Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Alleged Liquid Bomb Plot Credibility Crumbles

Court clears Rauf of charges as much vaunted transatlantic airliner attack dissipates into another staged terror alert

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The alleged ringleader of a much vaunted plot to blow up multiple transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives has been cleared of terrorism charges and of being a member of any terrorist group, rendering August's terror scare another hyped creation of government scare mongering.

In every single major terror bust or terror alert we have proven the evidence to be flawed and the charges to be cooked up nonsense aimed at prolonging the illusion that terror cells are lurking around every corner waiting to cause mayhem. The geopolitical agenda of the U.S., Britain and Israel depends on the proliferation phony terror threats in order to continue the farcical war on terror and take more of our innate freedoms at home to stifle dissent against the plot for worldwide hegemony.

The supposed transatlantic bomb plot has dissipated into another staged terror alert.

The BBC reports,

"A Pakistani judge has ruled there is not enough evidence to try a key suspect in an alleged airline bomb plot on terrorism charges.
He has moved the case of Rashid Rauf, a Briton, from an anti-terrorism court to a regular court, where he faces lesser charges such as forgery."

"The Pakistani authorities described him as a key figure."

"But an anti-terrorism court in Rawalpindi found no evidence that he had been involved in terrorist activities or that he belonged to a terrorist organisation."

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Since the panic surrounding the ridiculous hoax that led to an outright ban on all liquids in U.S. and British airports, the credibility of the alleged plot itself has crumbled.

In a series of reports following the August 10th scare, we traced the source of the alleged attack plot to Pakistani and British intelligence and were rapidly able to confirm that the story was nothing more than a manufactured ploy to frighten travelers at the height of the holiday season.



It comes as no surprise that the Pakistanis have acquitted Rashid Rauf. His involvement with the Lashkar-e-Toiba group provides a direct lineage back to the Pakistani ISI, which is in turn controlled by the CIA and British intelligence. Rauf likely acted as the willing patsy for the plot to be pinned on while the Blair government waved it in front of Britons as another reason for them to accept the Blairstrip One fascist surveillance state without dissent.

It was revealed that the alleged terrorist cell that planned to blow up ten planes had been completely infiltrated for weeks before the announcement of the foiled plot by British intelligence. From the evidence at hand allied with past history of how MI5 work, which was presented in our article, it can be reasonably claimed that an MI5 mole within the group orchestrated the entire operation.

According to news reports the British government and MI5 wanted to wait at least a week before busting the liquid terror cell that their agents had fully infiltrated, including planting a mole within the bomb squad. From the acknowledged timeline and admission that the real attack was scheduled for August 16th - little else can be deduced but the shocking fact that MI5 wanted the bombings to go forward - arresting the perpetrators only after the attack.

Echoing the activities of the 7/7 bombers, some of the main suspects in the case aside from Rashid Rauf exhibited behavior that in no way suggested they were preparing to launch mid-air suicide attacks on jumbo jets. Far from preparing his last will and testament, psyching himself up for his imminent death or acquiring the necessary materials to conduct the operation, Tayib Rauf was caught on CCTV hours before the launch of the plot doing something far more mundane - he was buying cakes for his father's confectionary business.

Former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray slammed the so-called foiled plot story as "propaganda" on behalf of Bush and Blair who yearn for a "new 9/11" to reinvigorate their flagging support base.

"None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time," said Murray.

Unconfirmed sources suggest that insider speculators with informants inside the British intelligence apparatus took advantage of their foreknowledge of the announcement of the foiled terror plot to place put options on airline stocks, reaping the benefits of their subsequent fall. Airline stocks dropped as much as 28 per cent during morning trading following the announcement of the alleged liquid bomb plot.

DeLay: 'Hillary Will Be the Next President'

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said today that Sen. Hillary Clinton (D.-N.Y.) would be elected president in 2008 and would probably tap Senate colleague Barack Obama (D.-Ill.) as her running mate.

DeLay met with conservative bloggers at a weekly lunch meeting hosted by HUMAN EVENTS and the Heritage Foundation. He is making the rounds in Washington to promote his new blog and activism website, TomDeLay.com .

DeLay said he was motivated to start the blog and create the Grassroots Action and Information Network after observing the success of liberal organizations such as MoveOn.org, the Media Fund and Americans Coming Together. He said he hopes to utilize some of the same tools to help Republicans win elections.

