Deception « Aletho News

‘Low-level NSA analysts can spy on Americans’

RT :: July 28, 2013

NSA spying programs give access to US citizens’ private data to low-level analysts with little court approval or supervision, says Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story on Washington’s PRISM surveillance system.

“[PRISM] is an incredibly powerful and invasive tool,” Greenwald told ABC’s ‘This Week.’ The NSA programs are “exactly the type that Mr. Snowden described. NSA officials are going to be testifying before the Senate on Wednesday, and I defy them to deny that these programs work exactly as I’ve said.”

The NSA keeps trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases which they can access anytime with simple screen programs, he said.

“And what these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things.”

“It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future.”

While the program conducts wiretapping with little court approval or supervision, there are “legal constraints” on surveillance that require approval by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, in which court judges can secretly review the government’s plans to track suspected terrorists in advance.

“You can’t target [Americans] without going to the FISA court,” Greenwald stressed. “But these systems allow analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents.”

“And it’s all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst,” he added.

Greenwald will testify before a Congressional committee on Wednesday, along with NSA officials who have previously downplayed Snowden’s claims about the agency’s easy-access data.

PRISM is a mass electronic surveillance data mining program operated by the NSA since 2007. The program was exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden earlier this summer. Snowden leaked information about the program to the media, warning of a far greater extent of mass data collection than the public knew existed. The disclosures were published by The Guardian and The Washington Post on June 6.

Snowden later leaked further information to Greenwald which pertained to mass security operations carried out across the world. He spoke of British spy agency GCHQ, which uses the Tempora surveillance program. The whistleblower also shared information regarding Germany’s cooperation with US intelligence, which reportedly combs through half a billion German phone calls, emails, and text messages on a daily basis.

A call for transparency on surveillance programs

The call for increased oversight and transparency for surveillance programs has been growing, even among supporters of the NSA.

“I do think that we’re going to have to make some change to make things more transparent,” Senator Saxby Chambliss, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told ABC.

Former federal judge James Robertson, who used to grant surveillance orders, said he was shocked to hear of changes to allow broader authorization of NSA programs – such as the monitoring of US phone records. He urged for a reform which would to allow counter-arguments to be heard.

“What FISA does is not adjudication, but approval,” Robertson said, speaking as a witness during the first public hearings into the Snowden revelations. “This works just fine when it deals with individual applications for warrants, but the 2008 amendment has turned the FISA court into an administrative agency making rules for others to follow.”

However, government officials have defended the surveillance initiatives as authorized under law, claiming they are necessary in order to guard the country against terrorist threats.

Following Snowden’s revelations on NSA surveillance, President Barack Obama assured US citizens in June that “nobody is listening to [their] telephone calls.”

He said the surveillance programs monitor phone numbers and the durations of calls, adding that if there are any suspicions and “if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation.”

President Obama added that America is “going to have to make some choices” between privacy and security, warning that the highly publicized programs will make it harder to target terrorists.

Meanwhile, deputy FBI Director Sean Joyce said that the “program is not intentionally used to target any US citizens” and is “key in our counter-terrorism efforts.”

Testifying on Capitol Hill before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in June, NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander claimed that the NSA’s storage of millions of phone records has thwarted more than 50 terror attacks in more than 20 countries since September 11, 2001. However, evidence of the prevented attacks has not been revealed.

July 29, 2013 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Glenn Greenwald, Human rights, Information Technology, Intelligence, Law, National Security Agency, NSA, Obama, Politics, United States, United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court | Leave a comment

Israeli archeologist: The finds in Khirbet Qeiyafa could belong to an Arab civilization

Palestine Information Center – 28/07/2013

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel Finkelstein, a noted Israeli archeologist and academic at Tel Aviv university, questioned the Jewish claims about the discovery of King David palace in Khirbet Qeiyafa, west of occupied Jerusalem, expressing his belief that the finds belong to an ancient Arab civilization.

Finkelstein said that it could be true that the site discovered dates back to the eighth or tenth century BC, but it could have been built in that period by the Palestinians, the Arab Canaanites or other peoples in the region.

He said he believes that the site was probably built by other ancient kingdoms in the region, especially since there is no conclusive physical evidence suggesting it is the palace of King David.

Israeli archeologists had claimed to have discovered the site of King David Palace in Khirbet Qeiyafa, according to the Jerusalem Post. The report also said that the diggings have been going on for seven years at the site and had revealed two huge Jewish buildings, a palace and a storehouse.

King David’s Palace Found? Biblical Archaeology Contentious (theepochtimes.com)

July 28, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Science and Pseudo-Science | Israel Finkelstein, Jerusalem, Jerusalem Post, Khirbet Qeiyafa, King David, Palace of King David, Palestine, Zionism | Leave a comment

Obama’s Plan for Economic Immiseration

By ROB URIE | July 26, 2013

President Barack Obama spoke at length on the economy on Wednesday in the first of what is reported to be a series of speeches he will give around the country to push his economic ‘agenda.’ A question for his supporters is why Mr. Obama is now purporting to promote the interests of the middle class and working poor when he has remained silent for the last five years during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression? If he cared one whit about these people the time to promote economic policies to help them was five years ago. And conversely, the economic policies he has pursued have decimated the very people he now claims to want to help.

Mr. Obama’s analysis of economic travails—globalization and its effects on an under-educated workforce, are the same neo-liberal pabulum the ‘Washington consensus’ has been serving up since Jimmy Carter was in office. And his economic prescriptions—public-private ‘partnerships’ to boost investment in technology, bringing corporate executives in to assess what is wrong with the educational system, building out lower cost ‘online’ education and community colleges to ‘boost American competitiveness,’ increased infrastructure spending and the creation of tax advantaged savings accounts for middle class families, are straight from the neo-liberal playbook as well. To ask the obvious question: if neo-liberal policies worked, why then the laundry list of economic travails?

Taking the speech at face value, the contention market forces (‘globalization’) are the central cause of the decades old downward mobility of the ‘American workforce’ leaves out the specific role Mr. Obama has played in pushing the monopoly capitalist coup forward with the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP), the role he personally has played in reviving the Wall Street banks responsible for the ‘financialization’ of the economy, the bi-partisan effort by official Washington to diminish the lot of organized labor and the ‘privatization’ schemes he continues to push to hand the public economy over to corporate interests. Government policies in the service of capital are no more ‘market’ forces than the much derided ‘central planning’ is.

A recent paper by the International Labour Organization (ILO) presents a broad and reasonably nuanced effort that concludes financialization, and not ‘technology,’ is the central explanation for the increased, and still increasing, share of income going to corporations and away from labor. By changing the corporate motive from continuing economic production to ‘financialized’ production—the creation of corporate architecture designed for maximum extraction of previously existing value, the ‘balance of power’ between labor and capital was shifted to capital by its corporate agents (executives). A prime example can be found in Wall Street itself—individual firms willing to sink the entire financial system for short term trading gains. Additionally, through the permeation of debt-based leverage, rentier income is now drawn from every section of the economy.

Mr. Obama’s unconditional bailout of Wall Street, with upwards of $25 trillion of public funds made available to ‘save’ the banks, is the single greatest gift from working people to the forces of their own demise in world history. The ILO paper articulates the role of Wall Street in the immiseration of the West’s toiling classes– not only was the transfer of public resources to ‘private’ banks in the bailouts taken from the working class, the financial economy Mr. Obama ‘saved’ is the absolute enemy of working people. Wall Street provided the tactic of immiseration of the working poor and middle class through financialization of economic production and it facilitated the process through financialization of the broader economy. In fact, Mr. Obama’s economic agenda can be read as the explicit continuation of this process.

Mr. Obama’s plan to ‘work with’ private technology companies to provide every college student in America with high speed internet service has particular irony as apparently the main capability to be boosted is the NSA’s ability to spy on students, long known to be periodically politically active, all the more quickly. As there was no mention of this ‘enhanced’ service being free—Mr. Obama is providing students the ‘right’ to buy products from private companies who then sell the information they gather from their ‘customers’ to the highest bidder while inventing ever more intrusive and corporate-totalitarian methods of controlling them. It is agreed that in theory high speed Internet service has value. That Mr. Obama’s actual corporate-state policies have made it a tool of totalitarian control shines a light on his true constituency. Conversely, it illustrates the destruction of actual economic value (high speed internet service) through strategies of domination by the same capitalists claiming they create economic value.

