Words of Power: April 2006

Saturday, April 29, 2006

GS(3) Intelligence Briefing (4-29-06)

NOTE: GS(3) Intelligence Briefing is posted on a bi-weekly basis. As circumstances dictate, we may post special editions. The Briefing is organized into five sections: Europe, Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific, Americas, Global and Cyberspace. Each issue provides insight on terrorism, cyber crime, climate change, health emergencies, natural disasters and other threats, as well as recommendations on what actions your organizations should take to mitigate risks. “Words of Power" commentary is also posted on a bi-weekly basis. This commentary explores a range of issues in the interdependent realms of security, sustainability and spirit. For more information, go to http://www.wordsofpower.net/

Here are highlights from 15 items, including both news stories and op-ed pieces, which provide insight on important global issues and trends, such as bird flu, global warming, energy security, the struggle for geopolitical hegemony, human rights, economic espionage and cyber crime. (Excerpts and links follow below this summary.)

EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA

The report, 'How prepared is Europe for Pandemic Influenza? An analysis of national plans', issued by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and presented in magazine Lancet on Thursday (20 April), reveals major discrepancies in planning in pandemic preparedness across Europe. (EU Observer, 4-20-06)
The Danube threatened to overcome soaked anti-flood defences in Serbia's capital and wash through towns across southeastern Europe on Sunday after heavy rains helped push it to its highest levels in a century. (Reuters, 4-16-06)
With soaring oil prices, rising demand, uncertain supply and the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, energy is in focus and the European Union is calling for coordinated policy. But the Nordic region -- united by history, a shared concern for the environment and a harsh climate which puts heavy demand on power -- is divided on energy, not least nuclear power….(Reuters, 4-21-06)

ASIA PACIFIC

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which maintained it had no plans for expansion, is now changing course. Mongolia, Iran, India and Pakistan, which previously had observer status, will become full members. (Asia Times, 4-19-06)
Slowly but surely, the grand strategy of the Bush administration is being revealed. It is not aimed primarily at the defeat of global terrorism, the incapacitation of rogue states, or the spread of democracy in the Middle East. These may dominate the rhetorical arena and be the focus of immediate concern, but they do not govern key decisions regarding the allocation of long-term military resources. The truly commanding objective -- the underlying basis for budgets and troop deployments -- is the containment of China.….(Michael Klare, TomDispatch, 4-19-06)
Mercurial dictator Saparmurat Niyazov has a multi-billion-dollar slush fund, which he uses to maintain his personality cult in natural gas-rich Turkmenistan, according to a report issued April 24 by the watchdog group Global Witness. European Union nations, in particular Germany, are helping conceal the way Niyazov is using Turkmenistan’s energy revenues, the report asserts. (Eurasianet, 4-24-06)

AMERICAS

Intelligence files reportedly suggest that an estimated 1,000 Chinese agents and informants operate in Canada. Many of them are visiting students, scientists and business people, told to steal cutting-edge technology. (CTV, 4-14-06)
In the absence of an imminent threat (with the Iranians at least several years away from having a nuclear arsenal), the attack would be a unilateral act of war.
If undertaken without formal Congressional declaration, it would be unconstitutional and merit the impeachment of the president….(Zbigniew Brezinzki, International Herald Tribune, 4-26-06)
Almost half of all public health workers would not go to work during a major flu pandemic, a survey has revealed. The study suggests that health and support services would be left in chaos if a deadly human form of bird flu spread around the world. (Daily Mail, 4-18-06)
This Saturday's elections in New Orleans represent yet another element of the vast crime committed against Black America. With as many as 300,000 residents, overwhelmingly African American, strewn about the country in government-engineered exile, the elections are an insult to the very idea of democracy, and to the dignity of all Black people. (Black Commentator, 4-20-06)

GLOBAL

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev urged the world's biggest industrialized nations to set up a 50-billion-dollar (44-billion-euro) fund to support solar power, warning that oil or nuclear energy were not viable energy sources for the future. (Agence France Press, 4-27-06)
A growing number of leading US companies are confronting the business challenges from global warming, recognizing that greenhouse gas limits are inevitable and that they cannot risk falling behind their international competitors in developing climate-friendly technologies….But many others are still largely ignoring the climate issue with "business as usual" strategies that may be putting their companies and shareholders at risk….(Greenbiz.com, 3-22-06)
Last year, Exxon made the biggest profit of any company ever, $36 billion, and its retiring chairman appears to be reaping the benefits. Exxon is giving Lee Raymond one of the most generous retirement packages in history, nearly $400 million….(ABC News, 4-14-06)
In 1899 Thorstein Veblen described predation as a phase in the evolution of culture, "attained only when the predatory attitude has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude...when the fight has become the dominant note in the current theory of life." After an entire century's struggle to escape from this phase, we've suffered a relapse. The predators are everywhere unleashed; and the institutions built to contain them, from the United Nations to the AFL-CIO to the SEC, are everywhere under siege. (James K. Galbraith, The Nation, 4-17-06)

CYBERSPACE

Online bank customers may want to pay a little more attention to their browsers the next time they log in, because many of the most popular banking sites in the U.S. may be needlessly placing their customers at risk to online thieves, a noted security researcher warned (IDG, 4-20-06)

Excerpts from these 15 stories with links to the full texts follow below. Remember, words-of-power.blogspot.com is also a searchable database. It is meant to accelerate, intensify and enrich your online research.

EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA

The report, 'How prepared is Europe for Pandemic Influenza? An analysis of national plans', issued by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and presented in magazine Lancet on Thursday (20 April), reveals major discrepancies in planning in pandemic preparedness across Europe. "Wide gaps exist in the pandemic preparedness of European nations," Dr Richard Coker, the report's lead author said, stressing that the EU must initiate a more co-ordinated approach to tackling a pandemic of the lethal bird flu strain….Only seven of the 21 listed countries know how to distribute medicines on a large scale, and in some of the countries the pile of anti-viral is enough for only two percent of the population. France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden topped the list, fulfilling over 70 percent of the criteria, while the Czech Republic, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Poland and Portugal were the least prepared of the countries….The lethal H5N1 virus has so far been found in twelve EU member states: Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Denmark, Poland and Slovenia.
Teresa Küchler, Europe bird flu plans full of holes, study says, EU Observer, 4-20-06

The Danube threatened to overcome soaked anti-flood defences in Serbia's capital and wash through towns across southeastern Europe on Sunday after heavy rains helped push it to its highest levels in a century. The river, fed by rain and melting snow in central Europe, rose to a 111-year record high on Saturday, displacing hundreds of people across the Balkans and putting thousands more at risk. A bottleneck at Serbia's narrow Djerdap gorge, near the border with Romania, caused the river to back up and water levels to rise upstream all the way to Belgrade….Much of the Balkans is still reeling from devastating floods last year which drowned scores of people and destroyed houses, farmland and infrastructure worth hundreds of millions of euros.
Danube threatens to burst its banks in the Balkans, Reuters, 4-16-06

With soaring oil prices, rising demand, uncertain supply and the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, energy is in focus and the European Union is calling for coordinated policy. But the Nordic region -- united by history, a shared concern for the environment and a harsh climate which puts heavy demand on power -- is divided on energy, not least nuclear power….Long before radiation on a Swedish power worker's shoes alerted the world to history's worst nuclear accident, Sweden had voted to get rid of atomic energy, in a 1980 referendum. It now aims to break with fossil fuels by 2020, when it also wants greenhouse gas emissions, blamed by many for global warming, cut by 25 percent against 1990 levels.…In Finland, however, nuclear power is seen as part of the future and its fifth atomic power plant -- the first built in Europe for more than a decade -- is due to come online in 2009....In Norway and Denmark, atomic power has never been an option. In the 1970s, when other Western nations were building nuclear plants, Norway started developing the vast oil and gas reserves that make it the world's third biggest oil exporter behind Saudi Arabia and Russia….Denmark -- home to Vestas, the world's largest wind turbine maker -- hopes use of sustainable sources such as wind and biofuels will reach 36 percent by 2025, from 25 percent in 2003….Iceland also aims to become the world's first oil-free nation, setting its sights on 2050, by shifting cars, buses, trucks and ships over to non-polluting hydrogen….
Sweden Goes for Green as Nordics Mull Energy Future, Reuters, 4-21-06

ASIA PACIFIC

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which maintained it had no plans for expansion, is now changing course. Mongolia, Iran, India and Pakistan, which previously had observer status, will become full members. SCO's decision to welcome Iran into its fold constitutes a political statement. Conceivably, SCO would now proceed to adopt a common position on the Iran nuclear issue at its summit meeting June 15. The SCO, an Intergovernmental organization whose working languages are Chinese and Russian, was founded in Shanghai on June 15, 2001 by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The SCO's change of heart appears set to involve the organization in Iran's nuclear battle and other ongoing regional issues with the United States….The SCO membership is therefore a lifeline for Iran in political and economic terms. The SCO is not a military bloc but is nonetheless a security organization committed to countering terrorism, religious extremism and separatism. SCO membership would debunk the US propaganda about Iran being part of an "axis of evil".… A People's Daily commentary on April 13 read: "The real intention behind the US fueling the Iran issue is to prompt the UN to impose sanctions against Iran, and to pave the way for a regime change in that country…." The commentary suggested Washington seeks a regime change in Iran with a view to establishing American hegemony in the Middle East. Gennady Yefstafiyev, a former general in Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, wrote: "The US's long term goals in Iran are obvious: to engineer the downfall of the current regime; to establish control over Iran's oil and gas; and to use its territory as the shortest route for the transportation of hydrocarbons under US control from the regions of Central Asia and the Caspian Sea bypassing Russia and China. This is not to mention Iran's intrinsic military and strategic significance."
M K Bhadrakumar, China, Russia welcome Iran into the fold, Asia Times, 4-19-06

