tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56791653406495108712023-11-15T06:56:05.293-08:00Bleier's DocumentationRonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.comBlogger113125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-88239898204216127922011-05-08T09:35:00.000-07:002011-05-08T09:44:24.553-07:00LRB on Tax Avoidance and how the 01% are destroying our economy<span style="font-weight:bold;">Didn’t they notice?</span><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">David Runciman</span><br />London Review of Books, 14 April 2011<br />See also accompanying article, "Out of Sight" by Richard Murphy<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Books under Review</span><br /><br />T<blockquote>reasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson<br /> Bodley Head, 329 pp, £14.99, January 2011, ISBN 978 1 84792 110 9<br />Buy<br />Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson<br /> Simon and Schuster, 368 pp, £11.50, March 2011, ISBN 978 1 4165 8870 2<br /></blockquote><br />How to sum up Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, that emblematic figure of our times, with his doctorate from the LSE (‘The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions’), his charitable foundations, his extensive property portfolio, his playboy lifestyle, his motley collection of friends (Peter Mandelson, Nat Rothschild, Prince Andrew), his ready access to Libya’s sovereign wealth fund, and his recently professed willingness to eliminate the enemies of his father’s regime one bullet at a time? He’s a hypocrite, of course, but that hardly does him justice (who isn’t?). He is also, on some accounts, a victim: his unfortunate mentor at the LSE, David Held, has described the predicament the ostensibly reform-minded Saif found himself in after his father’s people had revolted as ‘the stuff of Shakespeare’, but that surely is letting everyone concerned off far too lightly. He may just be a smooth-talking thug, and many online observers have noted that he seems to model himself on the smooth-talking thug and would-be businessman Stringer Bell from The Wire. But the word that best captures Saif Gaddafi comes from Nicholas Shaxson’s blistering account of the role that tax havens play in international finance. Shaxson doesn’t discuss the Gaddafis themselves, but he does paint a picture of the world in which the young Gaddafi, until very recently, felt right at home. This is the world of ‘offshore’. Shaxson doesn’t limit the term to its technical meaning, as a simple description of the particular jurisdictions that enable people to eliminate their tax bills. He applies it to people as well as places, and to a way of life along with a state of mind. Seen like this, it turns out to be a very useful word. Saif Gaddafi is just an offshore guy, living in an offshore world.<br /><br />The essence of offshore is the need to keep up a solid appearance of respectability, while allowing money in and out with as little fuss as possible. Tax avoidance (unlike tax evasion) is not a clandestine activity, and tax havens don’t exist just to enable people to squirrel their money away from the authorities. The money needs to be accessible, and it needs to be liquid. For that reason, people prefer tax havens where they can conduct their business relatively openly, and the most successful offshore jurisdictions are the ones that ask no questions but also tell no lies. Shaxson’s memorable phrase for this is ‘theatre of probity’. The Swiss have always been the masters, with their formal manners and careful paperwork. But it turns out that the other champions of this way of doing business are the British. Shaxson’s book explains how and why London became the centre of what he calls a ‘spider’s web’ of offshore activities (and in the process such a comfortable home for the likes of Saif Gaddafi). It is because offshore is the offshoot of an empire in decline. It perfectly suited a country with the appearance of grandeur and traditionally high standards, but underneath it all a reek of desperation and the pressing need for more cash.<br /><br />As Shaxson shows, many of the world’s most successful tax havens are former or current British imperial outposts. These include Hong Kong, the Channel Islands and remaining overseas territories like the Cayman Islands. What such places offer are limited or non-existent tax regimes, extremely lax regulation, weak local politics, but plenty of the trappings of respectability and democratic accountability. Depositors are happiest putting their money in locations that have the feel of a major jurisdiction like Britain without actually being subject to British rules and regulations (or British tax rates). The Caymans, or Jersey, make full use of their British connections to reassure people that their money is safe (the Cayman national anthem is still ‘God Save the Queen’), but when anyone complains to the authorities back in London that these places are being used by criminals and dictators to launder their assets, they are told that it is no longer Britain’s role to tell its dependencies how to run their own affairs. It was a function Hong Kong fulfilled before its handover to China in 1997: it could be presented to the outside world as somewhere with British values but without its unfortunate tendency to raise either taxes or regulatory standards in response to political pressure. Strikingly, it plays the same role for China today. After 1997 China preserved Hong Kong as a ‘special administrative zone’ autonomous of the mainland in all matters except foreign relations and defence. As Shaxson puts it, ‘The resemblance with the ambiguous Britain-Jersey link, or the Britain-Cayman arrangement, is no coincidence. Chinese elites want their own offshore centre, complete with political control and judicial separation.’ So offshore suits empires on the rise as well.<br /><br />The other thing most of these places have in common is that they are islands. Islands make good tax havens, and not simply because they can cut themselves off from the demands of mainland politics. It is also because they are often tight-knit communities, in which everyone knows what’s going on but no one wants to speak out for fear of ostracism. These ‘goldfish bowls’, as Shaxson calls them, suit the offshore mindset, because they are seemingly transparent: you can see all the way through – it’s just that when you look there’s nothing there. Jersey is the template: a nice, genteel place, with a strong sense of civic responsibility and plenty of opportunities for public participation, including elections to all manner of public offices (senators, deputies, parish constables), but weak political parties, staggered ‘general’ elections, and never a meaningful change of government. ‘If you don’t like it, you can leave’ is the basic refrain of Jersey politics. Dissent is not obviously suppressed, as it might be under a dictatorship (which is why dictatorships make bad tax havens: you never know when the whole thing is going to blow up). Instead, dissent is simply allowed to wither away. The same thing happens on the Cayman Islands, with its tiny population (around 55,000), its elected legislature and its governor-general appointed from London, who takes all the difficult decisions but allows the locals to have their say. As one former governor-general put it, ‘I think we are in the world of semantics here. The more Caymanians we can put in positions of power, the better; they will act as lightning conductors for political dissent.’<br /><br />This is the web, but where is the spider? At the heart of Shaxson’s story lies the City of London, itself a kind of island within the British state. Again, the rise of the City as the favourite place for foreigners to park their money, no matter who they were or where it came from, is related to imperial decline. After the Second World War, sterling still financed much of global trade, but the British economy was no longer able to sustain the value of the pound against the dollar. In the aftermath of Suez, which caused a run on the pound, the government attempted to impose curbs on the overseas lending of London’s merchant banks. The response of the banks, with the connivance of the Bank of England, was to shift their international lending into dollars. The result was the creation of the so-called ‘Eurodollar market’ – which was effectively an offshore haven. Because the trade was happening in dollars, the British saw no need to tax or regulate it; because it was happening in London, the Americans had no means to tax or regulate it. Among the first people to spot the advantages of this new system were the Soviets, who wanted a secure place outside the US to hold their dollars so that the Americans could not seize them if relations between the countries deteriorated. They were soon followed by the Americans themselves – that is, American banks and wealthy individuals – who saw the London market as somewhere to do business free from the grasping hand of the US authorities. The money started to pile in.<br /><br />The Bank of England was happy: London was once again a lynchpin of international finance. The American authorities, unsurprisingly, were not so happy: they feared a balance of payments crisis. But when in 1963 President Kennedy tried to stem currency outflows by taxing the interest on foreign securities, in an effort to reduce the incentive to export dollars to more lucrative overseas markets, it had the opposite effect, and produced what Shaxson calls ‘a stampede for the unregulated London offshore market, free of tax and regulations’. US policy-makers were now in a dilemma. They could try to face down the threat of offshore, either with higher domestic interest rates, or with tighter controls on currency outflows and a tougher regulatory regime requiring US banks to share information about their overseas activities. Or they could copy London by creating an offshore world of their own closer to home: in other words, if you can’t beat them, join them. The second was the path of least resistance – among other things it was a useful way of reinforcing the dollar’s position as the global reserve currency – and over time it was the one they took. Slowly in the later 1960s and 1970s, and then much more rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, America deregulated its financial controls and allowed money to move in and out with fewer if any questions asked, in the hope that more of it would stick to the sides.<br /><br />Once this process began, it also unleashed a new wave of competition between individual American states to offer the most hospitable, least intrusive regulatory environment for outside companies to work in. Leading the way was little Delaware, which had always tried to compensate for its lack of size by being open for any business. Since the 1980s more and more corporations have moved to Delaware to take advantage of the state’s extreme laissez-faire attitude to the rights of shareholders and employees against company managements. If you took your business to Delaware (and this was often just a question of establishing a shell office and filling in some forms), it would be much harder for anyone to prove anything against you, because the Delaware courts did not think that much of what you did was any of their concern. Again, other states faced a choice: they could try to isolate Delaware by tightening up their own standards or they could try to compete for a share of the spoils. Enough of them decided to compete to start a race to the bottom. Offshore had moved onshore.<br /> <br /><br />When officials from Delaware toured the globe in the late 1980s advertising their services (and hoping, among other things, to provide a haven for all the hot money that was expected to flow out of Hong Kong in the run-up to the handover to China), they did so under the slogan ‘Delaware can protect you from politics.’ Shaxson defines a tax haven as ‘a place that seeks to attract business by offering politically stable facilities to help people or entities get around the rules, laws and regulations of jurisdictions elsewhere’. But this is the crux: where is the politics? Why aren’t these moves more politically unstable, or at least politically contentious? In the case of Delaware, as with other goldfish bowl communities, size probably tells (for a long time Delaware politics was shaped by the influence of the Du Pont family, whose vast chemical operations dominated the local economy). What, though, about Washington, where the shift to an offshore mindset at the national level might be expected to run up against some serious political opposition? What happened to the representatives of all those people who don’t have lots of money to move around, who can’t relocate even if they wanted to, and who have an interest in a fair, open and broadly progressive tax system? Didn’t they notice what was going on?<br /><br />This is the question that Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson tackle in Winner-Take-All Politics. They don’t spend much time talking about offshore, but the story they tell has striking parallels with the one laid out by Shaxson. One of the ways you can identify an offshore environment, according to Shaxson, is that local politics gets captured by financial services. In that sense, Washington has gone offshore: its politics has been captured by the interests of a narrow group of very wealthy individuals, many of whom work in finance. For Hacker and Pierson this, more than anything else, explains why the rich have got so much richer over the last 30 years or so. And by the rich they don’t mean simply the generally wealthy; they mean the super-rich. The real beneficiaries of the explosion in income for top earners since the 1970s has been not the top 1 per cent but the top 0.1 per cent of the general population. Since 1974, the share of national income of the top 0.1 per cent of Americans has grown from 2.7 to 12.3 per cent of the total, a truly mind-boggling level of redistribution from the have-nots to the haves. Who are these people? As Hacker and Pierson note, they are ‘not, for the most part, superstars and celebrities in the arts, entertainment and sports. Nor are they rentiers, living off their accumulated wealth, as was true in the early part of the last century. A substantial majority are company executives and managers, and a growing share of these are financial company executives and managers.’<br /><br />Hacker and Pierson believe that politics is responsible for this. It happened because law-makers and public officials allowed it to happen, not because international markets, or globalisation, or differentials in education or life-chances made it inevitable. It was a choice, driven by the pressure of lobbyists and other organisations to create an environment much more hospitable to the needs of the very rich. It was even so a particular kind of politics and a particular kind of choice. It wasn’t a conspiracy, because it happened in the open. But nor was it an explicit political movement, characterised by rallies, speeches and electoral triumphs. It relied in large part on what Hacker and Pierson call a process of drift: ‘systematic, prolonged failures of government to respond to the shifting realities of a dynamic economy’. More often than not the politicians were persuaded to do nothing, to let up on enforcement, to look the other way, as money moved around the globe and up to the very top of the financial chain. This chimes with what Shaxson says about the way the offshore system was allowed to develop over the last four decades. Here too there was no real conspiracy, because there was no real need. Instead, it happened because ‘nobody was paying attention.’<br /><br />One of Hacker and Pierson’s complaints about the way we usually regard politics is that we miss what’s really going on by focusing on the show of elections and the competition between parties. This is the theatre of electoral politics, to set alongside the theatre of probity. Too often, they say, we reduce politics to the level of sport: ‘This is no doubt why politics as electoral spectacle is so appealing to the media: it’s exciting and it’s simple. Aficionados can memorise the stats of their favourite players or become experts on the great games of the past. Everyone, however, can enjoy the gripping spectacle of two highly motivated teams slugging it out.’<br /><br />I have to plead guilty here. I have often wondered whether I am interested in politics because I am interested in sport, and sometimes I have felt vaguely guilty about this, suspecting it means I don’t actually understand what’s happening. Elections are seductive, and these days the build-up is so protracted that they can drown out the real business of politics: the way organised groups use pressure – money, lobbying, threats – to squeeze whichever politicians happen to be in power, in order to influence the shaping of policy. Elections also suggest false historical turning points. It is easy to assume that if the rich have been winning in recent decades, the process must have started with the election of the pro-big business, anti-big government Ronald Reagan in 1980 (and concomitantly, Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979). But Hacker and Pierson argue that the real turning point came in 1978, during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. This was the year the lobbyists and other organised groups who were pushing hard to relax the burden of tax and regulation on wealthy individuals and corporate interests discovered that no one was pushing back all that hard. Despite Democratic control of the White House and both Houses of Congress, 1978 saw the defeat of attempts to introduce progressive tax reform and to improve the legal position of trade unions. Instead, legislation was passed that reduced the tax burden on corporations and increased the burden on their employees (through a hike in the payroll tax, a regressive measure). All this happened because the politicians followed the path of least resistance – as elected politicians invariably do – and the better organised and better-funded resistance came from the representatives of big business, not organised labour.<br /><br />What took place in the 1980s was therefore an extension of the Carter years, not a reversal of them. The process of deregulation and redistribution up the chain accelerated under Reagan, who was broadly sympathetic to these goals. Yet it happened not because he was sympathetic to them, but because his sympathies were allowed free rein in a political environment where the opposition was muted and the expected coalition of interests opposed to the changes never materialised. After all, as Hacker and Pierson point out, Richard Nixon, who might have been expected to share some of Reagan’s sympathies, had gone the other way in his actual policies a decade earlier, shoring up the legislative framework of the welfare state and maintaining a broadly progressive tax system. (Something similar happened in Britain under Edward Heath.) He acted like this because he felt he had little choice: the organised pressure ready to resist change appeared much too strong. It was only during the Carter years – and to some extent the Callaghan years in Britain – that this pressure turned out to be weaker than anyone thought. The politicians of the Reagan/ Thatcher revolution did what they did not because they were committed ideologues, determined to stick to their principles. They did it because they found they could get away with it.<br /><br />So where did the resistance go? This is the real puzzle, and Hacker and Pierson take it seriously because they take democracy seriously, despite its unhealthy fixation on elections. Democracies are meant to favour the interests of the many over those of the few. As Hacker and Pierson put it, ‘Democracy may not be good at a lot of things. But one thing it is supposed to be good at is responding to problems that affect broad majorities.’ Did the majority not actually mind that they were losing out for the sake of the super-rich elite? In the American case, one common view is that the voters allowed it to happen because they minded more about other things: religion, culture, abortion, guns etc. The assumption is that many ordinary Americans have signed a kind of Faustian pact with the Republican Party, in which the rich get the money and the poor get support for the cultural values they care about. Hacker and Pierson reject this view, and not just because they don’t think the process they describe depends on there being a Republican in the White House: they see strong evidence that the American public do still want a fairer tax system and do still see it as the job of politicians to protect their interests against the interests of high finance. The problem is that the public simply don’t know what the politicians are up to. They are not properly informed about how the rules have been steadily changed to their disadvantage. ‘Americans are no less egalitarian when it comes to their vision of an ideal world,’ Hacker and Pierson write. ‘But they are much less accurate when it comes to their vision of the real world.’<br /><br />Why is no one paying attention? Perhaps it’s the fault of the internet, which is making it increasingly hard for anyone to focus on anything for long. Yet it is striking that Hacker and Pierson’s argument is really a return to a much longer-standing critique of democracy, one that flourished during the 1920s and 1930s but was supplanted in the postwar period by expectations of rational behaviour on the part of voters. This traditional critique does not see the weakness of democracy as a matter of the voters wanting the wrong things, or not really knowing what they want. They know what they want but they don’t know how to get it. It’s because they don’t understand the world they live in that democracy isn’t working. People aren’t stupid, but when it comes to politics they are ignorant, lazy and easily satisfied with pat answers to difficult questions. Hacker and Pierson recognise that it has become bad manners to point this out even in serious political discourse. But it remains the truth. ‘Most citizens pay very little attention to politics, and it shows. To call their knowledge of even the most elementary facts about the political system shaky would be generous.’ The traditional solution to this problem was to supplement the ignorance of the voters with guidance from experts, who would reform the system in the voters’ best interests. The difficulty is that the more the experts take charge, the less incentive there is for the voters to inform themselves about what’s going on. This is what Hacker and Pierson call the catch-22 of democratic politics: in order to combat what’s taking place under the voters’ radar it’s necessary to continue the fight under the voters’ radar. The best hope is that eventually the public might wake up to what is going on and join in. But that will take time. As Hacker and Pierson admit, ‘Political reformers will need to mobilise for the long haul.’<br /><br />Yet time may be one of the things that the reformers do not have on their side. As Shaxson points out in his account of the rise of the tax havens, one of the reasons for the drift towards deregulation is that politics has been too slow to resist it. This, again, is one of the traditional critiques of democracy: while decent-minded democrats are organising themselves to make the world a better place, the world has moved on. In a fast-moving financial environment, it is usually easier to assemble a coalition of interests in favour of relaxing the rules than one in favour of tightening them. Similarly, it’s easier not to enforce the rules you have than to enforce them: non-enforcement is the work of a moment – all you have to do is turn a blind eye – whereas enforcement is a slow and laborious process. Shaxson, like everyone else, is torn. On the one hand, he thinks the key to resisting the rise of offshore is a more transparent system, based on what he calls ‘automatic information exchange on a multilateral basis’. This is the equivalent of putting the experts in charge. On the other hand, he wants national governments to be more active, dynamic, responsive to the interests of their citizens. But a speeded-up national politics may go against the international co-ordination needed for a fully transparent system. If you reawaken democratic politics at the national level, it will by definition be harder to co-ordinate it at the international level. This is the catch-22 of globalisation.<br /><br />Shaxson illustrates the problem at the end of his book, where he lists his proposals for changing the culture of offshore. One example he gives of how it can be done comes from the United States, where in 2001 Congress finally passed stronger anti-money laundering legislation and clamped down on the spread of offshore shell banks, which hide behind nominees and trustees so no one knows who their real owners are. But the date is important: these measures were included in the Patriot Act, and the reason they were passed was that national politics had been woken up by 9/11. Yet no one could argue that the ultimate consequences either of that act or the vitality of American politics in the aftermath of 9/11 was a better integrated, more transparent world. Another of Shaxson’s demands is that governments do more to keep money onshore. One of the drivers of the offshore world is what he calls the ‘tides of looted or tainted oil money [that] sluice into the offshore system, distorting the global economy in the process’. One radical solution is to get a country’s mineral windfalls out of the hands of a few super-wealthy individuals and into the hands of ordinary citizens, by redistributing the money directly to every inhabitant. This may sound unrealistic but such schemes have been implemented in a few places, including Alaska. However, Shaxson doesn’t see fit to tell us the name of the politician who spread the wealth there: it was Sarah Palin. So yes, dynamic, quick-thinking democratic politicians can make a difference, but no, it doesn’t follow that greater understanding between nations will be the result. These two brilliant books are right to suggest that politics is the answer. Still, politics is also, as always, part of the problem.Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-55078117683769561182010-11-17T18:56:00.001-08:002010-11-17T18:57:19.408-08:00Christopher Hitchens: Obama's Latest Craven Deal with Israel<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:85%;color:black;"> <div><br /></div> <div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: medium;"> <div><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><b><span style="font-size:6;">Israel's Shabbos Goy</span></b><br /><br />Why America will come to regret the craven deal Obama is offering Netanyahu.<br /><br /><b>By Christopher Hitchens<br /><br />November 17, 2010 "</b></span><a target="_blank" href="http://www.slate.com/id/2274918"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><b>Slate</b></span></a><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><b>" - - Those</b> of us who keep an eye on the parties of God are avid students of the weekly Sabbath sermons of<a target="_blank" href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/yosef.html">Rabbi Ovadia Yosef</a>. In these and other venues, usually broadcast, this elderly Sephardic ayatollah provides an action-packed diet that seldom disappoints. A few months ago, he favored his devout audience with a classic rant in which he called down curses on the Palestinian Arabs and their leaders, wishing that <a target="_blank" href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38901525/">a plague would come and sweep them all away</a>. Last month, he announced that <a target="_blank" href="http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=191782">the sole reason for the existence of gentiles</a> was to perform menial services for Jews: After that, he opined, their usefulness was at an end. A huge hubbub led to his<a target="_blank" href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/ovadia-yosef-atones-to-mubarak-after-declaring-palestinians-should-die-1.314243">withdrawal</a> of the first of these diatribes. (I would be interested to know if this was on partly theological grounds. After all, the local Palestinians may still have some labor to perform before the divine plan is through with them.) The second sermon, so far as I know, still stands without apology. Why on earth should anybody care about the ravings of this scrofulous medieval figure, who peppers his talk of non-Jews in Palestine with comparisons to snakes, monkeys, and other lesser creations, rather as Hamas and Hezbollah refer to the Jews? Well, one reason is that he is the spiritual leader of the Shas Party, an important member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition. Indeed, two key portfolios, of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2001/4/Ministry%20of%20the%20Interior">the Interior</a> and of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.gov.il/FirstGov/TopNavEng/Engoffices/EngMinistries/EngConstruction/">Construction and Housing</a>, are held by Shas members named <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Templates/Hasava.aspx?NRMODE=Published&NRNODEGUID=%7BAA57153B-2E4F-48E8-B656-47BB43E42F32%7D&NRORIGINALURL=%2FMFA%2FGovernment%2FPersonalities%2FFrom%2BA-Z%2FEliyahu%2BYishai.htm&NRCACHEHINT=Guest">Eli Yishai</a> and <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Government/Personalities/From+A-Z/Ariel+Atias.htm">Ariel Atias</a>.</span></div> <div><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">Yishai recently delighted the Diaspora by saying that only those Jews who converted via the Orthodox route could carry "<a target="_blank" href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/jewish-gene-theories-make-waves-in-germany-go-unnoticed-in-israel-1.311182">the Jewish gene</a>." Atias has expressed alarm about the tendency of Israeli Arab citizens to try to live where they please—<a target="_blank" href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/housing-minister-spread-of-arab-population-must-be-stopped-1.279277">or "spread," as he phrases it</a>—and has advocated a policy of segregation in housing within Israel proper. He also advocates the segregation by neighborhood of secular from Orthodox Jews, adding that <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3976199,00.html">he does not wish his own children to mix with their nonreligious peers</a>. It is Yishai's ministry that is famous for making announcements about new "housing" developments outside Israel itself and in legally disputed territory. Very often, Netanyahu himself has claimed to be taken by surprise at these announcements, which usually involve tense areas of Jerusalem. Thus the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/world/middleeast/10biden.html">huge embarrassment</a> inflicted on Vice President Joe Biden earlier this year, when fresh settlement construction was proclaimed in the middle of his high-level visit. And thus the undisguised irritation of President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week, when yet another round of such housing was scheduled while Obama was in Asia and Netanyahu was in the United States. Apparently, the latest high-level round of the peace process has included the modest and tentative suggestion to Israel that such disclosures be timed with greater tact and coordination in the future.</span></div> <div><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">It's not only the doings of his Interior and Housing ministries of which Netanyahu has to remain resolutely uninformed. His foreign minister is not a part of Israel's most important external negotiation. This is perhaps just as well, since the holder of the post, Avigdor Lieberman, regards the whole "process" as a waste of time. He <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Government/Speeches+by+Israeli+leaders/2010/FM_Liberman_Addresses_UN_General_Assembly_28-Sep-2010.htm">said as much</a> at the United Nations last September. It was patiently explained at that time that Netanyahu had not been favored with advance notice of the contents of the speech.</span></div> <div><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">Lieberman has another distinction that I believe is unique. He does not live in the country whose foreign ministry he heads. He chooses, rather, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/the-hilltop-youth-from-nokdim-1.280029">to make his home</a> in the West Bank settlement of Nokdim, a tenaciously held outcrop with a population of fewer than 1,000 people. The party which he heads—<a target="_blank" href="http://www.yisraelbeytenu.com/">Yisrael Beytenu</a>—is a nationalist rather than religious faction, but in a competition with Rabbi Yosef for vicious anti-Arab rhetoric, it's not immediately clear which one would emerge the winner.</span></div> <div><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">Now <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/world/middleeast/15mideast.html">we read that</a>, in return for just 90 days of Israeli lenience on new settlement-building (this brief pause or "freeze" <em>not </em>to include the crucial precincts of East Jerusalem), Netanyahu is being enticed with "a package of security incentives and fighter jets <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/world/middleeast/14mideast.html?scp=1&sq=%2522a%20package%20of%20security%20incentives%20and%20fighter%20jets%20worth%20%25243%20billion%2522&st=cse">worth $3 billion</a>" and a promise that the United States government would veto any Palestinian counterproposal at the United Nations. Netanyahu, while graciously considering this offer, was initially reported as being unsure whether he "could win approval for the United States deal from his Cabinet." In other words, we must wait on the pleasure of Rabbi Yosef and Ministers Atias, Yishai, and Lieberman, who have the unusual ability to threaten Netanyahu from his right wing.</span></div> <div><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">This is a national humiliation. Regardless of whether that bunch of clowns and thugs and racists "approve" of the Obama/Clinton grovel offer, there should be a unanimous demand that it be withdrawn.</span></div> <div><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">The mathematics of the situation must be evident even to the meanest intelligence. In order for any talk of a two-state outcome to be even slightly realistic, there needs to be territory on which the second state can be built, or on which the other nation living in Palestine can govern itself. The aim of the extreme Israeli theocratic and chauvinist parties is plain and undisguised: Annex enough land to make this solution impossible, and either expel or repress the unwanted people. The policy of Netanyahu is likewise easy to read: Run out the clock by demanding concessions for something he has already agreed to in principle, appease the ultras he has appointed to his own government, and wait for a chance to blame Palestinian reaction for the inevitable failure.</span></div> <div><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;">The only mystery is this: Why does the United States acquiesce so wretchedly in its own disgrace at the hands of a virtual client state? A soft version of Rabbi Yosef's contemptuous view of the gentiles is the old concept of the <em>shabbos goy</em>: the non-Jew who is paid a trifling fee to turn out the lights or turn on the stove, or whatever else is needful to get around the more annoying regulations of the Sabbath. How the old buzzard must cackle when he sees the gentiles actually volunteering a bribe to do the lowly work! And lowly it is, involving the tearing-up of international law and U.N. resolutions and election promises, and the further dispossession and eviction of a people to whom we gave our word. This craven impotence will be noticed elsewhere, and by some very undesirable persons, and we will most certainly be made to regret it. For now, though, the shame.</span></div> <div><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><em>Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for </em>Vanity Fair<em> and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.</em></span></div></span></div></span>Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-74328552494070747992010-08-16T20:21:00.000-07:002010-08-16T20:22:44.404-07:00CP: Esam Al-Amin: Who Killed Hariri?August 16, 2010<br />Israel's Hidden Hands in Lebanon<br />Who Killed Hariri?<br /><p>http://www.counterpunch.org/amin08162010.html</p><p><br /></p>By ESAM AL-AMIN<br /><br />On Valentine’s Day in 2005, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri left in his motorcade along the seaside highway, cruising towards his mansion. As the motorcade slowed down in front of the St. George Hotel in downtown Beirut, a huge explosion of a parked Mitsubishi pick-up truck detonated at 12:56 PM, killing him along with 22 others including his entourage, bodyguards and some passers-by.<br /><br />Ever since that day the polarization in Lebanon has deepened between the pro-Western forces led by Hariri’s son Saad, his Sunni-led coalition with Druze and pro-American Christian allies, and the pro-Syrian block of the Shiite parties led by Hezbollah and their Christian allies of the Free Patriotic Front. Soon after, the pro-Western parties accused Syria of being behind the crime and immediately embarked on massive demonstrations and pursued the intervention of international powers in order to dislodge Syria from Lebanon after a twenty-nine year military presence.<br /><br />Less than one month into George W. Bush’s second term, the U.S. president took advantage of the incident by applying immense pressure on the Syrian regime, which eventually culminated in a U.N. Security Council resolution on April 7, 2005 appointing an international tribunal to investigate Hariri’s assassination. From day one the tribunal, led by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, accused Syria of being behind the assassination. The enormous political and public pressures resulted in Syria’s withdrawal by the end of April.<br /><br />The politicization of the UN investigation was in full swing when the tribunal issued several reports accusing the Syrian regime, based on non-credible witnesses. It took four years for the tribunal to admit that much of “the evidence” used against Syria was fabricated by false witnesses, some of them even tied to Israeli intelligence (Abdelbasit Bani Odeh) or the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies (Ahmad Mari‘e and Zuhair Siddiq).<br /><br />By the end of 2009, the whole case against Syria collapsed and the four senior security officers held for over four years were consequently released. In the mean time, the false witnesses were relocated outside Lebanon and given protection and new identities in different European countries.<br /><br />Meanwhile, a new tribunal was appointed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in March 2009. The new team was led by Italian judge Antonio Cassesse and Canadian prosecutor Daniel Bellemare. On May 23, 2009, the German publication Der Spiegel published a report detailing the new direction of the second investigative team.<br /><br />Basing their conclusions on leaks from the international tribunal, the German article, as well as many other subsequent Israeli media accounts, reported that members of Hezbollah were behind the assassination. In the spring of 2010, Prime Minister Saad Hariri told Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah that an indictment against members of his group was expected before the end of the year.<br /><br />This development prompted Nasrallah to charge the reconstituted international tribunal of being a political instrument in the hands of the United States and Israel. This self-serving statement would have been easily dismissed except that the first tribunal was indeed used against Syria for political ends.<br /><br />Moreover, the efforts since 2005 to disarm Hezbollah, including the summer war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, have not only failed, but the militant group has become even stronger and better armed. Hence, the attempt to neutralize it through international pressure has accelerated within the last year.<br /><br />On August 9, Nasrallah, gave a masterful multimedia performance pointing a finger towards Israel and accusing it of involvement in the assassination. He admitted that he did not have direct evidence but over the span of two hours he presented a case of circumstantial evidence that showed means, motive, and opportunity for Israel.