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Obama — still a slave of the Israel lobby

By Paul Woodward on May 20, 2010

Will sanctions against Iran work?

There seems to be a near-universal consensus that sanctions won’t persuade Iran’s leaders to abandon the Islamic republic’s uranium enrichment program — but maybe that’s besides the point. Maybe by now what would be the most cynical interpretation of the Obama administration’s objectives can also be treated as the most credible view.

In this instance, what does that mean? It means that the drive to impose sanctions on Iran has less to do with Iran than it has to do with calming the fears of the Democratic Party’s wealthiest Zionist donors ahead of this fall’s midterm elections.

Unnerved by the repeated warnings that Israel faces an existential threat, these donors won’t sign their checks until they’ve heard a sufficiently soothing answer to the question: “What are you doing about Iran?”

“We’ll do whatever it takes.” “We’re pushing for tougher sanctions than the Bush administration did.” “We’re absolutely dedicated to preventing Iran acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.”

May 21, 2010 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

The Tory/Lib-Dem Government endorses actual change

By Glenn Greenwald| May 21, 2010

Over the past couple years, I’ve written numerous times about the serious left-right coalition that had emerged in Britain — between the Tories and Liberal Democrats — in opposition to the Labour Government’s civil liberties abuses, many (thought not all) of which were justified by Terrorism.  In June of 2008, David Davis, a leading Tory MP, resigned from Parliament in protest of the Government’s efforts to expand its power of preventive detention to 42 days (and was then overwhelmingly re-elected on a general platform of opposing growing surveillance and detention authorities).  Numerous leading figures from both the Right and Left defied their party’s establishment to speak out in support of Davis and against the Government’s growing powers.  Back then, the Liberal Democrats’ Leader, Nick Clegg, notably praised the right-wing Davis’ resignation, and to show his support for Davis’ positions, Clegg even refused to run a Lib Dem candidate for that seat because, as he put it, “some issues ‘go beyond party politics’.”

Now that this left-right, Tory/Lib-Dem alliance has removed the Labour Party from power and is governing Britain, these commitments to restoring core liberties — Actual Change — show no sign of retreating.  Rather than cynically tossing these promises of restrained government power onto the trash pile of insincere campaign rhetoric, they are implementing them into actual policy.  Clegg, now the Deputy Prime Minister, gave an extraordinary speech last week in which he vowed “the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832.”  He railed against a litany of government policies and proposals that form the backbone of Britain’s Surveillance State, from ID Card schemes, national identity registers, biometric passports, the storing of Internet and email records, to DNA databases, proliferating security cameras, and repressive restrictions on free speech and assembly rights.  But more striking than these specific positions were the general, anti-authoritarian principles he espoused — ones that sound increasingly foreign to most Americans.  Clegg said:

It is outrageous that decent, law-abiding people are regularly treated as if they have something to hide.  It has to stop. . . . And we will end practices that risk making Britain a place where our children grow up so used to their liberty being infringed that they accept it without question. . . . This will be a government that is proud when British citizens stand up against illegitimate advances of the state. . . .

And we will, of course, introduce safeguards to prevent the misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.  There have been too many cases of individuals being denied their rights . . . And whole communities being placed under suspicion. . . . This government will do better by British justice.  Respecting great, British freedoms . . . Which is why we’ll also defend trial by jury.

Clegg also inveighed against the oppressive criminal justice system that imprisons far too many citizens and criminalizes far too many acts with no improvement in safety, and also pledged radical reform to the political system in order to empower citizens over wealthy interests.  To underscore that this was not mere rhetoric, the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition published their official platform containing all of these proposals, and the Civil Liberties section begins with language inconceivable for mainstream American discourse:  “The Government believes the British state has become too authoritarian, and that over the past decade it has abused fundamental human rights and historic civil liberties.”

Most striking of all, the new Government (specifically William Hague, its conservative Foreign Secretary) just announced that “a judge will investigate claims that British intelligence agencies were complicit in the torture of terror suspects.”  More amazing still:

The judicial inquiry announced by the foreign secretary into Britain’s role in torture and rendition since September 2001 is poised to shed extraordinary light on one of the darkest episodes in the country’s recent history.

It is expected to expose not only details of the activities of the security and intelligence officials alleged to have colluded in torture since 9/11, but also the identities of the senior figures in government who authorised those activities. . . . Those who have been most bitterly resisting an inquiry — including a number of senior figures in the last government — may have been dismayed to see the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition formed, as this maximised the chances of a judicial inquiry being established.

What an astounding feat of human innovation:  they are apparently able to Look Backward and Forward at the same time!  And this concept that an actual court will review allegations of grave Government crimes rather than ignoring them in the name of Political Harmony:  my, the British, even after all these centuries, do continue to invent all sorts of brand new and exotic precepts of modern liberty.

Most readers have likely been doing so already when reading these prior paragraphs, but just contrast all of this to what is taking place in the United States under Democratic Party rule.  We get — from the current Government — presidential assassination programs, detention with no charges, senseless demands for further reductions of core rights when arrested, ongoing secret prisons filled with abuse, military commissions, warrantless surveillance of emails, and presidential secrecy claims to block courts from reviewing claims of government crimes.  The Democratic-led Congress takes still new steps to block the closing of Guantanamo.  Democratic leaders push for biometric, national ID cards.  The most minimal surveillance safeguards are ignored.  Even the miniscule limits on eavesdropping powers are transgressed.  And from just this week:  “Millions of Americans arrested for but not convicted of crimes will likely have their DNA forcibly extracted and added to a national database, according to a bill approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday”.

