From ths at psalience.org Mon Oct 3 12:32:54 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:32:54 +0200 Subject: [THS] 700 Thrown in Jail as Wall St. Protest Grows -- Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111003123143.06637220@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/rss/1/674826/%22they%27re_arresting_us_one_by_one%22%3A_700_thrown_in_jail_as_wall_st._protest_grows_--_labor_declares_support?akid=7650.234008.8VBPNc&rd=1&t=2 [see original for photos] AlterNet / By Sarah Jaffe comments_image 11 COMMENTS "They're Arresting Us One by One": 700 Thrown in Jail as Wall St. Protest Grows -- Labor Declares Support It's raining in Liberty Plaza Saturday afternoon as the shrunken crowds fall in around the Occupy Wall Street media center, which still isn't allowed a tent. They're keeping the laptops and livestream (which reports 13,000 viewers at one point, from around the world) under a large picnic umbrella and some tarps, and every now and then the call "mic check!" rings out and someone jumps atop a table to relay the latest from the protesters kettled on the Brooklyn Bridge, cuffed, and being loaded onto giant NYPD buses for dispersal to various locations. The "People's Mic" is one of the most striking features of the "Occupy Wall Street" community that has sprung up down in the heart of New York's financial district. Because NYPD hasn't allowed amplification, speakers confine themselves to short half-sentences, that are repeated back by the crowd. It makes every statement communal--in addition to wiggling your fingers downward if you disagree, or rolling your arms around if you want the person to hurry up and finish, you often simply stop repeating. There's an engagement, a type of consent that it creates, which is demonstrated when Congressman Charles Rangel shows up just before the march to show his support--Rangel is greeted by the horde of reporters thrusting the microphones not allowed protesters in his face, but Rangel's words don't get repeated to the crowd--instead, the most striking feature of his attempt to speak is the crowd's reaction to a heckler who got in Rangel's face. The crowd immediately took up the chant "Sit down!" and then "This is a peaceful march!" echoing across the plaza. P1010034 There's only one round of shout-backs necessary in the small crowd during Saturday afternoon, but later that night, at about 7:30 PM, the reports from the legal team are echoed back in waves. It's almost soothing; combined with the professionalism from the legal team volunteer, who tells the crowd that they have names of 100 confirmed arrested and have dispatched lawyers to get them out, you almost forget that friends, colleagues are standing in the rain on the bridge. (Photo by Michael Whitney) AlterNet's Kristen Gwynne is one of those stuck in the bridge when the police closed off both ends and came in with the plastic cuffs. "They're arresting us one by one. I just asked a cop and they said they're going to arrest all of us. There are hundreds of people who dont have room to sit down. We're just crammed in," she reports by phone. Later, she texts, "Now it's pouring and we're huddled five people to an umbrella. People just sang that [Rihanna] song "you can get under my umbrella." Spirits are high and people are sharing what they have and coming together to protect each other." The relationship with the police stationed around the park has been remarkably good, but marches have been contested. The Saturday crowd proves that Friday's attendance wasn't just a fluke brought on by a rumor that Radiohead would play for the protesters, and thousands of people join the march--as we pass, the boy clinging to a drainpipe and counting protesters shouts out "1200 and counting!" When visiting UK journalist Laurie Penny and I turn back, we squeeze past easily as many people as were ahead of us. A couple of marchers have a giant balloon cluster floating above with a camera dangling from it, getting a bird's-eye view of the crowds. When the texts and Twitter reports start to flood in that arrests are happening on the bridge, that even a New York Times reporter is being held, we rejoin the now-smaller crowd in Liberty Plaza to find out if there's any news. Reports are confused--some say that you can get off the bridge on the Brooklyn side, and indeed I receive a report from a colleague that he's on the other side at Cadman Plaza. The jubilant tweets that the police were allowing marchers into the traffic lanes have turned to fear and anger at what many perceive as a trap. Surprisingly quickly, facilitators call "mic check!" and ask anyone who has a smartphone to go to the base of the bridge and record what they see--including clear instructions on a specific app that can be downloaded to stream video instantly to the Web. From the park, we briefly return to the base of the bridge to see a mass of police officers blocking the entrance to the traffic lanes. The crowd gathered there is mostly pointing cameras and smartphones at the police, but with no one moving on or off the bridge, the scene is tense. Protesters call "Join us!" and "Police are the 99 percent!" at the officers, who stand impassive, making no moves to arrest anyone or to allow anyone, on foot or on vehicles, from either direction, past. In the rain, we return to Liberty Plaza and the media tent, hoping for better news updates, and check updates on our phones. P1010053 Even as the NYPD was corralling and cuffing protesters on the bridge, new support was rolling in for the occupiers. Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers union, North America's largest industrial union with 1.2 million active and retired members, made a resounding declaration of support: "The United Steelworkers (USW) stands in solidarity with and strongly supports Occupy Wall Street. The brave men and women, many of them young people without jobs, who have been demonstrating around-the-clock for nearly two weeks in New York City are speaking out for the many in our world. We are fed up with the corporate greed, corruption and arrogance that have inflicted pain on far too many for far too long." Working America, the AFL-CIO's community affiliate which organizes non-union workers, releases a statement as well, offering support and encouragement to the protesters. "It's obvious what has motivated these protests, and it's the same thing we hear at the doors we knock on every day," the statement reads. News also came in that the NYPD, which according to protesters has not allowed its officers to even accept donuts from protesters in the square, gratefully took $4.6 million from JP Morgan Chase, one of the Wall Street banks targeted by the protesters, in donation to its foundation. New Yorker and Naked Capitalism blogger Yves Smith writes of the gift, "The Foundation has been in existence for 40 years. If you assume that the $100 million it has received over that time is likely to mean ?not much over $100 million? this contribution could easily be 3-4% of the total the Foundation have ever received." The news coming in just as the reports were hitting that police had actually led protesters onto the car-traffic section of the bridge certainly sets the crowd humming (video below shows police marching ahead of the crowd onto the bridge): Michael Whitney, who was marching with the crowd onto the bridge, tells me, "No one knew we were going over the bridge." He says that the march stopped, then proceeded onto the traffic lane on the bridge, led by police. "We walked past dozens of police officers who said nothing to us--in the middle of the march, with 1200 people ahead of us. I thought out loud it felt like a trap and a bad idea." Whitney continues, "When it became clear police were blocking us from Brooklyn on the walkway and the roadway, we knew it was only a matter of time before arrests began. We started walking against the crowd back towards Manhattan. That's when we saw a sergeant and two officers walking up the pedestrian walkway, and multiple police vans driving on the roadway. They were getting everybody off the bridge, including the hot dog vendor and an old couple on a bench." Smith comments, "We simply don?t know whether the police would have behaved one iota differently in the absence of the JP Morgan donation. But it raises the troubling perspective that they might have." No one knows yet what the next few days will bring; Wednesday will see a march in solidarity with the occupiers which will include The United Federation of Teachers; 32BJ SEIU & 1199 SEIU; Workers United; Transport Workers Union Local 100, as well as the Working Families Party, Moveon.org, Make the Road New York, the Coalition for the Homeless, the Alliance for Quality Education, Community Voices Heard, United New York and Strong Economy For All. Occupations have sprung up around the country, and with the growing media coverage, the word is spreading fast. With union support comes money and an infrastructure used to planning rallies, strikes and protest actions, and with the community groups come people who aren't on social media but understand all too well the impact of bankers' greed. The first edition of the "Occupied Wall Street Journal", professionally printed as a broadsheet, was handed out along the parade route, and the occupiers issued their first official statement Saturday as well. P1010020 The statement reads, in part: They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage. They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses. They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one?s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation. Hena Ashraf, who joined the protests this week, details in a blog post the process by which the official statement was composed and edited; her account highlights both the drawbacks and the strengths of the movement. She writes of calling the facilitators out for unacknowledged white privilege, the way the consensus-based decision-making process worked, and how the protesters learn from each other. "We walked away realizing what we had just done - spontaneously come together, demand change, and create it, in a movement that we are in solidarity with, but also feel a need for constructive criticism," she writes. The crowd at the end of the night is unbowed, the mood still jubilant, in a "the flag was still there" sort of way. The square is full again, full of wiggling fingers of assent, echoes of news, dotted with Guy Fawkes masks turned backwards and 1199 SEIU ponchos, brought down from the union. Kristen is released from jail late at night; other protesters are also freed the same evening. Jeff Rae, one of those arrested, tweets pictures from inside his cell before his release, and says he is charged with "failure to obey order, prohibited use of roadway, and blocking traffic." Their resolve is only hardened by their time singing songs of support on the bridge, the honks of support from passing cars, the growing protests around the country, and the cheers back in Liberty Plaza. *Photos, unless otherwise noted, are by Sarah Jaffe. From ths at psalience.org Mon Oct 3 12:35:53 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:35:53 +0200 Subject: [THS] The Extrajudicial Drone Murder of US Citizen Anwar al-Awlaki Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111003123505.04b99cf0@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/152594/the_extrajudicial_drone_murder_of_us_citizen_anwar_al-awlaki_?akid=7650.234008.8VBPNc&rd=1&t=8 Comment Is Free / By Michael Ratner comments_image 7 COMMENTS The Extrajudicial Drone Murder of US Citizen Anwar al-Awlaki The law on the use of lethal force by executive order is specific. This assassination broke it ? that creates a terrifying precedent. October 2, 2011 | Is this the world we want? Where the president of the United States can place an American citizen, or anyone else for that matter, living outside a war zone on a targeted assassination list, and then have him murdered by drone strike. This was the very result we at the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU feared when we brought a case in US federal court on behalf of Anwar al-Awlaki's father, hoping to prevent this targeted killing. We lost the case on procedural grounds, but the judge considered the implications of the practice as raising "serious questions", asking: "Can the executive order the assassination of a US citizen without first affording him any form of judicial process whatsoever, based on the mere assertion that he is a dangerous member of a terrorist organisation?" Yes, Anwar al-Awlaki was a radical Muslim cleric. Yes, his language and speeches were incendiary. He may even have engaged in plots against the United States ? but we do not know that because he was never indicted for a crime. This profile should not have made him a target for a killing without due process and without any effort to capture, arrest and try him. The US government knew his location for purposes of a drone strike, so why was no effort made to arrest him in Yemen, a country that apparently was allied in the US efforts to track him down? There are ? or were ? laws about the circumstances in which deadly force can be used, including against those who are bent on causing harm to the United States. Outside of a war zone, as Awlaki was, lethal force canonly be employed in the narrowest and most extraordinary circumstances: when there is a concrete, specific and imminent threat of an attack; and even then, deadly force must be a last resort. The claim, after the fact, by President Obama that Awlaki "operationally directed efforts" to attack the United States was never presented to a court before he was placed on the "kill" list and is untested. Even if President Obama's claim has some validity, unless Awlaki's alleged terrorists actions were imminent and unless deadly force employed as a last resort, this killing constitutes murder. We know the government makes mistakes, lots of them, in giving people a "terrorist" label. Hundreds of men were wrongfully detained at Guant?namo. Should this same government, or any government, be allowed to order people's killing without due process? The dire implications of this killing should not be lost on any of us. There appears to be no limit to the president's power to kill anywhere in the world, even if it involves killing a citizen of his own country. Today, it's in Yemen; tomorrow, it could be in the UK or even in the United States. Michael Ratner is president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights. From ths at psalience.org Mon Oct 3 12:39:15 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:39:15 +0200 Subject: [THS] National Student Walkout in Solidarity with Occupy Wall Street! Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111003123853.06583298@mail.messagingengine.com> >From Andrew Ross: NYU students and workers: Join us for the National Student Walkout in Solidarity with Occupy Wall Street! Stop what you are doing/walk out of class/leave the library at 4pm on Wednesday, October 5th. We will meet in the middle of Washington Square Park and march together to City Hall, where we'll join the Community/ Labor March in Solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, endorsed by dozens of NYC unions and community groups, including the United Federation of Teachers, SEIU 32BJ and SEIU 1199, the Transit Workers Union Local 100, Make the Road New York, New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, the Alliance for Quality Education, and more! We will also be joining students from around the city who are organizing walkouts against unforgivable student debt and soaring tuition rates. Join us to protest the arrest of 700 marchers on the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday, while the banksters who wrecked the economy remain free. Join us to protest the horrific inequality that leaves 1 in 3 New York City children in poverty while Mayor Bloomberg sits on a $20 billion fortune. Join us to protest the foreclosure crisis that has driven millions from their homes, while bank profits soar. Join us because We Are the 99 Percent! If your group would like to endorse, please be in touch! Most importantly, spread the word by inviting ALL of your friends on Facebook, making announcements in your classes, and sharing this e-mail. Contact: owsnyu at gmail.com From ths at psalience.org Mon Oct 3 12:42:02 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:42:02 +0200 Subject: [THS] Montana Follows Vermont's Lead on Path to State-Level Single-Payer Health Care Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111003124122.06586228@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.opednews.com/populum/linkframe.php?linkid=138838 On the News With Thom Hartmann: Montana Follows Vermont's Lead on Path to State-Level Single-Payer Health Care, and More Thursday 29 September 2011 by: Thom Hartmann, The Thom Hartmann Program | News Report In today's On the News segment: Montana follows Vermont's lead on path to state-level single-payer system, Republican attacks on reproductive rights continue in a new request for 12 years of Planned Parenthood's financial disclosures, new evidence surfaces that the conflict in Afghanistan is worsening, and more. Thom Hartmann here ? on the news You need to know this. The stage is set for a Supreme Court showdown. The Department of Justice called on the Supreme Court yesterday to rule on the constitutionality of President Obama?s signature health reform law ? making it extremely likely the high court will hear the case sometime around the summer of next year ? right smack dab in the middle of the election season. The DOJ is calling on the court to reverse a decision made by a lower appeals court in Atlanta that struck down the entire law earlier this year. In a statement released yesterday ? the DOJ made it clear that it was confident Obamacare would be upheld saying, ?Throughout history, there have been similar challenges to other landmark legislation, such as the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and all of those challenges failed.? According to the Center for American Progress ? if all 9 Supreme Court justices remain consistent in their previous rulings ? then there are at least 7 votes on the high court in favor of the Affordable Care Act. Then again, they will rule during an election ? and given that this is one of the most politicized Supreme Courts in our nation?s history ? anything can happen ? just look at Citizens United. The racial wealth inequality in our nation is getting worse. For the first time in history ? a minority group ? Hispanics ? have the most children living in poverty in America. Up until this year ? there?s always been more white children living in poverty than black or Hispanic children ? simply because there are so many more white children in this country. But according to a new report released by Pew ? 6.1 million Hispanic children now live in poverty ? compared to 5 million white children ? and 4.4 million black children. That?s despite the fact that Hispanics make up only about 1/6 of the nation?s population. The reports notes that minorities have been hit the hardest by the Bush recession over the last 3 years. And while this racial inequality is troubling ? what?s even more troubling is that ANY child is living in poverty in the United States ? the wealthiest nation on the planet. Currently, one out of every five children in America ? regardless of race ? lives in poverty. This is a national crisis, and the Republicans want to make it worse. In the best of the rest of the news First it was Vermont ? now it?s Montana. Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana said he plans to ask the federal government to exempt his state from requirements in the Affordable Care Act ? so that he can set up a universal, single-payer system like in Canada. Earlier this year ? the state of Vermont started moving in the same direction too. Governor Schweitzer said he wants to create a system modeled after the Canadian province of Saskatchewan ? where less is spent on healthcare ? but there are better results and people live longer. Today ? Canada has a nationwide single-payer system ? but it started with one province ? Saskatchewan ? and spread across the rest of the nation. Let's hope we see the same thing sweep across America. While the Republican base might applaud state-sanctioned executions ? one former Supreme Court justice doesn?t. Retired Justice John Paul Stevens, echoing former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell years ago, said one of his major regrets from his time on the court ? was his vote in 1976 to reinstate the death penalty. Stevens said, ?Maybe one believes, and certainly a lot of people sincerely do, that it is an effective deterrent to crime and will in the long run will do more harm than good. I don?t happen to share that view. But being hard on crime...always is politically popular, let?s put it that way.? Stevens' comments come a week after our nation executed Troy Davis in Georgia ? a man that in all likelihood was innocent. Let?s not forget this tragedy of justice ? let?s end state-sanctioned murder in America. There?s now more evidence that the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating. According to a new United Nations report ? violence has increased in Afghanistan 39% since last year ? with more and more armed clashes and homemade bomb attacks being carried out by Taliban insurgents. In just three months ? June through August ? of this year ? 971 civilians were killed and another 1,400 hundred injured in the ongoing war. But it?s not just insurgents killing civilians ? it?s our own airstrikes. As the UN report notes ? in the month of July ? 38 civilians were killed by US airstrikes. It?s been nearly a decade since this war started ? and that?s a decade too long. Time to end the wars. In case we all forgot ? Republicans reminded us this week that their war on women is still ongoing. The Republican-led House Energy Committee sent a letter to Planned Parenthood requesting 12 years of financial disclosures to determine if the organization is misusing federal funds ? in particular for abortion services. The ranking Democrat on the Committee ? Rep. Henry Waxman ? called the investigation into Planned Parenthood, ?part of a Republican vendetta against an organization that provides family planning and other medical care to low-income women and men." I guess with the economy in full meltdown ? with growing civil unrest about the high crimes on Wall Street ? and with two endless wars ? Republicans in Congress think taxpayers dollars are best used to go after Planned Parenthood ? and women?s reproductive health and rights. It makes you wonder...what planet are these guys living on? From ths at psalience.org Mon Oct 3 12:42:54 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:42:54 +0200 Subject: [THS] Japan Discovers Plutonium Far From Crippled Reactor Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111003124244.066bdea8@mail.messagingengine.com> Japan Discovers Plutonium Far From Crippled Reactor BY TOKO SEKIGUCHI http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204226204576604013365441594.html TOKYO?Trace amounts of plutonium were found as far as 28 miles from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant, the first time that the dangerous element released from the accident was found outside of the immediate area of the plant. The science ministry report issued Friday comes just as the government lifted one of its evacuation advisories, underscoring the difficulty of restoring normalcy and assuring the safety of residents around the crippled plant. The government also reported a rare detection of strontium, another highly dangerous element, far from the crippled reactor, in one spot as far away as 50 miles. From ths at psalience.org Mon Oct 3 12:54:46 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:54:46 +0200 Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?EU_Climate_Chief_=91Shocked=92_at_US_Debate?= Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111003124404.04b997d0@mail.messagingengine.com> Published on Tuesday, September 27, 2011 by The Hill (Washington, DC) EU Climate Chief ?Shocked? at US Debate by Ben Geman European Union climate chief Connie Hedegaard is disposing of diplomatic niceties when describing U.S. political battles over climate change. ?I?m shocked that the political debate in the U.S. is so far away from the scientific facts,? she said, according to The Copenhagen Post. ?When more than 90 percent of researchers in the field are saying that we have to take [climate change] seriously, it is incredibly irresponsible to ignore it. It?s hard for a European to understand how it has become so fashionable to be anti-science in the U.S.,? Hedegaard said in the Post account, which reprints comments she made to the Danish paper Politiken. ?And when you hear American presidential candidates denying climate change, it?s difficult to take,? she said. Her remarks come amid a split in the GOP presidential field, where candidates including Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann dispute the mainstream scientific view that the planet is warming and human activities are a key factor. The European Union in 2007 committed to cut its overall emissions by at least 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and has offered much steeper cuts if other major emitting countries agree to an international deal. The EU has also implemented a cap-and-trade system to curb emissions from power plants, factories and other facilities. In the U.S., climate change legislation collapsed on Capitol Hill last year, while Environmental Protection Agency plans to craft greenhouse gas standards for power plants and refineries are under attack by Capitol Hill Republicans and some major industry groups. EPA recently said it would delay the unveiling of proposed emissions standards for power plants that had been slated for Sept. 30. The agency maintains that it's committed to issuing the rules. Internationally, hopes have faded ? at least, for now ? for a binding emissions-reduction treaty any time soon to replace the Kyoto Protocol, although the last two major United Nations summits have led to more modest agreements on deforestation, climate finance and other matters. The next big U.N. climate summit will take place in Durban, South Africa, in late November. ?In Durban we will attempt to lay out a plan with deadlines for when we will arrive at a legally binding agreement that includes both the U.S. and China,? Hedegaard said. President Obama on Sunday attacked Perry on his climate views, drawing a counterattack from the Texas governor's camp. The president also said it?s imperative that ?our planet doesn?t reach a tipping point in terms of climate change.? ? 2011 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp. From ths at psalience.org Tue Oct 4 14:02:13 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:02:13 +0200 Subject: [THS] !!!!!! Paul Craig Roberts: The Day America Died Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111004124817.068c70a0@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29285.htm "Now the US government not only can seize a US citizen and confine him in prison for the rest of his life without ever presenting evidence and obtaining a conviction, but also can have him shot down in the street or blown up by a drone." "Readers ask me what they can do. Americans not only feel powerless, they are powerless... Voting has no effect... To expect salvation from an election is delusional. All you can do, if you are young enough, is to leave the country. The only future for Americans is a nightmare." [For the moment it seems that only Muslims are targeted, but watch out - the ratchet of FASCISM goes in but one direction. Who will be in the next category of perceived threats? See below. -ths] The Day America Died By Paul Craig Roberts October 03, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- September 30, 2011 was the day America was assassinated. Some of us have watched this day approach and have warned of its coming, only to be greeted with boos and hisses from ?patriots? who have come to regard the US Constitution as a device that coddles criminals and terrorists and gets in the way of the President who needs to act to keep us safe. In our book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Lawrence Stratton and I showed that long before 9/11 US law had ceased to be a shield of the people and had been turned into a weapon in the hands of the government. The event known as 9/11 was used to raise the executive branch above the law. As long as the President sanctions an illegal act, executive branch employees are no longer accountable to the law that prohibits the illegal act. On the president?s authority, the executive branch can violate US laws against spying on Americans without warrants, indefinite detention, and torture and suffer no consequences. Many expected President Obama to re-establish the accountability of government to law. Instead, he went further than Bush/Cheney and asserted the unconstitutional power not only to hold American citizens indefinitely in prison without bringing charges, but also to take their lives without convicting them in a court of law. Obama asserts that the US Constitution notwithstanding, he has the authority to assassinate US citizens, who he deems to be a ?threat,? without due process of law. In other words, any American citizen who is moved into the threat category has no rights and can be executed without trial or evidence. On September 30 Obama used this asserted new power of the president and had two American citizens, Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan murdered. Khan was a wacky character associated with Inspire Magazine and does not readily come to mind as a serious threat. Awlaki was a moderate American Muslim cleric who served as an advisor to the US government after 9/11 on ways to counter Muslim extremism. Awlaki was gradually radicalized by Washington?s use of lies to justify military attacks on Muslim countries. He became a critic of the US government and told Muslims that they did not have to passively accept American aggression and had the right to resist and to fight back. As a result Awlaki was demonized and became a threat. All we know that Awlaki did was to give sermons critical of Washington?s indiscriminate assaults on Muslim peoples. Washington?s argument is that his sermons might have had an influence on some who are accused of attempting terrorist acts, thus making Awlaki responsible for the attempts. Obama?s assertion that Awlaki was some kind of high-level Al Qaeda operative is merely an assertion. Jason Ditz concluded that the reason Awlaki was murdered rather than brought to trial is that the US government had no real evidence that Awlaki was an Al Qaeda operative. Having murdered its critic, the Obama Regime is working hard to posthumously promote Awlaki to a leadership position in Al Qaeda. The presstitutes and the worshippers of America?s First Black President have fallen in line and regurgitated the assertions that Awlaki was a high-level dangerous Al Qaeda terrorist. If Al Qaeda sees value in Awlaki as a martyr, the organization will give credence to these claims. However, so far no one has provided any evidence. Keep in mind that all we know about Awlaki is what Washington claims and that the US has been at war for a decade based on false claims. But what Awlaki did or might have done is beside the point. The US Constitution requires that even the worst murderer cannot be punished until he is convicted in a court of law. When the American Civil Liberties Union challenged in federal court Obama?s assertion that he had the power to order assassinations of American citizens, the Obama Justice (sic) Department argued that Obama?s decision to have Americans murdered was an executive power beyond the reach of the judiciary. In a decision that sealed America?s fate, federal district court judge John Bates ignored the Constitution?s requirement that no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law and dismissed the case, saying that it was up to Congress to decide. Obama acted before an appeal could be heard, thus using Judge Bates? acquiescence to establish the power and advance the transformation of the president into a Caesar that began under George W. Bush. Attorneys Glenn Greenwald and Jonathan Turley point out that Awlaki?s assassination terminated the Constitution?s restraint on the power of government. Now the US government not only can seize a US citizen and confine him in prison for the rest of his life without ever presenting evidence and obtaining a conviction, but also can have him shot down in the street or blown up by a drone. Before some readers write to declare that Awlaki?s murder is no big deal because the US government has always had people murdered, keep in mind that CIA assassinations were of foreign opponents and were not publicly proclaimed events, much less a claim by the president to be above the law. Indeed, such assassinations were denied, not claimed as legitimate actions of the President of the United States. The Ohio National Guardsmen who shot Kent State students as they protested the US invasion of Cambodia in 1970 made no claim to be carrying out an executive branch decision. Eight of the guardsmen were indicted by a grand jury. The guardsmen entered a self-defense plea. Most Americans were angry at war protestors and blamed the students. The judiciary got the message, and the criminal case was eventually dismissed. The civil case (wrongful death and injury) was settled for $675,000 and a statement of regret by the defendants. The point isn?t that the government killed people. The point is that never prior to President Obama has a President asserted the power to murder citizens. Over the last 20 years, the United States has had its own Mein Kampf transformation. Terry Eastland?s book, Energy in the Executive: The Case for the Strong Presidency, presented ideas associated with the Federalist Society, an organization of Republican lawyers that works to reduce legislative and judicial restraints on executive power. Under the cover of wartime emergencies (the war on terror), the Bush/Cheney regime employed these arguments to free the president from accountability to law and to liberate Americans from their civil liberties. War and national security provided the opening for the