Militarism « Aletho News

5+1 group fails to reach agreement on Iran’s proposals

Mehr News Agency – May 24, 2012

BAGHDAD – The six major powers known as the 5+1 group (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) failed to reach an agreement between themselves on a package of proposals which had been presented by Iran in the meeting on Wednesday.

Sources close to the meeting have blamed the U.S. for the failure of talks between the major powers, the Mehr News Agency correspondent reported from Baghdad.

Iran had presented a five-point proposal which included “nuclear and non-nuclear issues”.

Diplomats close to the talks say the major powers have reneged on their promises of reciprocal steps which had been agreed upon in the Istanbul talks on April 4.

In the meeting negotiators from the 5+1 group especially the U.S. used a language similar to those of Israeli officials and this caused a hurdle in the talks, diplomat said.

According to our correspondent, the 5+1 group is suggesting another place for a next meeting. However, the Iranian side is seeking a tentative agreement in Baghdad before setting a date for the next meeting.

Iran’s lead negotiator, Saeed Jalili, and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who represents the major powers in the talks, held bilateral talks late on Wednesday and early Thursday.

The two top negotiators plan to brief reporters about the results of negotiations later today.

May 24, 2012 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Baghdad, Catherine Ashton, European Union, Iran, Mehr News Agency, Saeed Jalili | Leave a comment

Deal or no deal, Iran may be bombed – Israeli minister

RT | May 23, 2012

A military strike against Iranian facilities is not out of the question, even though Tehran has reached agreement on a probe with the UN’s nuclear watchdog, says Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

The official was referring to a deal announced on Tuesday by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Barak called it an Iranian ploy to fend off international pressure.

The minister told Army Radio that “a nuclear Iran is intolerable and no options should be taken off the table,” referring to the use of force.

He said the only way Israel could see Iran develop its civilian nuclear industry is if it shuts down all of its uranium enrichment sites and uses imported fuel.

The comments came as Iranian nuclear negotiators are meeting the P5+1 group in Baghdad on Wednesday. They are to discuss the conflict over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which the West suspects of being a clandestine attempt to build an atomic weapon. Iran insists its pursuits are purely civilian.

“Dragging things out, in our eyes, is problematic, so conversations between the West and Iran must occur more frequently. North Korea also negotiated with the West but in the end tested nuclear weapons,” Barak pointed out.

Last week US Ambassador Dan Shapiro said the Pentagon has a plan for a military strike on Iran, and may carry it out if ordered.

“It would be preferable to resolve this diplomatically and through the use of pressure than to use military force,” he said.

Possible use of force against Iran has been discussed by Israel and its western allies for months. Israel insists on the right to strike when and if it sees fit, saying it will not ask for anyone’s consent. There is fear that if such an attack happens, Iran would retaliate at any forces it sees as enemies, which could result in a major regional war.

May 23, 2012 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Wars for Israel | Ehud Barak, International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran, Israel | Leave a comment

Poisoning People in Apollo

By MICHAEL D. YATES | CounterPunch | May 23, 2012

Apollo is a small town in western Pennsylvania, part of the old coal and steel belt that surrounds Pittsburgh. The shallow Kiskiminitas River, a tributary of the Allegheny, flows through the borough. Although it is close to my hometown, I never knew much about it, except that my artist uncle once made a glass carving for the town to commemorate the Apollo astronauts the community had embraced.

I remember passing through Apollo and noticing a large industrial complex at the edge of town. Years later, I learned that this plant was owned by the Babcock & Wilcox Corporation, and it produced uranium fuel. Babcock & Wilcox, a global conglomerate, has been involved in nuclear-related industrial production ever since the Manhattan Project, designing, fabricating, and supplying components for nuclear power plants, ships, submarines, and weapons.

The facility in Apollo and another one in nearby Parks Township, initially built by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in 1957 and later bought by the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) and then by Babcock & Wilcox, closed in 1986. Left behind were contaminated land and water and sick and dead residents.

Victims and their families sued the companies in the mid-1990s for damages suffered, and ARCO and Babcock & Wilcox were forced to pay $80 million to compensate victims for cancers and loss of property value. Sadly, by the time the lawsuits were settled, in 2008 and 2009, 40 percent of the claimants had died.

Meanwhile, Babcock & Wilcox declared bankruptcy in 2000 to avoid liability in thousands of lawsuits by employees subjected to asbestos, a substance that businesses have known since the 1930s causes cancer. As a condition of exiting bankruptcy, it set up a trust fund to pay asbestos claimants; the amount of money put aside was far less than the company would very likely have had to pay if it had faced those lawsuits.

Recently, nearly one hundred new lawsuits against ARCO and Babcock & Wilcox were filed by scores of people claiming that they got cancer as a result of exposure to radiation. A report to the federal court by an expert witness stated that the two companies “knew about worst-in-the-nation releases of radioactive materials that spanned decades, but opted not to do enough to protect neighbors from cancer-causing dust.” NUMEC showed an almost wanton disregard for safety. “In the first few years, the company lost so much uranium—enough to build several nuclear bombs—that the FBI investigated whether someone was actually stealing the material and selling it to a foreign country!” At the Parks Township facility, which produced plutonium and enriched uranium, NUMEC buried radioactive waste in an open unfenced field close to where children played. It is implausible that Babcock & Wilcox, with its many nuclear projects over a long period of time, did not know about the problems with the entities it was buying. Yet, it did nothing to protect its workers or the community. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,

A top official in 1974 viewed memos on the facility [which Babcock Wilcox bought in 1971] and wrote that if they were accurate, ‘we are guilty of gross irresponsibility in continuing to operate our uranium facilities.’ He threatened to shut them down, but the company didn’t stop making highly enriched uranium there until 1978, and it ended all production in 1984.

The actions of these corporations helped to destroy a town and its people, and it appears they knew what they were doing. They not only located a nuclear plant in a town, but then failed to shut it down when they knew that workers and residents were being poisoned. “ ‘A lot of people have lost not only their entire savings but their homes,’ due to the health effects and loss of property value caused by the plants, said Patricia Ameno, of Leechburg, who sued the companies in a previous round of litigation . . . . ‘Their families have been torn apart by illnesses and deaths.’” Ms. Ameno, whose body has been wracked by cancer and brain tumors, added, “I saw the town I grew up in … disintegrating, just like the bricks on that plant.” One of the persons who posted a comment on the Post-Gazette article noted that a 1999 piece in the same newspaper showed that one-sixth of Apollo’s population had some type of cancer!

I posted the Post-Gazette story on a facebook page dedicated to men and women who grew up in my hometown in the 1950s and 1960s. Most know about the Apollo plant. And they all lived in a town dominated by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, which poisoned its own employees with asbestos and silica dust and whose now abandoned property is so full of harmful chemicals that it cannot even donate it to the town. Outside town, near the company-owned fields on which I used to play baseball, “waste lagoons” built by the company and fed by pipes that went under the river have been leaking “arsenic, chromium, lead, manganese, copper, zinc, mercury and other toxic compounds into the river.” Despite this, only two persons commented on what I posted. If a post concerns some ancient bit of trivia or the local hoagie shop, members of the group fall all over themselves to make some meaningless remark. But something so important is met with silence.

Sadly, a family member is a manager at Babcock & Wilcox. I have always wondered how he could do this. The division of the company in which he works is knee-deep in the bowels of the military-industrial system. It “manages complex, high-consequence nuclear and national security operations, including nuclear production facilities and the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.” In others words, it is part of the U.S. war machine, making money by helping the government kill people, just like it killed people more directly in Apollo.

Thousands of people grew up in and near Apollo. They have learned what harm the corporations who employed them and their relatives and friends have done and continue to do. Men, women, and children were poisoned by that uranium fuel plant and that glass plant. Yet, for the most part, they ignore this, content to contemplate instead their “warm and fuzzy” memories, as one person put it on my hometown facebook page. And many hundreds of thousands of men and women work as managers for horrendous corporate criminals like Babcock & Wilcox without ever questioning their actions. Perhaps this tells us something about what those who raise their voices in protest are up against. Including the plaintiffs challenging Babcock & Wilcox. I wish them success.

