FRENCH RAID PIRATE SHIP

Post-Passover: Arabs Threaten, Police Ban Jews from Temple Mt.
by Hillel Fendel APR 16,09

(IsraelNN.com) The police restricted the Temple Mount to Muslims – and then closed it completely to Jews, citing security warnings. Nationalist MKs protest.A surrender to terrorism and yet another blow to Jews' rights to worship freely in the Land of Israel.With these and other words, MKs Uri Ariel and Aryeh Eldad of the National Union party attacked the police decision to close the Temple Mount to Jewish worshipers and visitors on Thursday, the day after the week-long Passover holiday.The Temple Mount – the locale of the Holy Temples and the place where Abraham went to sacrifice his son Isaac in fulfillment of G-d’s command – is the most sacred site in the world for the Jewish People. This past week saw much vibrant Jewish activity on the Mount, including the once-every-28-years Blessing of the Sun last Wednesday, and hundreds of visitors who ascended daily to the site in purity – i.e., after immersing in a ritual bath and following the other prescribed Jewish-legal precautions for visiting the holy site. In addition, on Tuesday, just before the beginning of the last day of the holiday, dozens of Jews prayed the afternoon service outside the Shalshelet Gate, just as they left the Mount.Today (Thursday), many Chabad Lubavitch members planned to visit the holy site and hold a Hak’hel commemoration, in memory of the Biblical command to gather the entire nation at the Holy Temple following the Shemitta year.

Moslems Protest and Threaten, Jews Banned
However, these plans were nipped in the bud by a sudden decision by national and city police to ban Jews from entering the Temple Mount today. The reason: Intelligence warnings of a possible attack by Muslim terrorists. Prior to the decision, some 200 Islamic Movement extremists protested in the Old City of Jerusalem, complaining that right-wing Jews planned to take over the Temple Mount. A heavy police presence was on hand.I certainly understand the police’s concern for public safety, MK Ariel said, and I assume that the decision [to close the Mount to Jews] was made based on trustworthy information. Even so, the decision is a grave one, and represents a surrender to terrorism.Instead of sending signals to the terrorists that we are afraid, Ariel said, and instead of preventing the citizens from waging their normal lives, the police and security forces should back up their citizens, pursue the terrorists, and give a strong message of determination and unwillingness to concede to terrorism.MK Ariel had a message for Public Security Minister Yitzchak Aharonovitch, of the hawkish Yisrael Beiteinu party: Every time there is a warning or terrorist threat, the policy towards terrorists and their supporters must be made harsher.

MK Eldad
MK Aryeh Eldad said the decision to close the Temple Mount to Jews is a surrender to Muslims who wish, via threats of violence and terrorism, to prevent Jews from actualizing their rights on the Mount.Eldad said that when the Knesset’s summer session begins, I will convene a meeting of all the Knesset Members who are loyal to the Temple Mount, to discuss the demands we will make of the government regarding freedom of worship at the holy site.

Lieberman: Traditional Approach to Israel-PA Talks is Flawed
by Maayana Miskin APR 16,09

(IsraelNN.com) Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman met Thursday with United States envoy George Mitchell for the first time since taking office. Lieberman warned Mitchell that the current approach to Israel-Palestinian Authority negotiations has failed to yield solutions, and that a new approach will be necessary.Previous Israeli leaders have been willing to make major concessions to the PA, but have received nothing in return, he said. The concessions Israel has made unilaterally, such as giving up Gaza, have not improved Israel's security, he added, but instead have led to conflicts such as the Cast Lead counterterrorism operation there.In order to support peace, the international community must respect Israel's need for security and to maintain its Jewish nature, Lieberman said.Mitchell told Lieberman that the U.S. supports a two-state solution that would create a PA-led Arab state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Mitchell made similar statements in a meeting with President Shimon Peres.Mitchell praised his meeting with Lieberman as “candid,” and said the two discussed the history of Israel-PA negotiations as well as options for the future.

EARTH DESTROYED WITH THE EARTH

GENESIS 6:11-13
11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.(WORLD TERRORISM,MURDERS)
12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence (TERRORISM) through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

EARTHQUAKES

MATTHEW 24:7-8
7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.
8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.

MARK 13:8
8 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom:(ETHNIC GROUP AGAINST ETHNIC GROUP) and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.

LUKE 21:11
11 And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.

Papua New Guinea rocked by strong quake: USGS APR 15,09

SYDNEY (AFP) – A quake with a magnitude of 6.0 struck the remote Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville Thursday, the US Geological Survey said, but there were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.The quake hit at 10.43am local time (0043 GMT) 153 kilometres (95 miles) west-southwest of Arawa, in central Bougainville, at a depth of 44 kilometres, the USGS said.At this stage no information has been received of any damage or tsunamis, that sort of thing,said local seismologist Lawrence Anton.

I don't think we would be expecting anything serious like a tsunami or big damage, Anton told AFP.The tremor was a typical interaction of the Solomon plate and the Pacific plate, he added.Papua New Guinea sits on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, where continental plates meet. The region is frequently rocked by earthquakes.

FAMINE

REVELATION 6:5-6
5 And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.
6 And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.(A DAYS WAGES FOR A LOAF OF BREAD)

FAMINE

MATTHEW 24:7-8
7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.
8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.

MARK 13:8
8 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.

LUKE 21:11
11 And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.

THE FAMINE AND INFLATION IS STARTING TO KICK IN WERE I LIVE LAST MONTH I PAYED 59 CENTS FOR NO NAME TOMATO SOUP,I JUST GOT 20 MORE CANS TODAY AND PAYED 89 CENTS A CAN A RISE OF 30 CENTS IN A MONTH,LOOKOUT WORLD LIKE THE BIBLE SAYS PRICES WILL BE SO EXPENSIVE IT WILL BE A DAYS WAGES FOR A LOAF OF BREAD.

Drought threatens Garden of Eden marshes in Iraq By HADI MIZBAN, Associated Press Writer – Wed Apr 15, 9:59 am ET

HOR AL-HAMMAR, Iraq – A severe drought is threatening Iraq's southern marshes — the traditional site of the biblical Garden of Eden — just as the region was recovering from Saddam Hussein's draining of its lakes and swamps to punish a political rebellion.Marshes that were coming back to life a few years ago with U.N. help are again little more than vast expanses of cracked earth. The area's thousands of inhabitants, known as Marsh Arabs, are victims of the debilitating drought that has ravaged much of Iraq and neighboring countries the last two years.I have no work. Our livestock have died, our children have left school because we don't have money to buy them clothes,said fisherman Yasir Razaq. He spoke in front of his wooden boat, which sat on a dried-up lake bed in the Hor al-Hammar marsh near Nasiriyah, 200 miles south of Baghdad.Before when there was fishing, we could get money for children's clothes, he said.Now we have lost everything and our situation is miserable.The Marsh Arab culture existed for more than 5,000 years in the 8,000 square miles of wetlands fed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The marshes boasted hundreds of species of birds and fish, and periodic flooding created fertile farm lands.The flooded, flat plain is said to have played an important role in the development of an agriculture-based culture that helped raise civilization to new heights. Some biblical scholars identified the vast marshes — the most extensive wetlands in the Middle East — as the site of the fabled Garden of Eden.But after the 1991 Gulf War, the marshes became a casualty of Iraq's religiously based politics.Saddam, a Sunni Muslim, considered the thousands of mostly Shiite Marsh Arabs to be disloyal — first in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and more seriously when Shiites in southern Iraq rose up against his regime after a U.S.-led coalition forced the Iraqi army out of Kuwait.Many Shiite rebels hid among the Marsh Arabs in the forests of reeds and myriad of lakes. To punish them, Saddam built a massive network of dams and earthen walls to divert water and dry the marshes.

The effect was devastating.

By the time Saddam was overthrown in 2003, the marshes had shrunk by 90 percent from their size in the 1970s, when they had covered nearly 3,500 square miles — larger than Delaware.Many experts direly predicted that the marshes might disappear entirely by 2008.The United Nations launched an $11 million project to restore the marshes, including removing some of the barriers that were keeping water from flowing into the area.And by 2006, more than half the original marshlands had successfully flooded.

Our ministry right from beginning ... started considering the restoration of the marshes area to be our priority,said Iraqi Water Resources Minister Abdul-Latif Jamal Rasheed, adding that the effort had achieved some success.The marsh restoration programs depend on adequate water flow in the Tigris and the Euphrates, the two rivers that gave Iraq its ancient name of Mesopotamia — Greek for land between the rivers.But the recent drought has caused the levels of those two rivers to fall.

Iraq's winter ended without adequate rain for a second year in a row. Overall, the rainfall for the last two years has been only about 30 to 40 percent of normal levels_ not only in Iraq but in Syria and southeastern Turkey to the north, where the great rivers begin. By the time the rivers meander through Iraq down to its southern marshes, much of the water has already been diverted into canals to irrigate parched farm fields. Last month, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization and the Iraqi government announced a new $47 million program last month to restore the marshes, focusing on the southern provinces of Maysan, Dhi Qar and Basra. But the program's Iraq director, Dr. Fadel el-Zubi, expressed doubt that the marshes can be fully restored without a break in the drought. Also needed are new water-sharing agreements among countries in the region including Syria and Iran to give Iraq more access to water, he said. There is much less water coming from neighboring countries, he said. So the amount of water going to the marshlands will be less.Much of the program is aimed at improving the lives of Marsh Arabs, who pursue a life of fishing and foraging that has not changed substantially for thousands of years. Among other things, the program will include restocking the marshes with fish capable of surviving in areas where low water levels have raised the salt content, el-Zubi said.

He said the program would also help people in the region replenish their livestock, mostly sheep and water buffalo. The main goal is to restore the maximum that you can within the coming five years and to enable the marshland people to resume farming, livestock production and so on,he said. Even with the drought, the outlook for the marshes is better than a decade ago. But that means little to many of the Marsh Arabs.We hoped the new government might do something,said a fisherman who gave his name only as Mohammed because he feared criticizing the government publicly. But it's still the same. This is the second time that the water has been drained away.
Associated Press writers Kim Gamel and Sinan Salaheddin in Baghdad contributed to this report.

Obama's Mideast envoy meets new Israeli leaders By STEVE WEIZMAN, Associated Press Writer – Wed Apr 15, 3:31 pm ET

JERUSALEM – President Barack Obama's Mideast envoy began a new round of diplomacy Wednesday aimed at bridging the growing divide between a right-wing Israeli government and a weak Palestinian leadership.His first challenge will be a series of meetings with a new Israeli government that is seemingly at odds with the Obama administration over the basic outlines for Israeli-Palestinian peace.U.S. envoy George Mitchell, on a weeklong regional tour, said on an earlier stop in Algeria on Tuesday that the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel is the only way to peace.On Thursday, Mitchell will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has not endorsed Palestinian statehood and has yet to unveil his government's policy on peace efforts. He will also talk with Netanyahu's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who has said pledges made by the previous Israeli administration to work for Palestinian independence are no longer relevant.He met with Defense Minister Ehud Barak at his Tel Aviv home for a little over an hour on Wednesday evening. A statement from Barak's office said he told Mitchell it was possible and necessary (for Israel and the U.S.) to coordinate and understand one another regarding all the current issues.Promising a vigorous push for Israel-Palestinian peace, Mitchell made his first Mideast foray in January, just a week after Obama took office. He made a second visit with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton a month later.Since then, a general election that strengthened hawks and the religious Jewish right put Netanyahu at the head of a governing alliance softened only slightly by the inclusion of Barak's battered Labor Party, beaten into fourth place in the election.

Mitchell did not speak on his arrival Wednesday.

