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China premier attacks Dalai Lama

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has accused the Dalai Lama of masterminding recent violence in Tibet’s main city, Lhasa. Speaking at the close of parliament, Mr Wen also said that the exiled Tibetan leader’s claim of “cultural genocide” in Tibet was nothing but lies.

China’s response to the violence had been restrained, the premier said.

China says 13 people were killed by rioters in Lhasa. Tibetan exiles say at least 80 protesters were killed in a crackdown by Chinese security forces.

The Dalai Lama, who in 1989 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his consistent opposition to the use of violence in the quest for Tibetan self-rule, has repeatedly called for dialogue with China.

The protests began on 10 March - the anniversary of a Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule - and gradually escalated, culminating in a day of violence late last week.

The demonstrations have also spread to Tibetan communities in Gansu and Sichuan provinces.

‘Seeking independence’

Mr Wen’s comments - his first since the violence broke out - came in response to a question by a Western journalist at a press conference following the close of parliament.

He defended China’s handling of the violence, accusing protesters of robbery, arson and violence, and said Tibetan exiles had instigated the violence. “There is ample fact and plenty of evidence proving this incident was organised, premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai clique,” he said.

“This has all the more revealed the consistent claims by the Dalai clique that they pursue not independence, but peaceful dialogue, are nothing but lies.”

In recent years, Tibetan exiles have accused the Chinese government of trying to eradicate Tibetan culture.

As Tibet has developed, Han Chinese have poured in and now dominate the economy, while the authorities continue to control aspects of Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetans are now a minority in Lhasa.

Olympic ’sabotage’

But Mr Wen insisted China was helping to improve the livelihoods of Tibetans.

“These claims that the Chinese government is involved in so-called cultural genocide are nothing but lies,” he said.

The Chinese premier accused the protesters of trying to sabotage the Beijing Olympic Games, which begin on 8 August.

On Monday, European Union ministers ruled out a boycott over Tibet, saying it would only punish athletes.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called on both Chinese forces and demonstrators to show restraint.

In Tibet, large numbers of police are patrolling the streets of the regional capital, Lhasa, and at midnight on Monday (1600 GMT) a Chinese deadline for protesters to surrender passed.

But the BBC’s Quentin Sommerville in Beijing says that people outside of China have been placing far more emphasis on the deadline than is the case inside the country.

In effect there has not been a deadline, our correspondent says, but instead a rolling crackdown with Chinese security forces moving through the city, going door to door, to root out and detain the instigators of the unrest.

China says Tibet has always been part of its territory but Tibet enjoyed long periods of autonomy before the 20th Century and many Tibetans remain loyal to the Dalai Lama, who fled in 1959.

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VIDEO: Clinton vs Obama on Blackwater

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Winter Soldier: Jeremy Scahill discusses why no presidential candidate plans on fully leaving Iraq

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!.

The Real News Network

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McCain the Warmonger?

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

If you’ve followed Senator John McCain at all, you’ve heard about his tendency to, well, explode. He’s erupted at numerous Senate colleagues, including many Republicans, at the slightest provocation. “The thought of his being President sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me,” wrote Republican Senator Thad Cochran, shortly before endorsing McCain.

You’ve heard about his penchant for bellicose rhetoric, whether appropriating a Beach Boys song in threatening to bomb Iran or telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that he doesn’t care what he thinks about American plans to install missiles in Eastern Europe.

And you’ve heard, no doubt, about McCain’s stubbornness. “No dissent, no opinion to the contrary, however reasonable, will be entertained,” says Larry Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s top aide. “Hardheaded is another way to say it. Arrogant is another way to say it. Hubristic is another way to say it. Too proud for his own good is another way to say it. It’s a quality about him that disturbs me.”

But what you may not have heard is an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call “the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism,” McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a “League of Democracies” that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in “rogue state rollback” against his version of the “axis of evil.” In all, it’s a new apparatus designed to carry the “war on terror” deep into the twenty-first century.

“We created a number of institutions in the wake of World War II to deal with the situation,” says Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s top adviser on foreign policy. “And what Senator McCain wants to begin a dialogue about is, Do we need new structures and new institutions, both internally, in the US government, and externally, to recognize that the situation we face now is very, very different than the one we faced during the cold war?” Joining Scheunemann, a veteran neoconservative strategist and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, are a panoply of like-minded neocons who’ve gathered to advise McCain, including Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt and Maj. Ralph Peters. “There are some who’ve moved into his camp who scare me,” Wilkerson says. “Scare me.”

If McCain intends to be a shoot first, ask questions later President, consider a couple of the new institutions he’s outlined, which seem designed to facilitate an unencumbered, interventionist foreign policy.

First is an unnamed “new agency patterned after the…Office of Strategic Services,” the rambunctious, often out-of-control World War II-era covert-ops team. “A modern day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare; covert action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines,” wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. “Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization” that would “fight terrorist subversion [and] take risks.” It’s clear that McCain wants to set up an agency to conduct paramilitary operations, covert action and psy-ops.

