Susanne Posel

Chancellor George Osborne has named Mark Carney, who is the current governor of the Bank of Canada and Chairman of the Financial Stability Board of the G20, has been chosen for governor of the Bank of England and successor to Mervyn King.

In April it was revealed that Carney was being “informally approached as a potential candidate to replace King as head of the central Bank of England in June of 2013.”

Obsorne explained that Carney brings “strong leadership and external experience the Bank needs.” Carney and his leadership in Canada were recognized for having weathered the central banking schemes “better than any other Western country.”

The Bank of England, established 318 years ago, is expected to take a new direction under Carney’s leadership – a suspected necessity for the technocrats to gain stronger hold over the financial markets. There are rumors that the incessant printing of fiat will be curbed because of its inability to stimulate the global economy. This strategic move may also ensure that the City of London can repair its reputation.

Carney’s position as governor of the central Bank of England will last for 8 years; however Carney has indicated that he expects to serve for 5 years and hand over the position in 2018.

Carney appears to be a solid choice, as he has not been tainted by the planned implosion of the global financial market that was the Crash of 2008. He also has a long history with the technocrats. Carney was employed by the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc in the City of London. He also worked at Goldman Sachs locations in Tokyo, New York and Toronto. Carney has a masters and PhD degree from the globalist-funded Oxford University.

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Stephen Lendman

Advancing America's imperium alone matters. Human lives, democratic values, and fundamental fairness don't count. Anything goes is policy.

A previous article discussed Obama's kill list. Another explained his "disposition matrix." Both constitute elevating Murder, Inc. to a higher level. Obama now wants more. He wants murder legalized.

On November 24, The New York Times headlined "Election Spurred a Move to Codify US Drone Policy," saying, pre-election, Obama "accelerated work….to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned droned." He wants standards and procedures established.

In other words, he wants murder legalized. Washington designates anti-war/imperial opponents "terrorists." He wants new rules giving him clear authority to murder them. Israel designates Palestinians wanting to live free from occupation and state terror the same way. Rogue states operate that way. Obama wants new standards in place. He wants cover for governing illegally. He wants fundamental US and international laws overridden. He wants tyrannical authority. He wants final say. He wants diktat power to be the last word. He wants to be judge, jury and executioner. He wants it codified and made legal.

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Gilad Atzmon

Ethnic cleansing advocate Alan Dershowitz is not at all happy. He is devastated by the media and international community's failure to distinguish between the Israeli military and ‘Hamas terrorists’ (this is how he refers to Palestinian freedom fighters). Last week, Haaretz lent its pages to the Talmudic spin-meister – and I was delighted because Dershowitz’ arguments throw new light on the depths of Jewish ideological and political morbidity.

“As Hamas continues to target Israeli civilians in their homes, Israel continues to target terrorist leaders and other legitimate military targets.”

It seems that Dershowitz has found the magic formula that distinguishes between the ‘Jew’ and the ‘Goy’ in this conflict. The Jew is always a ‘civilian’ who happens to be a ‘victim’, while the dozens of babies, children and women murdered in the last week by Israel, they must have been ‘terrorist leaders’. Dershowitz argues that the Hamas policy is...

“...designed to sow terror among the Israeli population.”

This is a peculiar argument. Due to its limited means, Hamas is confined to the use of primitive rockets. If Hamas had cruise missiles at its disposal and still used them to target civilians, then I would be the first to agree with Dershowitz and even support his argument. But the contrary is true: It is the IDF that possesses the most sophisticated weaponry and is capable of targeting military targets with precise, even astonishing accuracy. So, with that in mind, every Palestinian civilian casualty caused by the Jewish state must be counted as an Israeli attempt at massacre and therefore, nothing short of a vile war crime.

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Stephen Lendman

A man takes photographs inside a garment-factory where
a fire killed more than 110 people Saturday on the outskirts
of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Monday, Nov. 26, 2012.

"Over and over again we see companies have made lovely codes of conduct, but are workers’ rights being respected? - No."

Corporate predators seek cheap labor worldwide. Countries like China, India, Honduras, Jordan, Haiti, and Bangladesh provide it. Global sweatshops supply them.

Workers endure horrific conditions. Some work up to 90 or more hours weekly. They're wage slaves. They earn sub-poverty pay. They're subjected to punishing harassment, beatings, sexual abuse, and rape. Transnational giants are unaccountable.

