The US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the office of the White House Counsel
are preparing a draft document laying out the President’s wartime authority to remain in office past 2008.
The scheme is described as an emergency “continuity presidency,”
made necessary by the extraordinary circumstances and unique challenges of protecting the United States from the threat of international terrorism.

“The world changed on 9/11,” a confidential DoJ memo explains,
“and no Administration is US history is better suited to adapt productively to those changes than this one.”
“The Attorney General supports the basic framework in the White House Counsel’s draft proposal for a future Executive Order..
establishing a Continuity Presidency, with two provisos:

1. There must be at least the appearance of a time limit,
which the AG believes might be satisfied by tying the duration of the Continuity Presidency to the duration of the GWOT [global war on terrorism]; and
2. The House and Senate Majority Leaders and the Chairpersons of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees must issue a written certification that they have approved the plan.
“AG does not believe that the plan will succeed unless those conditions can be met..
Suggest you liase with [the White House office of] Legislative Affairs and get their sense of the liklihood that the key Members will work with us.”
The memo is signed Christine McIntyre, Special Assistant to the United States Attorney General,
and is addressed to Philip Van Zandt, Special Assistant to White House Counsel Harriet Miers.
A second memo,
this time from DoJ Assistant McIntyre to Jock Mahoney, Special Assistant to US Solicitor General Paul Clement, and to Philip Van Zandt at the White House, anticipates an immediate Supreme Court challenge to the scheme, and offers a few suggestions for defending the Administration’s action.
“We will be attacked on the basis of Article II Section 1, and on Amendment XXII,” McIntyre writes.
“Thus it is absolutely crucial that the anticipated Executive Order for a Continuity Presidency make no mention whatsoever of a ‘Third Term.’
This will eliminate appeals to Amendment XXII, and leave us free to focus our attack on Article II Section 1 alone.
Thus, the Executive Order has got to be framed as a necessary..
– and Congressionally authorized – extension of the President’s Second Term, so that we can base our arguments on the Joint Resolution and Article II Section 2.
“Above all,” McIntyre warns, “we must emphasize that the 2001 Joint Resolution, in which Congress empowered the President to ‘use all necessary and appropriate force … to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States,’ and Article II Section 2 of the United States Constitution, give the President ample authority to issue an Executive Order for a Continuity Presidency for the duration of the GWOT, to exercise fully his mandate to protect the American people from harm.
“We must also press the national security angle hard and emphasize that the United States would be endangered severely by a change of government at this time. America cannot afford to give the terrorists such an opportunity.”

Now, this might not seem like much for the Bushies to pin their imperial hopes on,
but the White House has already succeeded in expanding the 2001 Joint Resolution, and Article II Section 2 of the Constitution,
to include virtually any step, legal and illegal, that the Administration wishes to take in prosecuting the war on terror.
For a recent example we might recall repeated White House and DoJ assertions that the Joint Resolution and Article II Section 2 authorize the President
to eavesdrop on US citizens in clear violation of federal law.
And neither Congress nor the Supremes have shown any inclination to rein him in.
So, as sketchy as the justification is,
if the Congressional leadership and the US Supreme Court should capitulate to Bush, as they have tended to do in the past,
it seems possible that he might remain in the White House past the expiration of his second term, as he obviously intends.

