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New Zealand’s NIWA sued over climate data adjustments

August 16, 2010 by Anthony Watts

NIWA is being sued by the NZ Climate Coalition, mainly due to the differences in data in this graph:

Niwa sued over data accuracy

The country’s state-owned weather and atmospheric research body is being taken to court in a challenge over the accuracy of its data used to calculate global warming.

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition said it had lodged papers with the High Court asking the court to invalidate the official temperatures record of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa).

The lobby of climate sceptics and ACT Party have long criticised Niwa over its temperature data, which Niwa says is mainstream science and not controversial, and the raw data publicly available.

The coalition said the New Zealand Temperature Records (NZTR) were the historical base of NIWA’s advice to the Government on issues relating to climate change.

Coalition spokesman Bryan Leyland said many scientists believed although the earth had been warming for 150 years, it had not heated as much as Government archives claimed.

He said the New Zealand Meteorological Service had shown no warming during the past century but Niwa had adjusted its records to show a warming trend of 1degC. The warming figure was high and almost 50 percent above the global average, said Mr Leyland.

”Twentieth-century temperature records are now being challenged all around the world” said Bryan Leyland, spokesman for the NZCSET. “But I think we are the first country where the issues are to be placed squarely before an independent judicial forum.”
“Many scientists believe that, although the earth has been in a natural warming phase for the past 150 years, it has not heated as much as Government archives claim. The precise trend figure is extremely important, as it forms the sole basis of the claim that human activities are the dominant cause of the warming.

“The New Zealand Met Service record shows no warming during the last century, but NIWA has adopted a series of invariably downward adjustments in the period prior to World War 2. Because these move the old temperature records downwards, the 7SS NZTR shows a huge bounce-back of over 1°C in the first half of the century” said Mr. Leyland. “Although this is out of line with dozens of other records, and has been the subject of sustained questioning by both the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition and the ACT party, NIWA refuses to accept that there are serious problems with the adjustments. In fact, no one has been able to explain exactly how they were arrived at.”

The Court proceedings also allege bias and unethical conduct on the part of NIWA’s National Climate Centre. These are based partly on NIWA allegedly delegating the NZTR decision to a former employee, James Salinger, knowing that he had a vested interest in an untested theory put forward in his own 1981 thesis. NIWA also knew that the data and calculations for that theory had been lost, and, thus could not be replicated.

The Court will be asked to rule that NIWA has refused to repudiate the current NZTR in order to avoid political embarrassment, and feared loss of public confidence in the objectivity of its scientists. The proceedings were filed and served this week, and NIWA has up to a month to respond.

Full story here:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/4026330/Niwa-sued-over-data-accuracy

August 17, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

No Room for Arab Students at Israeli Universities

New Rules Favor Former Soldiers
By Jonathan Cook – August 17th, 2010

Measures designed to benefit Jewish school-leavers applying for places in Israeli higher education at the cost of their Arab counterparts have been criticised by lawyers and human rights groups.

The new initiatives are viewed as part of an ongoing drive by right-wing politicians in Israel to demand “loyalty” from the country’s large minority population of Arab citizens.

Critics have termed the measures, including a programme to provide financial aid exclusively to students who have served in the Israeli army, a form of “covert discrimination”.

While most Jews are conscripted into the military, Israel’s Arab citizens are generally barred from serving.

The issue came to a head last week over reports that Tel Aviv University had reserved a large number of dormitory places for discharged soldiers, leaving Arab students facing a severe shortage of university accommodation in the coming academic year.

In addition, only former soldiers will be eligible in future for large subsidies on tuition fees under an amended law passed last month.

Arab students already face many obstacles to pursuing higher education, according to the Dirasat policy research centre in Nazareth. These include psychometric exams — a combined aptitude and personality test that has been criticised as culturally biased — and minimum age restrictions for courses, typically at age 21, when soldiers finish their three-year service.

But Tel Aviv university’s decision has come under fire because it will put further pressure on Arab students to forgo higher education.

Most Arab families live far from Tel Aviv, with limited public transport connections. High poverty rates also mean few are able to afford private rooms for their children, and Arab students already complain that private landlords refuse to rent to them.

Although comprising only five per cent of the student body at Tel Aviv university, Arabs won about 40 per cent of dorm places last year, when rooms were awarded using social and economic criteria, said Mohammed Awadi, a Tel Aviv student leader.

“Now the university management has told us that most Arab students will be rejected because preference will be given to military service,” he said. “The message is that they would rather have a university without any Arabs at all.”

Yousef Jabareen, Dirasat’s director, said the university’s decision represented an increasingly hardline attitude from its officials. “What is so worrying is that a supposedly liberal academic institution — not the right-wing government — is promoting discrimination,” he said.

Yesterday, Joseph Klafter, the university’s president, was reported to be inspecting course reading lists for signs of what officials called “post-Zionist bias”, or criticism of Israel’s founding ideology.

Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal centre in Haifa, said the new rules on subsidised tuition and student housing were part of the government’s “loyalty drive”, a programme of reforms that has been decried for creating an overtly hostile political climate towards the Arab minority.

The campaign has been spearheaded by the Yisrael Beitenu party of the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, whose election slogan was “No loyalty, no citizenship”.

The use of military service as a criterion for awarding student housing was ruled discriminatory two years ago by Haifa district court. The government, however, quickly amended the law, allowing universities to change their rules, as Tel Aviv University has now done.

