<a href=www.sfgate.com>URL Tuesday, March 25, 2003
(03-25) 14:26 PST WASHINGTON (AP) --

President Bush on Tuesday named Marsha E. Barnes, a career diplomat with the State Department, as U.S. ambassador to the Caribbean nation of Suriname.

Barnes, of Maryland, is currently assessor for the Board of Examiners at the State Department. She has served in posts in Bonn, Germany, and Moscow.

Bush also on Tuesday nominated career diplomat John Maisto as U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States.

Maisto has served on the National Security Council as director of Latin American affairs for two years.

He previously has served as ambassador to Venezuela and to Nicaragua.

Subject to Senate confirmation, Maisto will replace Ambassador Roger Noriega at the OAS. Noriega was nominated Monday to be assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs.

www.ocweekly.com A CLOCKWORK ORANGE Vol. 8 No. 29 March 21 - 27, 2003
by Matt Coker

PARTY OUT OF BOUNDS After being away since, hell, winning the 2000 presidential election, it was nice to see Democrats returning to their role as the opposition party this past weekend. Of course, they had to come to the nation’s most Democratic state, California, to pull it off. With the economy in the shitter and the nation all a-jitter, the time was ripe to snipe at the status quo during the state Democratic convention in Sacramento. Those hoping to lead the party into the next tainted presidential election were cheered like rock stars if they openly opposed Dubya’s Iraqi quagmire—and likewise jeered if they supported war. It was quite refreshing, especially considering that even all-right-wing, all-the-time Fox News had been begging Democrats to mount some kind of challenge to the other side if for no other reason than great TV. How anemic had them Dems been? As recently as the president’s March 8 radio address, the Democratic Party countered with . . . drum roll . . . Gray Davis, whose approval ratings are lower than Bush’s—even among California Democrats! What, was Charles Manson busy?

CNN’S GOT YOU COVERED Over images of previous pro-war picketing and right-wing radio commentators bashing liberal peace protesters, a reporter on the March 14 Live From CNN daytime news program breathlessly previewed support-our-troops/hooray-for-USA/bomb-Baghdad festivities scheduled for that weekend in seven cities, including CNN’s hometown of Atlanta. The bit ended with the reporter live inside an unidentified manufacturing warehouse, where he held up what people could expect to see at all seven kill-Iraqi rallies: white T-shirts with identical, multicolored "Support Our Troops" logos. As the white dude spoke, half a dozen female immigrant garment workers wearing the same "Support Our Troops" tees worked their asses off to crank out more shirts. Many who later donned those shirts would have just as soon rounded those ladies up for deportation. God bless America!

FRANKIE GOES TO ANAHEIM Major League Baseball teams pay their players for service during the regular season, but when it comes to the playoffs and World Series, the ultimate winning team gets a big pot of cash, the losers get less in descending order, and the players divvy it all up. For instance, the Anaheim Angels decided their rookie phenom pitcher Francisco Rodriguez should get $5,000. While that’s not exactly chump change in Rodriguez’s native Venezuela, where the average annual income is $4,310 (U.S.), Frankie’s on-field contributions were certainly every bit as important as the 42 teammates who got full $272,000 shares. For those who were holed up in La Cave during the Halos’ incredible championship run, then-20-year-old Rodriguez’s strong arm, ice-cold demeanor and timely strikeouts were huge in dispatching the Minnesota Twins, New York Yankees and San Francisco Giants. While division of the postseason booty was decided before play began, at a time when Frankie was an unknown quantity, it still had the effect of giving another young immigrant Latino in Orange County shit wages for the really hard work.

FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD •A woman told Dana Point cops that an unknown man took the diamond ring off her finger around last call at a Monarch Beach bar on March 2. She figured he made off with it while kissing her hand.

•A man who had slurped raw fish at Sushi Laguna the evening of March 7 suddenly leapt from his seat, darted out the door and ran after a truck towing away his pickup. Laguna Beach Police arrived to find the man arguing with the tow operator, but the matter seemed to be resolved after he paid the driver, got his pickup back and everyone left happy. Uh, not quite: Sushi Laguna called the cops back to say the man never paid his bill.