Are these memos a hoax?
Renowned constitutional scholar Bud Jamison, of the prestigious Washington legal firm Horowitz Feinberg & Horowitz, has this insight.
“I don’t think they’re a hoax, but I also don’t think that there’s anything here for the public to worry about, except the sad comment it makes on the current Administration.”
“I think we can assume – even for the sake of argument alone – that there is a draft proposal along these lines circulating.
Obviously, we can only speculate about the full content and wording of the proposal, but based on the comments in these memos,
I think we can do that fairly productively,” Jamison said.
“First, the fact that this proposal is in the works so far in advance of the 2008 elections suggests that real care is being taken,
which in turn suggests that President Bush is, for the moment, anyway, quite serious about attempting this coup d’état.
“If it ever becomes public, I suspect we’ll find that the proposed executive order will postpone the 2008 elections
– citing the exigencies of war – rather than attempt to do battle with Article II Section 1 and the 22nd Amendment,” Jamison explained.
“But, Constitutionally speaking, Bush hasn’t got a leg to stand on.
Article II Section 1 states plainly that the president is elected to a four-year term,
and the 22nd Amendment states plainly that he can serve only two terms.
He’s looking for weasel room,
and he thinks that merely extending his second term, rather than declaring a third term, will give it to him.
He’s mistaken.
“I can’t imagine even a sympathetic Supreme Court going along with this
– although I’ll admit that I was surprised when they handed him the Florida election in 2000.
Still, what’s being proposed here is literally a coup d’état; the Court is not going to sanction it, even if key members of Congress do.
“If you think about what would happen, it quickly becomes a reductio ad absurdum, Jamison explained.
“Consider the practical problems: the election might well go on in defiance of the executive order.
That might leave Bush no alternative but to declare martial law.
He would need support from the military in that case, and I doubt he would get it.
Remember, military personnel swear an oath to the Constitution first, and to the President second.
Where the two are in conflict, most will consider the Constitution paramount.
“But suppose he were to let the election go on, and merely declare its results invalid, say with another executive order.
Even a Republican House is going to impeach him, and even a Republican Senate is going to convict him. He’ll be the ex-President in a heartbeat,” Jamison predicted.
“And suppose he still refuses to leave? The Secret Service might forcibly eject him from the White House when the Senate conviction is handed down.
What a gross public humiliation that would be, to be seen kicking and screaming as he’s carried from the building.
Bush can’t risk it, especially with his grandiose personality.”
“The best he could hope for is a military faction that would support him and defend the White House third-world-style,
but there will certainly be a larger faction that will oppose him.
Bush would become a prisoner in the White House, with his little Praetorian Guard.
He’d be irrelevant.
Congress would take over all of the day-to-day business of running the federal bureaucracy, and cut off money and other supplies to the White House.
They’d probably cut the electricity, too.
“So you can see how quickly this becomes absurd. Bush will either finish his second term on schedule,
or he’ll be out of the White House before his second term expires.”
“I’m sure he’ll go with option one,” Jamison chuckled.
“But,” Jamison continued, “Bush is so accustomed to having his way, and he exists in such a weird bubble of manufactured reality,
that I can picture him believing that his second term could be extended.”
“Still, I’m confident that someone among the gaggle of boot-licking toadies he’s surrounded himself with
will muster the nerve to sit him down and explain the facts of life.”
“This proposal will never see the light of day.”
“It may take a while for reality to sink in,
but once Bush appreciates the potential for grotesque public humiliation that he’s courting, he’ll kill it,” Jamison concluded.
As for the inevitable political fallout from the leaked memos alone, Jamison sees little for Bush to worry about.
“It shows incredibly poor judgment and galling arrogance on the Administration’s part, but that’s nothing new.
And you can be sure that Bush and Cheney have got complete deniability in this little caper,” he said.
“And that goes for Gonzales, Miers, and Clement too. The five or six people involved will be sacked, and the press will be told that the affair was merely the unauthorized creation of a handful of over-zealous underlings acting on their own. The Republican-controlled Congress will decline to investigate, and the issue will soon be forgotten. A break in the Natalee Holloway investigation is all it takes for a story like that to be erased permanently from the news.”

citx say…”did you hear that Rummy?…you can let that poor girl go now..its time”

¡LA Times NO HABLA ESPANOL!

oh yeah..AND they cant COUNT either

and you have NO IDEA what im talking about..HR 4437..check it out…..

UNLESS you are a fucking FACIST scumbag..in which case..go back to your “life”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

We demand that the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood. If it should not be possible to feed the whole population, then aliens (non-citizens) must be expelled from the Reich.

A Reich citizen is that subject who is of German or related blood only and who through his behavior demonstrates that he is ready and able to serve faithfully the German people and Reich.

“I constantly read the analyses of foreigners or Iraqis who’ve been abroad for decades talking about the divide that has always existed between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq…That is simply not true”. — Baghdad Burning; Iraqi girl blogger

a sequence from a ‘home movie’ shot by a US marine corpsman..that doesnt LOOK like a carbomb!