Haifa University, which has the largest Arab student population, also reserves dorm rooms for former soldiers.

Far-right leaders have suggested in the past that the Arab minority can be encouraged to emigrate by restricting access to higher education. Benny Elon, a former cabinet minister, notoriously summed up the policy as: “I will close the universities to you, I will make your lives difficult, until you want to leave.”

Last month the parliament approved a package of additional financial benefits to encourage former soldiers to study in “peripheral areas”, including three colleges in West Bank settlements.

Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group, warned that the law would push Israel’s academic system “deeper into complicity with the occupation” and bolster the movement for an academic boycott of Israel.

Ms Zaher said the government appeared determined to push farther along the same path.

Last month a ministerial committee approved a draft bill that would allow private businesses to award extra benefits to former soldiers.

Although Arabs are a quarter of the college-age population, they comprise only eight per cent of the students attending Israeli universities.

A Dirasat survey last year showed that half of Arab students — about 5,400 — chose to study abroad, mainly in neighbouring Jordan, because of the difficulties they faced in Israel.

Ms Zaher said that introducing discriminatory measures at universities would exacerbate already stark socio-economic disparities in Israel. Poverty rates among Arab families are three times those of the Jewish population.

“Rather than trying to remedy the discrimination by investing extra budgets to help the Arab community, public and private institutions are being encouraged to widen the gaps,” she said.

Ms Zaher was due this week to send a letter to the Yehuda Weinstein, the attorney-general, calling for the government to stop tying basic rights to military service.

At Tel Aviv University, Arab students expressed concern about the new rules.

Rula Abu Hussein, a film studies student from Umm al-Fahm in northern Israel, said she had been told to vacate her dorm by October, when her second year begins.

“It’s really hard to find affordable private rooms in Tel Aviv for anyone but if you’re an Arab it’s especially difficult,” she said. “A lot of the landlords are racist and don’t want an Arab in their properties.”

Tel Aviv university was unavailable for comment.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.

August 17, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Leave a comment

Court finds Israel responsible for girl’s shooting death

Ma’an – 17/08/2010

JERUSALEM — An Israeli court ruled Monday that the state was responsible for the fatal 2007 shooting of a 10-year-old Palestinian girl in a village near Jerusalem.

The court ruled that an Israeli border guard shot Abir Aramin in the head with a rubber bullet in Anata village north of Jerusalem, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported. Abir was buying sweets during a break from school with her sister and two friends when she was killed.

An army statement at the time said troops were responding to a riot in the village and “were forced to respond with methods for dispersing protesters.” The army has never accepted responsibility for the killing.

Ruling the shooting “totally unjustifiable,” the court found that Abir and her friends were walking down a street from which no stones were thrown, and “there was no apparent reason to fire in that direction,” Haaretz reported.

Judge Orit Efal Gabai ordered the government to pay damages to the family.

The civil suit was brought to the Jerusalem District Court after the army and state refused to open a criminal investigation into the killing. An appeal to the High Court to force an investigation was rejected in October 2009, when Judge Beinish ruled that Abir may have been killed by stones thrown by Palestinian protesters.

Judge Orit Efal Gabai said Monday that “There is no debate over the conclusion that Abir was injured by a rubber bullet shot by border guards, which in turn leads to the conclusion that the shooting of Abir occurred out of negligence, or in violation of the rules of engagement,” Haaretz reported.

Abir’s father is a founding member of Combatants for Peace, a joint Israeli-Palestinian peace group.

August 17, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | Leave a comment

A Beautiful Gift from the BBC

By Ken O’Keefe | Pulse Media | August 17, 2010

If you haven’t seen it, look for BBC Panorama’s “Death in the Med” program online (Part One, Part Two), you will be treated to first class propaganda as only the BBC can deliver.

I am one of the passengers/witnesses interviewed for this program and I am very much aware of BBC’s role in justifying war and covering up Israeli crimes. I am in no way naive about this; to the contrary my motivation for the interview lay largely in the all too likely opportunity to expose the BBC. A relevant job considering the BBC’s role in the slaughter of over one million Iraqi’s, a direct role by virtue of the war they justified. BBC from start to present, justifying Iraq, a massive war crime and crime against humanity based entirely on lies (propagated intensely by the BBC). The British Broadcasting Corporation, synonymous with millions of orphans and refugees and countless lives destroyed in Iraq, beating the drums of war without pause, the ultimate prostitutes of propaganda.

With this understanding I solicited an agreement with the BBC producers, in return for my interview the program would include the fact that we disarmed, captured and ultimately released three Israeli commandos (after giving them medical attention no less). That was the deal, a deal I made with an audio recorder in service.

And yes the poor Israeli commandos were beaten, just as any invader in any capable persons home would be beaten. I take no issue with that fact.

But truth be told, the commandos we captured should thank us for their lives. I ask the Israeli’s, British and American people specifically, if your home was invaded, your family being murdered, would you be willing to disarm, completely control, and then set a murderer of your family free?

You can lie to yourself if you like, bury that head right down deep in the sand, but that ship was our home, and we were all brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles, united, a family, engaged in a most righteous cause, with the vast majority of the planet behind us. The primary beneficiary of our mission, over 800,000 innocent children.