asserted new powers, and a mixture of fear and desire for revenge for 9/11 led Congress, the judiciary, and the people to go along with the dangerous precedents. As civilian and military leaders have been telling us for years, the war on terror is a 30-year project. After such time has passed, the presidency will have completed its transformation into Caesarism, and there will be no going back. Indeed, as the neoconservative ?Project For A New American Century? makes clear, the war on terror is only an opening for the neoconservative imperial ambition to establish US hegemony over the world. As wars of aggression or imperial ambition are war crimes under international law, such wars require doctrines that elevate the leader above the law and the Geneva Conventions, as Bush was elevated by his Justice (sic) Department with minimal judicial and legislative interference. Illegal and unconstitutional actions also require a silencing of critics and punishment of those who reveal government crimes. Thus Bradley Manning has been held for a year, mainly in solitary confinement under abusive conditions, without any charges being presented against him. A federal grand jury is at work concocting spy charges against Wikileaks? founder Julian Assange. Another federal grand jury is at work concocting terrorists charges against antiwar activists. ?Terrorist? and ?giving aid to terrorists? are increasingly elastic concepts. Homeland Security has declared that the vast federal police bureaucracy has shifted its focus from terrorists to ?domestic extremists.? It is possible that Awlaki was assassinated because he was an effective critic of the US government. Police states do not originate fully fledged. Initially, they justify their illegal acts by demonizing their targets and in this way create the precedents for unaccountable power. Once the government equates critics with giving ?aid and comfort? to terrorists, as they are doing with antiwar activists and Assange, or with terrorism itself, as Obama did with Awlaki, it will only be a short step to bringing accusations against Glenn Greenwald and the ACLU. The Obama Regime, like the Bush/Cheney Regime, is a regime that does not want to be constrained by law. And neither will its successor. Those fighting to uphold the rule of law, humanity?s greatest achievement, will find themselves lumped together with the regime?s opponents and be treated as such. This great danger that hovers over America is unrecognized by the majority of the people. When Obama announced before a military gathering his success in assassinating an American citizen, cheers erupted. The Obama regime and the media played the event as a repeat of the (claimed) killing of Osama bin Laden. Two ?enemies of the people? have been triumphantly dispatched. That the President of the United States was proudly proclaiming to a cheering audience sworn to defend the Constitution that he was a murderer and that he had also assassinated the US Constitution is extraordinary evidence that Americans are incapable of recognizing the threat to their liberty. Emotionally, the people have accepted the new powers of the president. If the president can have American citizens assassinated, there is no big deal about torturing them. Amnesty International has sent out an alert that the US Senate is poised to pass legislation that would keep Guantanamo Prison open indefinitely and that Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) might introduce a provision that would legalize ?enhanced interrogation techniques,? an euphemism for torture. Instead of seeing the danger, most Americans will merely conclude that the government is getting tough on terrorists, and it will meet with their approval. Smiling with satisfaction over the demise of their enemies, Americans are being led down the garden path to rule by government unrestrained by law and armed with the weapons of the medieval dungeon. Americans have overwhelming evidence from news reports and YouTube videos of US police brutally abusing women, children, and the elderly, of brutal treatment and murder of prisoners not only in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and secret CIA prisons abroad, but also in state and federal prisons in the US. Power over the defenseless attracts people of a brutal and evil disposition. A brutal disposition now infects the US military. The leaked video of US soldiers delighting, as their words and actions reveal, in their murder from the air of civilians and news service camera men walking innocently along a city street shows soldiers and officers devoid of humanity and military discipline. Excited by the thrill of murder, our troops repeated their crime when a father with two small children stopped to give aid to the wounded and were machine-gunned. So many instances: the rape of a young girl and murder of her entire family; innocent civilians murdered and AK-47s placed by their side as ?evidence? of insurgency; the enjoyment experienced not only by high school dropouts from torturing they-knew-not- who in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, but also by educated CIA operatives and Ph.D. psychologists. And no one held accountable for these crimes except two lowly soldiers prominently featured in some of the torture photographs. What do Americans think will be their fate now that the ?war on terror? has destroyed the protection once afforded them by the US Constitution? If Awlaki really needed to be assassinated, why did not President Obama protect American citizens from the precedent that their deaths can be ordered without due process of law by first stripping Awlaki of his US citizenship? If the government can strip Awlaki of his life, it certainly can strip him of citizenship. The implication is hard to avoid that the executive branch desires the power to terminate citizens without due process of law. Governments escape the accountability of law in stages. Washington understands that its justifications for its wars are contrived and indefensible. President Obama even went so far as to declare that the military assault that he authorized on Libya without consulting Congress was not a war, and, therefore, he could ignore the War Powers Resolution of 1973, a federal law intended to check the power of the President to commit the US to an armed conflict without the consent of Congress. Americans are beginning to unwrap themselves from the flag. Some are beginning to grasp that initially they were led into Afghanistan for revenge for 9/11. From there they were led into Iraq for reasons that turned out to be false. They see more and more US military interventions: Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and now calls for invasion of Pakistan and continued saber rattling for attacks on Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. The financial cost of a decade of the ?war against terror? is starting to come home. Exploding annual federal budget deficits and national debt threaten Medicare and Social Security. Debt ceiling limits threaten government shut-downs. War critics are beginning to have an audience. The government cannot begin its silencing of critics by bringing charges against US Representatives Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. It begins with antiwar protestors, who are elevated into ?antiwar activists,? perhaps a step below ?domestic extremists.? Washington begins with citizens who are demonized Muslim clerics radicalized by Washington?s wars on Muslims. In this way, Washington establishes the precedent that war protestors give encouragement and, thus, aid, to terrorists. It establishes the precedent that those Americans deemed a threat are not protected by law. This is the slippery slope on which we now find ourselves. Last year the Obama Regime tested the prospects of its strategy when Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence, announced that the government had a list of American citizens that it was going to assassinate abroad. This announcement, had it been made in earlier times by, for example, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, would have produced a national uproar and calls for impeachment. However, Blair?s announcement caused hardly a ripple. All that remained for the regime to do was to establish the policy by exercising it. Readers ask me what they can do. Americans not only feel powerless, they are powerless. They cannot do anything. The highly concentrated, corporate-owned, government-subservient print and TV media are useless and no longer capable of performing the historic role of protecting our rights and holding government accountable. Even many antiwar Internet sites shield the government from 9/11 skepticism, and most defend the government?s ?righteous intent? in its war on terror. Acceptable criticism has to be couched in words such as ?it doesn?t serve our interests.? Voting has no effect. President ?Change? is worse than Bush/Cheney. As Jonathan Turley suggests, Obama is ?the most disastrous president in our history.? Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate who stands up for the Constitution, but the majority of Americans are too unconcerned with the Constitution to appreciate him. To expect salvation from an election is delusional. All you can do, if you are young enough, is to leave the country. The only future for Americans is a nightmare. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was appointed by President Reagan Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and confirmed by the US Senate. He was Associate Editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, and he served on the personal staffs of Representative Jack Kemp and Senator Orrin Hatch. He was staff associate of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, staff associate of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, and Chief Economist, Republican Staff, House Budget Committee. He wrote the Kemp-Roth tax rate reduction bill, and was a leader in the supply-side revolution. He was professor of economics in six universities, and is the author of numerous books and scholarly contributions. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions. From ths at psalience.org Tue Oct 4 15:18:38 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:18:38 +0200 Subject: [THS] A 40-Year Scan of the Right-Wing Corporate Takeover of America Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111004151640.03e0b100@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/152605/the_big_picture%3A_a_40-year_scan_of_the_right-wing_corporate_takeover_of_america__?page=entire AlterNet / By Don Hazen and Colin Greer The Big Picture: A 40-Year Scan of the Right-Wing Corporate Takeover of America Author and public intellectual Colin Greer tells us how we got where we are today. It's not a pretty picture, but hope is on the way. October 3, 2011 | At this moment, there are growing protests on Wall Street in Manhattan, in Boston at the Bank of America, and in cities around the country. These embryonic and creative efforts are targeting the greed of the banks, the collusion of the corporate class with their corrupt elected officials, the high level of unemployment, the huge burden of student loans in a time of diminished opportunities, the increasing numbers of poor and hungry people, and much more. These protests, along with those earlier in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, are signs of revival of a long tradition of popular revolt against excesses of wealth and the corporate class. The new protests come after a long dark period -- specifically the last 11 years of George W. Bush and Barack Obama -- during which time conservatives have gained more power and ability to control the national debate than they have in the past 75 years. The current right-wing power presence, spiked by the corporate media's obsession with Tea Party protests, came most immediately as a result of the Great Recession caused by the housing bubble and obscene corruption of the banks. This crisis was exacerbated by large-scale anger about the subsequent bank bailout, and corporate-backed attacks on the health care reform package passed by Congress. But that is just part of the latest political news. The conservative ascendancy is hardly an overnight phenomenon. Rather, it represents a dynamic shift in American politics that has taken place over more than 40 years, beginning in the 1970s. During this time, conservative billionaire donors, corporations and the Chamber of Commerce, all invested in conservative think-tanks and communications infrastructure, while Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and a broad and deep media network of right-wing pundits have come to dominate the public discourse. Subsequently, the liberal/progressive side of the political equation has lost much of its influence from the period of the 1970s and early '80s. How this has happened over time is little understood. In fact, the lack of protest and effective organizing against the right wing during the Tea Party ascension especially has been a mystery to many, and a source of great frustration. Colin Greer, a transplanted Brit, has observed and engaged in every phase of progressive politics. Greer is the author of a number of books (with his best-known being The Great School Legend), has been a professor at Brooklyn College of CUNY, and for many years has served as president of the New World Foundation, known in the philanthropic world for its commitment to supporting grassroots organizing and providing seed money for many of the most effective progressive political efforts over the last decades. Over this long period, Greer has had a cat-seat view of all the forces that have shaped our last 40-plus years. He has a big-picture take on the turmoil and politics of this period, as major shifts -- globally, economically and culturally; the tectonic plates of change and reaction -- have reshaped our world in ways we have yet to fully understand. AlterNet sat down with Colin Greer in his office in New York in late September. Don Hazen: Why have conservatives succeeded so dramatically in this period, and liberals and progressives are arguably the weakest in decades? Colin Greer: There is no single causal factor. The shaping of these two divergent paths begins in the 1980s when you had the last flourish of an expansive society. But the last three years of the '70s were characterized by stagflation and disappointment and took a great toll, forfeiting a real sense that the constant growth of openness in American society and economy was endlessly sustainable. Fast-forward to the present and we have the twin dominance of austerity, i.e. eviscerating public spending as the solution to economic crises; and aristocracy, represented by the protected tax and profit oasis of the wealthiest 1 percent. It?s instructive to note that events in the U.S. are not in isolation. Back in the '60s and '70s when progressive movements were in ascendency, the liberation themes of the time were part of a global anti-colonial uprising, and broad disgust at the war in Vietnam. Today, trade policies and globalization means that the other major economies of the world are also in the grips of a greed and hyper-profit which is in the process of discarding hard won values, rights and decent living conditions. DH: That was Carter and also the hostage crisis too at the end of the '70s, yes? CG: Yeah, it?s about how social and economic consciousness changed. Carter?s inability to act effectively in the hostage crisis or to defeat stagflation reinforced a national feeling of malaise and weakness. That?s why Reagan campaigned on "hope in America" versus Carter's kind of dismal, high-standing morality, an apparent inability to act from strength. It was the beginning of a long term of undermining the presumption of multi-dimensional social and economic expansion, which had flourished since World War II. So in the 1980s you had Reagan, along with the last flourish of direct political action on the left and the last gasps of the global social change that characterized the 1960s and '70s; i.e. the fight against apartheid, which succeeded in turning the Reagan administration around to support the anti-apartheid/ divestment movement, and you had the Nuclear Freeze movement. DH: These were the last grassroots successes of the left? CG: Yes. Although one can never do a one to one equation, the Freeze was a factor in Reagan's shift in nuclear arms negotiations with the Russians and the anti-apartheid divestment strategies, fueled by a popular movement with strong student leadership, which created shantytowns on campuses throughout America, helped win that struggle. But then there was a dramatic change in direction when the air traffic controllers went on strike. Reagan seized the moment, and fired the air traffic controllers, destroying PATCO, their union. That was the beginning of the end of the labor deal with capital; a deal that was carved out in the Cold War in which labor got negotiated settlements here at home for its support for the Cold War abroad. In a sense it was anti-red internationally and social democratic here in the United States. And that deal went through the beginning of the 1980s, until Reagan, responding to the conservative base, changed the ground rules. And with it, labor's guaranteed negotiating strength ended. We have seen a diminishing power of labor since. And we've also seen a shrinking power of popular movements on the left as well, so that by the time we got to the invasion of Iraq, a million people in the street could be ignored. How different that was from the last gasps of enduring popular protest against Reagan?s contra-aid and its illegal processes. DH: Those demonstrations against the Iraq invasion seemed like a big deal at the time, a major accomplishment, and around the world as well. CG: Yeah, but for only one day. What is required is the ability to constantly bring people out and not end it when there?s no popular response. You need to get the news story, and push the politicians to shift. We're up against the kind of new politics in which they didn't shift and we didn't come out with continual resistance, and that inability to resist played out in the 1990s when you have a Democratic president who was disappointing over and over, with no popular mobilization against his deregulation of the finance industry or his welfare reform initiative. DH: Is it possible to have a popular movement against a disappointing Democratic president? CG: I think it was in 1992, but only theoretically; it didn't happen. By the 1990s, because progressives in a sense had been disciplined by the reduced power of labor, by the new power of the right, the visceral fear that Republicans would be worse, and the fact that a certain amount of administration figures came from progressive organizations and might still influence policy, all contributed to a lack of action against Clinton policies And there is another crucial point: by the time we get to late 1980s and 1990s, social movements on the left were essentially demobilized into NGOs and legislative agendas, so progressive politics became more about winning elections, seeking legislative reform, and building not-for-profit institutions that represented progressive vision and options. There no longer was a base beyond labor, which was itself shrinking. DH: How sudden was this shift from more popular movements to foundation-funded projects? CG: It happened over time. The trends were growing in the early '70s because progressives had control over a lot of federal spending, and a lot of activists had access to all the major agencies. There was a kind of flourish of success and even progress under Nixon. Legislative efforts were working. We especially got environmental legislation, and it looked like the courts were on our side. Meanwhile the right, in earnest, started building both its base and its options, with think tanks, organizations and communications capacity. But by 1990, the left so to speak, except for labor, had become almost entirely dependent on foundation support, which was based in the IRS 501 (c) (3) tax structure which required grant recipients to be non-partisan. But it was influential at the level of government and so it felt like it could deliver through the lobbying capacity of NGOs and by winning in the electoral, legislative and judicial spheres. In the '80s, when they saw the right-wing agenda through Reagan taking serious root, many groups worked on voter registration to expand the electorate, but were constrained again by the IRS rules. It took a Jesse Jackson presidential campaign as a reminder that you need a popular base to move an agenda and to build a popular base to undercut the climate of low taxes, high profits, and the growing transfer of public assets into private control. Jackson created a social movement?he went to organized farmworkers, he worked with gay activists, he really did see that campaign as a progressive, social movement campaign. But after Jackson (?84 and ?88) that kind of campaign mobilization didn't happen again until Obama. And Jackson did exactly what Obama did. He demobilized his campaign agency. He turned into a kind of not-for-profit organization, and Obama turned it into the Democratic Party. But they are two moments -- and it's interesting that both black figures produced the sense of a national movement. But the end of the Jackson campaign coincided with end of '80s, and that was where the Democratic Leadership Council, that Clinton led, emerged strongly and represented the shift to a "new progressive politics" where they made progressive mean something else. Imagine if the Jackson campaign had remained mobilized in relation to the Clinton administration and/or if the Obama campaign had remained live going into the 2010 elections when victories on the right were won by small margins. DH: I assume when you say progressive came to mean something else, it meant moderate? CG: In a sense once you had Murdoch and Fox and a growing conservative infrastructure, it labeled the DLC?transfused Democratic party?as the left. Any real left was marginalized into virtual invisibility and anonymity, the center was moved significantly to the right, and progressives increasingly pushed into protecting eroding rights and benefits, without a political infrastructure or national leadership of its own. In the electoral arena, in the media, and in the mainstream foundation world, moderate was called left or liberal, and leaders in pursuit of public office more and more have eschewed the liberal label by moving ever so profoundly to the right. DH: So the middle became the left, and the conservatives keep moving successfully to the right -- a trend we have seen reach the present moment of the far, far right influencing the political process. And there has been no pendulum swinging back, that's for sure. CG: Yes, and one of the critical ingredients in this huge shift rightward over the last few decades, as I inferred earlier, was the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union had a profound effect on two things: 1) the idea that there was a left alternative, and that there was a path to reform that had the best interest of the public at large as its highest priority, and had the "state" involved directly in business and the interest of public; and 2) the shift of states in the Soviet orbit to capitalism basically made capitalism the world model. So then it was a question of what you did in the framework of capitalism, not challenging its framework. That's been the umbrella for China, India, Brazil. All over, left groups moved into the electoral arena, and didn't challenge the capitalist model. As a result, we now have a global context that advances austerity and aristocracy in support of a global capitalism that has declared war on the social contract. In the Scandinavian model, they're more responsive to public conditions, but not to challenging capitalism itself. I'm not arguing that we need a left to challenge capitalism because it isn't clear that we do have that option. But what we're faced with now is that any system that has monopoly status moves toward tyranny. So we're now seeing that 40 years of the rogue rise of the right has produced a tyrannical right. All of the conditions, the improvements around tolerance and cultural openness and responsibility for the poorest of the poor, the perspective that a healthy society is one that has a priority to care for all its people -- those standards have so diminished so that you have candidates now talking about the fact that people may have to starve. And that?s now a legitimate thing to say. Killing gets cheered by the GOP grassroots. The four GOP debates so far are really interesting because they indicate something really seriously bad. DH: The rise of the Tea Party, aided by its intense promotion by the corporate media, has given the public the sense that there is a powerful angry grassroots movement underway. How does that play out? CG: Tyranny grows first of all in the establishment of a legitimation of its point of view, even on the margins. You can see it in Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry, a war hero, and with Murdoch and Roger Ailes growing Fox. There is the constant testing of a model that is very similar in tone to the most successful moment of progressives in the 1960s. It reaches into high levels of rhetorical hysteria. When we were on the streets 40 years ago there was a kind of hysteria -- police were the enemy. There's a similar level of hysteria now. What that means is basically that on the road to power, most people committed to power will use the "crowd" -- they construct a crowd. You need the crowd, even if it's only a tiny fraction of the population. If the crowd is visible through spectacle then you start conditioning the public's readiness to act, and you encourage readiness of others not to act. So in the present political reality, you have the convergence of the crowd's mentality, with the readiness to be tyrannical in leadership, with leaders in Congress like Jim DeMint, Eric Cantor, and of course funding for it all from the Kochs. This tyrannical style of leadership has grown through the Bush years to a dramatic level, and has not been effectively challenged by Obama. You have the growth of the crowd and the paralysis of public at large. When you look at poll data there is no way in which the public agrees with the Tea Party or with right-wing political figures, but it is paralyzed, and paralyzed serially over time. A million people on the street didn't get listened to over the Iraq invasion, or the defeat of Kerry through usurping of the public stage by Swift Boat in 2000. Then the inability of Gore to fight for his election followed by the Supreme Court decision which gave us eight years of Bush. The choice to fight or not is rarely a popularly held prerogative until the public bursts forth as perhaps in the Arab Spring. Until such moments, leadership is top down, especially in the electoral arena, where money and incumbency determine authority and good judgment. The Tea Party is the latest in a series of experiments -- remember the Promise Keepers and the Christian Coalition back in the '80s -- to advance right-wing politics from the margins to a new center. We've been holding them off time and time again but not by producing anything for the future. Instead we have benefitted from the cultural victories of the '70s and '80s that have become enshrined in entertainment conventions and interpersonal lifestyles. In both realms we have taken great strides to persuade Americans that young people should have the vote at 18, that women are equal, that abortion is pretty much something you can argue rhetorically but hard to lose practically, but now we're losing ground on everything. The death penalty for a while looked like we were humane, we don't just kill people -- we're losing ground on that. We didn't go to war casually -- we've lost ground on that. DH: Without tension of competing systems, is there an inevitable march to the extreme? Is there a theory that most extreme seems to always win out? CG: The fact is, a society grows into tyranny over time as the most powerful cultivate extreme crowd behavior, which, unless resisted can have a contagion effect into the public at large, paralyzing resistance and recruiting frightened supporters. While clearly minority politics, the Tea Party zealots who cheered at death and execution much as Sarah Palin once called on us to ?Drill, baby, drill!?ought to be a reminder and a warning. But I don?t know any mainstream media that treated the cheers for the death penalty and barbarous inhumanity to the sick as a story truly worth engaging. The crowd is the critical thing that tyranny requires eventually -- the mobilization of the crowd. With recessions every 10 years, the circumstances periodically creates the possibility for angry people to be organized into a crowd. Progressives did that. The New Deal was about using the circumstance of the depression to organize a progressive crowd. DH: Mostly organized by the Communist Party. But we have no capacity to do that now? CG: and the Socialist party. But there was a plethora of organizations. And no, we have no apparent capacity do that now, although we desperately need it. New protests and organizing efforts are definitely sparks of hope. But that kind of action is primarily on the right. DH: It's a resource question, too? CG: Yes, and it's also a planning and leadership question. The Socialist party, Catholic Workers, Communists -- they were planners, they had an agenda not limited by electoral and legislative politics, and not dependent on foundation resources for scale. Forty years ago a dozen small progressive foundations could help support strong action and analysis. The big checks now come from professionalized, very mainstream foundations that do not, as was the case with the earlier funders, institutionally identify with a progressive world view. DH: The Kochs write the big checks for the right today. So is the weakness primarily an issue of class -- resources staying in the educated class? CG. No. It is that and it is something deeper, more psychological. When I was in England a bit ago, I was talking to a Syrian cab driver, this was in the middle of the Arab Spring. I said, why is it that you've got (this was before the riots) English kids protesting at Trafalgar Square against tuition increases? You've got women in Rome -- a million people -- protesting against Silvio Berlusconi. The next day they've all gone home, the kids have gone home. In America we had the resistance against the Iraq war, they went home. But in Egypt they came back every single day. In Yemen they come back every day. And he said, "Well, we in the West have freedom. They don't have the freedom." So there is someway in which we have the consciousness here that we have something that could be lost that we don't want to risk. In the Middle East, there is nothing left to be lost. DH: So fast-forward to the present. How has the right-wing philosophy which has dramatically increased its influence, changed the nature of government? CG: What we are up against is the constant reduction of compassion as the highest priority in how you make public policy and deliver public goods. The right wants to take public space. They want to take public resources. In response, progressives get lost in the message of to trying to re-instill belief in government. With the government argument, I think we're missing the point, both in terms of compassion but also that it's not not about belief in government. It's about who owns government and what it's for. Despite the right's anti-government rhetoric, their practice is pro government. But it is government for them. So we must challenge the principle of who owns government. We are saying they've diminished the belief in government, but why does Rick Perry want to become president of the United States and, in effect, CEO of the nation?s investment engine, that is, government. It's not because he doesn't believe in government, it's because he wants to control government. They want to control and privatize government resources. Capitalism is exhausted here. It needs more public money. It?s always needed public money, it needs more now. When you look at the growth of capitalism in America from railroads all the way to the computer, it's publicly funded. I say to people what do Velcro and GPS have in common? They were both created by the military. And who is making a profit from that? Does the public get any return for its investment? But if we had a conception of government that was not only tax agent, service deliverer, but also an investor in the economy like a bank, and it was entitled to a return just the way a bank gets return, we'd have plenty money. But we don't treat ourselves as the investor. But every major technological growth has been publicly invested in. If we were a shareholder in Microsoft because we invented the computer, it would be a very different terrain. So the reinvention of capitalism is the issue, and the reinvention of government is what is happening. So capitalism is directly claiming public investment now. DH: Can you provide a current example of the privatization impulse? CG: Charter schools are a very good case study for the impulse. Forget anti-unionism; forget whether or not they work, because they don't. But even if they did they are not cheaper. Charter schools are simply the transfer of public money to profit-making activity. That's the system they are steadily building -- prisons, schools, public parks, there's a conversion of the whole system into an investment of capital which is a major extension of what's always been true. It's a way of government supporting the expenditure of money, but it has been organized so that it stays in private control. And in private control it's become increasingly privileged in how the decisions are made. So you've got hedge fund people now funding charter schools -- they are the largest engine behind charter schools. And so they care about education. Some of them even believe public schools are so bad we need this alternative. But there's not a lot of thinking about about whether profit is compatible with learning. If profit is the major goal and keeping costs down is the major goal, then how do you have learning be the major goal? That's exactly the contradiction. If you're going to have learning be the major goal, you have to invest