Dutch cabinet collapses in dispute over Afghanistan
Dutch forces have been in Uruzgan since 2006
BBC | February 20, 2010
The Dutch government has collapsed over disagreements within the governing coalition on extending troop deployments in Afghanistan.
After marathon talks, Christian Democratic Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende announced that the Labour Party was quitting the government.
Mr Balkenende has been considering a Nato request for Dutch forces to stay in Afghanistan beyond 2010. But Labour, the second-largest coalition party, has opposed the move.
Just under 2,000 Dutch service personnel have been serving in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan since 2006, with 21 killed. Their deployment has already been extended once.
The troops should have returned home in 2008, but they stayed on because no other Nato nation offered replacements. The commitment is now due to end in August 2010.
The Dutch parliament voted in October 2009 that it must definitely stop by then, although the government has yet to endorse that vote.
The finance minister and leader of the Labour Party, Wouter Bos, demanded an immediate ruling from Mr Balkenende.
The collapse of the government was announced after a 16-hour cabinet meeting. The prime minister said there was no common ground between the parties.
“Where there is no trust, it is difficult to work together. There is no good path to allow this cabinet to go further,” he said.
The launch in 2001 of Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) for Afghanistan was the organisation’s first and largest ground operation outside Europe.
Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said six months ago when he began his job that his priority was the war in Afghanistan.
As of June 2009, Isaf had more than 61,000 personnel from 42 different countries including the US, Canada, European countries, Australia, Jordan and New Zealand.
The US provides the bulk of foreign forces in Afghanistan, and President Barack Obama has announced an extra 30,000 American troops for Afghanistan.
The Pentagon has said the next 18 months could prove crucial for the international mission in Afghanistan, after more than eight years of efforts to stabilise the country.
Afghanistan remains a deadly place for foreign forces. Suicide attacks on Afghan civilians and roadside bomb strikes on international troops are common, with the Taliban strongly resurgent in many areas of the country.
University Of Colorado Must Reinstate Professor Whose Free Speech Rights Were Violated
ACLU, AAUP And NCAC File Brief Urging Court To Uphold First Amendment In Ward Churchill Case
ACLU | February 18, 2010
NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Colorado, American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) today submitted a brief to a Colorado Court of Appeals arguing that the University of Colorado, a publicly funded university, should reinstate a tenured professor who was wrongly terminated from his job there for exercising his right to free speech.
“The First Amendment prohibits public officials from suppressing lawful speech or retaliating against those who engage in such speech, no matter how unpopular or offensive the speech may be to some people,” said Aden Fine, staff attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group. “That is especially the case in the university setting, where the Supreme Court has made clear that First Amendment freedoms must be vigilantly protected.”
After he was fired from the teaching post he had held for many years, Ward Churchill sued the University and its Board of Regents alleging that he was unconstitutionally terminated because of a controversial and unpopular essay he had written concerning the events on September 11. In April 2009, a jury agreed that Churchill was fired for expressing his personal opinions, which is a clear violation of his First Amendment rights.
However, a judge denied Churchill’s petition to be reinstated to his job, essentially denying him any relief for the blatant denial of his rights. Churchill is appealing that decision to the Colorado Court of Appeals. The ACLU, ACLU of Colorado, AAUP and NCAC filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting reversal of the trial court’s decision, arguing that plaintiffs whose constitutional rights have been violated must be provided with a remedy, and that in this case, Churchill should be reinstated to the job from which he was wrongly fired.
“Denying a remedy to people whose rights have been violated amounts to gutting the Constitution,” said Mariko Hirose, a legal fellow with the ACLU First Amendment Working Group. “The court has a responsibility to ensure the University of Colorado rights its wrong and reinstates Professor Churchill immediately.”
“Unless the trial court’s ruling is corrected, university professors will receive the chilling message that silence is smart and voicing unpopular views can be fatal to their careers,” said Mark Silverstein, ACLU of Colorado Legal Director. “The First Amendment right to speak out is meaningful only if it is enforceable in court.”
Today’s friend-of-the-court brief is available online at: www.aclu.org/free-speech/ward-churchill-v-university-colorado-et-al-amicus-brief
Attorneys include Fine and Hirose of the ACLU First Amendment Working Group, Silverstein of the ACLU of Colorado, Rachel Levinson of AAUP and Joan Bertin of NCAC.