For those lost in a pit of ignorance and indoctrination, those currently stripped of all reason, absent of conscience, duped and hoodwinked, I know you very well because I was once you, a US Marine robot volunteering to kill or be killed. I see my past self in the Zionist who has no capacity at this moment to think, for in that state it is all about regurgitation, independent thought is but a possibility. For you I maintain no hate, for nobody actually, rather it is pity, pity for you that you sacrifice the greatest gift of all, the gift of humanity.

And so it is that the BBC, absent of integrity, contemptuous of humanity, attempts in this program to turn disarmed, helpless Israeli commandos into heroic self-rescuing commandos who managed to Superman their way out of a circle of well over 100 very motivated men whose brothers lay murdered with multiple gunshot wounds. That is what we call a bald-faced lie. Big time lie, in your face lie, you in the audience are a bunch of drooling idiots lie.

Returning from the Zionist alternate universe, we held in our power the fate of three boy commandos who may well have been murderers on that night. Think about that, under these circumstances, we let them go. That is what we call preserving life.

It is not that BBC does not know the truth, there are literally hundreds of witnesses and overflowing facts to reveal it; it is simply BBC’s slavish duty to produce a Zionist storyline of illusions and deceptions. And the story goes that we are the aggressors, “terrorists”, “extremists” and killers. Only in this context can the poor Israeli commandos be victims. How is it possible to dominate and control commandos simply to let them go if we are killers? Answer, it isn’t. And that is precisely why Panorama blatantly lied.

Ah but the irony, the kind of irony that always provides me a smile from the inside out, the irony of these lies being big, beautiful gifts. In all sincerity, thank you BBC.

The BBC says there is doubt as to who fired first. There is no doubt at all who shot who and when to the hundreds of us on the Mavi Marmara and other ships. The Israelis have said we shot at them, well where are their gunshot wounds? And even if you have gunshot wounds, how do we know you did not shoot yourselves? Exactly like you did in “Operation Cast Lead”?

Returning once again from the Zionist alternate universe, the Israeli military attacked in international waters and murdered within the first five minutes of the attack. The attack resulting in scores of gunshot wounds and death in rapid succession. Blood spilling all over the ship. In that environment I took possession of a 9mm pistol that I removed from one of the commandos… and I emptied it of the (real) bullets. Other weapons were seized by other brothers and thrown into the sea, one of which was an assault rifle. Yet when others and myself had the power to end life, and believe me it was as simple as release the safety, point, shoot, over. Instead we preserved life, by taking those weapons away from established killers, we prevented them from killing more. We literally saved our lives and their lives. That is what we call cold, hard facts.

We could have taken out at least three of them, but we did not. Nope, we let them go.

The BBC mentions that we were in international waters at the very end of the story, as if this were an insignificant fact. The fact that Israel stole all the footage that it could, footage that undoubtedly shows them firing 4 bullets to the head of the 19-year-old American passenger, Furkan Dogan. No problem. Executing people at close range, no worries. The fact that the blockade itself is illegal, nah, don’t mention that. 800,000 plus children in Gaza, malnourished, anemic, traumatised… not important.

I would need to review this program many times over to identify every poisoned tactic that the BBC employed in order to do what they do so well, justify murder and war.

Nevertheless BBC’s perversion of the truth will elevate the cause of justice immensely, delegitimizing itself in such grand fashion was indeed a great big gift.

Hats off to ya BBC!

Ken O’Keefe is Managing Director of Aloha Palestine and blogs here. He was on board the Mavi Marmara.

UPDATE:
Demonstration against ‘Death on the Med’ :: Location: BBC Television Centre, London :: Date: Sunday, 22 August 2010 :: Time 13:00

August 17, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Billions of dollars promised for Haiti fail to materialize

By Isabel Macdonald – The Star – August 16, 2010

Nearly seven months after a devastating earthquake killed upwards of 250,000 people in Haiti, UN special envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton told Associated Press on Aug. 6 that international donors have yet to make good on their promises of billions of dollars to help the country rebuild.

Haiti’s rebuilding could cost $14 billion, according to a recent Inter-American Development Bank study. Yet only “five countries — Brazil, Norway, Australia, Colombia and Estonia — have so far provided $506 million, less than 10 per cent of the $5.3 billion pledged for Haiti at a March donors’ conference,” according to an Aug. 6 AP article.

Today, dozens of leading academics, authors and activists from around the world proposed a bold solution to this desperate financial shortfall.

Why not reimburse Haiti for the illegitimate “independence debt” it paid France?

In an open letter to French president Nicolas Sarkozy published today in the French national daily newspaper Liberation, 90 leading academics, authors, journalists and human rights activists from around the world urged the French government to pay Haiti back for the 90 million gold francs Haitians were forced to pay as a price for their independence.

There are “powerful arguments in favour of the restitution of the French debt,” as Harvard medical professor Paul Farmer (who was recently appointed deputy UN special envoy to Haiti) pointed out in his testimony at the 2003 hearings in France on the independence debt.

This historic payment was patently illegitimate, and, on several different scores, it was also illegal, according to a 2009 paper produced by the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti.

Prior to independence, St. Dominique — the country that is now Haiti — was France’s most profitable colony, thanks in no small part to its particularly brutal system of slavery. In 1791, the slaves revolted, and in 1804, after defeating Napoleon’s armies, founded the world’s first black republic.