Asking business leaders to opine on the system of public education is more cynical still given Mr. Obama’s appointment of long-term public school privatizer Arne Duncan as Education Secretary. Business leaders’ interest is to shift the cost of training ‘their’ workforces onto the public dime. Even granting the dubious proposition education is to benefit capitalist enterprise, truly educating ‘the workforce’ provides for a broad set of potentially socially beneficial applications whereas training teaches skills that benefit certain employers. Given the history of American corporations trying to limit the mobility of workers, such as pensions with long vesting periods, providing specific training in lieu of broad education serves corporate interests against those of labor. And ‘education’ only creates ‘American’ jobs to the extent Federal government policies put certain classes of labor into faux ‘competition’ with more effectively exploited workers overseas. ‘Education,’ as Mr. Obama presents it, is a phony solution to an engineered problem.

Even in the dim corporate-state worldview of Mr. Obama’s patrons there must be interest in education outside rote training and inculcating maximum consumption—otherwise, who will create? Additionally, the basic arithmetic of privatized education is revenue – costs = profits. If profits are zero, as is the case with public education, then expenditures equal revenues. Why extracting profits–increasing public expenditures that go to capitalists rather than to education, adds value to education when it so clearly detracts is a mystery Mr. Obama should explain. And paradoxically, his ‘private’ model for education finds precedence in his health care ‘reform’ plan, the ACA, with the central difference being that Mr. Obama’s explanation for retaining a private healthcare system is that it is already ‘private’ whereas the educational system Mr. Obama now wants to privatize is largely public. And there is no grimmer view of human existence than corporations training human ‘consumption units’ in the empty ideology of capitalist consumption.

Mr. Obama’s ‘tax advantaged’ savings accounts for middle class families are a particularly cynical ploy. Middle class wages were stagnant for thirty years before declining in the economic calamity associated with the financial ‘crisis’ of 2008. What middle class (and poor) families need is income, not accounts to put income they don’t have into. With more details allegedly forthcoming, the initial read is through his ‘private accounts’ Mr. Obama hopes to effectuate George W. Bush’s plan for his own ‘private accounts’ as a step toward privatizing Social Security. And in his Wednesday speech Mr. Obama made coded comments about cutting Social Security that tie directly to his Hamilton Project (Robert Rubin) speech nearly a decade earlier. To be clear, the working poor would be hurt most were Mr. Obama to push ‘private’ savings accounts only the rich can afford while cutting the Social Security the working poor most depend on.

The infrastructure spending Mr. Obama advocates may or may not be a good idea depending on how it is financed. In the U.S., given its geography and geopolitics, infrastructure has unambiguously provided an economic benefit in the post-WWII period. But corporations formerly paid a substantial proportion of the costs of building infrastructure through taxes. Over the last fifty years taxes on corporations and the wealthy have been massively cut leaving the middle class to pay an increased share of public expenditures. And a significant proportion of this burden, in the form of municipal debt, is coming due.

The struggle currently underway in ‘bankrupt’ Detroit between ‘bondholders’ and pensioners has the Democratic Party of the last forty years supporting the immiseration of pensioners to pay financial speculators for financing infrastructure spending. To be clear, public (and private) pensions are deferred income negotiated in lieu of current income. Democrat Robert Rubin, with whose acolytes Mr. Obama has continued to fill his Cabinet, is an insistent advocate of Detroit’s bondholders being fully paid. And the only way to do so is to take the money, earned income that was deferred, from pensioners. Mr. Obama’s threat to appoint arch Rubinite Larry Summers—the man who bears significant responsibility for deregulating Wall Street and for the ensuing economic calamity, to Chair the Federal Reserve is a clear signal increased infrastructure spending is intended to transfer even more public wealth to ‘private’ hands.

Mr. Obama refers to the student debt ‘crisis’ as if he had no role in it. In fact, about half of the total student loan debt outstanding was accumulated while Mr. Obama has been President. Mr. Obama ‘removed the banks’ from making student loans in 2009 as part of his effort to shift bad bank debts and economic risk from the banks onto the public balance sheet, not in an effort to help middle class students as he now asserts. Under Mr. Obama student loan debt fraudulently incurred through bogus ‘for-profit’ colleges and trade schools has exploded with fully one-third of indebted students failing to receive degrees. With full knowledge that student loan debt is nearly impossible to discharge, Mr. Obama encouraged students to take loans as part of his education ‘initiative’ creating a new generation of debt slaves to a particularly pernicious type of debt.

The ‘middle class’ jobs Mr. Obama now claims to have created through the automaker bailouts is a particularly offensive sleight of hand. Before the bailouts a proposal had been floated to create a ‘tiered’ wage system where new autoworkers would earn approximately one-half what existing workers made. As a condition of the automaker bailouts Mr. Obama forced the issue by putting tiered wages in place while no restrictions were put on executive compensation. In large measure the same executives who had sunk the auto industry were left in their jobs at full pay and were left free to continue relocating autoworker jobs to low wage countries. And in fact, the bailouts Mr. Obama now claims were his were largely engineered by the George W. Bush administration before it left office. As with Mr. Obama’s healthcare plan, right-wing Republicans conceived the automaker bailouts.

On a positive note, it was refreshing to hear Mr. Obama correctly characterize his healthcare ‘reform’ plan, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as a plan to provide health insurance, rather than health care, to those lacking it. The Democrat partisans who tried to draw such a stark line between Mr. Obama’s policies and the likely policies of his Republican rival in the last election, Mitt Romney, largely avoided the fact that Mr. Obama’s health care ‘reform’ was the same plan Republican Mitt Romney had implemented as Governor of Massachusetts. The right-wing Heritage Foundation originally conceived the plan as the radical right’s ‘solution’ to the ‘threat’ of national health care. Under the guise of political feasibility Mr. Obama has pushed through the major policies of the radical corporate-right with his long-suffering constituents believing they got a good deal.

The genesis of the ACA as a corporate-right ‘solution’ to a public health crisis is what it is, but this alone doesn’t doom it to failure. What it leaves is a system that provides about two-thirds of the benefits of a functioning health care system at twice the cost. While implementation of the plan in Massachusetts initially reduced the number of medical bankruptcies —families that were bankrupted by medical costs, the number quickly recovered. The basic flaws of the existing healthcare system remain—monopoly power in pricing medical services and medical provision, a disjoint and ring-fenced system designed to maximize profits rather than to provide healthcare, and hugely asymmetrical political-economic power between insurance companies, medical providers and the ‘insured’. The ACA’s liberal supporters believe against all history that private insurers will willingly provide the health care they are contractually obligated to provide when they only have when forced to in the past. The question then, with the unconditional bank bailouts as guide, is who is going to force them?

Again, the received wisdom amongst the self-described ‘liberal’ economists supporting the ACA is that it is all that was politically feasible. In fact, with poll results showing 75% of the American people initially supporting a national (single payer) health care system, Mr. Obama could have taken his case to the people. Alternatively, Mr. Obama could have represented popular disillusion as a potential threat to the extractive, dysfunctional private health care providers and won concessions. Instead, he had a health insurance lobbyist write the ACA and proceeded to pass the Republican plan conceived by the right-wing Heritage Foundation off as his signature achievement.

What Mr. Obama apparently hopes to accomplish in the remainder of his term, as evidenced by his economic ‘agenda,’ is the conversion of every remaining socially beneficial public institution into private enterprises designed to provide the highest profits for connected capitalists while converting their (public institutions’) ‘products’ into tools for the domination and control of the populace. Postmodernist insights notwithstanding, there is a difference between education and capitalist-corporatist propaganda. There is a difference between education and technical training in the service of industry. Savings accounts for people who have no income to save are a hoax. Infrastructure designed to extract ongoing fees for private interests at public expense is a cynical ploy. And as ACA supporters will soon be learning in excruciating detail, there is a difference between health insurance and health care. Finally, privatization isn’t efficient rationalization of public institutions; it is the replacement of the public interest with private interests. Lest the result remain unclear, replacement means elimination of the public interest.

Rob Urie is an artist and political economist in New York. His book, Zen Economics, will be published by CP/AK Press in 2014.

Source

July 27, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Obama, United States, Wall Street | Leave a comment

Another Journalist with Children in the Israeli Military

By ALISON WEIR | CounterPunch | July 26, 2013

The New York Times recently published a news brief, reporting that Israel is going to re-investigate an incident in which an American citizen, Tristan Anderson, was permanently maimed.

Anderson suffered extensive brain damage (part of his frontal lobe was destroyed) and paralysis, and was blinded in one eye, after Israeli soldiers shot him with a tear gas canister intended as a “barricade penetrator” from inappropriately close range. According to eyewitnesses, Anderson was shot as he was taking photographs in a Palestinian village after an unarmed protest against the illegal and extensive confiscation of village land.

