From ths at psalience.org Mon Dec 5 12:34:15 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2011 12:34:15 +0100 Subject: [THS] Tomgram: William deBuys, The Parching of the West Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111205122652.0434a748@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175475/tomgram%3A_william Tomgram: William deBuys, The Parching of the West Posted by William deBuys at 6:02pm, December 4, 2011. [several embedded links/references at url above] The good news? While 2010 tied for the warmest year on record, 2011 -- according to the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) -- is likely to come in 10th once November and December temperatures are tallied. In part, this is evidently due to an especially strong La Ni?a cooling event in the Pacific. On the other hand, with 2011 in the top ten despite La Ni?a, 13 of the warmest years since such record-keeping began have occurred in the last 15 years. Think of that as an uncomfortably hot cluster. And other climate news is no better. A recent study indicates that Arctic ice is now melting at rates unprecedented in the last 1,450 years (as far back, that is, as reasonably accurate reconstructions of such an environment can be modeled). As the Arctic warms and temperatures rise in surrounding northern lands -- someday, Finland may have to construct artificial ski trails and ice rinks for its future winter tourists -- a report on yet another study is bringing more lousy news. Appearing in the prestigious science journal Nature, it indicates that the melting permafrost of the tundra may soon begin releasing global-warming gases into the atmosphere in massive quantities. We?re talking the equivalent of 300 billion metric tons of carbon over the next nine decades. Recently, Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, suggested that, by century?s end, the planet?s temperature could rise by a staggering 6? Celsius (almost 11? Fahrenheit). International climate-change negotiators had been trying to keep that rise to a ?mere? 2? C. ?Everybody, even the schoolchildren, knows this is a catastrophe for all of us,? was the way Birol summed the situation up. If only it were so, but here in the U.S., none of the above news was even considered front-page worthy. Nor was the news that, in 2010, humans had pumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than at any time since the industrial revolution began: 564 million more tons than in 2009 to be exact. We?re living today with just less than a degree of those six degrees to come, and the results in extreme weather this year should have made us all stop and think. If you want to focus in on damage here in the U.S., consider Rick Perry?s Texas, where, according to scientists, ?daily temperatures averaged 86.7? in June through August -- a staggering 5.4?F above normal.? According to the WMO, that?s the highest such average ?ever recorded for any American state.? And still global politicians yammer on and do little; still, the U.S. shuffles its political feet, while Canada?s government has announced that it will make no new commitments and may even be preparing to withdraw from the Kyoto protocol, and countries with booming developing economies like China, India, and Brazil hedge their bets when it comes to action. In the meantime, nature doesn?t care whether or not we do anything. It?s on its own schedule. And when it comes to the American Southwest, that schedule looks daunting indeed as William deBuys makes clear. His new book, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest, is the definitive work on the subject of water and the West (and, as with all of his work, a pleasure to read). So get yourself a glass of water while you still can and settle in for a dose of the Age of Thirst. (To catch Timothy MacBain?s latest Tomcast audio interview in which deBuys discusses the water politics of the American West, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom The Age of Thirst in the American West Coming to a Theater Near You: The Greatest Water Crisis in the History of Civilization By William deBuys Consider it a taste of the future: the fire, smoke, drought, dust, and heat that have made life unpleasant, if not dangerous, from Louisiana to Los Angeles. New records tell the tale: biggest wildfire ever recorded in Arizona (538,049 acres), biggest fire ever in New Mexico (156,600 acres), all-time worst fire year in Texas history (3,697,000 acres). The fires were a function of drought. As of summer?s end, 2011 was the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat. It was the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado. Virtually every city in the region experienced unprecedented temperatures, with Phoenix, as usual, leading the march toward unlivability. This past summer, the so-called Valley of the Sun set a new record of 33 days when the mercury reached a shoe-melting 110? F or higher. (The previous record of 32 days was set in 2007.) And here?s the bad news in a nutshell: if you live in the Southwest or just about anywhere in the American West, you or your children and grandchildren could soon enough be facing the Age of Thirst, which may also prove to be the greatest water crisis in the history of civilization. No kidding. If that gets you down, here?s a little cheer-up note: the end is not yet nigh. In fact, this year the weather elsewhere rode to the rescue, and the news for the Southwest was good where it really mattered. Since January, the biggest reservoir in the United States, Lake Mead, backed up by the Hoover Dam and just 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas, has risen almost 40 feet. That lake is crucial when it comes to watering lawns or taking showers from Arizona to California. And the near 40-foot surge of extra water offered a significant upward nudge to the Southwest?s water reserves. The Colorado River, which the reservoir impounds, supplies all or part of the water on which nearly 30 million people depend, most of them living downstream of Lake Mead in Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, Tijuana, and scores of smaller communities in the United States and Mexico. Back in 1999, the lake was full. Patricia Mulroy, who heads the water utility serving Las Vegas, rues the optimism of those bygone days. ?We had a fifty-year, reliable water supply,? she says. ?By 2002, we had no water supply. We were out. We were done. I swore to myself we?d never do that again.? In 2000, the lake began to fall -- like a boulder off a cliff, bouncing a couple of times on the way down. Its water level dropped a staggering 130 feet, stopping less than seven feet above the stage that would have triggered reductions in downstream deliveries. Then -- and here?s the good news, just in case you were wondering -- last winter, it snowed prodigiously up north in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. The spring and summer run-off from those snowpacks brought enormous relief. It renewed what we in the Southwest like to call the Hydro-Illogic cycle: when drought comes, everybody wrings their hands and promises to institute needed reform, if only it would rain a little. Then the drought breaks or eases and we all return to business as usual, until the cycle comes around to drought again. So don?t be fooled. One day, perhaps soon, Lake Mead will renew its downward plunge. That?s a certainty, the experts tell us. And here?s the thing: the next time, a sudden rescue by heavy snows in the northern Rockies might not come. If the snowpacks of the future are merely ordinary, let alone puny, then you?ll know that we really are entering a new age. And climate change will be a major reason, but we?ll have done a good job of aiding and abetting it. The states of the so-called Lower Basin of the Colorado River -- California, Arizona, and Nevada -- have been living beyond their water means for years. Any departure from recent decades of hydrological abundance, even a return to long-term average flows in the Colorado River, would produce a painful reckoning for the Lower Basin states. And even worse is surely on the way. Just think of the coming Age of Thirst in the American Southwest and West as a three-act tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions. The Age of Thirst: Act I The curtain in this play would surely rise on the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which divided the river?s water equally between the Upper and Lower Basins, allocating to each annually 7.5 million acre-feet, also known by its acronym "maf." (An acre-foot suffices to support three or four families for a year.) Unfortunately, the architects of the compact, drawing on data from an anomalously wet historical period, assumed the river?s average annual flow to be about 17 maf per year. Based on reconstructions that now stretch back more than 1,000 years, the river?s long-term average is closer to 14.7 maf. Factor in evaporation from reservoirs (1.5 maf per year) and our treaty obligation to Mexico (another 1.5 maf), and the math doesn?t favor a water-guzzling society. Nonetheless, the states of the Lower Basin have been taking their allotment as if nothing were wrong and consequently overdrafting their account by up to 1.3 maf annually. At this rate, even under unrealistically favorable scenarios, the Lower Basin will eventually drain Lake Mead and cutbacks will begin, possibly as soon as in the next few years. And then things will get dicier because California, the water behemoth of the West, won?t have to absorb any of those cutbacks. Here?s one of the screwiest quirks in western water law: to win Congressional approval for the building of a monumental aqueduct, the Central Arizona Project (CAP), which would bring Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona agreed to subordinate its Colorado River water rights to California?s. In that way, the $4 billion, 336-mile-long CAP was born, and for it Arizona paid a heavy price. The state obliged itself to absorb not just its own losses in a cutback situation, but California?s as well. Worst case scenario: the CAP aqueduct, now a lifeline for millions, could become as dry as the desert it runs through, while California continues to bathe. Imagine Phoenix curling and cracking around the edges, while lawn sprinklers hiss in Malibu. The contrast will upset a lot of Arizonans. Worse yet, the prospective schedule of cutbacks now in place for the coming bad times is too puny to save Lake Mead. The Age of Thirst: Act II While that Arizona-California relationship guarantees full employment for battalions of water lawyers, a far bigger problem looms: climate change. Models for the Southwest have been predicting a 4?C (7.2?F) increase in mean temperature by century?s end, and events seem to be outpacing the predictions. We have already experienced close to 1? C of that increase, which accounts, at least in part, for last summer?s colossal fires and record-setting temperatures -- and it?s now clear that we?re just getting started. The simple rule of thumb for climate change is that wet places will get wetter and dry places drier. One reason the dry places will dry is that higher temperatures mean more evaporation. In other words, there will be ever less water in the rivers that keep the region?s cities (and much else) alive. Modeling already suggests that by mid-century surface stream-flow will decline by 10% to 30%. Independent studies at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in California and the University of Colorado evaluated the viability of Lake Mead and eventually arrived at