Franklin Lamb

Lebanon's Tribunal As Bludgeon

“I’ve got these [expletive deleted] just where we want them Maura! Watch the 1000 slow cuts as we shred Hezbollah–who do they think they are? And we’ll do it by using 1757 and this time we’re going all the way. I told Israel to stay out of Lebanon because the IDF can’t defeat Hezbollah plus the whole region would burn. I will handle this and it will be my Christmas present to Lebanon.”

So said Jeffrey Feltman in conversation with his former office staffer, now US Ambassador to Lebanon, Maura Connelly during October 17, 2010 visit with MP Walid Jumblatt at his Clemenceau residence.

On December 12, 2008, Naharnet.com reported that

“Former US Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman presented Prime Minister Fuad Siniora with what the American diplomat described as his personal Christmas present to Lebanon. Mr. Feltman assured PM Siniora that he will force Israel out of Ghajar village before the end of 2008.”

As it turned out, Prime Minister Fuad Siniora and Lebanon never did receive Feltman’s promised 2008 Christmas present and Israel still has its tanks and troops in Lebanon’s Ghajar village even as pressure mounts for ending its four-year illegal occupation of North Ghajar which, in violation of UNSCR 1701, Israel invaded in July 2006 and from which it has refused to withdraw.

This holiday season Jeff is again assuring his Lebanese allies that he’s Santa Claus and Hezbollah’s head will adorn his sleigh during his Christmas eve rounds. The reason for his optimism is that US and Israel are quietly confident that they can achieve with UNSCR 1757 what was intended but fell short with UNSCR 1559, which is stripping Lebanon’s Resistance of its defensive weapons.

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Stephen Lendman

In October, the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, together with nine other human rights organizations, addressed a position paper on "The unconstitutionality of the state's policy of demolishing Arab Bedouin unrecognized villages in the Negev" to three Israeli officials:

● Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
● Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, and
● Minister of Justice Yaakov Neeman.

Citing the illegality of home demolitions, in this case of Arab Israeli citizens, they urged halting them immediately and finding a durable solution for unrecognized village residents. In Salim Abu- Medeghem v. The Israel Land Administration (April 14, 2007), Israel's High Court proposed replacing demolitions with solutions based on dialogue, Justice Arbel ruling:

"....the difficult reality the Bedouin population faces in the State of Israel requires a systemic, complete and comprehensive solution, and the sooner the better...The time has come to formulate and implement a truly comprehensive solution to this problem."

An earlier article addressed this issue, accessed through THIS link.

It explained that Israeli Arabs live mainly in all-Arab towns and villages in three heartlands - the Galilee in the north; what's called the "Little Triangle" in the center along the Israeli side of the Green Line; and the Negev in the south.

Up to 150,000 Bedouin Arabs, Israeli citizens, live in so-called "unrecognized villages," mainly in the Galilee and Negev. They're unrecognized because their residents are considered internal refugees, forced from their homes during Israel's War of Independence and prevented from returning. Thereafter, they've been relentlessly mistreated, including by repressive zoning restrictions, prohibiting construction, agriculture, and other legal rights.

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WikiLeaks Staff Editorial
TwitLonger

Why our editor-in-chief is busy and needs to be defended

In October 2010 Julian Assange won the Sam Adams Award for Integrity. He has also been awarded the 2009 Amnesty International Media Award and the Economist Index on Censorship Award in 2008. It is important to remember that accolades such as these do come without tremendous hard work.

The expose of the Afghan War Diaries was a moment of media history, orchestrated by Julian Assange. He brought together The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel, three of the world’s most reputable newspapers to collaborate with WikiLeaks on exposing more than 90 000 secret significant action reports by the United States relating to the war in Afghanistan. This involved a huge amount of administration in order to co-ordinate all four media partners’ publishing schedules and a lot of time to carefully construct the levels of trust needed to bring together three major newspapers who were also competitors.

Since 2007 Julian, WikiLeaks and the Sunshine Press have been behind international front page stories that have changed the world. However, every story exposing abuses by powerful organizations, whether they be from New York or Nairobi results in a counter attack. Such the importance and veracity of revelations must be defended. Immediately after the Afghan War Diaries he conducted seventy-six interviews in three days maximizing the impact of the disclosures. It is very important for WikiLeaks to create a global platform with which to reach all corners of the earth. This demonstrates to those who wish to expose wrongdoing and misconduct that there is a way to do so without putting themselves at risk. He remains a messenger who big governments and their agencies can, and constantly do, attack while all the time keeping the source of the information published safe.

