KNOT undone

DieManTIFFTattoo_20110914_07sm

2011-09-15T14:03:00.001-04:00

DieManTIFFTattoo_20110914_07sm
Originally uploaded by DawnOne

DIE MANNEQUIN TIFF© Linda Dawn Hammond / IndyFoto.com '11 playing Bruce McDonald's Hard Core Logo II party at TATTOO on Sept.13 (or 14th if you will) . 2011 .
Such a great band! I was really enjoying shooting them until some idiot threw alcohol and ice(?) which hit my eye and abruptly ended my evening...

NXNE 2011 © Linda Dawn Hammond / IndyFoto

2011-06-25T14:38:00.001-04:00

NXNE 2011 © Linda Dawn Hammond / IndyFoto, a set on Flickr.

Coverage of bands and events during this years's NXNE festival in Toronto! Photography and text © Linda Dawn Hammond / IndyFoto

ObamakillsOsama_20110501_13

2011-05-02T18:06:00.001-04:00

ObamakillsOsama_20110501_13
Originally uploaded by DawnOne

Osama's death announced by Obama on TV. Somber reaction from the crowd at the Victory Cafe Hot Docs party. Distinctly different from the scenes of American jubilation being beamed in from locations in the USA. Obama VS Osama .© Linda Dawn Hammond / IndyFoto.com '11 May 1, 2011, Victory Cafe, Toronto, Canada.

Protester and Pillowcase demo at AIDS Convention

2011-03-25T19:34:00.001-04:00

Protester and Pillowcase demo at AIDS Convention
Originally uploaded by DawnOne

Tony Clement-
he just won't go away- for me!
Former Minister of Health, now Minister of Industry...

www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/ton...

Tony Clement urges senators to block generic-drug legislation- Gloria Galloway, Globe and Mail , March 24, 2011 4:51PM EDT
"Industry Minister Tony Clement has asked his Conservative colleagues in the Senate to vote against an NDP bill that would allow generic companies to copy brand-name drugs and sell them at cut rates to the world’s poorest countries...."

THINK PINKo DAY!

2010-12-14T15:59:00.001-05:00

THINK PINKo DAY!
Originally uploaded by DawnOne

Rally to bring Omar Khadr back to Canada

2010-11-01T15:26:00.001-04:00

Rally to bring Omar Khadr back to Canada
Originally uploaded by DawnOne

Regardless of Omar Khadr's recent "guilty" plea, I personally still believe he is innocent of throwing the grenade and only pleaded guilty to avoid the military trial and obtain a plea bargain, in order to eventually return to Canada and resume his life. If it had gone to military trial, he would have been declared guilty and given a 40 year sentence or worse. There was no justice in either option, so he chose the one more likely to get him out while he is still young. Keep in mind, he was only 15 and considered under law a child when they arrested him. Canada should release him upon arrival for time served in one of the most horrific jails on earth. I am appalled that he will now serve an additional year in Guantanamo, in solitary with other convicted terrorists, rather than the area he was been in, which is comparatively more lenient and better suited to his age and temperament. He is considered to have been a "model inmate" and a great candidate for rehabilitation. One year in solitary with criminals (if they are in fact) or hardliners might change that prospect.

AGOSchnabel_20100826_072xsm

2010-09-09T06:56:00.001-04:00

AGOSchnabel_20100826_072xsm
Originally uploaded by DawnOne

"Julian Schnabel: Art and Film” at the AGO
Text and selected photos © Linda Dawn Hammond, with additional photos courtesy of the artist and AGO

Waiting for Julian Schnabel. Who is tardy but that's OK because I hate getting up early, was also late, and frankly can't fathom why any artist would schedule a press conference before noon. We're all there to attend a "sneak peek' offered by the AGO in Toronto- an exclusive advance glance of their upcoming exhibition, "Julian Schnabel: Art and Film," and an opportunity to meet the famed American artist and filmmaker in person.

Journalists warn each other not to ask any questions which could set him off, as he will undoubtedly leave, thus ruining it for everyone. No criticisms or "stupid comments" , only fawning permitted. No-one wants to become the next "Robert Hughes", a well-known critic, whom the mere mention of his name to Schnabel will spark the afore mentioned crisis, or another "Jake Chapman", who was infamously challenged to a fistfight following disrespectful comments about the artist. It is actually appalling to watch the majority of press comply, all smiles and glazed eyes fixed on Schnabel, effecting looks of studied intensity as they lap up every proffered word. All it takes to command such adulation is super star status, and Schnabel has managed to achieve this successfully on two fronts- first, Art in the 80s, then as an award winning film director for the past 15 years. I suspect that by now he finds all the deference annoying as well as flattering, and one can understand why he chooses his close friends amongst the similarly rich and famous. The man is known to be enormously wealthy, enormously egotistical, and creates works of art on an increasingly enormous scale in an enormous pink palace he personally designed and decorated. The 170-foot-tall Palazzo Chupi was placed atop an industrial building, much to the initial consternation of his West Village neighbours in NYC. It is magnificent, if you like all things Venetian and Gaudi-esque, and I confess I do!

With the 45 minute delay, the anticipation in the room mounts. The buzz includes such lofty musings as- What will he wear? In spite of his wealth, the corpulent, middle-aged Schnabel (59) now eschews the elegant yet edgy clothing of his youth for the comfort of pajamas (worn in public like Hefner) and sarongs. A startling effect nicely offset with the inevitable beautiful woman dangling off an arm. Men shake their heads- how does a guy dress like that and yet score such babes, they ask, as if the answer isn't glaringly obvious. Money, position and power win the girl every time- or at least, some girls, with lots of lookers to choose from in that pool, and evidently intelligent ones too. Fashion TV was there, presumably for the art, but when Schnabel eventually meandered in they weren't disappointed. He was a study in contrived yet casual disarray - buttoned up plaid shirt, mismatched plaid shorts and drooping 2 toned socks which came up too high over his low-rise "Vans" sneakers. You couldn't help but think- Oh, come on... you have money, and probably a stylist- you didn't just throw this on, you chose this outfit for us! But it worked. We're all talking about it, unlike the more conventional suits worn by the 2 men who introduced him, AGO board member Jay Smith, and David Moos, AGO curator of modern and contemporary art. A catalogue, Julian Schnabel: Art and Film, has been published in conjunction with the exhibition. David Moos wrote the introduction and will also conduct a dialogue with Schnabel about the relationship between painting and film in his practice.

After speeches which established Julian Schnabel's position as “one of the most famous artists in the world today,” (Jay Smith), and emphasized the importance film has always played in Schnabel's work, long before he ventured into that particular medium himself (David Moos), we were taken on a tour of the show, which was still in the process of being mounted. We were escorted by Schnabel, who fielded cameras graciously and avoided questions about any intended meanings deftly, and even read quotes from his catalogue to the rapt audience. At one point the press were abandoned, when Schnabel went “hands-on” and climbing on a scissor lift, began to place his movie posters on the wall with a staple gun, a "moment' that seemed contrived but could be symptomatic of an artist who likes to control all aspects of his creative output.
The exhibit reflects an eclectic range of styles, materials and intentions, understandable as it does represent a professional career spanning 3 decades. In a 2003 interview with Art Forum, he addressed this aspect of his work. "It worried me at first, because it seemed like the works didn't go together, but later I discovered it was a good thing. It wasn't that I couldn't make up my mind. It was just that I was attracted to different things. I wanted to expand what art materials were." Schnabel continued the thread in a “60 Minute” TV interview in 2008, saying, "I probably paint like a jazz musician. I know where to begin but I don't really have necessarily an idea of how the thing's going to turn out..." The AGO exhibition covers Schnabel's work as a painter from the mid-1970s to the present, and features more than 25 key works in various mediums. These include several of the 1979 neo-impressionist broken "plate paintings’, the series which brought him world wide recognition, paintings on velvet (Portrait of Andy Warhol, 1982) and sailcloth (Jane Birkin #2, 1990); monumental 22-by-22-foot canvasses (Anno Domini, 1990); photography and recent gesso-and-ink paintings on polyester. Some pieces are political in nature, such as the 1988 "Jerusalem Gate" and "Palestine Gate", also on display at the AGO.

In one small room, 4 paintings face-off on 4 planes, reflecting upon each other in a convoluted series of connections. On one wall is a self-portrait of the artist. On another, a portrait of his current partner and muse, Rula Jebreal. A third wall contains a painting of actor Gary Oldman, who played a character based on Schnabel in the artist’s first foray into film,"Basquiat". He is depicted in a matador outfit, which references Picasso- an important influence for Schnabel, and whom he once famously and grandiosely compared himself with, saying, “I’m as close to Picasso as you’re going to get in this f------ life,” though I believe at the time Picasso himself was still around. Andy Warhol is on the fourth wall- another mentor, not only artistically, but possibly as an inspiration of art business acumen. He is revealing his wounds, and I thought I saw the figure of a reclining woman within them- possibly his mother, or would be assassin who shot him, or one of the doomed girls from the scene he inhabited? According to Schnabel- none of the above and just my own projections, but I'm not convinced, and besides, art is in the eye of the beholder, as is its inherent meaning.
The scale of the work is often cinematic in scope, as befitting an exhibit which to some degree dwells upon the biggest names in cinema today, either titular, in homage to their style of oeuvre (as example, the 2006 Surfing Paintings series dedicated to Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci) or as representations of movie personalities such as Marlon Brando, Albert Finney, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Mickey Rourke, Christopher Walken and Jane Birkin.
"The show traces a personal connection to these people who worked in another practice than painting, often on both sides of the camera," says Schnabel. "Film is like a world outside of this world. Painting is like that too. When we are attracted to the imagination of a work, we pick a world that we prefer to live in."
"It has become abundantly clear, as Julian Schnabel's painterly vision has evolved, that cinema has served to germinate his pictorial imagination, inspiring his paintings in diverse and dynamic ways," says AGO curator of modern and contemporary art, David Moos. "Julian Schnabel: Art and Film poses cinema as a connective force, coiling through his entire oeuvre and serving to link together formally disparate work via this shared theme."

Schnabel will appear in conversation with Moos at a public talk on September 15, at 7:15- 8:30 PM in the AGO's Baillie Court. Four of Schnabel's films - Basquiat (1996), Before Night Falls (2001), Lou Reed: Berlin (2007) and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) will screen throughout the exhibition's run. All screenings take place in the AGO's Jackman Hall.

The exhibit is brilliantly timed to coincide with the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival, where Schnabel’s latest movie, “Miral”, will have its North American premiere in mid September. It stars actors Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire), Willem Dafoe (Antichrist), Hiam Abbass (The Limits of Control) and Vanessa Redgrave (Atonement). North American theatrical rights were recently acquired by The Weinstein Company, with release scheduled for later this year. “I am thrilled to be back in business with Julian Schnabel,” stated Harvey Weinstein, Co-Chairman. “This film is truly a challenge for me to take on personally and professionally. It is the first film I am involved in that shows the ‘other side’ of the Israeli / Palestine conflict. As a staunch supporter of Israel I thought this would be a movie I would have a hard time wrapping my head around. However, meeting Rula moved me to open my heart and mind and I hope we can do the same with audiences worldwide.”
“Miral” is based on the novel by Israeli Palestinian writer Rula Jebreal, Schnabel’s current partner. She also wrote the screenplay for the film, which revolves around a real-life orphanage established by a Palestinian woman (played by Abbass) following the 1948 creation of the Israeli state. In an interview with an Israeli journalist in 2008, Schnabel explained, "… it's about Palestinian women under the Israeli state. It's about Hind Husseini who started the Dar El-Tifl orphanage in Jerusalem. It's about a lot of things. It's about peace." The story is set in Jerusalem, in 1948. On her way to work, Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass) finds 55 orphaned children in the street. She takes them home and gives them food and shelter. Within six months, 55 have expanded to almost 2000, and the Dar Al-Tifel Institute is born. In 1978, at the age of 5, Miral (Pinto) is sent to the Institute by her father following her mother's death. Brought up safely inside the Institute's walls, she is naïve to the troubles that surround her. At the age of 17, she is assigned to teach at a refugee camp, where she is awakened to the reality of her people's struggle. When she falls for political activist, she finds herself torn between the fight for the future of her people and Mama Hind's belief that education is the road to peace. "Miral" was filmed in Israel and Schnabel hopes to use the film as a vehicle for just that. "We need to fix things over there," he told the Israeli reporter before filming. "I'm going to work on it. That will be my next thing. Yes, I'm going to devote myself to try and make things better over there."

One French reporter will be fortunate if she doesn’t end up on Schnabel’s infamous blacklist. I heard from a source that she essentially asked him in a private interview how “his people’ would respond to a film which depicts the Palestinians in a positive light. Schnabel chose not to understand the question. As “his people” now includes his Palestinian partner as well as those who share his particular ethnic background, the question illustrates the barriers of ignorance yet to be overcome. I hope that Schnabel succeeds in his goal- an effort which all people who desire peace and justice in the Middle East can support.

The AGO show runs from September 1, 2010 through January 2, 2011 and takes up the entire fifth floor of the Art Gallery of Ontario's Vivian & David Campbell Centre for Contemporary Art.

Links
Art Gallery of Ontario site, for admission prices and further information. Note that on Wednesday evenings after 6pm, admission to the AGO is free to the general public.
www.ago.net/"; www.ago.net/

“Miral”- Julian Schnabel's film (Trailer)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck96h97y9Vs
Toronto International Film Festival
http://tiff.net/

All photos and text - Julian Schnabel at the AGO © Linda Dawn Hammond / IndyFoto.com 2010, Toronto, August 26, 2010.

Native protesters try to greet the Queen at St.James

2010-07-06T18:13:00.001-04:00

Queen_20100704_0010sm
Originally uploaded by DawnOne

Waiting for the Queen to arrive at St.James cathedral July 4, 2010 Toronto Canada
Queen's visit © Linda Dawn Hammond / IndyFoto.com 2010

Native rights protesters moved to other side of street, then questioned by police, and a man asked to drink the fluid in a water bottle he was carrying to prove it wasn't caustic. Since the G20 summit a week ago, the Toronto police have been acting aggressively, exercising rights to question and detain citizens based on superficial evaluations. It now appears the special powers accorded to the police to interrogate and arrest near the perimeter fence have been revealed as an intentional misconception.
READ
‘No extra powers’ granted to police during G20 summit: Liberals"
www.thestar.com/news/gta/torontog20summit/article/830030-...

The protest did seem a little misguided as the complaints could have more accurately been levelled towards the Catholic church rather than at a Protestant one- and the Queen can hardly be held personally responsible for all grievances that occur. Nevertheless, this dates back to a historic precedent and responsibility towards the First nations people.

www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/westview/special-royal-...
"After the British gained military control over lands in North America formerly under French control, King George III's priority was to ensure peace and friendship with First Nations. He issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which is still part of the Canadian Constitution, to recognize that First Nations had control over their lands and to establish a process for ceding lands to the British Crown to facilitate European settlement. The Supreme Court of Canada has stated that the treaty process "serves to reconcile pre-existing aboriginal sovereignty with assumed Crown sovereignty."

Subsequently, about 500 nation-to-nation treaties were signed between the First Nations in Canada and the Crown. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) noted that "because of this relationship, the Crown acts as the protector of the sovereignty of aboriginal peoples within Canada and as guarantor of their aboriginal and treaty rights. This fiduciary relationship is a fundamental feature of the constitution of Canada."

Chief R. Donald Maracle of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte, was one of two Mohawk leaders representing two Royal Chapels located on First Nations territories in Ontario. They were invited to meet the Queen and Prince Philip at St. James Cathedral, where the Queen presented a gift of eight silver hand bells engraved "The Silver Chain of Friendship 1710-2010," to mark the 300th anniversary of the 1710 visit of the "four Iroquois kings" with Queen Anne in England. The bells presented to the Tyendinaga Mohawks will be housed at Christ Church, Her Majesty's Chapel Royal of the Mohawks near Deseronto, Ontario was designated a national historical site in 1995.

www.tyendinaga.net/history/
Tyendinaga Mohawks, "Kanyen'kehaka, the people of the flint"

Queen_20100705_0055xsm

2010-07-06T16:48:00.001-04:00

Queen_20100705_0055xsm
Originally uploaded by DawnOne

The Queen at Pinewood studios with Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, is NOT AMUSED. She does not want to put on the 3d glasses to view the screen and has to be convinced. It was so obviously staged for us, the media, who were of course ready to pounce on it because the British media had let us know in advance what was to occur. The Queen did not want to be made a spectacle of (!) and possibly didn't like that the diamond encrusted 3D glasses made especially for her also were also branded "Pinewood Studios" on the side.
This must be a lady in waiting beside her, for who else would be permitted to put something in the Queen's handbag and then close it for her? It appeared to be a blue cloth of some sort in the larger view. July 5, 2010. Queen's visit © Linda Dawn Hammond / IndyFoto.com 2010

blackblokrevealedG20

2010-06-28T17:11:00.001-04:00

blackblokrevealedG20
Originally uploaded by DawnOne

Nuclear whistleblower Vanunu arrested again by Israel...

2010-05-29T16:37:00.003-04:00

In May 2010, Mordechai Vanunu was re-arrested and sentenced to three months in jail on suspicion that he had met with foreigners (meetings with his Norwegian girlfriend and journalists), thus violating one of the unreasonable conditions of his 2004 release from jail.

When is this idiocy going to end, and Israel finally allows him to leave the country in accordance with his stated wishes. They have already subjected him to almost 2 decades of prison, much of it under inhumane conditions such as 11 years of isolation, essentially robbing him of much of his life, and all for revealing publicly the covert nuclear program that Israel still doesn't officially admit to. To those who believe in nuclear non-proliferation, the man is a hero. Amnesty International considers him 'a prisoner of conscience'.

If the British and their allies had not "unofficially" facilitated the original development of Israel's nuclear program, perhaps we would not be witnessing other countries in the region scrambling to develop one of their own. It's decidedly hypocritical of the West to condemn and punish through sanctions Israel's Middle Eastern neighbours for the same action they condone when the nation is Israel.

Mordechai Vanunu jailed by Israeli court for unauthorised meetings.
Israeli whistleblower, who spent 18 years in jail for exposing Israel's nuclear arsenal, given new three-month sentence
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 23 May 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/23/israeli-nuclear-whistleblower-prison-sentence

Bloomberg
Israel Will Not Take Part in ‘Flawed’ NPT Resolution (Update1)
May 29, 2010
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-29/israel-will-not-take-part-in-flawed-npt-resolution-update1-.html

George's Shoe Head

2009-05-29T13:06:00.001-04:00

George's Shoe Head
Originally uploaded by DawnOne

There is a Demo and shoe throwing today in Toronto to oppose George Bush visit- he's speaking with Clinton.

Over 900 innocent dead in 15 days and counting. And yet israel is "defending herself." Is it really self-defense to blow up a school full of children? I wonder.

2009-01-12T16:32:00.001-05:00

Over 900 innocent dead in 15 days and counting. And yet israel is "defending herself." Is it really self-defense to blow up a school full of children? I wonder.
Originally uploaded by Saaer ,,When justice prevail

Happy New Year 2009!!

2008-12-28T14:56:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year 2009!!
Originally uploaded by DawnOne

McCain Dropping The Ball

2008-10-25T00:15:00.001-04:00

McCain Dropping The Ball
Originally uploaded by DawnOne

Dropping The Ball-
Palin deflects the ball dropped by running mate, McCain, as he trips on camera and sticks out his tongue, chasing after Obama while missing his exit.

The spOILz of WAR - Blair Profits Exxon

2006-08-09T15:53:00.000-04:00

The spOILz of WAR - Blair Profits Exxon, originally uploaded by indyfoto.

WHO's PAYING- WHO's PROFITING?
One Canadian, Ali Mallah, Vice-president of Canadian Arab Federation, has a very personal investment in his desire to see an immediate halt to the bombing in Lebanon- his wife and 2 children, ages 9 and 11, are there visiting family and are now in immediate danger in the South of Lebanon- the area worst hit in the Israeli bombings, and now completely cut off from humanitarian aid and supplies. The children are being brave, and said that they don't want to abandon their grandmother and cousins. Many foreign nationals are remaining for similar reasons.
CNN news reported that the cost of evacuating one American family, only to Cyprus, was $4000.- which the US government CHARGED to the FAMILY's credit card. I wonder if the American families WITH funds are getting out first... and if this has any bearing on the number of people choosing to take the much more dangerous overland route to neighbouring countries. America, one of the richest countries in the world, is the only one I've heard of so far which is putting the cost of the evacuation on the victims' shoulders.
Not that the US doesn't have money to burn...
David Clark, a former UK Labour special adviser at the Foreign Office, wrote in this week's Guardian, "Yet the US remains entirely
complicit in its role as Israel's main strategic ally. In the midst of last
week's onslaught, in which Israeli bombers killed dozens of Lebanese civilians, the Pentagon announced the export of $210m of aviation fuel to help Israel "keep peace and security in the region". Even Britain and other European countries indulge in a form of diplomatic misdirection by focusing one-sidedly on the roles played by Syria and Iran. " Some Lebanese are perplexed by the targeting of their country- after all, they don't have any oil, unlike some of their richer neighbours. The oil companies, however, are reporting record profits, caused by the panic over oil supplies possibly being disrupted, which in turn leads to greater costs for consumers at the pump. Our governments, which add a hefty tax to the already inflated prices, therefore also profit from the mayhem this war is causing. And in the end, unfortunate Lebanon will have to take out loans at high interest rates to pay for the reconstruction of their country, profiting the organizations that will do the lending. No wonder they're all taking their time to resolve this.

I think that Lebanon's government, and the refugees forced to flee their shores, should consider sending ALL of the BILLS to Israel, to be in turn paid by their "special friend", I expect. It's only fair.

STOP THE WAR speaker Ali Mallah

2006-08-09T15:16:00.000-04:00

STOP THE WAR speaker Ali Mallah, originally uploaded by indyfoto.

Ali Mallah, V.P.Canadian Arab Federation and Steering committee member Canadian Peace Alliance, addresses the crowd at the rally for Lebanon in front of US Consulate, Toronto.
July 22, 2006
Between 10-15,000 people attended, according to media estimates.
Ali Mallah ,Vice-president of Canadian Arab Federation

Lebanon Protest Poster -Measured Response

2006-08-09T15:03:00.000-04:00

Lebanon Protest Poster -Measured Response, originally uploaded by indyfoto.

MAKE BREAD NOT WAR Poster #2 at rally (According to Indyfoto)

2006-08-09T14:02:00.000-04:00

MAKE BREAD NOT WAR Poster #2 at rally (According to Indyfoto), originally uploaded by indyfoto.

Moron Poster #1 at Rally (according to Indyfoto)

2006-08-09T13:59:00.000-04:00

Moron Poster #1 at Rally (according to Indyfoto), originally uploaded by indyfoto.

Judaism Rejects Zionism...

2006-08-09T13:56:00.000-04:00

Judaism Rejects Zionism..., originally uploaded by indyfoto.

I am Ashamed of the Actions of My Fellow Jews

2006-08-09T13:53:00.000-04:00

I am Ashamed of the Actions of My Fellow Jews, originally uploaded by indyfoto.

Measured?

2006-08-09T13:50:00.000-04:00

Measured?, originally uploaded by indyfoto.

For You Eyes Only

2006-08-09T13:47:00.000-04:00

For You Eyes Only, originally uploaded by indyfoto.

Protest photos, Articles on Lebanon War - Fisk Links,

2006-08-03T03:32:00.000-04:00

Palestinian Baby Holding Protest Sign, originally uploaded by indyfoto.

CLICK above to see other protest photos!
2 year old Palestinian baby Isabelle, playing with a protest sign across from Israeli Consulate. July 29th, 2006 protest march from the Israeli Consulate to the American consulate, Toronto, in support of the Lebanese people caught up in the deadly Israeli attack on their country. Demand for an immediate ceasefire. Unfortunately, no-one in "power" appears to be listening.
Innocent people, the majority of whom are children, continue to die. How many perished today, as the buildings they were hiding in came tumbling down around them? Places where the media either cannot or dare not penetrate? The targeted bombing of the UN observer post, with the resultant deaths of 4 unarmed foreign peacekeepers, appears to have achieved what may have been its intended goal- the UN has since pulled out its 50 remaining unarmed observers from their posts along the Southern border. This could have been STOPPED WEEKS AGO! "Two soldiers" are no justification for this kind of carnage- the "response" to their "kidnapping" serves as a cynical excuse for Israel to destabilize a neighbouring country, compromising their sovereignty and elected government's authority. Nato forces, if employed, should be there to keep the peace, NOT prop up a puppet government put in place by occupying forces. Let's hope that isn't the next strategy...

PLEASE take the time and READ the following articles by the amazing Robert Fisk- a voice of truth, wisdom and courage. He conveys the human side to these desperate events. The photo of the Lebanese child with facial burns is from the
Clearing House- Lebanon files.If you go there, be warned- these are graphic images of the horror of war and the terrible price paid by the innocent. Some already seen in the Western newspapers, most not. Yet I'm told that the Arab press is publishing worse than these. It amazes me that I am receiving extremely nasty messages from pro- Israel supporters, describing these very people as barbarians and therefore unworthy of consideration. What kind of humane government unleashes such carnage and misery? Who are the true barbarians? Incidentally, that wasn't a request for more of the same.

Robert Fisk: Entire Lebanese family killed in Israeli attack on hospital

Robert Fisk: 'How can we stand by and allow this to go on?'

Robert Fisk: A Nato-led force would be in Israel's interests, but not Lebanon's

Robert Fisk: This draft shows who is running America's policy... Israel

Help save the children, victims of war FUND

Robert Fisk: Slaughter in Qana
Sunday, 30 July
Qana again. AGAIN! I write in my notebook. Ten years ago, I was in the little hill village in southern Lebanon when the Israeli army fired artillery shells into the UN compound and killed 106 Lebanese, more than half of them children. Most died of amputation wounds - the shells exploded in the air - and now today I am heading south again to look at the latest Qana massacre.
Fifty-nine dead? Thirty-seven? Twenty-eight? An air strike this time, and the usual lies follow. Ten years ago, Hizbollah were "hiding" in the UN compound. Untrue. Now, we are supposed to believe that the dead of Qana - today's slaughter - were living in a house which was a storage base for Hizbollah missiles. Another lie - because the dead were all killed in the basement, where they would never be if rockets were piled floor-to-ceiling. Even Israel later abandons this nonsense. I watch Lebanese soldiers stuffing the children's corpses into plastic bags - then I see them pushing the little bodies into carpets because the bags have run out.
But the roads, my God, the roads of southern Lebanon. Windows open, listen for the howl of jets. I am astonished that only one journalist - a young Lebanese woman - has died so far. I watch the little silver fish as they filter through the sky.
On my way back to Beirut, I find the traffic snarled up by a bomb-smashed bridge, where the Lebanese army is trying to tow a vegetable-laden truck out of a river. I go down to them and slosh through the water to tell the army sergeant that he is out of his mind. He's got almost 50 civilian cars backed up in a queue, just waiting for another Israeli air attack. Leave the lorry till later, I tell him.
Other soldiers arrive, and there is a 10-minute debate about the wisdom of my advice, while I am watching the skies and pointing out a diving Israeli F-16. Then the sergeant decides that Fisk is not as stupid as he looks, cuts the tow-rope and lets the traffic through. I am caked in dust, and Katya Jahjoura, a Lebanese photographer colleague, catches sight of me and bursts into uncontrollable laughter. "You look as if you have been living in rubble!" she cries, and I shoot her a desperate look. Better get out of this place, in case we get turned into rubble, I reply.
Monday, 31 July
Benjamin Netanyahu tries another lie, an old one reheated from 1982, when Menachem Begin used to claim that the civilian casualties of Israel's air raids were no different from the civilians killed in Denmark in an RAF raid in the Second World War. Ho hum, nice try, Benjamin, but not good enough.
First, the story. RAF aircraft staged an air raid on the Nazi Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, but massacred more than 80 children when their bombs went astray. The Israelis are slaughtering the innocent of southern Lebanon from high altitude - high enough to avoid Hizbollah missiles. The reason the RAF killed 83 children, 20 nuns and three firemen on 21 March 1945 was that their Mosquitoes were flying so low to avoid civilian casualties that one of the British aircraft clipped its wing on a railroad tower outside Copenhagen central station, and crashed into the school. The other aircraft assumed the smoke from its high-octane fuel was the target.
Interesting, though, the way Israel's leaders are ready to manipulate the history of the Second World War. No Israeli aircraft has been lost over Lebanon in this war and the civilians of Lebanon are dying by the score, repeatedly and bombed from a great height.
Tuesday, 1 August
Electricity off, my fridge flooded over the floor again, my landlord Mustafa at the front door with a plastic plate of figs from the tree in his front garden. The papers are getting thinner. However, Paul's restaurant has reopened in East Beirut where I lunch with Marwan Iskander, one of murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri's senior financial advisers.
Marwan and his wife Mona are a source of joy, full of jokes and outrageous (and accurate) comments about the politicians of the Middle East. I pay for the meal, and Marwan produces - as I knew he would - a huge Cuban cigar for me. I gave up smoking years ago. But I think the war allows me to smoke again, just a little.
Wednesday, 2 August
Huge explosions in the southern suburbs of Beirut shake the walls of my home. A cauldron of fire ascends into the sky. What is there left to destroy in the slums which scribes still call a "Hizbollah stronghold"?
The Israelis are now bombing all roads leading to Syria, especially at the border crossing at Masna (very clever, as if the Hizbollah is bringing its missiles into Lebanon in convoys on the international highway). Then the guerrilla army, which started this whole bloody fiasco, fires off dozens more rockets into Israel.
I put my nose into the suburbs and get a call from a colleague in south Lebanon who describes the village of Srifa as "like Dresden". World War Two again. But the suburbs do look like a scene from that conflict. My grocer laments that he has no milk, no yoghurt, which - as a milkoholic myself - I lament.
Thursday, 3 August
More friends wanting to know if it's safe to return to Lebanon. An old acquaintance tells me that when she insisted on coming back to Beirut, a relative threw a shoe and a book at her. What was the book, I asked? A volume of poetry, it seems.
Electricity back, and I torture myself by watching CNN, which is reporting this slaughterhouse as if it is a football match. Score so far: a few dozen Israelis, hundreds of Lebanese, thousands of missiles, and even more thousands of Israeli bombs. The missiles come from Iran - as CNN reminds us. The Israeli bombs come from the United States - as CNN does not remind us.
Friday, 4 August
The day of the bridges. Abed and I are up the highway north of Beirut with Ed Cody of The Washington Post (he who reads Verlaine) and we manage to drive on side roads through the Christian Metn district, which has inexplicably been attacked (since the Christian Maronites of Lebanon are supposed to be Israel's best friends here). "You cannot believe how angry we are," a woman says to me, surveying her smashed car and smashed home and shattered windows and the rubble all over the road. A viaduct has fallen into a valley, all 200 metres of it, though another side road is left completely undamaged, and we cruise along it to the next destroyed bridge. So what was the point of bombing the bridges?
We drive back to Beirut on empty roads, windows open and the whisper of jets still in the sky. I go to the Associated Press office, where my old mate Samir Ghattas is the bureau chief. "So how were the bridges?" he asks. "I guess you were driving fast." He can say that again.
I do an interview with CBC in Toronto and talk openly of Israeli war crimes, and no one in the Canadian studio feels this is impolitic or frightening or any of the other usual fears of television producers, who think they will be faced with the usual slurs about "anti-Semitic" reporters who dare to criticise Israel.
I turn on the television, and there is Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's boss, threatening Israel with deeper missile penetrations if Israel bombs Beirut. I listen to Israel's Prime Minister, saying much the same thing in reverse.
I call these people the "roarers", but I leaf through my tatty copy of King Lear to see what they remind me of. Bingo. "I shall do such things I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth." Shakespeare should be reporting this war.
Saturday, 5 August
Lots of stories about a massive Israeli ground offensive, which turn out to be untrue. The UN in southern Lebanon suspects that Israel is manufacturing non-existent raids to pacify public opinion as Hizbollah missiles continue to fly across the frontier. But a friend calls to tell me that Hizbollah might be running out of rockets. Possibly true, I reflect, and think of all the bridges which haven't yet been blown to pieces.
More gruesome photographs of the dead in the Lebanese papers. We in the pure "West" spare our readers these terrible pictures - we "respect" the dead too much to print them, though we didn't respect them very much when they were alive - and we forget the ferocious anger which Arabs feel when these images are placed in front of them. What are we storing up for ourselves? I wrote about another 9/11 in the paper this morning. And I fear I'm right.