similar conclusions: after about 2026, the risk of ?failure? at Lake Mead, according to a member of the Colorado group, ?just skyrockets.? Failure in this context would mean water levels lower than the dam?s lowest intake, no water heading downstream, and the lake becoming a ?dead pool.? If -- perhaps ?when? is the more appropriate word -- that happens, California?s Colorado River Aqueduct, which supplies water to Los Angeles, San Diego, and the All-American Canal, which sustains the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, will go just as dry as the Central Arizona Project aqueduct. Meanwhile, if climate change is affecting the Colorado River?s watershed that harshly, it will undoubtedly also be hitting the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The aptly named Lester Snow, a recent director of California?s Department of Water Resources, understood this. His future water planning assumed a 40% decline in runoff from the Sierras, which feeds the California Aqueduct. None of his contemplated scenarios were happy ones. The Colorado River Aqueduct and the California Aqueduct make the urban conglomerations of southern California possible. If both fail at once, the result will be, as promised, the greatest water crisis in the history of civilization. Only Patricia Mulroy has an endgame strategy for the demise of Lake Mead. The Southern Nevada Water Authority is, even now, tunneling under the lake to install the equivalent of a bathtub drain at close to its lowest point. At a cost of more than $800 million, it will drain the dregs of Lake Mead for Las Vegas. Admittedly, water quality will be a problem, as the dead pool will concentrate pollutants. The good news, according to the standard joke among those who chronicle Sin City?s improbable history, is that the hard-partying residents and over-stimulated tourists who sip from Lake Mead?s last waters will no longer need to purchase anti-depressants. They?ll get all the Zoloft and Xanax they need from their tap water. And only now do we arrive at the third act of this expanding tragedy. The Age of Thirst: Act III Those who believe in American exceptionalism hold that the historical patterns shaping the fate of other empires and nations don?t apply to the United States. Be that as it may, we are certainly on track to test whether the U.S. is similarly inoculated against the patterns of environmental history. Because tree rings record growing conditions year by year, the people who study them have been able to reconstruct climate over very long spans of time. One of their biggest discoveries is that droughts more severe and far longer than anything known in recent centuries have occurred repeatedly in the American Southwest. The droughts of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, of the 1950s, and of the period from 1998 to 2004 are remembered in the region, yet none lasted a full decade. By contrast, the drought that brought the civilization of the ancestral Puebloans, or Anasazi, centered at Chaco Canyon, to its knees in the twelfth century, by contrast, lasted more than 30 years. The one that finished off Mesa Verdean culture in the thirteenth century was similarly a ?megadrought.? Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona who played a major role in the Nobel-Prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, tells me that the prospect of 130? F days in Phoenix worries him far less than the prospect of decades of acute dryness. ?If anything is scary, the scariest is that we could trip across a transition into a megadrought.? He adds, ?You can probably bet your house that, unless we do something about these greenhouse gas emissions, the megadroughts of the future are going to be a lot hotter than the ones of the past.? Other scientists believe that the Southwest is already making the transition to a ?new climatology,? a new normal that will at least bring to mind the aridity of the Dust Bowl years. Richard Seager of Columbia University, for instance, suggests that ?the cycle of natural dry periods and wet periods will continue, but around a mean that gets drier. So the depths -- the dry parts of the naturally occurring droughts -- will be drier than we?re used to, and the wet parts won?t be as wet.? Drought affects people differently from other disasters. After something terrible happens -- tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes -- people regularly come together in memorable ways, rising above the things that divide them. In a drought, however, what is terrible is that nothing happens. By the time you know you?re in one, you?ve already had an extended opportunity to meditate on the shortcomings of your neighbors. You wait for what does not arrive. You thirst. You never experience the rush of compassion that helps you behave well. Drought brings out the worst in us. After the Chacoan drought, corn-farming ancestral Puebloans still remained in the Four Corners area of the Southwest. They hung on, even if at lower population densities. After the Mesa Verdean drought, everybody left. By the number of smashed crania and other broken bones in the ruins of the region?s beautiful stone villages, archaeologists judge that the aridifying world of the Mesa Verdeans was fatally afflicted by violence. Warfare and societal breakdown, evidently driven by the changing climate, helped end that culture. So it matters what we do. Within the limits imposed by the environment, the history we make is contingent, not fated. But we are not exactly off to a good start in dealing with the challenges ahead. The problem of water consumption in the Southwest is remarkably similar to the problem of greenhouse gas pollution. First, people haggle to exhaustion over the need to take action; then, they haggle over inadequate and largely symbolic reductions. For a host of well-considered, eminently understandable, and ultimately erroneous reasons, inaction becomes the main achievement. For this drama, think Hamlet. Or if the lobbyists who argue for business as usual out west and in Congress spring to mind first, think Iago. We know at least one big thing about how this particular tragedy will turn out: the so-called civilization of the Southwest will not survive the present century, not at its present scale anyway. The question yet to be answered is how much it will have to shrink, and at what cost. Stay tuned. It will be one of the greatest, if grimmest, shows on Earth. William deBuys is the author of seven books, including the just published A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), and The Walk (an excerpt of which won a Pushcart Prize). He has long been involved in environmental affairs in the Southwest, including service as founding chairman of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the 87,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico. To listen to Timothy MacBain?s latest Tomcast audio interview in which deBuys discusses the water politics of the American West click here, or download it to your iPod here. Copyright 2011 William deBuys From ths at psalience.org Mon Dec 5 12:30:37 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2011 12:30:37 +0100 Subject: [THS] Climate Change: High risk of permafrost thaw Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111205121944.05972988@mail.messagingengine.com> http://planet3.org/2011/12/01/climate-change-high-risk-of-permafrost-thaw/ Climate Change: High risk of permafrost thaw Written on December 1, 2011 by Michael Tobis in Featured Somewhat in the shadow of the big state-of-the-Arctic publication today is a related paper in Nature, an expert elicitation on the risks of methane releases from permafrost thaw by Schuur and Abbott is released today. Climate change: High risk of permafrost thaw Nature 480, 32?33 (01 December 2011) doi:10.1038/480032a Experts were fairly tightly clustered in their estimates of equivalent CO2 to be expected from this phenomenon. In a high warming scenario, 95% confidence bounds offered CO2 equivalents of: ?30 billion to 63 billion tonnes of carbon by 2040, reaching 232 billion to 380 billion tonnes by 2100 and 549 billion to 865 billion tonnes by 2300? with roughly 1/3 of those values in a low warming scenario. The low warming scenario presumably corresponds to the trillion ton scenario, under which we have 450 billion tons left to emit. So at a third of the approximately 300 billion tons by 2100, our safe operating range is substantially cut, from 450 B tons left to about 350 B tons left, with just this one geochemical feedback. This is not the methane runaway some people lose sleep over, but it?s pretty nasty news just the same. As the paper says: Knowing how much carbon will be released from the permafrost zone in this century and beyond is crucial for determining the appropriate response. But despite the massive amount of carbon in permafrost soils, emissions from these soils are unlikely to overshadow those from the burning of fossil fuels, which will continue to be the main source of climate forcing. Permafrost carbon release will still be an important amplifier of climate change, however, and is in some ways more problematic: it occurs in remote places, far from human influence, and is dispersed across the landscape. Trapping carbon emissions at the source ? as one might do at power plants ? is not an option. And once the soils thaw, emissions are likely to continue for decades, or even centuries. Photo is from the article, captioned ?Abrupt thaw, as seen here in Alaska?s Noatak National Preserve, causes the land to collapse, accelerating permafrost degradation and carbon release.? From ths at psalience.org Mon Dec 5 16:31:47 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:31:47 +0100 Subject: [THS] The Constitution Is Dead Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111205163002.0413af78@mail.messagingengine.com> The Constitution Is Dead: The Gradual Transition towards an Orwellian Police State Americans denied their First and Third amendment rights... By Devon DB URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28010 Global Research, December 3, 2011 Many in America still believe that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and that politicians, both Republican and Democrat alike, still hold that view and ensure that any and all legislation passed does not violate it. However, in today?s America, the Constitution is effectively a null and void document, nothing more than a symbol politicians pay lip service to. The destruction of the Constitution began soon after 9/11 when the Patriot Act was pushed through Congress. In the heat of the moment it seemed as if the legislation was meant to protect us from terrorism, however it was later revealed that certain provisions blatantly violated the First, Fourth, and Sixth Amendments. [1] Interestingly enough, however, this didn?t stop the Senate from to extending the Patriot Act earlier this year [2]. In doing this, the government revealed just how much they respect the Constitution. The next unconstitutional act to take place was under President Obama. Despite his ?hope and change? rhetoric during the campaign, the only thing Obama changed was to further erode the Constitution and the power of checks and balances in government. Obama argued that the UN mandate gave him the right to bombard Libya, however the mandate has nothing to do with the fact that such an action was unconstitutional [3] as the power to declare war in held solely by Congress, not to mention the fact that it violated the War Powers Act. In carrying out this action, Obama did even more to