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Stefan Steinberg & Barry Grey
WSWS

A pedestrian walks past graffiti on a wall, in south Dublin. (Reuters)

In a revealing admission concerning the relationship between capitalist governments and international financial interests, the Financial Times on Tuesday wrote of “Europe’s dirty secret.”

The newspaper editorialized against the plan of the European Union, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund to loan Ireland tens of billions of euros in order to guarantee in full the investments of international bankers and bondholders in the country’s failing banking system.

Under the plan, Ireland will effectively surrender sovereignty over its economic policy to the EU and the IMF and agree to claw back the latest bailout of the global financial elite by imposing a new and even more savage round of attacks on the wages and living standards of the working class.

The Financial Times argued that using the €440 billion European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) to cover the bad debts of the financial elite by propping up zombie banks, while driving the Irish state closer to default, would be “a fatal mistake.” The Times insisted that such a policy was shortsighted and self-defeating, since sovereign defaults would trigger new financial panics and bankruptcies.

The Times wrote:

“It would keep the Irish people indentured to those who recklessly fund their banks: EFSF funds must, after all, be paid back by taxpayers. It would also give an official EU imprimatur on Europe’s dirty secret: public treasuries will do anything to make private bank creditors whole.”

What the Financial Times calls a “dirty secret” is hardly news to those who have followed developments since the collapse of Lehman Brothers 26 months ago. What is remarkable, however, is the bluntness with which this organ of British finance capital acknowledges the existence of a dictatorship of the banks over government policy throughout Europe. Nor is it any different in North America, South America, Africa or Asia.

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Steve James
WSWS

A beggar sits on O'Connell Bridge in the centre of Dublin

The accelerating economic crisis in Ireland is taking a terrible toll on broad layers of workers, particularly the more vulnerable—children, the elderly, those on low incomes and with insecure housing.

Hundreds of thousands of people face privation and suffering as every area of social life comes under intense stress from savage spending cuts and increased unemployment. This is in advance of the measures now being put in place by the Irish elite, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund to implement another major subvention of public funds to the banking system.

Dublin City Coroner’s Court heard last week that 81-year-old Ann Cumiskey died in the early hours of the morning when fire broke out in her Dublin house. Ms. Cumiskey lived with her son-in-law, Patrick Gorman, who could no longer afford to pay electricity bills and had removed all the fuses in the house. Ms. Cumiskey appears to have used candles for lighting her hallway and bedroom, one of which is suspected of starting a fire in her bedroom. She was overcome by smoke. Other members of the family suffered burns and broken bones. Mr. Gorman had recently lost his job.

The tragedy points to countless unidentified personal crises that lie behind unemployment figures for the Irish republic, which currently stand at 13.6 percent, up from 4.3 percent in 2005 and 7.6 percent in 2007. The figure for October fell slightly, from 13.8 percent, but this is due to a rapid increase in emigration.

More than 1,250 students are reported to be leaving the country every month. Thousands of mostly younger workers are now once again emigrating in search of a livelihood. Recent press reports included interviews with workers who have travelled as far as South Korea in search of work, along with more traditional destinations such as the United States and Canada.

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Stephen Lendman

On September 15, 2009, the UN Human Rights Council's (HRC) Goldstone Commission issued its findings on Cast Lead, Israel's war of aggression against Gaza, inflicting enormous loss of life, thousands of injuries, massive human suffering, and vast destruction, despite no provocation or threat to Israeli security.

The Commission concluded that "there is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity."

Notably the Commission said:

"While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right of self defence, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole."

Defensive rocket attacks in response to repeated Israeli provocations were, in fact, a pretext for naked aggression.

On September 27, 2009, Haaretz writer Nathan Guttman headlined, "Israel, US working to limit damage of Goldstone report," saying:

"Because of joint efforts, it's all but certain the report will not reach any binding international forums."

With US help, Israel was obstructionist all along, refusing to cooperate in the investigation, including by preventing Goldstone from entering Israel. Its "drive to counter the report began moments" after its release, blasting it as biased and pressing Washington to block Security Council action.

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David Walsh
WSWS

Swedish authorities, stepping up their persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, have issued an international arrest warrant for his detention in relation to trumped-up “rape” charges.

