Rice protests deal to arm Venezuela

[Condoleezza Rice seems to move through the geopolitical arena without making much contact with reality, sealed as she is inside the bubble of her own mental playworld. A half-educated academic, morally stunted by a permanent commitment to the dying tyrant called Big Oil, Rice is burdened with neither principles nor ideas. As she showed during her confirmation hearings, she can lie with a smile even when human lives are in the balance. Worse, by her oft-invoked "example" she demonstrates for millions of gifted young African American women that it is possible to ascend to high office, provided you care nothing about human rights, cleave to American supremacy, and repeat the right wing Party line at every turn.

"Russia is not a strategic enemy. We are not against Russia. We see Russia as a strategic partner in the war on terror." In other words, you people were our previous fake enemy, but we've moved on: "We are not against Russia." Spoken like a diplomat.

Since the Pentagon runs our foreign policy, and State has become a risible puppet of Mr. Rumsfeld, there's no harm in turning Madame Secretary loose upon the world. But it does get sad once in a while, as in the story below, where she insists that Russia and Venezuela cease to cooperate with one another and kowtow to the very rogue nation that has subverted and insulted those two countries for decades. It seems like only yesterday that America sent the CIA to destroy Venezuelan democracy, but the attempt failed because the people of that Bolivarian republic are too experienced (and President Hugo Chavez is too smart) to be toyed with by the racist sick-o to the North. But here's Doctor Rice (a real live Ph.D.!) handing down demands as the ground shifts under her feet. - JAH]

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

MOSCOW -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday warned Russia against selling arms to Venezuela, and Moscow immediately rebuffed her criticism, saying a $120 million deal it has signed with Caracas violates no laws or treaties.

On the second day of her first visit to Russia since taking office, Miss Rice also called Washington's main Cold War foe a "strategic partner" in the war on terror and other issues, while continuing to speak out against setbacks to democratic reforms and other political and economic policies.

The sharpest public exchange came in a joint press conference with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, at which Miss Rice said: "We have made it [sic] very clear to the Russian government our concerns about certain arms sales in Latin America and [particularly] Venezuela."

Mr. Lavrov replied that the arms sales were legal and appropriate. "Our military cooperation with Venezuela and other countries doesn't violate any of our international obligations," he said.

The United States fears that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a longtime ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, will use his newly purchased weapons to prop up left-wing governments and to aid left-wing rebellions in the region.

The United States formally protested the Russian sale of 100,000 AK-47 assault rifles to Venezuela late last year, a protest first reported in The Washington Times.

The $120 million arms package criticized by Miss Rice yesterday includes attack, assault and transport aircraft.

It is the South American country's largest purchase since Mr. Chavez came to power in 1999.

Miss Rice said U.S. concern went beyond whether the Russian arms sales were legal or not.

Venezuela says its arms purchases are for self-defense, including an effort to beef up security along the Venezuelan-Colombian border to prevent kidnappings and armed incursions by Colombia's Marxist rebels.

Russian press reports said Venezuela also is contemplating buying advanced Russian MIG-29 military aircraft.

On overall U.S.-Russian relations, Miss Rice said in a live interview with the independent Radio Ekho Moskvy:

"Russia is not a strategic enemy. We are not against Russia. We see Russia as a strategic partner in the war on terror ... in stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction [and] in solving regional issues like the Balkans and the Middle East."

On other issues, Miss Rice said it was time the rule of Belorussian President Aleksander Lukashenko, "the last true dictatorship in the center of Europe," came to an end.

Last year, Mr. Lukashenko won a disputed referendum that in effect made him president for life.

Miss Rice, who also met yesterday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, later flew to Vilnius, Lithuania, to attend an informal NATO ministerial meeting.

[Air Force Cadet Jessica Brakey was one of dozens of United States Air Force Academy cadets who reported being sexually abused and raped. The assailant she named was fellow cadet Joseph Harding. Brakey had seen a civilian rape crisis counselor, Jennifer Bier, as part of her recovery from the experience. In civilian life, the interactions between therapist-counselors and victims are confidential. In the military, this privilege is frequently waived for the purpose of using confidential conversations, often out of context, to impugn the victim's testimony. The military's interest is in lowering the number of convictions for rape and sexual assault, not out of concern for false accusation (which contrary to the urban myth of being ubiquitous, are actually around 2%). The military doesn't like to admit it has a problem, so the concern is for the institutional image. Civilian rape counselor Bier was subpoenaed by the Air Force to surrender her records as part of the court martial preparation. Bier has said, hell no, and she has retained a lawyer to fight the subpoena.

