Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | March 24, 2010
There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.
Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.
Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-Semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”
Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.
Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.
Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.
Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell off-shoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relics from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.
Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”
And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”
The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies’ role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.
The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.
And there is the global warming scandal, in which NGOs. The UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.
Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.
Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.
I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.
When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.
As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the off-shoring of U.S. GDP. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe off-shoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.
Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.
Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.
Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.
Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.
I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”
For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the off-shoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.
For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.
The American corporate [establishment] does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.
America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.
These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.
With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.
The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Research suggests BBC Arabic coverage not objective
Ma’an – 23/03/2010
Ramallah – A researcher at Birzeit University submitted findings Saturday outlining what she found to be un-objective coverage around “the question of Palestine” on BBC Arabic’s broadcast news.
The study, focusing on the daily news program World News This Evening’s broadcasts between 8 November and 8 December 2008, found external political motivations swayed coverage of Palestine only weeks before Israel launched its Operation Cast Lead on 26 December 2008.
Masters student Buthayna Hamdan, who pioneered the study, explained that she measured the objectivity of the reports by BBC’s own standards, and basic precepts of news coverage.
Benchmarks for measurement included: Omission of facts, clear differentiation of facts and opinions, and avoiding prioritization of accounts.
The research found that the news coverage employed Israeli terminology, describing the military as “defense forces” when its actions were offensive, labeling locations with Israeli place names like the illegal settlement Har Homa, built on appropriated land known as Jabal Abu Ghnaim.
Because the settlement and the expropriation of land is illegal under international law, the study argued, the area where the settlement is located should retain its Arabic name.
Not once in the month of broadcasts on BBC Arabic did newscasters say the word “occupation” in relation to Israel or Palestine, the study said. It also noted the use of the term “military arsenal” to describe home made projectiles fired toward Israel by militant factions in Gaza.
During the study period, the research found 25 news events in Palestine, including the death, injury and detention of Palestinians including children, that went unreported by the news program. The same period saw the full coverage of every home made projectile launched from Gaza into Israeli territory, a total of 14.
The report found the coverage of projectile launches “exaggerated,” given all 14 incidents resulted in no deaths or injuries.
Following the analysis, and citing works by British journalist Robert Fisk, the report suggested that BBC Arabic’s news coverage was influenced by an Israeli lobby, and a mass supply of Israeli government-produced news and information. The study cited the publication of several opinion articles by Israeli consular staff in London, but no corresponding articles from Palestinian sources.
To prove the point, the study compared the suggested bias in reporting on Israel and Palestine to the case of alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Citing studies on the station’s coverage, the study noted research found the station was shown to be independent in its coverage, despite the fact that its government was preparing to go to war in Iraq when the coverage was aired.
The study concluded that the presence of an Israeli lobby, and its absence in the coverage on Iraq, was the single largest factor in the discrepancy of coverage.
To substantiate the arguement, the study cited BBC Director-General Mark Thompson’s relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Airel Sharon, relating the relationship to Thompson’s decision not to air an appeal for humanitarian aid to Gaza paid for by several international agencies.
Buthayna Hamdan, a student in International Studies, presented her research to a thesis committee on Saturday. Her committee included Dr Samih Shabib from the Department of Culture, Dr George Jaqaman from the Department of Culture and director of the Muwatin Foundation (Citizen Foundation), and Dr Samir Awad, from the Department of International Relations and director of the university’s Center for Development Studies.
The committee passed the research and awarded Hamdan her Master of Arts. In their comments, the committee applauded the research as a “remarkable contribution to the field of media research.”
US ‘Victory’ in Settlements Row Short-Lived
Netanyahu Vows to Continue East Jerusalem Construction
By Jason Ditz | March 21, 2010
Last week’s declaration of victory in the ongoing Israel row by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to have been a short-lived win, and media claims that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “bowed” to US demands appear to be premature.
In his most recent public comments, Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterated that he would like to see the “indirect talks” with the Palestinian Authority resume, but that he absolutely would not ever agree to restrict construction in occupied East Jerusalem, the issue upon which the talks have stalled.
With Netanyahu on his way to the US for AIPAC’s policy conference, and expected to focus his visit on pressing President Obama for more advanced weapons with which to attack Iran, it was widely expected that the Netanyahu government would try to defuse the tensions over the East Jerusalem move, which US officials considered a public insult.