Slowly but surely, the grand strategy of the Bush administration is being revealed. It is not aimed primarily at the defeat of global terrorism, the incapacitation of rogue states, or the spread of democracy in the Middle East. These may dominate the rhetorical arena and be the focus of immediate concern, but they do not govern key decisions regarding the allocation of long-term military resources. The truly commanding objective -- the underlying basis for budgets and troop deployments -- is the containment of China.….It was not China's military moves, however, that truly alarmed American policymakers -- most professional analysts are well aware of the continuing inferiority of Chinese weaponry -- but rather Beijing's success in using its enormous purchasing power and hunger for resources to establish friendly ties with such long-standing U.S. allies as Thailand, Indonesia, and Australia….At the same time, Republican strategists were becoming increasingly concerned by growing Chinese involvement in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia -- areas considered of vital geopolitical importance to the United States because of the vast reserves of oil and natural gas buried there….In this way, Washington's concern over growing Chinese influence in Southeast Asia has come to be intertwined with the U.S. drive for hegemony in the Persian Gulf and Central Asia….From Beijing's perspective, the reality must be unmistakable: a steady buildup of American military power along China's eastern, southern, and western boundaries. How will China respond to this threat? For now, it appears to be relying on charm and the conspicuous blandishment of economic benefits to loosen Australian, South Korean, and even Indian ties with the United States…China, however, has always responded to perceived threats of encirclement in a vigorous and muscular fashion as well, and so we should assume that Beijing will balance all that charm with a military buildup of its own….This will make the amicable long-term settlement of the Taiwan problem and of North Korea's nuclear program that much more difficult, and increase the risk of unintended escalation to full-scale war in Asia. There can be no victors from such a conflagration.
Michael T. Klare, Containing China, TomDispatch, 4-19-06

Mercurial dictator Saparmurat Niyazov has a multi-billion-dollar slush fund, which he uses to maintain his personality cult in natural gas-rich Turkmenistan, according to a report issued April 24 by the watchdog group Global Witness. European Union nations, in particular Germany, are helping conceal the way Niyazov is using Turkmenistan’s energy revenues, the report asserts.
The Global Witness paper -- titled Funny Business in the Turkmen-Ukraine Gas Trade -- estimates that Turkmenistan earns more than $2 billion per year from natural gas exports, a large share of which goes to Western Europe via Russia and Ukraine. The report states that a significant portion of revenue never finds its way into state coffers. Instead, Niyazov parks much of the money in foreign bank accounts under his direct control. “A horrifying 75 percent of the state’s spending ... appears to take place off [the government’s] budget,” the report says. It goes on to cite “several credible estimates” in valuing Niyazov’s slush fund at over $3 billion, “some $2 billion of which appears to reside in the Foreign Exchange Reserve Fund at Deutsche Bank in Germany.”
….Niyazov appears to lavish a large share of the revenue on “an increasingly bizarre personality cult,” the report suggests, adding that “his [Niyazov’s] picture is everywhere in Turkmenistan: on public buildings, on packets of salt and tea, bottles of vodka and even floats eerily in the corner of television broadcasts.”
TURKMENBASHI MAINTAINS MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR SLUSH FUND – REPORT, Eurasianet, 4/24/06

AMERICAS

Intelligence files reportedly suggest that an estimated 1,000 Chinese agents and informants operate in Canada. Many of them are visiting students, scientists and business people, told to steal cutting-edge technology. An example being touted as copied technology is China's Redberry -- an imitation of the Blackberry portable e-mail device, created by Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion Ltd….Juneau-Katsuya said the former Liberal government knew of the espionage, but were too afraid to act. "We didn't want to piss off or annoy the Chinese," said Juneau-Katsuya, who headed the agency's Asian desk. "(They're) too much of an important market." However, he argued that industrial espionage affects Canada's employment levels. "For every $1 million that we lose in intellectual property or business, we lose about 1,000 jobs in Canada," he said.
Robert Fife, Government 'concerned' about Chinese espionage, CTV.ca News, 4-14-06

In the absence of an imminent threat (with the Iranians at least several years away from having a nuclear arsenal), the attack would be a unilateral act of war.
If undertaken without formal Congressional declaration, it would be unconstitutional and merit the impeachment of the president….
2. Likely Iranian reactions would significantly compound ongoing U.S. difficulties in Iraq and in Afghanistan, perhaps precipitate new violence by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and in all probability cause the United States to become bogged down in regional violence for a decade or more to come….
3. Oil prices would climb steeply, especially if the Iranians cut their production and seek to disrupt the flow of oil from the nearby Saudi oil fields….
4. America would become an even more likely target of terrorism, with much of the world concluding that America's support for Israel is itself a major cause of the rise in terrorism….
It follows that an attack on Iran would be an act of political folly, setting in motion a progressive upheaval in world affairs. With America increasingly the object of widespread hostility, the era of American preponderance could come to a premature end.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Do not attack Iran, International Herald Tribune, 4-26-06

Almost half of all public health workers would not go to work during a major flu pandemic, a survey has revealed. The study suggests that health and support services would be left in chaos if a deadly human form of bird flu spread around the world. The US researchers also found two thirds of public health staff felt they would put themselves at risk if asked to report to work during a pandemic….The survey was carried out in Maryland where 308 workers from three Maryland counties with typical health departments serving local communities were questioned….Experts from the World Health Organisation have warned that a pandemic is "inevitable and possibly imminent".
Health staff fears over bird flu, Daily Mail, 4-18-06

This Saturday's elections in New Orleans represent yet another element of the vast crime committed against Black America. With as many as 300,000 residents, overwhelmingly African American, strewn about the country in government-engineered exile, the elections are an insult to the very idea of democracy, and to the dignity of all Black people. This farcical exercise in faux democracy will no doubt be followed by corporate media declarations that New Orleans is returning to "normalcy" - the same term that the media bandied about when the city held a shrunken Mardi Gras, in February. Behind that bland word, "normalcy," lies a wish list and narrative that sees white rule as normative in America - the way things should be - and Black electoral power as an aberration, a kind of organized pathology in which people are assumed to be up to no good. Despite Katrina's vast damage to Louisiana infrastructure and commerce, there is a current of elation among white elites and common folk alike, at the winds and waters that cleansed New Orleans of its two-thirds Black majority, which was seen as a sore on the body politic, a den of Otherness and iniquity.
Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, New Orleans Is Our Gettysburg, A generation's defining event. The Black Commentator, 4-20-06
GLOBAL

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev urged the world's biggest industrialized nations to set up a 50-billion-dollar (44-billion-euro) fund to support solar power, warning that oil or nuclear energy were not viable energy sources for the future. Gorbachev -- who chairs an environmental thinktank, Green Cross International -- called on leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations to invest in renewable energy sources, in a statement marking the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster….The Green Cross proposals were contained in a letter sent to the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized nations who are due to meet in Russia in July. Some of the proposals were reported last week in the Financial Times. "This idea reflects our vision of a way of helping the energy-impoverished in the developing world, while creating concentrations of solar energy in cities that could be used to prevent blackouts," Gorbachev said. Solar energy would also "lower electricity bills, and would provide a source in the future for generating renewable hydrogen fuels," he added. "The fund could easily be raised by cutting subsidies for fossil fuels like oil and coal."
Gorbachev Urges G8 to Back Solar Power, Not Oil or Nuclear, Agence France Press, 4-27-06>

A growing number of leading US companies are confronting the business challenges from global warming, recognizing that greenhouse gas limits are inevitable and that they cannot risk falling behind their international competitors in developing climate-friendly technologies….But many others are still largely ignoring the climate issue with "business as usual" strategies that may be putting their companies and shareholders at risk….The report uses a "Climate Governance Checklist" to evaluate how major industrial corporations are addressing climate change in five broad areas: board oversight, management performance, public disclosure, greenhouse gas emissions accounting and strategic planning....Foreign companies such as BP, Toyota, Alcan, Unilever and Rio Tinto had the highest scores in five of the nine sectors that included both US and non-US firms. American companies - DuPont, General Electric, International Paper and United Parcel Service - led in the other four sectors….Douglas Cogan, principal author of today's report and the 2003 report, says he sees important progress by US companies that are beginning to build climate change into their governance practices and strategic planning…."Typically, CEOs and boards look out only three to five years when making investment decisions - about as long as they serve in their leadership roles," Cogan said. "But the assets they put into place last much longer. Building a new conventional coal plant or a new engine factory for SUVs might make sense under 'business as usual' thinking, but what will happen to these facilities in five or 10 years, when they're still not fully depreciated but facing carbon emission constraints?"
Ceres Releases First-Ever Ranking of 100 Global Companies on Climate Change Strategy, GreenBiz.com, 3-22-06

Last year, Exxon made the biggest profit of any company ever, $36 billion, and its retiring chairman appears to be reaping the benefits. Exxon is giving Lee Raymond one of the most generous retirement packages in history, nearly $400 million, including pension, stock options and other perks, such as a $1 million consulting deal, two years of home security, personal security, a car and driver, and use of a corporate jet for professional purposes.
Exxon Chairman's $400 Million Parachute, Exxon Made Record Profits in 2005, ABC News, 4-14-06

In 1899 Thorstein Veblen described predation as a phase in the evolution of culture, "attained only when the predatory attitude has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude...when the fight has become the dominant note in the current theory of life." After an entire century's struggle to escape from this phase, we've suffered a relapse. The predators are everywhere unleashed; and the institutions built to contain them, from the United Nations to the AFL-CIO to the SEC, are everywhere under siege. Predation has again become the defining feature of economic life. Our first problem is to grasp this reality in full.
Postwar prosperity was built on a vast cut in the cost of security and the achievement of peace in Europe and much of Asia. The American role in the cold war system was to provide security; for this the dollar's role as anchor of the world trading system was our reward. But now, with Iraq, we are seen worldwide as the leading predator state, promoting war as a solution rather than as the ultimate economic and human horror. For this, many would like to see our privileges revoked.
Corporate and financial fraud and political corruption form the second great domain of predatory capitalism. DeLay, Frist and Abramoff are the names in the news, but the tone is set by the leadership--Cheney of Halliburton and Bush of Harken Energy--a large predator and a small scavenger, specialists in cronyism and expert in nothing else. When predation becomes the dominant business and political form, the foundation of capitalism crumbles….
JAMES K. GALBRAITH, Taming Predatory Capitalism, The Nation, 4-17-06