In addition to Netanyahu and Lieberman, he was expected to meet with opposition leader and former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and President Shimon Peres.On Friday he is scheduled to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in the West Bank. Their government, headed by Abbas' Fatah movement, is in control only of the West Bank because their rivals in the militant Hamas group seized control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007. Efforts to reconcile those factions have so far failed, adding a serious obstacle to peace efforts.Speaking to businessmen on Wednesday, Fayyad said Netanyahu's stated preference for concentrating on Palestinian economic growth for now, while putting statehood talks aside for some point in the future, would not bring peace.If there is to be any two-state solution to speak of, the Israeli government must take immediate and bold steps toward ending its colonization and occupation of Palestinian territory,Fayyad said.Visiting Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos said after meeting Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki in Ramallah that the two-state model remains the only option.Moratinos said he too would meet Netanyahu and Lieberman on Thursday, seeking to learn their intentions.I want to listen to them,he told reporters.The Israeli government is now evaluating its political relationships with the Palestinian government and the international community.Associated Press writer Dalia Nammari contributed to this report from Ramallah, West Bank.

Celente Calls for Revolution as the Only Solution
The Yonkers Tribune April 15, 2009

The Tea Parties and Tax Protests sprouting across the nation, which we had predicted, are harbingers of revolution,said Gerald Celente, Director of The Trends Research Institute.But they are not enough. Much stronger and directed action is required. Our call for Revolution will galvanize the people, destroy the corrupt ruling systems, and produce a prosperous and more just nation.Gerald Celente.

The Revolution Celente proposes is unique in concept and bold in execution. It is about a lot more than just taxation without representation.Nothing short of total repudiation of our entrenched systems can rescue America,said Celente.We are under the control of a two-headed, one party political system.Wall Street controls our financial lives; the media manipulates our minds.These systems cannot be changed from within. There is no alternative.Without a revolution, these institutions will bankrupt the country, keep fighting failed wars, start new ones, and hold us in perpetual intellectual subjugation.The country is restless, and ripe for radical reform.There is no doubt protests will proliferate and intensify.In response, the government will call out the troops and bring in the police.They will use the Patriot Act to silence, detain, harass, persecute and prosecute groups and individuals exercising their Constitutional rights.But Celente’s Revolution need not degenerate into violence or open warfare.

Intellectual Revolution

I am calling for an Intellectual Revolution. I ask American citizens to free their minds from the tyranny of Dumb Think.This is a revolution about thinking - not manning the barricades.It’s about brain power - not brute force.For society to survive and grow, it must wake up and grow up.Americans must acknowledge what their opinions are based on, who they listen to … and why.What are America’s prime information sources? CNN, The most trusted name in news? Fox, Fair and balanced?

CNBC, First in Business Worldwide? The New York Times, All the news that’s fit to print? Who do the people listen to? A closed circuit of familiar faces guaranteed to take predictable positions.Authorities on nothing, yet pronouncing upon everything; a cadre of media aristocrats,pretending they’re the people’s voice.Bill O’Reilly, Steven Colbert, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, Sean Hannity, Jon Stewart, Chris Matthews, Jim Cramer, Joe Scarborough, Anderson Cooper, Bill Maher.TV tough guys, broadcast big mouths and Beltway blowhards have now been joined by featherweight comics throwing powder puff punches at sitting targets.This new addition to the critical debate is celebrated by the world’s leading financial newspaper: Wall Street Riveted by Comedy Clash.

Financial Times, 13 March 2009

A showdown between a comedian who has become one of America’s most challenging commentators and a news commentator known for his comedic antics has shown the brightest spotlight on the media’s market coverage since the financial crisis began.

On Thursday night, two cable television celebrities squared off as Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show … on Comedy Central … confronted Jim Cramer … star of CNBC’s Mad Money programme.Without a hint of irony, FT bestows the title of highest American intellectual common denominator upon a clown.A pencil throwing, screaming, wryly grimacing professional comedian has become one of America’s most challenging commentators? Wall Street riveted by comedy clash? The brightest spotlight on the media’s market coverage? With the world financial markets in collapse, this rivets Wall Street? Nearly two years into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, this shines as the brightest spotlight? From Wall Street, comedy moves to the White House. President Obama made history using comic Jay Leno’s Tonight Show as a platform to peddle his policies.World shaping decisions are packaged in sound bites and pitched by the nation’s Showman-in-Chief. There is no time or place for debate or discussion. It’s all entertainment.The Intellectual Revolution must be waged on the battlefield of the mind,said Celente.Americans are doomed unless they kick the junk news habit, deprogram themselves from celebrity worship, refuse to blindly follow political leaders and question all ideological dogmas … especially their own.For the revolution to succeed, people must repudiate the one-headed, two party system, and learn to think for themselves,said Celente.While the corporate-owned mainstream media and the government still control the broad avenues of news and information, only willing and lazy minds need be held hostage to it. The Internet world is awash in data, facts, analyses and opinions (independent and mainstream) for all to access and assess.Think for Yourself.The Intellectual Revolution has begun.

Trend Call-to-Action:

What can you do? Participating in an April 15th tax protest may be your cup of tea. Pester your politicians. Make your voice heard, your discontent felt and your solutions known. Band with others who share similar objectives and common goals.

Medicine Hat, Alta., to stand in as Kandahar for Canadian troops in training Tuesday, 14 April 2009

MEDICINE HAT, Alta. - Canada's sunniest city, Medicine Hat, will stand in this spring for dusty, dangerous Kandahar as a new battle group of troops trains for duty in Afghanistan.The community of 61,000 is going to allow more than 800 soldiers to practise convoys and patrols on its streets as well as how to respond to simulated roadside bomb explosions.Some troops will act as Taliban insurgents as the units get experience on what it is like to operate in a busy urban setting, Col. Andre Corbould, commander of 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group, said Tuesday.We are going to make it as realistic as we possibly can,Corbould said. We want to have them respond to incidents within the city like they will do in Afghanistan.Most of the troops involved in the training will be serving with the Provincial Reconstruction Team based in Kandahar City.Columns of LAV IIIs and other armoured vehicles will weave their way through Medicine Hat traffic starting later this month and into May, he said.Troops will practise setting up security cordons. There will also be medical evacuations of simulated injured soldiers and civilians. Some of the troops will also practise setting up make shift classrooms and delivering other humanitarian aid.

Soldiers will also learn what it is like to perform their different tasks under the eyes of the public. The streets of Kandahar City are often filled with bustling crowds.Canadian troops heading to Afghanistan have conducted similar training on isolated bases and in other communities before, but on a smaller scale.Medicine Hat Mayor Norm Boucher said he is happy to allow the soldiers to use the city as a training ground.Boucher, a former RCMP officer who served on peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Kosovo, said he likes the idea of people in the city seeing first-hand the military doing the jobs they will perform in Kandahar.We owe it to them to ask,what do you do?,he said.I think it is about time that citizens see exactly how the military contributes. Where does the money go? We are going to see part of that here.

The troops that will train in Medicine Hat are part of a larger force of more than 3,000 soldiers who are taking part in live-fire exercises at nearby Canadian Forces Base Suffield.The battle group that is to leave for Afghanistan in September includes infantry, armour, combat engineers and medics from Edmonton as well as an artillery unit from Shilo, Man., and reconnaissance troops from Petawawa, Ont.-By John Cotter in Edmonton.

PDF OTHER LINKS
http://www.infowars.com/federal-authority-over-the-internet-the-cybersecurity-act-of-2009/

Federal Authority Over the Internet? The Cybersecurity Act of 2009
Jennifer Granick The Electronic Frontier Foundation April 15, 2009

There’s a new bill working its way through Congress that is cause for some alarm: the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 ( PDF summary here), introduced by Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME). The bill as it exists now risks giving the federal government unprecedented power over the Internet without necessarily improving security in the ways that matter most. It should be opposed or radically amended.

Essentially, the Act would federalize critical infrastructure security. Since many of our critical infrastructure systems (banks, telecommunications, energy) are in the hands of the private sector, the bill would create a major shift of power away from users and companies to the federal government. This is a potentially dangerous approach that favors the dramatic over the sober response.One proposed provision gives the President unfettered authority to shut down Internet traffic in an emergency and disconnect critical infrastructure systems on national security grounds goes too far. Certainly there are times when a network owner must block harmful traffic, but the bill gives no guidance on when or how the President could responsibly pull the kill switch on privately-owned and operated networks.

Furthermore, the bill contains a particularly dangerous provision that could cripple privacy and security in one fell swoop:The Secretary of Commerce— shall have access to all relevant data concerning (critical infrastructure) networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.In other words, the bill would give the Commerce Department absolute, non-emergency access to all relevant data without any privacy safeguards like standards or judicial review. The broad scope of this provision could eviscerate statutory protections for private information, such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Privacy Protection Act, or financial privacy regulations. Even worse, it isn’t clear whether this provision would require systems to be designed to enable access, essentially a back door for the Secretary of Commerce that would also establish a primrose path for any bad guy to merrily skip down as well. If the drafters meant to create a clearinghouse for system vulnerability information along the lines of a US/CERT mailing list, that could be useful, but that’s not what the bill’s current language does.A privacy threat still in the cocoon is the provision mandating a study of the feasibility of an identity management and authentication program with just a nod to appropriate civil liberties and privacy protections.There’s reason to fear that this type of study is just a precursor to proposals to limit online anonymity. But anonymity isn’t inherently a security problem. What’s secure depends on the goals of the system. Do you need authentication, accountability, confidentiality, data integrity? Each goal suggests a different security architecture, some totally compatible with anonymity, privacy and civil liberties. In other words, no one identity management and authentication program is appropriate for all internet uses.

Whether the bill is amended or rejected, the question remains what kind of actions would help cybersecurity, and what role the federal government has to play. As security expert Bruce Schneier has pointed out, the true causes of government cyber-insecurity are rather mundane:GAO reports indicate that government problems include insufficient access controls, a lack of encryption where necessary, poor network management, failure to install patches, inadequate audit procedures, and incomplete or ineffective information security programs. The Cybersecurity Act is an example of the kind of dramatic proposal that doesn’t address the real problems of security, and can actually make matters worse by weakening existing privacy safeguards – as opposed to simpler, practical measures that create real security by encouraging better computer hygiene. We’ll be watching this bill carefully to ensure that it doesn’t pass in its present form.

VAN JONES SOCIALIST ACTIVIST
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=95013

The Purpose of NATO Is to Prepare for War
From the desk of Thomas Landen on Tue, 2009-04-14 08:37

The new enemy of the West is ideological Islam. If NATO wants to be a useful instrument in defending the West against this enemy it needs to accept a new member state – Israel – and stop groveling to Turkey.Last week, Bernard Kouchner, the powerful Minister of Foreign Affairs of France, announced that he is no longer in favor of admitting Turkey to the European Union. Mr. Kouchner changed his mind, he said, at the recent NATO summit in Strasbourg on April 4th. There, Ankara threatened to veto the appointment of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish Prime Minister, as NATO’s new Secretary-General. The Turks objected to Mr. Rasmussen because in 2005 he defended the freedom of expression of Danish cartoonists who had depicted the Muslim prophet Muhammad.Turkey is governed by the AKP, a very popular Islamic party in Central and Eastern Anatolia. The AKP’s voters feel more strongly about the Islamic law which prohibits depicting the Muslim prophet than about basic Western values such as freedom of expression. These voters already feel hurt by the simple depiction of their prophet, which in Islam is blasphemy. The Turkish threats in Strasbourg jolted Mr. Kouchner into realizing what the future has in store for the European Union if Turkey becomes a member. I was very shocked by the pressure that was brought on us, Mr. Kouchner said.Turkey’s evolution in, let’s say, a more religious direction, towards a less robust secularism, worries me.