in it like you would a war. You don't in a war say the major goal is how to make profit and we'll only fight the war according to the profit. DH: With the enormous investment in military arms, and more recently mercenaries, it seems like we are headed there. CH: Well, that is one reason we have more war. But in the end you can't sell to the public that the measure of our success here is profit. And in education, were saying basically you can trust profit. The market will give you better results. There's no reason to believe that. The public hasn't accepted it, although it's getting pushed on them because of the power that's established in the state houses. Also, what's not well understood, is there are three kinds of charters. So the privatization has three identities and they're being merged. One is public school experiments with the charter system. The second is not-for-profit charters run by not-for-profit organizations are closer to the base. The third is the for-profit charter. The first two models are perfectly fine. We have private schools and parochial schools which have tax exemptions so they're only quasi private. Those two forms are part of the American education fabric, so having another thing called charters wouldn't be a problem. It's nice to experiment with different forms of government organization and curriculum. But the for-profit charter is a very different entity and to allow it to be conflated with the other two is basically to let the Trojan horse in. DH: As a longtime foundation executive, how has philanthropy exacerbated the progressive weakness? CG: Foundations mostly gave money according to sociology or class, so people gave money to organizations led by people most like them, or slowly there was entry of people who were not like them but were being identified by people like them, and also very little money when you think about it. If you take the most successful community based organization in philanthropy at community based building level, it's probably SCOPE in Los Angeles. And they went from a $5,000 grant to its founder from New World Foundation to a $3 million, maybe a $4 million budget, which took 25 years to get to. We have a number of very strong local and state organizations that have built powerful bases to influence local politics, pioneering such inventions as ?living wage,? and ?community benefits.? But to date this is a record of policy reform and some electoral victories for local leaders, all of which is very important. It is, however, not yet a coherent, comprehensive and compelling base for challenging the structural realignment of capitalism in our time. DH: What are the consequences of that lack of a base to challenge the excesses of capitalism? CG: So middle-income workers and people in impoverished communities are all under serious attack by this realignment, and are not yet organized in an aggressive agenda of their own within a worldview they share. I think there?s a sense that we have more to lose than to gain in such action at this time, but time may be running out on that one. Most people do have a certain level of freedom, they have a lot of harassment -- but they have a certain level of freedom. And for the average African American who is now 25 -- they have family that experienced the change so they are freer than they were. They don't get off the street curb when they're coming up to a white person. They can be on the street with a white date or partner. There have been significant changes, not necessarily lasting changes, but changes that make you feel you've got something. The real danger is now that the economy can't produce the benefits it was producing, and the greed in capitalism has gone to such an extreme, that the Captains of capitalism seem not to be concerned about the social order dangers that the extreme inequalities create, which opens the gates to fascism. When you have the a tyrannical crowd, you have the tendency to tyranny, you have the crowd behaving the way they did in those four Republican debates. So while they're only a minority, they're setting a tone. In the first debate nobody was willing to say that a dying child, a very ill child, should get medical care. In the second debate you've got cheering for the death penalty. In the third debate you've got the call to kill, for a young man who's on life support. And in the fourth debate the gay soldier is booed. So you've got this extreme hysteria that is not being challenged. DH: So you can imagine serious political repression here in the USA? Where is the hope? CG: I think we know what?s going to come down. I think people know. People are afraid. There's an implicit fear. And also there are moments when spontaneity breaks out. Who knows, we may be lucky enough that spontaneity e.g. at Occupy Wall Street that will help produce a social movement. And all that's been funded and developed will be ready to move. We don't have that now. There was a kind of serial violence that you couldn't have predicted, when Martin Luther King was assassinated. The Nuclear Freeze movement was not predictable when it suddenly flourished. You can't predict them. But it's obvious why after they happen. So we don't know that we don't have the ground for something major to happen. In almost every state, strong organizations have been developed that might well be the basis for movement capacity when forces outside of their own terrain call them to new and unified action. If one looked at the black churches before the Civil Rights Movement flourishes of the 1960s, they probably would not have looked as strong one by one as they did when called to unified action. So too with their leaders. Indeed, so too with the Tea Party and right-wing movements. The external call for the latter has been heavy duty private money and a driving corporate agenda that is committed to reversing the deals it made since the 1930?s. But what?s observable is the right has established an ideology and a worldview, a sense of what?s right and what?s wrong that has captured enough of public to dominate news with visible activism, and to paralyze public at large. That doesn't mean they can hold onto it, but that?s the phenomenon were facing. The economy has no ability to buy the public back into the equation. This recent disaster relief controversy is an example. We are unable to buy back into the equation of what looked like we had won forever -- that is the public good. We've lost a major piece of the ideology that was built over 40 or 50 years -- that we care about people in pain. If we don't have the ideolology that we care about people in pain as your basic ethical compass, then you have the kill mentality. Because we're always balancing between compassion and fear. If compassion doesn't dominate and you don't have resources to feel you can be compassionate without paying a high price yourself, then you're going to turn to fear to protect what you've got, or reach your hand out for what you can get. I think the health care debate is an interesting case to consider in all this. Obviously, the social benefit is intrinsic to a progressive perspective. The kind of health care reform we?ve received is, for a variety of reasons, insufficient and insecure. Foundation funding for advancing public education and lobbying ran to the millions of dollars but it was all silo policy oriented and for the most part, top down. If that kind of money could have been used to help build a comprehensive foundational commitment to social welfare and organizational capacity, a partial achievement might well have helped produce a powerful movement advance. DH: Does that loss of the moral compass, along with the fear, have to translate into passivity? How do we combat that? CG: Well, I don't know that were not doing some of what is necessary. We have to reinvest in the ideology lots of organizations have gotten lost in the idea that you have to invest in resurrecting belief in government. This is about messages. Elections may be fought on messages. Social movements are about consciousness. We have still to invest psychically, financially and organizationally in rebuilding a shared consciousness for a threshold number of Americans that is characterized in the idea that we want a compassionate society and that government is the best vehicle to deliver that. One thing I didn't mention about the '80s that the assault on government that Reagan led, the left created earlier. We talked about problems of welfare system, about the ineffectiveness of the education system -- that was us. Cloward and Piven, me, everybody. We undermined that system. We didn't have a sense, probably because we were young, that you win a victory and then you evolve the maturity of that victory. We wanted it to be correct, and the right will suffer the same hubris -- they're moving way beyond their ideological reach, beyond the ability to deliver it. DH: So, what happens in the interim? What about political repression? CG: As Eric Cantor said, "People could starve." He said, "If you haven't saved for a rainy day yourself, that's your responsibility." That's the opposite of compassion; that generates fear. And if you have violence on the street, they will have their own excuse for political repression. If there is an excess of even the right-wing on the street you could have the excuse of police intervention that looks like it's in public interest. But we have work to do, not least is to protect the moment. By that I mean, we should give serious thought about the impact of colluding in the electoral defeat of this president by undermining him publicly and reducing his viability as a candidate. The alternative is truly dangerous. At the same time, we must think of ourselves in a political era that calls for breaking from the conventions of recent political discourse that has narrowed our social and political vision. It?s time to name what is happening in our country without hysteria, but to be clear that the next elections are part of a struggle for a social and cultural threshold that will determine the quality of life and democracy in this country. And we need to keep in mind what's always been true in the politics of social movements -- they are the province of the young. Just look for example at how the brave young people in the Dream Act campaigns have actually won victories against inhumane ICE practices. They took and they take risks. Now, as other young people are stepping up to make powerful statements, take risks, try new tactics, they need our support and understanding. Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet. Colin Greer is president of the New World Foundation in New York. Among his books is A Call to Character (HarperCollins, 1995). From ths at psalience.org Tue Oct 4 15:31:24 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:31:24 +0200 Subject: [THS] Killer Student Debt and Unemployment Made Young People the Leaders Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111004152100.04b35e08@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/rss/1/675403/how_killer_student_debt_and_unemployment_made_young_people_the_leaders_at_occupy_wall_street?akid=7657.234008.oYFeNz&rd=1&t=12 New Deal 2.0 / By Mike Konczal How Killer Student Debt and Unemployment Made Young People the Leaders at Occupy Wall Street This Occupy Wall Street sign is my favorite: The sign has a clever double meaning. The young have the most to lose by standing idle and not having their voices heard in the political process, and they have the most to lose by actually being idle ? or unemployed. The media hasn?t learned the lessons from the 1960s, as there is still a tendency to dismiss young people protesting because they are young. You can see this phenomenon in the original New York Times coverage, and it appears in much of the rest. But at the heart of dismissals of young college kids in the 1960s was the idea that they had a very bright future ahead of them that they were taking for granted. For instance, here?s President Nixon in the New York Times, May 1970: You know, you see these bums, you know, blowin? up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are, burnin? up the books, I mean, stormin? around about this issue, I mean you name it ? get rid of the war, there?ll be another one. Can it be argued that young people, college educated or not, are particularly lucky in this recession? Every category of worker is doing terribly in the Lesser Depression. My former editor Derek Thompson has a must-read article, ?Who?s Had the Worst Recession: Boomers, Millennials, or Gen-Xers?,? which compares the three age categories across employment, income and wealth, and finds that everyone is suffering across the board. But let?s focus on the young. The issue of debt, especially student debt, hovers over the protests. How is the employment ratio looking for young people with a college degree? Here?s data from last year: And that doesn?t factor in the fact that many college educated workers are working jobs that don?t require college degrees. They are essentially using their degrees to crowd out those with a high school diploma or some college education from the jobs they would normally take. And no matter what jobs they are able to get, student debt hangs around their necks like an albatross. This impacts everyone who is young. Here?s a summary of the recent 2010 Census? American Community Survey by PBS: * Employment among young adults between the ages of 16 to 29 was at its lowest level since the end of World War II. Just 55 percent were employed, compared with 67 percent in 2000. * Nearly 6 million Americans between the ages of 25 to 34 lived in their parents? homes last year. * Young men are nearly twice as likely as women to live with their parents. * Marriages among young adults hit a new low. Just 44 percent of Americans in that age group were married last year. * Other trends were also headed in the wrong direction. In 43 of the 50 largest metro areas ? often a magnet for 20-and-30-somethings ? employment declined. In our desperate bid to replicate Japan, we are also replicating the poverty and joblessness among Japanese youths. This 2010 AOL article, ?Japan?s Economic Stagnation Is Creating a Nation of Lost Youths,? can give you a sense of our trajectory. Will we get our own version of the hikikomori? Young people are doubling up and not moving out of their parents? houses in this recession. If we looked at solely their own income, their poverty rates would be astounding. From the Census Bureau: These ?doubled-up? households are defined as those that include at least one ?additional? adult ? in other words, a person 18 or older who is not enrolled in school and is not the householder, spouse or cohabiting partner of the householder In spring 2007, there were 19.7 million doubled-up households, amounting to 17.0 percent of all households. Four years later, in spring 2011, the number of such households had climbed to 21.8 million, or 18.3 percent Young adults were especially hard-hit, with 5.9 million people ages 25 to 34 living in their parents? household in 2011, up from 4.7 million before the recession. That left 14.2 percent of young adults living in their parents? households in March 2011, up more than two percentage points over the period. These young adults who lived with their parents had an official poverty rate of only 8.4 percent, since the income of their entire family is compared with the poverty threshold. If their poverty status were determined by their own income, 45.3 percent would have had income falling below the poverty threshold for a single person under age 65. Even if we can ever move out of the short-term recession, it will impact young people for years to come. Looking at a research summary compiled previously by Roosevelt Institute super-intern Charlie Eisenhood, Beaudry and DiNardo (1991) found ?that every percentage increase in the [national] unemployment rate is associated with a 3-7 percent drop in entry-level contract wages.? Kahn (2009) found an estimate on the high end of that spectrum, discovering an ?initial wage loss of 6 to 7% for a 1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate measure.? Unfortunately, the recession?s effect is not limited just to the initial job search and wages. The negative impact persists far beyond that. Kahn found that the effect ?falls in magnitude by approximately a quarter of a percentage point each year after college graduation. However, even 15 years after college graduation, the wage loss is 2.5% and is still statistically significant.? Job mobility is also affected. Kahn found a ?negative correlation between the national unemployment rate and occupational attainment (measured by a prestige score) and a slight positive correlation between the national rate and tenure.? She concludes that ?workers who graduate in bad economies are unable to fully shift into better jobs after the economy picks up.? Worse, Oreopoulos found permanent wage effects on workers with low expected earnings (based on occupational prestige). So yes, young people have an important stake in what happens going forward. Do we continue policies that benefit Wall Street and the top 1 percent? Do we tax the rich to rebuild America? Do we reform a financial sector that dominates the economy? The list of choices in front of us goes on and on. Their whole future, indeed all of ours, depends on it. It?s no wonder that they?ve taken to the streets. From ths at psalience.org Tue Oct 4 15:34:41 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:34:41 +0200 Subject: [THS] GOP Frontrunners Fight Aid for Starving Americans Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111004153355.04a52308@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.truth-out.org/pro-hunger-lobby-gop-frontrunners-fight-aid-starving-americans/1317148242 The Pro-Hunger Lobby - GOP Frontrunners Fight Aid for Starving Americans Monday 3 October 2011 by: Maya Schenwar, Truthout | News Analysis Texas Gov. Rick Perry, left, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speak during a commercial break in a Republican presidential debate in Orlando, on September 22, 2011. (Photo: Chip Litherland / The New York Times) "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls people to lives of complacencies and dependencies, into a permanent condition where they never get on their feet." -Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) "I get home and realize I'm hungry. No need to ask myself what I feel like eating. It will be Farina for breakfast - all week long." - Sheila Steffen, reporter attempting to subsist on food stamps for a week. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps, is one of the most efficient, effective, penny-pinching programs in today's government-scape. Food stamps have cushioned the recession's blow for the 45 million Americans that depend on them for daily meals. And we're not talking government-subsidized caviar: On average, food stamp recipients can expect an allotment of $30 per week. Plus, it's a dream of a stimulus - every $5 in SNAP benefits generates nearly double that in economic activity. However, as the race to 2012 builds and the crazies get crazier, the top GOP presidential hopefuls have turned on this all-star program with a vengeance. In September, Rick Perry proclaimed a "Hunger Action Month," expressing "deep concern" for his state's hungry families. It was about time: Texas has the second-highest rate of food insecurity in the country. However, it appears that Perry staunchly opposes action to alleviate the problem. Just a week and a half before his grand "awareness" proclamation, Perry trash-talked food stamps to a South Carolina luncheon audience. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (the census showed that in 2010, 3.9 million Americans - almost half of them children - were boosted out of poverty by food stamps), Perry denied SNAP's role as economic stimulus. "Most Americans do not yearn to be dependent on government subsidies," he said. "They want economic freedom, and economic freedom comes from work and wages, not welfare." Also on board with granting Americans the "economic freedom" to go hungry is Mitt Romney, who jumped on the pro-poverty bandwagon in late August as well. When asked what he thought of the food-stamps-as-stimulus question, Romney opined, "I think that there's some folks like Tom Vilsack and President Obama himself that imagine that if you just throw money at people, that somehow that will make the economy better." Not to be outdone, Rick Santorum has been quick to remind voters that he was the first candidate to endorse Paul Ryan's plan to transform food stamps into block grants, putting a cap on aid and leaving millions of hungry Americans without assistance. Early in the summer, he alleged that Obama is "pushing more people on food stamps," presumably by providing them to people in need. According to Santorum's logic, by granting aid to the poorest of the poor, the SNAP program is making poverty practically irresistible. (Who wouldn't want their family to live on $30 per week of groceries, given the chance?) The tide of food-stamp hypocrisy rises even higher in Michele Bachmann's corner. A late summer round of financial disclosures revealed that Bachmann has benefited heavily from federal aid over the years; her family farm, for example, received $260,000 in subsidies between 1995 and 2008. But that hasn't stopped her from bashing subsidies for low-income Americans. Last fall, when then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi pointed out food stamps' value as an economic stimulus, Bachmann countered, "This is why the Speaker needs to lose her gavel a few short days from now." What's most terrifying about this wave of attacks on the poor is not the denial of facts (food stamps work - people buy food, stimulating domestic production and creating jobs), or the bizarrely simplistic ways in which the candidates have voiced their opposition. It's that none of the candidates have presented a believable economic vision in which hunger is relieved by any other means: they're simply denying the notion that government has a responsibility to support Americans' well-being and security, negating the public good as a political priority. In this frame, poverty and hunger aren't real problems to be confronted in the physical world; they're conceptual nuisances to be wiped out with deafening rhetorical gymnastics. It's a revival of the Reagan-era "welfare queen" fiction, and the latest batch of GOPers are telling the tale with relish. Rep. Paul Ryan, the House's superstar slasher, has called SNAP "rife with fraud," pointing to it as a cesspool for taxpayer mooching. With food-stamp errors at their lowest rate ever, it's a tough claim to defend - but "fraud" is a catchy theme, especially when poor folks are the alleged culprits, and the facts haven't stopped Ryan from spreading the fallacy far and wide. In summing up his drastic budget plan last spring, Ryan invoked a similar sentiment, warning, "We don't want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls people to lives of complacencies and dependencies, into a permanent condition where they never get on their feet." Unless you're a small rabbit or living in the early 19th century, it's hard to imagine being lulled into complacency by $30 a week. As the gruesome campaign theatrics continue, the problem persists. More than 75 percent of households receiving food stamps currently include children. Almost a third contain disabled people or senior citizens. Americans in their 50s are 80 percent more likely to be food-insecure than they were ten years ago - and 17 million children are now in the same boat. In the face of the pro-hunger lobby, we must defend food stamps as not only a vital economic stimulus, but also a basic, public responsibility. For millions of Americans, food stamps are no hammock. They're not even a safety net - they're a lifejacket, and as Americans and human beings, we owe it to each other to keep this program alive and well. From ths at psalience.org Wed Oct 5 19:12:51 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 05 Oct 2011 19:12:51 +0200 Subject: [THS] First official, collective statement of the protesters in Zuccotti Park: Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111005191147.064705b8@mail.messagingengine.com> from Nationofchange.org Dear Readers, What follows is the first official, collective statement of the protesters in Zuccotti Park: As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies. As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known. They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage. They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses. They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one's skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation. They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization. They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices. They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions. They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right. They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers? healthcare and pay. They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility. They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance. They have sold our privacy as a commodity. They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit. They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce. They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them. They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil. They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people?s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit. They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit. They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media. They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt. They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas. They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government ontracts.* To the people of the world, We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power. Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone. To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal. Join us and make your voices heard! NationofChange has been an unfiltered media resource for the Occupy Wall Street movement even while the mainstream media has ignored, censored, and undermined the progress of the people. Rather than delivering consumers to advertisers NationofChange works tirelessly to deliver people to one another. Make a secure, tax-deductible donation to NationofChange today, and help sustain this vital service to the community. Please click the button below to make a secure tax-deductible donation or call in your donation at 1-800-803-6045. You can also mail a check to: 6319 Dante Ln NW, Albuquerque, NM 87114 From ths at psalience.org Thu Oct 6 00:36:21 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:36:21 +0200 Subject: [THS] William Blum: The Anti-Empire Report Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111006003552.043f20f8@mail.messagingengine.com> http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer98.html The Anti-Empire Report October 4th, 2011 by William Blum www.killinghope.org The crime of making Americans aware of their own history Is history getting too close for comfort for the fragile little American heart and mind? Their schools and their favorite media have done an excellent job of keeping them ignorant of what their favorite country has done to the rest of the world, but lately some discomforting points of view have managed to find their way into this well-defended American consciousness. First, Congressman Ron Paul during a presidential debate last month expressed the belief that those who carried out the September 11 attack were retaliating for the many abuses perpetrated against Arab countries by the United States over the years. The audience booed him, loudly. Then, popular-song icon Tony Bennett, in a radio interview, said the United States caused the 9/11 attacks because of its actions in the Persian Gulf, adding that President George W. Bush had told him in 2005 that the Iraq war was a mistake. Bennett of course came under some nasty fire. FOX News (September 24), carefully choosing its comments charmingly as usual, used words like "insane", "twisted mind", and "absurdities". Bennett felt obliged to post a statement on Facebook saying that his experience in World War II had taught him that "war is the lowest form of human behavior." He said there's no excuse for terrorism, and he added, "I'm sorry if my statements suggested anything other than an expression of love for my country." (NBC September 21) Then came the Islamic cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, who for some time had been blaming US foreign policy in the Middle East as the cause of anti-American hatred and terrorist acts. So we killed him. Ron Paul and Tony Bennett can count themselves lucky. What, then, is the basis of all this? What has the United States actually been doing in the Middle East in the recent past? * the shooting down of two Libyan planes in 1981 * the bombing of Lebanon in 1983 and 1984 * the bombing of Libya in 1986 * the bombing and sinking of an Iranian ship in 1987 * the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane in 1988 * the shooting down of two more Libyan planes in 1989 * the massive bombing of the Iraqi people in 1991 * the continuing bombings and draconian sanctions against Iraq for the next 12 years * the bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998 * the habitual support of Israel despite the routine devastation and torture it inflicts upon the Palestinian people * the habitual condemnation of Palestinian resistance to this * the abduction of "suspected terrorists" from Muslim countries, such as Malaysia, Pakistan, Lebanon and Albania, who were then taken to places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where they were tortured * the large military and hi-tech presence in Islam's holiest land, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf region * the support of numerous undemocratic, authoritarian Middle East governments from the Shah of Iran to Mubarak of Egypt to the Saudi royal family * the invasion, bombing and occupation of Afghanistan, 2001 to the present, and Iraq, 2003 to the present * the bombings and continuous firing of missiles to assassinate individuals in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Libya during the period of 2006-2011 It can't be repeated or emphasized enough. The biggest lie of the "war on terrorism", although weakening, is that the targets of America's attacks have an irrational hatred of the United States and its way of life, based on religious and cultural misunderstandings and envy. The large body of evidence to the contrary includes a 2004 report from the Defense Science Board, "a Federal advisory committee established to provide independent advice to the Secretary of Defense." The report states: "Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing, support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy." The report concludes: "No public relations campaign can save America from flawed policies." (Christian Science Monitor, November 29, 2004) The Pentagon released the study after the New York Times ran a story about it on November 24, 2004. The Times reported that although the board's report does not constitute official government policy, it captures "the essential themes of a debate that is now roiling not just the Defense Department but the entire United States government." "Homeland security is a rightwing concept fostered following 9/11 as the answer to the effects of 50 years of bad foreign policies in the middle east. The amount of homeland security we actually need is inversely related to how good our foreign policy is." ? Sam Smith, editor of The Progressive Review The lies that will not die In his September 22 address at the United Nations, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad mentioned the Nazi Holocaust just twice: "Some European countries still use the Holocaust, after six decades, as the excuse to pay fines or ransom to the Zionists." "They threaten anyone who questions the Holocaust and the September 11 event with sanctions and military action." That was it. By the term "questions the Holocaust" the Iranian president has made clear repeatedly over the years what he's referring to. He has commented about the peculiarity and injustice of a tragedy which took place in Europe resulting in a state for the Jews in the Middle East instead of in Europe. Why are the Palestinians paying a price for a German crime? he asks. And he has questioned the figure of six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany, as have many historians and others of all political stripes who think the total was probably less. This has nothing to do with the Holocaust not taking place. But, as usual, the Western media pretends that it doesn't understand. The New York Post (September 22) referred to the Iranian president as "the world's foremost Holocaust denier, the would-be genocidist Ahmadinejad". Agence France Presse (September 22) stated: "The Iranian leader repeated comments casting doubt on the origins of the Holocaust." The Washington Post wrote of "Ahmadinejad's speech suggesting larger conspiracies were behind the Holocaust and the Sept. 11 attacks caused delegates to walk out." (September 23) And Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! (September 23) included this amongst the radio program's news headlines: "For the third straight year, Ahmadinejad sent delegates to the exits after questioning the Nazi Holocaust." Without further explanation of that incendiary term ? and none was given ? what can "questioning the Nazi Holocaust" mean or imply to most listeners other than that Ahmadinejad was questioning whether the Holocaust had actually taken place? Once again I must point out that I have yet to read of Ahmadinejad ever saying simply, clearly, unambiguously, and unequivocally that he thinks that what we know as the Holocaust never happened. For the record, in a speech at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, in reply to a question about the Holocaust, the Iranian president declared: "I'm not saying that it didn't happen at all. This is not the judgment that I'm passing here." Indeed, I do not know if any of the so-called "Holocaust-deniers" actually, ever, umm, y'know ... deny