Can anyone even imagine for one second Barack Obama standing up and saying:  “My administration believes that the American state has become too authoritarian”?  Even if he were willing to utter those words — and he wouldn’t be — his doing so would trigger a massive laughing fit in light of his actions.  While Nick Clegg says this week that his civil liberties commitments are “so important that he was taking personal responsibility for implementing them, and promised that the new government would not be ‘insecure about relinquishing control’,” our Government moves inexorably in the other direction.

I don’t want to idealize what’s taking place in Britain:  it still remains to be seen how serious these commitments are and how genuine of an investigation into the torture regime will be conducted.  But clearly, what was once a fringe position there has now become the mainstream platform of their new Government:  that it’s imperative to ensure that their country is not “a place where our children grow up so used to their liberty being infringed that they accept it without question.”

That’s exactly what the U.S. has become, as each new Terrorist attack (or even failed attack) prompts one question and one question only, no matter which party is in power:  “which rights do we give up now”?  And  each serious government crime engenders new excuses for vesting political leaders with immunity.  And no new government power of detention, surveillance, or privacy-invasion is too extreme or unwarranted.  Unlike in Britain, the term “civil liberties” or the phrase “the state has become too authoritarian” is, in the U.S., one which only Fringe Purist Absolutists utter.  Unlike in Britain, efforts to impose serious constraints on unchecked government power are, in the U.S., the exclusive and lonely province of The Unserious Losers among us.  And unlike in Britain, the notion that political leaders should actually do what they vowed during the campaign they would do is, in the U.S., a belief held only by terribly un-Pragmatic purist ideologues.  Whatever else is true, it is encouraging that a major Western country — one that has been the victim of a horrific terrorist attack and that has a substantial Muslim population — has a government that is explicitly advocating (and, at least to some extent, implementing) these ideals.

May 21, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

“What kind of democracy is America, where people do not ask these questions?”

By Kathy Kelly and Josh Brollier | Pulse Media | May 18, 2010

Islamabad–On May 12th, the day after a U.S. drone strike killed 24 people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, two men from the area agreed to tell us their perspective as eyewitnesses of previous drone strikes.

One is a journalist, Safdar Dawar, General Secretary of the Tribal Union of Journalists. Journalists are operating under very difficult circumstances in the area, pressured by both militant groups and the Pakistani government.  Six of his colleagues have been killed while reporting in North and South Waziristan. The other man, who asked us not to disclose his name, is from Miranshah city, the epicenter of North Waziristan.  He works with the locally based Waziristan Relief Agency, a group of people committed to helping the victims of drone attacks and military actions.  “If people need blood or medicine or have to go to Peshawar or some other hospital,” said the social worker, “I’m known for helping them. I also try to arrange funds and contributions.”

Both men emphasized that Pakistan’s government has only a trivial presence in the area. Survivors of drone attacks receive no compensation, and neither the military nor the government investigate consequences of the drone attacks.

Mr. Dawar, the journalist, added that when he phoned the local political representative regarding the May 12th drone attack, the man couldn’t tell him anything.  “If you get any new information,” said the political representative, “please let me know.”

In U.S. newspapers, reports on drone attacks often amount to about a dozen words, naming the place and an estimated number of militants killed.  The journalist and social worker from North Waziristan asked us why people in the U.S. don’t ask to know more.

It’s hard to slow down and look at horrifying realities.  Jane Mayer, writing for The New Yorker, (“The Predator War,” October 26, 2009), quoted a former C.I.A. official’s description of a drone attack:

People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying. ‘You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,’ a former C.I.A. officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack.

“Human beings running for cover are such a common sight,” Jane Mayer continues, “that they have inspired a slang term: ‘squirters.’”

Just rubble and charred stuff…

The social worker recalled arriving at a home that was hit, in Miranshah, at about 9:00 p.m., close to one year ago.  The house was beside a matchbox factory, near the degree college.  The drone strike had killed three people.  Their bodies, carbonized, were fully burned. They could only be identified by their legs and hands.  One body was still on fire when he reached there.  Then he learned that the charred and mutilated corpses were relatives of his who lived in his village, two men and a boy aged seven or eight.  They couldn’t pick up the charred parts in one piece.  Finding scraps of plastic they transported the body parts away from the site.  Three to four others joined in to help cover the bodies in plastic and carry them to the morgue.

But these volunteers and nearby onlookers were attacked by another drone strike, 15 minutes after the initial one. 6 more people died. One of them was the brother of the man killed in the initial strike.

The social worker says that people are now afraid to help when a drone strike occurs because they fear a similar fate from a second attack. People will wait several hours after an attack just to be sure.  Meanwhile, some lives will be lost that possibly could have been saved.

The social worker also told us that pressure from the explosion, when a drone-fired missile or bomb hits, can send bystanders flying through the air.  Some are injured when their bodies hit walls or stone, causing fractures and brain injuries.