CYBERSPACE

Online bank customers may want to pay a little more attention to their browsers the next time they log in, because many of the most popular banking sites in the U.S. may be needlessly placing their customers at risk to online thieves, a noted security researcher warned Thursday At issue are the user log-in areas on sites like Chase.com and Americanexpress.com that ask customers to submit their ID and password information. Although these forms may be encrypted, they do not use authentication technology to prove they are genuine, according to Johannes Ullrich, chief research officer at the SANS Institute….Bank of America Corp. does not use SSL sign-in on its front page, and it defended its practices.
Major banking sites insecure, researcher warns, IDG, 4-20-06

Richard Power is the founder of GS(3) Intelligence and http://www.wordsofpower.net. His work focuses on the inter-related issues of security, sustainability and spirit, and how to overcome the challenges of terrorism, cyber crime, global warming, health emergencies, natural disasters, etc. You can reach him via e-mail: richardpower@wordsofpower.net. For more information, go to http://www.wordsofpower.net/

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Words of Power #18: 48 Hours -- What Happens When Military and Intel Officers Must Challenge Political Leaders to Uphold the Rule of Law

NOTE: Words of Power is published on a bi-weekly basis, and alternates with the GS(3) Intelligence Briefing, also posted on a bi-weekly basis. As circumstances dictate, we may post special editions. "Words of Power" commentary will explore a range of issues in the interdependent realms of security, sustainability and spirit. The GS(3) Intel Briefing is organized into five sections: Europe, Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific, Americas, Global and Cyberspace. Each issue will provide insight on terrorism, cyber crime, climate change, health emergencies, natural disasters, and other threats, as well as recommendations on what actions your organizations should take to mitigate risks. For more information, go to www.wordsofpower.net

Words of Power #18: Forty-Eight Hours -- What Happens When Military and Intel Officers Must Challenge Political Leaders to Uphold the Rule of Law

As Alexis de Tocqueville once said: "America is great because she is good. If America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." In January 2001, with the inauguration of George W. Bush as president, America set on a path to cease being good; America became a revolutionary nation, a radical republic. If our country continues on this path, it will cease to be great - as happened to all great powers before it, without exception.
Lt. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Retired, US Army, Baltimore Sun, 4-23-06

In a democratic society, high-ranking military officers, senior intelligence officials and decorated war heroes should not have to protect the rule of law, whether domestic (e.g., the Bill of Rights) or international (e.g., the Geneva Accords), against the nation’s own political leadership. Typically, most people would assume, it is the other way around. Nor should those military officers, intelligence officials and war heroes have to sound the alarm publicly when an administration fails its primary national security responsibilities. The task of sounding the alarm is supposed to be shared, in free societies, by a partisan opposition and a unbiased news media. But these are extraordinary times in the USA, and many of those who have taken an oath to defend the US Constitution against any foe “foreign or domestic” find themselves in remarkable circumstances.
For years, most congressional leaders (on both sides of the aisle) and almost all US mainstream news directors have helped hide the truth and ducked its consequences. Fortunately, the traditions and institutions of US government service have produced more than a few military and intelligence professionals true to their oaths, and they have forced the truth upon the American public again and again since 2003, and yes from 9/11 as well. Hopefully, it is unavoidable now.
Consider the relevant news items of the 48 hours from Sunday, April 23 until Tuesday, April 25, 2006:
On Monday, General Paul Van Riper, Retired, US Marine Corp, joined Generals Swanneck, Newbold, Eaton, Zinni, Batiste, Riggs and Clark, and became the eighth general to call for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Van Riper told Fox News, “If this leader is not capable of doing it, now going in excess of five years, has not demonstrated he is, then perhaps it is time to find a new one. If I was the president, I would have relieved him three years ago.”
Think Progress, 4-24-06
On Sunday morning, in a CBS Face The Nation interview with Bob Schieffer, Major General John Batiste, Retired, US Army did not equivocate in his responses:
SCHIEFFER: What did Secretary Rumsfeld do wrong in your view that causes you to say he--he must be replaced?
Maj. Gen. BATISTE: Bob, I think it--it's all a matter of treating the military with contemptuous attitudes, dismissive behavior and arrogance. We made a series of strategic decisions that were flawed with respect to the size of the force that we took into Iraq, the war plan that we executed, setting the conditions for Abu Ghraib. That should've been no surprise to any of us, and we stood down the [Iraqi] military at a point in time when that was the last thing that we wanted--or should have done....
CBS Face The Nation, 4-23-06
Meanwhile, Osama Bin Laden, the leader of those who attacked the USA on 9/11/01 issued an audio message exhorting his followers to “prepare for a drawn-out conflict with the Western world” and “blaming what he called 'a Crusader-Zionist war’ for a long list of attacks on Islam in places from Darfur to Denmark…”
Washington Post, 4-24-06
Appearing on ABC’s Sunday morning Week in Review, US Senator John Kerry (D-MA) eluded to the new Bin Laden tape, and reiterated his long-standing call for Rumsfeld’s resignation: “Bin Laden slipped past US troops from his hideout in the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan in late 2001 because Rumsfeld had not committed enough troops to finding him, Kerry, the Democratic Party candidate in the 2004 presidential election, told ABC television. The failure to catch the al-Qaeda head on that occasion was one of the biggest catastrophes in the war against terrorism, Kerry added….”
Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 4-23-06
On Sunday morning’s Op-Ed pages, Lt. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Retired, US Army, formerly chief aide to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, continued the brave advance of the patriots:
From the Kyoto accords to the International Criminal Court, from torture and cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners to rendition of innocent civilians, from illegal domestic surveillance to lies about leaking, from energy ineptitude to denial of global warming, from cherry-picking intelligence to appointing a martinet and a tyrant to run the Defense Department, the Bush administration, in the name of fighting terrorism, has put America on the radical path to ruin.
Unprecedented interpretations of the Constitution that holds the president as commander in chief to be all-powerful and without checks and balances marks the hubris and unparalleled radicalism of this administration. Moreover, fiscal profligacy of an order never seen before has brought America trade deficits that boggle the mind and a federal deficit that, when stripped of the gimmickry used to make it appear more tolerable, will leave every child and grandchild in this nation a debt that will weigh upon their generations like a ball and chain around every neck.
Baltimore Sun, 4-23-06
But the responsibility to resist and reveal was not shouldered by retired military officers and decorated war heroes alone, the weight of it was also taken up, as it has been even since 9/11, by former intelligence officials:
On Sunday evening, in CBS 60 Minutes report, Tyler Drumheller, the former head of CIA covert operations in Europe, spoke out in an interview with Ed Bradley. He said what many of us have insisted all along. It was not an “intelligence failure” that led to the Bush administration’s false claims about Iraqi possession of WMD, “a policy failure” in the White House. CBS reports that “the Bush administration, time and again, welcomed intelligence that fit the president's determination to go to war and turned a blind eye to intelligence that did not.” According to Drumheller, the prevailing consensus in the CIA, “from the beginning,” was that the Niger yellow cake uranium story was a canard. He also revealed that Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister, had “made a deal to reveal Iraq’s military secrets.” And guess what? He told them there were no WMD. But the Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice went ahead anyway, beating the drums of war and proffering false information to lend credence to their war-mongering.
CBS Sixty Minutes, 4-23-06
But perhaps the most damning bit of evidence flowing from Drumheller’s 60 Minutes appearance was revealed afterward, in an interview with blogger Josh Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo:
Did the Robb-Silbermann Commission not hear about what Drumheller had to say? What about the Roberts Committee?...He was interviewed by the Robb-Silbermann Commission. Three times apparently. Did he tell them everything he revealed on tonight's 60 Minutes segment. Absolutely. Drumheller was also interviewed twice by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Roberts Committee) but apparently only after they released their summer 2004 report….The fact that none of Drumheller's story managed to find its way into those reports, I think, speaks volumes about the agenda that the writers of those reports were pursuing. "I was stunned," Drumheller told me, when so little of the stuff he had told the commission's and the committee's investigators ended up in their reports. His colleagues, he said, were equally "in shock" that so little of what they related ended up in the reports either. What Drumheller has to say adds quite a lot to our knowledge of what happened in the lead up to war. But what it shows even more clearly is that none of this stuff has yet been investigated by anyone whose principal goal is not covering for the White House.
Talking Points Memo, 4-23-06
Then, on Monday morning, in Newsweek, a senior CIA official fired last Friday spoke out through another colleague who had resigned, as a matter of principle, in the ramp up to the tragic war in Iraq.
A former CIA officer who was sacked last week after allegedly confessing to leaking secrets has denied she was the source of a controversial Washington Post story about alleged CIA secret detention operations in Eastern Europe, a friend of the operative told NEWSWEEK. The fired official, Mary O. McCarthy, "categorically denies being the source of the leak," one of McCarthy's friends and former colleagues, [former National Security Council official] Rand Beers, said Monday after speaking to McCarthy….[Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst] maintains the Bush White House is "really damaging the intelligence community" by sending a message to career officials that "unless you are a partisan of the party in power, you cannot be trusted." This message, Johnson says, is destroying the intelligence community's "professional ethos." A serving CIA official said that the day that McCarthy was escorted out of the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters, some former colleagues of McCarthy defended her, even while acknowledging they were not familiar with the details of the case.
Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, Secrets of the CIA, Newsweek 4-24-06
What will happen now? What will you do? Where are the American people? Will these brave professionals stand alone? Or will a grateful citizenry, a repentant news media and a chastened political leadership rise up to stand beside them, instead of shirking the task at hand? Or wiil it all end here? Will this nation go the way of the Caligulas and the Neros? How far are we from death squads and detention camps? Probably about as far as we were back in January 2005 from where we are today, i.e. much closer than you think.
Bush’s latest CNN approval poll rating is at 32%
Perhaps the urgency is best captured in Batiste’s poignant reaction to Shieffer’s question on the looming confrontation with Iraq:
SCHIEFFER: We're told that the Iranians are developing a nuclear weapon. Let's suppose they--they do that. Can the United States tolerate that, and can we take military action against Iran if we're still involved in Iraq?
Maj. Gen. BATISTE: This is exactly my point, Bob. We need to hold the current secretary of defense accountable for some very bad strategic decisions. Just around the corner there are some huge decisions that this country will have to make. And we need senior leadership at the Department of Defense whose instinct and judgment we trust.
Most of us, including Gen. Batiste, know, of course, that it is not just Rumsfeld who has been exposed as horrifically inept and inexcusably cavalier in the exercise of national security responsibilities, but also President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condi Rice.
What will the next seventy-two hours bring? Or the next six months? Or the next two years?

