"The official story is so inadequate and far fetched that there must be a different one" - Andreas Von Bulow, Former German Secretary Of Defense

http://www.thedossier.ukonline.co.uk/video_september11.htm

Dutch TV  Documentary...

9/11: Attack or Godsend?

Was 9/11 more than just an attack?

Could the Bush administration have had anything to gain from the attack?

Two prominent European politicians, Michael Meacher and Andreas von Bulow, express their serious doubts about the official version of the 9/11 story

Stream: Real or Windows Media Player

http://www.tweevandaag.nl/index.php?module=PX_Story&func=view&cid=2&sid=29882#

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" Neocons – anxious for the U.S. to use force to realign the boundaries and change regimes in the Middle East – clearly understand the benefit of a galvanizing and emotional event to rally the people to their cause. Without a special event, they realized the difficulty in selling their policy of preemptive war where our own military personnel would be killed. Whether it was the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin or the Maine, all served their purpose in promoting a war that was sought by our leaders." - Congressman Ron Paul, TX We've Been Neo-Conned

http://www.counterpunch.org/jensen12052005.html

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December 5, 2005

Eviscerated By Big Money

The End of the 1st Amendment's Assembly and Petition Clauses

By ROBERT JENSEN

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While the great battles fought over the First Amendment's religion and free-speech/-press clauses are some of the most inspiring stories told 'round the legal campfire, the amendment's assembly and petition clauses are mostly a forgotten footnote.

There has been no great legal battle in easy memory over the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." In 1939, the Supreme Court decided a case, Hague v. Congress of Industrial Organizations, that definitively established "the right of the people peaceably to assemble" in public space, and there's been little discussion since.

Yet both these First Amendment footnotes offer important lessons about the more subtle--and what today are more crucial--obstacles to meaningful democracy that come with our economic system.

The right to petition the government is not really in question in a modern nation-state based on democratic principles. While a king, whose legitimacy was grounded in the concept of divine-right monarchy, might have contested his subjects' rights to press political demands, citizens in a democracy have an inherent right to petition those politicians who are supposed to serve us.

But a question nags: Are all petitions received by our leaders given equal weight? Are rich and poor alike going to be heard? The answer is painfully obvious.

Two realities distort the right of petition in the real world.

First is the reality that political campaigns are exercises in fundraising. For example, 96 percent of House and 91 percent of Senate races in 2004 were won by the candidate who spent the most. Those who provide that funding have an advantage: Money equals access, which means that when the campaign is over, some petitions are more equal than others.

Debates about the constitutionality of campaign-finance reform measures that try to deal with the distorting influence of big money are typically framed by the question of whether they limit the freedom of speech of contributors or candidates. But we might start to think of such reforms as protection of the right of petition.

Second, those who hire well-connected (and expensive) lobbyists to deliver a petition have an advantage. Recent news has focused on how lobbyists Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon allegedly defrauded their own clients, but the main problem with the lobbying industry is the routine way it skews the political process toward those who can afford to hire the big guns to influence policy.

Should we place stricter limits on paid lobbyists? Some argue it is a restriction on political freedom to limit anyone's right to spend money in attempts to influence public policy. But in a world in which the playing field is so tilted toward the wealthy, can we pretend that traditional libertarian defenses of money-as-speech can adequately address the contemporary political crisis?

Moreover, while the right to peaceably assemble is established in law, there remain struggles to ensure that the right to do so isn't undermined by sophisticated police tactics that appear to allow public protests but use pre-emptive arrest, physical barriers, and "free-speech zones" to limit protesters' ability to engage the public. Such heavy-handed operations were effective in Miami during the protests of the 2003 meetings about the Free Trade Area of the Americas and in New York during the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Yet the most disturbing threat to freedom of assembly isn't from the ways in which police officers restrict movement in public space, but from the disappearance of public space itself. Our conception of political assembly is rooted in a geography that is increasingly rare--the town square, the public meeting ground, a collective space in which people gather expecting political engagement.

Today the space that is most public is privatized: the shopping mall. If one wanted to distribute a political pamphlet and engage fellow citizens in conversation about the issues of the day, the mall would be the optimal site--a place where people of all ages and classes gather for commercial and social purposes.