Sweden’s Director of Prosecution, Marianne Ny, claims that Assange needs to be questioned. “So far, we have not been able to meet with him to accomplish the interrogations,” she said. The court ruling will allow prosecutors to seek assistance from other nations to have him arrested.

The case against Assange is aimed at discrediting or weakening WikiLeaks, which has made public hundreds of thousands of secret US documents exposing the criminal character of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. (See “The WikiLeaks documents and the rape of Iraq”) The Swedish prosecutor’s campaign has all the hallmarks of a “dirty tricks” operation organized or encouraged by either the Pentagon or the CIA, or both.

The charges have nothing to do with sexual assault, despite screaming media headlines. They relate to Assange’s encounters this past summer with two Swedish women. Rebutting prosecutor Ny’s comments in a strongly worded statement Tuesday, Mark Stephens, one of Assange’s British lawyers, explained that the allegations

“do not constitute what any advanced legal system considers to be rape; as various media outlets have reported ‘the basis for the rape charge’ purely seems to constitute a post facto dispute over consensual, but unprotected sex days after the event.”

The charges against Assange were, in fact, properly dropped last August within 24 hours by chief prosecutor Eva Finne, who found there was no “reason to suspect that he [Assange] had committed rape.” However, Assange’s identity had already been unlawfully disclosed to the right-wing media by the Swedish authorities. Stephens asserts, “The so called ‘rape’ story was carried around the world and has caused Mr. Assange and his organization irreparable harm.”

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John P. Curran
Documentaries.net

[Abolish The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 -Petition] On June 4, 1963, a virtually unknown Presidential decree, Executive Order 11110, was signed with the authority to basically strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money to the United States Federal Government at interest. With the stroke of a pen, President Kennedy declared that the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank would soon be out of business. The Christian Law Fellowship has exhaustively researched this matter through the Federal Register and Library of Congress. We can now safely conclude that this Executive Order has never been repealed, amended, or superceded by any subsequent Executive Order. In simple terms, it is still valid.

When President John Fitzgerald Kennedy - the author of Profiles in Courage -signed this Order, it returned to the federal government, specifically the Treasury Department, the Constitutional power to create and issue currency -money - without going through the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank. President Kennedy's Executive Order 11110 [the full text is displayed further below] gave the Treasury Department the explicit authority: "to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury." This means that for every ounce of silver in the U.S. Treasury's vault, the government could introduce new money into circulation based on the silver bullion physically held there. As a result, more than $4 billion in United States Notes were brought into circulation in $2 and $5 denominations. $10 and $20 United States Notes were never circulated but were being printed by the Treasury Department when Kennedy was assassinated. It appears obvious that President Kennedy knew the Federal Reserve Notes being used as the purported legal currency were contrary to the Constitution of the United States of America.

"United States Notes" were issued as an interest-free and debt-free currency backed by silver reserves in the U.S. Treasury. We compared a "Federal Reserve Note" issued from the private central bank of the United States (the Federal Reserve Bank a/k/a Federal Reserve System), with a "United States Note" from the U.S. Treasury issued by President Kennedy's Executive Order. They almost look alike, except one says "Federal Reserve Note" on the top while the other says "United States Note". Also, the Federal Reserve Note has a green seal and serial number while the United States Note has a red seal and serial number.

President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963 and the United States Notes he had issued were immediately taken out of circulation. Federal Reserve Notes continued to serve as the legal currency of the nation.

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Kenneth J. Theisen
The World Can't Wait!

In October 2001, then Vice President Dick Cheney said that the just launched U.S. “war on terror” was “different” than other wars: ‘‘in the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime’’. President Obama picked up the baton passed to him by Cheney’s boss, and has expanded and extended the wars started in the Bush-Cheney era, continued the policies of torture and extended the life of the dungeons where this torture is done.

Immediately after taking office President Obama announced that he was ordering the closing of the hellhole prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba by January 2010. That atrocity is still open.

Now the Obama administration has announced that its much trumpeted deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan will be extended three years, to 2014.

In 2009, at a speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Obama – in the midst of dramatically escalating the U.S. war in Afghanistan, announced a deadline of July 2011 as the time when U.S. troops would begin withdrawal. He made that announcement in part to deflect any opposition to his sending of tens of thousands of U.S. troops into that war-torn country. Since that West Point speech, Obama and his minions have been waffling on the withdrawal date. It now appears that the White House is all but abandoning the date or at least rebranding it by changing the “withdrawal” to a “transition.” But a transition to what - more war?