And indeed the tensions do seem to be dying down, though the only thing resembling a concession made by the Netanyahu government was to implement a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy wherein the Israeli government would continue to expand settlements in East Jerusalem with impunity but would stop publicizing them at inopportune times.
But even if US-Israeli relations return quickly to normalcy, there appears to be no rapprochement forthcoming with the PA. This may serve as a recipe for the Obama Administration to default back to chastising the Palestinians for “refusing” negotiations (just two weeks after they agreed to those negotiations, only to see them torpedoed by the most recent construction), but it seems unlikely that it will restart the peace talks.
‘NYT’ peddles meaningless Peres plan
By Ira Glunts on March 21, 2010
Isabele Kershner, writing in the NY Times the other day, presented a scoop that surely made her controversial boss proud. Her boss, Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan “AbuBenTzali*” Bronner, has been criticized for his lack of objectivity, but his colleague Kershner showed that she too can compose pro-Israel slanted news stories.
Kershner reports that the octogenarian Israeli President, Shimon Peres, who she incorrectly implies has a moderating effect on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, floated a bridging proposal which was meant to mend the current rift between feuding American and Israeli officials.
Peres sought to introduce a distinction between building colonies on open land in and around occupied East Jerusalem (presumably OK) and building within already existing Arab neighborhoods there, which usually entails booting out Palestinian residents (presumably, not helpful.) Both practices are equally illegal and threaten the Arab presence in the city. The first, which has been going on for over forty years, is actually the more significant in terms of altering the demographics of the area, although the second has recently generated demonstrations and much bad publicity. The Obama administration has explicitly called for a halt to all new settlement construction. The Americans would surely dismiss Peres’ meaningless distinction, which Kershner finally acknowledges in her last paragraph.
Shimon Peres, who is a former Israeli Prime Minister, has had a more than six-decade career as an important Israeli politician. However, he now occupies the ceremonial position of President and his real influence on policy has diminished to close to zero. What makes Peres’ thoughts newsworthy is anyone’s guess. It definitely is not the modest venue in which he chose to “float” (Kershner’s word) the proposal, which was an elementary school in a suburb of Tel Aviv! This is decidedly an odd place to test out thoughts on foreign diplomacy. One wonders if Kershner personally attended the event or was it was covered by a local “stringer.” Maybe some precocious and enterprising sixth grader tipped the paper about the Peres statement.
After it was made public recently that Ethan Bronner’s son had enlisted in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), his editor Bill Keller dismissed charges of conflict of interest,arguing that the fact that his chief correspondent’s family is embedded in Israeli culture only increases the quality of his contacts and enhances his understanding of events. I suppose that Kershner, who like Bronner, is married to an Israeli and is said to be more embedded than him, could possibly have a son or daughter in the class that hosted Peres. How is that for having contacts that most American reporters lack!
Reporting the non-story of Shimon Peres’ meaningless proposal is only one small example of the bizarre lengths that Bronner and Kershner will go in order to make Israel look good. In fact in the same piece, Kershner leads with the claim that Netanyahu’s quick and official repudiation of his crackpot brother-in-law’s accusation that President Obama is an anti-Semite is an indication that the Israeli Prime Minister is trying to be conciliatory. Yet later on in the article she admits that Netanyahu shows no inclination to budge on the very issue that caused the flap: building in East Jerusalem.
Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor of the Times, recommended that Bronner be reassigned, since readers “don’t expect a correspondent sent to cover an intense overseas conflict to wind up heavily invested in one side….” This prescription should also apply to Kershner, whose life and writing, like Bronner’s, points to the fact that she is “embed.”
*AbuBenTzali may be translated from Arabic and Hebrew as “Father of Kid IDF.”
Huffington Post’s Ventura Censorship Backfires
TPM | March 16, 2010
Did you know that Adam Lambert has a bulge in his crotch? Were you aware that the world’s shortest man recently died? Are you informed enough to know that Jessica Simpson says men are “undressing her with their eyes”?
Sorry, let me rephrase all that: Do you give a shit about any of that retarded “news”? I sure as hell don’t, but these were among the many absurd storys I found on the front page of a tabloid called the Huffington Post.