But while the mall is a very public place in some senses, it is private property and hence not governed by the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to impose on the owners of these public spaces the requirement to honor people's assembly and speech rights there (though they left the door open for states to find such a right in their own constitutions). When our lives in public are increasingly conducted in privatized space, are conventional understandings of "public" and "private" adequate for a democracy?

Both these First Amendment freedoms illustrate the paradox of U.S. politics. On one hand, we have extensive formal guarantees of political freedoms that have been hard-won by dissidents and progressive political movements that pressed the courts and legislatures to expand the scope of freedom. But the concentration of wealth in corporate capitalism means that those formal freedoms--while never irrelevant--are increasingly less important in a world in which money is necessary to amplify our voices in mass media.

The distortion of a political process by our economic system is also obvious in the realm of the speech and press clauses of the First Amendment, where we face tough questions about how to counter the increasing concentration of media ownership in a shrinking number of corporations, and whether full First Amendment protection should extend to commercial advertising.

If First Amendment debates are to be productive--if they are to be part of a process that helps us re-energize a political system that an increasing number of people feel is irrelevant to their lives--we will have to come to terms with the inherent incompatibility of capitalism and democracy. The former is a wealth-concentrating system that also concentrates political power, while the latter is premised on the assumption of the diffusion of power.

To date, the Supreme Court has ignored this simple reality, as has most of U.S. society. Even the self-proclaimed guardian of freedom, the American Civil Liberties Union, has trouble thinking straight about the problems for democracy that capitalism creates.

But if the First Amendment is to be part of a real democratic future--one in which ordinary people have a meaningful role in the formation of public policy, not simply a place in the political stadium as spectators--lawmakers and judges will have to come to terms with this basic contradiction.

It is unlikely they will confront the issue unless We the People force them to.

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ROBERT JENSEN is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of "The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity."

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"I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward. The example of great and fine personalities is the only thing that can lead us to fine ideas and noble deeds. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus or Gandhi with the money bags of Carnegie?" -  Albert Einstein

http://lnk.nu/guardian.co.uk/6qt.html

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Where they hide the cash

We help rich individuals and companies to spirit away vast sums from the developing world

Duncan Campbell
Monday December 5, 2005
The Guardian

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Five trillion dollars has been corruptly removed from the world's poorest countries and lodged permanently in the world's richest countries. That is the "conservative estimate" not of a leftwing anti-globalisation activist but of a leading American businessman and enthusiast for capitalism who has just completed a major study of how multinational corporations, wealthy individuals and unscrupulous governments are using the world's banking systems in ways that spread poverty.

When aid or debt relief are discussed, attention often focuses on corrupt leaders and governments in Africa and other parts of the developing world. But they are amateurs compared with the rich companies and individuals who use the world's tax havens and banking systems to hide sums of money that could address almost all of the continent's financial needs.

The United Nations has now recognised the seriousness of the situation and today the first meeting of a new committee of experts on international tax matters will be held in Geneva. What will emerge from it remains to be seen, but at least one of the world's great hidden scandals will have a brief airing.

Raymond Baker is a committed capitalist whose new book, Capitalism's Achilles Heel, has already made waves in the US. In Britain he has been working with the Tax Justice Network, a London-based organisation that seeks to expose the abuse of tax havens and loopholes.

Baker describes capitalism as "the greatest economic arrangement ever devised", but he believes that western governments and banks are failing catastrophically in their duty to police the system. "Falsified pricing, haven and secrecy structures and the illicit movement of trillions of dollars out of developing and transitional economies break the social contract ... that Adam Smith incorporated into the core of the free-market system," he writes.

Six out of 10 US corporations pay no tax, and the recent Enron scandal demonstrated how cynically major household names in the US exploit the system. Enron used around 800 different "Caribbean financial dumps" to hide its debts. Baker argues that the west could break the back of poverty worldwide if there was political will to tackle the abuse of the tax and banking systems. Instead, western countries have been all too willing to turn a blind eye to the original sources of money.