The social worker described four more cases in which he had been involved with immediate relief work, following a drone attack.  He didn’t supply us with exact dates, and we weren’t able to find news articles on the internet which exactly matched his accounts.  Riaz Khan, an AP reporter covering a drone strike on May 15th, noted differences in details reported by witnesses and official sources.  “Such discrepancies are common and are rarely reconciled,” according to Khan (May 15th , Officials: US missiles kill 5 in NW Pakistan‘).

Exasperated by the neglect and indifference people in Waziristan face, especially those who say they have nowhere to hide, the journalist and social worker began firing questions at us.

“If the US had good intelligence and they hit their targets with the first strike,” Safdar asks, “why would the second one be necessary? If you already hit the supposed militant target, then why fire again?”

“Who has given the license to kill and in what court?  Who has declared that they can hit anyone they like?”

“How many ‘high level targets’ could there possibly be?”

“What kind of democracy is America,” Safdar asks, “where people do not ask these questions?”

Reliance on robotic warfare has escalated, from the Bush to the Obama administrations, with very little significant public debate. More than ever before, it is true that the U.S. doesn’t want our bodies to be part of warfare; there’s also not much interest in our consent.  All that is required is our money.

But, you get what you pay for in the U.S.A.  The social worker and the journalist assured us that all of the survivors feel hatred toward the United States.  “It is a real problem,” said Safdar, “this rising hatred.”

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) and Josh Brollier (Joshua@vcnv.org) are co-coordinators of Voices for Creative Nonviolence  www.vcnv.org



May 18, 2010 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Obama’s Stupid Earth Day Celebration

Killing people with a biofuels jet fighter will be considered a “clean kill” by Obama. In his book, that makes it o.k.

By Jacob Freeze | May 17, 2010

obama-jet

“Well, if there’s any doubt about the leadership that our military is showing, you just need to look at this F-18 fighter and the light-armored vehicle behind me. The Army and Marine Corps have been testing this vehicle on a mixture of biofuels. And this Navy fighter jet — appropriately called the Green Hornet — will be flown for the first time in just a few days, on Earth Day.”

Can anyone imagine a stupider way to celebrate Earth Day than rolling out yet another version of one of the most lethal fighter-bombers ever invented?

F-18


May 18, 2010 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Obama and the myth of the public opinion excuse

By Glenn Greenwald | May 18, 2010

Writing about my post from last week on the diversion of civil liberties erosions from non-citizens to citizens, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst’s Charli Carpenter asks what (if anything) can be done to combat this trend:

[I]s it too late for dissent to make a difference? I welcome readers’ ideas. I think many voters thought they’d already taken the appropriate step by electing a progressive, pro-civil liberties leader. With the writing on the wall, what now?

In replying to her question, Matt Yglesias attempts to re-direct blame away from Obama by invoking the Public Opinion Excuse:

I don’t think the answer to her question is particularly difficult — people who want to halt the erosion of civil liberties need to do a better job of persuading people that the erosion of civil liberties would be a bad thing. If you have an incumbent administration being urged by the opposition to seize more power, and the public wants the administration to seize more power, then you get what we have today. People on the good team are sometimes in denial about opinion on this subject, but read the numbers — the public wants Guantanamo Bay open, wants suspects tried in military courts, and thinks we should give up more civil liberties in order to enhance security.

Public opinion on these issues is much more mixed than Matt suggests (the very first poll cited in his link shows the public almost evenly divided — 45-47% — on whether the alleged Times Square bomber should be tried in a civilian court or a military commission).  And if public opinion were really as clear and decisive in favor of those policies, it’s hard to explain how Barack Obama — who ran on a platform of reversing them, not as a side issue but as a central plank in his campaign — could have possibly won the election.  But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Matt’s right about the state of public opinion.  His claim — that Presidents in general merely follow what public opinion dictates, and Obama is continuing the erosion of civil liberties because public opinion desires that — is as common as it is mythical, for multiple reasons.

First, Presidents often insist on polices which public opinion rejects.  Bush continued and even escalated in Iraq when large majorities opposed the war, and Obama has done the same in Afghanistan (with less pervasive though, at least at times, substantial majoritarian opposition).  Obama fought for passage of a health care reform bill in the face of overwhelming public sentiment against it, and he favored the Wall Street bailout under the same circumstances.  Obama has strongly condemned, and threatened to take action against, the Arizona immigration law despite widespread public support for it.  Clearly, when a President believes a policy is sufficiently important, he’ll insist on it (often successfully) despite public opposition; conversely, when he genuinely opposes a policy, he’ll reject it despite public sentiment in favor.  That, I believe, is called leadership.

Second, if Presidents do nothing more than slavishly follow public opinion, then what difference do elections make?  If majority sentiment dictates policy outcomes, then who cares who does the implementing?

Third, if Matt is right — that the public favors civil liberties erosions and therefore Obama is eroding civil liberties — doesn’t that absolve Bush and Cheney of blame for what they did?  After all, majorities favored the invasion of Iraq, torture, Guantanamo and related policies; isn’t it fair to say that Bush officials were merely following public sentiment?