•A woman walked into a Laguna Beach hospital the afternoon of March 8 to report she had been assaulted by her roommate. Instead of receiving treatment, she was arrested on suspicion of public drunkenness. She’d walked into an animal hospital.

•A man called the Sheriff’s Department on March 9 to complain that a woman was screaming outside his San Clemente home. Deputies arrived to discover a dog and a raccoon had fought to the death. Well, one did; the report doesn’t say which animal died. Probably the one that screams like a girl. Sissy.

COSMIC DEBRIS Members of Holy Splendor Ministries in Long Beach reportedly meditate in prayer circles weekly to save the souls of evil extraterrestrials they believe are poised to destroy Earth. Holy Splendorer Terry Johnson maintains in a March 10 Wireless Flash news service report that the aliens might "work with us instead of against us" if we send them good vibes. But he cautioned the E.T.s aren’t exactly open to Earth religion, something he learned the hard way during numerous abductions. Sounds like someone’s a pair of Nikes and killer cocktail away from those yahoos who caught a ride on a passing comet a few years back.

english.pravda.ru 10:00 2003-03-19

From Canada to Chile, Governments along the Hemisphere isolated Bush bellicose approach to Iraq

After yesterday's speech, Bush found the strongest opposition to his plans for Middle East from his closer neighbors. The most relevant hemispheric governments said that they would not support US military adventure in Iraq and that they would have preferred a UN supported peaceful approach to this conflict.

The two Latin American non-permanent seats at the UN Security Council, Chile and Mexico, had anticipated their disagreement on Bush's yesterday's speech at the White House. Chile, in particular had made a proposal last week that could have avoided war in Middle East. However, its ideas were rudely rejected by the US administration before Bush's trip to the Azores' meeting.

President Ricardo Lagos maintains the faith on a peaceful resolution to the conflict, even at risk of breaking off the close commercial ties with USA, analysts say. According to local newspapers Lagos is on the phone at this moment trying to agree a common position with the other non-permanent seats at the Council.

Mexico, the main US trading partner holds a similar position than Chile. On a TV statement two hours after Bush's, President Vicente Fox made clear for the first time, country's approach to the Iraqi crisis. "We share the same values and objectives than USA, UK and Spain. However, we disagree with their procedures and timetables", said Fox. "Mexico insists on a peaceful multilateral way to resolve conflicts and regrets the road to war", concluded firmly the Mexican Head of State.

In turn, the former Mexico's Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda went further and said that thanks to Chile and Mexico, USA could not pass the so-called second resolution to allow the use of force against Iraq. "Without the strong Mexican and Chilean opposition they would have obtained the nine votes", said Castaneda.

Yesterday, the Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien said clearly and loudly: "Canada will play no role on the war against Iraq". Canada's Foreign Office had proposed a 30 days timetable to allow UN inspectors to disarm Saddam peacefully, but was ignored by its southern neighbor.

Mercosur countries also expressed their disagreement with the US administration bellicose position on Iraq and reiterated a strong support to Chile's position at the Security Council. Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva had anticipated last week a negative assertion on a military action in Middle East. Argentina, in turn, had clearly stated its pro-UN approach to the crisis one month ago and evacuated yesterday its 84 military officers in Kuwait. "We do not support any military action against Iraq", said Argentine Foreign Minister Carlos Ruckauf in response to a British enquiry submitted yesterday to Buenos Aires.

Those Latin American countries undoubtedly linked to Bush's administration, Colombia and Peru by case, opted to keep a low profile on this issue. Neither Lima nor Bogota have issued any formal statement until now.

There are many factors lying behind the Americas' objection to Bush. One of this is the strong Vatican opposition to the war. In a Catholic environment, Pope's active rejection on military plans to resolve the crisis had a very relevant influence on people and authorities' views. Also, the Americas have a long tradition of respectful policies towards the United Nations; the lack of interest shown by US diplomats on building up a consensus inside the organism could set a serious precedent looking forward incoming issues like Colombia and Venezuela.