Following Haiti’s independence, former French slave owners submitted detailed tabulations of their losses to the French government, with line items for each of “their” slaves that had been “lost” with Haitian independence. In 1825, French King Charles X demanded that Haiti pay an “independence debt” to compensate former colonists for the slaves who won their freedom in the Haitian revolution. With warships stationed along the Haitian coast backing up the French demand, France insisted that Haiti pay its former colonizer 150 million gold francs — 10 times the fledgling black nation’s total annual revenues.

Under threat of a French military invasion that aimed at the re-enslavement of the population, the Haitian government had little choice but to agree to pay. Haiti’s government was also forced to finance the debt through loans from a single French bank, which capitalized on its monopoly by gouging Haiti with exorbitant interest rates and fees.

The original sum of the indemnity was subsequently reduced, but Haiti still disbursed 90 million gold francs to France. This second price the French exacted for the independence Haitians had won in battle was, even in 1825, not lawful. When the original indemnity was imposed by the French king, the slave trade was technically illegal; such a transaction exchanging cash for human lives valued as slave labour represented a gross violation of both French and international laws.

And Haiti was still paying off this “independence debt” in 1947 — 140 years after the abolition of the slave trade and 85 years after the emancipation proclamation.

A lawsuit launched by the Haitian government to recuperate these extorted funds was aborted prematurely in 2004, with the French-backed overthrow of the government that had the temerity to point out that France “extorted this money from Haiti by force and . . . should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary health care, water systems and roads.”

The French government was similarly quick to suppress a Yes Men-style prank announcement last Bastille Day pledging that France would repay Haiti. On July 15 — one day after the hoax — a spokesperson for the French ministry told Agence France Presse that the French government was pursuing possible legal action.

August 16, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

How Israel helps eavesdrop on US citizens

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 3 November 2008

After the 11 September 2001 attacks, the United States government launched a massive program to spy on millions of its own citizens. Through the top secret National Security Agency (NSA), it has pursued “access to billions of private hard-line, cell, and wireless telephone conversations; text, e-mail and instant Internet messages; Web-page histories, faxes, and computer hard drives.” In his new book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America author James Bamford casts light on this effort, including a detailed account of how spying on American citizens has been outsourced to several companies closely linked to Israel’s intelligence services.

It is well-known that the two largest American telecom companies AT&T and Verizon collaborated with the US government to allow illegal eavesdropping on their customers. The known uses to which information obtained this way has been put include building the government’s massive secret “watch lists,” and “no-fly lists” and even, Bamford suggests, to deny Small Business Administration loans to citizens or reject their children’s applications to military colleges.

What is less well-known is that AT&T and Verizon handed “the bugging of their entire networks — carrying billions of American communications every day” to two companies founded in Israel. Verint and Narus, as they are called, are “superintrusive — conducting mass surveillance on both international and domestic communications 24/7,” and sifting traffic at “key Internet gateways” around the US.

Virtually all US voice and data communications and much from the rest of the world can be remotely accessed by these companies in Israel, which Bamford describes as “the eavesdropping capital of the world.” Although there is no way to prove cooperation, Bamford writes that “the greatest potential beneficiaries of this marriage between the Israeli eavesdroppers and America’s increasingly centralized telecom grid are Israel’s intelligence agencies.”

Israel’s spy agencies have long had a revolving-door relationship with Verint and Narus and other Israeli military-security firms. The relationship is particularly close between the firms and Israel’s own version of the NSA, called “Unit 8200.” After the 11 September attacks, Israeli companies seeking a share of massively expanded US intelligence budgets formed similarly incestuous relationships with some in the American intelligence establishment: Ken Minihan, a former director of the NSA, served on Verint’s “security committee” and the former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official responsible for liaison with the telecom industry became head of the Verint unit that sold eavesdropping equipment to the FBI and NSA.

Bamford writes that “concern over the cozy relationship between the [FBI] and Verint greatly increased following disclosure of the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping operations. At the same time that the tappers and the agents have grown uncomfortably close, the previous checks and balances, such as the need for a FISA warrant, have been eliminated.”

FISA — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 — required the government to seek court warrants for wiretaps where at least one target was in the US. In 2005, it was revealed that the Bush administration had been flagrantly violating this law. Last July, Congress passed a bill legalizing this activity and giving retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that had assisted.

Although there has never been any congressional oversight of the Israeli intelligence-linked firms operating in the heart of the US security establishment, American lawmakers and officials are not always so relaxed when it comes to foreign intrusion in the “national security” sphere. In early 2006, there was a national uproar when Dubai Ports World, a global company based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), attempted to buy the business that manages six major American seaports.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers united against the Bush administration’s approval of the sale, claiming it would harm national security. Senator Barack Obama echoed many in both parties when he said at the time, “Over four years after the worst terrorist attack in our history, not only are we failing to inspect 95 percent of the cargo that arrives at US ports, but now we’re allowing our port security to be outsourced to foreign governments.”

A New York Times editorial justified such alarmism on grounds that “money to finance the 9/11 attacks flowed through” the UAE, although there was never an allegation that the country’s government or Dubai Ports World were involved in that. The newspaper also cited claims that “Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, sent equipment to Libya and Iran through Dubai,” even though it also acknowledged that “port managers have little if anything to do with inspecting cargo or checking manifests” (“Reaping What You Sow,” Editorial, 24 February 2006).

