Archive for January 29th, 2008
Système financier : le prochain domino est encore plus gros
Système financier : le prochain domino est encore plus gros
29 janvier 2008
Par Paul Gallagher, EIR
Une bulle de quelque 50 000 milliards de dollars de contrats financiers dérivés [cf. note 1] menace d’éclater incessamment, provoquant un déferlement de faillites et d’insolvabilités bancaires. Raison de plus pour passer de toute urgence à une réorganisation du système.
Les produits dérivés en cause sont des contrats assurant le risque de crédit (credit default swaps – CDS). Pratiquement inexistants il y a cinq ans encore, leur « valeur » nominale a triplé en trois ans, selon des sources new-yorkaises bien informées qui parlent du « prochain domino à tomber », estimant que le choc sera « beaucoup plus sévère » que l’éclatement de la « bulle hypothécaire américaine », qui ne représentait « que » 20 000 milliards.
Les CDS s’échangent uniquement de gré à gré, c’est-à-dire qu’il n’existe aucun marché organisé qui puisse assumer une quelconque responsabilité pour cette énorme masse de contrats financiers, contrairement aux actions et obligations. Comme les fameux SIV (véhicules d’investissement structurés), les contrats bilatéraux assurant le risque sont des opérations spéculatives hautement rentables qui n’apparaissent jamais dans les bilans des banques et hedge funds qui en tirent profit – jusqu’au moment où ils s’évaporent, provoquant des centaines de milliards de dollars de pertes.
Dans le cas des CDS, il faudrait plutôt parler de dizaines de milliers de milliards, selon ces sources. Le but officiel de ces contrats est d’assurer les acheteurs d’obligations d’entreprise contre la défaillance de ces obligations. Or le montant des dettes d’entreprise effectivement « assurées » par ces 50 000 milliards de dollars de CDS ne s’élève qu’à… 5000 milliards. C’est incontestablement la plus haute montagne de dette par effet de levier !
En réalité, les swaps sur défaillance sont des moyens de spéculer massivement sur la capacité d’une société à rembourser ses dettes et obligations et sur lesquels des dizaines de banques, fonds spéculatifs et autres sociétés financières parient des sommes considérables. En outre, d’autres hedge funds achètent des swaps sur défaillance pour parier si, en cas de défaillance, les sociétés qui assurent les obligations ne feront pas défaut elles-mêmes !
Les hedge funds et les banques ayant vendu une « assurance » aux sociétés détentrices d’obligations d’entreprise encaissent des primes de la part de ces sociétés. Ensuite, ces primes sont titrisées – c’est-à-dire vendues comme titres financiers à d’autres banques et hedge funds, de la même manière que les crédits hypothécaires subprime avaient été regroupés dans toutes sortes de titres qui ont récemment perdu toute valeur.
Il existe peu d’instruments financiers qui aient permis, autant que les CDS, aux fonds spéculatifs de faire plus de profits en si peu de temps, avec un tel effet de levier et si peu de capital réel. Tant que sir Alan Greenspan (directeur de la Réserve fédérale jusqu’en 2006) faisait en sorte que les taux d’intérêt à court terme restent très faibles sur le plan international, et que le « yen carry trade » [cf. note 2] fournissaient aux spéculateurs des centaines de milliards de dollars d’« argent gratuit », il n’y avait quasiment pas de défaillances sur les obligations d’entreprise, même sur les obligations poubelles.
La vente d’une assurance contre défaillance, à l’aide de swaps, est alors devenue un jeu extrêmement rentable, presque entièrement financé par de l’argent emprunté avec un fort effet de levier. On comptait dix vendeurs d’assurance d’obligations pour chaque détenteur d’obligations susceptible de l’acheter. Par conséquent, les vendeurs se sont vendus les swaps entre eux, ajoutant de nouveaux paris de produits dérivés à la même obligation de référence sous-jacente. Et ils ont vendu les primes d’assurance sous forme de titres financiers, accumulant encore des dettes sur ces produits.
Sur les marchés et dans la presse financière, une peur bleue se répand face à la perspective d’une faillite imminente des grandes sociétés d’assurance d’obligations, comme Ambac Financial Corporation et MBIA, qui assurent plus de 2000 milliards de dollars de bons du Trésor et vendent des CDS. Merrill Lynch vient d’essuyer une perte de 3,1 milliards de dollars sur les CDS avec l’une d’entre elles. Mais selon nos sources, 50 % de ces 4500 à 5000 milliards de dollars représentent des obligations potentielles de banques et 24 % de fonds spéculatifs. Dans la première vague de défaillances, lorsqu’elles se volatilisent, ces obligations vont se retrouver chez les mêmes banques qui ont prêté aux fonds l’argent pour jouer le jeu des CDS.
L’effondrement financier en cours depuis juillet-août 2007 frappe désormais l’« économie réelle », avec des effets notables sur l’emploi, l’industrie, la consommation et, bien sûr, le bâtiment et l’ensemble du secteur immobilier. Pour les premiers mois de 2008, selon les estimations toujours optimistes des agences de notation Fitch et Moody’s, le pourcentage de défaillance sur les dettes d’entreprise devrait atteindre 4 à 5 % (10 % pour les obligations poubelles).
Mais les vendeurs de CDS, qui devraient normalement payer, n’ont rien provisionné pour cela. Ils comptent sur le jeu des contre-paris et contreparties pour s’en tirer indemnes, laissant les pertes échoir aux détenteurs originaux des obligations.
Ted Seides, directeur financier de Protégé Partners, a comparé la bulle des CDS à une « énorme industrie de l’assurance, dont les fournisseurs n’ont rien mis de côté pour couvrir les futures pertes. Imaginez ce qui se passera s’il y a des pertes de 5 % sur 45 000 milliards de dollars, et personne [dans les banques] n’a de quoi payer les pots cassés. »
Quelqu’un a-t-il espère t-il encore sauver le système ou alors en change t-on ?
Notes :
1- Le « contrat financier dérivé » est un pari hautement spéculatif puisqu’il porte sur la valeur future d’un objet tiers (matières premières, taux de change, indice boursier, etc.), dont le montant ne fait pas l’objet d’un paiement immédiat, mais seulement d’une « option » valant par exemple 1 % des sommes en jeu, d’où les « effets de levier » permettant de jouer gros avec presque rien.
2- Le « Yen carry trade » consistait à emprunter une somme en Yen lorsque celui-ci était à un taux anormalement bas (moins de 1 %) et permettait d’aller jouer ailleurs avec un bénéfice quasi-assuré à la clé, puisque le coût de ce crédit en Yen équivalait à 0.
solidarite et progres
Neurological Symptoms Of Pork Plant Workers Studied
Neurological Symptoms Of Pork Plant Workers Studied
From Patricia Doyle, PhD1-29-8
Prompted by reports of neurological symptoms among workers at 2 pork processing plants in the USA, CDC [US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has dispatched an urgent bulletin to all US neurologists requesting information about any similar cases they may come across. The CDC sent the bulletin to American Academy of Neurology (AAN) 17 Jan 2008; it reports that clinicians at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota notified the Minnesota Department of Health in the fall of 2007 about an unusual cluster of 12 patients who developed inflammatory neuropathy between November 2006 and November 2007.
