Mike Whitney

Schadenfreude. The pleasure derived from watching someone else suffer. It’s human natur, and it’s what’s what’s driving the Goldman pile-on. SEC Enforcement director Robert Khuzami had barely uttered his statement on Friday before the the yelps of joy arose from every corner of the country. “Fraud!” What a happy noise. Revenge is sweet. Suddenly the prospect of subpoenas, indictments, and long prison sentences didn’t seem so remote. But don’t get your hopes up. Goldman was picked for a reason, and that reason has nothing to do with its shady business transactions. It’s politics.

Don’t get me wrong; Goldman is guilty as hell. They slapped together a Kamikaze CDO that was designed to blow up, and then they schluffed it off on their clients without filling them in on the details. It’s called “withholding material information”, and its no-no. It’s like wrapping smelly fish in yesterday’s paper and pawning it off as fresh-caught Blackmouth. You can’t do that. According to former regulator William Black, “Goldman did not just withhold information, they told people, ‘Hey, the investment decisions are being made by experts who would only choose good quality stuff’, when. in fact, the stuff that was put in was chosen because it was considered the most likely to suffer near-term downgrades.”

So Goldman was minting its own roadside bombs and getting input from notorious hedge fund short-seller, John Paulson, who planned to bet against the same CDO. But what’s most shocking, is that Goldman was caught schtuping its own clients just to make a buck. That’s going to haunt them for a very long time. Trust is important, even on Wall Street. Goldman’s reputation is shot.

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Debbie Menon

Debbie Menon argues that Washington’s support for Israel is tragic, immoral and extremely damaging to Americans given that US “congressional representatives continue to put Israel’s interests before the interests of Americans”.

In a recent article in the journal Foreign Policy entitled “Petraeus wasn’t the first”, Mark Perry describes succinctly the opposition to US support for Israel, the rationale for this support and how American publishers cover it up.

The article is extremely valuable reading, recommends Alison Weir, the executive director of the website If Americans Knew. “It corrects misconceptions that so many Americans have on the causation of US support for Israel, including even some who are otherwise well informed on Palestine,” she asserts.

Mark Perry is correct in all respects. He quotes Joe Hoar, who remind him that it’s all old history. “What’s the news here? Hasn’t this been said before?” and hasn’t it all been done before?

Indeed, have humans ever learned from history? I think it says something about the nature of our species when you reflect that Albert Einstein once said that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Key elements of the US government have always opposed the concept of a Zionist Israel, ever since the state and defence departments advised President Harry Truman not to sign up to the Zionist project, which he nevertheless did but with reservations, qualifications and conditions that were immediately ignored.

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David Lindorff

Two days ago, the Wall Street Journal had a lead story about Israeli planning to possibly “go it alone” in an attack on Iran if the US were not to “succeed” in its diplomatic efforts to get Iran to “stop” its alleged attempts to develop a nuclear weapon capability.

Aside from the fact that there is no hard evidence that Iran is trying to make a nuclear bomb or even to refine uranium to obtain nuclear-grade material, the paper ignored one crucial point: Israel cannot “go it alone” in any strike on Iran, since its key weapons--American fighter-bombers--are supplied to it, and kept flying, thanks to the equipment and spare parts provided by the United States. Indeed the entire Israeli military machine is largely financed and armed by the US.

No Israeli military effort can go forward without the full backing of the US, and to say otherwise is to simply perpetrate a fraud on the American public, implying that Israel is an independent actor on the world stage. It is not.

Another example of media warmongering came in an interview by Terri Gross on her program “Fresh Air,” which I believe is the most widely syndicated and popular program on National Public Radio, produced here in Philadelphia at the studios of NPR affiliate WHYY. Listening to “Fresh Air” this week, which featured an interview with New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins, a generally excellent reporter who distinguished himself for his reporting on the Iraq War, and particularly on the brutal US assault on the city of Fallujah, I heard Filkins refer casually to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as “America’s arch-enemy.”

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David Swanson

Franz Kafka's book "The Trial" begins "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." There follow many thousands of words describing the ordeal of someone denied the right to know the charges against him, to face his accusers, to be given a fair and speedy trial by a jury of his peers, and so forth. We have read thousands of stories of such "Kafkan" experiences since the advent of the Global War of Terror. But we need a different kind of story now.

What if the beginning read like this: "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was killed one fine morning." With that kind of beginning, there can be no second sentence, unless the story jumps backward in time. With assassinations and drone strikes, night raids, and check point shootings replacing disappearances, imprisonments, renditions, and torture as tools of the imperial trade, we need stories that begin a lot earlier and end the moment the abuse starts. We need people's childhoods, adolescences, friends, loved-ones, hobbies, and careers. We need to know what they were doing that week, the previous evening, and the moments before they were annihilated. We need to know their last words, the last letter they wrote, the last person they kissed, the last child they cared for (or were they a child?). We need to understand who they were as that obvious and tautological but so elusive and all-decisive thing: human beings, fellow creatures whom we could imagine as parts of our own lives. We need to be able to picture that person in the instant that the explosion rips their flesh apart.

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Stephen Lendman

For many years, Israel's open secret is that it's one of eight known nuclear powers, including America and Russia with about 97% of the world's arsenal according to Helen Caldicott in her book "Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer." The others are Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel - North Korea a declared but unverified one.

In her January 20, 2009 Canadian Medical Association Journal article titled, "Obama and the opportunity to eliminate nuclear weapons" Caldicott wrote:

"The Cold War is over, but the threat of nuclear war is not. Little progress has been made since 1989 when the Berlin Wall collapsed. In fact, the threat of nuclear annihilation has escalated. In 1972, when 5 nuclear nations....signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, they agreed to rapidly disarm. They have done the opposite," resulting in a greater than ever threat, the Pentagon's new Nuclear Posture Review and US-Russia deal doing nothing to reverse it. (See Obama's Brave Nuke World.)

In his 1991 book, "The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and America Foreign Policy," Seymour Hersh discussed its strategy to launch a massive nuclear counterattack if it felt its existence threatened, the stark message being the next regional war may be nuclear.

In his 1997 book, "Open Secrets: Israeli Nuclear and Foreign Policies," Israel Shahak said that, helped by the Israeli Lobby (and Christian Zionists), "Israel (is) clearly prepar(ing) itself to seek overtly a hegemony over the entire Middle East (with no) hesitati(on) to use for the purpose all means available, including nuclear ones."

Shahak also explained that Israel regards "the launching of missiles (onto its territory) as 'nonconventional' regardless of whether they are equipped with explosives or poison gas." In turn, Israel's nuclear doctrine dictates that a "nonconventional" attack requires one in response, meaning a nuclear one, the foundation of its grand strategy, according to Shahak.

According to Hebrew University's Professor of Military History Martin Van Creveld, "We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you (it) will happen before Israel goes under."

Israel maintains a double standard. It won't let another Middle East state acquire nuclear weapons, but will never give up its own or the right to use them preemptively.

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Jeremy Scahill

As the Obama Administration continues the military privatization
agenda, a CIA-connected firm and an Israeli-run company named
Instinctive Shooting International are looking to cash in

The Obama administration has continued the Bush-era reliance on private contractors to sustain the US occupation of Iraq and the US operations in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, Obama has surpassed Bush’s reliance on contractors with current contractor levels surpassing 100,000 Defense Department contractors deployed. In Iraq, Obama has maintained the long-standing ratio of one contractor to every US soldier.