The notion that Iraq is now consumed by civil war depends on a number of assumptions that are inherently false.
First of all, it assumes that the Pentagon is ignoring the fundamental principle which underscores all wars: “Know your enemy”.
In this case, there’s no doubt about who the enemy is; it is the 87% of the Iraqi people who want to see an immediate end to the American occupation.
Therefore, the greatest threat to American objectives of permanent bases and occupation is the camaraderie that that manifests itself
in the form of Arab solidarity or Iraqi nationalism.
To this end, the Pentagon, through its surrogates in the media, has created a “self-fulfilling” narrative that civil war is already under way.
Most of the war coverage now makes it appear as though the violence is generated from ethnic tensions and sectarian hatred.
But is it?
Some of the more astute observers have noticed that other parts of the propaganda war,
(like references to the “imaginary” al-Zarqawi) have vanished from the newspapers,
as government spin-doctors are now devoting all their time to promoting their latest product-line; civil war.
In fact, if any of us were involved in the Pentagon’s “pacification” plans we’d probably be doing the same thing.
After all, the War Department is already overextended,
so a plan had to be devised to divert attention from the occupation forces and get Iraqis to kill each other.
The only reasonable choice is to incite “sectarian violence” and make civil war inevitable.
That, of course, is the task of the American trained death squads.
(The New York Times has confirmed that the Interior Ministry death squads were trained by American forces)
For three years the Iraqi resistance has successfully kept American troops on the defensive; gradually taking control of more area,
destroying pipelines and oil facilities at will, discouraging enlistment in the Iraqi Security Forces,
and undermining public support among Americans (63% of who now believe the war was “a mistake”)
These are the goals of every guerilla movement; a gradual erosion of public support, deflating morale, surprise attacks,
and eliciting greater support from the general population.
It is clear that this has been a winning strategy for the resistance, and not one that they would abandon to pursue an ethnic/religious war.
So, where does the violence originate?
Could it be that the independent militias are engaged in sectarian war without help from the greater resistance?
It could be, but it’s not likely. Again, the only one who benefits from civil war is the US military;
and it’s clear that the military has no other option but to follow a “divide and rule” strategy. They simply don’t have the human resources for any other plan.
In a larger sense, the “alleged” sectarian violence is consistent with what we have seen in previous CIA-run operations in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Negroponte are alumna of those conflicts (which, according to Cheney, succeeded quite admirably)
so it’s probable that they would apply what they have learned about counterinsurgency to the ongoing war in Iraq.
The El Salvador-experiment proved that the masses can eventually be terrorized into compliance.
Isn’t that what is taking place in Iraq?
In Iraq, terror is being used as a substitute for security,
because the United States has no intention of providing the manpower or funding needed to maintain order.

Death Squad Democracy

Video footage of a massacre outside of Nahrwan, east of Baghdad, has appeared on the Internet showing the bodies of Shiite laborers who were allegedly killed by Sunni death squads.
Journalist Paul McGeough was given the tapes and is planning to report on their content in the Sydney Morning Herald.
In one incident, four adults were pulled from their vehicle and either shot or stabbed to death in front of a 5 year old boy whose father was one of the victims. When the townspeople came to investigate the scene, they discovered the bodies of 48 men and women who had been dumped in a ditch.
The corpses showed the signs of having been “systematically murdered. Most were shot but some appear to have been stabbed and mutilated”.
It is the “stabbed and mutilated” part that should interest us.
After all, the intention of the Iraqi resistance is to gather greater support for their cause, not to alienate ordinary Iraqis through gratuitous acts of murder.
If, however, this was the work of American-backed death squads, then the alternate goal of “governing through terror” has been achieved.
Journalist McGeough sticks with the same, feeble mantra as the establishment-media to explain the tragedy:
“The current round of tit-for-tat sectarian violence was sparked by the bombing of the Samarra mosque—a holy site for Shiites. In the immediate aftermath, there were reports of many killings and fears that Shiite reprisals could see the country descend into a civil war.”
Isn’t this the official narrative?
The media insists that the destruction of the Golden-dome mosque was a “9-11-type event” which caused an up-tick in the bloodshed.
But, was it?….(putting aside for a moment the fact that 9/11 was brought to us couresy of Bush &Co.)
Or was it merely part of a broader (covert) strategy to foment civil war?
There’s evidence that the plan to divert attention from the occupation forces is succeeding.
In February the military reported less servicemen killed (31) than in any month in the last year.
Isn’t this the goal?
In Max Fuller’s seminal article “For Iraq, the ‘Salvador Option’ becomes Reality” the author disproves the idea “that sectarianism is a sufficient explanation for the violence in Iraq”.
Instead, Fuller says it is “structurally at the hands of the state as part of the ongoing economic subjugation of Iraq.”
It is simply impossible to grasp what is taking place in Iraq without reading Fuller’s well-documented article.
His clear-eyed analysis is invaluable in making sense of the apparent chaos:
“In Iraq the war comes in two phases.
The first phase is complete: the destruction of the existing state, which did not comply with the interests of British and American capital.
The second phase consists of building a new state tied to those interests and smashing every dissenting sector of society.
Openly, this involves applying the same sort of economic shock therapy that has done so much damage in swathes of the Third World and Eastern Europe. Covertly, it means intimidating, kidnapping and murdering opposition voices.”
Fuller backs up his observations with ample evidence; citing open-source material he has compiled in his research:
“What we do know, however, is that hundreds of Iraqis are being murdered and..
that paramilitary hit squads of the proxy government…
organized by US trainers with a fulsome pedigree in state terrorism are increasingly being associated with them.”
The objective of the death squads is not simply to target one particular group or ethnicity,
but to direct the violence outwards creating as much fear as possible in order to pacify the population.
Fuller winds up his polemic with a summary statement that confirms the long and bloody history of colonial wars:
“The pattern is repeated time after time in every imperialist so-called counter-insurgency war;
for behind each and every one lurks the reality of exploitation and class war, and, as successive imperialist powers have shown,
the bottom line in combating the hopes and dreams of ordinary people is to resort to spreading terror through the application of extreme violence.”