This idea is McCain’s response to a longstanding critique of the CIA by neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, who have accused the agency of being “risk averse.” Since 2001 the CIA has engaged in a bitter battle with the White House and the Pentagon on issues that include the Iraq War and Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The agency lost a major skirmish with the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which put the White House more directly in charge of the intelligence community. And now McCain wants to put the final nail in the CIA’s coffin by creating a gung-ho operations force. Scheunemann, who credits Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations with the idea, says the new agency is urgently needed to “meet the threats of the twenty-first century in a time of war, much as the OSS was created in a time of war.” And he disparages the CIA as a bunch of has-beens. The new agency would eclipse “an organization created to meet the needs of the cold war and hang out in embassies and try to recruit a major or two or deal with walk-in defectors,” Scheunemann told The Nation.

But John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA who retired in 2004, is more than skeptical, and he worries that McCain doesn’t understand the need for Congressional controls over spy agencies. “You need to have Congressional oversight and transparency,” he says. “I would not recommend a new agency that is set up parallel to the CIA…. All of those things can be done within the boundaries of the CIA.” Told about McLaughlin’s comments, Scheunemann says, “Anyone who thinks that the agency today is a nimble, can-do organization has a different view than Senator McCain does.”

The UN, too, would be shunted aside to make room for McCain’s new League of Democracies. Though the concept is couched in soothing rhetoric, the “league” would provide an alternate way of legitimizing foreign interventions by the United States when the UN Security Council won’t authorize force. Five years ago, on the eve of the Iraq War, McCain said bluntly before the European Parliament that if Security Council members resisted the use of force, or if China opposed US action against North Korea, “the United States will do whatever it must to guarantee the security of the American people.” Among the targets McCain cites for his plan to short-circuit the UN are Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe, Serbia, Ukraine and, of course, Iran–and he has already referred to “wackos” in Venezuela. According to Scheunemann, it’s an idea that bubbled up from some of McCain’s advisers, including Peters and Kagan, but it alarms analysts from the realist-Republican school of foreign policy. “They’re talking about a body that essentially would circumvent the UN and would take authority to act in the name of the international community, sometimes using force,” says a veteran GOP strategist who knows McCain well and who insisted on anonymity. “Well, it’s very easy to predict that the Russians and Chinese would view this as a threat.”

McCain seems almost gleeful about provoking Russia. At first blush, you’d think he’d be more nuanced, since many of the foreign policy gurus he says he talks to emanate from the old-school Nixon-Kissinger circle of détente-niks, including Henry Kissinger himself, Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft. Their collective attitude is that as long as Moscow doesn’t threaten US interests, we can do business with it. But there is little evidence of their views in McCain’s policy toward Putin’s Russia. “I think it’s fair to assume that he’s most influenced by his neoconservative advisers,” says the GOP strategist.

“We need a new Western approach to…revanchist Russia,” wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. He says he will expel Russia from the Group of Eight leading industrial states, a flagrant and dangerous insult, one likely to draw stiff opposition from other members of the G-8. He refuses to ease Russian concerns about the deployment of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, saying, “The first thing I would do is make sure we have a missile defense system in place in Czechoslovakia [sic] and Poland, and I don’t care what [Putin's] objections are to it.” And he’s all for rapid expansion of NATO, to include even the former Soviet republic of Georgia–and not just Georgia but also the rebellious Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Since Kosovo’s declaration of independence on February 17, which was opposed by Russia, Moscow has said it intends to support independence of the two Georgian regions, making McCain’s goal of expanding NATO provocative, to say the least. “McCain says [NATO] ought to include Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are not under the control of the current Georgian government,” says a conservative critic of the Arizona senator. “Which, if not a prescription for war with Russia, is at least a prescription for conflict with Russia.”

Earlier in his Congressional career, McCain was reluctant to engage in overseas adventures unless American interests were directly threatened. He opposed US involvement in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and in Haiti and the Balkan conflicts in the early 1990s. But as the post-cold war environment seemed increasingly to promise unchallenged American hegemony, McCain took up the neocons’ call for interventionism. His views crystallized in a 1999 speech, when he called for the United States to use tough sanctions and other pressure to roll back “rogue states” like Iraq and North Korea, adding, “We must be prepared to back up these measures with American military force if the existence of such rogue states threatens America’s interests and values.” In referring to “values,” McCain indicates his support for the notion that a selective crusade allegedly on behalf of freedom and democracy can provide a rationale for an aggressive new foreign policy outlook.

“He’s the true neocon,” says the Brookings Institution’s Ivo Daalder, a liberal interventionist who conceived the idea of a League of Democracies with Robert Kagan. “He does believe, in a way that George W. Bush never really did, in the use of power, military power above all, to change the world in America’s image. If you thought George Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military force, wait till you see John McCain…. He believes this. His advisers believe this. He’s surrounded himself with people who believe it. And I’ll take him at his word.”