"Laundered proceeds of drug trafficking, racketeering, corruption and terrorism tag along with other forms of dirty money to which the US and Europe extend a welcoming hand," concludes Baker, a businessman who operated in Nigeria for 35 years and is now attached to the Brookings Institution. Even since September 11, he says, the US has shown little inclination to clamp down on the illicit use of banking systems.

John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network, a former adviser to the Jersey government, says that more than 50% of the cash holdings of rich individuals in Latin America is now held offshore and that some 30% of the GDP of sub- Saharan African nations disappeared offshore in the second half of the 1990s. The situation in the Middle East and north Africa is even worse. Since the 1980s, banks have targeted the world's roughly 8 million "high net-worth individuals" and encouraged them to hide their funds offshore. As a result, around $11.5 trillion of their assets are now in tax-free or protected havens.

Today's Geneva meeting is one of the first acknowledgements that greedy individuals and companies and compliant banking systems and governments are far more responsible than corrupt dictators for the state of the poorest countries. It should be welcomed - though we shouldn't hold our breath. The scandal has only begun to be addressed.

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"Poverty wants much; but avarice, everything" - Publilius Syrus (Roman author, 1st century B.C.)

http://www.counterpunch.org/cloughley12052005.html

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December 5, 2005

The Poor Dead

The Relative Value of Human Lives

By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

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Please reflect on some statistics produced in November by the Pew Center which polled the American public about all sorts of things. Almost as an afterthought, the pollsters asked "What is the name of the president of Russia?"

63 per cent of Americans could not answer "Putin".

Another basic general knowledge question was "Recently, the Palestinians were given control of the Gaza Strip. Do you know which country gave them this control?"

48 per cent of Americans did not know that it was Israel.

*****

These responses serve to confirm my long-held belief that most people in every country are simply not interested in affairs beyond their borders. It isn't just Americans who are ludicrously ignorant of life in foreign lands, and yet they, and most people round the world, have forthright and even vicious views about how to treat foreigners. The matter of nationality is of much importance, especially to those who could not identify a country other than their own on an atlas. (See the hilarious "Who to Attack Next", which casts doubt on the view that mankind may be nature's last word in the development of Planet Earth.)

It is apparent that the value of your life depends to a great extent on the country whose passport you hold. If you are, say, a Yemeni, Filipino, Afghan or Sudanese, your life is near zero in worth, so far as the world at large is concerned. But if you are from a country that wants to protect its citizens, and that desire is backed by economic clout or military muscle, then you stand a good chance of being looked after by your native land.

To take one example : ten years ago there was a mysterious parachute drop of weapons in north west India from an Antonov aircraft. The details don't concern us, here, but what happened to the people who carried out the operation was revealing, in view of their nationality. There were five Latvians and two Britons in the airplane that was forced to land in India. (One Briton managed to get out of the country, in a remarkable operation conducted by professionals.) The remaining six were sentenced to life imprisonment, possibly justifiably. But their fates then altered.

After four years in prison the Latvians suddenly became Russians in nationality, and President Putin of Russia told the Indians he wanted them released, which they were -- instantly. The Briton, Peter Bleach, wasn't so lucky. He was left by Britain to rot in jail forever. The British foreign minister went through the motions of trying to do something and wrote two letters to his opposite number in India. Both were ignored. There wasn't even the courtesy of an acknowledgement, which says quite a lot about how the Britain of prime minister Blair is regarded by India and a lot of other countries, nowadays. Mr Bleach was eventually set free last year as a gesture of goodwill because India was arranging a deal to buy 66 planes for its air force from the UK. There was no question of the miserable Blair getting tough.

But Russia has always gotten tough. (Several people have emailed to ask me why I like to use 'gotten', as I am not American. I always reply that what was good enough for Shakespeare is good enough for me, and that my favorite phrase from The Merry Wives of Windsor is "He was gotten in drink.") Anyway, Russia was and continues to be very tough indeed concerning protection of its citizens abroad.

In the horrible, anarchic years in which so many people were kidnapped in Lebanon -- journalists, academics, businessmen and spooks -- there were victims from many countries. But no Russians. The reason there were no Russians taken hostage is simply that the ambassador of the Soviet Union in Beirut sent for the heads of the various terror groups and said words to the effect : "If you dare take a single Soviet hostage we will kill you and your entire families."