The Obama administration is scheduled to present its “transition plan” for Afghanistan at the upcoming NATO summit in Lisbon, Spain this coming Friday, November 19th. President Obama will attend the conference where the administration is expected to tell NATO of the U.S. commander in AfghanistanGeneral David Petraeus’ plan of a four year transition where NATO will turn over security responsibilities to Afghan puppet troops in 2014.

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Philip Giraldi

U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and first lady Michelle Obama are
led on a tour by Grand Imam Ali Mustafa Yaqub at the Istiqlal Mos-
que in Jakarta November 10, 2010. Reuters/Adek Berry/Pool

So if you doubt that the United States is tied hand and foot to Israel in terms of its ability to take independent action in the Middle East, just listen to what Dennis Ross, Joe Biden, and Eric Cantor are saying. Does it sound like they are articulating policies beneficial to the US? They are insisting that Americans have to support Israel unquestioningly no matter what it does and are little more than advocates for monsters like Bibi Netanyahu, pure and simple. The word Quisling comes to mind when one thinks of them and also Hoyer and Ros-Lehtinen.

President Barack Obama’s speech in Indonesia in which he conceded that the United States must do more to establish a good working relationship with many Muslim nations would have ranked as one of the more pathetic performances by an American president in recent years but for the fact that there have been so many awful performances to choose from. The president’s grammar and syntax were perfect and the speech was cleverly crafted, exactly what we have come to expect. It was replete with carefully designed pauses, Indonesian words and phrases, and some self deprecating humor, but it was characteristically bloodless and completely tone deaf. One almost longed to see Bill Clinton choking up and shedding a tear or two.

Obama’s spin team made a heroic effort to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. They likened the Indonesia speech to his Cairo offering seventeen months ago, in which he likewise committed his administration to establishing a new, more convivial modality for dealing with Islamic nations. That speech was received respectfully and even positively in many quarters, but this time no one was fooled. It’s funny how a year and a half of inaction and even retreat can reshape how someone thinks. One Indonesian commented afterwards "What will Obama do in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? If we don’t see any progress, what he says is just a speech."

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Stephen Lendman

On August 14, Obama did what he does best, deceiving and betraying the public. Again it was on the Gulf disaster, saying:

"Today, the well is capped, oil is no longer flowing into the Gulf, and it has not been flowing for a month....I also want to point out that as a result of the cleanup effort, beaches all along the Gulf Coast are clean and safe and open for business....But I won't be satisfied until the environment has been restored, no matter how long it takes."

False on all counts. The Macondo well was capped, but video and other evidence show continued leakage, an organization called Concerned Citizens of Florida (CCF), saying:

"....government cannot be relied upon to impart all the information that we need to make informed and necessary decisions. We know that they will not (and have not) respond(ed) quickly (and adequately) enough to this unfolding disaster or perform to the standard that is required to meet it head on." Nor will the major media, "act(ing) as a mouthpiece for both government and industry."

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Barry Grey & Stefan Steinberg
WSWS

"In an editorial published Tuesday, the Financial Times gave an unusually frank assessment of the basic social policy underlying the EU-IMF plan for Ireland. Arguing that the scheme will only intensify the European debt crisis, the newspaper wrote: “It would also give an official EU imprimatur on Europe’s dirty secret: public treasuries will do anything to make private bank creditors whole.”

The “dirty secret” of which the Times speaks is the class policy being pursued in every country—from the US to Europe to Japan and Australia—in response to the financial breakdown of 2008: the looting of public funds to pay off the gambling debts of the global financial elite."

After two days of crisis meetings in Brussels, European finance ministers dispatched a team of officials from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund to examine the books of Ireland’s banks and prepare the way for a “rescue” plan that will shred Irish political sovereignty and impose even more savage attacks on the working class.

The European and IMF intervention is being dictated by global bankers, who are seeking to offload huge losses from the meltdown of Ireland’s banking system onto the Irish population and establish a precedent for similar “stabilization programs” in other heavily indebted countries in Europe and beyond.

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Keith Johnson
Revolt of the Plebs

Live every day as if it were your last…
and then some day you’ll be right.
~ H.H. “Breaker” Morant

History is not likely to speak well of today’s Americans. While the people of nations around the globe stand up to their oppressors, Americans sit idly by as their government runs roughshod over their life, liberty and property.