Not surprisingly, the center of McCain’s foreign policy is the Middle East. “He’s bought into the completely fallacious notion that we’re in a global struggle of us-versus-them. He calls it the ‘transcendental threat…of extreme Islam,” says Daalder. “But it’s a silly argument to think that this is either an ideological or a material struggle on a par with [the ones against] Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism.” For McCain, the Iraq War, the conflict with Iran, the Arab-Israeli dispute, the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani crisis and the lack of democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all rolled up into one “transcendent” ball of wax.

More than any other politician, McCain is identified with the Iraq War. From the mid-1990s on, he and his advisers were staunch supporters of “regime change.” Scheunemann helped write the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which funded Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress; joined Bill Kristol’s Project for the New American Century; and helped create the neoconservative Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002, with White House support. Together with Joe Lieberman, Sam Brownback and a handful of other senators, McCain emerged as a major cheerleader for the war. Like his fellow neocons, McCain touted what proved to be faked intelligence on the threat posed by Iraq. Echoing Vice President Cheney, McCain said on the eve of the war, “There’s no doubt in my mind, once [Saddam] is gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators.” He pooh-poohed critics who argued that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s war plan was too reliant on technology and too light on troops, saying, “I don’t think you’re going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw…back in 1991.” When Gen. Eric Shinseki warned, a month before the war started, that occupying Iraq would require far more troops, McCain was mute.

Today McCain portrays himself as a critic of how the war was fought, but his criticism did not emerge until long after it was clear that the United States faced a grueling insurgency. From the fall of 2003 onward, against a growing chorus of critics who called for US forces to withdraw, McCain repeatedly called for more troops to secure “victory.” By late 2006, when the bipartisan Iraq Study Group called for pulling out all combat brigades within fifteen months, McCain, Lieberman and a hardy band of neocons, led by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and joined by Cheney, persuaded Bush to escalate the war instead. Asked if McCain directly lobbied Bush to reject the ISG’s recommendations, a McCain aide says, “There were many encounters with the President’s senior advisers and with the President on this issue.” Fred Kagan, the surge’s author and Robert Kagan’s brother, told McClatchy Newspapers, “It was a very lonely time. He went out there for us.”

In January McCain famously said US forces might end up staying in Iraq for a hundred years. It’s clear that for McCain the occupation is not just about winning the war but about turning Iraq into a regional base for extending US influence throughout the region. According to the original neocon conception of the war, as promoted by people like Perle and Michael Ledeen, Iraq was only a first step in redrawing the Middle East map. Gen. Wesley Clark said recently that on the eve of the war he was shown a Pentagon document that portrayed Iraq as the first in a series of operations to change regimes in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Lebanon.

When The Nation asked Scheunemann why US forces would have to stay in Iraq so long, he explicitly linked their presence to the entire Middle East. “Iraq might be stable, but what about the region?” he responded. “Other countries could be in turmoil; other countries could be threatening Iraq. It could be an external threat that we need to have troops there for, à la South Korea, à la Japan.” He added, “I understand your readers may think it’s some sort of malevolent imperialist conspiracy.” Conspiracy or not, it’s clear that McCain sees our presence in Iraq as a permanent extension of US power in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

McCain has made no secret of his belief that using force against Iran is the only way to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. “There is only one thing worse than a military solution, and that, my friends, is a nuclear-armed Iran,” McCain said. “The regime must understand that they cannot win a showdown with the world.” He supports tougher sanctions against Tehran, but critics note that implementing them would require Russia’s consent. McCain’s provocative anti-Russia stand, though, makes such a deal less than likely. And he rejects direct US-Iran talks.

In the end, McCain seems almost reflexively to favor the use of America’s armed might. “He would employ military force to the exclusion of other options,” says Larry Korb, a former Reagan Administration defense official. Scion of admirals (his father and grandfather), a combat pilot in Vietnam who continued to believe long after that war that it might have been won if the US military had been allowed free rein, McCain presents the image of a warrior itching for battle. He is the candidate of those Americans whose chief goal is an endless war against radical Islam and who’d like nothing more than for the Arizona senator to clamber figuratively into the cockpit once more. Like his former aide Marshall Wittman, currently a top aide to Senator Lieberman, McCain sees Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose interventionist President of the early twentieth century, as his role model. And that attracts neoconservatives.

“I’m an old-fashioned, Scoop Jackson–I guess you’d now say Joe Lieberman–Democrat, and he’s a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, and they’re pretty close in their views, so substantively there’s a lot of overlap between us,” says James Woolsey, a former CIA director who’s endorsed McCain and has campaigned with him this year. “I think John’s style is very TR-like. It’s very much about speaking softly but carrying a big stick.”

We’re still waiting for the “speaking softly” part. “There’s going to be other wars,” McCain warns. “I’m sorry to tell you, there’s going to be other wars. We will never surrender, but there will be other wars.”

ROBERT DREYFUSS

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Extent of secret Government IRA links revealed

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

The full extent of a secret 20-year “back channel” between the British government and the IRA is revealed today by Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, who declares that the peace process might never have been possible without the link.