All of the subjects worked in a pork processing plant in Austin, Minnesota, in an area of the facility where the pigs’ heads are processed. In mid-January of 2008, there were reports of an additional cluster of patients with similar symptoms among individuals working in a pig processing plant in Indiana.
“In particular, neurologists who have diagnosed patients with peripheral neuropathy, myelopathy, or a mixed clinical presentation of peripheral/central (and, more specifically, myelopathic) involvement in persons with exposure to pig butchering or processing during the past year are asked to report this information to their state health department and contact the CDC at (770) 488-7100.”
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/569320
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[2] CDC: letter to American Academy of Neurology (AAN)
Date: Thu 17 Jan 2008
Source: American Academy of Neurology (AAN) website
http://www.aan.com/globals/axon/assets/3459.pdf
In the fall of 2007, clinicians at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, notified the Minnesota Department of Health of an unusual cluster of 12 patients with inflammatory neuropathy occurring between November 2006 and November 2007 among workers at a pork processing plant in Minnesota. An initial investigation has revealed that they all have worked in the same area of the plant where the heads of the pig are processed.
The investigation in Minnesota is ongoing and additional patients have been identified in Indiana, among workers in a similar plant. At this point an etiologic agent has not been identified.
These patients have frequently had illness onset with pain, numbness, and tingling in the extremities. The illness typically progressed with development of relatively symmetric mild to moderate weakness involving predominantly the distal lower limbs. Occasionally, facial weakness has also been observed. They often complain of difficulty with balance (ataxia). Electrodiagnostic testing showed prolonged motor distal latencies and F-wave latencies, minimal sensory nerve conduction abnormality, and evidence of mild denervation of distal muscles on EMG (electromyography).
Of the cases in which cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) has been obtained, all have had elevated CSF protein, with minimal if any pleocytosis (such as, cytoalbuminologic dissociation). Thoracic and lumbar magnetic resonance imaging has demonstrated mildly thickened nerve roots and contrast enhancement. Time of illness progression ranged from several days to months with severity of illness ranging from mild weakness in most cases to paraplegia in one. Most have had some level of recovery.
Given the apparent close association of these patients with participation in the processing of pig head material, it is possible that similar illnesses are occurring at other pork processing plants. The CDC is requesting neurologists to provide information about patients who may have developed illnesses similar to that reported by the Mayo Clinic. In particular, neurologists who have diagnosed patients with peripheral neuropathy, myelopathy, or a mixed clinical presentation of peripheral/central (and, more specifically, myelopathic) involvement in persons with exposure to pig butchering or processing during the past year are asked to report this information to their state health department, and contact the CDC at 770-488-7100.
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More clinical information is given here but the issues of using air pressure to extract the porcine brain in the plants where cases occurred is not mentioned and what kind of personal protective equipment was used is also not stated. – Mod.LL
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[3] Neurology Today: upcoming article [7 Feb 2008]
Date: Mon 28 Jan 2008
Source: American Academy of Neurology (AAN) website
http://www.aan.com/globals/axon/assets/3462.pdf
An unusual illness in a dozen workers at a Minnesota pork processing plant has state health officials concerned that the cluster could be an unknown animal-borne nervous system disease.
All of the employees worked in an area where compressed air was used to cleanse brain cavities, giving rise to speculation that the illness, health officials are calling it an unknown inflammatory polyneuropathy, may have been caused by exposure to an infectious agent in airborne brain particulate matter.
Early reports suggested chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP), which damages the myelin sheath surrounding nerves and typically progresses for months.
However, CIDP, as a specific diagnosis, was ruled out after workers were examined by neurologists and had nerve conduction studies.
According to Daniel Lachance MD, the Mayo Clinic neurologist who is caring for many of the workers, “an astute nurse” at the plant brought the symptoms to the attention of local Austin physicians, who in turn notified the Mayo Clinic. Dr Lachance recognized the symptoms as being unusual.
He told Neurology Today in a telephone interview that while the illness shares many similarities with CIDP, tests have shown it has a different signature. Unlike CIDP, which is characterized by slowing or blocking of nerve conduction, the workers’ illness can be categorized only as an inflammatory response that is attacking nerve roots proximally, and peripheral motor nerves distally, he explained.
“While they do have electrophysiological evidence for peripheral nerve involvement and the disorder appears associated with a remarkable activation of the immune system, the clinical picture is different from CIDP,” he said….”the syndrome is best characterized as an inflammatory polyradiculopathy.”
“All of the information we have to date indicates that the general public is not at increased risk for developing this type of illness,” said Minnesota commissioner of health Sanne Magnan MD PhD, in a news release. “Also, there is no evidence that the foot supply has been affected.”
Symptoms appeared over several weeks to months, characterized by muscle weakness, paresthesias, especially in the legs, and chronic fatigue with a sudden onset. In most patients, symptoms have been severe enough to limit many daily activities, according to Dr Lachance, noting, for example, that many have difficulty managing stairs.
Symptoms were first noted in a worker in a local soccer league when he could not continue playing. In some patients, sensory symptoms and discomfort in the neck, lower back, and limbs dominate the clinical picture, while in others, mild to moderate weakness can be demonstrated on the neurological examination. Treatment has generally consisted of observation in milder cases, while the more severely affected have been treatment with steroids or intravenous immunoglobulins.
At press time, the Minnesota state health department had not identified a cause of the illnesses. Investigators had interviewed all 12 patients, as well as workers who worked in the same area and those who did not, collecting information on work history, medical history, potential exposures, and other topics. Clinical specimens, including throat swabs and blood, were obtained from 90 per cent of those interviewed and evaluation for possible infectious agents is ongoing.
All cases of the cases involved people who worked in an area where swine heads are processed and brains removed.
A compressed air system for cleaning out the brain cavities of processed swine was introduced at the plant shortly before the 1st worker complained of symptoms, and there has been concern that the illness might have been caused by inhalation of aerosolized brain tissue or a microorganism associated with this mode of exposure.
The plant quickly stopped using the compressed air system and implemented other measures to protect workers in early December 2007, and as of press time, no new cases with symptom onset since the changes were made have been reported, according to Dr Lachance.
Aerosolized blood and organ particulate in slaughterhouses and meat processing plants, referred to as “blood mist” in occupational safety circles, has long been recognized as a potential health risk and there are regulations for worker exposure in the Occupational Health Act. Even so, the symptoms do not match any known neurological illness that can be transmitted from animals to humans.
Exposure to chemical toxins at the plant has been ruled out as a cause. To date, no similar cases have been found in other states [as noted earlier in the posting, there appears to be cases in an Indiana plant using the same compressed air technique - Mod.LL] or elsewhere in Minnesota.
Because the workers were close to the brain removal area, concern was raised that the pig CNS might be the infectious vehicle. “But we did not know of any specific infectious or autoimmune disorder like this that is caused by exposure to animal tissue,” Dr Lachance said, adding the disorder could be an autoimmune response to an infection.
“Transverse myelitis or a brachial plexopathy after a viral syndrome, Guillian-Barre syndrome associated with _Campylobacter_ infection are the most likely models, but to our knowledge, nothing like this has even been encountered before.”