Robert Fisk: A terrible thought occurs to me - that there will be another 9/11

05 August 2006

The room shook. Not since the 1983 earthquake has my apartment rocked from side to side. That was the force of the Israeli explosions in the southern suburbs of Beirut - three miles from my home - and the air pressure changed in the house yesterday morning and outside in the street the palm trees moved.
Is it to be like this every day? How many civilians can you make homeless before you start a revolution? And what is next? Are the Israelis to bomb the centre of Beirut? The Corniche? Is this why all the foreign warships came and took their citizens away, to make Beirut safe to destroy?
Yesterday, needless to say, was another day of massacres, great and small. The largest appeared to be 40 farm workers in northern Lebanon, some of them Kurds - a people who do not even have a country. An Israeli missile was reported to have exploded among them as they loaded vegetables on to a refrigerated truck near Al-Qaa, a small village east of Hermel in the far north. The wounded were taken to hospital in Syria because the roads of Lebanon have now all been cratered by Israeli bomb-bursts. Later we learnt that an air strike on a house in the village of Taibeh in the south had killed seven civilians and wounded 10 seeking shelter from attack.
In Israel two civilians were killed by Hizbollah missiles but, as usual, Lebanon bore the brunt of the day's attacks which centred - incredibly - on the Christian heartland that has traditionally shown great sympathy towards Israel. It was the Christian Maronite community whose Phalangist militiamen were Israel's closest allies in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon yet Israel's air force yesterday attacked three highway bridges north of Beirut and - again as usual - it was the little people who died.
One of them was Joseph Bassil, 65, a Christian man who had gone out on his daily jogging exercise with four friends north of Jounieh. "His friends packed up after four rounds of the bridge because it was hot," a member of his family told us later. "Joseph decided to do one more jog on the bridge. That was what killed him." The Israelis gave no reason for the attacks - no Hizbollah fighters would ever enter this Christian Maronite stronghold and the only hindrance was caused to humanitarian convoys - and there were growing fears in Lebanon that the latest air raids were a sign of Israel's frustration rather any serious military planning.
Indeed, as the Lebanon war continues to destroy innocent lives - most of them Lebanese - the conflict seems to be increasingly aimless. The Israeli air force has succeeded in killing perhaps 50 Hizbollah members and 600 civilians and has destroyed bridges, milk factories, gas stations, fuel storage depots, airport runways and thousands of homes. But to what purpose?
Does the United States any longer believe Israel's claims that it will destroy Hizbollah when its army clearly cannot do anything of the kind? Does Washington not realise that when Israel grows tired of this war, it will plead for a ceasefire - which only Washington can deliver by doing what it most loathes to do: by taking the road to Damascus and asking for help from President Bashar al-Assad of Syria?
What in the meanwhile is happening to Lebanon? Bridges and buildings can be reconstructed - with European Union loans, no doubt - but many Lebanese are now questioning the institutions of the democracy for which the US was itself so full of praise last year. What is the point of a democratically elected Lebanese government which cannot protect its people? What is the point of a 75,000-member Lebanese army which cannot protect its nation, which cannot be sent to the border, which does not fire on Lebanon's enemies and which cannot disarm Hizbollah? Indeed, for many Lebanese Shias, Hizbollah is now the Lebanese army.
So fierce has been Hizbollah's resistance - and so determined its attacks on Israeli ground troops in Lebanon - that many people here no longer recall that it was Hizbollah which provoked this latest war by crossing the border on 12 July, killing three Israeli soldiers and capturing two others. Israel's threats of enlarging the conflict even further are now met with amusement rather than horror by a Lebanese population which has been listening to Israel's warnings for 30 years with ever greater weariness. And yet they fear for their lives. If Tel Aviv is hit, will Beirut be spared. Or if central Beirut is hit, will Tel Aviv be spared? Hizbollah now uses Israel's language of an eye for an eye. Every Israeli taunt is met by a Hizbollah taunt.
And do the Israelis realise that they are legitimising Hizbollah, that a rag-tag army of guerrillas is winning its spurs against an Israeli army and air force whose targets - if intended - prove them to be war criminals and if unintended suggest that they are a rif-raff little better than the Arab armies they have been fighting, on and off, for more than half a century? Extraordinary precedents are being set in this Lebanon war.
In fact, one of the most profound changes in the region these past three decades has been the growing unwillingness of Arabs to be afraid. Their leaders - our "moderate" pro-Western Arab leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt - may be afraid. But their peoples are not. And once a people have lost their terror, they cannot be re-injected with fear. Thus Israel's consistent policy of smashing Arabs into submission no longer works. It is a policy whose bankruptcy the Americans are now discovering in Iraq.
And all across the Muslim world, "we" - the West, America, Israel - are fighting not nationalists but Islamists. And watching the martyrdom of Lebanon this week - its slaughtered children in Qana packed into plastic bags until the bags ran out and their corpses had to be wrapped in carpets - a terrible and daunting thought occurs to me, day by day. That there will be another 9/11.

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STOP the ATTACK on Lebanon! Articles 4 of 4-"Yo, Blair!"

2006-07-21T14:14:00.000-04:00

MASS RALLY Against the attacks on Lebanon and Gaza, calling for an immediate HALT.
Sat. Aug.12, 06 1 PM at the Israeli Consulate, 180 Bloor St. West Toronto (W. of Avenue Rd., N. of Bloor)
http://www.nowar.ca
Email Canadian PM Harper at: pm@pm.gc.ca

'Yo, Blair!':
Transcript of actual conversation follows article.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article1183389.ece

18 July 2006 13:21
Home > News > World > World Politics

'Private' chat heard by world caps disastrous G8 summit for Blair
By Andy McSmith in St Petersburg and Stephen Castle in Brussels
Published: 18 July 2006

Capping a miserable G8 summit for Tony Blair, President George Bush has spurned an offer from the Prime Minister to go to the Middle East as a peacemaker, after deciding that he would rather send the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.
The snub was revealed in a private conversation that was accidentally broadcast yesterday. It is the latest in a series of frustrating setbacks that bedevilled Mr Blair, as he spent the weekend trying to reprise the role of world statesman that he played successfully at the Gleneagles G8 meeting last year.
This year's gathering in St Petersburg, which ended yesterday, has seen Mr Blair struggling to make any headway on the two issues, climate change and world trade, that he wanted to push to the forefront of the agenda.
The Prime Minister has also thrown his personal authority behind a proposal to send an enlarged UN force into Lebanon, but yesterday he confessed that it was an "open question"as to whether it will ever happen, with other powerful nations clearly sceptical about the idea.
His unguarded chat with the US President provided a unique insight into the relationship between the two men, from George Bush's opening line - "Yo, Blair. How are you doing?" to his use of a mild expletive to describe the morass in the Lebanon.
They were talking before the start of yesterday's working lunch in St Petersburg's Konstantinovsky Palace, unaware that they were being overheard halfway round the world by a technician who was up early monitoring a live feed for an American TV station. By the time Mr Blair spotted the live microphone, the two leaders had unwittingly shared their private thoughts with the outside world - and revealed who is the boss.
A transcript of their conversation, compiled by Sky News, showed how Mr Bush simply blanked out the Prime Minister's suggestion that he visit the Middle East, telling him: "I think Condi is going to go pretty soon."
Mr Blair tried again, suggesting that the Americans could not afford to have their Secretary of State go into the region and come away empty handed, whereas, he said, "I can go out and just talk." At his press conference later, Mr Blair confirmed that the trip was off.
Mr Bush also revealed his frustration at other governments for not leaning heavily enough on the Syrians, which both leaders suspect of being able to control Hizbollah. "What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit," he remarked.
The rebuff by Mr Bush in this manner was one of several frustrating experiences for Mr Blair during the three-day summit.
Climate change, which Mr Blair sees as the most important long-term problem facing the planet, was mentioned only in passing in a summit dominated by the Middle East crisis and by two powers - the US and Russia - with vast energy-producing interests that they want to protect. But when the Prime Minister reports back to the Commons today, he is expected to emphasise that every head of government in St Petersburg acknowledged that climate change needed to be addressed.
His mild expression of concern about civil rights in Russia was brushed off twice by President Vladimir Putin. First, with a joke at the Prime Minister's expense about the recent arrest of his friend, Lord Levy. Then later with an attack on the UK Government for failing to extradite a Chechen rebel, Akhmed Zakayev, whom the Russians want to put on trial for alleged terrorist offences.
Until yesterday's working lunch, Mr Blair also feared that his efforts to revive talks on a world trade deal had reached a dead end. In his private conversation with George Bush, he is heard saying "maybe it's impossible". But at his press conference later, he said his hopes of success had been restored by the lunchtime discussion, chaired by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in which all the protagonists seemed to agree that it was necessary to compromise.
But Mr Blair still risks being humiliated over his call for a peacekeeping force that would go into Lebanon after a ceasefire has been achieved. Mr Blair wants a multinational force much larger than the present contingent of 2,000 Ghanaian and Indian troops on the Lebanon-Israel border. But his hand is weakened by his reluctance to send in any British troops. European foreign ministers backed the principle of an international force, though no clear plan for a mission has yet been tabled.

Squish Your Head!

With apologies and thanks to "Kids in the Hall' for inspiration!

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article1183388.ece

18 July 2006 13:15
Home > News > World > World Politics

'Yo, Blair!': Overheard at the G8
Published: 18 July 2006

Bush: Yo, Blair. How are you doing? (Does he regard Mr Blair as an equal? What about 'Yo, Tony'?)
Blair: I'm just...
Bush: You're leaving?
Blair: No, no, no not yet. On this trade thingy....(inaudible) (Mr Blair is getting anxious that the World Trade Organisation is falling apart because some nations, including the US, are putting domestic interests before a worldwide free trade agreement)
Bush: Yeah, I told that to the man.
Blair: Are you planning to say that here or not?
Bush: If you want me to.
Blair: Well, it's just that if the discussion arises...
Bush: I just want some movement.
Blair: Yeah.
Bush: Yesterday we didn't see much movement.
Blair: No, no, it may be that it's not, it may be that it's impossible.
Bush: I am prepared to say it.
Blair: But it's just I think what we need to be an opposition...
Bush: Who is introducing the trade?
Blair: Angela (The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, will lead the trade discussion. That is good for Mr Blair. She is on his side.)
Bush: Tell her to call 'em.
Blair: Yes.
Bush: Tell her to put him on, them on the spot. Thanks for the sweater it's awfully thoughtful of you.
Blair: It's a pleasure.
Bush: I know you picked it out yourself.
Blair: Oh, absolutely, in fact (inaudible)
Bush: What about Kofi? (inaudible) His attitude to ceasefire and everything else ... happens. (Change of subject. Now they are on to Lebanon and the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan)
Blair: Yeah, no I think the (inaudible) is really difficult. We can't stop this unless you get this international business agreed.
Bush: Yeah. (Mr Blair is trying to push the idea of a UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon. That 'yeah' does not sound like a wholehearted agreement)
Blair: I don't know what you guys have talked about, but as I say I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is, but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral. (Meaning: 'Please, George, let me go to the Middle East and be a world statesman')
Bush: I think Condi is going to go pretty soon. (Meaning: 'No')
Blair: But that's, that's, that's all that matters. But if you... you see it will take some time to get that together. (Meaning: 'Oh well, all right, if you don't want me to. Just a thought')
Bush: Yeah, yeah.
Blair: But at least it gives people...
Bush: It's a process, I agree. I told her your offer to... (Meaning: 'Drop it. You're not going.')
Blair: Well... it's only if I mean... you know. If she's got a..., or if she needs the ground prepared as it were... Because obviously if she goes out, she's got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk.
Bush: You see, the ... thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over. (Mr Bush is expressing his belief that Syria is pulling Hizbollah's strings, while Mr Blair is hinting the Syrians might be up to no good as well)
Blair: (inaudible)
Bush: (inaudible)
Blair: Syria.
Bush: Why?
Blair: Because I think this is all part of the same thing.
Bush: Yeah.
Blair: What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way... (Here they might be talking about Kofi Annan, or they may mean the Syrian President, Bashir Assad)
Bush: Yeah, yeah, he is sweet. (Mr Bush is probably being sarcastic)
Blair: He is honey. And that's what the whole thing is about. It's the same with Iraq.
Bush: I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to Assad and make something happen.
Blair: Yeah.
Bush: (inaudible)
Blair:(inaudible)
Bush: We are not blaming the Lebanese government.
Blair: Is this...? (at this point Blair taps the microphone in front of him and the sound is cut.)
Bush: Yo, Blair. How are you doing? (Does he regard Mr Blair as an equal? What about 'Yo, Tony'?)
Blair: I'm just...
Bush: You're leaving?
Blair: No, no, no not yet. On this trade thingy....(inaudible) (Mr Blair is getting anxious that the World Trade Organisation is falling apart because some nations, including the US, are putting domestic interests before a worldwide free trade agreement)
Bush: Yeah, I told that to the man.
Blair: Are you planning to say that here or not?
Bush: If you want me to.
Blair: Well, it's just that if the discussion arises...
Bush: I just want some movement.
Blair: Yeah.
Bush: Yesterday we didn't see much movement.
Blair: No, no, it may be that it's not, it may be that it's impossible.
Bush: I am prepared to say it.
Blair: But it's just I think what we need to be an opposition...
Bush: Who is introducing the trade?
Blair: Angela (The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, will lead the trade discussion. That is good for Mr Blair. She is on his side.)
Bush: Tell her to call 'em.
Blair: Yes.
Bush: Tell her to put him on, them on the spot. Thanks for the sweater it's awfully thoughtful of you.
Blair: It's a pleasure.
Bush: I know you picked it out yourself.
Blair: Oh, absolutely, in fact (inaudible)
Bush: What about Kofi? (inaudible) His attitude to ceasefire and everything else ... happens. (Change of subject. Now they are on to Lebanon and the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan)
Blair: Yeah, no I think the (inaudible) is really difficult. We can't stop this unless you get this international business agreed.
Bush: Yeah. (Mr Blair is trying to push the idea of a UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon. That 'yeah' does not sound like a wholehearted agreement)
Blair: I don't know what you guys have talked about, but as I say I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is, but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral. (Meaning: 'Please, George, let me go to the Middle East and be a world statesman')
Bush: I think Condi is going to go pretty soon. (Meaning: 'No')
Blair: But that's, that's, that's all that matters. But if you... you see it will take some time to get that together. (Meaning: 'Oh well, all right, if you don't want me to. Just a thought')
Bush: Yeah, yeah.
Blair: But at least it gives people...
Bush: It's a process, I agree. I told her your offer to... (Meaning: 'Drop it. You're not going.')
Blair: Well... it's only if I mean... you know. If she's got a..., or if she needs the ground prepared as it were... Because obviously if she goes out, she's got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk.
Bush: You see, the ... thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over. (Mr Bush is expressing his belief that Syria is pulling Hizbollah's strings, while Mr Blair is hinting the Syrians might be up to no good as well)
Blair: (inaudible)
Bush: (inaudible)
Blair: Syria.
Bush: Why?
Blair: Because I think this is all part of the same thing.
Bush: Yeah.
Blair: What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way... (Here they might be talking about Kofi Annan, or they may mean the Syrian President, Bashir Assad)
Bush: Yeah, yeah, he is sweet. (Mr Bush is probably being sarcastic)
Blair: He is honey. And that's what the whole thing is about. It's the same with Iraq.
Bush: I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to Assad and make something happen.
Blair: Yeah.
Bush: (inaudible)
Blair:(inaudible)
Bush: We are not blaming the Lebanese government.
Blair: Is this...? (at this point Blair taps the microphone in front of him and the sound is cut.)

Moron Poster #1 at Rally (according to Indyfoto), originally uploaded by indyfoto.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/56709485@N00/sets/72157594208421837/
STOP WAR INDYFOTO Set

The spOILz of WAR - Blair Profits Exxon, originally uploaded by indyfoto.

STOP the ATTACK on Lebanon! Articles 3- What British Jews think of Israel

2006-07-21T14:00:00.000-04:00

I am Ashamed of the Actions of My Fellow Jews, originally uploaded by indyfoto.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/56709485@N00/sets/72157594208421837/
STOP WAR INDYFOTO Set

18 July 2006 Home > News > UK > This Britain
What British Jews think of Israel
For Britain's 267,000 Jews, liberal by instinct and socially progressive, Israel represents their greatest hope and, at times, their deepest shame. The nation that was forged in the aftermath of the Holocaust was once regarded as a bold experiment in democracy and collective living. Now it stands accused of the same acts of terror with which it condemns its enemies. Linda Grant asks the children of the Diaspora how they see the Promised Land
Published: 18 July 2006

At the end of last week, already deep into the military and political crisis that had suddenly taken hold of Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, Lynne Sidkin waited anxiously for news of her 16-year-old son Sam. The previous weekend she had driven him from their family home in Wimbledon to a synagogue car-park in Stanmore to join an excited group of Jewish teenagers who were about to set off for a month in Israel.
A few days later, after a missile hit a hillside in Haifa, Sidkin received a text from the tour organisers, the Federation of Zionist Youth, saying that the kids were all fine and that they would ring later. Matter-of-factly, Sam told her that the place they were supposed to visit the next day had been bombed, so the itinerary was changing and they would be going elsewhere.
"They seemed detached from it, in a way," Sidkin says. "On Sunday night, when we dropped him off, emotions were running high, but there were no tears. The people in Israel can't run away from it and these children are there for a month. I'm anxious, but I'm not going to get on a plane to bring him back."
It seemed strange to me that Sam, an adored only child, long waited for, born of IVF treatment, would be sent off by his parents into the middle of a terrifying crisis at the heart of the Middle East at a time British tourists were being evacuated from Beirut at the prospect of all-out war between Israel and Hizbollah. But a summer in Israel has become a rite of passage for Jewish teenagers; throughout wars, intifada, peace processes and their breaking down, a steady stream have continued to arrive, the numbers fluctuating according to the political situation. This year, before the deteriorating military situation, participation was at an all-time high, with more than 1,300 British teenagers booked to take part - over 50 per cent of all Britain's Jewish 16-year-olds. Some went with the Orthodox youth group Bnei Akiva, some with Habonim, the socialist Jewish scouts (whose most famous alumnus is Sacha Baron Cohen), some with Netzer, the Reform synagogue youth wing, some with the Federation of Zionist Youth.
The Sidkins did not send Sam to Israel for a dose of Zionist indoctrination, but because they subscribe to a widespread view in the Jewish community that, as part of a small and rapidly assimilating ethnic minority in the UK, Jewishness can be reinforced by sending your children to the one place where Jews are everywhere. "Here in south London, Sam is mixing with very different people," Sidkin says. "He's very Anglicised, and one of his best friends is Muslim. This summer, he's going to be with people who feel more strongly about Israel than he does - and we want him to find out about his history. We want him to feel proud of being Jewish and his roots, because that's what I find is important in my own life."
When I asked her where she stood on the political spectrum regarding Israel, and what she thought of the recent events in Gaza and Lebanon, Sidkin replied: "I'm not heavily into politics. I watch the news but I don't have very strong views. You'd have to talk to my husband, but he isn't here at the moment."
As Sam passes through Israel, visiting a Druze [one of Israel's non-Jewish ethnic minorities] village last week, and helping to prepare Ethiopian children for their bar and bat mitzvahs, the British media is on fire with angry opinion and rhetoric, and the rights and wrongs of the escalating crisis have provoked a ferocious expression of opposing viewpoints inside the Jewish community itself. Ten days ago, it took only 48 hours for the organisation Jews for Justice for Palestinians to collect the names of 300 British Jews, including Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh and Gillian Slovo, together with small donations worth £10,000 to pay for a full-page advertisement in The Times condemning Israel's bombing of the power station in Gaza that has deprived the civilian population of water, food and dialysis machines, and which has led some to make comparisons with conditions in the Warsaw ghetto.
Others, while sharing the horror at the fate of the Gazans, are discomforted by the advertisement. Why The Times, asked the columnist Jonathan Freedland, instead of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz? A debate is underway in which one side argues that speaking out against Israel is necessary to avoid the growth of anti-Semitism, while others counter that there can be no excuses for racism.
Reform Rabbi Tony Bayfield, writing in The Guardian, described a deepening dilemma for many British Jews, torn between dismay and despair at Israel's actions and anger at the response to them in the British media. "As I listen to the news, with its details of Israel's return to Gaza, I cringe," he wrote. "I cringe at the continuing involvement of Israeli Jews in the suffering of Palestinians. I cringe because I can't believe that it will advance the cause of peace. I cringe at the seeming hopelessness of it all. But I also become incandescent at the sanctimonious advice and the hypocritical disavowal of any responsibility that is so prevalent in this country and even in certain quarters of the Church."
There is a perception among the general public that most, if not all, Jews support Israel or are not prepared to criticise it in public. Some critics detect a seamless link between US policy, American Jewish lobby groups and political opinion in Golders Green.
Responding to criticism that the Board of Deputies of British Jews should have spoken out against Israeli policy, Jon Benjamin, its chief executive, argues: "We are speaking on behalf of the British Jewish community to the extent that the way Israel is reported in the media impacts on us. I have nothing to say about the attacks on Gaza, but if we saw any upsurge of anti-Semitic attacks because of the way that story had broken, doubtless we would have something to say about that."
Privately, figures in what is known as the Jewish "establishment" have been aghast at right-wing American support for Israel and the campaigns of bombarding dissenting journalists with abusive e-mails. "If you want to characterise British Jewry, as opposed to the American Jewish community," sources say, "it has tended to support those Israeli governments that have made moves towards peace. The natural inclination here is to vote Tory in Britain and support Labour governments in Israel. People know where they want to get to. The South African Jewish community was far less ready to move with the times and US rabbis have been part of [right-wing] demonstrations against Israeli governments. It's not a coincidence that most of the hard-line Gush Eminem [settler] movement speaks with an American accent."

MAKE BREAD NOT WAR Poster #2 at rally (According to Indyfoto), originally uploaded by indyfoto.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/56709485@N00/sets/72157594208421837/
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While at least two members of the Board of Deputies are known to have signed the Times advertisement, for many Jews on the left, the board's refusal to engage critically with Israeli government policy has given rise to a "not-in-my-name" movement. Jews for Justice for Palestinians was founded in 2002 by Irene Bruegel, Professor of Urban Policy at South Bank University. It is currently chaired by her partner Richard Kuper, a founder of the left-wing publishing house Pluto Press. She had been a member of Women in Black, a women's peace organisation originally founded in Israel in 1988 in response to the occupation, but which now considers itself to be an international movement. In 2001, she took part in a visit to Israel and the West Bank, out of which the International Solidarity Movement was born.
"It was a very diverse group," she says, "and two things struck me. They had a very black-and-white view of Israelis - and almost, in a sense, that needs to be the case if you are an activist. The other was the incredibly warm welcome we got from the Palestinians we met when we said we were Jewish, and we thought it was very important that they knew there were Jews who supported Palestinian rights while still supporting Israeli security. When I got back I felt lost and wanted somewhere I felt safe, and there were no organisations that did that work."
Bruegel had never been involved in Palestinian politics before. Indeed, she had avoided the Middle East as a political issue. Growing up in a Jewish area of north London in a street she describes as 99 per cent Jewish, she is the child of refugees from Czechoslovakia, socialists and anti-Zionists, her father a specialist on the Holocaust. "I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust for all my childhood," she says, "and we had people coming to live with us who had been in camps, so when people justify everything Israel does on the basis of the Holocaust, my father gets very upset."
Her idea was not to start a political organisation, but to form a broad network around a simple statement, which has itself proved extremely divisive. Supporting the "right of Israelis to live in freedom and security within Israel's 1967 borders," it alienated a part of the radical anti-Zionist left that calls for a single, unitary state, while the name alone was off-putting to those who asked where the interest in justice for Israelis was. Others, she now concedes, placed a narrow interpretation on the word "justice", believing that it included support for the Palestinian right of return, effectively ending the Jewish majority and Israel as a state.
Internal divisions have made it difficult for JfJfP to play a pro-active role, with some members wanting to support divestment and the AUT boycott of Israeli academics, and others strongly opposing such moves. Internally, the group is confronted with a choice between being "a powerful alternative to the Jewish lobby", as a recently circulated report proposed, or keeping on board its 1,200 signatories, many of whom would be lost if it did so.
Bruegel also acknowledges the problems that Jews have had working with Palestinian solidarity groups. "Solidarity movements are good at blunting analysis," she says. "There were people at meetings talking about a Palestinian state from the river to the sea, but at least we got them to take down the banners with swastikas. Many of them see no difference between Jews and Israelis; we have to chip away at the edges."
Groups like JfJfP have sprung up across Britain, more or less unnoticed by the media, but they find themselves both distrusted by the mainstream Jewish community and uncomfortable among Muslim and Palestinian groups. Karen Worth, a GP, co-founded the Nottingham Peace Campaign in 2001. "My main view is one of huge sadness and disappointment," she says. "I have an underlying feeling of responsibility. We wanted to make good links with local Muslims and say there are Jews who don't condone what the government does and are also not anti-Israeli, though some of our group are."
As a member of her local Liberal Synagogue, she has tried to raise awareness in the Jewish community of what is happening in Palestine, but "people feel it's so touchy you better not go there, though in the past couple of years there has been more discussion. I have some cousins in B'tselem [the Israeli human-rights organisation], so when they come over we have a meeting. But I don't feel safe or happy to go on some of the anti-war or pro-Palestinian marches either. Recently I went to a Palestine Solidarity Campaign meeting and it was fairly edgy. There is anti-Semitism and it's hard to know how you fit within the left. It's hard to find a place where you feel comfortable."
Jon Benjamin describes the Jewish community as having a "siege mentality about talking openly about Israel because they know that others who wish Israel harm will take those views and turn them around to use them against Israel's right to exist." The sense of being pressed between two powerful and opposing points of view has led many Jews, whose political opinions are naturally on the left, to feel isolated.
Martin Vogel, the editor of a news website, is, like Irene Bruegel, the son of a Czech Jewish refugee, but his father married a British Catholic and he grew up with no connection to the Jewish community. "It was an upbringing of intellectual debate, particularly around politics," he says. "But a large part of my identity was bound up with the Holocaust. None of my grandparents' family survived, and this made them strongly pro-Zionist, and I only started to think about Israel critically when I was at university studying sociology. A lot of the courses were in the Marxist tradition, and Israel was presented to us as a colonial state, which I don't disagree with. So was America. But what strikes me now is a lazy quasi-humanism in leftist liberal articles which identify with the oppressed without enquiring about the complexities. These articles really crystallised something in me.
"The thesis put forward by Melanie Phillips is very shrill but argued with relentless logic: that Israel is being singled out for special opprobrium, and that that is modern anti-Semitism. What it does is to make me more bloody-minded and possibly less prone to criticise Israel than I should, because it needs my solidarity. You're faced with people who get very moralistic very quickly and the emotional tension increases. They don't get emotionally wrought about Burma. One of the fault lines in those conversations is this idea that suicide bombing is outrageous, but the outrage stops when you get to the borders of Israel. My views don't play well with my friends; they don't even play very well with my wife, who isn't Jewish."