And the Sovs could and would have carried out their threat. They weren't amateurs. They had Arabic speakers who had specialized in the region since their teens. Some of them had attended the American University. They were ruthless, but they didn't flail about being ruthless when they knew they would alienate the population by killing civilians.

Of course it isn't that the Sovs were averse to killing civilians. God forbid the thought, if you will excuse the expression in this context. The Soviet Union was right up there with Hitler, Mao and all the African dictators in callously extinguishing the lives of countless millions of men, women and children. But there was, and continues to be in the Russian leadership, some regard for the relative value of lives. It is immoral and disgusting, of course, to be selective. But it works.

And we are all selective about the value of lives. Every country in the world is selective.

There is no country in which newspapers have not at some time had grotesquely nationalistic headlines about a global disaster. The Times of Calathumpia (it's a country just to the right of Xenophobia), for example, will carry something like : "SIX CALATHUMPIANS KILLED IN TSUNAMI. 300,000 others dead" on the front page.

Then it publishes interviews with the relatives, friends and family pets of the dead Calathumpians on pages 2 through 15, with a center spread of photographs from their College Year Books and recollections from backyard barbecues over the past decade or so. The 300,000 dead foreigners are given space once the six dead heroes (because all people of your own nation who die in earthquakes or whatever are 'heroes') have been described in unremittingly maudlin detail from cradle to grave.

And this is merely a surface-scratch on the carapace of moral-resistant humbug that surrounds us all. It would be nice to think that devout Christians believe that Buddhists (for example) deserve understanding and are also God's People. But many millions of Christians have no such Christian sentiments. They regard the lives of non-Christians as being less important than those who are 'Saved'.

And, to be unpalatably honest with ourselves, there are very few of us who do not consider some individuals or even entire peoples to be inferior because of their religious practices, skin color, place of birth, national characteristics, ethnic habits, dietary practices, or anything, really, that makes them different from the 'normal' (read, 'perfect') person that we fondly imagine ourselves to be.

When Leslie Stahl of CBS asked Madeleine Albright on May 11, 1996 if the deaths of half a million Iraqi children because of US-induced UN sanctions were "worth it", Albright replied "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it." Would she have said that if the kids had been white? Certainly, this was a staggeringly cold and horrible utterance, but one wonders how many people -- and in how many countries? -- supported her point of view. Because it is only us silly sentimental liberals who took exception to her endorsement of actions that would have had King Herod think admiringly about appointing her as chief infanticide advisor.

There is a comic side to all this nationalistic chauvinism. When a newsworthy event takes place, the media of most countries immediately look for the local angle. The parish-pump parochialism of even the most prestigious newspapers is staggeringly funny. (Most countries' television news, generally with the exception of the BBC, is concerned with fatuous home-town nonsense.) Today, as I write this piece, the 'New Zealand Herald' front page headline is AUCKLAND MAN HELD HOSTAGE. It concerned an unfortunate man taken captive by the murderous loonies in Iraq. (That is the Iraqi murderous loonies; not the other murderous loonies who blitz towns with chemical weapons that aren't chemical weapons because they are used for democracy.) One would imagine from the banner headline that a New Zealander was involved. That would be a reasonable assumption.

But given the immaturity and lack of savoir faire of the tiny tots involved in production of today's newspapers, that is not at all a reasonable conclusion to reach. As revealed later in the front page splurge : "Harmay Singh Sooden [the 'Auckland Man Held Hostage'], 32, a Canadian citizen born in Africa of Indian parents . . ." was kidnapped in Iraq along with three other people who had, alas, no connection with Auckland or any other centre of high culture. The others were real foreigners, although Mr Sooden, who had been a student in Auckland, is no more an Aucklander than is Yogi Bear. It is this type of thing that exemplifies the parochialism of many countries' newspapers -- and of their readers. For it is readers (and especially advertisers) who dictate what appears in newspapers : and what they want is trivia. (And, in the case of the UK, Ms Trivia with Big Tits.) But if there has to be reportage of boring international events, then this has to be closely focused on nationalism, because the lives of citizens of any newspaper's country are by definition more valuable than the lives of foreigners.