As far as genuine news goes the Huffington Post has some bizarre standards. Jesse Ventura honored the ragsheet by writing a great piece for them. The former Navy Seal and former Governor explained why over 1,000 Architects and Structural Engineers have come together to demand a new investigation regarding the collapse of three high-rise buildings on 9/11. It was a fact filled article that clearly explained the main technical issues that motivated the experts to demand a new investigation. Unfortunately, Ventura was informed that the article did not meet the high standards of the Huffington Post’s editorial policy.
Jesse Ventura blew it. He probably should have talked about the Engineers crotches, and included some bulge pictures. Maybe that would have put the article in line with the pathetic tabloid’s standards. Who knows. Maybe the Navy seal needed to include some discussion of a deformed midget Architect who was dying. That might have made Huffington’s day.
Either way, the censorship backfired and blew up in Arianna Huffington’s puffy face. Thousands of web pages have proudly stepped up to the plate and printed Ventura’s excellent article. Good websites. The article ended up getting way more exposure. Maybe the best thing is that Huffington’s censorship is now well known, and they have been fully exposed as the pathetic rag-sheet they are.
All is well that ends well.
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The anti-Venezuela election campaign
Venezuela’s election is not until September, but the international campaign to delegitimise the government has already begun
Mark Weisbrot | guardian.co.uk | 18 March 2010
Venezuela has an election for its national assembly in September, and the campaign has begun in earnest. I am referring to the international campaign. This is carried out largely through the international media, although some will spill over into the Venezuelan media. It involves many public officials, especially in the US. The goal will be to generate as much bad press as possible about Venezuela, to discredit the government, and to delegitimise the September elections – in case the opposition should choose to boycott, as they did in the last legislative elections, or refuse to recognise the results if they lose.
There’s no need for conspiracy, since the principal actors all know what to do. Occasionally some will be off-message due to lack of co-ordination. A fascinating example of this occurred last week when Senator John McCain tried to get General Doug Fraser of the US Southern Command to back his accusations that Venezuela supports terrorist activities. Testifying before the Senate armed services committee on March 11, General Fraser contradicted McCain:
“We have continued to watch very closely … We have not seen any connections specifically that I can verify that there has been a direct government-to-terrorist connection.”
Oops! Apparently Fraser didn’t get the memo that the Obama team, not just McCain, is in full campaign mode against Venezuela. The next day, he issued a statement recanting his testimony:
“Assistant Secretary Valenzuela [the state department’s top Latin America official] and I spoke this morning on the topic of linkages between the government of Venezuela and the Farc. There is zero daylight between our two positions and we are in complete agreement.
“There is indeed clear and documented historical and ongoing evidence of the linkages between the government of Venezuela and the Farc … we are in direct alignment with our partners at the state department and the intelligence community.”
Well it’s good to know that the United States still has civilian control over the military, at least in the western hemisphere. On the other hand, it would be even better if the truth counted for anything in these Congressional hearings or in Washington foreign policy circles generally. The general’s awkward and seemingly forced reversal went unnoticed by the media.
The “documented and historical and ongoing evidence” mentioned by General Fraser refers to material alleged to come from laptops and hard drives allegedly found by the Colombian military in a cross-border raid into Ecuador in 2008. Never mind that this is the same military that has been found to have killed hundreds of innocent teenagers and dressed them up in guerrilla clothing. These laptops and hard drives will continue to be tapped for previously undisclosed “evidence”, which will then be deployed in the campaign against the Venezuelan government. We will be asked to assume that the “captured documents” are authentic, and most of the media will do so.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton‘s attacks on Venezuela during her trip to South America were one of the opening salvos of this campaign. Most of what will follow is predictable. There will be hate-filled editorials in the major newspapers, led by the neocon editorial board of the Washington Post (aka Fox on 15th Street). Chávez will be accused of repressing the media, even though most of the Venezuelan media – as measured by audience – is still controlled by the opposition. In fact, the media in Venezuela is still far more in opposition to the government than is our own media in the United States, or for that matter in most of the world. But the international press will be trying to convey the image that Venezuela is Burma or North Korea.
In Washington DC, if I try to broadcast on an FM radio frequency without a legal broadcast licence, I will be shut down. When this happens in Venezuela, it is reported as censorship. No one here will bother to look at the legalities or the details, least of all the pundits and editorial writers, or even many of the reporters.
The Venezuelan economy was in recession in 2009, but will likely begin to grow again this year. The business press will ignore the economic growth and hype the inflation, as they have done for the past six years, when the country’s record economic growth cut the poverty rate by half and extreme poverty by 70% (which was also ignored). Resolutions will be introduced into the US Congress condemning Venezuela for whatever.
