British, Canadian soldiers killed in new Afghan violence
AFP
9.4.06
A suicide car bomb in Kabul has killed a British soldier and four Afghans while a Canadian troop died in gunfire from NATO aircraft during a dawn battle against seasoned Taliban insurgents.
Sixteen Taliban and three police were meanwhile killed in a battle overnight when the rebels tried to retake a southern town they had captured briefly weeks ago, and two more policemen were killed in an attack near the capital Friday.
The suicide blast struck a British patrol on a road in the east of the city that is regularly used by foreign troops and has seen most of the suicide blasts in the city.
Britain's Ministry of Defence said in London that one British soldier was killed and another was badly injured in the bomb attack.
NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said two others were lightly hurt.
The dead Afghans included three passers-by and a member of the Afghan intelligence agency, the head of the police criminal investigation department, General Alishah Paktiawal, told AFP.
The bodies of men who had been riding a motorbike were lying amid the debris of destroyed vehicles at the scene. The body of the suicide attacker, which was blackened and dismembered, was quickly covered and taken away by police as the blood-spattered road was washed down.
Fourteen British soldiers have now died in hostile action in Afghanistan this year, 13 of them in the southern province of Helmand where the bulk of a British deployment of 4,500 troops to Afghanistan is based.
The toll excludes 14 who were killed in the southern province of Kandahar on Saturday when a reconnaissance plane supporting a major anti-Taliban operation crashed because of a technical problem.
It was the single biggest loss of British troops in Afghanistan or Iraq since the US-led "war on terror" was launched in November 2001.
The spy plane, despatched from Qatar, had been operating in support of Operation Medusa launched on Saturday with 2,000 Afghan and NATO troops, which is aimed at driving seasoned Taliban fighters from a stronghold in Panjwayi district of Kandahar province.
In a dawn battle between ISAF and the Taliban in the area on Monday, gunfire from NATO aircraft killed a Canadian soldier and wounded several others.
The friendly fire incident happened after troops had called for air support, ISAF said in a statement. "Two ISAF aircraft provided the support but regrettably engaged friendly forces during a strafing run, using cannons."
ISAF commander Lieutenant General David Richards told reporters the incident was "regrettable".
"But the task they were set is extremely important, perhaps vital to the operation we are conducting here," the British general said.
This was the first such incident in more than 800 operations involving close air support, he said.
He lied.
Four Canadian soldiers were killed while participating in Operation Medusa on Sunday. Twenty Canadians have been killed in hostile action this year.
Around 200 rebels have been killed and 80 arrested in the first two days of the offensive in Panjwayi, about 35 kilometres (20 miles) from Kandahar city.
The area is the birthplace of the Taliban extremists who were in government between 1996 and 2001.
Afghan police reported meanwhile that 16 Taliban and three policemen were killed in Helmand province late Sunday when the rebels tried to retake Garmser town, which they had held for nearly two days in July.
A district police chief and a fellow officer were also killed Sunday when Taliban fighters ambushed their patrol just 30 kilometres from Kabul.
ISAF took over the southern provinces on July 31 in NATO's most ambitious military operation yet. Richards said in an interview published Saturday that the force had set itself a six-month deadline to establish a clear advantage over Taliban insurgents.
20 Taliban killed in major NATO, Afghan operation
AFP
Sun Sep 3
More than 20 insurgents have been killed in a major offensive against Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan, the NATO-led force said Sunday, a day after the drive was launched.
Operation Medusa, involving Afghan and NATO troops, kicked off in southern Kandahar province on Saturday with the aim of driving Taliban militants from a rebel stronghold in the Panjwayi area.
The operation had "special emphasis on driving out the insurgents so Afghans in Panjwayi district of Kandahar can return to their homes and orchards that sustained their livelihood," an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) spokesman said.
"We all see signs that the ISAF troop presence in the area is doing just that with more than 20 insurgents killed there in recent action," Major Luke Knittig told reporters in the capital.
He wouldn't give details saying "the operation is very much ongoing."
The toll was the first released by the NATO force with a spokesman saying earlier that the action had seen "substantial" rebel casualties.
ISAF officials have said the operation involves nearly 2,000 Afghan and ISAF troops and is set to continue for "some time".
The Taliban took up arms in the area in the early 1990s to sweep to power in 1996, before being ousted five years later for sheltering Al-Qaeda leaders blamed for the September 11 attacks in the United States.
A British reconnaissance plane that crashed hours after take-off had been trying to ensure civilian casualties were avoided in the operation, ISAF spokesman Major Quentin Innes told AFP.
We try to be good and they shoot us down. That plane was not helping attack it was helping to assist.
The crash caused the biggest single loss of British troops in Afghanistan or Iraq since the US-led "war on terror" was launched in November 2001. Twelve RAF personnel, a Royal Marine and a British Army soldier were killed.
ISAF said the crash was caused by technical failure and the plane had not been shot down as claimed by Taliban rebels.
"We were doing a very detailed survey of the target and that aircraft was part of assets to do that survey and to ensure non-combatants were not injured in the operation," Innes told AFP.