MICHAEL D. YATES is Associate Editor of Monthly review magazine. He is the author of Cheap Motels and Hot Plates: an Economist’s Travelogue and Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy. He is the editor of Wisconsin Uprising: Labor Fights Back. Yates can be reached at mikedjyates@msn.com

Study Supports Communities’ Claims Against Nuclear Fuel Plants (pittsburgh.cbslocal.com)
Evidence of US Weapons-Grade Uranium Diversions to Israel (toonaripost.com)

May 23, 2012 Posted by aletho | Environmentalism, Militarism, Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular | Apollo, ARCO, Babcock Wilcox | Leave a comment

The Nearly $1 Trillion National Security Budget

By Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer | TomDispatch | May 22, 2012

Recent months have seen a flurry of headlines about cuts (often called “threats”) to the U.S. defense budget. Last week, lawmakers in the House of Representatives even passed a bill that was meant to spare national security spending from future cuts by reducing school-lunch funding and other social programs.

Here, then, is a simple question that, for some curious reason, no one bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we spending on national security these days? With major wars winding down, has Washington already cut such spending so close to the bone that further reductions would be perilous to our safety?

In fact, with projected cuts added in, the national security budget in fiscal 2013 will be nearly $1 trillion — a staggering enough sum that it’s worth taking a walk through the maze of the national security budget to see just where that money’s lodged.

If you’ve heard a number for how much the U.S. spends on the military, it’s probably in the neighborhood of $530 billion. That’s the Pentagon’s base budget for fiscal 2013, and represents a 2.5% cut from 2012. But that $530 billion is merely the beginning of what the U.S. spends on national security. Let’s dig a little deeper.

The Pentagon’s base budget doesn’t include war funding, which in recent years has been well over $100 billion. With U.S. troops withdrawn from Iraq and troop levels falling in Afghanistan, you might think that war funding would be plummeting as well. In fact, it will drop to a mere $88 billion in fiscal 2013. By way of comparison, the federal government will spend around $64 billion on education that same year.

Add in war funding, and our national security total jumps to $618 billion. And we’re still just getting started.

The U.S. military maintains an arsenal of nuclear weapons. You might assume that we’ve already accounted for nukes in the Pentagon’s $530 billion base budget. But you’d be wrong. Funding for nuclear weapons falls under the Department of Energy (DOE), so it’s a number you rarely hear. In fiscal 2013, we’ll be spending $11.5 billion on weapons and related programs at the DOE. And disposal of nuclear waste is expensive, so add another $6.4 billion for weapons cleanup.

Now, we’re at $636 billion and counting.

How about homeland security? We’ve got to figure that in, too. There’s the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which will run taxpayers $35.5 billion for its national security activities in fiscal 2013. But there’s funding for homeland security squirreled away in just about every other federal agency as well. Think, for example, about programs to secure the food supply, funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. So add another $13.5 billion for homeland security at federal agencies other than DHS.

That brings our total to $685 billion.

Then there’s the international affairs budget, another obscure corner of the federal budget that just happens to be jammed with national security funds. For fiscal 2013, $8 billion in additional war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan is hidden away there. There’s also $14 billion for what’s called “international security assistance” — that’s part of the weapons and training Washington offers foreign militaries around the world. Plus there’s $2 billion for “peacekeeping operations,” money U.S. taxpayers send overseas to help fund military operations handled by international organizations and our allies.

That brings our national security total up to $709 billion.

We can’t forget the cost of caring for our nation’s veterans, including those wounded in our recent wars. That’s an important as well as hefty share of national security funding. In 2013, veterans programs will cost the federal government $138 billion.

That brings us to $847 billion — and we’re not done yet.

Taxpayers also fund pensions and other retirement benefits for non-veteran military retirees, which will cost $55 billion next year. And then there are the retirement costs for civilians who worked at the Department of Defense and now draw pensions and benefits. The federal government doesn’t publish a number on this, but based on the share of the federal workforce employed at the Pentagon, we can estimate that its civilian retirees will cost taxpayers around $21 billion in 2013.

By now, we’ve made it to $923 billion — and we’re finally almost done.

Just one more thing to add in, a miscellaneous defense account that’s separate from the defense base budget. It’s called “defense-related activities,” and it’s got $8 billion in it for 2013.

That brings our grand total to an astonishing $931 billion.

And this will turn out to be a conservative figure. We won’t spend less than that, but among other things, it doesn’t include the interest we’re paying on money we borrowed to fund past military operations; nor does it include portions of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that are dedicated to national security. And we don’t know if this number captures the entire intelligence budget or not, because parts of intelligence funding are classified.

For now, however, that whopping $931 billion for fiscal year 2013 will have to do. If our national security budget were its own economy, it would be the 19th largest in the world, roughly the size of Australia’s. Meanwhile, the country with the next largest military budget, China, spends a mere pittance by comparison. The most recent estimate puts China’s military funding at around $136 billion.

Or think of it this way: National security accounts for one quarter of every dollar the federal government is projected to spend in 2013. And if you pull trust funds for programs like Social Security out of the equation, that figure rises to more than one third of every dollar in the projected 2013 federal budget.

Yet the House recently passed legislation to spare the defense budget from cuts, arguing that the automatic spending reductions scheduled for January 2013 would compromise national security. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has said such automatic cuts, which would total around $55 billion in 2013, would be “disastrous” for the defense budget. To avoid them, the House would instead pull money from the National School Lunch Program, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicaid, food stamps, and programs like the Social Services Block Grant, which funds Meals on Wheels, among other initiatives.

Yet it wouldn’t be difficult to find savings in that $931 billion. There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit, starting with various costly weapons systems left over from the Cold War, like the Virginia class submarine, the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, the missile defense program, and the most expensive weapons system on the planet, the F-35 jet fighter. Cutting back or cancelling some of these programs would save billions of dollars annually.

In fact, Congress could find much deeper savings, but it would require fundamentally redefining national security in this country. On this issue, the American public is already several steps ahead of Washington. Americans overwhelmingly think that national security funding should be cut — deeply.

If lawmakers don’t pay closer attention to their constituents, we already know the alternative: pulling school-lunch funding.

Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer are research analysts at the National Priorities Project. They wrote the soon-to-be-published book A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget, and host weekly two-minute Budget Brief videos on YouTube.

Copyright 2012 Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer

Gutting START; Re-Starting a Nuclear Arms Race (alethonews.wordpress.com)
New Paper Argues for Immediate, Practical Cuts in Military Spending (nationalinterest.org)
GOP: Shield DOD, cut poverty funds (politico.com)

May 22, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, Economics, Militarism | Department of Homeland Security, NASA, National security, Pentagon, United States, United States Department of Defense, United States Department of Energy | Leave a comment

US Sends Combat Commanders to Colombia

By Susana Pimiento and John Lindsay-Poland | Fellowship of Reconciliation | May 21, 2012

U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff commander General Martin Dempsey visited Colombia on March 29 to announce that within weeks U.S. military personnel will operate from a military base there with the newly formed Vulcan Task Force.

The Vulcan Task Force, which was established in December 2011, has 10,000 soldiers, three mobile brigades and one fixed brigade, operating from a base in Tibú, in the Catatumbo region (North Santander), just two miles from the Venezuela border.

On April 15, presidents Obama and Santos met during the Americas Summit and agreed on a new military regional action plan that will include training police forces in Central America and beyond. The announcement cited Operation Martillo, by which U.S. and Colombian forces have participated in operations this year against criminal elements on the coasts and interior of Central America.

The presence of U.S. soldiers on the military base in Tibú was presented by General Dempsey as an effort by the United States to support Colombia in its fight against drug trafficking and the insurgency. According to Dempsey, the Pentagon plans by June to send U.S. brigade commanders with practical experience in Afghanistan and Iraq to work with police and army combat units that will be deployed in areas controlled by the rebels. Dempsey said that U.S. military personnel will not participate in combat operations in Colombia.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Colombia has established its own version of U.S. joint special operations commands that carry out hunt-and-kill missions – operations for selective killings that have included U.S. citizens accused of having ties to Al Qaeda. With these special commandos, Colombia hopes to reach its goal of reducing the FARC guerrillas by 50% in two years.