Israeli forces have a history of shooting unarmed protesters with these canisters, which one expert likens to “a small missile.”

Yet the New York Times report, “Israel Reopens Inquiry Into Activist’s Injury” (July 11, 2013, P. 9) reveals few of these details.

The Times article states that Anderson was injured when he was hit in the head by a tear gas canister and is partly paralyzed and blind in one eye, but does not mention his extensive brain damage and that his paralysis is over half his body. It doesn’t reveal that the type of canister used is extraordinarily destructive or that it was fired at such close range.

The report also omits the fact that this incident is part of a pattern, even though Israeli forces have killed at least two Palestinians with these canisters, and shot out the eye of an American student with another. According to a report by an Israeli organization, Israeli forces “frequently fire tear-gas canisters directly at demonstrators.”

The Times report states that the protest was “against the extension of Israel’s separation barrier in the West Bank” without citing the villagers’ actual complaint — the confiscation of their land and, thus, livelihood by Israel. It similarly fails to mention that over previous decades Israel confiscated over 80 percent of the village land and now intends to take between a quarter and a third of what remains to build the “barrier.”

Finally, the Times report repeats, without attribution, the Israeli security forces’ claim that the shooting occurred “during a clash,” implying that it happened accidentally during a violent engagement, ignoring eyewitness testimony that the protest had dissipated and most people had gone home.

The byline on the Times report is Myra Noveck. Noveck has bylined a number of stories for both the New York Times and its European affiliate the International Herald Tribune, where ZoomInfo lists her as a contributor.

Noveck is frequently cited in New York Times news reports as a contributor to stories, and a prominent Israeli newspaper calls her the Times’ “deputy bureau chief” for the Times’ Jerusalem bureau, its bureau for covering Israel-Palestine.

From information she has posted online, it appears that Noveck is an American who moved to Israel after college. According to Torah in Motion, which promotes Jewish dialogue and speakers, two of her children were serving in the Israeli military as of 2012. It is unclear whether her children are currently still on active duty or whether they are now serving as Israeli reserve soldiers.

In either case, it appears that while Noveck has been writing and contributing to news reports about Israel and about the Israeli military, her children have been serving in it.

Such a situation appears to constitute a clear conflict of interest – even according to the Times’ own ethics standards – and should normally cause a journalist to be assigned to a different area of reporting.

When it came to light in 2010 that then chief of the Times’ Jerusalem bureau, Ethan Bronner, had a son in the Israeli military, even the Times’ own ombudsman concluded that Bronner should be reassigned.

In response to requests for information and interviews with Noveck and Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson, a Times spokesperson issued a written statement claiming that Noveck is “not a reporter,” but merely a “long-time news assistant in The Times’s bureau in Jerusalem.”

The statement went on to say: “She works under the direction of our bureau chief primarily doing translation and research. She is an Israeli citizen. If she has children and they are also Israeli citizens, presumably they would be required to serve in the military*. This situation would not constitute a ‘breach with impartiality.’”

I wrote back pointing out (1) that Times’ conflict of interest requirements include family members and (2) that Noveck’s byline appeared on a news report. The spokesperson then admitted that Noveck “on rare occasions received a byline” but still maintained that “she is not a reporter.”

However, the Times’ published ethics standards generally extend ethical requirements ”to all newsroom and editorial page employees, journalists and support staff alike.”

Reporters Frequently Have Ties to Israeli Military

This incident is part of a pattern of ethics violations concerning reporting on Israel.

Isabel Kershner, a senior Times reporter in the region, is an Israeli citizen whose husband, according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (Fair) works for an Israeli organization, the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), which has close ties to the Israeli military and is “tasked with shaping a positive image of Israel in the media.”

A FAIR study of articles that Kershner had written or contributed to since 2009 found they had overwhelmingly relied on the INSS for analysis about events in the region.

A multitude of journalists at the Times and elsewhere have had close personal and family ties to the Israeli military – almost none of them ever disclosed, including the previous Times bureau chief Ethan Bronner, as noted above.

Jonathan Cook, a British journalist based in Israel, quotes a Jerusalem bureau chief who stated: “… Bronner’s situation is ‘the rule, not the exception. I can think of a dozen foreign bureau chiefs, responsible for covering both Israel and the Palestinians, who have served in the Israeli army, and another dozen who like Bronner have kids in the Israeli army.”

Cook writes that the bureau chief explained: “It is common to hear Western reporters boasting to one another about their Zionist credentials, their service in the Israeli army or the loyal service of their children.”

For more information on journalists’ pro-Israel conflict of interest violations see ”US Media and Israeli Military: All in the Family,” “Jodi Rudoren, Another Member of the Family: Meet the New York Times’ New Israel-Palestine News Chief,” “Ethan Bronner’s Conflict With Impartiality,” and ”AP’s Matti Friedman: Israeli citizen and former Israeli soldier.”

It would appear from this pervasive pattern that many of the owners, editors, and journalists who determine U.S. reporting on Israel-Palestine believe that normal ethics requirements don’t apply in regard to Israel.

This situation holds serious consequences for the American public. American taxpayers give Israel over $8 million per day (more than to any other country) and, as a result, most of the world views Americans as responsible for Israeli actions, exposing us to escalating risks.

Osama Bin Laden and others have often cited U.S. support for Israeli crimes as a primary cause of hostility against us.

It is thus essential that Americans be accurately and fully informed. This is unlikely to happen while those reporting for American news media (whether “reporters” or “assistants”) have such close ties to Israel and its powerful military forces.

Witnesses Describe Soldiers Shooting Protesters with High-Speed Canisters

Anderson was shot in 2009 after a protest in the Palestinian village of Ni’lin in the West Bank. Since 2007 Ni’lin villagers and others have been demonstrating against the illegal Israeli confiscation of up to a third of the village’s land (following previous confiscations in which the majority of the village’s original land was taken by Israel).

Gabby Silverman, a witness to the shooting of Tristan Anderson, describes the incident: “Tristan had wandered off with his camera. I was looking at him. And out of nowhere, they opened fire on us. The first shot they fired, they got Tristan.”

Anderson is now in a wheelchair with permanent brain damage. He is hemiplegic (paralyzed on the left, formerly dominant, side of his body). He is blind in his right eye and part of his head and frontal lobe were destroyed.

The kind of canister Israeli forces shot at Anderson is particularly dangerous, according to their manufacturer itself. The shells have a range of several hundred meters, yet Israeli soldiers fired at Anderson from approximately 60 meters away.

The canisters’ manufacturer, Combined Systems, Inc. (CSI), classifies them as “barricade penetrators” and advises that they should not be fired at people. A spokesperson for an Israeli human rights organization says, “It’s like firing a small missile.” Because of an internal propulsion mechanism, they hurtle through the air at 122 meters per second.

CSI is reportedly the primary supplier of tear gas to Israel. A watchdog group reports that the company flew the Israeli flag at its Jamestown, Pennsylvania, headquarters until, in advance of a planned Martin Luther King Day demonstration, CSI took it down and replaced it with the Pennsylvania state flag.

According to an in-depth report on CSI by Pennsylvania professor Dr. Werner Lange, the company was founded by two Israelis, Jacob Kravel and Michael Brunn.

A month after Anderson was shot, a Palestinian nonviolence leader was killed by this same type of tear gas canister when an Israeli soldier shot it into the victim’s chest (the fifth Palestinian killed in Ni’lin by the Israeli military in a year and a half).

The next year Israeli forces fired a similar canister at a young American art student, Emily Henochowicz, destroying one eye. An eyewitness reported that an Israeli soldier intentionally aimed the canister at Henoschowitz while she was participating in a nonviolent demonstration.

In 2012 another Palestinian was killed when an Israeli soldier shot him in the face with what appears to have also been a long-range CSI canister.

The occupying Israeli forces have consistently suppressed the Ni’lin villagers’ unarmed protests against the stealing of their land. As of 2012, Israel had arrested more than 350 villagers, killed 5 – including a 10-year-old child – injured “multiple” protesters with live ammunition, and broken the bones of 15 people with tear gas projectiles, according to the villagers’ website, created to document the situation.

There are similar reports from other Palestinian villages, where several other protesters have died from tear gas fired by Israeli forces.

It is unfortunate that almost none of this was even hinted at in Myra Noveck’s New York Times report.

*While military service is required for both males and females in Israel, only about 50 percent actually serve; many Israelis have refused to serve in the Israeli military for reasons of conscience.

Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew and president of the Council for the National Interest. She can be reached through contact@ifamericansknew.org.

For more information on Anderson, videos of the incident, and the latest updates go to http://www.justice4tristan.org/.