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http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article1183428.ece
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Israel and Zionism have now become virtual arguments between strangers on internet chatrooms - an alternative war in which the missiles being lobbed are URLs mined from Google supporting the thesis of either side. Reading these hysterical and abusive fights with their mutual accusations of "Nazi!", one is struck by how few of the participants, particularly those from America, have ever been to the country they feel so passionately about, either for or against. What differentiates most British Jews from the rest of the population is that they have actually visited Israel, and often have relatives there, often because before the Second World War families fleeing Europe took whatever visa they could get and found themselves flung out across the globe - in Britain, America, Argentina, South Africa or Mandate Palestine. Others emigrated to Israel out of ideological conviction or because they liked the place, or married Israelis.
Netanya, where Hamas killed 29 people during a Passover celebration in the Park Hotel, is a favourite holiday or retirement spot for British Jews. When there is a suicide bomb in Tel Aviv or a Katushya missile strike on Haifa, British Jews are reaching for the telephone to make sure that relatives and friends are safe, rather than arguing about root causes.
On the other hand, few have been to the West Bank - let alone Gaza - and many are unaware of the true extent of conditions there under occupation. The Portland Trust, founded by Sir Ronald Cohen of the hedge fund company Apex, together with a number of other very wealthy Jews who prefer to remain nameless, has offices in Tel Aviv and Ramallah and a brief to promote peace by building the Palestinian private-sector economy. The trust is currently involved in setting up the structures for loan guarantee schemes to Palestinian banks from the US and Europe. But its policy is that to be effective it has to operate below the radar of media attention, and it is reluctant to answer questions about its work.
A few years ago, having written a book about my mother's dementia and the role of memory in Jewish life, I was invited to speak at a series of fundraising lunches of the women's group WIZO (Women's International Zionist Organisation). My mother had been a member, and as far as I understood it, the group consisted of ladies who held coffee mornings to raise money for Israel, a product of the suburbanisation of Jewish post-war life. I became aware that deep beneath the surface of the Jewish middle class there was anger at Israeli government policy, which was uncomfortable about expressing itself in a public forum, lest it give aid to the country's enemies and be used as a pretext for deligitimisation of the state itself. Behind closed doors, when an elderly lady raised her hand and asked: "Why is Ariel Sharon sending Jewish boys to become murderers in Gaza, when Israeli children are living below the poverty line?" a number of others applauded.
WIZO was founded in 1918 by Rebecca Sieff, a member of the Marks & Spencer dynasty, and Vera Weizmann, wife of Chaim Weizmann, the man who negotiated the Balfour declaration - the document that led ultimately to the establishment of the Jewish state. By the 1970s, WIZO had become a quasi-feminist organisation, campaigning in Israel against domestic violence and rape, and doing leadership training among minorities such as the Bedouin.
Its work opened the eyes of generations of British women to the reality of life in Israel outside the tourist sites - in particular, the ways in which the continuing conflict has affected families. Recently, it has been working to counteract the effects of the stringent cuts in welfare enacted when Benjamin Netanyahu was finance minister in the last Likud government. And yesterday, WIZO was setting up emergency dormitories for families fleeing the northern border towns.
If anyone knows what is really going on inside the Green Line, and how relentless militarisation affects a society, it is Lorraine Warren, the WIZO chairman, Michele Vogel, the president, and Ruth Sotnick, honorary president. "We feel resentment of the criticism of Israel, because we don't think it's completely justified," they say, over lunch in their offices. "We know more about Israel than many, we have a day-care project in Sderot [the Israeli town that has been the target of Qassam missiles] and we don't have any projects on the settlements. We know about the impact of a million Russian immigrants and the situation of Bedouin women and the Ethiopians. We want to help our fellow Jews in Israel. If the situation in the territories was better, it would be better for Israelis. But the billions of aid given to the Palestinians has been squandered. We help out when our people are in need of help, and we don't hear of the Arab states doing the same. The reason why Hamas has done so well is that they're the WIZO of Palestine."
Donating money to help Israel has been part of Jewish life in Britain for more than 100 years, through the medium of the Jewish National Fund. But alternative organisations have grown up with more radical social programmes. The New Israel Fund, founded in the 1990s, grants donations to a wide range of Israeli non-governmental organisations, both Jewish and Arab. NIF's donors are, according to its chief executive, Alan Bolchover, "educated, quite knowledgeable people who read Ha'aretz online, people with family in Israel, soft left with traditional values of the state as it was originally founded. Certain individuals are driven by the fight for Arab-Israeli equality, others are reacting to religious orthodoxy and for equal opportunities for all Israelis.
"Many of them thought that Sharon going on the Temple Mount was antagonistic, but in 2002 there was a lot of anger, the feeling that Israel was very badly treated in the press. I'm utterly convinced that the majority don't want to continue with the occupation; the question is where you draw the border. As far as the Board of Deputies is concerned, there is a leadership of the community which comes together to form an opinion and people don't like this because Jews are naturally anti-establishment. I'm of the view that the Board of Deputies tries to be democratic, but whether it is, is another matter."
The most visibly identifiable section of the Jewish population, the Charedi, chooses not to send representation to the Board of Deputies. Living in closed communities, rarely interacting with the mainstream Jewish population, let alone with non-Jews, the Charedi turn out to be the most divided on Israel and on Zionism.
A few months ago, Rabbi Abraham Pinter, white-bearded, dressed in a black coat and black hat, was trying to get across Oxford Street when he was waylaid by an activist from BiG, the Boycott Israeli Goods campaign, who tried to hand him a leaflet, but he refused it.
As he prepared to cross the road, he heard a man at the BiG stall say to his colleague: "What did you expect?" He turned back to face a woman on the stall who was dressed in hijab. Did British people assume that because she was dressed as a devout Muslim, she must be a terrorist? And wasn't such an assumption racist? She agreed. He pointed to the activist. "Well, he's a racist, because he too judges people's political views on how they dress."
I met Rabbi Pinter in his house in a cul-de-sac in Stamford Hill where every house is owned by a Charedi family. The headmaster of the Yesodey Hatorah school, he was also for many years a Labour member of Hackney council.
The 40,000-strong UK Charedim, out of nearly a million worldwide, are divided between those who believe that the whole land of Israel from Jordan to the sea was granted to the Jews by God and cannot be given away by peace treaties, and those who hold that the Jewish state can only be established with the arrival of the Moshiach (Messiah). A much smaller, fringe sect, the Neturei Karta, numbering about 500 in Britain, holds similar theocratic views but believes that the Holocaust was retribution by God for Zionism, have praised the Iranian Prime Minister for calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map", and have attracted hostility even from the non-Zionist Charedi for their extremism.
"I stand in the middle," Rabbi Pinter says. "I am not a Zionist, but I see Zionism in a very practical way. I have a love of Israel because of Judaism, even if Israel was still a British protectorate, so Israel's safety and wellbeing is important to me. My children are there, and a big part of my income goes to them.
"A lot of people in the non-Charedi community need Israeli for their link to Judaism and I don't need Israel for that. If it were up to me, I would go back to the 1967 borders and divide Jerusalem, but most of the Charedim wouldn't."
I asked him what he felt when he saw pictures on the news of Palestinian children killed by rocket fire. He said: "I find it hard to cope with some of these things, and the quicker we're out of Gaza the better. But a lot of the Holocaust survivors have a different way of looking at it. If you get into the kitchen, you'll get hot. You can't expect to shoot Qassams from a block of flats and not get retaliation. I don't take that point of view - but a lot of people here do."
The debate about Israel is about to heat up in the pages of The Jewish Chronicle, whose newly appointed editor, David Rowan, was previously in charge of The Guardian's comment pages. After the bombing of the power station in Gaza, the JC had an interview with the Israeli novelist and peace activist David Grossman on its front page.
Rowan insists that, while he is Jewish, he is a journalist first. "The JC needs to be the place where the debate takes place, but doesn't instinctively support one side or another. We need to be fair to all parties and there are some very strongly held views. The danger is in trying to guess what makes the readership comfortable and shaping the news to it. I don't want to make it a pro- or anti-Israel paper, but I want it to reflect the depth of feeling and not to exclude any constituency unless they are completely barking or dangerous or destructive.
"Israel at the moment has a pretty lousy image. There's a debate about whether that image needs changing and we've had a lot of good letters in response, saying it's not PR, it's killing children on the ground that's the problem. We need to give space to articulate that viewpoint. We can't be in the untenable position of 'Israel right or wrong'.
"There are people who say we should have the debate in private, that Israel has enough enemies in the mainstream press without the JC, but we can't answer for the shortcomings of other newspapers."
There is a famous Jewish saying: "Two Jews, three opinions." Another joke tells of the rabbinical speaker giving a lecture on Judaism. "The essence of Judaism is disputation," he says. A hand goes up in the audience: "I beg to differ."
For some - like the characters in Mike Leigh's hit play Two Thousand Years - Israel has been a heartbreaking disappointment, an exercise in idealism turned badly wrong. For others, it is still seen as a bolthole if anti-Semitism returns to Europe; a place of potential refuge (and this is particularly true of French Jews). Still others think its creation was an error that must be corrected. But it is highly unlikely that the Diaspora will come to regard it with disinterested objectivity any time soon. Most want to be proud of Israel and are anguished that they are not.
Linda Grant's most recent book, The People on the Street: a writer's view of Israel, is published by Virago (£9.99). Her novel set in Israel, When I Lived in Modern Times won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000
Jewish Britain: the facts
* According to the 2001 Census, there are 267,000 Jews in Britain. In 1995, the Board of Deputies put the number at 285,000. Fifty years ago, there were more than 500,000.
* About 70 per cent of the Jewish community is affiliated to one of the country's 350 synagogues, in the following proportions: 47 per cent traditional Orthodox, 12 per cent Reform, 4 per cent Liberal, 4 per cent ultra-Orthodox, 2 per cent Sephardi, 1 per cent Masorti.
* Of the total British Jewish population, 72 per cent live in Greater London. There are large communities in Greater Manchester (Salford in particular), Liverpool, Glasgow, Leeds and Gateshead. Stockbridge in Hampshire also has an unusually large Jewish community.
* Barnet council has the highest proportion of Jews on any British council (14.2 per cent).
* The British Jewish population is relatively old; 24 per cent of British Jews are over 65, compared to the national figure of 16 per cent. This is largely due to the fact that so many younger Jews are now "marrying out".
* This year marks the 350th anniversary of the return of the Jews to Britain under Oliver Cromwell. Jews had been expelled from England under Edward I in 1290.
* A recent poll by The Jewish Chronicle named Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs as Britain's greatest-ever Jew, beating competition from such 19th-century hotshots as Benjamin Disraeli and Moses Montefiore.
* Jews in Britain have more volunteers working in organisations designed to benefit their members than any other minority. The Jewish population sustains more than 2,000 such institutions - charitable, educational, religious and welfare - whose combined annual income is about £500m.

STOP the ATTACK on Lebanon! Articles 2 -Palestinians in Lebanon,Lebanese flee,Israel's Arabs

2006-07-21T13:48:00.000-04:00

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http://mondediplo.com/2006/07/03refugees
Middle East in crisis
Lebanon: the other Palestinians

As the world focuses its attention on the grave crisis in Lebanon and Gaza (see “A long week in Gaza City”), which risks being transformed into a regional conflict, it is time to listen to the Palestinians in Lebanon - in particular those still living in the refugee camps.

By Marina Da Silva

The current crisis in Lebanon has revived the debate about disarming Hizbullah and returned attention to the Palestinians, who mostly live in Lebanon’s refugee camps, forgotten by history and left out of negotiations. Now they are being pushed to the centre of the political stage and are trying to assert a right of return which they have never renounced.
Khadda, who lived in the biggest camp in Lebanon, Ein al-Hilweh, on the edge of Saida, so dreaded the tensions and armed conflicts in it that she left the camp, risking the cohesion of her family. Her husband, who runs a small shop, has stayed, and her children go back every weekend. She said: “The refugee camps, and Ein al-Hilweh in particular, are always described in the national and international press as no-go areas that harbour criminals and Islamic extremists. But we are the camp, more than 45,000 of us, and we cherish our identity and our history. It’s not those tearaways, at most a couple of hundred, who are the products of insecurity and political stalemate.” Even more than the violence, Khadda is weary of the sense of suffocation, of the poverty clearly visible in the narrow, filthy streets and crumbling houses, fertile ground for Islamic radicalisation.
The turning point came in 1982 with Israel’s invasion and the forced departure of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and its fighters. The PLO had provided work for nearly 65% of the Palestinians, as well as funding for health and education (also open to destitute Lebanese). Lebanon’s Palestinians then felt forgotten by the Oslo agreements of 1993: the PLO concentrated its diplomatic efforts on the West Bank and Gaza, which also received international aid. The budgets allocated to Lebanon by international NGOs, Unrwa (1) and other UN agencies were drastically reduced. The refugee camps that bore the brunt of war and economic hardship have been passed over.
The Islamist movements, mainly Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), have touched the poorest sections of the population by providing much-needed aid. Hamas benefited from popular anger after Israel deported 415 Palestinians close to the movement from the occupied territories to southern Lebanon in December 1992; Hamas benefited again when Israel began targeted assassinations of Palestinian Islamist political leaders: Sheikh Ahmad Yassin in March 2004 and Abdelaziz al-Rantissi a month later, both in Gaza. Their portraits are everywhere. Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections in January has added to its strength.
Um Fadi, who is close to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was surprised “like everyone else” at the Hamas victory, but she was pleased with the result, a vote “against corruption and for Palestinian rights, including the right of return”. Ein al-Hilweh is not like it was when her children were born there: in those days the camps were the symbol of Palestinian political life and of building a society in exile. “Today,” she said, “the population is hostage to political factions settling internal scores. Often there are deaths and people are afraid. But they don’t want to leave, because the camp still symbolises our long wait for return and the struggle for our rights.”
On 1 May a member of Fatah was killed by a militant member of Usbat al-Ansar (League of Partisans), a Salafist group thought to have links with al-Qaida. The death was the latest in a long list of casualties. These confrontations, political as much as criminal, often go beyond internal rivalries: they are part of a strategy of tension orchestrated by the various organisations’ secret services and meant to confuse. Ein al-Hilweh retains its symbolic status as a political camp where all Palestinian parties are recognised and respected, a real capital of the Palestinians in exile.
Sensitive situation
“The situation is sensitive,” said Abu Ali Hassan, a former leader of Ein al-Hilweh who is now at Mar Elias, a small, mainly Christian camp in Beirut, where he is in charge of relations with the Lebanese political parties. “The disarmament of the Palestinian organisations, called for by resolution 1559 of September 2004, at the instigation of France and the United States, constitutes one of the issues in Lebanese political life (2). The national unity government in Beirut has formed a committee to negotiate the disarmament of the bases outside the camps and control the arms inside them. We’re working towards creating a united delegation and ensuring that this issue isn’t dealt with just from a security point of view, but that the outcome will advance our political rights and improve the humanitarian situation in the camps.”
Abbas Zaki, from Fatah, heads the PLO representation in Jnah, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. He believes that its reopening in May was a strong political signal: “The government doesn’t want to deal with this issue by force; it’s mainly armed Palestinians in a dozen bases spread out across the Beqaa valley and in the coastal town of Nahme, 15km south of Beirut, who cause problems.” The statement by Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, in Paris last October, that Palestinians living in Lebanon had to “obey the law” and that they were there as “guests” was not welcomed.
Lebanese newspapers regularly report infiltrations of Palestinian militants from Syria into the western Beqaa, which have led the Lebanese army to seal off some 40 illegal crossing points between the countries and to tighten its control of Palestinian factions that are linked to pro-Syrian organisations based in Damascus, such as the PFLP-GC, Fatah-Intifada (a splinter group of Fatah, led by Abu Musa) and Al-Saiqa (the Palestinian wing of the ruling Ba’ath party in Syria).
“Because we’ve led the armed resistance to Israel and are still active and influential, we’re seen as obstacles to peace”, said Nabil, who heads the people’s committee in the camp at Beddawi, below Tripoli, in the north. Beddawi has less crowded houses, rebuilt roads and sewers, and is further away from the battle zone. It might seem peaceful, but to Nabil ,war remains a threat: “Israeli planes still fly regularly over Lebanon, north to south and back again, with total impunity. Sabra and Shatila will remain forever in our memory. We were massacred while we were under the protection of international forces. The arms in the camps are there to ensure our protection” (3).
The arms question conceals the Palestinians’ living conditions and their banishment. According to Unrwa’s March figures, there are 404,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, of whom 220,000 live in a dozen camps around the country. These include: in Beirut, Mar Elias, Burj al-Barajneh, Sabra and Shatila, and Dbayeh; in the south, near Saida, Ein al-Hilweh and Mieh Mieh; also in the south, near Tyre, al-Buss, Rashidieh, Burj al-Shemali; in the north by Tripoli, Nahr al-Bared and Beddawi; and Wavel in the Beqaa valley. There are also small illegal ghetto-camps, not recognised by Unrwa and therefore without aid.
The Lebanese army keeps up pressure around the camps, particularly those in the south which provide shelter for some 100,000 refugees; access to these is restricted and requires a permit.
Fatah remains the most powerful organisation here, while in the camps in Beirut, northern Lebanon and the Beqaa, the pro-Syrians have maintained a significant presence. Everywhere the increasing strength of the Islamist movements is noticeable: some think it now puts Fatah and Hamas on an equal footing.
According to Unrwa, 60% of Palestinian refugees live in poverty and as many as 70% are unemployed. Until recently there were 72 jobs they were unable to practise outside the camps; they were not allowed to bring construction material into the camps; and they cannot leave or re-enter Lebanese territory without a visa, which lasts for only six months.
In June 2005 the Lebanese minister of labour, Trad Hamade, who is close to Hizbullah, signed a memorandum in favour of Palestinians born in Lebanon and registered at the interior ministry, which partly lifts the ban on doing certain jobs. But this does not change anything for qualified Palestinians, who still cannot practise medicine, law or architecture. There is total silence about a 2001 law that forbade Palestinians to buy houses or property in Lebanon, which has led to legal confusion, particularly on inheritance.
Samira Salah heads the PLO’s department for Palestinian refugee affairs and coordinates the campaign for the rights of refugees in Lebanon and the right of return, in accordance with UN resolution 194. She sees Hamade’s measures as a step forward, though they will not change anything in real terms: “Proposals were already made in 1995 indicating that a Palestinian born in Lebanon had the right to work, on condition he had a permit; but this permit is still almost impossible to obtain and the minister’s proposal doesn’t include social security or insurance.”
The campaign for Palestinian rights was started in April 2005 by a collective that brings together 25 Palestinian associations, the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s refugee affairs department and members of civil society. The campaign includes workshops and training, and seeks to gain the support of the Lebanese population to create a broad movement of political pressure. Under the slogan “Civil rights until we return; together with the Lebanese we will resist settlement and naturalisation of refugees”, the campaign has four main demands: the right to work, to own property, to security and to free association. These are not new but they have never been answered.
There are now some 4 million refugees, about 60% of the Palestinian community, who were originally forced into exile in their hundreds of thousands when the state of Israel was created; 90% live in the Palestinian territories and neighbouring Arab countries. Lebanon’s Palestinians crystallise the most sensitive issues in both Lebanese and regional politics. They are a reminder that any move in the Arab-Israeli conflict is linked to a resolution of the refugee problem.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1183355.ece
18 July 2006 13:40
Home > News > World > Middle East

Thousands of Lebanese flee to Beirut from unstable south
By Jerome Taylor
Published: 18 July 2006

As foreign powers mobilised to evacuate their citizens, tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians were fleeing the country's southern areas last night, following six days of near-continual bombardment by Israeli artillery and air power.
Officials said more than 58,000 people had been displaced by the fighting and 14,000 have headed to the relative safety of Beirut, despite the fact that Lebanon's capital has been attacked every day since Thursday.
Thousands of people from Beirut's southern Shia suburbs, a stronghold of Hizbollah and a major target for Israeli bombing raids, have also fled into the city centre to avoid the daily air strikes that have killed an average of 33 Lebanese civilians a day.
Speaking from the cramped and increasingly squalid Sanayeh Gardens - one of Beirut's oldest parks, used as a refugee camp during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon - Ali Sharara, 21, said, "My brother and I have been here more than two days. My mother and sisters are in Ashrafieh, I don't know where exactly. I can't believe they [the Israelis] are doing all this for two captives. This is just an excuse."
Another refugee, Hussein Ajami, said: "We've been sleeping outside on the grass. They keep telling us about schools that have opened their doors, but when we get there we find them already full."
The reappearance of so many refugees in Lebanon is a stark and depressing reminder of the country's 15-year civil war which killed more than 100,000 people and created a refugee crisis. Many of the sites that once housed refugees from the civil war and Israel's previous invasion of Lebanon are fast filling up again.
There are also fears that the arrival of so many refugees may upset Beirut's delicate sectarian balance. Most of the new arrivals are Shia Muslims who are having to find shelter and support in Beirut's Sunni and Christian areas.
The government's struggling Interior Ministry began trying to set up gathering points where families and refugees could try and find shelter. Hizbollah supporters were also out in force organising refugee centres.
As foreign powers mobilised to evacuate their citizens, tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians were fleeing the country's southern areas last night, following six days of near-continual bombardment by Israeli artillery and air power.
Officials said more than 58,000 people had been displaced by the fighting and 14,000 have headed to the relative safety of Beirut, despite the fact that Lebanon's capital has been attacked every day since Thursday.
Thousands of people from Beirut's southern Shia suburbs, a stronghold of Hizbollah and a major target for Israeli bombing raids, have also fled into the city centre to avoid the daily air strikes that have killed an average of 33 Lebanese civilians a day.
Speaking from the cramped and increasingly squalid Sanayeh Gardens - one of Beirut's oldest parks, used as a refugee camp during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon - Ali Sharara, 21, said, "My brother and I have been here more than two days. My mother and sisters are in Ashrafieh, I don't know where exactly. I can't believe they [the Israelis] are doing all this for two captives. This is just an excuse."
Another refugee, Hussein Ajami, said: "We've been sleeping outside on the grass. They keep telling us about schools that have opened their doors, but when we get there we find them already full."
The reappearance of so many refugees in Lebanon is a stark and depressing reminder of the country's 15-year civil war which killed more than 100,000 people and created a refugee crisis. Many of the sites that once housed refugees from the civil war and Israel's previous invasion of Lebanon are fast filling up again.
There are also fears that the arrival of so many refugees may upset Beirut's delicate sectarian balance. Most of the new arrivals are Shia Muslims who are having to find shelter and support in Beirut's Sunni and Christian areas.
The government's struggling Interior Ministry began trying to set up gathering points where families and refugees could try and find shelter. Hizbollah supporters were also out in force organising refugee centres.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1183353.ece
18 July 2006 13:42
Home > News > World > Middle East

Israel's Arab citizens caught in a war they never wanted
By Donald Macintyre in Majd el Krum
Published: 18 July 2006

Hassan Nasrullah, the leader of Hizbollah, has spoken of having more "surprises"in store for Israel after the deluge of rockets which culminated in the killing of eight Israeli civilians in Haifa in a single attack on Sunday.
But few residents of northern Israel can have been as "surprised" as those in the Arab village of Majd el Krum when it was hit by a volley of six Katyushas.
"We never saw anything like this," said Inas Ayub, 25. "There was no warning and we never expected anything like it."
Mrs Ayub lives next door to the fortunately empty house her brother-in-law Mahmoud is building for his son, part of whose roof and top floor was blown away by a direct hit from a Hizbollah rocket. She described how she was sitting inside her house with her two sons, one-year-old Mohammed and Liaan, three, when "I heard a very loud explosion. It was very strong. I took my sons downstairs. I started to scream because I saw that all the windows were broken and the front yard was full of rubble. Then I fainted."
This experience - though traumatic for the Ayub family - is trifling compared to the death and destruction in Lebanon they were seeing on their television screen yesterday. But it is especially vexing for the Muslim inhabitants here who, while reluctant to talk politics, mainly proclaim their neutrality in a war in which they have no part.
As the vulnerability of the village to a repeat of last Thursday's Katyusha attack was underlined by a volley of rockets on Karmiel three kilometres away, Mrs Ayub said that Hizbollah appeared not "to make a difference between Jews and Arabs. But we all eat from the same plate."
Najib Sjeer, 63, a former deputy superintendent of schools, echoed the frequent complaints about discrimination against Israel's Arab citizens by saying there were no warning sirens in the village and no shelters in the schools. While the village had not been caught up in a war since 1948, he added: "There are no public shelters. We have no protection.
"We are a part of Israel but Israel does not see us as part of the country," he said.
Mr Sjeer did not directly apportion blame for the war but declared: "Israel has planned to destroy Hizbollah for a long time and now they have found an excuse. This is not about the two soldiers who were kidnapped. Basically this is to destroy south Lebanon. If you shoot at a bus with 20 civilians you are not just going after Hizbollah."
Mr Sjeer insisted that the village would not be deterred from its normal life by the rocket volley. "Yesterday we had a big wedding here, and it would have been a disaster if there had been a rocket. But we have faith here. If it happens it won't be because of Nasrallah or Olmert or Peretz. Everything is from Allah."
Aslan Hammoud, 18, returned home yesterday from hospital having had three pieces of shrapnel removed from his shoulder after being wounded by a Katyusha which landed across the road from his family's home and pet shop. Part of the rocket was still embedded in the car park opposite the house. His father Mahmoud, 43, explained that as one of the relatively few residents to have built his house with an official permit, the family does have a secure room in the basement, but none of the family had been in it when the Katyusha landed without warning.
Mr Sjeer, like Mrs Ayub, said he did not believe that Hizbollah distinguished between Jewish and Arab villages. "They don't ask for people's ID cards before firing," he said. But Mahmoud Hammoud was convinced there was a reason why there had so far been no repeat of the Katyusha attack here. "This is a Muslim town and that is why I believe they have stopped shooting in this direction."
Maybe. But yesterday a Katyusha landed on Abu Snen, an Arab village seven miles away.

isrleb5sm, originally uploaded by indyfoto.

SPEAKER Naomi Binder Wall - Member, Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation. Monday July 17, 2006 Steelworkers Hall Toronto

Mass Rally/ Protest
- Sat. July 22, 06 1 PM
- Israeli Consulate, 180 Bloor St. West Toronto
(W. of Avenue Rd., N. of Bloor)
www.nowar.ca

STOP the ATTACK on Lebanon! Articles 1- MUST READ -David Clark report, Hizbullah here?,Simon Tisdall article, World Looks On, Brink of Chaos,

2006-07-21T12:53:00.000-04:00

Mass Rally/ Protest
- Sat. August 12, 06 1 PM
- Israeli Consulate, 180 Bloor St. West Toronto
(W. of Avenue Rd., N. of Bloor)
www.nowar.ca

Ali Mallah ,Vice-president of Canadian Arab Federation, also has a very personal investment in his desire to see an immediate halt to the bombing in Lebanon- his wife and 2 children, ages 9 and 11, are there visiting family and are now in immediate danger in the South of Lebanon- the area worst hit in the Israeli bombings, and now completely cut off from humanitarian aid and supplies. The children are being brave, and said that they don't want to abandon their grandmother and cousins. I hope they continue to be safe. Many foreign nationals are remaining for similar reasons.

I saw on CNN news that the cost of evacuating one American family, only to Cyprus, was $4000.- which the US government CHARGED to the FAMILY's credit card. I wonder if the American families WITH funds are getting out first... and if this has any bearing on the number of people choosing to take the much more dangerous overland route to neighbouring countries. America, one of the richest countries in the world, is the only one I've heard of so far which is putting the cost of the evacuation on the victims' shoulders.

Not that the US doesn't have money to burn...

David Clark, a former UK Labour special adviser at the Foreign Office, wrote in this week's Guardian, "Yet the US remains entirely
complicit in its role as Israel's main strategic ally. In the midst of last
week's onslaught, in which Israeli bombers killed dozens of Lebanese civilians, the Pentagon announced the export of $210m of aviation fuel to help Israel "keep peace and security in the region". Even Britain and other European countries indulge in a form of diplomatic misdirection by focusing one-sidedly on the roles played by Syria and Iran. "

David Clark 's full article and many others on this crisis follow!

'guardian-weekly' features/ 2006.7.23

Comment / In a state of denial / The Olmert government, Hizbullah and Hamas are
united in rejection of any moves toward peace. David Clark reports

Whatever else can be said for or against Israel's escalation of military action
against Lebanon, there is little prospect that it will achieve its stated
objectives. If Israel couldn't defeat Hizbullah after 18 years in which its army
occupied large swaths of Lebanese territory, it is not going to succeed with air
strikes and blockades, or even another occupation. The same point applies even
more forcefully in the case of Gaza. Every time Israel applies the iron fist in
an effort to beat the Palestinians into submission, their resistance simply
re-emerges in a more extreme and rejectionist form. Far from fearing Israel's
wrath, Hizbullah and Hamas must be rather pleased at their success in provoking
it into the sort of overreaction from which they have always benefited.
Nor does it seem plausible that military action will enable Israel to secure the
release of its captured soldiers. The civilian victims of Israel's
indiscriminate retaliation have no real influence over the militias that hold
them, while the militias themselves are untroubled by the spectacle of public
suffering. On the contrary, they thrive on it. In the case of Lebanon, it is
possible that acts of collective punishment, such as the destruction of Beirut
airport and the killing of yet more civilians, might divide Hizbullah and its
supporters from the rest of the country, but only at the risk of triggering
another civil war and creating a vacuum that Israel's enemies in Syria and Iran
will find easier to exploit.
In view of all this, it is valid to ask what Israel thinks it is doing. Indeed,
this question is implicit in the statements of world leaders at the G8 and
elsewhere who have called on Israel to use force proportionately, avoid civilian
casualties and refrain from acts that might strengthen Hamas or destabilise
Lebanon's fragile political settlement. No one quibbles with Israel's right to
defend itself, but doesn't it understand how irresponsible and immoral it is to
deliberately escalate the conflict in this way?
The problem is that the premise of the question is false. It assumes that Israel
shares our view that a de-escalation followed by negotiation is the best route
to a settlement. It assumes, therefore, that when Israeli ministers complain of
having "no partner for peace", they actually want one. A much more sensible
approach would be to credit them with having the intelligence to know exactly
what they are doing and to work backwards from there.
If so, it might become apparent that far from wanting a partner with which to
negotiate, the Israeli government is acting with the specific intention of
forestalling that possibility. There is nothing particularly new in this. The
extremists on both sides have always formed a kind of tacit alliance, with the
supporters of "greater Israel" and "no Israel" understanding their joint
interest in preventing any moves towards a compromise peace. That is the main
reason why Israel encouraged the growth of Hamas as it emerged in the 1980s.
Unwilling to negotiate with the secular nationalists of Fatah, even as they were
moving towards support for a two-state solution, the Israeli authorities thought
it would be a clever idea to promote their Islamist rivals.
In the case of the current crisis, it is no accident that it occurred precisely
when the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, was gaining the upper hand in the
latest round of that struggle. By using the threat of a referendum to force
Hamas to accept the existence of Israel as the basis for a final settlement,
Abbas had created the most promising opening for peace in six years. Faced with
the loss of political initiative, Hamas militants understood that the only way
to prevent it would be to trigger another cycle of violence. In turn, the
Israeli government, whose interests were also threatened by the Abbas
initiative, recognised that it had an equally good reason to oblige. The effect
of Hizbullah's intervention and Israel's overreaction has been to put peace even
further down the agenda.
The plain truth is that Israel thinks that it can get more by imposing a
solution through force than by negotiation and is not interested in any kind of
peace process. The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, pays lip service to the
road map, but he has already received American endorsement for his fallback
position, artfully dubbed "unilateral convergence". George Bush has described it
as a "bold idea". Armed with the knowledge that he will continue to enjoy
American patronage if the road map fails, Olmert has set out to ensure that it
does just that. Bush's diplomacy has been truly inept.
It's high time western governments grasped the fundamental truth that Israel is
pursuing an agenda that conflicts directly with their own. In the context of the
fight against terrorism and the need to promote international cooperation, the
West's interest must be to remove the Palestinian question as a source of
grievance among mainstream Muslims in a way that guarantees justice for the
Palestinians and security for Israel. A settlement of this kind is perfectly
feasible and has been outlined in countless documents and initiatives over the
years, most recently in the Geneva accords. But the main reason it has proved
elusive is that Israel is not, and never has been, prepared to make the
territorial compromises required. It still believes that it is entitled to the
victor's spoils by annexing large tracts of Palestinian land.
This situation will persist as long as the West remains in denial about the
reasons for the ongoing conflict and until the Israeli political establishment
is forced to pay a price for its obstinacy. Yet the US remains entirely
complicit in its role as Israel's main strategic ally. In the midst of last
week's onslaught, in which Israeli bombers killed dozens of Lebanese civilians,
the Pentagon announced the export of $210m of aviation fuel to help Israel "keep
peace and security in the region". Even Britain and other European countries
indulge in a form of diplomatic misdirection by focusing one-sidedly on the
roles played by Syria and Iran.
The key to resolving the situation in Lebanon lies, as it did throughout the
1970s and 1980s, in finding a solution to the Palestinian question. A viable and
successful Palestinian state would rob Hizbullah and its sponsors of the conceit
that they are defending helpless Muslims and make it easier for those in the
region who oppose them to gain the upper hand. Mahmoud Abbas is the only leader
currently working for the kind of negotiated two-state solution that the Middle
East and the wider world desperately need. But he is being let down by the West
at the moment when he had earned the right to expect better. The Palestinian
president needs a partner for peace. If Israel will not play that role, the
international community must.