It's this liberal coalition, working in concert with the news media, that will propel Clinton to the White House in 2008, DeLay said. “Hillary will be the next president of the United States because they have built a coalition,” he said.

DeLay also implored conservatives to start digging into Obama's past. He said Obama's record in the Illinois Senate was on par with a “Marxist leftist.” Citing defeated U.S. Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee, DeLay said Obama was attempting to disguise his liberal views. (Read Amanda Carpenter's report on Obama and his conflicting rhetoric .)

DeLay named Clinton loyalists Harold Ickes, Sidney Blumenthal, James Carville, Paul Begala and Joe Lockhart as the masterminds behind the left-wing coalition. He said that these groups, more than anything else, contributed to the GOP's fall this November. “I have never seen a more powerful coalition,” he said.

One such example of the coalition's power played out precisely as planned in California's 11th District. Republican Rep. Richard Pombo was toppled after facing an onslaught of attacks from the left .

DeLay said his goal in creating the new organization is to turn ideas into action. He said he will reach out to the diverse coalition of conservative groups and bring them together to rival the coalition built by liberals. Prior to the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, DeLay said he employed a similar strategy that the GOP has gradually abandoned.

One day after launching the new website, DeLay said he's had 100 people pay the $52 per year to join the Grassroots Action and Information Network.

Human Events

Analysts: Dollar collapse would result in 'amero'

Think deep recession likely regardless of Fed's actions

Two analysts who have reconstructed money supply data after the Fed stopped publishing it argue a coming dollar collapse will set the stage for creating the amero as a North American currency to replace the dollar.
The reconstructed M3 data – the broadest measure of money – published on econometrician Gary Kuever's website, NowAndFutures.com , shows M3 increased at a rate of 11 percent in May, compared to 9 percent when the Federal Reserve quit publishing M3 data earlier this year.

Asked why the Fed decided to stop publishing M3 data, Kuever told WND, "The Fed probably wants to hide how much liquidity is being pumped into the market, and I expect the trend to keep pumping liquidity into the market will continue, especially since the economy is slowing down."

Why is this important?

"The trend line in my M3-plus-debt chart is staggering," Kuever said. "There has been a straight, long-term trend line of M3-plus-credit increasing since 2000. Long-term, we are creating inflation and the dollar has lost almost 98 percent of its value in the past 100 years."

Kuever, a retired investor, is concerned that with growing budget and trade deficits "the dollar could collapse."

"Especially if the Fed cannot increase rates, because we have already entered a recession," he said.



Bob Chapman, who issued a reconstructed M3 estimate to the 100,000 subscribers to his newsletter, "The International Forecaster", agrees.

"The world is awash in money and credit," Chapman told WND. "My numbers show M3 increasing at about a 10-percent rate right now."

Chapman believes the U.S. economy entered a recession in February. In his newsletter of Dec. 9 he predicted the Fed would hold interest rates at 5.25 percent.

"The Fed is in a very tough spot here," Chapman wrote, "If they raise rates, the real estate market will collapse, and if they lower rates, the dollar will collapse."

Meeting yesterday, the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee voted, as Chapman had predicted, to hold the overnight lending rates between banks steady at 5.25 percent. This was the fourth straight meeting the Fed had voted not to change rates. In its rate announcement, the Fed affirmed the economy had slowed.

Almost immediately after the announcement of the Fed's decision, the dollar weakened to a new 20-month low against the euro, with currency markets reportedly pricing in the expectation the Fed will be forced to lower rates next year to bolster the economy. Following the announcement by the Fed, the U.S. Dollar Index, or USDX, also dropped, with the dollar going below 83.

A dollar collapse is imminent, Chapman declared.

"Technicians studying the USDX think there is a support level for the dollar at 75, but I don't think so."

How low could the dollar go?

"If the dollar breaks through 78.33 on the USDX," Chapman answered, "my guess is the dollar will go through a 35-percent correction, which would put it at 55."

"The key in how low the dollar goes is the interest rates," Chapman told WND. "In January, the Fed is going to have to make a decision which way to go. If Fed rates go up, the dollar will hold in the 78.33 range, but the stock market and the economy will tank. If next year the Fed lowers rates to keep the economy from crashing, the bottom will fall out of the dollar, and I see it going as low as 55. Once the dollar hits bottom, it will take the stock market and the economy right with it anyway. The Fed is in a box they can't get out of."