Fourth, Matt’s argument assumes that Obama really wishes he could restore civil liberties but is simply constrained by public opinion, a proposition for which there is no evidence (and there’s evidence to the contrary, beginning with Obama’s refusal to reverse Bush/Cheney policies regardless of public opinion, contrasted with his pursuit of other unpopular policies, as well as his early opposition to investigations of Bush crimes even in the face of public support for such investigations).  There are a litany of factors unrelated to public opinion that could easily be driving Obama to do what he is doing, including a fear of alienating the military and intelligence communities and/or a genuine desire for the powers he has preserved and is enhancing.  If that’s true, as it appears to be, then favorable changes in public opinion would have little effect on Obama’s conduct.

Fifth, Obama’s anti-civil-liberties record has extended far beyond what public opinion has called for.  I don’t recall any public outcry for a program to assassinate American citizens without due process, or the invocation of new secrecy and immunity claims to protect Bush crimes from judicial review, or the maintenace of secret prisons in Afghanistan.  One would be hard-pressed to claim that the public even knows about, let alone is agitating for, such extremist policies, yet Obama vigorously embraces them.  He must be doing so for reasons other than public opinion.

Finally, and most important:  this Public Opinion Excuse ignores the substantial agency which Obama possesses in shaping our political debates.  Presidents have numerous tools for influencing public opinion, and Obama has used none for the purpose of fortifying support for the new Terrorism policies he vowed during the campaign to pursue.  He’s actually done the opposite:  by advocating for the continuation of so many Bush/Cheney policies, he’s weakened opposition to that approach.  In that regard, Matt has it backward:  Obama isn’t following public opinion on these questions; public opinion is following Obama.

Our mainstream political debates are invariably framed as Republican v. Democrat.  If neither of the two parties’ leadership advocates a particular view, that view will barely be heard (as we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War).  When a party occupies the Oval Office, its position is determined almost exclusively by the President and his administration.  Here, Republicans have been vehement in their demand for the continuation of Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies.  Because the Obama White House has largely been unwilling to engage that debate, and has often affirmatively endorsed the Republicans’ central claims, there has been no real “debate” on these issues.  If both political parties are seen as endorsing a particular view (or, at best, if one party is seen as vehemently supporting it and the other party is seen as indifferent or afraid to engage), is it really surprising that public opinion will support the view that is most aggressively and clearly defended?

Even if one assumes that Obama secretly wishes he could do more on the civil liberties front, the problem is of his own making.  How can an administration that endorses and maintains military commissions possibly make a stirring case in favor of civilian courts?  How can a President who repeatedly invokes secrecy to shield Terrorism policies from judicial review possibly convince the public of the need for transparency?  Or how could he possibly persuade Americans of the grave evils of Guantanamo when he himself proposes a system of indefinite detention and merely wants to relocate its defining attributes to a new locale?  Or how could he convincingly justify the need for oversight when he supports oversight-free eavesdropping, detentions and even assassinations?  As is true for any debate, where one side is firm and emphatic in its view, and the other side is, at best, muddled, fearful and largely acquiescent in response, the side that appears to believe in its views and is willing to defend them will easily triumph.

Then there is the even more significant fact that what were once viewed as controversial right-wing, Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies have been transformed, under Obama, into bipartisan consensus.  Whereas the vast majority of Democrats spent the last eight years claiming to vehemently oppose policies such as indefinite detention, military commissions, and secrecy claims, they now actively defend them or (at best) remain meekly silent because it’s now their political party, rather than the GOP, that is responsible for them.  By embracing as his own many of the very policies he vowed to uproot, Obama has gutted the core of public opposition to those policies. Is it really a surprise, then, that public opinion on these questions has worsened under Obama [as but one example, compare the CNN poll on whether Guantanamo should be closed:  before Obama’s inauguration, a majority wanted the camp to be closed (51-47%); now, a year into Obama’s presidency and yet another year removed from the 9/11 attacks, a large majority (60-39%) wants it to remain open]?

Of course it would be desirable if public opinion more strongly supported pro-civil-liberties policies.  But the reality is that the two political parties have a virtual monopoly on how political debates are conducted, and with few exceptions (such as the Wall Street bailout), if both parties generally support a particular view, then the public will, too, because they will hear so little challenge and opposition to it.  Democrats haven’t abandoned civil liberties because the public has; the public (which was clearly prepared to reject the Bush/Cheney approach) has abandoned civil liberties because the Democrats, now that they’re in power, have joined the GOP in doing so.

That’s why I believe that the most promising course of action is to do everything possible to force a change in position by the Democratic Party (through primary challenges, intra-party disputes, and vocal criticisms of the President), as well as by making common cause on an issue-by-issue basis with non-Democrats (as Al Gore did in 2006 with his partnership with Bob Barr) when the opportunity presents itself (witness the newfound and extremely hypocritical though potentially useful GOP concern for civil liberties now that they’re out of power, a trend that could accelerate with a victory today by the war-questioning Rand Paul in Kentucky over his GOP establishment opponent).  It shouldn’t be the case, but the two political parties possess a virtual monopoly on the views that are aired in mainstream public debates.

To pretend that Barack Obama is a helpless captive of public opinion rather than one of the principal forces which shape it is the opposite of reality.  It would be good if public opinion more strongly supported civil liberties, but as long as Obama joins the GOP in opposing them, hordes of Democrats who once supported such liberties will reflexively follow Obama, making that improvement extremely difficult to achieve.

May 18, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Obama wants US taxpayers to pay for an Israeli ‘defense’ scam

By Paul Woodward on May 14, 2010

Israel’s newly developed “Iron Dome” missile defense shield will supposedly provide vital protection from rocket attacks from Gaza or Lebanon.