Ni’lin is also sometimes referred to as Nilin or Na’alin.

Palestinian photographer who was shot in the cheek could be imprisoned yet again (alethonews.wordpress.com)

July 26, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture | Ethan Bronner, New York Times, Palestine, Tristan Anderson, Zionism | Leave a comment

UK Serious Crimes Agency buried evidence of massive criminality by major corporations, rich people — wouldn’t even tell the cops

By Cory Doctorow | boingboing | July 25, 2013

Back in June, the Independent broke a huge story about a scandal whereby the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency sat on evidence of widespread use of phone-hacking and other dirty tricks by rich people, top-flight law-firms, telecoms companies and blue-chip firms.

Today, they’ve published an update: the list of companies that routinely engaged in criminal behavior is longer than earlier thought — including pharma companies and many others — and what’s more, SOCA hid this information from the Metropolitan Police force, effectively insulating these top firms and toffs from any consequence for their criminality.

Following weeks of damaging revelations in The Independent, Soca finally bowed to political pressure earlier this week and privately released to MPs the historical details which its investigators ignored for years.

However, the agency has classified the material as secret to safeguard individuals’ human rights and protect the “financial viability of major organisations by tainting them with public association with criminality”…

…Illegal practices identified by Soca investigators went well beyond the relatively simple crime of voicemail hacking and also included police corruption, computer hacking and perverting the course of justice.

Meanwhile, in an extraordinary joint admission on the Soca website, Mr Pearce and Commander Neil Basu of the Metropolitan Police admit the agency sat for years on evidence of criminality, until it was finally forced to act in May 2011 by former British Army intelligence officer Ian Hurst whose computer was allegedly hacked by corrupt private investigators.

Unsurprisingly, lots of rich elite guys in Britain snoop on enemy voicemail | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com (wired.com)

July 26, 2013 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Cory Doctorow, Crime, Metropolitan Police, Metropolitan Police Service, Serious Organised Crime Agency, UK, UK government | Leave a comment

Venezuela: Supporting a Once and Future Revolution

By Roger D. Harris | Dissident Voice | July 25th, 2013

Venezuela is at a critical moment in its Bolivarian revolution, dealing with serious economic issues due to its transitional economy that is under siege by local oligarchs. At the same time, President Nicolás Maduro’s decision to welcome Edward Snowden, if he opts for political asylum in Venezuela, means that the Obama administration is escalating its hostility towards his government.

Venezuela faces a situation analogous to that of the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende from 1970 to 1973 when, as is well documented, the CIA and the local business class conspired to destabilize the economy, overthrow the democratically elected socialist government, and impose the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

It is in this context that we find it ill timed at best that Clif Ross has assailed the Venezuelan government with one-sided and flimsy arguments (e.g., criticizing Chávez for choosing to divert electrical power from basic industry to the populace when natural droughts curtailed hydroelectric production) in recent articles at Dissident Voice and CounterPunch Weekend Edition.

A former Chávista, Ross now takes what he describes as an “agnostic” view of the Bolivarian movement. His agnosticism extends to the US-backed opposition, which Ross argued in his talk in Berkeley could be even better for Venezuela if it were to come to power.

As solidarity activists, the Task Force on the Americas is not afflicted with agnostic angst; we support the social justice movements against imperialist intervention. Our responsibility is to allow the Venezuelans to resolve the contradictions within their movement without the interference of the US government.

A class analysis is needed of what is happening in Venezuela. The many problems with the Bolivarian revolution are inherent in trying to create socialism on the foundations of capitalism. Within Chávismo there is an acute awareness of problems, and President Maduro is working on them. We support the overall Bolivarian struggle against outside interference, because the alternative of the opposition in power would mean no opportunity for a people’s agenda.

Ross is concerned about the contagion of state power. None of the 21st century socialist governments in Latin America pass his muster. All are corrupt, authoritarian, and going in the wrong direction in his view.

But it was through state power that the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela distributed land to 300,000 families, halved the poverty rate, reduced extreme poverty by two-thirds, went from being among one of the most economically unequal nations in the Latin America to being the among the most equal, reduced child malnutrition by 40%, increased social expenditures by 60%, built 700,000 homes, and returned 1 million hectares to Indigenous communities.

This same government has promoted community councils and other instruments of participatory democracy. Not surprisingly, according to the annual World Happiness poll, Venezuela is the second happiest country in the world.

A mere decade and a half ago, most analysts would have ranked Venezuela as least likely to stand up on its own two feet to challenge the Empire, to be recognized as sovereign and equal. It was arguably the most sycophantically Americanized nation in South America. In a mere 14 years of the Bolivarian revolution, there has been a blossoming of home grown culture. A sense of national identity and pride has become universal, even among the Miami jet-setting opposition elements.

Today, 32-year old musical wunderkind and avowed Chavista Gustavo Dudamel is not only the music director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar in Caracas but of the Philharmonic Orchestra in Los Angeles. Culture is still being imported, but the shipping lanes are going both ways now.

The Bolivarian revolution is considered a major threat by the US empire. The US has a stated policy of regime change for Venezuela, spending millions of dollars on “democracy promotion” to demonize and destabilize the Bolivarian movement. With the US as the sole super power having an uncontested military superiority, the Bolivarian revolution is all the more of a threat because it is a “threat of a good example.”

In 2008, when the US financial crisis precipitated a world recession, the capitalist solution was to impose austerity measures on working people with increased unemployment and economic insecurity. In contrast, the Venezuelan government reduced the gap between rich and poor by elevating the poor.

As James Petras has pointed out, US policy toward Venezuela has taken many tactical turns. But the enduring objective has been the same: oust the Chavistas, reverse the nationalization of big businesses, abolish the mass community and worker based councils, and revert the country into a client-state. These are the salient issues the solidarity movement needs to address.

Roger D. Harris is President of the Task Force on the Americas, a 29-year-old human rights organization based in Marin County, which works in solidarity with the social justice movements in Latin America and in opposition to US interference with their self-determination. V isit Roger’s website.

Venezuela ends normalization of US relations (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Venezuela arrests Colombian paramilitaries plotting instability (alethonews.wordpress.com)

July 26, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics, Timeless or most popular | Bolivarian Revolution, Latin America, Nicolás Maduro, South America, United States, Venezuela | Leave a comment

Israel unveils controversial plan for West Bank rail network

Al-Akhbar | July 25, 2013

Israel revealed on Wednesday plans for a sprawling railway system across occupied Palestinian territories, a move which has been rejected by the Palestinian Authority, local media reported.

According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the “grandiose” plan includes 473 kilometers of rail, 30 stations on 11 lines and dozens of bridges and tunnels in order to connect all West Bank cities.

The planned rail network – which could cost at least $27.8 billion according to media reports – would connect major Palestinian cities in the West Bank with the Gaza Strip and Israeli settlements beyond the Green Line. The trains would also link to border crossings into Jordan and Syria, The Times of Israel wrote, disregarding existing political demarcation lines.

The PA has officially refused to cooperate with Israel’s civil administration regarding the plan, as Palestinians eye the Israeli move with suspicion.

“The West Bank and Gaza are, by international law, occupied territories,” Salman Abu Sitta, a Palestinian researcher and author of the Atlas of Palestine, told Al-Akhbar.

“Any action by the occupying power is not allowed there, therefore this plan is expropriation of Palestinian land.”

“In normal circumstances, railways are a good thing, but this is a war crime under the Rome Statute,” just like the apartheid wall, Abu Sitta added.

Following the PA’s repeated refusal to collaborate on the project, Israel decided to proceed without Palestinian input and publicize the plan. Israeli officials said the railway initiative will be open for comments and objections from the public before its final validation.

The decision to push forward with the plan ignores the possible ramifications of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to revive peace talks between Palestinian and Israeli officials, Palestinian newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadida noted.

Should the railway plan materialize, the trains could facilitate movement of Israeli troops and settlers across the West Bank, Abu Sitta noted.

Abu Sitta dismissed Israeli media coverage of the railway plan which highlighted its benefits for commuting Palestinians.

“They (Israelis) always say that, just like they claim settlements are good for Palestinians,” he said. “But the good of the Palestinians is to be decided by the Palestinians themselves and their democratically elected government.”

Israeli Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz told The Times of Israel that the high cost of the plan meant that “there is no intention to advance the plan to the implementation stage at this time.”

“This is just on paper. It’s not going to be built for years,” Katz said, adding that construction in areas A and B of the West Bank could not take place without approval from the Palestinian Authority.

Even if funds for the costly project do not materialize, “the mere existence of the plan means that any construction program from now on will have to take the theoretical railway lines into account,”Haaretz wrote.