As WND reported earlier this week, in an unusual move, the Bush administration is sending virtually the entire economic "A-team" to visit China for a "strategic economic dialogue" in Beijing Thursday and Friday. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are leading the delegation, along with five other cabinet-level officials, including Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez. Also in the delegation will be Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, Energy Secretary Sam Bodman, and U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab.

But Chapman doubts the trip will help the Fed to engineer a slow dollar slide.

"The Chinese are going to do what the Chinese want to do, not what we want them to do," he said. "I believe the Chinese are going to send Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernanke home packing, with little or nothing to show for the trip."

How severe will the coming dollar collapse be?

"People in the U.S. are going to be hit hard," Chapman warned. "In the severe recession we are entering now, Bush will argue that we have to form a North American Union to compete with the Euro."

"Creating the amero," Chapman explained, "will be presented to the American public as the administration's solution for dollar recovery. In the process of creating the amero, the Bush administration just abandons the dollar."

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More Deaths by Government

During the heyday of the Mises Seminar in New York City in the middle of the last century, Ludwig von Mises would each session toss off numerous suggestions for research, for Ph.D. dissertation topics. Murray N. Rothbard was known to engage in this sort of thing as well. Many is the time he would wistfully say something like, "Someone ought to do research on…. Someone ought to write about…"

Unhappily, we no longer have these two giants of liberty and Austrian economics around to guide us. So, we chickens will just have to do these sorts of things for ourselves. It is in this vein that we urge that research improving on that of Rummel, Courtois, and others, be undertaken.

R.J. Rummel and Stephane Courtois , et. al have done yeoman libertarian work in terms of exposing governments as the murderous thuggish entities that they are. Each of them has documented the numbers (in the many millions) of citizens of their own countries killed by the state. This is crucially important in the case against the government. For all the philosophical treatises in the world attesting to the evil of this institution can go only so far. An important supplement to this type of analysis is the actual facts and figures regarding statist depredations. And this Rummel and Courtois have dramatically publicized. We libertarians owe them a great debt of gratitude.

But they have not gone far enough. They have only covered explicit murders, and, not even all of those. This is the third in a series of articles that are critical of Rummel and Courtois for touching, only, the tip of the iceberg in this regard. It is the hope of the present authors that Rummel and Courtois and others like them, perhaps, even, some of the scholars who are regular readers of LRC, will extend this type of research.

The first in the series was written by DiLorenzo . It showed that the U.S. War of Northern Aggression (1861-1865, in case anyone was wondering as to, precisely, which war we are referring) was a case in point, not contemplated in the statistics supplied by Rummel and Courtois. These were uncounted but direct murders, brought to us courtesy of St. Abraham.

The second in this series was Block's demonstration that highway fatalities, too, are properly to be laid at the door of unbridled statism. As there are some 40,000 people who die every year in the U.S. on its socialist traffic arteries, and many, many more around the world who suffer in this way, this too is a significant example of deaths due to government. (This present op-ed is fashioned from letters in response to that one. There are multiple co authors of it since there were many such readers of LRC who added their entries to the list of government killings in replies to Block. Hey, the system works.)

The present article is dedicated to further expanding this critique of Rummel and Courtois. Here, we go beyond the War to Prevent Southern Secession (1861-1865), and roadway fatalities, to consider a whole host of other governmental causes of death of innocent people. They are as follows:

1. Health

Government intervention in the health care market has been particularly pernicious. For example, Dr. Mary Ruwart believes the Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendments of 1962 "may very well be the deadliest law that Congress ever passed."

The FDA touts these amendments as ensuring "drug efficacy and greater drug safety" since they required drug manufacturers to "prove to FDA the effectiveness of their products before marketing them," but they have caused the approval process to more than double since 1964 from 6.5 years to 14.8 years [ see this ]. Thus, Dr. Ruwart estimates 4.7 million people have died in the last 40 years, while waiting for FDA approval. Chapter 6 of her book Healing Our World , entitled "Protecting Ourselves to Death" provides further examples of how regulation causes needless deaths while saving only a few. Then, minor detail, if addictive drugs, all of them, were legalized, this would save tens of thousands of lives in one fell swoop. Alcohol, nowadays, is still a social problem. But no one gets shot in the street in fights over turf, nor killed from the products of back wood stills, or from bathtub gin.