The relative value of lives is nowhere more starkly highlighted than in the two wars that Bush Washington is conducting at the moment, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraqi civilians are killed in their scores by insurgents' car bombs and the scale of slaughter of Iraqi civilians by US troops is monstrous. The number of dead caused by insurgents (the word that is so disliked by the moron Rumsfeld) is faithfully recorded by the Pentagon. The number of Iraqi civilians killed by US bombing is ignored. All Iraqis killed -- all of them, without exception -- are "terrorists".

The oafish US Air Force General Walter E (Buck) Buchanan III, commander of US Central Command Air Forces, said last month in Dubai that reports of civilian casualties in Iraq were exaggerated and that many deaths had been "staged". (The cretin also said that White Phosphorus had not been used as a weapon, which the Pentagon had been forced to admit it had, just the day before he warbled from a different song sheet. Where on earth do they get these people from?)

But we shouldn't blame fatheads such as Buck Buchanan the Third for being so gross as to announce that the number of Iraqi casualties had been exaggerated [by whom?] and that dead Iraqis weren't really dead because their deaths had been "staged". He and his ilk really believe that everything the US says is Right, and everything that foreigners say is Wrong. He has probably never seen the photograph of the weeping, blood-covered three year-old Iraqi girl whose parents had just been killed by a merciless hail of fire from trigger-happy soldiers. The general and his merry jet-jockeys, after all, bomb from 30,000 feet and never see the results of their slaughter. It's just a video game to the boys upstairs. And, as the general and all Pentagon propagandists assure us, their bombs never miss. They are smart bombs.

But the trouble is that the people directing them are not as smart as their bombs. And the bombs kill hundreds of civilians because many of the people who direct them on to their targets are semi-robots, and in any case couldn't give a damn about the lives of ragheads. The relative value of lives formula in the US military is that foreigners don't matter. Kill a few hundred civilians? What the hell does it matter?

*****

"October 18, 2005. KANDAHAR, Afghanistan. Reuters - US troops shot four Afghan policemen dead and wounded another after mistaking them for militants during an operation in southern Afghanistan, a senior local official said on Tuesday . . . Earlier this month US troops mistook some policemen for militants during a hunt in the adjacent province of Helmand, again killing four and wounding another."

Imagine what would happen if US troops had shot dead some British or German police on patrol in Afghanistan. There would be uproar. But they were only Afghans who were killed. Who cares? Nobody has ever heard of these incidents except those who closely follow developments in the shambles that Bush has created in Afghanistan. There were eight families devastated by the loss of their breadwinners, but they are only Afghans.

The relative value of lives internationally is a simple assessment. And the only conclusion is that the life of a person from a poor nation, or one without military or economic clout, is worth less than the life of a citizen of a powerful one.

When this is displayed in terms of the military might that is exercised by barbaric occupation forces such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, then the difference becomes even more reprehensible in moral terms. But then, morality is in pretty short supply round the world. It's better just to bury your head in the sand and occasionally lift it out to squawk that all foreigners are nasty. Few people would disagree with you.

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Brian Cloughley writes on military and political affairs.

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"It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." - Albert Einstein

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=9431

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Venezuela’s true patriots ... unlike the cowards who stayed home and griped!

Tuesday 6th December 2005


 
 by Mary MacElveen

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With the outcome of the Venezuelan elections now decided President Chavez’ MVR party now holds a convincing majority. No matter what the fevered opposition says, it is still a majority since those who did in fact go to the polls in torrential rains decided which direction Venezuela must democratically take.

MVR won 114 out of the 167 seats and this boils down to 68% ... it must mean that Chavez is doing something right if he gained such a majority to push through further reforms.

As reported elsewhere: “Many voting centers had to open late, though, because citizens who were asked to staff the centers did not show up, particularly in upper middle class neighborhoods, where the opposition parties that called for a boycott, are especially strong.”

I find this interesting for many reasons...

If the opposition feels the country is going in the wrong direction, they should not boycott an election. Quite simply, they should show up en masse ... staying away from a polling station that’s kept open late only shows cowardice on the part of Chavez’ opposition.

