everyone is not jumping as high, I now get a ton more points in the paint and rebounds. And I don’t get sick very often. I can’t shake the feeling that more athletes should try eating this way.”

Of course, new year’s resolutions tend to focus on weight loss more than anything else, and vegetarianism is helpful there, too, since vegetarians are one-third as likely to be obese as meat-eaters are, and vegans are about one-tenth as likely to be obese. You can be an overweight vegan, of course, and you can be a skinny meat-eater. But on average, vegans are 10 to 20 percent lighter than meat-eaters. Temporary diets don’t work, but a lifestyle switch to a vegetarian diet does, in instance after instance after instance, as documented in books like Dr. Neal Barnard’s Food for Life or Dr. Dean Ornish’s Eat More, Weigh Less.

The cancer prevention properties of a vegetarian diet were covered on HuffPo last year about this time in Michael Huffington’s new year’s resolution column about his own vegan commitment after he read Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s best-selling book, The China Study, so I won’t revisit them here.

Of course, a vegetarian diet is also the best diet for the environment and animals, as has been discussed admirably in the past on HuffPo. I grew up in Minnesota and Oklahoma, and when I was first presented with the idea of not eating meat, it sounded to me about as plausible as not breathing oxygen. But upon further examination, I came to see that my progressive ideology requires of me an openness to new and challenging ideas, even if they strike at the foundation of my existence — what I eat.

Readers interested in meal plans, cookbook recommendations, recipes, and more, can find it all at www.VegCooking.com. For more information on all aspects of vegetarianism and the meat industry, please visit www.GoVeg.com.

Happy Eating and Happy New Year!

Bruce Friedrich is vice-president in charge of international grassroots campaigns for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the world’s largest animal rights organization, with more than 1.6 million members and supporters.

Saturday, December 29, 2007

Fisk: They don't blame al-Qa'ida. They blame Musharraf

Robert Fisk: They don't blame al-Qa'ida. They blame Musharraf

Published: 29 December 2007

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article3291600.ece

Weird, isn't it, how swiftly the narrative is laid down for us. Benazir Bhutto, the courageous leader of the Pakistan People's Party, is assassinated in Rawalpindi – attached to the very capital of Islamabad wherein ex-General Pervez Musharraf lives – and we are told by George Bush that her murderers were "extremists" and "terrorists". Well, you can't dispute that.

But the implication of the Bush comment was that Islamists were behind the assassination. It was the Taliban madmen again, the al-Qa'ida spider who struck at this lone and brave woman who had dared to call for democracy in her country.

Of course, given the childish coverage of this appalling tragedy – and however corrupt Ms Bhutto may have been, let us be under no illusions that this brave lady is indeed a true martyr – it's not surprising that the "good-versus-evil" donkey can be trotted out to explain the carnage in Rawalpindi.

Who would have imagined, watching the BBC or CNN on Thursday, that her two brothers, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, hijacked a Pakistani airliner in 1981 and flew it to Kabul where Murtaza demanded the release of political prisoners in Pakistan. Here, a military officer on the plane was murdered. There were Americans aboard the flight – which is probably why the prisoners were indeed released.

Only a few days ago – in one of the most remarkable (but typically unrecognised) scoops of the year – Tariq Ali published a brilliant dissection of Pakistan (and Bhutto) corruption in the London Review of Books, focusing on Benazir and headlined: "Daughter of the West". In fact, the article was on my desk to photocopy as its subject was being murdered in Rawalpindi.

Towards the end of this report, Tariq Ali dwelt at length on the subsequent murder of Murtaza Bhutto by police close to his home at a time when Benazir was prime minister – and at a time when Benazir was enraged at Murtaza for demanding a return to PPP values and for condemning Benazir's appointment of her own husband as minister for industry, a highly lucrative post.

In a passage which may yet be applied to the aftermath of Benazir's murder, the report continues: "The fatal bullet had been fired at close range. The trap had been carefully laid, but, as is the way in Pakistan, the crudeness of the operation – false entries in police log-books, lost evidence, witnesses arrested and intimidated – a policeman killed who they feared might talk – made it obvious that the decision to execute the prime minister's brother had been taken at a very high level."