General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan/Pakistan, said recently that he believes the US has “created in ourselves a dependency on contractors that is greater than it ought to be.” He added: “I think it doesn’t save money. I actually think it would be better to reduce the number of contractors involved, increase the number of military if necessary.”

Despite such proclamations, the pattern of dependence on contractors is continuing unabated—and not just within the Department of Defense.

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Stephen Lendman

A July 2008 Fact Sheet Series titled, "Behind the Bars: Palestinian Women in Israeli Prisons" was jointly prepared by the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, the Palestinian Counseling Center (PCC), and Mandela Institute. Along with background information, it covered Israel's obligations under international law, prison conditions where they're held, medical neglect, and their educational rights restricted or denied.

Relevant International Laws Protecting Prisoners and Civilians in Times of Conflict, Including Women

The 1949 Third Geneva Convention applies to prisoners of war, replacing the 1929 Prisoners of War Convention. It broadened the categories of persons entitled to prisoner of war status and precisely defined the conditions and places of their captivity - especially with regard to allowed labor, financial resources, required treatment, and rules of judicial proceedings.

It specifically prohibited acts of:

-- "Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
-- Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;" and
-- judicial guarantees "recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."

The 1955 UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners requires "no discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status."

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Joshua Kors

On Honor: To the people of our Nation, particularly our elected officials and VA bureaucrats: We, your Military Veterans, ask that you honor neither our service nor our sacrifice. We ask only that you honor your promise to us as we have honored ours to you. ~ Disposable Warriors

The mortar shell that wrecked Chuck Luther's life exploded at the base of the guard tower. Luther heard the brief whistling, followed by a flash of fire, a plume of smoke and a deafening bang that shook the tower and threw him to the floor. The Army sergeant's head slammed against the concrete, and he lay there in the Iraqi heat, his nose leaking clear fluid.

"I remember laying there in a daze, looking around, trying to figure out where I was at," he says. "I was nauseous. My teeth hurt. My shoulder hurt. And my right ear was killing me." Luther picked himself up and finished his shift, then took some ibuprofen to dull the pain. The sergeant was seven months into his deployment at Camp Taji, in the volatile Sunni Triangle, twenty miles north of Baghdad. He was determined, he says, to complete his mission. But the short, muscular frame that had guided him to twenty-two honors--including three Army Achievement Medals and a Combat Action Badge--was basically broken. The shoulder pain persisted, and the hearing in his right ear, which evaporated on impact, never returned, replaced by the maddening hum of tinnitus.

Then came the headaches. "They'd start with a speckling in the corner of my vision, then grow worse and worse until finally the right eye would just shut down and go blank," he says. "The left one felt like someone was stabbing me over and over in the eye."

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Chris Floyd

Arthur Silber is back, with piercing insights that rip the veil which even self-proclaimed dissenters still draw across the blood-soaked reality of what Silber aptly calls the "Death State" that has long "wrapped the world in flames" (to quote the preferred method of resolving diplomatic conflicts famously voiced by Abe Lincoln's secretary of state) from its mephitic base on the Potomac.

As always with Silber, you must read the whole piece (and follow the links) to get the full force of the argument, which is nuanced, multifarious and deeply considered, but here is just the briefest excerpt to send you on your way:

I repeat a few words I first wrote at the beginning of 2009...:

For more than a hundred years, the foreign policy of the United States government has been directed to the establishment and maintenance of global dominance. To this end, violence, overthrow, conquest and murder have been utilized as required ... More and more, oppression and brutalization have become the bywords of domestic policy as well. Today, the United States as a political entity is a corporatist-authoritarian-militarist monstrosity: its major products are suffering, torture, barbarism and death on a huge scale.

I repeat the fundamental point to make certain there is no misunderstanding as to where I stand on this question: as a political entity, the United States is an endlessly destructive monstrosity. The overwhelming majority of people -- including, I regret to say, even many of those who are severely critical of the United States government -- fail to understand this point in anything close to the thorough and consistent manner required. This failure is the result of an earlier one: an inability to grasp fully what it means to revere the sacred value of a single human life.

There is more, much more in the original post -- "An Evil Monstrosity: Thoughts on the Death State"; excerpting it actually does it an injustice. So go there now and read it.

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Thomas Elholm, Juridisk Institut, Syddansk Universitet
(Innsendt av Patrick Mac Manus / Foreningen Oprør )

Er de senere års nye regler unødigt vidtgående indgreb i borgernes retsstilling?

Virkning af sortlistning

En dag i 2002 opdagede Hr. Sison pludselig, at alle hans finansielle midler var blevet indefrosset. Han opdagede det ved, at købmandsregningen ikke var blevet betalt som normalt via banken. Banken forklarede, at staten havde krævet alle hans finansielle midler indefrosset pga. mistanke om forbindelse til terrorisme. Sison var derfor frataget enhver råderet over sine bankkonti og alle øvrige finansielle midler, inklusive den månedlige socialhjælp på ca. 200 euro. Senere blev han – ligeledes på grund af sortlistningen – bedt om at fraflytte lejligheden, som han havde fået tildelt af kommunen. Familien fik dog lov til at blive.

Sidenhen har Sison flere gange fået EF-domstolenes ord for, at sortlistningen af ham strider mod grundlæggende retsgarantier, senest ved dom af 30. september 2009 (sag T-341/07). I dag – 7 år efter sortlistningen – har Sison stadig ikke fået en tilstrækkelig begrundelse for, hvorfor han optræder på listen. Retten i Første Instans finder ikke, at de beviser, som ligger til grund for sortlistningen, knytter Sison til terror. Derfor er det heller ikke godtgjort, at EU-rettens betingelser for at sortliste Sison, er opfyldt.

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Stephen M. Walt

Back when I started writing this blog, I More hype about warned that the idea of preventive war against Iran wasn't going to go away just because Barack Obama was president. The topic got another little burst of oxygen over the past few days, in response to what seems to have been an over-hyped memorandum from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and some remarks by the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, following a speech at Columbia University. In particular, Mullen noted that military action against Iran could "go a long way" toward delaying Iran's acquisition of a weapons capability, though he also noted this could only be a "last resort" and made it clear it was not an option he favored.

One of the more remarkable features about the endless drumbeat of alarm about Iran is that it pays virtually no attention to Iran's actual capabilities, and rests on all sorts of worst case assumptions about Iranian behavior. Consider the following facts, most of them courtesy of the 2010 edition of The Military Balance, published annually by the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies in London:

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Stephen Lendman

On May 14, 2008, New York Times writer Lynnley Browning headlined, "Ex-Banker from UBS Is Indicted in Tax Case," saying:

"The one-count conspiracy indictment, unsealed in federal court, accuses the former banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, of helping (a wealthy American real estate developer) evade taxes on $200 million held in bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein."

According to the indictment, "fictitious trusts and bogus corporations (were created) to conceal the ownership and control of offshore assets. They also advised clients to destroy bank records and helped them file false tax returns...."

National Whistleblowers Center (NWC) covers his case on whistleblowers.org, saying:

"Bradley Birkenfeld commenced serving a three-year and four-month sentence in federal prison on January 8, 2010, a direct result of blowing the whistle on one of the largest tax fraud schemes in US history."