the Holocaust. They question certain aspects of the Holocaust history that's been handed down to us, but they don't explicitly say that what we know as the Holocaust never took place. (Yes, I'm sure you can find at least one nut-case somewhere.) Another enduring lie about Ahmadinejad is that he has called for violence against Israel: His 2005 remark re "wiping Israel off the map", besides being a very questionable translation, has been seriously misinterpreted, as evidenced by the fact that the following year he declared: "The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon, the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom." (Associated Press, December 12, 2006) Obviously, the man was not calling for any kind of violent attack upon Israel, for the dissolution of the Soviet Union took place peacefully. Carl Oglesby The president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 1965-66, died September 13, age 76. I remember him best for a speech of his I heard during the March on Washington, November 27, 1965, a speech passionately received by the tens of thousands crowding the National Mall: The original commitment in Vietnam was made by President Truman, a mainstream liberal. It was seconded by President Eisenhower, a moderate liberal. It was intensified by the late President Kennedy, a flaming liberal. Think of the men who now engineer that war ? those who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead: Bundy, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, Goldberg, the President [Johnson] himself. They are not moral monsters. They are all honorable men. They are all liberals. He insisted that America's founding fathers would have been on his side. "Our dead revolutionaries would soon wonder why their country was fighting against what appeared to be a revolution." He challenged those who called him anti-American: "I say, don't blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart." We are dealing now with a colossus that does not want to be changed. It will not change itself. It will not cooperate with those who want to change it. Those allies of ours in the government ? are they really our allies? If they are, then they don't need advice, they need constituencies; they don't need study groups, they need a movement. And if they are not [our allies], then all the more reason for building that movement with the most relentless conviction. It saddens me to think that virtually nothing has changed for the better in US foreign policy since Carl Oglesby spoke on the Mall that day. America's wars are ongoing, perpetual, eternal. And the current war monger in the White House is regarded by many as a liberal, for whatever that's worth. "We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality," war correspondent Michael Herr recalled about the US military in Vietnam. "Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop." Items of interest from a journal I've kept for 40 years, part V * A Bush administration regulation on Sept. 30, 2004 said Americans cannot buy or smoke Cuban cigars even in countries where the cigars are legal, such as Canada, Mexico, Europe, indeed most of the world. The same goes for Havana Club rum and other Cuban products. * April 26th, 2007 posting from the courageous but anonymous Iraqi woman who has, since August 2003, published the indispensable blog Baghdad Burning. Her family, she reported, was finally giving up and going into exile. In her final dispatch, she wrote: "There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends. ... And to what?" * "God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist." ? John LeCarre (London Times, January 15, 2003) * Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq admonished his troops regarding the results of an Army survey that found that many U.S. military personnel there are willing to tolerate some torture of suspects and unwilling to report abuse by comrades. "This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we ? not our enemies ? occupy the moral high ground," he wrote in an open letter dated May 10 and posted on a military Web site. (Washington Post, May 11, 2007) * "To most of its citizens, America is exceptional, and it's only natural that it should take exception to certain international standards." ? Michael Ignatieff, former Canadian politician and Washington Post columnist * It is easy to understand an observation by one of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld. After the U.S. invaded Iraq, knowing it to be defenseless, he noted, "Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy." ? Noam Chomsky * "It is easier for an American member of Congress to criticize an American president than to criticize an Israeli Prime Minister; it is easier for them to criticize an unjust and unwarranted US war than one launched by Israel." ? Jeffrey Blankfort * Ken Livingston, Mayor of London, re: his visit to Cuba in 2006: "What really stood out for me was hearing first hand from people working in the medical services just how appalling the US blockade is. When you meet people who are treating eye disorders and blindness on a huge scale and they describe how difficult it is to get the equipment they need except through indirect routes because of the blockade you get a feel for the scale of the injustice that is being imposed on Cuba." Livingston might have added that the "indirect routes", even if available, are much more expensive. * In 1965 when UN Secretary-General U Thant tried to open back-channel ties to the North Vietnamese, US Secretary of State Dean Rusk called him off by shouting: "Who do you think you are, a country?" (Washington Post BookWorld, January 7, 2007) * George W. Bush: "Years from now when America looks out on a democratic Middle East, growing in freedom and prosperity, Americans will speak of the battles like Fallujah with the same awe and reverence that we now give to Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima" in World War II. (Associated Press, November 11, 2006) * The National Endowment for Democracy was US Government initiated, and although ostensibly "independent," has been continually funded by the US Congress, and its Board has included top level actors in the US Government's foreign policy apparatus, including former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, former National Security Council Chair Zbigniew Brzezinski, and former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz. * CBS News, September 9, 2006: Senator Jay Rockefeller says the world would be better off today if the United States had never invaded Iraq. Does Rockefeller stand by his view, even if it means that Saddam Hussein could still be in power if the United States didn't invade? "Yes. Yes." says Rockefeller. "He wasn't going to attack us." * William Appleman Williams, in his 2007 book "Empire as a way of life": Analyzing US history from its revolutionary origins to the dawn of the Reagan era, Williams shows how America has always been addicted to empire in its foreign and domestic ideology. Detailing the imperial actions and beliefs of revered figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this book is the most in-depth historical study of the American obsession with empire, and is essential to understanding the origins of our current foreign and domestic undertakings. * Compare Washington's reaction in recent years to popular uprisings alleging electoral fraud in the Ukraine and Georgia to its reaction to the same in Mexico in 2006 when the rightwing Felipe Calderon was declared the winner in a very questionable manner. * Venezuelan President Hugo Ch?vez, in his talk at the United Nations, September 20, 2006, sharply criticized US president George W. Bush's foreign policies and Bush himself. Britain's Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett suggested that the Ch?vez comments were beyond the pale of diplomatic protocol at the UN. "Even the Democrats wouldn't say that". However, the Guardian reported that "Delegates and leaders from around the world streamed back into the chamber to hear Mr Ch?vez, and when he stepped down the vigorous applause lasted so long that it had to be curtailed by the chair." * Only the imperialist powers have the ability to enforce sanctions and are therefore always exempt from them. ? William Blum is the author of: * Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2 * Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower * West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir * Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website. To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 [at] aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area. (Or put "remove" in the subject line to do the opposite.) Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission. I'd appreciate it if the website were mentioned. Home From ths at psalience.org Thu Oct 6 00:50:15 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:50:15 +0200 Subject: [THS] !!!!! Economics is a Physics Problem Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111006004603.03fe6bf0@mail.messagingengine.com> Nov. 22, 2009 - In a provocative new study, a University of Utah scientist argues that rising carbon dioxide emissions - the major cause of global warming - cannot be stabilized unless the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day. "It looks unlikely that there will be any substantial near-term departure from recently observed acceleration in carbon dioxide emission rates," says the new paper by Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences. Garrett's study was panned by some economists and rejected by several journals before acceptance by Climatic Change, a journal edited by renowned Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider. The study will be published online this week. The study - which is based on the concept that physics can be used to characterize the evolution of civilization - indicates: Energy conservation or efficiency doesn't really save energy, but instead spurs economic growth and accelerated energy consumption. Throughout history, a simple physical "constant" - an unchanging mathematical value - links global energy use to the world's accumulated economic productivity, adjusted for inflation. So it isn't necessary to consider population growth and standard of living in predicting society's future energy consumption and resulting carbon dioxide emissions. "Stabilization of carbon dioxide emissions at current rates will require approximately 300 gigawatts of new non-carbon-dioxide-emit ting power production capacity annually - approximately one new nuclear power plant (or equivalent) per day," Garrett says. "Physically, there are no other options without killing the economy." Getting Heat for Viewing Civilization as a "Heat Engine" Garrett says colleagues generally support his theory, while some economists are critical. One economist, who reviewed the study, wrote: "I am afraid the author will need to study harder before he can contribute." "I'm not an economist, and I am approaching the economy as a physics problem," Garrett says. "I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have." Garrett treats civilization like a "heat engine" that "consumes energy and does 'work' in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy," he says. "If society consumed no energy, civilization would be worthless," he adds. "It is only by consuming energy that civilization is able to maintain the activities that give it economic value. This means that if we ever start to run out of energy, then the value of civilization is going to fall and even collapse absent discovery of new energy sources." Garrett says his study's key finding "is that accumulated economic production over the course of history has been tied to the rate of energy consumption at a global level through a constant factor." That "constant" is 9.7 (plus or minus 0.3) milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar. So if you look at economic and energy production at any specific time in history, "each inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar would be supported by 9.7 milliwatts of primary energy consumption," Garrett says. Garrett tested his theory and found this constant relationship between energy use and economic production at any given time by using United Nations statistics for global GDP (gross domestic product), U.S. Department of Energy data on global energy consumption during1970-2005, and previous studies that estimated global eco nomic production as long as 2,000 years ago. Then he investigated the implications for carbon dioxide emissions. "Economists think you need population and standard of living to estimate productivity," he says. "In my model, all you need to know is how fast energy consumption is rising. The reason why is because there is this link between the economy and rates of energy consumption, and it's just a constant factor." Garrett adds: "By finding this constant factor, the problem of [forecasting] global economic growth is dramatically simpler. There is no need to consider population growth and changes in standard of living because they are marching to the tune of the availability of energy supplies." To Garrett, that means the acceleration of carbon dioxide emissions is unlikely to change soon because our energy use today is tied to society's past economic productivity. "Viewed from this perspective, civilization evolves in a spontaneous feedback loop maintained only by energy consumption and incorporation of environmental matter," Garrett says. It is like a child that "grows by consuming food, and when the child grows, it is able to consume more food, which enables it to grow more." Is Meaningful Energy Conservation Impossible? Perhaps the most provocative implication of Garrett's theory is that conserving energy doesn't reduce energy use, but spurs economic growth and more energy use. "Making civilization more energy efficient simply allows it to grow faster and consume more energy," says Garrett. He says the idea that resource conservation accelerates resource consumption - known as Jevons paradox - was proposed in the 1865 book "The Coal Question" by William Stanley Jevons, who noted that coal prices fell and coal consumption soared after improvements in steam engine efficiency. So is Garrett arguing that conserving energy doesn't matter? "I'm just saying it's not really possible to conserve energy in a meaningful way because the current rate of energy consumption is determined by the unchangeable past of economic production. If it feels good to conserve energy, that is fine, but there shouldn't be any pretense that it will make a difference." Yet, Garrett says his findings contradict his own previously held beliefs about conservation, and he continues to ride a bike or bus to work, line dry family clothing and use a push lawnmower. An Inevitable Future for Carbon Dioxide Emissions? Garrett says often-discussed strategies for slowing carbon dioxide emissions and global warming include mention increased energy efficiency, reduced population growth and a switch to power sources that don't emit carbon dioxide, including nuclear, wind and solar energy and underground storage of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning. Another strategy is rarely mentioned: a decreased standard of living, which would occur if energy supplies ran short and the economy collapsed, he adds. "Fundamentally, I believe the system is deterministic," says Garrett. "Changes in population and standard of living are only a function of the current energy efficiency. That leaves only switching to a non-carbon-dioxide-emitting power source as an available option." "The problem is that, in order to stabilize emissions, not even reduce them, we have to switch to non-carbonized energy sources at a rate about 2.1 percent per year. That comes out to almost one new nuclear power plant per day." "If society invests sufficient resources into alternative and new, non-carbon energy supplies, then perhaps it can continue growing without increasing global warming," Garrett says. Does Garrett fear global warming deniers will use his work to justify inaction? "No," he says. "Ultimately, it's not clear that policy decisions have the capacity to change the future course of civilization." http://unews.utah.edu/old/p/112009-1.html Full study at http://www.springerlink.com/content/9476j57g1t07vhn2/fulltext.pdf From ths at psalience.org Thu Oct 6 00:56:23 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:56:23 +0200 Subject: [THS] Canadian ice shelves halve in six years Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111006005300.047c46f8@mail.messagingengine.com> Canadian ice shelves halve in six years September 29th, 2011 in Space & Earth / Environment Half of Canada's ancient ice shelves have disappeared in the last six years, researchers have said, with new data showing significant portions melted in the last year alone. The rate at which ice melts is seen by climate scientists as an indicator of the pace of global warming. Satellite images released by researchers from Carleton University in Ottawa show that most of the Serson Ice Shelf broke away during the Canadian summer this year. The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf split into two separate pieces during the Canadian summer this year, the images show. This ice lost during the Canadian summer this year equals up to three billion tonnes or about 500 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza, a statement released by the university said. [ illustrations at original: "Canadian ice shelves halve in six years." September 29th, 2011. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-canadian-ice-shelves-halve-sixyears.html ] Serson Ice Shelf on March 19, 2011 (red) before Canadian summer 2011 break-up. Serson A is a floating glacier tongue (south) and Serson B is composed of thick, ancient sea ice (north). Blue denotes the coast of Ellesmere Island. Radarsat-2 fine beam imagery ? MDA 2011, Distribution licensed by MDA-GSI for the SOAR program Canadian ice shelves halve in six yearsSerson Ice Shelf on September 23, 2011 (red) following Canadian summer 2011 break-up. Serson A is a floating glacier tongue (south) and Serson B is composed of thick, ancient sea ice (north). Blue denotes the coast of Ellesmere Island Radarsat-2 fine beam imagery. Credit: MDA 2011 ?Since the end of July, pieces equaling one and a half times the size of Manhattan Island have broken off,? said Luke Copland, researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of Ottawa. Oil rigs in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas may be at risk from large icebergs that broke off the shelf and are now floating south, he said. Assistant Professor Derek Mueller, a researcher in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, said that Canadian ice shelves had halved in size since 2005. ?The ice shelves were formed and sustained in a different climate than what we have now. As they disappear, it implies we are returning to conditions unseen in the Arctic for thousands of years,? he said. Professor Steven Sherwood, Co-Director of the University of NSW?s Climate Change Research Centre, said the rapid pace of melting showed that recent global warming was unnatural. ?The real significance of this, in my view, is that this ice has reportedly been there for thousands of years. The same is true of glaciers that have recently disappeared in the Andes. These observations should dispel in one fell swoop any notion that recent global warming could be natural,? he said. From ths at psalience.org Thu Oct 6 13:59:20 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 13:59:20 +0200 Subject: [THS] Live from Occupy Wall Street: Video Stream - Chat - Twitter Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111006135901.045229d8@mail.messagingengine.com> Live from Occupy Wall Street Video Stream - Chat - Twitter This channel will feature live streams from global non violent revolution spreading across the globe, with broadcasts from Wall Street Occupation in NYC. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29304.htm From ths at psalience.org Thu Oct 6 14:22:37 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:22:37 +0200 Subject: [THS] Ron Paul: US Could Target Journalists For Killing Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111006142035.04cad680@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29315.htm [as I recall, US troops have already killed some journalists, notably Al Jazeera's in Irak, firing on the journalists' hotel, bombing Al Jazeera headqwuarters...-ths] Ron Paul: US Could Target Journalists For Killing By The Associated Press October 05, 2011 "AP" -- Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is warning that the United States could kill journalists in the same manner it targets terrorists. The Texas congressman said Wednesday that it's not a far leap from the United States killing suspected terrorists in Yemen to targeting reporters at home. Paul says President Barack Obama was wrong to approve the killing of two American citizens who had become central figures in al-Qaida. He warns that the United States could go further as it ignores civil rights and due process. Paul says that the U.S. cannot let the deaths of Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Kahn go without protest, otherwise the country will start adding reporters to its list of threats that must be taken out. From ths at psalience.org Thu Oct 6 14:28:48 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:28:48 +0200 Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?Ray_McGovern=3A_Israel=92s_Window_to_Bomb_Ir?= =?iso-8859-1?q?an?= Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111006142811.04cada70@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29291.htm Israel?s Window to Bomb Iran By Ray McGovern October 04, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- There are mounting signs that the right-wing Israeli government may think the timing is right for an attack on Iran, with growing alarms inside Israel about alleged Iranian progress on building a nuclear bomb ? and with President Barack Obama fearing loss of key Jewish political support in 2012 if he doesn?t go along. On Sept. 26, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated Iran?s alleged progress, telling interviewer Charlie Rose that ?time is short? before Iran obtains nuclear weapons and poses a direct threat to Israel and the rest of the world. Yet, the key factor in any Israeli decision to send its aircraft and missiles to Iran is the degree to which Netanyahu and other hard-line Likud leaders believe that President Obama is locked into giving blanket support to Israel ? particularly as Election 2012 draws near. The Israelis might well conclude that the formidable effectiveness of the Likud Lobby and kneejerk support of the U.S. Congress as well as still powerful neoconservatives in the Executive Branch (and on the opinion pages of major American newspapers) amount to solid assurance of automatic support for pretty much anything Israel decides to do. If Israel translates this into a green light to attack Iran, the rest of the world ? even Washington ? may get little or no warning. Netanyahu and his associates would presumably be reluctant to give Obama the kind of advance notice that might allow him to consult some adult political and military advisers and thus give him a chance to try to spike Israeli plans. Consequences of blindsiding? There would be a strong argument in Tel Aviv that past precedent amply demonstrates that there are few if any consequences for blindsiding Obama on Israeli actions. There is also the precedent of how an earlier generation of Likud leaders reacted to a possible second term by a Democratic president who was suspected of having less than total loyalty to Israel. In 1980, Prime Minister Menachem Begin was angered by President Jimmy Carter?s pressure that had forced Israel to surrender the Sinai in exchange for a peace treaty with Egypt. Begin made clear to his followers at home and abroad that Carter, if freed from the political pressure of facing reelection, might push Israel into accepting a Palestinian state. So, Begin quietly shifted Israel?s political support to Republican Ronald Reagan, helping to ensure Carter?s lopsided defeat. Similarly, some Israeli hard-liners suspect that Obama in a second term might be liberated from his fear of Israeli political retaliation and thus renew pressure on Netanyahu to halt Jewish settlements in the occupied territory of Palestine and to reach a true accommodation with the Palestinians. Under this analysis, a second-term Obama might add to Israel?s growing isolation in the Middle East, which even Defense Secretary Leon Panetta noted Sunday, telling reporters that Israel must restart negotiations with the Palestinians and work to restore relations with Egypt and Turkey. ?Is it enough to maintain a military edge if you?re isolating yourself in the diplomatic arena?? Panetta asked. ?And that?s what?s happening.? A Very Bad Year Indeed, 2011 has been the worst year in recent memory for Israel, ushering in a highly unfavorable sea change in its strategic position. Israel has lost the support of formerly friendly governments in Egypt and Turkey and finds itself increasingly isolated internationally, as the occupation of Palestinian territory begins its 45th year and the plight of the Palestinian people garners more and more attention ? and sympathy. As Netanyahu and his right-wing advisers look at the new constellation of stars, it is a safe bet they discern an imperative to readjust them in Israel?s favor. But, by attacking Iran? Okay, I know it sounds crazy. It is crazy. The question, however, is whether it sounds crazy to Israel?s leaders, accustomed as they are to a reality in which the tail can wag a large dog at will. Besides, the Israelis are sounding increasingly desperate and the notion of attacking Iran and involving the U.S. might well be seen by desperate leaders as a way to stem further erosion of their strategic position ? or at least to show they still have a very powerful supporter. In my view, an attack on Iran would have a two-fold purpose: (1) to set back Iran?s nuclear development program and infrastructure, and (2) to mousetrap Washington into an even closer military relationship with Israel. Let?s put some context around these one by one. First, the bugaboo about an Iranian nuclear weapon. Let me say at the outset that I could readily believe that Iran is working on a nuclear weapon. There are all sorts of reasons why one could understand Tehran seeing this as a reasonable course of action. (As has been pointed out, Iraq had no nukes and we know what happened to it; North Korea has a handful of nukes and we know what did not happen to it.) Trouble is, it doesn?t matter what I ? or anyone else ? might believe. For substantive analysts faith-based analysis is not an option (or, at least, it didn?t use to be). Empirical evidence is the coin of the realm for us. Unlike Israel, which has refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty and has some 200 to 300 nuclear weapons, Iran did sign the NPT and insists it has no interest in nuclear weapons, only enriched uranium for medical research and energy. Unlike Israel, Iran has allowed UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors in to verify compliance with its commitment not to build nukes. Still, there continue to be ?beliefs,? and suspicions that Iran, for example, may be laying the groundwork for an eventual break-out capability, and Tehran has not always fulfilled all its obligations under the safeguards regime. Yet, despite the spin often applied to IAEA reports by the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) and particularly The New York Times, the IAEA has never detected the diversion of enriched uranium from declared sites for the purpose of building a nuclear weapon. That is fact. Intelligence Analysts Thwart War Beyond that inconvenient truth, some other recent history may be worth bearing in mind. In 2007, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, with full-throated support from Israel and the FCM, were drumming up support for countering what they claimed was Iran?s determination to build a nuclear weapon. On Oct. 22, 2007, the Israeli Ambassador to the United States insisted publicly that ?very little time? remained to keep Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Really? Even were there to have been a nuclear program hidden from the IAEA, no serious observer expected Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon until several years later. Actually, truth be told, every other year since 1995 U.S. intelligence had been predicting that Iran could have a nuclear weapon in about five years. It became downright embarrassing ? like a broken record. The repetition was punctuated by the likes of former CIA Director James Woolsey, a dyed-in-the-wool neocon who kept warning that the U.S. may have no choice but to bomb Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program. In mid-2006, Woolsey, who has called himself the ?anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,? put it this way: ?I?m afraid that within, well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they [the Iranians] could have the bomb.? That was five years ago. The Russians Get It Right In early October 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin, unencumbered by the Likud Lobby which enforces Washington?s neocon-dominated ?group think,? publicly mocked the ?evidence? that had been adduced to show that Iran intended to make nuclear weapons. Then, during a visit to Iran on Oct. 16, 2007, Putin sprinkled salt on the wounds of ?bomb-Iran? neoconservatives; he warned, ?Not only should we reject the use of force, but also the mention of force as a possibility.? This brought an interesting outburst from President Bush the next day at a press conference. Q. ?Mr. President, I?d like to follow on Mr. ? on President Putin?s visit to Tehran about the words that Vladimir Putin said there. He issued a stern warning against potential U.S. military action against Tehran. Were you disappointed with [Putin?s] message?? Bush: ?I ? as I say, I look forward to ? if those are, in fact, his comments, I look forward to having him clarify those. And so I will visit with him about it.? Q. ?But you definitively believe Iran wants to build a nuclear weapon?? Bush: ?I think so long ? until they suspend and/or make it clear that they ? that their statements aren?t real, yes, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon. And I know it?s in the world?s interest to prevent them from doing so. I believe that the Iranian ? if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace. ?But this is ? we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I?ve told people that if you?re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously.? Honest Intelligence Just weeks later in November 2007, the U.S. intelligence community completed a formal National Intelligence Estimate in the best tradition of speaking truth to power. The NIE was the fruit of a bottom-up investigation of all evidence over the years on Iran?s nuclear activities and plans. But the NIE?s conclusions bore no resemblance to what Bush, Cheney, their Israeli counterparts and the FCM had been claiming about the imminence of a nuclear threat from Iran. The following is from the paragraph introducing the Key Judgments of the NIE of November 2007 that headed off war with Iran: ?A. We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program; we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. ?Tehran?s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005. Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.? Having reached these conclusions, it is not surprising that the NIE?s authors make a point of saying up front (in bold type) ?This NIE does not (italics in original) assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons.? There being no guarantee that, even with an honest Estimate, reason would prevail in the White House, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen and other senior officers like CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon took the unusual step of insisting that the Estimate?s key judgments be declassified and made public. They calculated, correctly, that this would put an iron rod into the wheels of the juggernaut then rolling toward a fresh disaster ? war with Iran. Recall that Adm. Fallon, who became CENTCOM commander in March 2007, let the press know that there would be no attack on Iran ?on my watch.? He was fired in March 2008. His senior military colleagues, while not as outspoken as Fallon, shared his disdain for the dangerously simplistic views of Bush and Cheney on the use of military power. Bush and Cheney Aghast What is perhaps most surprising is the disarming (if that is the correct word) candor with which George W. Bush has explained his chagrin at learning of the unanimous judgment of the intelligence community that Iran had not been working on a nuclear weapon since late 2003. Bush lets it all hang out in his memoir Decision Points. Were one to assume that he and Cheney were genuinely worried about a threat from Iran, a long sigh of relief ? or at least some follow-up questions ? might have been reasonably expected in reaction to the NIE?s judgment. Instead, Bush complains revealingly that the NIE ?tied my hands on the military side,? noting that the NIE opened with the ?eye-popping? high-confidence finding that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003. The former president adds that the ?NIE?s conclusion was so stunning that I felt it would immediately leak to the press.? He writes that he authorized declassification of the key findings ?so that we could shape the news stories with the facts.? Facts? Sure. New and different ?facts.? Did not the experience on Iraq prove that the ?intelligence and facts? could be ?fixed around the policy,? as the famous Downing Street Memo of July 23, 2002, put it regarding the need for the U.S. and U.K. to cook the intelligence and facts to ?justify? attacking Iraq? On Iran, though, a crestfallen Bush writes, ?The backlash was immediate. [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad hailed the NIE as a ?great victory.?? Bush?s apparent ?logic? here is to use the widespread disdain for Ahmadinejad to discredit the NIE through association, i.e. whatever Ahmadinejad praises must be false. But can you blame Bush for his chagrin? Alas, the NIE had knocked out the props from under the anti-Iran propaganda machine, imported duty-free from Israel and tuned up by neoconservatives here at home. How embarrassing. Here before the world were the key judgments of an NIE, the most authoritative genre of intelligence report, unanimously approved ?with high confidence? by all 16 intelligence agencies and signed by the Director of National Intelligence, saying, in effect, that Bush and Cheney had been lying about the nuclear threat from Iran. Quid Est Veritas? In his memoir, Bush laments: ?I don?t know why the NIE was written the way it was. Whatever the explanation, the NIE had a big impact ? and not a good one.? Spelling out how the Estimate had tied his hands ?on the military side,? Bush included this (apparently unedited) kicker: ?But after the NIE, how could I possible explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?? Well, bummer! Thankfully, not even Dick Cheney could persuade Bush to repair the propaganda juggernaut and let it loose for war on Iran. The avuncular Cheney has made it clear that he was very disappointed in his prot?g?. On Aug. 30, 2009, he told ?Fox News Sunday? that he was isolated among Bush advisers in his enthusiasm for war with Iran. ?I was probably a bigger advocate of military action than any of my colleagues,? Cheney said when asked whether the Bush administration should have launched a pre-emptive attack on Iran before leaving office. And it is entirely possible that the Iran-war juggernaut would have been repaired and turned loose anyway, were it not for strong opposition by the top military brass who convinced Bush that Cheney, his neocon friends and the Israeli leaders had no idea of the chaos that war with Iran would bring. Regrettably, Adm. Mullen just retired, and Adm. Fallon was fired in 2008 for speaking truth. It is far from clear that their replacements will be as able to act as counterweight to the neocons who continue to wield extraordinary influence in Official Washington. For the record, despite the periodic alarums being raised among the usual suspects about the growing danger from Iran, U.S. intelligence analysts and top officials, to their credit, have continued to play it straight, so far as I can tell. Although they have pretty much worn out the subjunctive mood in their testimony to Congress, the bottom line is that there is no new intelligence information that would warrant significant change in the judgments of the NIE of November 2007. There is still no intelligence to ?justify? a preventive attack on Iran (as if preventive attacks are ever justified under international law). And this time senior intelligence officials should be called to testify under oath about the evidence and analytical conclusions, before Israel gets the U.S. embroiled in another catastrophic war that would make Iraq and Afghanistan look like a skirmish. Mousetrapping the President I promised, so many paragraphs ago, to address how Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu might see an attack on Iran as ?mousetrapping? Washington into an even closer military relationship with Israel. My own sense is that, despite his recent bravura performance in Washington? which included a speech to a joint session of Congress in which Republicans and Democrats competed to see who could jump to their feet fastest and applaud the loudest at every phrase uttered by the Israeli prime minister ? Netanyahu is running scared. I believe he thinks he needs the U.S. now more than ever. And on that I would have to agree. This shone through his answers to David Gregory of NBC?s ?Meet the Press? on Sept. 25. Gregory could hardly get a word in edgewise, but that was good in a way, since a loquacious Netanyahu provided ample grist for analysis. The Prime Minister seemed to be reaching ? and came across, at least to me, as defensive: GREGORY: ?Israel is arguably as isolated as it?s ever been in the midst of Arab spring. Turkey has turned against you, the Arab world has moved away from dictators who supported Israel, had peace treaties with Israel, and is now more negative towards Israel. In this day and age, at this particular moment, despite Israel?s well-known and substantial security concerns, how can you occupy Palestinian territory at this moment?? NETANYAHU: ?Well, you?ve got two assumptions in your questions, and I want to parse out and actually suggest that they?re wrong. The first one is that we?re isolated. Well, we?re not isolated in this country, which happens to be the strongest country on earth. ?I walked yesterday in the ? in, in Central Park. You know, people met me. Jewish-Americans, but many non-Jewish-Americans and they said, ?Keep the faith. We?re strong. Be strong. We?re with you.? ?A former lieutenant colonel in the Marines who?s now a teacher met me in a restaurant in New Jersey, great view of the United ? of New York City. He said, ?We?re with you all the way. Stay strong.? A New York NYPD policeman, he says, ?I?m not Jewish. We support you. Stay strong.? America supports Israel in unparalleled way, unprecedented ways, number one. ?Every one of the U.S. presidents represents and acts on the tremendous innate friendship of the American people to Israel. And by the way, a piece of news, Israel is the one country in which everyone is pro-American, opposition and coalition alike. ?And I represent the entire people of Israel who say, ?Thank you, America.? And we?re friends of America, and we?re the only reliable allies of America in the Middle East.? However, there can be little doubt with Israel?s loss of key allies in Turkey and Egypt that its strategic position in the region is more tenuous than it has been in recent memory. Grassroots movements are also taking root in America showing sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, even if Official Washington continues to march in lockstep behind Netanyahu. Yet what matters most, in my view, is how Netanyahu and his associates read Obama; specifically, how afraid is he of diverging one iota from the pro-Israel stance he has adopted. There is quite enough evidence they feel he is putty in their hands, and it is hardly necessary to rehearse that here. Let me instead try to draw a lesson from my experience last summer as a passenger on the U.S. Boat to Gaza, ?The Audacity of Hope.? Activism Exposes Cowardice When we made a break from Greece for the high seas on July 1, it was a mere 33 minutes before a Greek Coast Guard boat intercepted us. After a standoff of well over an hour, black-clad, black-masked commandos showed up in a black rubber boat, climbed onto the Coast Guard boat, and pointed their machine guns at us. It was more than a little bizarre: not one of us 37 passengers, 12 media journalists, or five crew flinched, much less hit the deck. When our captain discerned that his delaying tactics would not prevent us from being boarded, he acquiesced to the Greek Coast Guard orders to return to Piraeus, where ?The Audacity of Hope? was (and is still) impounded. We later learned that on that same day, the government of Greece issued a directive without precedent in that legendary seafaring nation. The order prohibited any boat from leaving Greek ports bound for Gaza. It was clear that the Israeli government was pressuring Athens, in private and in public, to stop the ten boats of this year?s flotilla from setting out for Gaza. It is unlikely, though, that Israel alone would have been able to reverse four millennia of Greek history and embarrass the Greeks so pointedly. It became obvious to me that it was Washington that brought the most decisive pressure to bear on the Greeks. Why? In short, because Obama has far more influence with Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou than with Netanyahu. And this, despite the $3 billion the U.S. gives Israel every year. Before leaving the United States, I was cautioned by a source with access to senior staffers at the National Security Council that not only did the White House plan to do absolutely nothing to protect our boat from Israeli attack or boarding, but that White House officials ?would be happy if something happened to us.? The way this happy message was phrased was that NSC officials would be ?perfectly willing to have the cold corpses of activists shown on American TV.? Former UK Ambassador Craig Murray was told essentially the same thing by former colleagues reporting what they had learned from senior State Department officials. In other words, senior national security and foreign policy officials in Washington were claiming they viewed with equanimity the possibility that we would meet the same type of welcome given by the Israeli Navy to last year?s flotilla to Gaza ? though, on sober reflection, it appears to me that the Obama administration?s preferred outcome was that we simply be bottled up in Greece. In last year?s attempt to break the Gaza blockade, Israeli commandos attacked the flotilla on the early morning of May 31, 2010, in international waters. The commandos killed eight Turkish civilians and a 19-year-old American, Furkan Dogan. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan protested ? and Turkey continues to demand an Israeli apology, compensation, and an end to the blockade of Gaza. In contrast, not a whimper came from President Obama. Actually, it gets worse. The White House and State Department did their level best to duck any responsibility to protect American citizens; instead, Official Washington spread the erroneous notion that Dogan was not a red-white-and blue American but rather some sort of hybrid ?Turkish-American.? They knew that was incorrect. He was born in Troy, New York; he never applied for Turkish citizenship. Blockade?s Legality As for the legality of the Israeli blockade, happily, there remain at the State Department some sticklers for international law, apparently with the courage to quit loudly if State were to give its blessings to the outlandish notion that the Israeli blockade is legal. There are enough recalcitrant professionals ? experts on the Law of the Sea and international conventions ? to put their weight down behind the notion that all countries, Israel included, should abide by those laws. Thankfully, their professionalism prevented even further embarrassment from U.S. behavior vis-?-vis international law. That stubborn professionalism may account for one of the most bizarre State Department press conference I have seen. On June 24, AP reporter Matt Lee and some of his colleagues decided to be more matter-of-fact than diplomatic with State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, the wife of Robert Kagan, a neoconservative national security adviser to Vice President Cheney from 2003 to 2005 (and now a Washington Post columnist). Asked directly, three times, whether the U.S. government considers the Israeli blockade of Gaza legal, Ms. Nuland would give no answer. ?I am not a Law of the Sea expert,? she insisted (four times). Her talking points were that the U.S. Boat to Gaza should not be a ?repeat of what happened last year? (four times). As though last year?s flotilla was responsible for the attacks by Israeli naval commandos and this year?s flotilla would be considered responsible as well. It seems likely that, however discreet we passengers on ?The Audacity of Hope? tried to be with our messaging, U.S. officials became aware that we were on the verge of making a break for the high seas and Gaza (damn the torpedoes and commandos). What seems clear in retrospect is that, whereas macho officials at State and the NSC would have been comfortable, as they claimed, seeing our cold corpses on U.S. TV, Obama had the presence of mind to consult his handful of adult advisers who understood that something had to be done ? and quickly ? since a PR disaster was in the making. An attack on a U.S.-registered boat endangering us passengers, including author Alice Walker (not to mention the journalists on board from The New York Times, CBS, CNN, Democracynow.org, et al.) was to be avoided at all costs. Mr. Milquetoast himself could not match Obama in pandering to the Israelis. That said, the President does try to keep to a minimum those times when it is acutely embarrassing to defend the kind of Israeli behavior the rest of the world finds heinous. If there were a ?repeat of what happened last year,? it would prove more difficult this time to avoid criticizing Israel (though, when push came to shove, Obama could probably summon the political ?courage? to remain silent again). However, if President Obama could not summon up the courage to ask Prime Minister Netanyahu to ensure safe passage for ?The Audacity of Hope,? that display of timidity would not be lost on the Israeli leaders; one can imagine them being amused by it. But if he did ask Netanyahu, Obama apparently received the gesture that seems to have become Netanyahu?s trademark in reacting to entreaties from Washington (right thumb on nose, fingers flapping). In that case, Obama would have been forced to recognize that his influence with Netanyahu is nil, and rather than risk a dust-up with Israel, the safer course would be to put the screws to the less formidable Greeks to bring us back to shore and keep us there. Fortunately for Obama, considerable leverage was available on Greece since it was in dire economic straits and in need of another fiscal bailout. With bigger fish to fry, so to speak, Greek Prime Minister Papandreou did what he was told and kept us ashore. The middle-level Greek officials, including some of the Coast Guard, whom we encountered, were very apologetic, virtually holding their noses as they forced us to comply. So, put yourself in the position of Netanyahu and his colleagues. Try to see Obama as they do and reflect on the various political equities and strategic considerations mentioned above. If you were Netanyahu, would you worry very much that Obama might get in the way if Israel decided to take a whack at Iran? Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served a total of 30 years as a U.S. Army officer and then a CIA analyst, and is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). This article was first posted at Consortium News From ths at psalience.org Thu Oct 6 14:30:42 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:30:42 +0200 Subject: [THS] The Sad Story of Jose Padilla - Tortured and Denied Justice Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111006142958.0679eeb0@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29294.htm It Could Be You: The Sad Story of Jose Padilla, Tortured and Denied Justice By Andy Worthington October 04, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- For nine and a half years - almost as long as the "war on terror" has been providing an excuse for paranoia about Muslims in general - the case of US citizen Jose Padilla has demonstrated, to those willing to pay attention, that something has gone horribly wrong in the United States of America. A former gang member and a convert to Islam, Padilla was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, in connection with an alleged "dirty bomb plot" that never existed, on May 8, 2002, as he returned from Pakistan. Held for a month as a material witness, he was then designated an "enemy combatant" by President George W. Bush and held in complete isolation in a military brig for the next three and half years - a process that also involved prolonged sensory deprivation. According to the psychiatrist Dr. Angela Hegarty, who spent 22 hours with Padilla in 2006, "What happened at the brig was essentially the destruction of a human being?s mind." In November 2005, fearing that Padilla might successfully challenge the government's argument that it had the right to hold a US citizen indefinitely without charge or trial on the US. mainland and subject him to torture, the Bush administration suddenly indicted Padilla on charges of conspiracy "to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas," and transferred him out of the brig. However, the injustice did not come to an end as the courts took over. The charges against Padilla were based on the Bush administration's claim that, along with alleged facilitators Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, he was part of a Florida-based plot to aid Islamic extremists in holy wars abroad. His trial took place in the summer of 2007. The judge, Marcia Cooke, refused to allow Padilla or his lawyers to make any mention of what had happened in the three and a half years that he was held in a legal black hole. On August 16, 2007, the jury found him guilty, and on January 22, 2008, he received a sentence of 17 years and 4 months. This sentence was in spite of the fact that the conspiracy in which he was reportedly involved had not taken place, and he had been involved in only seven of the hundreds of phone calls between his two co-defendants that had been monitored by the FBI (Hassoun and Jayyousi also received prison sentences). It also came about in spite of the fact that all that could be confirmed of his intent, in physical terms, was his signature on an application form for a military training camp in Afghanistan that he may or may not have actually attended. Padilla appealed his sentence, and so did the Bush administration, whose position - that his sentence was too lenient - was adopted by the Obama administration, which has repeatedly clung to the same position maintained by its predecessor when it comes to "national security" issues involving terrorism. Last week, the latest phase in this alarming saga of paranoia, torture and injustice took place in Florida, when the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit not only backed the government against Padilla, but went so far as to vacate the original sentence, in effect telling the judge that she had been too lenient and that she should revisit her ruling and hand down a much longer sentence. The majority judges in the three-judge panel - the notoriously right-wing judges Joel F. Dubina and William Prior - claimed that Padilla's original sentence was "substantively unreasonable because it does not adequately reflect his criminal history, does not adequately account for his risk of recidivism, was based partly on an impermissible comparison to sentences imposed in other terrorism cases, and was based in part on inappropriate factors." The dissenting judge, Rosemary Barkett, was thoroughly critical of her colleagues' actions, specifically noting that: In reversing Padilla?s sentence, the majority fails to adhere to the principles articulated by the Supreme Court and this Circuit requiring appellate courts to accord the trial judge the "considerable discretion" granted district courts in sentencing and to guard against substituting its judgment for that of the trial judge. Continuing, she referred to a precedent from a 2009 Eleventh Circuit case, in which it was noted: We may vacate a sentence because of the variance only if we are left with the definite and firm conviction that the district court committed a clear error of judgment in weighing the ... factors by arriving at a sentence that lies outside the range of reasonable sentences dictated by the facts of the case. However, that we might reasonably have concluded that a different sentence was appropriate is insufficient to justify reversal. Judge Barkett also took exception to her colleagues' arguments that the trial judge had erred when she refused - as they thought appropriate according to sentencing guidelines - to give Padilla a sentence that was a minimum of 30 years. Spelling out what judicial discretion means, she again referred to the precedent from the Eleventh Circuit in 2009, in which it was noted: The district court must evaluate all of the ... factors when arriving at a sentence, but is permitted to attach great weight to one factor over others. In assessing the factors, the sentencing court should remember that each convicted person is an individual and every case is a unique study in the human failings that sometimes mitigate, sometimes magnify, the crime and the punishment to ensue. Primarily, however, Judge Barkett was concerned to point out that a sentence less than the full maximum could be justified when, as in Padilla's case, "the trial judge correctly concluded that a sentence reduction is available to offenders who have been subjected to extraordinarily harsh conditions of pre-trial confinement." Judge Cooke may have refused to allow any discussion of Padilla's torture in his trial, but she did note that the conditions in which he was held "were so harsh that they warrant consideration," and, as Judge Barkett noted, Padilla had been able to highlight his torture - which was so harrowing that it was not easy to ignore - when he was being sentenced. As she wrote in her dissenting opinion: Padilla presented substantial, detailed, and compelling evidence about the inhumane, cruel, and physically, emotionally, and mentally painful conditions in which he had already been detained for a period of almost four years. For example, he presented evidence at sentencing of being kept in extreme isolation at the military brig in South Carolina where he was subjected to cruel interrogations, prolonged physical and mental pain, extreme environmental stresses, noise and temperature variations, and deprivation of sensory stimuli and sleep. Judge Barkett also highlighted one more area in which her Eleventh Circuit colleagues had crossed a line, in this case with regard to their allegations about his perceived susceptibility to recidivism. Even though, after serving his sentence, Padilla would be "in his mid-fifties," and "subject to a twenty-year term of supervised release," her fellow judges nevertheless concluded that Judge Cooke "erred in determining that Padilla will not pose a high risk of recidivism." Even though there was no evidence to support the judges' fears, and even though they explicitly stated in their opinion that a trial judge is allowed to "find that recidivism generally decreases with age," she noted that the majority "not only rejects that presumption for Padilla, but goes one step further and decides that trial judges may no longer consider, for anyone convicted of a terrorism-related offense, the likelihood that the risk of recidivism will decrease with age." Judge Barkett's dissenting opinion was important, but, unfortunately, it did nothing to stem the institutionalized paranoia and injustice that has plagued Padilla since he was imprisoned as an "enemy combatant" in May 2002. I have never understood how so many Americans accepted the torture of Padilla - an American citizen on US soil, and not even a foreigner held at Guant?namo - without recognizing that, although a Latino Muslim convert was today's "enemy combatant," tomorrow it might be some other demonized American. I was also astonished when no one cared that Padilla's torture was not mentioned in his trial, and he received a sentence of 17 years and four months for little more than a thought crime. Last week's ruling by the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit only adds to the bitter legacy of Padilla's brutalization at the hands of his own government, revealing how, for terror suspects held as "enemy combatants" - like Padilla, or, again, the prisoners at Guant?namo - all sense of proportion can be dismissed, even by those who should know better. For these scaremongers, who are found in Congress as well as in the courts, the end result of their sustained hysteria about terrorism is a twisted version of reality in which it is legitimate to complain that sentences are not long enough, and that the crime of terrorism is so unique and dangerous that judges can argue that there is no possibility of being reformed - even when, as in Padilla's case, the US government actually spent three years destroying his mind through torture, rendering him largely incapable of anything. And all without anyone responsible for his treatment being held accountable. Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, author and filmmaker, specializing in Guant?namo and the ?War on Terror,? but also covering revolutionary movements in the Middle East, and UK politics. http://www.andyworthington.co.uk This article was first posted at truthout.org From ths at psalience.org Thu Oct 6 14:32:26 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:32:26 +0200 Subject: [THS] Nearly 12, 000 Prisoners Join California Hunger Strike To End Torture Conditions Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111006143210.04520c70@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29295.htm Nearly 12,000 Prisoners Join California Hunger Strike To End Torture Conditions By Jeffrey Kaye October 04, 2011 "The Public Record" -- According to a report published Saturday by Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity (PHSS), the Federal receiver?s office has indicated that ?nearly 12,000 prisoners were on hunger strike, including California prisoners who are housed in out of state prisons in Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma.? This is the second hunger strike in less than four months, with prisoners at the Supermax Pelican Bay Prison and other California state prisons protesting the use of long-term solitary confinement, in addition to four other main demands, including provision of adequate and nutritious food, an end to administrative abuses (such as group punishments), and expansion, and in some cases provision, of ?Constructive Programming and Privileges for Indefinite SHU Status Inmates.? But besides an end to state-sanctioned isolation, which amounts to torture, the most salient demand is an end to the hated ?debriefing? system, which places inmates in solitary if prison officials determine they are ?gang members.? As I noted in an article last July, determination of ?gang? status includes ?acquisition or exchange of personal or state property amounting to more than $50 . tattooing or possession of tattoo paraphenalia . possession of $5 or more without authorization . [and] refusal to work or participate in a program as assigned,? among others. Indeed, even refusal to submit to ?debriefing,? i.e., interrogation of prisoners to get them to ?snitch,? or give names of other ?gang? members, is reason to label someone a gang member and put them in solitary indefinitely. The prisoners call this ?snitch, parole, or die.? Both isolation and forced confessions are illegal forms of incarceration. The 2006 Commission on Safety and Abuse in America?s Prisons, co-chaired by former Chief Judge of U.S. Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, John Gibbons and former Attorney General Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, called for an end to isolation in U.S. prisons. (See summary of findings and recommendations, PDF.) A Fight for Dignity, Justice, and Humanity California prisons are a stinking mess, a scandal of gigantic proportions. The health care component of the California prison system has been in federal receivership for years because of the awful, insufficient care provided to the sick and mentally ill. As reported in a McClatchy article last May, the U.S. Supreme Court ?cited ?serious constitutional violations? in California?s overcrowded prisons and ordered the state to abide by aggressive plans to fix the problem.? The court rejected state pleas to put off the necessary changes, and ordered the prison system to lower its population by approximately 37,000. (A plan to implement the changes is meeting some skepticism.) According to the McClatchy article: One hundred and twelve California prison inmates died unnecessarily because of inadequate medical care in 2008 and 2009, analysts found. Acutely ill patients have been held in ?cages, supply closets and laundry rooms? because of overcrowding, investigators found. Suicides by California inmates have been double the national average. No wonder the prisoners? hunger strike is gaining so much support in California prisons, where inmates are held like animals. The overcrowding is largely due to long-time incarceration for drug charges, including simple possession, and California?s onerous Three Strikes law. The prisoners have indicated they will conduct ?rolling? hunger strikes, allowing prisoners to come off strike to regain their strength. They indicated they have resumed their strike after changes promised after the July hunger strike by the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR) failed to materialize, in particular ?demands related to solitary confinement and gang validation.? Meanwhile, CDCR has indicated they will punish strikers. Two attorneys representing prisoners in mediation talks with the CDCR have been ?banned from all prisons pending an investigation into whether or not they had ?jeopardized the safety and security of CDCR? institutions.? According to an article at the PHSS website, ?The CDCR has delivered memos to prisoners at each state prison threatening that any participation or support for the hunger strike will result in disciplinary actions, such as placement in Ad-Seg/ASU [Administrative Segregation Unit] or SHUs [Security Housing Units] (for prisoners currently in General Population), increased destructive cell searches, removal of canteen items, and worse. We know that a number of prisoners lost their jobs as added punishment for supporting the strike in July.? International Support The renewed strike has gotten support from Palestinian hunger strikers protesting the use of isolation in the imprisonment of Palestinian leaders such as Ahmad Sa?adat. The use of isolation to punish and break prisoners is not limited to California or U.S. prisons, but cases involving American prisoners have made the news in recent months, including the incarceration of Bradley Manning, and the ongoing refusal to release the last British resident prisoner at Guantanamo, Shaker Aamer, who is also on a hunger strike to protest the conditions he is held under. As thousands muster at protests across the country, such as the Occupy Wall Street protests covered by The Dissenter, in the deepest, darkest holes of misery this country people are fighting with their lives for basic humanity and just treatment by a system that treats its victims ? whether they are prisoners, or whether they are impoverished unemployed, thrown on the trash heap by financiers and indifferent politicians ? with indifference at best, or sadistic animus at worst. The prisoners cannot win their battle without public support. The public must see that the fate of the men and women thrown into American prisons is part of their own struggle, as the methods and attitudes fostered by the prison establishment are turned increasingly on the U.S. population as a whole, just as surveillance, mass round-ups, torture, and economic shock treatment has metastasized from imperialist foreign policy to a domestic program of immiserating working Americans to pay for Wall Street?s follies and the Pentagon?s wars. Originally published at The Dissenter. Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout and The Public Record, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government?s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. From ths at psalience.org Thu Oct 6 14:35:07 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:35:07 +0200 Subject: [THS] If NATO attacks Syria: we'll fire missiles at Tel Aviv Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111006143436.04cb7150@mail.messagingengine.com> Report: Deserters have killed 80 Syria military personnel: Reports in Syria claim that the Free Syria Army - made up of Syrian military deserters - has killed no fewer than 80 Syrian soldiers and mercenaries hired by the Assad regime. http://bit.ly/pYraPl === 10 killed in Syria amid clashes between troops, deserters : - At least 10 people were killed in Syria on Tuesday as fighting between government troops and army defectors continues in the northern part of the country. http://bit.ly/rniLse === Syrian army deserter/rebel commander takes refuge in Turkey: "We live in a safe place in Turkey, I am grateful to the government and people of Turkey. Turkish officials cared about us," Colonel Riad al-Asaad said in an interview datelined Hatay in southern Turkey. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44770371/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/#.ToskM1udDzw === Russia calls latest U.N. Syria resolution 'unacceptable': The current proposal would impose sanctions if Assad failed to comply within 30 days with instructions to end violence and impose reforms. http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/10/04/170164.html === 'If NATO attacks Syria, we'll fire missiles at Tel Aviv': Syrian President Bashar Assad warned western countries on Tuesday that if Syria comes under NATO attack it would fire missiles at Tel Aviv, Iranian semi-official news agency FARS reported. http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=240519 === From ths at psalience.org Thu Oct 6 14:39:57 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:39:57 +0200 Subject: [THS] 20.000 Rally in New York to Support Occupy Wall Street Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111006143900.06bd33e0@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/152622/this_is_only_getting_bigger%3A_20%2C000_rally_in_new_york_to_support_occupy_wall_street?akid=7668.234008.IoFtlM&rd=1&t=2 AlterNet / By Sarah Jaffe This Is Only Getting Bigger: 20,000 Rally in New York to Support Occupy Wall Street Despite another clash with police, the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to gain support as unions and community groups march in solidarity. October 5, 2011 | It's 10 PM in Liberty Plaza and the jubilant 20,000-plus crowd from the day's solidarity march has dwindled, now, to the faithful, the regulars, having debated and decided by consensus against another attempt at marching. The police have dropped barricades around the entire plaza, but rumors that they are coming in are so far unfounded. The medical team has calmed down and are eating pizza from the boxes being carried throughout the plaza. A giant projection on the wall of a building across Trinity Street reminds the protesters "The Whole World is Watching #OccupyWallStreet." A large group of people are holding signs and singing "This Little Light of Mine" down at the base of the plaza, almost to Trinity Street, where Ed Schultz of MSNBC is broadcasting his show live on the other side of the police barricade. An officer tells me the barricades aren't shutting us in, I'm welcome to leave at the corners of the plaza. From ths at psalience.org Thu Oct 6 14:42:52 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:42:52 +0200 Subject: [THS] Occupy Wall St.: Incredible Show of Solidarity, Followed by Police-Induced Confusion and Violence, Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111006144210.048aee70@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/rss/1/676106/an_incredible_show_of_solidarity%2C_followed_by_police-induced_confusion_and_violence%2C_at_occupy_wall_st?akid=7668.234008.IoFtlM&rd=1&t=21 AlterNet / By Kristen Gwynne An Incredible Show of Solidarity, Followed by Police-Induced Confusion and Violence, at Occupy Wall St. This afternoon, thousands of students, union members, and activists, the compassionate and the fed-up, gathered at Foley Square to march to Zuccotti Park, also (and formerly) called Liberty Plaza. At Foley Square, speakers representing different unions declared their solidarity with Occupy Wall St. and emotionally expressed their concern for the 99% of America exploited by corporations and their government. The teachers said they were fighting for the students - our futures - and their families; the nurses said they were sick of watching what Wall St. is doing to patients; and the SEIU said they were sick of greedy bankers stealing money from the people. It was a new conglomeration of frustrated workers, the un-employed, and students - many of whom will graduate into a crisis where jobs are nearly impossible to find, but the interest on school loans keeps piling up. The energy pouring out of different people united under one common goal - to fight greed and return money back to the workers - was unstoppable. People were tired, angry that they lost their jobs, their schools, and their public services as Wall St. got richer. They were all races, ages, religions, and sub-cultures. They were the 99%, and they marched all the way from Foley Square to Liberty plaza. Some even marched from Liberty Plaza to Foley Square, then turned around and came back. But after that, things turned violent. For the march from Foley to Liberty, organizers obtained a permit and police interfered little with the demonstration. Barricades, however, kept protestors on a minimal section of the street. Following the massive march, thousands of organizers and high-profile supporters, including Michael Moore and Reverend Billy, revved-up the crowd for what was intended to be a historic march on Wall St. The momentum building up to the un-permitted march was lost in the mobs of people blocked once again by police. Cops put barricades up on the sidewalk to prevent the demonstration from reaching Wall St., at the corner of Broadway. Horses, NYPD pick-up trucks, and an NYPD bus arrived at the scene. As organizers attempted to have an assembly behind barricades and determine the next steps, chaos broke out and several people were pepper sprayed. Even more were arrested. At the same time, a violent conflict erupted between police and organizers spanning the length of the park on Broadway. The tension rose until one man, who demonstrators say threw something a cop, sprinted threw the park. Protestors chased after him, angry with him for breaking their characteristic non-violence. As confusion turned into disappointment on the street, hundreds stayed gathered inside of the park. Some protestors were demanding to march again; other people were sitting around idle. A smaller group of demonstrators attempted to approach Wall St. from a different angle, but a large fleet of police on motorcycles trapped them again. One protestor was beaten quite severely. When he finally came up for air, surrounded by motorcycles that had been knocked over as at least three cops swarmed him, his face was red with bruises, scrapes, and blood. The police were angry, even scared. A white-shirt cop ordered a protestor to remove the collar blocking his mouth, and the demonstrator asked why. Two cops responded by saying "fucking look up the law yourself" and "don't fuck with a cop." When the crowd rushed to cross the street, the police charged them, attacking from the side. Night sticks came out and there was a struggle that dismantled after people shouted to turn back. Throughout the ordeal, two demonstrators threw plastic bottles at the police, to the dismay of the non-violent majority. Then, after being barricaded again, medics and other organizers suggested people head back to the park. A mic-check conducted afterwards blamed disorder and lack of organization for the arrests and beatings. Speakers condemned the violence and chaos. After two harsh confrontations with the police, some demonstrators had not lost their energy and were gearing up to march again. Others were not so sure it would happen. "People are just pissed - they're pissed and they're crazy right now," said one demonstrator who "doubted" they would march again. Still, hundreds remained in the park. And while Occupy Wall St. facilitators may not have been prepared for the masses that strolled through the plaza, they are prepared to spread their message, and they have the support to do it. As the movement grows, Occupy Wall St, like all movements, will face obstacles. Complications will arise, and imperfection will surface. But in the belly of the movement, they remain non-violent and organized. They are empowered by larger numbers, they have learned, and they are preparing to deal with a new make-up. Update: There is a heavy police presence surrounding Liberty Plaza. A rumor is circulating that police may shut it down tonight, but some officers say the suggestion is false. From ths at psalience.org Thu Oct 6 14:50:35 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:50:35 +0200 Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?Greg_Palast=3A_=DCber-Vultures=3A_The__Billi?= =?iso-8859-1?q?onaires_Who_Would_Pick_Our_President?= Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111006144952.040b5780@mail.messagingengine.com> ?ber-Vultures: The Billionaires Who Would Pick Our President The untold story of the sources of the loot controlled by Paul "The Vulture" Singer, Ken Langone and the Kochs?and why they need to buy the White House by Greg Palast for TruthOut/Buzzflash Greg Palast's investigative reports are broadcast by BBC Television's Newsnight. His new book, Vultures' Picnic: a Tale of Oil, Sex, Radiation and Investigative Reporting will be released by Penguin USA on November 14. [October 5, 2011] Paul Singer likes to breakfast on decayed carcasses. What he chews down is sickening, but just as nausea-inducing are his new table mates: Ken Langone and the Koch Brothers, Charles and David. Singer has called together the billionaire boys club for the purpose of picking our next president for us. The old fashioned way of choosing presidents?democracy and counting ballots and all that?has never been a favorite of this pack. I can tell you that from my investigations of each of these gentlemen for The Guardian. When the Statue of Liberty has nightmares, she dreams that these guys will combine to seize America via a cash-and-carry coup d'?tat. Welcome to the nightmare. Singer, Langone and the Kochs last month decided to elect Chris Christie for us. The Jersey Governor's pseudo-campaign went belly-up before it began. But that's besides the point. Now that the Supreme Court has effectively ended campaign finance limits and allowed secretive contributions through "corporations", this new combine of the ultra-wealthy should not be viewed as just a political threat to the Democrats, but a threat to democracy. Let me give you a run-down from my sulphur-scented files on these men who would be king-makers. BILLIONAIRE 1: Ken Langone Langone likes to be known as the founder of Home Depot, just your local tool guy in a blue apron with a little bag of screws. But he was also the man, with his right-wing partners, behind DBT, Database Technologies. It was in my first investigation of Langone in 2000 that I discovered that DBT had created a list of several thousand "felons"?most of them Black, all of them innocent, all of them purged from Florida's voter rolls by DBT's client, Katherine Harris. And Langone's company knew exactly what was going on. What qualifies Langone to pick our president? In his own words: "I'm nuts, I'm rich." BILLIONAIRES 2&3: David and Charles Koch You think you've read all about the billionaire brothers. Well, there's more: In 1996, an FBI agent, Richard Elroy, told my team that oil had been pilfered from the Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma. He and other G-men filmed the filch?theft, say witnesses, personally ordered by Charles Koch. A few barrels here, a few barrels there. It all added up: to about a billion and a half dollars in looted petroleum, says one expert, a third of the Koch fortune at the time. David and Charles shared in the booty via their private company, Koch Industries. BILLIONAIRE 4: Paul Singer Now we get to the carrion king, Paul Singer, known as Singer The Vulture. I didn't give him the moniker. The name Vulture was tagged on him and his speculator colleagues by the Prime Minister of Britain and the World Bank. Recently, former Deputy Secretary-General of the UN Winston Tubman suggested I ask Singer or his business associates, "Do you know you're causing babies to die?" What does this guy do?put poison in kiddies' milk? Worse: he takes away the milk. Singer's modus operandi is to find some forgotten tiny debt owed by a very poor nation (Peru and Congo were on his menu). He waits for the US and European taxpayers to forgive the poor nations' debts; then waits at bit longer for offers of food aid, medicine and investment loans. Then Singer pounces: legally grabbing at every resource and all the money going to the desperate country. Trade stops, funds freeze and an entire economy is effectively held hostage. Singer then demands aid-giving nations pay monstrous ransoms to let trade resume. At BBC TV's Newsnight, we learned that Singer demanded $400 million dollars from the Congo for a debt he picked up for less than $10 million. If he doesn't get his 4,000% profit, he can effectively starve the nation. I don't mean that figuratively?I mean starve as in no food. In Congo-Brazzaville last year, one-fourth of all deaths of children under five were caused by malnutrition. For BBC, I tried to ask Vulture Singer the diplomat's question about the baby killing, but I couldn't get past George Gershwin. (In the New York office tower housing the billionaires' roost, a George Gershwin look-alike in top hat and tails plays show tunes on a grand piano for Singer's grand entrance.) And it's not just poor African carcasses that tempt Singer. Indeed, during my investigation for my new book Vultures' Picnic, I discovered that Singer's first big vulture attack was on American asbestos victims. Background: The executives of a few asbestos companies, WR Grace, USG and Owens-Corning, knew that their asbestos factories were killing their workers. When caught and sued, the companies filed for bankruptcy, agreeing to pay almost all their earnings to those dying and injured by their asbestos. But Singer had a better idea. These companies, as you can imagine, were worth next to nothing; and Singer bought Owens-Corning for a song. If he could cut the amount paid to the victims, Singer could boost Corning's value big time. So, a PR campaign was begun attacking the dying workers, saying they were all faking it. One attacker was a guy named George W. Bush. In January 2005, President Dubya held a televised meeting to promote an "expert" who pronounced that over half a million workers suing Singer's industry were liars. If workers couldn't breathe, he said to the grinning President, it wasn't the fault of asbestos. The "expert" was not a doctor, but notably, his "research" was partly funded by ...Paul Singer. And so was Bush. Since the death of Enron's Ken Lay, Singer and his vulture flock at Elliott International had become the top contributors to the Republican National Committee. It's hard to measure his largesse exactly because some of that help comes in through the side door. For example, Singer put money behind the "Swift Boat" smear on Bush's opponent, John Kerry. The legal, political and PR attacks on the dying workers chiseled away the compensation expected to be paid by the asbestos companies, boosting their net worth. Singer then flipped Corning, selling it for a neat billion-dollar profit. It's legal, it's brilliant, it's sick, it's Singer. One of my favorite Singer scores was his successful scheme to legally loot the Treasury of Peru. The nation's US lawyer told me, aghast, how Singer let Peru's rogue President, Alberto Fujimori, flee his nation to avoid murder charges. Singer had seized Fujimori's get-away plane. The Vulture named his price: One of Fujimori's last acts as president before he fled was to order his dirt-poor nation to pay Singer $58 million. Why the Billionaires Need to Buy the White House A Koch Industries executive (not knowing he was being taped) said he had asked Charles Koch, who already had a billion from an inheritance, why Koch was pocketing a few bucks a week from poor Indians. Koch told him, "I want my fair share, and that's all of it." And "all of it", of course, includes the White House. Putting Bush in the White House was worth his weight in gold to these gents?more, in fact. And now, the Kochs, Singer and Langone have teamed to pick a candidate they pray can take back their real estate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The gimme for Langone. Langone's firm DBT's "felon" scrub list included only innocent people, so you certainly wouldn't find the name "Langone" on it. In 2004, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer charged Langone with conspiracy, accusing the billionaire with subverting a stock exchange regulator's investigation into monkey business by Langone's investment bank. A technicality ended the civil action on the conspiracy charge. But now, Obama's new banking and securities reforms, albeit weak, give regulators new enforcement powers and provide an extra independent eye on stock-market shenanigans. For Langone, picking the President means closing the regulatory eye. The gimme for The Kochs. The Koch Brothers, from "The Joker's Wild" deck of cards by Greg Palast and Bob Grossman. Click here for all cards. FBI man Elroy told our investigators that the Justice Department was going to let the FBI cuff Charles Koch on criminal charges for the theft of the Osage Indian oil. But then, fumes Elroy, Koch's well-funded buddies, Senators Bob Dole and Don Nickles, stepped in?and Koch walked. No charges. US Senator Dennis DeConcini wanted to know why criminal or civil charges were never brought against the Kochs. That was not a wise question to ask. The Senator told me that the Kochs threatened his political destruction if the Congressional Committee he chaired continued with its investigations of the theft of Native oil. He continued, but his political career did not. During the Clinton Administration, Koch Industries was charged with criminal violations of the Clean Water Act. Under President Bush, the charges, but not the water, were cleaned up. In other words, crime pays?if you get to pick the sheriff. The gimme for Paul Singer. Paul Singer had placed a big bet on the asbestos industry; then, set out to fix the casino, helping install Bush in the White House. That is, he had a President willing to beat up on asbestos workers and push for so-called "tort reform" that undermined these victims' claims. What the victims lost, Singer gained. But there's trouble on the horizon for Singer. In 2007, Britain outlawed Singer and all other Vulture speculators in Third World debt from collecting their pound of flesh in the United Kingdom. Other European nations are following suit. Several US Congressmen are pushing a UK-style prohibition on Singer's activities. (Even Chevron Corporation is complaining about the Vulture attacks. When Chevron calls bankers unscrupulous, they've got to be really unscrupulous.) Without a veto pen over Congress, Singer stands to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Singer plays defense, but is best at offense: To collect on some of his claims against Argentina, his lobbyists have pushed a bill in Congress to put an economic choke-hold on trade with the South American nation. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blocked this crazy attack on our ally. As a result, Singer is not a happy gaucho. There will be blood. Obama will have to pay. The gimme for them all. There's one thing that every billionaire wants: another billion. And that's threatened by Obama's plan to tax the "carried interest" tax deferment. Guys like Singer and Langone don't pay taxes like you and I do. While we pay taxes on income, the profits from vulture speculation and arbitrage are often recorded as "carried interest," effectively not taxed. It's a billion-dollar benefit for the billionaires, and every Republican candidate has sworn to keep this loophole open and make sure you and I pay Singers' taxes for him. Unfortunately for Singer, the Kochs and Langone, the GOP candidates currently kissing the billionaires' behinds don't seem electable. So the Billionaire Boys Club prodded Gov. Christie, a bully-boy from Jersey, to muscle his way into the Oval Office. Christie didn't fly, no surprise. But whether they pick the GOP candidate or retreat to their old tactics of smear-from-the-rear, the fragile thing called democracy stands little chance against the tsunamic powers of the quartet's combined checkbooks. ***** For more on Greg Palast's upcoming new book, Vultures' Picnic: in Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Predators, a Tale of Oil, Sex, Radiation and Investigative Reporting, go to www.VulturesPicnic.org. Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts. Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter. GregPalast.com To no longer receive these e-mails reply to this e-mail with "unsubscribe" in the subject line. From ths at psalience.org Thu Oct 6 23:02:04 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 06 Oct 2011 23:02:04 +0200 Subject: [THS] Nation of Change Newsletter [excerpt] Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111006225950.049c2b58@mail.messagingengine.com> Nation of Change Newsletter [excerpt] http://www.nationofchange.org/contact_importer Thursday, 06 October 2011 As we enter the fourth day of our fundraiser, we are inspired at how quickly the world?s attention has been demanded by the people?s movement. Momentum is building each day as more of the general public becomes aware of the change we are working to enact in this nation. Today, President Obama commented on the movement, stating that it ?expresses the frustrations that the American people feel that we had the biggest financial crisis since the great depression, huge collateral damage all across the country, all across mainstreet. Yet, you're still seeing the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this mess in the first place... The protesters are giving voice to a more broad based frustration about how our financial system works.? Help us continue to bring the true voice of this movement to the people of our country. Help us continue to fight agasint those who would sweep it under the rug, or pervert and undermine its character. If you can afford to give $10 or even $5 to support our work, please make a secure, tax-deductible donation to NationofChange now. Dean Baker | Steve Jobs And Alan Greenspan Dean Baker, Op-Ed: ?On the tragic passing of Steve Jobs, while still a relatively young man, it is interesting to juxtapose him to Alan Greenspan, one of the other iconic figures of our time. One made us rich, with a vast array of new products and new possibilities. The other made us poor with a long-lasting downturn that could persist for more than a decade. The two of them can be taken as symbols for the best and worst of modern capitalism. Jobs is the symbol of capitalism when it works.? READ | DISCUSS | SHARE A ?Dangerous? Movement NationofChange Fundraising Appeal: The first step has been taken and across this country we challenge the people to confront our own oppression. We challenge our nation to stop wallowing in cynicism and despair, to turn their attention away from the pacification of mass entertainment designed to distract, numb, and sterilize the fecundity of our combined creative force. We challenge the people to turn to one another, find strength in community and show the world once again what the power of peaceful resistance can do. READ MORE Day 19: Live Coverage of The Wall Street Occupation Special Coverage: As we enter Day 19 of the Wall Street Occupation the movement begin to pick up steam across the country. Thousands of activists have descended on Wall Street since this past weekend as part of the #OccupyWallStreet protest organized by several action groups. What follows is a live video stream and live Twitter feed of this event. READ | DISCUSS | SHARE Dennis Kucinich: Keep Occupying Wall Street Dennis Kucinich, Video Report: Dennis Kucinich: ?Millions support your efforts. We know the present system has taken the wealth of our nation and put it into the hands of a few. 14 million Americans out of work, 15 million Americans without healthcare, millions denied a college education because they cannot afford it, millions losing their homes, millions of pensions threatened, dreams crushed by a system, will be dreams recued by your effort, your commitment, your dedication to a new America.? READ | DISCUSS | SHARE Resistance Rising ? Wisconsin, Ohio, and What?s Next News Analysis: ?The panel opened with Mahlon Mitchell, who recounted the events preceding Governor Scott Walker?s (R-WI) so-called Budget Repair Bill. In January, the same month Mitchell became president of the state?s firefighter union, Wisconsin?s government gave tax breaks to corporations, but told people the state was broke. Then Walker tried to take away the rights of state and municipal employees and teachers. The firefighters decided they could not sit idle. ?We could be next,? said Mitchell. ?We were just responding to an emergency; there was an emergency in our state.?? READ | DISCUSS | SHARE Flat-Lining The Middle Class Andy Kroll, Op-Ed: ?Food pantries picked over. Incomes drying up. Shelters bursting with the homeless. Job seekers spilling out the doors of employment centers. College grads moving back in with their parents. The angry and disillusioned filling the streets. Pan your camera from one coast to the other, from city to suburb to farm and back again, and you?ll witness scenes like these. They are the legacy of the Great Recession, the Lesser Depression, or whatever you choose to call it. In recent months, a blizzard of new data, the hardest of hard numbers, has laid bare the dilapidated condition of the American economy, and particularly of the once-mighty American middle class.? READ | DISCUSS | SHARE The Politics of Occupy Wall Street: Bernie Sanders, Progressives, Big Unions Endorse John Nichols, Op-Ed: ?The Occupy Wall Street movement?s political breakthrough came Wednesday, as leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus joined Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, in endorsing the burgeoning national challenge to corporate greed and corrupt politics. On a day that saw thousands of union members, community activists and supporters of New York?s Working Families Party rallied in solidarity with the New York protests and Congressman John Larson.? READ | DISCUSS | SHARE What Is Obama?s Actual Record on Creating Jobs? Braden Goyette, News Analysis: ?The U.S. economy has been staggering for months and is still millions of jobs away from recovering from the nearly 9 million jobs lost since the start of the recession. Indeed, the official unemployment rate has hovered around 9 percent or 10 percent for more than two years. President Obama has promised to focus on jobs, so we decided to look at his actual record: What exactly has the Obama administration done to create jobs so far? Here?s a look at Obama?s jobs initiatives, the hits, the misses, and the ones we?re still waiting for an answer on.? READ | DISCUSS | SHARE Hank Williams, Jr: Bring Him Back, Buy Him A Beer - And Invite Him to #OccupyWallStreet Richard (RJ) Eskow, Op-Ed: ?By now everybody knows that Hank Williams, Jr. was suspended from ESPN and Monday Night Football for that strange and now infamous interview where he seemed to compare the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler. I say: Bring Hank back. Bring him back with no conditions, limitations, fines, fees, or rules. What?s more, I?m publicly offering to buy the man a beer, at the time and place of his choosing, with no strings attached. And if he?s willing, I?ll do something else too: I?ll take him to an Occupy Wall Street demonstration.? READ | DISCUSS | SHARE Obama Confronts the Corporation Stephen Pitt, Cartoon: Stephen Pitt is NationofChange's art director. Stephen is a southern California artist whose work focuses on matters political, social, and economic. In 2004 Stephen began drawing and painting political imagery to communicate his sincere displeasure with disturbing changes set in motion by ideologues acting in bad faith. With a background in figurative drawing and respect for color, Stephen traded the 6B pencil for a digital stylus and went to work. Published by the San Francisco Chronicle and Z Magazine, Stephen?s work has since been seen on Truthout and Firedoglake. READ | DISCUSS | SHARE Sarah Palin Announces She Won?t Run for President in 2012 Erika Bolstad and Sean Cockerham, News Report: ?Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008, said Wednesday that she won?t be running for president in 2012. Palin made the announcement on the Mark Levin radio show, saying her family?s wishes were the main factor in her decision. But she also said she felt she could have the most impact by supporting other like-minded candidates. ?I am very thankful that included in a list of supporters in my life are my family members,? Palin told the conservative talk show host. ?They do support this decision.? READ | DISCUSS | SHARE Occupy Wall Street March Gets Massive Turnout; 28 Arrested in Police Crackdown Video Report: ?Labor unions and students joined the growing Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City on Wednesday in the largest march since the protest began 20 days ago. Tens of thousands marched from Foley Square to Zuccotti Park, renamed ?Liberty Plaza,? the site of the protest encampment where hundreds have been sleeping since Sept. 17. The march was peaceful ,but police later beat a handful of protesters with batons after they toppled a police barricade in an attempt to march down Wall Street. Police say a total of 28 people were arrested.? READ | DISCUSS | SHARE How (And Why) to Co-opt Those Cops on Wall Street Joe Conason, Op-Ed: ?The young (and not-so-young) protesters who came to Occupy Wall Street ? and have stayed despite mass arrests ? deserve thanks from the ?99 percent? of Americans they claim to represent. Without articulating a clear set of demands, they have nevertheless voiced the frustration felt by millions of ordinary people who have lost homes, jobs, income and security in the post-crash economy and see little help coming from government offices or corporate suites.? READ | DISCUSS | SHARE Reports Of Arrests And Pepper Spraying At Wall Street Protests News Report: ?There have been multiple reports of arrests and pepper spraying of protesters on Wall Street tonight. According to the Guardian, ?there?s a flashpoint on the intersection of Broadway and Cedar Street,with reports of a number of arrests. Police have deployed orange netting to contain protesters. Subway trains have been ordered not to stop at Wall Street station.?? READ | DISCUSS | SHARE President Obama Speaks Out on Wall Street Movement News Report: In a press conference on Thursday President Obama described the Occupy Wall Street movement as something which ?I think [the movement] expresses the frustrations that the American people feel that we had the biggest financial crisis since the great depression, huge collateral damage all across the country, all across main street. Yet, you're still seeing the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this mess in the first place. I think people are frustrated. The protestors are giving voice to a more broad based frustration about how our financial system works.? READ | DISCUSS | SHARE From ths at psalience.org Fri Oct 7 16:23:43 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:23:43 +0200 Subject: [THS] Carter: Obama must make good on Nobel Prize and back Palestinian statehood Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111007162328.06be0b50@mail.messagingengine.com> Carter: Obama must make good on Nobel Prize and back Palestinian statehood Carter says Arab Spring has created opportunities for resolving conflicts in Middle East, comparing it to political reality in which he, as president, helped broker peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. By ReutersTags: Barack Obama Arab Spring Egypt U.S. President Barack Obama needs to make good on the promises that won him the Nobel Peace Prize, fellow laureate and former U.S. president Jimmy Carter said on Thursday. Carter called on the current American president to back the Palestinian?s bid to the UN for statehood and seize the opportunity provided by the Arab Spring to facilitate Palestinian-Israeli peace. The shaking up of authoritarian rule in the Arab world has created opportunities for resolving conflicts in the Middle East, Carter said, comparing the Arab Spring to the political reality in which he, as president, helped broker the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Carter reiterated his support for the Palestinians? push for recognition of statehood in the United Nations, saying he hoped they would secure backing in the UN General Assembly to at least enhance their status in the body. However, he said the U.S. veto in the Security Council would block full membership. "The United States will veto any move in the Security Council if they get the votes there, which I think is a mistake. But that's the privilege of the president to decide," he said during a brief visit to Oslo to meet Norwegian diplomats. "But I think the entire Arab Spring movement is at least breaking the ice and letting some more flexibility be introduced into a stalemated Middle East situation,? he added. On the eve of this year's Nobel award, which could honor the Arab Spring protesters who caught Washington off guard by toppling autocratic leaders who were U.S. allies, Carter told Reuters he hoped his fellow Democrat would keep his promises to promote human rights, Middle East peace and other issues. "I hope he'll fulfill the promises that were made at the time he got the peace prize," Carter said in an interview when asked what Obama, who was honored in 2009 after being in office less than a year, could do to live up to the honor. "It was given primarily because of some of the commitments he had made verbally, his speeches and so forth about taking the leadership role and dealing with global warming and dealing with the immigration problem, enhancing human rights, promoting peace in the Middle East," Carter said, a prizewinner in 2002. "I hope that some of those promises will be realized," he said, adding that he believed Obama would overcome sagging poll ratings to win re-election to a second term next year. Carter, 86, who has worked to resolve conflicts and promote democracy since leaving office 30 years ago, has been critical of U.S. -- and Israeli -- positions on Middle East peace and called Obama's likely veto of giving a Palestinian state UN membership is a "mistake" at a time when, he believed, the Arab Spring had opened new possibilities for settling the region's disputes. Obama, who acknowledged that his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was controversial when he received it "at the beginning and not at the end" of his presidency, has been accused of failing to deliver on promises made in a speech to the Muslim world in Cairo that year. The toppling this year of Tunisia's strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali followed by Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, a close U.S. ally, led to harsh criticism of Washington, who many claimed were slow to back democratic uprisings due to political considerations. Many tipsters think the Norwegian Nobel Committee, appointed by the parliament in Oslo, may honor the young, Twitter-using demonstrators who humbled police states in Tunis and Cairo and set an example for Syrians, Libyans, Yemenis and others. But the Peace Prize is notoriously difficult to predict and Carter, whose presence in Oslo was, he said, coincidental, would not be drawn on a forecast. "I don't have any way to know ahead of time," he said. "I didn't know when I got it." http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/carter-obama-must-make-good-on-nobel-prize-and-back-palestinian-statehood-1.388602 From ths at psalience.org Fri Oct 7 16:35:27 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 07 Oct 2011 16:35:27 +0200 Subject: [THS] !!!!!! John Pilger: The 'Getting' of Assange and the Smearing of a Revolution Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111007162939.06bf8d00@mail.messagingengine.com> The 'Getting' of Assange and the Smearing of a Revolution by John Pilger http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26959 The High Court in London will soon to decide whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct. At the appeal hearing in July, Ben Emmerson QC, counsel for the defence, described the whole saga as ?crazy?. Sweden?s chief prosecutor had dismissed the original arrest warrant, saying there was no case for Assange to answer. Both the women involved said they had consented to have sex. On the facts alleged, no crime would have been committed in Britain. However, it is not the Swedish judicial system that presents a ?grave danger? to Assange, say his lawyers, but a legal device known as a Temporary Surrender, under which he can be sent on from Sweden to the United States secretly and quickly. The founder and editor of WikiLeaks, who published