The FDA is active both in terms of preventing access as well as on the approval side . Then, too, there are other such miscellaneous causes of death by government. For example, asbestos, vaccines, etc. Also, natural health solutions are available for many diseases today but are not accepted by the FDA and in many cases prohibited by them. And this is not to mention the fact that under FDA supervision, an estimated one million Americans were never told they were given Hepatitis C-infected blood.

A recent report , "Death by Medicine" by Gary Null, et al. estimates that between 800,000 and 1 million people die annually as a result of conventional medical treatment or diagnostic procedures. Not all of these iatrogenic deaths can be ascribed directly or indirectly to state intervention. However, the study authors, being themselves part of the medical profession, fail to see that physicians and other individuals and companies in the health care market have actively sought state "protection" in the form of licensing laws, regulatory agencies and other state-imposed controls. Consequently, the authors' implied solution (reviving the Office of Technology Assessment) is yet one more intervention. See also Milton Friedman's splendid chapter 9 of his book Capitalism and Freedom , dealing with restricted entry into medical practice. Ron Hamowy covers this deleterious governmental regulation (a redundancy) from a Canadian perspective.

But this by no means exhausts the depredations. There is also subsidized tobacco, responsible for an estimated 435,000 deaths per year. There is state-funded (Medicaid) abortion ; libertarians need take no position on this contentious issue to oppose government subsidization of this practice. According to one report about state influence on doctors/health-care, physicians are the 3rd leading cause of death in US, responsible for 225,000 deaths per year. Then there are the infamous illegal and or covert medical experiments, such as those perpetrated on black people. Nor should we ignore fumigation , USDA/DHSS dietary guidelines (the " food pyramid ") and accidents, i.e. Chernobyl (ok, it is not our government here, but it is a government). Nor would it do to leave out the statist banning of DDT, which greatly increased malaria deaths.

Of course, there is a silver lining in this cloud, as there is in every such case: this is one way to save Socialist Security (no one lives long enough to collect)! Ahhh! It hurts when we laugh.

For more information on how government negatively impacts health, see here , here , here , here , here and here .

2. Housing

Government housing policies can kill you too. In Toronto, Canada, for example, but everywhere else this pernicious legislation has ever been tried, rent control means that the rent is out of control. Modest apartments are typically in disrepair because the landlord can not charge what he needs to maintain it.

In one case, an apartment almost exploded when the natural gas lines leaked and the furnace exuded enough carbon monoxide to kill an entire building's worth of people, even according to the government's own Fire Department. Why, then, don't people move elsewhere? Where would they go? Thanks to the government, there is hardly any place to stay if you are not a homeowner, since this regulation has taken much of the incentive away from landlords to provide housing.

In several cases, landlords have purposefully attacked tenants because provisions of these enactments typically provide for rent increases when tenants vacate their premises. The "worst get on top" applies not only in government bureaus, but also in the field of rental housing, when control legislation pays a premium to landlords not for satisfying customers, as in the free market, but for evicting them.

Then, there is public housing. True, an awful lot of killings in these death traps are drug related, see above, but socialist housing makes an independent contribution to this end as well. Public housing is for the poor. So, there have to be income cut off points, lest the rich find their way into these vertical slums. If you are middle class you don't qualify. If you are poverty stricken, but work hard, get a raise, prosper, they kick you out because you are now above the income cut off level.

This is like continually skimming the cream off the top. What is left as this process continues? Well, the non cream. Families that are intact, with fathers present, are likely the first to go. This leaves a disproportionate number of female headed households. These women are simply unable to cope with the hordes of teenaged boys, with no adult males around to help enforce civilized behavior. Just as the Lord of the Flies depicted a society run by 12 year old boys, public housing indicates a 16 year old boy's idea of nirvana: rape, drugs, defecating in the hallways, etc. Then, there is the almost palpable hatred of commerce on the part of the architects of public housing. Never a store shall be suffered on its premises. Jane Jacobs has demonstrated that this too contributes to crime, as there are fewer "eyes on the street." Without people coming and going into groceries, to get a bottle of milk or a newspaper, there is less incentive for people to look at of their windows at the doings of their society, such as it is. Not much is doing out there, at least publicly.