On April 15, he filed an appeal for clemency.

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Patrick Martin

Henry Kissinger (left) and Augusto Pinochet (center)

Documents released last week by the National Security Archive, which has played a valuable role in uncovering evidence of the crimes of American imperialism in Latin America, provide new details on the role of top US officials in facilitating the assassination of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier.

These documents add to the overwhelming case for the prosecution of then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger, then-CIA director George H. W. Bush and other top officials for their role in these and other murders perpetrated by military juntas allied with and backed by the US government.

The September 21, 1976 murder of Letelier and an American aide, Ronni Moffitt, was the most spectacular act of international terrorism on US soil up to that time. The two were killed, and Moffitt’s husband Michael wounded, when a bomb detonated underneath their car as they rounded Sheridan Circle in northwest Washington D.C., barely a mile from the White House.

Letelier, who had served as foreign minister and then defense minister in the reformist government of Salvador Allende, was arrested and tortured in the September 11, 1973 military coup lead by General Augusto Pinochet. He was eventually sent into exile, but became a thorn in the side of the Chilean junta because of his political activities abroad, exposing the savagery of the junta’s repression and campaigning for an international boycott.

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Jay Barr

This is the reality. This what the 76 senators are supporting.

The Boxer-Isakson "Israel Support Letter" [.pdf] addressed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and currently signed by 76 senators [.pdf] answers a question no one needed to ask: Does the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have the support of the United States Senate? However, unlike the proverbial napkin former AIPAC bigwig Steven Rosen boasted that he could have signed by 70 senators within 24 hours, this particular piece of paper contains a slew of Likud talking points, few of which are supported by reality. Some read an implicit rebuke of the Obama administration in the letter for the administration’s alleged spat with Israel, though despite the new conventional wisdom that there’s a major schism between the two, it would be hard to point to on-the-record words or actions taken by the Obama administration that translate into substantive criticism of Israeli policies.

The letter states, "Despite your [Clinton's] best efforts, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have been frozen for over a year." If Clinton were truly making her best efforts to restart the peace process, she would wield the considerable U.S. leverage of aid to tiny Israel in order to rein in their increasingly extreme activities that violate even their own lukewarm prior commitments. One commitment, the so-called settlement freeze, involves the seemingly self-evident notion that if you are serious about good-faith negotiations over borders you do not continue to expand your territory into the ever shrinking piece that is well-established as belonging to the other side. Instead, Clinton bragged at her recent speech to AIPAC about the increase in U.S. aid to Israel in 2010 and the planned increase for 2011.

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Marc W. Herold

A child killed in recent airstrikes, western Afghanistan

“The American public is conditionally tolerant of [military] casualties and consistently indifferent to collateral damage.” ~Dr. Karl P. Mueller, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base

"General McChrystal’s data provided an opportunity to reveal Pentagon lying (or incompetence) to all, but only the libertarians rose to the occasion. The mainstream U.S media, Obama cultists, and much of the U.S antiwar movement persist in blithely quoting UNAMA and consuming Pentagon and embedded “patriotic” U.S reporters’ characterizations of America’s War in Afghanistan."

The Politics of Counting Dead Afghan Civilians: Responses by the Libertarian Right and Obama Liberals to McChrystal’s Numbers.

The ever-so-faithful stenographer of Pentagon truths, USA Today, printed numbers put forth by General McChrystal on Afghan civilians who perished at the hands of NATO.[1] The article headlined “NATO Strikes Killing More Afghan Civilians,” noted that such deaths rose from 29 during the first three months of 2009, to 72 during 2010.

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Stephen Lendman

The status applies to all Wall Street giants, none, however, the equal of Goldman, the Grand Master. Like the fabled comic book Superman hero, it's:

-- faster than its competitors, thanks to its proprietary software ability to front run markets (illegal, but no matter);
-- more powerful than the government it controls; and
-- able to leap past competitors, given its special status.

Founded in 1869, GS calls itself "a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm that provides a wide range of services worldwide."

Since going public in 1999, the same year Glass-Steagall ended letting banks, insurers and securities companies combine, GS became a giant hedge fund trading against the advice given clients with the full faith and blessing of Washington - the same thing other Street giants did and profited handsomely.

In his April 17 article headlined, "Goldman Sachs Vampire Squid Gets Handcuffed," L. Randall Wray noted SEC laxity for years, "managing to sleep through every bubble and bust in recent memory," and saying Goldman acts above the law "since it took over Washington during the Clinton years." Their criminal behavior is nothing new. It's their established business model, the reason it's been immersed in nearly all financial scandals since the 19th century.

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Christopher King

Christopher King considers the evidence which indicate that murder of civilians and state-sponsored terrorism are tools of US policy in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and argues that unless Britain leaves Afghanistan immediately, it will not recover morally or economically and will not be on the path to control its destiny.

You have probably seen the Wikileaks collateral murder video of an American helicopter gunship crew killing 12 Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, the details of which had been concealed by the Pentagon. It’s something that everyone should see, particularly those British politicians who voted for the Iraq war and are now, before an election, attempting to persuade us that they are fit to govern our country.

Gordon Brown in particular is trading our soldiers’ lives for the sort of multi-million dollar payoff that Tony Blair got by backing America’s adventures in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like most of our Members of Parliament, he also voted to invade Iraq and enthusiastically supported Barack Obama in Afghanistan. What our politicians call “re-engaging” with the public, something they only attempt at election time, is futile because we know them to be self-serving liars without morality. Incompetent too, but what else would one expect? Enough of them for the moment.

We should note that the occasional cross-border US drone attack into Pakistan has gradually escalated to regular attacks, and a respectable-sized local war, US ground involvement and a CIA presence in Pakistan. Surely the Pakistanis have wondered what the US plans are for their country and nuclear stockpile?

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Stephen Lendman

In June 2009, Defence for Children International (DCI)/Palestine Section published a report titled, "Palestine Child Prisoners: The systematic and institutionalized ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children by Israeli authorities."

DCI/Palestine "is a national section of the international non-government child rights organisation and movement (dedicated) to promoting and protecting the rights of Palestinian children," according to international law principles.

Each year, about 700 West Bank children, under 18, are arrested, detained, interrogated, and prosecuted in Israeli military courts, in total about 6,500 since 2000. DCI lawyers represent 30 - 40% of them. The report focuses on their torture and abuse in custody.

Since the 1967 occupation, an estimated 700,000 Palestinian men, women, and children passed through Israel's judicial system, over 150,000 tried in military courts from 1990 - 2006, the remainder handled through plea bargains for lighter sentences. On average, over 9,000 Palestinians a year are affected, including 700 children treated the same as adults.

For nearly 43 years, Israeli military justice operated "almost completely devoid of international scrutiny," giving authorities license to violate human rights and humanitarian law with impunity. As a result, due process and judicial fairness don't apply under a system denying them.