U.S. participation in such an aggressive military campaign would undercut prospective attempts to negotiate a settlement of the armed conflict, which has increasing support in Colombia. The campaign, which apparently does not target successor paramilitary groups, is also likely to benefit those groups, which continue to commit human rights abuses, engage in drug trafficking, and operate in more than 400 municipalities in 31 Colombian states, according to a report by the Institute for Study of Development and Peace, INDEPAZ.

The Journal also cited statements by Southern Command chief General Douglas Fraser at a March 12 hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee expressing concern about the strengthening of diplomatic relations between Iran and the governments of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua.

The expansion of counterinsurgency forces in Africa and Latin America is also part of a new national security strategy released by the White House in February. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that the new strategy introduces “innovative methods” for supporting counter-terrorist forces and expanding the United States’ influence on the two continents.

Joint Task Force Vulcan is led by Brigadier General Marcolino Tamayo Tamayo, who in 1985, when he was a lieutenant, participated in the operation to retake the Palace of Justice in Colombia. Similar joint task forces have been created in Tumaco, Nariño; Miranda, Cauca; and Tame, Arauca.

U.S.’s Post-Afghanistan Counterinsurgency War: Colombia (alethonews.wordpress.com)
DOD pushing more forces into South America (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Progress or Promises? Free Trade and Labor Rights in Colombia (alethonews.wordpress.com)
When the Respectable Become Extremists The Extremists Become Respectable: Colombia and the Mainstream Media (alethonews.wordpress.com)

May 21, 2012 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | Central America, Colombia, Dempsey, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Latin America, Leon Panetta, Martin Dempsey, United States | Leave a comment

Attack of the drones

By Chizom Ekeh | Morning Star Online | May 20, 2012

Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have become the centrepiece of the allied military strategy in the “war on terror.”

In 2011 they were deployed in Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine and Turkey.

According to the Economist, drone strikes have increased by 1,200 per cent since 2005. This is equivalent to one strike every four days.

Modern warfare is transforming and could lead to the deployment of military robots that make attack decisions independently.

Termed as “automatic deletion,” human operators would be taken out of the loop and preprogrammed robots would carry out missions guided by artificial intelligence.

According to Teal Group, a US aerospace and defence analysis firm, investment in the industry is projected to rise to $89 billion over the next 10 years.

Author of the study and director of Teal’s corporate analysis Philip Finnegan predicted that “the UAV market will continue to be strong despite cuts in defence spending.

“UAVs have proved their value in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and will continue to be a high priority for militaries in the US and worldwide.”

Israel is the leading global exporter of UAVs, while other key players in the industry include Canada, France, Italy and South Africa. There are currently 40 companies selling and manufacturing drones, and 50 countries have acquired the technology.

In recent years Britain has been using Israeli drones in Afghanistan which it has rented on a pay by the hour basis from the company Elbit Systems.

British soldiers have also received training in Israel on how to operate the weapons.

Proponents of drone warfare claim that UAVs bring down the costs of war. They argue that civilian casualties are reduced due to higher-precision strikes.

Furthermore, they highlight that robots could make war more ethical, as they cannot act out of malice or hatred which can lead to war crimes or other abuses of human rights.

While the Economist asserts that “claims that drones are constantly blowing up Afghan weddings is wrong,” the fact remains that civilian casualties are rising and protests against their use are intensifying worldwide. In response, savvy industry leaders have mobilised to discuss “how to stop the public hysteria surrounding UAV operations in the 21st century?” and the MoD has committed to implementing a communications strategy to counter negative publicity.

The Bureau for Investigative Journalism has reported that between 2004 and August 2011, 2,347 people were killed by US drones. Between 392 and 781 were civilians, and of these 175 were children.

Other sources state that at least one of these victims was disabled and confined to a wheelchair.

Additionally, six of these victims were British nationals, but the British government has not investigated their deaths.

Meanwhile, of the two US citizens killed in strikes, one was alleged by the CIA to have been al-Qaida’s leader in the Arabian Peninsula.

In September 2011 Anwar al-Awlaki was assassinated in Yemen by a US drone. Two weeks later, in a separate attack, his 16-year-old son was one of nine people killed.

Concerns have been raised by lawyers about the legality of Awlaki’s assassination as a US citizen with no criminal charge.

Against this background the American Civil Liberties Union said: “If the constitution means anything, it surely means that the president does not have the unreviewable authority to summarily execute any citizen who it concludes is an enemy of the state.”

In November 2011, 16-year-old Tariq Aziz and his 12-year-old cousin Waheed Khan were both killed by US drone strikes in Northern Waziristan. Just days before his death, Tariq had attended a meeting organised by the British charity Reprieve.

Tariq had agreed to assist the organisation by taking pictures of the aftermath of Allied strikes.

Mounting civilian casualties and the lack of accountability for these deaths is fuelling anger globally. In November 2011, 2,000 people staged an anti-drone demonstration outside the parliament building in Islamabad, and for the first time Yemeni citizens came together to voice their outrage in Sana’a.

Human rights lawyer Shazad Akbar is suing the CIA for the killing of Pakistani civilians.

Furthermore, legal action taken by human rights groups against Foreign Secretary William Hague could lead to his prosecution for war crimes. He is accused of providing intelligence that assisted CIA-targeted killings in Pakistan.

In April last year a civil disobedience action was staged at Hancock Air National Guard Base in the US. Thirty-eight anti-drone protesters were arrested and some have been put on trial.

Meanwhile at RMT University in Melbourne, protesters disrupted a meeting organised by UAV manufacturers. They urged attendees to reject technological innovations which enable killing from great distance and condemned the use of the weapons as immoral.

Drone Wars UK has demanded the classification of drones as “too cruel to use, like cluster munitions and landmines.” This has been backed by critics who warn that the use of robots to achieve military objectives could amount to a disproportionate use of force.

In future, drones could be developed that achieve superhuman levels of accuracy, reaching a 100 per cent rate of effectiveness. However such capability would break rules of proportionality under international humanitarian law (IHL).

Overseen by the International Red Cross, IHL bans weapons that cause more than 25 per cent mortality on the battlefield and 5 per cent mortality in hospitals.

The question of the legality of targeted killing remains unanswered. The US and British governments either refuse to disclose information about when this policy is applied or deny outright that it is happening. Lawyers state that targeted killings contravene the rule of law and argue that this amounts to state-sanctioned assassination.

Criticising the EU’s silence on targeted killing in Pakistan, analyst Nathalie Van Raemdonck contends that drone warfare could be illegal, and that the EU’s failure to put pressure on the US to explain the legal basis of its policy is due to a lack of consensus caused by vested interests among member states.

She warns: “Even though the analysis of the US’s targeted killing makes it clear that it is a legally and morally controversial practice, it is possible that the EU finds advantages of avoiding the subject to be greater than those of living up to its moral obligation of urging the US to comply with international law.”

Agreeing with Van Raemdonk’s warnings against a backlash, critics argue that robotic warfare could destabilise global security and deepen hostility towards British and US peacekeeping or military interventions overseas.

Robots, they say, would make war easier to wage, as the safety of remote operators thousands of miles away from their targets would make them less concerned about killing.

An adviser to the CIA and expert on robots has emphasised the need for continued human diplomacy to avoid fuelling resentment.

Highlighting Iraq, he said: “Sending in robot patrols into Baghdad to keep the peace would send the wrong message about our willingness to connect with residents. We still need human diplomacy for that. In war this could backfire against us, as our enemies mark us as dishonourable and cowardly for not willing to engage them man to man. This serves to make them more resolute in fighting us and leads to a new crop of determined terrorists.”

As has occurred with all war technologies in the past, the risk of UAV proliferation is high.

Noting this danger, UN Special Rapporteur on Extra Judicial Killing Christof Heyns warned: “The use of such methods by some states to eliminate opponents around the world raises the question why other states should not engage in the same practices.

“The danger is one of global war without borders, in which no one is safe.”