When Murtaza's 14-year-old daughter, Fatima, rang her aunt Benazir to ask why witnesses were being arrested – rather than her father's killers – she says Benazir told her: "Look, you're very young. You don't understand things." Or so Tariq Ali's exposé would have us believe. Over all this, however, looms the shocking power of Pakistan's ISI, the Inter Services Intelligence.

This vast institution – corrupt, venal and brutal – works for Musharraf.

But it also worked – and still works – for the Taliban. It also works for the Americans. In fact, it works for everybody. But it is the key which Musharraf can use to open talks with America's enemies when he feels threatened or wants to put pressure on Afghanistan or wants to appease the " extremists" and "terrorists" who so oppress George Bush. And let us remember, by the way, that Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by his Islamist captors in Karachi, actually made his fatal appointment with his future murderers from an ISI commander's office. Ahmed Rashid's book Taliban provides riveting proof of the ISI's web of corruption and violence. Read it, and all of the above makes more sense.

But back to the official narrative. George Bush announced on Thursday he was "looking forward" to talking to his old friend Musharraf. Of course, they would talk about Benazir. They certainly would not talk about the fact that Musharraf continues to protect his old acquaintance – a certain Mr Khan – who supplied all Pakistan's nuclear secrets to Libya and Iran. No, let's not bring that bit of the "axis of evil" into this.

So, of course, we were asked to concentrate once more on all those " extremists" and "terrorists", not on the logic of questioning which many Pakistanis were feeling their way through in the aftermath of Benazir's assassination.

It doesn't, after all, take much to comprehend that the hated elections looming over Musharraf would probably be postponed indefinitely if his principal political opponent happened to be liquidated before polling day.

So let's run through this logic in the way that Inspector Ian Blair might have done in his policeman's notebook before he became the top cop in London.

Question: Who forced Benazir Bhutto to stay in London and tried to prevent her return to Pakistan? Answer: General Musharraf.

Question: Who ordered the arrest of thousands of Benazir's supporters this month? Answer: General Musharraf.

Question: Who placed Benazir under temporary house arrest this month? Answer: General Musharraf.

Question: Who declared martial law this month? Answer General Musharraf.

Question: who killed Benazir Bhutto?

Er. Yes. Well quite.

You see the problem? Yesterday, our television warriors informed us the PPP members shouting that Musharraf was a "murderer" were complaining he had not provided sufficient security for Benazir. Wrong. They were shouting this because they believe he killed her.

Bush As A War Criminal - Torture Tapes And More Evidence

Published on Monday, December 24, 2007 by The Times Online

The Torture Tape Fingering Bush As a War Criminal

by Andrew Sullivan

Almost all of the time, the Washington I know and live in is utterly unrelated to the Washington you see in the movies. The government is far more incompetent and amateur than the masterminds of Hollywood darkness.

There are no rogue CIA agents engaging in illegal black ops and destroying evidence to protect their political bosses. The kinds of scenario cooked up in Matt Damon’s riveting Bourne series are fantasy compared with the mundane, bureaucratic torpor of the Brussels on the Potomac.

And then you read about the case of Abu Zubaydah. He is a seriously bad guy - someone we should all be glad is in custody. A man deeply involved in Al-Qaeda, he was captured in a raid in Pakistan in March 2002 and whisked off to a secret interrogation, allegedly in Thailand.

President George Bush claimed Zubaydah was critical in identifying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind behind 9/11. The president also conceded that at some point the CIA, believing Zubaydah was withholding information, “used an alternative set of procedures”, which were “safe and lawful and necessary”.

Zubaydah was waterboarded. That much we know - it was confirmed recently by a former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, who even used the plain English word “torture” to describe what was done. But we know little else for sure. We do know there was deep division within the American government about Zubaydah’s interrogation, and considerable debate about his reliability.

Ron Suskind’s masterful 2006 book The One Percent Doctrine recorded FBI sources as saying that Zubaydah was in fact mentally unstable and tangential to Al-Qaeda’s plots, and that he gave reams of unfounded information under torture - information that led law-enforcement bodies in the US to raise terror alert levels, rushing marshals and police to shopping malls, bridges and other alleged targets as Zubaydah tried to get the torture to stop. No one disputes that Zubaydah wrote a diary - and that it was written in the words of three personalities, none of them his own.