According to the group Sweatshop Watch a sweatshop is a workplace that violates the law and where workers are subject to:

■ extreme exploitation, including the absence of a living wage or long hours;
■ poor working conditions, such as health and safety hazards;
■ arbitrary discipline, such as verbal or physical abuse, or
■ fear and intimidation when they speak out, organize, or attempt to form a union."

Women are exploited. Around 90% of the workforce is female. Most are aged 15 - 25. Globalization also takes a heavy environmental toll. It includes air pollution, ozone layer depletion, acid rain, ocean and fresh water contamination, and an overtaxed ecosystem. Unsafe living conditions exist worldwide.

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Philip Giraldi

There has been considerable debate over who “won” the recent fighting in and around Gaza, though the question itself might lack relevancy as both sides have largely returned to the status quo ante. Hamas has indeed proven itself capable of resisting Israel and has gained the respect of its Arab neighbors while its political opponent Fatah has again looked weak and vacillating. That many of the frequently homemade Gazan rockets were able to penetrate Israeli defenses and even strike near Tel Aviv is also being promoted by some as a game changer, but in reality the actual impact was more psychological than lethal. Israel blinked because it had become clear that there were no real military targets remaining in Gaza and only civilians, many of them children, were being killed. Continuing the air assault or initiating a ground invasion would only lead to a major public relations victory for the Palestinians in the court of world opinion.

Pundits taking their cue directly from the Israeli Foreign Ministry did not necessarily agree, quickly claiming that Israel had won because, suffering minor losses itself of only six killed it inflicted serious damage on the Gazan infrastructure while killing 163 Palestinian “terrorists.” Israeli government sources maintain that “all objectives were reached,” presumably meaning that the ability of the Gazans to continue to fire homemade rockets at Israel had been seriously degraded, which may or may not be true. On a political level, Netanyahu’s tough response to the Gazans had been originally regarded as a vote winner in the lead up to January elections, a consideration that certainly entered into his willingness to go to war, though many Israelis are now dismayed that he did not go far enough.

But stopping the rockets and a display of military prowess before an election might not have been the actual objectives. More ominously, some media both in Israel and the US have described the timing and the nature of the Gaza offensive as a test run for an attack on Iran. If that was the true motivation behind the Israeli attack, it means that a war may have been started just to test Israel’s missile defense system under realistic conditions. If so, “Operation Pillar of Defense” would be comparable to the Germans and Italians using Spanish “live targets” to evaluate the performance of their new weapons in 1937.

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Eric Peters

Our rulers will force us to go cashless

It still says, “legal tender for all debts, public and private” – but it’s becoming clear the powers-that-be would much prefer you used something else. Besides cash money, that is. Increasingly, they are insisting.

A few weeks ago, for example, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a motorist on a toll road who tries to pay the toll with cash may be physically detained – and forced to submit to an an interrogation. (PDF of the ruling is available here.)

Last year, Florida residents Joel, Deborah and Robert Chandler were driving on the Florida Turnpike – hilariously named The Less Stressway – when they came upon a toll both, operated by private contractor Faneuil, Inc. for the state of Florida. They attempted to pay the toll with legal tender – cash. A $50 bill. Faneuil, Inc. really wants people to use “SunPass” electronic transponders and has eliminated cash toll lanes on a section of the Parkway between the Exit 1 and Exit 47 interchanges in Miami-Dade County. This happened to be the stretch of road on which the Chandlers were driving that day. They did not have the electronic “Sun Pass” transponder – perhaps because, like many motorists, they don’t like the idea of a government-issued (or corporate issued) electronic transmitter in their vehicle – which can track their vehicle. The transponders make it easy to monitor where a car goes, when it goes – and how quickly it goes. Reasonably, many people – including the Chandlers – prefer not to be so monitored. So, they tried to pay the toll with cash.

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Naomi Spencer

The Army’s pre-trial hearing resumed Tuesday against Bradley Manning, the 24-year-old private who is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified military and government documents to the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks.

Manning is expected to speak this week about his nine-month confinement at the Quantico, Virginia Marine Corps prison. There he was held in isolation in a 6-by-8-foot cell more than 23-and-a-half hours a day. He was made to stay awake from 5 in the morning until 10 at night with nothing to do, forbidden even to exercise. Guards ordered him to strip naked and stand in humiliating positions in their presence. He was denied such basic items as eye glasses and bedding.

Manning’s testimony will be the first public comment by the former intelligence analyst in more than two years.