Coalition and ISAF forces have come under heavy criticism for killing civilians in their operation in Afghanistan. Human rights officials said nearly 40 were killed in a coalition operation in Panjwayi in May.
Days ahead of the launch of the operation, ISAF and Afghan officials had urged residents through the media and meetings with area elders to leave the area so they would not be caught up in the violence.
That worked so well for the IDF, why not try it ourselves.
ISAF was still cleaning up the crash site Sunday, Innes said. The remains of the soldiers would be transported to the Kandahar Air Field before being repatriated to Britain, Innes said.
British forces form the bulk of an ISAF deployment of about 10,000 troops in southern Afghanistan, with the other major contingents coming from Canada and The Netherlands.
The troops have suffered a barrage of attacks, with more than 80 foreign soldiers killed in hostile action in Afghanistan in a surge in Taliban violence this year.
Panjwayi has in particular seen fierce fighting this year.
Observation showed that seasoned Taliban fighters in the area were "hardening their defence positions and sandbagging buildings and bringing in ammunition," an ISAF spokesman said Saturday.
"We have had indications that these Taliban fighters are of the hardcore variety as opposed to the soldiers-for-a-day we see sometimes," Major Scott Lundy said.
"The goal is to remove the Taliban threat from Panjwayi and stabilise the situation so that much needed reconstruction and development projects can resume."
That goal can not be achieve for no one will push the students of Islam out of Afghanistan, just ain’t going to happen.
ISAF commander Lieutenant General David Richards said in an interview published at the weekend that the force had set itself a six-month deadline to establish a clear advantage over Taliban insurgents.
"We have to show in the next six months that the government is on the winning side," he told Britain's Financial Times business daily.
What happens after six months and no signs of victory?
Israel could release 800 Palestinian prisoners for soldier
AFP
Sun Sep 3
Under secret talks being mediated by Egypt, Israel could release up to 800 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a soldier captured by Gaza militants in early June, a report said.
Quoting unnamed security officials, Israel's mass-selling Yediot Aharonot said Israel would release the prisoners in three stages and that the negotiations were being held up over the timetable of the prisoner release.
Israel has refused as part of the deal to release Marwan Barghuti, a leader of the Palestinian uprising and a top official of president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah faction, it said.
Gaza militants seized Corporal Gilad Shalit in a June 25 cross-border raid that left two other soldiers dead, sparking a widescale Israeli offensive in the costal strip to recover the serviceman and prevent rocket fire.
The continuing offensive has killed more than 200 Palestinians.
The three groups that claimed responsibility for the raid, including the armed wing of the ruling Islamist Hamas movement, have demanded that Israel release prisoners in exchange for the soldier.
The Jewish state has officially demanded an unconditional release, but local media have reported that talks have been underway for some time.
On Saturday, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told the state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper that talks were under way to release the Israeli soldier in exchange for Palestinian women and underage prisoners.
The Cairo weekly Akhbar Al-Yom quoted Egypt's foreign minister as saying that Egypt was trying to secure the release of 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Shalit.
So if Israel releases 800 for one, it not only undermines the casa belli but it provides motivation to future kidnappings more in the order to free more jailed Palestinians. Everyone knows the minute the Israelis release these men they will once again begin to arrest them all over agian until all are either dead or in custody. It is a deadly cycle.
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
The New York Times
September 3, 2006
Soldiers’ Stories
HIT, Iraq
SOON after Specialist Michael Potocki was shot and killed in June, the soldiers in his platoon agreed on their goal for the months ahead: to survive and make it home alive.
Survival may be the only thing the troops here agree on. The first death of a comrade in battle is always an emotional shock, and the views from the foxhole here are probably as varied as the 34 soldiers. Still, in this hostile stretch of western Iraq, some of the troops have begun to wonder if the presence of United States forces here is worth the cost in American lives.
The vision at the top is that the forces here are a small but vital part of the counterinsurgency campaign, which requires patience and continued sacrifice until newly minted Iraqi forces are ready to take over.
“The coalition needs to leave, but not too fast,” says Lt. Col. Thomas Graves, who commands Task Force 1-36, the Army unit responsible for securing the town.
Staff Sgt. Ryan Poetsch, who did a previous tour in Baghdad and serves in Specialist Potocki’s platoon, acknowledges that he does not always have the big picture. But he does have a view from the streets in Hit and questions the strategy.
Hit is a tough assignment. The predominantly Sunni town of some 65,000 sits astride the Euphrates in Anbar Province. Saddam Hussein hid in the nearby palm groves soon after escaping from Baghdad in April 2003, a telling indication that the town contained more than a few supporters of the old order.
The overstretched American military got off on the wrong foot here. In the year before Colonel Graves’s task force arrived last February, an array of American units rotated through the area, a pattern that made it more difficult for the United States to cultivate relationships with the locals.
The current task force’s deployment will last a year, but the mechanized unit has only some 600 troops — far fewer than some of its predecessor units. Many of the city’s residents believe that the surest way to put an end to the roadside bombings, sniper attacks and mortar rounds would be for the Americans to deprive the insurgents of their target by leaving.