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
Social Security Will Fall To Obama Before The Taliban Do
By Paul Craig Roberts | February 18, 2010
Hank Paulson, the Gold Sacks bankster/US Treasury Secretary, who deregulated the financial system, caused a world crisis that wrecked the prospects of foreign banks and governments, caused millions of Americans to lose retirement savings, homes, and jobs, and left taxpayers burdened with multi-trillions of dollars of new US debt, is still not in jail. He is writing in the New York Times urging that the mess he caused be fixed by taking away from working Americans the Social Security and Medicare for which they have paid in earmarked taxes all their working lives.
Wall Street’s approach to the poor has always been to drive them deeper into the ground.
As there is no money to be made from the poor, Wall Street fleeces them by yanking away their entitlements. It has always been thus. During the Reagan administration, Wall Street decided to boost the values of its bond and stock portfolios by using Social Security revenues to lower budget deficits. Wall Street figured that lower deficits would mean lower interest rates and higher bond and stock prices.
Two Wall Street henchmen, Alan Greenspan and David Stockman, set up the Social Security raid in this way: The Carter administration had put Social Security in the black for the foreseeable future by establishing a schedule for future Social Security payroll tax increases. Greenspan and Stockman conspired to phase in the payroll tax increases earlier than was needed in order to gain surplus Social Security revenues that could be used to finance other government spending, thus reducing the budget deficit. They sold it to President Reagan as “putting Social Security on a sound basis.”
Along the way Americans were told that the surplus revenues were going into a special Social Security trust fund at the U.S. Treasury. But what is in the fund is Treasury IOUs for the spent revenues. When the “trust funds” are needed to pay Social Security benefits, the Treasury will have to sell more debt in order to redeem the IOUs.
Social Security was mugged again during the Clinton administration when the Boskin Commission jimmied the Consumer Price Index in order to reduce the inflation adjustments that Social Security recipients receive, thus diverting money from Social Security retirees to other uses.
We constantly hear from Wall Street gangsters and from Republicans and an occasional Democrat that Social Security and Medicare are a form of welfare that we can’t afford; an “unfunded liability.” This is a lie. Social Security is funded with an earmarked tax. People pay for Social Security and Medicare all their working lives. It is a pay-as-you-go system in which the taxes paid by those working fund those who are retired.
Currently these systems are not in deficit. The problem is that government is using earmarked revenues for other purposes. Indeed, since the 1980s Social Security revenues have been used to fund general government. Today Social Security revenues are being used to fund trillion dollar bailouts for Wall Street and to fund the Bush/Obama wars of aggression against Muslims.
Having diverted Social Security revenues to war and Wall Street, Paulson says there is no alternative but to take the promised benefits away from those who have paid for them.
Republicans have extraordinary animosity toward the poor. In an effort to talk retirees out of their support systems, Republicans frequently describe Social Security as a Ponzi scheme and “unsustainable.” They ought to know. The phony trust fund, which they set up to hide the fact that Wall Street and the Pentagon are running off with Social Security revenues, is a Ponzi scheme. Social Security itself has been with us since the 1930s and has yet to wreck our lives and budget. But it only took Hank Paulson’s derivative Ponzi scheme and its bailout a few years to inflict irreparable damage on our lives and budget.
Years ago with stagflation defeated and a rising stock market, I favored privatizing Social Security as a way of creating a funded retirement system and producing greater savings and larger incomes for retirees. At that time Wall Street was interested, not for my reasons, but in order to collect the fees from managing the funds.
Had Social Security been privatized, I doubt that Wall Street would have been permitted to deregulate the financial system. Too much would have been at stake.
After the latest crisis brought on by Wall Street’s dishonesty and greed, trusting Wall Street to manage anyone’s old age pension requires a leap of faith that no intelligent person can make.
Wall Street has got away with its raid on the public treasury. Now, pockets full, it wants to pay for the heist by curtailing Social Security and Medicare. Having deprived the working population of homes, jobs, and health care, Wall Street is now after the elderly’s old age security.
Social Security, formerly an untouchable “third rail of politics,” is now “unsustainable,” while the real unsustainables–a pre-1929 unregulated financial system and open-ended multi-trillion dollar Global War Against Terror–are the new untouchables. This transformation signals the complete capture of American democracy by an oligarchy of special interests.