Ah socialism! It does so much for the national character, doesn't it?

3. Arbitrary abuse of power

Under this rubric we include BATF, FBI (Waco, Ruby Ridge, etc., etc.,) the alphabet regulatory agencies such as the EPA, FTC, INS, IRS, OSHA, and the SEC. Each of them has contributed their mite to our cause, and sometimes has gone over and above the call of duty in this regard.

There are also the CIA death squads, engaged in regime change, countering drug smuggling and creating general mayhem. According to some reports , they are responsible for some "6-million deaths." Interesting number, that.

Nor can any account that wishes to be exhaustive and inclusive ignore the people murdered while waiting for a gun permit to clear. First, the government taxes people so as to finance police. Then, the latter do not protect them, but rather shoot them down like rabid dogs in the street. When the people attempt to defend themselves, as the second amendment to the constitution provides , they are balked in this manner as well.

This constitutes a terrible public policy in effect in most states of providing violent criminals with a governmental guarantee that law-abiding, honest people are unarmed when away from their home or business. We need more studies comparing victims of violent crimes (homicides) in states with strict "gun control" vs. those with no restrictions (i.e., Vermont) that issue concealed carry permits. The scholar who has done important work in this field is John Lott .

4. Money and finance

Then, too, there are financial policies. The Great Depression led to many undocumented starvation deaths. The World Bank and the IMF have slowed down the rate of economic development of poor backward countries. Tariffs, quotas and other interferences with trade can actually kill people, too.

Foreign aid undercuts those farmers in the recipient country who are trying to sell their goods. Foreign aid to poorer countries often maintains a dictator who in turn kills his people. Both the donors who make these massacres possible, and the recipients who do the "blue collar" work in these cases are, wait for it, governments. Similarly, the U.S. gave Stalin aid, and we all know the result of that sorry episode.

5. Motor Vehicle Bureau

First, who teaches people how to drive? Government, via public schools, that's who. They pick a crony and give him a "contract" to provide Driver's Training courses in their schools. These are nothing but hours wasted "driving" while doing little more than riding in a car. As an example, North Carolina requires "X" number of hours of behind the wheel experience for a student to pass this course. However, in essence, what happens is that a carload of students take turns driving each other home after school. For kids to have actually driven the prescribed number of hours they would have had to do all the driving in every "class" every day for them to achieve this goal.

Second, who certifies that these kids can drive? Government, once again, via its Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). You pull out of the DMV office with a "tester" next to you and pretty much if you manage to get back in one piece, you pass. Many people have been at the DMV for renewal of their "driving privilege" (that is another peeve; if driving is a privilege then you are effectively under house arrest since the state has designed cities to be virtually un-navigable without a car) and seen the "tester" actually give answers to octogenarians so they could "pass" their vision test. Here is some must see television: the South Park episode dedicated to older drivers .

6. Infrastructure

High up on the list in this regard are the levees in New Orleans which collapsed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. These were planned, built and managed by the Army Corp of Engineers, a government entity. Almost 2,000 people lost their lives due to this bit of statist negligence. Then there is FEMA (a local bumper sticker: FEMA Happens!) which aided and abetted in this needless loss of life by refusing to rescue the denizens of New Orleans, and placing barriers against the efforts of private individuals and groups who were valiantly struggled to come to the aid of waterlogged citizens of the Big Uneasy.

Conclusion

This article would have more credibility if all the data were further divided into objective, verifiable deaths and then the more subjective/conjecture oriented. In that way the reader could be presented with hard, undeniable statistics as well as the less definite, which the more pessimistic (or dare we say statists, if there are any who will read it) could dismiss as fantasy. Unhappily, this will have to be left for future researchers. The present essay is but an op-ed piece, meant not to give definitive answers, but, mainly, to spur on further efforts in the direction of gathering and analyzing them.

This article, even all three essays of which this is the third part, should not be taken as a definitive list, or final word, of the way in which government is bad for our health. Rather, it should be seen as barely a first step in the direction of a very worthwhile research program.

lewrockwell.com

Israel Will `Vanish' Just Like Soviet Union, Ahmadinejad Says

By Paul Tighe and Brendan Murray

Dec. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Israel will `vanish' just like the Soviet Union collapsed, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a conference in Tehran that questions the Holocaust.

