NEW YORK - Christian leaders from the United States lamented the war in Iraq and apologized for their government's current foreign policy during the 9th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which ended Thursday.

"We lament with special anguish the war in Iraq, launched in deception and violating global norms of justice and human rights," the Very Rev. Leonid Kishkovsky, the moderator of the U.S. Conference for the WCC, told fellow delegates from around the world.

Kishkovsky is the rector of Our Lady of Kazan Church in Sea Cliff, New York, and is an officer in the Orthodox Church of America.

Taking an unusual stand among U.S. Christian leaders, the United States Conference for the World Council of Churches (WCC) criticized Pres. George W. Bush's actions in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"We are citizens of a nation that has done much in these years to endanger the human family and to abuse the creation," says the statement endorsed by the most prominent Protestant Christian churches on the Council.

"Our leaders turned a deaf ear to the voices of church leaders throughout our nation and the world, entering into imperial projects that seek to dominate and control for the sake of our own national interests. Nations have been demonized and God has been enlisted in national agendas that are nothing short of idolatrous."

The message, written like a prayer of repentance and backed by the 34 Christian churches that belong to the WCC, mourns those who have died or been injured in the Iraq war and says, "We confess that we have failed to raise a prophetic voice loud enough and persistent enough to deter our leaders from this path of preemptive war."

Among the attendees was the Rev. Bernice Powell-Jackson, North American President of the World Council of Churches. A civil rights activist for more than 25 years, Jackson previously served as executive director of one of the Justice and Witness Ministries predecessor bodies, the Commission for Racial Justice.

The U.S. Conference of the WCC also criticized the government's position on global warming. "The rivers, oceans, lakes, rainforests, and wetlands that sustain us, even the air we breathe continue to be violated... Yet our own country refuses to acknowledge its complicity and rejects multilateral agreements aimed at reversing disastrous trends," reads the message.

Earlier this month, a group of more than 85 U.S. evangelical Christian leaders called on Congress to enact legislation that would reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, which most scientists believe contribute to global warming.

The U.S. Conference of the WCC message also said, "Starvation, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the treatable diseases that go untreated indict us, revealing the grim features of global economic injustice we have too often failed to acknowledge or confront."

"Hurricane Katrina," it continues, "revealed to the world those left behind in our own nation by the rupture of our social contract. As a nation we have refused to confront the racism that infects our policies around the world."

The statement comes days after the National Council of Churches (NCC), the United States chapter of the WCC, endorsed a U.N. report on the situation of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

Separately, in a letter addressed to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, NCC General Secretary Robert W. Edgar called on the U.S. to bring the detainees to trial, release them, or to "close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility without further delay". It also asked Rice for access to the Guantanamo facility "to monitor the physical, spiritual and mental conditions of the detainees".

At the Brazilian conference, the Rev. John Thomas, president of United Church of Christ, was quoted as saying: "An emerging theme in conversation with our partners around the world is that the U.S. is being perceived as a dangerous nation."

He called the Assembly "a unique opportunity to make this statement to all our colleagues" in the ecumenical movement. The statement says, "We come to you seeking to be partners in the search for unity and justice."

Thomas acknowledged that not all church members would agree with the thrust of the statement, but said it was their responsibility as leaders to "speak a prophetic and pastoral word as we believe God is offering it to us".

The final WCC event featured a candlelit march for peace through downtown Porto Alegre with up to 2,000 people -- including two Nobel Prize-winners -- taking part.

Organized by local churches as part of the World Council of Churches' Decade to Overcome Violence, it was accompanied by Latin American music from Xico Esvael and Victor Heredia. Young people carried banners highlighting peace and justice issues. One, depicting the world held in God's hand, read "Let God change you first, then you will transform the world."

WCC president Powell-Jackson urged the crowd to commit themselves to overcoming violence. Prawate Khid-arn of the Christian Conference of Asia told them, "If we do not take the risk of peace, we will have to take the risk of war."

Israel Batista of the Latin American Council of Churches spoke of poverty, injustice and abuse of women and children and asked, "How are we to speak of peace?" Still, he said, "In spite of violence, we will persist in the struggle for peace."