<br /><br />He displayed video testimony of several agents of Israel in Lebanon, demonstrating that at least since September, 1993, the Israeli Mossad had been tracking Hariri. The agent Ahmad Nasrallah (no relation), confessed that he had been planting with his security detail false stories that Hariri was a target of assassination by Hezbollah. Although the agent had been detained since 1996, he escaped from a Lebanese prison several years later and fled to Israel.<br /><br />Furthermore, most of the 100 Israeli agents caught by the Lebanese internal security apparatus in the past few years have confessed to a fifteen-year spying operation by Israel, spanning from the surveillance of major Lebanese figures, including the Lebanese president, the head of the army, and heads of pro-Western political parties to surveilling and assassinating major figures in the Lebanese resistance camp.<br /><br />But perhaps the major revelation in Nasrallah’s press conference was the ability of his group to intercept all reconnaissance images sent from the Israeli drones over Lebanese skies back to Israel. This technical feat achieved by Hezbollah since 1997 allowed them to analyze Israel’s major targets in Lebanon. For example he showed that in September, 1997, because of such interceptions, his troops were able to ambush an Israeli commando unit after entering Beirut by sea, and even videotaped the helicopter evacuation of fifteen dead and wounded soldiers following the botched raid.<br /><br />In his speech, Nasrallah matched the intercepted images with several assassinations carried out in Lebanon in the past decade evidenced by confessions of the captured Israeli agents in Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre. He then showed extensive images taken by the Israeli drones for over a five-year period of Rafik Hariri’s land routes across Lebanon- to and from his offices and residences in Beirut, his summer home in the mountains, and the coastal route to his brother’s residence in Sidon.<br /><br />In all these routes there were no Hezbollah targets, offices or bases, leaving no doubt that Hariri was the target of the drones that were taking images from all angles, especially those close to the coastal areas, while pausing and zooming at the points of intersections.<br /><br />The Hezbollah leader pointed out that just this past year the Lebanese authorities arrested several Israeli agents who confessed to penetrating the mobile communications network across Lebanon. In essence, the Israeli Mossad has had the capacity to intercept and plant any communications in Lebanon. He also exposed the most dangerous Israeli agent in Lebanon in the past two decades as being retired Army Brig. Ghassan Jirjis Al-Jidd.<br /><br />He not only assisted missions logistically by picking up and driving Israeli assassination teams throughout Lebanon since 2004, but he was also an operational agent, carrying out several missions on behalf of the Israelis including carrying and planting bombs, as confessed by other captured agents. Al-Jidd was also placed at the scene of the crime on February 13, 2005 one day before Harriri was killed. But after he was exposed by Hezbollah in 2009, Al-Jidd was able to flee to France, then to Israel hours before he was to be apprehended by the Lebanese authorities.<br /><br />Nasrallah finally disclosed that an Israeli reconnaissance plane and an Israeli AWACS were flying over Beirut on the day of the assassination for four hours from 10:30 am until 2:30 pm encompassing the 1 pm time of the assassination. He questioned whether it was a coincidence that an operational plane would be flying so close to the location at the time when the crime was committed.<br /><br />The Israeli government immediately dismissed these accusations as baseless although many Israeli experts admitted that Hezbollah had been able to intercept Israeli drone images for many years, but they argued that the transmission of pictures have since been encrypted, making it very difficult to intercept.<br /><br />Israel has a long and bloody history of successful assassinations in Lebanon since the 1970’s, including the killing of the former leader of Hezbollah in 1992, and the assassination of dozens of Palestinian leaders in the occupied territories, Europe and other Arab states including many leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the PLO.<br /><br />Many of these assassinations were carried out secretly but some were exposed when agents were caught red handed as in the 1997 attempt to kill Hamas’ leader Khaled Meshal in Amman, or after leaving behind many clues as in the assassination of another Hamas leader in Dubai in January of this year. Often times Israel would conduct such assassinations in public and in cold blood without any fear of international condemnation or scrutiny, especially when carried out in the occupied territories.<br /><br />Since its forced withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, Israel has had two primary objectives in Lebanon: forcing a withdrawal of Syria and hence reducing its influence, and secondly, disarming Hezbollah and other resistance groups. The first goal was achieved shortly after the Hariri assassination but the second has been difficult to accomplish despite employing a vicious military attack in 2006 as well as mobilizing all levers of local, regional and international political powers.<br /><br />But pinning the assassination of Hariri on Hezbollah could be the trigger to a bloody sectarian civil war by exploiting the Sunni-Shi’a divide. At minimum Israel and its allies hope that under indictment Hezbollah and its friends would be on the defensive, thus forcing the disarmament of its militia or at least curbing their influence.<br /><br />If anything, Nasrallah’s presentation succeeded in forcing the international tribunal to consider Israel as a possible suspect. Two days after the press conference a spokesperson for Bellemare asked the Lebanese government to submit all the evidence in the hands of Hezbollah. For his part Nasrallah promised that if a serious investigation were initiated he would present much more evidence and secrets that would take the investigation to a completely different route, in the direction of Tel Aviv.<br /><br />Whether Israel had a hand in the Hariri assassination remains to be seen. But what is clear is that Israel has found its match in the grand chess game in Lebanon.<br /><br />Esam Al-Amin can be reached at alamin1919@gmail.comRonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-51628092402887704682010-06-06T18:39:00.000-07:002010-06-06T18:40:36.515-07:00Uri Avnery attacked by rightest thugs: 10,000 march vs Israeli brutality<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:14.0pt"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level:1"><b><u><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;font-family:Arial">“The Government Is Drowning Us All”</span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level:1"><b><u><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;font-family:Arial">Uri Avnery attacked by rightist thugs</span></u></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial">A disaster was averted yesterday (June 5) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>at Tel-Aviv’s Museum Square, when rightists threw a smoke grenade into the middle of the protest rally, obviously hoping for a panic to break out and cause the protesters to trample on each other. But the demonstrators remained calm, nobody started to run and just a small space in the middle of the crowd remained empty. The speaker did not stop talking even when the cloud of smoke reached the stage. The audience included many children.</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial">Half an hour later, a dozen rightist thugs attacked Gush Shalom’s 86 year old Uri Avnery, when he was on his way from the rally in the company of his wife, Rachel, Adam Keller and his wife Beate Siversmidt. Avnery had just entered a taxi, when a dozen rightist thugs attacked him and tried to drag him out of the car. At the critical moment, the police arrived and made it possible for the car to leave. Gush spokesman Adam Keller said: “These cowards did not dare to attack us when we were many, but they were heroes when they caught Avnery alone.”</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial">The incident took place when the more than 10 thousand demonstrators were dispersing, after marching through the streets of Tel Aviv in protest against the attack on the Gaza-bound aid flotilla.</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial">Not only was this one of the largest peace demonstrations for a long time, but also the first time that all parts of the Israeli peace camp - from Gush Shalom and Hadash to Peace Now and Meretz – did unite for common action </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial">The main slogan was “The Government Is Drowning All of Us” and “We must Row towards Peace!” - alluding to the attack on the flotilla. The protesters called in unison “Jews and Arabs Refuse to be Enemies!”</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial">The demonstrators assembled at Rabin Square and marched to Museum Square, where the protest rally was held. Originally, this was planned as a demonstration against the occupation on its 43</span></b><b><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family: Arial">th</span></b><b><span style="font-family:Arial"> anniversary, and for peace based on “Two States for Two Peoples” and “Jerusalem – Capital of the Two States”, but recent events turned it mainly into a protest against the attack on the flotilla.</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial">One of the new sights was the great number of national flags, which were flown alongside the red flags of Hadash, the green flags of Meretz and the two-flag emblems of Gush Shalom. Many peace activists have decided that the national flag should no longer be left to the rightists.</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial">“The violence of the rightists is a direct result of the brainwashing, which has been going on throughout the last week,” Avnery commented. “A huge propaganda machine has incited the public in order to cover up the terrible mistakes made by our political and military leadership, mistakes which are becoming worse from day to day.”</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-family:Arial"> </span></b></p>Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-18076263052123757542010-05-18T13:26:00.000-07:002010-05-18T13:32:09.497-07:00Rahm Emanuel: I'm more hawkish than most Israelis<p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>From Xymphora's Blog<br /></p><p>Saturday, May 15, 2010</p>http://xymphora.blogspot.com/<br /><p>Xymphora quotes US billionaire and pro Israeli Haim Saban quoting Rahm Emanuel describing his Zionism.<br /></p>Saban: I had the chance to talk to Hillary about a lot of things including this and I also talked to Rahm Emanuel and Rahm Emanuel for instance told me ‘I am more hawkish than 50 percent of the people in Israel.’"Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-80148924030400960842010-05-18T13:23:00.000-07:002010-05-18T13:25:25.326-07:00Jeffrey Blankfort: Winograd's Competitive Despite her progressive Middle East StanceMay 10, 2010<br />Harman vs. Winograd<br /><p>The Last Democratic Primary Worth Watching</p><p>Counterpunch Website</p><p>http://www.counterpunch.org/blankfort05102010.html<br /></p><br />By JEFFREY BLANKFORT<br /><br />What may be the last Democratic primary race worth paying attention to is taking place in the 36th Congressional District along the Southern California coastline where incumbent Jane Harman is facing a serious challenge from Los Angeles school teacher, Marcy Winograd, with the candidates’ widely separated positions on the Israel-Palestine conflict dominating a critical section of the political landscape.<br /><br />Harman is the second richest member of the House of Representatives with estimated assets between $112 and $377 million dollars. Whether it was her money or her Israeli connections that kept the Southern California Democrat from being indicted as a foreign agent five years ago or a combination of both is something the public is never likely to know.<br /><br />What is clear is that the Bush administration’s Attorney General Alberto Gonzales neither investigated nor indicted the eight-term congresswoman after she was recorded on a National Security Agency wiretap in 2005 speaking to someone identified as an Israeli agent in which she reportedly agreed to intervene with the Justice Dept. on behalf of two top AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who were then under indictment for passing classified information to Israel in an FBI-initiated “sting.” <br /><br />Whether or not that phone call will come back to haunt her and be a factor in Harman’s heated race against Winograd, a strong critic of Israel and outspoken advocate for the Palestinians, won’t be known until June 8th, the date of the California primaries, but Harman is clearly running scared.<br /><br />According to an expose of the wiretapping incident in Congressional Quarterly, in April, 2009, she signed off the conversation with the Israeli agent saying, "This conversation doesn't exist." The government investigators who had been wiretapping the Israeli were so concerned about Harman’s comments, wrote CQ, that they sought a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant —reserved for sensitive intelligence cases — to tune in on her conversations, as well. In a touch of irony, Gonzales, however, supposedly halted the investigation because it was believed that he would need Harman’s continuing support, as a Democrat, for the Bush administration’s warrantless wire-tapping program that was about to be exposed by the New York Times.<br /><br />In exchange for Harman’s interceding on behalf of Rosen and Weissman, said CQ, the Israeli agent pledged to use his influence with Haim Saban, the Israeli-American billionaire and donor of millions to the Democratic Party (and to AIPAC) to persuade House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to appoint Harman chair of the House Select Intelligence Committee. Pelosi reportedly was made aware of the wire tap and Harman did not get the appointment. Not surprisingly, all the parties named denied that any such deal was offered.<br /><br />Immediately after the story broke, Harman left a voicemail message that any allegation of improper conduct on her part would be "irresponsible, laughable and scurrilous." She also quickly retained top GOP lawyer, Ted Olson, who may be remembered as representing Paula Jones in her sexual harassment case against President Clinton and appearing for George W Bush before the Supreme Court as it was deciding the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. It was a curious choice for a Democrat, even a Blue Dog varietal, but it apparently represented no problems for the party leadership. But then again, neither did her earlier bragging that she was “the Best Republican in the Democratic Party” in her unsuccessful run for the California governorship in 1998.<br /><br />Harman continued to deny that she had contacted the White House or any other agency about the investigation, and last spring sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting that he "release all transcripts and other investigative material involving me in an unredacted form,” adding that it was her “ intention to make this material available to the public."<br /><br />Less than three weeks after the CQ exposure Harman spoke on a panel at AIPAC’s annual policy conference in Washington where she “explore[d] the myriad foreign policy challenges facing the United States, Israel and the world.”<br /><br />If she received the NSA transcript it has never been acknowledged. Certainly its contents have not been made public and Holder, like Gonzales, not only chose not to pursue a case against Harman but, shortly after his appointment by Obama, he dropped the indictment against the two Israeli officials, much to the disgust of the Justice Dept. officials who had been pursuing the case.<br /><br />In April 2009, the congressman who got the job as House Select Intelligence Chair, Silvestre Reyes, from Texas, told his staff to begin investigating the incident but a year later there has been nothing reported and calls to the committee office have not been returned. The last word on the subject was apparently an article in the Washington Post last October which noted that Harman was among 30 House members and several aides being investigated by the House Ethics Committee on issues that included defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling. As of the first week in May, no report had been issued on that investigation by the Ethics Committee.<br /><br />Harman was not left out entirely, being appointed by Pelosi to chair the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment. With whom and what intelligence information she has been sharing, however, is a question that begs to be asked.<br /><br />This is of note at the moment because Winograd, Harman’s challenger in California’s 36th Congressional District won 38% of the primary vote in 2006 and may be primed to pull a major upset come June 8, one that would sound the alarm in the Israeli Knesset as much as it would on the Washington beltway..<br /><br />Like Harman, Winograd, is Jewish but apart from sharing religion and gender, that’s where the similarities end. Harman is not only a hawk when it comes to Israel, she is also an enthusiastic backer of the military budget, the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, and the Wall Street and banking bailouts . <br /><br />In 2007 she introduced, HR 1955, “The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” whose stated purpose was to deal with "homegrown terrorism and violent radicalization." Fortunately, the draconian act was too much for even the pliant US Congress and the bill went nowhere. <br /><br />Last May, Harman weighed in on Iran, suggesting that that nation, whose history goes back thousands of years, be broken up into a confessional state, following the formula for the region once advanced by a senior Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry official, Oded Yinon. "The Persian population in Iran is not a majority,” said Harman, “it is a plurality. There are many different, diverse, and disagreeing populations inside Iran and an obvious strategy, which I believe is a good strategy, is to separate those populations.”<br /><br />When it comes to her donors Harman is clearly cherished by the Military Industrial Complex but she is not averse to playing the field. While the top two suitors are Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, the entire list of her contributors reads like a Who’s Who of corporate America. At the same time, a review of the 765 companies listed in the vast investment portfolio held by Harman and her businessman husband, Sidney, founder of audio/infotainment equipment manufacturer, Harman International Industries, may explain her devotion to the Bush and Obama bailouts, with a marked preference shown for investment houses, banks, pharmaceutical industries, arms manufacturers, and real estate interests across the globe. At the head of the Harman list is UBS in which the couple have invested between $12 and $47 million. Not surprisingly, Goldman Sachs is there with between $1 and $2 million with somewhat smaller, six figure amounts invested in JP Morgan Chase, City National Bank and Wells Fargo.<br /><br />As a sign that Harman and the AIPAC crowd have been taking Winograd’s challenge seriously, her campaign put out a call for help to the poster boy of Southern California liberals, Henry Waxman (D-30). Waxman has a history of moonlighting as an Israel Lobby enforcer and he took after Winograd with a vengeance, assuming that Jewish voters in the 36th District are more concerned with the welfare of Israel than what happens in their district, not to mention the United States:<br /><br />“Recently, “wrote Waxman in an undated letter to Harman’s Jewish constituents in November, “I came across an astounding speech by Marcy Winograd, who is running against our friend Jane Harman in her primary re-election to Congress. Ms. Winograd’s views on Israel I find repugnant in the extreme. And that is why I wanted to write you.<br /><br />“What has prompted my urgent concern is a speech Ms. Winograd gave, entitled, “Call For One State,”… last year. The complete text is attached, but in it she says:<br /><br />‘I think it is too late for a two-state solution. Israel has made it all but impossible for two states to exist. Not only do I think a two-state solution is unrealistic, but also fundamentally wrong…’<br /><br />‘As a citizen of the United States, I do not want my tax dollars to support institutionalized racism. As a Jew, I do not want my name associated with occupation or extermination. Let us declare a one-state solution.’<br /><br />To me,” Waxman fulminated, “the notion that a Member of Congress could hold these views is alarming. Ms. Winograd is far, far outside the bipartisan mainstream of views that has long insisted that US policy be based upon rock-solid support for our only democratic ally in the Middle East.<br /><br />“In Marcy Winograd’s foreign policy, Israel would cease to exist. In Marcy Winograd’s vision, Jews would be at the mercy of those who do not respect democracy or human rights. These are not trivial issues; they cannot be ignored or overlooked. Jane’s victory will represent a clear repudiation of these views.<br /><br />“I ask you to join me in showing maximum support for Jane…<br /><br />In a response to Waxman, Winograd, co-founder of LA Jews for Peace, wrote, in part:<br /><br />“ Like you, I am intimately aware of our Jewish history. On my mother’s side, my great-grandparents escaped the Russian Pogroms to make a better life for themselves in Europe. On my father’s side, my great-grandparents were killed in the Jewish Holocaust of Nazi Germany. Because of our collective experience with persecution, it behooves us to stand in opposition to persecution anywhere and everywhere, rather than sanctify reductionist state policies that cast all Jews as victims who can only thrive in a segregated society.<br /><br />Furthermore, we must stand in explicit opposition to the Israeli persecution of the Palestinians; the brutal blockade of Gaza, an act of war by international standards, denying children clean water, food, and medicine…<br /><br />“In your letter, you include what you term an “alarming’ quote of mine – ‘As a Jew, I do not want my name associated with occupation or extermination.’ Frankly, I am mystified as to why you would find my words objectionable. Surely, you are not saying the converse is true – that you want Jewish people associated with occupation and extermination. Such a legacy would dishonor our people.”<br /><br />It is unlikely, however, that either Harman or Winograd’s stand on Israel will be the determining factor in the election.<br /><br />“Unlike the substantial Jewish population in Waxman’s affluent 30th Congressional District whom he relies on for financial support, the Jewish population in Harman’s 36th Congressional District is significantly smaller, “wrote the LA Progressive’s Linda Malazzo who has been covering the race to represent what is historically a strongly Democratic district that runs from Marina del Rey to Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach and on to San Pedro.<br /><br />“Issues concerning Israel don’t regularly affect the day to day lives of the majority of its residents who care mostly about jobs, healthcare and housing,” notes Malazzo. “18.3% of the under 65 population of the 36th CD have no health insurance. Over 7,500 home foreclosures took place in 2009 and another 25,000 foreclosures are anticipated over the next four years.”<br /><br />“Some Harman supporters fear that Winograd’s progressive stands on social issues and her opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may appeal to many Jewish voters,” wrote Tom Tugend, in the LA Jewish Journal, “especially those not familiar with the challenger’s views on Israel.”<br /><br />The competition for trade union support has been intense. While Harman bagged the backing of ILWU Local 13th on April 15, two days earlier Winograd scored a major coup when the ILWU Southern California District Council, representing 14 locals, including Local 13, broke precedence and ranks with Democratic Party officials and gave Winograd its unqualified endorsement.<br /><br />ILWU District Council President, Rich Dines, praised Winograd’s commitment to organized labor. “Marcy Winograd’s commitment to protecting and enhancing workers’ rights, funding federal job creation, and tackling unfair trade agreements is why we support her candidacy for Congress. As leaders in the labor movement, we proudly and enthusiastically endorse Marcy and look forward to working with her to keep more Americans on the job, in their homes, and inspired to organize.”<br /><br />Among Winograd’s name endorsements are Daniel Ellsberg, Ed Asner, Gore Vidal, Jim Hightower, Vietnam Veteran Ron Kovic, author of Born on the Fourth of July, Jodie Evans, co-founder of Code Pink, former California Assembly Member Jackie Goldberg, and Norman Solomon, of Progressive Democrats of America.<br /><br />At a hectic California state Democratic Convention, the chair, former congressman John Burton, rammed the endorsement process through as quickly as he could with Harman winning 599 votes to 417 for Winograd which was an extraordinary showing for a primary challenger.<br /><br />In May of last year, Harman told POLITICO that she doesn’t mind a primary challenge. “It’s a democracy,” said Harman, “and anyone is entitled to run. I’m in a strong position politically in my district and working on key issues that affect my constituents and the country, including homeland security, climate change and health care reform.”<br /><br />By this March, Harman did not appear so dedicated to democracy. When incumbent and challenger were invited by the LA Jewish Journal’s Rob Eshman to debate, “Winograd, the challenger, quickly accepted,” wrote Eshman. “It’s taken a while to get a response from Harman, but yesterday her chief of staff e-mailed me a firm but polite no.<br /><br />‘Hi Rob—thank you for your message and your invitation. However, Congresswoman Harman declines the kind offer and believes her views on Israel are very clear. John H.’<br /><br />“Too bad, we even had a venue: Rabbi Dan Shevitz of Temple Mishkon Tephilo had offered his 800-seat sanctuary gratis.<br /><br />“I understand why Harman, who beat Winograd in the last race has little to gain from exposing herself to her opponent. But my reason for holding the debate had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the state of The State of Israel and the American Left. Both Harman and Winograd are Democrats. Harman represents a broad consensus view for a two state solution to the Israeli Palestinian issue, and strong American political and financial support for Israel. Winograd made clear in a speech that she supports a one-state solution and a deep reconsideration of America’s stand vis a vis Israel. This divide is a crucial one among Democrats on the Left, Far Left and Center, and the more open and intelligent debate on it, the better. That’s my point of view. Clearly, it’s not Harman’s.<br /><br />“Too bad,” concluded Eshman.<br /><br />A complete list of endorsers on Marcy Winograd and her stand on the issues can be found on http://winogradforcongress.com/<br /><br />Information on Jane Harman’s assets and the names of her contributors can be found on http://www.opensecrets.org/pfds/<br /><br />Where Harman stands on some issues can be found on her website: www.janeharmancongress.com<br /><br />Curiously, there is no mention there of her support for Israel.<br /><br />Jeffrey Blankfort can be contacted at jblankfort@earthlink.netRonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-63343166383668387312010-04-15T18:56:00.000-07:002010-04-15T19:01:56.783-07:00John Spritzler: Why Do they Single Out Israel?<div align="center"><span style="font-size:180%;">Why Do They Single Out Israel?</span><br /></div><p align="center">by John Spritzler</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>"How come you single out Israel for its faults, but never criticize other governments for doing things just as bad?" This is what apologists for the Israeli government say to those, like myself, who criticize it. Their not-so-subtle implication is that critics of the Israeli government are really just motivated by antisemitism and therefore their views should not be given credence.<br /><br />Since I do indeed focus more on Israel's faults than the faults of other countries, it is only fitting and proper that I should explain why. Here is why.<br /><br />To start with, I admit that the Israeli government is certainly not the only government that does terrible things to innocent people, using lies to justify the unjustifiable. Nor do I claim that Israel's government is worse than others in this respect. Virtually all governments oppress their own people so that inordinate power and privileges are enjoyed by a ruling elite. The Chinese government is no exception. Neither is the Iranian government. Additionally the Russian government oppresses the Chechen people; the Saudi government is particularly oppressive of Saudi women; and the U.S. government kills innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq, not to mention millions whom it killed earlier in Vietnam and elsewhere. Lots of governments commit terrible crimes. Who can quantify the wrongness of these crimes and say "this one is the worst" and "this one is not as bad"?<br /><br />Before I explain why I focus on it so much, let us at least agree about what the Israeli government is doing, whether or not it is the worst crime being committed by any government in the world today. The Israeli government is carrying out brutal and violent ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, which is a terrible thing. Millions of Palestinians are refugees--living in refugee camps in places like the Gaza Strip section of Palestine, and in other countries such as Lebanon. They lost all of the property they once owned and are refugees from their own country of Palestine--the place where they were born, or would have been born had not the Zionist military forces (that became the Israeli military in 1948) violently driven their parents, or grandparents in some cases now, out of their villages throughout the 78% of Palestine that is now called "Israel" in 1947 and 1948 and again later in1967. Israel continues this ethnic cleansing today by denying the refugees their right of return and by making life as unpleasant as possible for Palestinians (for example massacring civilians in Gaza last December/January) in an effort to make them depart from all of Palestine "voluntarily." Israel does not let these refugees return to their country for only one reason--they are not Jewish.<br /><br />But why focus on Israel? Why focus on this crime above all others?<br /><br />I do it for three reasons.<br /><br />#1. As an American I have a duty to focus on my own government's mis-deeds more than on other government's mis-deeds ("the log in my own eye, as opposed to the mote in my neighbor's eye," as a wise man once put it), and my focus on Israel is actually a focus on the wrongness of my own government's over-the-top and virtually unconditional support for the Israeli government's ethnic cleansing. It is my government, not I, who has singled out Israel from all other countries to receive military, diplomatic (all those UN vetos!) and economic (no-strings-attached loans!) aid far surpassing that given to any other nation.<br /><br />#2. Also as an American, I want to expose the Big Lie that the American ruling class uses to control ordinary Americans. The Big Lie is a) that there are lots of evil people who commit terrorist violence against us and against Israelis simply out of an irrational hatred of freedom and an antisemitic hatred of Jews and of anybody who defends Jews from such hateful violence, b) that our government is waging a War on Terror to defend good people against these evil people, and c) that we must obey our leaders during this war and surrender basic freedoms we once held dear in order to win it.<br /><br />Exposing this Big Lie requires focusing on Israel because one of the main reasons Americans believe the Big Lie is that they see so many news reports about Palestinians violently attacking Israel and they do not understand the true reason why Palestinians do this. Our corporate-controlled mass media never explain that Israel, as a Jewish state that uses ethnic cleansing to ensure it has at least an 80% Jewish population, oppresses Palestinians because they are not Jewish. Nor does the media explain that Israel defines itself as a state of the Jewish people and not a state of all its citizens, that it enacts laws that discriminate against non-Jews, and that Palestinian anger at this is not hateful antisemitism but simply anger at being ethnically cleansed from their own country. By portraying the justified anger of Palestinians (and of all the Arabs and Muslims who share it) as unjustified irrational antisemitic and "anti-freedom" hatred, our rulers try to persuade us that the War on Terror is a real war against a real enemy when in fact it is an Orwellian war of social control. To expose this lie one must "focus on Israel" to explain the truth about Palestinian (and Arab and Muslim) anger at the U.S. and Israeli governments.<br /><br />#3. Even were I not an American, however, and even if the Israeli government's ethnic cleansing were not being used by the American ruling class to force Palestinians into a conflict with the Israeli government that enables our mass media to portray them as a "bogeyman" hateful terrorist enemy, there would remain one more reason to focus on Israel, which is this.<br /><br />The Israeli government's crime of ethnic cleansing is, in one important respect, worse than the crimes that other governments commit. When other governments oppress people they of course lie about their reasons, but they almost never equate opposition to such oppression with bigotry and in the rare cases when they do so this assertion is not taken seriously by most people in the world. When Americans opposed our government's invasion and bombing of Vietnam, nobody ever accused them of being bigots for it. When people oppose the Saudi government's oppression of women, nobody ever accuses them of being bigots for it. When people oppose the Chinese government's oppression of workers and peasants, nobody ever accuses them of being bigots for it.<br /><br />But when people oppose the Israeli government's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the entire spectrum of political and corporate and academic leaders in the United States equate that righteous stand against oppression with antisemitism! People are labeled antisemites and thereby have their reputations smeared just for defending the 13th article of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says that "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." (It doesn't say "except Palestinians.") The Israeli government is the only one that commits its particular crime in the name of righteousness, in the name of fighting racism and bigotry. It carries out ethnic cleansing of non-Jews in the name of fighting antisemitism. And it uses organizations with righteous names like "Anti-Defamation League" to accuse anybody who opposes this crime of being an antisemite.<br />Think about it. When many crimes are being committed, but only one of those crimes is done under the cover of "fighting bigotry" and only one of the criminals dares to equate opposition to their crime with bigotry, then is it not reasonable to focus on that crime, even if it is in other respects not the worst one? The victims of the other crimes will get support from the many good people of the world who oppose injustice and oppression. But the victims of a crime carried out by a criminal who persuades the world of the lie that the crime is actually a battle against antisemitism will not receive the support they deserve. Good people of the world, to their great credit, detest antisemitism and will support the side they believe is fighting against it. This is precisely why it is so important that those who do understand what is actually happening, who do understand that the crime is a crime and not a righteous defense against antisemitism, focus on exposing the lie. This means focusing on the crimes of the Israeli government.Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-87591468296004445952010-03-23T19:42:00.000-07:002010-03-25T06:27:45.908-07:00Noor Elashi: My Father's Unjust IncarcerationMarch 23, 2010<br />My Father's Unjust Incarceration<br />The Case of the Holy Land Five<br /><br />By NOOR ELASHI<br /><br />A decade before my father received a 65-year prison sentence, he handed me an unusual book, one that ultimately shifted the way I perceive the world. It was titled Magic Eye, and it contained pages of what seemed like simple multicolored patterns. But each page had a hidden gift, a sensational truth. By diverging your eyes, my father told me, you’ll see an unexpected image. It seemed to challenge everything I’d ever known. I stared at the flat, distorted artwork until it transformed into a faded silhouette and then a three-dimensional shape like a group of dolphins or a rose-filled heart. Years later, as I flip through the pages of my family’s narrative, I see images that are far less whimsical, and indeed, painful.<br /><br />Last week, U.S. attorney Jim Jacks filed a motion asking the federal judge of the Holy Land Foundation case to transfer my father—Ghassan Elashi, the charity’s co-founder—and his colleagues to a prison that closely monitors its inmates. If transferred to either of these so-called “Communication Management Units” in Terre Haute, Indiana or Marion, Illinois, my father’s phone calls would be more limited than they are now, in Seagoville, Texas. His letters would be monitored, his visitation time would be reduced to four hours a month and his conversations would be restricted to English, which is his second language.<br /><br />Perhaps this may seem like an illustration of an effective justice system at work. But if one diverges his or her eyes, the camouflaged truth will slowly unfold, until it comes into focus. I, for one, see a hazel-eyed girl with pale skin and soft dark curls losing her home uponIsrael’s creation in 1948. The young woman, now my paternal grandmother, often tells me about her banishment from Jaffa, a once vibrant Palestinian city known for its orange groves and turquoise beach. I also see a man who was expelled from his native Gaza City in 1967 and was not allowed to return. I grew up hearing stories from this man, my father, about the plight of Palestinians, whom he called “a voiceless population” suffering from occupation, starvation, demolished homes, uprooted trees, constrained movement and a devastated economy.<br /><br />As I look deeper, I see the Holy Land Foundation rise to stardom in the eyes of human rights activists worldwide who had witnessed this charitable organization alleviate poverty in Occupied Palestine through bags of rice, boxes of medicine, conventional humanitarian aid. I see my family scrutinized throughout the 1990s due to agenda-driven reports linking my father to terrorism—reports written by individuals who saw the HLF’s strength as a threat, for they wanted Palestinians to remain weak and desolate. I see President Bush shutting down the Holy Land Foundation three months after Sept. 11, 2001, calling the action “another important step in the financial fight against terror.”