In the first authoritative account of the link by a British official, Jonathan Powell tells the Guardian that a Derry businessmen, Brendan Duddy, and a series of MI5 and MI6 officers risked their lives to allow the British government and the IRA leadership to communicate in private between 1973 and 1993. In the latest extracts from his memoirs, serialised in the Guardian this week, Powell writes: “It is very hard for democratic governments to admit to talking to terrorist groups while those groups are still killing innocent people.

“Luckily for this process, the British government’s back channel to the Provisional IRA had been in existence whenever required from 1973 onwards.” The secret link was only used on three major occasions: to negotiate an IRA ceasefire in the mid-1970s; during the first IRA hunger strike in 1980; and in the early stages of the peace process in the 1990s. But Powell writes that the simple fact that a link existed from the IRA leadership to Downing Street - mainly via Duddy and his MI6 handler Michael Oatley - was of huge significance.

Powell writes: “It was, metaphorically, contained in a locked box, the key to which was in the possession of Brendan Duddy and behind which, wherever he happened to be in the world, was Oatley, known to the IRA as ‘Mountain Climber’.”

The link broke down in 1993 when Martin McGuinness, Sinn Féin’s chief negotiator, reacted furiously to claims that he had sent a message purportedly saying that the IRA’s “conflict is over”. Duddy told the BBC’s Peter Taylor, in an interview published in today’s Guardian, that he was interrogated for four hours by four “very senior Provisionals” after he was wrongly suspected of sending the message.

Powell admits that the message is in dispute, but he says it laid the grounds for the peace process. “What that message succeeded in doing, true or not, was to get the attention of the British government. John Major really thought: ‘Gosh, here is a chance that we can make a breakthrough in Northern Ireland’.”

The DUP leader, Ian Paisley, condemned Major for the secret back channel when it was revealed in 1993. But Powell reveals in his memoirs that 10 years later the DUP established its own secret channel to Sinn Féin when Paisley’s party won the elections to the Northern Ireland assembly of 2003. The channel was kept secret because the DUP refused to meet Sinn Féin at the time on the grounds that the IRA was still active. Powell says: “They [the DUP] were no different from the British government at the time of John Major or Margaret Thatcher saying they never had contacts with the IRA - but actually [they were] doing so as well. It did play an important role in making possible that extraordinary meeting between Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams. They had never met, they had never spoken until they sat down for that photo-opportunity in March 2007. If you hadn’t had that back channel building confidence over time, it would have been difficult.”

Nicholas Watt
The Guardian,

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Burrell ‘took bloodstained ring from Diana’s body’

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell took a bloodstained engagement ring off her dead body and kept it, her inquest heard today.

Michael Faux, who worked as Burrell’s bodyguard, said he had been “disgusted” after hearing the revelation. He told the inquest Burrell told him he took the ring in the Paris hospital where Diana died following a car crash in August 1997.

Faux said: “He said that he took it from the body in Paris.”

Nicholas Hilliard, representing the coroner, said: “Did he have any way of demonstrating this was hers?”

Faux replied: “Yes, there was still blood on the ring and he could prove it was hers by the DNA.”

He told the jury Burrell only told him of the engagement ring after he agreed to sign a confidentiality agreement.

The jury has heard that Diana received a gold Bulgari friendship ring from Dodi Fayed, which she wore on her right hand.

In a written statement to the court, Burrell said: “There was no conversation about a ring. I have never referred to the Bulgari friendship ring as an engagement ring. This is not my opinion of what the ring was.

“I have never told anybody that I have had possession of that ring. I am not in possession of that ring.”

The hearing continues.

Fred Attewill and agencies
guardian.co.uk,

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America: Big Brother’s big week

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Americans learned last week that, whatever the law says, they shouldn’t assume that their private communications are private. It was a big week for Big Brother, with but a single, small ray of hope at week’s end.

— The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the National Security Agency, which is supposed to spy only on foreign targets, now “monitors huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel and telephone records.” The NSA has created, in effect, a back-door version of the controversial “Total Information Awareness” program that Congress thought it killed in 2003.

— The Boston Globe reported Friday that last month President George W. Bush quietly changed the rules governing the authority of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. The board, a group of private citizens, is supposed to provide oversight of intelligence agencies. In an executive order issued Feb. 29, Mr. Bush stripped the board of its power to report suspected unlawful activity to the Justice Department. So if the intelligence agencies are doing something illegal, they’ll just have to turn themselves in.

— On Friday afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an extension of the so-called Protect America Act that will allow the warrantless surveillance program to continue. But Mr. Bush, who says the program is essential to the nation’s security, has threatened to veto the bill anyway if it reaches his desk because it doesn’t grant immunity to telecommunications companies for any illegal acts they already committed in cooperating with the government. The Senate version of the bill does. The House version also would set up an independent commission to investigate the surveillance program, an absolutely splendid idea.

Mr. Bush’s actions stem from Vice President Dick Cheney’s belief that the executive branch gave up too much of its inherent power in the post-Watergate reform era. When the president acts as commander in chief in the war against terrorism, the specious Cheney theory goes, there are no limits to his executive authority.