The pre-trial proceeding, known as an Article 32 hearing, is scheduled to run through Sunday, December 2 at Fort Meade, Maryland. It is the last in a long series of hearings before a full court-martial trial scheduled for February 4. Manning elected to be tried by a military judge, rather than by a jury.

Manning faces possible life imprisonment if he is convicted of “aiding the enemy” under the Espionage Act. He faces 22 separate charges for allegedly accessing classified information while stationed in Baghdad in 2009-2010.

Many of the files Manning is accused of leaking document war crimes by the US military, most notably a video published by WikiLeaks under the title “Collateral Murder” that captures a 2007 US helicopter attack on Iraqi civilians that left 12 dead, including children and two Reuters journalists. The military had characterized all of the dead as “enemies killed in action.” Other documents from Iraq showed tens of thousands of previously unreported civilian deaths and a formal military policy of covering up torture, rape and murder.

Tuesday’s proceedings focused on the testimony of commanders at Quantico. Wednesday will center on the testimony of behavioral health specialists at the brig.

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Seifeldin Fawzy

Protests in downtown Cairo on November 23rd. (Image
originally posted to flickr by Jonathan Rashad.)

If allowed to stand, the decree’s “unprecedented assault on judicial independence” would result in inviolable rights that would render any hints of democracy in Egypt meaningless. Crucially, it would also mean that there would be no channel to challenge Morsi and the Islamist-dominated constituent assembly and shura council.

Through the release of a controversial set of executive decrees, President Mohamed Morsi has granted himself unheralded powers—powers normally reserved for dictators, not democratic leaders. The raft of decrees effectively renders him as “above the law,” meaning that the jurisdiction of Egypt’s courts no longer applies to the Egyptian president, or any of his Islamist-controlled executive bodies—an unprecedented move that not even Hosni Mubarak himself dared to employ.

The promises of democracy, social justice, and transparency in government remain as out of reach right now as they were during the Mubarak era. Egypt’s president holds executive powers and legislative powers (which he usurped based on the dissolution of Parliament last June), and is no longer checked by any judicial authority. Thus any hope of a system of “checks and balances” is now in tatters. Morsi claimed in his speech on Friday that he does not seek to monopolize power. Yet his recent actions seem to suggest otherwise.

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Ismail Salami

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was bitterly right when he said US President Barack Obama “seems to be a nice man, and that is precisely the problem” and aptly described him as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”.

Under the pretext of combating terrorism, Obama has followed in the footsteps of former President George Bush and even intensified the killer drone attacks in different parts of the world, a move which has terminated in the unfortunate deaths of multitudes of innocent people. President Obama argues that the drone strikes are focused efforts to exterminate people who are on a list of active terrorists and that they have not caused huge human losses.

Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who represents families of civilians killed in US killer drone strikes, says, "Either President Obama is lying to the nation, or he is too naive, to believe on the reports which CIA is presenting to [him]." In a similar strain, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK has said:

"So many people who spoke out against George [W.] Bush’s extraordinary rendition and Guantánamo and indefinite detention have been very quiet when it comes to the Obama administration, who is not putting people in those same kind of conditions, instead is just taking them out and killing them. So we need to make people speak up and say that when Obama says this [program] is on a tight leash, this is not true, this is a lie."

Only in Pakistan, Obama has authorized over 300 drone attacks and has killed innocent civilians. A new study by Stanford Law School and New York University's School of Law shows that the killer “drone strikes in Pakistan have killed far more people than the United States has acknowledged, have traumatized innocent residents and largely been ineffective.” Besides, the study calls for a re-evaluation of the practice, saying the number of "high-level" targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low - about 2%. The report says Washington is misrepresenting drone strikes as "a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer," saying that in reality, "there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians."

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Mike Adams

In reviewing all the breaking news over the last few months and looking for the "big picture" of where America is headed, one pattern has emerged with striking regularity: America has quietly become less free in many ways than nations like Cuba, China and even Venezuela.

This is especially true in California, where "justice" has become a joke, and the power of the state is unleashed in personal vendettas against innocent citizens who have done absolutely nothing wrong other than refuse to bow down to state-run tyranny.

In California, the most freedom-crushing region of America, a man was recently thrown in jail for four days for photographing police. Photographing or video recording police is not a crime if done in a manner that does not directly impede their actions. But California police simply don't "like" being photographed, so they throw people in jail, without charge, and let them rot in California's third-world prisons for a few days as a form of retaliation.