Richard Power is the founder of GS(3) Intelligence and http://www.wordsofpower.net. His work focuses on the inter-related issues of security, sustainability and spirit, and how to overcome the challenges of terrorism, cyber crime, global warming, health emergencies, natural disasters, etc. You can reach him via e-mail: richardpower@wordsofpower.net. For more information, go to http://www.wordsofpower.net/

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Words of Power #17: Harry Potter and the Night Commuters

NOTE: Words of Power is published on a bi-weekly basis, and alternates with the GS(3) Intelligence Briefing, also posted on a bi-weekly basis. As circumstances dictate, we may post special editions. "Words of Power" commentary will explore a range of issues in the interdependent realms of security, sustainability and spirit. The GS(3) Intel Briefing is organized into five sections: Europe, Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific, Americas, Global and Cyberspace. Each issue will provide insight on terrorism, cyber crime, climate change, health emergencies, natural disasters, and other threats, as well as recommendations on what actions your organizations should take to mitigate risks. For more information, go to www.wordsofpower.net

”But I haven’t got uncommon skill and power,” said Harry, before he could stop himself.
“Yes, you have,” said Dumbledore firmly. “You have a power that Voldemort has never had. You can…”
“I know!” said Harry impatiently. “I can love!” It was only with difficulty that he stopped himself adding, “Big deal!”
“Yes, Harry, you can love,” said Dumbledore, who looked as though he knew perfectly well what Harry had just refrained from saying. “Which, given everything that has happened to you, is a great amd remarkable thing. You are still too young to understand how unusual you are.”
“So, when the prophecy says that I’ll have ‘power the Dark Lord knows not,’ it just means – love?” asked Harry, feeling a little let down.
“Yes – just love,” said Dumbledore…
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince

“One boy tried to escape, but he was caught. They made him eat a mouthful of red pepper, and five people were beating him. His hands were tied, and then they made us, the other new captives, kill him with a stick. I felt sick. I knew this boy from before. We were from the same village. I refused to kill him, and they told me they would shoot me. They pointed a gun at me, so I had to do it. The boy was asking me, “Why are you doing this?” I said I had no choice. After we killed him, they made us smear blood on our arms. I felt dizzy. They said we had to do this so we would not fear death, and so we would not try to escape.” -Susan, 16
Human Rights Watch, The Scars of Death: Children Abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Armys in Uganda, Human Rights Watch Report, 1997

For the last few months, I have carried a newspaper clipping around in my satchel. It haunts me. I can’t let go of it.  The Associated Press story, “Ugandan rebels wage war on future,” ran in the Fresno Bee on Christmas morning, in 2005. It tells of “hundreds of children who hike through the heat and the dust, clutching their mats and blankets” to the northern Ugandan town of Gulu. They are called the “night commuters.” Every night, they leave their families in the refugee camps and journey into town to sleep on verandahs and relief agency shelters. It is the only way that they avoid being kidnapped and forced into servitude by the “Lord’s Resistance Army” (LRA).
The crisis in Uganda, of course, is not new. It has gone on for many years.
According the story’s author, Rodrique Ngowi, the LRA has “given a whole new meaning to the term child abuse.” “This is a war on the future,” Ngowi wrote, “turning boys into soldiers and girls into sex slaves…At its peak, 4,500 children would walk into the main shelters in Gulu each night…” The UN estimates that at least 25,000 children have been abducted.
Last year, an AlertNet poll of more than 100 experts cited Uganda as second in the world’s top ten forgotten emergencies, behind only the Congo and just ahead of Darfur.  The LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony is described as “a former altar boy and self-proclaimed prophet” on “an apocalyptic spiritual crusade.”
In Chapter 3 of Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban, the young wizard flees the house of his abusive Aunt and Uncle, on a cold night, and waits alone in the menacing darkness, at a Muggle bus stop on a deserted street.
He does not know where he is going, or how he is going to get there.
The Knight Bus, a “violently purple” magical triple-decker bus from the Wizarding World, arrives to whisk him away.
“The bus functions as public transportation for the wizard or witch in need everywhere in England, Scotland and Wales, bringing passengers to the destinations of their choice with seemingly no set route. It bolts through the streets, entirely invisible to Muggles and causing other objects to dodge it instead of the other way round, to cover short distances. For long ones, the Knight Bus makes hundred mile (160 km) leaps accompanied by a great bang and jolt, possibly similar to Apparating. The interior of the bus changes or is changed depending on the time of day, with chairs by day and beds by night….” (The Knight Bus, Wikipedia)
As a young boy, I rode the subways and traversed the mean streets of New York City, late at night, fleeing from one danger only to encounter others. And although no Knight Bus arrived for me, I survived those dangers, and later in life, overcame the traumas inflicted -- because of the magic I discovered within and around me.
Survival kindled in me both an indomitable trust in that magic and an ardent desire to draw attention to the plight of children who live in such dire straits with no opportunity to find their own wands.
I have written to you before both about the power of Harry Potter (Words of Power #9: The Goblet of Fire, The Deep Magic & The Giant Sequoias) and the tragedy of the world’s child soldiers (Words of Power #3: Gangstas = Child Soldiers Without A Country).
In the early 1990s, J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, was single mother, battling poverty and depression. But looking back on the past decade, she has arguably exercised one of the most profound cultural influences of the millennial crossing:
The Harry Potter books have been translated into more than 55 languages, and it has been estimated that more than 250 million copies have been sold around the world. The first three books have been made into films: Sorcerer's Stone made more than $950 million; Chamber of Secrets, more than $850 million; and Prisoner of Azkaban, more than $650 million, as of July 2004, when the third was still in theaters. All three are among the top twenty highest-grossing films of all time.  In February 2004, Forbes magazine estimated that Rowling had £576 million, or more than a billion dollars. This would make her the first person ever to become a billionaire from writing books. (Monster Facts)
Within the breathtakingly paced pages of her adventure stories, Rowlings inspires her readers (whether young or just young at heart) not only to embrace the sublime (e.g., the mystical dimensions of this life) and the poignant (e.g., youth’s growing pains and rites of passage), but also to confront a plethora of social ills (e.g., racism, sexism, slavery, propaganda and terrorism). In Rowling's Wizarding World, conscience is the only unfailing oracle, and unconditional love is the only indefatigable power.
The deep, real magic within us is both incalculably ancient and utterly modern. And if we are to overcome the spiritual challenges of the 21st Century Security Crisis, it has to be unleashed. When elucidating this extraordinary convergence of risks and threats (e.g., global warming, nuclear proliferation, religious extremism, etc.) and the unprecedented demands it will make on all individuals, organizations and societies, I encourage adherence to three vital principles:
Empower those we want to reach, instead of seeking to instill fear or incite to violence.
Illustrate, by example, the immutable law that everything and everyone is connected, i.e. that whatever is done to any strand in the the web of life impacts the whole of it.
Identify the real enemies, i.e., the sources of the diseases that plague our collective psyche, e.g., ignorance, suffering and lack of opportunity, rather than futilely trying to treat the symptoms.
There is no better way to work toward establishing global security, sustainability and spiritual renewal than making personal, organizational and national commitments to the realization of the UN’s Millennium Goals by 2015:
1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
2. Achieve universal primary education
3. Promote gender equality and empower women
4. Reduce child mortality
5. Improve maternal health
6. Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases
7. Ensure environmental sustainability
8. Develop a global partnership for development
There is no greater spiritual imperative.
There is no greater national security issue.
If enough individuals, organizations and governments accept this portfolio of responsibility, the “Night Commuters” of Uganda, and many millions more, will find their way to the Wizarding World.

Richard Power is the founder of GS(3) Intelligence and http://www.wordsofpower.net. His work focuses on the inter-related issues of security, sustainability and spirit, and how to overcome the challenges of terrorism, cyber crime, global warming, health emergencies, natural disasters, etc. You can reach him via e-mail: richardpower@wordsofpower.net. For more information, go to http://www.wordsofpower.net/

Child Soldiers, Harry Potter, Myth, Millennium Goals

Friday, April 14, 2006

GS(3) Intelligence Briefing (4-16-06)

The United States was too late. Iran’s leaders had learned from what happened to Saddam Hussein in 1981, when Israeli F-16s destroyed a facility at Osirak where most of his nuclear projects were concentrated. Iran spread its research to at least a dozen sites—exactly how many, and where, the U.S. government could not be sure.

The United States was too vulnerable. Iran, until now relatively restrained in using its influence among the Iraqi Shiites, “could make Iraq hell,” in the words of one of our experts, Kenneth Pollack, of the Brookings Institution. It could use its influence on the world’s oil markets to shock Western economies—most of all, that of the world’s largest oil importer, the United States.

The plan was likely to backfire, in a grand-strategy sense. At best, it would slow Iranian nuclear projects by a few years. But the cost of buying that time would likely be a redoubling of Iran’s determination to get a bomb—and an increase in its bitterness toward the United States.