The whole question of how rape laws developed, how they have been enforced, the gendered power systems that stand behind them, and how gender and militarism are connected has not been adequately explored. This series on rape and the military is based closely on one section of my upcoming book, "Sex & War", and it will make some controversial and hopefully provocative points to start discussions about gender, the elephant in the living room when we talk about militarism. - SG http://stangoff.com]

Facing threat of arrest, a Colorado Springs therapist has enlisted a Boston lawyer known for championing the confidentiality rights of rape-crisis centers to help fight an Air Force subpoena for records of her own counseling sessions with a cadet.

The move helps postpone - at least for now - a trip by federal marshals to Colorado to take Jennifer Bier to Randolph Air Force Base in Texas as part of court-martial proceedings against former Air Force Academy cadet Joseph Harding, who is accused of raping fellow cadet Jessica Brakey and another woman at the academy in 1999 and 2000.

Bier, representing herself in recent weeks, has refused to comply with a subpoena from the Texas air base sought by Harding's attorneys for notes of conversations with Brakey at Bier's office outside the Air Force Academy, saying such a move would conflict with her ethics and deter other women from seeking treatment in the future.

But her new attorney has helped persuade Randolph Air Force Base officials to give Bier, a civilian counselor, more time to file a brief with the judge arguing for a reversal on the basis that the subpoena is unconstitutional.

"What I'm doing is going right back to ground zero to insist there's due process for Jennifer," said Wendy Murphy, a member of the New England School of Law faculty. "My position is that the defendant has no right to ask for this stuff, and the victim has a fundamental constitutional right to keep it private."

Meanwhile, the case is prompting members of Congress to draft letters demanding that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld live up to Congress' intent in legislation passed last year to safeguard the privacy of service members who are raped.

"We're looking closely at the issue and planning some quick action," said Eric Burns, a spokeswoman for Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y.

Several U.S. lawmakers, including Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., have decried the Air Force's move, saying the records belong to Bier and not the military. Allard, whose father-in-law passed away last week, is unavailable for comment until later this week, his spokeswoman said.

Other members of Congress have said the case illustrates how the military's rules for protecting therapist-patient privilege need strengthening.

"The military has no authority to snoop around in a victim's private space," said Murphy, who acknowledged that case law regarding privilege issues in the military, which has its own justice system, is not abundant. "It's a perversion of the process. The civilian law is more settled on this."

A court-martial date has not yet been set in Harding's case, but the judge has set an April 11 hearing to review evidence.

KUALA LUMPUR - Pirates are making a mockery of the half-hearted efforts of Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore to make the Malacca Strait safe for shipping.

When the three littoral states launched a plan last July to coordinate patrols of the strait, they were determined to make two points. One, the waterway through which a third of the world's trade and half its oil passes was not vulnerable to terrorist and pirate attacks. And two, the littoral states themselves were up to the task of securing the strait and assistance by foreign militaries was unnecessary.

But four brazen pirate attacks in the strait in the past month alone have put paid to the littoral states' pretensions.

One saw 35 armed pirates hijack a gas tanker, something that it has long been feared might be converted by terrorists into a floating bomb and spearheaded into a port, severely disrupting world trade. Another attack saw three crewmen of a Japanese tugboat kidnapped, marking an incident in which a non-littoral state became a victim of a pirate attack.

In a race to allay fears and defend its sovereignty, the Malaysian government announced on April 1 that it would place armed police officers on board selected tugboats and barges traversing the strait. Singaporean officials say they are setting up a 24-hour information center that will begin operations next year.

"The [littoral state] authorities realize the importance of beefing up patrol," said Noel Choong, head of the Piracy Reporting Center of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB). "Indonesia and Malaysia don't want foreign intervention, but if this keeps going on, they will have a harder time resisting it."

Those two states are betting that better coordinating patrols will do the trick - such patrols, in Choong's words, being in essence a matter of "you control your waters, we control ours". But many observers have their doubts as to the effectiveness of this method.

Iskandar Sazlan of the IMB said the question is no longer whether the coordinated patrols are working - "clearly they're not" - but whether it is safe to sustain them. It is widely contended that the only way for coordinated patrols to be effective is if all parties involved are pulling their weight.