A former FBI agent who was involved in the interrogation, Daniel Coleman, said last week that the CIA knew Al-Qaeda’s leaders all believed Zubaydah “was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone. You think they’re going to tell him anything?” Even though preliminary, legal interrogation gave the US good - though not unique - information, the CIA still asked for and received permission to torture him in pursuit of more data and leads.

The Washington Post reported that “current and former officials” said the torture lasted weeks and even, according to some, months, and that the techniques included hypothermia, long periods of standing, sleep deprivation and multiple sessions of waterboarding. All these “alternative procedures”, as Bush described them, are illegal under US law and the Geneva conventions.

They are, in fact, war crimes. And they were once all treated by the US as war crimes when they were perpetrated by the Nazis. Waterboarding has been found to be a form of torture in various American legal cases.

And that is where the story becomes interesting. The Bush administration denies any illegality at all, insists it does not “torture” but refuses to say whether it believes waterboarding is torture or not. But hundreds of hours of videotape were recorded of Zubaydah’s incarceration and torture. That evidence would settle the dispute over the extremely serious question of whether the president of the United States authorised war crimes.

And now we have found out that all the tapes have been destroyed.

See what I mean by Hollywood? We know about the destruction because someone in the government told The New York Times. We also know the 9/11 Commission had asked the administration to furnish every piece of relevant evidence with respect to Zubaydah’s interrogation and was not told about the tapes. We know also that four senior aides to Bush and Dick Cheney, the vice-president, discussed the destruction of the tapes - including David Addington, Cheney’s right-hand man and the chief legal architect of the administration’s detention and interrogation policies.

At a press conference last Thursday the president gave an equivocal response to what he knew about the tapes and when he knew it: “The first recollection is when CIA director Mike Hayden briefed me.” That briefing was earlier this month. The president is saying he cannot recall something - not that it didn’t happen. That’s the formulation all lawyers tell their clients to use when they need to avoid an exposable lie.

This is not, of course, the first big scandal to have emerged over the administration’s interrogation policies. You can fill a book with the sometimes sickening details that have come out of Guantanamo Bay, Bagram in Afghanistan, Camp Cropper in Iraq and, of course, Abu Ghraib.

The administration has admitted that several prisoners have been killed in interrogation, and dozens more have died in the secret network of interrogation sites the US has set up across the world. The policy of rendition has sent countless suspects into torture cells in Uzbekistan, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere to feed the West’s intelligence on jihadist terrorism.

But this case is more ominous for the administration because it presents a core example of what seems to be a cover-up, obstruction of justice and a direct connection between torture and the president, the vice-president and their closest aides.

Because several courts had pending cases in which testimony from Zubaydah’s interrogation was salient, the destruction of such evidence triggers a legal process that is hard for the executive branch to stymie or stall - and its first attempt was flatly rebuffed by a judge last week.

Its key argument is a weakly technical one: that the interrogation took place outside US territory - and therefore the courts do not have jurisdiction over it. It’s the same rationale for imprisoning hundreds of suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba - a legal no man’s land. But Congress can get involved - especially if it believes that what we have here is a cover-up.

What are the odds that a legal effective interrogation of a key Al-Qaeda operative would have led many highly respected professionals in the US intelligence community to risk their careers by leaking top-secret details to the press?

What are the odds that the CIA would have sought to destroy tapes that could prove it had legally prevented serious and dangerous attacks against innocent civilians? What are the odds that a president who had never authorised waterboarding would be unable to say whether such waterboarding was torture?

What are the odds that, under congressional grilling, the new attorney-general would also refuse to say whether he believed waterboarding was illegal, if there was any doubt that the president had authorised it? The odds are beyond minimal.

Any reasonable person examining all the evidence we have - without any bias - would conclude that the overwhelming likelihood is that the president of the United States authorised illegal torture of a prisoner and that the evidence of the crime was subsequently illegally destroyed.

Congresswoman Jane Harman, the respected top Democrat on the House intelligence committee in 2003-06, put it as simply as she could: “I am worried. It smells like the cover-up of the cover-up.”

It’s a potential Watergate. But this time the crime is not a two-bit domestic burglary. It’s a war crime that reaches into the very heart of the Oval Office.