James Fallow, The Nuclear Power Beside Iraq, The Atlantic Monthly, 5-06

Iran is not to be easily intimidated. Few in Tehran take the threat of oil sanctions seriously. Iranians know that even if the US decided to bomb the country's nuclear sites, they are maintained by Russian advisers and technicians; that would mean in effect a declaration of war against Russia…. Iranians know Shi'ites in the south and in Baghdad would turn extreme heat on the occupation forces in Iraq. Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, on an official visit to Iran, according to his spokesman, said that "if any Islamic state, especially the Islamic Republic of Iran, is attacked, the Mehdi Army would fight inside and outside Iraq". Iranians also know they can bypass any trade sanctions by trading even more with China….Mohammed-Nabi Rudaki, deputy chairman of the National Security and Foreign Policy Commission….has already threatened that "if Europe does not act wisely with the Iranian nuclear portfolio and it is referred to the UN Security Council and economic or air travel restrictions are imposed unjustly, we have the power to halt oil supply to the last drop from the shores of the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz".  Up to 30% of the world's oil production passes through the strait. Were Iran to block it, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait would not be able to export their oil.
Pepe Escobar, The war on Iran, Asia Times, 4-13-06

ASIA PACIFIC

Evidently, China's government considers the development of indigenous technical standards a strategic priority….At the moment, most of the first movers are US, European or Japanese firms. But China would dearly like the first movers of the future to be Chinese. And the easiest way to make sure that happens is to promote indigenous technical standards, which - because China's market is so huge and growing so rapidly - the global electronics industry cannot afford to ignore, even if they perceive that losing control of standards will undermine their long-term interests….What we are seeing now is the early stage of a high-stakes struggle over technology standards that will last for many years, and analysts are beginning to discern the patterns….Undoubtedly, there is a growing school of thought that says the Chinese believe their market is so large that they will ultimately be able to force adoption of their standard, and eventually use this structural advantage to take control of the industries in question….Indeed, whether the rest of the world is prepared or not, it is already clear that China is using its massive markets and spectacular growth as leverage in the standards war. Markets for the country's electronic-information products have grown from $20 billion in 1999 to more than $85 billion (estimated) in 2005, and according to Vice Minister of Information Industry Lou Qinjian, China's output of several categories of home-made electronic and information products already ranks first worldwide. With consumer-electronics products such as color TV sets and mobile phones witnessing scorching growth, "China has become the world's second-largest consumer-electronics market next to the US," said the minister. ….The most likely pattern for the future is that China will first mass-produce in its home market, and then export its new technologies to neighboring developing-country markets in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and other countries that do not have technologies to call their own.
Indrajit Basu, China and the art of (standards) war, Asia Times, 4-13-06

Beware of the dragonfly: it may be a bugging robot disguised as a harmless insect. No, the advice does   not come from a mental patient convinced the   government is spying on his laundry bills: it was one   of the security tips issued during last week’s two-day   workshop for 120 Korean delegates in the nation’s   impending free-trade negotiations with the U.S. The   workshop was designed to help delegates guard their   negotiation strategies from prying ears when the talksstart in June.   Security authorities at the workshop revealed the extraordinary inventiveness of U.S.’s intelligence   surveillance power, which indeed stretches to a   dragonfly robot that records conversation with the   microphones concealed in its trunk as it sluggishly drones about the room.
KOREAN FTA NEGOTIATORS PRIMED ON U.S. BUGGING TRICKS, Chosun Ilbo, 4-9-06

Concerns about Kyrgyzstan’s political stability are rising following an assassination attempt April 12 against a prominent civil society figure. The attack against Edil Baisalov -- head of the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society, a Bishkek non-governmental organization – occurred as he was leaving the organization’s offices in central Bishkek at approximately 6 pm local time….
Kyrgyzstan has experienced frequent spasms of political violence since the Tulip revolution swept Askar Akayev’s old regime from power in March 2005. Prime Minister Feliks Kulov, who visited Baisalov in the hospital, characterized the assassination attempt as politically motivated. In early April, Baisalov led an NGO effort to organize mass demonstrations, calling on President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s administration to vigorously pursue an anti-crime and corruption agenda. Baisalov had also been vocal in his opposition to a Supreme Court decision that enabled reputed organized crime boss Ryspek Akmatbayev to contest a parliamentary by-election….The assassination attempt sent shock waves through Kyrgyzstan’s NGO sector. Medet Tiulegenov, the executive director of the Soros Foundation – Kyrgyzstan, suggested that the incident could fuel criticism of the Bakiyev administration for not taking a tough stand against rampant crime and corruption. "Today’s attempt to take the life of a civil society leader signifies yet another manifestation of the deteriorating governance of Kyrgyzstan," Tiulegenov said….Kyrgyzstan has been the scene of geopolitical competition between Russia and the United States in recent years. [For background see the Eurasia Insight archive]. However, there are indications that both states are alarmed by the country’s burgeoning disorder.
ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT IN KYRGYZSTAN UNDERSCORES SLIDE TOWARD INSTABILITY, Eurasianet, 4-12-06

AMERICAS

When the hated despots of nations like Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan loot their countries' treasuries, transfer their oil wealth to personal Swiss bank accounts and use the rest to finance (in the House of Saud's case) terrorist extremists, American politicians praise them as trusted friends and allies. But when a democratically elected populist president uses Venezuela's oil profits to lift poor people out of poverty, they accuse him of pandering. As the United States and Europe continue their shift toward a Darwinomic model where rapacious corporations accrue bigger and bigger profits while workers become poorer and poorer, the socialist economic model espoused by President Hugo Chávez has become wildly popular among Latin Americans tired of watching corrupt right-wing leaders enrich themselves at their expense. Left-of-center governments have recently won power in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. Chávez's uncompromising rhetoric matches his politics, but what's really driving the American government and its corporate masters crazy is that he has the cash to back it up…..Eighty-two percent of Venezuelans think Chávez is doing a good job. That's more than twice the approval rating by Americans of Bush. He roundly defeated an attempt to recall him. So why is Washington lecturing Caracas? "The [Venezuelan] government is making billions of dollars [from its state oil company] and spending them on houses, education, medical care," notes CNN. And--gasp--people's lives are improving.
What if the rest of us noticed? No wonder Chávez has to go.
Ted Rall, The Danger of Hugo Chávez's Successful Socialism, Common Dreams, 4-7-06

London's Financial Times performed an American public service in its weekend edition, calling editorially for open and honest discussion of the influence of Israel on American foreign policy. The call came amid the resounding silence in "responsible" American circles concerning the paper recently issued by two highly regarded political scholars, Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, discussing the "Israeli lobby" in Washington and its effect on American foreign relations. So far as one can make out, in the mainstream American press, only United Press International, the International Herald Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have carried articles on the paper….in the case of the Washington Post, two of them, both featuring the news that the totally insignificant David Duke, a former head of the Ku Klux Klan, applauds the Merscheimer-Walt paper….linking him to the Merscheimer-Wall document was an act of character assassination by association, just like those that won Sen. Joseph McCarthy infamy in the 1950s….In fact, Mearsheimer and Walt are recognized and respected political scholars in the so-called realist tradition, which regards the defense and promotion of the national interest of states as the chief purpose of foreign policy. Their paper is a responsible document of public importance. The venom in the attacks made on it risks the opposite of its intended effect by tending to validate the claim that intense pressures are exercised on publishers, editors, writers and American universities to block criticism, intimidate critics and prevent serious discussion of the American-Israeli relationship….
William Pfaff, Israeli lobby and U.S. foreign policy, International Herald Tribune, 4-6-06

GLOBAL

THE world lacks the means to produce enough oil to meet rising projections of demand for fuel over the next decade, according to Christophe de Margerie, head of exploration for Total and heir presumptive to the leadership of the French energy multinational.
The world is mistakenly focusing on oil reserves when the problem is capacity to produce oil, M de Margerie said in an interview with The Times. Forecasters, such as the International Energy Agency (IEA), have failed to consider the speed at which new resources can be brought into production, he believes.
“Numbers like 120 million barrels per day will never be reached, never,” he said.
Carl Mortished, World 'cannot meet oil demand', Times of London, 4-8-06

The world is moving towards a new third industrial revolution based on a new energy regime, argues US thinker Jeremy Rifkin as Europe considers how to reformulate its energy policy. "We are on the cusp of a new energy regime that will alter our way of life as fundamentally as the introduction of coal and steam power in the 19th century and the shift to oil and the internal combustion engine in the 20th century", argues Mr Rifkin in an interview with the EUobserver."The hydrogen era looms on the horizon and the first major industrial nation to harness its full potential will set the pace for economic development for the remainder of the century."To back up his thesis, he says that Hitachi and Toshiba are planning to bring the first portable fuel cells to the market in 2007.Consumers will be able to power up their cell phones, lap top computers, digital cameras, and Mp3 players with a single cartridge. And the first mass-produced vehicles are expected to be in the showrooms between 2010 and 2012, he points out. "Today's centralised, top-down flow of energy, controlled by global oil companies will then become obsolete," says Mr Rifkin, who is founder of Washington-based think-tank the Foundation on Economic Trends…."We have to reconfigure the power grip of Europe and the world, so that it’s smart and distributive just like the Internet. This is open-source energy"."This new energy regime will mean re-globalisation, this time from the bottom up.”
Lisbeth Kirk, World on the 'cusp of a new energy regime' EU Observer, 4-13-06

The Government's chief scientist today gave his starkest warning yet about the world's increasing carbon emissions saying that even the best-case scenario put millions of lives at risk by the end of the century.  Professor Sir David King said that a 3C rise in global temperatures is likely within 100 years, a process that will lead to a rise in sea levels and increase in desertification that will place 400 million people at the risk of hunger. Parts of Britain will be flooded as the UK comes under coastal attack. Developing countries will be the hardest hit, with ecosystems failing to adapt and between 20 million to 400 million tonnes of cereal production being lost, according to Sir David.
He said the temperature rise would be the consequence of carbon dioxide levels of 500 parts per million, roughly double those of the Industrial Revolution. The current carbon dioxide concentration stands at 380 parts per million, already the highest levels likely to have been experienced on Earth for 740,000 years….But Sir David, who has been criticised in the past for restraining his warnings on the advice of Government ministers, had stern words for politicians who say that carbon emissions can be controlled by the use of new, environmentally-friendly technologies. "There is a difference between optimism and head in the sand," he said. "Quite clearly what we have to do as we move forward with these discussions is see that this consensus position of the scientific community is brought right into the table where the discussions are taking place."
Sam Knight, Scientist Issues Grim Warning on Global Warming, Times of London, 4-14-06