Indonesia, even by its leadership's admittance, is not. Of 325 reported pirate attacks worldwide in 2004, 93 occurred in Indonesian waters (compared with nine in Malaysia and eight in Singapore). The country's defense capacity is spread thin, with the government trying to quell separatist movements in Aceh and maintain stability elsewhere across the sprawling archipelago.

Complicating matters is an ongoing border row between Indonesia and Malaysia over two reputably oil-rich islands. Leaders on both sides play down the possibility this might impair joint efforts to monitor the strait, but both nations have become pronouncedly less hospitable toward one another of late. On Tuesday, Indonesia asked that all Malaysian troops involved in aid work in Aceh leave the region - this after the Malaysian government threatened to jail, cane and fine the estimated 1 million Indonesians working illegally in Malaysia. After the illegal-worker crackdown began last month, the Malaysian government announced that it would import 100,000 Pakistanis and nationals of several other Asian countries to help fill the labor shortage.

Suspicion and indignation that the two countries traditionally have reserved for non-regional "imperialists" are increasingly being directed at each other. This, said Iskandar, may hinder security efforts. If, for instance, one side were to deploy dozens of warships to patrol its waters, "it will raise questions about whether it's an act of aggression", Iskandar noted. "Perceptions have very quickly changed."

The tensions are likely to stymie any calls to elevate coordinated patrols to a joint-patrol arrangement. Joint patrols would allow for "hot pursuit", whereby any littoral state chasing a pirate could cross over into the territorial waters of another littoral state. Some say hot-pursuit rights are vital to fight piracy effectively in the strait. Others say patching gaps in the current arrangement would help, and that this is something Malaysia and Indonesia could do without feeding suspicion or sacrificing sovereignty.

Part of the current problem, according to an official with the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore, is the extent and timeliness of information sharing between the littoral states; often by the time information is transferred, it's of little use. That, he said, should be helped by the information center, which several countries inside and outside the region are expected to sign on to soon.

Another helpful measure, he said, is a Japanese-sponsored regional cooperation agreement, which is "a first-of-its-kind legal framework to combat piracy". This agreement was endorsed in November by the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), along with China, Japan, South Korea, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka, the maritime official said.

But a legal framework hardly addresses what others see as an unraveling situation. Indeed, reported pirate attacks worldwide dropped from 445 in 2003 to 325 last year, and from 121 to 93 in Indonesia over that same period. But the numbers don't reflect the nature of recent attacks.

According to the IMB's annual piracy report, of the 37 incidents in the Malacca Strait in 2004, "Many of these attacks were serious and involved crew being fired upon and crew kidnapped for ransom." The 35 pirates who attacked the gas tanker were said to have been carrying machine-guns and rocket launchers. Those who boarded a Malaysian tugboat in February reportedly shot an engineer in the leg and kidnapped the captain and chief officer. Both were later released.

Malaysian Defense Minister Najib Razak has openly acknowledged the severity of the situation, as well as its implications. "We have requested ... more cooperation from the Indonesian government in this matter," Najib recently told the state-monitored New Straits Times newspaper.

Echoing Choong from the IMB, he said, "If we fail to act, then I believe the international community will have more reasons to pressure us on the issue of security in the Malacca Strait."

Some of that pressure is coming from within the littoral triangle itself. Unlike Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore has long been an advocate of greater international support, as its port is the busiest in the world and the city-state may stand to lose the most from a terrorist incident. This stance was reiterated in March when Singapore's defense minister, Teo Chee Hean, told a conference on maritime security that collective cooperation should include states outside the region. The city-state got a boost two weeks later when the Japanese crewman were kidnapped, given that the victims were not of the littoral states.

According to the Singaporean Maritime and Port Authority official quoted earlier, international intervention need not jeopardize national sovereignty. He pointed out that Japan, highly dependent on the strait, has been helping Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore secure the strait for the last 30 years. "But we haven't had a problem yet. Japan knows how to work well with local authorities. First, they recognize that they have a responsibility to the region. Secondly, they haven't stepped on anyone's toes."

The same could not be said last April, when US Admiral Thomas Fargo announced that the United States was considering deploying special forces on high-speed vessels along the Malacca Strait to compensate for some of the littoral states' seeming nonchalance toward safeguarding against a terrorist incident. The Malaysian government vociferously rejected the offer.