Evidence in British court contradicts CIA drone claims (alethonews.wordpress.com)
The cost and consequences of exposing the drone wars (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Analysis: Little Caution Used in U.S. Drone Assassinations (alethonews.wordpress.com)

May 21, 2012 Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Militarism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | American Civil Liberties Union, Anwar al-Awlaki, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Pakistan, UAV, United States, Unmanned aerial vehicle | Leave a comment

The insolvent United States banking system: lessons from J.P. Morgan Chase

Why the banks must be nationalized

By Horace Campbell | PAMBAZUKA NEWS | 2012-05-17

Since September 15, 2008 the United States economy has been like a ticking time bomb with the unregulated activities of the banks the fuse that is slowly burning. This fuse has affected the international banking system and while citizens of the United States are focused on an electoral contest, the issues of the future of the U.S banking system, the future of the dollar and the future of the Euro are bringing home the reality of the capitalist depression. Two weeks ago, Paul Krugman released a book entitled, End this Depression Now. This book sought to galvanize action by the US government to stimulate the economy based on the twentieth century Keynesian ideas of stimulating growth. Increasingly, it is becoming clearer that far more drastic political measures will be needed if the international financial system is to be protected from the gambling of the top bankers in the United States. Wealth creation and a new economic system are needed to meet the needs of human beings.

This reality was brought home last Thursday, May 10, when it was revealed that J. P Morgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States had been involved in the most risky type of speculative trading that was not supposed to be undertaken by a federally insured depository institution. The nature of the speculative trading is still covered up by the media but from what has been coming out there were bets placed by a derivative trader who was placing US$100billion bets that the US economy would recover. One report called the operation ‘trades in the synthetic derivatives hedging business.’

Whether this is the real cause of the attention to JP Morgan Chase will only come to light when the media and the representatives of the people call for the removal of Jamie Dimon, the CEO of this bank and takes over the bank. While the information on the $3 billion loss is as opaque as the business world of the financial system, the nature of the risk that was being undertaken is reserved exclusively for the big banks and offers multi- million dollar profits in this ether world that is called financial capitalism.

JPMorgan Chase is currently one of the biggest banks in the world supposedly with $2.1 trillion in assets and more than 239,000 employees. I used the word ‘supposedly’ because JP Morgan Chase was one of the recipients of more than$26 billion of Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the American International Group (AIG) in September 2008. Troubled Assets was the term coined by the US government to hide from the world the state of the insolvency of the US banking system where the big banks had overextended themselves in the housing bubble issuing what was then called mortgage backed securities. These banks are still mired in the toxic mess from the orgy of speculation of that era and JP Morgan compounded its own risky position by taking over the bad bank, Washington Mutual.

The Bank JP Morgan Chase grew bigger and riskier after absorbing two of the failed banks at the center of the MBS debacle. JPS acquired Bears Stearns and Washington Mutual. Hence on top of its own involvement in the casino economy, JP Morgan Chase had taken on two failed banks in an attempt to save the US financial system.

The Tarp instrument was the means through which the US government had ‘bailed out the banks and investment houses in 2008. JP Morgan Chase was involved in the same credit default swaps (CDS) that was at the core of the gambling that brought down the system in 2008. The speculative activities of the Banks have increased since 2008 and now the press is seeking to lay the blame on one derivatives trader in London. According to the media, speculation by a derivatives trader in London has produced a $2 billion trading loss for JP Morgan Chase. It is still not clear the extent of the loss but we know that it is in the same category as the losses at MF Global last year. These losses add to the scandal after scandal and are supposed to be on par with the other debacles of 2008 when two major Wall Street institutions, Bear Stearns and then Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. This year the progressive forces must renew the call for the nationalization of the big banks which are supposed to be too big to fail.

THE ARROGANCE OF THE BIG BANKS

The rise and impending collapse of J P Morgan Chase is a cautionary tale about the fortunes (or currently misfortunes ) of the US banking system. Older readers will remember the name Chase Manhattan Bank and the era when David Rockefeller and this bank stood at the apex of US capitalism. Today Chase Manhattan no longer exists and has been absorbed through the mergers and acquisitions of the years of neo-liberal capitalism. Then there was the other major US capitalist whose fortunes were made when there were the most brutal forms of exploitation of workers. This was the banker and industrialist, John Pierpont Morgan. The career of JP Morgan was symbolic of the merger of industrial and bank capital to create financial capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Today at the start of the 21st century JP Morgan Chase is the result of the combination of several large U.S. banking companies over the last decade including Chase Manhattan Bank, J.P. Morgan & Co., Bank One, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. Going back further, the predecessors of the current banking behemoth include major banking firms among which are Chemical Bank, Manufacturers Hanover, First Chicago Bank, National Bank of Detroit, Texas Commerce Bank, Providian Financial and Great Western Bank.

JP Morgan Chase is a textbook case of what happened to US banks during the era of neo-liberalism when the Glass Steagall Act was repealed separating investment banking from federally insured deposit banks. Much attention has been paid to the two poster children of the new casino type operators who claim to be bankers, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. These two are just at the top of the massive political structure that squeezes the mass of the citizens of the world for the top 1 per cent. In the book ‘13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown’, the authors Simon Johnson and James Kwak have detailed the evolution of the neo-liberal world that was spun by these bankers. According to Johnson and Kwak, the bankers created new money machines with new schemes such as securitization, high yield debt, arbitrage trading and derivatives. On top of these serial innovations we now have a new one called value at risk. Later we will be told what is synthetic derivatives hedging business. These “serial innovations created the new money machines that fueled the rapid, massive growth in the size, profitability and wealth of the financial sector over the last three decades.”

It is the accrued power of these bankers that now threatens the global system of capitalism. After the tremors of the financial markets in 2008 these same banks that called for deregulation called for bail outs because they were too big to fail. For a while, there had been word of the depth of the hole in other banks and we are still waiting for the information on Bank of America which is still under wraps with Wikileaks. Only two months ago, the Federal Reserve completed a “stress test” of the 19 largest US banks, which gave all of them a green light in terms of solvency and approved increased dividends or stock buybacks for 15 of the 19 banks. This exposure of JP Morgan exposes the fraud of the so called stress tests.

Although the banking system was propped up and we are informed in the media that these banks recently passed ‘stress tests,’ the news about the risky bets of JP Morgan is a stark reminder that the time bomb is ticking. Since that fateful week in September 2008, far from resolving the crisis of the US financial system, the bailout of Wall Street that had been orchestrated by the Federal government has resulted in a further centralization of financial assets in a handful of giant institutions that dominate American society. The further centralization now means that five of the 13 banks—JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs — held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011. The big five have increased their viselike grip on the US economy over the past five years: in 2006, their financial holdings amounted to 43 percent of US gross domestic product. By the end of 2011, that figure had risen to 56 percent.

JP MORGAN AT THE FOREFRONT OF OPPOSING REGULATION

JP Dimon is the CEO of JP Morgan Chase. He has been the most active among the bankers in manipulating the system playing both sides of the political game and arguing against the regulation of the banks. Jamie Dimon was paid over US $23 million last year and now it is coming out that it is the accounting scams that produced the paper profits that enabled the big bonuses for Dimon and the traders who were urged to make riskier bets. Dimon has been the most active in the press and in his visits to the Obama White House. He has argued for the ‘markets’ to take their course when his bank has been in operation in a world that is beyond the reach of markets. While the world of these bankers is beyond the ‘market’ these are the financiers who promote the myth that the development of a generalized market (the least regulated possible) and democracy are complimentary to one another. The same bankers who argue that the economic sphere and the political sphere are separate and that the market does not need the state are the same bankers who are expending billions to lobby so that the limited regulations proposed by the Dodd-Frank legislation of 2010 are not affected. The Dodd-Frank legislation included one particular clause called the Volcker rule that was supposed to ban proprietary trading by the lords of the universe.

Jamie Dimon has been described by Barack Obama as one of the smartest bankers in the United States. Obama was simply exposing the subservience of the federal government to the bankers who are the same group pouring millions into both campaigns. The bankers are ensuring that whichever party wins in November, the US banking system will be protected. Barack Obama timidly called for regulating JP Morgan while actively engaging the soliciting of funds from one of the most notorious ‘private equity’ firms in New York. The close relationship between the private equity firms and the bankers constitute the power of the top one per cent and the US government acts to serve this one per cent. After the big scare of 2008 there was fear internationally that there would be a run on the dollar. It was this fear that induced the members of the US government to pass the Dodd-Frank Legislation to prevent the obscene conflict of interest of the banks and investment houses. The expedient which was supposed to prevent the conflict of interest was the Volcker rule, named after the former Treasury Secretary of an era before financialization. The rule placed trading restrictions on financial institutions. In the 2010 legislation, the Volcker rule separates investment banking, private equity and proprietary trading (hedge fund) sections of financial institutions from their consumer lending arms. Banks are not allowed to simultaneously enter into an advisory and creditor role with clients, such as with private equity firms. The Volcker rule aims to minimize conflicts of interest between banks and their clients through separating the various types of business practices financial institutions engage in.