CYBERSPACE

Telecommunications companies like Verizon and AT&T want to build high-speed networks to provide video and Internet services in competition with cable companies. Will these networks be broadly available and foster technological innovation? Or will they simply benefit certain moneyed interests? The answer -- and, ultimately, the future of the Internet -- depends on the telecommunications bill currently winding its way through Congress. Consumer advocates and progressives like Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) are pushing for the telecom networks, which will be built using public rights-of-way, to provide universal, non-discriminatory access. The telecommunications companies (along with the cable giants) want to reserve the right to give preferential access to whomever has the most cash. Thus far, unfortunately, the industry is winning.
The End Of The Internet As We Know It?, Center for American Progress, 4-12-06

Richard Power is the founder of GS(3) Intelligence and http://www.wordsofpower.net. His work focuses on the inter-related issues of security, sustainability and spirit, and how to overcome the challenges of terrorism, cyber crime, global warming, health emergencies, natural disasters, etc. You can reach him via e-mail: richardpower@wordsofpower.net. For more information, go to http://www.wordsofpower.net/

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Words of Power #16: Lt. Gen. Newbold Bears Witness, Sy Hersh Sounds the Alarm & Patrick Fitzgerald Raises the Stakes

NOTE: Words of Power is published on a bi-weekly basis, and alternates with the GS(3) Intelligence Briefing, also posted on a bi-weekly basis. As circumstances dictate, we may post special editions. "Words of Power" commentary will explore a range of issues in the interdependent realms of security, sustainability and spirit. The GS(3) Intel Briefing is organized into five sections: Europe, Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific, Americas, Global and Cyberspace. Each issue will provide insight on terrorism, cyber crime, climate change, health emergencies, natural disasters, and other threats, as well as recommendations on what actions your organizations should take to mitigate risks. For more information, go to www.wordsofpower.net

With the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership, I offer a challenge to those still in uniform: a leader's responsibility is to give voice to those who can't—or don't have the opportunity to—speak. Enlisted members of the armed forces swear their oath to those appointed over them; an officer swears an oath not to a person but to the Constitution. The distinction is important.
LEUT. GENERAL GREG NEWBOLD (RET.), "Why I Think Rumsfeld Must Go,” TIME, 4-9-06

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”
The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it “a juggernaut that has to be stopped.” He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue.
Seymour Hersh, The Iran Plans, New Yorker, 4-10-06

Is a President, on the eve of his reelection campaign, legally entitled to ward off political embarrassment and conceal past failures in the exercise of his office by unilaterally and informally declassifying selected - as well as false and misleading - portions of a classified National Intelligence Estimate that he has previously refused to declassify, in order to cause such information to be secretly disclosed under false pretenses in the name of a "former Hill staffer" to a single reporter, intending that reporter to publish such false and misleading information in a prominent national newspaper? The answer is obvious: No. Such a misuse of authority is the very essence of a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States. It is also precisely the abuse of executive power that led to the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon.
Elizabeth de le Vega, Final Jeopardy, TomDispatch, 4-10-06

While the US body politic distracts itself, over the airwaves, and in the corridors of power, with a futile and falsely premised debate over illegal immigration, serious questions about the life and death of the republic go largely ignored. Recent revelations from US DoJ special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, retired US Marine Corp Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh (encapsulated above) have converged to create a watershed moment.
But who will seize it? Will Bush-Cheney get to Iran before special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald gets to the truth about Bush-Cheney? Will the US military officer corps heed Lt. Gen Newbold’s call to speak out about the debacle in Iraq before it results in an American Den Bien Phu? Will members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff resign, as Sy Hersh suggests, in protest over Bush-Cheney’s eagerness to nuke Iran? Will mid-term US elections bring the return of oversight and accountability before the extension of Bush-Cheney’s folly precipitates WWIII?
Will some aggregate of power and influence within Beltwayistan force Bush to jettison Cheney and Rumsfeld, and replace them with Colin Powell and others, and then allow the lame duck to live out the rest of his term under some de facto White House arrest? Will a new Congress be sworn in, through some miracle of democracy worthy of Kiev or Bishkek, and take up the issues of censure and impeachment? Will Bush-Cheney pull a “Saturday Night Massacre” and order Gonzalez to fire Fitzgerald? Of course, they wouldn’t have to worry about Gonzalez pulling an Elliot Richardson or a Bill Ruckleshaus and refusing to carry out their outrageous demand. (Indeed, Gonzalez would probably render Fitzgerald to Syria if the “Unitary Executive” so decreed.) Will we lose an American city to an Al Qaeda WMD attack, and succumb to martial law before a new Congress can be sworn in?
The sands in the hourglass are dwindling. No one knows the exact number of grains, but it is finite. And when they have all fallen, the republic will be gone.
How could anyone on Capitol Hill or in the US mainstream news media pretend that the Bush-Cheney national insecurity team has either the credibility to confront Iran on its nuclear weapons program, or the competence to determine how to wage war even if the situation demanded it? And yet, the follies of Bush-Cheney continue unchallenged in any real way either by the Congress, as a co-equal branch of government, or by the network and cable news organizations, as guardians of the people's right to know.
In an Buzzflash exclusive, Greg Palast puts it succinctly:
Now the pundits are arguing over whether our war-a-holic President had the legal right to leak this national security information. But, that's a fake debate meant to distract you. OK, let's accept the White House alibi that releasing Plame's identity was no crime. But if that's true, they've committed a bigger crime: Bush and Cheney knowingly withheld vital information from a grand jury investigation, a multimillion dollar inquiry the perps themselves authorized.
Today, in the US, we are witnessing the inverse of the process that worked to preserve the rule of constitutional law during the era of Watergate scandal and the Pentagon Papers. In the early 1970s, a strong, independent news media drove the process, and jump-started the system of checks and balances. But today’s Daniel Ellsbergs and Marc Felts (a.k.a. “Deep Throat”) have nowhere to turn in the US mainstream news media. (Remember the NYT sat on the NSA scandal for a year, indeed an election year.) And apparently, there are no Howard Bakers in the 21st Century Republican Party.
In the Bush-Cheney era, accountability is being driven from below, and at great peril.
Consider Sidney Blumenthal’s recent expose (“The Tethered Goat Strategy” Guardian, 4-6-06) on the fate of US foreign service officers:
“Since the Iraqi elections in January, US foreign service officers at the Baghdad embassy have been writing a steady stream of disturbing cables describing drastically worsening conditions….The insurgency, according to the reports, also continues to mutate...State department officials in the field are reporting that Shia militias use training as cover to infiltrate key positions. Thus the strategy to create institutions of order and security is fuelling civil war. Rather than being received as invaluable intelligence, the messages are discarded or, worse, considered signs of disloyalty. Rejecting the facts on the ground apparently requires blaming the messengers. So far, two top attaches at the embassy have been reassigned elsewhere for producing factual reports that are too upsetting.”
Furthermore, Blumenthal reports, “under the pretence that Iraq is being pacified, the military is partially withdrawing from hostile towns in the countryside and parts of Baghdad,” and “the jobs the military doesn't want to perform are being sloughed off on state department ‘provisional reconstruction teams’ (PRTs) led by foreign service officers.” Chillingly, Blumenthal adds, “the Pentagon has informed the state department it will not provide security for these officials and that mercenaries should be hired for protection instead.”
“Amid this internal crisis of credibility,” Blumenthal concludes, Condoleezza Rice “has washed her hands of her department.”
With this atmosphere of fear and repression inside the goverment, the exhortation of Lt. Gen. Newbold (“a leader's responsibility is to give voice to those who can't—or don't have the opportunity to—speak”) takes on even greater poignancy and urgency.
And for those of you who have not sworn an oath to protect and defend the US Constitution, but consider yourselves just concerned citizens, you are free to spend as much time as you want talking about health care, education and, of course, illegal immigration. But if you do, you are spending your time re-arranging deck chairs on a constitutional (i.e. Bill of Rights), geopolitical (i.e., Western Alliance) economic (national debt and deficits) and environmental (global warming) Titanic.
Meanwhile, the Bush cabal is running out the clock on the republic.
You can’t have a republic at home, and an empire abroad. Not for long, anyway. Eventually, you must choose one or the other. And if you chose empire, you will not be able to change your mind without great upheaval, if at all, and if you don’t change your mind, you will inevitably fail -- because the age of empires has past.

Richard Power is the founder of GS(3) Intelligence and http://www.wordsofpower.net. His work focuses on the inter-related issues of security, sustainability and spirit, and how to overcome the challenges of terrorism, cyber crime, global warming, health emergencies, natural disasters, etc. You can reach him via e-mail: richardpower@wordsofpower.net. For more information, go to http://www.wordsofpower.net/

Saturday, April 08, 2006

GS(3) Intelligence Briefing (4-8-06)

NOTE: GS(3) Intelligence Briefing is posted on a bi-weekly basis. As circumstances dictate, we may post special editions. The Briefing is organized into five sections: Europe, Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific, Americas, Global and Cyberspace. Each issue provides insight on terrorism, cyber crime, climate change, health emergencies, natural disasters and other threats, as well as recommendations on what actions your organizations should take to mitigate risks. “Words of Power" commentary is also posted on a bi-weekly basis. This commentary explores a range of issues in the interdependent realms of security, sustainability and spirit. For more information, go to GS(3) Intelligence and  Words of Power, go to http://www.wordsofpower.net/

Here are thirteen items, including both news stories and op-ed pieces, which provide insight on the struggle for geopolitical hegemony, the global sustainability crisis, nuclear proliferation, the danger of religious extremism, the exploitation of women, energy security, environmental security, the victimization of the poor, and other important global issues and trends.

EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA
“A Belgian reporter claims she carried a bomb into the hotel where the German and French leaders, Angela Merkel and Jacques Chirac, stayed during last week’s EU summit in central Brussels.” (EU Observer, 3-28-06)
“One United Nations estimate says from 113 million to 200 million women around the world are demographically "missing." Every year, from 1.5 million to 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect….In the past two centuries, those in the West have gradually changed the way they treat women. As a result, the West enjoys greater peace and progress. It is my hope that the third world will embark on this effort. Just as we put an end to slavery, we must end the gendercide.” (International Herald Tribune, 3-25-06)  NOTE: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the author of this op-ed piece, is a Somali woman serving in the Dutch legislature. She is protected twenty-four hours a day against death threats from Islamic extremists. Her collaborator, filmmaker Theo van Gogh, with whom she made "Submission," a documentary about women and Islam, has already been murdered.
“Twelve business groups control the Israeli economy, making it one of the most concentrated in the world, Forbes Israel said in a report….” (Jerusalem Post,  4-3-06)

ASIA PACIFIC
“Concerned about China's growing interest in the Indian Ocean, a body of water and region that New Delhi considers to be its own sphere of influence, India is strengthening its already close military cooperation with Maldives, a nation of 1,192 tiny, low-lying coral islands strategically located about 300 miles off subcontinent's southeast coast ….”(Asia Times, 4-7-06)
“In an attempt to preserve control over energy exports out of the Central Asia, Russia is taking a two-track approach to opposing the possible construction of trans-Caspian Sea pipelines. While Russian diplomats argue against an undersea pipeline on environmental grounds, Moscow is concurrently beefing up its military presence in the region….” (Eurasianet, 3-23-06)
“Three tightly correlated factors have allowed us to avert the prospect of a world where several dozen nuclear powers compete. Yet today, these factors have been weakened, both individually and collectively… “ (Le Monde, 4-3-06)

AMERICAS
“Virtually anyone paying attention to events in Venezuela and Nicaragua in the north to Peru and Bolivia further south, plus in different ways Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, comes to the same conclusion: there is a wave of profound anti-American feeling stretching from the Texas border to the Antarctic. And almost everyone believes it will get worse….” (BBC, 3-4-06)
“In his speech at a ministerial-level meeting on biodiversity, the popular Brazilian leader, known widely as "Lula", also criticised the West for what many economists consider unsustainable patterns of consuming the world's resources, which are contributing to an alarming level of poverty. In 1980, the rich had 30 times more wealth than the poor, noted Lula. Now that ratio has almost doubled.” (Inter Press Service, 3-28-06)
“Colombia is a complicated stew of violence--the repressive Colombian government, under the democratically elected but dictatorial President Uribe, a drug benefactor and friend of George W. Bush; the brutal Colombian military; the tens of thousands of paramilitary troops who roam the country doing the army’s dirty work; the rebel groups, FARC and ELN; the massive U.S. military aid; the ever-present U.S. soldiers and U.S. military advisors; and the multinational corporations stealing the land from the poor.” (Common Dreams, 3-28-06)

GLOBAL
“The spread of avian influenza through at least 29 new countries in the past seven weeks — one of the biggest outbreaks of the virus since it emerged nine years ago — is prompting a sobering reassessment of the strategy that has guided efforts to contain the disease.” (Los Angeles Times, 3-27-06)
“Every second, someone in the world moves into a slum. Over the next 30 years, the world's slum population will, on average, increase by 100,000 each day…Overcrowding is the most visible problem, but the sheer number of people is just the beginning. In slums across Asia, such as in Mumbai or Dhaka, around 1,000 people live together in each acre of land, without proper sanitation. The result is a massive amount of human and solid waste that even the most willing government would struggle to deal with….” (Guardian/UK, 3-28-06)
“Capitalism and sustainability are deeply and increasingly interrelated. After all, our economic activity is based on the use of natural and human resources. Not until we more broadly "price in" the external costs of investment decisions across all sectors will we have a sustainable economy and society.   The industrial revolution brought enormous prosperity, but it also introduced unsustainable business practices...Today, the global context for business is clearly changing.” (Dow Jones, 4-2-06) NOTE: The authors of this op-ed piece are Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States and David Blood, former head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, who are the co-founders of Generation Investment Management.)

CYBERSPACE
"...according to a comprehensive survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), identity theft is affecting millions of households in the U.S each year and costing an estimated $6.4 billion per year. About 3 percent of all households in the U.S., totaling an estimated 3.6 million families, were hit by some sort of ID theft during the first six months of 2004….” (IDG, 4-3-06)

Excerpts from these thirteen stories with links to the full texts follow below. Remember, words-of-power.blogspot.com is also a searchable database. It is meant to accelerate, intensify and enrich your online research.

Europe, Middle East, Africa

A Belgian reporter claims she carried a bomb into the hotel where the German and French leaders, Angela Merkel and Jacques Chirac, stayed during last week’s EU summit in central Brussels. Belgian TV journalist Katleen Peeraer, who works for the Flemish-speaking VTM TV network's 'Telefacts' programme, also reportedly approached one of the leaders with a loaded Beretta pistol in her bag. Despite heavy security measures, she was not searched at the hotel's entrance.  "She walked in and out [of the hotel] without problems," said Telefacts editor Ann Vroom on the VTM website….The bomb carried by the reporter was heavy enough to blow up a complete floor of the hotel, according to VTM….The producers of the programme said they wanted to highlight the poor security at EU summits held in Brussels.
Lucia Kubosova, Reporter smuggles bomb into Merkel and Chirac hotel, EU Observer, 3-28-06

One United Nations estimate says from 113 million to 200 million women around the world are demographically "missing." Every year, from 1.5 million to 3 million women and girls lose their lives as a result of gender-based violence or neglect….The Islamists are engaged in reviving and spreading a brutal and retrograde body of laws. Wherever the Islamists implement Shariah, or Islamic law, women are hounded from the public arena, denied education and forced into a life of domestic slavery. Cultural and moral relativists sap our sense of moral outrage by claiming that human rights are a Western invention. Men who abuse women rarely fail to use the vocabulary the relativists have provided them. They claim the right to adhere to an alternative set of values - an "Asian," "African" or "Islamic" approach to human rights.
    This mind-set needs to be broken. A culture that carves the genitals of young girls, hobbles their minds and justifies their physical oppression is not equal to a culture that believes women have the same rights as men.
    Three initial steps could be taken by world leaders to begin eradicating the mass murder of women:
    A tribunal such as the court of justice in The Hague should look for the 113 million to 200 million women and girls who are missing.
    A serious international effort must urgently be made to precisely register violence against girls and women, country by country.
    We need a worldwide campaign to reform cultures that permit this kind of crime. Let's start to name them and shame them.
    In the past two centuries, those in the West have gradually changed the way they treat women. As a result, the West enjoys greater peace and progress. It is my hope that the third world will embark on this effort. Just as we put an end to slavery, we must end the gendercide.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Women Go 'Missing' by the Millions, International Herald Tribune, 3-25-06

Twelve business groups control the Israeli economy, making it one of the most concentrated in the world, Forbes Israel said in a report…. The groups - controlled by Sami Ofer, Nochi Dankner, Shari Arison, the Cerberus-Gabriel consortium, Charles Bronfman, Yitzchak Tshuva, the Saban group, Lev Leviev, Matthew Bronfman, Tzadik Bino, the Borovich family, and Eliezer Fishman - have each put together empires of the largest companies in Israel, using organizational structures that have since been eliminated in other parts of the Western world, the report said. "This is an economy in which the banks can control whole corporations and where the country is afraid of its capital holders," said Ben-Gurion University professor Daniel Maman.
These 12 groups own 60 percent of the aggregate market value of all Israeli public companies (when the exceptionally-large Teva Pharmaceutical Industries is excluded), with shares valued at some NIS 200 billion, Forbes Israel showed.
Forbes Israel: 12 groups run economy, Jerusalem Post, 4-3-06

Asia Pacific

Concerned about China's growing interest in the Indian Ocean, a body of water and region that New Delhi considers to be its own sphere of influence, India is strengthening its already close military cooperation with Maldives, a nation of 1,192 tiny, low-lying coral islands strategically located about 300 miles off subcontinent's southeast coast ….Maldives shares ties of religion with Pakistan (both countries are Sunni Muslim)….The visit of then Chinese premier Zhu Rongji to Male in 2001 immediately prompted rumors that the Chinese were seeking a base on one of the atolls….The base was to become operational in 2010.  The deal appeared to have run into trouble in 2002, but reports of renewed maritime cooperation on the part of China and Maldives surfaced again in 2004….To the west of India lies China's longtime "all-weather friend" Pakistan. China's cooperation on missiles and nuclear weapons is well known and its funding of Pakistan's Gwadar port will enable the Chinese navy to sit at the mouth of the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which passes much of the world's petroleum supply, as well as provide it access to the Arabian Sea.  To India's east, China has substantial influence over the military junta in Myanmar. It is helping modernize several bases along the Andaman Sea in Hianggyi, Akyab, Kyun and Mergui to support Chinese submarine operations. Myanmar is said to have leased a base to the Chinese in the Coco Islands, which are just a few nautical miles from India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands….China also has extensive military relations with Bangladesh. Dhaka is said to have offered the Chinese access to Chittagong port.
Sudha Ramachandran, Maldives: Tiny islands, big intrigue, Asia Times, 4-7-06