<br /><br />I see my father and his colleagues tried in 2007 and almost vindicated. I see him tried a second time and convicted in 2008, thereby receiving a life-long sentence. In both trials, prosecutors argued that the HLF gave money to Palestinian zakat (charity) committees that they claimed were controlled by Hamas, which the U.S. designated a terrorist organization in 1995. To prove this, prosecutors called to the stand an Israeli intelligence agent testifying under the pseudonym of Avi who claimed he could “smell Hamas.” The prosecutors intimidated the jury by showing them scenes of suicide bombings completely unaffiliated with the HLF, and they used guilt by association by linking my father and the other defendants to relatives who are members of Hamas. The defense attorneys’ argument was simple: The Holy Land Five gave charity to the same zakat committees to which the American government agency USAID (United States Agency for International Development) gave money. Furthermore, none of the zakat committees included in the HLF indictment were named on any of the U.S. Treasury Department’s lists of designated terrorist organizations.<br /><br />Nationally respected human rights law professors such as David Cole have associated the Holy Land case with McCarthyism, and other experts have called it a miscarriage of justice. The book that my father gave me had this subtitle: A New Way of Looking at the World. If one looks at our world with a fresh pair of eyes, he or she will see that Jim Jacks’ request for harsher prison conditions is unnecessarily cruel, and that supporting the appeal process is the only way to achieve justice. He or she will also see that the Holy Land Five arepolitical prisoners, and that we live in a twisted time, a time when humanitarians are pursued relentlessly for political purposes.<br /><br />Noor Elashi is a Palestinian-American and writer based in New York City.Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-68053785592062787922010-01-30T20:15:00.000-08:002010-01-30T20:17:52.687-08:00Emptywheel:bmaz: OPR Report Altered to Exculpate Bybee and Yoo<span style="color:#ff0000;">OPR Report Altered To Cover Bush DOJ Malfeasance</span><br />By: bmaz Friday January 29, 2010 <br /><br /><br />Mike Isikoff and Dan Klaidman put up a post about an hour ago letting the first blood for the Obama Administration’s intentional tanking of the OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility) Report. In light of Obama’s focused determination to sweep the acts of the Bush Administration, no matter how malevolent, under the rug and “move forward” the report is not unexpected. However, digesting the first leak in what would appear to be a staged rollout is painful:<br /><br /><em><span style="font-size:85%;">…an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations.</span></em><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><em>While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry</em></span>.<br /><br />The news broken in the Newsweek Declassified post is huge, assuming it is accurate, and the sense is that it is. In spite of the weight of the report, the report tucks the substantive content behind the deceptively benign title “Holder Under Fire”. The subject matter is far too significant though for it to have been casually thrown out. Consider this description of the OPR finding on the nature and quality of the critical August 1, 2002 Torture Memo:<br /><br />The report, which is still going through declassification, will provide many new details about how waterboarding was adopted and the role that top White House officials played in the process, say two sources who have read the report but asked for anonymity to describe a sensitive document. Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo—including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture—were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice’s criminal division, refused the CIA’s request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.<br /><br />Hard to figure how this finding and conclusion could be determined by David Margolis to warrant the “softening” of the original finding of direct misconduct. Margolis is nearly 70 years old and has a long career at DOJ and is fairly well though of. Margolis was tasked by Jim Comey to shepherd Pat Fitzgerald’s Libby investigation. In short, the man has some bona fides.<br /><br />Margolis is, however, also tied to the DOJ and its culture for over forty years, not to mention his service in upper management as Associate Attorney General during the Bush Administration when the overt acts of torture and justification by Margolis’ contemporaries and friends were committed. For one such filter to redraw the findings and conclusions of such a critical investigation in order to exculpate his colleagues is unimaginable.<br /><br />One thing is for sure, with a leak like this being floated out on a late Friday night, the release of the full OPR Report, at least that which the Obama Administration will deem fit for the common public to see, is at hand. Mike Isikoff and Dan Klaidman have made sure the torturers and their enablers can have a comfortable weekend though. So we got that going for us.Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-51217528007923934202010-01-26T10:57:00.000-08:002010-01-26T11:16:54.067-08:00Tom Burghardt: Global Research: Smoking Gun Disclosures of the Coverup of the Underwear Bomber Affair (Flight 253)<p><em><br /></em></p><p><em>The interesting question that Burghardt raises is whether right wing Cheney embeds especially in the security apparat are in a conspiracy to embarrass and/or bring down the Obama administration. From where I sit, it's too early to say whether the Obama administration, i.e, </em><em>Obama and Rahm Emanuel, </em><em>knew in advance about the underwear bomber shenanigans. Obama first made statements to the effect that he'd punish the people responsible for not connecting the dots; statements </em><em>he reversed within a week. Also notable was his 76 hour silence, consistent with his lack of foreknowledge. So we'll have to wait and see.</em></p><p><em>That being said, the article below leans too heavily for my taste on the side </em><em> of Obama as essentially a humane democrat, unwilling but forced into the ruthlessness that we have become accustomed to after 9/11. After all, the drone attacks started 3 days after he was in office. He deliberately fired the previous general in favor of McChrystal as top general in Afghanistan. </em><em>And more. </em></p><p><em>***<br /></em></p><p><br /></p><p><strong><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#ff0000;">The Obama Administration's Cover-up of the Flight 253 Affair</span></span></strong><strong><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#ff0000;"><br /></span></span></strong></p><p><strong><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="color:#ff0000;">"New Smoking Gun" Disclosures</span></span></strong></p><p><em>by Tom Burghardt</em><br /></p><p>http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17184</p><p>Relevant questions begging for answers include: Who made the decision not to "connect the dots"? Are right-wing elements and holdovers from the previous administration actively conspiring to destabilize the Obama government? Was the attempted bombing a planned provocation meant to incite new conflicts in the Middle East and restrict democratic rights at home? <br /></p>As with the 9/11 attacks, these questions go unasked by corporate media. Indeed, such lines of inquiry are entirely off the table and are further signs that a cover-up is in full-swing, not a hard-hitting investigation. <br /><p>Nearly one month after passengers foiled an attempted suicide bomb attack aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it approached Detroit on Christmas Day, new information reveals that the White House and U.S. security agencies had specific intelligence on accused terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, far earlier than previously acknowledged. <br /></p><br />Along with new reports, evidence suggests that the administration's cover-up of the affair has very little to do with a failure by the intelligence apparatus to "connect the dots" and may have far more serious political implications for the Obama administration, and what little remains of a functioning democracy in the United States, than a botched bombing. <br /><br />What the White House and security officials have previously described only as "vague" intercepts regarding "a Nigerian" has now morphed into a clear picture of the suspect--and the plot.<br /><br />The New York Times revealed January 18 that the National Security Agency "learned from a communications intercept of Qaeda followers in Yemen that a man named "Umar Farouk"--the first two names of the jetliner suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab--had volunteered for a coming operation."<br /><br />According to Times' journalists Eric Lipton, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti, "the American intelligence network was clearly listening in Yemen and sharing that information." Indeed, additional NSA intercepts in December "mentioned the date of Dec. 25, and suggested that they were 'looking for ways to get somebody out' or 'for ways to move people to the West,' one senior administration official said."<br /><br />Clearly, the administration was "worried about possible terrorist attacks over the Christmas holiday." These concerns led President Obama to meet December 22 "with top officials of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security, who ticked off a list of possible plots against the United States and how their agencies were working to disrupt them," the Times reports.<br /><br />"In a separate White House meeting that day" the Times disclosed, "Mr. Obama's homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, led talks on Yemen, where a stream of disturbing intelligence had suggested that Qaeda operatives were preparing for some action, perhaps a strike on an American target, on Christmas Day."<br /><br />In mid-January, Newsweek reported that the "White House report on the foiled Christmas Day attempted airliner bombing provided only the sketchiest of details about what may have been the most politically sensitive of its findings: how the White House itself was repeatedly warned about the prospect of an attack on the U.S.," Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff disclosed.<br /><br />According to the newsmagazine, "intelligence analysts had 'highlighted' an evolving 'strategic threat,'" and that "'some of the improvised explosive device tactics AQAP might use against U.S. interests were highlighted' in other 'finished intelligence products'." <br /><br />However, the real bombshell came last Wednesday during hearings before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee when Bushist embed, and current Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Michael E. Leiter, made a startling admission. <br /><br />CongressDaily reported on January 22 that intelligence officials "have acknowledged the government knowingly allows foreigners whose names are on terrorist watch lists to enter the country in order to track their movement and activities." <br /><br />Leiter told the Committee: "I will tell you, that when people come to the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another."<br /><br />CongressDaily reporter Chris Strohm, citing an unnamed "intelligence official" confirmed that Leiter's statement reflected government policy and told the publication, "in certain situations it's to our advantage to be able to track individuals who might be on a terrorist watch list because you can learn something from their activities and their contacts."<br /><br />An alternative explanation fully in line with well-documented inaction, or worse, by U.S. security agencies prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and now, Christmas Day's aborted airline bombing, offer clear evidence that a ruthless "choice" which facilitates the murder of American citizens are cynical pretexts in a wider game: advancing imperialism's geostrategic goals abroad and attacks on democratic rights at home.<br /><br />Leiter's revelation in an of itself should demolish continued government claims that the accused terror suspect succeeded in boarding NW Flight 253 due to a failure to "connect the dots."<br /><br />However, as far as Antifascist Calling can determine, no other media outlet has either reported or followed-up CongressDaily's disclosure; a clear sign that its explosive nature, and where a further investigation might lead, are strictly off-limits. <br /><br />Taking into account testimony by a high-level national security official that terrorists are allowed to enter the country for intelligence purposes, one can only conclude that the alleged "failure" to stop Abdulmutallab was neither a casual omission nor the result of bureaucratic incompetence but rather, a highly-charged political calculation. <br /><br />Bushist Embeds: Destabilizing the Obama Administration? <br /><br />One subject barely explored by corporate media throughout the Flight 253 affair, is the unsettling notion that the aborted Christmas day bombing may have been a move by rightist elements within the security apparatus to destabilize the Obama administration, a course of action facilitated by the Obama government itself as we will explore below. <br /><br />This is not as implausible as it might appear at first blush. When one takes into account the meteoric rise to power by the 40-year-old former Navy pilot and federal prosecutor, Michael Leiter's ascent tracks closely with his previous service as a cover-up specialist for the Bush-Cheney regime.<br /><br /><p>"In 2004, while working as a federal prosecutor," a New York Times puff piece informs us, "Mr. Leiter joined the staff of a commission, appointed by President George W. Bush, to examine intelligence failures leading up to the war in Iraq. That led to a series of jobs in the intelligence </p><p><br /></p><p>world, and in 2008, Mr. Bush appointed him director of the counterterrorism center." <br /></p><br /><br />A rather curious appointment, if Leiter were simply an ingénue with no prior experience in the murky world of intelligence and covert operations. However the former Navy pilot, who participated in the U.S. wars of aggression against the former Yugoslavia and Iraq seemed to have the requisite qualifications for work as an intelligence "specialist."<br /><br /><br />While attending Harvard Law School, Leiter served as a "human rights fellow" with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, the U.S.-sponsored kangaroo court that has prosecuted America's official enemies in the Balkans whilst covering-up the crimes of their partners.<br /><br /><br />Amongst America's more dubious "allies" in the decade-long campaign to destabilize socialist Yugoslavia were al-Qaeda's Islamist brigade, responsible for carrying-out hideous massacres in Bosnia and Kosovo, with NATO approval and logistical support, as Global Research analyst Michel Chossudovsky, and others, have thoroughly documented.<br /><br /><br />As Deputy General Counsel and Assistant Director of the President's Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States, the so-called "Robb-Silberman" cover-up commission, Leiter focused on what are euphemistically described in the media as "reforms" with the U.S. "Intelligence Community," including the stand-up of the FBI's repressive National Security Branch.<br /><br /><br />Prior to joining NCTC, Leiter was the Deputy Chief of Staff for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under former NSA Director and ten-year senior vice president of the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton security firm, John "Mike" McConnell.<br /><br /><br />From his perch in ODNI, Leiter coordinated all internal and external operations for the Office, including relations with the White House, the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA.<br /><br /><br />Leiter's résumé, and his role in concealing Bush administration war crimes, predicated on ginned-up "intelligence" invented by Dick Cheney's minions in the Defense Department and the CIA, should have sent alarm bells ringing inside the incoming Obama administration.<br /><br /><br />As we have seen since Obama's inauguration however, rather than cleaning house--and settling accounts--with the crimes, and criminals, of the previous regime, the "change" administration chose to retain senior- and mid-level bureaucrats in the security apparatus; employing officials who share the antidemocratic ideology, penchant for secrecy and ruthlessness of the Bush administration.<br /><br /><br />While the Times claims his "unblemished résumé" has taken a hit over the Flight 253 plot, an interview with National Public Radio shortly before the Abdulmutallab affair, provides chilling insight into Leiter's agenda, particularly in light of his January 20 statement to the Senate Homeland Security Committee.<br /><br /><br />Presciently perhaps, the NCTC chief told NPR: "We're not going to stop every attack. Americans have to very much understand that it is impossible to stop every terrorist event. But we have to do our best, and we have to adjust, based on, again, how the enemy changes their tactics."<br /><br /><br />It becomes a painfully simple matter for "the enemy" to gain advantage and "change their tactics" when those charged with protecting the public actually facilitate their entrée into the country "for some reason or another"!<br /><br /><br />According to the Times, the White House has kept Leiter at the helm and that it came as "no surprise to Bush officials" because, get this, "Michael wasn't political," if we're to believe the carefully-constructed legend of former Bushist Deputy National Security Adviser Juan Zarate.<br /><br /><br />If the Bush-Cheney years tell us anything it's that appointments by the previous regime were ruthlessly political. As The Washington Post reported shortly after Obama's election, these appointments were made permanent across a multitude of federal agencies and departments, including the security apparat, in a cynical maneuver designed to reward Bush loyalists.<br /><br /><br />"The transfer of political appointees into permanent federal positions" the Post disclosed, "called 'burrowing' by career officials, creates security for those employees, and at least initially will deprive the incoming Obama administration of the chance to install its preferred appointees in some key jobs."<br /><br /><br />The Times reports that the White House has publicly defended Leiter "and aides to the president said Mr. Obama called to convey his support." Perhaps not so curiously, the allegedly "nonpolitical" NCTC Director "has been mentioned as a possible future head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and how he performs might help determine whether he remains on the fast track."<br /><br /><br />One can only wonder, how many other counterterrorist officials have "burrowed" their way into, and hold key positions in the current administration, ticking political time-bombs inside America's permanent shadow government.<br /><br /><br />Senate Whitewash Fuel Attacks on Democratic Rights<br /><br /><br />During Wednesday's Senate hearings, Obama's Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, in keeping with the former Bush administration's assault on democratic rights, assailed the decision by the Justice Department to try the suspect in a court of law.<br /><br /><br />This is fully in line with the rhetoric of ultra-right Republicans and so-called "centrist Democrats" such as arch neocon Senator Joseph Lieberman.<br /><br /><br />Newsweek reports that new details "surrounding the Christmas Day interrogation of the bombing suspect aboard Northwest Flight 253 raise questions about the accuracy of testimony provided Wednesday by senior U.S. intelligence and Homeland Security officials."<br /><br /><br />Last week, the newsmagazine reported that "Obama administration officials were flabbergasted Wednesday when Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair testified that an alleged Qaeda operative who tried to blow up a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day should have been questioned by a special interrogation unit that doesn't exist, rather than the FBI."<br /><br /><br />This theme was quickly picked-up by Senate Republicans.<br /><br /><br />The overarching sentiments expressed by this gaggle of war criminals and corporate toadies was not to demand accountability from the responsible parties, but to call for further attacks on Americans' democratic rights.<br /><br /><br />Republicans on the committee lambasted Obama's Justice Department for its decision to try Abdulmutallab in a civilian court. John McCain (R-AZ), the Republican party's failed candidate in the 2008 presidential election, said the decision was "a terrible, terrible mistake," while the execrable Jeff Sessions (R-AL) claimed that the hapless suspect should have been delivered to the U.S. military as an "enemy combatant."<br /><br /><br />Ranking Republicans on the committee, Susan Collins (R-ME) and John Ensign (R-NV) went so far as to imply that Abdulmutallab should have been tortured. Collins inquired: "how can we uncover plots" if accused criminal suspects are allowed to "lawyer up and stop answering questions?" Ensign, a staunch supporter of policies articulated by the Bush administration, particularly former Vice President and war criminal, Dick Cheney, argued that "limiting" CIA interrogators to the methods laid out in the Army Field Manual would allow terrorists to "train" in advance of interrogations.<br /><br /><br />But the harshest criticism of the administration came in the form of a stealth attack by Obama's own Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Blair.<br /><br /><br />The Wall Street Journal reported January 21 that "nation's intelligence chief said the man accused of trying to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day should have been questioned by a special interrogation team instead of being handled as an ordinary criminal suspect."<br /><br /><br />Rather than coming to terms and halting the Bush regime's practice of torturing so-called terrorist suspects, the Obama administration has compounded the crime by creating a secretive group of interrogators called the High-Value Interrogation Group or HIG.<br /><br /><br />Blair told the Senate that the administration had "botched" the handling of suspect Abdulmutallab, by, wait, not handing him over to a group that as of this writing, exists only on paper, a salient fact of which Blair was certainly knowledgeable!<br /><br /><br />In his testimony however, the DNI told the Homeland Security Committee that the HIG "was created exactly for this purpose--to make a decision on whether a certain person who's detained should be treated as a case for federal prosecution or for some of the other means."<br /><br /><br />Blair implicitly criticized the Justice Department's decision to uphold constitutional protections that guarantee a suspect a right to a trial in a court of law and not a one-way ticket to an American gulag. Blair said, "we did not invoke the HIG in this case; we should have. Frankly, we were thinking more of overseas people and, duh, you know, we didn't put it [in action] then."<br /><br /><br />Mendaciously, the DNI claimed "I was not consulted. The decision was made on the scene, [and] seemed logical to the people there, but it should have been taken using this HIG format, at a higher level."<br /><br /><br />Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff disclosed January 20 that "senior administration officials" told him that Blair was "misinformed on multiple levels" and that the DNI's assertions were "all the more damaging because they immediately fueled Republican criticism that the administration mishandled the Christmas Day incident in its treatment of the accused Qaeda operative as a criminal suspect rather than an enemy combatant."<br /><br /><br />Isikoff reported January 22 that Blair, Leiter and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were asked about the decision to try Abdulmutallab and all gave the same answer when queried by right-wing Senator Susan Collins, the Committee's ranking Republican: "Were you consulted regarding the decision to file criminal charges against [suspect Umar Farouk] Abdulmutallab in civilian court?"<br /><br /><br />Leiter and Napolitano both replied: "I was not." According to Newsweek, Blair also said he was "not consulted" and claims that the government "should have" brought in the yet-to-be activated HIG "to conduct the questioning of the suspect."<br /><br /><br />As with every aspect of this strange affair, Newsweek reports, these statements are riddled with lies and mischaracterizations.<br /><br /><br />Isikoff writes that "all the relevant national-security agencies, including top aides to Blair and Napolitano, were fully informed about the plans to charge the suspect in federal court hours before he was read his Miranda rights and stopped cooperating."<br /><br /><br /><br />Newsweek further reveals that a "key event" was a secure videoconference on Christmas Day "that included Leiter" and Jane Lute, DHS' No. 2 official and that "neither Leiter nor any of the other participants, including representatives from the FBI and the CIA, raised any questions about the Justice Department's plans to charge the suspect in federal court, the officials said."<br /><br /><br />"If you participate in a conference call and you don't raise any objections, that suggests you were consulted," said one senior law-enforcement official. Another added that "nobody at any point" raised any objections, either during the meeting or during a four-hour period afterward when Abdulmutallab was informed of his Miranda rights to be represented by a lawyer," according to Newsweek.<br /><br /><br />Ultra-right Senator Kit Bond (R-MO), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a witting accomplice to the previous regime's high crimes and misdemeanors against the American people said, "That this administration chose to shut out our top intelligence officials and forgo collecting potentially life-saving intelligence is a dangerous sign."<br /><br /><br />It's a "dangerous sign" to be sure, for America's battered democracy.<br /><br /><br />An On-Going Cover-Up<br /><br /><br />As events continue to unfold and new information shreds the official story, is Leiter's chilling testimony that suspected terrorists are allowed to enter the United States "because we have generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some reason or another," merely a banal slip or something far more sinister that betrays the real order of things in post-democratic America?<br /><br /><br />Relevant questions begging for answers include: Who made the decision not to "connect the dots"? Are right-wing elements and holdovers from the previous administration actively conspiring to destabilize the Obama government? Was the attempted bombing a planned provocation meant to incite new conflicts in the Middle East and restrict democratic rights at home?<br /><br /><br />As with the 9/11 attacks, these questions go unasked by corporate media. Indeed, such lines of inquiry are entirely off the table and are further signs that a cover-up is in full-swing, not a hard-hitting investigation.<br /><br /><br />In truth, what we are dealing with here as we stagger into the second decade of the 21st century, is not a "conspiracy" per se but a modus operandi as the World Socialist Web Site has argued, rooted in a bankrupt system quickly reaching the end of the line.<br /><br />Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Tom BurghardtRonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-58580706063371407002009-12-29T16:03:00.000-08:002009-12-29T16:12:18.749-08:00Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitic?<br />Jewish Critics Speak<br /><p>Edward C. Corrigan</p><p>Middle East Policy, Vol. XVI, No. 4, Winter 2009</p><p><br /></p><p>Mr. Corrigan, BA, MA, LL.B., is a lawyer certified as a specialist in Citizenship and Immigration Law and Immigration and Refugee Protection by the Law Society of Upper Canada in London, Ontario. He can be reached at corriganlaw@edcorrigan.ca or at (519) 439-4015.<br /></p><p>When individuals, activists or politicians in the United States and Canada criticize human-rights problems in Israel or question the tenets of the political ideology of Zionism, they are attacked, and accusations of bias and even anti-Semitism are made in an attempt to discredit them.<br />The allegation that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic is used as an effective political weapon. To quote one anti-Zionist Jewish writer:<br />Criticizing Israel’s mistakes is acceptable. But questioning whether Israel is a Jewish state with a racist<br />apartheid system that renders non‑Jews second rate citizens — that is not acceptable. It makes little difference<br />whether the criticism is based on facts. Few people who cannot claim Jewish descent would dare to criticize publicly. They are afraid of being accused<br />of “anti‑semitism.”2<br />Joel Beinin in “Silencing Critics Not Way to Middle East Peace,” an article published in the San Francisco Chronicle, discussed the campaign to silence critics<br /></p><p>of Israeli policy. Beinin, a professor of history at Stanford University, is active in Jewish Voice for Peace and an editor of Jewish Peace News.3 Here is what he had to say about the campaign to attack critics of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians:<br />Why discredit, defame and silence those with opposing viewpoints? I believe it is because the Zionist lobby knows it cannot win based on facts. An honest discussion can only lead to one conclusion: The status quo in which Israel declares it alone has rights and intends to impose its will on the weaker Palestinians, stripping them permanently of their land, resources and rights, cannot lead to a lasting peace. We need an open debate and the freedom to discuss uncomfortable facts and explore the full range of policy options.<br />Only then can we adopt a foreign policy that serves American interests and one that could actually bring a just peace to Palestinians and Israelis.4<br />In “Why It Is Essential for Jews to Speak Out as Jews, on Israel,” Internet blogger Philip Weiss interviewed long-time Jewish activist Dorothy Zellner. She is now working with “Jews Say No.” As Weiss notes, “A lot of activists would say that this is an American issue; everyone should be engaged. And a lot of left-wingers<br />would say, religion/ethnicity is a tiresome<br />traditional category, I don’t want to identify myself in such a manner.” Zellner responds to these arguments and explains why she believes that it is essential to address<br />the Palestinian issue “as Jews, and speak to other Jews as Jews”:<br />But the sight of us doing the unthinkable has many benefits: There are a few Jews who are happy and relieved to see us because it opens the door for them. They have felt uneasy about Israeli policies for a long time, and seeing us seems to give them more courage to speak their minds. There are also some gentiles who are happy to see us because they have been afraid for a long time of being called anti‑Semites if they criticize Israel.<br />Just think what it would mean if a significant number of people in our country started to break through the rigid, unthinking mindset of supporting<br />Israel right or wrong! And just think what it means if we could have weakened the stranglehold of Israeli policies but chose not to do it!<br />Because we are Jews, we naturally<br />have a certain currency in challenging<br />Israeli policies. We identify with the Jewish people, and we respect Jewish culture. Some of us are former Zionists, and we know that Israel was never an empty land. We’ve been to Israel and Palestine more than once, and we’ve seen the checkpoints and the barbed wire and the guard towers with our own eyes. We’ve been angry and ashamed that this occupation is supposedly being done to protect us. Some of us have relatives in Israel. Some of us are the children of Holo<br /><br />Speakcaust survivors, and we say that what happened to our murdered relatives in Europe should not be the reason for Palestinian pain.5<br />Here is what Norman Solomon has to say about anti-Semitism: “As with all forms of bigotry, anti‑Semitism should be condemned. At the same time, these days, America's biggest anti‑Semitism problem has to do with the misuse of the label as a manipulative tactic to short‑circuit debate about Washington's alliance with Israel.”6 He added,<br />The failure to make a distinction between anti‑Semitism and criticism<br />of Israel routinely stifles public debate. When convenient, pro‑Israel groups in the United States will concede<br />that it’s possible to oppose Israeli policies without being anti‑Semitic. Yet many of Israel’s boosters reflexively<br />pull out the heavy artillery of charging anti‑Semitism when their position is challenged.7<br />Professor Michael Neumann had the following to say about anti-Semitism:<br />. . . to inflate the definition by including<br />critics of Israel is, if not exactly incorrect, self‑defeating and dangerous.<br />No one can stop you from proclaiming<br />all criticism of Israel anti‑Semitic.<br />But that makes anti‑Semites out of Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu, not to mention tens of thousands of Jews.<br /></p><p>For more: See Middle East Policy, Vol. XVI, No. 4, Winter 2009</p>Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-60489032209566751802009-12-27T16:44:00.000-08:002009-12-27T16:46:50.402-08:00Xymphora: Did Berlusconi Fake the Attack?<p>Once again Xymphora comes through with the information. Nice Going.</p><p><br /></p><p>Friday, December 25, 2009</p><p>http://xymphora.blogspot.com/<br /></p>Oscar for Berlusconi<br />The Italians posting videos to YouTube (here and here and here and the one embedded here) make an excellent case that the attack on Berlusconi was faked;<br />the cameraman meticulously following Berlusconi's every move mysteriously turns away vaguely into the crowd just before the attack;<br />you can see the swing of the attacker at Berlusconi, which misses him;<br />Berlusconi immediately puts a black piece of plastic he had been holding in his hand (?) over his face (but in the moment before he does so you can see his face is unmarked);<br />there is no blood above the plastic at first, but when Berlusconi emerges from his car there is a new smear of blood under his eye;<br />his bodyguards spend some time obscuring our view while they apply the makeup in the car (and one may have a can of some spray-on substance);<br />the makeup appears as caked and dried blood, not what you would see as the result of a very recent attack.<br /><br />The trickery worked - Berlusconi's personal popularity in Italy soared after the attack.Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-46644061699309776712009-12-26T08:51:00.001-08:002009-12-26T08:53:11.149-08:00Jeremy Scahill: The Secret US War in Pakistan: Secret also from Congress<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; "><div style="background-image: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; -webkit-background-clip: initial; -webkit-background-origin: initial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font: normal normal normal 9pt/normal Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; background-position: initial initial; "><div id="container"><div id="mast"><a href="http://www.thenation.com/" id="logo" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 102); font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; "><img src="http://www.thenation.com/images/structure/logo-sm.png" alt="The Nation." style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; " /></a></div><ul class="history" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); "></ul><div class="mod content-w-ad-w"><div class="main"><h1 class="main title" style="font-size: 2.2em; line-height: 0.909091; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.909091em; margin-left: 0px; ">The Secret US War in Pakistan</h1><h2 class="by" style="font: normal normal bold 0.9em/1.1 Verdana, Geneva, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.05em; margin-bottom: 2.4em; text-transform: uppercase; "><b style="font: normal normal normal 1.11111em/1.1 Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; letter-spacing: 0px; text-transform: lowercase; ">by</b> <cite style="font-style: normal; "><a href="http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/jeremy_scahill" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 102); font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; ">JEREMY SCAHILL</a></cite></h2><p class="context" style="margin-top: 0.5em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; float: right; font-style: italic; text-align: right; "></p><h3 class="when" style="font-size: 1.4em; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 2em; ">November 23, 2009</h3><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; "></p><div id="main-content" class="mod" style="font-size: 1.3em; line-height: 1.28571; "><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by <i>The Nation</i> has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; "></p>The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater's involvement. He spoke to <i>The Nation</i> on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so "compartmentalized" that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.<p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; "></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking comment for this story. Capt. John Kirby, the spokesperson for Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told <i>The Nation</i>, "We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature." A defense official, on background, specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. "We don't have any contracts to do that work for us. We don't contract that kind of work out, period," the official said. "There has not been, and is not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">Blackwater's founder Erik Prince contradicted this statement in a recent interview, telling <i>Vanity Fair</i> that Blackwater works with US Special Forces in identifying targets and planning missions, citing an operation in Syria. The magazine also published a photo of a Blackwater base near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency's director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. "This is a parallel operation to the CIA," said the source. "They are two separate beasts." The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war--knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan. In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">Blackwater, which recently changed its name to Xe Services and US Training Center, denies the company is operating in Pakistan. "Xe Services has only one employee in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the U.S. Government," Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement to <i>The Nation</i>, adding that the company has "no other operations of any kind in Pakistan."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source's claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan. The former executive spoke on condition of anonymity.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">His account and that of the military intelligence source were borne out by a US military source who has knowledge of Special Forces actions in Pakistan and Afghanistan. When asked about Blackwater's covert work for JSOC in Pakistan, this source, who also asked for anonymity, told <i>The Nation</i>, "From my information that I have, that is absolutely correct," adding, "There's no question that's occurring."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">"It wouldn't surprise me because we've outsourced nearly everything," said Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, when told of Blackwater's role in Pakistan. Wilkerson said that during his time in the Bush administration, he saw the beginnings of Blackwater's involvement with the sensitive operations of the military and CIA. "Part of this, of course, is an attempt to get around the constraints the Congress has placed on DoD. If you don't have sufficient soldiers to do it, you hire civilians to do it. I mean, it's that simple. It would not surprise me."