expand the imperial presidency and showed his blatant hypocrisy as in 2007 he clearly stated that ?The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.? [4] (emphasis added) However, in later months he would take this disregard of the Constitution to the extreme. Just two months ago, Obama authorized the assassination of American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. While al-Awlaki was a member of Al Qaeda, he was still a US citizen at the time of his death [5] and thus he still had rights as a citizen, specifically the right due process. This never occurred with al-Awlaki. Due to al-Awlaki?s assassination, it sets a legal precedent which allows the current and future Presidents to assassinate US citizens and withhold damning evidence- if there even is any- from the public under the guise of ?national security.? Today, we see due to the brutal crackdown of the Occupy Wall Street movement in Oakland, New York, and most recently Los Angeles, that Americans are being denied their First and Third amendment rights. Mayors are sending the message that if one decides to pose a serious challenge to the status quo, they will be violently crushed. The Constitution is dead and with it the beliefs and ideals America was founded on have also passed away. The most terrifying occurrence, however, is that Americans are seeing their freedoms eroded are still in denial that a police state is slowly, but surely on its way. Notes 1: http://www.scn.org/ccapa/pa-vs-const.html 2: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/05/25/senate-moves-patriot-act-extension/ 3: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/24/obama_s_unconstitutional_war?page=full 4: http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/specials/CandidateQA/ObamaQA/ 5: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/09/30/was_anwar_al_awlaki_still_a_us_citizen From ths at psalience.org Mon Dec 5 19:13:14 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2011 19:13:14 +0100 Subject: [THS] "Harpers": Scott Horton: A Club of Liars, Demagogues, and Fools Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111205191057.03fa3a00@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29854.htm A Club of Liars, Demagogues, and Fools By Scott Horton November 30, 2011 "Harpers" -- The German newsweekly Spiegel takes the latest disclosures concerning Herman Cain and the rise of Newt Gingrich as an opportunity to offer a foreign bird?s-eye view of the current Republican Party and the American media froth around it. My translation: ?Africa is a country. The Taliban rule in Libya. Muslims are terrorists. Immigrants are mostly criminals, Occupy Wall Street protesters are always dirty. And women who claim to have been sexually molested should kindly keep quiet.? Welcome to the wonderful world of the Republican Party. Or rather: to the distorted world of its presidential campaign. For months it has coiled through the country like a traveling circus, from debate to debate, from scandal to scandal, contesting the mightiest office in the world ? and nothing is ever too unfathomable for them These eight presidential wannabes are happy enough not only to demolish their own reputations but also that of their party, the once worthy party of Abraham Lincoln. They are also ruining the reputation of the United States. They lie, deceive, scuffle and speak every manner of idiocy. And they expose a political, economic, geographic and historical ignorance compared to which George W. Bush sounds like a scholar. Even the party?s boosters are horrified by the spectacle Platitudes in lieu of programs: in serious times that demand the smartest, these clowns offer blather that is an insult to the intelligence of all Americans. But as with all freak shows, it would be impossible without a stage, the U.S. media, which has been neutered by the demands of political correctness, and a welcoming audience, a party base that seems to have been lobotomized overnight. Notwithstanding the subterranean depths of the primary process, the press and broadcasters proclaim one clown after the next to be the new frontrunner, in predictable news cycles of forty-five days. Spiegel ties the disintegration of the Republican Party to the Tea Party, ?a ?popular movement? that was sponsored by Fox News and never showed any interest in the business of government ? neither in information nor intellect, which are its requisites, but rather in a self-marketing exercise driven by commissions and millions.? The most important observation Spiegel offers is this: At a time of mounting crisis, when much of the world is looking to the United States for leadership and initiative, the celebration of sleaze and ignorance that has marked the Republican primary is damaging the reputation of the nation as a whole. Even those who despise the G.O.P. should be concerned about the depths to which the party has sunk. Scott Horton is a Contributing Editor of Harper's Magazine and writes No Comment for this website. - A New York attorney known for his work in emerging markets and international law, especially human rights law and the law of armed conflict, Horton lectures at Columbia Law School. From ths at psalience.org Tue Dec 6 19:24:10 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:24:10 +0100 Subject: [THS] Reactor Core Melted Fully, Japan Says Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111206192400.0791b9c0@mail.messagingengine.com> Reactor Core Melted Fully, Japan Says December 1, 2011, Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204262304577069302835999204.html Japan's tsunami-stricken nuclear-power complex came closer to a catastrophic meltdown than previously indicated by its operator [which on November 30] described how one reactor's molten nuclear core likely burned through its primary containment chamber and then ate as far as three-quarters of the way through the concrete in a secondary vessel. The [new] assessment?offered by Japan's government and Tokyo Electric Power Co., ... marked Japan's most sobering reckoning to date of the nuclear disaster sparked by the country's March 11 earthquake and tsunami. But it came nearly six months after U.S. and international nuclear experts and regulators had reached similar conclusions. For the first time, Tokyo Electric ... said that nuclear-fuel rods in the complex's No. 1 reactor had likely melted completely, burning through their so-called pressure vessel and then boring through concrete at the bottom of a second containment vessel. That brought the fuel closer than previously believed to breaching the containment vessel and foundation and continuing to burn through the ground below ? a scenario sometimes described as the "China Syndrome." The findings are the latest reminder of how much remains unknown about the extent of the mid-March Fukushima Daiichi accident. From ths at psalience.org Tue Dec 6 21:00:46 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 21:00:46 +0100 Subject: [THS] Michel Chossudovsky: Preemptive Nuclear War against Iran Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111206210013.078ae308@mail.messagingengine.com> World War III: The Launching of a Preemptive Nuclear War against Iran By Michel Chossudovsky URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28026 Global Research, December 4, 2011 The launching of an outright war using nuclear warheads against Iran has been on the active drawing board of the Pentagon since 2005. If such a war were to be launched, the entire Middle East Central Asia region would flare up. Humanity would be precipitated into a World War III Scenario. World War III is not front-page news. The mainstream media has excluded in-depth analysis and debate on the implications of these war plans. The onslaught of World War III, were it to be carried out, would be casually described as a "no-fly zone", an operation under NATO's "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) with minimal "collateral damage" or a "limited" punitive bombing against specific military targets, all of which purport to support "Global Security" as well as "democracy" and human rights in the targeted country. Public opinion is largely unaware of the grave implications of these war plans, which contemplate the use of nuclear weapons, ironically in retaliation to Iran's nonexistent nuclear weapons program. Moreover, 21st Century military technology is at an advanced stage of development combining an array of sophisticated weapons systems. We are at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in World history. The future of humanity is at stake. The present situation is one of advanced war planning by a formidable military force using nuclear warheads. The Pentagon?s global military design is one of world conquest. The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the World simultaneously. Militarization at the global level is instrumented through the US military's Unified Command structure: the entire planet is divided up into geographic Combatant Commands under the control of the Pentagon. According to (former) NATO Commander General Wesley Clark, the Pentagon?s military road-map consists of a sequence of war theaters: ?[The] five-year campaign plan [includes]... a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan.? Military action is waged in the name of the "Global War on Terrorism" and Global Security. It has a stated "humanitarian" "pro-democracy" mandate. It is predicated on the notion that the West's arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons are (in contrast to those [nonexistent] of the Islamic Republic), according to expert scientific opinion on contract to the Pentagon, "harmless to the surrounding civilian population because the explosion is underground." Irresponsible politicians are unaware of the implications of their actions. They believe their own war propaganda: nuclear weapons are heralded as an instrument of peace and democracy. War is heralded as a peace-keeping making operation carried out with the support of the "international community". The victims of war are described as the perpetrators. Iran and Syria constitute a threat to Global Security thereby justifying pre-emptive military action. Global Warfare The concept of the "Long War" has characterised US military doctrine since the end of World War II. The broader objective of global military dominance in support of an imperial project was first formulated under the Truman administration in the late 1940s at the outset of the Cold War. We are dealing with a global military agenda, namely "Global Warfare". The 2000 Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which was the backbone of the NeoCon's agenda was predicated on "waging a war without borders". The PNAC's declared objectives were to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars" in different regions of the World as well perform the so-called military "constabulary" duties "associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions". Global constabulary implies a Worldwide process of military policing and interventionism, including covert operations and "regime change". (Project for a New American Century, Rebuilding Americas Defenses.pdf, September 2000) This diabolical military project formulated by the NeoCons was adopted and implemented from the very outset of the Obama administration. With a new team of military and foreign policy advisers, Obama has been far more effective in fostering military escalation than his predecessor in the White House, who has recently been condemned by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal for "Crimes against the Peace". In the present context, US military and intelligence actions are been undertaken in different part of the the World. Ongoing war plans within the broader Middle East Central Asian region would involve coordinated actions against Iran, Syria and Pakistan leading to an extended regional war theater. The three existing and distinct war theaters (Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine) would merge into a broad regional war extending from the Lebanese-Syrian East Mediterraean coastline to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border with Western China (See map below). Israel, Lebanon and Turkey would be engulfed in the conflict. It is important to address the history of this military agenda including the slated role of Israel. The main coalition partners, including the US, UK, Israel and Turkey have been in "an advanced stage of readiness" since 2005. The Combatant Command structure of a military operation against Iran is centralized and controlled by the Pentagon. In 2005, USSTRATCOM was identified as "the lead Combatant Command for integration and synchronization of DoD-wide efforts in combating weapons of mass destruction." This Combatant Command integration also included coordination with America's allies including NATO, Israel and a number of frontline Arab states, which are members of NATO's Mediterranean dialogue. To implement USSTRATCOM's mandate, a new command unit entitled Joint Functional Component Command Space and Global Strike, or JFCCSGS was created. JFCCSGS was granted the mandate to oversee the launching of a nuclear attack against Iran in accordance with the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, approved by the US Congress in 2002. The NPR underscores the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons not only against "rogue states" (i.e. Iran) but also against China and Russia. The operational implementation of the "Global Strike" was labelled CONCEPT PLAN (CONPLAN) 8022. The latter is described as "an actual plan that the Navy and the Air Force translate into strike package for their submarines and bombers,' CONPLAN 8022 is 'the overall umbrella plan of the pre-planned strategic scenarios involving nuclear weapons.' Rebuild the Antiwar Movement. SAY NO to World War III The antiwar movement is in crisis: civil society organizations are misinformed, manipulated or co-opted. A large segment of "progressive" opinion is supportive of NATO's R2P "humanitarian" mandate to extent that these war plans are being carried out with the "rubber stamp" of civil society. There is a definite need to rebuild the antiwar movement on entirely new premises. The holding of mass demonstrations and antiwar protests is not enough. What is required is the development of a broad and well organized grassroots antiwar network, across the land, nationally and internationally, which challenges the structures of power and authority. People must mobilize not only against the military agenda, the authority of the state and its officials must also be challenged. Central to an understanding of war, is the media campaign which grants it legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion. A good versus evil dichotomy prevails. The perpetrators of war are presented as the victims. Public opinion is misled: ?We must fight against evil in all its forms as a means to preserving the Western way of life.? Breaking the "big lie" which upholds war as a humanitarian undertaking, means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force. This profit-driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies. It should be understood that whatever its justification, War is a "Crime against the Peace" under Nuremburg. George W. Bush and Anthony L. Blair have been condemned by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal for waging a criminal war of aggression against Iraq. War crimes, however, are not limited to the former US president and British Prime Minister. There are, so to speak, "New War Criminals on the Block" including the president of the United States of America Barack Hussein Obama, among others. The acting heads of state and heads of government which support US-NATO-Israel wars of aggression under an R2P pretext are war criminals under international law. This proposition, which consists in unseating the war criminals in high office, is central to the waging of an effective antiwar movement. This war can be prevented if people forcefully confront their governments, address the issue of war crimes, pressure their elected representatives, organize at the local level in towns, villages and municipalities, spread the word, inform their fellow citizens as to the implications of a global war, initiate debate and discussion within the armed forces. Nuclear War against Iran Below are excerpts from my January 2006 article (emphasis added) which outlines the process of military deployment including the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Iran. To read the complete article click here: Nuclear War against Iran. A more detailed analysis is contained in my book entitled Towards a World War III Scenario (see ordering details below): "Various military exercises have been conducted, starting in early 2005. In turn, the Iranian Armed Forces have also conducted large scale military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf in December in anticipation of a US sponsored attack. Since early 2005, there has been intense shuttle diplomacy between Washington, Tel Aviv, Ankara and NATO headquarters in Brussels. In recent developments [late 2005], CIA Director Porter Goss on a mission to Ankara, requested Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan "to provide political and logistic support for air strikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets." Goss reportedly asked " for special cooperation from Turkish intelligence to help prepare and monitor the operation." (DDP, 30 December 2005). In turn, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has given the green light to the Israeli Armed Forces to launch the attacks by the end of March [2006]: All top Israeli officials have pronounced the end of March, 2006, as the deadline for launching a military assault on Iran.... The end of March date also coincides with the IAEA report to the UN on Iran's nuclear energy program. Israeli policymakers believe that their threats may influence the report, or at least force the kind of ambiguities, which can be exploited by its overseas supporters to promote Security Council sanctions or justify Israeli military action. (James Petras, Israel's War Deadline: Iran in the Crosshairs, Global Research, December 2005) The US sponsored military plan has been endorsed by NATO, although it is unclear, at this stage [December 2005], as to the nature of NATO's involvement in the planned aerial attacks. "Shock and Awe" The various components of the military operation are firmly under US Command, coordinated by the Pentagon and US Strategic Command Headquarters (USSTRATCOM) at the Offutt Air Force base in Nebraska. The actions announced by Israel would be carried out in close coordination with the Pentagon. The command structure of the operation is centralized and ultimately Washington will decide when to launch the military operation. US military sources have confirmed that an aerial attack on Iran would involve a large scale deployment comparable to the US "shock and awe" bombing raids on Iraq in March 2003: American air strikes on Iran would vastly exceed the scope of the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear center in Iraq, and would more resemble the opening days of the 2003 air campaign against Iraq. Using the full force of operational B-2 stealth bombers, staging from Diego Garcia or flying direct from the United States, possibly supplemented by F-117 stealth fighters staging from al Udeid in Qatar or some other location in theater, the two-dozen suspect nuclear sites would be targeted. Military planners could tailor their target list to reflect the preferences of the Administration by having limited air strikes that would target only the most crucial facilities ... or the United States could opt for a far more comprehensive set of strikes against a comprehensive range of WMD related targets, as well as conventional and unconventional forces that might be used to counterattack against US forces in Iraq (See Globalsecurity.org at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iran-strikes.htm In November [2005], US Strategic Command conducted a major exercise of a "global strike plan" entitled "Global Lightening". The latter involved a simulated attack using both conventional and nuclear weapons against a "fictitious enemy". Following the "Global Lightening" exercise, US Strategic Command declared an advanced state of readiness. Consensus for Nuclear War No dissenting political voices have emerged from within the European Union. There are ongoing consultations between Washington, Paris and Berlin. Contrary to the invasion of Iraq, which was opposed at the diplomatic level by France and Germany, Washington has been building "a consensus" both within the Atlantic Alliance and the UN Security Council. This consensus pertains to the conduct of a nuclear war, which could potentially affect a large part of the Middle East Central Asian region. Moreover, a number of frontline Arab states [i.e. Arab League] are now tacit partners in the US/ Israeli military project. A year ago in November 2004, Israel's top military brass met at NATO headquarters in Brussels with their counterparts from six members of the Mediterranean basin nations, including Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania. [Arabic league and Israel work hand in glove] A NATO-Israel protocol was signed. Following these meetings, joint military exercises were held off the coast of Syria involving the US, Israel and Turkey. and in February 2005, Israel participated in military exercises and "anti-terror maneuvers" together with several Arab countries. The media in chorus has unequivocally pointed to Iran as a "threat to World Peace". The antiwar movement has swallowed the media lies. The fact that the US and Israel are planning a Middle East nuclear holocaust is not part of the antiwar/ anti- globalization agenda. The "surgical strikes" are presented to world public opinion as a means to preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. We are told that this is not a war but a military peace-keeping operation, in the form of aerial attacks directed against Iran's nuclear facilities. Mini-nukes: "Safe for Civilians" The press reports, while revealing certain features of the military agenda, largely serve to distort the broader nature of the military operation, which contemplates the preemptive use of tactical nuclear weapons. The war agenda is based on the Bush administration's doctrine of "preemptive" nuclear war under the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review. Media disinformation has been used extensively to conceal the devastating consequences of military action involving nuclear warheads against Iran. The fact that these surgical strikes would be carried out using both conventional and nuclear weapons is not an object of debate. According to a 2003 Senate decision, the new generation of tactical nuclear weapons or "low yield" "mini-nukes", with an explosive capacity of up to 6 times a Hiroshima bomb, are now considered "safe for civilians" because the explosion is underground. The following article