The US government will continue to pour millions of dollars into Venezuela through USAid, and will refuse to disclose the recipients. This is the non-covert part of their funding for the campaign inside Venezuela.
The only part of this story that is not predictable is what the ultimate result of the international campaign will be. In Venezuela’s last legislative elections of 2005, the opposition boycotted the national elections, with at least tacit support from the Bush administration. In an attempt to delegitimise the government, they gave up winning probably at least 30% of the legislature.
At the time, most of the media – and also the Organisation of American States – rejected the idea that the election was illegitimate simply because the opposition boycotted. But that was under the Bush administration, which had lost some credibility on Venezuela due to its support for the 2002 coup, and for other reasons. It could be different under an Obama administration.
That is why it is so ominous to see this administration mounting an unprovoked, transparently obvious campaign to delegitimise the Venezuelan government prior to a national election. This looks like a signal to the opposition: “We will support you if you decide to return to an insurrectionary strategy,” either before or after the election.
The US state department is playing an ugly and dangerous game.
Oren’s historical fiction about Lebanon war has long tradition in MSM hasbara
By David Samel | March 19, 2010
Michael Oren has an op-ed in Thursday’s NY Times about the Bibi-Biden flap. While a comprehensive dissection would consume many times the length of the original, my attention was drawn to a very narrow issue that appears in the following sentence: “Previous withdrawals, from Lebanon and Gaza, brought not peace but rather thousands of rockets raining down on our neighborhoods.”
Let’s leave aside Gaza, which is quite deserving of its own counter-analysis, and focus on Lebanon. It is widely believed that upon Israel’s “voluntary” withdrawal in 2000 from territory it had been illegally occupying in southern Lebanon for about two decades, Hezbollah repeatedly fired rockets into northern Israel, eventually resulting in the 2006 bombing and invasion of Lebanon. Oren describes this bombardment in his current op-ed, and when Gaza started 15 months ago, Ethan Bronner wrote an article in the Times stating that the 2006 Lebanon war began after “an Iranian-backed Islamist group [Hezbollah] was lobbing deadly rockets into Israel with apparent impunity and had captured an Israeli soldier in a cross-border raid.”
Anyone who remembers rocket barrages from Lebanon into Israel in the six years between 2000 and 2006 is delusional. It just did not happen. There were a handful of incidents in that direction over those six years, and more deadly ones in the other direction. Israel launched its 2006 invasion allegedly in response to the “crossborder raid” alone. To be sure, after Israel’s invasion, Hezbollah launched retaliatory rockets aimed at civilian communities in northern Israel, but it was not raining “thousands of rockets” (Oren) or “lobbing with apparent impunity” (Bronner) before Israel initiated the large-scale hostilities.
This brazen rewriting of history is in turn reminiscent of Israel’s June 1982 invasion of Lebanon that took an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese lives. There continues to be a widespread fictional recollection that that invasion also was launched in response to rocket fire from Lebanon (from the PLO). The truth is that a cease fire had been in place for nearly a year, and had been scrupulously honored by the PLO while the Israelis occasionally tried to provoke a casus belli to justify a long-planned invasion. When Israel’s ambassador to the UK was shot in London, and not by the PLO, Israeli PM Begin proclaimed that the cease fire had been violated and ordered a massive invasion led by Defense Minister Sharon. I distinctly recall that historical revision started right away. Later that same month of June, 1982, I heard from two separate people, one a friend and one a rabbi, that the rockets had finally stopped threatening Israel.
In the years since, I have followed this factoid and it can be surprising who still gets it wrong. For example, in his book with the A-word in the title, Jimmy Carter mistakenly (I presume) says that Israel had invaded Lebanon to stop the rocket fire. Other claims to this effect are not so surprising, like this one from the ADL website: “In June 1982, after the continued shelling of northern Israel by Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) forces based in Lebanon, Israel launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon.”