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; "><b>The Counterterrorism Tag Team in Karachi</b></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The covert JSOC program with Blackwater in Pakistan dates back to at least 2007, according to the military intelligence source. The current head of JSOC is Vice Adm. William McRaven, who took over the post from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC from 2003 to 2008 before being named the top US commander in Afghanistan. Blackwater's presence in Pakistan is "not really visible, and that's why nobody has cracked down on it," said the source. Blackwater's operations in Pakistan, he said, are not done through State Department contracts or publicly identified Defense contracts. "It's Blackwater via JSOC, and it's a classified no-bid [contract] approved on a rolling basis." The main JSOC/Blackwater facility in Karachi, according to the source, is nondescript: three trailers with various generators, satellite phones and computer systems are used as a makeshift operations center. "It's a very rudimentary operation," says the source. "I would compare it to [CIA] outposts in Kurdistan or any of the Special Forces outposts. It's very bare bones, and that's the point."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">Blackwater's work for JSOC in Karachi is coordinated out of a Task Force based at Bagram Air Base in neighboring Afghanistan, according to the military intelligence source. While JSOC technically runs the operations in Karachi, he said, it is largely staffed by former US special operations soldiers working for a division of Blackwater, once known as Blackwater SELECT, and intelligence analysts working for a Blackwater affiliate, Total Intelligence Solutions (TIS), which is owned by Erik Prince. The military source said that the name Blackwater SELECT may have been changed recently. Total Intelligence, which is run out of an office on the ninth floor of a building in the Ballston area of Arlington, Virginia, is staffed by former analysts and operatives from the CIA, DIA, FBI and other agencies. It is modeled after the CIA's counterterrorism center. In Karachi, TIS runs a "media-scouring/open-source network," according to the source. Until recently, Total Intelligence was run by two former top CIA officials, Cofer Black and Robert Richer, both of whom have left the company. In Pakistan, Blackwater is not using either its original name or its new moniker, Xe Services, according to the former Blackwater executive. "They are running most of their work through TIS because the other two [names] have such a stain on them," he said. Corallo, the Blackwater spokesperson, denied that TIS or any other division or affiliate of Blackwater has any personnel in Pakistan.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The US military intelligence source said that Blackwater's classified contracts keep getting renewed at the request of JSOC. Blackwater, he said, is already so deeply entrenched that it has become a staple of the US military operations in Pakistan. According to the former Blackwater executive, "The politics that go with the brand of BW is somewhat set aside because what you're doing is really one military guy to another." Blackwater's first known contract with the CIA for operations in Afghanistan was awarded in 2002 and was for work along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">One of the concerns raised by the military intelligence source is that some Blackwater personnel are being given rolling security clearances above their approved clearances. Using Alternative Compartmentalized Control Measures (ACCMs), he said, the Blackwater personnel are granted clearance to a Special Access Program, the bureaucratic term used to describe highly classified "black" operations. "With an ACCM, the security manager can grant access to you to be exposed to and operate within compartmentalized programs far above 'secret'--even though you have no business doing so," said the source. It allows Blackwater personnel that "do not have the requisite security clearance or do not hold a security clearance whatsoever to participate in classified operations by virtue of trust," he added. "Think of it as an ultra-exclusive level above top secret. That's exactly what it is: a circle of love." Blackwater, therefore, has access to "all source" reports that are culled in part from JSOC units in the field. "That's how a lot of things over the years have been conducted with contractors," said the source. "We have contractors that regularly see things that top policy-makers don't unless they ask."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">According to the source, Blackwater has effectively marketed itself as a company whose operatives have "conducted lethal direct action missions and now, for a price, you can have your own planning cell. JSOC just ate that up," he said, adding, "They have a sizable force in Pakistan--not for any nefarious purpose if you really want to look at it that way--but to support a legitimate contract that's classified for JSOC." Blackwater's Pakistan JSOC contracts are secret and are therefore shielded from public oversight, he said. The source is not sure when the arrangement with JSOC began, but he says that a spin-off of Blackwater SELECT "was issued a no-bid contract for support to shooters for a JSOC Task Force and they kept extending it." Some of the Blackwater personnel, he said, work undercover as aid workers. "Nobody even gives them a second thought."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The military intelligence source said that the Blackwater/JSOC Karachi operation is referred to as "Qatar cubed," in reference to the US forward operating base in Qatar that served as the hub for the planning and implementation of the US invasion of Iraq. "This is supposed to be the brave new world," he says. "This is the Jamestown of the new millennium and it's meant to be a lily pad. You can jump off to Uzbekistan, you can jump back over the border, you can jump sideways, you can jump northwest. It's strategically located so that they can get their people wherever they have to without having to wrangle with the military chain of command in Afghanistan, which is convoluted. They don't have to deal with that because they're operating under a classified mandate."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. "That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don't know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan," he said. "So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?"</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; "><b>Pakistan's Military Contracting Maze</b></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">Blackwater, according to the military intelligence source, is not doing the actual killing as part of its work in Pakistan. "The SELECT personnel are not going into places with private aircraft and going after targets," he said. "It's not like Blackwater SELECT people are running around assassinating people." Instead, US Special Forces teams carry out the plans developed in part by Blackwater. The military intelligence source drew a distinction between the Blackwater operatives who work for the State Department, which he calls "Blackwater Vanilla," and the seasoned Special Forces veterans who work on the JSOC program. "Good or bad, there's a small number of people who know how to pull off an operation like that. That's probably a good thing," said the source. "It's the Blackwater SELECT people that have and continue to plan these types of operations because they're the only people that know how and they went where the money was. It's not trigger-happy fucks, like some of the PSD [Personal Security Detail] guys. These are not people that believe that Barack Obama is a socialist, these are not people that kill innocent civilians. They're very good at what they do."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The former Blackwater executive, when asked for confirmation that Blackwater forces were not actively killing people in Pakistan, said, "that's not entirely accurate." While he concurred with the military intelligence source's description of the JSOC and CIA programs, he pointed to another role Blackwater is allegedly playing in Pakistan, not for the US government but for Islamabad. According to the executive, Blackwater works on a subcontract for Kestral Logistics, a powerful Pakistani firm, which specializes in military logistical support, private security and intelligence consulting. It is staffed with former high-ranking Pakistani army and government officials. While Kestral's main offices are in Pakistan, it also has branches in several other countries.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">A spokesperson for the US State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), which is responsible for issuing licenses to US corporations to provide defense-related services to foreign governments or entities, would neither confirm nor deny for <i>The Nation</i>that Blackwater has a license to work in Pakistan or to work with Kestral. "We cannot help you," said department spokesperson David McKeeby after checking with the relevant DDTC officials. "You'll have to contact the companies directly." Blackwater's Corallo said the company has "no operations of any kind" in Pakistan other than the one employee working for the DoD. Kestral did not respond to inquiries from <i>The Nation</i>.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">According to federal lobbying records, Kestral recently hired former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, who served in that post from 2003 to 2005, to lobby the US government, including the State Department, USAID and Congress, on foreign affairs issues "regarding [Kestral's] capabilities to carry out activities of interest to the United States." Noriega was hired through his firm, Vision Americas, which he runs with Christina Rocca, a former CIA operations official who served as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 2001 to 2006 and was deeply involved in shaping US policy toward Pakistan. In October 2009, Kestral paid Vision Americas $15,000 and paid a Vision Americas-affiliated firm, Firecreek Ltd., an equal amount to lobby on defense and foreign policy issues.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">For years, Kestral has done a robust business in defense logistics with the Pakistani government and other nations, as well as top US defense companies. Blackwater owner Erik Prince is close with Kestral CEO Liaquat Ali Baig, according to the former Blackwater executive. "Ali and Erik have a pretty close relationship," he said. "They've met many times and struck a deal, and they [offer] mutual support for one another." Working with Kestral, he said, Blackwater has provided convoy security for Defense Department shipments destined for Afghanistan that would arrive in the port at Karachi. Blackwater, according to the former executive, would guard the supplies as they were transported overland from Karachi to Peshawar and then west through the Torkham border crossing, the most important supply route for the US military in Afghanistan.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also integrate with Kestral's forces in sensitive counterterrorism operations in the North-West Frontier Province, where they work in conjunction with the Pakistani Interior Ministry's paramilitary force, known as the Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as "frontier scouts"). The Blackwater personnel are technically advisers, but the former executive said that the line often gets blurred in the field. Blackwater "is providing the actual guidance on how to do [counterterrorism operations] and Kestral's folks are carrying a lot of them out, but they're having the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go out with the teams when they're executing the job," he said. "You can see how that can lead to other things in the border areas." He said that when Blackwater personnel are out with the Pakistani teams, sometimes its men engage in operations against suspected terrorists. "You've got BW guys that are assisting... and they're all going to want to go on the jobs--so they're going to go with them," he said. "So, the things that you're seeing in the news about how this Pakistani military group came in and raided this house or did this or did that--in some of those cases, you're going to have Western folks that are right there at the house, if not in the house." Blackwater, he said, is paid by the Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services. "That gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, 'Hey, no, we don't have any Westerners doing this. It's all local and our people are doing it.' But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for [counterterrorism]-related work."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The military intelligence source confirmed Blackwater works with the Frontier Corps, saying, "There's no real oversight. It's not really on people's radar screen."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">In October, in response to Pakistani news reports that a Kestral warehouse in Islamabad was being used to store heavy weapons for Blackwater, the US Embassy in Pakistan released a statement denying the weapons were being used by "a private American security contractor." The statement said, "Kestral Logistics is a private logistics company that handles the importation of equipment and supplies provided by the United States to the Government of Pakistan. All of the equipment and supplies were imported at the request of the Government of Pakistan, which also certified the shipments."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; "><b>Who is Behind the Drone Attacks?</b></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">Since President Barack Obama was inaugurated, the United States has expanded drone bombing raids in Pakistan. Obama first ordered a drone strike against targets in North and South Waziristan on January 23, and the strikes have been conducted consistently ever since. The Obama administration has now surpassed the number of Bush-era strikes in Pakistan and has faced fierce criticism from Pakistan and some US lawmakers over civilian deaths. A drone attack in June killed as many as sixty people attending a Taliban funeral.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">In August, the <i>New York Times</i> reported that Blackwater works for the CIA at "hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company's contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft." In February, The <i>Times</i> of London obtained a satellite image of a secret CIA airbase in Shamsi, in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan, showing three drone aircraft. The <i>New York Times</i> also reported that the agency uses a secret base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to strike in Pakistan.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The military intelligence source says that the drone strike that reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, his wife and his bodyguards in Waziristan in August was a CIA strike, but that many others attributed in media reports to the CIA are actually JSOC strikes. "Some of these strikes are attributed to OGA [Other Government Agency, intelligence parlance for the CIA], but in reality it's JSOC and their parallel program of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] because they also have access to UAVs. So when you see some of these hits, especially the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC strikes." The Pentagon has stated bluntly, "There are no US military strike operations being conducted in Pakistan."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The military intelligence source also confirmed that Blackwater continues to work for the CIA on its drone bombing program in Pakistan, as previously reported in the <i>New York Times</i>, but added that Blackwater is working on JSOC's drone bombings as well. "It's Blackwater running the program for both CIA and JSOC," said the source. When civilians are killed, "people go, 'Oh, it's the CIA doing crazy shit again unchecked.' Well, at least 50 percent of the time, that's JSOC [hitting] somebody they've identified through HUMINT [human intelligence] or they've culled the intelligence themselves or it's been shared with them and they take that person out and that's how it works."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The military intelligence source says that the CIA operations are subject to Congressional oversight, unlike the parallel JSOC bombings. "Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and the CIA knows that," he says. "Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don't care. If there's one person they're going after and there's thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That's the mentality." He added, "They're not accountable to anybody and they know that. It's an open secret, but what are you going to do, shut down JSOC?"</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">In addition to working on covert action planning and drone strikes, Blackwater SELECT also provides private guards to perform the sensitive task of security for secret US drone bases, JSOC camps and Defense Intelligence Agency camps inside Pakistan, according to the military intelligence source.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">Mosharraf Zaidi, a well-known Pakistani journalist who has served as a consultant for the UN and European Union in Pakistan and Afghanistan, says that the Blackwater/JSOC program raises serious questions about the norms of international relations. "The immediate question is, How do you define the active pursuit of military objectives in a country with which not only have you not declared war but that is supposedly a front-line non-NATO ally in the US struggle to contain extremist violence coming out of Afghanistan and the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan?" asks Zaidi, who is currently a columnist for <i>The News</i>, the biggest English-language daily in Pakistan. "Let's forget Blackwater for a second. What this is confirming is that there are US military operations in Pakistan that aren't about logistics or getting food to Bagram; that are actually about the exercise of physical violence, physical force inside of Pakistani territory."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; "><b>JSOC: Rumsfeld and Cheney's Extra Special Force</b></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">Colonel Wilkerson said that he is concerned that with General McChrystal's elevation as the military commander of the Afghan war--which is increasingly seeping into Pakistan--there is a concomitant rise in JSOC's power and influence within the military structure. "I don't see how you can escape that; it's just a matter of the way the authority flows and the power flows, and it's inevitable, I think," Wilkerson told<i>The Nation</i>. He added, "I'm alarmed when I see execute orders and combat orders that go out saying that the supporting force is Central Command and the supported force is Special Operations Command," under which JSOC operates. "That's backward. But that's essentially what we have today."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">From 2003 to 2008 McChrystal headed JSOC, which is headquartered at Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where Blackwater's 7,000-acre operating base is also situated. JSOC controls the Army's Delta Force, the Navy's SEAL Team 6, as well as the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron. JSOC performs strike operations, reconnaissance in denied areas and special intelligence missions. Blackwater, which was founded by former Navy SEALs, employs scores of veteran Special Forces operators--which several former military officials pointed to as the basis for Blackwater's alleged contracts with JSOC.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">Since 9/11, many top-level Special Forces veterans have taken up employment with private firms, where they can make more money doing the highly specialized work they did in uniform. "The Blackwater individuals have the experience. A lot of these individuals are retired military, and they've been around twenty to thirty years and have experience that the younger Green Beret guys don't," said retired Army Lieut. Col. Jeffrey Addicott, a well-connected military lawyer who served as senior legal counsel for US Army Special Forces. "They're known entities. Everybody knows who they are, what their capabilities are, and they've got the experience. They're very valuable."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">"They make much more money being the smarts of these operations, planning hits in various countries and basing it off their experience in Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia, Ethiopia," said the military intelligence source. "They were there for all of these things, they know what the hell they're talking about. And JSOC has unfortunately lost the institutional capability to plan within, so they hire back people that used to work for them and had already planned and executed these [types of] operations. They hired back people that jumped over to Blackwater SELECT and then pay them exorbitant amounts of money to plan future operations. It's a ridiculous revolving door."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">While JSOC has long played a central role in US counterterrorism and covert operations, military and civilian officials who worked at the Defense and State Departments during the Bush administration described in interviews with <i>The Nation</i> an extremely cozy relationship that developed between the executive branch (primarily through Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) and JSOC. During the Bush era, Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct coordination with the White House. Throughout the Bush years, it was largely General McChrystal who ran JSOC. "What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing," said Colonel Wilkerson. "That's dangerous, that's very dangerous. You have all kinds of mess when you don't tell the theater commander what you're doing."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">Wilkerson said that almost immediately after assuming his role at the State Department under Colin Powell, he saw JSOC being politicized and developing a close relationship with the executive branch. He saw this begin, he said, after his first Delta Force briefing at Fort Bragg. "I think Cheney and Rumsfeld went directly into JSOC. I think they went into JSOC at times, perhaps most frequently, without the SOCOM [Special Operations] commander at the time even knowing it. The receptivity in JSOC was quite good," says Wilkerson. "I think Cheney was actually giving McChrystal instructions, and McChrystal was asking him for instructions." He said the relationship between JSOC and Cheney and Rumsfeld "built up initially because Rumsfeld didn't get the responsiveness. He didn't get the can-do kind of attitude out of the SOCOM commander, and so as Rumsfeld was wont to do, he cut him out and went straight to the horse's mouth. At that point you had JSOC operating as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive branch--read: Cheney and Rumsfeld--wanted it to do. This would be more or less carte blanche. You need to do it, do it. It was very alarming for me as a conventional soldier."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">Wilkerson said the JSOC teams caused diplomatic problems for the United States across the globe. "When these teams started hitting capital cities and other places all around the world, [Rumsfeld] didn't tell the State Department either. The only way we found out about it is our ambassadors started to call us and say, 'Who the hell are these six-foot-four white males with eighteen-inch biceps walking around our capital cities?' So we discovered this, we discovered one in South America, for example, because he actually murdered a taxi driver, and we had to get him out of there real quick. We rendered him--we rendered him home."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">As part of their strategy, Rumsfeld and Cheney also created the Strategic Support Branch (SSB), which pulled intelligence resources from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA for use in sensitive JSOC operations. The SSB was created using "reprogrammed" funds "without explicit congressional authority or appropriation," according to the <i>Washington Post</i>. The SSB operated outside the military chain of command and circumvented the CIA's authority on clandestine operations. Rumsfeld created it as part of his war to end "near total dependence on CIA." Under US law, the Defense Department is required to report all deployment orders to Congress. But guidelines issued in January 2005 by former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone stated that Special Operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations...before publication" of a deployment order. This effectively gave Rumsfeld unilateral control over clandestine operations.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The military intelligence source said that when Rumsfeld was defense secretary, JSOC was deployed to commit some of the "darkest acts" in part to keep them concealed from Congress. "Everything can be justified as a military operation versus a clandestine intelligence performed by the CIA, which has to be informed to Congress," said the source. "They were aware of that and they knew that, and they would exploit it at every turn and they took full advantage of it. They knew they could act extra-legally and nothing would happen because A, it was sanctioned by DoD at the highest levels, and B, who was going to stop them? They were preparing the battlefield, which was on all of the PowerPoints: 'Preparing the Battlefield.'"</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The significance of the flexibility of JSOC's operations inside Pakistan versus the CIA's is best summed up by Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Every single intelligence operation and covert action must be briefed to the Congress," she said. "If they are not, that is a violation of the law."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; "><b>Blackwater: Company Non Grata in Pakistan</b></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">For months, the Pakistani media has been flooded with stories about Blackwater's alleged growing presence in the country. For the most part, these stories have been ignored by the US press and denounced as lies or propaganda by US officials in Pakistan. But the reality is that, although many of the stories appear to be wildly exaggerated, Pakistanis have good reason to be concerned about Blackwater's operations in their country. It is no secret in Washington or Islamabad that Blackwater has been a central part of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that the company has been involved--almost from the beginning of the "war on terror"--with clandestine US operations. Indeed, Blackwater is accepting applications for contractors fluent in Urdu and Punjabi. The US Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, has denied Blackwater's presence in the country, stating bluntly in September, "Blackwater is not operating in Pakistan." In her trip to Pakistan in October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dodged questions from the Pakistani press about Blackwater's rumored Pakistani operations. Pakistan's interior minister, Rehman Malik, said on November 21 he will resign if Blackwater is found operating anywhere in Pakistan.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The <i>Christian Science Monitor</i> recently reported that Blackwater "provides security for a US-backed aid project" in Peshawar, suggesting the company may be based out of the Pearl Continental, a luxury hotel the United States reportedly is considering purchasing to use as a consulate in the city. "We have no contracts in Pakistan," Blackwater spokesperson Stacey DeLuke said recently. "We've been blamed for all that has gone wrong in Peshawar, none of which is true, since we have absolutely no presence there."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">Reports of Blackwater's alleged presence in Karachi and elsewhere in the country have been floating around the Pakistani press for months. Hamid Mir, a prominent Pakistani journalist who rose to fame after his 1997 interview with Osama bin Laden, claimed in a recent interview that Blackwater is in Karachi. "The US [intelligence] agencies think that a number of Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are hiding in Karachi and Peshawar," he said. "That is why [Blackwater] agents are operating in these two cities." Ambassador Patterson has said that the claims of Mir and other Pakistani journalists are "wildly incorrect," saying they had compromised the security of US personnel in Pakistan. On November 20 the <i>Washington Times</i>, citing three current and former US intelligence officials, reported that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, has "found refuge from potential U.S. attacks" in Karachi "with the assistance of Pakistan's intelligence service."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">In September, the Pakistani press covered a report on Blackwater allegedly submitted by Pakistan's intelligence agencies to the federal interior ministry. In the report, the intelligence agencies reportedly allege that Blackwater was provided houses by a federal minister who is also helping them clear shipments of weapons and vehicles through Karachi's Port Qasim on the coast of the Arabian Sea. The military intelligence source did not confirm this but did say, "The port jives because they have a lot of [former] SEALs and they would revert to what they know: the ocean, instead of flying stuff in."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; "><i>The Nation</i> cannot independently confirm these allegations and has not seen the Pakistani intelligence report. But according to Pakistani press coverage, the intelligence report also said Blackwater has acquired "bungalows" in the Defense Housing Authority in the city. According to the DHA website, it is a large residential estate originally established "for the welfare of the serving and retired officers of the Armed Forces of Pakistan." Its motto is: "Home for Defenders." The report alleges Blackwater is receiving help from local government officials in Karachi and is using vehicles with license plates traditionally assigned to members of the national and provincial assemblies, meaning local law enforcement will not stop them.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When things go wrong, it's the contractors' fault, not the government's. But the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions, particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. "We are using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered to be a violation of the Geneva Convention," said Lt. Col. Addicott, who now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. "In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope to the breaking limit, and it's almost a fiction that these guys are not in offensive military operations." Addicott added, "If we were subjected to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That's one of the reasons we're not members of the International Criminal Court."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 0px; ">If there is one quality that has defined Blackwater over the past decade, it is the ability to survive against the odds while simultaneously reinventing and rebranding itself. That is most evident in Afghanistan, where the company continues to work for the US military, the CIA and the State Department despite intense criticism and almost weekly scandals. Blackwater's alleged Pakistan operations, said the military intelligence source, are indicative of its new frontier. "Having learned its lessons after the private security contracting fiasco in Iraq, Blackwater has shifted its operational focus to two venues: protecting things that are in danger and anticipating other places we're going to go as a nation that are dangerous," he said. "It's as simple as that."</p><div class="about-author" style="border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: dotted; border-top-color: rgb(200, 200, 200); font-size: 0.857143em; line-height: 1.5; padding-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 2em; "><h2 style="font-size: 1em; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">About Jeremy Scahill</h2>Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/156858394X/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 102); font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; "><i>Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army</i></a>, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program <cite style="font-style: normal; ">Democracy Now!</cite>. <a href="http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/jeremy_scahill" style="color: rgb(0, 51, 102); font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; ">more...</a></div></div></div></div><div id="footer" style="border-top-width: 6px; border-top-style: solid; border-top-color: rgb(228, 228, 228); margin-top: 2em; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2em; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 1em; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 1em; padding-left: 0px; "><ul class="info" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-weight: bold; "><li style="list-style-type: none; list-style-position: initial; list-style-image: initial; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; ">Copyright © 2009 The Nation</li></ul></div></div></div></span>Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-16410211907746520502009-12-18T18:29:00.000-08:002009-12-18T18:32:36.362-08:00Mort Zukerman Defends Massacre in Gaza: Letter to the NY Daily News<div><span style="font-family:Comic Sans MS;font-size:85%;">New York Daily News:</span></div> <div><span style="font-family:Comic Sans MS;font-size:85%;">December 17, 2009</span></div> <div><span style="font-family:Comic Sans MS;font-size:85%;">Letter to the Editor:</span></div> <div><span style="font-family:Comic Sans MS;font-size:85%;"></span> </div> <p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Lucida Sans Unicode;font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS'; font-size: small; ">To the Editor</span></span></p><p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Lucida Sans Unicode;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS'; "></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Thank you for your editorial “Sneak Attack on Israel” (12.16.09) ; You object to the recent British threat to arrest former Israel Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni for human rights violations. You write that Israel merely used “necessary force to disarm Hamas terrorists.” But the highly regarded Goldstone report found that Israel used “disproportionate force to punish, humiliate and terrorize“ the civilian population as they killed more than 1400 Palestinians and wounded perhaps thousands in their Dec-Jan 2009 attack -–more properly termed a massacre -- on the helpless people of Gaza. </span></span></p> <p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><span><span style="font-family:Lucida Sans Unicode;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Lucida Sans Unicode;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The Goldstone report also accused Israel of successfully targeting a wide range of Gaza’s infrastructure, including mosques, schools and universities, bakeries, chicken farms, factories, and many hundreds of homes, forcing thousands of people into the street.</span></span></p> <p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><span><span style="font-family:Lucida Sans Unicode;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p> <p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Lucida Sans Unicode;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I gather you also support the Obama administration’s apparent disinterest in pressing Israel to allow Gazans to import concrete and other materials to rebuild their destroyed territory. </span></span></p> <p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family:Lucida Sans Unicode;"></span> </span></p> <p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Lucida Sans Unicode;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Sincerely,</span></span></p> <p style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Lucida Sans Unicode;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Ronald Bleier</span></span></p>Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-70133199167632877092009-12-14T20:17:00.000-08:002009-12-14T20:24:21.160-08:00Webster Tarpley: Obama Declares War on Pakistan (after Bush declared war on Afganistan which Obama continues<p><span style="font-size:85%;">Note: I'm sort of half a fan of Webster Tarpley. He comes up with more than his fair share of howlers. But this article is far and away the best I've read or heard about what the US is doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I've believed for some time that it was the Bush-Cheney plan to destabilize Pakistan and do something crazy about its nukes, but this article gives valuable details. --Ronald Bleier</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">Obama Declares War On Pakistan</span></p><p><br />Webster G. Tarpley<br />Infowars.com<br />December 14, 2009</p><p>http://www.infowars.com/obama-declares-war-on-pakistan/<br /><br />Obama declared all-out war on Pakistan during his December 1, 2009,<br />West Point speech.<br /><br />Obama's West Point speech of December 1 represents far more than the obvious<br />brutal escalation in Afghanistan - it is nothing less than a declaration of<br />all-out war by the United States against Pakistan. This is a brand-new war,<br />a much wider war now targeting Pakistan, a country of 160 million people<br />armed with nuclear weapons. In the process, Afghanistan is scheduled to be<br />broken up. This is no longer the Bush Cheney Afghan war we have known in the<br />past. This is something immensely bigger: the attempt to destroy the<br />Pakistani central government in Islamabad and to sink that country into a<br />chaos of civil war, Balkanization, subdivision and general mayhem. The<br />chosen strategy is to massively export the Afghan civil war into Pakistan<br />and beyond, fracturing Pakistan along ethnic lines. It is an oblique war<br />using fourth-generation or guerrilla warfare techniques to assail a country<br />which the United States and its associates in aggression are far too weak to<br />attack directly. In this war, the Taliban are employed as US proxies. This<br />aggression against Pakistan is Obama's attempt to wage the Great Game<br />against the hub of Central Asia and Eurasia or more generally.<br /><br />US DETERRED FROM OPEN WAR BY PAKISTAN'S NUKES<br /><br />The ongoing civil war in Afghanistan is merely a pretext, a cover story<br />designed to provide the United States with a springboard for a geopolitical<br />destabilization campaign in the entire region which cannot be publicly<br />avowed. In the blunt cynical world of imperialist aggression à la Bush and<br />Cheney, a pretext might have been manufactured to attack Pakistan directly.<br />But Pakistan is far too large and the United States is far too weak and too<br />bankrupt for such an undertaking. In addition, Pakistan is a nuclear power,<br />possessing atomic bombs and medium range missiles needed to deliver them.<br />What we are seeing is a novel case of nuclear deterrence in action. The US<br />cannot send an invasion fleet or set up airbases nearby because Pakistani<br />nuclear weapons might destroy them. To this extent, the efforts of Ali<br />Bhutto and A.Q. Khan to provide Pakistan a deterrent capability have been<br />vindicated. But the US answer is to find ways to attack Pakistan below the<br />nuclear threshold, and even below the conventional threshold. This is where<br />the tactic of exporting the Afghan civil war to Pakistan comes in.<br /><br />The architect of the new Pakistani civil war is US Special Forces General<br />Stanley McChrystal, who organized the infamous network of US torture<br />chambers in Iraq. McChrystal's specific credential for the Pakistani civil<br />war is his role in unleashing the Iraqi civil war of Sunnis versus Shiites<br />by creating "al Qaeda in Iraq" under the infamous and now departed double<br />agent Zarkawi. If Iraqi society as a whole had lined up against the US<br />invaders, the occupiers would have soon been driven out. The counter-gang<br />known as "Al Qaeda in Iraq" avoided that possibility by killing Shiites, and<br />thus calling forth massive retaliation in the form of a civil war. These<br />tactics are drawn from the work of British General Frank Kitson, who wrote<br />about them in his book Low Intensity Warfare. If the United States possesses<br />a modern analog to Heinrich Himmler of the SS, it is surely General<br />McChrystal, Obama's hand-picked choice. McChrystal's superior, Gen Petraeus,<br />wants to be the new Field Marshal von Hindenburg - in other words, he wants<br />to be the next US president.