Unlike the UAE, however, Israel has a well-established record of compromising American national security. The most notorious case was that of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. Although the full details of his crimes are still secret, he is thought to have passed critical information about US intelligence-gathering methods to Israel, which then traded those secrets to US adversaries. In 2005, Larry Franklin, a Defense Department analyst, pleaded guilty to spying for Israel. Most recently, Ben-Ami Kadish, a retired US army engineer, was indicted in April for allegedly passing classified documents about US nuclear weapons to Israel from 1979 to 1985. Two former officials of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, are still awaiting trial on charges that they passed classified information between Franklin and the Israeli government.

Nor have particular Israeli firms established a record of trustworthiness that would justify such complacency. Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, the former Israeli intelligence officer who founded Verint, fled the US to Israel in 2006 just before he and other top executives of a subsidiary were indicted for fraud that allegedly cost US taxpayers and company shareholders $138 million. Alexander eventually adopted a fake identity and hid in the southern African country of Namibia where he is now fighting extradition. In only once case did US officials block an Israeli high-tech firm from taking over an American company for security concerns.

Israeli companies do not assist the US only to spy on its own citizens, of course. Another Israeli firm, Natural Speech Communication (NSC), among whose directors is former Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit, makes software that the US uses to electronically analyze and key-word search recorded conversations in “Levantine Arabic,” the dialects “spoken by Israeli Arabs, Jordanians, Lebanese and Palestinians.” Mexico and Australia are among other countries known to use Israeli technologies and firms to eavesdrop on their citizens.

Not surprisingly, some of Bamford’s claims have been criticized by pro-Israel activists for lacking evidence. Writing about a subject shrouded in secrecy is inherently difficult. But even what is solidly known ought to make Americans demand that Israeli intelligence activities (not less than their own government’s) be sharply curtailed. In his 2001 book Body of Secrets, Bamford contended that Israel’s attack on the US Navy signals ship USS Liberty during the June 1967 war was deliberately intended to prevent the Americans from learning about Israeli massacres of Egyptian prisoners of war. Thirty-four sailors were killed in the attack on the ship off the Sinai coast. Despite decades of demands by USS Liberty survivors, the US has never reopened the investigation.

So far Bamford’s latest revelations involving Israel have had scarcely more impact. Former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey gave The Shadow Factory a mostly glowing review in The Washington Post. But Kerrey, who was a member of the 9/11 Commission and is president of The New School University in New York, anxiously discounts Bamford’s contentions that the 11 September hijackers in any way “were motivated by anger over an Israeli bombing of Lebanese civilians in 1996” and reassures us their only motive was “radical Islamic fervor.” Kerrey concludes that Bamford’s “apparent negativity toward Israel is a significant distraction from the content of his book” (Bob Kerrey, “Big Brother’s Big Failure,” 12 October 2008).

When any material that raises legitimate questions about Israeli actions is automatically discounted by US elites, and the motives of critics immediately cast under suspicion, it is no wonder Israel gets away with so much.

August 16, 2010 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Obama Warns Erdogan over Israel, Gives Ultimatum

Al-Manar – 16/08/2010

Britain’s Financial Times reported on Monday that the US President Barack Obama personally warned Turkish Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erodgan that Washington will not sell weapons to Turkey if it does not change its position towards Israel.

Obama said that Turkey’s strained ties with Israel and increasing support of Iran could hinder an arms deal between Ankara and Washington.

The ultimatum is particularly important to Turkey, who was reportedly planning to buy American drone aircraft to attack Kurdish group PKK after the US pulls out of Iraq next year.

“The president has said to Erdogan that some of the actions that Turkey has taken have caused questions to be raised on the Hill [Congress] about whether we can have confidence in Turkey as an ally,” one senior administration official told the Financial Times.

“That means that some of the requests Turkey has made of us, for example in providing some of the weaponry that it would like to fight the PKK, will be harder for us to move through Congress,” the official was quoted as saying.

Relations between Israel and Turkey have grown increasingly strained since Israel’s three-week-long Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, which was launched in December 2008. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed, including 420 children and over 5300 others were injured.

Erdogan condemned the Israeli offensive in Gaza, and criticized the Israeli blockade of the Palestinian enclave.

Following the offensive, Turkey called off a joint military drill with Israel, and relations were strained further after Israel rebuked the then Turkish envoy over a television show depicting Israeli soldiers as cold-blooded killers.

The most critical blow to Israeli-Turkish relations, however, came on May 31, when Israeli commandos raided a Turkish aid convoy trying to break the naval blockade on Gaza, which resulted in the deaths of nine Turkish activists. Turkey had threatened to cut off diplomatic ties with Israel, and continues to demand an official apology over the raid.

Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu last week said Israel should admit sole responsibility for the killing of the nine activists.

“No one else can take the blame for killing civilians in international waters,” Davutoglu told journalists. “Israel has killed civilians, and should take the responsibility for having done so.”

Turkey, which is a NATO member and European Union member candidate, has also seen its capital rise sharply in the Muslim Middle East since Ankara’s vocal condemnation of the killings of nine pro-Palestinian activists aboard a Gaza-bound aid ship.

Ankara, together with Brazil, brokered a nuclear fuel swap in May in the hopes that the deal would draw Iran and major powers back to the negotiating table.

Turkey last week also said it would support gasoline sales by Turkish companies to Iran, despite U.S. sanctions that aim to squeeze the Islamic Republic’s fuel imports.

The U.S. administration official quoted by the Financial Times, however, said that Turkey needs to show it takes American national security interests seriously.

Washington is closely watching Turkish conduct to assess if there were “sufficient efforts that we can go forward with their request,” the official said.