Colonel Graves seems to have the perfect résumé for the job.
A native of Killeen, Tex., he did a stint on a task force that studied the lessons of the Iraq invasion and served a previous tour as the Army wrestled with insurgent-infested Ramadi. Lean, taciturn and focused, he often jogs around the perimeter of his camp on Hit’s outskirts, in part to help him think about the decisions ahead.
Hit’s police force was overrun by the insurgents last year, and Colonel Graves has told the town elders that American forces will not leave Hit before a new police force is recruited, trained and on the streets.
Soon after a July police recruiting drive ended, he got into an armored Humvee and headed downtown to hear what the imams were saying at the local mosques. An interpreter scribbled down a sermon blasting from a loudspeaker. It implored the faithful not to cooperate with their occupiers.
Still, the colonel says he is making headway.
“Given where I was in Ramadi, I see progress,” he said. “In January 2005 we could not get anybody in Ramadi to participate in the political process. Now you have the citizens of Hit who at least understand that process even if they don’t necessarily agree with it.”
Given what? They are comparing shit to crap.
The colonel is aware that the grunts on the ground may not be making that comparison.
“The leap of logic that is really hard is: What does the daily patrol downtown in Hit do to stabilize the country?” Colonel Graves said. “The answer is that it goes to securing the area so we can get some breathing space to build the Iraqi institutions, to train the Iraqi army and police.
A conclusion that is simply whack.
“It is not as simple that if you just leave, everything will be fine. We left Falluja and what happened? It became a haven for murder and intimidation. If you leave too early you create a chaotic situation.”
He is delusional about the events in the town of Fallujah.
For some troops it is satisfying to know that they are professionals taking on an enormously demanding mission.
Professional what? Killers, occupiers, crusaders? It is like a real estate agent calling himself a ‘professional’. If some on thinks they are a professional one can assume they are an asshole and a bit full of themselves. When the words “I am a professional” are heard they really mean “I am a dumbshit, look at me.”
A 34-year-old Marine reservist from Detroit, Maj. Brent Lilly, leads the civil affairs team. A practicing Muslim who speaks some Arabic, his goal is to improve the city’s ailing infrastructure, show the Iraqis that the Americans can be trusted and pick up some useful intelligence along the way.
The military has distributed $100,000 for sewage, water distribution and other projects, and has plans to spend much more if security improves. Major Lilly, however, is under no illusion about the difficulty of winning over the city’s residents.
Spending money derived from where. Congress has stop funding the rebuilding of Iraq.
“Over all, they just tolerate us,” he said. “We’re here, and they have no other recourse but to tolerate us. The great majority want us to go home.”
They seem to have other recourse than just tolerating. IED seems to be one...
Asked how he carries on, Major Lilly says he is a Marine officer who is doing his job.
While it is difficult to gauge their numbers with precision, there are pockets of dispirited troops who are no longer convinced that Washington has committed the resources for a winning strategy.
Deep pockets.
Sergeant Poetsch, 31, comes from a small town in Ohio. He re-enlisted in the Army just before returning to Iraq, believes the military has made him a better person and says he would like to work as an Army recruiter. His parent battalion — 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment — is currently fighting in Ramadi, but his company was sent to Hit to augment the Army task force here.
Sergeant Poetsch thought the United States was doing the right thing by toppling Saddam Hussein. But the Army, he says, does not have nearly enough troops to patrol the city effectively, and he says Hit’s residents, unlike the people he encountered during his previous tour in Baghdad, do not want to have much to do with the Americans.
“At the beginning, I was all for it,” he said. “Saddam Hussein was not a good guy, and I always felt good that he is gone. But somehow it seems it seems that we lost direction. It is just hard for guys here to understand what we are doing. What makes it so significant if we can’t have more manpower and better living conditions?”
The task force has rotated the companies among several bases in and around the city. Firm Base 1, where the platoon used to live in the city, is austere even by military standards. On the wall of one room there is a scrawl of graffiti: “God doesn’t live here.”
Sergeant Poetsch was with Specialist Potocki when he was shot as they manned a combat outpost in the city. At first, it seemed that the 21-year-old specialist from Baltimore would be all right, but he later died from internal bleeding.
The loss of a comrade hit the platoon hard, as Sgt. Ryan Kahlor, 22, noted in an emotional letter to his parents in San Diego.
“The world keeps turning and so does the fighting in Iraq,” he wrote. “Yesterday, my soldier and friend was shot and killed. ...He is the first one in our platoon to be killed. His death has started an uproar of emotions in the platoon.”
Very strong words.
To deal with their grief, the platoon drew a memorial for Specialist Potocki and two wounded soldiers on a wooden door in one of their sandbagged rooms. They plan to bring it back to their home base in Germany. But it is not time to leave yet, and even demoralized troops need a mission.
“We are here for each other to make it home,” said Sergeant Poetsch. “That’s what our motto is. After Potocki went down we sat the platoon down and talked about that even if you don’t believe in what is going on, at least we fight for each other. That is how we are going with it now.”