Byline: Kurt Samson
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This piece states, of note, that the use of the compressed air technique was started only shortly before cases began. The cause here may or may not be an infectious agent but could be an immunologically reactive moiety such as myelin.
More information is clearly needed here to better define this entity. – Mod.LL
In a telephone call the MN epidemiologist reported that there is no respiratory protection although full face shields are in use.- Mod.TG Patricia A. Doyle DVM, PhD Bus Admin, Tropical Agricultural Economics Univ of West Indies
Please visit my “Emerging Diseases” message board at:
http://www.emergingdisease.org/phpbb/index.php
Also my new website:
Zhan le Devlesa tai sastimasa
Go with God and in Good Health
http://rense.com/general80/porkp.htm
Species Spread of H5N1 in Calcutta Suburbs
Species Spread of H5N1 in Calcutta Suburbs
Recombinomics Commentary 01:19
January 29, 2008
In the affected district of Howrah, avian flu spread to Panchla in addition to Sankrail. Reports from the district said a fox and other birds like falcon were found dead there.
The above comments describe likely spread of H5N1 to additional species in the Calcutta suburbs that have tested positive for H5N1 (see satellite map here and here).
Although West Bengal has not confirmed H5N1 in additional species, Bangladesh has reported H5N1 confirmation in massive crow deaths in north and south Bangladesh. Videos of initial outbreaks in Birbhum also showed large numbers of dead crows in regions where poultry died. Similarly, crow deaths have been described in multiple regions in West Bengal.
The spread of H5N1 to these additional species hampers control of H5N1. Although Calcutta has been sealed, the additional species provide vectors that can navigate over and through poultry checkpoints on Calcutta’s borders.
Similarly, these wild species also impacts control of H5N1 at the borders with neighboring districts or countries. Although alerts have been issued and checkpoints have been increased, further spread of H5N1 is likely and excessive poultry deaths suggest H5N1 has already crossed into adjacent districts and countries.
More extensive testing and reporting in these border areas would be useful.
L’Union européenne envoie “une force de paix” à la frontière du Darfour
L’Union européenne envoie “une force de paix” à la frontière du Darfour
“La décision de lancer l’opération au Tchad et en République centrafricaine a été adoptée”, souligne une déclaration des ministres des Affaires étrangères des 27 pays de l’UE réunis à Bruxelles.
Avec cette décision, “l’UE intensifie l’action qu’elle mène depuis longtemps en faveur d’un règlement de la crise du Darfour, au travers d’une approche régionale de la crise”, affirment-ils.
L’opération baptisée Eufor Tchad-RCA consiste à envoyer près de 3.700 soldats, dont plus d’une moitié viennent de France et le reste de 13 autres pays européens, dans l’est du Tchad et le nord-est de la Centrafrique.
L’insécurité dans ces régions frontalières du Darfour, province soudanaise où sévit un conflit meurtrier depuis 2003, est aggravée par les heurts entre groupes rebelles et soldats des gouvernements de N’Djamena et de Bangui.
“Conformément à la résolution 1778 du Conseil de sécurité des Nations unies” de septembre 2007, l’Union confie à la nouvelle Eufor la tâche de “protéger le personnel de l’ONU“, autrement dit la mission de police des Nations unies et ses 300 policiers instructeurs, ainsi que “les civils exposés au danger” et le “personnel humanitaire”.
Elle devra “faciliter l’arrivée de l’aide humanitaire” en “aidant à sécuriser” la région, dit le texte.
L’Eufor devra ainsi veiller à la sécurité de 241.000 réfugiés soudanais du Darfour dans l’est du Tchad et de 3.000 autres dans le nord-est de la Centrafrique, ainsi que des 179.000 Tchadiens et 20.000 Centrafricains déplacés, à l’intérieur de leurs pays respectifs, par les violences.
Les premiers éléments de l’Eufor, notamment un détachement d’une quinzaine d’Autrichiens, partiront mardi, a annoncé Vienne. Ils seront suivis d’une cinquantaine d’Irlandais début février.
L’Eufor, commandée par le général irlandais Patrick Nash, devrait être au complet en juin.
Depuis que la politique européenne en matière de défense est devenue vraiment opérationnelle en 2001, il s’agit de la plus importante mission militaire de l’UE hors du continent européen, et sans assistance de l’Otan, contrairement à l’opération Althea lancée par l’UE fin 2004 en Bosnie.
L’Eufor Tchad-RCA, qui aurait dû initialement démarrer en novembre, a eu du mal à se constituer et à se doter des moyens logistiques nécessaires (transport aérien, antennes hospitalières).
Les principales nations contributrices sont la France (2.100 soldats), l’Irlande et la Pologne (400 chacune). La Suède fournira 200 hommes et l’Autriche 160.
Neuf autres pays ont promis aussi des contributions, parfois à confirmer: Belgique, Espagne, Finlande, Grèce, Italie, Pays-Bas, Portugal, Roumanie et Slovénie.
En revanche, l’Allemagne, qui avait largement participé l’été 2006 (bien 2006) à la précédente Eufor en République démocratique du Congo, n’envoie que quatre officiers à l’état-major parisien et le Royaume-Uni, deux.
Néanmoins, la contribution financière de l’UE à cette opération ayant été portée à près de 120 millions d’euros au lieu des 99 millions d’euros prévus au départ, le ministre français Bernard Kouchner a salué la “très grande générosité” de l’Allemagne et du Royaume-Uni.
Outre le fait que les armées européennes ploient sous le nombre d’interventions extérieures, de l’Afghanistan à la Côte d’Ivoire, les difficultés à mobiliser pour le Tchad pourraient tenir aussi à certaines appréhensions à l’égard de Paris.
Des députés au Parlement européen et des ONG ont exprimé leurs craintes d’une confusion entre l’Eufor et les soldats français présents au Tchad au titre d’un accord de défense bilatéral.
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Operation Desert Slaughter
Operation Desert Slaughter
Thoughts on Holocaust Memorial Day. by Felicity Arbuthnot
Global Research, January 28, 2008
It is seventeen years since America and Britain embarked on their ‘Final Solution’ for the population of Iraq.The forty two day carpet bombing, enjoined by thirty two other countries, against a country of just twenty five million souls, with a youthful, conscript army, with broadly half the population under sixteen, and no air force, was just the beginning of a United Nations led, global siege of near mediaeval ferocity. Having, as James Baker boasted they would, reduced ‘Iraq to a pre-industrial age’, the country was denied all normality : trade, aid, telecommunications, power, sanitation, water repairs, seeds, foods, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment.
As I write, seventeen years ago, Iraq would be entering the second week of a barbaric, near twenty four hour a day, carpet bombing, which, then, as now (lest we forget – yet again) scrupulously ignored Protocol 1, Additional to the Geneva Convention of 1977: ‘It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies such as irrigation works (denying them) to the civilian population or to the adverse Party … for any motive.’
The blitzkrieg on Iraq deliberately targeted all ‘indispensable to survival’.
Within twenty four hours, most was destroyed. The electricity went off within two hours, leaving patients on life support machines and vital equipment, babies in incubators, or those on oxygen to die. Refrigerators defrosted, all medicine needing refrigeration, blood banks and vital saline solutions for the injured were destroyed. Food rotted and between the bombing and the bank closures (latter for fear of looting) replacements were scarce to unbuyable.