published in January 2006 outlined the main features of this diabolical military agenda. In recent developments, following the threats by Britain and Israel, we have reached a major turning point. .... Space and Earth Attack Command Unit A preemptive nuclear attack [against Iran] using tactical nuclear weapons would be coordinated out of US Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force base in Nebraska, in liaison with US and coalition command units in the Persian Gulf, the Diego Garcia military base, Israel and Turkey. Under its new mandate, USSTRATCOM has a responsibility for "overseeing a global strike plan" consisting of both conventional and nuclear weapons. In military jargon, it is slated to play the role of "a global integrator charged with the missions of Space Operations; Information Operations; Integrated Missile Defense; Global Command & Control; Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance; Global Strike; and Strategic Deterrence.... " In January 2005, at the outset of the military build-up directed against Iran, USSTRATCOM was identified as "the lead Combatant Command for integration and synchronization of DoD-wide efforts in combating weapons of mass destruction." To implement this mandate, a brand new command unit entitled Joint Functional Component Command Space and Global Strike, or JFCCSGS was created. JFCCSGS has the mandate to oversee the launching of a nuclear attack in accordance with the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, approved by the US Congress in 2002. The NPR underscores the pre-emptive use of nuclear warheads not only against "rogue states" but also against China and Russia. ... CONCEPT PLAN (CONPLAN) 8022 JFCCSGS is in an advanced state of readiness to trigger nuclear attacks directed against Iran or North Korea. The operational implementation of the Global Strike is called CONCEPT PLAN (CONPLAN) 8022. The latter is described as "an actual plan that the Navy and the Air Force translate into strike package for their submarines and bombers,' (Ibid). CONPLAN 8022 is 'the overall umbrella plan for sort of the pre-planned strategic scenarios involving nuclear weapons.' 'It's specifically focused on these new types of threats -- Iran, North Korea -- proliferators and potentially terrorists too,' he said. 'There's nothing that says that they can't use CONPLAN 8022 in limited scenarios against Russian and Chinese targets.'(According to Hans Kristensen, of the Nuclear Information Project, quoted in Japanese economic News Wire, op cit) The mission of JFCCSGS is to implement CONPLAN 8022, in other words to trigger a nuclear war with Iran. The Commander in Chief, namely George W. Bush would instruct the Secretary of Defense, who would then instruct the Joint Chiefs of staff to activate CONPLAN 8022. CONPLAN is distinct from other military operations. it does not contemplate the deployment of ground troops. CONPLAN 8022 is different from other war plans in that it posits a small-scale operation and no "boots on the ground." The typical war plan encompasses an amalgam of forces -- air, ground, sea -- and takes into account the logistics and political dimensions needed to sustain those forces in protracted operations.... The global strike plan is offensive, triggered by the perception of an imminent threat and carried out by presidential order.) (William Arkin, Washington Post, May 2005) From ths at psalience.org Wed Dec 7 13:43:01 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:43:01 +0100 Subject: [THS] "Shadow War" Heating Up. War With Iran: A Provocation Away? Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111207134138.04903ca0@mail.messagingengine.com> THE CLOCK IS TICKING: "Shadow War" Heating Up. War With Iran: A Provocation Away? By Tom Burghardt URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28045 Global Research, December 5, 2011 Antifascist Calling... Amid conflicting reports that a huge explosion at Iran's uranium conversion facility in Isfahan occurred last week, speculation was rife that Israel and the United States were stepping-up covert attacks against defense and nuclear installations. The Isfahan complex transforms mined uranium into uranium fluoride gas which is then "spun" by centrifuges that enrich it into usable products for medical research and for Iran's civilian nuclear energy program. While Iranian officials sought to distance themselves from initial reporting by the semi-official Fars news agency that a "loud explosion" was heard across the city, but that "the sound of the explosion was from [a] military exercise," has been contradicted by several sources. Indeed, some Iranian officials have denied that an explosion even took place. On Tuesday however, The Times reported that "satellite imagery ... confirmed that a blast that rocked the city of Isfahan on Monday struck the uranium enrichment facility there, despite denials by Tehran." "The images," Times reporter Sheera Frenkel averred, "clearly showed billowing smoke and destruction, negating Iranian claims yesterday that no such explosion had taken place. Israeli intelligence officials told The Times that there was 'no doubt' that the blast struck the nuclear facilities at Isfahan and that it was 'no accident'." Despite clear evidence that Israel and the United States have stepped-up their shadow war against the Islamic Republic, Defense Minister Ehud Barak "played down speculation on Saturday that Israel and U.S.-led allies were waging clandestine war on Iran, saying sanctions and the threat of military strikes were still the way to curb its nuclear program," Reuters reported. Proverbial "facts on the ground" however, tell a different tale. The latest attack on Iran's civilian nuclear program followed a blast two weeks ago at the sprawling Bid Ganeh missile base 25 miles west of Tehran. That blast killed upwards of 30 members of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including Major General Hassan Moqqadam, a senior leader of Iran's missile program. Satellite imagery shows much of the base in ruins. The attack was described by Time Magazine as the work "of Israel's external intelligence service, Mossad." In a backhanded confirmation that Monday's blast was the handiwork of Mossad and their terrorist proxies, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), Frenkel wrote that "Dan Meridor, the Israeli Intelligence Minister, said: 'There are countries who impose economic sanctions and there are countries who act in other ways in dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat'." Frenkel reported that "Major-General Giora Eiland, Israel's former director of national security told Israel's army radio that the Isfahan blast was no accident. 'There aren't many coincidences, and when there are so many events there is probably some sort of guiding hand, though perhaps it's the hand of God'," Eiland said. The Isfahan blast, as with other recent attacks, were allegedly in response to allegations made last month in a report filed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran may be seeking to develop nuclear weapons. However, while the "Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at the nuclear facilities," the ginned-up report relied on information provided by "Member states," presumably Israel and United States in the form of forged computer laptop documents and other "intelligence sources." The Agency claims they were "unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities." Black operations targeting the Islamic Republic aren't solely the province of America's "stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East," Israel. As Seymour Hersh reported last spring in The New Yorker: "In the past six years, soldiers from the Joint Special Operations Force, working with Iranian intelligence assets, put in place cutting-edge surveillance techniques, according to two former intelligence officers." In 2007, ABC News disclosed that "the CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert 'black' operation to destabilize the Iranian government." Unnamed sources told ABC News that President Bush signed a presidential finding "that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions." Congress has appropriated some $300 million for the CIA and the Pentagon's covert war. In the intervening years, those programs have turned lethal. Widely applauded by "liberal" Democrats and "conservative" Republicans alike, these programs have continued, indeed expanded under Barack Obama's "progressive" Democratic administration. Despite the fact that there "is also constant satellite coverage of major suspect areas in Iran," The New Yorker reported "that nothing significantly new had been learned to suggest that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon." 'Shadow War' Heating Up Iran's intelligence services haven't been sitting idly by watching American, British, and Israeli terror operations. On Sunday, Al Jazeera reported that the Iranian armed forces "brought down an unmanned US spy plane." "Iran's military has downed an intruding RQ-170 American drone in eastern Iran," Iran's Arabic-language Al Alam state television network quoted an unnamed source as saying on Sunday." "The semiofficial Fars news agency," Al Jazeera averred, said "that the plane is now in the possession of Iran's armed forces. The Fars news agency is close to the powerful Revolutionary Guard." "Fars reported that the drone had been brought down through a combined effort by Iran's armed forces, air defence forces and its electronic warfare unit after the plane briefly violated the country's airspace at its eastern border." An unnamed source, according to AFP, warned that Iran's armed response would "not be limited to our country's borders" for the "blatant territorial violation." AFP also reported that in June, "Brigadier General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Guards' aerospace unit, said Iran had shown Russian experts the US drones in its possession. "'Russian experts requested to see these drones and they looked at both the downed drones and the models made by the Guards through reverse engineering,' he said." In a further sign that the "shadow war" is heating up, last week's occupation of the British embassy in Tehran may have been a warning to the U.K. over sanctioned leaks by the British defense establishment to The Guardian which suggested that "Britain's armed forces are stepping up their contingency planning for potential military action against Iran." "In anticipation of a potential attack," The Guardian disclosed that "British military planners are examining where best to deploy Royal Navy ships and submarines equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles over the coming months as part of what would be an air and sea campaign. The embassy occupation and subsequent downgrade of diplomatic relations between Britain and Iran mean these threats are being taken very seriously indeed. Asia Times Online reported that Iran's claim "to have arrested 12 spies working for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is potentially a major blow to American intelligence-gathering efforts in Iran and to American intelligence generally." Following closely on the heels of last month's arrest in Lebanon of some 30 CIA operatives by Hezbollah "is suggestive of a major American intelligence defeat, if not a full-blown disaster," Asia Times analyst Mahan Abedin wrote. Far from being a high-quality intelligence operation, Abedin averred that the "CIA is operating a lower threshold of quality control in terms of agent recruitment and