Robert Fisk: American and Muslim: six million people in search of an identity
Seattle businessmen, students, Miami housewives... Well, what did I expect, asks Robert Fisk at the Chicago Muslim convention
Published: 03 September 2006
A guy with brown eyes and dark skin and a thick American accent walks up to talk to me. I guess he's an Iranian, possibly a Pakistani. Where're you from, I ask? "Austin, Texas," he replies. Fisk foiled again. But where do you originally come from I ask him? "I was born in Newark, New Jersey." Fisk clears his throat. Where does his family originally come from? I'm beginning to feel like the man from Homeland Security, racially profiling my new friend. "Lahore," he replies laconically and I try to make amends. The only beautiful city in Pakistan, I say, and he smiles witheringly at me.
And I go on making the same mistake at the conference hall where the biggest annual convention of American Muslims - perhaps 32,000 of them - is meeting for a weekend of speeches and discussions that run all the way from drug addiction to Condi Rice's "new" and bloody Middle East, from banking without interest to the Bush administration's use of torture and yes, of course, the after-effects on Muslims of the international crimes against humanity of September 11, 2001.
You from Jordan I ask? "Denver, Colorado," the young woman replies. Born in San Diego. Family, yes, from Jordan. From Lebanon, I ask another? "Buffalo, New York." Actually, the family was from Syria.
It takes a while to realise that I'm playing the game of so many American non-Muslims in the aftermath of the plane hijackings. I'm sniffing for the world's enemies only hours after President George W Bush went into paranoid mode while addressing the American Legion in Salt Lake City. He had just claimed that America is fighting "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century" and then jumped on the crumbling old arguments of pre-Second World War appeasement to bang the Hitler drum as well.
Oddly, it's the Muslim converts rather than the Muslim-born Americans who are toughest on Bush. "He wants eternal war," a young man with a brown beard but very bright blue eyes - yes, he was from Vermont - hissed at me. "He talks shit and we have to listen to this and promise to be non-violent or someone will point the finger at us." All agree that the most pernicious element to the latest Bush rant is his gift to Israel of placing Ehud Olmert in the ranks of his "war on terror", quite specifically linking Israel's slaughter of Lebanese civilians in July and August to his own manic project by stating that combatants from Iraq and Lebanon "form the outlines of a single movement, a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology".
I search for the anger amid these thousands of Muslims, businessmen from Seattle and students from Harvard and housewives from Miami. It's there, I know, but as an Armenian friend of mine remarks in the afternoon, they seem happy. And it's true. There are more smiles than expressions of contempt, more babies in backpacks and prams than posters of pain. In fact there aren't any posters at all. But I suspect I know the truth. On their own, as thin minorities in the towns and cities of the United States, America's Muslims - perhaps six million of them - can feel under siege, distrusted and even hated.
At the convention centre, however, they are in a self-confident majority, Sunnis for the most part - America's Shias, who may be in the majority over all, don't have the same organising abilities at present - who blithely ignore the officers of the Illinois state police and the Chicago cops' bomb squad. I watch them, guns swinging at their hips, go from stand to stand, occasionally inspecting the boxes of books piled against the walls. Just who, I wonder, do they think is going to bomb Muslims in Chicago?
Salam al-Marati - he is one of the few Muslims I meet who actually was born in the Arab world, in the Baghdad suburb of Qadamiyeh - is director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), a Los Angeles advocacy group which repeatedly urges American Muslims to work with the authorities against violence but who sees other dangers and other targets for Muslim political anger: the pro-Israeli lobbyists who ostentatiously insist that the vast majority of American Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding but that a "network of Islamic terror" exists across the nation.
Daniel Pipes is a bête noire, as is Steven Emerson, a freelance journalist who grinds out article after article about the "American jihad" for such august papers as The Wall Street Journal, which, by the way, more and more reads like The Jerusalem Post. Emerson and his work are taken apart by al-Marati and his colleagues in a widely circulated booklet entitled Counterproductive Terrorism: How Anti-Islamic Rhetoric is Impeding America's Homeland Security.
"Those representing pro-Israeli groups continue to intimidate and marginalise those who are critical of Israeli policies by claiming this is pro-terrorism," al-Marati says with a mixture of anger and weariness. "This is to the detriment of America, to the detriment of countering terrorism."
Maher Hathout, originally from the Cairo suburb of Qasr el-Aini and an MPAC advisor, is, if anything, even more angry. "We are that group of Americans who are not intimidated," he says. "You go to the campuses, and the Muslim students are the most outspoken. They are asking - we are asking - how we can get the average American who knows the truth about the Middle East to have the guts to speak it. Our job is to say: 'Shame on you. You criticise your President. But when you speak of Israel,you whisper.' What has happened to the home of the brave?"
MPAC - which is operating in Chicago under the auspices of the distinctly pro-Saudi Islamic Society of North America - has produced a handbook called the Grassroots Campaign to Fight Terrorism, which quotes from the Koran ("Whoever killed a human being... it shall be as if he had killed all mankind") and advises its supporters that "it is our duty as American Muslims to protect our country and to contribute to its betterment".