Yes, it is Hollywood time. And the ending of this movie is as yet unwritten.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Microbes Are Us - 1,000 Trillion Bacteria Cells with each 100 Trillion Cells Of A Person

Microbes Are US
http://www.lef.org/news/LefDailyNews.htm?NewsID=6111&Section=Vitamins

The State Journal-Register Springfield, IL

11-15-07

Each of us is a singular crowd - a walking, talking, air- breathing, waste-producing assemblage of microbial organisms.

Your body consists of 100 trillion cells, give or take, but they're in the minority. Each human also is home to, among other things, an estimated 1,000 trillion individual bacteria, or 10 times more microbes than human cells. What does this mean?

Well, for one thing, it means that you're not alone. Ever. But more importantly, it means you're alive - and well.

"People like to think of themselves as exclusively human," said Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, a molecular biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, "but we're really a composite of many species, an amalgamation of human and microbial attributes. To fully understand what it means to be human, we need to embrace, explore and explain what microbes mean to us."

Because they cause disease and bodily harm, bacterial pathogens such as Vibrio cholerae and Mycobacterium tuberculosis tend to grab most of our attention. But there are many more bacteria species that pose no threat to humans, and quite a few that are, in fact, symbiotic or mutually beneficial.

"These microbes provide humans with features we haven't had to evolve on our own, such as breaking down otherwise indigestible foods, detoxifying carcinogens, educating our immune system and generally keeping bad bugs out," Gordon said.

Bacterial symbionts tend to be found in and on specific parts of our bodies. The average person's mouth, for example, contains perhaps 25 species of bacteria, with a quarter-teaspoon of saliva holding up to 40 million individual cells.

But it's the intestines that are the real microbial zoo. Gordon says the human gut is the densest bacterial ecosystem known, home to perhaps 500 species and 10 trillion to 100 trillion individual microbes. That works out to about 4 pounds of bugs in an adult, but you don't want to lose the weight.

Besides breaking down otherwise indigestible carbohydrates and helping absorb minerals like copper and iron, intestinal bacteria produce vital nutrients like vitamin K (necessary for clotting blood) and folic acid.

When you upset them by, say, taking antibiotics that can kill good bacteria along with the bad, intestinal microbes could cause you to be, well, upset, too.

In the womb, human babies are essentially germ-free, but that soon changes. Newborns pick up their first bugs passing through Mom's birth canal, then spend the rest of their lives acquiring more and different bacterial residents and visitors.

Doing so may, in fact, be a factor in how long you live. A 2003 study by Caltech scientists found that fruit flies exposed to bacteria in the first week of life lived 30 percent longer than flies exposed to bacteria at midlife or not exposed at all. Some researchers suggest something similar may happen with people.

"Microbes in the human body is no accident," says Dr. Martin Blaser, a professor of internal medicine and microbiology at the New York University Medical Center. "They've been with us a long time. They've co-evolved with us. They've been naturally selected because they help keep us alive. They are indisputably important."

How important isn't completely understood. It's not known, for example, exactly how many types of bacteria inhabit humans. And the full nature of our symbiotic relationship with bacteria is even more mysterious, not the least because it's so incredibly complicated. Bacteria that are benign in one person may be pathogenic in another. They might be beneficial - or at least harmless - in one part of the body, but problematic somewhere else.

Lactobacillus bacteria, for example, helps break down foods in the intestines (and helps make foods like yogurt, cheese and pickles), but in the mouth, the bacteria converts sugars into plaque, promoting dental caries or cavities.

Escherichia coli 0157:H7 is a notorious food-borne strain of bacteria that causes illness and even death. But other E. coli strains are commonly found in the human gut, where they quietly go about their business and may, according to some research, confer increased resistance to urinary tract infections.

Blaser's fear, which Gordon and others echo, is that humans are permanently altering ages-old, evolved microbial relationships without really knowing what the consequences might be. Or what might be lost. The concern is similar to that voiced by environmentalists who contend unknown numbers and types of beneficial plants and organisms are going extinct, some before they've even been discovered.

Microbiologists like Blaser and Gordon are pushing for a national and international effort to map the human microbiome akin to the Human Genome Project.

Humans harbor an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 bacteria species. Each bacterium has its own genome. Microbial genes in the large intestine alone outnumber human genes 100 to 1. The majority of bacteria species have yet to be fully described or sequenced. And in combination, they form ecosystems that probably are unique to their hosts.