The system’s manufacturer, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, says:

The Iron dome is a cost effective system that can handle multiple threats simultaneously and efficiently [and] has been selected by the Israeli Defense Ministry as the best system offering the most comprehensive defense solution against a wide range of threats in a relatively short development cycle and at low cost.

Israel receives $3 billion annually in military aid from US taxpayers, so you’d imagine that the Israeli government would allocate some of that generous aid to pay for Iron Dome. No, instead President Obama just agreed that we should chip in an extra $205 million because Iron Dome “addresses an immediately existing threat to each Israeli citizen,” a senior administration official said.

But while Israel isn’t willing to cover the cost of deploying this system, it is already looking at opportunities to sell it to NATO.

As for the “low cost” the manufacturers tout, perhaps what they mean is that it will be a low cost for Israelis so long as its paid for by Americans. Whether the system would have any real value — that’s a completely different question.

Some of the harshest criticism of the system comes from inside Israel where Tel Aviv University professor and noted military analyst Reuven Pedatzur charged that despite the well-known ineffectiveness of Iron Dome and other missile defense systems, “for the aeronautics and defense industries, it’s a matter of money; and for politicians, supporting such projects allows them to tell the public that they’re doing something, they’re trying to find answers to the threats we face.”

“The Iron Dome is all a scam,” he said. “The flight-time of a Kassam rocket to Sderot is 14 seconds, while the time the Iron Dome needs to identify a target and fire is something like 15 seconds. This means it can’t defend against anything fired from fewer than five kilometers; but it probably couldn’t defend against anything fired from 15 km., either.”

Added Pedatzur: “Considering the fact that each Iron Dome missile costs about $100,000 and each Kassam $5, all the Palestinians would need to do is build and launch a ton of rockets and hit our pocketbook.

The  David’s Sling is even worse, he said. “Each one of its missiles costs $1 million, and Hizbullah has well over 40,000 rockets. This issue has no logic to it whatsoever.”

May 14, 2010 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Nuclear leak threatens NJ drinking water. But there’s more…

Bluelyon | May 9, 2010

Interesting.

Tainted nuke plant water reaches major NJ aquifer

Radioactive water that leaked from the nation’s oldest nuclear power plant has now reached a major underground aquifer that supplies drinking water to much of southern New Jersey, the state’s environmental chief said Friday.

The state Department of Environmental Protection has ordered the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station to halt the spread of contaminated water underground, even as it said there was no imminent threat to drinking water supplies.

The department launched a new investigation Friday into the April 2009 spill and said the actions of plant owner Exelon Corp. have not been sufficient to contain water contaminated with tritium.

[…]

He ordered the Chicago-based company to install new monitoring wells to better measure the extent of the contamination, and to come up with a plan to keep it from ever reaching a well.

[…]

The radioactive water leaks were found just days after the plant got a new 20-year license in 2009 that environmentalists had bitterly fought for four years. Those problems followed corrosion that left the reactor’s crucial safety liner rusted and thinned.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Exelon insist Oyster Creek can operate safely until it is 60 years old. But environmental groups disagree.

“The bad news is Exelon’s Oyster Creek plant … has now become a major threat to South Jersey’s drinking water,” said David Pringle of the New Jersey Environmental Federation. “The good news is NJDEP Commissioner Martin is taking aggressive action to safeguard our water and hold Exelon accountable for this leaky 40 year old plant.”

Exelon . . . Exelon . . . where have I heard that name before? Oh. Yeah. New York Times, February 3, 2008

Mr. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in December that it was “the only nuclear legislation that I’ve passed.”

“I just did that last year,” he said, to murmurs of approval.

A close look at the path his legislation took tells a very different story. While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks.

Those revisions propelled the bill through a crucial committee. But, contrary to Mr. Obama’s comments in Iowa, it ultimately died amid parliamentary wrangling in the full Senate.

“Senator Obama’s staff was sending us copies of the bill to review, and we could see it weakening with each successive draft,” said Joe Cosgrove, a park district director in Will County, Ill., where low-level radioactive runoff had turned up in groundwater. “The teeth were just taken out of it.”

The history of the bill shows Mr. Obama navigating a home-state controversy that pitted two important constituencies against each other and tested his skills as a legislative infighter. On one side were neighbors of several nuclear plants upset that low-level radioactive leaks had gone unreported for years; on the other was Exelon, the country’s largest nuclear plant operator and one of Mr. Obama’s largest sources of campaign money.

Since 2003, executives and employees of Exelon, which is based in Illinois, have contributed at least $227,000 to Mr. Obama’s campaigns for the United States Senate and for president. Two top Exelon officials, Frank M. Clark, executive vice president, and John W. Rogers Jr., a director, are among his largest fund-raisers.

Another Obama donor, John W. Rowe, chairman of Exelon, is also chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry’s lobbying group, based in Washington. Exelon’s support for Mr. Obama far exceeds its support for any other presidential candidate.

Typical Obama modus operandi was evident long, long ago, if anyone was paying attention: Say one thing to his “progressive base,”  lie with a straight face about his legislation (you can keep your insurance!), all the while working deals in the back room with his industry donors.