<br /><br />The vulnerability of Pakistan which the US and its NATO associates are<br />seeking to exploit can best be understood using a map of the prevalent<br />ethnic groups of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and India. Most maps show only<br />political borders which date back to the time of British imperialism, and<br />therefore fail to reflect the principal ethnic groups of the region. For the<br />purposes of this analysis, we must start by recognizing a number of groups.<br />First is the Pashtun people, located mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan.<br />Then we have the Baluchis, located primarily in Pakistan and Iran. The<br />Punjabis inhabit Pakistan, as do the Sindhis. The Bhutto family came from<br />Sind.<br /><br />PASHTUNISTAN<br /><br />The US and NATO strategy begins with the Pashtuns, the ethnic group from<br />which the so-called Taliban are largely drawn. The Pashtuns represent a<br />substantial portion of the population of Afghanistan, but here they are<br />alienated from the central government under President Karzai in Kabul, even<br />though the US puppet Karzai passes for a Pashtun himself. The issue involves<br />the Afghan National Army, which was created by the United States after the<br />2001 invasion. The Afghan officer corps are largely Tajiks drawn from the<br />Northern Alliance that allied with the United States against the Pashtun<br />Talibans. The Tajiks speak Dari, sometimes known as eastern Persian. Other<br />Afghan officers come from the Hazara people. The important thing is that the<br />Pashtuns feel shut out.<br /><br />The US strategy can best be understood as a deliberate effort at<br />persecuting, harassing, antagonizing, strafing, repressing, and murdering<br />the Pashtuns. The additional 40,000 US and NATO forces which Obama demands<br />for Afghanistan will concentrate in Helmand province and other areas where<br />the Pashtuns are in the majority. The net effect will be to increase the<br />rebellion of the fiercely independent Pashtuns against Kabul and the foreign<br />occupation, and at the same time to push many of these newly radicalized<br />mujaheddin fighters across the border into Pakistan, where they can wage war<br />against the central government in Islamabad. US aid will flow directly to<br />war lords and drug lords, increasing the centrifugal tendencies.<br /><br />On the Pakistani side, the Pashtuns are also alienated from the central<br />government. Islamabad and the army are seen by them as too much the<br />creatures of the Punjabis, with some input from the Sindhis. On the<br />Pakistani side of the Pashtun territory, US operations include wholesale<br />assassinations from unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, murders by CIA and<br />reportedly Blackwater snipers, plus blind terrorist massacres like the<br />recent ones in Peshawar which the Pakistani Taliban are blaming on<br />Blackwater, acting as a subcontractor of the CIA. These actions are<br />intolerable and humiliating for a proud sovereign state. Every time the<br />Pashtuns are clobbered, they blame the Punjabis in Islamabad for the dirty<br />deals with the US that allow this to happen. The most immediate goal of<br />Obama's Afghan-Pakistan escalation is therefore to promote a general<br />secessionist uprising of the entire Pashtun people under Taliban auspices,<br />which would already have the effect of destroying the national unity of both<br />Kabul and Islamabad.<br /><br />BALUCHISTAN<br /><br />The other ethnic group which the Obama strategy seeks to goad into<br />insurrection and secession is the Baluchis. The Baluchis have their own<br />grievances against the Iranian central government in Tehran, which they see<br />as being dominated by Persians. An integral part of the new Obama policy is<br />to expand the deadly flights of the CIA Predators and other assassination<br />drones into Baluchistan. One pretext for this is the report, peddled for<br />example by Michael Ware of CNN, that Osama bin Laden and his MI-6 sidekick<br />Zawahiri are both holed up in the Baluchi city of Quetta, where they operate<br />as the kingpins of the so-called "Quetta Shura." Blackwater teams cannot be<br />far behind. In Iranian Baluchistan, the CIA is funding the murderous<br />Jundullah organization, which was recently denounced by Teheran for the<br />murder of a number of top officials of the Iranian Pasdaran Revolutionary<br />guards. The rebellion of Baluchistan would smash the national unity of both<br />Pakistan and Iran, thus helping to destroy two of the leading targets of US<br />policy.<br /><br />OBAMA'S RUBE GOLDBERG STRATEGY<br /><br />Even Chris Matthews of MSNBC, normally a devoted acolyte of Obama, pointed<br />out that the US strategy as announced at West Point very much resembles a<br />Rube Goldberg contraption. (In the real world, "al Qaeda" is of course the<br />CIA's own Arab and terrorist legion.) In the world of official US myth, the<br />enemy is supposed to be "Al Qaeda." But, even according to the US<br />government, there are precious few "Al Qaeda" fighters left in Afghanistan.<br />Why then, asked Matthews, concentrate US forces in Afghanistan where "Al<br />Qaeda" is not, rather than in Pakistan where "Al Qaeda" is now alleged to<br />be?<br /><br />One elected official who has criticized this incongruous mismatch is<br />Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who said in a television<br />interview that 'Pakistan, in the border region near Afghanistan, is perhaps<br />the epicenter [of global terrorism], although al Qaida is operating all over<br />the world, in Yemen, in Somalia, in northern Africa, affiliates in Southeast<br />Asia. Why would we build up 100,000 or more troops in parts of Afghanistan<br />included that are not even near the border? You know, this buildup is in<br />Helmand Province. That's not next door to Waziristan. So I'm wondering, what<br />exactly is this strategy, given the fact that we have seen that there is a<br />minimal presence of Al Qaida in Afghanistan, but a significant presence in<br />Pakistan? It just defies common sense that a huge boots on the ground<br />presence in a place where these people are not is the right strategy. It<br />doesn't make any sense to me.' Indeed. 'The Wisconsin Democrat also warned<br />that U.S. policy in Afghanistan could actually push terrorists and<br />extremists into Pakistan and, as a consequence, further destabilize the<br />region: "You know, I asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,<br />Admiral Mullen, and Mr. Holbrooke, our envoy over there, a while ago, you<br />know, is there a risk that if we build up troops in Afghanistan, that will<br />push more extremists into Pakistan?" he told ABC. "They couldn't deny it,<br />and this week, Prime Minister Gilani of Pakistan specifically said that his<br />concern about the buildup is that it will drive more extremists into<br />Pakistan, so I think it's just the opposite, that this boots-on-the-ground<br />approach alienates the Afghan population and specifically encourages the<br />Taliban to further coalesce with Al Qaida, which is the complete opposite of<br />our national security interest."'1 Of course, this is all intentional and<br />motivated by US imperialist raison d'état. .<br /><br />MALICK: "DID OBAMA DECLARE WAR ON PAKISTAN?"<br /><br />Obama's speech did everything possible to blur the distinction between<br />Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are after all two sovereign states and both<br />members of the United Nations in their own right. Ibrahim Sajid Malick, US<br />correspondent for Samaa TV, one of the largest Pakistan television networks,<br />called attention to this ploy: 'Speaking to a hall full of cadets at the US<br />Military Academy of West Point, President Barack Obama almost seemed like he<br />might be declaring war on Pakistan. Every time he mentioned Afghanistan,<br />Pakistan preceded mention.. Sitting at the back benches of the hall at one<br />point I almost jumped out of my chair when he said: "the stakes are even<br />higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that al Qaeda and<br />other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe<br />that they would use them." I was shocked because a succession of American<br />officials recently confirmed that the Pakistani arsenal is secure.'2 This<br />article is entitled "Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?", and we can chalk<br />the question mark up to diplomatic discretion. During congressional hearings<br />involving General McChrystal and US Ambassador Eikenberry, Afghanistan and<br />Pakistan were simply fused into one sinister entity known as "Afpak" or even<br />"Afpakia."<br /><br />a.. A d v e r t i s e m e n t<br />b..<br />In the summer of 2007, Obama, coached by Zbigniew Brzezinski and other<br />controllers, was the originator of the unilateral US policy of using<br />Predator drones for political assassinations inside Pakistan. This<br />assassination policy is now being massively escalated along with the troop<br />strength: "Two weeks ago in Pakistan, Central Intelligence Agency<br />sharpshooters killed eight people suspected of being militants of the<br />Taliban and Al Qaeda, and wounded two others in a compound that was said to<br />be used for terrorist training.. The White House has authorized an expansion<br />of the C.I.A.'s drone program in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas, officials<br />said this week, to parallel the president's decision.to send 30,000 more<br />troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about<br />the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time - a<br />controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas - because that is<br />where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide."3 The US is now training<br />more Predator operators than combat pilots.<br /><br />BLACKWATER ACCUSED IN PESHAWAR MASSACRE OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN<br /><br />The CIA, the Pentagon, and their various contractors among the private<br />military firms are now on a murder spree across Pakistan, attacking peaceful<br />villages and wedding parties, among other targets. Blackwater, now calling<br />itself Xe Services and Total Intelligence Solutions, is heavily involved:<br />'At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations<br />Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite<br />division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they<br />plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives,<br />"snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside<br />and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The<br />Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct<br />a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the<br />well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source<br />within the US military intelligence apparatus.' 4<br /><br />As shocking as Scahill's report is, it must nevertheless be viewed as a<br />limited hangout, since there is no mention of the persistent charges that a<br />large part of the deadly bombings in Peshawar and other Pakistani cities are<br />being carried out by Blackwater, as this news item suggests: "ISLAMABAD Oct.<br />29 (Xinhua) - Chief of Taliban movement in Pakistan Hakimullah Mehsud has<br />blamed the controversial American private firm Blackwater for the bomb blast<br />in Peshawar which killed 108 people, local news agency NNI reported<br />Thursday."5 This was blind terrorism designed for maximum slaughter,<br />especially among women and children.<br /><br />US ALSO AT WAR WITH UZBEKISTAN?<br /><br />Scahill's report also suggests that US black ops have reached into<br />Uzbekistan, a post-Soviet country of 25 million which borders Afghanistan to<br />the north: 'In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against<br />suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA,<br />the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside<br />Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the<br />military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the<br />operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. "That<br />piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don't know if you<br />noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan," he said. "So,<br />did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?"' 6 Such are the<br />ways of hope and change.<br /><br />The role of US intelligence in fomenting the Baluchistan rebellion for the<br />purpose of breaking Pakistan apart is also confirmed by Professor<br />Chossudovsky: 'Already in 2005, a report by the US National Intelligence<br />Council and the CIA forecast a "Yugoslav-like fate" for Pakistan "in a<br />decade with the country riven by civil war, bloodshed and inter-provincial<br />rivalries, as seen recently in Baluchistan." (Energy Compass, 2 March 2005).<br />According to the NIC-CIA, Pakistan is slated to become a "failed state" by<br />2015, "as it would be affected by civil war, complete Talibanization and<br />struggle for control of its nuclear weapons". (Quoted by former Pakistan<br />High Commissioner to UK, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Times of India, 13 February<br />2005).. Washington favors the creation of a "Greater Baluchistan" which<br />would integrate the Baluch areas of Pakistan with those of Iran and possibly<br />the Southern tip of Afghanistan, thereby leading to a process of political<br />fracturing in both Iran and Pakistan.'7 The Iranians, for their part, are<br />adamant that the US is committing acts of war on their territory in<br />Baluchistan: "TEHRAN, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) - Iran's Parliament Speaker Ali<br />Larijani said .that there are some concrete evidences showing U.S.<br />involvement in recent deadly bomb explosions in the country's<br />Sistan-Baluchistan province, the official IRNA news agency reported. .. The<br />deadly suicide attack by Sunni rebel group Jundallah (God's soldiers)<br />occurred on Oct. 18 in Iran's Sistan-Baluchistan province near the border<br />with Pakistan when the local officials were preparing a ceremony in which<br />the local tribal leaders were to meet the military commanders of Iran's<br />Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).8<br /><br />US GOAL: CUT THE PAKISTAN ENERGY CORRIDOR BETWEEN IRAN, CHINA<br /><br />Why would the United States be so obsessed with the breakup of Pakistan? One<br />reason is that Pakistan is traditionally a strategic ally and economic<br />partner of China, a country which the US and British are determined to<br />oppose and contain on the world stage. Specifically, Pakistan could function<br />as an energy corridor linking the oil fields of Iran and possibly even Iraq<br />with the Chinese market by means of a pipeline that would cross the<br />Himalayas above Kashmir. This is the so-called "Pipelinestan" issue. This<br />would give China a guaranteed land-based oil supply not subject to<br />Anglo-American naval superiority, while also cutting out the 12,000 mile<br />tanker route around the southern rim of Asia. As a recent news report points<br />out: 'Beijing has been pressuring Tehran for China's participation in the<br />pipeline project and Islamabad, while willing to sign a bilateral agreement<br />with Iran, has also welcomed China's participation. According to an<br />estimate, such a pipeline would result in Pakistan getting $200 million to<br />$500 million annually in transit fees alone. China and Pakistan are already<br />working on a proposal for laying a trans-Himalayan pipeline to carry Middle<br />Eastern crude oil to western China. Pakistan provides China the shortest<br />possible route to import oil from the Gulf countries.. The pipeline, which<br />would run from the southern Pakistan port of Gwadar and follow the Karakoram<br />highway, would be partly financed by Beijing. The Chinese are also building<br />a refinery at Gwadar. Imports using the pipeline would allow Beijing to<br />reduce the portion of its oil shipped through the narrow and unsafe Strait<br />of Malacca, which at present carries up to 80% of its oil imports. Islamabad<br />also plans to extend a railway track to China to connect it to Gwadar. The<br />port is also considered the likely terminus of proposed multibillion-dollar<br />gas pipelines reaching from the South Pars fields in Iran or from Qatar, and<br />from the Daulatabad fields in Turkmenistan for export to world markets. Syed<br />Fazl-e-Haider, "Pakistan, Iran sign gas pipeline deal," Asia Times, 27 May<br />2009.9 This is the normal, peaceful economic progress and cooperation which<br />the Anglo-Americans are hell-bent on stopping.<br /><br />Oil and natural gas pipelines from Iran across Pakistan and into China would<br />carry energy resources into the Middle Kingdom, and would also serve as<br />conveyor belts for Chinese economic influence into the Middle East. This<br />would make Anglo-American dominion increasingly tenuous in a part of the<br />world which London and Washington have traditionally sought to control as<br />part of their overall strategy of world domination.<br /><br />US domestic propaganda is already portraying Pakistan as the new home base<br />of terrorism. The four pathetic patsies going on trial for an alleged plot<br />to bomb a synagogue in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx in New York<br />City had been carefully sheep-dipped to associate them with the shadowy and<br />suspicious Jaish-e-Mohammad, allegedly a Pakistani terrorist group. The same<br />goes for the five Moslems from Northern Virginia who have just been arrested<br />near Lahore in Pakistan.<br /><br />INDIA AND IRAN<br /><br />As far as the neighboring states are concerned, India under the unfortunate<br />Manmohan Singh seems to be accepting the role of continental dagger against<br />Pakistan and China on behalf of the US and the British. This is a recipe for<br />a colossal tragedy. India should rather make permanent peace with Pakistan<br />by vacating the Vale of Kashmir, where 95% of the population is Moslem and<br />would like to join Pakistan. Without a solution to this issue, there will be<br />no peace on the subcontinent.<br /><br />Regarding Iran, George Friedman, the head of the Stratfor outlet of the US<br />intelligence community recently told Russia Today that the great novelty of<br />the next decade will be an alliance of the United States with Iran directed<br />against Russia. In that scenario, Iran would cut off oil to China<br />altogether. That is the essence of the Brzezinski strategy. It is urgent<br />that the antiwar movement in the United States regroup and begin a new<br />mobilization against the cynical hypocrisy of Obama's war and escalation<br />policy, which suprasses even the war crimes of the Bush-Cheny neocons. In<br />this new phase of the Great Game, the stakes are incalculable.<br /><br />1<br />http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/06/feingold-why-surge-where_n_381729.html<br /><br />2 Ibrahim Sajid Malick, "Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?," Pakistan for<br />Pakistanis Blog, 2 December 2009.<br />http://ibrahimsajidmalick.com/did-Obama-declare-war-on-pakistan/484/<br /><br />3 Scott Shane, "C.I.A. to Expand Use of Drones in Pakistan," New York Times,<br />December 3, 2009. See also David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, "Between the<br />Lines, an Expansion in Pakistan," New York Times, 1 December 2009.<br /><br />4 Jeremy Scahill, "The Secret US War in Pakistan," The Nation, November 23,<br />2009<br /><br />5 "Taliban in Pakistan blame U.S. Blackwater for deadly blast," Xinhua News<br />Agency, 29 October 2009,<br />http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/29/content_12358907.htm<br /><br />6 Jeremy Scahill, "The Secret US War in Pakistan," The Nation, November 23,<br />2009<br /><br />7 Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Pakistan, Global Research,<br />December 30, 2007<br /><br />8 "Iran says having evidences of U.S. involvement in suicide bomb attacks,"<br />Xinhua, 29 October 2009.<br /><br />9 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KE27Df03.html<br /></p>Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-26395026656190380602009-12-12T18:37:00.000-08:002009-12-12T18:39:25.037-08:00Truthout: Jason Leopold: ACLU Blasts Obama for covering up Bush-Cheney CrimesBlistering Indictment Leveled Against Obama Over His Handling of Bush-Era War Crimes<br /><br />Saturday 12 December 2009<br /><br />by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report<br />http://www.truthout.org/12110911<br /><br />During his 36-minute speech after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway Thursday, President Barack Obama explained to an audience of 1,000 how the United States has a "moral<br />and strategic interest" in abiding by a code of conduct when waging war - even one that pits the<br />US against a "vicious adversary that abides by no rules."<br /><br />"That is what makes us different from those whom we fight," Obama said. "That is a source of<br />our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo<br />Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend.<br />And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard."<br /><br />To many human rights advocates, however, Obama's high-minded declaration rang hollow in<br />light of fresh reports that his administration continues to operate secret prisons in Afghanistan<br />where detainees have allegedly been tortured and where the International Committee for the<br />Red Cross has been denied access to the prisoners.<br /><br />Obama has substituted words for action on issues surrounding torture since his first days in<br />office nearly one year ago. Last June, on the 25th anniversary of the Convention Against Torture<br />and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Obama said the US<br />government "must stand against torture wherever it takes place" and that his administration<br />"is committed to taking concrete actions against torture and to address the needs of its victims."<br /><br />But it's clear that his pledge does not apply to torture committed by Bush administration officials.<br /><br />That's the point the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) made shortly after Obama's<br />acceptance speech. Officials from the civil rights organization issued a withering indictment of<br />the Obama administration's handling of clear-cut cases of war crimes they say were committed<br />by former Bush officials who the Obama administration not only refuses to prosecute but has gone<br />to extraordinary lengths to cover up.<br /><br />"We're increasingly disappointed and alarmed by the current administration's stance on<br />accountability for torture," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, during a conference call with reporters. "On every front, the [Obama] administration is actively obstructing accountability. This administration is shielding Bush administration officials from civil liability, criminal investigation and even public scrutiny for their role in authorizing torture."<br /><br />Before leaving office, Dick Cheney said he approved waterboarding on at least three "high value" detainees and the "enhanced interrogation" of 33 other prisoners. President Bush made a somewhat vaguer acknowledgement of authorizing these techniques.<br /><br />The ACLU and other civil rights groups said Bush and Cheney's comments amounted to an admission of war crimes.<br /><br />Under the Convention Against Torture, the clear record that the Bush administration used waterboarding and other brutal techniques to extract information from detainees should have<br />triggered the United States to conduct a full investigation and to prosecute the offenders. In the<br />case of the<br />US's refusal to do so, other nations would be obligated to act under the principle of universality.<br /><br />However, instead of living up to that treaty commitment, the Obama administration is resisting<br />calls for government investigations and going to court to block lawsuits that demand release of<br />torture evidence or seek civil penalties against officials implicated in the torture.<br /><br />Jaffer said that while "the Bush administration constructed a legal framework for torture, now the Obama administration is constructing a legal framework for impunity."<br /><br />Defending John Yoo<br /><br />Indeed, last week, Obama's Justice Department asked a federal appeals court in San Francisco to dismiss a lawsuit filed against former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, who authored some<br />of the memos that justified torture largely by re-defining what the term means.<br /><br />In seeking to quash that lawsuit filed by alleged "dirty bomb" plotter Jose Padilla, Obama's<br />lawyers argued, in a friend-of-the-court brief that Justice Department lawyers who advise on<br />torture and other human rights issues are entitled to absolute immunity from lawsuits.<br /><br />"The Holder Justice Department insists that they are absolutely not responsible, and that they are<br />free to act according to a far lower standard of conduct than that which governs Americans<br />generally," wrote Scott Horton, a human rights attorney and constitutional expert in a column published on the Harper's web site. "Indeed, this has emerged as a sort of ignoble mantra for the Justice Department, uniting both the Bush and Obama administrations."<br /><br />Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley went even further, asserting that the Obama administration's arguments reversed more than six decades of US legal precedents - dating back<br />to the post-World War II Nuremberg trials - which held that legal wordsmiths who clear the way<br />for war crimes share the guilt with the actual perpetrators.<br /><br />The Obama administration "has gutted the hard-fought victories in Nuremberg where lawyers and judges were often guilty of war crimes in their legal advice and opinions," Turley said. "Quite a legacy for the world's newest Nobel Peace Prize winner."<br /><br />What's remarkable about the Obama Justice Department's amicus brief in the Padilla case is that it didn't need to be filed to begin with. Yoo hired a private defense attorney, albeit one who is paid<br />for with taxpayer dollars, earlier this year when the Justice Department backed out of representing Yoo due to undisclosed conflicts.<br /><br />"Qualified Immunity"<br /><br />In court papers filed last week, the Obama administration took a hard line in another case, arguing that a Supreme Court ruling that gave detainees the right to challenge their indefinite imprisonment doesn't apply to the cases of Yasser Al-Zahrani and Salah Al-Salami, two Guantanamo prisoners who committed suicide in June 2006.<br /><br />The fathers of the men, who were never charged with a crime, sued Bush administration Defense Department officials in federal court, arguing that the torture their sons endured drove them to hang themselves on June 10, 2006 after being detained for four years.<br /><br />But the Obama administration said in a legal brief that the Military Commissions Act of 2006<br />stripped the courts of jurisdiction to hear lawsuits that challenged the "detention, transfer, treatment<br />or conditions of confinement" of "enemy combatants."<br /><br />Moreover, in court papers filed in June, the Obama administration said, "Judicial intrusion into this politically sensitive area by creating a damages remedy for detainees could subvert these military<br />and diplomatic efforts and lead to 'embarrassment of our government abroad.'"<br /><br />Besides, the Obama administration said, just as John Yoo is entitled to absolute immunity, Defense Department officials are entitled to "qualified immunity" because the "Fifth and Eighth Amendments do not extend to Guantánamo Bay detainees."<br /><br />Earlier this week, a report prepared by the Seton Hall University School of Law Center for Policy<br />& Research called into question the veracity of the government's official version of the deaths of the two men and that of a third prisoner, who was also found hanging in his cell on June 10, 2006. The government attributed the suicides to "asymmetrical warfare."<br /><br />"Both the time and exact manner of the deaths remain uncertain, and the presence of rags stuffed in the detainees' throats is unexplained," the report said.<br /><br />CIA Renditions and State Secrets<br /><br />The Obama administration also has mounted an aggressive defense in another high-profile case regarding the Bush administration's wrongdoing.<br /><br />The Bush administration had invoked the state secrets privilege in a 2007 lawsuit filed against Jeppesen DataPlan, a subsidiary of Boeing, that is accused of knowingly flying people kidnapped by the CIA to secret overseas prisons where they were tortured. Bush's legal move was successful in getting the case tossed out, but the ACLU appealed the decision.<br /><br />When that appeal came up last February, Obama's Justice Department shocked civil liberties and human rights advocates by dispatching attorneys to federal court in San Francisco, where they invoked the same state secrets privilege.<br /><br />Even the judge was baffled, and asked a Justice Department attorney if the change in US government leadership would lead to a change in the legal position with regard to state secrets. The answer was a resounding "no."<br /><br />Still, the appellate court ruled in April that the case could move forward, asserting that state secrets can only be cited with regard to specific evidence, and not used as a means to dismiss an entire lawsuit. Justice Department attorneys will be back in court next week to appeal that decision, carrying forward the Bush administration's legacy of secrecy.<br /><br />Concealing Evidence<br /><br />The Obama administration also has tried to block Binyam Mohamed, one of the victims named in Jeppesen lawsuit, from obtaining documentary evidence to support his claims that he was tortured while in US custody.<br /><br />Terrorism-related charges against Mohamed were dropped last year when his attorneys sued to gain access to more than three dozen secret documents. He was released in February after being imprisoned for seven years and sent back to Great Britain.<br /><br />In a legal brief, the ACLU said Mohamed was beaten so severely on numerous occasions that he routinely lost consciousness and during one gruesome torture session "a scalpel was used to make incisions all over his body, including his penis, after which a hot stinging liquid was poured into his open wounds."<br /><br />Obama's determination to protect these dirty secrets of its predecessors even reached across the Atlantic. The Obama administration told British officials that intelligence sharing between the US and the UK might be disrupted if seven redacted paragraphs contained in secret US documents relating to Mohamed's torture allegations were made public by a British High Court.<br /><br />Those threats were conveyed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the CIA, and Obama's National Security Adviser James Jones, according to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.<br /><br />"The United States Government's position is that, if the redacted paragraphs are made public, then the United States will re-evaluate its intelligence-sharing relationship with the United Kingdom with the real risk that it would reduce the intelligence it provided," the High Court wrote in a ruling in February when it agreed to keep the paragraphs blacked out.<br /><br />"There is a real risk, if we restored the redacted paragraphs, the United States Government, by its review of the shared intelligence arrangements, could inflict on the citizens of the United Kingdom a very considerable increase in the dangers they face at a time when a serious terrorist threat still pertains."<br /><br />After the High Court's ruling, the Obama White House issued a statement thanking the British government "for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information" and added that the order would "preserve the long-standing intelligence sharing relationship that enables both countries to protect their citizens."<br /><br />Following the High Court's reversal, the New York Times published a sharply worded editorial criticizing the Obama administration's hard-line position in the Mohamed case.<br /><br />"The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration's expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush's cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama's cover-up," the Times wrote.<br /><br />Torture Photos<br /><br />Obama also reversed a commitment earlier this year to release photos of US soldiers torturing and abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.<br /><br />Obama said his decision stemmed from his personal review of the photos and his concern that their release would endanger American soldiers in the field, but the reversal also came after several weeks of Republican and right-wing media attacks on him as weak on national security.<br /><br />The Obama administration then appealed to the US Supreme Court to overturn a federal court order requiring release of the images, and Obama's aides worked with Congress to pass legislation giving the Defense Secretary the power to keep the photographs under wraps.<br /><br />The legislation passed in November and was promptly signed by Obama. By blocking release of the photographs, Obama essentially killed any meaningful chance of opening the door to an investigation or independent inquiry of senior Pentagon and Bush administration officials who implemented the policies that led to the abuses captured in the images.<br /><br />In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, the ACLU also questioned the value of Obama's much-touted executive order - signed on his second day in office - demanding a shift away from excessive secrecy toward a presumption in favor of open government.<br /><br />"We have not seen the presumption translated into the release of more information," Jaffer said. "There are several cases which we are just at a loss to understand why the information we are requesting is still being withheld."<br /><br />Those documents include ones related to the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program and transcripts of Combatant Status Review Tribunals where detainees "describe the abuse they suffered at the hands of their CIA interrogators."<br /><br />However, the ACLU's Freedom of Information lawsuit continues to unearth bits of new evidence. For instance, the ACLU obtained hundreds of new documents, including a one-page questionnaire apparently from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to the CIA.<br /><br />"How close is each technique to the 'rack and screw'?" the questionnaire asked, referring to a medieval torture device.<br /><br />"Anytime you need to ask a question like that it is deeply disturbing and shows you've strayed from constitutional norms," said ACLU legal fellow Alex Abdo. "You're asking a question as to whether the conduct you're about to authorize relates to rack and screw and that in and of itself should be evidence enough that you're going too far. It never should get to that point."<br /><br />Other newly disclosed documents show that the Bush White House was deeply involved in discussions about destroying 92 torture videotapes.<br /><br />Obama and Congress<br /><br />Perhaps, Obama's most positive act on behalf of open government came in April when he resisted pressure from the CIA and ordered the release of legal memorandums written by lawyers in Bush's Office of Legal Counsel, including Yoo and two former OLC chiefs, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury.<br /><br />The memos used creative definitions regarding torture to authorize the CIA to apply a variety of torture techniques to so-called "high-value" prisoners, including beatings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, placing insects inside a confinement box to induce fear, exposing naked detainees to extreme heat and cold, and shackling prisoners to the ceilings of their prison cells or in other painful "stress positions."<br /><br />In the face of this evidence, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and his counterpart in the House, John Conyers, floated competing proposals early in the year for a 9/11-style "truth commission" or a blue-ribbon investigative panel to look into the circumstances that led the Bush administration to create its policy of torture.<br /><br />Obama signaled that he was open to the idea of a "truth commission" but he said he was concerned "about this getting so politicized that we cannot function effectively, and it hampers our ability to carry out critical national security operations."<br /><br />After Republicans and neoconservative opinion writers went on the attack, Obama quickly retreated, calling lawmakers to the White House for a closed-door meeting in late April to talk them out of the idea of moving forward with independent investigations or even oversight hearings into the Bush administration's use of torture.<br /><br />Underscoring Obama's concerns about a high-profile investigation, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters at the time: "the President determined the concept didn't seem altogether workable in this case."<br /><br />Gibbs added, "The last few days might be evidence of why something like this might just become a political back and forth."<br /><br />Hoping for bipartisanship on pressing issues like the economy and health care, Democrats scuttled the investigative plans. However, Republicans have shown no reciprocal interest in bipartisanship, voting as a virtual bloc against every significant bill that Obama and the Democrats have proposed.<br /><br />Despite Obama's insistence of "looking forward, not backward," there remains a chance that hearings on Bush's torture practices might still be held next year.<br /><br />Leahy and Conyers have indicated they intend to hold hearings next year once a long-awaited report by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is released that delves into Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury's legal work surrounding torture, according to Christopher Anders, the ACLU's senior legislative counsel.<br /><br />Leahy and Conyers "said a number of times that they would have hearings when the OPR report comes out," Anders said in an interview. "It would be a big surprise if they didn't conduct hearings. We fully expect them to hold hearings."<br /><br />Spokespeople for Conyers and Leahy did not return calls or respond to e-mails seeking comment.<br /><br />Upcoming Hearings on Torture?<br /><br />However, according to Christopher Anders, the ACLU's senior legislative counsel, Leahy and Conyers have both said they intend to hold hearings next year once a long-awaited report by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is released that delves into Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury's legal work surrounding torture.<br /><br />Leahy and Conyers "said a number of times that they would have hearings when the OPR report comes out," Anders said in an interview. "It would be a big surprise if they didn't conduct hearings. We fully expect them to hold hearings."<br /><br />Anders added that while there is a time and place for independent commissions, the issue of torture is really a matter for Congress to probe.<br /><br />"These are the hard issues that Congress should really be tackling" Anders said. "It's squarely under their jurisdiction."<br /><br />Spokespeople for Conyers and Leahy did not return calls or respond to e-mails seeking comment.<br /><br />The ACLU said that as much as the Obama administration may hope that additional revelations related to the Bush administration's policy of torture will slip underneath the radar, numerous documents expected to be released in the weeks and months ahead will ensure the issue remains front and center for years to come, and calls for accountability will continue.