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Ronald Aronson

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus

The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus first met in June 1943, at the opening of Sartre's play The Flies. When Sartre was standing in the lobby, according to Simone de Beauvoir, "a dark-skinned young man came up and introduced himself: it was Albert Camus." His novel The Stranger, published a year earlier, was a literary sensation, and his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus had appeared six months previously. The young man from Algiers was marooned in France by the war. While convalescing from an exacerbation of his chronic tuberculosis in Le Panelier, near Chambon, Camus had been cut off from his wife by the Allied conquest of French North Africa and the resulting German invasion of unoccupied France in November 1942. He wanted to meet the increasingly well-known novelist and philosopher—and now playwright—whose fiction he had reviewed years earlier and who had just published a long article on Camus's own books. It was a brief encounter. "I'm Camus," he said. Sartre immediately "found him a most likeable personality."

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Stephen Lendman

Terry Kupers is a practicing psychiatrist, an expert on long-term isolated prison confinement, author of numerous articles on the subject as well as his book titled, "Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars and What We Must Do About It." He's also a frequent expert witness in related cases, serves as a consultant, and is currently Institute Professor in the Graduate School of Psychology at Wright Institute, Berkeley, CA. More on his work below.

Social scientists have studied the effects for years, social psychologist Hans Toch coining the term "isolation panic" to describe symptoms he observed in men he interviewed, including panic, rage, a sense of total loss of control, emotional breakdown, regressive behavior, and self-mutiliation. He distinguished between difficult but tolerable incarceration and intolerable long-term isolation.

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Chris Floyd

Fallujah child victim. Attack on Fallujah by US troops, April 2004,
seven months before the war crimes committed by US military high
command in November 2004. (albasrah.net / thewe.cc)

The other day I was reading the New York Review of Books in a bookstore café. I saw a large ad in the bottom corner of a page; it began with this quote, in bold capitals:

"WHY IS IT A CRIME FOR ONE MAN TO MURDER ANOTHER, BUT NOT FOR A GOVERNMENT TO KILL MORE THAN A MILLION PEOPLE?"

My first reaction, before I read further, was a feeling of surprise that someone had articulated the case against the Iraq war so clearly – and had bought expensive space in the magazine to bring this unpunished, unrepented – indeed, unacknowledged – war crime to the national consciousness again.

A moment later, I saw that it was actually an ad for an exhibition in New York City about Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish exile and U.S. government advisor who first coined the term and developed the concept of "genocide." Under a picture of Lemkin's wartime government ID card, the ad goes on: "Before Raphael Lemkin, that kind of killing had no name. Today we know it as genocide."

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På Høyden
En diskusjon

[Denne diskusjonen begynte den 8.4.2010. Alle innleggene vil bli publisert her på den samme URL.]

25.5.2010
Klimaskepsis på tynn is
Helge Drange, Tor Eldevik, Tore Furevik og Eystein Jansen, Bjerknessenteret

Kvalheim og Sletten (K&S) har i det siste hyppig søkt til Bjerknessenteret for hjelp til å forstå sammenhengen mellom CO2 og global oppvarming (På Høyden 8.4, 19.4 og 7.5). De har tydeligvis ikke funnet våre svar (På Høyden 12.4 og 11.5) hensiktsmessige. I sitt siste innlegg har de derfor gått bort frå å spørre til selv å konkludere: Klimamodellene har for høy ”klimafølsomhet” (På Høyden 19.5).

Dette gjør de med henvisning til et kommende arbeid av Spencer & Braswell (2010). Som K&S burde kjenne til, også etter siste tiders brevveksling med Bjerknessenteret, er det en omfattende faglitteratur som viser det motsatte. K&S velger ikke å anerkjenne denne.

Overnevnte omgang med faglitteraturen følger samme praksis som leserinnlegget Hvorfor feiler klimamodellene? av Kvalheim i Teknisk Ukeblad 16.11.2009 (med påfølgende tilsvar fra Bjerknessenteret). I Kvalheims innlegg ble blant annet en studie av Lindzen & Choi (2009) brukt for å illustrere klimamodellenes svakheter. Allerede da Kvalheims innlegg ble publisert, var det allment kjent at det var metodiske svakheter ved Lindzen & Choi.

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Stephen Lendman

The Law Offices of Richard I. Fine & Associates (richardfinelaw.com) web site says he established the firm in 1974. His credentials include a Doctor of Law from the University of Chicago, a Ph.D in International Law from the London School of Economics, a Certificate from the Hague Academy of International Law, among his many other awards, including Lawyer of the Decades 1976 - 2006.

He's also been widely published in legal journals with regard to antitrust, comparative and international law. Fine's resume is long and impressive.

Before entering private practice, he "founded and was chief of the first municipal antitrust division in the United States, for the City of Los Angeles." He was also Special Counsel to the Government Efficiency Committee of the LA City Council, and a member of the US Department of Justice Antitrust Division.

In addition, he practiced law in London and with another firm before establishing his own. He was also Norway's Southern California Consul General.

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Socialistisk Information
Innsendt av Patrick Mac Manus/Foreningen Oprør

For et år siden blev firmaet Figthers+Lovers dømt. For nylig blev talsmanden for Foreningen Oprør dømt. Efter straffelovens bestemmelser om, at støtte til terrorister ikke er tilladt. Imens deltager Danmark i en krig i Afghanistan, under ledelse af amerikanerne, som blandt andet indebærer, at de udenlandske styrker samarbejder med grupper blandt afghanerne, der i andre sammenhænge ville blive betegnet som terrorister! Er De forvirret? Ikke underligt, for der arbejdes her med to standarder: én for folk, som vil afprøve grænserne for demokratiet og friheden, og en anden for, hvad en stat må gøre, når den udråber sig som repræsentant for demokratiet og friheden.

I øjeblikket forberedes en anden retssag, hvor terrorparagrafferne tages i anvendelse. En ung mand er sigtet for at have overvåget og registreret organiserede nazister.

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The Economist

Two compelling documentaries illuminate the dilemmas facing Africa’s dwindling white tribes. One is set in Zimbabwe, the other in Kenya. The Zimbabwean film, “Mugabe and the White African”, is the more straightforward and should be shown as widely as possible to help end one of Africa’s great tragedies: the ruin of one of the continent’s most successful countries and the moral bankruptcy of the governments of the nearby states (bar plucky Botswana) for failing to isolate and oust a vile dictator.

It shows how a brave film company, embedding itself with a beleaguered family of white farmers off and on for a year, can bring to life the horrors that have befallen an entire country. Like the large majority of the 5,000-odd white farmers who stayed on after Robert Mugabe became prime minister in 1980 and later president, Mike Campbell and his son-in-law Ben Freeth acquired their farm and the regulation government certificate showing that no black citizen also sought to buy the same farm, which then became Zimbabwe’s largest producer of mangoes and employed 500 locals. When a man with ministerial connections claimed the property for himself a few years ago, Messrs Campbell and Freeth refused to go, prompting a campaign of intimidation, arson and assault, including the beating up not just of the two farmers but also their wives, all horrifically shown on screen.

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Ray McGovern

NSA Servers

According to a draft memo by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the nominee to head up the new US Cyber Command will be current NSA Director Keith Alexander. Alexander is a three-star General and is expected to earn a fourth star after his appointment. The creation of the US Cyber Command comes amid rising concerns over computer attacks on our nations networks. [I Watch Obama]

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander may well be harboring the proverbial thought attributed to prevaricator Oliver North upon being spared punishment -- and instead getting rewarded handsomely -- for lying about the Iran-Contra Affair: “Is this a great country or what!”