In Najav, seventy dialysis patients, ‘old friends’, said the senior nurse in charge of the unit, died for want of electricity. The water supply was deliberately destroyed, parts denied subsequently by the pathetic, US-UK dominated Sanctions Committee – a Committee without a backbone between them – and remains lethal to this day.
This was the plan by US Central Command, it seems, all along. The destruction of Iraq’s water system has been described by Professor Nagy and Stephanie Miller as: ‘a slow motion holocaust’. Few could have put it better.
(See: How the US deliberately destroyed Iraq’s water. by Thomas J Nagy : http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/NAG108A.html)
The telecommunications tower was also one of the earliest casualties, an elegant, soaring, structure on the edge of Baghdad’s Mansur district. It lay, broken and crumpled, as did the remains of those who worked inside it. Iraq was thus cut off from the world, the extent of the bombing and atrocities largely unknown for considerable time. Iraqis throughout the world had no way of knowing if their families, friends, loves, were dead or alive. Radio and television stations across Iraq were blitzed so no warnings to populus could be given (journalists too have special protection in wars, but decision makers, seemingly are not only illiterate, but ignore legalities.)
Hospitals, health clinics, schools and kindergartens were bombed, education eradicated so totally that the stores for educational materials, in buildings separate from the schools (usually in a central distribution point some miles away) were also bombed. Agriculture in all forms was deliberately targeted. Chicken farms bombed, flocks of sheep and goats, broadly half of all buffalo were killed, dairy farms obliterated. Crops, food processing factories reduced to rubble. A war crime stupendous in its immensity, for which not one murderous, genocidal, infanticidal, decision maker or pilot has stood trial.
Pharmaceutical factories were bombed, the medical syringe factory was destroyed. And in an especially psychotic policy, the countries who were Iraq’s trading partners and had built factories and installations for the country, bombed those which they had built. America’s gung-ho goons whooped over bombing the Pepsi and Coca Cola factories. ‘Bravery’ doesn’t come more deviant, sub-normal and retarded than that.
Due to the use of defoliants and napalm, half of all Iraq’s trees, including the great, ancient palms, died. Remaining palms did not bear their succulent fruit for about five years. In the tranquil, family farming settlements, amongst the palms, women and livestock alike aborted and often died. Survivors consistently described a ‘vapor’ coming from the ‘planes, then the horrific aftermath, affecting those living in the shelter of the palm groves or copses of trees, where dwellers settled for relative cool from Iraq’s searing summers. And, of course, in this decimation from above, which dropped more ordinance daily than was dropped daily in the second world war, five times more explosive power was dropped than on Hiroshima.
The weapons used were depleted uranium, which continues to irradiate Iraq and the region, the people, flora and fauna -and will continue to do so for four and a half billion years. ‘..protection of the natural environment against widespread, long term and severe damage’, is another absolute dictate under the Geneva Convention. It proscribes absolutely ‘… damage to the natural environment (prejucing) the health and survival of the population.’ Contraventions don’t come bigger than condemning inestimable generations yet unborn, to death and deformity. The Nuremberg Principles are exercised by the treatment of both civilians and prisoners and the: ‘… murder or ill treatment …of prisoners of war … further, extermination … and other inhuman acts against any civilian population’.
The ‘inhuman acts’, committed against the Iraqi people in 1991 constitute war crimes which, since no one was brought to justice, one can only hope haunt those responsible for all time.
The slaughter on the Basra Road, after the ceasefire, the fleeing civilians and retreating troops, ripped to pieces, or incinerated in General Norman Schwartzkop’s ‘turkey shoot’. The whole war, of course, was nothing else. Saddam Hussein had offered, indeed, started to retreat from Kuwait before the carnage began, but as ever, for the United States, conciliation was ‘too late’. Buses, lorries, cars were also targeted throughout the forty two day massacre. Lorries carrying medicines, meat, essentials were burned, with their drivers. Western troops took their repulsive ‘trophy photos’, with the pathetic remains of the incinerated and dismembered.
When the (UK) Observer, to its credit, printed the picture which became the symbol of the 1991 atrocities, the Iraqi soldier, with his near melted face welded to the windscreen of his vehicle, there was an outcry. The sensitivities of readers should not be exposed to such horrors. Maggie O’Kane, writing in the Guardian Weekly (16th December 1995) describes searingly, reality. Relatives, praying, hope against hope, that those they loved, had somehow miraculously survived the hadean inferno that was the Basra Road massacre. “On the day the war ended, at a bus station south of Baghdad, dusk was falling and the road was covered with weeping women.
The Iraqi survivors of the `turkey shoot’ on the Basra Road were crawling home with fresh running wounds. Their women were throwing themselves at the battered minibuses and trucks, pulling, pleading, begging. `Where is he, have you seen him ? Is he not with you ?’ Some fell to their knees on the road when they heard the news.
Others kept running from bus, to truck, to car, looking for their husbands, their sons or their lovers – the 37,000 Iraqi soldiers who would not come back. It went on all night and it was the most desperate and moving scene I have ever witnessed.” There was worse. Think of the excesses of horrors the Western media has deluged its readers with over the years, those perpetrated by people of other cultures, with other features: Stalin, Pol Pot, indeed Saddam Hussein and consider this in Maggie O’Kane’s article: ‘
When Sergeant Joe Queen returned to his home town of Bryson City North California, after the Gulf war, the first thing he saw was a huge banner draped outside Hardees Burger Restaurant, which read: `Welcome Home Joe Queen.’ Joe Queen, who’d been awarded a bronze star, wanted to chill out after the war, but Bryson City wouldn’t let him Joe, 19-years old, had gone straight from Desert Storm to become one of the first American troops to cross the Saudi border in an armored bulldozer. His job was to bury the Iraqis alive in their trenches and then cover over the trenches real smooth so the rest of the Big Red One, as The First Armored Mechanized Brigade is called, could come nice and easy behind him. ‘Joe Queen doesn’t know how many Iraqi troops he buried alive on the front line.
But five years later, in his military base in Georgia, he remembers well how it worked:
`The sand was so soft that once the blade hits the sand it just caves in right on the sides, so we never did go back and forth. So you are traveling at five, six, seven miles an hour just moving along the trench… You don’t see him. You’re up there in the half hatch and you know what you got to do. You did it so much you could close your eyes and do it… I don’t think they had any idea because the look on their faces as we came through the berm was just a look of shock. `While I was retreating, I saw some of the soldiers trying to surrender, but they were buried. There were two kinds of bulldozers, real ones, actual ones, and also they had tanks and they put something like a bulldozer blade in front of them. Some of the soldiers were walking towards the troops holding their arms up to surrender and the tanks moved in and killed them. They dug a hole in the ground and then they buried the soldiers and leveled it.’ One survivor described the friends buried alive, who he had laughed with, eaten with …’I really don’t know how to describe it. We were friends. I ate with some of them. I talked to some of them. I cannot express how I felt at that moment….. I saw one soldier and his body was just torn apart by a bulldozer. The upper part was on one side and the lower on the other side.’