This is not insignificant. Israel repeatedly manages to alter history in its favor, resulting in common acceptance that Israel won territory in a 1967 “defensive war” and that Arafat ordered the second intifadah in 2000 to win through terror what he could not negotiate at Camp David. On the other hand, Palestinians are often unable to gain public recognition of actual realities, such as the massacres that precipitated the Nakba and Israel’s shamefully discriminatory treatment of its own non-Jewish citizens. Oren’s false comment, which I am sure passed by the paper’s staff unnoticed, reflects the carefully cultivated assumption underlying mainstream discourse, that Israel is perpetually forced to defend its populace from attack. Even many who criticize Israeli “excesses” believe that there was a legitimate reason to initiate military action. It is especially significant when considering last year’s Gaza offensive, which in many ways mirrored the Lebanon “war” two years earlier. Israel’s insistence that it was finally responding to incessant rocket fire from Gaza gets a much-needed but undeserved boost if people believe that its similar offensive against Lebanon two years earlier was in reaction to similar provocation. Oren’s and Bronner’s casual references to historical fiction are insidious and contribute mightily to this false narrative.
East Jerusalem isn’t ‘disputed,’ it’s ‘occupied’
By Henry Norr | March 19, 2010
On CNN, Jack Cafferty called East Jerusalem “disputed.” The other day the Washington Post referred to East Jerusalem as “disputed.” As Susie Kneedler reminds us often, it’s not “disputed.” Henry Norr is on the case, in this letter to National Public Radio:
During the “Week in Review” segment of this morning’s “Weekend Edition Saturday” show, Ron Elving referred at least twice to East Jerusalem as a “disputed” area. “Disputed” is the term the Israeli government and its advocates use and actively promote as an alternative to “occupied,” in hopes they can get out of the legal implications of occupation.
But the U.S. government, the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the European Union, the UK, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, among other entities, all reject the Israeli usage and consistently use the term “occupied” in reference to East Jerusalem, as well as the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. (As it happens, the U.S. Department of State issued its annual report on human rights in “Israel and the occupied territories,” including East Jerusalem in the latter category, just two days ago).
Because these terms have clear, well established, and important legal and political meanings, choosing between them is not an innocent stylistic question. Why does NPR’s Senior Washington Editor adopt Israeli usage, rather than that of our own government, the UN, and most of the rest of the world? I think you owe your listeners a correction on this matter.
Also from Rannie Amiri:
… New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in a March 13 op-ed column titled “Driving Drunk in Jerusalem,” feigned indignation at Biden’s treatment when he wrote that he [Biden] should have “… snapped his notebook shut, gotten right back on Air Force Two, flown home and left the following scribbled note behind: ‘Message from America to the Israeli government: Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. And right now, you’re driving drunk. You think you can embarrass your only true ally in the world, to satisfy some domestic political need, with no consequences?’”
He continues, “… Israel needs a wake-up call. Continuing to build settlements in the West Bank, and even housing in disputed East Jerusalem is sheer madness.”
Disputed East Jerusalem?
By all international standards—the U.N. Charter, the Fourth Geneva Convention, the rulings of the International Court of Justice—East Jerusalem has been indisputably recognized as occupied territory since the 1967 Six-Day War.
Furthermore, U.N. Resolution 252 “considers that all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, including expropriation of land and properties thereon, which tend to change the legal status of Jerusalem are invalid and cannot change that status.” It also reaffirms “… that acquisition of territory by military conquest is inadmissible.”
Like Friedman, the mainstream U.S. media eschews the correct designation of East Jerusalem, preferring to mindlessly label it “predominantly Arab” instead.
Yet Another Political Show Trial: Why the Prosecution of Demjanjuk is Malicious
By Dirk Steil | Aletho News | March 17, 2010
John Demjanjuk, who turns 90 next month, is on trial in Munich for having allegedly been an accessory to the killing of 27,900 people at a labor camp at Sobibor in Poland during the second World War. This trial is for the benefit of a group of obsessive Jews within the holocaust industry and as a shallow public relations stunt by the German government to “atone”, as it were, for having failed to prosecute known mass murderers many decades ago.
In a proper court case, the prosecution would have to prove that the numbers of people alleged were murdered at the camp during the period in question, that Demjanjuk was present there, and that he assisted willingly, in the sense of having had an option to simply refuse such activities.
The first point, the alleged murders, was not subject to challenge, even though much controversy and opaqueness surrounds the circumstances there at that camp.
The second point, that Demjanjuk was present there, has not been proven conclusively either because Demjanjuk denies having been at the location, and no affirmative corroboration has been presented.