Gen. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency since August 2005, is about to become what the Army describes as “dual hatted.” The Senate is about to confirm him to a new, highly sensitive leadership position requiring the utmost integrity and fidelity to the Constitution when he has shown neither.

Yet, after sizing up the enormous challenge of running the new U.S. cyber-warfare command, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, looked at Gen. Alexander and added, “And you’re the right person for it.”

Not for the first time, neither Inhofe nor his colleagues seem to have done their homework. Or maybe it is simply the case that Congress now accepts being lied to as part of the woodwork in the Capitol.

Alexander, you see, has a publicly established record of lying about NSA’s warrantless wiretapping. Call me naïve or obsolete, but when I was an Army officer it was understood that an officer did not lie — and especially not to Congress. Gen. Alexander seems to have missed that block of instruction.

And the same can be said for so many other very senior Army officers. It becomes easier to understand why Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba compared some of his colleagues during the Bush administration to the Mafia.

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Stephen Lendman

"Instead of recommending an equitable end to a 62 year conflict, Reut Institute (RI) advises sabotage and subterfuge against growing global forces it fears, ones effectively undermining Israel's legitimacy, so to prevail they must be subverted and stopped."

Working pro bono for Israeli government agencies, the Tel Aviv-based Reut Institute (RI) provides "real-time strategic decision-making" support in areas of national security and socioeconomic policy.

Saying global peace and justice groups threaten Israel's legitimacy, its recent series of articles, policy papers, and presentations counterattacked - a combination of damage control and rethink despite legitimate criticism showing Israel delegitimizes itself, and no amount of policy paper makeover will change it. Only Israel can do that, but in its 62 year existence never tried.

In a January 28 brief, RI said Israel:

"face(s) a dramatic assault on the very legitimacy of its existence as a Jewish and democratic state. While the ideological framework for this delegitimacy was solidified after the first Durban" World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, "the trend (got) a boost by the perceived lack of (political) progress, coupled with Operation Cast Lead in Gaza," followed by the damning Goldstone Report.

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Charles E. Carlson

This writer left the Gaza Strip on March 10th. During the preceding week over 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds were wounded and a number of Israelis died. I interviewed Muslims and Christians Arabs, including evangelicals; a co-ed college English class; a PLO officer and a United Nation aid worker--both off the record; the chairman of a mental health organization treating traumatized children; a businessman resident of a refugee camp; a young Muslim woman named Shireen who wanted to talk to America on the record; a number of workers and numerous youths in several Internet cafés and several Israeli travelers and businessmen. I also witnessed and photographed from my rooftop an Apache helicopter raid that killed four Palestinians and wounded 30 more. The edition(s) to come will lay the blame for the 52-year slaughter and suggest a low-cost, no-lives-lost solution to the problem and a humane course for Americans to follow.

Two friends accompanied me when I walked out of Gaza, the same way I had walked in --through a 600-meter barricaded gauntlet at Ares gate. As before, no one but me entered or left this crowded non-country of more than a million persons during the half hour that it took to process out. Consider this one incredible fact there is virtually no human traffic in or out of Palestine. At the only border crossing where people are allowed to pass through not one human soul went in or came out.

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Glen Whitman

"New paternalist policies, and indeed the intellectual framework of new paternalism itself, create a serious risk of slippery slopes toward ever more intrusive paternalism."

For as far back as memory reaches, people have been telling other people what’s good for them — and manipulating or forcing them to do it. But in recent years, a novel form of paternalism has emerged on the policy stage. Unlike the “old paternalism,” which sought to make people conform to religious or moralistic notions of goodness, the “new paternalism” seeks to make people better off by their own standards.

New paternalism has gone by many names, including “soft paternalism,” “libertarian paternalism,” and “asymmetric paternalism.” Whatever the name, it arose from the burgeoning field of behavioral economics, which studies the myriad ways in which real humans — unlike the agents who populate most economic models — deviate from pure rationality. Real people suffer from a variety of cognitive biases and errors, including lack of self-control, excessive optimism, status quo bias, susceptibility to framing of decisions, and so forth. To the extent such imperfections cause people to make choices inconsistent with their own best interests, paternalistic interventions promise to help them do better.

What sort of interventions? To the casual reader, the new paternalism might seem to have little to do with government at all. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s Nudge[1] and Daniel Ariely’s Predictably Irrational[2], for instance, often read more like advice manuals than policy manifestos. But if you dig deeper, you’ll find a wide-ranging policy agenda at work.

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Stephen Lendman

On April 9, Justice John Paul Stevens delivered a letter to President Obama stating:

"Having concluded that it would be in the best interests of the Court to have my successor appointed and confirmed well in advance of the commencement of the Court's next Term, I shall retire from regular active service as an Associate Justice."

NBC anchor Brian Williams called him a "liberal lion," a "lawyer's lawyer." UPI's Michael Kirkland said he led the Court's "four-member liberal bloc." AP's Mark Sherman and Calvin Woodward said he "carved a liberal legacy on the high court." Clinton's acting Solicitor General, Walter Dellinger, called him "the Chief Justice of the Liberal Supreme Court." Writing in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin said he was a "liberal leader (who's) views suggest a sensibility more than a philosophy."

Others remember him both ways:

-- voting to reinstate the death penalty in 1976 and against "affirmative" preferences in the 1978 Bakke case; and

-- for his scathing 2000 Bush v. Gore dissent, support for reproductive rights, and the separation of church and state, among his other liberal and conservative decisions.

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Jonathan Cook

An Arab member of the Israeli parliament is demanding that a newspaper be allowed to publish an investigative report that was suppressed days before Israel attacked Gaza in winter 2008.

The investigation by Uri Blau, who has been in hiding since December to avoid arrest, concerned Israeli preparations for the impending assault on Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead.
 
In a highly unusual move, according to reports in the Israeli media, the army ordered the Haaretz newspaper to destroy all copies of an edition that included Mr Blau’s investigation after it had already gone to press and been passed by the military censor. The article was never republished.
 
Mr Blau has gone underground in London after the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, demanded he return to Israel to hand back hundreds of classified documents they claim are in his possession and to reveal his sources.  

He published several additional reports for Haaretz in 2008 and 2009 that severely embarrassed senior military commanders by showing they had issued orders that intentionally violated court rulings, including to execute Palestinians who could be safely apprehended.

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Lt. Col. Barry Wingard

During his 2008 campaign, President Obama promised the country “change we can believe in.” Yet, more than a year into his administration, he has delivered “more of the same” on issues pertaining to Guantanamo Bay. The island prison is still open, detainees still await trials, and officials have recommended the worst of George W. Bush’s policies — indefinite detention.

The Bush way of thinking seems to be the guiding force behind many of the administration’s decisions on terrorism and Guantanamo. Following the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a U.S. airliner, Obama administration officials decided to read the suspect his Miranda rights, claiming former President Bush would have done the same thing. I commend using our federal courts to try suspected terrorists, but I’m alarmed at how U.S. officials arrived at that decision.

If Obama’s invocation of Bush stopped there, I might cut him some slack. Unfortunately, the Bush mindset never left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue along with its former inhabitant. Not long after taking office, Obama promptly revamped the conviction machine known as the military commissions, an alternative legal system that, as a presidential candidate, he had led us to believe he would abandon altogether in favor of federal trials.