I hope your nightmares and those of your colleagues haunt for all time Joe Queen. May the specter of those for whose live burial you and your murderous colleagues were responsible, follow in all your footsteps, for all time.
These mass graves also carry the names of the leaders who ordered the decimation of Iraq in 1991,their military Commanders and soldiers, on every one of them. Ironically, the mass graves of Saddam Hussein have seemingly not materialized, just war graves and those from the uprising encouraged by the US and UK at the end of the 1991 decimation. The war, of course, never ended. The thirteen year subsequent embargo cost maybe one and a quarter million lives.
Additionally, the US and UK, bombed Iraq (illegally) until the (illegal) invasion of 2003. In 2002, they stepped up their destruction of life, limb and of entire housing projects with families within, children playing, doing homework, flocks of sheep and goats with their child shepherds. ‘Approximately a year before the United States initiated Operation Southern Focus, as a change to its response strategy, by increasing the overall number of missions and selecting targets throughout the no-fly zones to disrupt the military command structure in Iraq. The weight of bombs dropped increased from none in March 2002 and 0.3 in April 2002 to between 8 and 14 tons per month in May-August, reaching a pre-war peak of 54.6 tons in September 2002.’ (Wikipedia.)
A recent study by the Centre for Public Integrity, has also uncovered lies of impeachable stature, leading to invasion, by the Bush Administration..
‘The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them, or had links to al Qaeda, or both. ‘Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq’s links to al Qaeda, the study found. That was second only to Powell’s 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al Qaeda.’ (http://www.publicintegrity.org)Iraq’s post invasion (2003-2007) excess under five mortality has been estimated at over one million. In Afghanistan, post invasion, at 1.9 million (2001-2007.)
For another humanitarian abomination of our time, the Israeli siege of the Gaza strip (June 2007 and ongoing) total excess death figures are elusive. CIA figures for infant mortality, however (2004) are woeful at 23.54 per thousand births. Sweden (2007) just 2.76 per thousand births. Given Israel’s withdrawal of electricity and just about all needed to sustain life since last June, some serious statistical data is needed – and relentless and absolute demands for humanity and human rights for our global neighbors in Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan, the forgotten of Lebanon’s ‘Simmer Rain’ decimation, by ‘we the people …’ Like Joe Queen’s genocidal actions, the atrocities committed in these countries are being carried out in our name. ‘Silence is complicity’. (For much more shameful complicity – since 1950 – please see Dr Gideon Polya: ‘Body Count’, an academic, key and indispensable work: http://www.globalbodycount.blogspot.com)‘There was no one left to kill’, declared General Norman Schwartzkopf after the Basra Road bloodbath, where even the injured holding white flags, and doctors accompanying them were obliterated. ‘Morally, we won’, an Iraqi doctor told me shortly afterwards. Indeed. ‘We are the new Jews’, is an oft heard, Arab refrain now.
As I write, on Holocaust Memorial Day, it is impossible not to reflect that is does not take forced labor camps, forced transport and Zyclon B to create a holocaust. When the figures of the dead in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza, reach six million, as the world stands by, will they too get their own Holocaust Memorial Day? Will we all, regardless of color or creed, ever learn, before it is too late?
A Plot At The Brink Of A Dark Age
A Plot At The Brink Of A Dark Age
1-28-8
(LPAC) — The final disintegration of the global monetary system was but a hair’s breadth away on January 21 and 22 of this year. Stock markets all around the world dropped precipitously on Monday the 21st, except for markets in the U.S., which were closed for the Martin Luther King holiday. Faced with the prospect of a bloodbath in the U.S. markets when they opened on Tuesday, the Federal Reserve made a pre-emptive emergency interest-rate cut of three-quarters of a point.
This cut, undoubtedly combined with more covert market-supporting operations, stopped a meltdown of the stock market, but this apparent success came at the expense of accelerating a much larger problem, the hyperinflationary collapse of the U.S. dollar.
Just days after these dramatic events, French banking giant Société Générale announced at a January 24 press conference, that it had lost euro 7 billion, of which euro 5 billion was blamed on what the bank described as “an exceptional fraud” by a junior equity derivatives trader, Jérôme Kerviel.
The bank insisted that Kerviel had not only placed bets far beyond his authority, but had somehow used his knowledge of the bank’s control procedures “to conceal these positions through a scheme of elaborate fictitious transactions.” Société Générale officials insisted that it was a case of “isolated fraud,” and that Kerviel had acted alone.
The bank’s disclaimers did not ring true, calling to mind the string of events in the early 1990s where failures at banks such as Barings and Kidder Peabody were blamed on what Lyndon LaRouche characterized as “loan assassins,” individuals designated to be public scapegoats for much larger and more systemic problems.
The case drew the attention of the Paris Bureau of Executive Intelligence Review magazine, and an EIR reporter who attended the press conference found the bank’s story hard to swallow. Société Générale, after all, had a world-class reputation as a derivatives dealer, and had that very month been given Risk magazine’s award as the equity derivatives house of the year for 2008. The idea that Société Générale’s vaunted expertise could have been completely outflanked by a single junior trader acting all alone, did not seem plausible, so EIR began to dig further.
In explanations provided by Société Générale at its press conference and subsequent reports, the bank claimed to have discovered the “fraudulent positions” between January 18 and January 20, but rather than informing the police or judicial authorities, the leadership of the bank instead went to Christian Noyer, the head of France’s central bank, the Banque de France, and to Gerard Rameix, the head of the French Authority of Financial Markets.
Noyer is a friend and collaborator of Jean Claude Trichet, the head of the European Central Bank, and a man whose role in operations against the dollar have been publicly criticized by Lyndon LaRouche. Neither French President Nicholas Sarkozy nor his Prime Minister were informed until January 23.
Instead, what the bank did, it said, was unwind these allegedly fraudulent positions over a three-day period, a period which just happened to coincide with the precipitous drop in worldwide stock markets on January 21, causing the huge loss. The bank said it had to rush the unwinding in order to publish its results for 2007.
However, the context in which these actions occurred lead EIR to suspect that, far from being a case of fraud by a lone junior trader, the Société Générale affair was actually an inside job aimed at luring the United States into a hyperinflationary trap for the purpose of ending its role as a world power. With the demise of the global financial system last year, the Anglo-Dutch financial oligarchy has launched an all-out assault on the United States, as part of a political move to end the power of nation- states and create a global empire.
The City of London’s game-plan is to induce the United States to flood its markets with liquidity in the name of preventing losses, and thereby triggering a hyperinflationary explosion that would bring the brunt of the global financial collapse down on the U.S. One key player in this war, as identified by LaRouche, is Trichet’s European Central Bank.
President Sarkozy was reportedly livid with anger that he had not been alerted to this crisis, and that actions had been taken behind his back. There have been indications in France, notably from Jacques Attali, that there were moves afoot between the French and American circles around the NYSE Euronext financial market (this is the entity formed by the merger between the New York Stock Exchange and the Paris-based Euronext) to make Paris the leading financial center in Europe, displacing London. Worth noting in this context is that Sarkozy has been virtually at war with the European Central Bank over its refusal to lower interest rates.