Turkey only dropped its veto against the Danish politician after US President Barack Obama brokered a compromise. Mr. Rasmussen is obliged to have a Turkish deputy and to issue some sort of apology to the Islamic world. Lo and behold, within a week Mr. Rasmussen rushed to Istanbul where he declared: I would never myself depict any religious figure, including the prophet Muhammad, in a way that could hurt other people’s feelings. […] During my tenure as the secretary general of NATO I will pay close attention to the religious and cultural sensibilities of the different communities that populate our increasingly pluralistic and globalized world.Prior to Mr. Rasmussen, President Obama himself had also traveled to Istanbul to declare that The United States is not at war with Islam and to express American support for Turkish EU membership. While Mr. Kouchner, a liberal European, was shocked by the behavior of the Turks in Strasbourg, Mr. Obama, a liberal American, clearly was not. He did not find it worrying in the least.If Turkey can be a member of NATO and send its troops to help protect and support its allies and its young men are put in their way, I don’t see why you should not also be allowed to sell apricots to Europe or have more freedom to travel,Mr. Obama told his AKP hosts in Istanbul.

Perhaps Mr. Obama does not realize that for ordinary Europeans the European Union is about more than selling apricots and tourism. Ordinary Europeans expect the EU to defend European identity. Unlike Mr. Obama, ordinary Europeans doubt whether Turkey is bound to Europe and shares Europe’s history and culture.The current wave of distrust of the EU by ordinary Europeans is caused to a large extent by their fear that the EU institutions in Brussels are pushing for Turkish EU membership. This would make Turkey the most populous of all EU member states, with the largest number of seats in the European Parliament, and turn the AKP into the most powerful political party in Europe. What this will lead to suddenly dawned on the secularist Mr. Kouchner in Strasbourg, but it had already been clear to many of his compatriots when they rejected the EU Constitution in a referendum in 2005. Indeed, one of the main reasons why the French rejected the Constitution were their concerns about Turkish accession to the EU.While perhaps Mr. Obama no longer considers America to be basically a Christian nation, polls in secularist Europe show that most ordinary citizens in Europe seem to consider the EU as basically a Christian club,thereby implicitly acknowledging that Europe’s history and culture was shaped by its Judeo-Christian heritage. According to a Eurobarometer survey, taken shortly after the 2005 referendum, opposition against Turkey’s entry to the EU runs as high as 80% in countries such as France and Germany.While Mr. Obama proclaims in Istanbul that The United States has been enriched by Muslim Americans,Europeans, who have seen a massive flow of Muslim immigration to their continent in the past decades, take an entirely different view. The Pew Center’s Global Attitude Polls indicate that citizens in EU countries with high percentages of Muslim immigrants adopt negative attitudes towards Muslims. These Europeans have noticed how their neighborhoods, cities and countries are losing their traditional European identity following the erosion of European values owing to the immigration of large numbers of Muslims with entirely different views of how people should behave and what liberties they should have.

We are not at war with Islam,Mr. Obama said in Istanbul. He seems to have forgotten that Europe and America were never at war with the Soviet Union either. Indeed, the purpose of NATO was to ensure peace and stability in Europe by maintaining a level of deterrent which refrained the Soviet Union from attacking NATO or one of its member states. NATO ensured that we were never at war with the Soviets by preparing itself for war against the Soviets. In doing so, NATO successfully preserved the freedoms of the West.

Turkey Out, Israel In

Today, ideological Islam has replaced Marxism as the main threat to the freedoms of the West. If sixty years after its foundation NATO wants to continue serving its purpose it needs to transform itself into an organization which can ensure that we will never be at war with Islam. NATO’s successful past shows that it can only serve this goal by preparing itself for war against Islam.If NATO wants to continue serving its goal it should stand strong against every attempt at intimidation by ideological Islam. Instead of giving in to AKP threats it should forcefully reject them. If this means that Turkey leaves the organization, so be it. NATO should have shown Turkey the door in Strasbourg instead of giving in to the whims of the AKP.NATO serves no purpose if it does not include all countries which, because they stand for basic Western values, are threatened by ideological Islam. Israel is in the frontline in this battle. NATO serves no purpose if it does not include Israel. An attack by ideological Islam on Israel should be considered an attack on the entire free world. Perceptive European politicians are aware of this. In a recent interview the Belgian politician Filip Dewinteradvocated the accession of Israel to NATO because NATO defends freedoms and democratic values characteristic of European civilization, and I have always said so and will repeat it again, that Israel is an outpost of the free West in Islam-occupied territory.Mr. Obama went to Istanbul to grovel at the feet of the AKP and speak out in favor of Turkey’s EU admission. Since America is not a member of the EU, however, EU affairs are none of Mr. Obama’s business. Ordinary Europeans are justifiably offended by Mr. Obama’s arrogance, which is an indication of the unilateral approach of the Obama White House when dealing with Europe. If Mr. Obama wants to serve the free world he should go to Istanbul to speak out in favor of Israel’s admission to NATO.

DOCTOR DOCTORIAN FROM ANGEL OF GOD
then the angel said, Financial crisis will come to Asia. I will shake the world.

JAMES 5:1-3
1 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.
3 Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.

REVELATION 18:10,17,19
10 Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.
17 For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off,
19 And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.

EZEKIEL 7:19
19 They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be removed: their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the LORD: they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels: because it is the stumblingblock of their iniquity.

REVELATION 13:16-18
16 And he(FALSE POPE) causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:(CHIP IMPLANT)
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.(6-6-6) A NUMBER SYSTEM

WORLD MARKET RESULTS
http://money.cnn.com/data/world_markets/

HALF HOUR DOW RESULTS THU APR 16,2009

09:30 AM +15.20
10:00 AM -4.62
10:30 AM +3.90
11:00 AM -56.76
11:30 AM -29.08
12:00 PM -10.68
12:30 PM -14.90
01:00 PM +20.07
01:30 PM +24.24
02:00 PM +6.18
02:30 PM +34.23
03:00 PM +94.22
03:30 PM +119.38
04:00 PM +95.81 8125.43

S&P 500 865.30 +13.24

NASDAQ 1670.44 +43.64

GOLD 875.00 -18.50

OIL 50.02 +0.76

TSE 300 9336.09 +89.98

CDNX 982.13 -5.81

S&P/TSX/60 567.17 +5.22

MORNING,NEWS,STATS
GOLD AT OPEN TODAY $890.20.OIL AT OPEN TODAY $49.91.
Dow +30 points at 4 minutes of trading today.
Dow -67 points at low today so far.
Dow +45 points at high today so far.

YEAR TO DATE PERFORMANCE
Dow -8.51%
S&P -5.67%
Nasdaq +3.16%
TSX Advances 826,declines 667,unchanged 279,Volume 2,178,628,152.
TSX Venture Exchange Advances 408,Declines 376,Unchanged 345,Volume 236,412,642.

AFTERNOON,NEWS,STATS
Dow -67 points at low today so far.
Dow +120 points at high today so far.

DAY TODAY PERFORMANCE - 12:30PM STATS
NYSE Advances 2,215,declines 1,349,unchanged 114,New Highs 9,New Lows 43.
Volume 3,312,050,780.
NASDAQ Advances 1,456,declines 1,122,unchanged 149,New highs 15,New Lows 11.
Volume 981,230,866.
TSX Advances 732,declines 589,unchanged 281,Volume 1,186,980,872.
TSX Venture Exchange Advances 284,Declines 276,Unchanged 324,Volume 135,143,513.

WRAPUP,NEWS,STATS
Dow -67 points at low today so far.
Dow +139 points at high today so far.
Dow +1.19% today,Volume 359,453,586.
Nasdaq +2.68% today,Volume 2,147,483,648.
S&P +1.55% today,Volume N/A.

GOLD HOLDINGS(METRIC TONNES)

1-U.S.A 8,133.
2-Germany 3,412.
3-IMF 3,217.
4-France 2,508.
5-Italy 2,451
6-GLD 1,127

NOTICE THE EU RULES THE GOLD HOLDING 4 OF THE TOP 6 SPOTS.IN FACT 3 OF THE ORGINAL 6 NATIONS TO SIGN THE ROME TREATY ARE IN THE TOP 5 SPOTS.WHAT DOES THAT TELL YOU,THATS GOT BILDERBERG WRITTEN ALL OVER IT.

Poland continues drive towards euro
ANDREW WILLIS 15.04.2009 @ 18:18 CET

The Polish government is pressing ahead with its ambitious plans to adopt the euro by 1 January 2012 as fears that the move would be premature under the current environment appear to be subsiding.To join the currency shared by 16 of the EU's 27 member states, Poland would first have to first enter a two-year antechamber known as Exchange Rate Mechanism II, which allows only limited currency fluctuations between - in this case - the zloty and the euro. The Polish government hopes to enter ERM-II before the end of June. I think the government will join ERM-II, provided the [zloty's] situation stabilises on the financial markets, Polish Socialist MEP Dariusz Rosati, who sits on the European Parliament's economy committee, told EUObserver on Wednesday (15 April), adding that the government will likely wait until the last moment before making the decision. This view is shared by Agata Urbanska, an economist with ING Bank specialising in emerging Europe. She feels that the worst of the currency volatility seen last August is over, in part thanks to Poland's ability to distinguish itself from other eastern European markets and especially from the Baltic states.The desire to further stabilise the county's currency appears the main motivation behind Tuesday's announcement by the Polish centre-right government of its intention to apply for a €15.5 billion ($20bn) credit line from the International Monetary Fund.From the very start, we have said zloty stability is one of the conditions for the ERM-II entry, Polish finance minister Jacek Rostowski told Polish radio on Wednesday.I hope it [zloty volatility] is behind us ... I think access to the IMF funds will significantly help us.

Speculative attack

EU treaties in theory allow for currency fluctuation of 15 per cent both above and below an agreed exchange rate once countries join ERM-II.In practice however, the European Central Bank usually stipulates a much narrower bandwidth, restricting currency depreciation to 2.25 per cent against the euro. Despite this, Mr Rosati feels there is little likelihood of Poland being forced to leave ERM-II if it does indeed join in June. The zloty is deeply undervalued right now, he says, making appreciation the more likely direction. The potential reasons for a forced departure from ERM-II however are not limited to natural currency fluctuations versus the euro.

In 1992, Britain was forced to leave the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (the predecessor to ERM-II), following a move by currency speculator George Soros in which he sold $10 billion worth of sterling as he predicted the currency would be forced to dip below the minimum level allowed under the ERM. His prediction proved to be correct, despite the British government's best efforts, which included raising interest rates to 15 per cent. Black Wednesday, as 16 September 1992 came to be known - the day that the UK was forced to withdraw the pound from the ERM, is estimated to have cost the British treasury £3.4 billion.Mr Rosati feels the Polish repetition of this event is unlikely. Our fundamentals are much stronger [than those of British economy in 1992], and the zloty is not over valued, as the pound was at that time.

Administration declines to cite China on currency By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer APR 15,09

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration on Wednesday declined to cite China as a country that is manipulating its currency to gain unfair trade advantages.The finding in a semiannual Treasury Department report comes after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said during his Senate confirmation hearings that President Barack Obama believed China was manipulating its currency.Geithner's comments in January came in response to questions from the Senate Finance Committee and raised expectations that the new administration would take a tougher line in dealing with China than the Bush administration.Geithner cited Obama's support as a senator of legislation that would have authorized a tougher enforcement process for currency manipulators.Geithner said in January that Obama believed the process needed to be overhauled so that countries like China cannot continue to get a free pass for undermining fair trade principles.