Also, It should not be underestimated Spain's alignment to USA. The Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar is a kind of scarecrow for Latin Americans governments. Many consider him mere simple lobbyist behind Spanish largest corporations' interests in the region and are afraid of a broader alliance with Washington.

Economics reasons have to be taken into account, too. Dollar diplomacy did not work out this time. Perhaps, a strengthened Euro also played its role on this.

Hernan Etchaleco PRAVDA.Ru Argentina

www.alternet.org By Eric Bosse, AlterNet March 17, 2003

American investigative reporter Greg Palast writes for the London Observer and reports for BBC news. His stories have appeared in the annual Project Censored lists but rarely in mainstream American media. Palast's book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," now out in an expanded paperback edition with 40 percent new material, made the New York Times' Best Sellers list in its first week in stores.

In the opening chapter, Palast details the ways Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris rigged Florida's 2000 vote by hiring a data mining company, DataBase Technologies, a subsidiary of ChoicePoint. Harris instructed Database to sift through Florida's voter rolls to eliminate felons, suspected felons, and people with names or birth dates similar to felons. In all, according to the company's documents, some 91,000 people were wrongly barred from voting.

Of those, more than ninety percent were Democrats. The majority were black.

Q: Is ChoicePoint or one of their subsidiaries still on contract in Florida?

A: No. Well, they won't be. They are getting out of the racial purge business, but they're moving into something new and better. If you read Forbes Magazine or the new edition of my book, Forbes says, "We don't know who has lost the war on terror, but we do know who has won: ChoicePoint, Inc." They're the big contractor in Total Information Awareness. They've got the big DNA database they're keeping for the new vampiric agency. ChoicePoint owns the companies that are going to do the airport profiling, the immigration intake profiling, and, most importantly, these are the guys that have the database of over 20 billion records on Americans. Now, when I say 20 billion, that was like a year ago. It's got to be way up there now. They had it at 20 billion and growing phenomenally. Until now, for 200 years, you could not go into private records without a search warrant. Under the USA Patriot Act – and I mean the one in force, we don't have to wait for the second shoe to drop – for the first time in American history the feds will be able to go through private records, the private database. They call it "data mining." They're going to be hunting through our records without a search warrant, on a massive data-crunching basis. And so, ChoicePoint is going to ring the cash register big time.

Q: Your book implies that ChoicePoint is affiliated with the political right.

A: It isn't implied. Look at their board. It looks like a Republican country club meeting. You've got Ken Langone, the investor who was also the treasurer for the Rudy Giuliani for Senate campaign. You've got Bernard Marcus, the founder of Home Depot, a big Republican sugar daddy. You've got Vin Weber, the ultra-right ex-congressman who is their Washington lobbyist. You've got Howard Safir, the New York Police Chief of Repression. They've got all these Republican politicos like George Bruder out of Florida, who was deeply involved in their operations for getting rid of "the dark vote." So, look, it's a Republican firm.

Their company was chosen after they replaced a company that was only being paid about five thousand dollars a year, and Database got paid something like two million. What is it with American reporters? I mean, don't they find that interesting? I mean, if it's not in a press release, they think you might as well just throw it away.

Q: You also write about how the Bush administration stifled investigation of Saudis.

A: Yeah, well, I should stop saying that because it doesn't help the war effort. You know, a great investigator like Bob Woodward wrote that book Bush at War. I should feel ashamed about bringing up how Bush got us into war through his buddies, the Saudis.

People like Mike Moore make a lot out of the Bush connections to the Bin Laden family. That's useful to know, but I think there are more important connections.

For example, the BBC and Guardian reporting teams have information which is solid from two separate sources that there was a meeting in 1996 where Saudi billionaires agreed to fund Al Quaeda. It was kind of like, "Stop blowing up our country, get out of Saudi Arabia – what does it cost to get you to go play in Afghanistan?" The problem with that, besides giving money that not only terrorizes Afghanistan but also ends up in the pockets of people taking flying lessons with no intention to land, is that you need to follow that money.