After an address by Julia Qusibert, a Bolivian indigenous Christian, the marchers sang the Samba of the Struggle for Peace and the Taizé chant Ubi Caritas, among other songs. The march paused while Nobel prize-winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel improvised a poem and addressed the crowd at the Esquina Democrática or Democratic Corner.

The evening was brought to a climax with an address by the second Nobel Prize-winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He began his impassioned speech by saying, "We have an extraordinary God. God is a mighty God, but this God needs you. When someone is hungry, bread doesn't come down from heaven. When God wants to feed the hungry, you and I must feed the hungry. And now God wants peace in the world."

The WCC is the largest Christian ecumenical organization, comprised of 340 Christian denominations and churches in 120 countries, and said to represent 550 million Christians throughout the world. The U.S. Conference of the World Council of Churches alone represents 34 Christian churches, including Orthodox, Evangelical, Lutheran and Anglican churches, and four million members throughout the country.

The Roman Catholic Church is not a member of the WCC but has worked closely with the Council in the past. Since its origins in 1948, the WCC gathers in an Assembly every seven years with each member church sending a delegate.

© Copyright 2006 IPS - Inter Press Service

 CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

The White House staff members who are trying to prevent Iran from developing its own nuclear-energy capacity, and who refuse to take military action against Iran "off the table," have conveniently forgotten that the United States was the midwife to the Iranian nuclear program 30 years ago.

Every aspect of Iran's current nuclear development was approved and encouraged by Washington in the 1970s. President Gerald Ford offered Iran a full nuclear cycle in 1976. Moreover, the only Iranian reactor currently about to become operative -- the reactor in Bushire (also known as Bushehr) -- was started before the Iranian revolution with U.S. approval, and cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium.

The Bushire reactor, a "light-water" reactor, produces Pu240, Pu241, and Pu242. Although these isotopes could theoretically be weaponized, the process is extremely long and complicated, and untried. To date, no nuclear weapon has ever been produced with plutonium produced with the kind of reactor at Bushire.

Moreover, the plant must be completely shut down in order for the fuel rods to be extracted -- making the process immediately open to inspection and detection. Other possible reactors in Iran are far in the future.

The American push for Iran's nuclear development was carried out with great enthusiasm. Prof. Ahmad Sadri, chairman of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Lake Forest College, in Illinois, was a young man in Iran when the United States was touting nuclear-power facilities to the government of the Shah, in the 1970s. He remembers seeing the American display at the Tehran International Exhibition, which was "dedicated to the single theme of extolling the virtues of atomic energy and the feasibility of its transfer to Iran."

Sadri also remembers an encounter with Octave J. Du Temple, executive director emeritus of the American Nuclear Society, who fondly reminisced about half a dozen trips to Tehran in the early '70s to participate in meetings on "transfer of nuclear technology."

Donald Weadon, an international lawyer active in Iran during that period, points out that after 1972, and the oil crisis, the United States was rabidly pursuing investment opportunities in Iran, including selling nuclear-power plants. He writes that "the Iranians were wooed hard with the prospect of nuclear power from trusted U.S.-backed suppliers, with the prospect of the reservation of significant revenues from oil exports for foreign and domestic investment."

American dissimulation on this point reveals some interesting motives on Washington's part. Iran under the Shah was as much of a threat to its neighbors -- including Iraq -- as it might be said to be today; its nuclear ambitions then could have been inflated and denigrated in exactly the same way that they are being inflated and denigrated today. But the United States was blissfully unconcerned. The big difference today is that Iran is now perceived to be a threat to Israel, and this fuels much of the threat of military action.

Even those who admit that the United States helped start Iran's nuclear development can produce only two factors that make a difference in how Iran should be treated today, as opposed to the '70s. The most recent factor is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's widely denounced remarks attacking Israel. The second, older factor is Iran's alleged concealment of nuclear-energy development in the past.

President Ahmadinejad's remarks have little or no connection with any probable action on Iran's part regarding Israel. His pronouncements were designed primarily to shore up support from extremist elements among his revolutionary supporters. Moreover, he has no control over Iran's foreign policy or its nuclear-energy program, and his views are not embraced by Iran's clerical leaders.

However, the second accusation -- that Iran has "regularly hidden information about its nuclear program" -- is equally specious. When the reports of the United Nations inspection team are examined, one realizes that much of what the United States has called "concealment" was never concealed at all.