However, in a statement accompanying the new report, Geithner cited a number of actions China has taken in recent months to enhance exchange rate flexibility.Those actions included allowing its currency, the yuan, to rise in value against a group of currencies including the dollar by 16.6 percent between the end of last June and the beginning of February. However, the currency report noted that the yuan's value against the dollar has been essentially flat during the same period.American manufacturers contend that the undervalued Chinese currency is the biggest cause for the huge trade deficit the U.S. runs with China. They argue that the yuan is undervalued by between 20 and 40 percent against the dollar.John Engler, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, called the action by the administration a missed opportunity to address the problem China's undervauled currency poses for the U.S. and global economy.Alan Tonelson, an official with the U.S Business & Industry Council, which represents 1,900 mainly family-owned U.S. manufacturing companies, said the failure to cite China as a currency manipulator represented a broken campaign promise on Obama's part.His decision not to cite China gives Beijing a green light to keep cheating America's domestic manufacturers and their employees out of earnings and jobs,Tonelson said.Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., one of the leaders in the Senate pushing for a tough stance with China, said he understood that the current global economic turmoil made it difficult to cite China at the present time. He said he planned to reintroduce legislation on the issue in Congress.Geithner said that China had played a constructive role in the current global economic downturn, including advancing an economic stimulus package that he said was second in size only to the program the U.S. is pursuing.Geithner's statement did not mention recent comments by Chinese officials concerning their worries about the projected increase in America's federal budget deficit, or a suggestion that dollar's position as the world's top reserve currency should be reconsidered.(This version CORRECTS that 16.6 percent rise in yuan is against a basket of currencies including the dollar)

Credit squeeze, price wars shut Canada tour operator Wed Apr 15, 4:23 pm ET

TORONTO (Reuters) – Canadian tour operator Conquest Vacations suddenly shut its doors on Tuesday, stranding as many as 2,000 travelers in what may augur a shakeup in an industry already beset by economic crisis.Toronto-based Conquest Vacations said on Internet sites and on telephone voice recordings the shutdown was immediate, and blamed price wars and a credit squeeze stemming from the global economic crunch for its demise after 37 years in service.Unfortunately this has been a result of overcapacity and price war among the major tour operators, unrealistic and unreasonable demands by the credit card processing companies, credit squeeze and economic turmoil in recent months making it impossible for companies like Conquest to continue in business even after weathering many storms over the past 37 years, Conquest said.The move was positive for rival Transat AT., whose stock was up 34 Canadian cents at C$9.44, and Macquarie Capital Markets Canada issued a note recommending clients purchase Transat stock.We believe today's news is the beginning of the restructuring of the Canadian tour operator industry,Macquarie said.Tour operators and airlines have grounded planes and cut capacity globally to adapt to slowing demand as the international economic crisis strains business-travel budgets and holiday spending.The industry has also been shaken by wildly fluctuating exchange rates and fuel prices that have varied by more than US$100 per barrel in the past year, especially for operators whose hedges backfired.We've been characterizing this as the year of the deal,said Stuart Morris, whose online travel retailer itravel2000 carried Conquest vacation packages.We know that the tour operators, the travel industry, has been living on very very thin margins, which is great for travelers, but not great if you're a tour operator.

He estimated that between 1,000 and 2,000 travelers to Mexico and the Caribbean had been stranded by Conquest Vacations' abrupt end to operations.There is too much capacity and pricing is overly aggressive, affecting every tour operator's profitability,Macquarie said. "Something has to give. Eventually industry capacity will have to be reduced to rationalize pricing.(Reporting by Pav Jordan; editing by Janet Guttsman)

The next global economic shock? By Milton Ezrati Milton Ezrati – Tue Apr 14, 5:00 am ET

New York – As American financial strains have at last begun to show some signs of healing, another risk from the European side of the ocean has become more evident. For some time now, America's friends and associates on the other side of the Atlantic have, as is their habit, enjoyed blaming all problems on America's risky ways. But of late, it has become clear that Europe's own financial wizards have opened their financial institutions to a potentially bigger problem: Eastern European and Asian debt. The losses could even surpass those of the subprime meltdown. Though at present the potential problems deserve the tag risk and not probability,investors need to remain alert to the situation.The problem for much of the emerging world is that the global economic downturn has severely hurt exports, their main – and in some cases, only – engine of economic growth. Take China. Its exports have fallen by about 17 percent, as have Singapore's. Others have fared a lot worse. South Korea's exports have plunged by 21 percent, and Taiwan's by 36 percent. Similar figures typify the situations elsewhere in Asia and in Eastern Europe. Not surprisingly, given the export-oriented growth model of these economies, overall economic growth has also turned sharply downward. Singapore's gross domestic product (GDP) declined 11.5 percent from a year ago, while South Korea's economic output sunk 4.2 percent. In the Ukraine, December industrial production registered a 26.6 percent decline from a year ago. Other nations, from the Czech Republic to Hungary to Russia, have experienced sharp contractions, too.

The problem for Western European finance is that it holds most of the international loans in these sinking economies. European banks, for instance, hold some 54 percent of the $1.4 trillion of foreign bank loans residing in the Asian emerging economies. (For perspective, American banks hold only 15 percent of such debt.) Of the $1.8 trillion of foreign bank loans in Eastern Europe, more than 70 percent resides in Western European banks.The economic difficulties in these regions are bound to pressure European finance, where, according to the International Monetary Fund, bank leverage exceeds that of American banking by 50 percent. It is hard to make American banks look prudent, but the Europeans seem to have managed.The aggressive nature of European lending has created a particularly difficult regulatory situation should circumstances require a rescue operation, as the American subprime excesses did in the United States. Because European banks are far more extended than American banks are, their governments and even the European Central Bank lack sufficient resources to replace lost capital, as the Federal Reserve and the Treasury are doing in the United States.In contrast to American banking, which holds assets equal to some 85 percent of US GDP, Eurozone bank assets in total amount to 330 percent of Eurozone GDP. What makes matters still more precarious, these aggregate figures look moderate when compared to the lending ratios of some individual Eurozone members. Irish banks, for instance, took on debt equal to almost 11 times their national GDP. Dutch banks took on debt equal to seven times their national GDP, and Belgian banks took on debt equal to four times their national GDP.The potentially troubled loans in Eastern Europe and Asia could amount to some 33 percent of Eurozone GDP, a far higher figure than subprime in the United States, which, in the worst calculated scenarios, amounts to some 8 percent of American GDP.So far, these borrowers, if they have not managed to remain entirely current on their obligations, have paid sufficiently well to avoid the troubles implicit in these comparisons. If, as expected, the American economic situation can stabilize in the second part of this year, and China can sustain an adequate growth rate as it reorients its economy toward a domestic growth engine, there is a good chance that European finance and, by implication, global finance, will avoid the dangers implicit in these great vulnerabilities. But still, for the time being, investors need to recognize the significant risks.

This vulnerability may also explain why the Europeans are so focused on regulation and have chosen to emphasize it above the kinds of fiscal stimulus that the Obama administration has pushed. On the one hand, they want to garner all the resources they have should the banking sector need them at some future date. On the other, the emphasis on regulations might well reflect an urgent need to prevent this from happening again.Milton Ezrati is senior economic strategist at Lord Abbett, a money management firm.

Afghan women attacked for protesting marriage law By HEIDI VOGT, Associated Press Writer – Wed Apr 15, 5:18 pm ET

KABUL – Dozens of young women braved crowds of bearded men screaming dogs! on Wednesday to protest an Afghan law that lets husbands demand sex from their wives. Some of the men picked up small stones and pelted the women.Slaves of the Christians! chanted the 800 or so counter-demonstrators, a mix of men and women. A line of female police officers locked hands to keep the groups apart.The warring protests highlight the explosive nature of the women's rights debate in Afghanistan. Both sides are girding for battle over the legislation, which has sparked an international uproar since being quietly signed into law last month.The law says a husband can demand sex with his wife every four days, unless she is ill or would be harmed by intercourse. It also regulates when and for what reasons a wife may leave her home without a male escort.Though the law would apply only to the country's Shiites, who make up less than 20 percent of Afghanistan's 30 million people, many fear its passage marks a return to Taliban-style oppression of women. The Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001, required women to wear all-covering burqas and banned them from leaving home unless accompanied by a male relative.Governments and rights groups around the world have condemned the legislation, and President Barack Obama has labeled it abhorrent.Afghan President Hamid Karzai has remanded the law to the Justice Department for review and put enforcement on hold.

A host of Afghan intellectuals, politicians and even a number of Cabinet ministers have come out against the law. But those who decry the legislation face quick criticism from conservative Muslim clerics and their followers, as Wednesday's protests showed.You are a dog! You are not a Shiite woman! one man shouted to a young woman in a head scarf.The woman, who held a banner reading We don't want Taliban law, replied quietly:This is my land and my people.The demonstrators chose a risky spot to hold their protest — in front of the mosque of the legislation's main backer — and were easily outnumbered by supporters of the law. They said many women had been stopped on their way to the protest.In the end, more women demonstrated in favor of the law than against it: A few hundred Shiite women marched with banners to join the angry men. They blamed foreigners for inciting the protests.We don't want foreigners interfering in our lives. They are the enemy of Afghanistan,said 24-year-old Mariam Sajadi.Sajadi is engaged to be married, and said she plans to ask her husband's permission to leave the house as put forth in the law. She said other articles — such as the one allowing husbands to demand sex — have been misinterpreted by Westerners prejudiced against Islam. She did not elaborate.On the other side of the shouting, Mehri Rezai, 32, urged her countrymen to reject the law.

This law treats women as if we were sheep,she said.

Both sides say they're defending their constitutional rights — but Afghanistan's constitution is unclear. It defers to Islamic law as the highest authority, but also guarantees equal rights for women.Abbas Noyan, a Shiite lawmaker who opposes the law, said he is hopeful it will be changed. But others are less sure, and even the country's minister of women's affairs, who is female, has declined to comment on the law.New York-based Human Rights Watch maintains that the judicial review ordered by Karzai is unlikely to be truly independent because those leading the process come from a conservative Shiite background.

EUROPEAN UNION ARMY

DANIEL 7:23-25
23 Thus he said, The fourth beast (EU,REVIVED ROME) shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth,(7TH WORLD EMPIRE) which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces.(TRADING BLOCKS)
24 And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings(10 NATIONS) that shall arise: and another shall rise after them;(#11 SPAIN) and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings.( BE HEAD OF 3 NATIONS)
25 And he (EU PRESIDENT) shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time.(3 1/2 YRS)

DANIEL 8:23-25
23 And in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full, a king (EU DICTATOR) of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences,(FROM THE OCCULT) shall stand up.
24 And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power:(SATANS POWER) and he shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper, and practise, and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people.
25 And through his policy also he shall cause craft to prosper in his hand; and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace shall destroy many: he shall also stand up against the Prince of princes;(JESUS) but he shall be broken without hand.

DANIEL 11:36-39
36 And the king (EU DICTATOR) shall do according to his will; and he shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak marvellous things against the God of gods, and shall prosper till the indignation be accomplished: for that that is determined shall be done.
37 Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers,(THIS EU DICTATOR IS JEWISH) nor the desire of women, nor regard any god: for he shall magnify himself above all.(CLAIM TO BE GOD)
38 But in his estate shall he honour the God of forces:(WAR) and a god whom his fathers knew not shall he honour with gold, and silver, and with precious stones, and pleasant things.
39 Thus shall he do in the most strong holds with a strange god,(DESTROY TERROR GROUPS) whom he shall acknowledge and increase with glory: and he shall cause them to rule over many,(HIS ARMY LEADERS) and shall divide the land for gain.