The secretary general of the Association of Muslim Scholars, Hareth al-Dhari, said it even more succinctly than Fuller;

“This is state terrorism.”

-courtesy of the U.S. Taxpayer

Did we mention “killing”?

March 15, 2006

The Honorable Andrew Card

Chief of Staff

The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. Card:

On February 8, 2006, President Bush signed into law a version of the Deficit Reduction Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 2005that was different in substance from the version that passed the U.S. House of Representatives. Legal scholars have advised me that the substantive differences between the versions - which involve $2 billion in federal spending - mean that this bill did not meet the fundamental constitutional requirement that both Houses of Congress must pass any legislation signed into law by the President.

I am writing to learn what the President and his staff knew about this constitutional defect at the time the President signed the legislation.

Detailed background about the legislation and its constitutional defects are contained in a letter I sent last month to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, which I have enclosed with this letter.[1] In summary, the House-passed version of the legislation required the Medicare program to lease “durable medical equipment,” such as wheelchairs, for seniors and other beneficiaries for up to 36 months, while the version of the legislation signed by the President limited the duration of these leases to just 13 months. As the Congressional Budget Office reported, this seemingly small change from 36 months to 13 months has a disproportionately large budgetary impact, cutting Medicare outlays by $2 billion over the next five years.[2]

I understand that a call was made to the White House before the legislation was signed by the President advising the White House of the differences between the bills and seeking advice about how to proceed. My understanding is that the call was made either by the Speaker of the House to the President or by the senior staff of the Speaker to the senior staff of the President.

I would like to know whether my understanding is correct. If it is, the implications are serious.

The Presentment Clause of the U.S. Constitution states that before a bill can become law, it must be passed by both Houses of Congress.[3] When the President took the oath of office, he swore to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” which includes the Presentment Clause. If the President signed the Reconciliation Act knowing its constitutional infirmity, he would in effect be placing himself above the Constitution.

I do not raise this issue lightly. Given the gravity of the matter and the unusual circumstances surrounding the Reconciliation Act, Congress and the public need a straightforward explanation of what the President and his staff knew on February 8, when the legislation was signed into law.

Sincerely,

Henry A. Waxman Ranking Minority Member

Enclosure

[1] See Letter from Rep. Henry A. Waxman to Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Feb. 14, 2006).

[2] See Letter from CBO Acting Director Donald Marron to Rep. John M. Spratt, Jr. (Feb. 13, 2006).

[3] U.S. Constitution, Article I, � 7.

“bush wheelchair waterloo”
-courtesy of bhaller

LEARN

Supreme Court justices keep many opinions private but Sandra Day O’Connor no longer faces that obligation.
Yesterday, the retired justice criticized Republicans who criticized the courts.
She said they challenge the independence of judges and the freedoms of all Americans.
O’Connor’s speech at Georgetown University was not available for broadcast but NPR’s legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg was there.