<br /><br />"The lesson that this is giving to the rest of the world is that countries do not have to be accountable for their actions even when torture and abuse occurs," the ACLU's Anders said. "That's going to make it much more difficult for the United States to push other countries on human rights issues across the board, and it's going to make it much easier for other countries to shirk their own duties to bring accountability for their own actions in the past."<br /><br />Despite Obama's spotty record on the war crimes that grew out of the Bush's "war on terror," the President still focused his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech on the altruism of US foreign policy and America's commitment to upholding human rights.<br /><br />The ACLU's Jaffer said there is "an obvious tension on what the president is saying on the commitment to human rights and the work we're doing here in the United States to actually hold people accountable for the violations of both domestic and international law."<br /><br />"A lot of what was authorized by senior Bush administration officials was illegal not only under international law but domestic law as well," Jaffer said. "Many of the methods that were approved by CIA and [Department of Defense] interrogators had previously been described by multiple US administrations as war crimes and some of them have been prosecuted as war crimes.<br /><br />"Waterboarding in particular is something that has been prosecuted as a war crime before September 11. And yet we are not holding people accountable for having used those techniques, authorized those techniques. Increasingly, we're frustrated by the gap between the Obama administration's rhetoric on accountability and reality. We see the Obama administration actively obstructing accountability on every front."<br />--<br /> <br /><br />For more News From Underground, visit http://markcrispinmiller.comRonaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-50122788188650910342009-11-28T19:42:00.000-08:002009-11-28T19:49:56.264-08:00David Ray Griffin Reviews The Assassination of Paul Wellstone <br /><p> <span style="font-size:130%;">American Assassination: The Strange Death Of Senator Paul Wellstone</span></p><p><span style="font-size:130%;">by </span><span style="font-size:100%;">Four Arrows (Author), James H. Fetzer (Author)</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2BTXHV65XDHKY/ref=cm_cr_dp_auth_rev?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview</span><span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span></p><p>Reviewed for Amazon.com by Prof David Ray Griffin (December 5, 2004)<br /></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Abundant and Compelling Evidence,</span></p> <br />The authors of this important book argue that Senator Paul Wellstone's death, 10 days before the 2002 elections, was an assassination, most likely ordered by the Bush administration.<br /><br />Directly confronting the widespread tendency to reject all "conspiracy theories," the authors point out that "the idea that every theory that implies the existence of conspiracy ought to be rejected out of hand" is no more rational than the idea that every such theory should be accepted. Rather, "each case has to be evaluated on the basis of the evidence that is relevant and available in that case." On that basis, they argue, if we look at ALL the relevant evidence and employ the scientific method of inference to the best explanation, we must conclude that the theory that Wellstone was assassinated is far more probable than the official theory, according to which his airplane crash was an accident.<br /><br />The evidence includes several facts suggesting that the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) colluded with the FBI in a cover-up:<br /><br />1. FBI agents from Minneapolis arrived at the crash site within 2 hours after the crash, even though the trip from Minnesota to Duluth to the crash site would have taken at least 3 hours--so they must have departed before the plane crashed.<br />2. When asked for the times at which private flights had arrived in Duluth that morning, the FAA said the records had been destroyed.<br />3. Considerable disinformation about weather conditions was quickly given to the press.<br />4. Although regulations called for the investigation to be carried out by the NTSB, not the FBI (because the crash site was not designated a crime scene), the FBI agents were there for 8 hours before the NTSB team arrived.<br />5. The FBI, even though there illegally, prevented the local "first responders" from taking photographs.<br />6. Although it was the NTSB's responsibility to determine the cause of the crash and although the FBI's prior presence was illegal, the NTSB leader publicly accepted the FBI's declaration, made before the NTSB's investigation, that there was no evidence of terrorism.<br />7. When the NTSB team finally carried out its own investigation, it was unable to find either the cockpit recorder, which it assumed the plane had had, or the black box.<br />8. The NTSB held no public hearings, claiming that it was not a sufficiently "high-profile" case.<br />9. The NTSB's final report concealed the fact of the FBI's participation.<br />10. The NTSB investigation was headed by Acting Director Carol Carmody, a Bush appointee who had earlier ruled that there was no foul play in the small airplane crash in 2000 that took the life of Governor Mel Carnahan of Missouri, the Democratic candidate for the Senate who was killed 3 weeks before his expected victory (over John Ashcroft).<br /><br />The evidence also includes some facts strongly suggesting the falsity of the NTSB's official conclusion, which was that the plane crashed because the pilot failed to maintain proper speed, causing the plane to stall.<br /><br />1. The plane would have stalled only if it slowed to below 70 knots, yet it was equipped with a device that emitted a loud warning at 85 knots.<br />2. The plane was being flown by two experienced and fully certified pilots, a fact--obfuscated in the NTSB report-that makes this kind of pilot error very unlikely.<br />3. The NTSB's theory fails to explain why, about two minutes before the crash, all communication was abruptly terminated and the plane began going off course.<br /><br />The evidence also includes facts suggesting that the plane was instead brought down by an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapon:<br /><br />1. The plane's fuselage burned, although it was separated from the wings, which contained the fuel.<br />2. The plane's electrical system, which would be affected by an EMP, was in the fuselage, and the fire from the fuselage gave off blue smoke, which is indicative of an electrical fire.<br />3. An EMP could explain why the plane simultaneously went off course and lost its radio about two minutes before the crash.<br />4. At the same time, cell phones and garage doors in the area behaved in a way consistent with the occurrence of an EMP.<br />5. An NTSB spokesman professed ignorance about the existence of EMP weapons that could have brought down the plane, although the existence of such weapons had been known for several years.<br /><br />An important part of the authors' case is the fact that the Bush administration would have had several motives:<br /><br />1. Wellstone's defeat would return control of the Senate to the Republicans.<br />2. Wellstone's death 10 days before the election meant that $700,000 in the Republican campaign chest could be transferred, the very next day, to the (successful) effort to defeat Max Cleland in the Senate race in Georgia.<br />3. Wellstone was the biggest obstacle in the Senate to several Republican policies, such as those involving Iraq, Colombia, the SEC, tax cuts, and Homeland Security, and he was the strongest voice in Congress calling for a full investigation into 9/11.<br />4. Two days before his death, Wellstone reported that Cheney had told him: "If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you."<br />5. Wellstone had developed a 7-point lead in the polls over Norm Coleman, the Bush administration's hand-picked candidate.<br /><br />Finally, with regard to the question whether the Bush administration would commit such a heinous act, the authors argue that an administration that "compounded lie upon lie to . . . send hundreds of thousands of young American men and women into harm's way [in Iraq] is not an administration that would hesitate to kill a single senator."<br /><br />The authors conclude that the evidence shows beyond reasonable doubt that Wellstone was assassinated. They have, in my view, made a convincing case.<br /><br /><p>David Ray Griffin, author of "The New Pearl Harbor" and "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions & Distortions"<br /></p><p><br /></p><p>166 of 177 people found the following review helpful:</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-19696162495768846312009-11-24T17:36:00.000-08:002009-11-24T17:38:52.836-08:00Jonathan Cook: Have Israeli Spies Infiltrated International Airports?November 23, 2009<br />South Africa Deports Airline Official After Investigation<br />Have Israeli Spies Infiltrated International Aiports?<br /><br /><p>By JONATHAN COOK</p><p>http://counterpunch.org/cook11232009.html<br /></p><p>Counterpunch.org</p><br />South Africa deported an Israeli airline official last week following allegations that Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, had infiltrated Johannesburg international airport in an effort to gather information on South African citizens, particularly black and Muslim travellers.<br /><br />The move by the South African government followed an investigation by local TV showing an undercover reporter being illegally interrogated by an official with El Al, Israel’s national carrier, in a public area of Johannesburg’s OR Tambo airport.<br /><br />The programme also featured testimony from Jonathan Garb, a former El Al guard, who claimed that the airline company had been a front for the Shin Bet in South Africa for many years.<br /><br />Of the footage of the undercover reporter’s questioning, he commented: “Here is a secret service operating above the law in South Africa. We pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. We do exactly what we want. The local authorities do not know what we are doing.”<br /><br />The Israeli foreign ministry is reported to have sent a team to South Africa to try to defuse the diplomatic crisis after the government in Johannesburg threatened to deport all of El Al’s security staff.<br /><br />Mr Garb’s accusations have been supported by an investigation by the regulator for South Africa’s private security industries.<br /><br />They have also been confirmed by human rights groups in Israel, which report that Israeli security staff are carrying out racial profiling at many airports around the world, apparently out of sight of local authorities.<br /><br />Concern in South Africa about the activities of El Al staff has been growing since August, when South Africa’s leading investigative news show, Carte Blanche, went undercover to test Mr Garb’s allegations.<br /><br />A hidden camera captured an El Al official in the departure hall claiming to be from “airport security” and demanding that the undercover reporter hand over his passport or ID as part of “airport regulations”. When the reporter protested that he was not flying but waiting for a friend, El Al’s security manager, identified as Golan Rice, arrived to interrogate him further. Mr Rice then warned him that he was in a restricted area and must leave.<br /><br />Mr Garb commented on the show: “What we are trained is to look for the immediate threat – the Muslim guy. You can think he is a suicide bomber, he is collecting information. The crazy thing is that we are profiling people racially, ethnically and even on religious grounds … This is what we do.”<br /><br />Mr Garb and two other fired workers have told the South African media that Shin Bet agents routinely detain Muslim and black passengers, a claim that has ignited controversy in a society still suffering with the legacy of decades of apartheid rule.<br /><br />Suspect individuals, the former workers say, are held in an annex room, where they are interrogated, often on matters unrelated to airport security, and can be subjected to strip searches while their luggage is taken apart. Clandestine searches of their belongings and laptops are also carried out to identify useful documents and information.<br /><br />All of this is done in violation of South African law, which authorises only the police, armed forces or personnel appointed by the transport minister to carry out searches.<br /><br />The former staff also accuse El Al of smuggling weapons – licensed to the local Israeli embassy – into the airport for use by the secret agents.<br /><br />Mr Garb went public after he was dismissed over a campaign he led for better pay and medical benefits for El Al staff.<br /><br />A South African Jew, he said he was recruited 19 years ago by the Shin Bet. “We were trained at a secret camp [in Israel] where they train Israeli special forces and they train you how to use handguns, submachine guns and in unarmed combat.”<br /><br />He added that he was assigned to “armed security” in the early 1990s. “Armed security is being undercover, carrying a weapon, a handgun and at that time as well, sounds crazy but we carried Samsonite briefcases with an Uzi submachine gun in it.”<br /><br />Mr Garb claimed to have profiled 40,000 people for Israel over the past 20 years, including recently Virginia Tilley, a Middle East expert who is the chief researcher at South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council. The think tank recently published a report accusing Israel of apartheid and colonialism in the Palestinian territories.<br /><br />“The decision was she should be checked in the harshest way because of her connections,” Mr Garb said.<br /><br />Ms Tilley confirmed that she had been detained at the airport by El Al staff and separated from her luggage. Mr Garb said that during this period an agent “photocopied all [her] documentation and then he forwarded it on to Israel” – Mr Garb believes for use by the Shin Bet.<br /><br />Israeli officials have refused to comment on the allegations. A letter produced by Mr Garb – signed by Roz Bukris, El Al’s general manager in South Africa – suggests that he was employed by the Shin Bet rather than the airline. Ms Bukris, according to the programme, refused to confirm or deny the letter’s validity.<br /><br />The Israeli Embassy in South Africa declined to discuss evidence that it, rather than El Al, had licensed guns issued to the airline’s security managers. Questioned last week by Ynet, Israel’s largest news website, about the deportation of the airline official, Yossi Levy, an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, said he could not “comment on security matters”.<br /><br />A report published in 2007 by two Israeli human rights organisations, the Nazareth-based Arab Association for Human Rights and the Centre Against Racism, found that Israeli airline staff used racial profiling at most major airports around the world, subjecting Arab and Muslim passengers to discriminatory and degrading treatment in violation both of international law and the host country’s laws.<br /><br />“Our research showed that the checks conducted by El Al at foreign airports had all the hallmarks of Shin Bet interrogations,” said Mohammed Zeidan, the director of the Human Rights Association. “Usually the questions were less about the safety of the flight and more aimed at gathering information on the political activities or sympathies of the passengers.”<br /><br />The human rights groups approached four international airports – in New York, Paris, Vienna and Geneva – where passengers said they had been subjected to discriminatory treatment, to ask under what authority the Israeli security services were operating. The first two airports refused to respond, while Vienna and Geneva said it was not possible to oversee El Al’s procedures.<br /><br />“It is remarkable that these countries make no effort to supervise the actions of Israeli security personnel present on their territory, particularly in light of the discriminatory and humiliating procedures they apply,” the report states.<br /><br />Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.<br /><br />A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-46122703313183188622009-11-08T19:58:00.000-08:002009-11-08T19:59:35.256-08:00Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed: Iraq's invasion of Kuwait engineered by US- On Sun, 11/8/09, Robert Gipson <robertgipson@comcast.net> wrote:<br /><br />Subject: Iraq's invasion of Kuwait engineered by US<br />To:<br />Date: Sunday, November 8, 2009, 11:59 AM<br /><br />I cannot overemphasize the importance of the following article. It deserves a complete read. Due to it's length, I've synopsized it immediately below. <br /><br />Especially in relation to the recent tragic shooting at Ft. Hood, it is crucial to remember that Saddam Hussein brutally suppressed and imprisoned islamic extremists/jihadists of any sect (Wahabbist, Sunni or Shiite); that in pre-US-invasion Iraq, Christians and Muslims lived side-by-side peacefully; that Saddam's second-in-command was Christian; and that, in it's war against Iraq, the US allied with countries (Saudi Arabia) where you would be executed for possessing a Bible.<br /><br />Now, the synopsis of the article. The US did the following:<br /><br />a. Encouraged Kuwait to make provocative moves against Iraq, to instgate a conflict. These moves included (but were not limited to) Kuwait's slant-drilling (with US-provided technology) into Iraq's oil fields; Kuwait's illegally over-extracting oil from fields it shared with Iraq; and Kuwait demanding immediate payment of loans from the Iran-Iraq war (a war for which Kuwait and the US sold arms to both sides). <br /><br />b. Encouraged Kuwait to refuse to negotiate with Iraq over these issues, to provoke Iraq into military action.<br /><br />c. Began in January, 1990, the US moved massive quantities of weapons and materiel into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, in preparation for war against Iraq.<br /><br />d. In July, 1990 the US assured Saddam that, if he invaded Kuwait, the US would not intervene .<br /><br />Selected excerpts: <br /><br />"King Hussein of Jordan ... found Kuwait’s [instigatory moves] perplexing... 'really puzzling...'"<br /><br />Yasser Arafat...stated “The U.S. was encouraging Kuwait not to offer any compromise which meant that there could be no negotiated solution to avoid the Persian Gulf crisis.”<br /><br />“Schwarzkopf was [in Kuwait] on visits before the war, maybe a few times a year. He was a political general, and that was unusual in itself. He kept a personally high profile and was on a first-name basis with all the ministers in Kuwait.”<br /><br />"In October 1990, [Colin] Powell referred to the new military plan developed in 1989."<br />“in his prewar period”, Saddam Hussein “did more than most rulers in that part of the world to meet the basic material needs of his people in terms of housing, healthcare and education ... Iraq's impressive infrastructure and strongly nationalistic ideology led many Arabs to conclude that the overkill exhibited by American forces and the postwar sanctions was a deliberate effort to emphasize that any development strategy in that part of the world must be pursued solely on terms favorable to Western interests."<br />“the majority of Iraqi civilians enjoyed an almost First World-level standard of living, with education and health care systems that remained free, accessible to every Iraqi and among the highest quality in the developing world.”<br /><br /> - Bob<br /><br />http://www.voltairenet.org/article162816.html<br />Setting the American Trap for Saddam Hussein (Part 2) The 1991 Gulf Massacre<br /><br />by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed*<br />In the second part of his study Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed offers a behind-the-scenes account of the 1991 Gulf War revealing that, contrary to conventional opinion, there exists considerable evidence to indicate that the Gulf War had not only been anticipated by the United States, but fell well within its political, strategic and economic interests. A variety of factors, both within the U.S. and the Middle East, appear to support the conclusion that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was deliberately engineered by the U.S. to provide a pretext for war.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />George H.W. Bush riding in an armored jeep with General ’Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia, 22 November 1990<br />Part One: The Historical & Strategic Context of Western Terrorism in The Gulf<br />IV. Protecting Order in the Gulf<br />IV.I The Domestic Scene in the U.S.<br />Prior to the Gulf War, the United States was facing massive cutbacks in military expenditure. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. had lost its old Cold War foe, leaving its military institutions such as NATO with nothing left to do – or at least no credible pretext on which to do it. Consequently, a political conflict had begun within the U.S. over the issue of the necessity of defence spending. With the Cold War over, many outside the U.S. military establishment naturally called for the reduction of military expenditure.<br />In February 1990, the Washington Post reported that “the administration and Congress are expecting the most acrimonious, hard-fought defense budget battle in recent history”. [1] By June, the Post reported that “tensions have escalated” between the Congress and the Pentagon, “as Congress prepares to draft one of the most pivotal defense budgets in the past two decades” [2]. By July, due to the vote of a Senate Armed Services subcommittee calling for cuts in military manpower almost three times that of Bush’s recommendations, it appeared that the Pentagon was losing the battle for military spending. The Los Angeles Times reported: “The size and direction of the [military] cuts indicate that President Bush is losing his battle on how to manage reductions in military spending.” [3]<br />Being Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, former CIA Director, and a former investor in Texas oil, Bush was instrumental in fighting against such reductions. Yet while he was drastically failing to secure high U.S. military spending, his domestic popularity was also drastically decreasing. Although in January 1990 he had an approval rating of 80 per cent having emerged victorious from the U.S. war in Panama, towards the end of July his ratings had steadily dropped to 60, and were set to drop further. [4] Thus, President Bush and the corporate-military interests he was supporting were searching for a way to boost military spending and generate renewed public popularity.<br />The background for Bush’s campaign to maintain high levels of military spending was rooted in the prospects for a U.S. military presence in the Middle East, particularly the Gulf region. When the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, U.S. contingency plans for war in the Gulf region posed Iraq as the enemy. [5] In January 1990, CIA Director William Webster acknowledged the West’s increasing dependency on Middle East oil in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. [6] One month later, General Schwarzkopf advised the Committee to increase the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, describing new plans to intervene in a regional conflict.<br />The principal vehicle of this operation would be the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), formerly the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, which had been covertly expanding a network of U.S. military-intelligence bases in Saudi Arabia. [7] Notably, CENTCOM’s War Plan 1002, which was designed during the inception of the Reagan administration to implement the Carter Doctrine of confronting any challenge to U.S. access to Middle East oil by military force, was revised in 1989 and renamed War Plan 1002-90; the last two digits, of course, standing for 1990. In the updated plan, Iraq replaced the Soviet Union as the principal enemy. [8]Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-46802683332438046252009-10-25T17:55:00.000-07:002009-10-25T17:59:25.103-07:00Craig Murray: UK Ambassador Sacked for Whistelblowing about torture in Uzbekistan<div>How a Torture Protest Killed a Career</div><div>by Craig Murray</div><div><br /></div><div>http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/102409b.html</div><div><br /></div><div>Editor's Note: In this modern age - and especially since George W. Bush declared the "war on terror" eight years ago - the price for truth-telling has been high, especially for individuals whose consciences led them to protest the torture of alleged terrorists.</div><div>One of the most remarkable cases is that of Craig Murray, a 20-year veteran of the British Foreign Service whose career was destroyed after he was posted to Uzbekistan in August 2002 and began to complain about Western complicity in torture committed by the country's totalitarian regime, which was valued for its brutal interrogation methods and its vast supplies of natural gas.</div><div>Murray soon faced misconduct charges that were leaked to London's tabloid press before he was replaced as ambassador in October 2004, marking the end of what had been a promising career. Murray later spoke publicly about how the Bush administration and Prime Minister Tony Blair's government collaborated with Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov and his torturers. [See, for instance, Murray's statement to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Torture.]</div><div>But Murray kept quiet about his personal ordeal as the victim of the smear campaign that followed his impassioned protests to the Foreign Office about torture. Finally, on Oct. 22 at a small conference in Washington, Murray addressed the personal pain and his sense of betrayal over his treatment at the hands of former colleagues.</div><div>While Murray's account is a personal one, it echoes the experiences of many honest government officials and even mainstream journalists who have revealed inconvenient truths about wrongdoing by powerful Establishment figures and paid a high price.</div><div>Below is a partial transcript of Murray's remarks:</div><div><br /></div><div>Craig Murray:</div><div><br /></div><div>I was just having dinner in a restaurant that was only a block from the White House. It must have been a good dinner because it cost me $120. Actually it was a good dinner. Š </div><div><br /></div><div>I've never, ever spoken in public about the pain of being a whistleblower. Partly because of the British stiff-upper lip thing and partly as well because if you wish to try eventually to get on and reestablish yourself then it doesn't do to show weakness. Š</div><div>I was sitting in this place on my own and feeling rather lonely. And there were a whole bunch of people in dark suits coming from government offices, in many cases in groups, and there they were with the men's suits sleek and the ladies, the whole office, power-politics thing going on, having after-dinner champagne in the posh bar.</div><div>And I was remembering how many times I'd been the center of such groups and of how successful my life used to be. I was a British ambassador at the age of 42. The average age for such a post is 57.</div><div>I was successful in worldly terms. And I think I almost never sat alone at such a place. Normally if I had been alone in such a place, I would have ended up probably in the company of a beautiful young lady of some kind.</div><div>I tell you that partly because this whole question of personal morality is a complicated one. I would never, ever, no one would have ever pointed at me as someone likely to become or to be a person of conscience. And yet eventually I found myself on the outside and treated in a way that challenged my whole view of the world.</div><div>Mission to Tashkent</div><div>Let me start to tell you something about how that happened. I was a British ambassador in Uzbekistan and I was told before I went that Uzbekistan was an important ally in the war on terror, had given the United States a very important airbase which was a forward mounting post for Afghanistan, and was a bulwark against Islamic extremism in Central Asia.</div><div>When I got there I found it was a dreadful regime, absolutely totalitarian. And there's a difference between dictatorship of which there are many and a totalitarian dictatorship which unless you've actually been in one is hard to comprehend.</div><div><br /></div><div>There's absolutely no free media whatsoever. News on every single channel, the news programs start with 12 items about what the president did today. And that's it. That is the news. There are no other news channels and international news channels are blocked.</div><div>There are about 12,000 political prisoners. Any sign of religious enthusiasm for any religion will get you put into jail. The majority of people are predominantly Muslim. But if you are to carry out the rituals of the Muslim religion, particularly if you were to pray five times a day, you'd be in jail very quickly. Young men are put in jail for growing beards.</div><div>It's not the only religion which is outlawed. The jails are actually quite full of Baptists. Being Baptist is illegal in Uzbekistan. I'm sure that Methodists and Quakers would be illegal, too, It's just that they haven't got any so they haven't gotten around to making them illegal.</div><div>And it's really not a joke. If you are put into prison in Uzbekistan the chances of coming out again alive are less than even. And most of the prisons are still the old Soviet gulags in the most literal sense. They are physically the same places. The biggest one being the Jaslyk gulag in the deserts of the Kizyl Kum.</div><div>I had only been there for a week or two when I went to a show trial of an al-Qaeda terrorist they had caught. It was a big event put on partly for the benefit of the American embassy to demonstrate the strength of the U.S.-Uzbek alliance against terrorism.</div><div>When I got there, to call the trial unconvincing would be an underestimate. There was one moment when this old man [who] had given evidence that his nephew was a member of al-Qaeda and had personally met Osama bin Laden. And like everybody else in that court he</div><div>was absolutely terrified.</div><div>But suddenly as he was giving his evidence, he seemed from somewhere to find an inner strength. He was a very old man but he stood taller and said in a stronger voice, he said, "This is not true. This is not true. They tortured my children in front of me until I signed this. I had never heard of al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden."</div><div>He was then hustled out of the court and we never did find out what had happened to him. He was almost certainly killed. But as it happens I was within touching distance of him when he said that and I can't explain it. It's not entirely rational. But you could just feel it was true. You could tell he was speaking the truth when he said that.</div><div>And that made me start to call into doubt the whole question of the narrative about al-Qaeda in Uzbekistan and the alliance in the war on terror.</div><div>Boiled to Death</div><div>Something which took that doubt over the top happened about a week later. The West -- because Uzbekistan was our great ally in the war on terror - had shown no interest in the human rights situation at all. In fact, the opposite, going out of its way to support the</div><div>dictatorship.</div><div>So the fact that I seemed to be interested and seemed to be sympathetic came as something of a shock and people [in Uzbekistan] started to come to me.</div><div>One of the people who came to me was an old lady, a widow in her 60s whose son had been killed in Jaslyk prison and she brought me photos of the corpse of her son. It had been given back to her in a sealed casket and she'd been ordered not to open the casket but to bury it the next morning, which actually Muslims would do anyway. They always bury a body immediately.</div><div>But she disobeyed the instructions not to open the casket. She was a very old lady but very determined. She got the casket open and the body out onto the table and took detailed photos of the body before resealing the casket and burying it. These photos she now brought to me.</div><div>I sent them on to the chief pathologist at the University of Glasgow, who actually now by coincidence is the chief pathologist for the United Kingdom. There were a number of photos and he did a detailed report on the body. He said from the photographs the man's fingernails had been pulled out while he was still alive. Then he had been boiled alive. That was the cause of death, immersion in boiling liquid.</div><div><br /></div><div>Certainly it wasn't the only occasion when we came across evidence of people being boiled alive. That was the most extreme form of torture, I suppose, but immersion in boiling liquid of a limb was quite common.</div><div>Mutilation of the genitals was common. Suffocation was common, usually by putting a gas mask on people and blocking the air vents until they suffocated. Rape was common, rape with objects, rape with bottles, anal rape, homosexual rape, heterosexual rape, and mutilation of children in front of their parents.</div><div>It began with that and became a kind of personal mission for me, I suppose, to do what I could to try to stop this. I spent a great deal of time with my staff gathering evidence on it.</div><div>Being a very capricious government, occasionally a victim [of the Uzbek regime] would be released and we'd be able to see them and get medical evidence. More often you'd get letters smuggled out of the gulags and detention centers, evidence from relatives who managed to</div><div>visit prisoners.</div><div>We built up an overwhelming dossier of evidence, and I complained to London about the conduct of our ally in rather strong terms including the photos of the boy being boiled alive.</div><div>'Over-Focused on Human Rights'</div><div>I received a reply from the British Foreign Office. It said, this is a direct quote, "Dear Ambassador, we are concerned that you are perhaps over-focused on human rights to the detriment of commercial interests."</div><div>I was taken aback. I found that extraordinary. But things had gotten much worse because while we were gathering the information about torture, we were also learning what people were forced to confess to under torture.</div><div>People aren't tortured for no reason. They're tortured in order to extract some information or to get them to admit to things, and normally the reason you torture people is to get them to admit to things that aren't actually true. They were having to confess to membership in al-Qaeda, to being at training camps in Afghanistan, personally meeting Osama bin Laden.</div><div>At the same time, we were receiving CIA intelligence. MI-6 and the CIA share all their intelligence. So I was getting all the CIA intelligence on Uzbekistan and it was saying that detainees had confessed to membership in al-Qaeda and being in training camps in Afghanistan and to meeting Osama bin Laden.</div><div>One way and another I was piecing together the fact that the CIA material came from the Uzbek torture sessions.</div><div>I didn't want to make a fool of myself so I sent my deputy, a lady called Karen Moran, to see the CIA head of station and say to him, "My ambassador is worried your intelligence might be coming from torture. Is there anything he's missing?"</div><div>She reported back to me that the CIA head of station said, "Yes, it probably is coming from torture, but we don't see that as a problem in the context of the war on terror."</div><div>In addition to which I learned that CIA were actually flying people to Uzbekistan in order to be tortured. I should be quite clear that I knew for certain and reported back to London that people were being handed over by the CIA to the Uzbek intelligence services and were being subjected to the most horrible tortures.</div><div>I didn't realize that they weren't Uzbek. I presumed simply that these were Uzbek people who had been captured elsewhere and were being sent in.</div><div>I now know from things I've learned subsequently, including the facts that the Council of Europe parliamentary inquiry into extraordinary rendition found that 90 percent of all the flights that called at the secret prison in Poland run by the CIA as a torture center for extraordinary rendition, 90 percent of those flights next went straight on to Tashkent [the capital of Uzbekistan].</div><div>There was an overwhelming body of evidence that actually people from all over the world were being taken by the CIA to Uzbekistan specifically in order to be tortured. I didn't know that. I thought it was only Uzbeks, but nonetheless, I was complaining internally as hard as I could.</div><div>Retaliation</div><div>The result of which was that even when I was only complaining internally, I was subjected to the most dreadful pattern of things which I still find it hard to believe happened.</div><div><br /></div><div>I was suddenly accused of issuing visas in return for sex, stealing money from the post account, of being an alcoholic, of driving an embassy vehicle down a flight of stairs, which is extraordinary because I can't drive. I've never driven in my life. I don't have a driving license. My eyesight is terrible. Š</div><div>But I was accused of all these unbelievable accusations, which were leaked to the tabloid media, and I spent a whole year of tabloid stories about sex-mad ambassador, blah-blah-blah. And I hadn't even gone public. What I had done was write a couple of memos saying that this collusion with torture is illegal under a number of international conventions including the UN Convention Against Torture.</div><div>I couldn't believe [what was happening], I'd been a very successful foreign service officer for over 20 years. The British Foreign Service is small. Actual diplomats, as opposed to [support] staff, are only about 2,000 people,</div><div>I worked there for over 20 years. I knew most of them by name. All the people involved in smearing me, trying to taint me on false charges, were people I thought were my friends. It's really hard when people you think are your friends [lie about you].</div><div>I'm writing memos saying it's illegal to torture people, children are being tortured in front of their parents. And they're writing memos back saying it depends on the definition of complicity under Article Four of the UN Convention.</div><div>I'm thinking what's happening to their moral sense, and I never, ever considered myself a good person, at all. Yet I couldn't see where they were coming from and I still don't; I still don't understand it to this day.</div><div>And then these people - and I'm absolutely certain quite knowingly - tried to negate what they saw as these unpatriotic things. I was told I was viewed now as unpatriotic, by trying to land me with false allegations.</div><div>I went through a five-month fight and formal charges. I was found eventually not guilty on all charges, but my reputation was ruined forever because the tabloid media all carried the allegations against me in 25-point headlines and the fact I was acquitted in two sentences on page 19. It's extraordinary.</div><div>Lessons Learned</div><div>The thing that came out of it most strongly for me is how in a bureaucratic structure, if the government can convince people that there is a serious threat to the nation, ordinary people who are not bad people will go along with things that they know are bad, like torture, like trying to stain an innocent man.</div><div>And it's circular, because the extraordinary thing about it was that the whole point of the intelligence being obtained under torture was to actually exaggerate the terrorist threats and to exaggerate the strength of al-Qaeda.</div><div>That was the whole point of why people were being tortured, to confess that they were members of al-Qaeda when they weren't members of al-Qaeda and to denounce long lists of names of people as members of al-Qaeda who weren't members of al-Qaeda.