Iraqi civil resistance leader Houzan Mahmoud will speak in New York City on Tuesday March 21. Houzan Mahmoud is a co-founder of the Iraqi Freedom Congress, a recent initiative to build a democratic, secular and progressive alternative to both the US occupation and political Islam in Iraq. Mahmoud, who fled Iraq in 1996 and is currently studying at the University of London, is also a cofounder of the Iraqi Women's Rights Coalition and editor-in-chief of Equal Rights Now, paper of the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq.

From UPI, March 16:

One of America's most respected elder national security statesmen called for a full pull-out from Iraq Thursday.

Delivering the keynote address at the Center for American Progress' "Iraq; Next Steps for U.S. Policy," Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former National Security advisor for President Jimmy Carter, said that "within a year we should be able to complete a course of disengagement" and withdraw from Iraq.

There's nothing new in this, except that it comes from scholars at Harvard, not cranks at Counterpunch. It's publication shows that the worm may be turning in the US against the supposedly privileged Jews. It greatly emphasizes "the Lobby" (guess which one) in the Iraq debacle, and poo-poos the notion of a war for oil. John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago professor and author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, and Stephen Walt, of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and author of Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy, write for London Review of Books March 10:

India's Maoist Naxalite rebels have been very busy lately, but the wave of attacks is going virtually unreported outside India. From PTI via The Hindu, March 14:

Naxalites this morning released the passenger train that they had seized last evening in a thick forest area in Jharkhand, without causing any harm to the passengers.

An ACLU press release, March 14:

PITTSBURGH – The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Pennsylvania today released new evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting investigations into a political organizations based solely on its anti-war views.

An ominous sense of deja vu. The US invasion of Iraq and rift with France immediately preceded new oil deals between Saddam and the French giant Total. (Seee WW4 REPORT #56) Now, just as Bush is rattling the sabre and hurling WMD accusations at Iran, comes this:

LONDON, March 14 (IranMania) - French state-run Gaz de France is in talks with French oil giant Total and Iranian authorities over participating in a huge liquefied natural gas (LNG) project there, Les Echos daily reported Tuesday.

A March 9 communique from the San José de Apartadó Peace Community in Colombia's northern Urabá region (our translation):

The Peace Community of San José of Apartadó denounces new abuses committed by the public forces against the civil population of the zone. The facts that we make known and leave for history are:

From the International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC), March 11:

Christian Peace Maker Teams (CPT) headquarters in Chicago in the United State has confirmed that CPT member kidnapped in Iraq Tom Fox, 54 was found dead in Baghdad on Saturday morning.