So after 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the NSA to ignore certain provisions of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They no longer had to seek warrants from special FISA judges to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists in this country. The NSA, with the cooperation of U.S. telecommunications companies, began mining electronic communications through computers and telephone switching stations in the United States.

After The New York Times revealed the warrantless wiretapping program, and the fact that communications involving U.S. citizens were being caught in the NSA’s drift net, Mr. Bush belatedly went to Congress and got permission to do what he’d already been doing. Under intense White House pressure, Congress last year passed the Protect America Act, a revision of the 1978 FISA act, but put a six-month expiration date on it. The law expired Feb. 17.

Since then, the battle to renew it has focused mainly on the provision to give telecom companies a free pass for any past bad acts. Some 38 pending lawsuits were filed by citizens who are angry that the companies gave up their private communications without valid warrants ordering them to do so. The administration argues that allowing the lawsuits to proceed would endanger national security and adds that it would make lawyers rich. Critics suggest that the administration is more worried that the lawsuits will reveal the flimsy legal pretexts used to justify spying on citizens without first getting court warrants.

Mr. Bush says the expiration of the law three weeks ago has made the country less safe. But he and his supporters consistently have refused to cite specific instances in which the law has resulted in credible intelligence against actual threats. It’s one of those “we could tell you, but then we’d have to kill you” kind of things.

Mr. Bush has substituted fear-mongering for facts, even as he weakens his own watchdogs and allows the NSA to cast its electronic nets farther and wider. The Senate, worried about “soft on terrorism” charges in the fall election, caved under the pressure. To their credit, most House Democrats and a few Republicans held firm.

They must continue to do so in negotiations with the Senate and in the face of Mr. Bush’s veto threat. In this instance, gridlock is not a bad thing. If, between now and the November elections, intelligence agencies have to get judicial warrants to do their spying, so much the better.

STL Today

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On Frontlines in Tibet, Protestors ‘Shot Like Dogs’

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Unconfirmed Reports From Tibet of Dozens of Civilians Killed in Crackdown

The Chinese military is shooting Tibetan demonstrators “like dogs,” a Tibetan exile group said Monday, firing “indiscriminately” intro groups of people protesting Chinese rule.

The accusation was leveled by the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, a group run by exiled Tibetans in Dharamsala, India, home to the Dalai Lama. Exile groups in India receive some of the few reports from inside Tibet and have provided some of the only reporting from there since last Monday, when the most significant Tibetan protests in 20 years began.

“People have been saying they’re shooting our people like dogs,” Tenzin Norgay, the spokesman for the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy, told ABC News, citing his sources inside Tibet. He spoke just a few hours after a deadline set by the Chinese government expired for the protestors to stop or face a crackdown. The protests, he says, continued, and so did the retaliation.

“From reports we have been able to gather, the military forces, they do not tolerate anything more than a few minutes and then immediately they begin shooting or beating. And if the crowd goes out of control they shoot indiscriminately,” Norgay said.

News Blackout

He said his group had confirmed that 55 protestors had been shot to death in the last few days. The Tibetan government in exile, which is seated in Dharamsala, maintains that it has confirmed at least 80 deaths in the capital of Lhasa alone during one week of protests.

If the Chinese military is in fact shooting into crowds, the accusation is impossible to prove. The Chinese government has kicked all journalists out of the region and exile groups’ sources are anonymous and refuse to speak directly to the media for fear of their safety.

The Chinese government denies shooting protestors over the last week, saying that Tibetans themselves are at fault.

The “atrocities of the Tibetan independence forces manifested … the hypocrisy and deceit of its peace and non-violence propaganda,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said, according to the Associated Press. “The Chinese government will unwaveringly protect national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

“Unwavering” for China has clearly meant a massive mobilization of soldiers and police to quell the protests. ABC News witnessed hundreds of buses full of soldiers rumbling along the road to Tibet on Monday, hours before the deadline expired.

But the protestors themselves have also been unwavering, and seem to be more aggressive than ever.

They have burned buildings, attacked cars with baseball bats and thrown rocks at Chinese authorities. Those methods have long been used by revolutionaries around the world, but never so often by Tibetans.

And as the actions and rhetoric on both sides rose over the last week, a fault line within the Tibetan independence movement has been exposed.

The Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of the movement, the living God who won a Nobel Peace Prize for advancing non-violent protest in Tibet. But the 72-year-old’s faith in Gandhian resistance has left some of his followers frustrated.

‘Issue Has to Do With Every Tibetian’

“He is the leader, yes, but every single Tibetan has the responsibility” to fight for independence, Tsewang Rigzin, the president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, told reporters in Dharamsala. “The issue of Tibet is not an issue of an individual or an individual organization. The issue of Tibet has to do with every single Tibetan. ”

He sat in front a sign that read “Rise Up, Resist, Return.” Unlike the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Youth Congress stands for aggressive protest. Unlike the Dalai Lama, it stands for Tibetan independence from China and not just autonomy. And Unlike the Dalai it believes that China should be stripped of the Olympics.

“There is a growing frustration within the Tibetan community, especially the younger generation,” Rigzin said. “His holiness’ brand of ‘middle way’ has been in existence for the last 20 years. And as of right now, nothing has come of it whatsoever.”