</div><div>I always tell my favorite example which is they gave me a long list of names of people whom people were forced to denounce and I often saw names of people I knew.</div><div>One day, I got this list from the CIA of names of a couple dozen al-Qaeda members and I knew one really quite well, an old dissident professor, a very distinguished man who was actually a Jehovah's Witness, and there aren't many Jehovah's Witnesses in al-Qaeda. I'd even bet that al-Qaeda don't even try to recruit Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm quite sure that Jehovah's Witnesses would try to recruit al-Qaeda.</div><div>So much of this intelligence was nonsense. It was untrue and it was designed to paint a false picture. The purpose of the false picture was to make people feel afraid. What was it really about. Š</div><div>I want to mention this book, which is the greatest book that I've ever written. It's called Murder in Samarkand and recounts in detail what I have just told you together with the documentary evidence behind it.</div><div>But the most interesting bit of the entire book comes before the page numbers start, which is a facsimile of a letter from Enron, from Kenneth Lay, chairman of Enron, to the honorable George W. Bush, governor of the state of Texas. It was written on April 3, 1997, sometime before Bush became president.</div><div><br /></div><div>It reads, I'll just read you two or three sentences, "Dear George, you will be meeting with Ambassador Sadyq Safaev, Uzbekistan's Ambassador to the United States on April 8th. Š Enron has established an office in Tashkent and we are negotiating a $2 billion joint venture with Neftegas of Uzbekistan Š to develop Uzbekistan's natural gas and transport it to markets in Europe Š This project can bring significant economic opportunities to Texas."</div><div>Not everyone in Texas, of course. George Bush and Ken Lay, in particular.</div><div>That's actually what it was about. All this stuff about al-Qaeda that they were inventing, extreme Islamists in Central Asia that they were inventing.</div><div>I have hundreds and hundreds of Uzbek friends now. Every single one of them drinks vodka. It is not a good place for al-Qaeda. They were inventing the threat in order to cover up the fact that their real motive was Enron's gas contract and that was the plain and honest truth of the matter.</div><div>Just as almost everything you see about Afghanistan is a cover for the fact that the actual motive is the pipeline they wish to build over Afghanistan to bring out Uzbek and Turkmen natural gas which together is valued at up to $10 trillion, which they want to bring over Afghanistan and down to the Arabian Sea to make it available for export.</div><div>And we are living in a world where people, a small number of people, with incredible political clout and huge amounts of money, are prepared to see millions die for their personal economic gain and where, even worse, most people in bureaucracies are prepared to go along with it for their own much smaller economic gain, all within this psychological mirage which is so much of the war on terror.</div><div>It's hard to stand against it. I do think things are a little more sane now than they were a year or two ago. I do think there's a greater understanding, but you'll never hear what I just told you in the mainstream media. It's impossible to get it there.</div><div>[For an early Consortiumnews.com article about President Bush's Uzbek alliance, see "The More Things Change."]</div><div><br /></div><div>--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~</div><div> </div><div><br /></div><div>For more News From Underground, visit http://markcrispinmiller.com</div><div>-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---</div><div><br /></div>Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-57353344573786381692009-10-21T12:14:00.000-07:002009-10-21T12:17:01.309-07:00David Bromwich: Obama's Pattern of Delay: His plan to continue the status quoObama’s Delusion<br />David Bromwich<br /><p>http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n20/print/brom01_.html<br /></p>Long before he became president, there were signs in Barack Obama of a tendency to promise things easily and compromise often. He broke a campaign vow to filibuster a bill that immunised telecom outfits against prosecution for the assistance they gave to domestic spying. He kept his promise from October 2007 until July 2008, then voted for the compromise that spared the telecoms. As president, he has continued to support their amnesty. It was always clear that Obama, a moderate by temperament, would move to the middle once elected. But there was something odd about the quickness with which his website mounted a slogan to the effect that his administration would look to the future and not the past. We all do. Then again, we don’t: the past is part of the present. Reduced to a practice, the slogan meant that Obama would rather not bring to light many illegal actions of the Bush administration. The value of conciliation outweighed the imperative of truth. He stood for ‘the things that unite not divide us’. An unpleasant righting of wrongs could be portrayed as retribution, and Obama would not allow such a misunderstanding to get in the way of his ecumenical goals.<br /><br />The message about uniting not dividing was not new. It was spoken in almost the same words by Bill Clinton in 1993; and after his midterm defeat in 1994, Clinton borrowed Republican policies in softened form – school dress codes, the repeal of welfare. The Republican response was unappreciative: they launched a three-year march towards impeachment. Obama’s appeals for comity and his many conciliatory gestures have met with a uniform negative. If anything, the Republicans are treating him more roughly than Clinton. Obama appears securer only because the mainstream media, which hated Clinton beyond reason, have showed up on his side. Americans, however, attend to a congeries of substitute media, at the centre of which lie Fox News Radio and Fox TV, the Murdoch stations. From that source, in the late spring and summer, a message percolated through a crowd of 20 million listeners, a message that was coherent, detailed and subversive of public order. I listened a little every day, as I drove to work and back, and I saw what was coming. The talk aimed to delegitimate the president, and it gave promise of an insurrection. A floating army of the angry and resentful were being urged to express contempt for Barack Obama, and to exhibit their loyalty to principles they felt in danger of losing – the right to bear arms, the right not to pay for health insurance. When representatives from Congress addressed town-hall meetings in the late summer, men in several states came armed with guns in leg holsters. Their local grievance was hostility to Obama’s plan for healthcare, a plan which was detested sight unseen, and which has still not been explained with sufficient clarity to remedy the distrust of the rational. (Clinton made the mistake of handing the construction of a national health system to his wife and a group of advisers she consulted in private. Obama, to avoid that error, left the framing and elaboration of a bill to five committees of Congress: an experiment in dissociation that rendered him blameless but also clueless beyond the broadest of rhetorical commitments.) But beneath all the accusations was a disturbance no ordinary answer could alleviate. The America these people grew up with was being taken away from them. That formulation occurred again and again on talk radio. Barack Obama had become the adequate symbol of forces that were swindling the people of their birthright. ‘This guy’ – another common locution – didn’t have a right to give laws to Americans.<br /><br />When the Clinton impeachment was going forward, Obama was a young Chicago politician with other things on his mind. He could have learned something then about how the Republicans work. The most questionable of his appeals in the primary campaign against Hillary Clinton was the endlessly repeated bromide with which he dissociated himself from ‘the partisan bickering of the 1990s’ – a piece of spurious evenhandedness if there ever was one. Bill Clinton, who gained his national stature in the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, had been as much a prudent adjuster and adapter as Obama. The fury of the attack on Clinton, which started a few months into his presidency, was not the bickering of two rival parties exactly comparable in point of incivility. Yet such was Obama’s convenient picture of the recent past.<br /><br />Delays in the passage, first, of Obama’s ‘stimulus package’ to strengthen the economy after last September’s financial collapse, and, second, of his healthcare bill, have been due in large part to his public pauses to wait for Republicans to lend these measures a bipartisan glow. A few came along, at a high price, to vote for the economic stimulus. None has taken up the offer on healthcare. The Republicans stand in place, and give no sign, and watch as the president’s stature dwindles. His reason for waiting doubtless has something to do with fear. Obama receives four times as many death threats as George W. Bush did. Yet he is also encumbered by the natural wish of the moderate to hold himself close to all the establishments at once: military, financial, legislative, commercial. Ideally, he would like to inspire everyone and to offend no one. But the conceit of accommodating one’s enemies inch by inch to attain bipartisan consensus seems with Obama almost a delusion in the literal sense: a fixed false belief. How did it come to possess so clever a man?<br /><br />Obama’s career up to now, lucky as it was, had been wanting in singular achievements for which he alone was responsible. His experience seems not to have taught him the law of natural selection in politics by which majorities are put together out of remainders. Any act that achieves something concrete will leave small multitudes of the disappointed keening but unheard. There are hurt feelings in politics, which only time can cure if anything can. This is a truth now staring at Barack Obama, on several different fronts, but he does not accept it easily. His way of thinking is close to the spirit of that Enlightenment reasonableness which supposes a right course of action can never be described so as to be understood and not assented to.<br /><br />The Republican Party of 2009 is a powerful piece of contrary testimony. It has become the party of wars and jails, and its moral physiognomy is captured by the faces of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, faces hard to match outside Cruikshank’s drawings of Dickens’s villains, hard as nails and mean as dirt and with an issue still up their sleeve when wars wind down and the jails are full: a sworn hostility towards immigrants and ‘aliens’. The anti-immigrant bias – from which George W. Bush and John McCain were free, but which both were powerless to counteract – is an underground stream of the party that makes it a bearer of racist sentiments no longer avowable in public. I have been studying the ante-bellum South, for a course on the career of Abraham Lincoln, and have been struck by the resemblance between the Republicans today and the pre-Civil War Democrats. The model of the Republicans today is John C. Calhoun, the political theorist of the slave South and deviser of the rationale for local nullification of federal policies.<br /><br />That the central lesson about his domestic enemies has not yet been learned by Obama is the mystery of the first eight months of his presidency. He has acted as if he were the leader of no party; as if patience and benignity of temper could bring out the best in everyone. This is part of a larger inward confusion about his role. He seems to speak at once, or rather he seems to speak at different times, as organiser and as mediator, national leader and national healer. There is something strange about the alternation of postures, from the point of view of empirical prudence. On the largest issues that he himself raised in his opening months – his decision to close Guantánamo, to press for a two-state solution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and to reform healthcare with a national plan – his pattern has been the grand exordium delivered at stage centre, followed by months of silence. He has left his agents or his advisers or his party or both parties to mind the details. During the protracted delay, the very features that give the impress of his intention are sanded away. Thus, a new kind of pressure on Israel and a resolve to create a Palestinian state appeared to be signalled by his Cairo speech in early June. It was a thoughtful speech, and a courageous one, even if you took it as a series of propositions uttered at a certain time in a certain place. Simply to address the Muslims of the world without condescension was sure to make him unforgiving enemies on the American right – including the considerable body of Christian Zionists in the Southern and border states – and Obama went to Cairo and delivered his speech knowing that. Yet the four months since have seemed much longer than four months. Israel has sapped and undermined the settlement freeze. Binyamin Netanyahu gambled that he could trespass against objections by Obama’s negotiators, Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell, and the gamble has worked. The American desiderata were never backed by a sanction, and the Netanyahu government approved thousands of new units for the expansion of the Israeli colonies. This the Americans called ‘not helpful’.<br /><br />Healthcare has been fretted according to a different schedule of neglect. Here, the undermining came first and Obama’s speech later. After a summer of radio coaching had rendered the opposition to healthcare so clamorous that many town-hall meetings erupted in disorder and some had to be closed early, Obama on 9 September addressed a joint session of Congress, and there, at last, he gave a measured and impressive presentation, which for the first time made the general case for his plan. It sent his approval ratings back above 50 per cent, and it was overshadowed only by the shout of a representative from South Carolina (Calhoun’s state), ‘You lie!’ – in effect a challenge to a duel with the president on the floor of Congress. This breach of protocol could hardly have come from a spontaneous welling-up of anger in Joe Wilson of South Carolina. To violate the hush of that monumental chamber required as much forethought and wild resolution as it would take to shout ‘God damn!’ in a cathedral. Wilson had done nothing previous of note, except mount a defence of the flying of the Confederate flag in the capitol of South Carolina. So the discord that the 9 September address was meant to salve showed its face again at the speech itself. There are people in America who sniff the taint of tyranny in every programme of the federal government; and a lot of them were listening to their radios in April, May, June and July. But there have also been grounds for fear that were genuine: a fact the prosperous neoliberal consensus lightly brushed off. Non-fanatical Americans of modest means have wondered how their children will pay for the emergency measures we are buying now but refusing to tax ourselves for.<br /><br />Early suspicion of the bank bail-outs found a ready target of displaced resentment in the later demand for health insurance reform. Healthcare had never seemed a main concern of Obama’s as a candidate, and this looked like one more exorbitance. The new president had run up a staggering bill, close to a trillion dollars, to pay the brokerage houses to stave off a depression. He expected a gratitude he did not get. His choice of tactics could never have been easy to explain in a climate where so many bankers survived and so many ordinary people lost their homes and jobs. ‘And you are losing your health coverage, too!’ Obama says. But in a country where 85 per cent have coverage of some sort, more have been worrying about their homes and their jobs. Most people’s health insurance payments are taken out of their monthly pay cheques and put into private plans offered by their employers; when an employer cuts your job you lose the insurance too; but it betrayed a planner’s conceit in Obama to imagine that people would worry first, and most acutely, about the loss of their insurance. Many without a history of political resentment, some of whom voted for Obama, are startled that they keep being asked to foot the bill. It was easier to blame ‘big government’ than to say that the bankers and brokers and the whole financial establishment, with Goldman Sachs at its core, did not deserve the bail-outs. Obama’s speech on 9 September arrived too late to work as a counter-charm.<br /><br />The pattern of the major announcement, the dilatory follow-up and the tardy self-defence has shown an alarming consistency in his administration. Obama ordered the closing of the prison at Guantánamo Bay as the first act of his presidency. Eight months later, Guantánamo remains open and unsolved, the date of its closing has been postponed, and the question of what to do with the prisoners has become the most explosive of all the matters that confront Obama’s authority. After signing the order in January, he took a long break; and his enemies rallied. Two elements of the syndrome should be distinguished. First, Obama is trying to do a great deal at once, not all of it thrust on him by the disasters of the previous administration. It is also beginning to appear that Obama has a slower ratio to the passage of time than most politicians. When he was attacked for the Guantánamo order, on the grounds that it placed the security of Americans in jeopardy, he let it be known that the issue was undergoing reappraisal; then, on 21 May, he gave a speech on law and national security at the National Archives: the worst speech of his presidency. He said that his paramount duty was ‘to keep the American people safe’: that word, safe, which was accorded a primacy by George W. Bush it had not been given by any earlier president, Obama himself now ranked ahead of the words justice, right, liberty and constitution. The National Archives speech was, more particularly, a response to the charges made by Dick Cheney over several preceding weeks.<br /><br />In a speech delivered on the same day, 21 May, the former vice president, who has never really retired, gave a digest of his own published criticisms. The decision to release photos of the victims of torture, and to rule out ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ in the future, could only ‘lead our government further away from its duty to protect the American people’. Cheney intimated that if an attack occurred in the coming years, the fault would be Obama’s for having restored an antiquarian understanding of civil liberties and obedience to international law. Obama’s answer was sober and resolute in appearance, but, in detail, the National Archives speech was a capitulation on most of the points specified by Cheney. Prisoners would now be divided into five categories: those who could be freed because they were innocent; those who could be extradited to foreign countries; those who fell under the jurisdiction of military tribunals; those who could be tried in civilian courts in the US; and then a fifth category – those whom we lacked evidence to convict but who (it had been decided) were too dangerous to set free. These prisoners would be held indefinitely under a new legal dispensation still to be devised.<br /><br />Preventive detention was a step President Nixon had proposed to Congress in 1970, but he never found the support or the temerity to put the programme into effect. Yet here was a Democratic president and professor of constitutional law doing what Nixon and for that matter Cheney and his assistants had only dreamed of. We have yet to see the final result, but the lesson of the encounter would seem to be: when you announce a great change, steal a march on your opponents by clinching the declaration with the deed. In no decision of his administration has Obama followed the wisdom of that Machiavellian precept. His government is also hampered by its want of a spokesman who can hit hard with words when the president wishes not to be seen to strike. Obama’s confidant David Axelrod, who managed his campaign and is often summoned to speak to the press on his behalf, emits a pleasant porridge of upper-media demotic. Another close adviser, Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago friend, is a technocrat to the bone, genially officious but lacking in any pith and point. These people are no match for Cheney, or for the president’s antagonists in the substitute media who speak under no restraint.<br /><br />What Cheney and the radio demagogues sowed, the less gifted members of the Republican minority in Congress gratefully reaped. The minority leader of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, said on 17 September on the PBS show NewsHour: ‘We’re in the middle of a modern-day political rebellion in America.’ Interviewer: ‘Rebellion?’ Boehner: ‘Rebellion’. He repeated the word without compunction, and added: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’ The tone of our public ‘conversation’ (he chose with malice the soft liberal word) Boehner pronounced to be healthy. He only hoped the crowds ‘would be civil’ or somehow would not become ‘too hateful’. But with Cheney at its head – a rebel against the constitution and a man above the laws since 2002 – the popular movement for nullification of the laws of the federal government has again become a force in American life.<br /><br />Talk radio in the United States is a law unto itself. With the diffusion of authority that has followed wide adoption of the internet, Fox News Radio and Fox TV may be the only major outlets that still command a sizeable fraction of the audience of the old networks. The intuition of Obama and his advisers must have been that any protest in these byways of discourse was right-wing business as usual. That lazy assumption left them unequipped for the gravity of the challenge. They thought the anger would simmer and die down. It did not occur to them that it might simmer and boil. If a threat is seen to spring from a determined opponent, Obama’s inclination is generally to let it go. He will emerge (he trusts) in the long run as the man who takes long views. By the effects of these postponements, however, he is forever giving new hostages to the truckle of compromise; he is put in the position of backing away while his enemies pick up strength; and in a leader whose nature is conciliatory, this means that the declared scope of every undertaking slowly shrinks and recedes. Guantánamo will be closed but not as soon as we said. Israel must recognise the wrong of further expansion of the settlements, but Israel will not be required to stop soon. Healthcare will be passed on some terms or other, but government will not compete with the big insurers; price reductions will be conceived and executed by private consortiums; illegal immigrants will stay uninsured; and even legal immigrants will be prohibited from buying coverage.<br /><br />There were plenty of people in December 2008 who nursed a prejudice against Obama but were still in search of reasons to back it. Rush Limbaugh was the radio talker who brought those people to a boil. Limbaugh’s style is a mixture of bluster, clowning and poison, in proportions hard to capture without his voice in your ear – a ‘fat’ voice, someone called it, that shifts in a beat from muttering to imprecation. It is always excited, always breathless, yet the pace is unhurried. Part of the appeal lies in a conscious and amiable egotism. ‘Rush Limbaugh,’ he will introduce himself after an ad, ‘with talent on loan from God.’ ‘El Rushbaugh, serving humanity (simply by being here).’ He tells people to believe him and believe no one else: ‘Shown by scientific study to be right 99.1 per cent of the time.’ He was capable, early, of nicknaming Obama ‘Bamster’ (to rhyme with ‘ham’), a semi-affectionate take-down in the parlance of fraternity boys. He nicknamed the health plan, with automatic sarcasm, ‘ObamaCare’. But the tone grew noticeably more bitter by late July. ‘You don’t know how difficult it is for me to say: the president of the United States is lying through his teeth.’ By 5 August it was ominous to the point of open menace: ‘The president of the United States, who is president of all of us, has decided to take aim at over half of the American people as political opponents.’<br /><br />He was the scourge of Obama in the summer, a palpable challenge to his claim of legitimacy, as much as Cheney was in the spring. On his show of 27 July, Limbaugh could boast without exaggeration: ‘July is the month of horrors for Obama and the Democrats. And I am largely the reason why.’ In the absence of these accusers, the Republican Party would be adrift. With the impetus of such voices, it now stands a chance of winning the midterm elections in 2010. Limbaugh was placed on the defensive some months ago when he said that he wanted President Obama to fail. This seemed an insult to the office as well as the man. It also seemed to suggest a peculiarly self-separating definition of national loyalty. But he justified himself by remarking that Obama’s success would mean the end of America as we knew it. (The president had to fail for the country to succeed.) A link between Cheney and Limbaugh certainly exists. Limbaugh, unlike the other far right hosts, shuns the interviewing of guests, and yet Cheney, who for his part shuns interviews, was the guest of Limbaugh even when he was vice president. More recently Limbaugh has interviewed him in the role of ex officio party counsellor.<br /><br />When I started taking notes for this piece at the end of the summer, violence was in the air. Has it passed? A protest march was shepherded to the Washington Mall and a monster rally of 100,000 was held on 12 September, the day after the anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. One message of the demonstration was a rebuke of Obama’s supposed offence against patriotic memory by his naming of 11 September as National Day of Service and Remembrance. Service – except for military service – is heard on the American right as a codeword or moral wedge for socialism: it is to socialism as doubt is to atheism. Probably they wanted something more like Pearl Harbor Day (though that is no longer commemorated). But when was there ever a rational fit between the size of a grievance flourished by an audience like this and a single cause the crowd can name?<br /><br />‘They’ve taken on too much, too fast,’ Limbaugh said of Obama’s domestic curriculum, ‘and they’re not doing it right.’ That was in late spring; and it was close to common sense. By late summer the mood on the right was reminiscent of the rage against Kennedy in 1962, which passed through November 1963 unchastened, and attained a temporary climax with the nomination of Barry Goldwater as the Republican presidential candidate in 1964. It surfaced again in the run-up to the Clinton impeachment in 1996-97; but the fury of that time was allowed to take a detour through sex mania. Given the emotions he was up against, Clinton may have got off lightly.<br /><br />Malthus’s doctrine on population and the necessity of many living in adversity, Hazlitt wrote, was a gospel ‘preached to the poor’. Equality in the United States in the early 21st century has become a gospel preached by the liberal elite to a populace who feel they have no stake in equality. Since the Reagan presidency and the dismemberment of the labour unions, America has not known a popular voice against the privilege of the large corporations. Yet without such a voice from below, all the benevolent programmes that can be theorised, lacking the ground note of genuine indignation, have turned into lumbering ‘designs’ espoused by the enlightened for moral reasons that ordinary people can hardly remember. The gambling ethic has planted itself deep in the America psyche – deeper now than it was in 1849 or 1928. Little has been inherited of the welfare-state doctrine of distributed risk and social insurance. The architects of liberal domestic policy, put in this false position, make easy prey for the generalised slander that says that all non-private plans for anything are hypocritical.<br /><br />Afghanistan is the largest and the most difficult crisis Obama confronts away from home. And here the trap was fashioned largely by himself. He said, all through the presidential campaign, that Iraq was the wrong war but Afghanistan was the right one. It was ‘a war of necessity’, he said this summer. And he has implied that he would accept his generals’ definition of the proper scale of such a war. Now it appears that Afghanistan is being lost, indeed that it cannot be controlled with fewer than half a million troops on the ground for a decade or more. The generals are for adding troops, as in Vietnam, in increments of tens of thousands. Their current request was leaked to Bob Woodward, who published it in the Washington Post on 21 September, after Obama asked that it be kept from the public for a longer interval while he deliberated. The leak was an act of military politics if not insubordination; its aim was to show the president the cost of resisting the generals.<br /><br />The political establishment has lined up on their side: the addition of troops is said to be the most telling way Obama can show resoluteness abroad. This verdict of the Wall Street Journal, the Post and (with more circumspection) the New York Times was taken up by John McCain and Condoleezza Rice. If Obama declined at last to oppose Netanyahu on the settlement freeze, he will be far more wary of opposing General Petraeus, the commander of Centcom. Obama is sufficiently humane and sufficiently undeceived to take no pleasure in sending soldiers to their deaths for a futile cause. He will have to convince himself that, in some way still to be defined, the mission is urgent after all. Afghanistan will become a necessary war even if we do not know what marks the necessity. Robert Dole, an elder of the Republican Party, has said he would like to see Petraeus as the Republican candidate in 2012. Better to keep him in the field (this must be at least one of Obama’s thoughts) than to have him to run against.<br /><br />For Obama to do the courageous thing and withdraw would mean having deployed against him the unlimited wrath of the mainstream media, the oil interest, the Israel lobby, the weapons and security industries, all those who have reasons both avowed and unavowed for the perpetuation of American force projection in the Middle East. If he fails to satisfy the request from General McChrystal – the specialist in ‘black ops’ who now controls American forces in Afghanistan – the war brokers will fall on Obama with as finely co-ordinated a barrage as if they had met and concerted their response. Beside that prospect, the calls of betrayal from the antiwar base that gave Obama his first victories in 2008 must seem a small price to pay. The best imaginable result just now, given the tightness of the trap, may be ostensible co-operation with the generals, accompanied by a set of questions that lays the groundwork for refusal of the next escalation. But in wars there is always a deep beneath the lowest deep, and the ambushes and accidents tend towards savagery much more than conciliation.<br /><br />David Bromwich teaches literature and political thought at Yale. He writes on America’s wars for the Huffington Post.Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-27493858309781605072009-10-20T18:00:00.000-07:002009-10-20T18:03:01.432-07:00Pam Martens: Federals team up with Wall St to foreclose on families<div>October 5, 2009</div><div>A CounterPunch Special Investigation: Part One of a Series </div><div>Wall Street Titans Use Aliases to Foreclose on Families While Partnering With a Federal Agency </div><div><br /></div><div>By PAM MARTENS </div><div>http://counterpunch.org/martens10052009.html</div><div><br /></div><div>A federal agency tasked with expanding the American dream of home ownership and affordable housing free from discrimination to people of modest means has been quietly moving a chunk of that role to Wall Street since 2002. In a stealth partial privatization, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) farmed out its mandate of working with single family homeowners in trouble on their mortgages to the industry most responsible for separating people from their savings and creating an unprecedented wealth gap that renders millions unable to pay those mortgages. This industry also ranks as one of the most storied industries in terms of race discrimination. Rounding out its dubious housing credentials, Wall Street is now on life support courtesy of the public purse known as TARP as a result of issuing trillions of dollars in miss-rated housing bonds and housing-related derivatives, many of which were nothing more than algorithmic concepts wrapped in a high priced legal opinion. It’s difficult to imagine a more problematic resume for the new housing czars. </div><div><br /></div><div>To what degree this surreptitious program has contributed to putting children and families out on the street during one of the worst economic slumps since the ’30s should be on a Congressional short list for investigation. HUD’s demand for confidentiality from all bidders and announcement of winning bids to parties known only as “the winning bidder” deserves its own investigation in terms of obfuscating the public’s right to know and the ability of the press to properly fulfill its function in a free society. </div><div><br /></div><div>Despite three days of emails and phone calls to HUD officials, they have refused to provide the names of the winning bidders or the firms that teamed as co-bidders with the winning party. Obtaining this information independently has been akin to extracting a painful splinter wearing a blindfold and oven mitts. </div><div><br /></div><div>That a taxpayer-supported Federal agency conducts a competitive bid program of over $2 billion and then refuses to announce the names of the winning bidders is beyond contempt for the American people. If the Obama administration does not quickly purge this Bush mindset from these Federal agencies, he is inviting a massive backlash in the midterm elections.</div><div><br /></div><div>The HUD program was benignly called Accelerated Claims Disposition (ACD) and was said to be a pilot program. A pilot program might suggest to those uninformed in the ways of the new Wall Street occupation of America a modest spending outlay; a go slow approach. In this case, from 2002 to 2005, HUD transferred in excess of $2.4 billion of defaulted mortgages insured by its sibling, the FHA, into the hands of Citigroup, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns while providing the firms with wide latitude to foreclose, restructure or sell off in bundles to investors. HUD retained a minority interest of 30 to 40 percent in each joint venture. Citigroup was awarded the 2002 and 2004 joint ventures; Lehman Brothers the 2003; Bear Stearns the 2005. I obtained this information by reconciling the aliases used by these firms in foreclosures of HUD properties to the addresses of the corporate parents. I further confirmed the information by checking the official records at multiple Secretaries of State offices where the firms must register their subsidiaries to do business within the state. </div><div><br /></div><div>What the program effectively did was allow the biggest retail banks in the country to get accelerated payment on their defaulted, FHA-insured, single family mortgage loans while allowing another set of the biggest investment banks to make huge profits in fees for bundling and selling off the loans as securitizations. Once the loans were securitized (sold off to investors) they were no longer the problem of HUD or the Wall Street bankers. The loans conveniently disappeared from the radar screen and the balance sheet. The family’s fate had been sold off by HUD to Wall Street in exchange for a small piece of the action. Wall Street then sold off the family’s fate to thousands of investors around the world for a large piece of the action. </div><div><br /></div><div>HUD has attempted to spin this program as a win-win for everyone with the suggestion that families would have more options under this program. In a HUD February 17, 2006 report titled “Evaluation of 601 Accelerated Claims Disposition Demonstration,” a few kernels of truth emerged. It was noted on page 4 that the private partners “determine how best to maximize the return on the loan…Loans liquidated through note sales generally earn a higher return than property sales, so the JV [joint venture] has an incentive to maximize the share of note sales relative to property sales.” Rather than evaluating the success of the program on how many families were able to get a loan modification and remain in their homes, the report notes that “The benchmark for progress is the share of loans that have reached resolution.”</div><div><br /></div><div>From its 2002 joint venture, Citigroup dumped en masse 2,599 loans in one securitization alone in August 2004. It sold another 1,177 at other unknown times. From its 2004 joint venture, it dumped 1,814 in one fell swoop. The 2006 HUD report notes that following securitization “there is no information available on the [home] retention after the sale.”</div><div><br /></div><div>According to HUD’s web site, another major award of $400 million to $800 million in defaulted mortgages was slated for October 23 of last year in the midst of a foreclosure and eviction crisis. Lemar Wooley, in HUD’s Office of Public Affairs, advises that the deal never happened as a result of “no acceptable bids being received.” Given that we have been promised change we can believe in, I would have much preferred to hear: “We’ve sacked this program as an abhorrent example of privatizing profits and socializing losses while turning our backs on the neediest of our society.”</div><div><br /></div><div>While this was clearly not a win-win for families in financial distress, two other red flags come to mind. The 2006 HUD report notes that to be eligible for this program, loans had to be four full payments past due (five full payments past due for the 2005 Bear Stearns deal). But to securitize the loans, the Wall Street firms had to bring the loans into performing status, that is, up to date in their payments. The question arises as to whether the investors in the securitizations were advised that these were heretofore defaulted HUD loans. One might be forgiven for pondering that as a material fact required in a prospectus since there is much data available showing that loans once in default tend to redefault. Some of these investors might unknowingly be you and your family members. The loans could be sitting right now in public employee pension funds, mutual funds held in 401(k)s, etc.</div><div><br /></div><div>The second concern is that many of the homes in the deals were foreclosed on in 2006, 2007 and 2008. By HUD not keeping these loans and insisting on its legal mandate for lenders to attempt loan modifications, special forbearance or partial claims to bring the loans current, what impact did this program have on the foreclosure glut and overall property value declines.</div><div>It is worth noting what happened to the firms that HUD deemed qualified for this program: Lehman Brothers collapsed on September 15, 2008. Bear Stearns required a weekend rescue by JPMorgan Chase and the Fed on March 16/17, 2008. Citigroup, which got the lions share of the HUD deals, exists today only because of a $45 billion direct infusion from unwilling taxpayers (overruled by their Congress) and hundreds of billions of dollars more in various other government backstop operations – some still undisclosed despite Freedom of Information Act requests and litigation.</div><div>Future articles in this series will look at how these deals started under the Clinton administration with awards to Goldman Sachs, GE Capital, Blackrock and others, with the dubious protection of Merrill Lynch as the overseer for HUD. This program also went virtually unnoticed until charges of rigged computers and bid rigging erupted in headlines. We will also look at the human suffering resulting from this macabre rewriting of the social contract in America. The series begins today with the most unlikely candidate of all for helping people in need: Citigroup.