August 16, 2010 Posted by | Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Hezbollah ruins Israeli drone contract

Press TV – August 16, 2010

Hezbollah’s recent revelation in airing photos taken by Israel’s unmanned surveillance planes has markedly affected the sale of the drones.

On August 9, Hezbollah Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah said the Lebanese resistance movement had intercepted Israeli drone transmissions and used the intelligence in a deadly attack on Israeli commandos in the Lebanese coastal village of Antsaria back in 1997.

Nasrallah also presented footage taken by Israeli drones of routes taken by Lebanon’s slain Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri prior his assassination in February 2005, saying the video proved Israel’s involvement in the murder.

Citing a report by Jane’s Defense Weekly, al-Manar said the televised speech and the revelation has affected agreements between Tel Aviv and Moscow for purchasing Israeli surveillance drones.

Russian officials had reportedly launched talks with Israeli counterparts on a drone sale contract worth USD 300 million, but the Israeli side had to pull out of the negotiations due to security considerations.

Experts believe Hezbollah’s interception of the intelligence collected by the drones will affect the willingness of other countries such as Brazil, India and Turkey to purchase the spy aircraft.

August 16, 2010 Posted by | Aletho News | Leave a comment

The Sierra Club: How Support for Industrial Wind Technology Subverts Its History, Betrays Its Mission, and Erodes Commitment to the Scientific Method

Jon Boone | April 18, 2010

Between the Gush for Wind and the Hard Place of Reality

The physical nature and enormous size of industrial wind projects has caused a lot of blowback. Between Maryland and West Virginia, for example, there is potential for around 2000 wind turbines, each nearly 500-feet tall; they would be placed atop 400 miles of the Allegheny Mountain ridges. About 20 acres of forest must be cut to support each turbine—4-6 acres to accommodate the free flow of the wind per turbine; one or more large staging areas for each wind project; access road construction; and a variety of substations and transmission lines. Cumulatively, about 40,000 acres of woodlands would be transformed into an industrial energy plant far larger than any conventional facility. Most of this montane terrain contains rare habitat and many vulnerable wildlife species.

How can such a looming industrial presence be reconciled with the goals of maintaining choice natural habitat while reducing the impact of human activity? For the Sierra Club, the answer is: The use of siting guidelines and wildlife assessment studies that would restrict limited liability wind companies from placing their huge machinery in the most sensitive places and away from rare and threatened species of plants and animals. If the war on carbon is to be won, and if skyscraper-sized wind turbines are part of the price for winning that war, then accommodation must be made. In the words of one wind developer, “some will have to sacrifice if we’re to have the clean, green energy from the wind” replacing coal and putting a stop to mountaintop removal coal extraction practices.

More than a few Sierra Club members and local chapters have resisted the national organization’s encyclicals on wind precisely because such hulking intrusion seems inimical to environmental common sense. The chair of the Maryland Chapter’s Conservation Committee, one of the nation’s leading naturalists, resigned in large part because of this concern. In response to such dissidents, the Club’s national leadership insists that it, and not its member chapters, be the final arbiter of what wind projects meet its standards: “It is important for the Club to speak with a unified, clear voice in its reaction to wind energy projects. It will not be good for the Club if one chapter is focusing totally on concerns about impacts on birds while the chapter in the next state is urging the public to support wind projects as a crucial element in reversing the impacts of global warming.” The organization enforces its authority under threat of expulsion, as was the case when its executive chairman, Carl Pope, in the wake of another controversy, excommunicated the entire Florida 35,000-memmber chapter for four years.

To “manage the negative environmental impacts of wind,” the Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, the American Bird Conservancy, Greenpeace, and the Audubon Society all recommend guidelines that, if followed, provide wind projects with their environmental seal of approval. Even on public lands. And with no evident sense of irony for the Sierra Club—since this is a policy taken from Gifford Pinchot’s playbook. John Muir is likely turning in his grave.

Siting guidelines that appear to make the wind industry more environmentally friendly, cognitively dissonant as the prospect seems to be, make sense only if the premise behind the policy is true, only if the technology can back down coal and offset significant amounts of carbon emissions.

Reality Bites

What is the scientific evidence that age-old technologies like wind, dressed up in high couture fashion, can provide clean, reliable, affordable, secure electricity to the masses, as the ruminations of Jacobsen and the optimism of the Department of Energy suggest?

Astonishingly, with 35,000 industrial wind turbines extant on this continent, no coal farms have closed because of the wind technology, and there is no empirical evidence there is less coal or natural gas burned per unit of electricity produced as a specific consequence of it. Contrary to the hopes of the Sierra Club, wind evidently is not an alternate energy source.

When the provisional ideas of ongoing scientific inquiry become politicized and then supported by a concatenation of groups seeking to profit from the ideas, both financially and ideologically—when science meets James Cameron and becomes entertainment for the masses in order to sell soap or sophistry, then we’ll get flying pigs, everywhere. Wind is not progressive, cutting edge, or effective, as the Sierra Club maintains. It is rather antediluvian, uncivil, and dysfunctional.

As a justification for wind promotion, science has become, for the Sierra Club and nearly all prominent environmental groups, not a method of seeking truth, but rather propaganda employed to prosecute its war on carbon. They routinely confuse engineering mechanics with science, and publish all kinds of techno-gismo birth announcements about saving the earth from those badass Big Oil/Big Coal corporations. But rarely do they provide the consequent obituaries. Or demand measurement of actual wind performance, which is the essence of scientific inquiry.