``As the Soviet Union disappeared, the Zionist regime will also vanish and humanity will be liberated,'' the official Islamic Republic News Agency cited Ahmadinejad as telling the conference yesterday.

The president's remarks are ``outrageous,'' U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in Washington, according to a transcript. It is hard to find words for his ``despicable behavior,'' he added.

Ahmadinejad, pronounced ah-ma-deen-ah-ZHAD, a year ago said that the Holocaust was a myth created by the West. He also said Israel should be ``wiped off the map.'' Iran hosted the two-day conference that ended yesterday in Tehran, giving a forum to Holocaust deniers who dismiss as fiction or exaggeration the killing of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during World War II.

The threat from Israel ``has caused the regional countries to divert their resources from development to spending them on purchasing arms which will increase discord among them,'' Ahmadinejad told the meeting, IRNA reported.

``If the Holocaust's truth is ruled out, root causes of problems and crimes in the Middle East will be terminated,'' the president said. Iran supported the creation of a fact-finding mission on the Holocaust, as proposed by the conference, that will put an end to a 60-yearlong dispute on the issue, he said.

Conference Condemned

The Bush administration yesterday condemned the Tehran conference and said the U.S. maintains support for those in Iran who stand against oppression.

``The gathering of Holocaust deniers in Tehran is an affront to the entire civilized world, as well as to the traditional Iranian values of tolerance and mutual respect,'' White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said in a statement issued in Washington.

``The Iranian regime perversely seeks to call the historical fact of those atrocities into question and provide a platform for hatred,'' Snow said. ``The United States will continue to support those in Iran and elsewhere who seek to promote human rights and dignity.''

U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also condemned the meeting. Iran's denial of the Holocaust ``demonstrates the danger that emanates from such a regime and the dangers for Israel and many other countries if such a state possesses non- conventional weapons,'' Olmert said at a news conference with Merkel in Berlin.

Systematic Killings

Germany's Nazis killed 6 million of Europe's 9 million Jews between 1939 and 1945 in a ``systematic, bureaucratic and state- sponsored campaign,'' according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Proof of the Holocaust has come from survivors of Nazi death camps, camp guards, government documents and testimony in the 1945 Nuremburg war crimes hearings. Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in a 2005 speech called the Holocaust ``the darkest chapter'' in Germany's history.

The U.S. rebuke comes as President George W. Bush is trying to pressure Iran to abandon a nuclear program that his administration says is aimed at developing atomic weapons. Iran insists its program is only for producing energy.

Nuclear Weapons

Olmert, in an interview with German television two days ago, included Israel on a list of nuclear-armed nations. His comment came after he was asked whether Israel's possession of nuclear weapons weakened the argument from western countries against Iran's nuclear program.

``We never threatened any nation with annihilation,'' Olmert responded. ``Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as France, America, Russia and Israel?''

Olmert yesterday declined to respond directly when asked at a news conference in Berlin if he would confirm whether his country is armed with atomic warheads.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied that it has such weapons. It hasn't signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which 188 countries are signatories.

Ethiopia Convicts Mengistu of Genocide

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — An Ethiopian dictator known as "the butcher of Addis Ababa" was convicted Tuesday of genocide in a rare case of an African strongman being held to account by his own country.

Mengistu Haile Mariam, who has been living in exile in Zimbabwe since 1992, was convicted in absentia after a 12-year trial. He could face the death penalty at his Dec. 28 sentencing, but Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe said he won't deport Mengistu if he refrains from making political statements or comments to the media.

The trial focused on Mengistu's alleged involvement in the killing of nearly 2,000 people during a 1977-78 campaign known as the Red Terror that targeted supposed enemies of his Soviet-backed regime.

A panel of judges, sitting before a packed courtroom, convicted him of instigating genocide, committing genocide, illegal imprisonment and abuse of power.

Mengistu ruled from 1974 to 1991 after his military junta ended Emperor Haile Selassie's reign in a bloody coup. Some experts say 150,000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed in a nationwide purge by Mengistu's Marxist regime, though no one knows for sure.

"I am very happy he has been found guilty," said Tadesse Mamo, 32, a businessman in the capital. "He killed so many of our intellectuals and our youth, most notably our emperor."

The emperor's cousin, Mulugeta Aserate, 55, said Mengistu's men came to his family's home in June 1974 and took away his father. He never saw his father again.

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Judgement!