For Abu Sitta, the possibility that land would be reserved for the railway network, intentionally blocking future Palestinian construction in those areas, is a plausible theory.

“We have a long record of such deception,” he said.

July 25, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Palestine, West Bank, Zionism | Leave a comment

ACLU Calls for New Investigations into Todashev Death

Abdulbaki Todashev, Ibraghim's father, holds up photos of his dead son at a press conference at the RIA Novosti headquarters in Moscow on May 30.

Ibraghim Todashev’s father holds up photos of his dead son at a press conference at the RIA Novosti headquarters. © RIA Novosti. Alexander Natruskin

RIA Novosti – July 23, 2013

WASHINGTON – The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wants two US states, Florida and Massachusetts, to open their own investigations into the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shooting death of a Chechen immigrant acquainted with one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects.

“A person was shot and killed at the hands of law enforcement in Florida. That alone should require Florida officials to investigate, and explain to the public what happened,” said Howard Simon, Florida Executive Director for the nonprofit civil liberties organization, in an ACLU press release.

The FBI and the Department of Justice are conducting an internal inquiry into the death of 27-year-old Ibragim Todashev, who was shot and killed by a Boston-based FBI agent during an interrogation with several different law enforcement agencies at his Orlando, Florida apartment on May 22.

Todashev was being questioned about a triple murder in the Boston area and his link to suspected marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed during a shootout with police in the Boston suburb of Watertown four days after the bombings.

There have been varying reports about exactly what happened when Todashev was killed.

“Florida officials are simply deferring to the FBI, allowing the FBI to investigate itself, but it is difficult to accept the FBI’s honesty in this matter,” the ACLU wrote in a letter to Commissioner Gerald Bailey of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, adding, “Now, more than eight weeks later, the public has very little information about this incident… Officials in both states should conduct their own investigations.”

In a similar letter to Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, the ACLU of Massachusetts (ACLUM) pointed to a New York Times analysis that found “FBI shooting reviews… virtually always clear the agency of wrongdoing.”

Last week the FBI blocked the release of Todashev’s autopsy by the Florida medical examiner’s office.

Carol Rose, ACLUM executive director, wrote, “It seems unlikely that the FBI investigation will meaningfully inform Massachusetts residents about what happened.”

Coakley’s office does not plan to open a new investigation.

“While the use of deadly force by law enforcement should be appropriately investigated, this particular incident happened in another state, which is outside our jurisdiction,” Coakley spokesman Brad Puffer told RIA Novosti.

Officials in Florida did not immediately respond to a request for comment from RIA Novosti.

FBI withholds autopsy of Tsarnaev associate ‘shot in head’ during questioning (alethonews.wordpress.com)

July 24, 2013 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, False Flag Terrorism | American Civil Liberties Union, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Ibragim Todashev, Tamerlan Tsarnaev | Leave a comment

Latin America’s Tragic Engagement with Microcredit

By Milford Bateman | CEPR Americas Blog | July 23, 2013

Thirty years ago, the international development community was abuzz with excitement. This was because it appeared that the perfect solution to poverty, exclusion and under-development had finally been found in the form of microcredit. As originally conceived, microcredit is the provision of micro-loans to the poor to allow them to establish a range of income-generating activities, supposedly facilitating an escape from poverty through individual entrepreneurship and self-help. Perhaps nowhere more than in Latin America was the excitement so intense. Stoked by the uplifting claims of Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto [1], that a vastly expanded informal economy would prove to be the economic salvation of the continent, the U.S. government through the World Bank and its own aid arm, USAID, along with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), led the charge to establish the microcredit movement as the dominant local intervention to address poverty.

However, the sour reality that Latin America faces today is that all the excitement over microcredit was fundamentally misplaced. As I argue in a recent article [PDF] published in the Mexican journal Ola Financiera, the microcredit movement has likely proved to be one of the most destructive interventions brought to Latin America over the last 30 years. A growing number of Latin American governments and international development agencies are now finally reconsidering their once unconditional support for the microcredit model. So what went wrong? Let me point to a few of the most important problems.

First, the overarching outcome of the microcredit model in Latin America has been an increase in the supply of “poverty-push” informal microenterprises and self-employment ventures. Yet rather than creating a De Soto-esque foundation for rapid growth and poverty reduction, the very worst possible foundation for promoting long-term poverty reduction and sustainable development was created. As economists such as Alice Amsden, Robert Wade and Ha-Joon Chang have convincingly shown, the now wealthy developed countries and the East Asian “miracle” economies found that what is really needed to escape poverty is for the state to engineer an entirely different constellation of the “right” enterprises: that is, enterprises that are formalized, large enough to reap important economies of scale, can innovate, can use new technology, are willing to train their workers, can supply larger enterprises with quality inputs, can facilitate new organizational routines and capabilities, and can eventually export. Economic history shows, too, that financing the expansion of the “wrong” sort of informal microenterprises and self-employment ventures will simply not lead to sustainable development. As Ha-Joon Chang brilliantly points out, Africa has more individual entrepreneurs than perhaps any other location on the planet, and many more are being created all the time thanks to rafts of microcredit programs backed by the developed countries, yet Africa remains in poverty precisely because of this fact. Likewise in Latin America: by programmatically channelling its scarce financial resources (savings and remittances) into informal microenterprises and self-employment ventures, and so away from virtually all other higher-value uses, the continent has actually been progressively destroying its economic base.

Mexico exemplifies the microcredit trap created in Latin America. Its financial institutions have all proved to be adept at channelling their funds into hugely unproductive and all too often temporary informal microenterprises and self-employment ventures – so-called “changarros” – leaving the bulk of potentially growth-oriented, but low profit and high risk, small and medium industrial enterprise projects increasingly without financial support. Over the last two decades this “crowding out” trend has undoubtedly undermined Mexico’s once powerful industrial and technological base.

A very similar story emerged in Bolivia since the 1980s, where the U.S. government-supported push for microcredit has played a not-unimportant role in gradually destroying an economy that was once slowly industrializing under Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) policies. Essentially, Bolivia’s carefully built-up raft of efficient industrial small and medium-sized enterprises was starved of funding and left to collapse. Resources were instead shifted into promoting the hugely unproductive and no-growth informal microenterprise and self-employment sector, which has, not surprisingly, dramatically expanded in recent years. Today, with nearly 40 percent of Bolivia’s financial resources now independently intermediated into these “wrong” sort of (micro)enterprises, the Bolivian government has its work cut out to try to stop the damaging de-industrialization trajectory underway in the country.

The second key problem with the microcredit model in Latin America arises from the fact that in the neoliberal 1990s it was aggressively commercialized and extensively deregulated. The primary motive for this move was to eradicate all government and international development community subsidies from the world of microcredit. The use of subsidies (typically to maintain low interest rates) was felt to be ideologically suspect by the main U.S.-based international development agencies, and it was also thought to unjustifiably add to the tax burden on business elites. With extensive advice and financial support provided by USAID, Bolivia was turned into the “best practice” example of commercialised microcredit, thanks mainly to BancoSol, the world’s first dedicated commercially-driven microcredit bank. Yet turning microcredit into a for-profit business under minimal regulation has proved to be a singular disaster: spectacularly damaging levels of Wall Street-style greed, profiteering and financial market chaos soon ensued. Microcredit effectively became the developing world’s very own version of the USA ’s sub-prime lending crisis.

In Bolivia, the commercialization of microcredit has been a major development disaster for the poor. First, Bolivia’s scarce financial resources were disastrously shifted into the “wrong” enterprises, as I just pointed out. Commercialization also directly precipitated the “microcredit meltdown” that Bolivia experienced across 1999-2000, an event that inflicted very serious long-term damage on the Bolivian economy. Crucially, however, commercialization has been a massive success for those managing and investing in Bolivia’s microcredit institutions. The elite group of individuals involved in running Bolivia’s main microcredit institutions, famously including BancoSol and its predecessor, PRODEM, have all become very rich indeed. High salaries, bonuses and dividends have been important to those most closely associated with the management and ownership of BancoSol. The first employees in PRODEM, an institution that has its origins as an NGO funded by the international community to “help the local community,” eventually made millions of dollars after they gradually took control of PRODEM and then brazenly sold it off to a Venezuelan bank. We should, of course, not be surprised to find that little trust, respect or solidarity exists between Bolivia’s poor and the microcredit sector supposedly established at great expense to help them.

