Some 1,100 violent death in Baghdad each month, some 50 today.
And a quite dangerous development: over 110 small homemade bombs went off all over Bangladesh today. That was a “warning shoot” that shows a very high level of coordination. The next run will come and be bigger.

Posted by: b | Aug 17 2005 8:30 utc | 4

Lives Blown Apart

“My son is the most important thing,” she said, “and I knew that if I was going to be with him, I wouldn’t be able to meet my financial obligations.”
So she gave up the townhouse and “turned in” a Honda Accord that she had purchased just a year earlier. “Voluntary repossession,” she said.
There is nothing unusual about Ms. Olson’s situation. Families forced to absorb the blow of a loved one getting wounded frequently watch other pillars of their lives topple like dominoes. What is unusual with regard to this war is the absence of a sense of shared sacrifice. While families like Ms. Olson’s are losing almost everything, most of us are making no sacrifice at all.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Aug 17 2005 10:28 utc | 6

Back to Treasongate, this argues that Fitzgerald cannot be removed from his Special Counsel responsibilities in October as some in the media have reported. Fitzgerald is the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois; that appointment expires in October. However, he is also Special Counsel – a different position – and that does not expire and is not dependent on his status as US District Attorney. Accoding to the article, James Comey, who appointed Fitzgerald, set up the appointment so Fitz could neither be removed nor be subject to DOJ oversight. Technically, Fitz is not an “independent” but a “special” counsel with indefinite funding by GAO under the law that provided funding for independent counsels. When the law covering independent counsels expired in 1999, funding was still permitted for ongoing independent counsel investigations and for investigations established under other law, as Fitz’s was. Thus:

McAllum can’t touch him. Flanigan can’t touch him. Gonzales certainly can’t touch him.
And the President can’t touch him because the conflict of interest which caused DOJ to appoint him in the first place has expanded exponentially.
Should President Bush try to fire Fitzgerald anyway, not only will the political fall out be much greater than if an underling did the dirty deed, but Fitzgerald could fight back on very solid legal ground using the arguments set forth below from the GAO which analyzes Fitzgerald’s “Special Counsel” mandate as being similar to the mandate conveyed by the expired Independent Counsel law. That law, I’m sure you will recall, prohibited the President from wriggling out of an impeachment and possible conviction by firing the Independent Counsel investigating him.

So, even if Fitz is not reappointed as US Attorney General, he continues as Special Counsel. Comey may be leaving, but the author – one Citizen Spook – says he is the one to thank for the appointment’s structure that protects Fitz:

Citizen Spook finds that neither Bush nor Attorney General Gonzales have the authority to remove Fitzgerald from his duties as special prosecutor in “Treasongate” aka “Rovegate”:
“As you will soon see, Fitzgerald’s appointment as Special Counsel, the first of its kind in the history of the United States, was meticulously crafted to withstand the coming onslaught…. Neither Bush nor his Justice Department cronies have the legal authority to remove Fitzgerald as Special Counsel or to prematurely end his grand jury. You can thank James Comey for this….
Fitzgerald was empowered by Comey with unilateral authority to “expand” his jurisdiction and “pursue it wherever he wants to pursue it.” Let your imagination run wild because it’s all legally in play…

[Italics are mine.]
The clock isn’t running out after all. I wonder if Judy Miller is aware of this.

Posted by: lonesomeG | Aug 17 2005 15:34 utc | 8

@lonesomeG – that´s good news, thanks
Roberts nomination:
Library Missing Roberts File

A file folder containing papers from Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr.’s work on affirmative action more than 20 years ago disappeared from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library after its review by two lawyers from the White House and the Justice Department in July, according to officials at the library and the National Archives and Records Administration.
..
As part of a vetting process before Roberts’s formal nomination by the White House in late July, the two lawyers requested and were granted special access to the Roberts files. Neither the White House nor the Justice Department would name the lawyers yesterday, but sources said one works for White House counsel Harriet Miers and the other is an aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

Posted by: b | Aug 17 2005 17:29 utc | 10

Officer Says Pentagon Barred Sharing Pre-9/11 Qaeda Data With F.B.I.
We now know that Israeli spies had infiltrated the Pentagon. We also know that Israel desired the US to enter into wars against Israel’s enemies. We know that the US Government has classified evidence that links arrested Mossad agents with 9-11. So, knowing that 9-11 was likely a frame-up, like the Lavon Affair, it stands to reason that the patsies, the Arabs on whom the “terror” attack would be blamed, had to be protected until they were used.
Therefore, the exact individuals within the Pentagon who blocked this transfer of information on Atta to the FBI may turnout to be agents for Israel.