The Dalai Lama has stuck to his principles. “Particularly in our case,” he said during a press conference on Sunday, “violence is almost like suicide.”

But he pointedly did not condemn the protesters’ actions during the press conference. He said he didn’t have the power to stop the demonstrations, though he admitted that he’d received requests not to intervene.

“Generally, Tibetans following, I think quite sincerely, non-violent peaceful” protest, he told reporters. “Of course, individual human beings, emotions become out of control, and [that leads to] violent actions. So this is possible.”

Asked by ABC News whether he supported the demonstrators and had the power to stop them, he parried, saying, “I have no such power.”

Perhaps he is not standing in the way because he and his advisers realize this is a moment the Tibet movement needs to seize. The Summer Olympics begin in only five months. Never have so many eyes been on China. And it seems that never has he been so impressed by the possibilities of this week’s protests.

When he heard the Chinese impose a deadline to the protestors, he said “I got the same sort of mental state which I experienced in 1959.” That is an extremely significant year for the Tibetan people — the year the Dalai Lama fled to India, and the year Tibetans tried to seize their homeland through force. “One side, Chinese military determined to crush. Other side, Tibetan side also, determined to resist that,” he said.

Emotions have never been higher here. Lobsang Tsering, a 28-year-old monk, left Tibet in 1989 to move to a monestary in Dharamsala. He has been following the protests in Tibet closely.

Situation in Lhasa

“So many people have been killed in Lhasa. Yesterday 15 were killed in Amdho. And yet the protesters continue — with only a photo of the Dali Lama and the Tibetan flags as their weapons. They have no guns. The Chinese have the guns,” he says.

While being interviewed he and another monk received a call from one of their friends in Tibet. The caller described a scene of violence unfold right in front of his eyes.

“The police are beating 70 people,” the called said. “One policeman just hit a monk’s head with a baton. The monk is bleeding right now.” As he continued describing the scene, the violence turned worse. “Oh! Just now two people were killed. I saw it right in front of me.”

Tsering was inconsolable. Speaking a few hours before the Chinese deadline, he feared that the violence would only get worse.

“If the Chinese shoot bullets into the Tibetans into the Tibet, the feeling is felt in the heart of those of us in exile,” he said. He started crying, and hugged a visiting reporter. “When I think about the news from the last couple of days, I feel mad. I don’t know what to do.”

ABC News

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Dalai Lama accuses China of cultural genocide

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

The Dalai Lama on Sunday accused China of unleashing a “cultural genocide” in Tibet and demanded an impartial international probe into the situation in violence-hit Lhasa.

Addressing his first press conference here in the wake of the violence in the Tibetan capital since Friday, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader felt said that India has a few limitations as far as China is concerned and was “too cautious” on the Tibet issue.

The Indian government, the 72-year-old monk said, had “hostile views” on certain actions of Tibetans but “we should not pick up one particular incident”. He did not elaborate.

The Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace laureate, demanded an international probe into the Chinese crackdown against protesters in Lhasa, saying “some respected international organisations can find out what the situation is in Tibet and what is the cause.”

He said the investigations should be independent and unbiased.

He favoured holding of Beijing Olympics in August, but reminded China that it should play a “good host.”

Replying to questions, he said “Tibetans’ protests in Lhasa is borne out of China carrying out a sort of cultural genocide in Tibet intentionally or unintentionally.”

On whether he could contain the violence, which, according to Chinese authorities, had claimed at 10 lives, he said: “I have no such power…. I do feel helpless.”

Expressing concern over China serving an ultimatum to protesters to surrender by Monday midnight, he said “while the Chinese authorities are bent upon crushing the agitation with the help of the army, Tibetans in Lhasa and other places are equally determined to continue the agitation”.

Denying China’s charge that he was behind the violence, the worst since 1989, the Dalai Lama said that he was “completely committed” to non-violence and favoured a “middle path” which he said was also supported by some Chinese officials and scholars, whom he did not name.

On whether he would use his good office to ask his fellow countrymen to halt the protests, he said “the situation in Tibet has become volatile and only a miracle power can control it, not me”.

“I have reached a stage of semi-retirement and at age 73, I am look for full retirement,” he said.

The Dalai Lama, who offered prayers before talking to the press, said “we want genuine autonomy and not independence (from China).”

On the death toll in Tibet, he did not give any definite figure claiming that different sources had varying figures which went up to even 100. “I do not know.”

He was also of the view that some trusted group should go to Tibet and see how it happened.

Holding that he was being made a “scapegoat” by the Chinese authorities, the Dalai Lama said whether Beijing admitted or not, there was a problem in Tibet.

He said “there is an ancient cultural heritage that is facing serious danger” and that China was imposing “political education” in monasteries there, much to the dislike of the monks.

He said in order to achieve peace, China was using force in Tibet. “They (China) simply rely on using force in order to simulate peace, a peace brought by force using a rule of terror,” he said.