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The Anti Press

This past week's Wikileaks release of footage showing the deaths of more than a dozen Iraqis in the summer of 2007 has generated a great deal of desperately needed public dialogue in regard to the reality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as opposed to the perception of the wars presented to us by the corporate media.

For more than three months, another story has been unravelling, the implications of which are far more startling than the information uncovered by Wikileaks. True to form - the corporate media's coverage of this event has an inverse relationship to its apparent gravity, meaning the coverage has been about zero.

Since the last days of December, the details of this event have been coming into focus - and the emerging image strongly suggests that coalition death-squads have been operating in Afghanistan.

Specific to this case, a group of Special Operations Forces landed outside a village in the middle of the night after receiving reports from informants that improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were being manufactured there. After finding what appeared to be two groups of unarmed fighting age males sleeping in two rooms - the reports indicate that the force summarily executed all of them using silenced weapons. Unfortunately, it appears that the Special Ops team had not entered the sleeping quarters of an IED cell, but the dormitory of a private school for boys.

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Stephen Lendman

Occupied Palestinians and Israeli Arabs never had rights in a state affording them solely to Jews. Now even they're at risk as democratic freedoms fast erode on their way to extinction; to wit, free expression, a right without which all others are endangered. It includes free speech, a free press, freedom of thought, culture, intellectual inquiry, and the right to challenge government authority peacefully, especially in times of war and cases of injustice, lawlessness, incompetence, and abuses of power.

Israel has no constitution or specific laws guaranteeing equality or free expression. Yet its Basic Laws protect human dignity and liberty as fundamental democratic values, more rhetoric than fact given its persecution of journalist Anat Kam and Haaretz's national security reporter Uri Blau.

Kam (held under house arrest since December) will be tried in mid-April for passing confidential documents she removed while stationed in IDF General Yair Naveh's office during her mandatory military service. Blau, fearing assassination or a judicial lynching, is now hiding in London.

Two (internal security) Shin Bet gag orders (code name "Double-Take") were judicially implemented to silence press discussion, on October 8, 2009 and on January 1, 2010 for 90 days, now partially lifted.

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Rachel Tabachnick

While the nation is fixated on the racist statements and misspelled signs at Tea Party events, there is a simultaneous movement working to bring together a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-national, and even multi-religious coalition, in an aggressive effort to "reform" America to conform with their biblical worldview.

On April 15-16 the Freedom Federation, a recent coalition of Religious Right organizations, will be holding a conference at Liberty University titled The Awakening 2010. The event could be described as Religious Right activists - White, Hispanic, Asian, and African American, coming together to embrace a John Birch Society worldview to the tunes of Hebrew melodies. It may sound unlikely, but the "pro-Israel" agenda is the camouflage that provides cover for this explicitly Christian nationalist movement.

This gathering of Religious Right leaders features familiar faces and familiar themes such as opposition to gay rights and reproductive rights. But the overall theme of the organization is reforming American government. The Freedom Federation includes established Religious Right organizations including the Family Research Council, Traditional Values Coalition, Eagle Forum, Concerned Women of America, and Wallbuilders, but notable is the inclusion of many organizations from the independent charismatic wing of the Religious Right which has been organized and streamlined under the auspices of C. Peter Wagner's New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and its apostles and prophets. These include Lou Engle's "The Call," Rick Joyner's MorningStar Ministries and Oak Initiative, Strang Communications, Cindy Jacobs' Generals International, and Che Ahn's Harvest International.

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Robert Ringer

In my article ”Saying Yes to the Party of No,” I commented on how pleased I’ve been to see Glenn Beck talking about a subject I’ve been writing about since the late seventies: a government-declared state of emergency leading to a ”temporary” dictatorship.

I have long believed that the mathematics of an insatiable entitlement society in the U.S. guarantees a runaway inflation, which likely would be followed by anarchy and chaos – a perfect excuse for government to resort to strong-armed totalitarian measures to ”restore order.” My model has always been Germany’s Weimar Republic in the 1920s, where runaway inflation brought Adolf Hitler to power.

I originally believed that the runaway-inflation scenario in the U.S. would play out in the early 1980s, but a combination of Ronald Reagan and an explosion in computers and electronic technology made possible by the remnants of our capitalist system headed it off.

Nevertheless, the threat of a runaway inflation has continued to increase over the years, even while our false-prosperity economy was booming. That’s because the underlying causes (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, insane union and government-employee wages and benefits, Social Security, Medicare, etc.) of our sick economy have never been addressed.

Unemployment is just a symptom; the disease is entitlements. Throughout the false-prosperity years, Social Security did not go away. It got bigger. Medicare did not go away. It got bigger. Virtually no other benefits went away. They only got bigger. So the underlying problem of entitlements not only has remained, but continued to grow.

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Jonathan Cook

Whistleblowing Israeli journalist treated as “fugitive felon”

An Israeli journalist who went into hiding after writing a series of reports showing lawbreaking approved by Israeli army commanders faces a lengthy jail term for espionage if caught, as Israeli security services warned at the weekend they would “remove the gloves” to track him down.

The Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, said it was treating Uri Blau, a reporter with the liberal Haaretz daily newspaper who has gone underground in London, as a “fugitive felon” and that a warrant for his arrest had been issued.

Options being considered are an extradition request to the British authorities or, if that fails, a secret operation by Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, to smuggle him back, according to Maariv, a right-wing newspaper.

It was revealed yesterday that Mr Blau’s informant, Anat Kam, 23, a former conscript soldier who copied hundreds of classified documents during her military service, had confessed shortly after her arrest in December to doing so to expose “war crimes”.

The Shin Bet claims that Mr Blau is holding hundreds of classified documents, including some reported to relate to Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008 in which the army is widely believed to have violated the rules of war.

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Stephen Lendman

"Along with the Infiltration Prevention Bill, potential mass Palestinian deportations and/or imprisonments takes Israel a step closer to full-blown fascism. It's already well along like its close Washington ally."

International law protects refugees and asylum seekers, Article I of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees calling them:

"A person who owning to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country."

Post-WW II, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established to help them.

To gain legal protection, they must:

-- be outside their country of origin;
-- fear persecution;
-- be harmed or fear harm by their government or others;
-- fear persecution for at least one of the above cited reasons; and
-- pose no danger to others.

The Knesset's 1950 Law of Return grants every Jew worldwide the right to live in Israel as a citizen. Yet no refugee law exists, despite Israel being a signatory to the 1951 UN Convention. Instead, unpublished Ministry of Interior procedures and secret inter-ministerial determinations are made on a case-by-case basis.

As a result, Israel has the lowest percent of requests granted (for temporary, not permanent status) compared to western states - 1% in 2005, under 0.5% in 2006, and in 2007, 350 refugees got temporary protection, 805 others were denied, and 863 were under review, after which most were rejected.