Even if one accepts the first two points above, the court must present evidence that Demjanjuk was a willing participant. This central aspect is now unravelling. Yesterday and today, an expert witness associated with the University in Munich, who had written a doctoral dissertation on the circumstances during that period in Galicia, appeared at the trial to answer questions. This mainstream scholar has corroborated the following key arguments maintained by Demjanjuk and his defense for years:
The testimony from decades ago – by a man (now dead) claiming that he and Demjanjuk participated in the killing of prisoners – is unreliable because it is very likely, that it was coerced under torture.
Circumstances in the camps for Soviet red army prisoners, of which Demjanjuk was one, were so awful that millions (more than half of them) died, and that volunteering to assist the Nazis instead was a means of avoiding death by starvation or disease.
Prisoners from the Red Army who volunteered were not told what they would be required to do.
Once these prisoners were sent to other camps to work as guards, refusing orders or being caught after an unsuccessful attempt to escape would have likely resulted in death.
These key facts should not come as a revelation because this information was already known beforehand. The prosecution certainly must have know this too but decided to proceed nonetheless. That is why this case is another political show trial, just as a prior case Demjanjuk had to endure decades ago in Israel was also a propaganda show trial, for the sake of shamelessly perpetuating the Jewish holocaust narrative. Demjanjuk was exonerated on appeal in that case in which he had initially been sentenced to death.
It is rather interesting to note, that thus far there has still not been any independent report in the German news media about the proceedings during the past two days. Telling the public that the prosecution’s case has fallen apart in light of the expert testimony is apparently not “politically correct”.
As has already been suggested by legal experts before the trial got underway, Demjanjuk cannot be legitimately convicted of the charges brought against him. However, that does not mean that the court will not convict him anyway because, after all, this is a political show trial, where facts are secondary and propaganda is what matters.
The War on Afghan Civilians
Expecting Gen. McChrystal to Protect Afghan Civilians is Like Hiring Ted Bundy to Combat Sexual Harassment in the Workplace
By DAVE LINDORFF | March 17, 2010
Three months after it initially lied about the murder by US forces of eight high school students and a 12-year-old shepherd boy in Afghanistan, and a month after it lied about the slaughter by US forces of an Afghan police commander, a government prosecutor, two of their pregnant wives and a teenage daughter, the US military has been forced to admit (thanks in no small part to the excellent investigative reporting of Jerome Starkey of the London Times), that these and other atrocities were the work of American Special Forces, working in conjunction with “specially trained” (by the US) units of the Afghan Army.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the US war effort in Afghanistan, says he is taking over “direct charge” of Special Forces operations because of “concern” that they were not following his orders to make limiting civilian casualties a “paramount” objective. McChrystal is quoted as saying the US military “carries the burden of the guilt” for the “mistakes” made by those Special Forces.
This has to be a sick joke. These incidents were not mistakes; they were planned actions. It’s all the sicker because we know that the US is busy training the Afghan Army to take over this kind of dirty work. And besides, even if McChrystal does assume direct command over Special Forces, that would leave unaccounted for the tens of thousands of private mercenary units hired by the US who are working completely in the shadows for the CIA or other organizations. (One such group hired buy the Defense Department, which posed as an intelligence-gathering operation, was recently exposed as actually being a privately run death squad.)
McChrystal, recall, was in charge of a huge and brutal death squad operation in Iraq before he was given his new assignment in Afghanistan, and at the time he was put in charge of the Afghanistan War, it was reported that he was planning to put in place a similar operation in Afghanistan, designed to take out the Taliban leadership in the country.
What we have been seeing in Afghanistan–and this goes way back to before the appointment of McChrystal, or even the election of President Barack Obama, and his subsequent escalation of the war–has been a vicious campaign of terror against the Afghan people.
It should be no surprise that this is so. It is the way the US has always done counterinsurgency. In a war in which the insurgents (or patriots, if you will–the people fighting against foreign occupiers, or in out case, the US) are a part of the people, and American forces are the invaders, the goal is to drive a wedge between those fighters and the rest of the population.
In Pentagon propaganda, this is referred to as “winning the hearts and minds” of the people, but in reality, the US military doesn’t give a damn about hearts and minds. It simply wants the people to become unwilling to hide or support the enemy fighters it is facing. If it can accomplish that by making people afraid, then that is what it will do, and making people afraid is much easier than “winning hearts and minds.”