The Dalai Lama said he has been receiving phone calls and e-mails from Tibetans asking him not to stop them from continuing with their agitation in Lhasa.

He blamed the local Chinese authorities in Tibet were responsible for the “non-solution” of the problem.

“While educated Chinese very well understand our viewpoint that the only solution to the Tibet issue is by granting genuine autonomy, the local Chinese authorities nourish a negative attitude,” he said.

The spiritual leader said he was of the opinion that “genuine harmony and unity between the Tibetans and the Chinese can be established only on the basis of trust and this shall come from the heart”.

Recalling the direct talks between his envoys and the Chinese government, which began in 2002, the Dalai Lama said the negotiations have been facing “difficulties” since February 2006 with Beijing “hardening” its stand on the Tibet issue.

Press Trust Of India

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‘Signs of torture’ you can’t imagine

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Editor’s note: In our Behind the Scenes series, CNN correspondents share their experiences in covering news and analyze the stories behind the events. Here, CNN’s Arwa Damon describes the hardships faced by Iraqi women. Her documentary airs this weekend on CNN and CNN International.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — The pain here is choking — it’s a dark, suffocating sorrow.

“They took my husband away in front of me. I found his body in the morgue a few days later. He had multiple bullet wounds and his eyes had been gouged out,” one woman tells me, forcefully twisting a tissue in her hands as if it somehow could ease her agony and erase the chilling memory.

She didn’t want her story told, too afraid that she would meet the same fate as the man she loved.

Her husband’s body bore the “signs of torture.” How many times has that phrase been used? It’s such a common phrase it’s as if what really happened gets glossed over: skin scraped off their bodies, fingernails ripped out, horrifying screams of pain before death.

How many times have we reported death tolls from one horrific bombing or another and not been able to get across that these are lives that literally were blown apart? No matter how hard we in the media try, Iraq remains a nation filled with untold tragedies, the scope of which so often is overwhelming.

And no matter how hard Iraqis try to shield themselves and those they love from the horrors here, more often than not they fail. Yet they keep fighting.

Nahla works at a radio station and is one of those women. She’s tall, slender, elegantly dressed and has a firm handshake. I look at her and it’s nearly impossible to imagine what she’s been through.

“This numbers game, you always think that you are exempt from the numbers,” Nahla tells me, referring to the daily death toll. “You’re pained by them, but you are outside of them.”

On April 14, 2007, her world shattered. There was an explosion on a bridge in the capital and 10 people were killed. Her husband, Mohammed, was one of them.

“And with it, I am motionless,” she says. “Truly, life was in color and now it is in black and white. I feel like it is a game of musical chairs we used to play with others. … One time you are hit with the chair; another time, someone else is. Now, my son and I are out of the game completely, completely.”

The image of the man she loved, tall and proud, is of a doctor who moved his family back to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein because he believed his country needed him. He was a father who doted on their 6-year-old autistic son.

Also etched into her memory is the image of his charred body, melted together with nine others, a twisted pile of black, scorched flesh.

Yet Nahla’s voice is calm as she speaks, only breaking at the very end of our conversation, when the pain, buried so deep, rises to the surface. She couldn’t suppress her gut-wrenching dry sobs.

I don’t know how many times I have heard stories like hers after nearly five years of war here, and yet I still get chills. I can’t stop being in awe — nor can I stop looking at these women in amazement. Life in Iraq has forced people to confront horror that would leave many of us paralyzed.

Where do they find the strength to keep going?

Some don’t and choose to live out their lives as hollow shells, just waiting for this wretched existence to be over. But so many others refuse to be beaten down, refuse to allow the horror that is Iraq to win and kill their spirit.

“If I want to see Baghdad again from before the war, I have to do my part while the other person will do his part and the other person will do his part,” says Dr. Eaman, a children’s doctor, as her bright smile seems to shine unnaturally in Baghdad’s grim atmosphere.

“This is the dream, and I wish everybody would believe it and it will happen, I’m sure, and this is what is keeping me here,” she continues. “I have been attacked by three insurgents and was going to be kidnapped.”

She now lives at the hospital, choosing to disassociate herself from her 8-year-old son to keep him safe.

“I wish I can have him with me, live with me, you know, raising him, and just show him how to do things more than anything else,” Eaman says as she laughs and apologizes for her tears. She knows she chose to live with that pain because she believes other children need her more.

“Iraq is my life, is my country. Being a woman and knowing what other [countries] look like, I want to make a change. I want to make a change for the future for a lot of people.”

Yanar is another fighter, petite with curly dark hair and a commanding presence.

“You have been beaten, pushed, kicked and blindfolded,” Yanar says, describing today’s Iraqi woman. “You cannot see, you cannot hear, but you are kicking back. It’s not OK to be like that. You kick back and you fight for what you deserve … you should not be turned into a prisoner.”

She started the Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq to act as a watchdog to help safeguard women’s rights amid war and conflict. She is another woman who exhibits jaw-dropping courage.

She left her family and her comfortable life in Canada and came to Baghdad to build growing support for women’s rights. She lives a life that at times sounds more like a James Bond movie — having to constantly move because of death threats — than that of a mother of a 9-year-old.