Nina Totenberg:
In an unusually forceful and forthright speech, O’Connor said that attacks on the judiciary by some Republican leaders
pose a direct threat to our constitutional freedoms.
O’Connor began by conceding that courts do have the power to make presidents or the Congress or governors, as she put it “really, really angry.”
But, she continued, if we don’t make them mad some of the time we probably aren’t doing our jobs as judges,
and our effectiveness, she said, is premised on the notion that we won’t be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts.
The nation’s founders wrote repeatedly, she said, that without an independent judiciary to protect individual rights from the other branches of government those rights and privileges would amount to nothing.
But, said O’Connor, as the founding fathers knew statutes and constitutions don’t protect judicial independence,
people do.
And then she took aim at former House GOP leader Tom DeLay.
She didn’t name him, but she quoted his attacks on the courts at a meeting of the conservative Christian group Justice Sunday last year
when DeLay took out after the courts for rulings on abortions, prayer and the Terri Schiavo case.
This, said O’Connor, was after the federal courts had applied Congress’ onetime only statute about Schiavo as it was written.
Not, said O’Connor, as the congressman might have wished it were written.
This response to this flagrant display of judicial restraint, said O’Connor, her voice dripping with sarcasm, was that the congressman blasted the courts.
It gets worse, she said, noting that death threats against judges are increasing.
It doesn’t help, she said, when a high-profile senator suggests there may be a connection between violence against judges
and decisions that the senator disagrees with.
She didn’t name him,
but it was Texas senator John Cornyn who made that statement, after a Georgia judge was murdered in the courtroom
and the family of a federal judge in Illinois murdered in the judge’s home.
O’Connor observed that there have been a lot of suggestions lately for so-called judicial reforms,
recommendations for the massive impeachment of judges, stripping the courts of jurisdiction and cutting judicial budgets to punish offending judges. Any of these might be debatable, she said, as long as they are not retaliation for decisions that political leaders disagree with.
I, said O’Connor, am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning.
Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and former communist countries
where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish,
O’Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strongarm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies.
It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said,
but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.

citx say..it woulda helped if you hadnt RATIFIED the Bush theft of the executive six years ago..”avoiding these beginnings”….please!

make room in Hell..you got friends on the way..

back in 1975…

New Yorkers were STILL worrying that the newly built WTC might fall accross half of Lower Manhattan

WASHINGTON — Forest Service officials and Western lawmakers battled Tuesday
over an administration proposal that would sell national forest lands

the sale is proposed to help pay for a rural schools program, as the vital 30-day public comment period began.
Agriculture Under Secretary Mark Rey defended the program but faced skeptical questions
from senators of both parties during testimony before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Congress must approve the proposal before any land could be sold.
President Bush’s 2007 budget proposed to fund payments over five years to counties
under the Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act
by selling off up to $800 million worth of National Forest System lands.
The act, designed to provide transitional assistance to rural counties
affected by declining revenue from timber harvests on federal lands,
is set to expire at the end of this year unless Congress renews it.
The Forest Service has identified 300,000 acres of land that could be offered for sale,
although Rey said only about 175,000 acres would probably be needed to raise enough money.
In Montana,
13,948 acres are potentially for sale in the Beaverhead, Bitterroot, Custer, Deerlodge, Flathead, Gallatin, Helena, Kootenai, Lewis and Clark and Lolo forests.
In Wyoming,
17,619 acres are potentially for sale in the Black Hills, Medicine Bow and Bridger-Teton forests and the Thunder Basin National Grassland.
Forest Service officials said they had posted detailed maps of every parcel on its Web site Tuesday so the public could examine them and make comments,
but technical glitches plagued the site and the maps could not be seen for much of the day.
The Forest Service also on Tuesday published a notice in the Federal Register seeking comments until March 30.
Rey said the agency will rework the suggested list of parcels for sale after the comment period, before presenting it to Congress.
Montana and Wyoming members of Congress support the Rural Schools Act and want it to be renewed,
but they generally say a different funding source must be found.
Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., has called the land-sales proposal “dead in the water.”
Asked about it Tuesday, he replied, “I’m opposed to it. That’s it.”
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., has been urging Montanans to unite to fight the proposal,
and Rep. Dennis Rehberg, R-Mont., objected to the land sales in a letter to Bush last week.

citx say- “i thought in the badlands they objected with .50 calibre buffalo guns?”