In another case, California's raw milk man James Stewart has just been released from jail after being forced to sign a plea deal with L.A. County which accused him of the heinous crime of distributing unpasteurized milk. His punishment? Nearly four months in jail, being treated as a terrorist and denied nutrition to the point where he emerged looking like a Nazi war camp prisoner. The state then slapped on two felony charges, five years of probation, and a $300,000+ fine that the man has no way to pay because California raided his business at gunpoint, stole all his cash and then destroyed all the inventory of his business, including over $50,000 in fresh food.

This was all done, remember, for the "crime" of running a members-only club where people could pick up farm-fresh milk, eggs, cheese, melons and other better-than-organic foods. This is the new California, where the government literally destroys your business, your inventory, your livelihood, your freedom and even your health.

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Eric Peters

The particulars don’t matter. The principle is everything.

Here’s How it Will be Done…Incrementalism has proved depressingly effective as a tool for getting most people to quietly surrender their rights piecemeal. For gradually habituating them to an ever-diminishing circle of liberty. When the circle finally closes and their rights no longer exist at all, they hardly notice – because by that time, most of their rights have already been taken. The final surrender is met with a shrug rather than a scream of outrage.

Think how Americans have been habituated to arbitrary search and seizure. Something like the TSA would simply not have been tolerated if it came out of the blue sky circa 1980. And no, the terrr attacks of nineleven did not “change everything.” Getting people to accept “sobriety checkpoints” beginning around 1980 changed everything. Accept that – and something like Gate Rape is inevitable.

The same process works just as well when it comes to dismantling due process – and removing limits on what the government may not do to us. We didn’t get to legal strip searches for jaywalking or littering in one fell swoop. Nor rendition, torture as policy – and presidential kill lists. It is a matter of getting them – getting us – to tolerate “A” so that “B” will be accepted in turn. This is how the citizens of the United States will be disarmed.

No sudden, mass ban or attempt at confiscation – because that would probably lead to open violence on a large scale and they – people like Dear Leader Obama and his Vyshinsky, AG Eric Holder, know this.

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Stephen Lendman

Decades of liberating struggle will end. Palestine will again be free. One day. When, who knows.

He admitted it. He's not finished. He has lots more killing and destruction to do. He "will not hesitate to do what is necessary to defend our people," he said. In other words, he'll ignore memorandum of understanding ceasefire terms, maintain Gaza's siege, manufacture pretexts to eliminate Israeli enemies, and kill Palestinian civilians he calls threats.

On November 25, Mossad-connected DEBKAfile (DF) headlined "Middle East in high suspense for Gaza operation sequels."

America's beefing up its regional presence. Washington also approved Patriot missiles for Turkey's Syrian border. US military crews will man them.

Russian Institute for Oriental Studies expert, Vladimir Kudelev, said deploying them means "no-fly zone" protection. Imposing it circumvents Security Council authority. Doing so is an act of war.

Washington-led NATO incrementally inches closer to full-scale involvement. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov fears militarizing the Turkish/Syrian border may spin things out of control. Libya 2.0 looms.

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Patrick Martin

According to a report published Sunday on the front page of the New York Times, the Obama administration is pushing ahead with plans to establish a more systematic and regular program of using unmanned drones to kill people selected by the White House for death.

The newspaper estimated that US drone strikes have killed more than 2,500 people—a death toll approximating the number killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The article was written by Scott Shane, the same reporter who was the conduit for administration propaganda last May, glorifying drone missiles as a great advance in the “war on terror” and detailing Obama’s personal role in the approval of targets.

Like the earlier report, Sunday’s article describes the assassination program in entirely uncritical terms, raising questions only over the political motivation of the decision to “develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones.” This effort was supposedly spurred by concern that Republican Mitt Romney might win the presidential election and inherit an open-ended drone missile program that he would then be able to define as he pleased.

The Times article claims that Obama and his top aides “are still debating whether remote-control killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling territory.”

The language is remarkable, since what is being discussed is nothing less than acts of political murder, and the two sides in the official “debate” are wrangling, like a Mafia council of war, over who should be targeted for “hits” and how to do it. The language used to describe various “options” in relation to the drone killings marks a further debasement in American political discourse.

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William T. Hathaway

From the book
RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War
by William T. Hathaway

Merna al-Marjan is a young Iraqi who is currently in Germany studying European history. We talked in her dormitory room, a spartan but functional cubicle in a building that embodies a hopeful change in European history: it was constructed in the nineteenth century as an army barracks but now houses university students. That's progress.