Many of the charges about removing top soil and bulldozing material at some of the research sites describe actions that never took place. Moreover, even if one concedes that Iran did conceal some processes, this activity started 18 to 20 years ago, when the revolution was still young and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was still alive, under completely different political actors from those in power today.

Indeed, whatever Iran did or didn't do in the past, today it is in compliance with the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. There would in fact be no way to accuse Iran of anything if it were not so compliant.

Furthermore, the treaty grants all signatories the right to pursue nuclear research for peaceful purposes of precisely the kind in which Iran is currently engaged.

The mantra "Iran must not get nuclear weapons" has been repeated so often now that most people have come to believe that Iran has them, or is getting them. This implication is completely unproven. The tragedy would be that in the end the United States may goad Iran into a real nuclear-weapons program. The Iranians may reason that since they are being punished for the crime, they may as well commit it.

William O. Beeman, a Brown University professor of anthropology and Middle East Studies, is author of "The 'Great Satan' vs. the 'Mad Mullahs': How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other."

© 2006 The Providence Journal Co

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

Mr. Bush and his cronies would like the argument over illegally wiretapping US citizens to be about who is willing to go the furthest to protect the American people. Predictably, the Democrats are falling into their frame.

But this isn’t about security. It’s about the rights of citizens in a democracy, the abuse of power, and the rule of law in preventing such abuses.

As many have pointed out, FISA gives the President broad authorities and even allows him to act prior getting a warrant.

Notwithstanding the breadth of FISA, many of us – Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals – are willing to examine whether or not we need to change the way we gather intelligence, both domestically and internationally in the age of the Internet, global communication networks, and terrorists.

But in America, as in other democracies, there’s a process for that.

When the leader believes he needs more power, he must go to the people or their representatives and ask them for it. The power in our democratic form of governance, after all, resides with the people. It’s ours to give, not his to take.

President Bush didn’t do that. Acting in secrecy, he simply took the power he wanted for his own. That’s how dictators in banana republics operate.

That’s the issue here. It’s that simple.

This kind of power grab was precisely the kind of abuses our founding fathers were trying to protect us from when they wrote the Bill of Rights.

And it’s not the first time he’s done it. Mr. Bush, like the spoiled preppy frat-boy he is, wants what he wants, and he doesn’t see why he has to be subject to the same limits as the rest of us.

When he wanted to invade Iraq, he manufactured fake intelligence and lied the people and Congress into his tragic and ill-conceived preemptive war.

When he wanted to pass a prescription drug plan designed to benefit the pharmaceutical companies at the expense of the elderly and the nation’s taxpayers, he lied about how much it would cost, and his administration threatened to fire the civil servant in charge of estimating the cost of the program if he told Congress the truth.

When he wanted to Privatize Social Security he lied about the health of the program, the cost of his alternative, and his motives for wanting to kill social security.

When he wanted to escape blame for 911, he said he wasn’t warned about the threat, even though he’d been given an intelligence memo titled "bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States" in August of 2001.

When he wanted to punish folks like Ambassador Wilson who exposed his lies, he mounted a vicious smear campaign that involved outing a covert CIA agent.

Mr. Bush has been willing to use any means necessary to push his own agenda, and he has shown, again and again, that he puts his agenda above the truth, above the rule of law, and above the will of the American people. Look at the pattern of Soviet Style propaganda – paid journalists, fake newsreels, fake town hall meetings featuring phony pre-screened audiences armed with pre-screened questions complete with jack-boot stooges to toss out any citizens who make it past the government-approved attendance lists. Are these the actions one would expect from a self-described "champion of democracy?"

And his domestic spying program hasn’t even made us safer. The FBI says they are getting swamped by poorly substantiated leads from these wiretaps; they tell us their agents are getting pulled from promising investigations to pursue witch hunts, and that America may be less safe as a result of this ill-conceived trampling of our Constitutional rights.

Nevertheless, in the face of doubts about the effectiveness of his domestic spying program, a record of blatant dishonesty and a penchant for grabbing power, Mr. Bush once again launches his fear machine and asks us to just "trust him," and he’ll protect us.

Sorry, Mr president, but trust is something you have to earn; and trust is something you’ve betrayed once too often. We’ve watched you crank up your fear machine so that you can launch your war; enrich your already rich buddies; and snatch away our rights. Frankly, Mr. Bush, you and your lust for power and your "theory of the unitary executive" have become as scary as that which you would protect us from.

