CARACAS, VENEZUELA - American singer and activist Harry Belafonte called U.S. President George W. Bush "the greatest terrorist in the world" last Sunday and said millions of Americans support the socialist revolution of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.

Belafonte led a delegation of Americans including actor Danny Glover, Princeton University scholar Cornel West and farmworker advocate Dolores Huerta that met with the Venezuelan president for more than six hours late Saturday. Some in the group attended Chavez's television and radio broadcast Sunday.

"No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we're here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people . . . support your revolution," Belafonte told Chavez during the broadcast.

"We respect you, admire you, and we are expressing our full solidarity with the Venezuelan people and your revolution," he added.

The 78-year-old Belafonte, famous for his calypso-inspired music, including the Day-O song, was a close collaborator of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and is now a UNICEF goodwill ambassador. He also has been outspoken in criticizing the U.S. embargo of communist Cuba.   more »

The US breeds terrorism by its 60-year old policy of interfering in the internal affairs of Muslim lands and ruling them through surrogates.

The US assaults Muslim sensitivities with the export of "American culture," a euphemism for sexual promiscuity.

The US creates enormous animosity by appearing to exploit Muslim oil wealth and by turning a blind eye while Israel expropriates the West Bank.

Doesn’t it make more sense to mend our ill-considered ways than to go to war against Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and who else?

Is there no one in the Republican or Democratic parties who is capable of intelligent leadership?

How many more Americans and Muslims are going to pay for Bush’s insane policy with their lives, arms, legs, and eyes?

How stupid are the American people?   more »

The sanitised images of war broadcast on television are a "lethal weapon" masking atrocities which demonstrate that conflict can "never be justified," an Independent debate was told last night.

"War is not about victory or defeat. It is about the total failure of human spirit," Robert Fisk, The Independent's Middle East correspondent, told the debate. "When you see the things I see, you would never support war ever again."

The increasingly chaotic conflict in Iraq is utterly unjustifiable and a by-product of the same Western thirst for "control, control, control" of the Middle East's assets and resources that has been evident for centuries, added Fisk.

"We've always gone to the Middle East to 'liberate' people, taking with us our guns and our swords, our horses and our helicopters," he said.

Fisk, whose new book The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East has been published by Fourth Estate, said there could be no lasting settlement in Iraq for as long as the occupiers remained there.

He presented a powerful case for presenting in the media the full horror of war - images such as the blood that poured over the top of his shoes in a Baghdad hospital, and the bones he saw where should have been feet on the legs of a child - a horrific sight which was edited out in newspaper images of the child.   more »

America is fundamentally conservative. It is patriarchial and respects authority. It admires the strong leader, the father figure. These factors can easily be manipulated by right-wing ideologues and shaped into authoritarianism.

Republicans believe the above characteristics as essential to the running of a stable society. They put order before experimentation. They are fearful of change, challenge, unorthodoxy.

Combine these characteristics with a fundamentalist christianity, where God is The Father, and you have all the ingredients for an authoritarian society. [Ed Strong]

Increasingly, more and more individuals and groups at home and around the globe including students, workers, feminists, educators, writers, environmentalists, senior citizens, artists, and a host of other individuals and movements are organizing to challenge the dangerous slide on the part of the United States into the dredges of an authoritarianism that threatens not just the promise but the very idea of democracy in the 21st Century.   more »

This year will see the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. It is therefore time for the mainstream media to resume its questioning and challenging stance, a position long forgotten.

More disturbingly, in the light of the New York Times releasing information about the Bush administration illegally spying on US citizens, a number of conservative commentators have questioned the paper’s right to even report the story.

(The fact the Times delayed the story for a year, after government objections, is equally concerning.)

Journalists are not supposed to be mere ciphers for a political party or position, though you’d be hard pressed to find many leading commentators in Australia who don’t seem to be in the pockets of the Liberal or Labor parties.

May 2006 be the year that imperial stenography ceases to be called journalism. And a time when state terror is regarded as a greater threat than a bunch of radical Islamists.   more »

An onslaught against some of the world’s poorest people is about to enter its next phase in a remote Swiss ski resort.

Unlike over Iraq, the world's richest countries are united in this big push which would reorganize the global economy in more far-reaching ways than the US neo-cons’ designs on the Middle East.

The upcoming ‘mini-ministerial’ meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Davos threatens to become an economic Fallujah.

While world leaders were last year professing their commitment to ending poverty, their real goals were revealed in months of behind closed door discussions at the WTO in Geneva.

There, rich countries have single-mindedly embarked on a grab for new markets around the world for their companies.

The aim is to push developing countries to reduce their trade barriers on imports of manufactured goods and services companies from the rich world.   more »

The US attack on Iraq provided al-Qaeda with a trump card as it was able to reactivate members and sympathizers in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Morocco and beyond.

# In fact the success of the Iraqi resistance, in which al-Qaeda is a component, figured significantly in the thinking of al-Qaeda's leadership to relaunch the group as an open organization to pitch a worldwide battle against US interests.

Serious debate on this new direction began in 2004, with two main issues prominent:

# Should al-Qaeda drop its shadowy nature and call for a jihad in the open against the United States?

# Should the "war" be exclusively against the US, or also against Muslim regimes sympathetic to the US?

These issues were later linked with two conditions:

# The acquisition of bases to launch a war in the open.

# The reorganization of sympathizers and new recruits to launch a worldwide battle.   more »

JUDGE ALITO'S RADICAL RIGHT VIEWS

If Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s confirmation hearings lacked drama, apart from his wife's bizarrely over-covered crying jag, it is because they confirmed the obvious.

Judge Alito is exactly the kind of legal thinker President Bush wants on the Supreme Court. He has a radically broad view of the president's power, and a radically narrow view of Congress's power.

He has long argued that the Constitution does not protect abortion rights. He wants to reduce the rights and liberties of ordinary Americans, and has a history of tilting the scales of justice against the little guy.

As senators prepare to vote on the nomination, they should ask themselves only one question: will replacing Sandra Day O'Connor with Judge Alito be a step forward for the nation, or a step backward?

Instead of Justice O'Connor's pragmatic centrism, which has kept American law on a steady and well-respected path, Judge Alito is likely to bring a movement conservative's approach to his role and to the Constitution.   more »

23 JANUARY

American Bloodlust: From the Indian Wars to the War on Terror

Paul Krugman: Bush's Monument... Iraq in Ruins

The Bush-Clinton Ratings War: Dallas or Dynasty?

Bin Laden: From "Terrorist" to Progressive Political Leader

Even Democrats Chant "Attack Iran...Save Israel"

US Bombing Pakistan: Will This Topple Musharraf?

Bob Herbert: From KGB to NSA... Who's Listening in to Your Phone Call?

Britain Lurches to the Authoritarian Right