Mexico’s experience also exemplifies the tremendous damage wrought by the commercialization of microcredit in Latin America. Even more so than in Bolivia , it is not the poor that have been benefitting from the increased supply of microcredit, but a small financial elite that has been quietly profiteering to a simply stupendous extent. Probably the best/worst example here is that of Banco Compartamos, an organization founded in 1990 as an NGO and making extensive use of international donor grant funding. Even with laudable goals written into its founding articles, very early on it became clear that the main intended beneficiaries of Compartamos’s operations were going to be its senior staff. After 2000, for example, the senior staff began to reward themselves with Wall Street-style salaries, bonus packages and cheap internal loans which allowed them to buy shares in Compartamos. Then in 2007, when Compartamos underwent the inevitable IPO, key senior staff really hit the big-time, with a number of them pocketing several tens of millions of dollars when they off-loaded their shares into the market. A number of external investors also made vast fortunes from their shareholdings in Compartamos, notably the Boston-based microcredit advocacy and investor body ACCIÓN, which saw an initial $1 million stake in Compartamos (of which $800,000 was actually a grant to ACCIÓN) rise in value to nearly $270 million. Note also that Compartamos generates the revenues to support such high financial rewards to senior staff by charging as much as 195 percent real interest rates on its microloans to mainly poor Mexican women.

Inevitably, the supply of microcredit has begun to reach its saturation point in Mexico. Compartamos’s growth has been nothing short of dramatic, while many other domestic microcredit institutions have also grown very rapidly. Compartamos has been the world’s most profitable microcredit institution for five of the past six years, and its nearly $100 million dividend payout to investors is now larger than the balance sheets of most other microcredit institutions. With such huge financial rewards made possible by lending to Mexico’s poor, the big profit-hungry international banks, such as Citigroup, have entered the market, clearly adding to the lending frenzy underway. However, real fears exist that Mexico cannot now avoid a destructive sub-prime-like “microcredit meltdown” episode not unlike the one that hit the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in 2010. Indeed, it is well known that multiple lending to households has begun to reach epidemic proportions in many parts of Mexico, especially in the massively over-supplied state of Chiapas.

Nevertheless, the question remains: has microcredit in Latin America in general, and Compartamos specifically, been helping the poor to escape their poverty? If the answer is broadly positive, then the spectacular financial rewards accruing to the providers of microcredit might be justified to an extent if meaningful benefits are accruing to the recipients – the poor. However, the unpalatable answer to this question is a resoundingly negative one: there is not a shred of real evidence to support the claim that Compartamos’s microcredit activities have played a role in resolving poverty. First consider that a U.K. government-funded study of virtually all previous impact evaluations of microcredit dramatically showed there is no empirical evidence anywhere [PDF] to show that microcredit has had a positive impact on poverty. Even long-standing supporters of microcredit now accept this extremely unpalatable fact.

More specifically, consider the findings of a just-released impact evaluation of Compartamos [PDF], financed by Compartamos itself and centrally involving one of the most high-profile microcredit supporters, professor Dean Karlan, who is based at Yale University in the U.S. In spite of Comapartamos’s huge presence in poor communities across Mexico, and its previous claims to be greatly helping Mexico’s poor, the impact evaluation team could only come up with a tiny amount of evidence of any positive impact arising from its activities. This was bad enough. But this tepid conclusion actually hides a much more disturbing fact, which is that the research team could only manage to arrive at this sliver of good news by effectively refusing to adopt/adapt an evaluation methodology that would capture the most important downsides to the microcredit model. One can only presume that this was felt necessary in order to ensure that they could come up with the required (very limited) positive impact result they later disingenuously claimed to have found, and which allowed Compartamos and other institutions involved to inevitably spin into the specious claim that Compartamos “generally benefits (its) borrowers”.”

Notably, the research team entirely overlooked so-called “displacement” effects – that is, the negative impact on incumbent microenterprises in the same community that lost business and income thanks to waves of new Compartamos-supported microenterprises. With most Mexican communities for a long time adequately served by simple informal microenterprises providing retail and other services to the poor, the arrival of rafts of new microenterprises operating in exactly the same sub-sector will inevitably have precipitated very large displacement effects. But these downside impacts were ignored. The team also failed to factor in the impact of exits, which is when a microenterprise fails – which the vast majority actually do, and usually very quickly – and the hapless individuals involved then have to either divert other funds (pensions, remittances, savings, etc.) to continue to repay their microloan, or else they lose assets lodged as collateral when they are forced into outright default.

But perhaps the most egregious downside impact ignored by the research team relates to the fact that they also chose to examine a very short and unrepresentative time period – introducing microcredit into a community where before there was none. This then allowed them to simply aggregate the short-term results in such virgin territory into a generally upbeat assessment of the longer-term impact. This is utter nonsense. By doing this, the research team chose to ignore, first, the fact that Compartamos has contributed to further inflating Mexico’s already over-blown and massively unproductive “changarros” sector, which a growing number of analysts now accept is creating an existential threat to the Mexican economy. Second, there was also no comment on the huge opportunity cost involved when scarce funds are gradually diverted away from the “right” enterprises. This silence prevailed in spite of the fact that even the neoliberal-oriented IDB had the guts to publicly admit in 2010 that this “crowding out” issue actually lies at the heart of Latin America’s recent history of poverty and exclusion. Third, you will find nothing in this impact evaluation that discusses the over-indebtedness problems that are clearly looming on the horizon for Mexico’s poor communities, and particularly for many of Compartamos’s long-standing clients.

The Latin American economies have all been ill-served by the microcredit model, which has provided, and continues to provide, a serious headwind to those governments in Latin America hoping to escape once and for all from poverty, exclusion and primitivizing development trajectories. That microcredit continues to attract such support today thus needs some explanation. I would argue it is down to two factors. First, the politics and ideology; principally the need by the U.S.-led international development community to ensure that individual entrepreneurship and self-help remain the only potential paths out of poverty for the poor in Latin America, and not the exercise of any form of “collective capabilities” through social movements, trade unions, pro-poor governments, or any other similarly “subversive” intervention that the poor might wish to collectively deploy to escape their poverty, and might even have voted for as part of the “pink tide” of leftist governments. Second, there is the issue of the massive wealth that a tiny financial elite has been able to generate for itself thanks to (over)lending to the poor, and which it is now, quite predictably, unwilling to forego. This wealth has allowed, among other things, for the microcredit industry to aggressively lobby governments, mount massive PR campaigns and effortlessly finance deliberately dodgy impact evaluations, all in order to persuade the key actors in Latin America to continue to support the microcredit model.

All told, Latin American governments urgently need to disentangle themselves from the egregious myths and neoliberal-inspired fantasies surrounding microcredit, and begin to completely re-think their (often imposed) allegiance to what has proved to be an ultimately destructive poverty reduction and local development model.

[1] Hernando de Soto (1986): El otro sendero: la revolución informal. Lima: ILD

Milford Bateman is a freelance consultant on local economic development and also, since 2005, a Visiting Professor of Economics at Juraj Dobrila at Pula University in Croatia.

Are Microcredits really the Rock Stars of International Aid? (tablenumbersix.wordpress.com)

July 24, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics, Timeless or most popular | Africa, Bolivia, Import Substitution Industrialization, Inter-American Development Bank, Latin America, Mexico, Microcredit, United States, World Bank | Leave a comment

Bowman Expedition 2.0 Targets Indigenous Communities in Central America

By Joe Bryan | Public Political Ecology Lab | July 23, 2013

The Lawrence World-Journal recently reported the Defense Department’s decision to fund the latest Bowman Expedition led by the American Geographical Society and the University of Kansas Geography Department. Like the first – and controversial – Bowman expedition to Mexico, this latest venture will be led by KU Geographers Jerome Dobson and Peter Herlihy and will target indigenous communities.

Like previous Bowman Expeditions, the expedition’s goal is to compile basic, “open-source,” information about countries that can be used to inform U.S. policy makers and the military. This time, however, they won’t be focused on a single country. Instead they’ll be working throughout Central America, a region that Herlihy and Dobson have elsewhere called “The U.S. Borderlands.” What is this Expedition about? And why is the Defense Department funding academic research on indigenous peoples?

As with the expedition to Mexico, Herlihy and Dobson are focused on land ownership. Echoing a growing list of military strategists, Herlihy and Dobson contend that areas where property rights are not clearly established and enforced by states provide ideal conditions for criminal activity and violence that threaten regional security.

Herlihy and Dobson propose to use maps made with indigenous communities of their lands to clarify this problem, ostensibly with an eye towards securing legal recognition of their property rights. In their expedition to Mexico, Herlihy and Dobson turned over their findings to Radiance Technologies, an Alabama-based military contractor specializing in “creative solutions for the modern warfighter.” It’s not clear whether this new expedition will do the same, though the program funding it, the Minerva Research Initiative, evaluates proposals according to their ability to address national security concerns.