David Clark is a former Labour special adviser at the Foreign Office

For You Eyes Only, originally uploaded by indyfoto.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/56709485@N00/sets/72157594208421837/
STOP WAR INDYFOTO Set

Hizbullah: force that claims 12,000 rockets and grassroots support / Brian
Whitaker in Beirut and Robert Tait in Tehran

Hizbullah will not only take war to Haifa, but "beyond Haifa, and beyond beyond
Haifa", its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said in a televised speech last week - and
some experts are prepared to believe him.
"When they say things, they mean it. They don't bluff," said Nicholas Noe, a
Cambridge researcher who is editing a book of Mr Nasrallah's speeches.
Mr Nasrallah's address last Friday ended with the news that Hizbullah had hit an
Israeli naval vessel off the Lebanese coast, which might be relatively
insignificant in military terms, but had a huge psychological impact. "No Arab
state has done that since [former Egyptian president Gamel] Nasser did it in
1967," Mr Noe said.
Few experts doubt the militant Shia organisation's standing. Mark Perry of the
Beirut-based Conflicts Forum said in a recent interview: "Hizbullah is the
second or third most competent military force in the region, after Israel and
Iran."
Unusually, Hizbullah announces its intentions in advance. It said it was
planning to capture Israeli soldiers, and did so. It also stated openly, before
the current conflict began, that it had 12,000 rockets - more than 700 of which
have now been fired. Most experts believe that the real figure is higher.
A more important question is how many rockets are usable. Unlike national
armies, Hizbullah does not keep them in arsenals. They are dispersed in houses,
caves and other hiding places: hence the Israeli tactic of blasting roads and
bridges in the hope of preventing the rockets being transported to firing
positions.
Most of the rockets are 107mm and 122mm Katyushas with a short range, but
according to Israeli sources Hizbullah also has Fajr-3 missiles with a 40km
range and Fajr-5 rockets, which can reach 70km. The Hizbullah television station
recently broadcast pictures of new, long-range missiles known as Zelzal-1 and
Zelzal-2. There have been claims that these could strike as far as Israel's
nuclear plant in the Negev desert.
No one really knows how many Hizbullah fighters there are, said Amal
Saad-Ghorayeb, who has written a book on the organisation. "Because it's a
populist grassroots movement, every household [in the Hizbullah areas] has
family members who could be easily mobilised . . . I think the Israelis are
fully aware that demolishing Hizbullah is virtually impossible," she said.
Iran denied this week that it was supplying Hizbullah with weapons to use
against Israel and dismissed accusations that its troops had helped the group
launch recent attacks. But a foreign ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza Asefi,
appeared to warn that Iran would act if Israel expanded its operations to
include Syria, Tehran's close ally. "Expanding the front of aggression and
attacks . . . would definitely face the Zionist regime with unimaginable
damages," Mr Asefi said.

'guardian-weekly' international/2006.7.23

'Is Hizbullah here? Only children here,' cries one father / Clancy Chassay in
Tyre and Brian Whitaker in Beirut

Twelve-year-old Nour lay heavily bandaged and fighting for her life in a
hospital in the southern Lebanese city of Tyre on Monday. She is one of many
child victims of Israeli air strikes on the Mediterranean port.
"We are praying for her," said Fatima, a laboratory technician doubling as a
nurse at Jabal Amal hospital. Ali, the doctor treating Nour, said he did not
know if she would survive. "She has large burns all over her body; she is losing
a lot of fluids. Her life is now in God's hands."
More ambulances streamed into the hospital. Whatever the Israelis' intended
target, a bomb had fallen on a small canal next to the Qasmia refugee camp, home
to 500 Palestinians. Its victims were 11 children taking a swim. Seven were
injured, three critically. Three have not been found.
Ismael, the father of one, sat on the edge of the crater, weeping. "Children!
Children!" he roared through his tears, "Children here! My son here." He stood
and looked down into the crater: "Is Hizbullah here?
Ahmed Mrouwe, the hospital's director, said that more than 200 wounded had been
brought into the hospital, one of three in the area. "We have received 196
wounded and 25 dead; the majority of them are children and women."
Monday was the one of the bloodiest so far in Lebanon, with 41 dead. In Sidon,
south of Beirut, an Israeli air strike on a road bridge hit two vehicles,
killing 10 civilians and wounding at least seven, medical sources told Reuters.
They said both vehicles had been crossing the Rmeileh bridge, heading to Beirut.
Leaflets dropped from Israeli planes have been urging residents in
Hizbullah-controlled areas of the south to leave.
Canada said seven of its nationals had been killed in an Israeli strike while
holidaying in the southern Lebanese village of Aitaroun. It was targeted again
on Monday night with six killed, local television reports said.
Early morning attacks left two men dead in the port of Beirut, and eight
Lebanese soldiers were killed in a rocket attack on an army position near
Tripoli in the north.
An annex of the hospital in Tyre had been bombed the day before. The attack came
as doctors were tending to victims of a strike on a 12-storey residential
building, which also housed the civil defence offices, in Tyre. That attack left
21 dead, including several children. Dr Mrouwe said nine people in one family
had been killed; only the father had survived.
Asked how it compared with 1996 when Israel launched an attack on the south,
killing scores of civilians, Dr Mrouwe said: "It's incomparable. In 1996 the
majority [of casualties] were fighters. This time we have yet to receive any
fighters."
In Beirut, where the Israelis are also dropping leaflets from the air urging
residents to leave suburbs controlled by Hizbullah, schools are being
overwhelmed as families set up temporary homes in classrooms. Hundreds of others
are sleeping out in the open.
Before the war began, more than half a million Shia were believed to be living
in Dahiyeh, the suburb most heavily targeted by the Israelis. The Lebanese
authorities opened dozens of schools last weekend but these are now overflowing.
The Chakib Arslan school in Verdun was considered suitable for up to 180 people,
but now holds 850. Most had only brought what they were wearing or could carry.
As the sound of three bombs shook the school, a teenage girl burst into tears.
Faten and her 16 relatives are living in a classroom. "Our house was not safe,"
she said. "Hizbullah told us to go and we left four days ago. We have $100
between us and my father needs medicine. We can't get it for him."
Rami, a volunteer, said: "Sometimes the families buy food. Most of the time the
government doesn't help much but it sends a little food." The relief effort is
being run by several organisations and political groups, and includes Christians
and Muslims. "It began with a sit-in, in solidarity with Gaza, but then turned
into relief work," said Ghassan Makarem of Helem, a Lebanese gay and lesbian
organisation. "It's a mix of NGOs, leftist groups, Palestinian youth groups, and
others," he said.
Outside Beirut, though, there is no such help and people are having to fend for
themselves. Many cannot leave because roads are impassable, and those who do
escape face the risk of being attacked.

'guardian-weekly' international/2006.7.23/

Only Washington can rein in Israel / World briefing / Simon Tisdall

Israel's assault on Lebanon, following Hizbullah's cross-border raid last week
and weeks of unremitting bloodshed in Gaza, has brought demands for
international action to contain the crisis and mediate an end to the fighting.
But the US, with its unmatched influence over Israel and as self-appointed
guardian of the Middle East peace process, has so far appeared reluctant to
intervene. Lebanon's appeal for the UN security council to step in and call a
ceasefire is supported by most Arab governments and by Lebanon's former colonial
master, France, which is the current security council president.
But the council has been vainly trying to agree on a resolution on Gaza, with
the US using its veto in defence of Israel. A consensus on the more complicated,
fast-moving crisis engulfing Lebanon is thus unlikely.
Other international bodies with pretensions to global peacemaking, such as Nato
and the EU - part of the Middle East "quartet" - are reduced to the role of
concerned bystanders. Russia tabled the issue at last weekend's St Petersburg G8
summit, but it only served to underscore international divisions.
President George Bush's administration has warned of the dangers of
destabilising Lebanon. But it has otherwise made no serious attempt to curb
Israel's offensive.
Mr Bush's non-committal statements have been widely interpreted as unqualified
support for Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's effort not only to free
captured Israeli soldiers but also to inflict as much damage as possible on
Hizbullah and Hamas in the process. That will strengthen regional perceptions
that this US administration, unlike those of Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr, is
unable or unwilling to play the honest broker.
Analysts suggest there is another reason for Washington's diffidence: US
influence and standing in the region is at a historic low ebb, partly because of
Iraq. "The worsening conflict in the Middle East is a blatant reflection of the
weakness of the American partner," Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli cabinet
minister, told Ha'aretz newspaper.
US leverage with many of the regional protagonists is poor or non-existent. The
US has in effect cut diplomatic relations with Syria and encouraged talk of
regime change in Damascus. It regards Palestine's elected Hamas government, like
Hizbullah's political wing, as a wholly terrorist grouping and refuses to deal
with either.
Even traditionally pro-western governments such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi
Arabia, no friends to Hizbullah or Hamas, have been alienated by the US war on
terror and hectoring pro-democracy policies since 9/11.
The Bush administration alone can rein in Israel. Its reluctance to do so may
mean that Washington will not be trusted in the longer term to forge a just and
lasting regional settlement.

'guardian-weekly' file 'gw-international/2006.7.23/1.1.txt
Lebanon: World looks on as Israel bombards its weak neighbour / Guardian
Reporters

Western leaders remained paralysed on Monday as Lebanon suffered one of its
bloodiest days since Israel began its bombardment last week.
For the second time in 48 hours western governments declined to intervene as
Israeli forces, on the sixth day of aerial attacks, killed 47 people and wounded
at least 53. Hizbullah, the Iranian-backed militia, also stepped up its attacks,
launching 50 rockets against Israel, the highest number in a single day. The
death toll since Israel began its attack has risen to 244 in Lebanon and 24 in
Israel.
The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, dismissed hopes of a quick resolution
to the conflict, vowing that his military would continue operating at full
intensity. He said Israel would not stop until two of its soldiers captured by
Hizbullah are freed; the Lebanese army is deployed to protect Israel's northern
border; and Hizbullah is forced to disarm.
He said both Hizbullah and Hamas, the Palestinian group, were working with the
support of "the axis of evil that stretches from Tehran to Damascus. When
missiles rain on our cities, our response will be to wage war with greater
determination, courage and sacrifice," he said.
After the failure of last weekend's G8 summit in St Petersburg to step in, EU
foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday also settled for a bland
statement that exposed divisions between European governments. EU foreign
ministers called on Israel not to resort to "disproportionate action", but
criticism of Israel in an original draft was diluted after pressure from Britain
and Germany, Israel's closest EU allies.
France and Italy have evacuated 1,600 Europeans by ship to Cyprus. The British
government airlifted 41 of its nationals out of Lebanon and announced plans to
evacuate 12,000 UK nationals and 10,000 people with dual nationality by sea. The
US sent an aircraft carrier in preparation for an evacuation of many of its
25,000 citizens in Lebanon.
The US and Britain insisted at the summit that criticism of Israel be removed
from a joint communique. John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, said that the
security council should delay any action until the UN envoy now in the Middle
East, Vijay Nambiar, returned this week to New York. Mr Nambiar said: "We hope
that we will be able to see our way toward . . . a de-escalation of the crisis."
Tony Blair and the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, called for the 2,000-strong
UN observer force on the Israel-Lebanon border to be expanded. But the US is
lukewarm about the proposal and Israel described it as premature.
The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, flew to Beirut, the
highest-level international presence since the crisis began. He called on Israel
and Hizbullah to implement an immediate ceasefire on humanitarian grounds and
for the release of the Israeli soldiers.
The Iranian foreign minister, Manoucher Mottaki, said that an end to the
fighting and an exchange of hostages would be acceptable and fair. Iran is the
main backer of Hizbullah, which is holding the two Israeli soldiers prisoner.
After meeting Syrian officials in Damascus, he said: "A reasonable and just
solution must be found to end this crisis. A ceasefire and then a swap is
achievable."
Exasperation with the international response was expressed by the Lebanese prime
minister, Fouad Siniora. In an interview with Britain's Channel 4 News he said:
"Until now I am very disappointed, but I can tell you there is still time to
make a real decision in the UN. Stop this massacre that is happening in Lebanon
because the more they inflict casualties the worse it becomes."
In a private conversation picked up by a microphone at the St Petersburg summit,
George Bush and Mr Blair singled out the Syrian president, Bashir Assad, as the
figure stoking violence in the Palestinian territories and Iraq as well as in
Lebanon. They claimed that Mr Assad was trying to destabilise the region and
block the introduction of democracy.
President Vladimir Putin argued that attacking Syria and Iran by name in the
final communique, would be counter-productive. But Mr Bush disagreed, saying
"the root cause of the instability was Hizbullah and its relationship with Syria
and Iran".
A mass exodus from Beirut was gathering pace, but escape routes from Lebanon
were closing. The capital's airport has been repeatedly bombed, its sea routes
blockaded, and the main highway into Syria is impassable.
On both sides of the border the crisis has fuelled a powerful sense of deja vu.
For the Beirut residents frantically hoarding food, candles, batteries and
petrol, the atmosphere recalled the country's 15-year civil war, and the 18-year
Israeli occupation they thought had ended in 2000.
For some in Israel the historical parallel was with the run-up to the war of
1967, and the prospect of direct military conflict between Israel and
neighbouring countries. The country is still reeling from the double assault on
its military prestige by separate attacks from Hizbullah and Hamas, which
captured an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, a month ago.
"This reminds me of a period before the 1967 war that was also characterised by
mutual humiliations," said the Israeli historian Tom Segev. "From a military
point of view the abduction of the soldiers should not have happened, but
instead of admitting this the army uses it as a pretext to destroy the delicate
political balance that exists in Lebanon . . . [Hizbullah leader Hassan]
Nasrallah is a nasty guy. He's a bit like Saddam. So it's similar to the Iraq
situation. We find it easier to relate to war in Lebanon than in Gaza."

guardian-weekly' features/2006.7.23/
Editorial / Middle East: On the brink of chaos

Once again the history of the Middle East is being written in Muslim and Jewish
blood while outsiders look on: fighting within the region is at its worst for at
least a decade. It could, then, have been a stroke of good fortune for the Group
of Eight nations to be meeting at the same time as a downward spiral of
retaliation and counter-strike took hold in Israel and Lebanon. In a sane world
the summit would have allowed the heads of the most powerful countries to
persuade all sides into respecting a ceasefire. Instead, the G8 meeting in St
Petersburg remained divided. Its emergency communique, issued last Sunday after
long wrangling, merely called for "utmost restraint" and an end to attacks, and
for the UN security council to consider a monitoring force on the border between
Israel and Lebanon.
The time for calling for restraint has passed, since too many on both sides show
no signs of exercising any. Last Sunday's deadly Hizbullah rocket attack on
Haifa, in particular, elevates the conflict to a point where the danger cannot
be overestimated. The most plaintive event, in the midst of civilians of all
faiths being killed, was the Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, appearing
on CNN last weekend to plead for his country's future. Lebanon's government
bears the signs of collapsing into a failed state. To expect it to successfully
disarm Hizbullah's militants, while Israeli jets inflict collective punishment
and undermine its fragile economy, is unrealistic.
Israel's leaders must be aware of the dangers they face. The road they are going
down is one that Israel travelled before, and it ended in 1982 in disaster. It
is also worth remembering that the chaos began with the kidnapping of an Israeli
soldier by allies of Hamas. Then, last Wednesday, Hizbullah captured two more.
Israel's disproportionate response has now brought the area into chaos. It has
acted as though the politics of the region do not exist; instead it has reacted
directly to each kidnapping and each missile. Israel has the right to defend
itself, a task made harder by the hidden arsenal of Hizbullah, and it should
object to any one-sided calls for restraint. But it cannot control its enemies'
responses: it can only control its own.

Mordechai Vanunu on trial again ???!!!

2006-02-23T13:58:00.002-05:00

I have been in contact with Mordechai Vanunu over the past year via email. Correspondance suddenly stopped and now I hear that he appears to be on trial again. His most recent email is below, and another is on my blog at
http://knotundone.blogspot.com/2005/11/vanuna-re-arrested-again-and-released.html

Vanunu evidently could benefit from some media attention, if the Israelis are indeed trying to confine him again on spying charges. Can anyone assist in getting him some much needed public attention and support? His email is: vmjc1954(at) gmail.com

Interesting developments in the UK on the nuclear front. It now transpires that British elements secretly and illegally supplied Israel with some of the plutonium they needed to develop their illicit nuclear weapon. This was back in the 1960s, and the revelation is only emerging now . This is important timing, considering that Blair is presently pushing for new nuclear reactors, to allegedly solve the UK's reliance on foreign energy sources, among other excuses, and that the US and Canada are both moving in the same direction. Articles follow.

Then there's the threatening gestures being levelled at Iran, over their desire for the very same thing everyone else seems to have. Personally, I'm opposed to all nuclear technology and weapons, regardless of which country is in possession of it. No-one has any solutions in terms of how to dispose of the waste, and it's caused untold grief and sickness in the countries it's been deployed against (atom bombs, and *depleted uranium- -- radioactive waste left over from nuclear bombs and reactors, used as a weapon in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere ),
* see this article- http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:NRT2KadTyewJ:feedthefish.org/blog/materials/johnson.html+plutonium++sickness+afghanistan&hl=en&gl=ca&ct=clnk&cd=3&ie=UTF-8) ,

not to mention the fallout from "mere" accidents, such as Three Mile Island and Cherynobal. The presence of these reactors are too convenient a target for terrorist organizations- many are located near large cities, and the civilian death toll would be unimaginable in the event of an attack.

From : vmjc vmjc1954@gmail.com
Sent : February 23, 2006 4:14:29 AM
To : 1vmjc
Subject : Trial,court Feb'22nd'.

to all those who did not receive this report.
Hi,Friends,Supporters.
Today the trial continue at 13:00, in the same court
in Jerusalem. Mr Feldman could not come to the
hearing so there was only Mr Michael Sfard as my
lawyer.
Few supporters were with me in the court, Jerry Levin
was there plus three from Norway and one from Belgium.
No press or any media people.
First, the judge Mr Yoel Zur, already this week gave a
decision that the court will not accept all the
evidence from the Internet and from 'Internet Chats'
taken without any authority from my computer by the
police.
Sfard cross examined the police man Peterburg, who
interrogated me months ago in the police offices,
about his methods especially with going through my
computers to see my emails and chats, and going to
court to ask for my arrest, and search my room.
Sfard prove to the court according to the police
documents, they asked Microsoft to give them details
of my Hotmail account, my passwords, and the IP
address. All this was after the police went to the
court , asking the judge the right to go to my emails.
Microsoft obeyed these orders and gave them all the
details, but not the Passwords. This took place on
Aug. 12th 2004. Three months before arresting me and
taking my computers. Sfard pointed out that it is
strange to ask Microsoft to give this information if
they don't have the court's order to listen to my
private conversations. It means they wanted to go to
my emails in secret or may be by they help the
secret services, the Shaback,Mossad. not as the police
stated, by Peterburg, that he did go to my email
account and all his material came only from my
computer.
More important revelation was, that the police each
time went to the court claiming that I am being
suspected with spying activity. Not just not
following the restrictions. So Mr Sfard wants the
police to tell the court what kind of espionage was I
involved with. The police man did not have any
answers and said that he brought all the evidence to
the court. When Sfard asked again Pterburg about any
material related to the 'espionage' Peterburg had no
answers.
So Sfard prove that the police had mislead the judges
who gave orders to arrest me, to search my room, to go
to my email, confiscate my computers (for almost a
year), and also mislead Microsoft to believe they are
helping in the case of espionage, other wise Microsoft
would not have cooperated with such orders.
It also revealed they have two Gov ministers orders,of keeping secrets documents {Hisaion},one by interior Security minister,one by defence minister,about what? we don't know,one thing is the secret cooperation ,work between the police and Shaback ,Mossad.
All this case, interrogations, arrests, confiscations
of private properties and more, all done from the the
start under the falls and misleading statements to the
courts of 'suspicion of espionage', and yet they are
not charging me with spy crimes.
{All these issues should had been raised in the early
testimony of the police man by Feldman.}
The judge also asked questions. He wants to know what
the police said to the judges when they asked all
these orders, how the proceedings been conducted,
then.
Peterburg most of the time said he does not remember.
It looked like he did not want to answer a lot of
questions.
The prosecutor wants the court to have the tapes,
where they video me in secret when I was interrogated
by the police in their offices.
The court decided to give time until May 1st, for each
side to write their arguments for and against " No
case to answer" .
That was it for today.
Please anyone who could suggest prominent names who
could testify on the subject of freedom of expression
and hopefully could come to testify or write on the
matter etc. Any ideas or help in this matter my right
of freedom of speech and that I have not committed any
crimes, include donation for legal expenses would be very welcome.
Thank You
vmjc
--
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4789832.stm >
Secret sale of UK plutonium to Israel

By Meirion Jones
BBC Newsnight

The UK supplied Israel with quantities of plutonium while Harold Wilson was prime minister, BBC Newsnight can reveal.
The sale was made despite a warning from British intelligence that it might "make a material contribution to an Israeli weapons programme".
Under Wilson, Britain also sold Israel tons of chemicals used to make boosted atom bombs 20 times more powerful than Hiroshima or even Hydrogen Bombs.
In Harold Macmillan's time the UK supplied uranium 235 and the heavy water which allowed Israel to start up its nuclear weapons production plant at Dimona - heavy water which British intelligence estimated would allow Israel to make "six nuclear weapons a year".
All export licensing of materials associated with civil nuclear programmes went through stringent checks across Whitehall
Foreign Office
Last August on BBC Newsnight we revealed the first British/Israeli deal, the sale of the heavy water, but the government responded by telling the International Atomic Energy Agency the UK was not a party to any sale to Israel and that all it did was sell some heavy water back to Norway.
Hundreds of shipments
Using Freedom of Information, Newsnight has obtained top secret papers. They show Foreign Minister Kim Howells misled the IAEA and that Britain made not one, but hundreds of secret shipments of nuclear materials to Israel.
Tony Benn, who was Minister of Technology in 1966, is shocked to learn of the sales
Tony Benn became Minister of Technology in 1966 while the plutonium deal was going through. The nuclear industry was part of his "white heat of technology" brief but no one told him that we were exporting atomic energy materials to Israel.
"I'm not only surprised, I'm shocked," he says, adding that neither he nor his predecessor Frank Cousins, who was a member of CND, agreed to the sales.
Benn says he always suspected civil servants were doing deals behind his back but he never thought they would sell plutonium to Israel. "It never occurred to me they would authorise something so totally against the policy of the government."
Dimona
Back in August 1960 covertly taken photos of a mysterious site at Dimona in Israel arrived at Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) in Whitehall. A brilliant analyst called Peter Kelly immediately realized they showed a secret nuclear reactor and he alerted the rest of British intelligence.
Kelly recognized it was a French reactor and soon discovered where the heavy water to run it had come from.
Selling plutonium to Israel was against UK government policy
Britain had bought heavy water from Norsk Hydro in Norway for its nuclear weapons programme but found it was surplus to requirements and needed a buyer. The papers obtained by Newsnight show that a company called Noratom acted as a consultant and arranged the deals in return for a 2% commission.
Britain knew all along that Israel wanted the heavy water "to produce plutonium" and Israel paid the full military price - £1 million - to avoid safeguards to stop the plutonium being used to make nuclear weapons.
Kelly discovered a charade was played out with the UK and Israeli delegations sitting in adjacent rooms while Noratom ferried separate contracts to and fro so Britain could say they hadn't signed a deal with Israel.
Once the press heard about Dimona in December 1960 there was an international outcry. Israel put out a cover story that it was a small research reactor. This did not fool Kelly. Using the figure of 20 tons of heavy water he estimated that Israel could build a reactor capable of producing "significant quantities of plutonium".
Michael Crick has used Freedom of Information to obtain secret papers
British intelligence learnt there was also a reprocessing plant and concluded "the separation of plutonium can only mean that Israel intends to produce nuclear weapons". Kelly even discovered that an Israeli observer had been allowed to watch one of the first French nuclear tests in Algeria.
Kelly and his colleagues in intelligence soon found their views about Israel were being challenged by Britain's representative at the IAEA Mike Michaels, who worked for one of the main figures in Harold Macmillan's Cabinet - Lord Hailsham.
Michaels received a JIC report early in 1961 estimating Israel would take at least three years to make enough plutonium and then another six months to work out how to make a bomb.
But it occurred to him that a friendly power might give Israel a small sample of plutonium to speed up the process. "Perhaps the French have supplied a small quantity for experimental purposes as we did to the French in like circumstances some years ago," he noted in the margin of the report. A few years later Michaels persuaded the UK to sell Israel a small sample of plutonium when he was aware - as this note shows - that this might cut months off the time it took them to get the Bomb.
Invitation
The Israeli nuclear chief, Ernst David Bergmann, personally invited Michaels to Israel. Kelly warned Israel might use Michaels as part of a disinformation campaign to show "everything is above board". Michaels was given VIP treatment. He met not only Bergmann but Shimon Peres and Prime Minister David Ben Gurion - the three fathers of the Israeli Bomb.
As Kelly suspected, Michaels' report gave Israel the all clear and he handed it to Hailsham at a crucial time, two days before Ben Gurion met Harold Macmillan at Downing Street.
Tony Benn thinks it inconceivable that Harold Wilson knew of atomic exports to Israel
In 1962 the Dimona reactor started turning uranium into plutonium, thanks to the heavy water Britain had delivered, but Michaels continued to protest Israel's innocence.
Then at the beginning of 1966 UK Atomic Energy Authority made what they remarkably called a "pretty harmless request". They wanted to export 10 milligrammes of plutonium to Israel. The MoD strongly objected and Defence Intelligence wrote directly to say the sale might have "significant military value".
The Foreign Office told UKAEA "It is HMG's policy not to do anything which would assist Israel in the production of nuclear weapons" and therefore they blocked the sale.
Sale
Michaels wrote angrily "to protest strongly" against the decision. Five years earlier he had noted such a sale could speed up the Israeli bomb programme, now he was powerfully advocating just that. He said small quantities of plutonium were not important and anyhow if we didn't sell it to the Israelis someone else would. The Foreign Office gave in and the sale went ahead. Kelly believes Mike Michaels knew all along that Israel was after the Bomb. He died in 1992.
Tony Benn is incredulous that Michaels never referred the Israeli nuclear sales to him or Frank Cousins. They were after all the ministers in charge of Britain's nuclear industry including imports and exports. "Michaels lied to me. I learned by bitter experience that the nuclear industry lied to me again and again".
The atomic files, which have been classified until now, detail hundreds of nuclear deals with Israel flagged up as sensitive.
Benn's initial reaction to whether Harold Wilson knew about atomic exports to Israel was "it's inconceivable". Then he muses: "Harold was sympathetic to Israel," before concluding that this was probably a conspiracy by civil servants and the nuclear industry to flout HMG policy.
This report was shown on Newsnight on Thursday, 9 March, 2006.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article349711.ece
Plan for new nuclear programme approaches meltdown after report
By Michael Harrison, and Michael McCarthy
Published: 07 March 2006