May 10, 2010 Posted by | Nuclear Power, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Obama Renews Sanctions on Syria for a Year

Al-Manar TV – 04/05/2010

President Barack Obama Monday renewed US sanctions on Syria for a year, accusing Damascus of supporting what he called “terrorist” groups and pursuing missile programs and weapons of mass destruction.

There had been no expectation that Obama would lift the measures, but the renewal came at an especially sensitive time in often tense US-Syria relations, despite efforts by the administration to return an ambassador to Damascus.

The United States has also recently accused Syria and Iran of arming Hezbollah with increasingly sophisticated rockets and missiles, which it says are undermining stability in the region.

Obama said in a message to Congress renewing the sanctions imposed by former US president George W. Bush in 2004, that the Syrian government had made “some progress” in suppressing the infiltration of foreign fighters bound for Iraq. But he added that its “continuing support for terrorist organizations and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and missile programs, continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

Obama also called on Syria to demonstrate “progress” in the areas that Washington says justify sanctions, to allow them to be lifted in future.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against the risk of sparking a regional war if he supplies long-range Scud missiles to Hezbollah. “President Assad is making decisions that could mean war or peace for the region,” she told a pro-Israel group. Her remarks followed claims by Israeli President Shimon Peres in April that Syria was supplying Hezbollah with Scud missiles. But Syria has dismissed the accusations and warned Washington against taking Israel’s claims seriously.

Some US lawmakers have seized upon the accusations to argue against any rapprochement between Washington and Damascus.

In February, Obama nominated career diplomat Robert Ford as the country’s first ambassador to Syria in five years, but his appointment has yet to be confirmed by the Senate.

Bush declared a national emergency regarding Syria on May 11, 2004, and imposed economic sanctions over charges it was a state sponsor of terrorism. They were extended in 2006, tightened in 2007 and renewed the following year.

Monday’s action marked the second renewal of the sanctions regime by Obama.

May 4, 2010 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Will Obama adopt a dangerously simplistic peace plan?

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 3 May 2010
A peace plan brought to the Obama regime is hardly a “bold gesture.” Pete Souza/White House

A new conventional wisdom is rapidly taking shape that the United States can resolve the 130-year-old conflict in Palestine by advancing its own peace plan. Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former US Congressman Stephen Solarz outlined such a plan in The Washington Post recently, and argued that President Obama could boost its prospects with a “bold gesture” — a trip, to Jerusalem and Ramallah in the company of Arab and other leaders to unveil it (“To achieve Mideast peace, Obama must make a bold Mideast trip,” 11 April 2010).

Strong supporters of Israel have pushed back that “imposing peace” would not work, but few Palestinian voices have been heard. Indeed, from a Palestinian perspective, this idea is dangerously simplistic, and more likely to deepen festering injustices and fuel, rather than resolve conflict.

The “comprehensive solution” Brzezinski and Solarz propose is nothing of the kind because the conflict cannot be reduced to a mere border dispute between Israel and a putative Palestinian state. They propose for example “a territorial settlement based on the 1967 borders, with mutual and equal adjustments to allow the incorporation of the largest West Bank settlements into Israel.”

This is deceptive; the West Bank and Gaza Strip constitute just 22 percent of historic Palestine between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, in which Palestinians formed the overwhelming majority prior to their expulsion and flight as Israel was created in 1948. Official Palestinian acceptance of the two-state solution was a concession unprecedented in the history of any nation because it involved surrendering the 78 percent of the country on which Israel was established. To demand that Palestinians further divide the remainder represents no compromise by Israel. It merely ratifies Israel’s systematic colonization of West Bank land since 1967 in flagrant defiance of international law.

The proposed “land swap” to compensate Palestinians for annexed Israeli settlements is illusory. The majority of the half million Israeli settlers are concentrated in and around Jerusalem — the heart of the would-be Palestinian state. Yet the lands that Israel might consider handing over in compensation are small barren tracts far away from population centers. If there are such lands that could compensate the French for Paris, the British for London or Americans for New York City, then there might be lands that Palestinians could accept instead of Jerusalem.

Even more devastating to Palestinian rights, Brzezinski and Solarz float “a solution to the refugee problem involving compensation and resettlement in the Palestinian state but not in Israel.” This they call “a bitter pill” but argue that “Israel cannot be expected to commit political suicide for the sake of peace.”

Palestinian refugees have an internationally-recognized legal right to return to their homes and lands, but Israel has always denied this on the sole grounds that Palestinians are not Jews. Thus Gaza, where 80 percent of the population are refugees, is essentially a holding pen for humans of the “wrong” ethno-religious group. Would Brzezinski and Solarz be so sanguine about accommodating Israel’s discriminatory character if its grounds for refusing the return of refugees was that they had the “wrong” skin color?

I write from downtown Pretoria, once the all-white capital of the South African apartheid state, which also argued that ending white rule would be “political suicide.” The notion that people of different groups cannot or should not mix is belied by the vibrant multiracial reality in the streets of Pretoria outside my window today.

And precedents for the actual return of refugees abound. Under the US-brokered 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnia war, almost half a million refugees and internally displaced persons returned home with international assistance, to areas that had become dominated demographically and politically by members of another ethno-national community — an enormous achievement in a country with a total population of 3.5 million and deep traumas as a result of recent war.

Other than Israel’s discriminatory aversion to non-Jews it is difficult to see why Palestinian refugees could not also return to their lands inside Israel, the vast majority of which remain uninhabited.

By endorsing Israel’s self-definition as a “Jewish state,” Brzezinski and Solarz not only ratify the violation of the fundamental rights of refugees, but consign another 1.4 million Palestinian citizens of Israel to permanent second-class status within an increasingly intolerant and ultranationalist Israel. A more likely outcome than “two states living side by side in peace” is that Palestinian citizens of Israel will come under increasing threat of expulsion to the Palestinian state — in other words, a new round of ethnic cleansing.

The vision of a truncated, demilitarized mini-state in no way fulfills basic Palestinian aspirations and rights and would bring no more peace or dignity than the bantustans which apartheid South Africa tried to establish for its black citizens to forestall and delay demands for equality and democracy. Nor would a trip by Obama do anything to revive shop-worn ideas that have gained little real support either among Palestinians or Israelis since they were first proposed at the failed Camp David summit in 2000.

Margaret Thatcher once said that partitioning South Africa to create separate black and white states would be like “trying to unscramble an egg,” and could lead to tremendous bloodshed. It is time to recognize that this truth also applies to Palestine/Israel and to seek political solutions similar to the one here, or the settlement in Northern Ireland, that embrace rather than attempt to deny diversity, equality and justice for all who live in that land.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.

May 3, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Obama Administration Gives Priority to Bioweapons Research

By Sherwood Ross | BLACKLISTED NEWS | 05-01-2010

The priorities of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the area of bacteriology have been “catastrophically re-ordered” by emphasizing bioweapons research over non-bioweapons research, a prominent authority states.

Giving priority to bioweapons research at NIH, started under the Bush Administration and continuing under President Obama, “diverts resources from critical public-health and scientific objectives,” says Richard Ebright, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.

“The negative impact has been most severe in bacteriology, in which NIH research priorities have been catastrophically re-ordered—with research on bacterial bioweapons receiving more support than research on the top five bacterial causes of death combined—and in which non-bioweapons research has suffered catastrophic losses in resources and personnel,” Ebright said.

Ebright cited the examples of research into two bacterial pathogens: “Streptococcus pneumoniae and Staphylococcus aureus, which claim 40,000 and 20,000 U.S. lives each year, respectively. Each kills more Americans than HIV-AIDS (15,000 U.S. lives) “but neither of these bacterial pathogens is on the list of NIAID Priority Pathogens,” Ebright pointed out. (NIAID, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is the subdivision of NIH responsible for infectious-disease research.)

“These two killer bacterial pathogens are not in NIAID’s ‘Category A’, with the anthrax bacterium and the smallpox virus, or even in NIAID’s ‘Category B’ or ‘Category C,’” Ebright says. “Something is wrong—very wrong—when NIAID fails to prioritize the top infectious cause of U.S. death,” he said in an email to this reporter.

Other top bacterial causes of U.S. deaths include Enterococcus faecium/faecalis, Clostridium difficile, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. “Of these, only the last is on the NIAID Priority Pathogens list and this pathogen is only in Category C,” Ebright said.

Asked “What is the mood of the scientific life sciences community at this time toward the Administration?” Ebright responded, “Hopeful expectation” but “growing concern that, thus far, there has been more continuity [from the Bush Administration] than change.”

The scope of the government’s involvement in bioweapons research, may be gauged from its estimated expenditure of $70 billion since 9/11 and the fact that, according to Ebright, more than 400 U.S. institutions are engaged in such work.

Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois, Champaign, said that in constant dollars the $70 billion “is twice what they spent on the Manhattan Project to develop the A-bomb—ergo, this is a weapons program.”

Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 for the U.S., said President Bush “turned the NIH into a front organization for biowarfare work,” and “(President) Obama is simply continuing the Bush policies” and is “now even exporting biowarfare capabilities to Third World Countries.”

Asked about the scope of the nation’s biowarfare activities, Boyle estimated there are “about 13,000 death scientists involved…(so) Dr. (Josef) Mengele has arrived on American campuses all over and the universities’ Institutional Review Boards (to review biowarfare research programs) are a joke and a fraud, too.” (Mengele was a German SS officer and physician who, during WWII, performed diabolical experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.)

Boyle said, “There is so much money involved that universities simply are not going to turn down these proposals no matter how reprehensible they might read…”

At his own University of Illinois, Boyle said, previous biowarfare research and development contracts with the Pentagon clearly stated: “We have selected pigs (to gas with biowarfare agents) because they have a circulatory system and a respiratory system similar to human beings.”

Boyle said, “I am sure similar type biowarfare contracts that are clearly anti-human, anti-ethical, illegal and criminal on their face alone have been approved all over (at) American universities by now. Money talks. Ethics walks.”

#

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for the Chicago Daily News and contributed regular columns to Reuters and UPI. His articles on biowarfare have been published in The Humanist and other magazines. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

May 1, 2010 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

Obama’s Favorite Weapons

By Nat Hentoff | CATO | April 14, 2010

With President Barack Obama’s firm approval, CIA pilotless Predator and Reaper drone planes — firing Hellfire missiles — are killing actual and suspected high-level terrorists. As Jane Perlez reports (New York Times, April 4), “flying overhead, sometimes four at a time” in Pakistan, the drones are also engaged in targeted assassinations in Afghanistan. It has been reported — but the CIA and Obama give us no facts — that in his first year, Obama has authorized more of these strikes than in President George W. Bush’s eight years.

Operated half a world away by remote control in Langley, VA., and outside of Las Vegas, the deaths sometimes unintentionally include those of innocent civilians, and are criticized here and in the targeted countries as “extra-judicial executions.”

Amid the growing controversy, State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh insists that these drone attacks “comply with all applicable law, including the (international) laws of war.” (“Legality of Drone Strikes Still in Question,” InterPress Service, April 3).

The United States, he explains, “is in armed conflict with al-Qaida as well as the Taliban and associated forces in response to the horrific attacks of 9/11.”

Koh, when he was Dean of Yale Law School, was a strong critic of the legal rationalizations of the Bush-Cheney war on terrorism. He is now part of what I call “The Obama Metamorphosis,” along with such other vehement opponents of the previous administration’s “dark side” as Attorney General Eric Holder and CIA Director Leon Panetta. These former critics are now loyal members of the Obama team.

There is some concern within the Obama administration that the drone planes’ corollary termination of civilians may aid our enemies’ recruiting efforts, as did the Bush torture policies at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. But Koh claims it is required that “the damage to civilians caused by those attacks … not be excessive.”

However, The Economist in England speaks of “a moral quandary” when “drone attacks often kill civilians,” pointing to “June 23, 2009, for example, an attack on a funeral in South Waziristan” (in northwest Pakistan, bordering on Afghanistan.) Those Hellfire missiles “killed 80 non-combatants.”

Does Koh regard that “damage” as “excessive?” Does Panetta? The ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for answers to such questions, along with many other acutely relevant queries on what the Predators and Reapers are doing in our name. As of this writing, there has yet to be a reply to this uncomfortable FOIA request.

The Economist’s report on “remote-control warfare” refers troublingly to an ongoing refinement in automated warfare aimed at answering those here and abroad who are questioning the ethics of this futuristic form of combat. Cited is Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing.

He “proposes involving the drone itself — or rather, the software that is used to operate it — in the decision to attack.

“In effect,” the article continues, “he plans to give the machine a conscience.”

Is this science-fiction? As I will demonstrate next week, Arkin is not alone among American high-tech explorers devising non-human target killings in attacks on terrorism. To elaborate on the inventive Arkin approach, “The software conscience that Dr. Arkin and his colleagues have developed is called Ethical Architecture.”

During attacks, the judgment of the automated and autonomous Predator or Reaper drone “may be better than a human’s because it operates so fast and knows so much. And — like a human but unlike most machines — it can learn.” After a strike, this ever-alert machine can indeed learn from other sources whether the damage it caused — including dead civilians — exceeded its intentions.

With this information, a drone with a conscience can more precisely tailor future attacks and instruct other drones on how to more carefully direct their Hellfire missiles. Thereby, these ethical drones can provide support to future American officials defending the use of killer drones by showing how carefully the United States is working to be humane in its self-defense against international terrorism.

On March 23, in testimony before the House National Security subcommittee’s largely pro-drone panel. John Edward Jackson, professor of unmanned systems at the U.S. Naval War College, warned:

“If trends in computer science and robotics engineering continue, it is conceivable that autonomous systems could soon be developed that are capable of making life and death decisions without direct human intervention.” (Dan Froomkin, commondreams.org, March 24).

Another witness, Edward Barrett — director of research for the U.S. Naval Academy’s ethics and military policy think tank at the Stockdale Center — focused on whether these autonomous drones would make waging war too easy as this intensive research on robotic warfare continues.

He asked whether these nonhuman attacks “reduce the vigor with which nonviolent alternatives are pursued, and thus encourage unnecessary — and therefore unjust — wars.”

Added ethicist Edward Barrett: “Would a self-conscious and willful machine choose its own ends?”

Next week: More specific factual information on the active planning to make robotic warfare more “humane” and, indeed, human. It would be very helpful if President Obama would tell us — at a nationally televised press conference — what his own concerns are about this rapidly developing global technology.

Will there be any mention of drones by candidates of either party in the midterm elections?

April 26, 2010 Posted by | Aletho News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | Leave a comment

US Vows New Sanctions Against Iran in ‘Weeks’

By Jason Ditz | April 20, 2010

Much as they did several times last week, and several times the week before that, and indeed innumerable times this year, last year, and the year before that, the US today vowed that there would be new sanctions against Iran in a matter of weeks.

This time the pledge came in the form of comments by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D – MD) who promised that the United States would act “sooner, rather than later” in more harsh sanctions against Iran for its civilian nuclear program.

The comments came as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once again demanded that the US enact “crippling sanctions” against Iran, blocking the nation’s gasoline imports in the hopes of crushing the government. Netanyahu made similar demands earlier in the month, and several times last month, and also innumerable times since coming into office last year.

But once again, the prospect of the sanctions, despite US optimism, seems slim. Russia has repeatedly opposed “crippling” sanctions, and said it would only support very limited sanctions targeting just the nuclear industry. China for its part again declared today that it remains firmly in favor of diplomacy, and says negotiations, not sanctions, remain the best way to solve disagreements.

Background:

March 08, 2010

Israeli Official: West Has 4-8 Weeks Left for Iran Diplomacy


April 21, 2010 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

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