How do you make people afraid of supporting or hiding and protecting enemy fighters like the Taliban? You terrorize them. You bomb their homes. You conduct night raids on their homes. You bomb their weddings and their excursions to neighboring towns or markets. You shoot them when they get too close to your vehicles.
Statistics show that the US has, in both Iraq and now Afghanistan, routinely killed more civilians than actual enemy fighters. That tells us all we need to know about what is really going on. America is fighting a war of terror against the people of Afghanistan.
No amount of feigned public hand-wringing by the blood-stained Gen. McChrystal, or of assertions that he is going to assume direct control (from whom? are we to assume that they were operating without direction before?) of the Special Operations troops in the country, will alter that fact. Civilians–including especially women and children–in Afghanistan will continue to die in prodigious numbers because that is how the US fights its wars these days.
The people of Afghanistan know this. That’s why the majority of them want the US out of their country.
It’s Americans who don’t know the truth, and it’s Americans who are really the target of statements from the Pentagon and from Gen. McChrystal claiming that the US is taking steps, nine years into this war, to “reduce civilian casualties” in Afghanistan. It doesn’t help that news organizations like the New York Times propagate that propaganda, as the paper did today in a lead headline that said: “US is Reining in Special Forces in Afghanistan. General Takes Control. McChrystal has Raised Civilian Casualties as a Concern.” It simply wouldn’t do to tell Americans that their country is conducting a war of terror. We are supposed to be the good guys who are bringing peace and democracy to a benighted land.
So let’s just face the facts squarely. The US is not the good guy in Afghanistan. It is an agent of death and destruction. Just check out the town of Marjah, largely destroyed over the last few months in order to “save” it from a handful of Taliban fighters. Over 30 civilians died in that American show of force, and the message of those deaths was clear: allow the Taliban to operate in your town, and we’ll kill you–not just your men, but your wives and your children, too.
NPR interviews two Israel lobbyists for story on settlement squabble
By Philip Weiss | March 16, 2010
The New Jersey Department of State has 19 agencies and divisions, only one of which is devoted to relations with a specific foreign country. Put on your thinking cap, now!
The agency is called, the New Jersey-Israel Commission, whose mission “is to foster economic, scientific, educational and cultural ties with the State of Israel, one of the Garden State’s most important trading partners.” The Commission chair is Daniel Kurtzer, a former ambassador to Israel, now a prof at Princeton.
When NPR’s Michele Kelemen did a story yesterday on the contretemps between the US and Israel, she interviewed Kurtzer as an expert, and also David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Kurtzer said, “Israel did a really in-your-face move with the vice president in town and, I think, it needs to find a way to offset that by responding to what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked for..” Makovsky offered neocon cant: “We do recognize that terrorists exploit this issue, but even if we had progress on this issue, does anyone really believe that al-Qaida would disappear or sectarian differences in Iraq would disappear or Iran would not seek a nuclear weapon?”
I admit that Kurtzer has a broad resume and tends to be reasonable–he also told Keleman that the Israelis are hurting our interests in the region–but back to the lead, he is chairman of an agency that promotes trade with Israel. Should NPR have disclosed this fact? Especially at a time when Gen’l Petraeus is saying that the Arab world regards the US as incapable of being tough with Israel?
Also, just to get on my sociological hobbyhorse, Is it really fair that NPR is interviewing two American Jews on this subject? Are there any other Americans who have expert opinions? What about Steve Walt, who knows this issue backward and forward? Or Helena Cobban, who is as sharp as they come? Or Ali Abunimah, who has followed the peace process forever and is funny? They all have less personal identification with Israel than Kurtzer and Makovsky. Can Americans learn their views?
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British weapons and personnel doing much of the killing in Yemen
Press TV – June 18, 2019
A detailed report published by the Guardian newspaper has shown how Britain is massively contributing to Saudi Arabia’s devastating war on Yemen as it suggests that London is not only supplying the bombs that fall on Yemenis, but it provides the personnel and expertise that keep the war going.
The comprehensive report by Arron Merat published on Tuesday showed that Britain was doing much of the killing in Yemen as the country continues to provide Saudi Arabia with everything it needs to turn its southern impoverished neighbor into a graveyard.
“Every day Yemen is hit by British bombs – dropped by British planes that are flown by British-trained pilots and maintained and prepared inside Saudi Arabia by thousands of British contractors,” said Merat in the report. … continue
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