"But what is the American-Muslim identity?" al-Marati asks. "Our religious values and our American values are not incompatible. There is no dissonance between the founding principles of America and Muslim values. Unless we have this identity, we will be trapped. We will end up creating Muslim ghettoes in America."
Sometimes, though, these men and women remind me of nothing so much as the more ardent members of the Israeli - or Armenian - lobby: fluent, just a little bit over-eloquent, passionate - and I wonder if one day they may get a little loose with the facts.
Japan’s Likely Next Premier in Hawkish Stand
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
The New York Times
TOKYO, Sept. 1 — Shinzo Abe, the nationalist politician who is expected to become Japan’s next prime minister, said Friday that Japan should revise the pacifist Constitution imposed on it by the United States.
He made the statement as he formally declared his candidacy for the presidency of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, a post that would give him the prime ministership. Mr. Abe, the chief cabinet secretary, also said Japan should seek a larger role in the world and further strengthen its alliance with the United States.
“As the next L.D.P. president, I’d like to take the lead to put revision of the Constitution on the political agenda,” Mr. Abe said at a regional party convention in Hiroshima.
“I’d like to draft a new Constitution with my own hands,” he added.
The current war-renouncing Constitution, which was drafted by Americans during their occupation of the country after World War II, does not allow Japan to possess a real military.
Mr. Abe is almost certain to succeed Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who according to party rules will retire later this month. The Liberal Democrats control the lower house of Parliament, which chooses the prime minister.
Two other politicians have declared their candidacy in the party election of Sept. 20: Taro Aso, the hawkish foreign minister, and Sadakazu Tanigaki, the finance minister, who has emphasized repairing Japan’s strained relations with China and South Korea.
But polls indicate that neither has a chance of mounting a serious challenge against Mr. Abe, who remains the leading choice of the general public and, more important, the party lawmakers and members who will cast the votes.
Japan has been adjusting in recent weeks to Mr. Abe’s apparently inevitable victory, especially since his most serious challenger, Yasuo Fukuda, a veteran lawmaker, decided against running earlier this summer.
Mr. Koizumi is said to have long favored Mr. Abe, whom he appointed as the chief cabinet secretary, the government’s second most visible position after prime minister. Recently, as Mr. Koizumi’s interest in government seemed to wane in his last weeks in office, Mr. Abe appeared to have already grabbed the baton.
His image as Mr. Koizumi’s heir apparent was further solidified after North Korea tested long-range missiles in early July. The perceived threat from North Korea played to Mr. Abe’s strengths as a hawk, and he wasted no time in suggesting that Japan, a pacifist nation, should debate whether it should acquire the military capacity for a pre-emptive strike.
At 51, Mr. Abe would become postwar Japan’s youngest prime minister and the first born after World War II. He is considered politically inexperienced compared with his two rivals, having held no cabinet position until his current one.
Until a few years ago Mr. Abe was known among voters mainly for being the son of Shintaro Abe, a Liberal Democrat who almost became prime minister, and the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, a cabinet member during the war, who was imprisoned as a Class A war crimes suspect but was never tried and who became prime minister in 1957.
But Mr. Abe shot to political stardom by taking a hard-line stance against North Korea, which admitted in 2002 that it had kidnapped several Japanese citizens in the 1970’s and 1980’s. By articulating popular anger — fanning it, critics say — against the North, Mr. Abe developed an image of strong leadership that helped increase his popularity.
Just what the world needs, an aggressive Japan.
Experts predict that Mr. Abe will hew to Mr. Koizumi’s domestic and foreign policies. Like Mr. Koizumi, Mr. Abe has taken a hard stance against China and South Korea, which have refused to hold summit meetings with Japan because of Mr. Koizumi’s annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, the memorial where Japan’s war dead are enshrined along with top war criminals.
Mr. Abe, who has staunchly supported the visits, is regarded in Japan more of a hard-liner than Mr. Koizumi. Unlike Mr. Koizumi, who has accepted the validity of the Tokyo trials in which Japan’s wartime leaders were judged, Mr. Abe has not.
Mr. Koizumi led efforts to change the Imperial Household Law to allow women to ascend the imperial throne. Mr. Abe is widely known to have opposed the proposal.
Over the years, Mr. Abe has supported nationalist scholars in their efforts to revise school textbooks that they say overemphasize Japan’s wartime misdeeds.
In foreign policy, Mr. Abe has emphasized building stronger ties with Australia, India and other countries that he says share values of democracy and human rights with Japan — comments that have been interpreted as putting distance between Japan and China.
Like Mr. Koizumi, Mr. Abe has said strengthening Japan’s alliance with the United States will, more than anything else, guarantee Japan’s prosperity. “The Japan-U.S. alliance is the most important thing for our country’s diplomacy and national security,” he said Friday.
Protest Keeps Fox From Giving State of the Union Speech
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
The New York Times
MEXICO CITY, Sept. 1 — Leftist lawmakers who have charged that fraud marred the presidential election in July staged a protest inside Congress that prevented President Vicente Fox from making his final state of the union speech to lawmakers on Friday, ending a tense day of political brinksmanship here.