Tony Blair's backing for nuclear power suffered a blow yesterday when the Government's own advisory body on sustainable development came down firmly against the building of a new generation of reactors.
Despite the Prime Minister's well-known support for the nuclear industry, the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) concluded that a new nuclear programme was not the answer to the twin challenges of climate change and security of supply. In a hard-hitting report, the 15-strong Commission identified five "major disadvantages" to nuclear power:
* The lack of a long-term strategy for dealing with highly toxic nuclear waste
* Uncertainty over the cost of new nuclear stations and the risk that taxpayers would be left to pick up the tab;
* The danger that going down the nuclear route would lock the UK into a centralised system for distributing energy for the next 50 years;
* The risk a new nuclear programme would undermine efforts to improve energy efficiency;
* The threat of terrorist attacks and radiation exposure if other countries with lower safety standards also opt for nuclear.
Nuclear power generates 20 per cent of the UK's electricity but, by 2020, that will have shrunk to 7 per cent and, by 2035, the last of the current generation of stations will have closed, potentially leaving the UK highly dependent on imported gas.
But instead of sanctioning a new nuclear programme, the SDC urged Mr Blair to back a further expansion of renewable power, fresh measures to promote energy efficiency and the development of new technologies such as "carbon capture" to tackle the environmental threat posed by fossil-fuelled stations.
The commission's report comes just three months before the Government publishes the results of its latest energy review, which is widely expected to pave the wave for a new generation of nuclear stations.
Sir Jonathon Porritt, the chairman of the commission, said:"Instead of hurtling along to a pre-judged conclusion (which many fear the Government is intent on doing) we must look to the evidence. There's little point in denying that nuclear power has its benefits but, in our view, these are outweighed by serious disadvantages. The Government is going to have to stop looking for an easy fix to our climate change and energy crises - there simply isn't one."
The commission said that even if the UK's existing nuclear capacity was doubled, it would only lead to an 8 per cent reduction in carbon emissions from 1990 levels. By contrast, renewable energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and biomass, which are zero-carbon sources of energy, could supply 68-87 per cent of the country's electricity needs if fully exploited.
Sir Jonathon added that opting for the "big-bang fix" of a new nuclear programme would jeopardise public-sector support for renewable power. It would also undermine efforts to improve energy efficiency, which the report estimates could reduce UK energy demand by as much as 30 to 40 per cent and cut carbon emissions by 20 million tons a year - equivalent to the output of 27 power stations.
Sir Jonathon said, that among the commission's 15 members, eight had come down against nuclear power, five had concluded it was not yet time for a new programme and two had said there was "maybe" a case for more reactors. He also took a sideswipe at other well-known environmentalists such as James Lovelock who backs nuclear power. "No one person should be accorded that over-arching credibility in the face of the evidence before us," he said.
The environmental pressure groups Friends of the Earth welcomed the commission's findings. Its director, Tony Juniper, said: "Tony Blair and his Government must now seize the historic opportunity presented by the energy review to set the UK on course to becoming a world leader in developing a low-carbon, nuclear free economy."
The Energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, who is leading the review, gave a guarded reaction, saying: "As the commission itself finds, this is not a black and white issue. It does, however, agree that it is right we are assessing the potential contribution of new nuclear."
Philip Dewhurst, chairman of the Nuclear Industry Association, voiced his "disappointment" at the report's findings but said he was pleased that the commission had confirmed nuclear as a low carbon source of energy, recognised its improved safety record and only voted by 8-7 to rule out new reactors.
Meanwhile, London's Mayor Ken Livingstone unveiled plans to revolutionise the capital's energy supply system to fight climate change. London is to spend many millions of pounds "decentralising" its electricity supplies - switching from giant power stations to much smaller units, generating power locally - by joining forces with the energy multi-national EDF to develop local electricity generating sites and networks across the capital. The commission's report warns that this is just the kind of development that would be compromised if the UK went down the nuclear route.
The five key objections
Waste
No long-term solutions for the disposal of nuclear waste, such as the spent fuel from atomic power stations, are yet available, let alone acceptable to the public, the report says. Nuclear waste is dangerous, hard to manage, and long-lasting in its effects. For example, the half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years. The pressure group Friends of the Earth once produced a poster showing a Roman centurion with the caption: "If the Romans had had nuclear power, we'd still be guarding their waste."
Cost
The economics of building new nuclear power stations are highly uncertain, the report says. It adds there is little, if any, justification for public subsidy, but if costs escalate there's a clear risk that the taxpayer will have to pick up the tab. The capital costs of building stations are colossal and can swing wildly with project overruns and increases in interest rates. And do you factor in the enormous costs of decommissioning the stations at the end of their lives, or not?
Inflexibility
A new generation of big nuclear power stations would lock the UK into a wasteful, centralised electricity distribution system for the next 50 years. What is needed is the much less wasteful micro-generation (small local power stations) and local distribution networks. Micro-generation is an idea whose time has come: only yesterday, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said the capital would seek to combat climate change and cut CO2 emissions with a massive switch to generating power locally.
Security
If the UK brings forward a new nuclear power programme, we cannot deny other countries the same technology. With lower safety standards, they run higher risks of accidents, radiation exposure, proliferation and terrorist attacks. The security risks of any given nuclear power programme are hard to quantify, but no one would deny that they exist - for example in the movement of reactor-grade fuel or spent fuel, which might be seized by terrorists for potential use in a "dirty bomb".
Efficiency
A new nuclear power programme would send out a signal that a major technological fix is all that is required, says the report, and hurt efforts to encourage energy efficiency. This has largely been the approach of the Bush administration to climate change. Environmentalists would contend that this is a dangerous delusion, and that technical fixes such as nuclear power do nothing about the long-term problem. Only changing the energy system profoundly will make a real difference.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article349712.ece
7 March 2006 14:16
Environment

Analysis: Porritt whispers in PM's ear with all the force he can muster
By Michael McCarthy
Published: 07 March 2006
Listen to yesterday's Sustainable Development Commission report on nuclear power and you will hear something uncommon, fascinating and slightly awe-inspiring: the sound of a big beast in the environmental jungle, getting his retaliation in first.
Jonathon Porritt has come a long way since he was one of the founders of the Ecology Party (which subsequently became the Green Party), and then leader of Friends of the Earth. Now, as chair of the SDC, and Tony Blair's official environmental adviser, he is part of the government establishment.
But only to a degree. Sir Jonathon may be an Etonian by schooling and a baronet by title but he has remained radical in his green convictions, and one of those, which he shares with most other environmentalists, is that no good whatsoever can come of nuclear power.
He clearly sees the current Energy Review as a stitch-up, a cosmetic exercise to prepare the way for a new generation of nukes, and let's be honest, many would agree with him. The common perception is Tony Blair has taken the decision already.
But unlike most green activists, Sir Jonathon can actually do something about it. His position at the head of the SDC gives him direct access to Mr Blair and potentially enormous influence, and in certain circumstances, he has to be listened to. This is one of those circumstances, and he is making the most of it. He's not waiting for the outcome of the Energy Review; he's making a determined attempt to sway the result.
Yesterday's SDC report and accompanying papers represent the most thorough, hard-hitting and detailed case against the British nuclear option which has yet been produced. This is not green soundbite, this is serious stuff. It will have to weigh in the argument. It certainly raises dramatically the political stakes for Mr Blair - and for Mr Brown when he takes over - in opting for atomic power once again.
Mr Blair has never been anti-nuclear (he likes shiny modern technology). But he has been especially persuaded of the necessity of a full new nuclear-build programme to fight climate change, by the Government's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King. Sir David has been whispering in one Blair ear; Sir Jonathon is now whispering in the other, although perhaps whispering hardly does justice to the force of yesterday's report.
The reason Sir Jonathon may ultimately not succeed is that the detail of the arguments against nuclear, displayed so powerfully yesterday, is not what is going to count. Few people would dispute that there is no solution yet to nuclear waste, or that nuclear economics are uncertain, or that a nuclear programme would partially lock the UK into a centralised energy system, or that there is a major security risk associated with nuclear energy. It's all true.
But the essence of the argument Sir David King has put to Mr Blair is that climate change is so threatening that nuclear is essential despite all that.
But you can't say the other side of it hasn't been made properly now, in the struggle between David and Jonathon for the ear of the Prime Minister.

Iraq fraud surfaces...

2006-02-03T13:44:00.000-05:00

Some of us, at least, suspected what is now being substantiated...
Not that anyone appears to notice, but there was a call for Blair's impeachment in the Guardian by a UK General, it has now been verified that the Iraq war was pre-planned by Blair and Bush (no surprise there), and US officials have been caught stealing huge sums of money intended for Iraq's restoration. Well, millions seems like a lot to me, but considering that the real cost of the Iraq war (for the Americans alone) is estimated to now run into the 2 TRILLIONS... inconceivable sums to those of us scrambling to keep rent and food costs covered.

If one examines the popular vote, Canada has not veered "right", as was reported in many international newspapers, in rejecting the Liberals and voting in Harper's Conservatives. Only 65% of the voting population turned out, of which the majority divided their votes amongst the 3 other parties which didn't win. Hardly an indication that Canada "returned" right, considering the Liberals are viewed as centre, the Bloc left to centre, and the NDP left to socialist! Specifically, the Conservatives only won 36.3% of the popular vote, as compared with the Liberal's close 30.1%, the NDP's 17.5%, the Bloc's 10.5%. and the Green's 4.5% . If we had proportional representation instead of the present system of delegating seats by region, the NDP and Greens would have won considerably more seats (as it stands, under this system the Greens ended up with- none.) The Bloc would have had less- 31 as opposed to 51. The Conservatives would have nevertheless squeaked through to victory, but with a more formidable leftist opposition to keep their radical (right) impulses in check.
I'd hate to speculate on how much money the Conservatives intend to squander - some Canadians still recall the $41 BILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT left by the last Conservative (Mulroney) government, which should have put the Sponsorship scandal millions more in perspective, but didn't.

Even under the Liberals, Canada was and is set to deploy more than 2000 additional troops to Afghanistan this month, in what looks less like a peacekeeping role with each new report. Essentially, we're freeing up over 4,000 US troops for deployment elsewhere. This move engages us indirectly in an Iraq war we rejected participation in, at a time when many are finally having the courage or insight to label it for what it was and is- ILLEGAL. The decision was not subject to public debate or a formal motion in Parl't. It has been suggested that the responsibility was deferred while the Liberals were busy running their ineffective (and losing) campaign. With Harper at the helm, we can only expect more of the same, as he supported the initial Iraq (2) invasion, against most people's better judgement. Canadians
overwhelming rejected the war, but readily accept the role of peacekeepers.

General Hillier, the present Canadian Chief of the Defence Staff appointed in 2005 by the Liberals, hardly embodies this when he describes the "enemy" as "detestable murderers and * scumbags," who, "...detest our freedoms, (they) detest our society, (they) detest our liberties." He's unequivocally stated that the role of Canadian troops is "to kill people". We are being warned to brace ourselves for body bags... and whatever else will follow, I expect.

* "Scumbag"- originally a slang term for "condom", now in disuse.

Articles encompassing the above follow...

Thursday, 2 February 2006, 22:53 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4675902.stm
Last Updated: Thursday, 2 February 2006, 22:53 GMT
US official admits Iraq aid theft
By Adam Brookes
BBC News, Washington

The post-war reconstruction effort has been heavily criticised
In the United States, a former official has admitted stealing millions of dollars meant for the reconstruction of Iraq.
Robert Stein held a senior position in the Coalition Provisional Authority, which administered Iraq after American and allied forces invaded in 2003.
In a Washington court, he admitted to stealing more than $2m (£1.12m) and taking bribes in return for contracts.
He faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.
Robert Stein's story is one of extraordinary corruption and excess amid the ruins of Iraq.
He was in charge of overseeing money for the rebuilding of shattered infrastructure in south-central Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
Suitcases of cash
Mr Stein admitted in court to conspiring to give out contracts worth $8m to a certain company in return for bribes.
He also received gifts and sexual favours lavished on him at a special villa in Baghdad.
But it didn't stop there.
Robert Stein admitted to stealing $2m from reconstruction funds.
Some of that money, the court heard, was smuggled onto aircraft and flown back to the United States in suitcases.
The case is an ugly twist in the tale of post-war Iraq.
The Coalition Provisional Authority, which ceased to exist in 2004, has already endured some tough criticism over the way it managed funds and handed out contracts.
A report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction on how the authority went about its business is expected in the coming weeks.
The signs are it could make embarrassing reading for many of those involved.

'guardian-weekly' file 'gw-us-news/2006.1.15/4.1.txt

Iraq war 'could cost US up to $2 trillion', says Nobel economist / Jamie Wilson
in Washington

The real cost to the US of the Iraq war is likely to be between $1 trillion and
$2 trillion, up to 10 times more than previously thought, according to a report
written by a Nobel prize-winning economist and a Harvard budget expert.
The study, which expanded on traditional estimates by including such costs as
lifetime disability and healthcare for troops injured in the conflict as well as
the impact on the American economy, concluded that the US government is
continuing to underestimate the cost of the war.
The report came during one of the most deadly periods in Iraq since the
invasion, with the US military revising upwards to 11 the number of its troops
killed during a wave of insurgent attacks last Thursday. More than 130 civilians
were also killed when suicide bombers struck Shia pilgrims in Karbala and a
police recruiting station in Ramadi.
The paper on the real cost of the war, written by Joseph Stiglitz, a Columbia
University professor who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2001, and Linda
Bilmes, a Harvard budget expert, is likely to add to the pressure on the White
House over the war. It also followed the revelation last week that the White
House had scaled back ambitions to rebuild Iraq and did not intend to seek funds
for reconstruction.
Mr Stiglitz told the Guardian that despite the staggering costs laid out in
their paper the economists had erred on the side of caution. "Our estimates are
very conservative, and it could be that the final costs will be much higher. And
it should be noted they do not include the costs of the conflict to either Iraq
or the UK." In 2003, as US and British troops were massing on the Iraq border,
Larry Lindsey, George Bush's economic adviser, suggested the costs might reach
$200bn. The White House said the figure was far too high, and the deputy defence
secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, said Iraq could finance its own reconstruction.
Three years later, with more than 140,000 US soldiers in Iraq, even the $200bn
figure was very low, according to the two economists.
Congress has appropriated $251bn for military operations, and the congressional
budget office has now estimated that under one plausible scenario the Iraq war
will cost over $230bn more in the next 10 years. According to Mr Stiglitz and Ms
Bilmes, there are substantial future costs not included in the congressional
calculations.
For instance, the latest Pentagon figures show that more than 16,000 military
personnel have been wounded in Iraq. Due to improvements in body armour, there
has been an unusually high number of soldiers who have survived major wounds.
The economists predict the cost of lifetime care for the thousands of troops who
have suffered brain injuries alone could run to $35bn.
The paper came amid the first indications from the Pentagon that it intended to
scale down its costly presence in Iraq this year.
- Paul Bremer, who led the US civilian occupation authority in Iraq after the
2003 invasion, admitted that the Americans "didn't really see" the threat coming
from insurgents in the country. He also criticised President George Bush and the
defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, saying they had not listened to his concerns
about the quality of Iraq's army, and that ultimately the White House bore
responsibility for decisions that had led to the current violence.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4675724.stm
Last Updated: Friday, 3 February 2006, 12:43 GMT

Blair 'made secret US Iraq pact'
The book details a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair
Tony Blair and George W Bush decided to invade Iraq weeks earlier than they have admitted, a new book by a human rights lawyer has claimed.
The book by Philippe Sands says the two leaders discussed going to war regardless of any United Nations view.
And it suggests the US wanted to provoke Saddam Hussein by sending a spy plane over Iraq in UN colours.
Downing Street said on Thursday it did not comment on discussions that "may or may not have happened" between leaders.
'Disarm Saddam'
The revelations come in an updated edition of Mr Sands' book Lawless World, which caused controversy when it was first published early last year.
The government has always insisted military action was used as a last resort against Saddam Hussein's regime.
Sir Menzies Campbell says there was a "rush to war"
Mr Blair told MPs on 25 February 2003: "Even now, we are prepared to go the extra step to achieve disarmament peacefully."
But the new book centres on a meeting between Mr Bush and Mr Blair at the White House three weeks earlier, on 31 January.
Professor Sands, a QC and professor of international law at University College London, says the two-hour meeting was also attended by six advisers.
The book quotes from a note it says was prepared by one of the participants.
Surveillance aircraft
According to the note, Mr Bush said the military campaign was pencilled in for March. Mr Blair is quoted as saying he was "solidly with the president and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam".
The book claims Mr Blair only wanted a second UN Security Council resolution because it would make it easier politically to deal with Saddam.
And it says Mr Bush told Mr Blair the US "was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours".
If Saddam fired on them, the Iraqis would be in breach of UN resolutions, he suggested.
Mr Bush is also quoted saying it was possible an Iraqi figure would defect and be able to give a "public presentation" of weapons of mass destruction.
The note said Mr Bush thought there was also "a small possibility that Saddam would be assassinated".
The book also claims the president "thought it unlikely that there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups".
'Will not re-litigate'
It also claims the note reveals the two leaders discussed a number of options.
A Downing Street spokeswoman told BBC News the events leading up to the war had been thoroughly investigated.
A spokeswoman said the prime minister only committed UK forces to Iraq after securing the approval of the House of Commons on 18 March 2003.
The decision to resort to military action into Iraq fulfilled the obligation imposed by successive UN Security Council resolutions after other routes to disarm Iraq had failed, she said.
The spokeswoman said No 10 did not comment on conversations between the prime minister and other leaders.
In the US, Frederick Jones, chief spokesman for the National Security Council, said the White House would not comment on what was said or not said in alleged private conversations between Mr Bush and foreign leaders.
Mr Jones said the White House "was not going to re-litigate how the nation went to war".
Acting Liberal Democrats leader Sir Menzies Campbell said Mr Blair had "a lot of explaining to do" and a full inquiry into the Iraq decision was now "imperative".
"It would appear that the diplomatic efforts in New York after the meeting of January 31[for a second UN resolution] were simply going through the motions, with the decision for military action already taken," he said.
Sir Menzies said the suggestion that the US considered using their military aircraft in UN colours to provoke Saddam Hussein "illustrates the rush to war".

UK general calls for Blair's impeachment!
guardian-weekly features/2006.1.15

Comment / Enough of these excuses / Michael Rose believes the only way to
restore faith in politicians is to impeach Tony Blair over the Iraq war

Wars are won when the people, government and army work together for a common
cause in which they genuinely believe. Whereas the people may be initially
uncertain about military intervention, politicians will often be the strongest
advocates - blinded by the imperatives of their political views. It will
invariably be military commanders who are most cautious about using force - for
they understand better than most the consequences of engaging in war.
Although in a true democracy they must remain subordinate to their political
masters, they have a clear responsibility to point out when political strategies
are flawed or inadequately resourced. Since they might also have to ask their
soldiers to sacrifice their lives, they must be assured that a war is just,
legal and the last resort available. Yet three years ago this country was
somehow led by the prime minister into war in Iraq where few, if any, of these
requirements were met.
Most importantly a clear justification for the war in Iraq was never
sufficiently made by Tony Blair - for the intelligence he presented was always
embarrassingly patchy and inconsistent. What is more, his unequivocal statement
to the House of Commons that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass
destruction that could be used within 45 minutes was made without being properly
validated - for it was decided in Washington and London to launch the invasion
of Iraq early, on the basis of the flimsy evidence available. This was done
without asking the UN weapons inspectors, who were actually on the ground in
Iraq, to investigate this allegation. Ultimately, as the inspectors suspected
and as we now all know, it turned out that there were no such weapons. Britain
had been led into war on false pretences. It was a war that was to unleash
untold suffering on the Iraqi people and cause grave damage to the west's
prospects in the wider war against global terror.
Nevertheless, today the prime minister seeks to persuade the world that the war
was justifiable because Saddam Hussein was toppled and there now exists in Iraq
a slender hope of democracy. The Iraqi elections are a creditable achievement by
the coalition forces. But it must be remembered that a general election was
previously held in Iraq in 1956, and within two years the country had fallen
under military rule. Without adequate security and the necessary democratic
institutions in place, there are absolutely no long-term guarantees that
democracy will endure.
Before the invasion, regime change was never cited as a reason for going to war.
Indeed, Mr Blair insisted that regime change was not, nor ever could be, a
reason for going to war. Had such a justification been fully debated in
parliament, it is exceedingly unlikely that the necessary political support
would have been forthcoming. It was the apparent need to defend ourselves
against a dire threat - so vividly described by Mr Blair in the Commons - that
finally won the political argument.
During the build-up to war and since, most of the electorate of this country
have consistently opposed the decision to invade. People have seen their
political wishes ignored for reasons now proved false. But there has been no
attempt in parliament to call Mr Blair personally to account for what has
transpired to be a blunder of enormous strategic significance. It should come as
no surprise therefore that so many of this country's voters have turned their
backs on a democratic system they feel has so little credibility and is so
unresponsive.
One obvious way of re-engaging these disaffected voters would be for parliament
to accept that it wrongly supported the war - but only because it believed what
Mr Blair told them. Now it is clear that parliament was misled by Mr Blair,
either wittingly or unwittingly, parliament should also call on him for a full
explanation as to why he went to war. It is not a sufficient excuse for Mr Blair
to say that he acted in good faith and that his decisions were based on the
intelligence he had been given. For it is the clear responsibility of people in
his position to test intelligence. No intelligence can ever be taken at face
value. Indeed it is negligent so to do.
Parliament should therefore ascertain how far the prime minister did evaluate
intelligence regarding WMD and how he assessed the reliability of the many
sources that provided that intelligence. It should ask him what corroborating
evidence there was for his specific statement about WMD - and why more use was
not made of the UN inspectors on the ground in Iraq to test the validity of that
statement. It should inquire just how much he discounted the mass of
intelligence that came in from the Iraqi National Congress - a body that had a
vested interest in removing Saddam from power. The list of possible questions is
huge and would no doubt be usefully expanded during any hearings.
Mr Blair is an able barrister who should relish the opportunity to put his side
of the case. No one can undo the decision to go to war. But the impeachment of
Mr Blair is now something I believe must happen if we are to rekindle interest
in the democratic process.

General Sir Michael Rose was adjutant general of the British army and commander
of the UN protection force in Bosnia

guardian-weekly features/2006.1.15

Comment / Folly of new opium war / The decision to send British troops to
Afghanistan is the half-baked product of Tony Blair's global machismo, says
Simon Jenkins

In the next few weeks, an army of 3,400 British troops expects to be deployed to
Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. This is nearly half the number
deployed in Iraq. Everything I have heard and read about this expedition
suggests that it makes no sense. British soldiers are being sent to a poor and
dangerous place whose sole economic resource is opium. They will sit there as
targets for probably the most intractable concentration of insurgents, Taliban,
drug traffickers and suicide bombers in the world - until some government
minister has the guts to withdraw them.
Even the context of this expedition is obscure. The Afghan war was supposedly
won and the Taliban defeated in 2001. It is fashionable, even in circles opposed
to the Iraq war, to claim Afghanistan as a triumph. The Americans and British
bombed the hell out of whatever was left of Kabul by the Russians, and the
Afghans themselves. A ramshackle army of warlords and mercenaries was helped
back into power and the status quo ante the Taliban was restored. That would
have been the best time to leave.
As it was, neoimperialists in Washington and London couldn't resist attempting
that Everest of nation-building, a new Afghanistan. Their engaging puppet, Hamid
Karzai, rules an increasingly insecure landscape, wholly dependent on western
aid and a booming narco-economy. Outside Kabul, the country appears to be in the
hands of a disparate federation of local rulers, tribal warlords and Taliban
commanders, all afloat on a sea of opium - the basis of half Afghanistan's
domestic output and virtually all its export and personal wealth.
The Americans are wisely treating this country as history. They are reducing
their troops to some 10,000 based at Bagram, dedicated to pursuing George Bush's
Scarlet Pimpernel, Osama bin Laden. The rest is being handed over to role-hungry
Nato. But Nato has no clue what to do. The French, Germans and Spaniards want no
part in the madcap venture. The Canadians and Dutch are nervous, so much so that
the Dutch may pull out. That leaves the British, mostly with the turbulent
province of Helmand, which is sliding under the control of drug warlords in
alliance with a resurgent Taliban.
The defence secretary, John Reid, said last month that the expedition's mission
is to promote security, which is "absolutely interlinked to countering
narcotics". This is to be achieved "by helping growers with an alternative
economic livelihood". This cannot make sense. There is no way 3,400 British
troops can handle the Taliban, now reinforced by drug profits. As for countering
those profits, opium is to Helmand what oil is to Kuwait.
Eradicating Afghanistan's poppy crop was assigned to Britain after the 2001 war.
Before Clare Short arrived to oversee this task, poppies were grown in just six
of the 32 provinces. By the time she finished, the UN recorded production in 28
provinces and a record export value of $2.3bn. It was probably Britain's most
successful agricultural policy of all time. Afghanistan now supplies 90% of
Britain's heroin market. Output is being curbed this year only because traders
are worried about lower prices.
Even the Americans, who have spent decades trying to wipe out South America's
coca crops, are distancing themselves from Reid's policy. Opium is crucial to
the power of the warlords on whom they and Karzai's regime depend.
This is a repeat of the 19th-century invasion of China by Britain to maintain
the illicit but convenient opium trade. But if the Americans are re-enacting the
opium wars, Britain is inverting them. Trying to combat Britain's addiction to
heroin by burning poppies and smashing opium "factories" is like combating
London's traffic congestion by bombing oil wells.
If there is any answer to the opium trade, it lies in repealing Britain's 1971
Misuse of Drug Act and controlling demand. Two years ago, when opium output was
low, there might have been some purchase in the so-called Senlis Council
project, to legalise the Afghan crop for medical use, as has been done in Turkey
and India. But profits are now so high that this is probably a fantasy, as are
such alternatives as hemp, wheat or coffee. Any form of eradication by
destroying poppy crops merely devastates the income of the poor growers and, by
restricting supply, increases profits to traffickers. It is a cruel policy,
which Reid's troops will presumably enforce with their newly acquired Apache
gunships.
In Chicago in 1999 Tony Blair set out five preconditions for British military
intervention in the new century. They included legal certainty, military
prudence and a clear national interest at stake. None is met in Helmand. Someone
should make Blair read General Sir Rupert Smith's recent study, The Utility of
Force. His view is that an exaggerated faith in hi-tech armies against
insurgency is now leading the West to create one ruined nation after another.
Smith points out that operations such as those in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq
are not like the Falklands or Gulf wars, where the military aim was to eject an
enemy army from occupied territories. They are rather "wars among the people",
in which missiles, gunships, fortified bases and search-and-destroy missions are
usually counterproductive. The enemy is not a state, vulnerable to "kinetic
force projection". It is a miasma of conspiracies, hidden loyalties and lasting
hostilities whose combatants know no boundaries. The influence of outside armies
over the outcome of such conflict can only be informal and limited.
The Helmand expedition arises from Blair's obsession with global machismo and
his addiction to abstract nouns. If I were its designated leader, General David
Richards, I would not disobey orders but I would ask to see Reid before leaving.
I would grab him by his lapels, ram his head against the ministry wall and
scream in his face: "Tell me what the hell you really mean by sending my
soldiers to that godawful place?"
If the reply is yet more waffle about upholding democracy and combating terror,
I would storm out with such a door slam as could be heard the length of Britain.

LINKS to ARTICLES on Canadian participation in Afghanistan. Hillier etc.

http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/theeditorialpage/story.html?id=4086aa67-8be3-45fd-ade8-a145ba045b4e
Calgary Herald editorial

http://server09.densan.ca/archivenews/051224/npt/051224at.htm
'Conspiracy of silence' over Afghanistan: Kandahar operations

http://server09.densan.ca/archivenews/051228/npt/051228c0.htm
Armed Forces should break the 'silence'

The Xbox we didn't get...

2005-12-25T15:43:00.004-05:00

Our pre-Xmas present from the politicians (in Canada) was news of a "surprise" January election, due to a vote of non-confidence in the present government. Thanks guys. Elections cost money too. You seem to forget that WE voted them in, not that long ago (ie. 18 months), for better or worse. Worse would be a Conservative win by default, when Duceppe sweeps Quebec, as he will. Does Harper really expect us to replace what he deems a "corrupt government" (the Liberals) with one which only promises MORE of the same- in other words, his own dreaded Conservatives. The thought makes me sicker than a New Year's hangover, and if I wake up in bed with THEM in charge of this nation, I swear...

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE- DON'T VOTE CONSERVATIVE!!!

Think the Liberals are corrupt and into cronyism? Try voting in the Harper gang... and watch our natural resources sold down river, literally (ie. States side), the health care system erode, privatisation expand, more Canadian troops die in places like Afghanistan and the national deficit return to levels last seen when the conservatives were in power. Specifically, a $41 BILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT left by the last Conservative (Mulroney) government!!!

On the other hand, the Liberals did pay down more than $60 BILLION on the national debt with 8 surplus budgets. A debt created by the prior Conservative government's fiscal mismanagement. Things are not great, but better than they were. Unemployment is down, the Canadian dollar is up. My family's lot hasn't improved, but somebody's , somewhere, must have.

Come on- we can't be as stupid as the Americans, who voted out the Democrats in spite of their excellent fiscal track record, merely on the basis of Clinton's personal marital indiscretion. Look where they are now. Soaring deficit. Iraq. Afghanistan. Guantanamo. Abu Ghraib. Teetering on the brink of a global Holy War they single handedly created. Any credibility America possessed long vanquished.

A Liberal minority with a strong NDP opposition would be our best solution. (Sorry Green party- but you're really not ready.) Banish the Conservatives to the netherworlds they ideologically inhabit.

John Lennon's 25th Anniversary

2005-12-08T13:43:00.000-05:00

25 years ago - I was walking home in Vancouver's West end, returning from a disastrous job interview on the Island, for my dream photographer's position on a newspaper. My chances had collapsed when I'd revealed to the editor I was 10 weeks pregnant.

It was raining - out of the fog emerged a woman, crying. She approached me, saying, "Did you hear? John Lennon's dead. He's been shot." I was stunned at the senseless loss and continued home to my parents, the song "Imagine' filling my head.

Waiting for me on the record player was a letter from my Swiss lover. The last time we'd spoken, he'd suggested getting married and having the baby together. Now, he was alluding to "another person", who had suggested that I might not really be pregnant, but was using this to get him to blackmail him into marrying me (followed with a ?? mark of his own) . He continued, "...now this person won't be with me because of you and the child, and so I am all alone with all my problems. "

He didn't know that my pregnancy was already in danger. I had spent the previous week in bed, trying to avoid movements which my doctor suspected could bring on a possible miscarriage. During which time my mother had stood by my side, shouting at me to get up. "You're just trying to have this baby!" I had gone to the Island, hoping that the job would offer me a way to support the child, should I find myself alone.

That night, I miscarried. Now for every anniversary of John Lennon's death, I remember the fog, the woman's plaintive voice announcing his death, and think of the phantom child who would have been, 25 years- today.

Recuerdo of a
Morning in Monterrey

It came to be in
Monterrey

You came.

It BE.

We three

We lay in Monterrey

You entered

Did I tell you- no?

I told you nought.

And when I thought to feel it flow

Did I cry NO!

Did I cry?

No.

A silver spoon I
stole away

A spoon belonging to that day

That day belonging to the lips

Which steal in sips the stars away

The stars which trickle from the moon

To form the handle of the spoon.

Oh LIPS to SIP and
SUCK and SIGH

Oh lips to wish the world...

Good-bye?

If never Live

Then never Die

If never BE

Then never breathe in

Ecstasy

Linda Dawn Hammond
1980
For Rafael
Recuerdo...

Vanuna re-arrested, again.... and released.