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Gilad Atzmon

In case you didn’t know, in Britain the Holocaust is part of the National Curriculum. Thanks to the ‘The Holocaust Educational Trust’ our children are guaranteed to learn how bad the Nazis were. This is probably much easier for our kids to acknowledge than to look into the ways in which the embarrassing legacy of the British Empire reverberates throughout almost every contemporary disastrous conflict on this planet. It is deemed far easier for our kids to learn about Anne Frank than to absorb the fact that Britain is directly responsible for the robbery of Palestine and the Palestinian ordeal. Learning about Auschwitz is also far easier than accepting the devastating reality created by Britain’s latest illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a colossal crime which has cost more than 1.5 million innocent lives so far. Thanks to The Holocaust Educational Trust we can brush history and our current crimes aside. Learning about the bad Nazis is far easier on our children than learning about the complicity of Britain in the holocaust. I guess that toughening British immigration laws to stop Jews escaping to Britain in the 1930s is not a prominent chapter in our kids’ text books. The Holocaust Educational Trust was established in 1988 says their official website. “Our aim is to educate young people from every background about the Holocaust and the important lessons to be learned for today.”

Wonderful, I think to myself. My 9 year old son told me that a Shoaguru visited his school recently to talk about the holocaust. My son raised his hand, he wondered whether the lesson of the holocaust could be applied to the Palestinian ordeal. “We are not here to talk about politics” answered the ‘trusted’ trained Shoa mentor. For my son the message was clear: The Jewish people's suffering is universal, other people's suffering is ‘politics’.

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Marc W. Herold

KANDAHAR, Aug 5, 2009 : Villagers look at the bodies of three
children after they were killed in an airstrike by foreign troops in
Arghandab district of Kandahar, south of Kabul, on Wednesday.
Four local civilians including three children were killed in the last
night bombing. (Photo: PAN/Bashir Nadim)

What needs first to be clearly understood is that is that Obama’s Pentagon has been much more deadly for Afghan civilians than was Bush in comparable months of 2008.

Buried in the public relations blather of U.S. Marine legions “liberating” Helmand and Afghan (sham) “elections” as democracy-restored (1) is an unspoken trade-off over who disproportionately dies in America’s modern wars in the Third World. Under George W. Bush, U.S politico-military elites chose to fight the Afghan war with minimal regard for so-called collateral casualties. But the soaring toll of killed Afghan civilians swayed world public opinion and stoked the Afghan resistance as grieved Afghan family members sought revenge. Enter Barack Obama. Faced with the prospect of NATO forces being withdrawn as restless NATO country citizens mobilized against the war, the Obama war machine took the decision to trade-off (mostly) lower-class U.S. “volunteer” soldiers from rural America (2) for fewer rural Afghan civilians killed. The decision had nothing to do with valuing Afghan lives and everything to do with a careful political calculation. In outlying areas such as in the Pakistan borderlands or in isolated rural areas of Afghanistan, Obama’s war machine cavalierly slaughters innocent civilians with the same impunity and at the same rate as his maligned predecessor did as drone strikes in Pakistan and U.S air strikes in Farah and Logar have demonstrated.

What has also changed is the public face of the war as one might expect from a President skilled in diction and possessed with the persuasion skills of a well-trained lawyer. On the other hand, behind the soothing words, the rationales are identical: in Phoenix recently, Obama reiterated the Bush of September 2001,

"This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. This is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.” (3)

So much for the current U.S. rationale for war. So much for “Change We Can Believe In.”

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Stephen Walt

If you would like to read a textbook example of a dust-kicking operation, please look at Robert Satloff's heated response to my recent post explaining the problems that can arise when top-level foreign policy officials have strong attachments to a foreign country. I seem to have struck a nerve.
There are only two important issues here, and Satloff ignores both of them. First, do some top U.S. officials -- and here we are obviously talking about Dennis Ross -- have a strong attachment to Israel? Second, might this situation be detrimental to the conduct of U.S. Middle East policy?

Regarding the first question, there is abundant evidence that Ross has a strong -- some might even say ardent -- attachment to Israel. These feelings are clearly on display in his memoir of the Oslo peace process, and they are confirmed by his decision to accept a top position at the Washington Institute of Near East Policy (WINEP) -- an influential organization in the Israel lobby-upon leaving government service in 2000. As Middle East historian Avi Shlaim put it in his own review of Ross's book:

Ross belongs fairly and squarely in the pro-Israel camp. His premises, position on the Middle East and policy preferences are identical to those of the Israel-first school. Indeed, it is difficult to think of an American official who is more quintessentially Israel-first in his outlook than Dennis Ross.

Furthermore, Ross served in recent years as chairman of the board of the Jewish People's Policy Planning Institute, a think-tank established by the Jewish Agency, which is headquartered in Jerusalem. Satloff does not mention this key fact, but the implications are unmistakable. Why would anyone take such a job if they did not have a deep-seated commitment to Israel?

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Chris Floyd

"And today [...] the brutalizing beat goes on. "Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, it's like it pounds in my brain," a U.S. soldier told the Los Angeles Times [...]. Another shrugged at the sight of freshly slaughtered bodies. "It doesn't bother me at all," he said. "I'm a warrior. My soldiers, they are all warriors. They have no problems. There's no place in this Army for men who aren't warriors." Said a third: "We talk about killing all the time. I never used to be this way…but it's like I can't stop. I'm worried what I'll be like when I get home.""

Penny Coleman at Alternet.com gives us a look at a new program designed to dull the moral sensibilities of American soldiers in combat on the imperial frontiers: Pentagon, Big Pharma: Drug Troops to Numb Them to Horrors of War.

But as we'll see below, this attempt to peddle magic pills to chase away the horrors of war is just one front in a long-term, wide-ranging "warfighter enhancement program" -- including the neurological and genetic re-engineering of soldiers' minds and bodies to create what the Pentagon calls "iron bodied and iron willed personnel": tireless, relentless, remorseless, unstoppable.

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Stephen Lendman

On October 21, 2008, for the first time in school history, the University of Ottawa (U of O) Faculty of Science, without cause, deregistered undergraduate Marc Kelly, an exemplary student, expelling him for the semester and preventing him from completing the final three courses he needed to graduate. The official email sent him read:

"The Faculty of Science has been asked to deregister you. (This) message is to notify you that you are no longer registered...."

The official reason was the Department of Physics' displeasure over the nature and methods of his valid, legitimate research, twice secretly rejecting it, then informing him through pro forma letters saying,

"It is common sense that (your research) has to use physics tools and physics knowledge."

Kelly was never contacted or questioned. When he tried approaching Physics Chair Bela Joos for an explanation, he refused to see him, suggesting this action wasn't over academic performance, but for publicly supporting tenured Professor Denis Rancourt, unfairly fired as explained below and in detail in an early April article titled, "Targeting Academic and Speech Freedoms: The Case of Canadian Professor Denis Rancourt."

In March 2009, it was for his political activism - specifically, courageously supporting oppressed Palestinians, criticizing the university's refusal to academically boycott Israel, and gallantly backing what U of O officials and President Allan Rock opposed - a former Canadian politician, UN ambassador, and staunch Israeli supporter.

Affected also was Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, student and former Fulcrum Publishing Society (FPS) Ombudsman (U of O's English-language student newspaper) until his March 2010 Board of Directors dismissal for supporting Rancourt, criticizing offensive FPS reports about him, refusing to stay quiet and go along, and confronting Business Manager Frank Appleyard's violation of FPS rules by simultaneously working for President Allan Rock and the FPS. His case was discussed in an April article titled, "Targeting Activist University of Ottawa Students."

