Mercury Rising

Well, at least the US is in control of one region infested by terrorists. The bad news is it's Kurdish Iraq. Just across the border in Turkey...

Turkey tightened security throughout its tourist areas yesterday as the group believed responsible for four of the weekend bomb attacks threatened to turn the country into "hell". Extra police detachments have been sent to tourist centres and identity checks set up on roads around resorts following the attacks that injured 21 people, including 10 Britons, in Marmaris and killed three people in a larger explosion in the southern city of Antalya. "We vow to turn the monstrous TC [Turkish republic] into hell ... with our warriors who have pledged revenge," the Kurdish Liberation Hawks (TAK) said in a statement on its website.... Separatist sentiment, once concentrated in Turkey's south-east, has spread across the country with decades of Kurdish migration, voluntary and enforced.

We also occupy a country responsible for a great deal of American suffering and death. The US. Naomi Klein:

The Red Cross has just announced a new disaster-response partnership with Wal-Mart. When the next hurricane hits, it will be a co-production of Big Aid and Big Box. This, apparently, is the lesson learned from the US government's calamitous response to Hurricane Katrina: businesses do disaster better. "It's all going to be private enterprise before it's over," Billy Wagner, emergency management chief for the Florida Keys, currently under hurricane watch for tropical storm Ernesto, said in April.... The first step was the government's abdication of its core responsibility to protect the population from disasters. Under the Bush administration, whole sectors of the government, most notably the Department of Homeland Security, have been turned into glorified temp agencies, with essential functions contracted out to private companies. The theory is that entrepreneurs, driven by the profit motive, are always more efficient (please suspend hysterical laughter). We saw the results in New Orleans one year ago: Washington was frighteningly weak and inept, in part because its emergency management experts had fled to the private sector and its technology and infrastructure had become positively retro. At least by comparison, the private sector looked modern and competent. But the honeymoon doesn't last long. "Where has all the money gone?" ask desperate people from Baghdad to New Orleans, from Kabul to tsunami-struck Sri Lanka. One place a great deal of it has gone is into major capital expenditure for these private contractors.

We have caught the leaders responsible for attempting to influence governmental decisions through violence or threats of violence. That would Bush, Cheney, Powell, and Rice:

The US government has been accused of trying to undermine the Chávez government in Venezuela by funding anonymous groups via its main international aid agency. Millions of dollars have been provided in a "pro-democracy programme" that Chávez supporters claim is a covert attempt to bankroll an opposition to defeat the government. The money is being provided by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) through its Office of Transition Initiatives. ... "What this indicates is that there is a great deal of money, a great deal of concern to oust or neutralise Chávez," said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (Coha) in Washington yesterday. "The US is waging diplomatic warfare against Venezuela." He said that while the US had accused Mr Chávez of destabilising Latin American countries, the term "destabilisation" more aptly applied to what the US was trying to do to Mr Chávez. "It's trying to implement regime change," Eva Golinger, a Venezuelan-American lawyer who wrote The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela, told AP. "There's no doubt about it. I think the US government tries to mask it by saying it's a noble mission." She added: "It's too suspicious to have such a high level of secrecy."