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A History Lesson for Obama
By Henry Norr | February 17, 2010
With President Obama’s Middle East peace plans so completely — and humiliatingly — shipwrecked on the rocks of Israeli intransigence, it’s time for him to consider a new approach, at least if he’s serious about his announced objectives. In the spirit of bipartisanship that he’s so dedicated to, I suggest he look to the way Dwight D. Eisenhower handled a similar predicament a half-century ago.
First, a quick review of the goals Obama staked out last year and how much progress his efforts have produced. In his speech in Cairo last June, he noted that the Palestinian people have “for more than 60 years … endured the pain of dislocation” and “the daily humiliations — large and small — that come with occupation.”
“Let there be no doubt,” he proclaimed, “the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. And America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.” Israel, he went on, “must live up to its obligation to ensure that Palestinians can live and work and develop their society.”
Specifically, on the key issue of Israeli colonization of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, he reaffirmed the policy Washington has subscribed to, at least on paper, since 1967: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.”
As to the devastated Gaza Strip, Obama said little in Cairo, observing only that “the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel’s security.” But shortly afterwards the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that his administration had delivered a diplomatic note to the Israeli government protesting its blockade of the 1.5 million Gazans and demanding that Israel open the border crossings to allow in desperately needed food, medical equipment, and reconstruction materials.
Now, thirteen months after Obama took office, and almost nine months since his Cairo speech, how do things look? No one can seriously claim that the Palestinians are any closer to “dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.” The only discernible changes are that Israel has stepped up repression of grassroots, non-violent anti-occupation activists and accelerated its campaign to “Judaize” East Jerusalem.
With regard to settlements, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu promised a 10-month “freeze” on new construction, but his commitment was riddled with loopholes, and in practice, as both Israeli and Palestinian media and human-rights organizations have documented, settlement expansion continues unabated. In the words of the prominent Israeli pundit Akiva Eldar, “Only an idiot would say Israel has frozen settlement activity.”
Netanyahu himself is no idiot: Last month, after Obama’s special envoy George Mitchell once again left the region in failure, the prime minister celebrated by planting trees in several settlements, and just to make sure no one could misunderstand the symbolism, he spelled out his intent: to “send a clear message that we are here. We will stay here. We are planning and we are building.” The major settlements, he declared, are an “indisputable part of Israel forever.”
Meanwhile, conditions in Gaza have scarcely changed. Just this week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham told a conference in Qatar that “We have pushed the Israelis to end the — to increase the trickle to a flood of goods into Gaza,” but the UN reports that deliveries of goods to Gaza actually declined last month and now amount to only 17 percent of the monthly average before Israel launched its full-scale siege in 2007 — a whole lot closer to a trickle than a flood.
When Secretary Clinton was grilled about the contradiction in Qatar, her only response was as vague as it was pathetic: “I hope that we are going to see some progress. … there are so many countries standing ready to help the people of Gaza rebuild. And we just want the chance to be able to do that.”
President Obama sounds equally helpless. “This is just really hard,” he told Time magazine reporter Joe Klein a few weeks ago. “This is as intractable a problem as you get. … And I think that we overestimated our ability to persuade” both the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority.
He promised, of course, to keep working on the issue, but if — as he’s shown over the past year — he’s unwilling to stand up to Netanyahu even over core American objectives, what reason is there to think he’ll have any more success in the coming year?
That’s where Ike comes in. 53 years ago this week, he too was facing a defiant Israeli government.* A few months earlier, in late October 1956, while he himself was in the home stretch of his re-election campaign, and the world was preoccupied with the bloody Hungarian revolution against Soviet rule, the Israelis colluded with Britain and France to launch a surprise attack on Nasser’s Egypt, apparently without so much as a word to Washington. Israeli forces quickly seized the Gaza Strip (previously under Egyptian control) and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, while the British and the French took over the Suez Canal.
Miffed at not being consulted, and embarrassed by such a blatant display of old-fashioned imperialism — instead of the neocolonial tactics of economic coercion and CIA manipulation the U.S. preferred — Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, forthrightly condemned the attack. At the United Nations, where Britain and France held veto power in the Security Council, the U.S. joined the Soviet bloc — even as Soviet tanks rolled through Hungary — as well as emerging third-world governments in taking the matter to the General Assembly and approving resolution after resolution calling for a ceasefire, then withdrawal of the aggressors.