management" and that this reflects "a scatter-gun approach by the CIA inasmuch as the agency is targeting virtually any Iranian citizen it believes could potentially provide useful information on the CIA's target set." According to Abedin's Iranian sources, the CIA's team of "operatives and analysts" appears to have been "embedded within numerous official and unofficial American organizations, including US embassies, multinational corporations, medium-sized commercial organizations, recruitment consultancies, immigration and wider legal services, academic and quasi-academic institutions and reputable (i.e. longstanding) as well as newly set up think tanks." In other words, as many researchers have amply documented, efforts by the U.S. secret state to subvert a target nation's internal defenses prior to full-on "regime change" either through direct warfare (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, now Syria) or via an American-brokered "color revolution" (Yugoslavia, Venezuela, Ukraine, Georgia) are not about "freedom and democracy" but to achieve Washington's geopolitical goals: total economic and political domination. "But despite clear improvements in counter-espionage capabilities and protective security measures," Abedin writes, "Iran is still some way away from making it prohibitively costly for Western agencies to operate inside the country. Indeed, all the major West European, North American and Israeli intelligence services are either active inside Iran or work closely with some elements of the Iranian diaspora." Describing the "psychological warfare" dimensions of a looming confrontation, Abedin wrote in a subsequent Asia Times Online piece that the covert war operates on two fronts, "one visible and rhetorical and conducted through official and unofficial media and the other secret and centered on sabotage." "In so far as the former is concerned Iran has risen to the challenge by superseding tough American and Israeli rhetoric with even tougher rhetoric." "However," Abedin averred, "it is on the sabotage front--where Iran appears to be under attack from several directions--that the Islamic Republic is raising eyebrows even amongst its hardcore supporters by displaying remarkable tolerance in the face of intolerable provocations." "More broadly, the Iranians are not paying sufficient attention to the long-term consequences of military confrontation with the United States and her allies." That the "long-term consequences" of a Western-led attack will be an unmitigated disaster for the Iranian people, indeed for people across the entire region and for world peace and stability as a whole, doesn't mean that Washington won't gamble that a "limited war" could be "contained." As analyst William Blum wrote in his Anti-Empire Report: "The secret to understanding US foreign policy is that there is no secret. Principally, one must come to the realization that the United States strives to dominate the world. Once one understands that, much of the apparent confusion, contradiction, and ambiguity surrounding Washington's policies fades away." "Examine a map," Blum observed. "Iran sits directly between two of the United States' great obsessions--Iraq and Afghanistan ... directly between two of the world's greatest oil regions--the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea areas ... it's part of the encirclement of the two leading potential threats to American world domination--Russia and China ... Tehran will never be a client state or obedient poodle to Washington. How could any good, self-respecting Washington imperialist resist such a target? Bombs Away!" Commenting on the Isfahan attack which described Israeli "black ops" as a "route to war," left-wing analyst Richard Silverstein wrote on the Tikun Olam web site, that "the tragedy of this black ops program is that it will not rattle or deter Iran, as Israeli intelligence believes." "Contrary to what Israeli generals believe," Silverstein wrote, "the Iranians are not pushovers, they can't be intimidated. They're willing to die for their country even more than Israelis. They've fought defensive wars going back decades and lost millions in conflict. A few explosions, assassinations, and computer viruses will not spook them." The drift towards war, which include moves to strangle Iran's economy prior to a strike, has gained traction on multiple fronts. On Friday, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed legislation as part of the $644. 3 billion 2012 Defense Authorization Act that "would give the president the power starting July 1 to bar foreign financial institutions that do business with Iran's central bank from having correspondent bank accounts in the U.S.," Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported. Coupled with reports that Germany and other EU member states will "considerably strengthen" sanctions against Iran, the leftist publication German Foreign Policy disclosed that "Berlin is participating in the intensification of western pressure on Teheran." Rejecting NATO rhetoric that new punitive economic measures are over "the so-called nuclear dispute," GFP's analyst correctly states that the "conflict is, in fact, over hegemony, with the West seeking to defend at all costs its predominance in the Middle Eastern resource-rich regions." While "Berlin's politicians are still divided over Iran ... Transatlantic oriented forces are preparing the public for possible military strikes." Regarding the strengthening of the West's sanctions regime, the World Socialist Web Site reported that the EU has "agreed to sanction some 200 Iranian companies, individuals and organisations. European Council President Herman Van Rompuy met with Obama on Monday and issued a joint statement expressing 'deep concern' over Iran's nuclear program, raising the possibility of 'additional measures' against the Iranian regime." "France," left-wing critic Oliver Campbell noted, "which is not a major importer of Iranian oil, issued a statement calling for 'new sanctions on an unprecedented scale,' including freezing the assets of the Iranian central bank and putting an embargo on Iranian oil." "Russia, which has acquiesced in imposing previous sanctions on Iran, has bluntly opposed further punitive measures. Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich denounced the latest sanctions as 'unacceptable' and 'contradictory to international law.' China and Turkey have also opposed additional UN penalties." There are new signs that this sharply escalating crisis is fraught with peril. Last week, Russia Today reported that "Moscow is deploying warships at its base in the Syrian port of Tartus. The long-planned mission comes, providentially, at the very moment when it could help prevent a potential conflict in the strategically important Middle Eastern country. ?"The Russian battle group will consist of three vessels led by the heavy aircraft-carrying missile cruiser, Admiral Kuznetsov." "Of course, the Russian naval forces in the Mediterranean will be incommensurate with those of the US 6th Fleet, which includes one or two aircraft carriers and several escort ships," former Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Viktor Kravchenko told Russia Today. Pointedly, Kravchenko warned, "today, no one talks about possible military clashes, since an attack on any Russian ship would be regarded as a declaration of war with all the consequences." Richard Silverstein grimly observed "that Israel knows that black ops will turn Iran more intransigent. It welcomes such Iranian rigidity because it means the day is closer when it will be set loose on the Iranians. Israel's policy toward Iran is scorched earth." The clock is ticking... Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century. Please support Global Research Global Research relies on the financial support of its readers. From ths at psalience.org Wed Dec 7 13:45:57 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:45:57 +0100 Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?_Michael_T=2E_Klare=3A_Obama=92s_Risky_Oil_T?= =?iso-8859-1?q?hreat__to_China?= Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111207134533.085a5510@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29896.htm Playing With Fire Obama?s Risky Oil Threat to China By Michael T. Klare December 06, 2011 "Tom Dispatch" - -When it comes to China policy, is the Obama administration leaping from the frying pan directly into the fire? In an attempt to turn the page on two disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East, it may have just launched a new Cold War in Asia -- once again, viewing oil as the key to global supremacy. The new policy was signaled by President Obama himself on November 17th in an address to the Australian Parliament in which he laid out an audacious -- and extremely dangerous -- geopolitical vision. Instead of focusing on the Greater Middle East, as has been the case for the last decade, the United States will now concentrate its power in Asia and the Pacific. ?My guidance is clear,? he declared in Canberra. ?As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.? While administration officials insist that this new policy is not aimed specifically at China, the implication is clear enough: from now on, the primary focus of American military strategy will not be counterterrorism, but the containment of that economically booming land -- at whatever risk or cost. The Planet?s New Center of Gravity The new emphasis on Asia and the containment of China is necessary, top officials insist, because the Asia-Pacific region now constitutes the ?center of gravity? of world economic activity. While the United States was bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, the argument goes, China had the leeway to expand its influence in the region. For the first time since the end of World War II, Washington is no longer the dominant economic actor there. If the United States is to retain its title as the world?s paramount power, it must, this thinking goes, restore its primacy in the region and roll back Chinese influence. In the coming decades, no foreign policy task will, it is claimed, be more important than this. In line with its new strategy, the administration has undertaken a number of moves intended to bolster American power in Asia, and so put China on the defensive. These include a decision to deploy an initial 250 U.S. Marines -- someday to be upped to 2,500 -- to an Australian air base in Darwin on that country?s north coast, and the adoption on November 18th of ?the Manila Declaration,? a pledge of closer U.S. military ties with the Philippines. At the same time, the White House announced the sale of 24 F-16 fighter jets to Indonesia and a visit by Hillary Clinton to isolated Burma, long a Chinese ally -- the first there by a secretary of state in 56 years. Clinton has also spoken of increased diplomatic and military ties with Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam -- all countries surrounding China or overlooking key trade routes that China relies on for importing raw materials and exporting manufactured goods. As portrayed by administration officials, such moves are intended to maximize America?s advantages in the diplomatic and military realm at a time when China dominates the economic realm regionally. In a recent article in Foreign Policy magazine, Clinton revealingly suggested that an economically weakened United States can no longer hope to prevail in multiple regions simultaneously. It must choose its battlefields carefully and deploy its limited assets -- most of them of a military nature -- to maximum advantage. Given Asia?s strategic centrality to global power, this means concentrating resources there. ?Over the last 10 years,? she writes, ?we have allocated immense resources to [Iraq and Afghanistan]. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership [and] secure our interests... One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment -- diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise -- in the Asia-Pacific region.? Such thinking, with its distinctly military focus, appears dangerously provocative. The steps announced entail an increased military presence in waters bordering China and enhanced military ties with that country?s neighbors -- moves certain to arouse alarm in Beijing and strengthen the hand of those in the ruling circle (especially in the Chinese military leadership) who favor a more activist, militarized response to U.S. incursions. Whatever forms that takes, one thing is certain: the leadership of the globe?s number two economic power is not going to let itself appear weak and indecisive in the face of an American buildup on the periphery of its country. This, in turn, means that we may be sowing the seeds of a new Cold War in Asia in 2011. The U.S. military buildup and the potential for a powerful Chinese counter-thrust have already been the subject of discussion in the American and Asian press. But one crucial dimension of this incipient struggle has received no attention at all: the degree to which Washington?s sudden moves have been dictated by a fresh analysis of the global energy equation, revealing (as the Obama administration sees it) increased vulnerabilities for the Chinese side and new advantages for Washington. The New Energy Equation For decades, the United States has been heavily dependent on imported oil, much of it obtained from the Middle East and Africa, while China was largely self-sufficient in oil output. In 2001, the United States consumed 19.6 million barrels of oil per day, while producing only nine million barrels itself. The dependency on foreign suppliers for that 10.6 million-barrel shortfall proved a source of enormous concern for Washington policymakers. They responded by forging ever closer, more militarized ties with Middle Eastern oil producers and going to war on occasion to ensure the safety of U.S. supply lines. In 2001, China, on the other hand, consumed only five million barrels per day and so, with a domestic output of 3.3 million barrels, needed to import only 1.7 million barrels. Those cold, hard numbers made its leadership far less concerned about the reliability of the country?s major overseas providers -- and so it did not need to duplicate the same sort of foreign policy entanglements that Washington had long been involved in. Now, so the Obama administration has concluded, the tables are beginning to turn. As a result of China?s booming economy and the emergence of a sizeable and growing middle class (many of whom have already bought their first cars), the country?s oil consumption is exploding. Running at about 7.8 million barrels per day in 2008, it will, according to recent projections by the U.S. Department of Energy, reach 13.6 million barrels in 2020, and 16.9 million in 2035. Domestic oil production, on the other hand, is expected to grow from 4.0 million barrels per day in 2008 to 5.3 million in 2035. Not surprisingly, then, Chinese imports are expected to skyrocket from 3.8 million barrels per day in 2008 to a projected 11.6 million in 2035 -- at which time they will exceed those of the United States. The U.S., meanwhile, can look forward to an improved energy situation. Thanks to increased production in ?tough oil? areas of the United States, including the Arctic seas off Alaska, the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and shale formations in Montana, North Dakota, and Texas, future imports are expected to decline, even as energy consumption rises. In addition, more oil is likely to be available from the Western Hemisphere rather than the Middle East or Africa. Again, this will be thanks to the exploitation of yet more ?tough oil? areas, including the Athabasca tar sands of Canada, Brazilian oil fields in the deep Atlantic, and increasingly pacified energy-rich regions of previously war-torn Colombia. According to the Department of Energy, combined production in the United States, Canada, and Brazil is expected to climb by 10.6 million barrels per day between 2009 and 2035 -- an enormous jump, considering that most areas of the world are expecting declining output. Whose Sea Lanes Are These Anyway? From a geopolitical perspective, all this seems to confer a genuine advantage on the United States, even as China becomes ever more vulnerable to the vagaries of events in, or along, the sea lanes to distant lands. It means Washington will be able to contemplate a gradual loosening of its military and political ties to the Middle Eastern oil states that have dominated its foreign policy for so long and have led to those costly, devastating wars. Indeed, as President Obama said in Canberra, the U.S. is now in a position to begin to refocus its military capabilities elsewhere. ?After a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly,? he declared, ?the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia-Pacific region.? For China, all this spells potential strategic impairment. Although some of China?s imported oil will travel overland through pipelines from Kazakhstan and Russia, the great majority of it will still come by tanker from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America over sea lanes policed by the U.S. Navy. Indeed, almost every tanker bringing oil to China travels across the South China Sea, a body of water the Obama administration is now seeking to place under effective naval control. By securing naval dominance of the South China Sea and adjacent waters, the Obama administration evidently aims to acquire the twenty-first century energy equivalent of twentieth-century nuclear blackmail. Push us too far, the policy implies, and we?ll bring your economy to its knees by blocking your flow of vital energy supplies. Of course, nothing like this will ever be said in public, but it is inconceivable that senior administration officials are not thinking along just these lines, and there is ample evidence that the Chinese are deeply worried about the risk -- as indicated, for example, by their frantic efforts to build staggeringly expensive pipelines across the entire expanse of Asia to the Caspian Sea basin. As the underlying nature of the new Obama strategic blueprint becomes clearer, there can be no question that the Chinese leadership will, in response, take steps to ensure the safety of China?s energy lifelines. Some of these moves will undoubtedly be economic and diplomatic, including, for example, efforts to court regional players like Vietnam and Indonesia as well as major oil suppliers like Angola, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. Make no mistake, however: others will be of a military nature. A significant buildup of the Chinese navy -- still small and backward when compared to the fleets of the United States and its principal allies -- would seem all but inevitable. Likewise, closer military ties between China and Russia, as well as with the Central Asian member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan), are assured. In addition, Washington could now be sparking the beginnings of a genuine Cold-War-style arms race in Asia, which neither country can, in the long run, afford. All of this is likely to lead to greater tension and a heightened risk of inadvertent escalation arising out of future incidents involving U.S., Chinese, and allied vessels -- like the one that occurred in March 2009 when a flotilla of Chinese naval vessels surrounded a U.S. anti-submarine warfare surveillance ship, the Impeccable, and almost precipitated a shooting incident. As more warships circulate through these waters in an increasingly provocative fashion, the risk that such an incident will result in something far more explosive can only grow. Nor will the potential risks and costs of such a military-first policy aimed at China be restricted to Asia. In the drive to promote greater U.S. self-sufficiency in energy output, the Obama administration is giving its approval to production techniques -- Arctic drilling, deep-offshore drilling, and hydraulic fracturing -- that are guaranteed to lead to further Deepwater Horizon-style environmental catastrophe at home. Greater reliance on Canadian tar sands, the ?dirtiest? of energies, will result in increased greenhouse gas emissions and a multitude of other environmental hazards, while deep Atlantic oil production off the Brazilian coast and elsewhere has its own set of grim dangers. All of this ensures that, environmentally, militarily, and economically, we will find ourselves in a more, not less, perilous world. The desire to turn away from disastrous land wars in the Greater Middle East to deal with key issues now simmering in Asia is understandable, but choosing a strategy that puts such an emphasis on military dominance and provocation is bound to provoke a response in kind. It is hardly a prudent path to head down, nor will it, in the long run, advance America?s interests at a time when global economic cooperation is crucial. Sacrificing the environment to achieve greater energy independence makes no more sense. A new Cold War in Asia and a hemispheric energy policy that could endanger the planet: it?s a fatal brew that should be reconsidered before the slide toward confrontation and environmental disaster becomes irreversible. You don?t have to be a seer to know that this is not the definition of good statesmanship, but of the march of folly. Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. A documentary movie version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation. To listen to Timothy MacBain?s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Klare discusses the American military build-up in the Pacific, click here or download it to your iPod here. Copyright 2011 Michael T. Klare From ths at psalience.org Wed Dec 7 13:58:34 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2011 13:58:34 +0100 Subject: [THS] Israel Stole Uranium from U.S., Report Will Show Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111207135739.085a5280@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29901.htm Israel Stole Uranium from U.S., Report Will Show By Kristin Dailey December 06, 2011 "The Daily Star" -- WASHINGTON: A U.S.