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Edward S. Herman & David Peterson

"The United States defines what constitutes a "threat" to international peace and security, and as it demonizes the entity alleged to pose the "threat" the establishment media fall into line, help inflame passions about the "threat," and thus facilitate U.S. policy goals towards it, irrespective of the validity or the direction of any real threat. Thus, Israel may have a substantial nuclear arsenal and may have engaged in cross-border wars and threatened to attack Iran, and Iran may have no nuclear weapons, not engage in cross-border wars, and not threaten to attack the United States or Israel, but the ratio of media attention paid to Iran's and Israel's nuclear programs for the seven-year period we studied was 92-to-1 in the New York Times, and 114-to-1 in a very large sample of wire services and newspapers."

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Stephen Lendman

For millions worldwide, Lynne needs no introduction. For others: She worked selflessly, tirelessly, and heroically for 30 years as a human rights champion, defending America's poor, underprivileged, and unwanted - people never afforded due process and judicial fairness without an advocate like her. She knew the risks, yet took them until bogusly indicted on April 9, 2002 for:

-- "conspiring to defraud the United States;
-- conspiring to provide and conceal material support to terrorist activity;
-- providing and concealing material support to terrorist activity; and
-- two counts of making false statements."

The charges related to her alleged violation of Bureau of Prisons Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) that prohibit discussing topics the Justice Department rules outside "legal representation" - to inhibit a proper defense and obstruct justice for anyone DOJ wants to convict.

Her client was Sheik Abdel Rahman, a one-time CIA asset, convicted in 1995 and now serving a life sentence for "seditious conspiracy" for his alleged connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing despite convincing evidence of his innocence.

As an advocate for justice, Lynne was targeted, indicted, and after a seven month 2004 - 2005 show trial featuring the worst of McCarthy-like tactics, convicted on February 10, 2005 after 13 days of deliberation on all five counts. She was automatically disbarred, then sentenced on October 17, 2006 to 28 months imprisonment.

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Rick Rozoff

Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was deposed five years after and in the same manner as he came to power, in a bloody uprising.

Elected president two months after the so-called Tulip Revolution of 2005 he helped engineer, he was since then head of state of the main transit nation for the U.S. and NATO war in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon secured the Manas Air Base (as of last year known as the Transit Center at Manas) in Kyrgyzstan shortly after its invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001 and in the interim, according to a U.S. armed forces publication last June, "More than 170,000 coalition personnel passed through the base on their way in or out of Afghanistan, and Manas was the transit point for 5,000 tons of cargo, including spare parts and equipment, uniforms and various items to support personnel and mission needs.

"Currently, around 1,000 U.S. troops, along with a few hundred from Spain and France, are assigned to the base." [1]

The White House's Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke paid his first visit in his current position to Kyrgyzstan - and the three other former Soviet Central Asian republics which border it, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - in February and said "35,000 US troops were transiting each month on their way in and out of Afghanistan." [2] At the rate he mentioned, 420,000 troops annually.

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Stephen Lendman

Mossawa means equality, the Mossawa Advocacy Center promoting it for Israel's Arab citizens - about 1.5 million, comprising 20% of the population. Established in 1997, it "strives to improve the social, economic and political status of (Israeli Arabs), while preserving their national and cultural rights as Palestinians." It also promotes gender equality "in all spheres of society."

Its September 29, 2009 press release headlined the "High Follow-up Committee for Arab citizens (an organization representing Israeli Arabs) call for a general" October 1 one-day work stoppage to protest deteriorating conditions they face, and Israel's failure "to bring justice to the families of the 13 Arab victims that were killed by security forces during the events of October 2000," the start of the second Intifada.

The Committee asked all Arab institutions, organizations and businesses to honor it in opposition to Triangle and Negev area home demolitions; Galilee and Triangle area settlement building; discrimination in allocating resources; police violence, intimidation, racial, and political incitement; and the right of Arab citizens "to exist and live in dignity in their historic homeland."

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John Mueller & Mark G. Stewart

An impressively large number of politicians, opinion makers, scholars, bureaucrats, and ordinary people hold that terrorism -- and al Qaeda in particular -- poses an existential threat to the United States. This alarming characterization, which was commonly employed by members of the George W. Bush administration, has also been used [3] by some Obama advisers, including the counter-terrorism specialist Bruce Riedel. Some officials, such as former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, have parsed the concept further, declaring [4] the struggle against terrorism to be a "significant existential" one.

Over the last several decades, academics, policymakers, and regulators worldwide have developed risk-assessment techniques to evaluate hazards to human life, such as pesticide use, pollution, and nuclear power plants. In the process, they have reached a substantial consensus about which risks are acceptable and which are unacceptable. When these techniques are applied to terrorism, it becomes clear that terrorism is far from an existential threat. Instead, it presents an acceptable risk, one so low that spending to further reduce its likelihood or consequences is scarcely justified.

An unacceptable risk is often called de manifestis, meaning of obvious or evident concern -- a risk so high that no "reasonable person" would deem it acceptable. A widely cited de manifestis risk assessment comes from a 1980 United States Supreme Court decision [5] regarding workers' risk from inhaling gasoline vapors. It concluded that an annual fatality risk -- the chance per year that a worker would die of inhalation -- of 1 in 40,000 is unacceptable. This is in line with standard practice in the regulatory world. Typically, risks considered unacceptable are those found likely to kill more than 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000 per year.

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Philip Jones

"The most dangerous revolutions are not those which tear everything down, and cause the streets to run with blood, but those which leave everything standing, while cunningly emptying it of any significance". ~ The Danish philosopher `Kierkegaard`.

London's Evening Standard edition for 1st July 2008 reported in an article entitled `Happyland` that a recent opinion poll revealed that of all the peoples of the world, Danes were the happiest. This the poll stated was due to the country's peaceful atmosphere, Democracy and social equality.

In recent times, there have been several such surveys conducted, all of which asserted that Denmark is the happiest place on the planet. The question is of course, why do we need to keep being told this? What is the purpose, and is there an agenda? I am a British expat who has lived here 13 years and for the life of me, I cannot see Danes as being a happy people at all.

Denmark is, and has been for years, a `Test Zone` for the European Union in particular and the emerging New World Order in general. The constant reinforcing of this Danish `fairy tale` in the international media is contrived to convince people that the subtle mental prison that is Denmark is a highly desirable model that all should strive for.

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Stephen Lendman

Until his early March Board of Directors removal, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya was Fulcrum Publishing Society (FPS) Ombudsman, the English-language student newspaper at Canada's University of Ottawa (U of O).

It resulted from his critical reports, including a preliminary February 23 one for FPS's editorial mistreatment of Professor Denis Rancourt, fired in March 2009 for his political activism - specifically his courageous stance on Occupied Palestine.

In 2007, after criticizing university opposition to academically boycotting Israel, repression against him intensified under new president Allen Rock, a former Canadian politician, UN ambassador, and staunch Israeli supporter.

Nazemroaya accused the Fulcrum of "publishing opinion pieces against Dr. Rancourt. (They've) strongly criticized him, his university classes, his position, and his brand of activism."

In his January 9 report, Nazemroaya cited illegal U of O "covert surveillance," adding that "The Fulcrum has a duty to cover all news concerning campus life in an unbiased way and to the best of its abilities," especially over denying a distinguished tenured professor academic freedom and firing him for his views - the way a police state silences dissent.

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