Understanding how these organisms live and work together and with us, said Gordon, presents incredible possibilities: "Microbes might be telltale signs, biomarkers of changes in ourselves and in other ecosystems. We might be able to learn how to intentionally manipulate microbiomes to improve health."

On the Web

www.microbeworld.org: A comprehensive site with articles, images, video and podcasts featuring news and information about bacteriaviruses, fungi and more.

adoptamicrobe.blogspot.com: Blogger Emily Lurie loves Salvador Dali, Pez dispensers and bacteria. Each day, she highlights a particular bug and why you should (or shouldn't) love it, too.

Monday, December 24, 2007

President Correa Of Ecuador - Kicks USA Military Out, Dumps IMF, Terminates Occidental Petroleum And Much More

Good and Evil at the Center of the Earth:
A Quechua Christmas Carol
by Greg Palast

December 24th, 2007

[Quito] I don't know what the hell seized me. In the middle of an hour-long interview with the President of Ecuador, I asked him about his father.

I'm not Barbara Walters. It's not the kind of question I ask.

He hesitated. Then said, "My father was unemployed.”

He paused. Then added, "He took a little drugs to the States... This is called in Spanish a mula [mule]. He passed four years in the states- in a jail.”

He continued. "I'd never talked about my father before."

Apparently he hadn't. His staff stood stone silent, eyes widened.

Correa's dad took that frightening chance in the 1960s, a time when his family, like almost all families in Ecuador, was destitute. Ecuador was the original "banana republic" - and the price of bananas had hit the floor. A million desperate Ecuadorans, probably a tenth of the entire adult population, fled to the USA anyway they could.

"My mother told us he was working in the States."

His father, released from prison, was deported back to Ecuador. Humiliated, poor, broken, his father, I learned later, committed suicide.

At the end of our formal interview, through a doorway surrounded by paintings of the pale plutocrats who once ruled this difficult land, he took me into his own Oval Office. I asked him about an odd-looking framed note he had on the wall. It was, he said, from his daughter and her grade school class at Christmas time. He translated for me.

"We are writing to remind you that in Ecuador there are a lot of very poor children in the streets and we ask you please to help these children who are cold almost every night.”

It was kind of corny. And kind of sweet. A smart display for a politician.

Or maybe there was something else to it.

Correa is one of the first dark-skinned men to win election to this Quechua and mixed-race nation. Certainly, one of the first from the streets. He'd won a surprise victory over the richest man in Ecuador, the owner of the biggest banana plantation.

Doctor Correa, I should say, with a Ph.D in economics earned in Europe.

Recession & Tent Cities Brought To You By Corporate Globalism

Tent City in Suburbs Is Cost of Home Crisis

By Dana Ford
Reuters

Thursday 20 December 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/122307Y.shtml
Go to Original

Between railroad tracks and beneath the roar of departing planes sits "tent city," a terminus for homeless people. It is not, as might be expected, in a blighted city center, but in the once-booming suburbia of Southern California.

The noisy, dusty camp sprang up in July with 20 residents and now numbers 200 people, including several children, growing as this region east of Los Angeles has been hit by the U.S. housing crisis.

The unraveling of the region known as the Inland Empire reads like a 21st century version of "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck's novel about families driven from their lands by the Great Depression.

As more families throw in the towel and head to foreclosure here and across the nation, the social costs of collapse are adding up in the form of higher rates of homelessness, crime and even disease.

While no current residents claim to be victims of foreclosure, all agree that tent city is a symptom of the wider economic downturn. And it's just a matter of time before foreclosed families end up at tent city, local housing experts say.

"They don't hit the streets immediately," said activist Jane Mercer. Most families can find transitional housing in a motel or with friends before turning to charity or the streets. "They only hit tent city when they really bottom out."

Steve, 50, who declined to give his last name, moved to tent city four months ago. He gets social security payments, but cannot work and said rents are too high.

"House prices are going down, but the rentals are sky-high," said Steve. "If it wasn't for here, I wouldn't have a place to go."

"Squatting in Vacant Houses"

Nationally, foreclosures are at an all-time high. Filings are up nearly 100 percent from a year ago, according to the data firm RealtyTrac. Officials say that as many as half a million people could lose their homes as adjustable mortgage rates rise over the next two years.