If as reported this boycott was strong, those who chose to join the stay-away failed in their mission. It also showed that boycotting the election was weak. If those in upper middle class neighborhoods felt left out of President Chavez’ people-oriented government, where the focus is on the poor of the nation, my message to them is: How do you think the poor of the United States feels when our government cares more for the rich?

Here in the United States, many did show up to the polls who wanted to see a change of course within this country ... but due to voter fraud, or being turned away from the polls, we have those that are friendly to President Chavez’ opposition in power. At least those who wanted to see a change of course showed up here as opposed to the opposition in Venezuela.

It almost appears that President Chavez’ opposition threw a hissy fit ... as if saying: “I am not getting my way so I’ll throw a temper tantrum”

Maria Corina Machado. an outspoken force against many of President Chavez’ policies, said “from a mulit-party parliament we pass to a single party parliament that does not represent the broad sectors of the population. Today, a National Assembly is born that is wounded in its legitimacy.”

If Maria Corina is that upset, she should have told her opposition NGO Sumate to show up and not to boycott this election. Those that did show up legitimized the election and the assembly by casting their votes instead of staying home. No one turned them away or purged their names off voter registration roles. There have been many provable reports where the US Republicans did just that here in the United States.

As we all know, her friend Bush is the head of that party.

* Now, Maria Corina can see exactly how it feels living in the minority ... perhaps that is her just reward and the opposition’s just reward for their sheer stupidity and arrogance.

Right now, many like myself, are living in the minority here in the United States under the rule of her friend George W. Bush. Bush and his supporters in our senate and House of Representatives act like totalitarian rulers instead of elected officials.

Oops, I keep forgetting the Supreme Court installed Bush back in 2000.

Many like me feel shut out of our political process, but the big difference here is that we say to our supporters: “SHOW UP to vote and work towards voter reform in this country.”

* In the United States, voter reform means getting the big money out of our political system and to do away with computerized voting machines. Personally, I would like to take a base ball bat to every single one of them.

If Maria Corina reads this column, I want to express to her that her friend Bush denied help coming from Venezuela to help the citizens of here in the United States in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and ask her: How she feels about that? If the opposition to President Chavez agrees with the denial of this humanitarian aid, then they deserved to lose.

Just last night, I was reading an AP article asking how we will pay for the rebuilding of Hurricane Katrina. Let me remind Maria Corina, we would not even be having this debate had her friend George W. Bush not spent billions upon billions for an illegal war.

Rest assured, Maria Corina those who were the recipients of discounted home heating oil here in the United States are thrilled with President Chavez, because it shows he cared and still cares for them unlike your friend Bush.

What I find amusing is that one of our minority leaders went behind Bush’s back to get this done ... his name is US Congressman William Delahunt ... he really deserves a pat on the back for that one.

In closing, those who went to the polls in Venezuela yesterday, and exercised their right to vote, were truly the ones looking out for the best interest of Venezuela.

They are Venezuela’s true patriots ... unlike the cowards who just stayed home and griped.

What they said through that vote was: we want to continue President Chavez’ people-oriented policies ... instead of going back into the misery of the last forty years of governmental malfeasance and corruption that characterized Maria Corina’s soul-mates in Venezuelan politics and their puppeteers in Washington D.C..

Mary MacElveen mary@vheadline.com
http://vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=47281

ALSO SEE:

WAYNE MADSEN REPORT

http://waynemadsenreport.com/

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December 5, 2005

Venezuelan oil pipeline suspiciously sabotaged shortly before election  boycotted by U.S.-backed opposition.

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In what clearly has the marks of a U.S. neocon destabilization campaign, a pipeline to Venezuela's Amuay-Cardon oil refinery was blown up by terrorists on December 3, on the eve of Sunday elections that returned President Hugo Chavez's Fifth Republic Movement to the National Assembly with well over a two-thirds majority, a majority that will enable the constitution to be changed to allow Chavez to run for a third term in 2012. Chavez will run for re-election to a second six year term next year.    

Working with local right-wing groups, the Bush administration supported a right-wing boycott of the legislative elections. Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel and Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez confirmed the explosion was sabotage. In October, another pipeline was sabotaged in Zulia state.