Much remains to be uncovered about this affair, including the possibility of a significant role by the City of London. Although Société Générale is based in Paris, it does its derivatives trading out of London. It would appear, at this early stage of the investigation, that, far from being the result of fraud by a lone trader, the Société Générale affair is actually a part of an all-out war being waged between the City of London and its allies at the European Central Bank, and an opposing transatlantic faction centered around the NYSE Euronext market.
A China base in Iran?
A China base in Iran?
By: Kaveh L Afrasiabi on: 29.01.2008
In the aftermath of President George W Bush’s recent tour of the Persian Gulf, coinciding with a similar trip by France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, culminating in a deal with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for a small French base, Iran’s security calculus has changed.
It has almost reached the point of Tehran considering the option of reciprocating the perceived excess Western intrusion into its vicinity by allowing a military base for China at one of Iran’s Persian Gulf ports or on one of its islands.
Without doubt, this would be a significant geopolitical move on both Iran’s and China’s part, bound to unsettle the US superpower that enjoys unrivalled hegemony in the oil region and which has unsettled China with its recent civilian nuclear agreement with India, widely interpreted as a long-term “containing China” initiative. In the tight interplay of geopolitics and geo-economics, with China heavily dependent on energy imports from Iran and other Persian Gulf states, the trend is definitely toward China’s naval complement of its flurry of energy deals in order to secure its precious oil and (liquefied) gas cargo ships exiting through the narrow corridors of the Strait of Hormuz.
Presently, China’s strategy is confined to the port city of Gwadar along the southwestern coast of Pakistan in Balochistan province, strategically located near the Hormuz Strait. Yet, due to the close US-Pakistan relations, it is highly improbable the US would permit Islamabad to enter into strategic relations with Beijing so that China, still lacking a formidable navy, could utilize it for power projection in the region. Not so with Iran, which is constantly threatened by the US, and now France, and which already enjoys observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), headed by China and Russia. Iran’s bid to join the SCO has been stalled partly as a result of the standoff over its nuclear program, but will likely succeed in the not too distant future should the present patterns of Iran-Russia and Iran-China cooperation continue.
Regarding the latter, China has already surpassed Germany as Iran’s number one trade partner. Sinopec, China’s largest oil refiner, has just finalized a multi-billion dollar deal to develop the giant Yadavaran oil field, and this is in addition to the “deal of the century” contract for natural gas from Iran’s immense North Pars field. Chinese contractors are also busy constructing oil terminals for Iran in the Caspian Sea, extending the Tehran metro, building airports, among other projects. And this while China arms sales to Iran have included such hot items as ballistic-missile technology and air-defense radars.
The growing Iran-China cooperation on the energy and trade fronts is bound sooner or later to spill over into more meaningful military cooperation and, in turn, this depends to some extent on the ebbs and flows of Iran-US and China-US “games of strategy”, particularly if China feels additional pressure from the US on the geopolitical front.
For sure, Iran’s willingness to show a greater willingness than hitherto to embrace China’s naval vessels making port calls to Iran is now in the cards, this as a prelude to more extensive agreements up to and including provisions for a small Chinese naval outpost on one of Iran’s Persian Gulf islands.
Again, such a scenario, sure to raise the serious ire of Washington, depends on a number of intervening variables. These include future US moves in the Persian Gulf, for example, whether or not the US military will end up utilizing some of the man-made artificial islands set up by the UAE. If so, thus enhancing the US’s power projection capability with regard to Iran, Tehran may be more inclined to try to offset the US’s leaning so heavy on it by playing the “China card”.
To reiterate, France’s bold new move in the Persian Gulf is equally unsettling to Tehran, which finds the new pro-US turn of French foreign policy detrimental to its national interests.
The net result is the cognitive bifurcation of “West” versus “us” 1 that nicely dovetails with the new “eastern orientation” of Iran under President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. This is part and parcel of an energetic new “globalist” approach that includes new strategic openings with certain Latin and Central American nations.
In other words, it is sheer error to misinterpret Iran’s “new foreign policy” as one-dimensionally regional or continental in nature, despite its narrow focus on Iran’s immediate regions.“Iran cannot remain indifferent to the aggressive geopolitical maneuvers against it by Western nations who are targeting Iran in no unmistakable language,” says a prominent political science professor at Tehran University.
The professor loudly wondered how France would react if all of a sudden Iran started setting up bases near its coastline or, for that matter, how Washington would respond to an Iranian base in Iran-friendly Nicaragua? “They definitely need a wake-up call that national security is not a one-way process.
“While Iran’s political pundits are not yet willing to concede that Iran is now at the stage to allow a Chinese base along its vast Persian Gulf coastline, nonetheless quite a few agree that with the changing geopolitical milieu representing potentially serious national security threats to Iran, all options must remain open. Note
1. After all, Sarkozy has stepped down from his predecessor’s talk of “multiploarism” and, instead, per an article in this week’s New York Times, “has tempered that notion with talk about France’s place within its ‘Western family’, an expression welcomed in Washington”.
Bush orders NSA to snoop on US agencies
Bush orders NSA to snoop on US agencies
Cyber attack fear used to expand spy grid
Published Sunday 27th January 2008
Not content with spying on other countries, the NSA (National Security Agency) will now turn on the US’s own government agencies thanks to a fresh directive from president George Bush.
Under the new guidelines, the NSA and other intelligence agencies can bore into the internet networks of all their peers. The Bush administration pulled off this spy expansion by pointing to an increase in the number of cyber attacks directed against the US, possibly from foreign nations.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will spearhead the effort around identifying the source of these attacks, while the Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon will concentrate on retaliation.
The Washington Post appears to have broken the news about the new Bush-led joint directive, which remains classified. The paper reported that the directive – National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 – was signed on Jan. 8. Earlier reports from the Baltimore Sun documented the NSA’s plans to add US spying to its international snooping duties.
The new program will – of course – drains billions of dollars out of US coffers and be part of Bush’s 2009 budget.
During Bush’s presidency, US citizens have come under an unprecedented spying regime. In addition to upping its focus on suspected criminals, the administration permitted a system for wiretapping the phone calls of Average Joes and Janes. The government is also funding specialized computers from companies such as Cray that can search through enormous databases at incredible speed. Ah, if only Stalin could see us now.
The government points to cyber attacks against the State, Commerce, Defense and Homeland Security departments as the impetus for expanding the NSA’s powers. “U.S. officials and cyber-security experts have said Chinese Web sites were involved in several of the biggest attacks back to 2005, including some at the country’s nuclear-energy labs and large defense contractors,” the Post reported.
Critics of the new directive will point to the NSA’s ability to operate in total secrecy as cause for concern.
More troubling, however, may be the Pentagon and Homeland Security’s aspirations to hit attackers with counter-strikes.
Proving that a nation rather than a rogue set of attackers are behind a cyber attack will likely be very difficult. In addition, the international community has yet to address the rules of cyber war in any meaningful way.
Gaza’s falling wall changes Middle East map for ever
Gaza’s falling wall changes Middle East map for ever
The tide of humans pouring over the frontier from Gaza into Egypt for days has now become a vast convoy of carts, cars and lorries. Peter Beaumont joined the jubilant throng who watched as the borders of a conflict that has lasted for generations were crossed
Sunday January 27, 2008
The Observer
They came and went in lorries and gas tankers, in flatbed trucks loaded with cattle and sheep, in coaches and mini-buses, loaded by the dozen in the backs of trucks, all shuttling across Gaza’s southern border. Four days ago they went on foot like refugees, but yesterday for the first time the trucks drove through and it felt like an unstoppable momentum had been reached.