As we speak, large-scale protests and mass demonstrations continue in more than a dozen countries as citizens strike back against injustice, criminality and brutal austerity measures imposed by their corrupt governments.

In the UK, more than 50,000 students recently took to the streets to protest a spike in tuition costs.

In Greece, workers clashed with police outside the Finance Ministry over frozen pensions and cuts in their salaries.

In Germany, tens of thousands demonstrated over the weekend to protest government policies and social inequities in advance of Merkel’s Democrat party’s national meeting.

In early October, thousands of Icelanders stormed their parliament with renewed anger over the deepening financial crisis, and against those responsible for it. Many of their politicians were forced to flee out the back door, where they were pelted with eggs, flour and tomatoes.

In France, transportation and commerce was brought to a virtual standstill throughout vast portions of the country, as angry citizens railed against their government for increasing the retirement age from 60 to 62.

Press coverage of these events gets little attention here in the United States. When the press does cover it, they portray the demonstrators as greedy layabouts who have become dependant on government handouts. In reality, people of these countries know full well that they are being made to do without in order to enrich powerful central banks that conspired with corrupt politicians to loot their economies. The people have had enough, and they’re letting their governments know it.

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Saman Mohammadi
The Excavator

By simply inverting the x-ray images, you can obtain a full-color, positive, naked
image of the person scanned. And every one of these naked photos taken of you
are stored...forever.

There is a growing public resistance campaign across U.S. airports against the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for routinely performing creepy pat-downs on passengers of all ages and all backgrounds and also submitting them to naked body scanners that are not only intrusive and unnecessary, but, according to scientists from Johns Hopkins University, are harmful to people's health.

Despite making no difference in airport security and the fight against government manufactured terrorism, the TSA's unpopular screening measures have not yet been terminated by the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that the TSA falls under. But that may change in the near future as there exists the possibility that millions of fed-up Americans will join John Tyner, who refused to be subjected to the TSA's perverted security ritual at San Diego International Airport on Saturday, and take collective action against the government's invasion of their humanity.

Amidst the renewed public scrutiny of the TSA thanks to Tyner's courageous act of dissent, a public boycott campaign against the TSA's invasive and humiliating techniques was started by James Babb and George Donnelly called "We Won't Fly" which urges travelers to refuse to go through naked body scanners on November 24. They /write:

"We are opposed to the full-body backscatter x-ray airport scanners on grounds of health and privacy. We do not consent to strip searches, virtual or otherwise. We do not wish to be guinea pigs for new, and possibly dangerous, technology. We are not criminals. We are your customers. We will not beg the government anymore. We will simply stop flying until the porno-scanners are history."

Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.com began a petition to press Congresspersons to investigate the TSA, which is publicly harassing John Tyner for the crime of refusing to be treated like a slave. Sign the petition HERE. Hamsher also wrote an article called, "Investigate the TSA, Not Tyner," explaining the reasons for the petition, and why Tyner must be aggressively supported for his act of resistance.

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Patrick Martin
WSWS

Some 15 percent of US households, 17.4 million families or about 50 million people, were too poor to buy adequate food last year, according to a new report from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). More than a third of these households, with as many as one million children, were missing meals on a regular basis, the study found.

The number of families classified as “food insecure” according to the USDA, which administers the food stamp program, has more than tripled since 2006, before the current economic slump which has brought near double-digit unemployment. Because most people are reluctant to admit they have a problem putting food on the table, particularly when they have children, “food insecurity” was calculated from survey questions about skipping meals or running out of food stamps, combined with comparisons of income and food prices.

Virtually the sole cause of food insecurity in America—the largest producer of agricultural and food products on the planet—is lack of money. The poverty rate has risen sharply over the past three years, with an estimated 50 million people living below the official poverty line, which grossly underestimates the income needed for basic necessities.

Highlighting the significant inequalities in food resource availability across US households, the USDA report noted that the typical food-secure household spent a whopping 33 percent more on food than the typical food-insecure household of the same size and household composition.

In keeping with the Obama administration’s policy of minimizing the depth of the social crisis, the USDA official who released the report, Under Secretary Kevin Concannon, said the latest hunger survey showed a “stabilization” of the problem compared to the year before. In other words, just as many people were hungry in 2009 as in 2008, as though that represented “progress” rather than making permanent a level of social misery not seen in America for 40 years.

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