JP Dimon has been the leader in opposing the Volcker rule because his organization has been at the forefront of the practice where a hedge fund is operating inside a commercial bank. Commercial banks are federally insured and are different from investment banks. Under the rules of the so called market, bankers are not supposed to take deposits from customers and then use the same deposits to make speculative bets. This was not supposed to happen but when the banks became huge money machines, they operated above the law. This is how a bank such as JP Morgan controls assets that are worth 20 per cent of the GDP of the USA.

BANKS MUST BE NATIONALIZED

Jamie Dimon sits on the Board of the Federal Reserve of New York. This is the most important position of the US financial system because this is the reserve system that holds the foreign reserves of 60 per cent of the economies of the world. JP Morgan Chase is a particularly critical financial institution, since in addition to its vast holdings; it serves as one of the two main clearing banks in New York City, along with Bank of New York Mellon, handling financial transactions for all other banks. Any challenge to its solvency immediately puts a question mark over the whole financial system. Central bankers all over the world are following with interest the call for Jamie Dimon to be removed from the Board of the Federal Reserve of New York because of conflicts of interest. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York carries out foreign exchange-related activities on behalf of the Federal Reserve System and the U.S. Treasury. In this capacity, the bank monitors and analyzes global financial market developments, manages the U.S. foreign currency reserves, and from time to time intervenes in the foreign exchange market. The bank also executes foreign exchange transactions on behalf of customers.

Tim Geithner now Treasury Secretary was the former President of the Federal Reserve Board of New York. It was under Geithner when billions were handed over to the bankers after 2008. Then Geithner was trying to save the US financial system so that foreigners will not pull their reserves out of the dollar. As Treasury Secretary, Geithner was reported to have had secret meetings with Jamie Dimon in March this year when news first surfaced of the synthetic trades.

Elizabeth Warren, now running for a Senate seat in Massachusetts, has called for the resignation of Jamie Dimon from the Federal Reserve Board of New York. Every citizen will understand that there is a conflict of interest [involved in] sitting on a board that is supposed to regulate the operations of JP Morgan Chase. But conflict of interest has never been a problem for the US capitalists. They changed the rules to suit themselves. However, this was before the era when other societies had alternatives. From China to Venezuela and from Argentina to Japan, central bankers are seeking ways to exit from the contagion of the speculative trading of US bankers.

Last year the world was exposed to the realities of the insolvency of the US financial system when there was the debate on the debt ceiling. Now it has been revealed that the debt ceiling will have to be raised again. This is sending shudders down the spine of financial institutions around the world.

The political struggles over the future of the US financial system are maturing. In order to pre-empt utter disaster the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has called for the big banks to be broken up. The big banks continue to act on the assumption that the US dollar will be the reserve currency of international trade, especially now that the Euro is in disarray. These big banks are of the view that the US government will continue the devaluation of the US dollar without a response from the rest of the world. It is this understanding which has influenced the bankers to believe that the US government will intervene to bail them out when they make speculative bets that the US economy will improve. Many refuse to accept that this is a depression.

Sober elements understand that the banks must be broken up and this was stated explicitly in the annual report of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The letter from the head of the Dallas Federal Reserve is entitled, Choosing the Road to Prosperity Why We Must End Too Big to Fail—Now. In this letter, Richard Fisher from the Dallas Federal Reserve argues that the situation of the big banks is a disaster in waiting. Fisher would force the big banks to reorganize and get much smaller. And he would require “harsh and non-negotiable consequences” for any bank that ends in trouble and seeks government aid, including removal of its leaders, replacement of its board, voiding all compensation and bonus contracts and clawing back any bonus compensation for the two previous years.

It is now understood by these sober elements in the USA that the Big Banks may be not only too big to fail, but also too big to save.

The politicians in the USA are compromised and refuse to see the reality. It is the task of the progressive forces to keep the discussions on the JP Morgan losses on the table in order to educate the people on the nature of the depression. The major media houses such as the New York Times are attempting to manage this story saying that this $3-4 billion loss is a drop in the bucket. From the financial papers there is the buzz that one’s loss is another person’s gain. This is cold comfort to the poor all over the world who are suffering in the midst of this depression. In 2008 the government socialized the losses while the profits were privatized. The bailout was one of the biggest transfers of wealth from the poor of the world to the rich. These bankers now need another bail out and the US government will have to increase the debt ceiling.

For the moment the Occupy Wall Street Movement has made it impossible for the government to bail out the banks again. However, far from bailing out the bankers, speculators such as Corzine of MF Global and Jamie Dimon should be prosecuted. It is not enough to say that what JP Morgan was doing was inappropriate from a federally insured depository institution. It is time for the people to call for these banks to be taken over and the big bankers removed.

It is now time for audacity and more audacity. Nationalization and political education at the moment is more important than the elections. Bankers like JP Morgan profit from war and these forces want another big war so that the capitalists can recover. The peace and justice forces must be more vigilant. The JP Morgan Chase debacle heightens the desperation of the top one per cent in the USA.

The Need For An Independent Investigation Into JP Morgan Chase (baselinescenario.com)

May 20, 2012 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Economics, Militarism | American International Group, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan, JPMorgan Chase, TARP | Leave a comment

DID OBAMA TAKE THE MILITARY OPTION AGAINST IRAN OFF THE TABLE?

THE RACE for IRAN | May 19th, 2012

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, whose relationship with President Obama dates back to Obama’s days in the Senate, made headlines this week with his statement, in an address to Israel’s bar association, that America’s military option against Iran is “not just available,” but “ready. The necessary planning has been done to ensure that it’s ready,” see here. Commenting on these remarks, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said today, see here,

“Let me just make clear that Ambassador Shapiro’s comments were designed to reflect completely what the President has said all along, which is that even as we move forward with the P5+1 discussions with Iran and hope that we can settle these issues through diplomacy, that we nonetheless take no option off the table.”

Against these remarks by Ambassador Shapiro and Ms. Nuland, we juxtapose one of the more striking pieces of commentary we have read since last month’s nuclear talks in Istanbul between the Islamic Republic and the P5+1 countries—an article from Mehdi Mohammadi, published in Kayhan. Mohammadi has written important and insightful pieces in the past. We provide below an English translation, titled “What Did Not Take Place,” below. For the original text, see here.

Mohammadi’s analysis is especially interesting with regard to the U.S. military option against Iran. In the middle of his analysis, he also makes an arresting factual claim: that President Obama, “in a letter written to Iran this past winter, announced openly that the military option from his country’s perspective is not on the table.”