Federal riot police officers and soldiers with water cannons had sealed off the Mexican Congress with miles of steel fence to protect Mr. Fox from thousands of leftist protesters camped out in the city’s center.
The president had vowed he would give his last state of the union message, despite threats from the leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and his followers to stop him.
At the last minute, however, Mr. López Obrador backed down. In front of at least 5,000 supporters in the capital’s central square, Mr. López Obrador, the former mayor of this sprawling city, told his followers it would be a mistake to confront the barricades and the police surrounding Congress. He said the “fascist” government of Mr. Fox would seize on any clashes between the police and the protesters to justify the brutal repression of his movement.
“We are not going to fall into any trap, we are not going to fall into any provocation,” he told the crowd, which had waited through a rainstorm to hear him speak. “Only those who are not in the right resort to force and violence, and we are in the right.”
Still, lawmakers from Mr. López Obrador’s Democratic Revolution Party protested inside the Chamber of Deputies, taking over the podium just before President Fox was to speak at 7 p.m. Several waved Mexican flags and signs calling Mr. Fox “a traitor to democracy.” The president of the chamber, Deputy Jorge Zermiño, was forced to call a recess.
Mr. Fox arrived 15 minutes later. As he entered the chamber, wearing the traditional red, white and green presidential sash, leaders of his party said it would be impossible for him to speak. He dropped off his yearly report, turned on his heel and left.
At 9 p.m., the government broadcast a recorded version of the president’s speech, complete with pictures of happy citizens to illustrate the gains his government has made in housing, education and health care.
Mr. Fox staunchly defended the balance of powers and the government institutions Mr. López Obrador claims are corrupt, notably the Federal Election Institute and the electoral tribunal. He also stressed that the rule of law was the basis of democracy and he took a veiled shot at Mr. López Obrador, saying “no one should try to corral democracy through intransigence and violence.”
“Whoever attacks our laws and institutions, attacks our history, attacks Mexico,” he said.
Mr. López Obrador claims he won the election, even though an official count, vetted by the country’s highest electoral tribunal, showed that the candidate from Mr. Fox’s National Action Party, Felipe Calderón, eked out a razor-thin victory.
Rather than concede, Mr. López Obrador has promised to convene his own national assembly and set up a parallel government this month. He has said that he will never recognize Mr. Calderón’s victory and has declared that Mr. Fox violated Mexican election law by campaigning for Mr. Calderón, as did various business leaders who spent millions on attack ads against Mr. López Obrador in the last days of the campaign.
He also claimed that his opponents stuffed ballot boxes with votes for Mr. Calderón and disposed of votes for him in some states, a charge Mr. Calderón’s aides called absurd.
On Friday, at least 6,000 police officers in riot gear ringed the congressional building with steel barricades and blocked nearby subway stations to discourage demonstrations. Before the lawmakers’ protest, the only demonstration occurred just before 6 p.m., when a small group from the Francisco Villa Popular Front, a militant group allied with Mr. López Obrador, painted antigovernment slogans on the fence and threw rocks at the wall and at the police, who ignored them.
For more than a month, thousands of Mr. López Obrador’s supporters have blocked the major avenue running through the city, Paseo de la Reforma, and camped out in the main square, Plaza de la Constitution.
Newly elected lawmakers from Mr. López Obrador’s party arrived en masse at the legislative building about 1 p.m., broke through one of the barricades, marched into the chamber and denounced the presence of the president’s federal police.
“This is unforgivable,” announced Senator Carlos Navarette. “The chambers should not be invaded by the federal police. This is the house of the deputies, not of the president.”
Mr. Navarette later led the protest among the lawmakers, denouncing the ring of police officers outside as an infringement on Mexicans’ right to protest as his partisans rushed the dais and occupied it.
Earlier this week, an electoral tribunal charged with ratifying the election and resolving challenges threw out most of Mr. López Obrador’s arguments that there was widespread fraud. The court still must rule on his request to annul the election on grounds that the president and private businesses interfered too much in the campaign.
Aides to Mr. López Obrador said he had acknowledged privately that the court would probably name Mr. Calderón president-elect next week.
What form Mr. López Obrador’s protest movement will now take remains unclear, but it is certain to keep him in the public eye for the next six years and make it hard for Mr. Calderón to govern.
“He’s saying to the government, ‘Everything that I am going to do is going to give you trouble,’ ” a close adviser said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
14 Are Arrested in Anti-Terror Raids in London
By ALAN COWELL
The New York Times
September 3, 2006
LONDON, Sept. 2 — The British police arrested 14 men in south, east and north London overnight, raiding a halal restaurant and an Islamic school in the latest display of concern about the spread of potential terrorists among British Muslims, police officials said Saturday.
Separately, the police in Manchester in the northwest said they arrested two men in raids on three homes on Saturday morning. None of the arrests were linked to the huge security alert that began Aug. 10 when police rounded up 24 people to thwart what they called a terrorist suicide plot to bomb trans-Atlantic airliners, police officials said.