In an attempt to preserve control over energy exports out of the Central Asia, Russia is taking a two-track approach to opposing the possible construction of trans-Caspian Sea pipelines. While Russian diplomats argue against an undersea pipeline on environmental grounds, Moscow is concurrently beefing up its military presence in the region. One or more pipelines stretching along the Caspian’s seabed would effectively break a Russian monopoly over export routes between Central Asia’s key energy producers – Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan – and Western markets….The Russian government recently brushed aside protests from Greenpeace and other groups opposing construction of a Pacific pipeline because the chosen route poses a threat to Lake Baikal’s delicate ecological balance. Yet, when it comes to the Caspian, Russian diplomats are basing their opposition to an undersea route on environmental concerns. ….At the same time, Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, continue to press a diplomatic offensive designed to prevent the United States from establishing a military presence in the Caspian Basin.
Sergei Blagov,  RUSSIA TRIES TO SCUTTLE PROPOSED TRANS-CASPIAN, Eurasianet, 3/28/06

At present, fewer than ten countries possess nuclear weapons: Israel, India and Pakistan are added to the five powers the nuclear status of which is recognized by the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and which are, moreover, permanent Security Council members. North Korea has most likely crossed the nuclear threshold, while Iran appears to be tempted by a North Korean-style process. The brevity of this table is the result of a kind of miracle. In fact, today about fifty states have research reactors or nuclear power stations that would allow them to cross the nuclear threshold within a more or less short delay….Three tightly correlated factors have allowed us to avert the prospect of a world where several dozen nuclear powers compete. Yet today, these factors have been weakened, both individually and collectively…
The American-Indian agreement confirms the short work the Bush administration makes of the several multilateral elements of order that frame the international system. With its unilateral doctrine of preventive strikes, the American executive had already supplied the targeted states with a convenient excuse for the acquisition of nuclear weapons. The Bush administration since then has done what it can to discourage those who try to preserve the international system of nuclear non-proliferation.
François Heisbourg, The Nuclear Club Must Remain Closed, Le Monde, 4-3-06

Americas

It is one of the most important and yet largely untold stories of our world in 2006. George W Bush has lost Latin America.
While the Bush administration has been fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, relations between the United States and the countries of Latin America have become a festering sore - the worst for years.
Virtually anyone paying attention to events in Venezuela and Nicaragua in the north to Peru and Bolivia further south, plus in different ways Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, comes to the same conclusion: there is a wave of profound anti-American feeling stretching from the Texas border to the Antarctic.
And almost everyone believes it will get worse….
The next country to fall to a strongly anti-American populist politician could be Peru….
Latin American voters have thrown out their governments and - often - given a two-fingered salute to Washington. That is their prerogative.
Economically, some countries - including Peru - have been roaring ahead.
Their cultures are flourishing too….
Analysis: How the US 'lost' Latin America, BBC, 3-4-06

Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva Monday castigated the wealthy and technologically advanced countries of the world for failing to live up to their responsibility in tackling poverty and environmental degradation on the planet….
In his speech at a ministerial-level meeting on biodiversity, the popular Brazilian leader, known widely as "Lula", also criticised the West for what many economists consider unsustainable patterns of consuming the world's resources, which are contributing to an alarming level of poverty. In 1980, the rich had 30 times more wealth than the poor, noted Lula. Now that ratio has almost doubled. "The industrialised nations spend about 900 billion dollars to defend their national borders," the Brazilian president said. "But they allocate less than 60 billion dollars for development in poor countries, where hunger has become a silent weapon of mass destruction." Lula told delegates that the developed world is willfully neglecting the widening gulf between the rich and poor because it continues to cling to a model of development that has no room for collective sharing of resources and lacks concern for environmental degradation. "Biodiversity is our planet's greatest treasure. Anything that is contrary to its conservation and to fair benefit sharing must be rejected," Lula said. "It's time to act. It's time for change."
Haider Rizvi, Brazil's Lula Lashes Out At Rich Nations, Inter Press Service, 3-28-06

Colombia is a complicated stew of violence--the repressive Colombian government, under the democratically elected but dictatorial President Uribe, a drug benefactor and friend of George W. Bush; the brutal Colombian military; the tens of thousands of paramilitary troops who roam the country doing the army’s dirty work; the rebel groups, FARC and ELN; the massive U.S. military aid; the ever-present U.S. soldiers and U.S. military advisors; and the multinational corporations stealing the land from the poor. This institutionalized violence gives Colombia the distinction of having the highest number of human rights violations in the Western Hemisphere ….“Daily life for the struggling people means being harassed, questioned, displaced, disappeared, perhaps kidnapped or killed by the army, paramilitaries or the guerillas,” one indigenous leader told us.
At one point, we came around a bend on the cliff and saw an entire mountainside where the green trees had been chopped down and the remaining stumps burned black. Along the road we found thousands of pine tree seedling samples in boxes, ready to be planted. Some North American firm had orchestrated the killing and removal of the indigenous people, took their land, and destroyed the trees in a scene out of Tolkein’s "The Lord of the Rings." It was preparing to plant pine trees for its paper business.
Up ahead, we saw a huge new hydroelectric plant and dam which the U.S. is building to control the river and the valley. Army barracks on the other mountaintops keep watch over it. This was globalization in action, the Free Tree Agreement at work. I soon understood what the people were trying to tell me: this war is not about drugs, but land….
John Dear, The Other War: A Report from Colombia, www.commondreams.org, 3-28-06

Global

The spread of avian influenza through at least 29 new countries in the past seven weeks — one of the biggest outbreaks of the virus since it emerged nine years ago — is prompting a sobering reassessment of the strategy that has guided efforts to contain the disease. Since February, the virus has cut a swath across the globe, felling tens of thousands of birds in Nigeria, Israel, India, Sweden and elsewhere. Health officials in the United States say bird flu is likely to arrive in North America this year, carried by wild birds migrating to their summer breeding grounds. The speed of the virus' migration, and the vast area it has infected, has forced scientists to concede there is little that can be done to stop its spread across the globe. "We expected it to move, but not any of us thought it would move quite like this," said Dr. David Nabarro, the United Nations' coordinator on bird-flu efforts….Although the virus also could mutate into a harmless strain, scientists have found that it has infected domestic cats and a stone marten in Germany, increasing concerns over its ability to cross into mammals.
"Something generally disturbing is going on at the moment," Nabarro said. "It's certainly in the bird world, and it's pushing up against the human world in a serious way."
Jia-Rui Chong, Bird-flu spread: "Nature is in control," Los Angeles Times, 3-27-06

Every second, someone in the world moves into a slum. Over the next 30 years, the world's slum population will, on average, increase by 100,000 each day. Globally, we are seeing a shift from rural areas to cities and, before the year is out, a higher proportion of people will be living in cities than ever before….in these rapidly growing cities, the proportion of people living in poverty grows at the greatest rate. The population trend to urbanization is important not just because of the numbers, but because of governments' inability to deal with its rate of growth, and this has an impact on every other aspect of life for the poor.
Overcrowding is the most visible problem, but the sheer number of people is just the beginning. In slums across Asia, such as in Mumbai or Dhaka, around 1,000 people live together in each acre of land, without proper sanitation. The result is a massive amount of human and solid waste that even the most willing government would struggle to deal with…. Africa is the most rapidly urbanizing continent, and in Kumasi, Ghana, because of a lack of proper sanitation, people in slums use a method known as "flying toilets" - essentially, disposing of their waste in plastic bags and discarding them in the streets. With waste collections irregular, it can stay there for months.
We know from our work in cities around the world that the massive impact of rapid urbanization can only be dealt with when we address the disenfranchisement of the urban poor and generate the political will from city leaders to put resources into poor areas.
Jennifer Rowell, The Slums in the World's Teeming Cities Need an Urgent Solution, Guardina/UK, 3-28-06

CAPITALISM and sustainability are deeply and increasingly interrelated. After all, our economic activity is based on the use of natural and human resources. Not until we more broadly "price in" the external costs of investment decisions across all sectors will we have a sustainable economy and society.   The industrial revolution brought enormous prosperity, but it also introduced unsustainable business practices….Today, the global context for business is clearly changing. "Capitalism is at a crossroads," says Stuart Hart, professor of management at Cornell University. We agree, and we think the financial markets have a significant opportunity to chart the way forward. In fact, we believe that sustainable development will be the primary driver of industrial and economic change over the next 50 years….While we are seeing evidence of leading public companies adopting sustainable business practices in developed markets, there is still a long way to go to make sustainability fully integrated and therefore truly mainstream. A short-term focus still pervades both corporate and investment communities, which hinders long-term value creation.   As some have said, "We are operating the Earth like it's a business in liquidation." More mechanisms to incorporate environmental and social externalities will be needed to enable capital markets to achieve their intended purpose -- to consistently allocate capital to its highest and best use for the good of the people and the planet.
Al Gore, David Blood, For people and planet, Dow Jones, 4-2-06

CYBERSPACE

Wondering how likely you are to have your credit card number stolen? Well, according to a comprehensive survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), identity theft is affecting millions of households in the U.S each year and costing an estimated $6.4 billion per year. About 3 percent of all households in the U.S., totaling an estimated 3.6 million families, were hit by some sort of ID theft during the first six months of 2004….The data comes from the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey, which interviews members of 42,000 households across the country every six months to better understand the nature, frequency, and consequences of crime.…
According to the DOJ's numbers, credit card misuse is the most common consequence of identity theft. It accounted for about half of the cases of identity theft that the survey tracked, Baum said….
The average loss from these crimes amounted to $1290, with two-thirds of respondents saying that the theft cost them money….
The young and the well-to-do appear to be more at risk for identity theft, according to the DOJ numbers. Households headed by people between 18 and 24 years of age and those with incomes of $75,000 or more were the most likely to experience identity theft.
Robert McMillan, How Common Is Identity Theft? ID theft affects millions of households and costs billions of dollars, government says, IDG News Service, 4-3-06

Richard Power is the founder of GS(3) Intelligence and http://www.wordsofpower.net. His work focuses on the inter-related issues of security, sustainability and spirit, and how to overcome the challenges of terrorism, cyber crime, global warming, health emergencies, natural disasters, etc. You can reach him via e-mail: richardpower@wordsofpower.net. For more information, go to http://www.wordsofpower.net/