2005-11-19T21:33:00.000-05:00

Vanunu has been arrested again by Israel - almost a year to the day since the last assault on his new-found "freedom", if virtual house arrest can be described as such. What follows is neither the best written nor most enlightening account of the heroic role Vanunu actually played in bringing Israel's covert nuclear program to the world's attention- and it doesn't take much of a stretch of imagination to assume that those paying for it- the Americans- were also complicit. Write to your local/ national politicians and Israel, and demand Vanunu's release and a lifting of the travel ban. More background info and contacts.
NOTE: Vanunu has since been released . It appears that the arrest was in essence an Israeli engineered "media feed", aimed at discrediting Vanunu by casting suspicion upon him as a Palestinian sympathiser. He never entered the West Bank - the basis of the false arrest and the media stories it inspired, such as the BBC article which follows. SEE FOOTNOTE AT END FOR VANUNU'S OWN ACCOUNT OF THE ARREST.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4450004.stm

Friday, 18 November 2005, 16:02 GMT
Vanunu held after West Bank visit

Mordechai Vanunu says he has averted a nuclear holocaust in the region. (WHAT, TODAY? NOW , HERE'S A GREAT PIECE OF JOURNALISM. THE "OPENING" STATEMENT IS IN FACT REFERRING TO VANUNU'S ACTIONS OF OVER 18 YEARS AGO- AND THE CLAIM IS NOT ONE OF PERSONAL CONCEIT BUT WIDELY HELD BY HISTORIANS AND THE GLOBAL PEACE MOVEMENT) Israeli ex-nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu has been held for allegedly violating restrictions imposed after his release from prison in 2004. Police said he was held at the al-Ram checkpoint north of Jerusalem as he was returning by bus from the West Bank. .The former nuclear scientist is barred from leaving Israel and is not allowed to visit the Palestinian territories. He was jailed (READ- KIDNAPPED ABROAD BY MOSSAD AGENTS AND ILLEGALLY CONVICTED) in 1986 for 18 years after discussing his work at the Dimona nuclear reactor with a UK newspaper.

"He (Mr Vanunu) has been taken to our International Crimes Unit for questioning," Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.

Mr Vanunu flashed a victory sign before being taken away in a police vehicle. Asked what he had done to prompt the arrest, he said: "Nothing. They just want to arrest me again. They don't want me to enjoy freedom."

Christianity convert

Mr Vanunu served most of his jail term in solitary confinement. He was released in April 2004 under strict conditions.
Mr Vanunu has not been allowed to have a passport, is forbidden to approach ports and airports, and is banned from talking to foreigners without permission. Israel insists Mr Vanunu - who has converted to Christianity - still poses a security threat.( AGAIN, THESE CONSTANT REFERENCES TO HIS RELIGIOUS CONVERSION, WHICH IS A PRIVATE DECISION BEING TREATED AS SYMPTOMATIC OF YET ANOTHER BETRAYAL, TO THE JEWISH FAITH THIS TIME. A CLUMSY ATTEMPT TO ALIENATE JEWISH SYMPATHIZERS FROM HIS CAUSE.) In March, he was charged with violating the terms of his release from jail by giving interviews to the foreign media.

Mr Vanunu says his action in revealing Israel's nuclear secrets aimed to avert a nuclear holocaust in the region.
Many Israelis view him as a traitor. (ON THIS LAST POINT- WELL? SO WHAT. PEACE LOVING ISRAELIS, also many in number, I hope,VIEW HIM AS A HERO, as do MANY OF US.)

FOOTNOTE: Vanunu wrote,
" last Friday again the israel authorities use the power to arrest me, but this time to continue by putting me back in prison for 2 days, sending me back to remember all the cruelty and hard life of 18 years in isolation , the reason this time was i come very close to the check point near the wall in Aram,a small Palestinian neighbourhood in east Jerusalem that still not decided were the apartheid wall going to move, I took a bus from the Bus station in east Jerusalem .the bus travel to the Aram without checking, and bus return to Jerusalem , but before leaving Aram they have a check point,
In the check point , they check my ID card and the soldiers there received the order to arrest me , they took my camera and my mobile, and took me to the nearest police station, where i was waiting for the special police unite who came from Tel Aviv to take me to there to be question,
meanwhile the police themselves invited the israel media TV to come and let them take photos as much as they want and report my arrest in their main news, as a man who is going to the occupied territories where the "enemies ","fighting" them. so they want the israel public to regard me equal to terrorist.
I said to the media "they arrested me when i went to see the Aram check point,to see the Apartheid wall, the Palestinians ghettos.".
In Tel Aviv they questioned me about this "entering" to the Palestine occupied territories.what am I doing there.why I am not following the general Army orders.I said Aram is still part of Palestine east Jerusalem,I am not interesting to see the occupied territories,I just want to see the apartheid wall,to see this village,I said it is not yet clear where is the borders in Jerusalem,he want to know with whom I was there,names,why I am with foreigners,he want to see the camera photos,
the police decided to arrest me because they want to release under court orders,but there was no court in Jewish sabbath day,so they need to wait until Saturday night,
so they imprisoned me in Tel Aviv,in a cell without any thing just mattrest and a blanket,
Saturday morning my lawyer Feldman and Sfard, came to see me,to hear what happened,
to represent me in court,in the evening the police took me back to the court ,the woman judge heard my case at 20:30.Feldman did not agree to the police terms of my release.they want 2 weeks house arrest,and 50.000 shekels.Feldman convinced the judge and even the police that this arrest was a big mistake because I was not violating the terms of my release, as it is not clear where yet israel want to put its apartheid wall,
before the judge make her decision the police capitulated and agree for immediate release without any condition just by my self signature,
that was a small victory for Feldman defending me,and my friend Gideon took me back to Jerusalem ,St. George, where we have a glass of Beer,
But the police with the israel spies ,couldn't go without something,
they demanded from me to give them my Camera and my mobile to check them,
so now I don't have my mobile .no phone connection until receiving them back.
So that was another harassment in this new serial cruelty since my release,until they will give up and let me go,leave isreal.or if they will they can put me back in prison.
My conclusion the world continue to ignore my situation and not doing for my freedom as they use to do during 18 years,no intervene to demand my release,the world let israel to do as they want.
let them commit more crimes.kidnapping,injustice and cruelty,
vmjc
--
message
Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free.
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such liberty.R Lovelace.

Happy Hallowe'en!

2005-11-01T21:14:00.000-05:00

playdead97sm
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Leaving the Play Dead party in style! Toronto Hallowe'en night- or rather, Dawn of Day of the Dead

On this day- in 1986 Israeli Nuclear technician Vanunu was kidnapped by Mossad

2005-10-20T13:53:00.000-04:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/20/newsid_3752000/3752128.stm
Israeli Nuclear technician Mordechai Vanuna, who acted as a conscientious whistle blower and revealed the presence of the Israeli nuclear program to the world, was kidnapped in Rome by Mossad, and imprisoned for 18 years!!! (11 1/2 years of which were spent in solitary confinement) He was finally "freed" on 21 April 2004, but under severe restrictions which make a mockery of the concept "liberty". Vanuna has not been allowed to leave Israel, which is his stated desire, is barred from speaking to the media, and has since been subjected to police intimidation-
re-arrested and then "released".

Mordechai sent this email on 12 April 2005, the day after receiving notice of the continuation of his restrictions.
"Hi Friends.
They decided to renew all the restrictions, for another year, yesterday the police come and gave the papers, saying they decided to continue the restriction, and thinking to make them more severe, like not to talk on NWs [nuclear weapons] to any one, So, it means one more year in this Prison state. I will continue to be very free, and exercise my freedom of speech...
vmjc "

Israel's nuclear program exists as a constant mockery of the UN's efforts to condemn and restrict the nuclear aspirations of countries such as Iran and Iraq, among many others. By ignoring Israel's program, the UN reveals that hypocrisy lies at the base of their attempts to secure world peace through nuclear nonproliferation. The UN, if it is to be taken seriously by those countries it wishes to restrict, must address this grave omission directly by monitoring Israel's nuclear program, and make every attempt to pressure Israel into truly releasing Vanuna. He is a hero in the eyes of those who seek a non-nuclear world. As a man, we have collectively robbed him of the prime of his life, which he sacrificed for the greater good of mankind. He wants what has been denied to him all these years- liberty of thought and action, and a chance to create a family. It is long overdue. Go to Vanunu's support site and
nonviolence.org for further information and to help secure Vanunu's freedom. The man risked so much for ours.

Buried alive

By Mordechai Vanunu

Solitary confinement is living in a grave
to live alone is living with yourself, talking to yourself in your mind remembering yourself in the past, living the past in the present, living the past many times,
In the present time you are Dead. A dead man walking in his grave. To be alive is to be free.
Here I am a blind man
my eyes, walls, can see
eight years far away from trees, flowers, sea, women, birds -freedom.
Now iron gates, doors, grills, cement in this concrete world solidifying me. Only my mind, my spirit is free-free to remember why I am in prison but not prison for my spirit, they cannot chain my mind.
And I am free to keep my belief
in my action against all psychological brainwash until I can fly from this state prison - until my dead body will rise again from this tomb like an agent who came back from the cold to serve the world in the war against nuclear Holocaust, nuclear proliferation, against nuclear secrets...
to be free to live to be alive...

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hiroshima - 50 Years

by Mordechai Vanunu

Hiroshima Hiroshima
My beloved Hiroshima
Your sons daughters elders wives
Blew radiated with an Atomic Bomb
A radioactive cloud consumed rubbed out Hiroshima
Hiroshima Hiroshima
For a live nuclear test sentenced you
a nuclear laboratory of children women trees animals
in and under nuclear mushroom live burning
burned flattened to ground radioactive ash- Hiroshima

Hiroshima Hiroshima
Nuclear weapons gamblers win against you '
a U.S. revenge for Pearl Harbour
Hiro-shima Japan heroism is the target
wipe out rain Hiro - Hero- shima - Truman
Hiroshima Hero- shima
Japan and U.S. betrayed you Hero Hiroshima
silence forget Hiroshima Atomic tragedy
Japan sacrifices your holocaust on the Yen altar
Hollywood doesn't know you - you are not a Jewish Holocaust
Hiroshima Hiroshima
Ant-nuclear weapons campaigners adopting your
orphans. Heritage of Hiroshima our heroes
carry preach the memory message of Hiroshima
to the future ages to end nuclear gamblers.
Beginning and end of nuclear weapons. Hiroshima. Hero.
Hiroshima. Hero. Hero. Hero.

Presented at the exhibition Hiroshima Sans Amour

TO CONTACT MORDECHAI VANUNU:

Here is the email address:
vmjc1954@gmail.com

and here is the postal address:

Mordechai Vanunu
c/o Cathedral Church of St. George
20 Nablus Road
PO Box 19122
Jerusalem 91191
Israel

Red Light Book Launch!

2005-10-11T15:43:00.000-04:00

Red Light Book Launch!
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

The book launch in Toronto on Oct. 5 was extremely enjoyable! I've attended a few spoken word events in the past, some of which were hard to endure, but ALL of the contributors to the Red Light project were well-spoken and witty! Thanks to editor Anna Camilleri for including my work in her wonderful book- the book launches continue across Canada and the States- check out Anna's site for further details at www.annacamilleri.com

Rubber Chicken with Sunglasses

2005-10-03T21:46:00.000-04:00

Rubber Chicken with Sunglasses
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

It's been that kind of day!

Real Gone at Cadillac Lounge, Toronto

2005-09-11T00:48:00.000-04:00

Real Gone at Cadillac Lounge, Toronto
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Sarah- vocals and stand-up bass player in Real Gone, photo taken at Cadillac Lounge. Upcoming gig Sept.11, 2005!

Running of the Stag

2005-08-29T12:46:00.000-04:00

Running of the Stag
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Ancient celtic male mating/ now pre-wedding ritual . Evolved into drunk/ possibly stoned males in coconut bras & grass skirts being escorted around Wasaga beach discos by their "buddies" , asking total strangers to inscribe written abuse on their victim's body with a sharpie. Also a female ritual- with the woman wearing an "adorned" veil to work prior to her wedding day.
Taken at the Dard (Dardenella) in Wasaga Beach, Ontario, Canada.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki remembered...

2005-08-08T13:00:00.002-04:00

For years after I first heard of the horrific carnage that the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had inflicted on innocent civilians, I thought that it was universally understood that a terrible wrong had been committed. Mankind had learned a lesson from this- NEVER AGAIN, as they like to say, over and over. As a child, I remember feeling distraught that something as devastating as the atom bomb loomed over us all, threatening annihilation either directly or through the long lingering death caused by the fallout. It was an evil I believed we all recognized.
It is only in the past 4 years that I have come to realize an exception exists- the American people. Not all, but enough to make their grotesque rumblings heard louder than anyone's. People who justify, excuse, even commend the action. Who claim that there were no innocents in Japan, as everyone was working for the war effort, even children. I wonder how they would have responded to a similar attack on any major American city, engaged as they were in their own war efforts. (Then again- why wonder. Think 911)
I recently discovered that there were some who had contemplated dropping yet another atom bomb, in spite of having witnessed Japan's ordeal. Specifically, General Douglas MacArthur, who had lobbied to bomb North Korea in 1950, once China had joined that war.
http://mondediplo.com/2004/12/08korea .
And the West wonders why North Korea and others appear to believe a bomb of their own might prove a deterrent. Since when is the USA a guardian of peace, alone possessing the moral integrity to resist using this kind of power. Fact is, they're the only ones who have used it against other humans.
In 1999 I went on a cross-country trip to the West Coast with my son. By chance, we found ourselves in Santa Fe, New Mexico on the very anniversary of the dropping of the bomb. Santa Fe isn't far from Los Alamos, where the technology for the bomb was developed. I heard that groups of Japanese were visiting the site to pray for peace and wanted to go and document it, but had no transportation and couldn't convince the people we were staying with that it was important. It's very frustrating at times, being unable to drive... I remember a local Santa Fe resident expressing anger at the Japanese visitors, saying, well, why don’t they come to pray for Pearl Harbour. Why don't we have a holiday for THAT? (Not worth a reply) The following year, Los Alamos was caught in a brush fire and burned down, so that opportunity was missed. What exists there now beyond a Virtual Los Alamos is anyone's guess. On the official Los Alamos website, among other things, they discuss the bombs in terms of firepower but omit to mention the Japanese people who died. The bombs have cute names, beloved of the American military mindset. "Little Boy", Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. "Fat Man", Nagasaki, August 9, 1945.
http://www.lanl.gov
Cute names aside, 140,000 people were killed by "Little Boy" 60 years ago. 70,000 more died 3 days later when "Fat Man" plunged on Nagasaki. It was only by chance that the second bomb killed fewer people, as in essence it was the more powerful weapon. Cloud cover obscured the drop and it fell into a ravine rather than hit the intended target.
Hibahusha is the name given to the people who survived, often only to contract cancer and other forms of radiation sickness years later. They suffered the additional emotional trauma of losing their families, only to be shunned and excluded as potential marriage partners, out of society's fear that they harboured dormant illnesses. (See the remarkable Shohei Imamura film, "Black Rain" http://www.crosscurrents.org/FeleppaSpring2004.htm)
The people who, oddly enough, seemed most interested in the Hibahusha's fate, were the very American scientists who had devised the destruction. "After the war, the Americans provided medical care for those affected. This also enabled scientists to study the effects of radioactive exposure on people." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4745653.stm
Imagine the humiliation of being physically probed by the perpetrators of your collective and personal misery. The survivors provided invaluable data on the effects of radiation poisoning.
Cynics might wonder if this doesn't provide another clue as to why 2 bombs were dropped. Did the repeat bombing end the war, as the Americans claim? Or was Japan ready to concede defeat , their overtures of surrender ignored, when the second bomb devastated Nagasaki. What was its purpose? The two bombs were not identical. They possessed different cores- Hiroshima's, uranium (obtained from Canada), while the one dropped on Nagasaki contained plutonium, leading to suspicions that the bombs were an evil experiment on the effects of atomic weapons on human populations. Prior to this, scientists could only theorize on their creation's possible effects- that is, before the bombing of Japan put an end to all speculation. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4133572.stm
Whatever the reasons given, I will never accept that the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was justifiable. Alongside the Holocaust, it will remain for me as the defining moment when, as a child, my belief in the inherent good in mankind was erased forever. Replacing it was an understanding that our species is an aberration, capable of incomprehensible acts of evil and destruction, which go against all laws of nature and morality.
Knowing this, I nevertheless believe that it is our duty to struggle against it- to encourage the goodness in people- to promote love and acceptance where we can- and when people like the idiots who dropped the atom bombs try to justify their actions- gently but firmly point out that they're FULL OF SHIT.

Eat , Drink, Live ATE

2005-07-04T11:41:00.000-04:00

LIVE ATE me

On Saturday I had the TV tuned into the Live 8 broadcasts, but with the sound turned off. Occasionally if I glanced over and something piqued my interest, I'd turn it on, but generally delegated it back to the land of MUTE within seconds. Why?

I was watching the Toronto Barrie show, with interspersed excerpts from the International venues. The Canadian equivalent was soft on talent and context, with a few notable exceptions such as Gordon Lightfoot (a cultural icon, politics aside), Bruce Cockburn and Neil Young, both of whom are irreproachable on all counts. Seriously though, what has Simple Plan, Motley Crue and Deep Purple really got to do mixing with this kind of event, other than the obvious benefits of self-promotion? I don't care how beloved the Bare Naked Ladies are to Canadians desperate to support home grown "talent"- I couldn’t bear to listen to their inane and only hit- " If I had a Million dollars", during a show allegedly intended to raise awareness about World poverty and hunger. I detected no discernable irony in the lyrics, "if I had a million dollars, I’d buy you a (INSERT COMMODITY)", to try to buy your love? . Come to think of it, it might not be so far off the mark after all. I’ll spend millions putting on a concert to show just how much I care that you’re starving in a country I can’t even identify on a map. To make ME feel better, thinking you (whoever you are) now love me for caring. Send out a shout out to Africa. Ignoring, of course, the starvation and desperate poverty among isolated indigenous communities in our own country of Canada- also off the map. Ignoring the mass rape, murder, HIV infection, starvation and forced expulsion being perpetrated on thousands of Sudanese, as we engage in endless debate over whether the word genocide is an appropriate term to describe their dilemma. Funny. I came to that conclusion over a year ago and our politicians are STILL DOING NOTHING. NEVER AGAIN? LIKE FUCK. I have physically participated in protests over the past 2 decades- including the Quebec summit where we were subjected to 5,000 canisters of teargas in an attempt to poison us into silence. We have put our heath and convictions physically and directly on the line and our political masters didn’t listen or care. Why should I believe that a rock concert in Barrie and a web petition can achieve otherwise???
I think that the bands’ material should have been more carefully chosen to support the cause, and not based on the given band’s greatest hit list in order to cater to audience recognition and generate further record sales. I really wonder what was the point of it all. There didn’t appear to be enough discussion on the true issues behind the vast poverty so many inhabitants face on this planet. Nelson Mandela was allowed a few words on the subject in Johannesberg, which we happily got to share. But none of it told people anything new beyond the obvious. How many in the audience are aware of the privatization of water in South African shantytowns, which is provoking water riots. Why not show these issues directly on television alongside images of the distended bellies we’ve evidently become immune to. The fact that impoverished people affected with Aids may be able to secure anti retrovirals to prolong their lives, if they’re among the very few fortunate ones. BUT one week out of four they can’t afford to pay for the clean water they also need to ward off infection, because privatization of natural resources is being forced upon indebted nations in return for said aid. Water pipes with pay meters in ghettos. Why not show this, and hordes of desperate people risking police and imprisonment to attack said pipes in the middle of the night? Not to mention the deals favouring biotech companies such as Monsanto, to push them towards GMO technology which will only result in further enslavement to the West. Denying people who have developed their own indigenous agricultural practices and seed varieties for centuries, the right to save seeds, avoid monoculture and live independently of the toxic chemical swill which is responsible for the increase in cancer deaths worldwide. Iraq is an example of this policy, where the constitution is being rewritten by the Americans to include provisions to the effect of enabling the biotech companies a future foothold. Where national seed stores were plundered and destroyed alongside their cultural heritage during the great "emancipation".
On another note, where were the women? I caught the great finale sing a long in Barrie. The closest we got to token representation in the main group was the "wife of" Neil Young, a female singer in a cowboy hat, a girl in a bikini (!?) and an androgynous tattooed rocker who looked sufficiently incongruous and uncomfortable to be embraced as one of our own.

That night I went out. I heard people talking about LIVE 8 at Sneaky Dee’s, a local punk club. Debating its merits and demerits. Most not complimentary.

My taxi driver going home was a Muslim from Ethiopia. We got into an intense political discussion which touched on a world of issues and regions. It was in a sense mutual back rubbing as we shared opinions and perspectives which were virtually identical, in spite of our radically different backgrounds and experiences. He turned off the meter at one point and we sat in front of my house for 45 minutes and engaged in further debate and a sharing of knowledge and information. We parted immensely pleased at the recognition that he and I are an example of how difference can be breached- that there is hope for a unified world. We also knew that our personal perspectives, though shared, are rare in this world and not of much consequence when it comes to the policy making decisions of those in power. Nevertheless, if like minded individuals can see past the immensely complicated cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious barriers which exist to isolate us from one other- if we can stand together, we WILL be a force to be reckoned with. For we have a will and a voice and a solid commitment to effecting a real change in this sad, sorry and desperately beautiful world we all share responsibility for.

Same Sex Marriage

2005-06-29T05:23:00.000-04:00

Same Sex Marriage
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Canada became the third country in the world to legalize same sex unions!

Mohawk Warriors 1990 Oka / Kanehsatake Quebec

2005-06-28T01:59:00.000-04:00

Mohawk Warriors 1990 Oka / Kanehsatake Quebec
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Kanehsatake Quebec, 1990. Mohawk Warriors guard their barricade, erected during an armed struggle over the intended expansion of a golf course onto disputed land which included a Native cemetary. Photos I took in 1990 of what became known as the "Oka Crisis" are on my website at DAWNONE.com .This July 11 marks the 15th anniversary. A pow wow will be held in the Mohawk community of Kahnawake, just outside of Montreal, on that date.

NOTE: I participated in an interesting group exhibit this summer entitled, The American West", at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, UK. It included photos from my Oka series.

UK REVIEW: A pioneering exhibition Aug 18 2005

PUNKS & PROVOCATEURS EXHIBIT- OPENS SUNDAY APRIL 3d!

2005-04-02T03:15:00.000-05:00

PUNKS & PROVOCATEURS EXHIBIT- OPENS SUNDAY APRIL 3d!
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Happy St.Patrick's day!

2005-03-15T11:24:00.000-05:00

I sadly missed the Montreal St.Patrick's day parade this year, in which for several years I've participated as a marcher with the group, Coalition For Peace in Northern Ireland.

It hasn't been a good year for the peace accord- first the allegations of IRA involvement in the bank heist (I haven't seen these substantiated yet) which resulted in measures being taken against Sinn Fein representatives in parl't, now the suspicions cast upon Sinn Fein (again) following the barroom brawl and murder of a Catholic man, Robert McCartney. I find it suspicious that any Ulster groups are even voicing concern about the death of a Catholic (sorry, but it is suspicious). I was of the understanding that while Sinn Fein may well be the political wing of the IRA, it cannot be held directly accountable for the actions of renegades within the group, any more than the founder and leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Ian Paisley, is directly responsible for the numerous atrocities and illegal activities committed by the UDA ( see below for text) against protestants and Catholics alike.
Now the sisters of the slain Catholic man, allegedly having decided after a mere week or so since the crime that justice cannot be had in their own country, have instead sought salvation across the pond. And hence landed in the lap of that supreme delineator of Good and Evil and infamous exporter of American style freedom, President Bush.
The BBC have asked another of their cute political questions on the issue. Again, as I do not expect to see my response in print, I'm posting it here. Their question was-
Sinn Fein warning: Your reaction

The family of murdered Belfast man Robert McCartney has rejected Sinn Fein claims that they risk being politically manipulated.

Robert McCartney's sisters and partner are travelling to the US, where there will meet President Bush, in the next phase of their fight for his killers to be brought to justice.

Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness warned them to "be careful" as taking an anti-Sinn Fein stance risked undermining the peace process.

Do you think the McCartney family are being politically manipulated? Do you think Sinn Fein is right to warn them? What do you think of the latest developments? Send us your views.

OK- here's mine.
The McCartney sisters feel compelled to seek retribution for a local murder from the same foreign administration who created the brand of "justice" exemplified by Guantanamo Bay, Abu Graib and the like? We might ask if the American government is also behind the push, as since when does Bush grant personal interviews to victims of bar fights in his own beleaguered state? It's obviously yet another political strike against the credibility of Sinn Fein. Of course they should be concerned that these women are being manipulated... grief has been known to blind common sense.

More on the UDA-
Comments in parl't by Viscount Bridgeman: addressed in part to Baroness Amos

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199900/ldhansrd/pdvn/lds04/text/41115-24.htm
Viscount Bridgeman: My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement today and for her customary courtesy in giving us early knowledge of its contents. From these Benches, we want to be in a position to welcome yesterday's statement on behalf of the Ulster Defence Association. We hope that there will now be, in the words of yesterday's statement, an eradication of all paramilitary activity.

But it is not by mere words that we shall judge the UDA; it is by its actions on the ground, and, in that respect, there is clearly a long way to go. The Independent Monitoring Commission has highlighted in two reports the extent to which the UDA has been involved in murder, shootings, assaults, exiling, organised crime and drugs. It has painted a graphic picture of the way in which the UDA imposes a mafia-style terror on entire communities.

Representatives of the UDA often talk about the problems affecting loyalist communities, but does the Minister not agree that organisations such as the UDA are the main problem affecting loyalist communities? The most recent IMC report concluded that the UDA,

"remains heavily involved in many kinds of organised crime and remains an active organisation capable of more widespread violence, with the will to commit it if judged appropriate".

Yet all these paramilitary and criminal activities have taken place over a period when senior UDA figures have reiterated their commitment to the 1994 cessation of military activities. That alone should lead us to be cautious; so, too, should the deplorable incident last night when an SDLP councillor in Larne, who has previously been targeted by loyalists, had to fire shots to defend himself.

I have a number of questions which I should like to ask the Minister, but I understand that she has a very important engagement. If she is not able to answer them comprehensively, I am sure that we shall have the benefit of a letter being placed in the Library of the House. My questions are as follows. Does the Minister agree that an eradication of all paramilitary activity must include an end to all other forms of criminal activity? What assurances has she had from the UDA that the organised crime, the drug dealing, the racketeering and the intimidation will stop? And does she agree that it must include the complete decommissioning of the UDA's illegally held weapons?

PUNKS & PROVOCATEURS invite, opening April 3, Blog active!

2005-02-26T12:10:00.000-05:00

PUNKS & PROVOCATEURS invite, opening April 3, Blog active!
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Rebel / Rebelle!
PUNKS & PROVOCATEURS
70s and 80s revisited- Toronto, Montreal and NYC.
BLOG: http://rebelrebelle.blogspot.com/
SITE info: http://rebelrebelle.com/

John Cale Band, The Edge, 1979

2005-02-14T02:57:00.000-05:00

John Cale Band, The Edge, 1979
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Something looks very wrong here...

This photo (& more of John Cale and other bands ) is part of an exhibit called PUNKS & PROVOCATEURS which will be on display in April in Montreal and is presently up on my blog. Go to www.rebelrebelle.com for link and info. To find photos on Blog, scroll down to Index of Past Entries! Also check January!

Animal Rights Wronged in the UK

2005-01-31T13:37:00.000-05:00

How much further into the pockets of the pharmaceuticals can Mr.Blair plunge?
First GMOs, now this. Does it mean that by merely suggesting one boycott a product, "a criminal offence to cause "economic damage" through campaigns of intimidation can now be laid"? The UK is setting a fine example of the kind of "democracy" it wishes to export elsewhere. READ ON.
LDH

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4221427.stm
'Clampdown' on animal activists
[animal protesters]
Huntingdon Life Sciences has been the focus of activists' protests
Animal rights activists could face five years in jail for targeting firms linked to animal research facilities, under new government plans.

The amendment to the Serious Organised Crime and Police Bill covers suppliers such as construction firms or cleaners working for animal research firms.

Measures to stop harassment of animal research facilities and their employees are already in the bill.

Campaigners say the government's proposed laws are not justified.

The amended bill would make it a criminal offence to cause "economic damage" through campaigns of intimidation.

We've got the strongest laws in the world to protect animals who are being used for medical research
Patricia Hewitt
Trade and industry secretary

Head to Head: Activist laws
Q&A: Planned new powers
Have Your Say

The plans already in the bill include giving police powers to arrest anyone protesting outside the homes of scientists - and the power to ban them from returning to a specified home for three months.

Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt told BBC News: "We can't have these extremists going way beyond the bounds of peaceful protest into these vicious campaigns of intimidation which have not been stopped by individual laws."

She added: "The simple fact is attacks by animal rights extremists put medical breakthroughs in areas like Aids, cancer and Alzheimer's directly at risk."

Ms Hewitt said the new law would not affect people's "important right" to peaceful protest but would "crack down hard" on extremists committing crimes.

Does this mean that people who are being harassed in other walks of life - such as a woman who is being stalked - are less important?
Greg Avery
Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty

She rejected suggestions by Home Office Minister Hazel Blears that new control orders to put terror suspects under house arrest would apply to animal activists, saying it was a "completely separate issue".

Greg Avery, a spokesman for anti-vivisection pressure group Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, said: "The government is bringing in laws to protect people who murder animals.

"Does this mean that people who are being harassed in other walks of life - such as a woman who is being stalked - are less important?"

The powers to take action against attacks on companies in the supply chain covers company employees, their relatives, business suppliers, plus charity shops and universities.

The government plans follow attacks on centres such as the Huntingdon Life Sciences and a farm in east Staffordshire where guinea pigs are bred for medical research.

Grave disturbance

Suppliers have also been targeted - last year work on Oxford University's new testing laboratory had to be halted after contractors complained they had been harassed and intimidated by animal rights activists.

Medical Research Council chief executive Professor Colin Blakemore welcomed the announcement, saying: "It is essential that researchers and those working with them are able to carry out their work without fear of intimidation."

For the Conservatives, shadow solicitor general Jonathan Djanogly said: "We have long been calling on the government to protect the industry, which makes a significant contribution to medical research. It is welcome that they have finally seen the importance of this issue."

For the Lib Dems Dr Evan Harris said: "A law to tackle the issue of economic sabotage is clearly required in the field of medical research involving animals.

"But the Liberal Democrats will not support this measure if it applies outside of the area of animal rights extremism where there is a clear problem and where existing laws have proved to be inadequate."

On the Beach- contemplating the Tsunami disaster

2005-01-02T14:40:00.000-05:00

New Year's Day. I have been feeling frustrated and guilty, as I seriously have no money to give to the relief funds (I have exactly $1.60 in my account), and have been unable to offer material support in the way of blankets etc. Most of the humanitarian agencies don't appear to want or need it- only cash. We were visiting Thunder Bay in Northern Ontario when the tsunami struck Asia at Xmas, killing thousands and displacing millons more and have since returned to Toronto. I am already too glued to the news at the best of times... to distract me, my boyfriend took me out for a walk on the beach beside Lake Ontario. The photos I took, upon retrospect, evidently reflect my ongoing thoughts and mood.