In light of the recent attacks, a Western diplomat treaded carefully on the question of whether the US government would make a stronger push to assist in strait security. "Ideally [the littoral states] will begin to cooperate more closely with each other," said the diplomat, who claimed the surge in attacks was not necessarily cause to sound alarm bells: "Pirate attacks are kind of cyclical in nature."

But clearly the international community is watching the developments in the strait very closely, if only from a different angle than the littoral states.

Ioannis Gatsiounis, a New York native, has worked as a freelance foreign correspondent and previously co-hosted a weekly political/cultural radio call-in show in the US. He has been living in Malaysia since late 2002.

Oil tanker fights off pirates

April 6, 2005 1:50 PM
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5661267&
cKey=1112788235000

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The crew of a Japanese oil tanker have used powerful fire hoses to fend off an attack by pirates in the Singapore Strait.

The International Maritime Bureau said pirates in seven fishing boats accosted the east-bound tanker near Indonesia's Karimun Islands on Tuesday afternoon -- the third attack on a Japanese vessel in three weeks in the busy shipping lane which carries more than a quarter of world trade.

Jayant Abhyankar, deputy director of the IMB said pirates from one of the boats steered close to the Japanese vessel and attempted to board the tanker while the remaining six hovered around it.

But the small craft was beaten off by strong water jets from fire hoses used by the crew. The tanker then increased speed and fled.

The centre could not confirm the total number of pirates or if they were armed, but said all twenty-five crew members of the vessel were safe.
The Singapore and Indonesian coast guards have been alerted, said Abhyankar.

The watchdog has repeatedly warned of a "potential human and environmental catastrophe" if an oil tanker is hijacked in the strategic sea lane.

The narrow strait between Malaysia and Indonesia, with Singapore at its southern entrance, links trading and oil centres in the Middle East, Asia and Europe, with over 50,000 commercial vessels travelling the 805-km (500-mile) channel between the Indonesian island of Sumatra and the Malaysian peninsula to Singapore each year.

The International Maritime Bureau said nearly a third of the 325 cases of recorded pirate attacks last year happened in Indonesian waters, including the Malacca Strait.

Violence resumes in Malacca Straits

Idaten, a Japanese tug, was attacked by pirates while towing the construction barge Kuroshio

http://www.iccwbo.org/home/news_archives/2005/Malacca_attacks.asp

Kuala Lumpur, 15 March 2005 - Citing three blatant acts of piracy in the past two weeks, the ICC's International Maritime Bureau (IMB) is reporting that violence is on the rise in the Malacca Straits.

Captain Pottengal Mukundan, Director of the IMB stated: "Following the tsunami of 26 December, there was a welcome decrease in piracy in the region. However, in the past two weeks there have been at least three violent attacks in these waters."

IMB's Piracy Reporting Centre in Kuala Lumpur received the details of the attacks shortly after they occurred.

The first attack occurred on 28 February, when a tug towing a barge carrying coal for Lumut Power Station was attacked off the port of Penang. A gang of pirates abducted the captain and chief officer and held them for ransom.

In the second incident, on 12 March, a fully laden oil tanker en route from Samarinda to Belawan in Indonesia was attacked by 35 armed pirates. The captain and chief engineer were kidnapped and are still missing. The vessel proceeded to Dumai, Indonesia.

At approximately 1830 hours on 14 March, the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre received a report of the third attack in the Malacca Straits in a fortnight. Idaten, a Japanese tug, had been attacked roughly 70 miles South West of Penang while towing Kuroshio, a construction barge, from Batam, Indonesia to Myanmar.

Armed pirates arrived in three fishing boats, abducted one Philippino and two Japanese crew members and transferred them to one of the fishing boats. The whereabouts of the abductees is still unknown. The remaining 11 members of the tug crew and 154 of the barge crew were not abducted and are safe. The Royal Malaysian Police sent patrol boats to the region and the tug and barge are now proceeding under police escort to Penang.

Captain Mukundan commented: "The recent upsurge of violence against vessels in the Malacca Straits is a matter of great concern. It is vital that action be taken by law enforcement agencies to identify the perpetrators of these attacks and have them punished under law. The abduction of crew members in this manner is a reprehensible act and should not be allowed to continue."

For further information or interviews please contact IMB Director, Captain Pottengal Mukundan +44 208 591 3000 Email: imb@icc-ccs.org