Posted by: Uncle $camed | Aug 17 2005 19:06 utc | 12

Robert Fisk has an article out where he manages to get the numbers of bodies handled by the Bagdhad morgue.
“Bodies of 1,100 civilians brought to mortuary in July Pre-invasion, July figure was typically less than 200 Last Sunday alone, the mortuary received 36 bodies Up to 20 per cent of the bodies are never identified Many of the dead have been tortured or disfigured”
It is of course a very depressing read but whether you do it as some sort of act of penance or to grab a handle on some numbers that realistically express the civilian deaths in Iraq I suggest you do it.
If Cindy Sheehan wants to make the rape and murders of Iraq all about her son that’s her privilege I guess but the rest of us at least owe the Iraqi dead an attempt to conceive their desperate situation. This might sound a bit harsh but every US citizen who dies in Iraq has made a conscious decision to either join an organisation whose primary aim is to kill people (the military) or has decided for whatever reason (money or altruism) to put themselves in harms way.
The people of Iraq have had no such choice offered them. All they can do is try and exist in a hellhole not of their own making.
I would like to see those of us that feel the need for heroes celebrate the young people of the US who despite their parlous financial state made a conscious decison not to join the military. The kids who decided that no amount of money or brainwashing by propaganda would get them to kill people just to pay for the plasma TV or whatever piece of consumerist shit kids are having forced down their throat in 2005. These are the real US heroes.
I feel sorry for those US citizens killed in Iraq, but their numbers are few in comparison the the young/old, rich/poor, male/female, bad/good, Iraqi people who have died with little or no input into the forces that caused their demise.
If the death of poor american kids becomes the chief reason for stopping this senseless slaughter, the people of Iraq will be left to try and establish sanity in a world of insanity. They can look forward to about 50 more years of madness. They may never have a country called Iraq again. These are the people who deserve our care and support.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 17 2005 22:31 utc | 14

Gentle reader, do you realize the danger of having a president so disconnected from reality that he plots to attack Iran–a country three times the size of Iraq–when he lacks sufficient forces to occupy Baghdad and to protect the road from Baghdad to the airport?
Despite all the high profile “sweeps” of US forces through insurgent strongholds, US commanders report a doubling of insurgent attacks.
The Bush administration is insane. If the American people do not decapitate it by demanding Bush’s impeachment, the Bush administration will bring about Armageddon. This may please some Christian evangelicals conned by Rapture predictions, but World War III will please no one else.
Paul Craig Roberts

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Aug 18 2005 1:42 utc | 16

jm
what ‘wrong’ with Iraqis is a quarter of a century of living under a regime Stalin would have found recognizable and would I suspect have been a bit jealous of. Only those who lived under Saddam can have any idea what it must have been like. The results, though, are clear enough. By 2003 Iraqi society was starved, half-mad with fear and almost bereft of any conception of what a normal life is like. The ubiquious terror has gone, only to be replaced by the random terror of the car bomber, the thuggish fundamentalist and the gangster; methods and people who thrive in the current chaos. Possibly, I don’t know, just maybe with the Muhkhabbat gone, people outside of Baghdad are experiencing something they have not known previously–the lack of pervasive fear.

Posted by: theodor | Aug 18 2005 3:22 utc | 18

U.S. diplomat in Baghdad is named in AIPAC spying case
The second-highest diplomat at the United States Embassy in Baghdad is one of the anonymous government officials cited in an August 4th indictment as having provided classified information to an employee of a pro-Israel lobbying group, people who have been officially briefed on the case said Wednesday.
The diplomat, David M. Satterfield, was identified in the indictment as a United States government official, “USGO-2,” the people briefed on the matter said. In early 2002, USGO-2 discussed secret national security matters in two meetings with Steven J. Rosen, who has since been dismissed as a top lobbyist for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC, who has been charged in the case….