They carried generators and goats, diesel and huge piles of carrots and cabbages. But most of all they carried the message that Israel’s long blockade of Gaza is over. ‘I want to get some cheese,’ says Ameera Ahmad, after crossing the border from Gaza into Egypt yesterday. ‘And honey. Look, crisps! I haven’t seen a bag of crisps for months.’
The teenager in the car’s front sticks his head out of the window into the crush of vehicles and people. ‘Jibna!’ he shouts, meaning cheese. It is not a request, although there are people selling it nearby. It is an affirmation of the possibilities outside Gaza.
Ameera, 24, texts her husband to ask if there is anything he wants brought back from Egypt. ‘Oh!’, she says suddenly in a quiet, happy voice, surveying a pretty vista of open fields, without walls or boundaries that cannot be crossed without risk. ‘This is my first time out of Gaza.’
So walls fall down. Not only physically, blasted down on Gaza’s border with Egypt last week with dynamite and cutting torches, but in the mind as well.
On the fourth day of Gaza’s explosive relief from seven months of tight economic blockade by Israel, and seven longer years of economic isolation since the beginning of the second intifada, it was not only people who were crossing yesterday.
After bulldozers of the militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza since seizing power last June, opened new routes through the border area on the Philadelphia Road on Friday night a new kind of traffic was streaming over.
By mid-afternoon, as the news had spread through Gaza that Egypt was accessible by car, and not just by foot, the cars, buses and lorries snaked from the border, through Rafah and Khan Younis and up to Gaza City in a column in perpetual motion. The men of Hamas’s Executive Force stood with their weapons by the road and watched the passing traffic.
Beyond the border, out of the clogging traffic jams, the vehicles fanned out, little convoys of Palestinian cars setting off along the sandy roads to avoid Egypt’s police on the main highway, traversing fields of flowering trees and tiny farms, all heading for the city of Al-Arish, 60 kilometres distant.
What seemed on Wednesday to be a huge, but perhaps brief, phenomenon dampened by the attempt by Egyptian riot police who moved later in the week to try to reseal the border, by this weekend was taking on the impression of a seismic and unstoppable reordering of the facts of the Middle East.
The four short days since Hamas blew down the six-metre metal border wall built by Israeli soldiers before the withdrawal of Israeli settlers and troops has forged a confusing new reality on the ground. What first was being treated as a holiday from the oppressive conditions of Gaza under Israeli siege, by yesterday was taking on the attributes of an entitlement – one for long refused.
But its uncertainties – in particular what it means in the long run for Gaza – do not change a simple fundamental fact. For the first time in years Gazans feel free. And when Gazans remember the last week it will be in two halves.
What will separate it in people’s memories will be the cold and overwhelming notion of Israel’s blockade that is lifted – at least for now. What they will remember will not simply be the condition of unemployment and deprivation that have gathered pace but the slow, corrosive degradation of a society that has accelerated since the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000, with the closing of Israel’s labour markets to Palestinian workers.
It is something that a few brief days of ‘festival’ – as many Gazans described the extraordinary scenes last week as they poured into Egypt to shop and visit relatives – cannot solve overnight. And which they cannot fix alone.
It is exam day at al-Azhar University. In the women’s campus, a hundred or so girls sit in the chill winter morning, some still cramming from notebooks for exams that mean little in a place where a degree does not mean a future. In his office, Mkhaimar Abu Sada, a political scientist, talks about the years of the blockade. He believes Gaza’s problems cannot simply be traced to the recent tightening of the closure on Gaza by Israel two weeks ago to complete closure – ostensibly in response to an increase of attacks from home-made Qassam missiles – aimed at the nearby Israeli town of Sderot.
He believes Gaza’s problems are the consequence of a longer-lasting pattern of behaviour whose wounds and deformities are beyond transformation overnight. ‘Since September 2000 and the beginning of the second intifada the Israelis stopped using Palestinian labour. Those going to the “other side” could earn between three and five times as much as labourers in Gaza. It was hugely important to Gaza.
‘It had a huge economic impact. The figures now show that we now have unemployment running at in excess of 55 per cent, and 80 per cent of the population lives below the World Bank’s poverty level.’
But it is only part of a history of Gaza’s decline. In truth that began with the al-Nakba – ‘the Catastrophe’ – as Palestinians call the Arab-Jewish war of 1948 that saw the establishment of the state of Israel. Then, Gaza’s population of 80,000 was swollen by the influx of 200,000 refugees, whose descendants occupy Gaza’s UN-run string of camps.
Occupied by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967, which seized it from Egyptian rule, the long years of direct Israeli rule ended with the Oslo peace accords that failed to see the end of Israeli settlement within the Gaza Strip. That only ended with Israeli’s unilateral ‘withdrawal’ in September 2005 that left Israel still largely in charge of access to Gaza, its airspace and access to the sea. Israel provided two-thirds of Gaza’s electricity, policed the land routes into which fuel, medicines and raw materials must pass, and controlled access of Palestinians to labour markets – Gaza’s population was in effect imprisoned.
Never wealthy, Gaza’s economic collapse was rapidly accelerated following the election in 2006 of the militant Hamas in the Palestinian elections in Gaza and the West Bank. Amid factional fighting between Hamas and the previously dominant Fatah, and a widespread breakdown in law and order, Hamas finally assumed power from Fatah in a few days of violence seven months ago. Israel’s response was to declare a Hamas-led Gaza a ‘hostile entity’, further strangling a sealed off Gaza Strip and leading to severe shortages of cement, cigarettes and other basic goods, in a move that further deepened poverty.
That noose was tightened even harder this month after a rise in rocket attacks led Israel to impose a complete closure on the Gaza Strip – relenting later to allow in some fuel and humanitarian supplies amid international horror at what was being done to Gaza as a whole. But deep and lasting damage had been inflicted, long before the events of the last week.
For the consequence of the longer-term blockade of the Gaza Strip – measuring just 40 kilometres by 10 – has been a far-reaching social fragmentation going deeper even than the political and clan violence that plagued Gaza before Hamas took power. For as the economic screw has been turned by Israel on Gaza, domestic violence, divorce and child abuse have increased to levels previously unheard of in a society where the family is a basic building block.
‘One of the main problems,’ says Sumya Habeeb, who works in marriage counselling in Gaza, ‘is that wives do not understand why their husbands are sitting around not earning any money. It is one of the major causes we are seeing both of domestic violence and wives returning to their parents. There is tremendous stress in marriages, not least for those men who worked in the Palestinian security forces before the Hamas takeover and who lost their jobs.’
Gaza’s great migration shows no signs of solving its longer-term problems. Instead, in the short term it may exacerbate its already deep economic woes if a more equitable solution to the Gaza question is not worked out.
For even as tens of thousands headed south, other merchants, already on the edge of ruin, were left watching money that would, in normal circumstances, be spent inside Gaza pouring out into Egypt.
