Steve Hendricks
HNN

Seventy percent of Americans believe we should commit crimes against humanity. Not that they would put it that way. They would say something like, in the words of a Pew poll from some months ago, that torturing suspected terrorists is “often justified” (19 percent), “sometimes justified” (35 percent), or “rarely justified” (16 percent). That such beliefs persist, in such numbers, after years of talk about torture, signifies a moral chasm almost too depressing to contemplate.

If hope remains for spanning that chasm, it lies in the possibility—I would even argue the probability—that the better part of those 70 percent are not barbarous, merely benighted. To maintain such hope, it helps to have faith in American ignorance. Mine is pure. I derive immense comfort, for example, from the similarity between the pro-torture 70 percent and the 68 percent of Americans who believe “angels and demons are active in the world.” Surely many of my pro-torture countrymen just need a little more education about torture. Well, a lot more.

There is ample reason to believe they aren’t getting enough to make a difference. As other commentators have described, our educators on such affairs—reporters, editors, producers—have failed us abysmally. They have deferred grossly to hawks (including torture hawks), have dismissed doves as frivolous, have soft-pedaled the worst of tortures as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” have only rarely told us that to torture (or to send captives elsewhere to be tortured, as we still do) is to violate the UN Convention Against Torture (which the United States has adopted as law), and have told us even more rarely that international law regards systematic torture as a crime akin to those for which we executed Nazis at Nuremberg.

I would add one important failing to this list—one almost never discussed, as I found in four years of working on my new book about extraordinary rendition and torture, A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial. To wit: the media almost never describe torture in all its savage detail. They abbreviate, elide, or wholly omit the gruesome specifics that many people need if they are to understand the horror that is torture. The media censor this, they tell us, because to do otherwise would be too disturbing. Evide ntly they do not consider that we should be disturbed.

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Saman Mohammadi
The Excavator

"Cantor's comments will be revisited in the future because they reveal an emerging political crisis in America that is becoming apparent to more and more people. It is common knowledge that America's political establishment totally betrayed the American people, and destroyed the country."

Last week, the new House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York City to privately discuss U.S. sanctions against Iran, U.S.-Palestinian relations, the United Nations, the Republican smackdown in the recent election, and various subjects dealing with Israel and America's special relationship. Laura Rozen of Politico reported on the meeting, writing:

Regarding the midterms, Cantor may have given Netanyahu some reason to stand firm against the American administration.

"Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington," the readout continued. "He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other."

Veteran observer of U.S.-Israeli relations Ron Kampeas said he found that statement "an eyebrow-raiser."

"I can't remember an opposition leader telling a foreign leader, in a personal meeting, that he would side, as a policy, with that leader against the president," Kampeas wrote at JTA's blog -- an interpretation which Cantor's office later disputed to Kampeas.

Cantor's comments reflect either a deep naivety, or a new found arrogance that came with the Republican victory less than two weeks ago.

Is he at all aware that it is an act of treason to meet with a foreign head of state as a senior government official in your own country, and candidly expressing your loyalty to him and his state's aims instead of siding with your own leader and your own country? Maybe he knows what he did is national sabotage, but he likes the idea of being hanged. Or maybe he has no respect for the American state at all. He could be an anarchist in that way. Or he could just be a filthy traitor. I guess time will reveal the answers to such questions.

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Stephen Lendman

Agreements like NAFTA, DR-CAFTA, and various bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) have proved hugely destructive, superseding national laws, sovereignty, labor rights, environmental concerns, and more.

"There's no free collective bargaining for workers," says Ralph Nader. "There's no rule of law (either, just) bribery, (worker exploitation and plunder). These companies (can) pollute at will. There's no judicial independence to make (them) accountable," to stop them from "abus(ing) workers and consumers and communities, as" they all do repeatedly.

In other words, "free trade" is a license to steal, plunder, exploit, pollute, and overall operate unrestrained, the sole consideration being maximum profits, no matter how gotten.

As a result, level playing fields don't exist. Jobs are exported and destroyed. Corporate giants alone win, trade managed solely for their benefit. An Economic Policy Institute (EPI) study showed NAFTA-related imports cost America 879,280 jobs in its first decade, besides downward pressure on wages and benefits. Saying FTAs will create them is deceptive hooey, a big lie based on historical experience, instructive for Korean and American workers as Washington pressures Seoul for a deal, a KORUS-FTA.

If agreed, EPI estimates that imports will displace around 888,000 existing or potential US jobs by 2015, causing a net 322,000 loss, the differential over export produced ones. Obama said he wanted a Bush negotiated KORUS voted on by Congress by early 2011 the latest after unspecified modifications were made. However, the current text replicates NAFTA and DR-CAFTA, contradicting his promise to use trade as a vehicle to create jobs, assure worker rights, protect ecological sustainability, and ensure financial stability.

As in America, worker rights violations, for example, are widespread in Korea. Authorities use their "obstruction of business" law to imprison labor leaders and employers, often using police repressively against union activity. America is more subtle for similar results, organized labor here a shadow of its former self.

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Adam Horowitz
Mondoweiss

Students for Justice in Palestine responds to its inclusion on the ADL's "top ten anti-Israel groups" in the U.S. This statement represents over 60 student groups promoting Palestinian freedom across the US:

On October 14th, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) named Students for Justice in Palestine on its list of the “Top 10 Anti-Israel Groups in America,” claiming that “SJP chapters regularly organize activities presenting a biased view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including mock ‘apartheid walls’ and ‘checkpoint’ displays.” As members of several student groups working for justice in Palestine, we affirmatively state that the ADL’s characterization of our campus educational efforts and activism about Israeli injustices against Palestinians as “biased” is a disingenuous and misguided attempt to vilify students that criticize Israel’s occupation, which denies Palestinian human rights and self-determination. In this statement, we clarify our principles and invite the ADL to reconsider its categorical silence on egregious Israeli human rights violations by joining the movement for freedom, equality, and justice in Palestine.

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K. Ratnayake
WSWS

A pro-Western bourgeois leader, Suu Kyi has a record of seeking reconciliation with the military rulers. Strategic rivalry between the US and China in Myanmar is part of a broader strategic rivalry throughout Asia. By releasing Suu Kyi, the Burmese junta is moving to facilitate diplomatic communications with the Western powers.

A day after her release from house arrest, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi made a public call yesterday for unity and reconciliation talks with the military junta. On Saturday the military junta in Myanmar (formerly Burma) released Suu Kyi, who had been held under house arrest since 2003, and has been under house arrest for 14 of the last 20 years.

Her release came six days after the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) won rigged elections for national and regional assemblies.

Suu Kyi’s call for talks, under these circumstances, belies the international media’s claim that her release was a “victory for democracy.” In her first public speech yesterday to thousands of NLD followers, from party headquarters in the former capital city of Yangon (Rangoon), Suu Kyi made clear gestures towards the junta.

The military regime released Suu Kyi in the face of increasing pressure by the Western powers, including the US and the European Union. Condemning last week’s election as a “sham,” the US and EU called for her release and for the military to ease the ban on her National League for Democracy (NLD), while threatening more economic sanctions against Burma.

She called for reconciliation talks, adding: “I am prepared to talk with anyone. I have no personal grudge towards anybody.” She added: “I don’t have any antagonism toward the people who kept me under house arrest...the security officials treated me well. I want to ask them to treat the people well also.”

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