Posted by: Nugget | Aug 18 2005 5:06 utc | 20

Jerome warned us that China was explosive…These are the first figures I’ve seen. Some 74,000 protests and riots broke out nationwide last year, up from just 10,000 in 1994″
10,000…74,000 Jesus…

Posted by: jj | Aug 18 2005 6:27 utc | 22

DARPA confab under-reported — but blogged
Noah Schachtman tells Boing Boing:
Pentagon mad science division DARPA had their sorta-annual convention last week. And there was exactly zero mainstream media coverage of the event, as near as I could tell.
Luckily, Defense Tech had a couple of spies at the conference, to see what’s doing at the Defense Department’s Q branch. Flocking drones, brain caps, Pentagon pandas, wi-fi space dust, and terror-fighting phone books were in attendance.
more links …

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 18 2005 6:48 utc | 24

Now I’m sounding like Alabama.
The WTC floors are huge and concrete, the planes in comparison are small and aluminum.
But it was never explored …

Posted by: jonku | Aug 18 2005 9:39 utc | 26

That is a good read Uncle – the site is another source for non-linear reflection.

Posted by: rapt | Aug 18 2005 15:11 utc | 28

Jonku:
This answers your question about the weight of the planes and summarizes the official explanation for the towers’ collapse:

When the planes hit the two towers, the collisions damaged each building in two major ways:
In each case, the force of the speeding plane knocked out a number of vertical columns around the building perimeter, damaged large sections of floor, sent furniture and plane wreckage flying through the offices and presumably damaged support columns in each building’s core. Most likely, the initial impact also destroyed the sprinkler system on those floors.
The evaluation team estimates that the first plane — a 395,000-pound (180,000-kg) Boeing 767-200ER going about 470 miles per hour (756 kph) — fractured as many as 36 perimeter support columns over a four-story area of WTC 1’s north face. The connected floors partially collapsed, and the central core suffered undefined damage. The second plane, a Boeing 767-200ER flying at about 590 miles per hour (950 kph), inflicted similar damage on WTC 2. The collision fractured as many as 32 perimeter columns over a five-story area, collapsing sections of connected floor and damaging the central core.
In each attack, the crash ignited the plane’s’ fuel supply, causing a massive fireball — an expanding area of burning gas. While the ignited fuel didn’t really explode, the fireball did spread fire down the side of the building, throughout the nearby floors and down interior shafts to lower floors. The investigators hypothesized that nearly all of the jet fuel was consumed in the initial fireball and first few minutes of the building fire, but it ignited enough office equipment, paper and building materials to keep the fire raging until the collapse.

Morgan Reynolds summarizes his problems with the official explanation in this article. (There are plenty of others sources to go to.)