REVELATION 19:19
19 And I saw the beast,(EU LEADER) and the kings of the earth, and their armies, gathered together to make war against him that sat on the horse,(JESUS) and against his army.(THE RAPTURED CHRISTIANS)

French raid pirate ship, US seeks to freeze assets By ELIZABETH A. KENNEDY and TODD PITMAN, Associated Press Writers APR 15,09

MOMBASA, Kenya – The U.S. and its allies battled Somalia's pirates on two fronts Wednesday, with French forces seizing a bandit mother ship and Washington seeking to keep the marauders from their spoils. Another U.S. freighter headed to port with armed sailors aboard after pirates damaged it with gunshots and grenades.One pirate issued a new threat to slaughter Americans, and Tuesday's assault on a second U.S. cargo ship, the Liberty Sun, underscored the outlaws' ability to act with impunity despite international naval operations against them and mounting concern worldwide over how to end the escalating attacks off the Horn of Africa.Pirates bombarded the U.S.-flagged Liberty Sun with automatic weapons fire and rocket-propelled grenades, but its American crew of about 20 successfully blockaded themselves in the engine room and warded off the attack with evasive maneuvers.The ship, carrying food aid for hungry Africans — including Somalis — was damaged pretty badly on its bridge, a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record about the ship.Windows were blown out and the crew had to put out a small fire, the official said, but they were still able to navigate. By the time the USS Bainbridge arrived five hours later, the pirates were gone.Meanwhile, French naval forces launched an early-morning attack on a suspected pirate mother ship 550 miles east of Mombasa and seized 11 men, thwarting an attack on the Liberian cargo ship Safmarine Asia, the French Defense Ministry said. No one was injured.The ministry said the vessel was a larger ship that pirates use to allow their tiny skiffs to operate hundreds of miles off the coast.French Foreign Ministry spokesman Christophe Prazuck said a French helicopter in the area heard a distress call from the Safmarine Asia. He described the seized ship as a small, noncommercial vessel carrying fuel, water and food supplies.The 11 pirates, believed to be Somalis, were being held on the Nivose, a French frigate among the international fleet trying to protect shipping in the Gulf of Aden.France has been proactive against pirates for at least the past year, intervening to save three of its ships and spearheading a Europe-wide anti-piracy force called Atalanta. French politicians have sought to have other European countries take greater action against pirates.Three Somali pirates in the French city of Rennes faced judicial investigation after being captured in a hostage rescue Friday. Several other pirates also have been in French custody since last year.In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced new diplomatic efforts to freeze the pirates' assets and said the Obama administration will work with shippers and insurers to improve their defenses against pirates, part of a diplomatic initiative to thwart attacks on shipping.

These pirates are criminals, they are armed gangs on the sea. And those plotting attacks must be stopped,Clinton said at the State Department.Clinton did not call for military force, although she mentioned going after pirate bases in Somalia, as authorized by the U.N. several months ago.She said it may be possible to stop boat-building companies from doing business with the pirates.The measures outlined by Clinton are largely stopgap moves while the administration weighs more comprehensive diplomatic and military action.She acknowledged it will be hard to find the pirates' assets. But she wants the U.S. and others to explore ways to track and freeze pirate ransom money and other funds used in purchases of new boats, weapons and communications equipment.We have noticed that the pirates are buying more and more sophisticated equipment, they're buying faster and more capable vessels, they are clearly using their ransom money for their benefit — both personally and on behalf of their piracy,she said.We think we can begin to try and track and prevent that from happening.Clinton said the administration will also call for immediate meetings of an international counterpiracy task force to expand naval coordination. The U.S. plans to send an envoy to an April 23 conference on piracy in Brussels. The U.S. will also organize meetings with officials from Somalia's largely powerless transitional national government as well as regional leaders in its semiautonomous Puntland region to encourage them to do more to combat piracy. Maritime experts say military force alone cannot solve the problem because the pirates operate in an area so vast as to render the flotilla of international warships largely ineffective. And with ships legally unable to carry arms in many ports, the world has struggled to end the scourge. The Gulf of Aden, which links the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, is the shortest route from Asia to Europe. More than 20,000 ships cross the vital sea lane every year. It is becoming more dangerous by the day.

In 2003, there were only 21 attacks in these waters. In less than four months this year, there have been 79 attacks, compared with 111 for all of 2008, according to the International Maritime Bureau. Somali pirates are holding more than 280 foreign crewmen on 15 ships — at least 76 of those sailors captured in recent days. On Wednesday, pirates released the Greek-owned cargo ship Titan and Greek authorities said all 24 crewmen were in good health. The ship was hijacked March 19. The assault on the Liberty Sun delayed a reunion between freed American sea captain Richard Phillips and the 19 crewmen of the Maersk Alabama he helped save in an attempted hijacking last week. Phillips had planned to meet his crew in Mombasa and fly home with them Wednesday, but he was stuck on the Bainbridge when it was diverted to help the Liberty Sun.Both the Liberty Sun and the Bainbridge could arrive in Mombasa on Thursday, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press about the matter. The Alabama's crew left without him Wednesday, heading to Andrews Air Force Base, Md., on a chartered plane.

We are very happy to be going home,crewman William Rios of New York City said. But we are disappointed to not be reuniting with the captain in Mombasa. He is a very brave man.A pirate whose gang attacked the Liberty Sun claimed his group was targeting American ships and sailors. We will seek out the Americans, and if we capture them, we will slaughter them,said a 25-year-old pirate based in the Somali port of Harardhere who gave only his first name, Ismail. We will target their ships because we know their flags. Last night, an American-flagged ship escaped us by a whisker. We have showered them with rocket-propelled grenades,said Ismail, who did not take part in the Liberty Sun attack.Pitman reported from Nairobi. Associated Press writers contributing this report include Mohamed Olad Hassan in Mogadishu, Somalia; Tom Maliti in Mombasa; Michelle Faul and Malkhadir M. Muhumed in Nairobi; Eliane Engeler in Geneva; Jenny Barchfield in Paris and Pauline Jelinek in Washington.

THE EU WILL DEFEAT THE RUSSIANS-MUSLIMS,CHINESE IN THE FUTURE 3RD WORLD WAR WHEN THEY MARCH TO ISRAEL,NO WONDER THE BIBLE SAYS THE EU WILL HAVE A FIERCE ARMY TO GET THE JOB DONE.

DANIEL 11:40-44
40 And at the time of the end shall the king of the south push at him: and the king of the north shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over.
41 He shall enter also into the glorious land, and many countries shall be overthrown: but these shall escape out of his hand, even Edom, and Moab, and the chief of the children of Ammon.
42 He shall stretch forth his hand also upon the countries: and the land of Egypt shall not escape.
43 But he shall have power over the treasures of gold and of silver, and over all the precious things of Egypt: and the Libyans and the Ethiopians shall be at his steps.
44 But tidings out of the east and out of the north shall trouble him: therefore he shall go forth with great fury to destroy, and utterly to make away many.(FIERCE EU ARMY)

[Comment] What are EU battlegroups for if not to intervene in Congo?
PETER SAIN LEY BERRY 21.11.2008 @ 08:16 CET

EUOBSERVER / COMMENT - Whether apocryphal or not, it is said that Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712-86) - old Fritz as he came to be known - would urge on his columns of young soldiers with the exasperated cry Wollen Sie ehrmals leben? (Do you want to live for ever?).Were Frederick alive today he might want to say something similar to the European Army, or rather those wanting it to remain pristine and unused and not sent to the dangerous tumult in Africa's dark centre.The army is not, of course, either properly European, or even an army come to that. It remains a collection of soldiers from a few member states available for constituting battlegroups,which can then be dispatched swiftly to pursue tasks of peacemaking in the wider European interest. For some two years now, and in the teeth of opposition both inside and outside the union, the EU has proudly declared that it has these forces available to intervene where other such forces - for instance the UN or NATO - are unwilling or unable to act with the alacrity required. Small contingents have intervened here and there. But never has decisive force been deployed.In terms of capability to mount overseas operations, Britain and France stand head and shoulders above the rest of the union. The European Defence Force initiative came therefore primarily from Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac in one of their rare moments of accord. Now the potential exists for it to become one of the more significant European achievements of the time.

The dark heart of Africa

In recent days the renewed tragedy of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has slowly filtered through to the headlines. This is the former colony, the Belgian Congo, the size of Western Europe, on whose ivory and rubber much of Brussels is built. It is the country that Joseph Conrad called - and for good reason - the dark heart of Africa.A country where some 5 million have died as a result of war these past 10 years.Were the DRC to be moved to the Balkans or the Middle East - to anywhere, in fact, but Africa - our newspapers would not be big enough for the deaths, atrocities, hate, random violence, rape of the land, burnings, summary executions and lines of corpses.We should be screaming about the decimation of the mountain gorillas in the Virunga National Park, through which the militias roam, shooting everything that moves, including the wardens. The park is being burnt and its wildlife habitats destroyed to provide cooking charcoal for the swollen population of Goma, the regional capital on the shores of Lake Kivu, now bursting with a million souls.A train of human misery - a quarter of a million strong - has fled south towards the city in recent weeks away from the fighting instigated by the rebel Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda and from the even more insidious and frightening attacks of the so-called Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).The LRA have taken advantage of the turbulence to embark again on their murderous campaign of burning villages, shooting (or worse) the adult inhabitants and kidnapping the children who, drugged to the eyeballs, they force to become child soldiers and prostitutes.No surprise then that the UN reports that from an area of 10,000 square kilometres in the north-east of the DRC scarcely a single person remains.

The largest peacekeeping operation in the world

They flee this rich and beautiful land, built of a raft of valuable minerals that includes a third of the world's tin reserves. Hardly anywhere on earth has suffered more from what Robert Burns termed man's inhumanity to man.There is a savagery, a contempt for feeling, a primitive brutality which, like some curable but virulent disease, has no right to exist in these otherwise enlightened times. Violence towards women is particularly severe, with rape used regularly as a weapon of war. The accounts written by sober doctors in the hospitals of Goma are distressingly revolting. It is not surprising that the people run for safety leaving everything behind at the first sound of gunfire - which is how militias of no more than a few thousand can terrorise a whole land.Indeed, villagers are not safe from the troops of their own government who also rape and steal with impunity. Even the precious hospitals in Goma have been looted of medicine and equipment.The UN of course is already in the DRC. Its 17,000 strong force, MONUC, is the largest peacekeeping operation in the world - 6,000 of its troops are in Goma. But self-evidently the force has failed to protect the civilian population. That is not entirely its fault, as one of its generals, Bipin Rawat, has pointed out. It is something of a handicap to have your tanks painted a livid white. Terms of engagement also require similar advertisement of one's presence with the requirement to give warnings.Three thousand more UN troops have been agreed, but these are not expected to arrive quickly. Meanwhile, Europe has promised only an airlift and humanitarian supplies.

How should the EU react?

This is not enough. Although General Nkunda has just withdrawn his forces by 25 miles, as agreed with the UN's envoy, the former Nigerian President Obasanjo - he can advance again at will. Many believe it is only a matter of time before he takes Goma and that the the UN cannot stop him.So a desperate request has gone out from 44 civil organisations in the city - the nearest thing Goma has to regional government - for the EU to send a force now to guarantee their security. How should the EU react?