On Merna's small table sat a pot of peppermint tea and a plate of baklava. She's short and plump with smooth skin the color of clover honey and deep anthracite eyes; she was wearing a long skirt of light cotton, a long-sleeved blouse, and a green paisley headscarf.

Hathaway: "Headscarves have become a controversial item of clothing here in Germany."

Al-Marjan: "Yes, you can't teach in the schools if you wear one. It's OK for a teacher to wear a Christian crucifix but not a Muslim headscarf. I didn't wear a hijab in Iraq, but I've started doing it here to show solidarity. It's ridiculous to ban an article of clothing, a simple piece of cloth. What sort of freedom is that?

"The West has such a distorted view of Arab women. Well, of men too, but since I'm a woman, I notice that more.

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Gilad Atzmon

In the past week, the people of Gaza have been subject to some serious Israeli attacks. Some Hamas leaders and militants have been murdered and many more Palestinians - innocent civilians, babies, kids women and elders – have lost their live. Yet, Gaza is celebrating with the Hamas leadership never more popular.

So here is an interesting anecdote that deserves our attention. During the recent clashes Gazan militants launched more than 1500 rockets at Israel. These rockets caused rather limited damage with more no than six Israeli fatalities. Militarily at least, this is far from a great achievement. And yet the Gazans are celebrating. Would Israelis be happy to learn that 1500 of their rockets had had such limited effect? Would any western army accept such a result at such a cost? The answer is a categorical NO. But the Palestinians are ecstatic, why, because they know they have won the battle and are now set to win the war. They won the battle, not because they killed six Israelis – actually they would have won it without hitting one single Israeli. They won it because they managed to deliver a message to Israel, world Jewry and the whole world.

For many years I have argued that the Palestinian war of the rockets should be seen as sending a message: Israelis! You are on stolen land! You took our houses, villages, cities, fields and orchards. You pushed us into the desert. You surrounded us with barbed wire. You starve us and you kill us simply to suit your political ambitions. So this rocket is a message to you all. Think about us and then look at yourself in the mirror. Enough is enough!’

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Stephen Lendman

Righteous Condemnation of Israeli Mass Murder

Media scoundrels feature pro-Israeli supporters. Doing so makes them complicit with Israeli crimes. Charles Krauthammer is one of the worst. He's an embarrassment to legitimate journalism. His latest Washington Post op-ed headlines "Why was there war in Gaza?" His commentary shows appalling ignorance, support for Israeli lawlessness, racist hate, and contempt for besieged Gazans.

"Israel wanted nothing more than to live in peace with this independent Palestinian entity," he claimed. "After all, the world had incessantly demanded that Israel give up land for peace." "It gave the land. It got no peace."

In 2005, Israel disengaged from Gaza. It did so to get Jews out of harm's way. Palestinian West Bank land was stolen to accommodate them. War was planned with no timeline. Cast Lead followed. Now Operation Pillar of Cloud. More coming. Stay tuned. Occupation of Gaza doesn't exist, claims Krauthhammer.

Explain it to 1.7 million oppressed Palestinians. They're isolated in the world's largest open-air concentration camp. Its harshness replicates Nazi-enforced Warsaw ghetto conditions. Humanitarian crisis conditions persist. Borders are closed. No one gets in or out without hard to get permit permission. Israel bombs, invades, and commits other atrocities at will. It maintains total control. Palestinians have no say whatever. "Israel has once again succeeded in defending itself," claims Krauthhammer. Irresponsibly he called months-ago planned naked aggression self-defense.

Rabbi Avichai Ronsky calls himself a man of God. He's also a former chief Israeli military rabbi. He's more concerned about militarism than Judaic doctrine. His comments show it. Ending conflict was "a great mistake and a disappointment," he said. Killing and injuring Palestinians should have continued.

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John Pilger

"The Israeli state has successfully intimidated the BBC into pre-
senting the theft of Palestinian land and the caging, torturing and
killing of its people as an intractable "conflict" between equals."

Understanding the BBC as a pre-eminent state propagandist and censor by omission - more often than not in tune with its right-wing enemies - is on no public agenda and it ought to be.

In Peter Watkins' remarkable BBC film, The War Game, which foresaw the aftermath of an attack on London with a one-megaton nuclear bomb, the narrator says: "On almost the entire subject of thermo-clear weapons, there is now practically total silence in the press, official publications and on TV. Is there hope to be found in this silence?"

The truth of this statement was equal to its irony. On 24 November, 1965, the BBC banned The War Game as "too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting". This was false. The real reason was spelt out by the chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, Lord Normanbrook, in a secret letter to the Secretary to the Cabinet, Sir Burke Trend.