The first thing we encountered was a Polish memorial to their dead, who perished by the thousands in Russian camps. People are always laying fresh wreaths at the site. The snow has melted today, revealing another fatality in the form of a dead cat. Evidently run over on adjacent King Street, and then either dragged itself to the memorial to die or was placed here. But the memorial reads "Katyn", which leads me to believe that someone either found this to be a funny or ironic gesture and placed the cat here intentionally (not inconceivable), or thought it to be an appropriate resting place with the best of intentions (more hopeful, less likely).

We crossed the bridge to the lakeshore. Under it were several makeshift camps- lean-to's composed of sleeping bags, plastic sheets, garbage bags. How the homeless survive the sub-zero temperatures is a mystery. People treated like the debris they call home. It was impossible to tell if there was a person in the midst of the tumble of material. I thought of photos of the flotsam floating on the ocean in the wake of the tsunami- a similarly impersonal mixture of garbage and humanity. We later passed by one such man walking on the boardwalk carrying his bundle. Eyes determinedly downcast, jaw resolute.

We surprisingly came upon of all things a coconut lying on the icy shore of the lake. The label read Dominican Republic- naturally grown. It was frozen solid, covered in a coating of ice. People in the tsunami-affected areas have been forced to survive on coconuts for food and water. The fish have been contaminated by the dead bodies in the water. I lived off coconuts myself years ago. I had travelled to Hawaii with $20 and a one way ticket and been forced to do the same for several days. After two days of only coconut to eat, the pulp turns to a dry, flaky mush in your mouth, impossible to swallow. You suck it dry, then spit it out. At least it's a sterile source of liquid, nutritious and certainly better than nothing.

Further down the beach- with a view of a frozen lake and the break wall behind it- a phone on a pole which had the word "emergency: written on it. The phone read- "Distress phone- Push for Help".

There is no tsunami warning system in the Indian ocean- a problem which will now have to be addressed. Nevertheless, it could have been predicted in the case of several countries where there was a delay of up to several hours after the earthquake. Where, if any, were the tsunami warning calls directed to? Certainly not the ordinary people living near the beach. Or the precious tourists. Or perhaps in view of their presence, there were none... a Thai meterologist, name withheld, shed some light on the mystery...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4139435.stm
"Mr Thaksin's (the Thai Prime Minister) remarks follow allegations made by an unnamed member of the Thai meteorological department this week that a tsunami alert was not issued for fear of hurting the country's important tourism industry in case it turned out to be a false alarm. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4127927.stm
None of the countries affected by the tsunami issued a warning.
Sulamee Prachuab, head of the Thai Meteorological Department's Seismological Bureau, recalled that a tidal wave warning issued five years earlier after an earthquake in Papua New Guinea had led to complaints from the tourism authority that such alerts hurt the industry.

Geoffrey York, writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail ( F1 Jan.1.05 ) , spoke of a boat trip he undertook to the Thai Island of Phi Phi in the wake of the disaster. The yacht, owned by a wealthy businessman, was intact as it had been ordered to rest out the storm in the high seas as soon as its owner had heard of the disaster in Sumatra. He predicted the incoming tide based on the magnitude of the tremor, the magic number for the yacht owner being 6.2 and above. According to an article written by Paul Koring in Washington, Brian Atwater, a US geological expert, places the limit at 9. and above. Nevertheless, an hour's grace had saved his boat from destruction and yet no-one in the Thai government appeared to share his foresight and issue warnings of their own. The quake, whose epicentre was off the coast of Sumatra, was believed initially by the Pacific watch keepers to have been in the range of 8., whereas it was in fact 10 times that figure.

The front page of the Globe contained what they believe to be a clever headline- (oh please spare me the inappropriate puns of the media... )"The hell after high water". The photo which accompanies it is of a yuppie couple of western descent (ok- read white) sunbathing on a Thai beach in their little oasis of deckchairs, umbrella and snack table, while the clean-up of the utter devastation goes on behind them. The woman reclines clad in bikini and sunglasses while her overweight companion watches the activity intently from his chair. The design on its fabric is revealed to be an idealized tropical beach - a palm tree shadowed against a sunset. It is ironic- and absolutely abhorrent. A great photo though- depicting a couple who I hope someone had the guts to confront, overturn their perch and suggest that they make their way to the airport and ship out immediately. They shame us all.

In the same Toronto paper appeared a column written by a journalist who does not warrant the title. I sent the following letter to the editor, though I don't expect it will be published. I'm sad that in spite of the distance, a google search will probably reveal her vitriol and inaccuracies to the poor Australian woman she maligns in the piece. I'm including my letter below in the hope that it may also appear in the search and at least correct some of the slanderous comments. I will also include links to other articles which contain a more accurate account of the event Blatchford described. To find her original article, seek out her column if you will but be assured that it isn't worth reading.

To the Editor-
You have done the brave and traumatized people who have survived the tsunami disaster an incredible disservice by allowing Christie Blatchford (Globe and mail, A3, Jan.1, 2005) to misrepresent them so dreadfully. The victims were gracious enough to share their horrific stories with the media, something at least one family is now likely regretting.

In particular, Jillian Searle of Australia, who had the misfortune to get caught up in the first "wave" in Phuket with 2 small children, and found herself unable to swim with both. From the relative safety of her hotel room in North Dakota, Globe writer Christie Blatchford blithely condemns Searle for her unhappy decision to choose between the two boys in order to survive. She relinquished the eldest who, according to Blatchford, the mother allegedly, "marked for death" as he could not swim. Blatchford imagines herself in a more heroic, albeit maudlin, role- "I think I would have preferred to die, holding onto both small hands... ", later, "that wee hand.", for additional poignancy.

Blatchford attacks the poor woman further, stating, "I can't believe she was quite sane, for she offered herself no protection from the awfulness of the truth of what she did." Ah yes, truth. But who's "truth" are we really discussing? The reader is presented only with Blathford's slanderous allegations, which obscure "truth" through omission in a bid to feed the writer’s own maudlin fantasies and unfortunately available byline.

We are led to believe that Blatchford researched her story, as any respectable journalist would. As I read her version, I recalled a previous report that Searle had not, in fact, "let slip that wee hand" to the water, but passed him on to another woman’s care, who had unfortunately lost the child when the second wave hit. The boy managed to survive nevertheless. Quite a different scenario- less dramatic, more forgiving to the mother, and a happier ending for the Searles than many other families under similar circumstances. It took me all of 3 minutes searching on Google to uncover several articles supporting this version of the "truth". I have included the urls below to save you the time.

Which leads me to something I and other Globe readers in my acquaintance have been wondering aloud in recent times- what exactly is Christie Blatchford doing on the third page of a generally respected newspaper, and why was she recruited from the ranks of those we don't choose to read? Are you trying to incite a reaction from your readers, by publishing such diatribe, to stir them out of a perceived complacency? Perhaps you believe that by offering this reactionary drivel alongside exemplary writers such as Geoffrey York, you are somehow presenting a balanced form of journalism. You are in fact only succeeding in annoying me as a reader, and putting at ease my decision to subscribe to the Guardian Weekly and not the Globe and Mail.

L.Hammond, Montreal, Quebec

More articles-

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/12/29/1103996613128.html?oneclick=true

Jillian's choice, but with happy ending
By Natasha Granath
December 30, 2004

"I just can't believe they are still here." Bradley and Jillian Searle with their sons Blake, 20 months, and Lachie, 5, safe in their Perth home.

Jillian Searle was faced with an excruciating decision when she and her two sons were swept up in the tsunamis that hit Phuket on Sunday.

She knew Lachie, 5, could not swim and was afraid of water. But she also knew that if she tried to hold on to Lachie and 20-month-old Blake, they would all be lost.

She clung to him for as long as she could, but as her strength waned she appealed to a young girl nearby to grab Lachie so she could hold Blake.

Jillian thought she would never see her son again as he screamed for her not to let go and the water surged up to her neck.

When she next saw the young girl, she told Jillian she had been unable to keep hold of the boy and had lost him.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1177929,001301540007.htm
Mother forced to choose which son to save when tsunami hit
Associated Press
Australia, December 31, 2005|22:30 IST

The tsunami that hit Phuket, Thailand, forced Jillian Searle to make a choice no mother should ever have to make: which son to hold on to in raging flood waters, and which to let go and hope he survived.

Searle, of Perth, Western Australia, was near her Phuket hotel pool with sons Lachie, 5, and Blake, 2, when the tsunami hit last Sunday.

"I knew I had to let go of one of them and I just thought I'd better let go of the one that's the oldest," she said.

"A lady grabbed hold of him for a moment but she had to let him go because she was going under. And I was screaming, trying to find him, and we thought he was dead."

Lachie was found safe two hours later after surviving the raging waters by clinging to a hotel room door.

"I cried for mom for a long time and then I was quiet," he later told his father, Bradley Searle.

With mud and watermarks up to his ears, his first words to his father were: "My hands are all dirty and I need to wash my clothes."

http://www.terradaily.com/2004/041230000751.93jj781s.html

More of the same.

Thunder Bay snowman and snowchild

2004-12-31T16:28:00.000-05:00

Thunder Bay snowman and snowchild
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Happy New Year- Take care of each other!

Happy Holidays & New Year!

2004-12-09T16:57:00.000-05:00

Real Gone

2004-12-07T00:07:00.000-05:00

Real Gone
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Rockabilly band , Real Gone, is playing a gig at John and Jenny's rockn'roll party , Toronto Dec. 10 at the Silver Dollar! They're the opening set, on at approximately 10 pm. Doors are at 9.

Bush UNWelcomed to Canada

2004-11-30T22:58:00.000-05:00

nobush23sm
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

BUSH- A man with a mission (er, correction- make that missile)

Martin take note- Bush and his entourage are not welcome in this country. As a Canadian, I am opposed to his Republican party's invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and ongoing interference in the sovereignty of various other countries across the world- Iran, Cuba, Venezuela among them. In my estimation, Bush is a terrorist and war criminal, as was Reagun before him. http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-75-104-906/science_technology/candu/clip8

Anti-Bush visit demo and Candlelight Vigil in Solidarity with Demonstrations to Stop Bush
Tuesday Nov. 30, 2 PM and 6:00 PM
(opposite the U.S. Consulate)
Click on the above photo, to see larger version and more from the demonstration.

While the Ottawa protest against the Bush visit numbered over 15,000- the Toronto one (a support protest for those who couldn't make it to Ottawa) was very small- a couple of hundred at the most, and at times in the afternoon, a couple of dozen. At this point I was wishing I’d gone to the Ottawa protest- however...
The police easily outnumbered the demo and even removed the barricades they'd previously placed in anticipation of greater numbers. I've never seen the American Embassy so naked! For some inexplicable reason, they nevertheless sent out an undercover police photographer, who took it upon himself to document a group of 14-16 year old high school kids playing hooky and Hackensack! One of the kids, who was wearing a mask, told me that his mother had requested he wear it as she was worried the police might engage in this kind of surveillance.
So, how did I know he was a police photographer? I went over and directly asked, which he admitted readily. He wondered how I knew who he was working for. Basically, his discomfort, clothing choice and the way he awkwardly held his camera gave him away. Instinct. I've been covering protests as a photographer since the late 70s. Once he'd admitted to me his affiliations, he disappeared. I suppose with his cover blown, they're obligated to replace him with another. I'm surprised the Toronto police haven't gone digital yet. It would make it easier to blend in and they wouldn't have to worry about technical issues, as he admitted that in spite of doing this a long time, he wasn't a photographer and knew nothing about cameras. The one thing he wouldn't tell me was what they intended doing with the photos he took- that was classified.
In the end, I was glad I went to this particular event. It was wonderful to witness such a diverse group of people, of different generations and backgrounds, coming together in solidarity to express mutual concern for the Iraqi people. I was impressed in particular by one 14 year old boy, who spoke to me so eloquently on topics ranging from war, to environmental issues, to racism, to genetics. There may have been a lot of misspelled signs among the students, but ample evidence of brilliance and hope. One dedicated group of 5 high school students bicycled all the way from Mississauga (a Toronto suburb) to attend the rally- almost 3 hrs. each way in the winter rain!
Speakers included the writer Linda McQuaig, Toronto City councillor Olivia Chow and the last minute addition of a spokeswoman from the Toronto Muslim community.
A Candlelight Vigil was held in memory of the estimated 100 000 Iraqi dead from the latest Bush adventure in Iraq- each candle representing 100 victims of the American led invasion. These numbers are of course inaccurate as we will never know the true human cost of this war, as unlike their "allied" counterparts, the Iraqi dead are not officially counted. It appears that the official American position is that all Iraqi men between the ages of 15 to 60 are to be viewed as possible enemy combatants and so not worthy of consideration as human beings. In Falujja individual boys as young as 10 have been now included among this group of the "justifiably killed". (They insist he was found with a gun in his hand...) When the Americans claim they cannot estimate the number of civilians included among the Falujja dead, is it any wonder when only women and girls are identifiable as such in their eyes? I remember the last Gulf war- the tragic retreat and wholesale slaughter along the road from Kuwait, which again went undocumented, unquestioned and unpunished, even though it was clearly a war crime and against the Geneva Convention. The world may have ignored it, but the Iraqi people who lost loved ones haven’t that luxury. Generations of males, whose crime was basically to have been conscripted into Saddam’s army, were blown up, strafed and bulldozed into ditches along that bloody road, leaving widows and orphans to face the future alone. That future contained weekly bombings and crippling UN sanctions which killed an estimated half million Iraqi children since 1992.
( Read http://www.commondreams.org/views/102300-103.htm )
Those children who survived to become adults are now serving as fodder in this latest episode of the Bush saga. It was a story not worth repeating.

Of Blogging and Indymedia and gov't repression

2004-11-25T13:25:00.000-05:00

Interesting new book out- We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People
by Dan Gillmor . I'm posting a review below. I haven't read it yet, but I trust it will mention the alternative news source, Indymedia. Gillmor is quoted in the review below as saying, "If today's Big Media is a dinosaur," he writes, "it won't die off quietly. It will, with the government's help, try to control new media, rather than see its business models eroded by it."

I believe that the Quebec Summit of 2001 provides one such example of the kind of measures they are willing to take. I have long suspected that our Indymedia outlet, CMAQ, was appropriated or "influenced" by the Canadian gov't. during the Quebec summit. We indyjournalists in Quebec City found ourselves posting articles to our local version of Indymedia, CMAQ, which became subject to lengthy delays or never appeared on the site at all. This is not the way Indymedia works- it's supposed to be uncensored. When we weren't facing disappearing articles, the site was down at critical times throughout the Summit. I ended up reposting my articles to indymedia sites based in Turkey and elsewhere- where I encountered no such difficulties. It seems the Canadian gov't had provided grants to rent the space in which the indymedia office was located - a conflict of interest. The offices themselves were constantly subject to teargas, which resulted in restrictions for journalists entering and leaving the premises, allegedly due to contamination concerns. I'm sorry to sound paranoid, but there were also several people posing as journalists at CMAQ whom I had valid reason to suspect were CIA or CSIS plants. The indymedia lobby was eventually used as a makeshift hospital after the first aid centre down the road was attacked by the riot police and closed down. The police subsequently attacked the Indymedia building and entered, using extreme force and teargas to apprehend several people within. The Quebec version of Indymedia died off shortly thereafter, I believe citing a lack of committed individuals and funds. It is evident from all of this that a certain degree of distance from the gov't in terms of funding must be maintained to establish credibility.
My account of the above events and video link are at CMAQatak or go to the full report menu- The Quebec Summit... It Was a Gas, Then a Disappearing Act.

A government attack on alternative media of an even more serious nature can be seen on the main indymedia.org site- USA: INDYMEDIA & REPRESSION - US government: "We seize - you can't complain"
12 Nov 2004 07:47 GMT - regarding the US seizure of two hard drives that hosted more than 20 Indymedia websites.

Book Review-
Simon Waldman enjoys a timely account of the new forms of grassroots journalism

All the news that's fit to blog

We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People for the People
by Dan Gillmor
O'Reilly 299pp Â£17.50 / Reviewed by Simon Waldman

When this book was in its earliest stages, the author, a respected Silicon Valley journalist, posted an initial outline on his weblog, asking for comments. He was besieged with emails offering suggestions and advice. More, in fact, than he could handle. Later, he posted draft chapters as they were finished. One reader, the publisher of a small newspaper in upstate New York, whom he had never met, sent back a draft chapter dripping with digital red ink, commenting: "The time is right; the subject is right. But your book deserves to be better than this."
For most journalists or authors the idea of putting yourself through this process, while trying to get a book out, seems about as smart as standing on a street corner with a sign round your neck saying: "Please poke me in the eye."
For Gillmor, however, it is a proof of his underlying thesis. Throughout this book he argues that the growth of internet and related technologies is changing the balance of power between journalists and their readers; you can succeed in the coming decades only by acknowledging that shift in power and changing your behaviour accordingly. "Big media . . . treated the news as a lecture. We told you what the news was. You bought it, or you didn't. You might write us a letter; we might print it . . . it was a world that bred complacency and arrogance on our part. It was a gravy train while it lasted, but it was unsustainable.
"Tomorrow's news reporting and production will be more of a conversation or a seminar. The lines will blur between producers and consumers, changing the role of both in ways we're only beginning to grasp. The communication network itself will be a medium for everyone's voice, not just the few who can afford to buy multimillion-dollar printing presses, launch satellites, or win the government's permission to squat on the public airways."
This thesis in itself is neither new nor original. What is new, and what makes this the right book at the right time, is that a huge amount has happened particularly over the past three years to prove it true. And this is the first time someone has put it all down in one place.
He tells us of OhMyNews.com in South Korea, which has 15,000 "citizen reporters" filing news and comment; and of wikipedia, the online encyclopedia where anyone can write or edit an article, which now has more than one million articles in more than 100 languages.
He tells us about bloggers who have bigger audiences than many newspapers, and who have become just as influential as any specialist journalist in their sector. How Russ Kirk of the alternative news site The Memory Hole used the Freedom of Information Act to get photos of dead US soldiers being brought back from Iraq in flag-draped caskets into the public domain; and how bloggers claimed the scalp of Trent Lott, the majority leader in the US Senate, after he appeared to wax nostalgic for a racist past at a fellow senator's birthday dinner.
Gillmor tells of his own experience as a columnist on the San Jose Mercury, starting to write a blog and dealing with comments and criticisms from his readers, who, he claims, "have made me a better journalist, because they find my mistakes, tell me what I'm missing and help me understand nuances". Hence his willingness to go through the rather bruising experience that was mentioned above.
The audience, claims Gillmor, is in fact "the former audience". They are no longer the passive masses; they have the tools to challenge traditional media and create media for themselves. And when they just want to consume, they have so much more choice of what to consume.
The other party whose lives are changed by all this is those who are written about, "the news-makers", particularly politicians and corporations that can no longer control information about themselves as they might have done before, because "in the emerging world of internet-enabled communications, obfuscation and lies will work even less than before".
Gillmor's ultimate hope is that the result is going to be better for everyone. Journalism, politics and major corporations will all engage with this former audience in new ways to become more transparent and trusted.
His fear, however, is that this won't happen, and based on the examples he gives, the future is more likely to live up to his fears than his hopes. "If today's Big Media is a dinosaur," he writes, "it won't die off quietly. It will, with the government's help, try to control new media, rather than see its business models eroded by it."
Not everything described applies to the UK political bloggers, for example, have failed to make the same splash in Britain, partly, one suspects, because the UK press is opinionated enough, but the trends are still relevant.
Exactly how newspapers and other organisations should evolve to deal with these phenomena is left unanswered. That is actually quite welcome. What's happening is so significant, so complex and so unfinished that simple three-point plans are neither welcome nor useful. But anyone plotting the future for a media organisation or any organisation that deals with the media â€” would be foolish to do so without first reading Gillmor's book.

The Guardian Weekly 2004-11-26, page 25

The Power of Christ Compels YOU / NOT

2004-11-20T14:10:00.000-05:00

smclinbar22
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

The back bar at Clinton's- someone wrote on the mirror- The Power of Christ Compells* You- but the camera flash's light and mirror reflection added another word- NOT- which is actually the word YOU in reverse- bizarre!

* Mispelled- should read "compels"

Where have all the poppies grown...

2004-11-20T13:01:00.001-05:00

A while ago I commented on what should have been an election issue but was only briefly mentioned by Kerry during the debates- the burgeoning poppy (read heroin) trade in Afghanistan since the Americans "liberated" it fromTaliban control.
Below is an interesting article from the NY Times.

Afghan Poppy Growing Reaches Record Level, U.N. Says

November 19, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL

KABUL, Afghanistan, Nov. 18 - Poppy cultivation in
Afghanistan, the source of most of the opium and heroin on
Europe's streets, was up sharply this year, reaching the
highest levels in the country's history and in the world,
the United Nations announced on Thursday.

"In Afghanistan, drugs are now a clear and present danger,"
said Antonio Maria Costa, director of the United Nations
Office of Drugs and Crime, on the release of the 2004
Afghanistan opium survey. "The fear that Afghanistan might
degenerate into a narco-state is becoming a reality."

Afghan officials and foreign diplomats called the sharp
rise in cultivation and production a major failure for
President Hamid Karzai and the international effort to
counter narcotics.

More than 321,236 acres of land were planted with poppy in
2004, a 64 percent increase over last year, the United
Nations survey found. Poppy has spread to every province in
the country, it said.

It was only by chance that drought and disease ravaged much
of the crop and prevented the harvest from exceeding the
all-time high, the report said. The harvest in 2004 was
estimated at 4,200 metric tons, an increase of 17 percent
from last year.

The scale of poppy cultivation is particularly alarming,
because of the growing stranglehold wealthy traffickers and
drug lords hold over farmers, and their influence over the
economy and government, Afghan officials and foreign
experts said.

The income from production and trafficking of opium in 2004
was estimated at $2.8 billion, equivalent to about 60
percent of the country's legal gross domestic product, or
more than a third of the total economy, the report said.

If the drug problem persists, "the political and military
successes of the last three years will be lost," Mr. Costa
said in a preface to the report. There are indications that
Al Qaeda and the Taliban are profiting from the Afghan
trade, the report said.

Gen. Muhammad Daoud, the recently appointed deputy interior
minister in charge of countering narcotics, noted that "87
percent of the world's opium is produced by Afghanistan."

He added, "Unfortunately that is a very negative point for
our country, and we will not gain any benefit from it,
except a few smugglers in our country and neighboring
countries."

Indeed, most of the profits go to a very few traffickers,
warlords and militia leaders, rather than the impoverished
farmers, who are often heavily in debt to the drug lords,
the United Nations report said.

There are signs, too, of a move toward a greater vertical
integration of the business and the growing involvement of
international organized crime, according to a recent report
by Barnett Rubin of the Center on International Cooperation
at New York University.

Law enforcement teams destroyed 78 drug-processing
laboratories this year, General Daoud said. The existence
of laboratories and seizures of more heroin than opium in
neighboring countries are signs that heroin processing is
increasing inside Afghanistan, the United Nations said.

The surge in cultivation, however, is a sign of the general
impunity with which farmers can grow and harvest poppy,
despite decrees outlawing it by Mr. Karzai, interim leader
of Afghanistan for the last three years, foreign officials
in Afghanistan say.

Until now, the Afghan government has not made the narcotics
problem a priority. But since his election to a five-year
term last month, Mr. Karzai has made more determined
statements about combating the trade. In his acceptance
speech, he vowed to make the fight against narcotics his
first priority.

His administration has included known drug lords, and many
of his provincial governors, police and army chiefs are
widely rumored to profit from the trade, diplomats and
Afghan officials acknowledge. Commanders of the powerful
Northern Alliance, which with American help overthrew the
Taliban in 2001, continue to profit from the trade in
northeastern Badakhshan Province.

The minister of tribal affairs, Muhammad Arif Nurzai, and
the governor of southern Helmand Province, Sher Muhammad
Akhund, both staunch Karzai allies, are widely believed to
profit from the drug trade, although both have denied any
involvement and voiced support for the government's
anti-narcotics stand.

Diplomats say there are even reports linking Mr. Karzai's
brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, an influential figure in the
southern city of Kandahar, to the trade. A senior
presidential adviser denied the reports, saying it is
propaganda aimed against the president as well as his
brother.

The government is finally trying to get the word out that
poppy cultivation is illegal and that farmers will be
penalized. The council of senior clerics recently issued a
religious edict forbidding poppy growing.

But international assistance has been inadequate and ill
focused, Mr. Rubin says. "U.S. cooperation with warlords
and militia leaders tied to trafficking has sent the wrong
signal about the U.S. commitment to combating narcotics,"
he said.

Britain, which has been leading the counternarcotics
program here, says the job is a long-term one, and includes
building up the justice system so traffickers can be
imprisoned and creating alternatives for farmers.

But critics call the effort small and ineffective, and the
British themselves are quick to recognize that their
program is underfinanced and have welcomed new American
involvement. The United States said Wednesday that it would
give $780 million to combat narcotics in Afghanistan this
year.

American plans, which focus on eradication, possibly with
the use of defoliants, also have their critics, including
Mr. Rubin, who argues that effort should concentrate on
intercepting the narcotics at the borders and catching the
big smugglers. Agriculturalists warn that defoliants could
damage Afghanistan's already precarious agriculture.

Gen. Muhammad Zaher Agbar, head of a new unit set up within
the Interior Ministry to eradicate poppy, said the
experience this summer showed that the task was not as
simple as cutting down poppy fields.

"It is not the ordinary people that are the problem," said
Col. Miakhel Muhammad Mangal, commander of the force's
Third Battalion, who found mines laid in the fields against
his unit. "It is the groups behind them, the mafia."

Vanunu has been re-arrested by Israel!!

2004-11-11T16:46:00.000-05:00

Mordechai Vanunu heroically risked his life and freedom to reveal Israel's illegal atomic weapon's program in '86 to the world. He was subsequently kidnapped in Europe by Israel's secret police, tried for treason, convicted and imprisoned for 18 years , including 11 years in solitary. He was finally released in April of this year but under severe restrictions which confined him to Israel, did not permit any contact with media and restricted that with foreigners.

Now, suddenly, he has been re-arrested. 30 to 50 men with machine guns stormed the church where he was living in Jerusalem and seized him.

All this just after Arafat's suspicious death- what strange timing.

Go to Vanunu's support site and
nonviolence.org for further information and to help secure Vanunu's freedom. The man risked so much for ours.

News UPDATE!
Outcry as Vanunu put under house arrest / Duncan Campbell

Israel faced international protest last week after the nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu was rearrested seven months after his release from an 18-year sentence.
Thirty armed Israeli soldiers burst into the courtyard of St George's Cathedral, Jerusalem, last Thursday morning and took the 50-year-old from the hostel where he had been given sanctuary since leaving prison. He was taken before a magistrate and ordered to be kept under house arrest at the hostel for seven days.
"This is a disgrace to Israeli democracy," Mr Vanunu shouted to journalists as he was led into court. "They want to punish me again; they cannot punish me twice. I suffered 18 years in prison, I have the right to be free."
Last week, in an interview with the Guardian in Jerusalem, Mr Vanunu said he had no secrets to disclose and was talking to foreigners, in defiance of government restrictions, so that the authorities would see he had nothing to hide. He is also forbidden from leaving the country for at least a further five months.
"I don't know what is the best way to overcome this restriction," he said during an interview in the churchyard. "Is it by silence or is it by speaking? I decided it was by speaking. If I was silent they might keep me longer. If I speak, they can see I have no more secrets, all I am saying is expressing my views, and also I am teaching them that they cannot silence anyone . . . If they take away your right to speak, you are not a human being any more."
Witnesses said soldiers wielding machine guns took papers and a computer from the small room where Mr Vanunu has lived since being freed from Ashkelon prison in April. "[Vanunu] is suspected of passing classified information to unauthorised parties," said a police spokesman. "He is also suspected of violating the terms of his release."
A Vanunu defence campaign spokesman said: "The attempt to silence Mordechai Vanunu on this of all days is an attempt to bury Israel's secret nuclear arsenal together with Yasser Arafat."

The Guardian Weekly 2004-11-19, page 5
Editorial / Mordechai Vanunu / Back behind bars

On April 21 this year Mordechai Vanunu was released from jail after serving an 18-year sentence for treason, two-thirds of it in solitary confinement. Just 203 days later, he was back behind bars. Last week, while the world's attention was focused on the death of Yasser Arafat and its ramifications, police entered the church in Jerusalem where the man who blew the whistle on Israel's nuclear weapons programme has lived since April, and arrested Mr Vanunu for violating the terms of his release.
Given the stifling nature of those terms - stripped of his passport, needing official permission to have contact with foreigners, forbidden from holding media interviews, and banned from discussing Israel's nuclear secrets- it will never be difficult for Israel's government to find grounds for re-arresting him. Last week's move may have been a response to Mr Vanunu's determination not to be bound, recently conducting a series of interviews.
Mr Vanunu remains a hate figure for many Israelis in the same way that America's cold warriors reviled the alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss as a traitor and symbol of the threats their country faced in the 50s and 60s. Like Hiss, it seems that Mr Vanunu will be pursued regardless of the price that he has paid. Unlike Hiss, there is depressingly little in the way of public unease about Mr Vanunu's treatment. It seems obvious that his knowledge of Israel's nuclear programme, gained during his work as a technician, is long since obsolete. By keeping him imprisoned, Israel merely makes itself appear cruel and vindictive. Since so many Israelis see him as a traitor, the answer is simple: let him leave the country if he wishes.

The Guardian Weekly 2004-11-19, page 13

The Bush Win- a sad day for the world

2004-11-03T23:39:00.000-05:00

I can't say that I didn't predict it, but for a small moment yesterday I allowed myself to contemplate a Kerry win. This is so sad... I hope that my other predictions for the next 4 years aren't realized as well. I empathize with all the emotionally crushed Democrats who voted for Kerry and feel as I do. I will try to keep your dissent in mind when I condemn the evils your government has committed and will no doubt continue to amass in the future ... and I'll try to remember that Bush's actions don't reflect those of all Americans. It is ironic that this election was won on alleged moral issues - evangelists are seriously misguided to view Bush as a man who reflects Christian ideals. I am not a practising Christian but I do know that compassion, tolerance, love for one's neighbour and a rejection of violence are an integral part of their beliefs. This is not reflected in the actions of the present administration, and avarice and greed may also be included among their collective sins.
It was quite clear that Bush was courting the evangelical vote - why Kerry's strategists didn't recognize this for the threat it evidently was and counter it with an even greater push for the youth and minority vote is hard to comprehend. They didn't adequately present Kerry's superior political record . In the end, Kerry performed better than I expected, but needed more guidance in terms of how he comported himself. (ie. looking directly at TV audience during debates, correctly holding the mike, not blocking his wife from view during interviews - though probably a media strategy)
Well, it's over.