At that time, the British authorities had raised their terrorism threat assessment level to “critical,” the highest designation meaning that an attack was imminent. That was reduced four days later to “severe,” meaning that an attack was “highly likely.” The threat assessment level remained at “severe” on Saturday, according to the British MI5 Security Service Web site.
There was no immediate indication from the police that the latest arrests were related to a specific conspiracy such as the one described by the authorities on Aug 10. A police official, who spoke in return for anonymity because the investigation was continuing, said one line of inquiry was whether those arrested had been seeking to set up training facilities for would-be terrorists.
Word of the latest raids in London began to emerge late Friday after as many as 50 officers stormed into the Bridge to China Town restaurant on Borough Road, south London. People living nearby said the restaurant was crowded at the time and was generally popular with Muslims because it serves halal food permissible under Islamic dietary laws. The police did not say what the men were suspected of doing.
Referring to the number of police officers, the restaurant owner, Madi Blyani, told the British Broadcasting Corporation: “It was surprising, actually, because plenty of them suddenly came in all together. There were more than 50 or 60 of them. They suddenly came inside because they were suspicious of some of the customers, and they talked to them. They talked to them more than one hour, two hours. And they arrested some of them.”
A police statement on Saturday said the 14 men arrested in London had been seized under counterterrorism laws “on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.” Police officers declined to go into detail on Saturday about their search of a privately financed Islamic school in the village of Mark Cross, near Crowborough, south of London, but said it was linked to the overnight raids.
Last Sunday, a British tabloid, The Express on Sunday, reported that Abu Hamza al-Masri, a radical Islamic cleric imprisoned this year on charges of inciting racial hatred and soliciting murder, had sought to use the Jameah Islameah Islamic school at Mark Cross, which offered weekend camping sites for Muslims. It quoted the school’s imam, Bilal Patel, as saying Mr. Masri and a group of followers had camped on the school’s 54-acre grounds but had been asked not to return. The newspaper did not say when Mr. Masri had used the school.
“We had to tell Abu Hamza that we did not want him to come again because he was so strange,” Mr. Patel was quoted as saying. “He had given me a letter explaining some of his views, and I passed that on to the local police. Later on I was visited by some people from the security services. I assumed they were from MI5 because they asked an awful lot of questions but they didn’t really say who they were.”
According to figures released in 2005, the vast majority of Britain’s 7,000 publicly financed religious schools were Christian, in addition to 36 Jewish, 5 Muslim and 2 Sikh schools. But there are also around 120 private Islamic schools.
“The arrests in south and east London follow many months of surveillance and investigation,” the police statement said.
The raids began only hours after Peter Clarke, the chief of London’s counterterrorism police, was quoted as saying that thousands of terrorism suspects may be at large in Britain — a figure certain to alarm those in the United States who have taken to depicting some among Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims as a growing security threat.
For instance, an article in August in The New Republic carried a headline calling London “Kashmir on the Thames” and said, “In the wake of this month’s high-profile arrests, it can now be argued that the biggest threat to U.S. security emanates not from Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan, but rather from Great Britain, our closest ally.”
Wow, fear is a right wing staple.
Mr. Clarke said, “What we’ve learned since 9/11 is that the threat is not something that’s simply coming from overseas into the United Kingdom.” He was speaking in an interview, recorded in July, that is to be broadcast Sunday as part of a BBC program tracing links between British and foreign terrorists.
“What we’ve learned, and what we’ve seen all too graphically and all too murderously is that we have a threat which is being generated here within the United Kingdom,” Mr. Clarke said.
He declined to say how many people were under suspicion, but said, “All I can say is that our knowledge is increasing and certainly in terms of broad description, the numbers of people who we have to be interested in are into the thousands.”
He added, “That includes a whole range of people, not just terrorists, not just attackers, but the people who might be tempted to support or encourage or to assist.”
In the latest raids, the police in Manchester said they seized two men at 6 a.m. Saturday, linking the arrests to the detention of a third man in the same area on Aug. 23.
Iraqi Casualties Are Up Sharply, Study Finds
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
The New York Times
September 2, 2006
Security
WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 — Iraqi casualties soared by more than 50 percent in recent months, the product of spiraling sectarian clashes and a Sunni-based insurgency that remains “potent and viable,” the Pentagon said in its latest comprehensive assessment of security in Iraq.
During the period from the establishment of the new Iraqi government on May 20 until Aug. 11, the average number of weekly attacks jumped to almost 800. That was a substantial increase from earlier this year and almost double the number of the first part of 2004.
As a consequence, Iraqi casualties increased 51 percent over the last reporting period. The document notes that, based on initial reports, Iraqi casualties among civilians and security forces reached nearly 120 a day, up from about 80 a day in the pervious reporting period from mid-February to mid-May. About two years ago they were running about 30 a day.
“Although the overall number of attacks increased in all categories, the proportion of those attacks directed against civilians increased substantially,” the Pentagon noted. “Death squads and terrorists are locked in mutually reinforcing cycles of sectarian strife, with Sunni and Shia extremists each portraying themselves as the defenders of their respective sectarian groups.”