The scientific controversy over the initial structural weakening has two parts: what caused the original tower damage and did that damage “severely” weaken the structures? Photos show a stable, motionless North Tower (WTC 1) after the damage suffered at 8:46 am and the South Tower after its 9:03 am impact. If we focus on the North Tower, close examination of photos reveals arguably “minor” rather than “severe” damage in the North Tower and its perimeter columns.
As many as 45 exterior columns between floors 94 and 98 on the northeast (impact) side of the North Tower were fractured – separated from each other – yet there is no direct evidence of “severe” structural weakening. None of the upper sections of the broken perimeter columns visibly sags or buckles toward its counterpart column below. We can infer this because of the aluminum covers on the columns: each seam uniformly aligns properly across the Tower, forming a horizontal “dashed line” in the façade from beveled end to end. Despite an impact hole, gaps in perimeter columns, and missing parts of floors 95–98 at the opening, the aluminum façade shows no evidence of vertical displacement in the columns, suggestive of little or no wider floor buckling at the perimeter.
The aluminum covers attached to the columns also aligned vertically after impact, that is, separated columns continued to visually remain “plumb” (true vertical), lining up top to bottom around the aperture, implying no perceptible horizontal displacement of the columns. Photographic evidence for the northeast side of the North Tower showed no wider secondary structural impact beyond the opening itself. Of course, there was smoke pouring out of the upper floors.
The fact that perimeter columns were not displaced suggests that the floors did not buckle or sag. Despite missing parts of floors 95–98, photos show no buckling or sag on other floors. If so, that boosts the likelihood that there was little damage to the core. Photos do not document what happened within the interior/core and no one was allowed to inspect and preserve relevant rubble before government authorities – primarily FEMA – had it quickly removed.….
….We know that the structural core and its steel was incredibly strong (claimed 600% redundancy) making it unlikely that the core was “severely” damaged at impact. There were 47 core columns connected to each other by steel beams within an overall rectangular core floor area of approximately 87 feet x 137 feet (26.5 m x 41.8 m). Each column had a rectangular cross section of approximately 36″ x 14″ at the base (90 cm x 36 cm) with steel 4″ thick all around (100 mm), tapering to ¼” (6 mm) thickness at the top. Each floor was also extremely strong (p. 26), a grid of steel, contrary to claims of a lightweight “truss” system.
Those who support the official account like Thomas Eagar (p. 14), professor of materials engineering and engineering systems at MIT, usually argue that the collapse must be explained by the heat from the fires because the loss of loading-bearing capacity from the holes in the Towers was too small. The transfer of load would have been within the capacity of the towers. Since steel used in buildings must be able to bear five times its normal load, Eagar points out, the steel in the towers could have collapsed only if heated to the point where it “lost 80 percent of its strength, ” around 1,300oF. Eagar believes that this is what happened, though the fires did not appear to be extensive and intense enough, quickly billowing black smoke and relatively few flames.
While some experts claim that airliner impact severely weakened the entire structural system, evidence is lacking. The perimeters of floors 94–98 did not appear severely weakened, much less the entire structural system. The criminal code requires that crime scene evidence be saved for forensic analysis but FEMA had it destroyed before anyone could seriously investigate it.….
The preliminary NIST Response claims that “the wall section above the impact zone moved downward” (pdf, p. 36) on WTC 1 but offers no evidence. It offers photographic evidence, however, for a “hanging floor slab” on the 82d floor of the South Tower at 9:55 a.m. This looks minor though because there is no sag on adjacent floors and the integrity of the structure looks very much intact. The fire looks weak too, yet the South Tower collapsed only four minutes later. This would be quite a puzzle without a demolition theory.
About a dozen of the fragmented ends of exterior columns in the North Tower hole were bent but the bends faced the “wrong way” because they pointed toward the outside of the Tower. This fact is troublesome for the official theory that a plane crash created the hole and subsequent explosion between floors 94 and 98. The laws of physics imply that a high-speed airplane with fuel-filled wings breaking through thin perimeter columns would deflect the shattered ends of the columns inward, if deflected in any direction, certainly not bend them outward toward the exterior.
A possible response would be that, well, yes, an airliner crash would bend a column inward rather than outward, if bent at all, but the subsequent force of a jet fuel blast would act in the opposite direction: any inward bends caused by plane impact would straighten toward vertical or even reverse the bent steel columns toward the exterior under blast pressure. However, such a proposed steel “reversal theory” (first bend inward by collision, then bend outward by explosion) suffers two major handicaps:
1. No “inward-bending columns” were observed and it would be unlikely that each and every one would be reversed by subsequent explosion, and
2. the hypothesis is ad hoc and lacks simplicity, both scientific negatives.
Occam’s razor would suggest that the outward bends in the perimeter columns were caused by explosions from inside the tower rather than bends caused by airliner impact from outside. Also supporting this theory is the fact that the uniformly neat ends of the blown perimeter columns are consistent with the linear shaped charges demolition experts use to slice steel as thick as 10 inches. The hypothesis of linear shaped charges also explains the perfectly formed crosses found in the rubble (crucifix-shaped fragments of core column structures), as well as the rather-neatly shorn steel everywhere.

And this:

The hole in the North Tower also is suspicious because it did not even have a continuous opening at the perimeter, but instead contained substantial WTC material (p. 27) just left of center (pp. 62, 105). This material appears integral to that area, so it did not move much, suggesting minimal displacement and no clean penetration by a jumbo jet. These huge airliners weigh 82 tons empty and have a maximum takeoff weight of up to 193 tons.
In the case of the South Tower, an engine from UAL Flight 175 (tail number N612UA and FAA-registered as still valid!) has not been recovered despite the fact that the flight trajectory of the video plane implied that the right engine would miss the South Tower. Photos showing minor engine parts on the ground are unconvincing, to put it mildly. Perhaps independent jet engine experts (retired?) can testify to the contrary. Further contradicting the official account, the beveled edge of the southeast side of the south tower was completely intact upon initial impact. The government never produced a jet engine yet claimed it recovered the passport of alleged hijacker Satam al Suqami unharmed by a fiery crash and catastrophic collapse of the North Tower. The government has not produced voice (CVR) or flight data recorders (FDR) in the New York attack either, so-called black boxes, a fact unprecedented in the aviation history of major domestic crashes.
—-
The next question is whether the fires were hot enough to cause the WTC buildings to collapse. In defending the official account and its clones that try to explain the unprecedented collapses of three steel-framed skyscrapers without demolition, heat arguably is more important than structural impact. That’s obviously true for building WTC 7 because there was no alleged airplane impact.
First, no steel-framed skyscraper, even engulfed in flames hour after hour, had ever collapsed before. Suddenly, three stunning collapses occur within a few city blocks on the same day, two allegedly hit by aircraft, the third not. These extraordinary collapses after short-duration minor fires made it all the more important to preserve the evidence, mostly steel girders, to study what had happened. On fire intensity, consider this benchmark: A 1991 FEMA report on Philadelphia’s Meridian Plaza fire said that the fire was so energetic that “[b]eams and girders sagged and twisted,” but “[d]espite this extraordinary exposure, the columns continued to support their loads without obvious damage” (quoted by Griffin, p. 15). Such an intense fire with consequent sagging and twisting steel beams bears no resemblance to what we observed at the WTC.
Second, severe structural damage to the WTC towers would have required fires that were not only large but growing throughout the buildings and burning for a considerable period of time. None of these conditions was present. “The lack of flames is an indication that the fires were small, and the dark smoke is an indication that the fires were suffocating,” points out Hufschmid (p. 35). Eyewitnesses in the towers, as well as police and firefighters, reported (pp. 199–200) the same thing.
Third, the impact opening was 15 floors lower in the South Tower than in the North Tower, where core columns were thicker, so the South Tower fire had to produce more heat to raise the steel temperatures to soften up (thermally weaken) the steel columns. Yet its fires were considerably smaller and 30 minutes shorter in duration. The Tower collapsed after burning only 56 minutes. A prime candidate to explain why “the wrong tower fell first” is that the small dying fire in the South Tower forced the hand of the mass murderers who decided to trigger demolition earlier than planned in order to sustain the lie that fire caused the collapse. The North Tower stood for another 29 minutes and its core steel was thinner at its upper stories. The 1991 Meridian Plaza fire burned for 19 hours and the fire was so extreme that flames came from dozens of windows on many floors. It did not collapse.
Fourth, implicitly trying to explain away these difficulties, the current NIST investigation, conducted by “an extended investigation team of 236 people,” makes “dislodged fireproofing” the key variable to explain the collapses. Supposedly, “the probable collapse sequence for the WTC towers are (sic) based on the behavior of thermally weakened structural components that had extensive damage to fireproofing or gypsum board fire protection induced by the debris field generated by aircraft impact” (p. 111). “Had fireproofing not been dislodged by debris field,” this team of government-paid experts claims, “temperature rise of structural components would likely have been insufficient to induce global collapse” (p. 108). Perhaps acknowledging the lack of direct evidence for its conjectures, the NIST admits that “a full collapse of the WTC floor system would not occur even with a number of failed trusses or connections” and it “recognizes inherent uncertainties” (pp. 110 and 112). The NIST will have to boost its creativity to plausibly explain the WTC 7 collapse because it won’t have the benefit of tales of aircraft and debris fields.
Aside from specific defects in the fire collapse theory, a wide variety of facts undermine it:
* Photos show people walking around in the hole in the North Tower “where 10,000 gallons of jet fuel were supposedly burning. The women (p. 27) seem to (sic) looking down to the ground” (the NIST “Response” pdf, p. 62, also shows a similar photo of the same blond woman with light-colored slacks looking over the edge of the 94th floor).
* By the time the South Tower was hit, most of the North Tower’s flames had already vanished, burning for only 16 minutes.
* The fire did not grow over time, probably because it quickly ran out of fuel and was suffocating rather than the sprinkler system dousing the fires.
* FDNY fire fighters remain under a gag order Rodriguezvs-1.Bush.pdf, p. 10) to not discuss the explosions they heard, felt and saw. FAA personnel are also under a 9/11 gag order.
* Even the 9/11 Commission (Kean-Zelikow) Report acknowledges that “none of the [fire] chiefs present believed that a total collapse of either tower was possible” (Ch. 9, p. 302). It shocked everyone that day, amateur and professional alike, although some firefighters realized that so-called secondary explosive devices were a risk.