Across the planet… the water wars are coming

Get out the dew harvester!!!
From Israel to India, from Turkey to Botswana, arguments are going on over disputed water supplies that may soon burst into open conflict.
Yesterday, Britain’s Defence Secretary, John Reid, pointed to the factor hastening the violent collision between a rising world population and a shrinking world water resource: global warming.
In a grim first intervention in the climate-change debate, the Defence Secretary issued a bleak forecast that violence and political conflict would become more likely in the next 20 to 30 years as climate change turned land into desert, melted ice fields and poisoned water supplies.
Climate campaigners echoed Mr Reid’s warning, and demanded that ministers redouble their efforts to curb carbon emissions.
Tony Blair will today host a crisis Downing Street summit to address what he called “the major long-term threat facing our planet”, signalling alarm within Government at the political consequences of failing to deal with the spectre of global warming.
Activists are modelling their campaign on last year’s Make Poverty History movement in the hope of creating immense popular pressure for action on climate change.
Mr Reid used a speech at Chatham House last night to deliver a stark assessment of the potential impact of rising temperatures on the political and human make-up of the world. He listed climate change alongside the major threats facing the world in future decades, including international terrorism, demographic changes and global energy demand.
Mr Reid signalled Britain’s armed forces would have to be prepared to tackle conflicts over dwindling resources. Military planners have already started considering the potential impact of global warming for Britain’s armed forces over the next 20 to 30 years. They accept some climate change is inevitable, and warn Britain must be prepared for humanitarian disaster relief, peacekeeping and warfare to deal with the dramatic social and political consequences of climate change.
Mr Reid warned of increasing uncertainty about the future of the countries least well equipped to deal with flooding, water shortages and valuable agricultural land turning to desert.
He said climate change was already a contributory factor in conflicts in Africa.
Mr Reid said: “As we look beyond the next decade, we see uncertainty growing; uncertainty about the geopolitical and human consequences of climate change.
“Impacts such as flooding, melting permafrost and desertification could lead to loss of agricultural land, poisoning of water supplies and destruction of economic infrastructure.
“More than 300 million people in Africa currently lack access to safe water; climate change will worsen this dire situation.”

He added: “These changes are not just of interest to the geographer or the demographer; they will make scarce resources, clean water, viable agricultural land even scarcer.
“Such changes make the emergence of violent conflict more rather than less likely… The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding in Darfur. We should see this as a warning sign.”
Tony Juniper, the executive director of Friends of the Earth, said: “The science of global warming is becoming ever more certain about the scale of the problem we have, and now the implications of that for security and politics is beginning to emerge.”
He said the problems could be most acute in the Middle East and North Africa.
Charlie Kornick, head of climate campaigning at the pressure group Greenpeace, said billions of people faced pressure on water supplies due to climate change across Africa, Asia and South America. He said: “If politicians realise how serious the problems could be, why are British CO2 emissions still going up?”
Tony Blair will be joined by the Chancellor Gordon Brown, the Environment Secretary, Margaret Beckett, and the International Development Secretary, Hilary Benn, at today’s talks in Downing Street.
They will be meeting representatives of the recently created Stop Climate Chaos, an alliance of environmental groups including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Oxfam. It will also meet opposition parties.
The alliance will call for the Government to commit itself to achieving a 3 per cent annual fall in carbon dioxide emissions.
The facts
• On our watery planet, 97.5 per cent of water is salt water, unfit for human use.
• Most of the fresh water is locked in the ice caps.
• The recommended basic water requirement per person per day is 50 litres. But people can get by with about 30 litres: 5 litres for food and drink and another 25 for hygiene.
• Some countries use less than 10 litres per person per day. Gambia uses 4.5, Mali 8, Somalia 8.9, and Mozambique 9.3.
• By contrast the average US citizen uses 500 litres per day, and the British average is 200.
• In the West, it takes about eight litres to brush our teeth, 10 to 35 litres to flush a lavatory, and 100 to 200 litres to take a shower.
• The litres of water needed to produce a kilo of:
Potatoes 1,000
Maize 1,400
Wheat 1,450
Chicken 4,600
Beef 42,500

get out your stillsuit Muad’ib…….