Left to herself there is little question that France would send troops - and Belgium too, the former colonial power. No doubt Germany could also be persuaded.Britain, however, is set strongly against any intervention. Its overstretched defence priorities lie elsewhere - in Iraq and Afghanistan. It fears another long commitment, another drain on the public purse at a time the government wishes only to boost the domestic economy. It argues that MONUC should simply send a greater part of its force to Goma and it is blocking any move to send a European force.Too bad. Europe has a duty - especially following the election of Barack Obama - to secure a different, more co-operative world. Europe should intervene in the DRC quickly and decisively. The battlegroups of the European Army are not there for show.Peter Sain ley Berry is an independent commentator on European affairs.

MUSLIM NATIONS

EZEKIEL 38:1-12
1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
2 Son of man, set thy face against Gog,(RULER) the land of Magog,(RUSSIA) the chief prince of Meshech(MOSCOW)and Tubal,(TOBOLSK) and prophesy against him,
3 And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech(MOSCOW) and Tubal:
4 And I will turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws,(GOD FORCES THE RUSSIA-MUSLIMS TO MARCH) and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed with all sorts of armour, even a great company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords:
5 Persia,(IRAN,IRAQ) Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:
6 Gomer,(GERMANY) and all his bands; the house of Togarmah (TURKEY)of the north quarters, and all his bands:(SUDAN,AFRICA) and many people with thee.
7 Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy company that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them.
8 After many days thou shalt be visited: in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword, and is gathered out of many people, against the mountains of Israel, which have been always waste: but it is brought forth out of the nations, and they shall dwell safely all of them.
9 Thou shalt ascend and come like a storm, thou shalt be like a cloud to cover the land, thou, and all thy bands, and many people with thee.(RUSSIA-EGYPT AND MUSLIMS)
10 Thus saith the Lord GOD; It shall also come to pass, that at the same time shall things come into thy mind, and thou shalt think an evil thought:
11 And thou shalt say, I will go up to the land of unwalled villages; I will go to them that are at rest, that dwell safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars nor gates,
12 To take a spoil, and to take a prey; to turn thine hand upon the desolate places that are now inhabited, and upon the people that are gathered out of the nations, which have gotten cattle and goods, that dwell in the midst of the land.

ISAIAH 17:1
1 The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.

PSALMS 83:3-7
3 They (ARABS,MUSLIMS) have taken crafty counsel against thy people,(ISRAEL) and consulted against thy hidden ones.
4 They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.
5 For they (MUSLIMS) have consulted together with one consent: they are confederate against thee:(TREATIES)
6 The tabernacles of Edom,and the Ishmaelites;(ARABS) of Moab, and the Hagarenes;
7 Gebal, and Ammon,(JORDAN) and Amalek;(SYRIA) the Philistines (PALESTINIANS) with the inhabitants of Tyre;(LEBANON)

DANIEL 11:40-43
40 And at the time of the end shall the king of the south( EGYPT) push at him:(EU DICTATOR IN ISRAEL) and the king of the north (RUSSIA AND MUSLIM HORDES OF EZEK 38+39) shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over.
41 He shall enter also into the glorious land, and many countries shall be overthrown: but these shall escape out of his hand, even Edom, and Moab, and the chief of the children of Ammon.(JORDAN)
42 He shall stretch forth his hand also upon the countries: and the land of Egypt shall not escape.
43 But he shall have power over the treasures of gold and of silver, and over all the precious things of Egypt: and the Libyans and the Ethiopians shall be at his steps.

EZEKIEL 39:1-8
1 Therefore, thou son of man, prophesy against Gog,(LEADER OF RUSSIA) and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech (MOSCOW) and Tubal: (TUBOLSK)
2 And I will turn thee back, and leave but the sixth part of thee, and will cause thee to come up from the north parts,(RUSSIA) and will bring thee upon the mountains of Israel:
3 And I will smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and will cause thine arrows to fall out of thy right hand.
4 Thou shalt fall upon the mountains of Israel, thou, and all thy bands,( ARABS) and the people that is with thee: I will give thee unto the ravenous birds of every sort, and to the beasts of the field to be devoured.
5 Thou shalt fall upon the open field: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord GOD.
6 And I will send a fire on Magog,(NUCLEAR BOMB) and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles: and they shall know that I am the LORD.
7 So will I make my holy name known in the midst of my people Israel; and I will not let them pollute my holy name any more: and the heathen shall know that I am the LORD, the Holy One in Israel.
8 Behold, it is come, and it is done, saith the Lord GOD; this is the day whereof I have spoken.

JOEL 2:3,20,30-31
3 A fire(NUCLEAR BOMB) devoureth before them;(RUSSIA-ARABS) and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.
20 But I will remove far off from you the northern army,(RUSSIA,MUSLIMS) and will drive him into a land barren and desolate, with his face toward the east sea, and his hinder part toward the utmost sea, and his stink shall come up, and his ill savour shall come up, because he hath done great things.(SIBERIAN DESERT)
30 And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke.(NUCLEAR BOMB)
31 The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the LORD come.

Report: Russia says no S-300 missiles sent to Iran Wed Apr 15, 6:44 am ET

MOSCOW – A top Russian defense official says Russia has not delivered any S-300 air-defense missile systems to Iran, the Interfax news agency reported Wednesday.

Supplying Russian S-300s to Iran would change the military balance in the Middle East and the issue has been the subject of intense diplomatic wrangling for months. Israel and the U.S. fear that Iran could use the missiles to protect its nuclear facilities.

Russian officials confirmed in March that a contract for the missiles had been signed with Iran two years ago, according to Russian news reports.But Interfax quoted Alexander Fomin, deputy director of the Federal Military-Technical Cooperation Service, as saying nothing is going on. There are no deliveries.Fomin was speaking at an international defense exposition in Brazil, the report saidIt was not clear why the missiles have not been delivered. There has been speculation, however, that Russia could use them as a bargaining chip with the United States as the two realign their relations under President Barack Obama's new administration.

EU SPAIN #11

DANIEL 7:23-24
23 Thus he said, The fourth beast(THE EU,REVIVED ROME) shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth,(7TH WORLD EMPIRE) which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces.(TRADE BLOCKS)
24 And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise:(10 NATIONS) and another shall rise after them;(#11 SPAIN) and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings.(BE HEAD OF 3 KINGS OR NATIONS).

Decision likely in US torture case in Spain By PAUL HAVEN, Associated Press Writer – Tue Apr 14, 10:12 am ET

MADRID, Spain – Spanish prosecutors will likely decide this week whether to recommend a full investigation into allegations that six Bush Administration officials sanctioned torture of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, an official in the prosecutor's office said Tuesday.The decision would put the case back in the hands of an investigative judge on Spain's National Court. The judge would not be bound by the prosecutor's recommendation, however.We are expecting the decision this week, said the prosecutor's office official, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity in line with department rules. The National Court said it had no information on when the recommendation might come.The case against the American officials — including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith — was brought by human rights lawyers before Spain's investigative judge, Baltasar Garzon, who sent it on to the prosecutors last month.Under Spanish law, once the judge receives the prosecutor's recommendation, he can either drop the case or open a full-blown probe that could lead to an indictment. It is the investigative judge, not the prosecutors, who files criminal charges.

Spanish law gives its courts jurisdiction beyond national borders in cases of torture or war crimes, based on a doctrine known as universal justice, though the government has recently said it hopes to limit the scope of the legal process.One of the human rights lawyers who brought the case, Gonzalo Boye, has told AP that the claim of Spanish jurisdiction was bolstered by the fact that five Guantanamo Bay inmates were either citizens or residents of Spain.In addition to Gonzales and Feith, the complaint names former Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, David Addington; Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee; and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes. It alleges the men gave legal cover to torture by claiming that the U.S. president could ignore the Geneva Conventions.Most of the men have not commented, but Feith has strongly rejected the charges and the claim that Spain has jurisdiction, saying the case was a national insult with harmful implications.Spain's government — which is keen for improved relations with Washington — has insisted the court is independent and that the executive branch has no sway over its decisions.Editor's Note: Associated Press reporter Jorge Sainz contributed to this report.

National laws hamstring EU elections, MEP says
HONOR MAHONY 18.03.2009 @ 17:30 CET

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - A leading MEP has said that some member states' electoral laws are contributing to the well-documented low turnout in the European elections.
Jo Leinen, German Socialist MEP and head of the constitutional affairs committee, said there should be a common code of conduct, common standards for selecting candidates and voter lists should be issued early in order to raise the level of turnout and candidates.Citing a study carried out by his committee, the MEP on Tuesday (17 March) noted that there is a real north-south divide, with Greece representing the worst case.Under Greek election law, the list of candidates only needs to be presented two weeks prior to election day. Under these conditions, a respectable campaign by the candidates is barely possible,said Mr Leinen. In addition, the party leader often decides personally who will be on the EU election list.The countries with the best practices, according to the study, are Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden, where most parties have primaries, meaning a decentralised way of deciding who gets on the list.The euro-deputy also criticised politicians who come to Brussels although they have no interest in practising European politics, referring to French justice minister Rachida Dati, who was recently strong-armed by President Nicolas Sarkozy to run in the June elections.

These practices are not going to make people more inclined to go to the polls, noted Mr Leinen, with the parliament having seen a decline in voter turnout every election year since direct elections began in 1979.

A new Europe of citizens

Mr Leinen admitted that stepping into member states' electoral territory was highly controversial adding that it pertains to the transition from a Europe of states to a Europe of citizens.The constitutional affairs committee has already dipped its toe into such electoral waters, however. A report by UK liberal MEP Andrew Duff, which is on hold as the current legislature draws to an end but due to be taken up in September, makes a number of bold of suggestions to shake up the European elections and give them a pan-European feel.His draft paper suggests creating a transnational constituency for a small number of additional seats; moving the elections to May to avoid summer holidays and to weekends or one single day; and having member states use semi-open list systems allowing greater choice for the voter.The report suggests the changes - including harmonising the minimum age at which EU citizens can vote (16) and be candidates (18); special constituencies for minority languages; and redistributing seats before each election on the basis of resident populations - should take place by 2014.The ideas are likely to cause wrangling in the parliament and among member states. Governments have regularly clashed when it comes to determining the number of seats in the parliament and how they are distributed, while a bill changing MEPs' pay took many years of fighting before it was eventually agreed.

US SUPREME COURT
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/justices/fullcourt.html

BACK IN 2006 ALREADY GINSBERG WAS HOT FOR INTERNATIONAL LAW. AND THE BIBLE CLEARLY SAYS THE EU WILL MAKE THE LAWS FOR THE COMING WORLD GOVERNMENT.

April 13, 2009 Justice Ginsberg Defends Supreme Court's Use of Foreign Law

At a symposium to honor U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg last Friday at the Moritz College of Law in Columbus, Ohio, Justice Ginsberg once again defended the Court's use of foreign law. She suggested that the controversy with respect to this issue is a passing phase and may reflect a misunderstanding that the Court is using foreign law as precedent rather than simply using it for its persuasive authority. She further suggested that the Court's reluctance to engage with foreign judical colleagues is dimishing the influence of the court internationally.At the recent annual meeting of the American Society of Law in Washington, D.C., a panel of supreme court justices appeared to largely agree with Justice Ginsberg. One of the members of the panel was John Hedigan, from the High Court of Ireland (and former judge on the European Court of Human Rights), who put it quite well, stating: The idea that you would not search out wisdom wherever you can find it is quite extraordinary.

A decent Respect to the Opinions of [Human]kind: The Value of a Comparative Perspective in Constitutional Adjudication Constitutional Court of South Africa
February 7, 2006 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Associate Justice Supreme Court of the United States.