the greatest leak of official documents in history, providing a unique insight into rapacious wars and the lies told by governments, is likely to find himself in a hell hole not dissimilar to the ?torturous? dungeon that held Private Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower. Manning has not been tried, let alone convicted, yet on 21 April, President Barack Obama declared him guilty with a dismissive ?He broke the law?. This Kafka-style justice awaits Assange whether or not Sweden decides to prosecute him. Last December, the Independent disclosed that the US and Sweden had already started talks on Assange?s extradition. At the same time, a secret grand jury ? a relic of the 18th century long abandoned in this country -- has convened just across the river from Washington, in a corner of Virginia that is home to the CIA and most of America?s national security establishment. The grand jury is a ?fix?, a leading legal expert told me: reminiscent of the all-white juries in the South that convicted blacks by rote. A sealed indictment is believed to exist. Under the US Constitution, which guarantees free speech, Assange should be protected, in theory. When he was running for president, Obama, himself a constitutional lawyer, said, ?Whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal?. His embrace of George W. Bush?s ?war on terror? has changed all that. Obama has pursued more whistleblowers than any US president. The problem for his administration in ?getting? Assange and crushing WikiLeaks is that military investigators have found no collusion or contact between him and Manning, reports NBC. There is no crime, so one has to be concocted, probably in line with Vice President Joe Biden?s absurd description of Assange as a ?hi-tech terrorist?. Should Assange win his High Court appeal in London, he could face extradition direct to the United States. In the past, US officials have synchronised extradition warrants with the conclusion of a pending case. Like its predatory military, American jurisdiction recognises few boundaries. As the suffering of Bradley Manning demonstrates, together with the recently executed Troy Davis and the forgotten inmates of Guantanamo, much of the US criminal justice system is corrupt if not lawless. In a letter addressed to the Australian government, Britain?s most distinguished human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce, who now acts for Assange, wrote, ?Given the extent of the public discussion, frequently on the basis of entirely false assumptions... it is very hard to attempt to preserve for him any presumption of innocence. Mr. Assange has now hanging over him not one but two Damocles swords, of potential extradition to two different jurisdictions in turn for two different alleged crimes, neither of which are crimes in his own country, and that his personal safety has become at risk in circumstances that are highly politically charged.? These facts, and the prospect of a grotesque miscarriage of justice, have been drowned in a vituperative campaign against the WikiLeaks founder. Deeply personal, petty, perfidious and inhuman attacks have been aimed at a man not charged with any crime yet held isolated, tagged and under house arrest ? conditions not even meted out to a defendant presently facing extradition on a charge of murdering his wife. Books have been published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the assumption that he is fair game and too poor to sue. People have made money, often big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive. On 16 June, the publisher of Canongate Books, Jamie Byng, when asked by Assange for an assurance that the rumoured unauthorised publication of his autobiography was not true, said, ?No, absolutely not. That is not the position... Julian, do not worry. My absolute number one desire is to publish a great book which you are happy with.? On 22 September, Canongate released what it called Assange?s ?unauthorised autobiography? without the author?s permission or knowledge. It was a first draft of an incomplete, uncorrected manuscript. ??They thought I was going to prison and that would have inconvenienced them,? he told me. ?It?s as if I am now a commodity that presents an incentive to any opportunist.? The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, has called the WikiLeaks disclosures ?one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years?: indeed, this is part of his current marketing promotion to justify raising the Guardian?s cover price. But the scoop belongs to Assange not the Guardian. Compare the paper?s attitude towards Assange with its bold support for the reporter threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act for revealing the iniquities of Hackgate. Editorials and front pages have carried stirring messages of solidarity from even Murdoch?s Sunday Times. On 29 September, Carl Bernstein was flown to London to compare all this with his Watergate triumph. Alas, the iconic fellow was not entirely on message. ?It?s important not to be unfair to Murdoch,? he said, because ?he?s the most far seeing media entrepreneur of our time? who ?put The Simpsons on air? and thereby ?showed he could understand the information consumer?. The contrast with the treatment of a genuine pioneer of a revolution in journalism, who dared take on rampant America, providing truth about how great power works, is telling. A drip-feed of hostility runs through the Guardian, making it difficult for readers to interpret the WikiLeaks phenomenon and to assume other than the worst about its founder. David Leigh, the Guardian?s ?investigations editor?, told journalism students at City University that Assange was a ?Frankenstein monster? who ?didn?t use to wash very often? and was ?quite deranged?. When a puzzled student asked why he said that, Leigh replied, ?Because he doesn?t understand the parameters of conventional journalism. He and his circle have a profound contempt for what they call the mainstream media?. According to Leigh, these ?parameters? were exemplified by Bill Keller when, as editor of the New York Times, he co-published the WikiLeaks disclosures with the Guardian. Keller, said Leigh, was ?a seriously thoughtful person in journalism? who had to deal with ?some sort of dirty, flaky hacker from Melbourne?. Last November, the ?seriously thoughtful? Keller boasted to the BBC that he had taken all WikiLeaks? war logs to the White House so the government could approve and edit them. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the New York Times published a series of now notorious CIA-inspired claims claiming weapons of mass destruction existed. Such are the ?parameters? that have made so many people cynical about the so-called mainstream media. Leigh went as far as to mock the danger that, once extradited to America, Assange would end up wearing ?an orange jump suit?. These were things ?he and his lawyer are saying in order to feed his paranoia?. The ?paranoia? is shared by the European Court of Human Rights which has frozen ?national security? extraditions from the UK to the US because the extreme isolation and long sentences defendants can expect amounts to torture and inhuman treatment. I asked Leigh why he and the Guardian had adopted a consistently hostile towards Assange since they had parted company. He replied, ?Where you, tendentiously, claim to detect a ?hostile tone?, others might merely see well-informed objectivity.? It is difficult to find well-informed objectivity in the Guardian?s book on Assange, sold lucratively to Hollywood, in which Assange is described gratuitously as a ?damaged personality? and ?callous?. In the book, Leigh revealed the secret password Assange had given the paper. Designed to protect a digital file containing the US embassy cables, its disclosure set off a chain of events that led to the release of all the files. The Guardian denies ?utterly? it was responsible for the release. What, then, was the point of publishing the password? The Guardian?s Hackgate exposures were a journalistic tour de force; the Murdoch empire may disintegrate as a result. But with or without Murdoch, a media consensus that echoes, from the BBC to the Sun, a corrupt political, war-mongering establishment. Assange?s crime has been to threaten this consensus: those who fix the ?parameters? of news and political ideas and whose authority as media commissars is challenged by the revolution of the internet. The prize-winning former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook has experience in both worlds. ?The media, at least the supposedly left-wing component of it,? he writes, ?should be cheering on this revolution... And yet, mostly they are trying to co-opt, tame or subvert it [even] to discredit and ridicule the harbingers of the new age... Some of [campaign against Assange] clearly reflects a clash of personalities and egos, but it also looks suspiciously like the feud derives from a more profound ideological struggle [about] how information should be controlled a generation hence [and] the gatekeepers maintaining their control.? For more information on John Pilger visit his website at www.johnpilger.com From ths at psalience.org Sat Oct 8 14:08:59 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sat, 08 Oct 2011 14:08:59 +0200 Subject: [THS] Joe Bageant: Now the World is a Sadder, Sillier Place Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111008140623.05394f90@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2011/10/now-the-world.html October 06, 2011 Now the World is a Sadder, Sillier Place This tribute to Joe Bageant originally appeared last May in La Cuadra, a print magazine published in Guatemala. The magazine recently posted the following to the web, and here it is. By Michael Tallon Editor-in-Chief, La Cuadra Magazine Joe Bageant is dead, Joe Bageant is dead. Now hang down your head, Joe Bageant is dead. It is with a heavy heart that we share that news. Cancer got him in the end. Regular readers will recognize his name as Joe was a steady contributor to La Cuadra over the years. Your editors had been fans of his for a long time, but when we first started this project we never imagined we?d actually land his great talents for our magazine. Then, one evening back in 2008, as we were necking beers with our good friend Earl The Retired Bank Robber, Joe?s name came up. I?d just stumbled upon Joe?s website and discovered a trove of essays I?d not seen before. When I asked Earl if he?d ever read Joe?s stuff, he grinned and said, ?Been friends with that old bastard for years. You want me to call him up and see if he?d do something for the rag?? A spit take and a ?Hells, yeah!? was the immediate response. The very next day I received an email from Joe saying ?any friend of Earl?s is a friend of mine,? and that he?d be more than happy to contribute. Further, he hoped that maybe he and Earl could arrange to be in Antigua at the same time someday so we could all get drunk. In that email, Joe noted that his schedule was very busy in the coming months, but concluded, ?. . . when I return, I?ll come down to Antigua and do anything you want. Or nothing in particular if you want. Nothing is as important to me as engaging good people in this life. In art and labor, Joe.? Sadly, life got in the way and we never had that boozy rendezvous, but we were able to keep up a healthy correspondence since then, culminating in an invite to his joint up in Virginia to talk about the world and see if he could do something about finding me a publisher up North. Missed that opportunity, too, goddammit. I coulda used some of his wisdom in those regards. Joe gave me the most deeply appreciated professional compliment I?ve ever received, and no matter how long I write, I doubt that I?ll hear more meaningful accolades. He?d read a review I?d written of his first book, Deer Hunting With Jesus, and shot an email to Earl that read, in part: ?Jesus H. Christ that Tallon can write! I don?t say that because of the favorable review of the book, but because he is a bona fide wordslinger of the first order. Clean, clear, punchy, intelligent.? I was the happiest of monkeys brachiating through the highest of branches for weeks after Earl forwarded that letter. Sweet shit, Joe Bageant likes MY stuff. For me that was like having Kareem Abdul-Jabbar compliment my hook shot. It wasn?t just his own skills at wordslingery that made him such a hero to those of us at La Cuadra. Joe had empathy out the ass for anyone who was getting the short end of the stick, and he noted, time and again, those were almost invariably the same people: poor folk; his folk. Joe grew up a redneck and remained one his entire life. Bageant was a Second-Amendment-defending, whiskey-drinking farmer?s son of Virginia. But intellectually and spiritually, he?d transcended the provincialism, the racism, the anti-intellectualism and the clan (if not The Klan) mentality of his shuttered volk. There?s a fetishism in our culture for white folk who ?remember their roots,? or black folk who ?keep it real.? Joe did both of those things, but unlike so many others, he was not limited by the horizons of his formation. He grew up hard, hungry and poor, spent the Vietnam years in the Navy, came home and moved out to the West Coast to be a hippie, took heroic doses of hallucinogens, partied with rock stars and wrote about holy men. He tended bar on an Indian reservation, edited a journal of military history, lived in Belize, Colorado, Idaho, Mexico and Oregon before deciding, in his words, ?to settle some scores with the bigoted, murderous redneck town I grew up in. I love ?em but they need a good ass kicking.? And so he moved back home. Joe spent much of his life kicking the collective asses of the bigots, the prideful, the pompous, the blindly patriotic and the cruel. And in that life he also brought balm and his big love to the weaker-thans and the world-forgotten. He was an honorable man. And Joe was a good man, a generous man, a loving man, and we?re sorry that we never got to share that beer in person. There aren?t enough hombres like him knocking heads together on this planet, and with his passing the world is a sadder, sillier place. So, we?re raising our glass to you, Joe. And our toast is a promise to keep faith with the cause of the just, and to maintain a weather-eye out for unexpected sources of kindness, sincerity and love. Sleep lightly and haunt the bastards. Joe Bageant lives on. Joe Bageant lives on. Now strike up a song, Joe Bageant lives on. From ths at psalience.org Sat Oct 8 15:04:16 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sat, 08 Oct 2011 15:04:16 +0200 Subject: [THS] Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111008150403.05228760@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/ Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet By Noah Shachtman Email Author October 7, 2011 | 1:11 pm | Categories: Drones A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America?s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots? every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones. The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military?s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech?s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military?s most important weapons system. ?We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,? says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. ?We think it?s benign. But we just don?t know.? Military network security specialists aren?t sure whether the virus and its so-called ?keylogger? payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don?t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they?re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command. Drones have become America?s tool of choice in both its conventional and shadow wars, allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its foes without risking American lives. Since President Obama assumed office, a fleet of approximately 30 CIA-directed drones have hit targets in Pakistan more than 230 times; all told, these drones have killed more than 2,000 suspected militants and civilians, according to the Washington Post. More than 150 additional Predator and Reaper drones, under U.S. Air Force control, watch over the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. American military drones struck 92 times in Libya between mid-April and late August. And late last month, an American drone killed top terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki ? part of an escalating unmanned air assault in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabian peninsula. But despite their widespread use, the drone systems are known to have security flaws. Many Reapers and Predators don?t encrypt the video they transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S. forces discovered ?days and days and hours and hours? of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video. The lion?s share of U.S. drone missions are flown by Air Force pilots stationed at Creech, a tiny outpost in the barren Nevada desert, 20 miles north of a state prison and adjacent to a one-story casino. In a nondescript building, down a largely unmarked hallway, is a series of rooms, each with a rack of servers and a ?ground control station,? or GCS. There, a drone pilot and a sensor operator sit in their flight suits in front of a series of screens. In the pilot?s hand is the joystick, guiding the drone as it soars above Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other battlefield. Some of the GCSs are classified secret, and used for conventional warzone surveillance duty. The GCSs handling more exotic operations are top secret. None of the remote cockpits are supposed to be connected to the public internet. Which means they are supposed to be largely immune to viruses and other network security threats. But time and time again, the so-called ?air gaps? between classified and public networks have been bridged, largely through the use of discs and removable drives. In late 2008, for example, the drives helped introduce the agent.btz worm to hundreds of thousands of Defense Department computers. The Pentagon is still disinfecting machines, three years later. Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use. In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm. ?But the virus kept coming back,? a source familiar with the infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS? internal hard drives. ?That meant rebuilding them from scratch? ? a time-consuming effort. The Air Force declined to comment directly on the virus. ?We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,? says Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft. ?We invest a lot in protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and other malware we discover.? However, insiders say that senior officers at Creech are being briefed daily on the virus. ?It?s getting a lot of attention,? the source says. ?But no one?s panicking. Yet.? Photo courtesy of Bryan William Jones From ths at psalience.org Sat Oct 8 15:06:38 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sat, 08 Oct 2011 15:06:38 +0200 Subject: [THS] !!!! Key Romney Advisers Advocate War With Iran Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111008150555.05824950@mail.messagingengine.com> Key Romney Advisers Advocate War With Iran Yesterday, GOP presidential front runner Mitt Romney announced his campaign?s foreign policy team. While ThinkProgress pointed out that many of Romney?s advisers helped push the United States into war with Iraq, it might also be interesting to know what the former Massachusetts governor will be hearing from his top aides regarding Iran. Prominent neoconservative Robert Kagan, who is among Romney?s foreign policy advisers, has actually spoken out in favor of talking to Iran. However, that view is by far an outlier among Romney?s team. While some of them have tried to pushthe claim that Iran is working with al Qaeda, others have said or written that the U.S. should take a more militaristic approach toward the Islamic Republic: ELIOT COHEN: Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Cohen, now director of the strategic studies program and Johns Hopkins University, called for the overthrow of the Iranian government. And that thinking doesn?t appear to have changed. In 2009, Cohen again called for the overthrow of the Iranian regime and said either attack Iran or it gets nukes. ?The choices are now what they ever were: an American or an Israeli strike, which would probably cause a substantial war, or living in a world with Iranian nuclear weapons, which may also result in war, perhaps nuclear, over a longer period of time.? MICHAEL HAYDEN: On CNN last year, former CIA director (and prominent torture advocate) Michael Hayden said attacking Iran over its nuclear program might not be a bad idea. ?In my personal thinking ? I need to emphasize that ? I have begun to consider that that may not be the worst of all possible outcomes,? he said. ERIC EDELMAN: Edelman was a career diplomat and former aid to Vice President Dick Cheney. Earlier this year in an article in Foreign Affairs, Edelman, along with two other co-authors, said that the U.S. will either have to attack Iran or contain its nuclear weapons capability. ?The military option should not be dismissedbecause of the appealing but flawed notion that containment is a relatively easy or low-risk solution to a very difficult problem,? they wrote. NORM COLEMAN: Coleman, the former Republican senator from Minnesota, said in 2007 that if Israel ever attacks Iran, the United States should join in. ?If something is taken,? Coleman said, ?the United States is going to be part of that. We have to understand that. There is no saying, ?Israel did it.?? KIM HOLMES: In 2005, the Heritage Foundation?s Kim Holmes worried that the Europeans, by negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program, might be preventing the U.S. from using military force to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Holmes called it a ?serious mistake? to allow Iran to obtain the bomb because ?Iran itself is simply too untrustworthy to be trusted with nuclear weapons.? Holmes is referring to the hackneyed right-wing fearmongering talking point which CAP?s Matt Duss has labeled, ?The martyr state myth.? The myth is that Iran is hell bent on using nuclear weapons, against Israel, the U.S., etc, should it acquire them and that Iran?s leaders are ?uniquely immune to the cost-benefit calculations that underpin a conventional theory of deterrence.? Today in his foreign policy speech at the Citadel military college in South Carolina, which happened to also be ?full of ridiculous fear mongering,? Romney echoed this sentiment. ?In the hands of the ayatollahs, a nuclear Iran is nothing less than an existential threat to Israel,? he said. ?Iran?s suicidal fanatics could blackmail the world.? Romney also said in his speech today that ?Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is unacceptable.? Now that we know how he will be advised on how to prevent that, it looks like Romney?s new American Century that he called for today, should he become president, is likely to turn out just like the last new American Century the neocons tried to create under the previous Republican president. http://thinkprogress.org/security/2011/10/07/338979/romney-advisers-war-iran/#.To9Vzl6sN84.email From ths at psalience.org Sat Oct 8 16:05:39 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sat, 08 Oct 2011 16:05:39 +0200 Subject: [THS] Naomi Klein: Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111008160321.049ab2d8@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29332.htm Occupy Wall Street: The Most Important Thing in the World Now By Naomi Klein I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I said had to be repeated by hundreds of people so others could hear (a.k.a. ?the human microphone?), what I actually said at Liberty Plaza had to be very short. With that in mind, here is the longer, uncut version of the speech. October 07, 2011 "The Nation" -- I love you. And I didn?t just say that so that hundreds of you would shout ?I love you? back, though that is obviously a bonus feature of the human microphone. Say unto others what you would have them say unto you, only way louder. Yesterday, one of the speakers at the labor rally said: ?We found each other.? That sentiment captures the beauty of what is being created here. A wide-open space (as well as an idea so big it can?t be contained by any space) for all the people who want a better world to find each other. We are so grateful. If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over. And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it?s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say ?No. We will not pay for your crisis.? That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began. ?Why are they protesting?? ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: ?What took you so long?? ?We?ve been wondering when you were going to show up.? And most of all: ?Welcome.? Many people have drawn parallels between Occupy Wall Street and the so-called anti-globalization protests that came to world attention in Seattle in 1999. That was the last time a global, youth-led, decentralized movement took direct aim at corporate power. And I am proud to have been part of what we called ?the movement of movements.? But there are important differences too. For instance, we chose summits as our targets: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the G8. Summits are transient by their nature, they only last a week. That made us transient too. We?d appear, grab world headlines, then disappear. And in the frenzy of hyper patriotism and militarism that followed the 9/11 attacks, it was easy to sweep us away completely, at least in North America. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, has chosen a fixed target. And you have put no end date on your presence here. This is wise. Only when you stay put can you grow roots. This is crucial. It is a fact of the information age that too many movements spring up like beautiful flowers but quickly die off. It?s because they don?t have roots. And they don?t have long term plans for how they are going to sustain themselves. So when storms come, they get washed away. Being horizontal and deeply democratic is wonderful. But these principles are compatible with the hard work of building structures and institutions that are sturdy enough to weather the storms ahead. I have great faith that this will happen. Something else this movement is doing right: You have committed yourselves to non-violence. You have refused to give the media the images of broken windows and street fights it craves so desperately. And that tremendous discipline has meant that, again and again, the story has been the disgraceful and unprovoked police brutality. Which we saw more of just last night. Meanwhile, support for this movement grows and grows. More wisdom. But the biggest difference a decade makes is that in 1999, we were taking on capitalism at the peak of a frenzied economic boom. Unemployment was low, stock portfolios were bulging. The media was drunk on easy money. Back then it was all about start-ups, not shut downs. We pointed out that the deregulation behind the frenzy came at a price. It was damaging to labor standards. It was damaging to environmental standards. Corporations were becoming more powerful than governments and that was damaging to our democracies. But to be honest with you, while the good times rolled, taking on an economic system based on greed was a tough sell, at least in rich countries. Ten years later, it seems as if there aren?t any more rich countries. Just a whole lot of rich people. People who got rich looting the public wealth and exhausting natural resources around the world. The point is, today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet, like the Alberta tar sands. And the atmosphere cannot absorb the amount of carbon we are putting into it, creating dangerous warming. The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological. These are the facts on the ground. They are so blatant, so obvious, that it is a lot easier to connect with the public than it was in 1999, and to build the movement quickly. We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite -- fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful -- the financial resources to build the kind of society we need. The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society ? while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take. What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed. And I?m not talking about regulating the banks and increasing taxes on the rich, though that?s important. I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it?s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult. That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely and proving health care, meditation classes and empowerment training. My favorite sign here says ?I care about you.? In a culture that trains people to avoid each other?s gaze, to say, ?Let them die,? that is a deeply radical statement. A few final thoughts. In this great struggle, here are some things that don?t matter. - What we wear. - Whether we shake our fists or make peace signs. - Whether we can fit our dreams for a better world into a media soundbite. And here are a few things that do matter. - Our courage. - Our moral compass. - How we treat each other. We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That?s frightening. And as this movement grows from strength to strength, it will get more frightening. Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets ? like, say, the person sitting next to you at this meeting. After all, that is a battle that?s easier to win. Don?t give in to the temptation. I?m not saying don?t call each other on shit. But this time, let?s treat each other as if we plan to work side by side in struggle for many, many years to come. Because the task before will demand nothing less. Let?s treat this beautiful movement as if it is most important thing in the world. Because it is. It really is. Editor's Note: Naomi's speech also appeared in Saturday's edition of the Occupied Wall Street Journal. From ths at psalience.org Sun Oct 9 12:47:24 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2011 12:47:24 +0200 Subject: [THS] John Pilger on 9/11 Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111009124338.06609080@mail.messagingengine.com> http://911truthnews.com/journalist-and-filmmaker-john-pilger-on-911/ John Pilger on 9/11 October 31, 2010 Source: 9/11 Truth News At the 2010 Anarchist Bookfair in London there was a discussion with independent journalist and filmmaker John Pilger (which was recorded ? listen below) and one of the questions from the audience was about the attacks on 9/11. The following is a transcript of the question and his reply: Audience Question: ?I would like to ask your views or theory that the US government was complicit in or even perpetrated the attacks on 9/11 to gain support for criminal [inaudible] Afghanistan and Iraq?? John Pilger: ?I think there is a lot of evidence that certain elements in the Bush administration, whether by intent or by or by their own arrogant incompetence, I don?t know, let things happen. I think there is enough evidence to We know the senior FBI people who gave warnings right throughout 2001. We know about the extraordinary inactivity by the NORAD aircraft on the day of September 11th. We know that Cheney was in charge of the White House on that day. I think the most plausible is the ?let it happen?, now at what stage it was let happen, I don?t know, I don?t know. But certainly that seems to me, the most plausible. There is no doubt that 9/11 became the opportunity for a new ?Cold War? basically, only called the ?War on Terror?. But beyond that I wouldn?t want to ? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ http://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/BushTE.html Bush Terror Elite Wanted 9/11 to Happen by John Pilger 12 December 2002 Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W Bush said what America needed was "a new Pearl Harbor". Its published aims have, alarmingly, come true. The threat posed by US terrorism to the security of nations and individuals was outlined in prophetic detail in a document written more than two years ago and disclosed only recently. What was needed for America to dominate much of humanity and the world's resources, it said, was "some catastrophic and catalysing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor". The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the "new Pearl Harbor", described as "the opportunity of ages". The extremists who have since exploited 11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when far-right groups and "think-tanks" were established to avenge the American "defeat" in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial of a "peace dividend" following the cold war. The Project for the New American Century was formed, along with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others that have since merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush regime. One of George W Bush's "thinkers" is Richard Perle. I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about "total war", I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America's "war on terror". "No stages," he said. "This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now." Perle is one of the founders of the Project for the New American Century, the PNAC. Other founders include Dick Cheney, now vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defence secretary, I Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, William J Bennett, Reagan's education secretary, and Zalmay Khalilzad, Bush's ambassador to Afghanistan. These are the modern chartists of American terrorism. The PNAC's seminal report, Rebuilding America's Defences: strategy, forces and resources for a new century, was a blueprint of American aims in all but name. Two years ago it recommended an increase in arms-spending by $48bn so that Washington could "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars". This has happened. It said the United States should develop "bunker-buster" nuclear weapons and make "star wars" a national priority. This is happening. It said that, in the event of Bush taking power, Iraq should be a target. And so it is. As for Iraq's alleged "weapons of mass destruction", these were dismissed, in so many words, as a convenient excuse, which it is. "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification," it says, "the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." How has this grand strategy been implemented? A series of articles in the Washington Post, co-authored by Bob Woodward of Watergate fame and based on long interviews with senior members of the Bush administration, reveals how 11 September was manipulated. On the morning of 12 September 2001, without any evidence of who the hijackers were, Rumsfeld demanded that the US attack Iraq. According to Woodward, Rumsfeld told a cabinet meeting that Iraq should be "a principal target of the first round in the war against terrorism". Iraq was temporarily spared only because Colin Powell, the secretary of state, persuaded Bush that "public opinion has to be prepared before a move against Iraq is possible". Afghanistan was chosen as the softer option. If Jonathan Steele's estimate in the Guardian is correct, some 20,000 people in Afghanistan paid the price of this debate with their lives. Time and again, 11 September is described as an "opportunity". In last April's New Yorker, the investigative reporter Nicholas Lemann wrote that Bush's most senior adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told him she had called together senior members of the National Security Council and asked them "to think about `how do you capitalise on these opportunities'", which she compared with those of "1945 to 1947": the start of the cold war. Since 11 September, America has established bases at the gateways to all the major sources of fossil fuels, especially central Asia. The Unocal oil company is to build a pipeline across Afghanistan. Bush has scrapped the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, the war crimes provisions of the International Criminal Court and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. He has said he will use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states "if necessary". Under cover of propaganda about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, the Bush regime is developing new weapons of mass destruction that undermine international treaties on biological and chemical warfare. In the Los Angeles Times, the military analyst William Arkin describes a secret army set up by Donald Rumsfeld, similar to those run by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and which Congress outlawed. This "super-intelligence support activity" will bring together the "CIA and military covert action, information warfare, and deception". According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld, the new organisation, known by its Orwellian moniker as the Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, or P2OG, will provoke terrorist attacks which would then require "counter-attack" by the United States on countries "harbouring the terrorists". In other words, innocent people will be killed by the United States. This is reminiscent of Operation Northwoods, the plan put to President Kennedy by his military chiefs for a phoney terrorist campaign -- complete with bombings, hijackings, plane crashes and dead Americans -- as justification for an invasion of Cuba. Kennedy rejected it. He was assassinated a few months later. Now Rumsfeld has resurrected Northwoods, but with resources undreamt of in 1963 and with no global rival to invite caution. You have to keep reminding yourself this is not fantasy: that truly dangerous men, such as Perle and Rumsfeld and Cheney, have power. The thread running through their ruminations is the importance of the media: "the prioritised task of bringing on board journalists of repute to accept our position". "Our position" is code for lying. Certainly, as a journalist, I have never known official lying to be more pervasive than today. We may laugh at the vacuities in Tony Blair's "Iraq dossier" and Jack Straw's inept lie that Iraq has developed a nuclear bomb (which his minions rushed to "explain"). But the more insidious lies, justifying an unprovoked attack on Iraq and linking it to would-be terrorists who are said to lurk in every Tube station, are routinely channelled as news. They are not news; they are black propaganda. This corruption makes journalists and broadcasters mere ventriloquists' dummies. An attack on a nation of 22 million suffering people is discussed by liberal commentators as if it were a subject at an academic seminar, at which pieces can be pushed around a map, as the old imperialists used to do. The issue for these humanitarians is not primarily the brutality of modern imperial domination, but how "bad" Saddam Hussein is. There is no admission that their decision to join the war party further seals the fate of perhaps thousands of innocent Iraqis condemned to wait on America's international death row. Their doublethink will not work. You cannot support murderous piracy in the name of humanitarianism. Moreover, the extremes of American fundamentalism that we now face have been staring at us for too long for those of good heart and sense not to recognise them. With thanks to Norm Dixon and Chris Floyd Copyright ? 2002 John Pilger Reprinted for Fair Use Only. John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney. he has been a war correspondent, film-maker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of `Journalist of the Year', for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia. Among a number of other awards he has been `International Reporter of the Year' and winner of the `United Nations Association Media Prize'. For his broadcasting, he has won an `American Television Academy Award', an `Emmy' and the `Richard Dimbleby Award', given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. "Pilger's strength is his gift for finding the image, the instant that reveals all: he is a photographer using words instead of a camera." --Salman Rushdie "John Pilger is fearless. He unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth, and tells it as it is . . . I salute him." --Harold Pinter From ths at psalience.org Sun Oct 9 13:30:28 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2011 13:30:28 +0200 Subject: [THS] Greenpeace Sues the Spies Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111009133012.067fe4c0@mail.messagingengine.com> http://my.firedoglake.com/markfloegel/2011/10/07/greenpeace-sues-the-spies/ Greenpeace Sues the Spies By: Mark Floegel Friday October 7, 2011 2:34 pm On 7 October, Greenpeace filed a lawsuit in Superior Court for the District of Columbia against Dow Chemical, Sasol North America (owned by the South African State Oil Company), two public relations firms ? Dezenhall Resources and Ketchum ? and four individuals. The suit is the result of the companies? efforts to stop Greenpeace from exposing the effects of their pollution. The charges in the complaint were triggered by corporate espionage directed at Greenpeace and our grassroots allies by the individuals ? they styled themselves as ?security professionals? ? working on behalf of the chemical companies. The public relations firms were the go-betweens and in all likelihood, the chemical companies may have thought the PR firms would provide insulation and deniability. This sounds like it fits in well with the news of the day. Wall Street is occupied by citizens outraged over the perversion of our economy and body politic by greedy corporations, the Murdoch media empire is being investigated on at least two continents for its black-bag operations and the Chamber of Commerce was recently caught hiring law firms and more ?security professionals? to go after its critics. This, however, is much older. The facts upon which Greenpeace?s case is built ? the kind of dirty laundry rarely seen outside a Wikileaks document dump ? date to the late 1990s. Greenpeace was then fighting to protect the lives and health of low-income communities in Louisiana where Dow and Sasol (under the name CONDEA Vista) produce chlorine-based plastics and use the local air and water as convenient dumps for their cancer and birth defect-inducing wastes. How long have the corporations been playing hardball? A long, long time. So this is a pointy-headed science debate about endocrine disruption and parts per million? On one level, yes. On another level, this case goes to the heart of American democracy in the 21st century. In this dispute, Greenpeace was allied with the working-class communities along the chemical companies? fence lines in Louisiana. We said the companies polluted the air and water. The multi-billion dollar multinational companies, with legions of lawyers and lobbyists, said they did not. It was a classic civic dispute. Even though the corporations had the overwhelming advantages of money and influence, they decided the deck was still not stacked enough in their favor, so they hired spooks ? ex-cops, Secret Service, and CIA agents ? to steal internal documents from Greenpeace and the local community activists. (Lawsuits on this issue have been filed in the Louisiana state courts as well.) I should note that Greenpeace initially filed this suit in federal court last November but last month a judge ruled ? without deciding the facts of the case ? that it did not fall within federal jurisdiction, so we have refiled the charges in DC court. Greenpeace was not the only national environmental group targeted, but we seem to have been an object of special fixation for the corporations. A backhanded compliment, I suppose. What we hope to gain from this is what Greenpeace always hopes for its activism ? to expose the harm done to people and the planet by those who cannot see past their own bottom line. If, by taking these corporations and their PR and security minions to court, we can deter other polluters from violating the civil rights of citizens, then the scales of America?s civil discourse will have been brought that much closer to the balance we all deserve. You can see the complaint and learn more about the lawsuit at spygate.org. From ths at psalience.org Sun Oct 9 15:09:48 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:09:48 +0200 Subject: [THS] Glenn Greenwald: Steve Jobs and drug policy Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111009150454.067fe230@mail.messagingengine.com> Steve Jobs and drug policy America's most admired inventor heaps praise on his own drug use, exposing the falsity at the heart of the Drug War By Glenn Greenwald . It?s fascinating to juxtapose America?s reverence for Steve Jobs? accomplishments and its draconian drug policy with this, from the New York Times? obituary of Jobs: [Jobs] told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had not tried psychedelics ? even people who knew him well, including his wife ? could never understand. Unlike many people who have enjoyed success, Jobs is not saying that he was able to succeed despite his illegal drug use; he?s saying his success is in part ? in substantial part ? because of those illegal drugs (he added that Bill Gates would ?be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once?). These quotes (first published by a New York Times reporter) have been around for some time but have been only rarely discussed in the recent hagiographies of Jobs: a notable omission given that he himself praised those experiences as an integral part of his identity and one of the most important things he ever did. A surprisingly good Time Magazine article elaborates on this Jobs-LSD connection further: The paradoxes of love have perhaps never been clearer than in our relationships with Apple products ? the warm, fleshy desire we feel for such cold, hard, glassy objects. But Jobs knew how to inspire material lust. He knew that consumers want something that not only sparkles and awes, but also feels accessible, easy to use, an object with which we want to merge and to feel one and the same. . . . Not coincidentally, that?s how people describe the experience of taking psychedelic drugs. It feels profoundly artificial yet deeply real, both high-tech and earthy-crunchy, human and mystically divine ? in a word, transcendent. Jobs had this experience. . . . As attested by the nearly spiritual devotion so many consumers have to Jobs? creations, the former Apple chief (and indeed many other top technology pioneers) appeared to have found enduring inspiration in LSD. Research shows that the psychedelic experience is, in fact, long lasting: a new study published last week found that people who took magic mushrooms (psilocybin) had long-term personality changes, becoming more open, more curious, more intellectually engaged and more creative. These personality shifts persisted more than a year after taking the drugs. America?s harsh prohibitionist drug policies are grounded in the premise that the prohibited substances have little or no redeeming value and cannot be used without life-destroying consequences. Yet the evidence of its falsity is undeniable. Here is one of the most admired men in America, its greatest contemporary industrialist, hailing one of the most scorned of these substances as integral to his success and intellectual and personal growth. The current President commendably acknowledged cocaine and marijuana use while there is evidence suggesting the prior President also used those substances. One of America?s most accomplished athletes was caught using marijuana at the peak of his athletic achievements. And millions upon millions of American adults have consumed some or many of those criminally prohibited substances, and themselves will say (like Jobs) that they had important and constructive experiences with those drugs or know someone who did. In short, the deceit at the heart of America?s barbaric drug policy ? that these substances are such unadulterated evils that adults should be put in cages for voluntarily using them ? is more glaring than ever. It?s rather difficult to reconcile America?s adoration for Steve Jobs in light of what he said and did with its ongoing obsession with prosecuting and imprisoning millions of citizens (mostly poor and minorities) for doing what Jobs, Obama, Michael Phelps and millions of others have done. Obviously, most of these banned substances ? like alcohol, gambling, sex, junk food consumption, prescription drug use and a litany of other legal activities ? can create harm to the individual and to others when abused (though America?s response to drug use ? prison ? also creates rather substantial harm to the drug user and to others, including their spouses, parents and children). But no rational person can doubt that these substances can also be used responsibly and constructively; just study Steve Jobs? life if you doubt that. Jobs? praise for his LSD use is what I kept returning to as I read about the Obama DOJ?s heinous new policy to use the full force of criminal prosecutions against medical marijuana dispensaries in California. In October, 2009, I enthusiastically praised Eric Holder and the DOJ for appearing to fulfill Obama?s campaign promise by refraining from prosecuting medical marijuana dispensaries in compliance with state law (a ?rare instance of unadulterated good news from Washington,? I gushed). Yet now, U.S. Attorneys in California will expend substantial law enforcement resources to persecute medical marijuana dispensaries that sell to consenting adults even though those transactions have been legalized by the voters of California and 16 other states (to see what a complete reversal this is of everything Obama and Holder previously said on this subject, see here). Progressives love to point out the hypocrisy of social conservatives who righteously rail against (and demand legal sanction for) the very same sexually sinful behavior in which they enthusiastically engage ? and rightly so. But what about a society that continues to imprison millions of human beings for using substances that vast numbers of people in the nation have secretly used and enjoyed, or which empowers people with the Oval Office, or reveres people like Steve Jobs, who have done the same? Even leaving aside the rather significant (and shameful) fact that drug laws are enforced with overwhelming dispropritionality against racial minorities, what possible justification is there for putting someone in a cage for using a substance they choose to use without any evidence that they?ve harmed anyone else or even risked harm to anyone else? All of this becomes even more incomprehensible when one considers the never-ending preaching about the need for ?austerity,? which means: depriving poor and middle class citizens of services and financial security. In this environment, how can it possibly be justified to expend substantial sums of money investigating, arresting, prosecuting and then imprisoning large numbers of people for doing nothing more than consuming marijuana or selling it in states where it is legal to sell it to other consenting adults? That makes about as much sense as deploying a State Department army of 16,000 for a permanent presence in Iraq at the same time political and financial elites plot cuts to Social Security and Medicare. I genuinely don?t understand why a policy that single-handedly sustains America?s status as World?s Largest Jailer ? and that consigns huge numbers of minorities and America?s poor to prison and permanent criminal status for no good reason, in the process breaking up families at astonishing rates (to say nothing of the inexorable erosion of civil liberties) ? isn?t a higher priority for progressives. But just like the senseless and monumentally wasteful Endless military War, America?s Drug War feeds the pockets of a powerful private industry: the growing privatized prison industry, which needs more and more prisoners for profits, gets many from drug convictions, and thus vehemently opposes and lobbies against any reform to the nation?s drug laws as well as reform of harsh criminal sentencing. That, combined with self-righteous, deeply hypocritical anti-drug moralizing and complete obliviousness to evidence, has ensured not that the Drug War and its prison obsession endures, but that it remains outside the scope of what can even be discussed in mainstream political circles. And as the Obama DOJ?s newly intensified attacks on marijuana demonstrate, the problem is, in many respects, getting worse, even as most of the world moves toward a much more restrained and health-based (rather than crime-based) approach to dealing with drug usage. * * * * * In 2009, I produced a study on the overwhelming success of drug decriminalization in Portugal, published by the CATO Institute. That study has been widely cited and discussed in numerous places, including receiving a critical response from the White House Drug Control Policy Office. I?m now working on an update to that report which I will present at this excellent Conference on Ending the Drug War, to take place on November 15, in Washington D.C., featuring former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former Mexican Foreign Affairs Minister Jorge Casta?eda, the Speaker of the Uruguyan House of Deputies Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou and several others. The Conference is open to the public and tickets can be obtained at the above link. From ths at psalience.org Sun Oct 9 15:13:30 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:13:30 +0200 Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?Jeremy_Salt_=96_Ankara=3A_Truth_and_Falsehoo?= =?iso-8859-1?q?d__in_Syria?= Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111009151312.06832320@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=17159 Truth and Falsehood in Syria By Jeremy Salt ? Ankara As insurrection in Syria lurches towards civil war, the brakes need to be put on the propaganda pouring through the western mainstream media and accepted uncritically by many who should know better. So here is a matrix of positions from which to argue about what is going on in this critical Middle Eastern country: 1. Syria has been a mukhabarat (intelligence) state since the redoubtable Abd al Hamid al Serraj ran the intelligence services as the deuxieme bureau in the 1950s. The authoritarian state which developed from the time Hafez al Assad took power in 1970 has crushed all dissent ruthlessly. On occasion it has either been him or them. The ubiquitous presence of the mukhabarat is an unpleasant fact of Syrian life but as Syria is a central target for assassination and subversion by Israel and western intelligence agencies, as it has repeatedly come under military attack, as it has had a large chunk of its territories occupied and as its enemies are forever looking for opportunities to bring it down, it can hardly be said that the mukhabarat is not needed. 2. There is no doubt that the bulk of people demonstrating in Syria want peaceful transition to a democratic form of government. Neither is there any doubt that armed groups operating from behind the screen of the demonstrations have no interest in reform. They want to destroy the government. 3. There have been very big demonstrations of support for the government. There is anger at the violence of the armed gangs and anger at external interference and exploitation of the situation by outside governments and the media. In the eyes of many Syrians, their country is again the target of an international conspiracy. 4. Whatever the truth of the accusations made against the security forces, the armed groups have killed hundreds of police, soldiers and civilians, in total probably close to 1000 at this stage. The civilian dead include university professors, doctors and even, very recently, the son of the Grand Mufti of the Republic. The armed gangs have massacred, ambushed, assassinated, attacked government buildings and sabotaged railway lines. 5. Bashar al Assad has a strong base of personal popularity. Although he sits on top of the system it is misleading to call him a dictator. The system itself is the true dictator. Deeply rooted power in Syria - entrenched over five decades - lies in the military and intelligence establishment, and to a lesser degree in the party structure. These are the true sources of resistance to change. The demonstrations were Bashar's opportunity to pass on the message, which he did, that the system had to change. 6. In the face of large scale demonstrations earlier this year the government did finally come up with a reform program. This was rejected out of hand by the opposition. No attempt was even made to test the bona fides of the government. 7. The claim that armed opposition to the government has begun only recently is a complete lie. The killings of soldiers, police and civilians, often in the most brutal circumstances, has been going on virtually since the beginning. 8. The armed groups are well armed and well organised. Large shipments of weapons have been smuggled into Syria from Lebanon and Turkey. They include pump action shotguns, machine guns, Kalashnikovs,RPG launchers, Israeli-made hand grenades and numerous other explosives. It is not clear who is providing these weapons but someone is, and someone is paying for them. Interrogation of captured members of armed gangs points in the direction of Saad al Hariri's Future Movement. Hariri is a front man for the US and Saudi Arabia, with influence spreading well beyond Lebanon. 9. Armed opposition to the regime largely seems to be sponsored by the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. In 1982 the government ruthlessly crushed an uprising initiated by the Brotherhood in Hama. Many thousands died and part of the city was destroyed. The Brotherhood has two prime objectives: the destruction of the Baathist government and the destruction of the secular state in favor of an Islamic system. It is almost palpably thirsting for revenge. 10. The armed groups have strong support from outside apart from what is already known or indicated. Exiled former Syrian Vice President and Foreign Minister, Abd ul Halim Khaddam, who lives in Paris, has been campaigning for years to bring down the Assad government. He is funded by both the EU and the US. Other exiled activists include Burhan Ghalioun, backed by Qatar as the leader of the 'national council' set up in Istanbul. Ghalioun, like Abd ul Halim Khaddam, lives in Paris and like him also, lobbies against the Assad government in Europe and in Washington. Together with Muhammad Riyad al Shaqfa, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, he is receptive to outside 'humanitarian intervention' in Syria on the Libyan model (others are against it). The promotion of the exiles as an alternative government is reminiscent of the way the US used exiled Iraqis (the so-called Iraqi National Congress) ahead of the invasion of Iraq. 11. The reporting by the western media of the situations in Libya and Syria has been appalling. NATO intervention in Libya has been the cause of massive destruction and thousands of deaths. The war, following the invasion of Iraq, is yet another major international crime committed by the governments of the US, Britain and France. The city of Sirte has been bombarded day and night for two weeks without the western media paying any attention to the heavy destruction and loss of life that must have followed. The western media has made no attempt to check reports coming out of Sirte of the bombing of civilian building and the killing of hundreds of people. The only reason can be that the ugly truth could well derail the whole NATO operation. 12. In Syria the same media has followed the same pattern of misreporting and disinformation. It has ignored or skated over the evidence of widespread killings by armed gangs. It has invited its audience to disbelieve the claims of government and believe the claims of rebels, often made in the name of human rights organisations based in Europe or the US. Numerous outright lies have been told, as they were told in Libya and as they were told ahead of the attack on Iraq. Some at least have been exposed. People said to have been killed by state security forces have turned up alive. The brothers of Zainab al Husni claimed she has been kidnapped by security forces, murdered and her body dismembered. This lurid account, spread by Al Jazeera and Al Arabiyya amongst other outlets, was totally false. She is still alive although now, of course, the propaganda tack is to claim that this is not really her but a double. Al Jazeera, the Guardian and the BBC have distinguished themselves by their blind support of anything that discredits the Syrian government. The same line is being followed by the mainstream media in the US. Al Jazeera, in particular, having distinguished itself with its reporting of the Egyptian revolution, has lost all credibility as an independent Arab world news channel. 13. In seeking to destroy the Syrian government the Muslim Brotherhood has a goal in common with the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, whose paranoia about Shia Islam reached fever pitch with the uprising in Bahrain. Wikileaks revealed how impatient it was for the US to attack Iran. A substitute target is the destruction of the strategic relationship between Iran, Syria and Hizbullah. The US and the Saudis may want to destroy the Alawi-dominated Baathist regime in Damascus for slightly different reasons, but the important thing is that they do want to destroy it. 14. The US is doing its utmost to drive Syria into a corner. It is giving financial support to exiled leaders of the opposition. It has tried (and so far failed thanks to Russian and Chinese opposition) to introduce an extensive program of sanctions through the UN Security Council. No doubt it will try again and depending on how the situation develops, it may try, with British and French support, to bring on a no-fly zone resolution opening the door to foreign attack. The situation is fluid and no doubt all sorts of contingency plans are being developed. The White House and the State Department are issuing hectoring statements every other day. Openly provoking the Syrian government, the US ambassador, accompanied by the French ambassador, travelled to Hama before Friday prayers. Against everything that is known about their past record of interference in Middle Eastern countries, it is inconceivable that the US and Israel, along with France and Britain, would not be involved in this uprising beyond what is already known. 15. While concentrating on the violence of the Syrian regime, the US, European governments (especially Britain) have totally ignored the violence directed against it. Their own infinitely greater violence, of course, in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and other places, doesn't even come into the picture. Turkey has joined their campaign against Syria with relish, going even further than they have in confronting the Syrian regime. In the space of a few months Turkey's 'zero problem' regional policy has been upended in the most inchoate manner. Turkey eventually lent its support to the NATO attack on Libya, after initially holding back. It has antagonised Iran by its policy on Syria and by agreeing, despite strong domestic opposition, to host a US radar missile 'defence' installation clearly directed against Iran. The Americans say its data will be shared with Israel, which has refused to apologise for the attack on the Mavi Marmara, plunging Israeli-Turkish relations into near crisis. So from 'zero problems', Turkey now has a regional policy full of problems with Israel, Syria and Iran. 16. While some members of the Syrian opposition have spoken against foreign intervention, the 'Free Syrian Army' has said that its aim is to have a no-fly zone declared over northern Syria. A no-fly zone would have to be enforced, and we have seen how this led in Libya to massive infrastructural destruction, the killing of thousands of people and the opening of the door to a new period of western domination. 17. If the Syrian government is brought down, every last Baathist and Alawi will be hunted down. In a government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood the status of minorities and women would be driven backwards. 18. Through the Syria Accountability Act, and through sanctions which the EU has imposed, the US has been trying to destroy the Syrian government for twenty years. The dismantling of unified Arab states along ethno-religious lines has been an aim of Israel's for decades. Where Israel goes, the US naturally follows. The fruits of this policy can be seen in Iraq, where an independent state in all but name has been created for the Kurds and where the constitution, written by the US, separates Iraq's people into Kurds, Sunni, Shi and Christian, destroying the binding logic of Arab nationalism. Iraq has not known a moment's peace since the British entered Baghdad in 1917. In Syria ethno-religious divisions (Sunni Muslim Arab, Sunni Muslim Kurd, Druze, Alawi and various Christian sects) render it vulnerable in the same way to the promotion of sectarian discord and eventual disintegration as the unified Arab state the French tried to prevent coming into existence in the 1920s. 19. The destruction of the Baathist government would be a strategic victory of unsurpassed value to the US and Israel. The central arch in the strategic relationship between Iran, Syria and Hizbullah will have been destroyed, leaving Hizbullah geographically isolated, with a hostile Sunni Muslim government next door, and leaving Hizbullah and Iran more exposed to a military attack by the US and Israel. Fortuitously or otherwise, the 'Arab spring' as it has developed in Syria has placed in their hands a lever by which they may be able to achieve their goal. 20. It is not necessarily the case that a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government in Egypt or Syria would be hostile to US interests. Wanting to be seen as a respectable member of the international community and another good example of 'moderate' Islam, it is likely and certainly possible that an Egyptian government dominated by the Brotherhood would agree to maintain the peace treaty with Israel for as long as it can (i.e. until another large scale attack by Israel on Gaza or Lebanon makes it absolutely unsustainable). 21. A Syrian government dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood would be close to Saudi Arabia and hostile to Iran, Hizbullah and the Shia of Iraq, especially those associated with Muqtada al Sadr. It would pay lip service to the Palestine cause and the liberation of the Golan Heights but its practical policies would be unlikely to be any different from the government it is seeking to destroy. 22. The Syrian people are entitled to demand democracy and to be given it, but in this way and at this cost? Even now, an end to the killing and negotiations on political reform is surely the way forward, not violence which threatens to tear the country apart. Unfortunately, violence and not a negotiated settlement is what too many people inside Syria want and what too many governments watching and waiting for their opportunity also want. No Syrian can ultimately gain from this, whatever they presently think. Their country is being driven towards a sectarian civil war, perhaps foreign intervention and certainly chaos on an even greater scale than we are now seeing. There will be no quick recovery if the state collapses or can be brought down. Like Iraq, and probably like Libya, looking at the present situation, Syria would enter a period of bloody turmoil that could last for years. Like Iraq, again, it would be completely knocked out of the ring as a state capable of standing up for Arab interests, which means, of course, standing up to the US and Israel. 23. Ultimately, whose interests does anyone think this outcome would serve? - Jeremy Salt is associate professor in Middle Eastern History and Politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Previously, he taught at Bosporus University in Istanbul and the University of Melbourne in the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science. Professor Salt has written many articles on Middle East issues, particularly Palestine, and was a journalist for The Age newspaper when he lived in Melbourne. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. If you like this article, please consider making a contribution to the Palestine Chronicle.