There are many sites with technical analysis questioning the official reasons for the towers’ collapse, but this summarizes them fairly well. There are plenty of reasons to think “maybe” in Reynold’s summary. He lays out his case in a way that would be easy to debunk, but I haven’t seen an article pick his analysis apart yet. (“Maybe” I’ve missed it so far.)
Sorry to take up so much bandwidth with this response.

Posted by: lonesomeG | Aug 18 2005 18:00 utc | 30

To finish the response to Jonku, the weight of the planes had no bearing in the official explanation of the collapse of WTC-1 and WTC-2. The WTC-7 collapse was officially caused by an “out of control fire” caused by debris falling from WTC-1 and WTC-2. Regarding WTC-7:

FEMA’s BPAT, the only official organization that reported on Building 7’s collapse, was completely indecisive. Their report stated:
The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. Further research, investigation, and analyses are needed to resolve this issue.

To believe the WTC-1 and 2 collapse stories, you also have to believe the WTC-7 story. I find this impossible.

Posted by: lonesomeG | Aug 18 2005 19:11 utc | 32

Sorry folks, I don´t understand this discussion about why the WTC collapsed.
– Photos show a stable, motionless North Tower writes one who doubts the offical plane claim.
I never saw a photo of buiding in motion.
– A high riser in spain burning is something different than a WTC burning.
Europe builds high risers with concrete, the US with steal. hell of a difference in catastrophic statics.
As a industrial engineer master I find the NIST explanations quite convincing. It is difficult to realy find out how and when what steal column was weakened enough to break down. But to think it’s not possible within reasonable bounds is stupid.
Alltogether I find it dumb to discuss if the WTC buildings came down by explosions. Two big planes hit the towers. They would have to be scraped anyhow if they would not have come down. The public effect would not have been much different. No civilian building is specificated to sustain a hit by a full fledged air liner.
You might speculate who was flying those planes if you don´t accept the Muhammed Atta story. You might speculate who “leaded” the Muhammed Atta group if you don´t accept the lead by Bin Laden story. You might speculate what “motivated” Bin Laden if you don´t believe the mislead islam interpretation story and suspect him to be a CIA asset. You might believe that the official story is correct but some people did no about this and let it happen to further their goals.
Why one has to start at the end of chain of events when all steps leading to it have aspects that have some doubts (like all true events have) is beyond me.
Feel free to discuss any WTC “explosions” but please use someone else’ bandwidth for this.
Thanks.

Posted by: b | Aug 18 2005 21:36 utc | 34

Cindy Sheehan leaves peace camp, mother ill

Posted by: Nugget | Aug 18 2005 22:24 utc | 36

This is a kick in the groin.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently found that the city’s original seizure of private property was constitutional under the principal of eminent domain, and now New London is claiming that the affected homeowners were living on city land for the duration of the lawsuit and owe back rent. It’s a new definition of chutzpah: Confiscate land and charge back rent for the years the owners fought confiscation.
In some cases, their debt could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Moreover, the homeowners are being offered buyouts based on the market rate as it was in 2000.

Posted by: lonesomeG | Aug 19 2005 1:17 utc | 38

Sorry Bernhard.
I didn’t mean to spark another long thread about WTC.
I was adding my first person recollection of a radio broadcast in New York on the evening of 11 September.

Posted by: jonku | Aug 19 2005 9:05 utc | 40

Fasten your seat belts.

Posted by: beq | Aug 19 2005 16:46 utc | 42

I found this paragraph funny:
“But Palacio himself might have helped trigger the protests by inflaming popular expectations with moves including diverting money from a fund previously destined for debt payments to pay for social programs, according to Alberto Ramos, an economist at Goldman Sachs in New York.”
Ecuadorian oil crisis

Posted by: biklett | Aug 19 2005 19:20 utc | 44