Venezuelan oil infrastructure: latest target of the neocons? Venezuela suspects terrorism in pre-election sabotage

WMR reported on Nov. 9 that Vatang Agrunov (aka  Bhatang Agranouve, Dahtang Mik Agarunov, and Bathan Agranouve), an Israeli national, was arrested in nearby Trinidad for suspicion that he was involved in July 11, August 10, September 10, and November 3 bombings in Port of Spain. The bombings injured 28 people. Agrunov was also caught with possessing a stolen Trinidad and Tobago immigration visa extension stamp.

Israelis are not required to have a visa to enter Trinidad but they are required to have one to enter Venezuela. An extended Trinidad visa would, however, permit easy entry into Venezuela from Trinidad, especially on small boats that ferry people between the seven- mile Gulf of Paria strait that separates the two nations.

WMR speculated at the time of his arrest for possible involvement in bombings in Trinidad that Agrunov may have been involved in a "false flag" plot to engage in anti-Chavez sabotage in Venezuela.

Prior to the April 2002 abortive U.S.-backed coup against Chavez, US Special Operations personnel on loan to the CIA attempted to foment disruption of the state-owned PDVSA oil infrastructure.

The Trinidad police believed Agrunov was going to falsify his passport to remain in the country illegally. The Israeli embassy in Caracas intervened in the Agrunov arrest as did, suspiciously, the FBI. Caribbean law enforcement agencies possess intelligence that Agrunov is a suspected terrorist. Agrunov was deported from Trinidad to Israel on November 15 after the Israeli Consulate in Port of Spain paid his $TT 2,500 bail.

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MORE ON THE VENEZUELAN VOTE FROM REUTERS:

http://lnk.nu/today.reuters.com/6q8.aspx

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Chavez lawmakers claim victory after Congress vote

Mon Dec 5, 2005 9:18 AM ET

By Andrei Khalip

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CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Lawmakers loyal to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Monday they had won all 167 seats in the National Assembly, after only about one-fourth of eligible voters participated in an election boycotted by the opposition.

Electoral authorities were to present the final tally later on Monday, but Chavez's Fifth Republic Movement party said it had secured 114 out of 167 National Assembly seats and that preliminary figures showed its allies had won the rest of the legislature.

Lawmakers backing Chavez say they want to amend the constitution to scrap the two-term limit on presidential reelection and introduce other reforms opponents worry will increase the left-wing former paratrooper's grip on power.

"The year 2006 will be for debate and definition of the themes and then we will certainly put forward proposals in 2007," Nicolas Maduro, Congress president and Chavez ally, told state television.

Most opposition groups stayed home on Sunday after accusing electoral authorities of favoring Chavez and manipulating electronic voting machines despite an earlier agreement to participate in the poll.

The National Electoral Council said turnout on Sunday was 25 percent of registered voters compared with just over 56 percent for the 2000 parliamentary election. Chavez's opponents may use the low turnout to question the parliament's legitimacy.

INCREASINGLY AUTHORITARIAN?

Chavez's critics say he has grown increasingly authoritarian by taking control of the courts and electoral council. But he has spent billions in oil revenues on projects for the poor as part of his self-styled socialist revolution, and is hugely popular.

TalCual newspaper editor Teodoro Petkoff, who has criticized both the opposition and the government, told Union Radio the election showed a "mega-abstention" and a lack of confidence in the electoral system.

"This process has buried Venezuela's electoral system. This electoral system does not deserve the trust, either of the government's opponents or of its allies," he said.

European Union election observers said they would present a preliminary report on the vote on Tuesday.

The Organization of American States said it found no evidence of vote tampering in a referendum last year that Chavez won with around 60 percent. The opposition claimed that vote was riddled with fraud.

Chavez accused the opposition of staging a U.S.-backed "electoral coup" on Sunday and dismissed the boycott as a failed attempt at sabotage by political parties who had no support.

U.S. officials and the Venezuelan opposition portray Chavez, who has close ties with Cuba, as a threat to democracy in Venezuela and the region. Chavez presents his policies as an alternative to U.S. proposals and has often accused Washington for attempting to overthrow him.

© Reuters 2005.

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"Our mission is socialist because it puts social aspects first. Capitalists put capital first." - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez