Obama promised to make ending the war in Iraq his first act in office. Then he did what he could to avoid ending it. Forced by Bush and Maliki and the Iraqis to remove troops, he’s keeping troops nearby and filling bases with mercenaries, while expanding ground and drone wars around the region and claiming the power to make war anywhere he likes, including having already done so in Libya. Nonetheless a hearty band of Obama-Right-Or-Wrongers planned a rally in Chicago to praise the president for . . . well, for something or other.
The rally was sponsored by Marilyn Katz and Carl Davidson and “Chicagoans Against War in Iraq,” and was promoted as a big national event. I heard about the planning here in Virginia. Among the 30 speakers were the president of the Cook County Board Toni Preckwinkle, Alderman Joe Moore, and Tom Hayden. But an email report I’ve just been forwarded says the audience was “5-10,” and “Dozens and dozens of prepared placards that said ‘yes we can’ were in a box, untouched.”
Meanwhile, “In opposition, holding placards, were some 15 or more from March 19th Anti-War Coalition, Occupy Chicago, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Albany Park, North Park, Mayfair Neighbors for Peace and Justice, and others. The placards included slogans “The U.S. War on Iraq is NOT Over” “Obama Does Mot Deserve Praise,” “Obama is Continuing Illegal & Unjust Wars,” “Obama Is Threatening Iran and Syria,” “Free Bradley Manning,” “No War on Iran,” “Orambo,” “There Is Nothing to Celebrate” and others. Hundreds of leaflets from the March 19th Anti-War Coalition entitled “The Government is NOT bringing all U.S. troops home or ending its wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or its threats against Iran and Syria and elsewhere” were distributed to passersby as well as those at the rally.”
December 17, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite |
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Liberals in Congress and in the general public have allowed their blind devotion to Obama obscure their understanding of the dramatic parallels between this administration and the previous one. Obama’s high-minded idealistic rhetoric (which Bush also engaged in, it should be pointed out) may sound great to establishment liberals, but it masks the same contempt for the rule of law that was displayed so often in the Bush imperial presidency. Now, Obama’s contempt for the Constitution is on display for all to see, although many will not like what they see.
Nowhere is this contempt for the highest laws of the land clearer than in Obama’s complete refusal to protect basic due process rights for alleged terrorists and detainees in the “War on Terror.” Case in point: Obama’s commitment to illegally detain American citizens under the name of fighting terrorism (more on this in a bit).
Before getting into Obama’s most recent attacks on the Constitution, I should note that they are part of a larger historical pattern of contempt for basic civil liberties. Count among Obama’s previous transgressions:
1. The decision to refrain from prosecuting the Bush administration for its many violations of the law, including the NSA wiretaps scandal, the Guantanamo-enemy combatant fiasco, the systematic lying about the reasons for war in Iraq, and the willful skirting of the Geneva Conventions as seen in the Abu Ghraib scandal, among other deceptions;
2. The decision to continue using rendition, where terrorist suspects would be sent to third world dictatorships to be interrogated, coupled with the absurd promise that these governments would no longer torture detainees (as they did under Bush), because the new interrogations were in service of the noble and selfless Obama, unlike Bush, who was a bad, bad man; and
3. Obama’s expanded “War on Terror” as seen in the Afghan surge, which would have been protested endlessly if it occurred under the Bush administration.
The Los Angeles Times’ reporting in early 2009 perfectly symbolized the naiveté of liberal aspirations for the president, as the paper reported on Obama’s tortured promise (no pun intended) that the CIA would continue to use rendition, but that foreign interrogators simply wouldn’t torture anymore. Such a promise was outlandish on the face of it, since the whole point behind rendition is to outsource torture to allied governments which are better able to hide their use of torture in interrogations (this was the lesson learned at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram, where U.S. interrogators were eventually implicated in coercive interrogations and torture).
As the LA Times optimistically reported at the time of Obama’s inauguration: “The CIA’s secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba… Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism… for taking suspected terrorists off the street.” The LA Times continued: “Obama created a task force to reexamine renditions to make sure that they ‘do not result in the transfer of individuals to other nations to face torture,’ or otherwise circumvent human rights laws and treaties. The CIA has long maintained that it does not turn prisoners over to other countries without first obtaining assurances that the detainees will not be mistreated.” Such naiveté was no doubt embraced by Obama supporters who wanted to believe that Obama could never engage in the kind of torture of detainees that so regularly characterized the actions of the Bush administration.
Now Obama appears to be ready to strengthen his contempt for the rule of law via his expansion of the enemy combatant system, while slyly refusing to refer to those detained as “enemy combatants.” Much was made of Obama’s initial attempts (in 2009) to shut down Guantanamo and send detainees there to U.S. civilian courts, where they would be granted basic due process rights. That plan was shut down by Democrats in Congress, which have long displayed their basic distaste for basic Constitutional and other legal protections for “terrorist suspects.” Obama kowtowed to Congressional criminality in 2009, and is set to do it again this year. As the New York Times recently reported, Obama has now abandoned his promise to veto the “military authorization bill” being considered in Congress, which threatens to extend denial of due process to American citizens who are suspected of terrorist activities. Let me repeat that in case you missed it: Obama has now gone on record as openly supportive of denying American citizens (not only non-citizens) basic due process rights such as the right to trial, trial by peers, and right to legal representation.
As the New York Times reports: “The administration had threatened to veto versions of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 passed by the House and the Senate, arguing that provisions would open the door for the military to perform policing functions inside the United States…But the bill includes a narrower provision, drafted by the Senate, authorizing the government to detain, without trial, suspected members of Al Qaeda or its allies — or those who ‘substantially supported’ them — bolstering the authorization it enacted a decade ago against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks…Another section would require officials to hold noncitizens suspected of being Qaeda operatives in military custody.”
Of course, the traditionally slavish U.S. media spared Americans the worst details of the new legislation. The Guardian reports that the new law potentially “allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay.” Neither of these details was acknowledged in the New York Times’ report on the National Defense Authorization Act, to the delight of the Obama administration.
It’s truly tragic and sad that this “debate” over circumvention of basic rights granted in the Constitution has to be replayed yet again in the United States. The Bush administration was rightly condemned for its complete contempt for the Constitution, but American liberals seem content to ignore these same transgressions when engaged in by Democrats.
For the record, there is nothing remotely controversial about the conclusion that denying citizens and non-citizens alike basic due process rights in civilian courts is illegal under national and international law. As the Supreme Court ruled in the 2004 case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, military tribunals for terrorist suspects clearly violate basic protections granted under the Geneva Conventions, which require that suspects be tried in “regularly constituted courts.” A regularly constituted court is widely understood to be the equivalent of a civilian court, conferring within it basic protections to confront accusers, benefit from a trial of one’s peers, and to be protected against hearsay, majority (rather than unanimous voting), and to confidential attorney-client privileges. All of these protections are circumvented in military tribunals, which afford a far lower level of basic protections to the accused. Such due process protections carry the force of domestic law, in light of the fact that the Geneva Conventions are U.S. ratified foreign treaties, and are protected under the Constitution’s “supremacy clause,” which places foreign treaties on par with national laws and the Constitution itself as the highest form of law in the land. The Supreme Court also found that the Geneva Conventions protections for non-citizens (to have access to a trial in a civilian court) were protected via the Uniform Military Code of Justice, which also incorporates basic Geneva Conventions protections.
The outlawing of the “enemy combatant” designation and the indefinite detainment of non-citizens was also reinforced in the Supreme Court’s 2004 Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld decision, which declared the Bush administration’s detainment of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo to be illegal and unconstitutional. The Constitution states explicitly in the 6th Amendment that: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury… and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.” Critics will no doubt point out that the 6th Amendment refers to basic protections granted to those who are charged with crimes allegedly committed within (rather than outside) the United States. This criticism is irrelevant, however, with regard to the new legislation being considered in Congress, which is set to apply to American citizens and their (alleged) illegal activities committed on U.S. soil. Furthermore, the Constitution does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens in the case of alleged crimes and due process rights, as addressed in the Fifth Amendment, which explicitly states that “no person [rather than no citizen]… shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” This provision essentially makes illegal and unconstitutional any attempts by presidents or congress to deny basic due process to citizens and non-citizens.
Obama’s lawless infringements on basic Constitutional principles are (fortunately) opposed by a strong majority of Americans, who still maintain a commitment to the rule of law. Polling on the denial of due process is in short supply, but what little evidence exists suggests strong rejection of the circumvention of the Constitution. A 2006 poll published by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, for example, uncovers the following findings:
– 73 percent of Americans believe terrorism “suspects should have the right to request and receive a hearing.”
– 66 percent think that the “home government and families [of detainees] should be informed of their capture and location.”
– 73 percent feel that detainees “treatment should be monitored by the Red Cross or another international organization” to ensure that they are treated humanely
– 75 percent (contrary to Obama’s reliance on rendition and torture) feel that detainees “should not be tortured,” while 57 percent think that detainees “should not be threatened with torture.”
– 63 percent agree that “the rules for treating someone who is being detained because they are suspected of terrorist activities should be the same for citizens and non-citizens.”
– 57 percent feel “the United States should not permit U.S. military and intelligence agencies to secretly send terrorism suspects to other countries that are known to use torture.”
– 78 percent believe that it would be “somewhat” or “very likely” that these suspects “were tortured even if officials [as Obama has done today] say they would not be.”
American majority sentiment is very clearly opposed to the Obama administration’s continuation of the illegal attacks on the Constitution and basic due process rights. We have an opportunity today to send a message to our members of Congress that denial of due process is unacceptable regardless of the party of the president. Simply because Congress decides to initiate illegal acts doesn’t mean that they are any less unconstitutional. Political elites may have no interest in this basic lesson, but that doesn’t mean that Americans have to accept such draconian, authoritarian arguments. I strongly urge all those committed to the rule of law to contact their legislators in the House and Senate and urge them strongly to vote no against the authorization of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act.
To look up your members of Congress, see the following links:
For the House of Representatives: http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
For the Senate: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
~
Anthony DiMaggio is the author of numerous books, including most recently The Rise of the Tea Party, and other works such as Crashing the Tea Party (2011); When Media Goes to War (2010); and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008). He has taught American politics and International Relations in Political Science at a number of colleges and universities, and can be reached at: adimag2@uic.edu
December 16, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular |
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Tehran – In what seems to be nothing but US-style barefaced arrogance, President Barack Obama has demanded the return of a spy drone which violated the airspace of the Islamic Republic but which was to the humiliation of the US officials downed by the Iranian army.
The top-secret RQ-170 Sentinel drone, which was used by Washington as part of the covert operations the US officials have already vowed to conduct inside Iran, was hunted down by an electronic ambush and landed with a minimal degree of damage over the city of Kashmar about 140 miles inside Iran.
Consciously blind to the realities of Washington’s abysmal policies, the Western media treated the report with a predilection for suspicion and disbelief and used the somewhat innocuous-sounding term ‘reconnaissance drone’. However, when Pentagon later acknowledged the “mysterious loss of a surveillance drone”, they had no choice but to face the truth.
What strikes as bizarrely ridiculous is the fact that Washington has demanded the return of the drone which they have confessed was sent on a secret mission for gathering information.
”We have asked for it back. We’ll see how the Iranians respond,” Mr. Obama has said.
Nonetheless, Iran says that it has no intention of returning the drone and that Washington should compensate Tehran for violating the country’s airspace.
Brushing aside the possibility of returning the drone, Chairman of Iran’s Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi said on Tuesday that the White House must face the consequences of violating Iran’s airspace.
Washington’s insistence on having the drone returned springs from some secret concern over the nature of what the Iranians would glean technologically from the spy drone.
Iranian military experts are reportedly in the final stage of extracting information from the drone. The extracted information will be used to sue the United States, an Iranian official says.
When asked at a White House news conference if he was concerned that Iran could weaken US national security by obtaining intelligence from the downed drone, Obama said, “I’m not going to comment on intelligence matters that are classified.”
Without directly referring to the spy drone, Obama had earlier repeated the same old threat that ‘all options are on the table in dealing with Iran’, saying, “Today Iran is isolated, and the world is unified in applying the toughest sanctions that Iran has ever experienced. They can break that isolation by acting responsibly and forswearing the development of nuclear weapons . . . or they can continue to operate in a fashion that isolates them from the entire world.”
Obama’s threatening words against Iran evidently reek of the literature of his predecessor George W. Bush. In fact, he is following in the footsteps of Bush and has metaphorically metamorphosed into the belligerent personality of the latter.
It is manifest that Washington has recently ramped up its espionage activities in Iran.
On May 21, 2011, Iran’s Intelligence Ministry arrested an espionage network comprising of 30 individuals who were working for the CIA and another 42 CIA operatives who had links with the network. The CIA-linked network deceived citizens into spying for the agency under the pretext of issuing visas, assisting with US permanent residency, and offering job and study opportunities in American universities.
According to Iran’s Intelligence Ministry, the disbanded network was chiefly focused on targeting the country’s nuclear plants, energy fields, and sensitive oil and gas centers with the main purpose of sabotaging these areas.
Iranian intelligence officials have learned that the CIA agents had gathered information from universities and scientific research centers in the field of aerospace, defense and biotechnology industries.
Also, on November 24, 2011, Iran arrested another 12 CIA agents who were working with Israel’s Mossad and targeted the country’s military and nuclear program. Member of the Iranian Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Parviz Sorouri said that the CIA and Mossad espionage apparatuses were making efforts to damage Iran both from inside and outside and deal a heavy blow with the help of regional intelligence services.
“Fortunately, with the swift reaction of the Iranian intelligence department, their attempts proved abortive,” Sorouri said.
If truth be told, the downing of the spy drone has surely delivered a heavy blow to the intelligence apparatus of the CIA and rustled many feathers in Washington. In an atrociously antagonistic manner, former US Vice President Dick Cheney unleashed his anger on President Barack Obama, saying that he should have doubled down on being caught spying with an overt attack on Iran.
“The right response would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down,” Cheney said.
Confusing Iran with Iraq and Afghanistan, he suggested that this could have been done either with a land invasion to recover the lost drone or by bombing the area until the drone was destroyed.
“The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it. You can do that from the air. You can do that with a quick airstrike, and in effect make it impossible for them to benefit from having captured that drone. I was told that the president had three options on his desk. He rejected all of them. They all involved sending somebody in to try to recover it, or if you can’t do that, admittedly that would be a difficult operation, you certainly could have gone in and destroyed it on the ground with an airstrike. But he didn’t take any of the options. He asked for them to return it. And they aren’t going to do that.”
The fury of poor Mr. Cheney is quite perceptible and pathetic and the predicament of President Obama is not hard to imagine.
However, it would be better if the US officials confessed to the military prowess of Iran instead of attributing the desperate loss of their drone to their President’s ineptitude.
The downing of the spy drone is a sign that Iran is militarily powerful and efficient. However, the secret mission of the drone, which is purported to have been the collection of secret data on the Iranian nuclear sites, consolidates the idea that Washington is more than ever bent on carrying out secret black operations inside Iran and that it is harboring a malicious plan to orchestrate an attack on the Iranian nuclear sites if not an Armageddon in the region.
– Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian author and political analyst. A prolific writer, he has written numerous books and articles on the Middle East.
December 15, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes |
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The killer said:
“Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top al-Qaeda leaders who’ve been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement,” the president fired back at an impromptu news conference at the White House.
“Or whoever’s left out there,” he added. “Ask them about that.”
Watch the video at the link provided above. It’s instructive, particularly Obama’s expression when he adds, “Or whoever’s left out there.” He speaks of murder, yet the words are breezy and casual: this is a murderer so used to killing that he talks of his past and future victims interchangeably, and in terms of approximation. Just “whoever’s left out there.” He wants to be sure you know he’ll order all of them killed in time. His face is expressionless, the eyes dead. This is a man without a soul in any healthy, positive sense. He murders — and he’s proud of it.
More than a million innocent Iraqis were murdered as the result of the United States’ criminal war of aggression on that country. Obama has heralded America’s “success” in Iraq as “an extraordinary achievement.”
The continuing murders in Pakistan and Afghanistan are so numerous and so regular that they barely merit notice for more than a few days, at least as far as the United States government and most Americans are concerned. Over the recent Thanksgiving weekend, the United States government murdered at least 25 Pakistanis. (NATO and the U.S. government are indistinguishable in any matter of importance, in any matter of murders of this kind.) Pakistan is deeply angry and unhappy. The United States government and Obama are concerned only to the extent that Pakistan’s unhappiness might interfere with the U.S.’s intention to dominate and control that part of the world. The U.S. government and Obama aren’t particularly upset about the murders, but about the strategic problem that might result from the murders.
On the same weekend: “Six children were among seven civilians killed in a NATO airstrike in southern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Thursday.” The story has already fallen into the well of forgetfulness. It must be the case that incidents like this occur at least once a day given the number of military operations ordered by the Murderer-in-Chief and carried out by those who follow his orders. Perhaps only one innocent person is killed. “Only” one. Perhaps we should ask “whoever’s left out there” what that one loss signifies.
Earlier in November, there was this story:
Last Friday, I met a boy, just before he was assassinated by the CIA. Tariq Aziz was 16, a quiet young man from North Waziristan, who, like most teenagers, enjoyed soccer. Seventy-two hours later, a Hellfire missile is believed to have killed him as he was travelling in a car to meet his aunt in Miran Shah, to take her home after her wedding. Killed with him was his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan.
Over 2,300 people in Pakistan have been killed by such missiles carried by drone aircraft such as the Predator and the Reaper, and launched by remote control from Langley, Virginia. Tariq and Waheed brought the known total of children killed in this way to 175, according to statistics maintained by the organisation I work for, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
…
Unless the CIA can prove that Tariq Aziz posed an imminent threat (as the White House’s legal advice stipulates a targeted killing must in order for an attack to be carried out), or that he was a key planner in a war against the US or Pakistan, the killing of this 16 year old was murder, and any jury should convict the CIA accordingly.
These are only a few of the stories we know about, and only from a very brief period of time. Countless other murders take place all over the world, and we can only gather the dim outlines of what is occurring. This is not to mention numerous lesser acts of cruelty and violence, many of which will alter lives in searing ways, for all the desolate years to follow.
Consider:
Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission. Now, say that 70 times and you’re done… for the day. Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world’s countries.
…
Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency. By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command [SOCOM] spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120. “We do a lot of traveling — a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq,” he said recently. This global presence — in about 60% of the world’s nations and far larger than previously acknowledged — provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world.
…
In 120 countries across the globe, troops from Special Operations Command carry out their secret war of high-profile assassinations, low-level targeted killings, capture/kidnap operations, kick-down-the-door night raids, joint operations with foreign forces, and training missions with indigenous partners as part of a shadowy conflict unknown to most Americans. Once “special” for being small, lean, outsider outfits, today they are special for their power, access, influence, and aura.
No minimally decent human being would choose to have anything whatsoever to do with a government which systematically engages in acts of this kind. This is true of anyone who is part of the national governing apparatus, or wishes to be. It is most especially true of anyone who wishes to become president. Even if a person declares his or her absolute commitment to ending all of this, it is impossible for one person to do it. The massive bureaucracy of death which carries out these acts was erected over decades; all such bureaucratic monstrosities take on lives of their own. It will not be dismantled by a single individual overnight, or even in a matter of months or probably years. That means the murders will go on.
It may be that at some point this machinery of death will be brought down comparatively quickly. If that happens, it will not be the result of one person’s actions, but of calamitous events on a momentous scale: widening war, catastrophic natural disasters, widespread financial collapse, and/or massive social unrest and violence. In the meantime, a reverence for life demands that we see the Death State exactly for what it is — and walk away to the fullest extent we can.
That is not the course Barack Obama chose. He wanted to be, he now is the Murderer-in-Chief. He is proud of his achievement.
Thus, the words I wrote over five years ago continue to hold a relevance and meaning that fill me with the deepest despair. I desperately wish that I had never had cause to compose this passage, and that I did not feel compelled to repeat it now:
If you have ever wondered how a serial murderer — a murderer who is sane and fully aware of the acts he has committed — can remain steadfastly convinced of his own moral superiority and show not even the slightest glimmer of remorse, you should not wonder any longer.
The United States government is such a murderer. It conducts its murders in full view of the entire world. It even boasts of them. Our government, and all our leading commentators, still maintain that the end justifies the means — and that even the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents is of no moral consequence, provided a sufficient number of people can delude themselves into believing the final result is a “success.”
…
We can appeal all we want to “American exceptionalism,” but any “exceptionalism” that remains ours is that of a mass murderer without a soul, and without a conscience. … It is useless to appeal to any “American” sense of morality: we have none. It does not matter how immense the pile of corpses grows: we will not surrender or even question our delusion that we are right, and that nothing we do can be profoundly, unforgivably wrong.
December 10, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes |
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Like a little kid who just got caught stealing and begs his mama not to spank him, Eric Holder stated in the House Judicial Hearing that “the tactics used during operation Fast and Furious would never be used again by the Justice Department” and that on the distinction between lying and misleading Congress, Holder said it was a matter of a person’s “state of mind.”
That’s reassuring.
Holder earned his stripes as a cover up agent in the Clinton administration working under Janet Reno to stifle the truth about the Oklahoma City bombing and the related murder of Kenneth Trentadue. Holder’s role in Clinton’s pardon of Mossad asset billionaire criminal Marc Rich shows how eagerly he will bow to Israeli lobbying and bribery.
Holder was one of many to be interviewed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and as Attorney General continues the coverup of that event to this day. Commentary from this video:
Eric Holder was chosen because they planned to rape justice and Eric is the right kind of criminal. The person in charge of the Justice system in America is the same person that runs {aids} Al-CIAeda planning to attack Americans on Christmas in Portland or Detroit. The reason you will never see justice for the real crimes being committed against Americans is because Eric represents another form of “justice.” Obama runs Al-CIAeda, and Eric Holder is Al-CIAeda’s lawyer. Eric Holder protected the Mumbai mastermind with a fake trial in Chicago. Eric Holder staged a fake spy swap for the media, using the justice system as a game for a show. Eric Holder was part of the Lockerbie bombers legal paperwork “release.” Eric Holder is a top “inside job” suspect, for 9/11, The USS Cole, and the Bombings at the US Embassy’s in Africa, front and center starring in the whole Bin Laden show.
What is pathetic about the house ‘furious’ hearing is that some are using it as an agenda for more gun regulations against honest Americans in the name of stemming the flow of weapons to Mexico. Although Holder said he will pursue prosecutions of those under his watch if laws were broken, the administration’s ultimate policy is to disarm citizens out of fear that one day they may feel the need to take a stand against the police state’s disregard of the constitution and Bill of Rights and overall government criminality.
As serious as this ‘gunwalker’ issue is, and make no mistake – this was not a sting operation but deliberate trafficking for reasons yet not clear, the house hearing was a sham. We will not be seeing hearings about the money draining scam of the ‘War on Drugs,’ the ever expanding drug running of the CIA and other governmental agencies with protection of Afghan opium crops and heroin producing facilities, drug money laundering by all of the big banks and the kickbacks to politicians who allow it all to happen. We won’t be hearing a word from Congress about Obama and Holder’s promise to end the Bush-era attacks on sellers of medicinal marijuana and the patients who use it which turned into nothing but lies.
Holder and cronies make Rod Blagojevich look like an amateur. Few of the top criminals are even investigated much less go to jail. ‘Walking’ is what those do who are so entrenched in the corrupt system that they are above the law. The ‘gunwalking’ is minor compared to wall street and war crimes in terms of both lives and theft.
Another crime boss, Jon Corzine, also testified before Congress today on the MF Global ‘failure.’ Not being under indictment he didn’t exactly say he would never do it again but did blame it on his his predecessors’ bad financial decisions, said that he never intended to break rules requiring to safeguard client funds and that he doesn’t know what happened to an estimated $1.2 billion that went missing.
I think his testimony qualifies him to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve.
There’s one guy who will not say “I’ll never do it again.” That would be the Newt. He will do it again and again, especially when it comes to his subservience to Israel and Jewish money.
He’s working to free Jonathan Pollard, would relocate the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and promised to reappoint war whore John Bolton. Newt is falling all over himself to outdo Romney for more of the Jewish pot of gold.
As with so many who have sold out and are Israel firsters, Newt has his 9/11 connection.
From Michael Collins Piper:
Gingrich has an unusual connection to Larry Silverstein, a controversial figure whose name has been in the forefront of the circumstances surrounding the cover-up of 9-11.
While in Congress, Gingrich benefited from the lucrative Israeli-connected activities of his then-second wife, Marianne, who was on the payroll of the Israel Export Development Company (IEDCO), which promoted the importation into the United States of Israeli products—even as Gingrich was using his influence as a member of Congress to advance U.S.-Israeli trade.
The aforementioned IEDCO was an operation run by mob-connected Silverstein, the billionaire owner of the World Trade Center towers at the time of the 9-11 tragedy.
IEDCO’s Silverstein once even admitted to The Wall Street Journal that Gingrich was one of a number of members of Congress who was lobbied to support Silverstein’s company’s proposals—when his wife was on Silverstein’s payroll. more {Marianne Gingrich Denies Israel Job Is a “Political Payoff” 1995}
Please … someone reassure me that the primaries won’t be rigged to give Gingrich the nomination, that Corzine won’t walk free to steal again and that Holder and Obama and Congress will be held in check and not allowed to sabotage what’s left of this country.
I know, you can’t. The whole political system is a crime scene and for lack of a better answer … it’s our fault.
December 9, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Progressive Hypocrite |
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President Obama thinks he can win reelection by running the same hoax on his Democratic base as he did in 2008: flavoring his speeches with progressive sounding rhetoric while tightening the bankers’ grip on government and continuing his pursuit a “grand bargain” with the Republicans. In his speech on Tuesday in Kansas, Obama depicted himself as the reincarnation of President Teddy Roosevelt, known as a corporate “trust-buster” at the turn of the 20th century. But Obama is no trust-buster. He has never busted a corporate monopoly. His administration approved the merger of Comcast and NBC, consolidating even an bigger monopoly and giving the lie to his 2008 campaign promise to reinvigorate anti-trust enforcement.
The Obama m.o. is to talk a progressive game and then do just the opposite. He claims he found it “infuriating” to rescue the banks from collapse when he came to office. If that’s the case, then the best thing that could happen to Black people would be for Obama to get absolutely furious at us – and then the trillions would flow. When Obama supposedly got furious at the banks, he put the whole government and the Federal Reserve at their beck and call and funneled more than $16 trillion into their accounts. Apparently, it pays big time to get Barack Obama “infuriated.” If he gets mad enough at you, he’ll open up the windows at the Federal Reserve and hand out trillions of dollars in interest-free loans. Then, if you’re a bank that he’s really mad at, you can take the people’s money and buy U.S. Treasury bonds and get a healthy return on your cost-free investment.
In Kansas, Obama claimed that his so-called banking reform legislation will funnel money to “families who want to buy a home or send their kids to college.” We’ve seen no evidence of that happening. But Obama did make sure that his “reforms” did nothing to upset the Wall Street derivatives casino that is now notionally valued at at least $600 trillion – about the same as it was before the 2008 meltdown and bailout. $600 trillion is roughly ten times the value of all the yearly goods and services produced by every man woman and child in the world. It is a ticking time bomb that will inevitably bring down the real world economy if it is not defused. Apparently, that makes Obama absolutely paralyzed with rage.
Obama says the banks “should be remedying past mortgage abuses that led to the financial crisis, and working to keep responsible homeowners in their home.” It’s nice to hear what he thinks banks “should” be doing, but he didn’t use his presidential clout to compel them to do much of anything to change their ways, even when he could, back when Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress. And Obama’s own pitiful program to keep families in their homes was a colossal failure that helped only a fraction. Perhaps Obama is now infuriated with himself.
Throughout his Wizard of Oz Kansas speech, Obama attempted to put moral and philosophical distance between himself and the Republicans. But this is not 2008. Anyone with eyes and ears and a memory now knows that Obama is a true believer in the old time deficit cutting religion, a disciple of austerity, a man who wants nothing more than to join hands with the GOP to gut Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. Obama is a charlatan who cites the deeds of dead presidents but pursues policies that are directly the opposite. In other words, he is a very elaborate liar.
December 7, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular |
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RAMALLAH — The Palestinian human rights foundation (Monitor) on Tuesday called for prosecuting US president Barack Obama and Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu in an international court as war criminals.
“The American administration participates in Israel’s killing of Palestinians and the powers in control of the decision-making in the US including the Jewish lobby are working on hiding the truth and undermining justice principles at the pretext of fighting terrorism,” Monitor stated in a press release.
“They make justifications for the genocidal campaign launched openly and gradually against an entire people simply because they demand the right to freedom and the independence of their land from which they were forcibly uprooted,” Monitor added.
Monitor highlighted that the terrorizing Israeli brutality used against the Palestinian people represented in massacres, a genocidal war and a deadly blockade is supported by some western countries, especially Britain and the US.
The human rights group also called for referring Israel’s nuclear file to the UN security council.
“It is not right to let such a devastating weapon in the hands of a handful of terrorists,” it said.
December 7, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes |
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The Obama Regime Has No Constitutional Scruples
During an interview with the Russian news network RT on December 1, I said that the US Constitution had been shredded by the failure of the US Senate to protect American citizens from the detainee amendment sponsored by Republican John McCain and Democrat Carl Levin to the Defense Authorization Bill. The amendment permits indefinite detention of US citizens by the US military. I also gave my opinion that the fact that all but two Republican members of the Senate had voted to strip American citizens of their constitutional protections and of the protection of the Posse Comitatus Act indicated that the Republican Party had degenerated into a Gestapo Party.
These conclusions are self-evident, and I stand by them.
However, I jumped to conclusions when I implied that the Obama regime opposes military detention on constitutional grounds. Dahlia Lithwick reported in a Slate article that the entire Obama regime opposed the military detention provision in the McCain/Levin amendment. Lithwick wrote: “The secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence, the director of the FBI, the CIA director, and the head of the Justice Department’s national security division have all said that the indefinite detention provisions in the bill are a bad idea. And the White House continues to say that the president will veto the bill if the detainee provisions are not removed.”
I checked the URLs that Lithwick supplied. It is clear that the Obama regime objects to military detention. However, on further reflection I conclude that the Obama regime’s objection to military detention is not rooted in concern for the constitutional rights of American citizens. The regime objects to military detention because the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war. As Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin put it: Should somebody determined “to be a member of an enemy force who has come to this nation or is in this nation to attack us as a member of a foreign enemy, should that person be treated according to the laws of war? The answer is yes.”
Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights. These rights would interfere with the regime’s ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas. This is what the Obama regime means when it says that the requirement of military detention denies the regime “flexibility.”
The Bush/Obama regimes have evaded the Geneva Conventions by declaring that detainees are not POWs, but “enemy combatants,” “terrorists,” or some other designation that removes all accountability from the US government for their treatment.
By requiring military detention of the captured, Congress is undoing all the maneuvering that two regimes have accomplished in removing POW status from detainees.
A careful reading of the Obama regime’s objections to military detention supports this conclusion. The November 17 letter to the Senate from the Executive Office of the President says that the Obama regime does not want the authority it has under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Public Law 107-40, to be codified. Codification is risky, the regime says. “After a decade of settled jurisprudence on detention authority, Congress must be careful not to open a whole new series of legal questions that will distract from our efforts to protect the country.”
In other words, the regime is saying that under AUMF the executive branch has total discretion as to whom it detains and how it treats detainees. Moreover, as the executive branch has total discretion, no one can find out what the executive branch is doing, who detainees are, or what is being done to them. Codification brings accountability, and the executive branch does not want accountability.
Those who see hope in Obama’s threatened veto have jumped to conclusions if they think the veto is based on constitutional scruples.
~
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
December 5, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular |
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Conventional economic wisdom teaches that it is not in the interests of employers to drive wages down to desperation levels, since most consumers are wage earners and consumption demand generates from 66 to 72 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. Were employers to drive wages too low they would at the same destroy their customer base, which is good for neither capital nor labor. This line of reasoning assumes that capitalism is organized such that each nation’s labor market is both entirely domestic and the sole source of the demand for its economy’s output. But capitalism is a global system and its sovereign components are not closed economies. The typical large corporations’ labor pool and customer base are now globally dispersed. In fact, the last few decades have seen the creation, for the first time in history, of a global labor market.
The outsourcing of jobs has become common knowledge, and is perceived by most working people as a significant source of the nation’s unemployment woes. The loss of jobs to cheaper labor markets is nothing new; it has been building since the 1960s. In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of domestic output. In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent. This tendency has accelerated with the deregulation of cross-border capital flows. Since 2000 the United States has lost thousands of factories and a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs, representing a 32 percent decline. By the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing. The last time we saw those numbers was in 1941.
Widget production is not the only sector that has seen job outsourcing. We are perhaps most familiar with offshore phone centers, but all sorts of uptown jobs have also been shipped out. Highly trained engineers and draftsmen, architects, computer programmers and other kinds of high-tech workers are increasingly employed by US companies in China, Russia, India, and the Philippines.
In these neoliberal times we are no longer scandalized to learn that this pattern is heartily championed by none other than the chairman of president Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, Jeffrey Immelt, who happens to be CEO of General Electric. 2010 was a banner year for GE, when $9.1 billion of its total profits of $14.2 billion came from its overseas operations. Immelt pulls no punches in his indifference to US workers. At a December 6, 2002 investors meeting he enthused “When I am talking to GE managers, I talk China, China, China, China, China. You need to be there. You need to change the way people talk about it and how they get there. I am a nut on China. Outsourcing from China is going to grow to 5 billion. We are building a tech center in China. Every discussion today has to center on China. The cost basis is extremely attractive. You can take an 18 cubic foot refrigerator, make it in China, land it in the United States, and land it for less than we can make an 18 cubic foot refrigerator ourselves.”
This is the man Obama put in charge of a committee assembled to address the nation’s unemployment crisis. But don’t think that Immelt’s obsession with overseas economic activity is only about cheap labor and lower costs. He goes on: “Today we go to Brazil, we go to China, we go to India, because that’s where the customers are.” My goodness, this looks like the Leninist thing about the insufficiency of domestic markets to absorb the economy’s output. The US worker is not only becoming decreasingly important as an input to production, (s)he is no longer seen by big capital as the most promising customer, the most robust source of sales revenue.
On both the supply side and the demand side, the US worker/consumer is perceived as incrementally inessential. The former Labor Secretary under Clinton and current liberal blogger Robert Reich thinks that this strategy is irrational, even on capitalist terms: “Corporate profits are up right now largely because pay is down and companies aren’t hiring. But this is a losing game even for corporations over the long term. Without enough American consumers, their profitable days are numbered. After all, there’s a limit to how much profit they can get out of cutting American payrolls or even selling abroad. European consumers are in no mood to buy. And most Asian economies, including China, are slowing.” Reich doesn’t get it.
The reference to “European consumers” is beside the point; Immelt and company don’t have Europe in mind. Exports are indeed the name of the current game, but the consumers are thought by the elite to be found in the emerging markets. Obama has for years been chanting the “export more, consume less” mantra as the key to US economic revival. His bosses reason by process of elimination. They know that the economy’s total product is generated by four and only four kinds of spending: consumption demand, investment demand, government demand and export demand. Consumption is not promising as a spur to production and profits because most consumers are wage earners, and they are low-paid, have taken absolute reductions in pay, are heavily indebted and are un- or underemployed. Investment doesn’t cut it for two reasons: no employer invests when purchasing power is exceptionally low, and, more importantly and completely unacknowledged by commentators, the present depression is not caused by a scarcity of productive facilities or by outdated equipment. A well developed complement of productive facilities is fully in place and ready to go. There is no need for additional investment. As for government spending for productive purposes, this is ruled out by the neoliberal consensus. Obama has repeatedly stressed that recovery must be rooted in the fabled self-restorative workings of the private sector.
We are left with exports as the economic Open Sesame. Obama has laid out the game plan in some detail in a speech, on his National Export Initiative, to the annual conference of the Import-Export Bank (March 11, 2010): “The world’s fastest-growing markets are outside our borders. We need to compete for those customers because other nations are competing for them.”
The focus on exports is consistent with the current geopolitics of the elite, which is reliably registered in the business press, most notably in such key journals as Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times and The Economist. There is thought to be a global shift of manufacturing activity from “the West” to “the East,” as the economically mature US, Europe and Japan deindustrialize while the emerging markets, mainly in Asia, take up the global slack by developing their own industrial prowess. Reich’s observation that “most Asian economies, including China, are slowing” is correct but inconsequential. What matters, as Obama notes, is where the “world’s fastest-growing markets” are to be found. Asia’s current slowing growth is compatible with the rapid growth, within China and India for example, of a new middle class and a nouveau riche. These are viewed by Western elites as where the present and prospective action is.
A now notorious Citigroup report encapsulates this economic cosmology in its thesis that “the World is dividing into two blocs – the Plutonomy and the rest.” Mounting inequality has become planet-wide. In a globalized world, the story goes, national consumers -“the US consumer”, “the French consumer”, “the Japanese consumer”- are obsolete. There are only the rich and the rest. The former are proportionally small in number but growing rapidly as neoliberal policy transfers to them the resources of the rest. The latter are accordingly marginal to what matters to the owning class.
A US-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told a writer for The Atlantic that “the hollowing out of the American middle class didn’t really matter.” The CEO described the subject of an executive discussion earlier this year: “… if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade.” The Chief Financial Officer of a US internet company expresses the same sentiment: “We demand a higher paycheck than the rest of the world. So if you’re going to demand 10 times the paycheck, you need to deliver 10 times the value. It sounds harsh, but maybe people in the middle class need to decide to take a pay cut.” At the summer 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival, the CEO of the Silicon Valley firm Applied Materials claimed that were he starting from scratch, only 20 percent of his workforce would be domestic. “This year, almost 90 percent of our sales will be outside the US. The pull to be close to the customers -most of them in Asia- is enormous.” And Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, is unabashedly frank about the way in which globalization generates an opposition between working-class and business interests: “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business… American businesses will adapt.” (See Chrystia Freeland, “The Rise of the New Global Elite,” in The Atlantic, January/February 2011.)
What all this comes to is a political economy of redistribution. Slow global economic growth over the past 30 or 40 years, and with no end in sight, has been construed by the Left as an indication of spreading “crisis,” a failure of capitalism to live up. From the perspective of working people the characterization is on the mark, since capitalism’s legitimizing ideology assures us that all will prosper when capitalism is doing its job. But from the point of view of capitalists, whose objective is to accumulate wealth, slow growth is not necessarily a sign of crisis, since wealth can be accumulated by redistribution, by widening inequality, in the absence of robust growth rates. This is what is currently taking place intra- and internationally. The outsourcing of jobs and customers is part of that game. Profits are revenues minus costs. Revenue maximization is thought by elites to be sought offshore. Cost reduction is to be created everywhere.
We can call this the Third-Worldization of the Rest, or, if we focus on the wage-earners of the developed countries, the creeping obsolescence of the working class. Workers can of course never be rendered entirely obsolete. What is happening is that we are approaching that condition asymptotically. One might object that there are clear limits to how impoverished working people can be made – after all, workers have to be maintained as work-ready. Upward redistribution can only go so far. But ever-widening inequality is perceived by elites as feasible by virtue of the limitless possibilities of greater indebtedness. Workers can make ends meet by indefinitely mortgaging their future income.
It is not far-fetched to see a growing resemblance of US and poor-country workers. High-priced economic forecasters and consultants are known to refer to the US as “Europe’s Mexico.” In the near future, they predict, some US states, mostly in the South but also including California and the Rust Belt, will be not only the cheapest manufacturing locations in the developed world, but also competitive with India and China. Wages are rising in the production- and service-oriented poor countries and falling in the rich ones. And US workers tend to quiescence, while unrest is brewing in the periphery. Costs of production are gradually converging between China and the US: declining-wage US workers are more productive. Non-union workers contracted by Ford to do inspection and repairs at the Dearborn truck plant make $10 an hour without benefits, which is projected to be less than the Chinese average by 2015.
Companies like Ford, Caterpillar, Wham-O Inc. (Frisbees), Master Lock, Suarez Manufacturing and General Electric have recently relocated production from China and Mexico to Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, California and Michigan. This may or may not be a growing trend, but the mere fact of some US regions becoming newly competitive with Mexico and China bespeaks the declining fortunes of the US worker.
The New York Times’ favorite neoliberal wild man Thomas Friedman summarizes the immiseration project in his trademark manner: the task in our country is to “cut public sector pay, freeze benefits, slash jobs, abolish a range of welfare entitlements and take the ax to programs such as school building and road maintenance.” Friedman goes on to excoriate US and Western European workers for believing in the “tooth fairy” and expecting government services without paying for them. In America, Friedman says, the baby-boomers, who inherited the prosperity of the post-war years, had “eaten through all that abundance like hungry locusts… After 65 years in which politics in the West was, mostly, about giving things away to voters, it’s now going to be, mostly, about taking things away. Goodbye Tooth Fairy politics, hello Root Canal politics.” (May 9, 2010)
The oligarchy has laid out, in plain and simple terms, its game plan. What shall be our response?
~
Alan Nasser is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. This article is adapted from his book in progress, The “New Normal”: Chronic Austerity and the Decline of Democracy. He can be reached at nassera@evergreen.edu
December 2, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Progressive Hypocrite |
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President Obama has been doing his charming best to play off the huge dilemma that the success of the Occupy Wall Street movement represents for his brand of corporate Democratic politics. Obama, the phony populist who is actually far better suited to corporate boardrooms, tried to mollify demonstrators at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, this week. Obama told a high school crowd: “In the Occupy movement there is a profound sense of frustration. The American dream – seems like that’s slipping away.” But, such presidential vagaries do not begin to describe the major thrust of the Occupation movement, whose overwhelming focus is “to get money out of politics,” as progressive reporter Arun Gupta recently told Black Agenda Radio. If there is anything that unites the supposedly leaderless Occupation movement, says Gupta, it is “a message about extreme concentration of wealth and power, and that wealth is used to dominate the political system.”
The trick that President Obama must pull off this election year is to raise a cool one billion dollars, while pretending to run as a man of the people – of the 99 percent. That kind of money can only come from the same Wall Street mafias that bankrolled Obama from the very start of his 2008 race for the White House. By any objective standard, the First Black President is really Mr. Moneybags, a corporate politician who has repaid Wall Street’s investment in him with $16 trillion of the people’s money. And, there is no doubt, Wall Street wants him back for a second term. To paraphrase Othello, Obama has done the plutocrats some service, and they know it. That’s why he is far ahead in the electoral race that really counts in America, the quest for campaign contributions, having already raised $155 million for himself and the Democratic Party – far ahead of any combination of Republicans.
However, after two months of Occupy Wall Street fever, Obama’s intimate relationship with rich men’s wallets may prove prejudicial to his reelection prospects. How can Obama claim to be ready to stand up to the 1 percent, when he’s weighted down with a billion dollars of their money?
The very idea that taking bundles of Wall Street checks hand over fist could be a negative for an American presidential campaigner, is testimony to the strength of the movement that has emerged over the past several months. I remember well how, back in the 2004 campaign, ABC’s Ted Koppel decided it was his civic and journalistic duty to evict the three poorest candidates from the Democratic primary race. Al Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich and Carolyn Moseley Braun, said Koppel, should get out of the running, to give more breathing space to the richer candidates. Koppel spoke to the non-corporate candidates like raggedy ass interlopers at a rich man’s ball. “You don’t have any money, at least not much,” Congressman Kucinich, said Kopple. “Rev. Sharpton has almost none.” And Ambassador Moseley Braun, “You don’t have very much.” Then Koppel accused them of being “vanity candidates” who ought to drop out. Immediately afterwards, ABC News cut off coverage of their campaigns.
What a difference even a whiff of a social movement makes. Now, the corporate candidates will have to explain why they’ve got so much money, and what they promised to do to get it. Especially, the richest one of all, Barack Obama.
November 23, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular |
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What initially piqued my interest in this story was the report in Haaretz that former Mossad chief Rafi Eitan organised President Museveni’s recent visit to Israel, where the Ugandan dictator ended up staying in the same hotel as the Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Eitan claims to be interested in starting a ranching business in Uganda. According to a senior Ugandan government official, the president’s secret visit likely had something to with “security matters and buying arms.”
Researching the origins of President Obama’s recent deployment of approximately 100 combat-equipped U.S. forces to help regional forces “remove from the battlefield” Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and senior leaders of the LRA, I learned that Sen. Russ Feingold was the author of the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act in 2009. Under the guise of campaign finance reform, McCain-Feingold legislation doubled the financial resources that the Israel lobby can deploy to elect and retain its supporters. What are the odds that AIPAC crafted both pieces of legislation?
In a 2010 report, the International Crisis Group recommended that the U.S. government should:
Deploy a team to the theatre of operations to run an intelligence platform that centralises all operational information from the Ugandan and other armies, as well as the UN and civilian networks, and provides analysis to the Ugandans to better target military operations.
George Soros, one of the ICG’s main donors, is also a major (and for a long time secret) donor to J Street — or “AIPAC Lite” as Philip Giraldi so aptly described the supposedly “alternative” pro-Israel lobby group. His Open Society Foundation is actively promoting “open society ideals” in Uganda. Significantly, ICG appears to be the source of the supposedly “humanitarian” R2P doctrine:
In its efforts to help prevent conflict worldwide, the International Crisis Group has consistently drawn upon the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the principle that sovereign states, and the international community as a whole, have a responsibility to protect civilians from mass atrocity crimes. Crisis Group President Gareth Evans served as co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty that first developed the R2P concept in 2001.
In an ABC report on Obama’s decision to protect “the people of central Africa,” Jake Tapper notes that Human Rights Watch “has a great deal of information about the infamous LRA.” In 2010, Soros gave $100 million to the American organisation enabling it to “increase its advocacy in key emerging regions in the developing world.”
Considering Soros’s reputation as a “non-Zionist,” it’s remarkable how often his interests appear to converge with those of the Jewish state’s intelligence services.
November 22, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
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Biofuel Death Squads
Imagine that an opposition organizer were murdered in broad daylight in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador or Venezuela by masked gunmen, or kidnapped and murdered by armed guards of a well-known supporter of the government. It would be front page news in the New York Times, and all over the TV news. The U.S. State Department would issue a strong statement of concern over grave human rights abuses. If this were ever to happen.
Now imagine that 59 of these kinds of political killings had taken place so far this year, and 61 the previous year. Long before the number of victims reached this level, this would become a major foreign policy issue for the United States, and Washington would be calling for international sanctions.
But we are talking about Honduras, not Bolivia or Venezuela. So when President Porfirio Lobo of Honduras came to Washington last month, President Obama greeted him warmly and said:
“Two years ago, we saw a coup in Honduras that threatened to move the country away from democracy, and in part because of pressure from the international community, but also because of the strong commitment to democracy and leadership by President Lobo, what we’ve been seeing is a restoration of democratic practices and a commitment to reconciliation that gives us great hope.”
Of course, President Obama refused to even meet with the democratically elected president that was overthrown in the coup that he mentioned, even though that president came to Washington three times seeking help after the coup. That was Mel Zelaya, a left-of-center president who was overthrown by the military and conservative sectors in Honduras after instituting a number of reforms that people had voted for, like raising the minimum wage and laws promoting land reform.
But what angered Washington most was that Zelaya was close to the left governments of South America, including Venezuela. He wasn’t any closer to Venezuela than Brazil or Argentina was, but this was a crime of opportunity. So when the Honduran military overthrew Zelaya in June of 2009, the Obama Administration did everything it could for the next six months to make sure that the coup succeeded. The “pressure from the international community” that Obama referred to in the above statement came from other countries, mainly the left-of-center governments in South America. The United States was on the other side, fighting — ultimately successfully — to legitimize the coup government through an “election” that the rest of the hemisphere refused to recognize.
In May of this year, Zelaya stated publicly what most of us who followed the events closely already guessed was true: that Washington was behind the coup and helped bring it about. While no one will likely bother to investigate the U.S. role in the coup, this is quite plausible given the overwhelming circumstantial evidence.
Porifiro Lobo took office in January 2010, but most of the hemisphere refused to recognize the government because his election took place under conditions of serious human rights violations. In May 2011 an agreement was finally brokered in Cartegena, Colombia, that allowed Honduras back into the Organization of American States. But the Lobo government has not complied with its part of the Cartegena accords, which included human rights guarantees for the political opposition.
Here are two of the dozens of political killings that have occurred during Lobo’s presidency, as compiled by the Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America (CRLN):
“Pedro Salgado, vice-president of the Unified Campesino Movement of Aguán (MUCA), was shot then beheaded at about 8:00 p.m. at his home in the La Concepción empresa cooperative. His spouse, Reina Irene Mejía, was also shot to death at the same time. Pedro suffered a murder attempt in December 2010. … Salgado, like the presidents of all the cooperatives claiming rights to land used by African palm oil businessmen in the Aguán, had been subject to constant death threats since the beginning of 2011.”
The courage of these activists and organizers in the face of such horrific violence and repression is amazing. Many of the killings over the past year have been in the Aguán Valley in the Northeast, where small farmers are struggling for land rights against one of Honduras’ richest landowners, Miguel Facussé. He is producing biofuels in this region on disputed land. He is close to the United States and was an important backer of the 2009 coup against Zelaya. His private security forces, together with U.S.-backed military and police, are responsible for the political violence in the region. U.S. aid to the Honduran military has increased since the coup. … Full article
November 21, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Environmentalism, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular |
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There’s one guy who will not say “I’ll never do it again.” That would be the Newt. He will do it again and again, especially when it comes to his subservience to Israel and Jewish money.
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