“At many stages I had to change my house so my address is a secret; nobody knows where I am other than 10 very close allies,” Yanar says nonchalantly, as if what she is saying is completely normal. But in Iraq it is — it’s a country where a person’s parameters of what they accept as being “normal” have to shift to survive.

“What brings me here,” Yanar says, “it is that everybody that I love, all the people that I love have been crushed.”

She adds, “This cannot happen, should not happen, cannot be allowed to happen.”

What we as journalists cannot allow to happen is for these voices to go unheard. No matter how hard it is for us to find them — literally navigating roadblocks and checkpoints or spending days chasing down someone — the voices of the innocents caught in war must be heard.

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Clinton Would Ban Private Military Contractors

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

Hillary Clinton, in a speech marking the five-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, said that if elected, she would pull armed private contractors from that country as well as U.S. troops.

Speaking at George Washington University in Washington, Clinton used the issue to try to draw distinctions between herself and her chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama, and John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.

“Senator Obama and I have a substantive disagreement here. He won’t rule out using armed private military contactors in Iraq to do jobs that historically have been done by the U.S. military or government personnel,” Clinton said.

The Pentagon has about 137,000 contract workers in Iraq, of which about 7,300 work in security. One contractor in particular, Blackwater Worldwide of Moyock, North Carolina, has come under scrutiny by Congress and the courts after a series of violent incidents involving its employees, including a 2007 shooting that killed at least 17 Iraqis.

Obama, in a speech in Monaca, Pennsylvania, said Clinton was a “latecomer” to cracking down on contractors.

“I actually introduced legislation in the Senate before Senator Clinton even mentioned this that said we have to crack down on private contractors like Blackwater, because I don’t believe they should be able to run amok and put our own troops in danger and get paid three or four times or ten times what our soldiers are getting paid,” Obama said.

He repeated that he was opposed to the war from the beginning.

Careful Getting Out

“I opposed this war in 2002, I opposed it in 2003, 4, 5, 6 and 7,” Obama said. “I have been consistently saying that we have to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in.”

Clinton also said she would end no-bid contracts, citing those won by Houston-based Halliburton Co., where Vice President Dick Cheney worked as chief executive officer before becoming vice president to George W. Bush.

“It’s also a time we put an end, once and for all, to the no-bid contracts that squander taxpayer money while lining the pockets of the president’s cronies,” Clinton said. “Companies like Halliburton are enjoying record profits thanks to a 700 percent increase in taxpayer funds awarded to them.”

Such no-bid contracts make up a larger proportion of federal spending than lawmakers’ pet spending projects known as earmarks, Clinton said.

No-Bid Contracts

“We’ve had a lot of talk in this town and elsewhere about earmarks, and I am one of those who believe we need more transparency and disclosure in the earmark process. But no-bid contracts are ten times more costly than earmarks,” Clinton said.

Clinton, a senator from New York, used the speech to present a three-point plan to end the war in Iraq. She would begin to remove one or two troop brigades from Iraq starting in 2009. She also would extend the amount of time soldiers are given between overseas deployments.

“Withdrawal is not risk-free, but the risks of staying in Iraq are certain,” Clinton said. “A well-planned withdrawal is the one and only path to a political solution.”

To boost political stability in Iraq, she would ensure that the nation’s oil profits are spent on critical reconstruction projects such as electricity and clean water. She said she would work with Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran and Syria, to craft a strategy for stabilizing the country.

“This war has made the terrorists stronger,” Clinton said. “We must persuade neighboring nations not to get involved in an Iraqi civil war.”

Flying Into Bosnia

Clinton, 60, has been touting her foreign policy experience on the Senate Armed Services Committee and as former first lady to draw contrasts between herself and Illinois Senator Obama, 46. During her speech, she recalled flying into Bosnia under sniper fire to visit U.S. troops when her husband Bill Clinton was president.

She blamed Bush for making decisions in Iraq that were “rooted in politics and ideology.”

“The mistakes of Iraq are not the responsibility of our men in uniform, but of our commander in chief,” Clinton said.

Cheney arrived in Baghdad today on an unannounced trip for meetings with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki as well as Army General David Petraeus, Ambassador Ryan Crocker and other leaders. Petraeus and Crocker are scheduled to brief Congress next month on progress in Iraq since the deployment of 30,000 extra U.S. soldiers a year ago.

First Stop

Iraq is the first stop for Cheney on a 10-day trip to the Middle East for discussions with Arab allies about oil production and prices, Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Arizona Senator McCain arrived in Iraq yesterday as part of a congressional delegation. He supported Bush’s troop increase and says the U.S. may need a continuing presence in Iraq for years.

The U.S. is pulling five of 20 combat brigades out of Iraq, totaling about 20,000 soldiers. Petraeus has said he wants to take time to assess security after the withdrawal ends in mid- July.

At least 3,978 U.S. personnel have died in Iraq and 29,395 more have been wounded, according to Department of Defense figures.

Lorraine Woellert
Bloomberg

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