The rationale for these Expeditions has been parsed in film, print, and by academics (myself included), revealing them to be little more than intelligence gathering efforts carried out by civilian professors and their graduate students. Zapotec communities visited by the previous expedition to Mexico have further denounced Herlihy’s and Dobson’s efforts as “geopiracy,” (and again here) that replay some of colonialism’s oldest tactics of extracting information from communities for people (the U.S. Army) who live elsewhere. Zapotec communities in Oaxaca have also accused Herlihy of failing to inform them of the U.S. Army’s role in funding the Expedition and process data collected by it.

Military funding for the latest Bowman Expedition raises the question of what the U.S. military wants to know about Central America. Moreover, why is it funding research on indigenous peoples? It’s hard to imagine that the U.S. military has much interest in the nuances that distinguish, say, Tawahka communities from Emberá ones. Nor does the military appear concerned with the chronic insecurity of land rights, which continues to be one of the primary threats faced by indigenous communities. A far more likely answer lies with the military’s growing interest in collecting information about the “cultural” or “human” terrain that they can use as needed for a variety of purposes, from managing risks posed by natural disasters to planning military interventions.

Maps of the sort produced by the Bowman Expeditions are certainly useful for this task compiling information about who lives where and place names, to give two examples. But maps can only describe the territory. What they cannot describe are the intricacies of the “terrain” such as the social networks through which access to land and resources are negotiated or the history of struggles over land.

The U.S. military is more familiar with this terrain than one might think. Beginning with the “Banana Wars” of the early 20th Century, the U.S. military has intervened more times in Central America that just about any other region in the world. Indeed the Marines’ first resource on counter-insurgency, the “Small Wars Manual,” drew extensively from their experiences navigating the indigenous Mayanagna and Miskito communities in pursuit of Augusto Sandino’s anti-imperialist forces in Nicaragua.

In the 1980s, U.S. military advisors once again traversed the indigenous areas of Central America for tactical gain. In eastern Nicaragua and Honduras, they helped train and organize Miskito-led armed groups as part of the proxy battle strategy of the Contra War. In Guatamala they targeted Maya communities as bastions of guerilla support with genocidal consequence. Dense forests and other isolated areas throughout the region further provided cover for airstrips also used for illicit shipments of cocaine and weapons orchestrated by the Reagan Administration in support of the Contras.

Herlihy knows this history well. He’s been mapping the forested areas in eastern Honduras used by the Contras and Miskito armed groups since the late 1980s. Herlihy’s (and Dobson’s) main military contact, Geoffrey Demarest, knows this history too. A graduate of the School of the Americas, he served as a military attaché to Guatemala. He’s since become an expert on counter-insurgency, publishing extensively from his experience in Colombia and its relevance for current wars. More recently, he enrolled in the Geography Ph.D. program at KU under Dobson’s supervision.

Still, what is the national security interest in Central America that a Bowman Expedition there can help address? Indigenous land ownership has already been extensively mapped in much of the region as part of property reforms supported by the likes of the World Bank. Several countries in the region now also have promising laws on the books recognizing indigenous and black land rights.

Yet neither maps nor legal reforms have been enough to stop the region from becoming a major transshipment route for cocaine en route to the United States. The State Department estimates that more than 80 percent of cocaine bound for the U.S. passes through Honduras. Some of this trafficking makes use of infrastructure created by counter-insurgency campaigns in the 1980s.

In 2011, Herlihy once again mapped the Honduran Mosquitia as part of another U.S. Army-funded Bowman Expedition. Shortly thereafter, in 2012, the region was targeted by the DEA who made use of counter-insurgency tactics developed in Iraq to fight traffickers. Among those lessons of Iraq applied in the Mosquitia was the use of forward operating bases immersed in the region’s physical and cultural terrain of the Mosquitia. Two of those bases, El Aguacate and Mocorón, were repurposed bases constructed during the Contra War. The campaign fits a broader pattern of escalating militarization of Central America further illustrated by this map compiled by the interfaith Fellowship of Reconciliation.

The application of counter-insurgency tactics gives mapping indigenous areas a more sinister edge. Historically the U.S. military has relied on the designation of “Indian Country” and “tribal areas” to designate areas at the edge of state control, often turning them into free-fire zones where the conventions of war, legal and otherwise, do not apply. Better knowledge of these areas has scarcely reduced incidents of violent conflict as Dobson suggests. Instead, that knowledge has served as a “force multiplier” – to use General Petraeus’s term – that allows the U.S. military to intervene with greater efficiency. Herlihy and Dobson claim to champion the rights of indigenous peoples, but the money and data trail suggests that is only a secondary concern to U.S. military interests.

So why is the U.S. military funding academic geographers to do research in indigenous areas in Central America instead of relying on its own people to do the work? In Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has relied on social scientists embedded with combat units as part of the Human Terrain System program to gather similar information. Funding academic researchers to do similar work poses a number of advantages. For starters, it sidesteps the ethical controversy raised by the Human Terrain System. It also brings the added benefit of relying on “civilian” researchers to access communities who might otherwise be wary of soldiers in military uniform. At the same time, it gives the military precisely the kind of detailed, georeferenced information – the spatial “metadata” – sought by the Human Terrain System for areas that lie far from current combat zones. It’s an approach consistent with what geographer Derek Gregory describes as the “everywhere war” currently waged across society on the whole by covert military teams, surveillance, and drones. By taking the measure of indigenous communities according to security interests, the Bowman Expeditions stand to perpetuate a role that is far too common in Geography’s history. The Bowman Expeditions have generated some productive debate (see also here, here, and here) in this regard, though in a context of shrinking budgets for university research and education the allure of military money remains powerful enough to trump ethical concerns.

Meanwhile as geographers debate the merits of military funding, indigenous peoples continue facing a long list of violent threats from drug trafficking, illegal logging, loss of lands, and institutional racism. The military-funded Bowman Expeditions merely add to that list. Still, as the Zapotec communities in Oaxaca forcefully remind us, it’s their information and the decision to participate in projects like the Bowman Expeditions – or any other research — ultimately resides with them. Herlihy’s and Dobson’s failure to address those concerns will only diminish their access to this field, undermining the kinds of rights and free exchange of knowledge they profess to support.

Military-backed Mapping Project in Oaxaca Under Fire

Joe Bryan is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder. For additional resources on the Bowman Expedition, see Zoltán Grossman’s fantastic website.

July 24, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Bowman Expedition, Central America, Herlihy, Indigenous People, Mexico, Peter Herlihy, United States, United States Army | Leave a comment

NSA Surveillance Through the Prism of Political Repression

By CARLOS BORRERO July 23, 2013

July 28th marks the 35th anniversary of the political assassination of two Puerto Rican independence activists, Carlos Soto Arriví and Arnaldo Darío Rosado, in the infamous Cerro Maravillai case. This case, which was widely followed among Puerto Ricans, involved an agent provocateur that led the activists to an ambush that resulted in their brutal murder by paramilitary agents within the colonial police force. The event led to two investigations, the second of which revealed a conspiracy to cover up both the assassination plot as well as the destruction and manipulation of evidence carried out by the colonial police and justice department, as well as the federal justice department and FBI. Cerro Maravilla symbolizes for many the most outstanding recent example of repressive measures, from surveillance to political assassination, unleashed by US imperialism against the anticolonial movement in Puerto Rico.

The recent revelations of NSA spying by Edward Snowden have provoked mass outrage across the globe. Much of the consternation comes from what is commonly understood as a violation of privacy. In the official media, Snowden’s actions have been framed as a debate between ‘national security’ and ‘privacy’. However, framing the question in these terms is pure subterfuge. The Puerto Rican experience shows that the true objectives of surveillance programs by intelligence agencies like the NSA, CIA, and FBI having nothing to do with ‘security’ or ‘protection’ but rather political repression. Systematic surveillance can only be understood as an essential part of state repression, the purpose of which is to intimidate those that question the status quo by promoting a culture of fear. One can never be separated from the other.