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

~~~

What Did Not Take Place

By Mehdi Mohammadi, domestic political analyst and contributor to Kayhan

A useful way of truly understanding what took place in the Istanbul talks [in April] is to analyze these talks through the lens of “what did not take place.”

From about six months before these negotiations and with the memories of the Istanbul I talks still on the Westerner’s minds, the primary concern of the P5+1 was that of how to force Iran to end its perseverance and to adjust its strategic calculus.

First of all, the most immediate issue for the United States and Israel was to halt Iranian uranium enrichment from progressing any further than where it currently stood. Therefore, a wave of “semi-hard power” operations in the form of cyber attacks, assassinating nuclear scientists, restricting the imports of certain materials and components to Iran, and most important of all, the cutting off what the Americans call the “source of funding” for the nuclear program has been undertaken. However, if we use the criterion of the expansion of installations and the amount of nuclear materials produced by Iran as a measure for the acceleration or deceleration of Iran’s nuclear program, these operations have achieved none of their goals. Scientists have been assassinated, but this affair has only convinced other scientists that they must work harder and take revenge for their martyrs. Cyber attacks were carried out against nuclear facilities but the only result was that not only did Iranian specialists learn defensive technological skills, but they quickly became capable of carrying out widespread cyber attacks in enemy territory. The sanctions prompted Iranian producers to search for new methods and in a short time this lead to self-reliance in certain areas which prior to the sanctions were dependent on imports. The financial resource for Iran’s nuclear program has not been cut off, since the increased oil revenue due to the psychological effect of the sanctions – keep in mind that the oil sanctions neither from Europe nor America have been enacted so far and it is all talk until now — has been much greater than the effect of the tiny amount of reduction Iranian oil exports have experienced.

Therefore, Iran was supposed to enter the Istanbul 2 negotiations with its nuclear program on the verge of bankruptcy. However, Iran entered the negotiations with the Fordo [plant] on the verge of operations, it had produced more than 100 kilos of 20% enriched nuclear materials and a few thousand reserve kilos of 5% enriched uranium, it had loaded the domestically produced fuel into the Tehran reactor and tested it successfully, and the determination of new nuclear sites had been completed and programs for the increase in nuclear production had been announced.

Western “semi-soft power” operations neither stopped nor slowed Iran’s nuclear progress, instead they had only resulted in the deepening, quickening, and immunization of the program and this was the first pillar upon which Iran’s negotiation strategy in Istanbul was founded upon.

Secondly, before the Istanbul talks, all of the West’s efforts went into convincing Iran that if negotiations did not go forward as some of the P5+1 members wished, the military option was firmly on the table. Based on a division of labor between America and Israel, Israel was supposed to threaten Iran with military attacks if it did not relinquish its nuclear program, and America was supposed to back up these threats. The Israeli theory was that if America did not approve of the threats, Iran would not take them as being credible, and the threats would not be taken seriously. However, was it really intended for someone to attack Iran? It has in fact been revealed that such a plan was not in the works from the very beginning.

The objectives of the American and Israeli military threat project were twofold:

First, the analytical consensus for the Israelis and Americans was that Iran would only cease its nuclear program when it felt that the pressure on its program was morphing into a threat to the existence of the Islamic Republic. The result of this Israeli presumption was that in order for Iran to cease its nuclear program, Iran must foresee the threat to its own existence, which is not possible unless Iran feels that the West is willing to even go as far as militarily attacking Iran in order to prevent its nuclearization. The reason that Barack Obama stated in his speech at the last AIPAC conference that his government’s policies in regards to Iran was not one of containment or prevention but rather intended to stopping Iran’s nuclear program, was precisely to send the message to Iran that America saw the risks associated with military confrontation with Iran as being less than that of the risks associated with Iran’s nuclearization. In sum, Israel wanted America to explicitly announce that all options, especially the military one, were on the table and to make the criterion for the use of such options very clear to Iran.

Second, the Israelis believe that the world would not accept the tightening of sanctions against Iran unless it felt that resisting against these sanctions may lead to the ignition of a new war in the region. The threat of attack, in essence, is a tool to force countries such as members of the European Union to tighten sanctions, and thus the analysis of some Western strategists is completely accurate that the most extreme option America and Israel can take against Iran is sanctions. The evaluation is that an attack is basically not one of the possible options, it is strictly a tool through which to make effective the sanctions option, a tool which they imagine furthers the effects of sanctions on Iran and also forces various countries to take the enforcement of sanctions more seriously.

Very well, so what has become the fate of this grand project of psychological warfare, and have the Westerners been able to bake any bread out of this oven they have built for the Istanbul talks? The fate of this project to create a credible military threat is truly quite full of lessons. At the beginning the Americans accepted the argument that if Iran sees a credible military threat on the table — and from America, not Israel — it will have a reason to back down. Therefore, American officials began threatening Iran by stating that their military capability for confronting Iran’s nuclear facilities is sufficient, that their plans for attack were almost complete and that no option has been excluded. However, astonishingly, the effects of this rhetoric were not at all what America had envisioned nor what Israel had predicted.

First of all, Iran quickly responded and conducted special military operations which demonstrated that not only could it defend itself against any attack, but if necessary, that it could carry out preventive operations before the enemy takes action and at a stage when threats are still being made. Subsequently, the Americans saw that their activities which were intended to keep tensions with Iran at a controlled level, could quickly slip out of hand and at any moment there was a possibility that a self-confident Iran could move America towards a deadly, albeit unwanted, conflict. The reason why Barack Obama, in a letter written to Iran this past winter, announced openly that the military option from his country’s perspective is not on the table, was exactly because the Americans saw that Iran was not afraid but in fact was preparing for war!

Secondly, the repeated threats against Iran drove up the price of oil (and as a result Iran’s revenues) sharply, doubling the stagnation of the the half-alive world economy, and with the unprecedented rise in gasoline prices, brought about serious domestic political problems for America and European countries. Indeed, the Americans felt that this ridiculous rhetoric is producing an opposite effect, it has not actually harmed Iran but instead it might at any moment bring about their own downfall and it was for this reason that Barack Obama stated visibly this past Isfand month (March) that whomever talks of attacking Iran are nonsensical fools who are lying to the American people about the potential cost of such an act.

The delectable result is this: while the project for creating a “credible military threat” was meant to make Iran scared and passive, it has unexpectedly and in a short time revealed the secret that the biggest opponent of this option is the American government itself, meaning the same government which was supposed to make the threats seem credible by putting on a show! Not only was the military threat without credit, but it was taken off the table not by the Iranians but by the Americans with unprecedented clearness, and the American representatives came to Istanbul knowing that the threats of attacking Iran were regarded by Iran as nothing but a bad joke and it was for this reason that neither the Americans nor the other members of the P5+1 even came close to expressing such threats [during negotiations].

Up until this point I have only discussed two of the factors which were supposed to occur at Istanbul but did not. There are at least three other factors which can be discussed but there is not enough opportunity to do so at this point. When these three factors are discussed properly and the arguments as to why these factors that the Americans wanted did not come into being are reviewed, then can it be clearly understood why the P5+1 participated in the Istanbul II talks from a weak position.

We are grateful to Mohammad Sagha, a senior in political science and economics at DePaul University for this translation.

~~~

Related:

Iranian lawmakers ask P5+1 to respect Iran’s nuclear rights in upcoming nuclear talks

Xinhua | 2012-05-20

TEHRAN — Iranian lawmakers issued a statement on Sunday asking the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany (P5+1) to respect Iran’s nuclear rights in the upcoming nuclear talks.

“We warn the P5+1 to respect the rights of the Iranian nation, act on the basis of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which is an internationally accepted norm,” the statement was quoted as saying by the semi-official Fars news agency.

The lawmakers urged the world powers to act “free from the Zionists’ (Israeli) pressures and change the policy of confrontation with the Islamic Republic to a policy of interaction, ” read the statement. … Full article

May 19, 2012 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Wars for Israel | Flynt Leverett, Iran, Israel, Mehdi Mohammadi, United States, Victoria Nuland | Leave a comment

Madeleine Albright and Iraq Genocide Memorial Day

By Felicity Arbuthnot | Palestine Chronicle | May 18, 2012

‘Get some new lawyers.’ — 1999: Then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook on his assertion that the bombing of Balkan States was illegal under international law.

In this sixteenth anniversary year of Madeleine Albright stating her endorsement of half a million child sacrifices at the altar of the UN Embargo on Iraq as a “price worth it”, this silent holocaust is to be commemorated annually.

In New Haven, Ct., On 12th May, marking the day of Albright’s infamous broadcast, a banner was unfurled and a minute’s silence held as the Middle East Crisis Committee, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CT), the Tree of Life Education Fund and We Refuse to be Enemies, inaugurated the first Iraq Genocide Memorial Day.

Stanley Heller, Chair of the Middle East Crisis Committee commented: “This horrific loss of life was ignored for six years until the US Ambassador to the UN appeared on ’60 Minutes’ and admitted the deaths of half a million children … We in the Middle East Crisis Committee call for May 12th to be marked as Iraq Genocide Memorial Day.”

Iraq’s children of course, continued to die at an average of six thousand a month until the illegal 2003 invasion wrought further apocalyptic disaster. Currently many hospitals are assessed as even more woeful than under the embargo, thus they continue to die in a near forgotten tragedy of UN-US-UK making. Soaring cancers and birth deformities linked to weapons used in the 1991 bombings, twelve years of subsequent bombings, 2003 and the following years have exacerbated and compounded a tragedy of enormity.