The Pentagon report, titled “Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq,” is mandated by Congress and issued quarterly. It covers a broad range of subjects, including the economy, public attitudes, and security.
This time, the study is the focus of special interest because of increasing fears that Iraq is sliding into civil war and because it is being published at a time when President Bush and members of his cabinet have been trying to present a strong case in support of the war, in the face of vehement criticism from Democrats.
The report does not take account of the latest efforts to bring order to Baghdad, operations that involved 12,000 additional soldiers, including some 7,000 additional American troops. Col. Thomas Vail, the commander of a brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, told reporters on Friday that his troops had made progress in recent days in tamping down the violence in the capital. The last several days have been particularly bloody, with about 250 Iraqis killed and scores wounded since Sunday. The Pentagon acknowledged that the grim data on attacks, casualties and executions was distressing. “It’s a pretty sober report this time,” said Peter Rodman, a senior Pentagon official, who met with reporters to discuss it. “The last quarter, it’s been rough. Sectarian violence has been particularly acute and disturbing.”
Democratic lawmakers portrayed the report as evidence that the administration’s strategy was failing. “They have not provided the real resources, in terms of both military and civilian advisers, nor real dollars to reconstruct and help Iraq emerge from this period of instability,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island said.
The report chronicles dangers on an array of fronts. Although the Sunni-based insurgency has received less news media attention since the surge of sectarian violence, the report cautions that it is resilient and strong. The number of attacks in Anbar Province, a vast Sunni-dominated region in western Iraq, averages more than 30 a day.
Regarding Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia’s operations in Iraq, the report says the network’s “cellular nature” has enabled it to continue attacks despite the death of its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
But sectarian strife has emerged as the biggest worry. In recent months, the Pentagon noted, “The core conflict in Iraq changed into a struggle between Sunni and Shia extremists seeking to control key areas in Baghdad, create or protect sectarian enclaves, divert economic resources, and impose their own respective political and religious agendas.” Echoing recent statements by senior American military commanders, the report says that “conditions that could lead to civil war exist in Iraq, especially in and around Baghdad, and concern about civil war within the Iraqi population has increased in recent months.”
The report notes that sectarian violence is gradually expanding north to Kirkuk and Diyala Province. Further, the confidence of Iraqis in the future has diminished, according to public opinion surveys cited in the Pentagon report.
Still, the study says the fighting in Iraq does not meet the “stringent international legal standards for civil war,” without further explanation. Even so, the sectarian fighting has been bloodier than ever.
What is this stringent international legal standard?
In discussing daily casualty rates, the report did not distinguish between the number of dead and wounded. But it noted that execution-type killings, in particular, reached a new high in July. “The Baghdad Coroner’s Office reported 1,600 bodies arrived in June and more than 1,800 bodies in July, 90 percent of which were assessed to be the result of executions,” the report states.
The report says that progress has been made in fielding Iraqi Army units and police that can take over the main responsibility for security. It says 5 Iraqi Army divisions, 25 brigades and 85 battalions have the lead for security in their areas. It notes that a lack of noncommissioned officers and absenteeism are obstacles to fielding an effective Iraqi force. Though the 63-page report does not discuss military operations in Baghdad in detail, it has become clear in recent months that Iraq could not be effectively secured without the active involvement of the Americans.
Is Iraq effectively secured even with the Americans?
When the Americans cut back patrols in Baghdad, violence rose and American commanders decided to send additional troops to the capital from elsewhere in the country.
The report notes that Iraq’s Interior Ministry does not have a system to determine how many of the forces trained by police advisers are still on the job. Advisers from the American-led forces estimate that the attrition rate is about 20 percent a year.
Citing polling data from the International Republican Institute, the report states that almost 80 percent of Iraqis thought in April 2006 that the general situation would be better in a year. By June, it was less than 50 percent. “In general, Iraqis have had an optimistic outlook,” the report stated. “However, as time has passed, their optimism has eroded.”
I wonder why?
'Deluded': Extraordinary attack on Blair by Cabinet
'Self-indulgent' PM urged to 'end the pantomime' as senior ministers meet to hasten his departure
By Francis Elliott, Whitehall Editor
Published: 03 September 2006
Tony Blair will be served notice to quit Downing Street at a meeting of the Cabinet next week when senior ministers plan to confront him over his refusal to commit to a departure timetable.
One described Mr Blair this weekend as "deluded", while another said he was being "self-indulgent". They are among a growing number of cabinet ministers, some formerly loyal to Mr Blair, who have concluded he must leave office sooner rather than later if Labour is to have a chance of winning a fourth term.
"This pantomime has to end or we are going to lose the next election," said one last night.
Another was brutally dismissive of the Prime Minister's attempt to "spray around policy initiatives" ahead of the party's annual conference in Manchester. "Tony is deluding himself if he thinks that anyone is listening to all this stuff."
Senior ministers were speaking last night of "near-panic" among MPs in marginal seats as Labour's poll ratings plunge be