The systematic surveillance and repression of Puerto Rico’s anticolonial movement is obviously just one example of many. A brief historical sketch of US imperialism’s repressive efforts against anticolonial forces in Puerto Rico must begin with the political intrigues that preceded the 1898 military invasion as well as the martial law that characterized both military and civilian colonial governments in its immediate aftermath. This history goes on to include the surveillance and repressive attacks against the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and its followers from the 30s through the 50s, which included massacres of unarmed civilians, political assassinations and imprisonments, the harassment and attacks against labor unions and newly emergent socialist organizations of the same period, as well as COINTELPRO operations against resurgent nationalist and socialist political formations during the 60s and 70s.ii Indeed, in 1987 it was revealed that over 130,000 files on individuals and organizations had been accumulated through systematic surveillance on the island. This history is an integral part of the parallel campaigns of systematic state repression unleashed within the United States against groups such as the Black Liberation Movement, the American Indian Movement, the Chicano Liberation Movement, radical labor organizations, progressive students and antiwar activists, as well as communists.iii As such, what constitutes a scandal for the broader public is in fact part of the daily reality for those that fight for freedom and an end to oppression.

Snowden’s revelation that the United States Security Group Command’s Sabana Seca installation, located in the northern coastal municipality of Toa Baja, is part of an international surveillance network, which includes the Fornstat program, comes to no surprise to Puerto Rican anticolonial activists. From Sabana Seca, US naval intelligence monitors and gathers Internet, phone, and other forms of communication. In 1999, Duncan Campbell and Mark Honigsbaum of The Guardian already highlighted the naval intelligence’s “Echelon” operations from Sabana Seca and other locations both in the US and internationally as part of joint US British surveillance programs.iv

What is critical to highlight about US imperialism in Puerto Rico is the continued military character of colonialism on the island. For the benefit of those that may be unaware or who take the position that US militarism characterized only the past history of colonialism in Puerto Rico, a few contemporary examples serve to illustrate the point. Over the past decade and a half, Puerto Ricans have mobilized en masse to oppose a proposed military radar system intended for the Lajas valley in the southwestern part of the island, to end the practice of using the eastern island of Vieques as a bombing range by the US military and its allies (It should be noted that there was also a successful campaign to end the militarization of Culebra island also off the eastern coast of the main island in the 70s), and in more recent times against a system of potentially toxic and environmentally destructive antennas used both by the military and cellular companies that have proliferated across the island. In an article in the current issue of Claridad, the spokesperson for the grassroots Coalition of Communities Against the Proliferation of Antennas, Wilson Torres, sheds light on the US military’s Full Spectrum Dominance program currently being implemented in Puerto Rico. v

Understood in the context of pervasive unemployment, which serves to ensure an ever present pool of recruits used as cannon fodder in US military campaigns throughout the world as well as the structural dependence of large parts of the colonial economy on the Pentagon, this picture constitutes the modified form of US militarism in Puerto Rico in the present context. One may add the militarization of the colonial police force in the ongoing attacks against residents of public housing and other marginalized communities to this reality.

It would not be difficult to draw parallels between much of what is described immediately above and the realities faced by many North Americans. Heavy-handed policing and economically depressed communities dependent upon military or prison industries are a familiar reality for many. Yet the notion that the United States of America is characterized by a repressive state is much more difficult for the average person to accept. The narrative of 9/11 provides the pretext that results in the conflation of national security and state repression in the minds of many.

Notwithstanding, the revelations about the NSA spying program have provoked the condemnation of all except the most recalcitrant sycophants of US imperialism. Yet, it is absolutely necessary to place these programs in the context of the long history of state repression and militarism. Those on the left must push to extend the public discourse beyond questions of personal privacy to a discussion of systematic political repression within increasingly militarized “liberal” democracies. The experiences of anticolonial activists and militant, class-conscious revolutionaries from Puerto Rico lend valuable insights that add to the discussion around the significance of what Snowden’s leaks reveal: systematic surveillance and state repression are two sides of the same coin.

An insightful comment by Marx, writing in the New York Daily Tribune about British imperialism in India during the mid 1800s and often repeated among Puerto Rican comrades, is a useful starting point for the US left:

“The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, moving from its home, where it assumes respectable form, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”

Source

Does the Right to Privacy Now Apply Only to the US Government?

July 24, 2013 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | NSA, Puerto Rico, Snowden, United States | Leave a comment

CIA Murder Claims Are Credible, but Too Late

By RYAN ABBOTT | Courthouse News | July 23, 2013

WASHINGTON – A federal judge dismissed claims that the CIA dosed a bioweapons scientist with LSD in 1953, killed him and made it look like a suicide.

Eric and Nils Olson say their father, Frank Olson, died shortly after expressing his disillusionment with his work as a CIA bioweapons expert during the early years of the Cold War. Olson had allegedly been involved in the highly classified MKUltra program, which sought to develop chemical and biological materials for clandestine operations. The program included testing LSD as a truth serum and a mind-control agent on human subjects.

Numerous works of investigative journalism and requests under the Freedom of Information Act ultimately brought the MKUltra project to light, and U.S. District Judge James Boasberg acknowledged that “the public record supports many of the allegations that follow, farfetched as they may sound.”

“Although mention of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) conjures in the popular imagination the 1960s escapades of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters … government study of its effects predates this by a decade,” Boasberg wrote.

The Olsons said their father “witnessed extreme interrogations in which the CIA committed murder using biological agents that Dr. Olson had developed.”

CIA officials allegedly believed that any misgivings Dr. Olson had about the work might drive him to commit security violations.

The Olsons said the CIA then spiked a bottle of Cointreau with LSD at an agency meeting, dosing their father without his knowledge and making him a “guinea pig for this ‘experiment’ into the effects of LSD on humans.”

The agency then shipped Olson to New York City, telling his family that he required psychiatric treatment and could be dangerous, his sons claimed.

A doctor allegedly met Olson at the New York hotel room he shared with another CIA colleague, Robert Lashbrook, and gave him bourbon and several sedatives.

“The men had two martinis each before bed that evening,” the sons said. “At approximately 2:30 in the morning on Saturday, November 28, Dr. Olson fell thirteen stories to his death from the window of room 1018A – the hotel room he was sharing with Dr. Lashbrook.”

They added: “The circumstances surrounding Dr. Olson’s wrongful death are substantially similar to a ‘secret assassination’ technique described in a manual that, upon information and belief, the CIA published the year of Dr. Olson’s death. The manual suggested ‘[f]or secret assassination … the contrived accident is the most effective technique’ because ‘[w]hen successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.”

Judge Boasberg again refused to cast doubt on the allegation.

“Indeed, this would be the precise modus operandi the CIA is alleged to have employed here,” he wrote.

Though the Olsons settled with the government in 1976, accepting $187,500 each for waiving their claims, CIA Director William Colby piqued their interest 18 years later, shortly before his own death under suspicious circumstances.

Colby apparently sent Eric Olson a message in 1993 that indicated there was more to tell about his father’s death.

The family exhumed Olson’s body and discovered a bruise on his skull that a forensic scientist attributed to a blow to the head prior to the fall.

After prosecutors reclassified Olson’s cause of death from suicide to “unknown,” the family has pressured the CIA to reveal more and ultimately filed suit in November 2012.

Boasberg concluded Wednesday, however, that the 1976 settlement wipes out the negligent supervision claim against the agency. The rest of the claims then fail under the statute of limitation.

The sons say the CIA cover-up of their father’s death also caused their mother’s descent into alcoholism, and that their “replacement father figure” sexually molested them for years.

“Concluding that most of the allegations are both untimely and waived by a prior settlement agreement, and that any timely or preserved claims fall outside of the United States’ waiver of sovereign immunity, the court will grant the Government’s motion,” Boasberg ruled.

July 23, 2013 Posted by aletho | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Frank Olson, United States, William Colby | Leave a comment

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‘Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison’: A Tale of Two Diaries

By Jill Erzen | The Defender | October 13, 2026

Dr. Anthony Fauci’s private diary reveals a “mind-numbing” contradiction between what the former top U.S. infectious disease official knew about COVID-19 and what he told the public, senior White House adviser Peter Navarro, Ph.D., said last week on “American Thought Leaders.”

In his new book, “Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison,” due out Oct. 20, Navarro compares Fauci’s private entries to his own pandemic-era diary, and uses what he calls “a tale of two diaries” to argue that Fauci should face criminal prosecution.

“I show, actually, how a prosecution can and should happen … at the state level, most likely,” Navarro said. “He should wind up in prison, and we’ve got the receipts in this book to put him there.”

Navarro said Fauci repeatedly acknowledged important facts in private, then publicly pursued policies that contradicted those facts — with devastating consequences.

“What he says many times privately in his diary is so at odds with both his public behavior and public statements that it’s mind-numbing,” Navarro said.

Navarro examines the lasting damage caused by lockdowns and other pandemic policies, and the ongoing toll of long COVID.

His book also addresses questions about vaccine safety, including why healthy young people faced COVID-19 vaccination mandates despite concerns about myocarditis, and why women were not warned about miscarriage risks linked to the shots. … continue

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