Oh, by the way, a couple days after the attack on the World Trade Center, did you notice that we suddenly had a list of the financial institutions and charities which were funding terrorists? They didn't have that on September 8th? No one asked, "Hey, when did you guys come up with this? Boy, you must have stayed up all night, huh? You just uncovered all these guys in two days!" No, the stuff was in the files and not being acted on, in part for bureaucratic reasons but in part because of reluctance first by the Clinton administration – do understand, the Clinton administration was very reluctant to bother the Saudi Arabians because they were the people sitting on the oil spigots – but we went from reluctance to downright interference from the Bush administration.

For example, very specifically, I bring up in the book the failure to hunt down the sources and the total operation of the Pakistan bomb building program. And we're worried about Saddam Hussein? Colin Powell stands up in front the United Nations and says we can't let some crazy, fanatical dictator with nuclear bombs stay in office, and my wife says, "Oh, we're invading Pakistan, right?" But instead we've got George Bush with his arm around the dictator of Pakistan, Musharraf, who we know has weapons of mass destruction and has threatened to use them; but our President stands there and gets his picture taken with him like he's a prom date. The problem was that the CIA was not permitted to check into the funding of the Pakistan bomb program because it was funded by the Saudis, and that would embarrass the United States and in particular we have to look at some of the people involved: Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, Adnan Khashoggi.

Now, Bakhsh is a very interesting guy because he's identified as being one of the people whose money may have somehow ended up in nefarious hands. Whether he directed that or not I have no idea, but why not investigate the guy? Well, supposedly for geopolitical reasons; but maybe that was influenced by the fact that Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh is also the guy who saved Harken Oil from bankruptcy – which is our President's former oil company. Now, did Bush say, "You're not allowed to investigate my former partners"? I can't imagine such a directive. What I do know is that when you have these kinds of entangling financial and personal relationships, political relationships, it influences your viewpoint so that you are susceptible to the line that we shouldn't bother these poor Saudis. So it's not a giant conspiracy. It is a political outlook poisoned by personal finance.

Q: A systemic problem rather than a conspiracy?

A: Yeah, right, it's not some odd little flaw in the system. It is the system – in which, there is back-scratching, helping each other financially. That's how it operates.

Plus it's not exactly a career-maker for agents to go after the President's partners or his Daddy's partners. That doesn't make a good impression.

You see, we're trying to clean up campaign financing, but we also have to clean up presidential family funding if we're ever going to have any reform. That's the most poisonous part of the Bush operation. There are two people who had the courage to stand up to this publicly. One is Cynthia McKinney, who was destroyed for trying to question the Bush family financing.

Q: She was a congresswoman from...?

A: From Atlanta. And the other is Norman Schwarzkopf. You have to understand that after Gulf War One, the Bush family cashed in like crazy, and Schwarzkopf said we didn't send half a million kids into the desert so the Bush family could cash in. And you hear how much he's been out front now, right? You'd think they would wheel out their big hero. That's where they're using the duct tape. They've got him wrapped up in a basement somewhere. He's not happy. He saw the Bush family cash in.

Let me give you an example. Who won Gulf War One? And that will tell you who is going to win Gulf War Two. Gulf War One, if you look in the book, Daddy Bush writes a letter for Chevron Oil, after he leaves the White House, to the Kuwaiti Emirate. We call them the royalty of Kuwait. That means that they're dictators with robes and crowns. So, he writes to the Kuwaiti dictatorship and asks them to give Chevron an oil concession. What the hell is a President of the United States doing, lobbying for a private oil company? These guys can't say no because he saved their Rolls Royces, right? Now, he says he never got any money from Chevron, and I have no reason to doubt it. He doesn't say that Chevron then kicks in half a million dollars into the Republican campaign for sonny boy. That's really poisonous because what's happening is that the seal of the President, the seal of the Oval Office, is for sale.