"[The War Game] is not designed as propaganda," he wrote, "it is intended as a purely factual statement and is based on careful research into official material... But the showing of the film on television might have a significant effect on public attitudes towards the policy of the nuclear deterrent." Following a screening attended by senior Whitehall officials, the film was banned because it told an intolerable truth. Sixteen years later, the then BBC director-general, Sir Ian Trethowan, renewed the ban, saying that he feared for the film's effect on people of "limited mental intelligence". Watkins' brilliant work was eventually shown in 1985 to a late-night minority audience. It was introduced by Ludovic Kennedy who repeated the official lie.

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Jean Shaoul and Chris Marsden

The ceasefire that brought to an end Israel’s eight-day blitzkrieg against Gaza is already under strain, after Israeli forces killed a Palestinian man on the border.

Anwar Qdeih, 23, was shot through the head as he tried to place a Hamas flag on the fence near Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. Around 20 other Palestinians were wounded. Israel claimed to be responding to “violent activity” by 300 protesters.

The agreement to end hostilities was pressed on Israel because of Washington’s concern that a threatened ground invasion would endanger its broader interests in the region, particularly the campaign against Syria and plans for war against Iran.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has threatened, “We are also prepared for the possibility that the ceasefire will not be upheld, and we will know how to act if need be.”

Netanyahu has come under attack from right-wing forces for his failure to send thousands of ground troops into Gaza. He was accordingly compelled to explain the political calculations underlying both “Operation Pillar of Defence” and its cessation.

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James Petras

President Obama and General David Petraeus in better days

The purge of General Petraeus and humiliation of General Allen is a victory for the civilian militarists who are unconditional supporters of Israel and therefore oppose any opening to ‘moderate’ Islamist regimes. They want a long-term and expanded US military presence in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Introduction: The headline stories claim that CIA Director General David Petraeus resigned as head of the CIA because of an adulterous relation with his young biographer and that General John Allen, Supreme Commander of US troops in Afghanistan, was under investigation and his promotion to top commander of US troops in Europe was on hold, because, we are told, of his ‘inappropriate’ comments in the exchange of e-mails with a civilian female friend.

We are told that a ‘hard-charging’ local FBI agent, Frederick Humphries, Jr., had uncovered amorous e-mails sent by General Petraeus to his girlfriend-biographer in the course of investigating a complaint of ‘cyber-stalking’. Out of concern that the General’s ‘adulterous behavior’ posed a risk to US national security, Florida-based FBI Agent Humphries handed the evidence over to one of Washington, DC’s most powerful Republican, Congressman Eric Cantor, who in turn passed them on to the Director of the FBI… leading to Petraeus resignation.

In other words, we are asked to believe that a single, low-ranking, zealous FBI agent has toppled the careers of two top US Generals: one in charge of the principle global intelligence agency, the CIA, and the other in command of the US and allied combat forces in the principle theater of military engagement – on the basis of infidelity and flirtatious banter! - Nothing could be more far-fetched simply on prima facie evidence.

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Johannes Stern

On Thursday evening Egypt’s Islamist president, Mohamed Mursi, issued a new constitutional declaration claiming vast new executive powers. This comes amid a broader political crisis in Egypt, after Israel’s brutal attack on Gaza and amid the ongoing US proxy war for regime change in Syria.

The main target of the declaration is working class opposition to Mursi and the ruling Muslim Brotherhood (MB). In Article VI Mursi claims extraordinary powers, declaring that, “the president is authorized to take any measures he sees fit in order to preserve and safeguard the revolution, national unity or national security.”

Mursi also re-asserts the powers he took from the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) junta in a political coup in August, also granting himself further powers over the ongoing formulation of Egypt’s constitution.

Article II of his declaration states that all “previous constitutional declarations, laws, and decrees made by the president since he took office on 30 June 2012, until the constitution is approved and a new People’s Assembly [lower house of parliament] is elected are final and binding and cannot be appealed by any way or to any entity.”

Mursi’s declaration explicitly targets rival sections of the Egyptian state. Those are more secular-oriented bureaucrats tied to the army and the old Mubarak regime. The declaration states that the January 25 Revolution had tasked the president to “root out the remnants of the old regime from Egypt’s state institution.”

Mursi thus cynically evokes the mass uprising against former dictator Hosni Mubarak, which the MB initially opposed, to replace the Mubarak-era figures with right-wing MB cadres.

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