Here's an article to help us understand this fiasco a little, though it doesn't explain away the substantial majority who voted for him. Anyone who has ever taken a Greyhound bus across the States and witnessed the level of intelligence, education and general comprehension of world affairs reflected in the average middle American, will completely understand how this could have occurred.

Keep in mind that Gore won the popular vote last time, but still lost. (Which doesn't really offer any comfort- sorry!)

Poll officials dismayed by extent of dirty tricks and double-dirty tricks
by Jo Becker and David Finkel

As if things weren't complicated enough, here comes the dirt.
Registered voters who have been somehow unregistered. Democrats who suddenly find they've been
re-registered as Republicans. A flier announcing that election day has been extended to Wednesday.
Dirty tricks are a staple of campaigns, but election officials say this year's could achieve new highs in
numbers and new lows in scope, especially in key states such as Florida and Ohio, where
special-interest groups poured in to influence the close race.
"In my 16 years as an election administrator, I've never seen anything like this," said Ion Sancho,
supervisor of elections in Leon County, Florida. "I see it as an expression of a political culture that has
evolved in the United States of win at any cost. It's not partisan, but it's 'Just lie, cheat and steal, and
ethics be damned'."
The problem in Leon County: students at Florida State and Florida A&M universities, some of whom
signed petitions to legalise medical marijuana or impose stiffer penalties for child molesters,
unknowingly had their party registration switched to Republican and their addresses changed.
Officials say students at the University of Florida in Alachua County have made similar complaints
and that about 4,000 potential voters in all have been affected. Local papers traced some of the
problems to a group hired by the Florida Republican party, which has denounced the shenanigans.
Switching voters' party affiliations does not affect their ability to vote, but changing addresses does,
because when voters show up at their proper polling places, they won't be registered there.
The college scam has also made an appearance in Pennsylvania, along with a separate scam in
Allegheny County, where officials received a flurry of phone calls about fliers handed out at a
Pittsburgh-area mall and mailed to an unknown number of homes. The flier, distributed on bogus but
official-looking stationery, told voters that "due to immense voter turnout expected on Tuesday", the
election had been extended. Republicans should vote on Tuesday and Democrats on Wednesday. A
criminal investigation has been launched.
Authorities in several states are investigating claims, by former employees of groups paid by both the
Republican party and Democratic-leaning interest groups, that they destroyed or did not turn in new
registrations by voters of the opposite party.
Clouding investigations are claims and counter-claims not only about tricks, but double-dirty tricks. In
Wisconsin a flier is circulating in Milwaukee's black neighbourhoods that purports to be from the
"Milwaukee Black Voters League". "If you've already voted in any election this year, you can't vote in the
presidential election," the flier reads. "If you violate any of these laws, you can get 10 years in prison
and your children will get taken away from you."
Chris Lato, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Republican party, called the fliers "appalling", but
wondered whether Democratic interest groups might be to blame. He said that fliers falsely claiming
to represent the Republicans might be an attempt to bolster turnout among black voters.
In Lake County, Ohio, some voters received a memo on bogus Board of Elections letterhead
informing voters who registered through drives by the Democratic party and the National Association
for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) that they could not vote. Election officials referred
the matter to the sheriff.
Lawyers for the Ohio Republican party, who have charged Democratic groups with registering
fictitious characters such as Mary Poppins, said they condemned election fraud and misinformation
campaigns of any kind. But some Lake County Republicans have adopted the double-dirty-trick
explanation, saying Democrats are out to make them look bad.
Whatever the motive, officials say voters are genuinely confused by the misinformation. In the
Cleveland area election officials said they received a spate of complaints after voters began receiving
phone calls incorrectly informing them their polling place had changed. Unknown volunteers began
showing up at voters' doors, illegally offering to collect and deliver completed absentee ballots to the
election office.
In South Carolina Charleston County officials warned voters to ignore a fake letter that purports to be
from the NAACP and threatens voters who have outstanding parking tickets or have failed to pay child
support with arrest.
The Rev Joe Darby, a South Carolina NAACP official, said: "This isn't new ? it's the South Carolina
politics of ignorance . . . But I don't think people will be fooled."

Washington Post

The Guardian Weekly 2004-11-05, page 6

Last Chance to oust BUSH- VOTE KERRY!!!!

2004-11-01T14:28:00.000-05:00

TO all of you Americans out there- please, VOTE FOR KERRY!!!!
There may not be a huge discernable difference between the macho posturing and sabre-rattlings of Kerry and Bush, but they are, in fact, immense if one considers the parties the two men represent. The Democrats have a better track record when it comes to the things which should count for you- economic security, health care, and striving towards a peaceful coexistence with other nations in this world. Bush is a weak-willed fool, in the pocket of despots whose only interests are self-serving. He used you and 911 to advance (key word) policies of world domination and impose greater restrictions on free speech at home. It will take a while to clean up the mess Bush created, so remember to have patience with Kerry as he attempts to re-balance the budget and straighten out the international disasters Bush created in Iraq and Afghanistan. GIVE KERRY THE CHANCE!! Otherwise the insanity will just spread- and next time the list will include Iran, Syria, possibly Cuba- who knows what's next on the Bush vendetta list.

Hallowe'en 04

2004-10-31T14:00:00.000-05:00

hallowe'en lin4
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Happy Hallowe'en to all!

FOUFOUNES EXHIBIT NEWS- I just got back from Montreal- my upcoming punk/alternative retrospective photo exhibit at the Foufounes is now scheduled for APRIL 2005- on all month. Documentary photos will date from 1977 to now, taken in Montreal, Toronto, Europe and NYC, of bands as well as the people who created the scene. A final day auction of the images will be held, with part of the proceeds going to Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Mind Games- reading Iraq

2004-10-07T02:50:00.000-04:00

Today's BBC news- headline, opening statements... and conflicting side reports. Three main points.

1. "Tony Blair has reacted defiantly to the official confirmation Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. "

2. "After searching for over a year, the Iraq Survey Group found no evidence he had had chemical, biological or nuclear weapons at the time Iraq was invaded. "

3. "But it found evidence Saddam hoped to revive a WMD programme after sanctions. "

Let's analyze and approach the three points backwards- as befitting when dealing with statements emanating from No.10 and the White House gang.

First, and last, #3> If one peruses the BBC's "Key findings in the report" -same day, same news site, observe the marked difference in conviction, tone and language.

* "There is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD after sanctions were lifted... "

Is this allegation now at all credible? No further details regarding said "evidence" are being offered, though perhaps "fragmentary and circumstantial" says it all. I suspect the vast majority of BBC's readers are not expected to read further on the subject, which opens a window of opportunity for politicians such as Bush, Blair and their henchmen /women to interpret and synthesize it for them.

For example, SIMONS SAYS... Foreign Office Minister Baroness Simons, who presumably read the same report, nevertheless " told BBC2's News night the report showed Saddam had been "very close" to breaking sanctions. It was his overriding aim - that was what he was about."

It reminds me of something Bush announced during the Kerry debate, that they had both seen the same "intelligence" regarding Iraq. Why hadn't they reached the same conclusion? 'Intelligence' is as intelligence does.

Saddam himself is allegedly the direct source of some of the statements regarding his WMD wish list. How were they acquired? Again, from the BBC - "The report bases many of its findings on US "debriefing" sessions with Saddam Hussein and former regime officials. " American Interrogation techniques in Iraq have included rolling around an Iraqi general in a sleeping bag and subsequently asphyxiating him. Other methods include forcing prisoners to simulate homosexual acts and actual rape has been reported. It leads one to question the validity of any of their captives' post-interrogation statements.

On to#2> Saddam- Did he or didn't he? It appears that all of the WMD had disappeared long ago from Iraq. We could presume that Saddam actually complied with the UN's demands and destroyed (or sold) them. Who knows. Considering the No-Fly zone, daily bombings and crippling sanctions Iraq was enduring at the time, is that a likely scenario? It's probably easier now that the border has been left virtually unguarded. Recent reports criticizing countries which opposed the West's sanctions are omitting their original reason - concern for the millions of innocent Iraqi children who died as a direct result of the sanctions, which left hospitals under-equipped and destroyed Iraq's infrastructure, causing wide-spread health problems and deprivation.

BBC- "But the report also says there are few indications of a concrete programme to renew Iraq's WMD capabilities behind the threat it projected. "While he may have said he had the desire, no source has claimed that Saddam had an explicit strategy or programme for the development or use of WMD during the sanctions period," says the report. His overriding ambition was to see sanctions dismantled, says the report."

Considering the deviating effect sanctions were having on Iraq's economy and people, in effect plunging a modern society back into the dark ages, Saddam's desire to see them lifted is hardly surprising or unreasonable. He also allegedly felt that Iraq's possession of WMD had convinced the US to tread more warily during the first Iraq war, possibly a reason for their departure before they had succeeded in removing him from power. This too is not an unreasonable strategy- one evidently echoed in North Korea, China and Israel. Speaking of the latter, as long as the West turns a blind eye to Israel's nuclear arsenal, they will not have a credible voice with which to convince Arab states not to embark upon the same path.

"Key findings" again stated in its elusive language-

* "The ISG has not found evidence that Saddam possessed WMD stocks in 2003, but [there is] the possibility that some weapons existed in Iraq, although not of a militarily significant capability."

When? 10 years ago? Possibly longer? What? (Exactly are they referring to?) I remember reading a similar report, when weapons of mass destruction Blair had used to state his case for war were revealed to be of the limited range sort sold at UK gun fairs. Are these the same ones?

* "The problem of discerning WMD in Iraq is highlighted by the pre-war misapprehensions of weapons which were not there. Distant technical analysts mistakenly identified evidence and drew incorrect conclusions."

Hans Blix attempted to correct the misconceptions and was forced into "early retirement’ from his job as chief weapons inspector. He had this to say-

"Had we had a few months more we would have been able to tell the CIA and others that there were no weapons of mass destruction ... former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix told the same BBC programme sanctions had "contained" Saddam. "They did destroy all the biological and chemical weapons and the nuclear weapons sector was also all cleared up. "

Which brings us to #1 and a "defiant" Blair, flanked by his equally defiant buddy Bush. Both steadfast in their convictions. Both with the blood of thousands on their hands, but unwilling to face up to their failings, either as democratic or moral leaders. Both faulty interpreters of "intelligence" - both wrong. And both up for re-election.

Wrong again.

100,000 Iraqi civilians have died since invasion, survey finds

Sarah Boseley

About 100,000 Iraqi civilians ? half of them women and children ? have died since the invasion, mostly as a result of coalition airstrikes, according to the first reliable study of the death toll from Iraqi and US public health experts.
The study, carried out in 33 randomly chosen neighbourhoods representative of the entire population, shows that violence is now the leading cause of death in Iraq. Before the invasion, most people died of heart attacks, strokes and chronic illness. The risk of a violent death is now 58 times higher than it was before the invasion.
Last week the Lancet medical journal fast-tracked the survey to publication on its website after rapid but extensive peer review and editing, because, said its editor, Richard Horton, "of its importance to the evolving security situation in Iraq". The findings raised important questions for the governments of the United States and Britain, who, Dr Horton said in a commentary, "must have considered the likely effects of their actions for civilians".
The research was led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. Five of the six Iraqi interviewers who went to the 988 households in the survey were doctors, and all those involved in the research on the ground, says the paper, risked their lives to collect the data. Householders were asked about births and deaths in the 14.6 months before the March 2003 invasion, and births and deaths in the 17.8 months afterwards. When death certificates were not available, there were good reasons, say the authors. "We think it is unlikely that deaths were falsely recorded. Interviewers also believed that in the Iraqi culture it was unlikely for respondents to fabricate deaths," they write.
They found an increase in infant mortality from 29 to 57 deaths per 1,000 live births, which is consistent with the pattern in wars, where women are unable or unwilling to get to hospital to deliver babies, they say. The other increase was in violent death, which was reported in 15 of the 33 clusters studied and which was mostly attributed to airstrikes.
"Despite widespread Iraqi casualties, household interview data do not show evidence of widespread wrongdoing on the part of individual soldiers on the ground," write the researchers. Only three of the 61 deaths involved coalition soldiers killing Iraqis with small-arms fire. In one case a 56-year-old man might have been a combatant, they say; in the second a 72-year-old man was shot at a checkpoint; and in the third an armed guard was mistaken for a combatant and shot during a skirmish. In the second two cases, US soldiers apologised to the families.
"The remaining 58 killings (all attributed to US forces by interviewees) were caused by helicopter gunships, rockets or other forms of aerial weaponry," they write.
The biggest death toll recorded by the researchers was in Falluja, which registered two-thirds of the violent deaths they found. "In Falluja, 23 households of 52 visited were either temporarily or permanently abandoned. Neighbours interviewed described widespread death in most of the abandoned houses but could not give adequate details for inclusion in the survey," they write.
The British government said it had "concerns and difficulties" about the survey's methodology, adding: "The findings were based on extrapolation and treating Iraq as if it were all the same in terms of the level of the conflict. This is not the case."
SBlt A soldier of Britain's Black Watch regiment sent north from Basra to a base southwest of Baghdad, near insurgent territory, was killed last week when a Warrior armoured fighting vehicle overturned. The accident, and several roadside bombs, delayed the convoy's journey.

The Guardian Weekly 2004-11-05, page 4

Upcoming Hellmarys and DOA gigz

2004-10-05T03:17:00.000-04:00

Hellmarys gig poster
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Hellmarys are playing in Toronto this Saturday at the Reverb. Also- DOA with BOFG at Club Rockit (also Toronto) on Friday!
http://www.hellmarys.com

Lost father on pole

2004-10-03T17:00:00.000-04:00

Lost father on pole
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

King & Spadina, Toronto
Next to incredibly deep construction pit. Passageway and pole with flyers. Daughter looking for her lost father on flyer placed lowest to the ground on pole. Seems to be aimed at a homeless man... to contact daughter staying at an upscale hotel .

Dini and Screaming Sam, exposed!

2004-09-25T23:37:00.000-04:00

Dini and Screaming Sam, exposed!
Originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Screaming Sam- Toronto's beloved punk icon, musician and outstanding artist!! With Dini the barmaid, at the Tap , Sept.24 04

Heads up in Iraq- 1,000 (make that 100,000) and counting

2004-09-23T15:19:00.000-04:00

I sent another (yet to be unpublished) letter to the BBC, who asked their latest inane question, designed to alleviate the frustrations of their muzzled readership-
"Thursday, 23 September, 2004,
John Kerry's Iraq speech: Your reaction-
John Kerry has made an outspoken attack on President Bush over the conflict in Iraq.
In a speech at New York University, the US Democrat presidential candidate accused Mr Bush of "colossal failures of judgement".
He said that the president's decision to go to war against Iraq had distracted from a greater threat to the US - more terrorist attacks - and created a crisis which could lead to an unending war.
The Bush campaign has accused Mr Kerry of inconsistency on Iraq and said a change in the middle of the war was not what the nation needed.

What do you think of John Kerry's speech? Was it the right thing to do or an act of desperation?"

Are they joking? The BBC also published a companion piece by one Tom Carver, who entitled his commentary, "Campaign column: Shifting focus - again". and , "John Kerry has flipped again." Why? Because Kerry had suggested the focus of his campaign would be domestic issues, then deigned to comment on Iraq??? Does this war not impact domestic issues, such as unemployment (which provides the fodder for war- 1,000 and counting- up) , job creation (hey, war's a big industry, as is oil for that matter), outsourcing (well, America outsources too- those jobs in Iraq aren't going to Iraqis. But who knows how many Americans are "working" in Iraq- there are no head counts, at least upon arrival.)
Sincere apologies and sympathy to the families of the deceased. But speaking of horror and head counts- ever wonder how many Iraqis have died??

Kerry should say MORE rather than less on Iraq, and why not include Afghanistan, where "post-liberation' has resulted in a surge of heroin production. Or is America no longer in the "war on drugs" but the grow op business?

I still believe, as I did months ago, that a clearly defined opposition was needed to take on Bush- NOT a candidate who had voted YES on the Iraq war issue. The Democrats' mistake was allowing the media to railroad Dean into withdrawing. It served the purpose- to counter Bush with a man who comes across as inconsistent and ineffectual.

America faces ever growing threats of terrorism precisely because of its disastrous policies and arrogance towards the rest of the world. This has been exacerbated under Bush's "leadership", not diminished, and the longer Bush remains in power, the more nourishment he provides the terrorists. Kerry needs to make it clear to the American people that he's better prepared to attack the roots, not just the growth. But then the US would have to acknowledge that they are not only victims, but primarily aggressors. American voters would rather hide their heads beneath, say, a bush, than admit culpability. It is the Republicans' one great advantage in this coming election.

Also in the news- a lengthy report on ABC documenting the entirety of Allawi's campaign speech for President Bush. In case you're wondering , who is Allawi- is he the warm, fuzzy character on that new show, "Puppets Who Kill?" Well, close. He is the interim Prime Minister of Iraq, undemocratically placed in position by Bush's administration. A puppet government in every sense of the term. A position which warrants an address to congress and the American people at large, about how great it is to be finally free and what a great job Bush is doing to secure it. Wow. So there's a bit of trouble. Hey. Allawi didn't write the speech- pretty obvious, considering how it pandered so exquisitely to Bush's agenda and was peppered with his mentor's now familiar catch phrases.

What I wonder is why Allawi, a minor player of no consequence or authority, is given so much air time on a major television station like ABC while Kerry is reduced to the occasional sound bite??

100,000 Iraqi civilians have died since invasion, survey finds

Sarah Boseley

About 100,000 Iraqi civilians ? half of them women and children ? have died since the invasion, mostly as a result of coalition airstrikes, according to the first reliable study of the death toll from Iraqi and US public health experts.
The study, carried out in 33 randomly chosen neighbourhoods representative of the entire population, shows that violence is now the leading cause of death in Iraq. Before the invasion, most people died of heart attacks, strokes and chronic illness. The risk of a violent death is now 58 times higher than it was before the invasion.
Last week the Lancet medical journal fast-tracked the survey to publication on its website after rapid but extensive peer review and editing, because, said its editor, Richard Horton, "of its importance to the evolving security situation in Iraq". The findings raised important questions for the governments of the United States and Britain, who, Dr Horton said in a commentary, "must have considered the likely effects of their actions for civilians".
The research was led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. Five of the six Iraqi interviewers who went to the 988 households in the survey were doctors, and all those involved in the research on the ground, says the paper, risked their lives to collect the data. Householders were asked about births and deaths in the 14.6 months before the March 2003 invasion, and births and deaths in the 17.8 months afterwards. When death certificates were not available, there were good reasons, say the authors. "We think it is unlikely that deaths were falsely recorded. Interviewers also believed that in the Iraqi culture it was unlikely for respondents to fabricate deaths," they write.
They found an increase in infant mortality from 29 to 57 deaths per 1,000 live births, which is consistent with the pattern in wars, where women are unable or unwilling to get to hospital to deliver babies, they say. The other increase was in violent death, which was reported in 15 of the 33 clusters studied and which was mostly attributed to airstrikes.
"Despite widespread Iraqi casualties, household interview data do not show evidence of widespread wrongdoing on the part of individual soldiers on the ground," write the researchers. Only three of the 61 deaths involved coalition soldiers killing Iraqis with small-arms fire. In one case a 56-year-old man might have been a combatant, they say; in the second a 72-year-old man was shot at a checkpoint; and in the third an armed guard was mistaken for a combatant and shot during a skirmish. In the second two cases, US soldiers apologised to the families.
"The remaining 58 killings (all attributed to US forces by interviewees) were caused by helicopter gunships, rockets or other forms of aerial weaponry," they write.
The biggest death toll recorded by the researchers was in Falluja, which registered two-thirds of the violent deaths they found. "In Falluja, 23 households of 52 visited were either temporarily or permanently abandoned. Neighbours interviewed described widespread death in most of the abandoned houses but could not give adequate details for inclusion in the survey," they write.
The British government said it had "concerns and difficulties" about the survey's methodology, adding: "The findings were based on extrapolation and treating Iraq as if it were all the same in terms of the level of the conflict. This is not the case."
SBlt A soldier of Britain's Black Watch regiment sent north from Basra to a base southwest of Baghdad, near insurgent territory, was killed last week when a Warrior armoured fighting vehicle overturned. The accident, and several roadside bombs, delayed the convoy's journey.

The Guardian Weekly 2004-11-05, page 4

Labour day- Custom bikes and spare tires

2004-09-06T16:00:00.000-04:00

This guy was cool! On the bridge with his custom bike and shades, watching the air show from the bridge- though I think he was really there to be observed himself!

Bike Rider,

< originally uploaded by DawnOne.

If I can't shoot unimpeded, my only subjects will have to be photographer guys like this, who can hardly refuse, can he. They represent the ultimate in unfortunate sterotypes (how big IS your lens?). But the "porn star" undies are really pushing it! He didn't refuse but finally withdrew out of range of my (little) lens and unrestrained cackles of glee.

Porn Star??,
originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Is documentary photography doomed??

2004-09-04T20:35:00.000-04:00

air show 1,
originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Another day of dive bombing jets at the air show. If it was only crazy stunts in the sky and nothing more. The Sat. Toronto Star published a plane spotting guide to help us identify the aircraft. Particularly disturbing were the descriptions of their past missions- "strikes in the no-fly zones in Iraq", "Operation Desert Fox", "air cover for strike on Libya in 1986" (which, as I recall, killed Qadhafi's adopted baby daughter). Good old-fashioned family entertainment. A reminder that the evil empire of today will become your ally in the war on terror tomorrow, with renewed access to oil wells throw into the bargain. Today Libya, tomorrow Iraq, again, as we shouldn't forget that Saddam was once America's special friend Trusted today, trussed tomorrow. Only the Snowbirds, the sole Canadians in the show, were described as an aerial acrobatic team and not cited for any combat roles. As I heard the planes, I thought- that we were all sharing sounds which had been previously heard in other parts of the world, as the bombs hit . Or in most cases, were not heard at all as the plane by this point is long gone. The boom follows the sound of exploding buildings, screams and flying body parts. Only the casualties who survive and grieving family members are privy to it. I photographed people on the beach with their families, skipping stones on the lake in between sorties. Looking up to watch when the planes buzzed them- or already bored and ignoring them. The scene reminded me of the movie, On the Beach. The Apocalypse. I wondered if my mother and her brothers and sisters had in any way enjoyed the spectacle when bombs had targeted them during the Second World War. She loves the air show now. So many people on the lakeshore from such diverse backgrounds- many of them recent emigrants, escaping deadly wars still fresh in their minds. How did they feel, watching, listening to this. Did they find it entertaining?

air show 2,
originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Background note- The other day the police chief of this paranoid town personally tackled and arrested a male photographer in his 40s as he photographed children at the CNE- an annual fun fair. I don’t know the full circumstances or even the eventual outcome, but according to the local paper, one of the alleged signs that the photographer was "suspect " involved a camera masked with tape in order to disguise it! I rather took this as a clue that he was possibly a professional photographer, or enlightened amateur. You see, this was quite common in the days of SLRs (35mm cameras which use film) and I've even seen the practice continued today on shiny digital cameras. Most SLRs were silver metal and black bodied cameras, while considered more "professional", were also pricier. Many people resorted to taping the shiny metal in flat black tape- to avoid the glare of reflections and, yes, to avoid attracting a subject’s attention. Back then it was perfectly acceptable to engage in street photography. As for the subject, to emerge in public meant becoming fair game for anyone's lens. End of story.
Why did Toronto's police chief earn accolades for assaulting an unarmed photographer with no apparent motive, unless it's being withheld from the press? Toronto as a city is particularly worried for its children in wake of a tragic kidnapping and murder last year, coupled with a media frenzy tying in kiddie porn on the internet. There are valid concerns, though they hardly suggest Toronto is a besieged city. Our travails pale in comparison and scale to what thousands of women, men and children are suffering in Sudan at this moment. Mass rapes, murder, mutilations, HIV exposure, torture, exodus, starvation and disease. Not to mention that most victims of kiddie porn and child prostitution reside in abjectly poor third world countries with no recourse to justice. And many of their visiting "uncles" are on sex tours originating in the " First World". But hey, let's get back to pretending that we're the centre of the universe.

Boy with no body!,
originally uploaded by DawnOne.

CNE photos

I have a problem with all the restrictions being placed upon documentary photographers as a result of the hysteria. Last month one of my favourite photographers, Cartier Bresson, died. He was the master of documenting people - minute gestures and expressions captured unobserved by his lens became symbolic of a humanity we all share. He coined the term, the "decisive moment", and we photo students were his avid disciples. Engaged in a discipline which entailed that one observe the subject patiently and wait for the right moment, when the image captured becomes a philosophical truth unto itself. When I heard of the CNE photographer's arrest, I thought, hmmm... I was at the CNE that day, doing what appears to been a similar thing (unless he was peeking under flying skirts on upside down rides, which, come to think, I've probably photographed too.) He could just as easily have been me- or, being female, am I more protected by virtue of my less threatening gender?

Pick a Duck- CNE,
originally uploaded by DawnOne.

Back to the air show and merry go round. I was practicing shooting moving objects- in this case, a child in a car ride with my relatively new digital camera. Nothing successful. Then I spotted a punk with green hair who was working the twirling strawberry ride. I used to be a punk and thought that this was a new take on it- quite amusing. I asked to photograph him and we were engaged in making portraits when suddenly an aggressive yuppy father confronted me. "You were photographing my daughter- do you want a release or something? Shouldn’t you ask my permission? How would you like it…" Etc. Actually, I hadn’t been concentrating at all on photographing his daughter, but was rather trying to demonstrate that the punk was actually working with the rides and not merely standing beside them. Normally I offer to email photos to my subjects, to engage them in the process and share, but was affronted by his hostile manner. I then noticed that the little boy with him was the same one who had been riding on the miniature cars I had shot. Perhaps the father thought I was following them, however he had certainly heard my discussions with the punk ride attendant about making portraits of him. I tried to explain to the father that I have a son too, and no- would not be upset if someone had photographed him. As a photographer, I understand this. And that attitudes like his were putting at risk the kind of documentation we will be left with of this epoch. If we are not permitted to ocassionally engage in street photography unobserved, if every image must be previously negotiated and constructed, then the resultant photos will be static, superficial – there will be no more Cartier Bressons, and no wonderfully candid images to illustrate to future generations how we really existed in this time.

I would never destroy a negative for anyone, but digital photography is a different beast. I decided after he left to erase the photos of his son- they had not been successful in any case and I wanted more to remove evidence of his tirade. I understand a desire to protect one's children, but where does one draw the line. If the day arrives that I cannot photograph unimpeded, I shall stop and deny the world any further contributions as an artist. It is hard to have one's efforts continually undervalued.

This daily thing isn't working...

2004-09-04T01:53:00.000-04:00

The photo ( an animated gif...) is from September 2nd- My mother's 79th birthday, btw!

After dinner we watched Bush address the Republican convention, and promised each other to reserve our catcalls and commentary for AFTER the speech. We didn't succeed.

It's unfortunate that Kerry was chosen over Dean as the Democratic candidate. Rather than representing an alternative, he's essentially cast as the lesser of two evils. Of course the Republicans were going to use it against Kerry that he voted for the Iraq war, and many other Bush initiatives. He isn't credible. Neither is Bush, except as a consistent rather than a vacillating bastard. Unfortunately the average idiot is going to believe the anti-Kerry ads, focus on his "suspect" Vietnam war record (which is more heroic by any account than Bush's own) and somehow absorb the Republican's continual boast of having created jobs, while missing the fact that a far greater number, almost 1 MILLION JOBS, have been LOST. Bush spoke at length of plans to ensure greater access to health care, yet his last term saw the number of Americans WITHOUT medical insurance INCREASE by 13 percent (5.1 million more Americans joined the ranks of the uninsured, bringing ther total to 44.96 million as of 2003).
My mother remarked that in a country which contains so many brilliant individuals, how does it arrive that two such ineffectual characters are competing to lead it.
Read my lips, or rather, watch Bush's lips as his beady eyes shift left to right, from one teleprompter to the other. As a puppet he is learning to pace himself better and read his given lines with increasing confidence. His performance was near perfect for the image he and his handlers wish to achieve. Strong, confident, caring, but none too smart that you couldn't barbecue some steaks with the guy and feel that he had better things to do or people to do it with. But who are you fooling- of course he does! His people play golf in exclusive country clubs. They own oil companies and profit from the disasters they create. Their kids are undoubtedly not in the reserves, being called up for duty. They won't be the ones brought back in body bags - that honour is for the fools who will vote Bush in for a second term. And I have no doubt that they will.

bushtv17,
originally uploaded by DawnOne.

The following morning I woke up, appropriately, to the sound of military jets dive-bombing my building (minus the explosives). Huge sonic booms. I thought it was the Snowbirds practicing for the weekend airshow at the "Ex" (Canadian National Exhibition) but I've been informed that these are the American bomber jets. Canadians don't possess anything close to such technology... good for us!

Elvis (iz) BUST at "Honest Ed's"

2004-09-01T13:07:00.000-04:00

Why Elvis? Is this an appropriate image upon which to begin a blog? Probably not. I always get a secret thrill shooting in "Honest Ed's" (an überkitsch dep't. store in Toronto) as for some inexplicable reason, it's forbidden. The place is full of surveillance cameras and you half expect a wiry old man in striped uniform to leap out unexpectedly and haul you off for disobeying their signs. I must remember to photograph their cameras for my new group on Flickr- "selbstportraits mit überwachungskameras" (translation from German - "self portraits with surveillance cameras"). It's a brilliant idea! A little group, mostly based in Berlin, I believe. Perhaps it will bring meaning and purpose to my life- a worthwhile distraction while I teeter on the brink beween inertia and an overactive mind.

I shot this particular Elvis for my friend Mick in London, a rockabilly guy who's wanted this statue forever and which I will some day bring him. The pedestal beside Elvis' contains smashed fragments of another bust.

More Elvis related photos can be seen at ELVIS KARAOKE- which is a hilarious event in Toronto that takes place each year on Elvis' birth and deathday.
The small but vital Montreal rockabilly scene can be often found at The Wheel Club . Not only is it an authentic anachronism, one can hardly believe that it exists in a sophisticated city such as Montreal. It reminds me of a bar I once worked at in the Yukon- the "Pit" in Dawson City.