And Schwarzkopf was talking about that. He was also concerned that after Gulf War One, who do we see sneaking in the desert, wearing saddle shoes and salesman's bags? Marvin and Neal Bush, trying to sell pipeline operations to the Gulf states, representing Enron Corporation. You know, these people have no shame.

Do you remember when we were promised, unless my memory fails, a democracy in Kuwait? Remember they were going to democratize? Have you heard the election results from Kuwait yet? I'm still waiting.

Q: I want to ask about two more topics: Venezuela and then...

A: Now, you're not supposed to ask about Venezuela. You've already made a mistake. With the USA Patriot Act, you're not supposed to look at anything but Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, which is the Weapon of Mass Distraction. And while you're supposed to be hypnotized by Iraq, don't watch that man behind the screen, Otto Reich in the White House, who is doing his level best to overthrow the elected government in Venezuela. So, I'm trying to write this story, but you can't get the true reports out for nothing. The New York Times runs a front-page picture of thousands of Venezuelans marching against Hugo Chavez. The same day, I'm photographing it myself, more people are marching for Chavez, but they don't show the others. It's more devastating than fabrication, because a picture makes you think, "That must be real." It's terribly sad, because the story of Venezuela is about oil. It is about crushing a dissenter to the new globalization order.

It's hard to tell the real stories because it requires investigation. It requires work. And it requires being able to say that official sources like the State Department are full of shit, that they are fabricating this stuff out whole cloth for the purpose of scrambling your brain, and that our media outlets buy it.

I can't tell you to how many reporters I've said, "Where do you get this stuff?" And they say, "Well, it was in a State Department press release," as if that's an acceptable source.

Q: What does it take for a complete blackout of like the one we're getting on, say, the U.S. spying on the United Nations delegates?

A: Official denial. American newspaper reporters and outlets will not run a story which has undercover information which is officially stone-blank denied. Now that story, for example, of spying on the U.N., that's my newspaper by the way, The Observer, and those are my friends – who are now, by the way, facing jail time for that story, under the Official Secrets Act.

Q: In England?

A: Yes. See, that's one of the reasons my new book is so much longer. If I printed everything I wanted, if I printed the American edition in Britain, I would be jailed. One of my sources has already spent six months in jail. It's just horrendous without a First Amendment. I mean, unfortunately we in the U.S. don't use our First Amendment. Like I say, if Britain needs a First Amendment they can use ours because we're not. It's a nightmare in both countries. There, the nightmare is the law. There, editors are afraid, justly afraid, of the law. Here, editors are afraid of their shadows. As I say, Bob Woodward, editor of the Washington Post, would never run the Watergate story today. It was an unnamable source versus an official denial. He would not run it now. No way. And that's why I'm "in exile."

Q: With these stories getting so little attention in the mainstream media, how do you account for the bestseller status of your book?

A: You, the Internet, the so-called alternative media, the weeklies, and radio, the independent, nonprofit radio stations. People hear about it and they want to know. And the information often goes out from the left and the right. There are what I call the honest conservatives – they're not comfortable with the country club set. I've been having discussions with my big, huge corporate publisher about something called "alternative media," which is bigger than the mainstream media. We are bigger. We should stop acting puny and stop calling ourselves alternative. They're like Lilliputians who don't want us to know that we're giants because we might do something.

www.msnbc.com By John Ness NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