Promoting siting guidelines for such a rude, intrusive, shaggy beast of a technology implies that if wind machines were properly situated—somewhere, just not in the Sierra Club’s neck of the woods—they might actually do some good. This is the thinking behind the movement known as Responsible Windpower—an oxymoron at virtually every descriptive level, for it does little more than give a second-story burglary ring a ladder and an alibi.

Citizen wind opposition to the outsized nature of the technology began as a “not-in-my-backyard” phenomenon, eventually becoming a prod for the Sierra Club’s current wind siting guidelines. Responsible Windpower campaigns gave succor to those who support wind as a credible energy source, allowing them to save face with mainline environmental groups while protecting hearth and home, and vulnerable wildlife, from the worst of wind’s gigantic presence.

The wind industry perversely encourages discussion about wind plant siting and wildlife studies, much in the way cigarette manufactures once encouraged health-warning labels. But debate over set backs, noise levels, proximity to vulnerable flora and fauna, etc, distracts from the central issue: whether the technology provides the benefits claimed for it. Even as this discussion takes place, however, limited liability wind companies routinely ignore siting prescriptions, knowing there’s virtually no enforcement against wrongdoing. Siting guideline discussions and he said/she said bird studies foster a lot of dithering.

At the very least, support for massive wind technology betrays sound environmental and scientific precepts, ideas that many knowledgeable environmentalists hold dear, while putting at risk vulnerable species and valuable habitat and furthering the cause of civil discord. Every environmental group has expressed grave concern about bird mortality and cell towers. Wind projects are much more problematic.

See also:

Toward a Better Understanding of Industrial Wind Technology

Michael Morgan | Allegheny Treasures | October 26, 2009

August 15, 2010 Posted by | Economics, Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Israel-US Increase Military Cooperation, Hold Joint Exercises

Al-Manar – 15/08/2010

The Israeli military on Saturday carried out maneuvers in a terrain that resembles south Lebanon as part of exercises on the occupied Palestinian territories’ borders with Lebanon and Syria.

The maneuvers were the first of their kind. Israeli TV channels showed parts of the exercises in which occupation soldiers engaged in street battles with “Hezbollah”. TV footage also showed U.S. marines participating in the drills with their Israeli counterparts.

U.S. military aid to Israel has increased markedly this year. Top-ranking U.S. and Israeli soldiers have shuttled between Tel Aviv and Washington with unusual frequency in recent months. A series of joint military exercises in Israel over the past months has included a record number of American troops.

This month, about 200 U.S. Marines joined a battalion of Israeli soldiers for an all-night march through the Negev desert, the culmination of three weeks of joint drills. As dawn approached, they crept up on a mock village, an Israeli military-built re-creation of a typical Palestinian hamlet, used for combat training, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Behind a dune on the village’s edge, a U.S. Marine company commander conferred with his Israeli counterpart before the two barked orders to soldiers scattered behind them. As dawn gave way to the Negev desert’s grinding August heat, the forces battled house-to-house in mock battle, as Israeli and Marine generals watched on from the sidelines, the report said.

The exercise was the biggest U.S.-Israeli joint infantry exercise ever, according to officials. By comparison, at the same exercise last year, there were only around 20 U.S. Marines involved. In the fall, there will be an even bigger joint infantry exercise involving tanks and armored vehicles, WSJ quoted officials as saying.

August 15, 2010 Posted by | Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

On James Petras’ Twelve Reasons to Reject Obama

By James Petras | Axis of Logic | October 29, 2008

The presidential elections in the US, once again, provide an acid test of the integrity and consequential conduct of US intellectuals. If it is the duty and responsibility of the public intellectual to speak truth to power, the recent statements of most of our well-known and prestigious public pundits have failed miserably.  Instead of highlighting, exposing and denouncing the reactionary foreign and domestic policies of Democratic Party candidate Senator Barack Obama, they have chosen to support him, ‘critically, offering as excuses that even ‘limited differences’ can result in positive outcomes,and that ‘Obama is the lesser evil’ and ‘creates an opportunity for a possibility of change.’

What makes these arguments untenable is the fact that Obama’s public pronouncements, his top policy advisers, and the likely policymakers in his government have openly defined a most bellicose foreign policy and a profoundly reactionary domestic economic policy totally in line with Paulson-Bush-Wall Street. On the major issues of war, peace, the economic crisis and the savaging of the US wage and salaried class, Obama promises to extend and deepen the policies which the majority of Americans reject and repudiate.

Twelve Reasons to Reject Obama

1. Obama publicly and repeatedly promises to escalate the US military intervention in Afghanistan, increasing the number of US troops, expanding their operations and engaging in systematic cross-border attacks. In other words, Obama is a greater warmonger than Bush.

2. Obama publicly has declared that his regime will extend the ‘war against terrorism’ by systematic, large-scale ground and air attacks on Pakistan, thus escalating the war to include villages, towns and cities deemed sympathetic to the Afghan resistance.

3. Obama opposes the withdrawal of US troops in Iraq in favor of redeployment; the relocation of US troops from combat zones to training and logistical positions, contingent on the military capability of the Iraqi Army to defeat the resistance. Obama opposes a clearly defined deadline to withdraw US forces from Iraq because US troops in Iraq are essential to pursuing his overall policies in the Middle East, which include military confrontations with Iran, Syria and Southern Lebanon.