Among them, in the Saha market in Gaza City, was Jaweed Ashour, the 42-year-old owner of Ashour Watches, who gloomily surveyed the sudden influx of both Gazan and Egyptian street sellers into the market-place outside his shop hawking cheap clothes and cigarettes brought from across the border.
‘I have seen no one come in today,’ he says standing in his small shop. ‘This month I haven’t sold a single watch. This is the hardest time I have ever known. There is no money. I no longer buy what we used to eat. I used to buy my son new clothes at every Eid. Now I can’t. If I buy a bag of sugar it is only a kilo bag.’
If many businesses faced being damaged, others will be saved by the opening of the Egyptian border after the months of hardship. Among them is the Lotus Flower hairdressing salon of Fatin Kehail. ‘Before the tightening of the blockade, after the Hamas takeover, women still used to go to restaurants and hotels a lot,’ she explained. ‘Now the only customers I tend to see are brides preparing for their weddings. Even then people will say: “Three hundred shekels? That is too much now.” I understand and do my best when I can.
‘There are less weddings that I hear of, too. People have been putting it off. And because of the blockade I am running out of the stuff I need for work, like hairsprays and shampoos. I’m down to my last gallon of shampoo. I hope to go to Egypt to replace it.’
They are contradictions that are reflected in the wider questions posed for the future of Gaza. For while the propaganda coup by Hamas, under intense Israeli pressure, of bringing down the wall may well have temporarily humiliated and wrong-footed Israel, the issue of where in fact Gaza’s future lies may have been made more complicated still.
There is little likelihood that Egypt can replace the valuable jobs lost in Israel for Gazan workers, even if President Hosni Mubarak has the will to do so, in a country where day rates for labouring are tiny in comparison.
While Mubarak may have acquiesced – under pressure from an outraged Arab street – into allowing the Palestinians of Gaza to cross the breached border en masse, a President who routinely locks up members of the Muslim Brotherhood is unlikely to view dealings with its off-shoot, Hamas, with very much enthusiasm.
Israel also finds itself in a similar bind. While some politicians suggested last week that the fall of the Rafah wall was an opportunity to hand responsibility for Gaza to Egypt, that, too, shows signs of a deep naivety.
Although there are those in Israel who might wish that Gaza looked to Egypt, Hamas – Gaza’s key player – is unlikely to trade easier access to the outside world in exchange for abandoning the struggle against Israel to end the wider occupation.
Which leaves Gaza where it was before the Rafah border crumbled: an economic disaster zone, with more cigarettes and meat and fuel for now, but no more certainty about its future than before last Wednesday morning.
But for now at least one sentiment remains. ‘It feels today,’ Ameera says on the return journey home to Beit Hanoun after her first journey out after buying her cheese: ‘that Gaza is not quite the same big prison any more.’
Not yesterday at least.
Gaza: A brief history
· A 225km rectangle on the Mediterranean, the Gaza Strip is squeezed between Egypt and Israel. With just under two million people, it has one of the world’s highest population densities. Half of all the people in Gaza are refugees, or their descendants, from Israeli wars.
· It was in Gaza that Samson brought down the temple on himself and his Philistine captors.
· The Ottoman Empire ruled Gaza during the 19th century. Palestine came under British rule in the First World War, Egyptian rule in 1948 – during the Arab-Israeli war when Gaza’s population tripled as Palestinians were pushed out of the new state of Israel. Israel captured the Strip in 1967 and has held it ever since.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2247566,00.html
The American military did the explosion in Mosul-Video
The American military did the explosion in Mosul
29/10/08
As I said before the (un)controlled explosion in Mosul done by the Americans but because it went wrong western media reported that it was a terrorists attack.Here is a video clipshows eyewitnesses, residents of Zndjeli area tell their story to an Iraqi government official.Translation
Eyewitness: they took the weapons only not the explosions and put it in their vehicles, they timed the explosion and runaway to the nearby streets, my family asked the American:It will be a big explosion, it is better if we leave our houses.
He answered:
No, it is not a big explosion, just leave the windows open and sit beside the walls, it will be alright.
Later the houses fell on our heads
__________________________________________________
Comment : by Seele ( AQ mean Alqaida)
So the US & Maliki simply invented the story that AQ is now in Mosul, and to cement this lie into the heads of the western public they needed a big incident with lots of innocent dead Mosul inhabitants, which then could be blamed on “the AQ forces which have sneaked into the town”.
The strategy was of course double-headed. On the one hand the incident should justify the planned US-Maliki full-scale offensive against Mosul before the face of the world. ( an operation which would for sure have been started by brutal areal bombing of the town and surrounding areas. ( Falalujah resp. Arab Jabour style ) And then being followed up by US troops and interior ministry comamndos storming into the town and doing lots of demolishing and creating vast havoc as collective punishment against the people of Mosul for helping the IR.
And on the other hand the building bombing was also meant to further degrade the image of AQII before the Iraqi people, i think.
And I feel it is very likely that the explosives in that building were placed there by the US itself, resp. by criminals paid by the US to do so. Of course it might also be that the US indeed found large cache of weapons and explosives and simply decided to use this “chance” to create a large civilian casualty incident which could then easily be blamed on “Al Qaeda”.
But from my feeling and from what I ve heard and read how things went, and in what time US decide that there would “not be big explosion” and how fast the controled west medias from all around the world were to blame the incident on “Al Qaeda” , and on Lybian AQ affiliates, I assume that the operation was truely pre-planned covert US military operation.
With the only thing which obviously indeed went “wrong” being that the US strategist did not foresee that so many people would survive the attack.
The US obviously did not expect so many survivors aka eyewitnisses coming out of a blast of explosives 1 ton+.
As without that it would have being indeed very easy to blame the explosion on “AQ”.
For example news would have read:
US soldiers went in found cache, started disarming it, and only seconds after the US troops were out the “militants” exploded the building, killing 100+ civilians + 3 Iraqi soldiers ( ING ) , blah blah blah …
But much more people than expected survived. (Namely those who rejected the US military advise to stay inside, and moved out before the US detonating the building).
And now the US is in deep shit, as the incident and its true circumstances are starting to reach the medias so that the incident and the US’s desperate attempts to cover it up will finally blow up into the US governements face at full force. ( It will be somewhat like the Abu Ghuraib scandal coming to light again, or the UK Basra SAS ‘false flag’ incident, where 2 UK SAS agents, camouflaged as mujahedeen (!) where caught by puppet police with a car full of explosives at a Basra market place, being exposed to the public again.
Keep in mind that the latest stand/update on the Mosul US black-op controlled house demolition is 60 (!) dead innocent Iraqi civilians (including women and children)+ up to 280 wounded, with toll still rising.
See:
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=24076
And criminal MSM blames ‘AQ’ for the explosion of the house, They blame “AQ”. Wherefore in fact the US itself detonated the explosives. Btw. it is now said that explosive experts estimate from the whole in the ground that at least 15 tons (!) of explosives were in the building.
And now again read/listen to what the eyewitness says. US military said “no big explosion will occure” just “leave the windows open”.
That is mass-murder of civilians – plain and simple ! It’s nothing short of this !: Massmurder of Iraqi innocent civilians men, women and children , large scale – a crime which is definitely touching the My Lai Vietnam dimension of US armies formerly carried out mass-murder back in the 1968.