March 24 issue — There’s a spine-chilling moment in the film “Titanic,” after the ship has struck an iceberg, when an engineer declares disaster to be “a mathematical certainty.” Gerald Haug had a similar epiphany of doom one evening at his Zurich home last year.         HE HAD PUT his 3-year-old son to bed at 8 o’clock and then sat down to read “The Great Maya Droughts.” The book boldly addressed the biggest mystery in New World archeology—why the magnificent Mayan civilization, which had flourished for centuries and once had a population in the millions, disappeared so suddenly in the 9th century. The reason, argued author Richardson Gill, was three catastrophic droughts that struck with the consistency of a metronome: in A.D. 810, 860 and 910. Mainstream archeology wasn’t having any of Gill’s theory, but Haug, a paleoclimatologist whose lab had been taking climate measurements of the same period, found it riveting. At about 2 in the morning, he put down the book and checked the latest results from his lab. The data gave him a jolt: they showed a century ravaged by three successive droughts — beginning in 810, 860 and 910. “I was bouncing around the living room,” says Haug.         Haug’s measurements of ancient climate variations in the Cariaco Basin off the coast of Venezuela—hundreds of miles from the Mayan sites in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, but affected by the same weather patterns—confirmed the existence of Gill’s droughts. Haug’s research, published last Friday in the U.S. journal Science , has provided the most conclusive evidence to date that a series of droughts in 9th-century Central America was an important cause—perhaps the main cause—of the collapse of Mayan civilization. The data downplays competing theories that emphasize a complicated interplay of ecology, disease, overpopulation and even class warfare. “Careers were made by coming up with these very complex theories,” says Gill.         For the past century archeologists relied on paleontology-centered methods of inquiry that put a premium on digging for artifacts and bones for evidence. Research yielded excellent portraits of Mayan social and economic interactions, but it never answered the Big Question. And it yielded no evidence that climate played much of a role—a big reason why archeologists discounted it. In the 1990s, a chorus of geologists, paleoclimatologists and other scientists began to reconsider. The most strident and unorthodox new voice was Gill, a former banker and freelance archeologist.         As a child growing up in Texas, Gill had seen severe drought. When the Texas economy tanked in the 1980s, he started investigating a hunch that drought killed off the Mayans. Most university archeologists told him respectfully—but plainly—that they didn’t think he was looking in the right place. The first supporting evidence came in 1995, from geologist David Hodell at the University of Florida. He and his team examined layers of sediment underneath Mexico’s Lake Chichancanab, which showed the first evidence of a catastrophic drought—the worst in 7,000 years—around the turn of the 10th century. That was enough for Gill. In his book, published in 2000, he proposed dates for three severe droughts. Most archeologists dismissed both the book and Hodell’s evidence—which relied on imprecise radiocarbon dating.         Haug, in 1996, was standing on the deck of a ship off the coast of Venezuela when workers hauled up a tube of sediment 170 meters long—encompassing 500,000 years of climate history. Six centimeters wide and greenish-brown, the core sample is made up of millions of tiny layers, a year to each half millimeter. As Venezuela’s rivers empty into the Cariaco Basin, they leave a chemical signature in the sediment that reveals how much rain fell that year. In 2001, Haug used the core-sample data to narrow the timing of the droughts to within four to five years, which left many archeologists unmoved. Haug then teamed up with chemist Detlef Gunther—who, like Haug, worked at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Using X-rays, Gunther was able to focus the precision to within two months. “It’s a superb piece of work and I want to know when these guys can come to the Near East with me,” says Yale archeologist Harvey Weiss, who has studied the effects of climate on the Mesopotamians. Haug’s latest results show enormous, abrupt swings of climate over the last century of Mayan society.         It will take time for scientists to integrate the great droughts into their story of the Mayan’s “demographic disaster.” They’ve already chronicled power struggles, crop failures and political crises. Three droughts must have put great pressure on Mayan society. Some Mayan archeologists, though, aren’t convinced that Haug makes an ironclad case. “This is not good science,” says UT Austin’s Karl Butzer. Others say Mayan specialists are just guarding their turf. “The significance of Hodell’s research was clear to all but the Mayan archeologists,” says Weiss. “But those Mayan archeologists who previously went ballistic with Hodell’s data will be hospitalized by this article.”         Scientists will convene in August in Guatemala to work through the new data. They’ll be a few hours’ drive from a spot where, toward the end, disillusioned Mayans are thought to have faced down their elites—and beheaded them. This year’s meeting will be more civil, but no less confrontational.