The warrant less wiretap program is not about security; it’s not about terrorism. It’s about the rule of law and the rights of citizens. Our rights.

If Americans value freedom, we can never allow any president to snatch our rights simply because he wants them. Tyranny is more often an inside job – freedom is given away more often than it is taken. And the soft siren-song of security has been the instrument of choice for would-be tyrants throughout history.

John Atcheson's writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, as well as in several wonk journals. Email to: atchman@comcast.net

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

For Karl Rove, no news from the Plame case -- Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as a CIA agent -- is definitely not good news. Seismic activity is notoriously silent, so we may not be hearing any rumblings at the moment. But speaking as a former prosecutor, I believe it highly likely that, just below the surface, the worlds of Karl Rove and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, shifting like tectonic plates, are about to collide. As was true with Vice President Cheney's top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, charged with obstruction of justice and lying to a federal agent as well as to the grand jury, Rove might not be charged with the leak itself. I am confident, however, that Rove will not leave this party empty-handed. He will, at the very least, almost certainly be charged with making false statements to an FBI agent. Here's why.

For starters, the evidence that Rove deliberately lied to the FBI is overwhelming.

In case anyone's forgotten, on July 14, 2003, eight days after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson in an op-ed in the New York Times publicly questioned Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to acquire "yellowcake" uranium in Africa, columnist Robert Novak wrote that "two senior administration officials" had told him the trip to Niger, which Wilson referenced in that piece, had been arranged by his wife Valerie, whom the officials described as a CIA operative assigned to investigate matters involving weapons of mass destruction.

It is now undisputed that Karl Rove spoke with at least two reporters about Valerie Wilson before Novak's now infamous article appeared: Novak himself (whom Rove has known for 30 years) and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper. Some details of the discussion with Cooper are in dispute, but there's no question that the two men discussed Valerie Wilson's identity as a CIA agent and the administration's claim that she had arranged her husband's trip to Niger. After the conversation, Rove sent an e-mail about it to then Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Rove's aide Susan Ralston has reportedly testified that Rove told her not to log in the phone call, although that was the usual office procedure. On July 17, Cooper wrote an article in which he described conversations with two government officials who claimed Wilson's wife was a CIA agent and had arranged Wilson's trip to Africa. Cooper questioned whether the administration was declaring war on Wilson.

Between July 14 and October 8, when Rove was interviewed by the FBI, the Bush administration held approximately 30 press briefings in which the leak and/or the Iraq-Niger uranium allegations were discussed. There were hundreds of news articles and repeated calls for an investigation by congressmen, columnists, and the CIA.

By mid-September, Karl Rove was increasingly being named as one of the "two senior administration officials" who blew Wilson's cover and Bush's press officer Scott McClellan was facing ever more insistent questions about Rove's involvement. On September 16, McClellan said that "it was ridiculous" to suggest Rove was the leaker. On the morning of September 29, McClellan announced that "the President knows Rove is not involved." From that date to October 8, when Rove was interviewed, Bush and McClellan were specifically questioned about Rove's possible role on ten separate occasions. On October 7, Rove and other White House staffers were required to provide investigators with all documents relating to any contacts they had had with reporters about Joseph Wilson, his trip to Niger, or his wife, Valerie Wilson.

As has now been widely reported, when Karl Rove spoke to FBI agents, he specifically told them that he had not spoken to any reporters about Joseph Wilson's wife before Novak's article appeared.

Given the almost seamless press coverage of the leak during the preceding three months, the time and effort that the White House was devoting to the issue, as well as the intensifying focus on whether he himself had leaked the information, it is impossible to believe that, on October 8, Karl Rove -- known for his brilliance, attention to detail, and legendary memory -- did not remember those two conversations with reporters about Valerie Wilson. If Rove told the FBI agents otherwise, it was surely a deliberate lie.

According to reports, Rove then added that he had first heard about Valerie Wilson from a reporter, though he did not remember which reporter or when he heard it. He also said that he had enlisted the aid of the Republican National Committee and conservative news agencies among other groups to spread disparaging information about Joseph Wilson and his wife, but only after Novak's article appeared.