As others accused of crimes against humanity and the peace end up at the International Criminal Court (but so far, only if black or Eastern European, it seems) Albright gathers a bizarre collection of “humanitarian” awards.

One of the strangest is surely the Freedom Award from the International Rescue Committee, initiated by Albert Einstein which: “responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people survive and rebuild their lives (offering) lifesaving care and life-changing assistance …” Endorsing infanticide hardly falls within the IRC’s lofty stated aspirations.

Two years after her statement on disposable children, Albright, now having abandoned further tarnishing the United Nations fine founding aspirations, to become US Secretary of State, declared (February 1998) : “Iraq is a long way from (here), but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.”

A year later, the 1999 razing of much of the Balkans became known as “Madeleine’s war.” The largely unrecognized nation of Kosova, carved from that decimation is now rated one of the most corrupt and lawless countries in the region and high in world ranking, according to December 2011 findings by Transparency International.

Talking after the virtual destruction of Iraq as a nation state, it’s records, government institutions bombed, looted, stolen, she told Jim Lehrer in September 2003: “ … I think we actually … kept him (Saddam Hussein) in a strategic box. We bombed very much if you remember all the maps, always in terms of North and South — covers a great portion of Iraq. I think we had him in the box.” No mention that both the bombing and the “box” were comprehensively illegal.

As ever, the majority of “bombed” victims were Iraq’s children for whom her contempt was seemingly boundless: small rural shepherds and goat herders tending the family flocks on the vast flat tundra, with no place to hide.

One politician with whom she had sparred did take a stand in vast contrast. Robin Cook, Britain’s Foreign Secretary resigned in protest two days before the invasion. His resignation speech in Parliament on 18th March 2003 was a searing indictment of stark double standards on dealing with Iraq. Deliberate selective perception which could now equally apply to threats to Iran:

“I have heard it said that Iraq has had not months but twelve years in which to complete disarmament, and that our patience is exhausted”, he began.

“Yet it is more than thirty years since (UN) Resolution 242 called on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

“We do not express the same impatience with the persistent refusal of Israel to comply.”

He talked of: “ … the strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world at what it sees as one rule for the allies of the US and another rule for the rest.”

Britain’s credibility was not: “helped by the appearance that our partners in Washington are less interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.

“That explains why any evidence that inspections may be showing progress is greeted in Washington not with satisfaction but with consternation: it reduces the case for war.

And as Iran now, he pleaded that: “Inspections be given a chance (that the UK was) “being pushed too quickly into conflict by a US Administration with an agenda of its own.

He asked for the halt of: “commitment of troops in a war that has neither international agreement nor domestic support” and ended: “I intend to join those tomorrow night who will vote against military action. It is for that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I resign from the government.”

On the first anniversary of the invasion he stated in Parliament: “It seems only too likely that the judgment of history may be that the invasion of Iraq has been the biggest blunder in British foreign and security policy in the half century since Suez. “In truth we would have made more progress in rolling back support for terrorism if we had brought peace to Palestine rather than war to Iraq.”

Robin Cook died of a heart complication whilst hill walking on remote Ben Stack in Scotland, coincidentally within a swathe of land owned by the Duke of Westminster, a Major General and at the time Assistant Chief of Defence Staff, who visited British held Basra a number of times after the invasion.

His death was on the 6th August, 2005, Hiroshima Day and the fifteenth anniversary of the imposition of the all denying embargo on Iraq. A price Robin Cook had clearly not thought “worth it.”

It has to be hoped that Iraq Genocide Memorial Day spreads worldwide both in memory of those abandoned by the inspiring words committed to in the UN Charter, the numerous hidden casualties, dead and alive – and as a reminder that for a great swathe of the world, mortifyingly, it is the West which appears to be increasingly despotic.

– Felicity Arbuthnot is a journalist with special knowledge of Iraq. Author, with Nikki van der Gaag, of Baghdad in the Great City series for World Almanac books, she has also been Senior Researcher for two Award winning documentaries on Iraq, John Pilger’s Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq and Denis Halliday Returns for RTE (Ireland.)

May 19, 2012 Posted by aletho | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Balkans, International Rescue Committee, Iraq, Madeleine Albright, Robin Cook, United Nations, United States | Leave a comment

Lebanese army seizes weapons, explosives near Syria border

Press TV – May 18, 2012

The Lebanese army has seized a consignment of weapons and explosives near the Syrian border, apparently destined for armed gangs fighting against the Damascus government.

According to Lebanese sources, the weapons were seized after the army intercepted a pickup truck in the village of Joura in the border region of Masharih al-Qaa late on Thursday.

One gunman was killed and a Lebanese soldier was injured in the exchange of fire between the two sides.

Lebanese troops also discovered a car laden with explosives in the southern city of Sidon.

Several people have been arrested in connection with the incidents.

Syria, which has been experiencing unrest since last year, has repeatedly said that weapons used by armed groups fighting against the government of President Bashar al-Assad are being smuggled into the country from Turkey and Lebanon.

Syria has also accused Saudi Arabia and Qatar, of fueling unrest in the country by funding and arming the anti-Syria gunmen.

Last month, the Lebanese navy intercepted a Sierra Leone-registered ship, Lutfullah II, and confiscated a large consignment of arms and ammunition it was carrying. It is believed that the weapons were bound for armed groups in Syria.

The ship’s owner said it was due to unload in Tripoli in northern Lebanon.

Huge Weapons Cache Aboard Italian Ship in North Lebanon (alethonews.wordpress.com)

May 18, 2012 Posted by aletho | Militarism | Lebanese Armed Forces, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Sidon, Syria | Leave a comment

US Gives Israel an Immediate $70 million for “Iron Dome” Systems

By Heidi Williams | IMEMC & Agencies | May 18, 2012

The Arab 48 News Agency reported today that US Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, announced on Thursday that the United States will provide Israel with $70 million in immediate aid for the purchase of additional Iron Dome rocket defense batteries. This was needed for Israel to meet its fiscal requirements for 2012. In addition, he said that the US was in talks with Israel about the possibility of establishing a multi-year budget plan to assist Israel in purchasing additional batteries.

Panetta made the announcement following a meeting with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak at the Pentagon. Barak was in Washington for talks aimed at coordinating strategy with the US ahead of the second round of talks between western powers and Iran scheduled to open next week in Baghdad.

Since the deployment of the system last year, Iron Dome batteries have intercepted over 90 Katyusha and Kassam rockets fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip.

The new aid package comes after the Obama administration gave Israel $205 million in 2011 and comes on top of the $3 billion Israel receives in annual foreign aid from the United States.

Barak thanked the US for its support and said that Israeli-US defense ties had never been as strong as they were today under the Obama administration. “The US decision to support further enhancing Israel’s security is an important demonstration of the unbreakable bonds between the United States and Israel,” Barak said.

In an interview late Wednesday, Barak told CNN the United States and Israel are essentially “on the same page” over the Iranian nuclear program. “We say loud and clear, the Americans say the same, the president says the same – a nuclear military Iran is unacceptable,” he said. “We are determined to prevent them from turning nuclear. And that no option except for containment, no option should be removed off the table in order to achieve this objective.”

May 18, 2012 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Ehud Barak, Iron Dome, Israel, Leon Panetta, United States, United States Secretary of Defense | Leave a comment

Gutting START; Re-Starting a Nuclear Arms Race

By ROBERT ALVAREZ | CounterPunch | May 17, 2012

This week the U.S. House of Representatives takes up the proposed National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013. (H.R. 4310). Below is a section by section analysis of the nuclear weapons provisions I drew up over the past few weeks. Also, here is the White House Statement of Administration Policy (SAP) regarding this legislation.

Democratic members will be offering amendments to strike and/or modify several provisions. House Republicans have cobbled together the most bellicose nuclear arms policy since the height of the Cold War. In doing so, they restore the “production over safety” policy that left behind an enormous human and environmental legacy.

Specifically, this bill:

(1) Blocks funding for implementation of the New START Treaty, and reductions in thousands of non-deployed weapons, known as the “war reserve” to be used in retaliation against civilian populations, unless new nuclear weapons facilities and delivery systems are funded over the next 10 years totaling about $185 billion;

(2) Dictates specific terms and conditions for future nuclear arms reductions driven by Cold War nuclear arms race policies;

(3) Requires the Administration to submit a report on re-deploying tactical nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula.