Within days the British and French gave in and began pulling out their troops. A few weeks later Israel grudgingly agreed to withdraw from the Sinai. But Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion adamantly refused to give up the Gaza Strip as well as an area along the Gulf of Aqaba, despite personal pleas from Eisenhower and a sixth UN resolution calling for withdrawal. Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, formally proclaimed the country’s intent to keep Gaza.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., Israel mobilized its lobby — already a formidable political force, if not quite as dominant as it is today — to pressure the administration to back off on its demands. Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, with support from his Republican counterpart, William Knowland, led the campaign, with support from such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Time Inc. publisher Henry Luce. Noting the “terrific control the Jews have over the news media and the barrage the Jews have built up on congressmen,” Dulles complained that “The Israeli Embassy is practically dictating to the Congress through influential Jewish people in the country.”
“I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to carry out a foreign policy not approved by the Jews,” he told Luce, but “I am going to have one. That does not mean I am anti-Jewish, but I believe in what George Washington said in his Farewell Address that an emotional attachment to another country should not interfere.”
Eisenhower agreed. On Feb. 11, 1957, he sent another message to Ben Gurion, offering to guarantee Israeli access to the Gulf of Aqaba but demanding “prompt and unconditional withdrawal” from Gaza. Ben Gurion again refused, replying that “there is no basis for the restoration of the status quo ante in Gaza.”
At that point, instead of an Obama-style cave-in, Ike decided to take the gloves off. On Feb. 20 he sent another cable to Ben Gurion threatening to support a UN call for sanctions against Israel and warning that such sanctions could apply not only to U.S. government aid to Israel (then modest) but also to Israel’s lifeline at the time, tax-deductible private donations and the purchase of Israel’s bonds. That same evening the president went on national television specifically to address the dispute with Israel. “We are now,” he told the American people, “faced with a fateful moment as the result of the failure of Israel to withdraw its forces behind the Armistice lines, as contemplated by the United Nations Resolutions on this subject.”
“I would, I feel, be untrue to the standards of the high office to which you have chosen me, if I were to lend the influence of the United States to the proposition that a nation which invades another should be permitted to exact conditions for withdrawal,” he continued. “I believe that in the interests of peace the United Nations has no choice but to exert pressure upon Israel to comply with the withdrawal resolutions.”
Ben Gurion’s initial response was continued defiance, but with no indication that Eisenhower would back down, and the General Assembly about to vote for sanctions, he had no choice but to capitulate. On March 1 Israel’s foreign minister, Golda Meir, announced that her government would withdraw from Gaza after all, and by March 16 the pull-out was complete. On the way out, the Israelis systematically destroyed all surface roads, railway tracks, and telephone lines in the area, as well as several villages. But at least the occupation of the Gaza Strip came to an end — until the Israelis came storming back 10 years later.
Granted, there was hypocrisy aplenty in Eisenhower’s stand, considering his own administration’s activities in Iran, Guatemala, and elsewhere. (In mid-1958 he even sent the Marines into Lebanon.) And of course the Middle East today is very different from in 1956-57.
Still, there’s a lesson in the events of 53 years ago that remains relevant today: on the rare occasions when U.S. leaders have the guts to stand up to the bluster of the Israelis and their supporters at home, to insist on respect for international law, to take their case to the American people and the world, and to back up their demands with the threat of economic sanctions, even the most recalcitrant Israeli government has to give in.
If Obama would only learn that lesson, he might yet be able to achieve the goals he set out last June in Cairo.
*This account of the events of 1956-57 is based mainly on the Eisenhower papers posted by the American Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara <www.presidency.ucsb.edu>; the archives of the New York Times; Patrick Tyler’s A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East – from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2009); and two books by Donald Neff, Warriors at Suez: Eisenhower Takes America into the Middle East in 1956 (1988) and Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945 (1995).
– Henry Norr is a retired journalist. He was fired by the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003 after participating in the International Solidarity Movement in the Gaza Strip, then getting arrested in San Francisco protesting the war on Iraq. He welcomes comments at henry@norr.com.
Settler sewage flowing into West Bank village
Ma’an –19/02/2010
Qalqiliya – Sewage from a treatment plant in the Israeli settlement of Sha’are Tiqwa has been flowing into a high school in the northern West Bank village of Azzun Atma since the early morning, local authorities said late on Wednesday.
The Azzun Atma Municipality said that some students simply stayed away from school because of the stench emanating from the wastewater that pooled in the schoolyard.
The municipality said it informed the Palestinian civil coordination office in order to pass a message to Israeli authorities. Officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross came to the village from nearby Qalqiliya and documented the sewage flow, the municipality added.
Aletho News 