4. Obama has declared his unconditional support for the position of the pro-Israel Lobby and the colonial expansionist and bellicose policies of the Jewish state. He has promised to back Israeli military attacks whatever the cost to the US. His abject servility to Israel was evident in his speech at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington 2008. Top advisers who have long and notorious links to the top echelons of the principle Zionist propaganda mills and the Presidents of the Leading Jewish American Organizations wrote the speech and formulate his Middle East policy.

5. Obama has promised to attack Iran if it continues to process uranium for its nuclear programs. Twice, just weeks before the elections, Obama’s running mate Joseph Biden spelled out a series of ‘points of conflict’ (including Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and North Korea) emphasizing that Obama ‘would respond forcefully’. Obama’s senior Middle East advisers include leading Zionists like Dennis Ross, closely linked to the ‘Bipartisan Policy Center’, which published a report serving as a blueprint for war with Iran. Obama’s proposed offer to negotiate with Iran is little more than a pretext for issuing an ultimatum to Iran to surrender its sovereignty or face massive military assault.

6. Obama unconditionally supports Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians and the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the leading cause of Middle East hostility, warfare and the discredit of US policy in the region. With three dozen Israel-Firsters among his leading campaign organizers, top policy advisers, speech writers and among the likely candidates for cabinet positions, there is virtually no hope of ‘influencing from within’ or ‘applying popular pressure’ to change Obama’s slavish submission to the Zionist Power Configuration. By supporting Obama, the “progressive intellectuals” are, in effect, allies of his Zionist mentors.

7. On the domestic front, Obama’s key economic advisers have impeccable Wall Street credentials. He gave unquestioning and immediate endorsement to Treasury Secretary Paulson’s $700 billion dollar taxpayer bailout of the richest investment banks in the US. Obama has failed to challenge Paulson or the banks over the use of Federal funds for buyouts and acquisitions instead of loans and credit to producers and homeowners. Obama’s backing of Paulson and the Wall Street bailout is matched by his meager proposals to suspend mortgage foreclosures for a three-month period, pending re-negotiations of interest payments. Obama proposes to escalate transfers of government funds to mismanaged financial institutions and bankrupt capitalist corporations, in efforts to save failed capitalism rather than pursue any new large-scale, long-term public investment programs which will generate well-paid employment for workers.

1. Obama’s economic team has openly declared their embrace and practice of ‘free market’ ideology and opposition to any effort to engage in large-scale injections of government funds in publicly-owned productive activity and social services in the face of wide-spread private sector failure, corruption and collapse.

2. Obama embraces failed private sector health plans, run and controlled by corporate insurance companies, conservative medical and hospital associations and Big Pharma. He publicly rejects a universal national health program modeled after the successful Federal Medicare program in favor of inefficient, state-subsidized private for profit plans that are costly and beyond the means of over one third of US families.

3. Obama is and continues to be an advocate for Big Agro and its highly subsidized and profitable ethanol program, which has increased food prices for millions in the US and for hundreds of millions in the world.

4. Obama advocates continuing the criminal embargo on Cuba, hostile confrontation with Venezuela’s populist President Chavez and other Latin American reformers and the duplicitous policy of promoting protectionism at home and free market access to Latin America. His key policy advisers on Latin America propose cosmetic changes in style and diplomacy but unrelenting support for re-asserting US hegemony.

5. Obama has not proposed, nor do his free market advisers and billionaire financial backers envision, any comprehensive plan or strategy to get us out of the deepening recession. On the contrary, the course of piecemeal measures presented by Obama are internally inconsistent: Fiscal austerity is incompatible with job creation; bailing out Wall Street drains funds from productive investment; and pursuing new wars undermine domestic recovery.

CONCLUSION

The intellectuals who, in the name of ‘realism’, support a politician who publicly and openly embraces new wars, billionaire bailouts and for profit, private sector-run health programs are repudiating their own claims as ‘responsible critics’. They are what C. Wright Mills called ‘crackpot realists’, abdicating their responsibility as critical intellectuals. In purporting to support the ‘lesser evil’ they are promoting the ‘greater evil’: The continuation of four more years of deepening recession, colonial wars and popular alienation. Moreover, they are allies of the mass media, major parties and the legal system which has marginalized or outright excluded the alternative candidates, Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney, who do speak out and oppose the war, the pro-Wall Street bailouts and propose genuine large-scale public investment in the domestic economy, a universal single payer health program, sustainable and pro-environment economic policies and large-scale, long-term income redistributive policies.

What is crass and unacceptable is the argument of these intellectuals, (an insignificant pimple on the Democratic donkey’s rear-end) that for a single moment believe that their ‘critical support’ of the Obama political machine will open space for radical ideas. The Zionists and civilian militarists totally control Obama’s war policy in the Middle East: There will be no space for peace with Iran, Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq. Wall Street controls the Obama’s financial policy: There will be no space for some Cambridge progressive to sneak in a handout for families losing their homes.

If the trade unions that have spent a hundred million dollars on each presidential campaign have failed to secure a single piece of progressive legislation in over 50 years, isn’t it delusional for our progressive ‘public intellectuals’ to imagine that they, in their splendid organizational isolation, can ‘pressure’ President Obama to renounce his advisers, backers and public defense of military escalation, to see his way to peace with Iran and to promote social justice for our workers and unemployed?

August 14, 2010 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

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