(4) Codifies a process to funnel additional money for the DOE nuclear weapons labs, above and beyond what they already receive from the Department’s of Defense, Homeland Security, and intelligence agencies;

(5) Bestows unprecedented inherent governmental oversight of budgets and Executive Branch nuclear weapons policies to the DOE nuclear weapons contractors;

(6) Eliminates the Energy department’s oversight and enforcement of health, safety security and financial management and transfers it these functions to the National Nuclear Security Agency, within DOE;

(7) Drastically cuts funding by more than $50 million that permits NNSA and DOE to carry-out safety, health, security and financial management oversight and enforcement responsibilities;

(8) Establishes a long-discredited policy by law which places budget and schedules above nuclear safety requirements; and

(9) Seriously weakens the authority of the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board (DNFSB), established after several serious safety lapses, to ensure that the nuclear weapons program meets DOE safety standards and practices.

(10) opens up the coffers of the Defense Department to pay for the multi-billion-dollar construction of new nuclear weapons production facilities;

(11) Codifies a process to funnel additional money for the DOE nuclear weapons labs, above and beyond what they already receive from the Department’s of Defense, Homeland Security, and intelligence agencies;

(12) Bestows unprecedented inherent governmental oversight of budgets and Executive Branch nuclear weapons policies to the DOE nuclear weapons contractors;

(13) Eliminates the Energy department’s oversight and enforcement of health, safety security and financial management and transfers these functions to the National Nuclear Security Agency, within DOE; and

(14) Seriously weakens the authority of the Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board (DNFSB), established after several serious safety lapses, to ensure that the nuclear weapons program meets DOE safety standards and practices.

ANALYSIS OF SECTIONS RELATING TO NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN H.R. 4310

Section 1053 effectively withholds funds for the implementation the New START Treaty if the President, in a report to Congress, does not submit budgets that ensure the U.S. is committed to “providing the resources, at a minimum at the levels set forth in the President’s 10-year plan provided to Congress in November 2010.” This plan called for a steep increase in funding for nuclear weapons R&D, modernization, and deployment of new delivery systems estimated at $185 billion. This provision also withholds funds to allow the President to reduce the number of warheads without justifying it for Congressional approval.

Section 1058 (e) requires the President to certify that the CMMR and UPF are constructed by 2012 and will be operational no later than 2024. This provision also effectively limits reductions in the “war reserve” containing thousands of non-deployed warheads until the construction and operation of these facilities occur.

Section 1062 establishes an “Interagency Council on the Strategic Capability of the National Laboratories.” This codifies the process put in place by the Obama Administration to funnel even more funds above and beyond what DOE labs currently receive from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and intelligence agencies.

Section 1059 effectively restricts the reduction the number of nuclear warheads on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles unless the President can certify to Congress that the Russian Federation and China are doing the same.

Section 1060 proscribes the terms and conditions that the U.S. must adhere to in negotiations to reduce tactical nuclear warheads in Europe and prohibits funding for “reduction, consolidation, or withdrawal of nuclear forces based in Europe, until the President certifies that NATO nations concur and that these steps are “specifically authorized by an Act of Congress.”

Section 2894 requires:

”that the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Building Replacement (CMRR) project, in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) project, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and any nuclear facility of the NNSA initiated on or after October 1, 2013 that is estimated to cost more than $1.0 billion (and is intended to be primarily utilized to support NNSAs nuclear weapons activities), be treated as military construction projects.
Furthermore, this section would authorize, as military construction, the CMRR project in the amount of $3.5 billion and the UPF project in the amount of $4.2 billion.
“This section would specify that the Secretary of Energy shall retain authority to regulate design and construction activities for these projects, that the Secretary of Defense must coordinate with the Administrator for Nuclear Security regarding requirements for these facilities, and that the Administrator must make available to the Secretary of Defense the expertise of the NNSA to support design and construction activities.” (P. 315, Committee Report for H.R. 4310)

Section 3114 establishes a NATIONAL NUCLEAR SECURITY ADMINISTRATION COUNCIL, made up of the DOE weapons labs directors and production contractors to provide recommendations for improving “the governance, management, effectiveness, and efficiency” of the NNSA and “scientific and technical issues relating to policy matters, operational concerns, strategic planning and development of priorities related to the mission and operations” of the NNSA and the “Administration of the nuclear security enterprise.” The NNSA and the DOE Secretary must act upon their recommendations within 60 days. This is an unprecedented effort to bestow inherent government oversight authority on DOE nuclear weapons contractors.  Section 3115 eliminates DOE oversight of financial, safety, health and security oversight and enforcement and places it in the hands of NNSA. The NNSA can waive current requirements for protection of the public and workers. In Section 3115 (d) the Committee also lowers the bar by legislating a radiation protection framework that was discarded some 40 years ago. Known as “as low as practicable (ALAP),” this practice would allow the NNSA and its contractors to use cost and schedule to override nuclear safety requirements, if they interfere with design, construction and operations of nuclear weapons facilities. By contrast the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires the practice of “as low as reasonably achievable,” which is based on a “safety first” criteria and also requires a greater level of inspection and enforcement of standards. The ALAP/Cold War practice in the hands of contractors is discredited by decades of Congressional, Executive Branch and independent reviews. DOE contractors are the only private businesses working for the U.S. government that are granted blanket indemnification for criminal violations of safety. This is a major reason why the U.S. taxpayer is on the hook for an enormous long-term liability at weapons sites. The HASC wants to restore this discredited system that puts workers and the public in harm’s way while increasing tax-payer liabilities.   Section 3117 effectively strips the DOE Secretary of its authority to oversee and enforce financial controls over DOE nuclear weapons contractors. In the name of “streamlining,” the HASC delegates approval for work for others and cooperative research and development agreements to the DOE contractors.

Section 3202 does the following:

It weakens the role of the Chair of the DNFSB by virtually making the other members co-equals, and creates potential problem of “gridlock.”
It proscribes a greatly weakened public safety standard that the Board must adhere to. As mentioned above: The “low as practicable’ practice allows the NNSA and its contractors to use cost and schedule to override design, construction and operational radiation safety. By contrast the Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires the practice of “as low as reasonably achievable,” which establishes a “safety first” criteria and also requires a greater level of inspection and enforcement of standards. The ALAP/Cold War practice in the hands of contractors is discredited by decades of Congressional, Executive Branch, and independent reviews.
It requires the Board to submit draft recommendations to the Secretary. Previously, recommendations made were final. This puts the Board in the position of sending its pre-decisional recommendations to the DOE, and subject safety findings to negotiations. A basic principal of nuclear safety, established by the Nuclear Navy, is that safety findings are not negotiable.

The provision stretches the time that the DOE/NNSA can respond to the Board Recommendations, another item that further weakens the Board.

ROBERT ALVAREZ, an Institute for Policy Studies senior scholar, served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary from 1993 to 1999. www.ips-dc.org

May 17, 2012 Posted by aletho | Militarism | United States | Leave a comment

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A Lesser “Grade” of Human

By Michael Hoffman | Revelation of the Method | January 3, 2024

Will the more than 100 Iranians killed by terrorist bombs today be mourned in the West as victims of terrorism? Certainly not. Allied doctrine has it that the killing of Israeli or American civilians is a crime of cosmic proportions, while shedding the blood of “enemy” women and children is perfectly acceptable; indeed commendable.

The West does not memorialize the hundreds of thousands of civilians bombed by the U.S. in Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan and every major German city 1943-1945. America’s fire-bombing of the city of Tokyo by General Curtis LeMay in March 1945 was followed by Harry Truman’s atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year. Truman never had a moment of doubt or regret over the murder of more than a 100,000 Asian children, mothers and non-combatant boys and men. It was business as usual for the “noble” Allies during the “Good War.”

In the West human rights signifies passionate concern only for civilians designated as truly human: Israelis first, then Americans and British, followed by their satraps.

This inhumanity is the legacy of Talmudic ideology, beginning with tractate Sanhedrin 57a from 400 A.D., concerning liability for capital punishment: “If a Jew murders a gentile, he is exempt.”

This teaching of contempt was reiterated in the dogma of Chabad Lubavitch founder Rabbi Shneur Zalman in the 18th century. … continue

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