South Africa's 1996 Constitution famously provides in Section 39: When interpreting the Bill of Rights, a court . . . must consider international law; and may consider foreign law.Other modern Constitutions have similar provisions, India's and Spain's, for example. In the United States the question whether and when courts may seek enlightenment from the laws and decisions of other nations has provoked heated debate. I will speak of that controversy in these remarks. At the outset, I should disclose the view I have long held: If U.S. experience and decisions can be instructive to systems that have more recently instituted or invigorated judicial review for constitutionality, so we can learn from others including Canada, South Africa, and most recently the U. K. - now engaged in measuring ordinary laws and executive actions against charters securing basic rights.Exposing laws to judicial review for constitutionality was once uncommon outside the United States. In the United Kingdom, not distant from France, Spain, Germany, and other civil law countries in this regard, court review of legislation for compatibility with a fundamental charter was considered off limits, undemocratic, irreconcilable with the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy. That was once true of South Africa, is that not so? But particularly in the years following World War II, many nations installed constitutional review by courts as one safeguard against oppressive government and stirred-up majorities. National, multinational, and international human rights charters and courts today play a prominent part in our world. The U.S. judicial system will be the poorer, I have urged, if we do not both share our experience with, and learn from, legal systems with values and a commitment to democracy similar to our own.

In the value I place on comparative dialogue - on sharing with and learning from others - I draw on counsel from the founders of the United States. The drafters and signers of the Declaration of Independence cared about the opinions of other peoples; they placed before the world the reasons why the States, joining together to become the United States of America, were impelled to separate from Great Britain. The Declarants stated their reasons out of a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind. They set out in the Declaration a long list of grievances, in order to submit the Facts - the long Train of [the British Crown's] Abuses - to the scrutiny of a candid World.The U.S. Supreme Court, early on, expressed a complementary view: The judicial power of the United States, the Court said in 1816, includes cases in the correct adjudication of which foreign nations are deeply interested . . . [and] in which the principles of the law and comity of nations often form an essential inquiry.Far from [exhibiting hostility] to foreign countries' views and laws,Professor Vicki Jackson of the Georgetown University law faculty recently reminded us: [T]he founding generation showed concern for how adjudication in our courts would affect other countries' regard for the United States.A similar concern is evident today in the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of South Africa. As Justice O'Regan put it, writing separately in Kaunda v. President of the Republic of South Africa: [O]ur Constitution recognizes and asserts that, after decades of isolation, South Africa is now a member of the community of nations, and a bearer of obligations and responsibilities in terms of international law.[2004 (10) BCLR 1009 (CC) at 222.] Even more so than when the United States was a new nation, the USA today, no less than South Africa, is subject to the scrutiny of a candid World.John Jay, one of the authors of The Federalist Papers promoting ratification of the U.S. Constitution, and George Washington's appointee as first Chief Justice of the United States, wrote of the new nation in 1793 much as Justice O'Regan did in 2004 of the new Republic. The United States, Jay observed, by taking a place among the nations of the earth, bec[a]me amenable to the laws of nations,the core of what we today call international law. Eleven years later, the great Chief Justice John Marshall cautioned:[A]n act of Congress ought never to be construed to violate the law of nations if any other possible construction remains.South Africa installed just such a guide in its 1996 Constitution. Section 233 instructs: When interpreting . . . legislation, every court must prefer any reasonable interpretation . . . consistent with international law over any alternative interpretation . . . inconsistent with international law.

True, there are generations-old and still persistent discordant views on recourse to the Opinions of Mankind. A mid-19th century U.S. Chief Justice expressed opposition to such recourse in an extreme statement. He wrote:No one, we presume, supposes that any change in public opinion or feeling . . . in the civilized nations of Europe or in this country, should induce the [U.S. Supreme Court] to give to the words of the Constitution a more liberal construction . . . than they were intended to bear when the instrument was framed and adopted.Those words were penned in 1857. They appear in Chief Justice Roger Taney's opinion for a divided Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford, an infamous opinion that invoked the majestic Due Process Clause to uphold one human's right to hold another in bondage. The Dred Scott decision declared that no descendants of Africans [imported into the United States], and sold as slaves could ever become citizens of the United States.While the Civil War and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution reversed the Dred Scott judgment, U.S. jurists and political actors today divide sharply on the propriety of looking beyond our nation's borders, particularly on matters touching fundamental human rights. Some have expressed spirited opposition. Justice Scalia counsels: The Court should cease putting forth foreigners' views as part of the reasoned basis of its decisions. To invoke alien law when it agrees with one's own thinking, and ignore it otherwise, is not reasoned decisionmaking, but sophistry.Another trenchant critic, Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, commented not long ago: To cite foreign law as authority is to flirt with the discredited . . . idea of a universal natural law; or to suppose fantastically that the world's judges constitute a single, elite community of wisdom and conscience.Judge Posner's view rests, in part, on the concern that U.S. judges do not comprehend the social, historical, political, and institutional background from which foreign opinions emerge. Nor do we even understand the language in which laws and judgments, outside the common law realm, are written.

Judge Posner is right, of course, to this extent: Foreign opinions are not authoritative; they set no binding precedent for the U.S. judge. But they can add to the store of knowledge relevant to the solution of trying questions. Yes, we should approach foreign legal materials with sensitivity to our differences, deficiencies, and imperfect understanding, but imperfection, I believe, should not lead us to abandon the effort to learn what we can from the experience and good thinking foreign sources may convey.Representative of the perspective I share with four of my current colleagues, Patricia M. Wald, once Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and former Judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, last year said with characteristic wisdom: It's hard for me to see that the use of foreign decisional law is an up-or-down proposition. I see it rather as a pool of potential and useful information and thought that must be mined with caution and restraint.Many current members of the U.S. Congress would terminate all debate over whether federal courts should refer to foreign or international legal materials. For the most part, they would respond to the question with a resounding No.Two identical Resolutions reintroduced last year, one in the House of Representatives and the other in the Senate, declare that judicial interpretations regarding the meaning of the Constitution of the United States should not be based on judgments, laws, or pronouncements of foreign institutions unless such [materials] inform an understanding of the original meaning of the Constitution. As of December 2005, the House Resolution had attracted support from 83 cosponsors. Two 2005-proposed Acts would do more than resolve.They would positively prohibit federal courts, when interpreting the U.S. Constitution, from referring to any constitution, law, administrative rule, Executive order, directive, policy, judicial decision, or any other action of any foreign state or international organization or agency, other than English constitutional and common law up to the time of the adoption of the [U.S.] Constitution.[Even reference to a Scottish verdict, i.e., a verdict of not proved, it seems, would be out of order.]

These measures recycle similar resolutions and bills proposed before the 2004 elections in the United States, but never put to a vote. Although I doubt the current measures will garner sufficient votes to pass, it is disquieting that they have attracted sizable support. And one not-so-small concern - they fuel the irrational fringe. A personal example. The U.S. Supreme Court's Marshal alerted Justice O'Connor and me to a February 28, 2005, web posting on a chat site. It opened:Okay commandoes, here is your first patriotic assignment . . . an easy one. Supreme Court Justices Ginsburg and O'Connor have publicly stated that they use [foreign] laws and rulings to decide how to rule on American cases.This is a huge threat to our Republic and Constitutional freedom. . . . If you are what you say you are, and NOT armchair patriots, then those two justices will not live another week.Nearly a year has passed since that posting. Justice O'Connor, though to my great sorrow retired just last week from the Court's bench, remains alive and well. As for me, you can judge for yourself.To a large extent, I believe, the critics in Congress and in the media misperceive how and why U.S. courts refer to foreign and international court decisions. We refer to decisions rendered abroad, it bears repetition, not as controlling authorities, but for their indication, in Judge Wald's words, of common denominators of basic fairness governing relationships between the governors and the governed.In a November 2005 Harvard Law Review comment, Georgetown's Professor Jackson usefully identified three responses to transnational sources: resistance, convergence, and engagement. South Africa's apartheid regime fit the Resistance Model, an approach that relishes resistance . . . to outside influence.Professor Jackson suggested that South Africa's 1996 Constitution fits the Convergence Model, in that it explicitly incorporate[s] international law as a controlling legal norm. But perhaps the Constitutional Court's emerging jurisprudence comes closer to the third approach, the Engagement Model.That Model comprehends transnational sources as interlocutors,a means to test understanding of one's own traditions and possibilities by examining them in the [reflected light cast by other legal systems].

The jurisprudence of South Africa's Constitutional Court offers many examples, among them, Justice Kriegler's cautionary note in Sanderson v. Attorney-General, Eastern Cape. The question in that case: Did a two-year delay in bringing a prosecution for alleged sexual offenses violate the defendant's constitutional right to a speedy trial. In determining that the defendant's rights were not violated, Justice Kriegler canvassed foreign precedents, especially U.S. and Canadian decisions; he prefaced his examination, however, by warning that the use of foreign precedent requires circumspection.[1997 (12) BCLR 1675 (CC) at 26.] In State v. Makwanyane, then Chief Justice Chaskalson earlier cautioned, in presenting his comparative survey decisions on capital punishment: We can derive assistance from . . . foreign case law, but we are in no way bound to follow it.[1995 (6) BCLR 665 (CC) at 39.] I agree. Some U.S. practices, I fully appreciate, are not suitably exported: the use of juries in civil cases is one example.In testimony prepared for a congressional hearing, Professor Jackson made a point critics of comparative sideglances perhaps overlook: the negative authority foreign experience sometimes may have. She referred in this regard to the Steel Seizure Case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952. There, Justice Jackson, in his separate opinion, pointed to features of the Weimar Constitution in Germany that allowed Adolf Hitler to assume dictatorial powers. He contrasted Germany's situation with that of Great Britain, a country in which legislative authorization was required for the exercise of emergency powers. Justice Jackson drew from that comparison support for the conclusion that, without more specific congressional authorization, the U.S. President could not seize private property (in that case, the steel mills) even in aid of a war effort. The U.S. President's wartime authority, you no doubt know, is today a hotly debated issue in U.S. political and legal circles.At the time Justice Jackson cast a comparative sideglance at Weimar Germany, the United States itself was a source of negative authority.The Attorney General pressed that point in an amicus brief for the United States in Brown v. Board of Education. Urging the Court to put an end to the separate but equal doctrine, the Attorney General wrote:

The existence of discrimination against minority groups in the United States has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination . . . raises doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.The U.S. Constitution, Justice Scalia has remarked, contains no instruction resembling South Africa's Section 39 prescription. So U.S. courts, he thinks, have no warrant from our fundamental instrument of government to consider foreign law. I would demur to that observation. Judges in the United States are free to consult all manner of commentary - Restatements, Treatises, what law professors or even law students write copiously in law reviews, for example. If we can consult those writings, why not the analysis of a question similar to the one we confront contained in an opinion of the Supreme Court of Canada, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the German Constitutional Court, or the European Court of Human Rights?