California ranks second in the nation for foreclosure filings - one per 88 households last quarter. Within California, San Bernardino county in the Inland Empire is worse - one filing for every 43 households, according to RealtyTrac.

Maryanne Hernandez bought her dream house in San Bernardino in 2003 and now risks losing it after falling four months behind on mortgage payments.

"It's not just us. It's all over," said Hernandez, who lives in a neighborhood where most families are struggling to meet payments and many have lost their homes.

She has noticed an increase in crime since the foreclosures started. Her house was robbed, her kids' bikes were stolen and she worries about what type of message empty houses send.

The pattern is cropping up in communities across the country, like Cleveland, Ohio, where Mark Wiseman, director of the Cuyahoga County Foreclosure Prevention Program, said there are entire blocks of homes in Cleveland where 60 or 70 percent of houses are boarded up.

"I don't think there are enough police to go after criminals holed up in those houses, squatting or doing drug deals or whatever," Wiseman said.

"And it's not just a problem of a neighborhood filled with people squatting in the vacant houses, it's the people left behind, who have to worry about people taking siding off your home or breaking into your house while you're sleeping."

Health risks are also on the rise. All those empty swimming pools in California's Inland Empire have become breeding grounds for mosquitoes, which can transmit the sometimes deadly West Nile virus, Riverside County officials say.

"Trickle-Down Effect"

But it is not just homeowners who are hit by the foreclosure wave. People who rent now find themselves in a tighter, more expensive market as demand rises from families who lost homes, said Jean Beil, senior vice president for programs and services at Catholic Charities USA.

"Folks who would have been in a house before are now in an apartment and folks that would have been in an apartment, now can't afford it," said Beil. "It has a trickle-down effect."

For cities, foreclosures can trigger a range of short-term costs, like added policing, inspection and code enforcement. These expenses can be significant, said Lt. Scott Patterson with the San Bernardino Police Department, but the larger concern is that vacant properties lower home values and in the long-run, decrease tax revenues.

And it all comes at a time when municipalities are ill-equipped to respond. High foreclosure rates and declining home values are sapping property tax revenues, a key source of local funding to tackle such problems.

Earlier this month, U.S. President George W. Bush rolled out a plan to slow foreclosures by freezing the interest rates on some loans. But for many in these parts, the intervention is too little and too late.

Ken Sawa, CEO of Catholic Charities in San Bernardino and Riverside counties, said his organization is overwhelmed and ill-equipped to handle the volume of people seeking help.

"We feel helpless," said Sawa. "Obviously, it's a local problem because it's in our backyard, but the solution is not local."

Friday, December 21, 2007

Ode's top 10 positive stories from 2007

Ode's top 10 positive stories from 2007

Good news rarely makes the headlines... except in Ode. To celebrate 2007—and anticipate more good news to come in 2008—here are Ode's 10 most positive stories from the year that was.

1.	Feed Your Brain A diet rich in vitamins, minerals and fatty acids can help reduce aggression, improve mood and prevent depression. So why aren't more people taking omega-3 capsules? Jurriaan Kamp
2.	Beyond organic The next ecological and social revolution is being plotted right now in the rainforests of South America. Jay Walljasper
3.	The transformation of an extremist How a former Taliban fighter learned that teaching young girls is the best way to help impoverished, war-torn Kashmir. Karin Ronnow
4.	Organic agriculture can feed the world A large-scale switch to organic agriculture could in fact, feed a growing world population while decreasing environmental destruction. Marco Visscher
5.	This little light of mine A revolutionary new light bulb uses so little energy it can last decades. Tijn Touber
6.	Satire invades China Satire allows young people to critique their government. Marco Visscher
7.	Pulling themselves up by their keyboards By bringing computers into slums, an Indian physicist shows that illiterate children can educate themselves and help their country progress. Lex Veldhoen
8.	Sisterhood is powerful A nunnery in northern India offers a full slate of classes, leading for the first time to the highest academic degree for Buddhist scholars. Diana Reynolds Roome
9.	Small is Successful A growing number of businesses discover that getting big is not the best measure of accomplishment. Jay Walljasper
10.	The car that runs on air The world's cleanest engine. Marco Visscher