Rove's elaboration not only compounded his initial lie but also illuminated the world of politics that he has been incapable of leaving behind -- a world that collides head-on with the one Patrick Fitzgerald inhabits, where politics have no place and where laws, and the highest standards of public service, prevail.

Despite his measured words, Fitzgerald revealed much about his worldview in the press conference in which he announced Libby's indictment. He said that the investigation was serious because the disclosure of classified information about a CIA officer could jeopardize national security. But equally serious -- and he repeated this more than once -- was the betrayal of government employees by their own officials. Anyone who has worked as a federal prosecutor for two decades, as has Fitzgerald, has also worked closely, often late and long hours, with law enforcement agents, so it is not surprising perhaps that when asked about the damage caused by the leak, Fitzgerald offered the following:

"I can say that for the people who work at the CIA and work at other places, they have to expect that when they do their jobs that classified information will be protected. And they have to expect that when they do their job, that information about whether or not they are affiliated with the CIA will be protected. And they run a risk when they work for the CIA that something bad could happen to them, but they have to make sure that they don't run the risk that something bad is going to happen to them from something done by their own fellow employees."

Later in the press conference, he said simply, "All I can do is make sure that myself and our team follow the rules."

Fitzgerald's world is far removed from the world of expediency and personal advantage in which Karl Rove operates. In his carefully crafted statements during the FBI interview on October 8, Rove indicated an obvious belief that he could get away with spreading information about government employees for political purposes as long as someone else had revealed that information first, regardless of whether or not the information was disparaging or classified. He did not appear to be concerned with where the information came from, or even whether it was true.

Although it is astounding that Rove would blatantly describe such a despicable ethos (if you can call it that), it should not have been unexpected. In the world of campaign politics that Rove has so long inhabited, smears and personal attacks are designed to seem as if they were spontaneously generated. They can then wander around, undirected, until they finally curl up in America's living rooms like so many mysterious, uninvited guests. These intruders may be rude and destructive, but no one is supposed to be able to get rid of them, in part because no one is supposed to be able to sort out or pinpoint how they got there in the first place. Thus, although Karl Rove has lurked in the background of an unprecedented number of whisper and smear campaigns -- that, for instance, John McCain had an illegitimate child (a rumor spread during the Republican primaries that preceded the 2000 election), or that former Texas Governor Ann Richards was a lesbian (a persistent rumor that was spread during Bush's Texas gubernatorial campaign) -- he has never been held accountable. And that is a state of affairs to which Rove became accustomed.

Rove has escaped responsibility for his sneaky campaign tricks because the candidates for whom he has worked -- most prominently, George Bush -- have had a stunning ability to accept, unquestioningly, the miraculous appearance of information that takes down their opponents. They had no problem about endorsing brazen dishonesty or the least interest in ferreting out bad actors in their camps. At the same time, opposing candidates have had neither the resources, nor the time to fully investigate the attacks before plummeting in the polls. Afterwards, of course, it was already far too late.

Unlike Rove's former adversaries in the political world, however, Fitzgerald has both the time and investigative resources. When Fitzgerald was appointed special prosecutor, all the known facts on the outing of Valerie Wilson indicated that government officials had broken the rules, if not the law. It's no surprise then that Fitzgerald has pursued the matter vigorously; nor should it be a surprise that Rove's statement to the FBI on October 8 would have raised some obvious red flags and caused Fitzgerald to become skeptical. Rove deliberately omitted key information about conversations with reporters that he could not possibly have forgotten; he claimed to have heard classified government information only from a reporter -- despite the fact that he himself was one of the highest government officials in the nation; and then he admitted that he had no qualms about enlisting surrogates to betray government employees in order to achieve political gain.

Rove's statement raised more questions than answers. It also opened a window into the world of a President's key adviser who never left campaign mode and who had never before been tripped up, no matter what he did. Such a man would be quite unprepared for an investigator like Fitzgerald who operates under a very different timetable and in a world ordered by radically different rules.

Now that Rove's statement has been shown to be so obviously false, it would be most surprising if when his world and Fitzgerald's collide, the result isn't a political earthquake. The moment an earthquake arrives remains impossible to predict, but it would be surprising if, in the CIA leak case, the impact of a Rove indictment did not cause massive aftershocks.

Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in the Nation Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon. She writes regularly for Tomdispatch. She may be contacted at ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net.