A case in point. On December 16, 2004, in a controversy precipitated by the fight against terrorism, the Lords of Appeal (the U.K. counterpart to the U.S. Supreme Court) issued a waypaving decision, one that looks beyond the United Kingdom's borders. The case was brought by aliens held in custody in Belmarsh Prison. A nine-member panel ruled, 8-to-1, that the British government's indefinite detention of foreigners suspected of terrorism, without charging or trying them, is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, incorporated into domestic law by the U. K. Human Rights Act. Lord Bingham's lead opinion draws not only on domestic decisions and decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. It also refers to opinions of the Supreme Court of Canada and U.S. Court of Appeals opinions (although not U.S. Supreme Court opinions). Finding the differential treatment of nationals and non-nationals impermissible under the Human Rights Act, Lord Bingham also referred to several U. N. instruments, commencing with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and including the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.Lord Bingham did make the observation, gently, that contemporary U.S. authority does not provide evidence of general international practice.That comment may have figured in the New York Times' characterization of the Lords' ruling as a strong example of the increasing interdependence of domestic and international law, at least outside of the United States.Parliament reacted swiftly to the Lord's decision. In March 2005, it enacted a measure allowing placement of terrorist suspects under a highly restrictive form of house arrest, in lieu of imprisonment, again without charging or trying them.One year later, in December 2005, the Law Lords resolved another headline case involving the Belmarsh detainees. A seven-member panel ruled unanimously that evidence obtained through torture was inadmissible in British courts to establish criminal liability or eligibility for deportation irrespective of where, or by whom, or on whose authority the torture was inflicted.Lord Bingham's lead opinion again surveyed U.N. instruments, including the Convention against Torture, as well as judicial decisions from other nations, including the United States, Germany, and Israel. These sources afforded confirmation for his ringing declaration: The English common law has regarded torture and its fruits with abhorrence for over 500 years, and that abhorrence is now shared by over 140 countries which have acceded to the Torture Convention.Some of the Lords' speeches cast a critical eye across the sea. Lord Hoffman ventured that many people in the United States, heirs to the common law tradition, have felt their country dishonoured by the use of torture outside the jurisdiction.Later in December, recognizing the nation's obligations under the Convention against Torture, the U.S. Congress banned cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. The legislation, however, stops short of explicitly banning evidence elicited by torture from consideration by a military tribunal charged with determining whether a detainee is an enemy combatant.

The notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions, as my quotation from Chief Justice Taney suggested, is in line with the view of the U.S. Constitution as a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification. I am not a partisan of that view. U.S. jurists honor the Framers' intent to create a more perfect Union,I believe, if they read the Constitution as belonging to a global 21st century, not as fixed forever by 18th-century understandings.A key 1958 plurality opinion, Trop v. Dulles, makes just that point. At issue in that case, whether stripping a wartime deserter of citizenship violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishments.The basic concept underlying the . . . Amendment,the opinion observed, is nothing less than the dignity of man.Therefore the Constitution's text must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.In that regard, the plurality reported: The civilized nations of the world are in virtual unanimity that statelessness is not to be imposed as punishment for crime. (The primacy of human dignity notably is not left to inference in South Africa's Constitution, for Section 10 prescribes: Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected.)Turning from frozen-in-time interpretation, I will take up another shortfall or insularity in current U.S. jurisprudence, at least as I see it. The Bill of Rights, few would disagree, is the hallmark and pride of the United States. One might therefore assume that it guides and controls U.S. officialdom wherever in the world they carry the flag of the United States or their credentials. But that is not the currently prevailing view. For example, absent an express ban by treaty, a U.S. officer may abduct a foreigner and forcibly transport him to the United States to stand trial. The U.S. Supreme Court so held, 6-to-3, in 1992. Just a year earlier, South Africa's Supreme Court of Appeal had ruled the other way. It determined that under South Africa's common law, a trial court has no jurisdiction to hear a case against a defendant when the State had acted lawlessly in apprehending him by participating in an abduction across international borders.

Another case in point, one in which I was a participant, involving civil litigation: Interpreting U.S. Supreme Court precedent, a divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held in 1989, during my tenure on that court, that foreign plaintiffs acting abroad - plaintiffs were Indian family planning organizations - had no First Amendment rights, and therefore no standing to assert a violation of such rights by U.S. officials. In particular, the Indian organizations complained of a condition on U.S. grant money: the recipients could not engage in any abortion counseling, even in a separate entity funded by non-U.S. sources. In dissent, I resisted the notion that in an encounter between the United States and the people of another land, the amendment we prize as first has no force in court.I expressed the expectation that the position taken in the Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations would one day accurately describe our law. [W]herever the United States acts,the Restatement projects,it can only act in accordance with the limitations imposed by the Constitution.Returning to my main theme, I will recount briefly and chronologically the Supreme Court's most recent decisions involving foreign or international legal sources as an aid to the resolution of constitutional questions. In a headline 2002 decision, Atkins v. Virginia, a six-member majority (all save the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia and Thomas) held unconstitutional the execution of a mentally retarded offender. The Court noted that within the world community, the imposition of the death penalty for crimes committed by mentally retarded offenders is overwhelmingly disapproved.(South Africa, of course, figures prominently in the worldwide disapproval, the Constitutional Court having held a decade ago that capital punishment in any case is unconstitutional.)New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse wrote of the following, 2002-2003, Term: The Court has displayed a [steadily growing] attentiveness to legal developments in the rest of the world and to the [C]ourt's role in keeping the United States in step with them. Among examples from that Term, I would include the Michigan University affirmative action cases decided June 23, 2003. Although the Court splintered, it upheld the Michigan Law School program. In separate opinions, I looked to two United Nations Conventions: the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the United States has ratified; and the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which, sadly, the United States has not yet ratified. Both Conventions distinguish between impermissible policies of oppression or exclusion, and permissible policies of inclusion, temporary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality.The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the Michigan Law School case, I observed, accords with the international understanding of the [purpose and propriety] of affirmative action.(South Africa's Constitution is clear on that matter; Section 9(2) provides: To promote the achievement of equality, legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken.)A better indicator from the U.S. Supreme Court's 2002-2003 Term, because it attracted a majority, is Justice Kennedy's opinion for the Court in Lawrence v. Texas, announced June 26, 2003. Overruling a 1986 decision, Lawrence declared unconstitutional a Texas statute prohibiting two adult persons of the same sex from engaging, voluntarily, in intimate sexual conduct. (I think it highly unlikely, however, that we will soon see a U.S. Supreme Court decision resembling the very recent decision of the Constitutional Court of South Africa in Minister of Home Affairs v. Fourie.) On the question of dynamic versus static, frozen-in-time constitutional interpretation, the Court's Lawrence v. Texas opinion instructs:

Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.On respect for the Opinions of [Human]kind,the Lawrence Court emphasized:The right the petitioners seek in this case has been accepted as an integral part of human freedom in many other countries.In support, the Court cited the leading 1981 European Court of Human Rights decision, Dudgeon v. United Kingdom, and subsequent European Human Rights Court decisions affirming the protected right of homosexual adults to engage in intimate, consensual conduct.In the 2003-2004 Term, foreign and international legal sources again figured in several decisions. These included, most notably, two June 2004 decisions in cases arising out of the war on terror. One, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, concerned a U.S. citizen, held incommunicado in a Navy brig in South Carolina pursuant to an executive decree declaring him an "enemy combatant.Ruling some six months before the Law Lords' decision in the 2004 Belmarsh case, the Court held, 8-to-1, that the petitioner was entitled to a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for his detention before an impartial adjudicator. Even in our most challenging and uncertain moments when our Nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested,Justice O'Connor wrote for a four-Justice plurality, we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad.[H]istory and common sense, she reminded,teach us that an unchecked system of detention carries the potential to become a means for oppression and abuse.On that theme, the U.K.'s Lord Hoffman wrote in his separate opinion in the 2004 Belmarsh case:The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws [or executive measures, such as the one at issue in Belmarsh, authorizing indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial]. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve.He hoped, after the Lords of Appeal ruling, that Parliament would not give the terrorists such a victory.(I should add that two University of Chicago Law School professors (Eric A. Posner and Adrian Vermeule) recently inveighed against Justice O'Connor's and Lord Hoffman's statements as absurdities.People do not prefer liberty to death, they urged. A government that does not contract civil liberties in face of terrorist threats, they said,is pathologically rigid, not enlightened.They queried whether the Lords would have come out the same way had the terrorist carnage in London's underground preceded the Belmarsh decision. The Law Lords, I note, have not relented. Their December 2005 decision excluding evidence obtained through torture post-dates the London underground bombing.)

The other enemy combatant case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2004, Rasul v. Bush, held that U.S. courts have jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured in hostilities abroad, then transported to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Court wrote narrowly; it said nothing about what claims, if any, would succeed once the detainees get to a federal court. [Britian's Lord Steyn, before this decision, called Guantanamo a legal black hole.] The Supreme Court has so far written only chapter one on the Guantanamo Bay incarcerations. Federal district court judges have split on chapter two. One judge held that foreigners detained at Guantanamo Bay, though they had access to court, could gain no judicial relief. Another ruled that the detainees were entitled to a fair hearing on the question whether their incarceration meets due process demands. Both cases are currently on appeal.Just a few months ago, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case, titled Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, posing these questions: (1) Does the President have authority to establish a military commission to try Guantanamo Bay detainees for alleged war crimes; and (2) Is the writ of habeas corpus in federal court an available means to determine Guantanamo Bay detainees' alleged rights under the 1949 Geneva Convention? The end of December legislation I earlier mentioned severely narrows Guantanamo Bay detainees' access to courts. The impact of that legislation on Hamdan's petition, and on scores of filings in the federal district court in the District of Columbia, remains uncertain.To conclude my account of recent decisions in which the U.S. Supreme Court cast comparative sideglances, the March 2005decision in Roper v. Simmons presents perhaps the fullest expressions to date on the propriety and utility of looking to the opinions of [human]kind. Holding unconstitutional the execution of persons under the age of 18 when they committed capital crimes, the Court declared it fitting to acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty. Justice Kennedy wrote for the Court that the opinion of the world community provides respected and significant confirmation of our own conclusions.It does not lessen our fidelity to the Constitution,he explained, to recognize the express affirmation of certain fundamental rights by other nations and peoples.(Among the dozens of amici curiae submissions in Roper, an impressive brief bears the names of several Nobel Peace Prize winners, including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, South Africa's former President Willem de Klerk, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The Nobel laureates urged the Court to consider the opinion of the international community, which has rejected the death penalty for child offenders worldwide.)[Justice O'Connor, although she dissented from the Court's categorical ruling in Roper, agreed with the Court on the relevance of foreign and international law to [an] assessment of evolving standards of decency. The other dissenters, for whom Justice Scalia spoke, vigorously contended that foreign and international law have no place in determining what punishments are cruel and unusual within the meaning of the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment.]

Recognizing that forecasts are risky, I nonetheless believe the U.S. Supreme Court will continue to accord a decent Respect to the Opinions of [Human]kind as a matter of comity and in a spirit of humility. Comity, because projects vital to our well being - combating international terrorism is a prime example - require trust and cooperation of nations the world over. And humility because, in Justice O'Connor's words: Other legal systems continue to innovate, to experiment, and to find new solutions to the new legal problems that arise each day, from which we can learn and benefit.In this regard, I was impressed by an observation made in September 2003 by Israel's Chief Justice Aharon Barak. September 11, he noted, confronts the United States with the dilemma of conducting a war on terrorism without sacrificing the nation's most cherished values, including our respect for human dignity. We in Israel,Barak said, have our September 11, and September 12 and so on. He spoke of his own Court's efforts to balance the government's no doubt compelling need to secure the safety of the State and of its citizens on the one hand, and the nation's high regard for human dignity and freedom on the other hand.He referred, particularly, to a question presented to his Court: Is it lawful to use violence (less euphemistically, torture) in interrogat[ing] [a] terrorist in a ticking bomb situation. His Court's answer: No,[n]ever use violence.He elaborated:[It] is the fate of a democracy [that] not all means are acceptable to it, . . . not all methods employed by its enemies are open to it. Sometimes, a democracy must fight with one hand tied behind its back. Nonetheless, it has the upper hand. Preserving the rule of law and recognition of individual liberties constitute an important component of [a democracy's] understanding of security. At the end of the day, [those values buoy up] its spirit and strength [and its capacity to] overcome [the] difficulties.In that opinion, I concur without reservation.