</div><div><br /></div><div>* * *</div><div>Read More: http://counterpunch.org/martens10052009.html</div>Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-4173926753565650432009-10-12T11:39:00.001-07:002009-10-12T11:39:59.733-07:00NYRB: Steven Weinberg: The Missions of Astronomy<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; "><div class="noprint" align="right"> <img src="http://www.nybooks.com/images/bookmark.png" width="12" height="12" border="0" alt="" /> <a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php" onmouseover="return addthis_open(this, '', '[URL]', '[TITLE]')" onmouseout="addthis_close()" onclick="return addthis_sendto()" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "> <small>Share</small></a> | <img src="http://www.nybooks.com/images/email-icon.gif" width="12" height="10" alt="email icon" /> <small><a href="javascript:popUp('article-email?article_id=23170')" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">Email</a></small></div><h4 class="date" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; font-size: 1em; font-variant: small-caps; ">Volume 56, Number 16 · <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/contents/20091022" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">October 22, 2009</a></h4><h2 style="line-height: normal; font-size: 1.5em; ">The Missions of Astronomy</h2><h4 style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; font-size: 1em; ">By <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/authors/201" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">Steven Weinberg</a></h4><p>A few years ago, I decided that I needed to know more about the history of science, so naturally I volunteered to teach the subject. In working up my lectures, I was struck with the fact that in the ancient world, astronomy reached what from a modern perspective was a much higher level of accuracy and sophistication than any other science.<a name="fnr1" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fn1" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[1]</a></sup> One obvious reason for this is that visible astronomical phenomena are much simpler and easier to study than the things we can observe on the earth's surface. The ancients did not know it, but the earth and moon and planets all spin at nearly constant rates, and they travel in their orbits under the influence of a single dominant force, that of gravitation.</p><p>In consequence, the changes in what is seen in the sky are simple and periodic: the moon regularly waxes and wanes, the sun and moon and stars seem to revolve once a day around the celestial pole, and the sun traces a path through the same constellations of stars every year, those of the zodiac.<a name="fnr2" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fn2" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[2]</a></sup> Even with crude instruments these periodic changes could be and were studied with a fair degree of mathematical precision, much greater than was possible for things on earth like the flight of a bird or the flow of water in a river.</p><p>But there was another reason why astronomy was so prominent in ancient and medieval science. It was useful in a way that the physics and biology of the time were not. Even before history began, people must have used the apparent motion of the sun as at least a crude clock, calendar, and compass. These functions became much more precise with the introduction of what may have been the first scientific instrument, the gnomon, attributed by the Greeks variously to Anaximander or to the Babylonians.</p><span class="ad"><hr style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153); border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; background-color: rgb(153, 153, 153); height: 1px; "><center><a href="http://rotator.adjuggler.com/servlet/ajrotator/147551/0/cj?ajkey=V1207B596F5J-573I573L1473964516E1D04516E1D0L777226L777222QL147520QQP0G00G07F" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "><img src="http://img1.cdn.adjuggler.com/banners/Client147524/1251473676921_LR_Hol09a.gif" height="280" width="336" border="0" alt="NYR Holiday Subscription Special" /></a></center><hr style="color: rgb(153, 153, 153); border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; background-color: rgb(153, 153, 153); height: 1px; "></span><p>The gnomon is simply a straight pole, set vertically in a flat, level patch of ground open to the sun's rays. When during each day the gnomon's shadow is shortest, that is noon. At noon, the gnomon's shadow anywhere in the latitude of Greece or Mesopotamia points due north, so all the points of the compass can be permanently and accurately marked out on the ground around the gnomon. Watching the shadow from day to day, one can note the days when the noon shadow is shortest or longest. That is the summer or the winter solstice. From the length of the noon shadow at the summer solstice one can calculate the latitude. The shadow at sunset points somewhat south of east in the spring and summer, and somewhat north of east in the fall and winter; when the shadow at sunset points due east, that is the spring or fall equinox.<a name="fnr3" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fn3" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[3]</a></sup></p><p>Using the gnomon as a calendar, the Athenian astronomers Meton and Euctemon made a discovery around 430 BC that was to trouble astronomers for two thousand years: the four seasons, whose beginnings and endings are precisely marked by the solstices and equinoxes, have slightly different lengths. This ruled out the possibility that the sun travels around the earth (or the earth around the sun) with constant velocity in a circle, for in that case the equinoxes and solstices would be evenly spaced throughout the year. This was one of the reasons that Hipparchus of Nicaea, the greatest observational astronomer of the ancient world, found it necessary around 150 BC to introduce the idea of epicycles, the idea that the sun (and planets) move on circles whose centers themselves move on circles around the earth, an idea that was picked up and elaborated three centuries later by Claudius Ptolemy.</p><p>Even Copernicus, because he was committed to orbits composed of circles, retained the idea of epicycles. It was not until the early years of the seventeenth century that Johannes Kepler finally explained what Hipparchus and Ptolemy had attributed to epicycles. The earth's orbit around the sun is not a circle but an ellipse; the sun is not at the center of the ellipse but at a point called the focus, off to one side; and the speed of the earth is not constant but faster when it is near the sun and slower when farther away.</p><p class="initial">or the human uses I have been discussing, the sun has its limitations. The sun can of course be used to tell time and directions only during the day, and before the introduction of the gnomon its annual motions gave only a crude idea of the time of year. From earliest recorded times, the stars were put to use to fill these gaps. Homer knew of the stars' use at night as a compass. In the <i>Odyssey</i>, Calypso gives Odysseus instructions how to go from her island eastward toward Ithaca: he is told to keep the Bear on his left. The Bear, of course, is Ursa Major, aka the Big Dipper, a constellation near the North Pole of the sky (called the celestial pole) that in the latitude of the Mediterranean never sets beneath the horizon (or, as Homer says, never bathes in the ocean). With north on his left, Odysseus would be sailing east, toward home.<a name="fnr4" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fn4" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[4]</a></sup></p><p>The stars were also put to use as a calendar. The Egyptians very early appear to have anticipated the flooding of the Nile by observing the rising of the star Sirius. Around 700 BC the Greek poet Hesiod in<i>Works and Days</i> advised farmers to plow at the cosmical setting of the Pleiades constellation—that is, on the day in the year on which the Pleiades star cluster is first seen to set before the sun comes up.</p><p>Observing the stars for these reasons, it was noticed in many early civilizations that there are five "stars," called planets by the Greeks, that in the course of a year move against the background of all the other stars, staying pretty much on the same path along the zodiac as the sun, but sometimes seeming to reverse their course. The problem of understanding these motions perplexed astronomers for millennia, and finally led to the birth of modern physics with the work of Isaac Newton.</p><p>The usefulness of astronomy was important not only because it focused attention on the sun and stars and planets and thereby led to scientific discoveries. Utility was also important in the development of science because when one is actually using a scientific theory rather than just speculating about it, there is a large premium on getting things right. If Calypso had told Odysseus to keep the moon on his left, he would have gone around in circles and never reached home. In contrast, Aristotle's theory of motion could survive through the Middle Ages because it was never put to practical use in a way that could reveal how wrong it was. Astronomers did try to use Aristotle's theory of the planetary system (due originally to Plato's pupil Eudoxus and his pupil Callippus), in which the sun and moon and planets ride on coupled transparent spheres centered on the earth, a theory that (unlike the epicycle theory) was consistent with Aristotle's physics.</p><p>They found that it did not work—for instance, Aristotle's theory could not account for the changes in brightness of the planets over time, changes that Ptolemy understood to be due to the fact that each planet is not always at the same distance from the earth. Because of the prestige of Aristotle's philosophy some philosophers and physicians (but few working astronomers) continued through the ancient world and the Middle Ages to adhere to his theory of the solar system, but by the time of Galileo it was no longer taken seriously. When Galileo wrote his <i>Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World</i>, the two systems that Galileo considered were those of Ptolemy and Copernicus, not Aristotle.</p><p>There was one more reason that the usefulness of astronomy was important to the advance of science: it promoted government support of scientific research. The first great example was the Museum of Alexandria, established by the Greek kings of Egypt early in the Hellenistic era, around 300 BC. This was not a museum in the modern sense, a place where visitors can come to look at fossils and pictures, but a research institution, devoted to the Muses, including Urania, the muse of astronomy. The kings of Egypt supported studies in Alexandria of the construction of catapults and other artillery and of the flights of projectiles, probably at the Museum, but the Museum also provided salaries to Aristarchus, who measured the distances and sizes of the sun and moon, and to Eratosthenes, who measured the circumference of the earth.</p><p>The Museum was the first of a succession of government-supported centers of research, including the House of Wisdom established around 830 AD by the caliph al-Mamun in Baghdad, and Tycho Brahe's observatory Uraniborg, on an island given to Brahe by the Danish king Frederick II in 1576. The tradition of government-supported research continues in our day, at particle physics laboratories like CERN and Fermilab, and on unmanned observatories like Hubble and WMAP and Planck, put into space by NASA and the European Space Agency.</p><p class="initial">n fact, in the past astronomy benefited from an overestimate of its usefulness. The legacies of the Babylonians to the Hellenistic world included not only a large body of accurate astronomical observations (and perhaps the gnomon) but also the pseudoscience of astrology. Ptolemy was the author not only of a great astronomical treatise, the <i>Almagest</i>, but also of a book on astrology, the<i>Tetrabiblos.</i> Much of the royal support for compiling tables of astronomical data in the medieval and early modern periods was motivated by the use of these tables by astrologers. This appears to contradict what I said about the importance in applications of getting the science right, but the astrologers did generally get the astronomy right, at least as to the apparent motions of the planets and stars, and they could hide their failure to account for human affairs in the obscurity of their predictions.</p><p>Not everyone has been enthusiastic about the utilitarian side of astronomy. In Plato's <i>Republic</i> there is a discussion of the education to be provided for future philosopher kings. Socrates suggests that astronomy ought to be included, and his stooge Glaucon hastily agrees, because "it's not only farmers and others who need to be sensitive to the seasons, months, and phases of the year; it's just as important for military commanders as well." Poor Glaucon—Socrates calls him naive, and explains that the real reason to study astronomy is that it forces the mind to look upward and think of things that are nobler than our everyday world.</p><p>Although surprises are always possible, my own main research area, elementary particle physics, has no direct applications that anyone can foresee,<a name="fnr5" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fn5" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[5]</a></sup> so it gives me little joy to note the importance of utility to the historical development of science. By now pure sciences like particle physics have developed standards of verification that make applications unnecessary in keeping us honest (or so we like to think), and their intellectual excitement incites the efforts of scientists without any thought of practical use. But research in pure science still has to compete for government support with more immediately useful sciences, like chemistry and biology.</p><p>Unfortunately for the ability of astronomy to compete for support, the uses of astronomy that I have discussed so far have largely become obsolete. We now use atomic clocks to tell time, so accurately that we can measure tiny changes in the length of the day and year. We can look up today's date on our watches or computer screens. And recently the stars have even lost their importance for navigation.</p><p>In 2005 I was on the bark <i>Sea Cloud</i>, cruising the Aegean Sea. One evening I fell into a discussion about navigation with the ship's captain. He showed me how to use a sextant and chronometer to find positions at sea. Measuring the angle between the horizon and the position of a given star with the sextant at a known chronometer time tells you that your ship must lie somewhere on a particular curve on the map of the earth. Doing the same with another star gives another curve, and where they intersect, there is your position. Doing the same with a third star and finding that the third curve intersects the first two at the same point tells you that you have not made a mistake. After demonstrating all this, my friend the captain of the <i>Sea Cloud</i> complained that the young officers coming into the merchant marine could no longer find their position with chronometer and sextant. The advent of global positioning satellites had made celestial navigation unnecessary.</p><p>One use remains to astronomy: it continues to have a crucial part in our discovery of the laws of nature. As I mentioned, it was the problem of the motion of the planets that led Newton to the discovery of his laws of motion and gravitation. The fact that atoms emit and absorb light at only certain wavelengths, which in the twentieth century led to the development of quantum mechanics, was discovered in the early nineteenth century in observations of the spectrum of the sun. Later in the nineteenth century these solar observations revealed the existence of new elements, such as helium, that were previously unknown on earth. Early in the twentieth century Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was tested astronomically, at first by comparison of his theory's predictions with the observed motion of the planet Mercury, and then through the successful prediction of the deflection of starlight by the gravitational field of the sun.</p><p>After the confirmation of General Relativity, for a while the source of the data that inspired progress in fundamental physics switched away from astronomy, first toward atomic physics and then in the 1930s toward nuclear and particle physics. But progress in particle physics has slowed since the formulation of the Standard Model of elementary particles in the 1960s and 1970s, which accounted for all the data about elementary particles that was then available. The only things discovered in recent years in particle physics that go beyond the Standard Model are the tiny masses of the various kinds of neutrinos, and these first showed up in a sort of astronomy, the search for neutrinos from the sun.</p><p class="initial">eanwhile, we are now in what it has become trite to call a golden age of cosmology. Astronomical observation and cosmological theory have invigorated each other, to the point that we can now say with a straight face that the universe in its present phase of expansion is 13.73 billion years old, give or take 0.16 billion years. This work has revealed that only about 4.5 percent of the energy of the universe is in the form of ordinary matter—electrons and atomic nuclei. Some 23 percent of the total energy is in the masses of particles of "dark matter," particles that do not interact with ordinary matter or radiation, and whose existence is so far known only through observations of effects of the gravitational forces they exert on ordinary matter and light. The greatest part of the energy budget of the universe, about 72 percent, is a "dark energy" that does not reside in the masses of any sort of particle, but in space itself, and that is causing the present expansion of the universe to accelerate. The explanation of dark energy is now the deepest problem facing elementary particle physics.</p><p>Exciting as all this is, both astronomy and particle physics have increasingly had to struggle for government support. In 1993 Congress canceled a program to build an accelerator, the Superconducting Super Collider, that would have greatly extended the range of masses of new particles that might be created, perhaps including the particles of dark matter. The European consortium CERN has picked up this task, but its new accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, will be able to explore only about a third of the range of masses that could have been reached by the Super Collider, and support for the next accelerator after the Large Hadron Collider seems increasingly in doubt. In astronomy, NASA has cut back on the Beyond Einstein and Explorer programs, major programs of astronomical research of the sort that has made possible the great progress of recent years in cosmology.</p><p>Of course, there are many worthy calls on government funds. What particularly galls many scientists is the existence of a vastly expensive NASA program that often masquerades as science.<a name="fnr6" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fn6" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[6]</a></sup> I refer, of course, to the manned space flight program. In 2004 President Bush announced a "new vision" for NASA, a return of astronauts to the moon followed by a manned mission to Mars. A few days later the NASA Office of Space Science announced cuts in its unmanned Beyond Einstein and Explorer programs, with the explanation that they did not support the President's new vision.</p><p>Astronauts are not effective in scientific research. For the cost of taking astronauts safely to the moon or planets and bringing them back, one could send many hundreds of robots that could do far more in the way of exploration. Astronauts in orbiting astronomical observatories would create vibrations and radiate heat, which would foul up sensitive astronomical observations. All of the satellites like Hubble or COBE or WMAP or Planck that have made possible the recent progress in cosmology have been unmanned. No important science has been done at the manned International Space Station, and it is hard to imagine any significant future work that could not be done more cheaply on unmanned facilities.</p><p>It is often said that manned space flight is necessary for science because without it the public would not support any space programs,<a name="fnr7" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fn7" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[7]</a></sup> including unmanned missions like Hubble and WMAP that do real science. I doubt this. I think that there is an intrinsic excitement to astronomy in general and cosmology in particular, quite apart from the spectator sport of manned space flight. As illustration, I will close with a verse of Claudius Ptolemy:</p><blockquote>I know that I am mortal and the creature of a day; but when I search out the massed wheeling circles of the stars, my feet no longer touch the Earth, but, side by side with Zeus himself, I take my fill of ambrosia, the food of the gods.</blockquote><h5 style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0px; font-size: 1em; ">Notes</h5><p><a name="fn1" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fnr1" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[1]</a></sup>This article is based on a talk given on September 25, 2009, at the Harry Ransom Center for Humanistic Studies of the University of Texas at Austin, to commemorate its exhibition "Other Worlds: Rare Astronomical Works," on view September 8, 2009–January 3, 2010.</p><p><a name="fn2" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fnr2" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[2]</a></sup>Of course the stars are not visible during the day, but some of them can be seen just after sunset, when the sun's position in the sky is still known.</p><p><a name="fn3" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fnr3" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[3]</a></sup>A gnomon is different from a sundial, because the pole that casts a shadow in a sundial is not vertical but set at an angle chosen so that the pole's shadow follows about the same path during each day of the year. This makes the sundial more useful as a clock, but less useful as a calendar.</p><p><a name="fn4" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fnr4" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[4]</a></sup>It may be wondered why Calypso did not tell Odysseus to keep the North Star on his left. The reason is that in Homer's time the star Polaris, which is now the North Star, was not at the North Pole of the sky. This is not because of any motion of Polaris itself, but because of a phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes, discovered by Hipparchus. In modern terms, the axis of the earth's rotation does not keep a fixed direction in the sky, but precesses like the axis of a spinning top, making a full circle every 25,727 years. It is a measure of the accuracy of Greek astronomy that the data of Hipparcus indicated a period of 28,000 years.</p><p><a name="fn5" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fnr5" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[5]</a></sup>I say "direct" applications because experimental and theoretical work in particle physics that pushes technology and mathematics to their current limits occasionally spins off new technology or mathematics of great practical importance. One celebrated example is the World Wide Web. This can provide a valid argument for government support, but it is not why we do the research.</p><p><a name="fn6" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fnr6" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[6]</a></sup>I have written about this at greater length in "The Wrong Stuff," <i>The New York Review</i>, April 8, 2004.</p><p><a name="fn7" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); "></a><sup style="font-size: 0.75em; line-height: 0.75em; "><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23170#fnr7" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); ">[7]</a></sup>This opinion was most recently expressed by Giovanni Bignami, the head of the European Space Agency Science Advisory Committee, in "Why We Need Space Travel," <i>Nature</i>, July 16, 2009.</p><div><br /></div><p></p></span>Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-57800842745977558472009-09-15T11:19:00.000-07:002009-09-15T11:22:53.955-07:00Mike Whitney: Bernanke/Paulsen deliberately created the Panic of Sept 2008 So that AIG and Goldman Might Live<div> </div><div><br /></div><div>September 15, 2009</div><div>The Real Lesson of Lehman's Fall </div><div>Lehman Died So TARP and AIG Might Live </div><div><br /></div><div>By MIKE WHITNEY</div><div>http://counterpunch.org/ </div><div><br /></div><div>"Lehman's fate was sealed not in the boardroom of that gaudy Manhattan headquarters. It was sealed downtown, in the gloomy gray building of the New York Federal Reserve, the Wall Street branch of the U.S. central bank."</div><div><br /></div><div>-- Stephen Foley, U.K. Independent</div><div><br /></div><div>Stephen Foley is on to something. Lehman Bros. didn't die of natural causes; it was drawn-and-quartered by high-ranking officials at the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Most of the rubbish presently appearing in the media, ignores this glaring fact. Lehman was a planned demolition (most likely) concocted by ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson, who wanted to create a financial 9-11 to scare Congress into complying with his demands for $700 billion in emergency funding (TARP) for underwater US banking behemoths. The whole incident reeks of conflict of interest, corruption, and blackmail.</div><div><br /></div><div>The media have played a critical role in peddling the official "Who could have known what would happen" version of events. Bernanke and Paulson were fully aware that they playing with fire, but they chose to proceed anyway, using the mushrooming crisis to achieve their own objectives. Then things began to spin out of control; credit markets froze, interbank lending slowed to a crawl, and stock markets plunged. Even so, the Fed and Treasury persisted with their plan, demanding their $700 billion pound of flesh before they'd do what was needed to stop the bleeding. It was all avoidable. </div><div><br /></div><div>Lehman had potential buyers--including Barclays--who probably would have made the sale if Bernanke and Paulson had merely provided guarantees for some of their trading positions. Instead, Treasury and the Fed balked, thrusting the knife deeper into Lehman's ribs. They claimed they didn't have legal authority for such guarantees. It’s a lie. The Fed has provided $12.8 trillion in loans and other commitments to keep the financial system operating without congressional approval or any explicit authorization under the terms of its charter. The Fed never considered the limits of its "legal authority" when it bailed-out AIG or organized the acquisition of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan pushing $30 billion in future liabilities onto the public's balance sheet. The Fed's excuses don't square with the facts. </div><div><br /></div><div>Here's how economist Dean Baker recounts what transpired last September 15:</div><div><br /></div><div>"Last September, when he (Bernanke) was telling Congress that the economy would collapse if it did not approve the $700 billion TARP bailout, he warned that the commercial paper market was shutting down.</div><div><br /></div><div>This was hugely important because most major companies rely on selling commercial paper to meet their payrolls and pay other routine bills. If they could not sell commercial paper, then millions of people would soon be laid off and the economy would literally collapse.</div><div><br /></div><div>What Mr. Bernanke apparently forgot to tell Congress back then is that the Fed has the authority to directly buy commercial paper from financial and non-financial companies. In other words, the Fed has the power to prevent the sort of economic collapse that Bernanke warned would happen if Congress did not quickly approve the TARP. In fact, Bernanke announced that the Fed would create a special lending facility to buy commercial paper the weekend after Congress voted to approve the TARP." ("Bernanke's bad Money", Dean Baker, CounterPunch)</div><div><br /></div><div>The reason Bernanke did not underwrite the commercial paper market was, if he had, he wouldn't have been able to blackmail congress. He needed the rising anxiety from the crisis to achieve his goals.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here's a clip from an editorial in the New York Times (admitting most of what has already been stated) that tries to put a positive spin on the Fed's behavior: </div><div><br /></div><div>"Mr. Nocera says that almost everyone he’s ever spoken to in Hank Paulson’s old Treasury Department agrees that without the immediate panic caused by the Lehman default, the government would never have agreed to make the loans needed to save A.I.G., a company it knew very little about. In effect, the Lehman bankruptcy caused the government to panic, which in turn caused it to save the firm it really had to save to prevent catastrophe. In retrospect, if you had to choose one firm to throw under the bus to save everyone else, you would choose Lehman.....it is quite likely that the financial crisis would have been even worse had Lehman been rescued. Although nobody realized it at the time, Lehman Brothers had to die for the rest of Wall Street to live. ("Lehman Had to Die So Global Finance Could Live", Sept 14, 2009, New York Times)</div><div><br /></div><div>So, according to the muddled logic of the NY Times, everything worked out for the best so there's no need to hold anyone accountable. (Tell that to the 7 million people who have lost their jobs since the beginning of the meltdown) This latest bit of spin is pure cover-your-ass journalism, an attempt to rewrite history and absolve the guilty parties. The fact is, Paulson and Bernanke deliberately created the crisis in order to jam their widely-reviled TARP policy down the public's throat. The Times thinks the public should be grateful for that because, otherwise, the crooked insurance giant, AIG, would not have been bailed out and Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street heavies would not have been paid off. </div><div><br /></div><div>The reason panic spread through the markets after Lehman filed for bankruptcy, was because the Reserve Primary Fund, which had lent Lehman $785 million (and recieved short-term notes called commercial paper) couldn't keep up with the rapid pace of withdrawals from worried clients. The sudden erosion of trust triggered a run on the money markets. Here's an excerpt from a Bloomberg article, "Sleep-At-Night-Money Lost in Lehman Lesson Missing $63 Billion":</div><div><br /></div><div>"On Tuesday, Sept. 16, the run on Reserve Primary continued. Between the time of Lehman’s Chapter 11 announcement and 3 p.m. on Tuesday, investors asked for $39.9 billion, more than half of the fund’s assets, according to Crane Data.</div><div><br /></div><div>“Reserve’s trustees instructed employees to sell the Lehman debt, according to the SEC.</div><div><br /></div><div>“They couldn’t find a buyer.</div><div><br /></div><div>“At 4 p.m., the trustees determined that the $785 million investment was worth nothing. With all the withdrawals from the fund, the value of a single share dipped to 97 cents.</div><div><br /></div><div>“Legg Mason, Janus Capital Group Inc., Northern Trust Corp., Evergreen and Bank of America Corp.’s Columbia Management investment unit were all able to inject cash into their funds to shore up losses or buy assets from them. Putnam closed its Prime Money Market Fund on Sept. 18 and later sold its assets to Pittsburgh-based Federated Investors.</div><div><br /></div><div>“At least 20 money fund managers were forced to seek financial support or sell holdings to maintain their $1 net asset value, according to documents on the SEC Web Site.</div><div><br /></div><div>“When news that Reserve Primary broke the buck hit the wires at 5:04 p.m. that Tuesday, the race was on" (Bloomberg)</div><div><br /></div><div>This is what a run on the shadow banking system looks like. Bernanke and Paulson pinpointed the trouble in the commercial paper market and used it to put more pressure on Congress to approve their bailout bill.</div><div><br /></div><div>Bloomberg again: </div><div><br /></div><div>"It was commercial paper and the $3.6 trillion money market industry that traded the notes that came close to sinking the global economy -- not a breakdown in credit-default swaps or bank-to-bank lending....</div><div><br /></div><div>“Like ice-nine, the fictitious substance in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, a single seed of which could harden all the world’s water, commercial paper was the crystallizing force that froze credit markets, choking off the ability of companies and banks to borrow money and pay bills." (Sleep-At-Night-Money Lost in Lehman Lesson Missing $63 Billion, Bob Ivry, Mark Pittman and Christine Harper, Bloomberg News) </div><div><br /></div><div>Bernanke could have fixed the problem in an instant. All he needed to do was provide explicit government guarantees on money markets and commercial paper. That would have ended the bank-run pronto. But he chose not to. He chose to wait until Congress capitulated so he could net $700 billion for his banking buddies.</div><div><br /></div><div>According to the UK Telegraph:</div><div><br /></div><div>"On Thursday night, the Treasury went literally down on his knees before Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, begging her to agree taxpayer money to bail out the financial system. Bernanke, a scholar of the financial panic that caused the Great Depression, told fearful lawmakers there wouldn't be a banking system in place by Monday morning if they didn't act. Paulson talked openly about planning for martial law, about how to feed the American people if banking and commerce collapsed."</div><div><br /></div><div>Despite their dire warnings, on Monday morning, the banking system was still in tact, just as it was a full month later when the first TARP funds were handed out to the big banks. It was all a hoax. The problem wasn't the banks toxic assets at all, but the commercial paper and money markets. The Fed and Treasury knew that they could count on Congress's abysmal ignorance of anything financial; and they weren't disappointed. On October 3, 2008, Congress passed the Financial Rescue Plan (TARP) Paulson's fear-mongering had triumphed. </div><div><br /></div><div>Here's a quick look at the Lehman chronology:</div><div><br /></div><div>On Sept 15, 2008, Lehman Bros filed for bankruptcy sending the Dow plummeting 504 points.</div><div><br /></div><div>On Sept 17, the Dow falls 449 points in reaction to AIG bailout.</div><div><br /></div><div>On Sept 29, the Dow tumbles 777 points after House votes "No" on TARP.</div><div><br /></div><div>On Oct 3, the House passes Financial Rescue Plan (TARP) The Dow falls 818 points.</div><div><br /></div><div>On Oct 7, the Fed creates the Commercial Paper Funding Facility to backstop the commercial paper market. Two weeks later, Bernanke announces the Money Market Investor Funding Facility to make loans of longer maturities. </div><div><br /></div><div>These are the two facilities which relieved the tension in the markets, not the TARP funds. It's clear that Bernanke knew exactly how to fix the problem, because he did so as soon as the TARP was passed. Here's economist Dean Baker in The American Prospect:</div><div><br /></div><div>"Bernanke was working with Paulson and the Bush administration to promote a climate of panic. This climate was necessary in order to push Congress to hastily pass the TARP without serious restrictions on executive compensation, dividends, or measures that would ensure a fair return for the public's investment.</div><div><br /></div><div>“Bernanke did not start buying commercial paper until after the TARP was approved by Congress because he did not want to take the pressure off, thereby leading Congress to believe that it had time to develop a better rescue package. ("Did Ben Bernanke Pull the TARP Over Eyes?", Dean Baker, The American Prospect) </div><div><br /></div><div>The American people have been ripped off by industry reps working the policy-levers from inside the government. That's the real lesson of the Lehman bankruptcy. Happy anniversary. </div><div><br /></div><div>Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com</div>Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5679165340649510871.post-22808675735623300642009-09-14T16:17:00.000-07:002009-09-14T16:19:32.520-07:00Chris Rizo: 91 former AGs file brief in Siegelman case;Eric Holder refuses to act on 600 cases of Bush-Cheney-Rove's Selective Prosecution<div>If AG Holder will stop looking for corrupt Republicans to exculpate, and take a minute to</div><div>peruse this (latest) brief on Siegelman's behalf--a brief filed by a group of AG's both</div><div>Republican and Democratic--maybe then he'll finally be impelled to put a stop to this</div><div>long, groundless persecution of a blameless man.</div><div><br /></div><div>And while he's at it, he could also take a peek at some, or all, of the (at least) six hundred</div><div>other cases of selective prosecution by Rove/Cheney's DoJ. (If you want to know more</div><div>about it, go to http://www.politicalprosecutions.org/.)</div><div><br /></div><div>MCM</div><div>[Mark Crispin Miller]</div><div><br /></div><div>91 former AGs file brief in Siegelman case</div><div>BY CHRIS RIZO</div><div>Don Siegelman (D)</div><div><br /></div><div>http://www.legalnewsline.com/news/222809-91-former-ags-file-brief-in-siegelman-case </div><div> </div><div>WASHINGTON (Legal Newsline)-- A bipartisan group of 91 former state attorneys general are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear an appeal by former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman.</div><div><br /></div><div>The former Democratic governor is appealing his federal bribery conviction. The former attorneys general, in a brief filed Thursday, said the case raises important free speech issues.</div><div>In court papers, the former attorneys general said it was not against the law for Siegelman to appoint former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy to a hospital regulatory board after Scrushy arranged for $500,000 in donations to Siegelman's campaign for a statewide lottery.</div><div><br /></div><div>They said there was no agreement between the governor and Scrushy concerning the appointment.</div><div><br /></div><div>"This case concerns the criminalization of conduct protected by the First Amendment - the giving and receiving of campaign contributions," the group's amicus brief said.</div><div><br /></div><div>Last month, a group of nine law professors filed a similar brief with the high court, raising First Amendment issues. The group of professors were represented by Jesse Choper of the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.</div><div><br /></div><div>Siegelman, who is out on bail pending appeal, and Scrushy were convicted in 2006 of bribery and other charges. Siegelman was sentenced to more than seven years in federal prison and Scrushy to nearly seven years.</div><div><br /></div><div>Although the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dropped two charges against Siegelman, the court upheld much of his conviction. The appeals court, meanwhile, upheld all of Scrushy's conviction. He is currently serving his sentence in a federal prison in Texas.</div><div><br /></div><div>Government prosecutors have until Oct. 14 to respond to Siegelman and Scrushy's appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.</div><div>Siegelman was the governor of Alabama from 1999 to 2003. He served as the state's attorney general before being elected governor.</div><div><br /></div><div>--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~</div><div>You received this message because you are subscribed to Mark Crispin Miller's "News From Underground" newsgroup. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Ronaldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06894911763711058827noreply@blogger.com0