-based research institute will soon publish what it says is ?indisputable? evidence that Israel stole weapons-grade uranium for its still-undeclared atomic weapons program from a nuclear reprocessing plant in western Pennsylvania. The Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) will release this month a 300-page report detailing the initial findings of a multi-year research project investigating the disappearance of highly enriched uranium from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec) in Apollo, Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 1960s. Grant Smith, the director of IRmep, told The Daily Star that the report would include a broad range of newly declassified and un-redacted government documents from various agencies ? including the Department of Energy, Atomic Energy Commission, FBI and CIA ? that prove that nuclear material was diverted from Numec to Israel. ?The story at this point is that there is no one smoking gun; there are many smoking pistols lying all over the place that we?ve painstakingly collected,? Smith told The Daily Star. When contacted by The Daily Star, Zalman Shapiro, the founder and former president of the Numec, strongly denied that any diversion of materials to Israel had ever taken place at the plant. ?The story is fabricated. Absolutely fabricated,? said Shapiro, who is now 91 years old. Smith said that among the evidence to be included in the report is a DOE document confirming that uranium samples picked up by the CIA outside Israel?s nuclear installation in Dimona bore the same isotopic signature as material produced by the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in the U.S. state of Ohio. The Portsmouth plant was a supplier for Numec. Victor Gillinsky, who was a commissioner for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1975 to 1984, said that evidence of a link between samples found at Dimona and nuclear material produced at Portsmouth, if reliable, would be ?very significant.? ?The [Portsmouth] plant was producing very highly enriched uranium, more highly enriched than the usual stuff produced anywhere in the U.S. or other countries because they were turning it out for Navy fuel. So if you found material of that high enrichment, I believe Portsmouth was the only place in the world that would be making it,? Gillinsky told The Daily Star. The former NRC official cautioned, however, that such evidence should still be viewed with skepticism, since any samples picked up by CIA agents at the Dimona facility would have been extremely small. ?The question is, did they really pick up things that they could clearly identify as coming from Portsmouth?? said Gillinsky. ?If [IRmep] do have something that does nail it down that would be very significant,? said Gillinsky. ?But I would look at [the evidence in the IRmep report] very carefully before concluding that it is nailed down.? The DOE reported in 2001 that 269 kilograms of highly enriched uranium went missing from the Numec plant during the course of its operations under Shapiro?s management from 1957 to 1968. Suspicion has long swirled around the possibility that the missing uranium was diverted to Israel. Both the FBI and CIA conducted years-long investigations into the missing uranium, but no charges were ever filed. Previously declassified documents revealed that some of Israel?s most elite spies visited the Numec facility in 1968. A request submitted to the AEC to gain approval for the visit identified the Israelis as Rafael Eitan, Avraham Ben-Dor, Ephraim Biegun and Avraham Hermoni. A former director of operations for Mossad, Eitan headed in 1960 the mission that led to the capture of ex-Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. Eitan later served as director of Israel?s Bureau of Scientific Relations (known by its Hebrew acronym Lekem), an intelligence entity that specialized in acquiring scientific and military secrets from abroad through covert means. As the head of Lekem, Eitan directly oversaw the activities of Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who was in 1987 convicted and sentenced to life in prison on charges of spying for Israel. Ben-Dor was Eitan?s right-hand man in the operation to capture Eichmann, and also served as a long-time Shin Bet agent before being forced to retire in 1986 for covering up the deaths of two Palestinian prisoners. Biegun was the head of Mossad?s Technical Department, specializing in electronics and communication. Hermoni was the technical director of the nuclear bomb project at RAFAEL, Israel?s armament development authority. Smith said the question of whether highly enriched uranium was diverted from Numec to Israel is all the more relevant now in view of current U.S. efforts to halt Iran?s nuclear program. ?Why are we looking at nuclear weapons? Probably the biggest question that?s being asked in this town [Washington] right now is whether to get even more heavily involved in trying to suppress Iran?s nuclear program. And we think it?s extremely valuable to get the truth out about U.S. collaboration, intentional or not, in Israel?s program,? Smith said. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is currently carrying out a $170 million cleanup of the decommissioned nuclear site in Apollo that is scheduled to be completed in 2015. A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on December 05, 2011, on page 8. From ths at psalience.org Wed Dec 7 14:07:40 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:07:40 +0100 Subject: [THS] Washington's Blog: So This Is How Liberty Dies Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111207140615.085a4ff0@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29902.htm So This Is How Liberty Dies Obama Wants to Veto the Indefinite Detention Bill Because It Would Hold the U.S. to the Geneva Convention By Washington's Blog December 06, 2011 "Washington's Blog" -- I ? like everyone else ? am horrified by the Senate?s passage of legislation that would allow for indefinite detention of Americans. And at first, I ? like many others ? assumed that Obama?s threat to veto the bill might be a good thing. But the truth is much more disturbing. As former Wall Street Street editor and columnist Paul Craig Roberts correctly notes: The Obama regime?s objection to military detention is not rooted in concern for the constitutional rights of American citizens. The regime objects to military detention because the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war. As Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin put it: Should somebody determined ?to be a member of an enemy force who has come to this nation or is in this nation to attack us as a member of a foreign enemy, should that person be treated according to the laws of war? The answer is yes.? Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights. These rights would interfere with the regime?s ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas. [Yes, Obama is still apparently allowing "extraordinary renditions" to torture people abroad.] This is what the Obama regime means when it says that the requirement of military detention denies the regime ?flexibility.? The Bush/Obama regimes have evaded the Geneva Conventions by declaring that detainees are not POWs, but ?enemy combatants,? ?terrorists,? or some other designation that removes all accountability from the US government for their treatment. By requiring military detention of the captured, Congress is undoing all the maneuvering that two regimes have accomplished in removing POW status from detainees. A careful reading of the Obama regime?s objections to military detention supports this conclusion. (See http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/sap/112/saps1867s_20111117.pdf) The November 17 letter to the Senate from the Executive Office of the President says that the Obama regime does not want the authority it has under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Public Law 107-40, to be codified. Codification is risky, the regime says. ?After a decade of settled jurisprudence on detention authority, Congress must be careful not to open a whole new series of legal questions that will distract from our efforts to protect the country.? In other words, the regime is saying that under AUMF the executive branch has total discretion as to who it detains and how it treats detainees. Moreover, as the executive branch has total discretion, no one can find out what the executive branch is doing, who detainees are, or what is being done to them. Codification brings accountability, and the executive branch does not want accountability. Those who see hope in Obama?s threatened veto have jumped to conclusions if they think the veto is based on constitutional scruples. Police State Started Years Ago Even if Obama?s threatened veto was for more noble purposes, the fact is that it would not change anything, because the U.S. government claimed the power to indefinitely detain and assassinate American citizens years ago. For example, law school professor and National Lawyers Guild president Marjorie Cohn pointed out in 2006: The Military Commissions Act of 2006 governing the treatment of detainees is the culmination of relentless fear-mongering by the Bush administration since the September 11 terrorist attacks. Because the bill was adopted with lightning speed, barely anyone noticed that it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens, ?unlawful enemy combatants.? *** Anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on Bush?s list of ?terrorist? organizations, or who speaks out against the government?s policies could be declared an ?unlawful enemy combatant? and imprisoned indefinitely. That includes American citizens. Glenn Greenwald and Fire Dog Lake?s Emptywheel have also documented that the White House has believed for many years that it possessed the power to indefinitely detain Americans. See this, this, this, and this. I noted Friday: The police state started in 2001. Specifically, on 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney initiated Continuity of Government Plans that ended America?s constitutional form of government (at least for some undetermined period of time.) On that same day, a national state of emergency was declared and that state of emergency has continuously been in effect up to today. The Obama administration has also said for more than a year and a half it could target American citizens for assassination without any trial or due process. In 2005, Chris Floyd pointed out that the ability of the government to assassinate U.S. citizens started the very week of 9/11: On September 17, 2001, George W. Bush signed an executive order authorizing the use of ?lethal measures? against anyone in the world whom he or his minions designated an ?enemy combatant.? This order remains in force today. No judicial evidence, no hearing, no charges are required for these killings; no law, no border, no oversight restrains them. Bush has also given agents in the field carte blanche to designate ?enemies? on their own initiative and kill them as they see fit. The existence of this universal death squad ? and the total obliteration of human liberty it represents ? has not provoked so much as a crumb, an atom, a quantum particle of controversy in the American Establishment, although it?s no secret. The executive order was first bruited in the Washington Post in October 2001 . The New York Times added further details in December 2002. That same month, Bush officials made clear that the dread edict also applied to American citizens, as the Associated Press reported. The first officially confirmed use of this power was the killing of an American citizen in Yemen by a CIA drone missile on November 3, 2002. A similar strike occurred in Pakistan this month, when a CIA missile destroyed a house and purportedly killed Abu Hamza Rabia, a suspected al Qaeda figure. But the only bodies found at the site were those of two children, the houseowner?s son and nephew, Reuters reports. The grieving father denied any connection to terrorism. An earlier CIA strike on another house missed Rabia but killed his wife and children, Pakistani officials reported. But most of the assassinations are carried out in secret, quietly, professionally, like a contract killing for the mob. As a Pentagon document unearthed by the New Yorker in December 2002 put it, the death squads must be ?small and agile,? and ?able to operate clandestinely, using a full range of official and non-official cover arrangements to enter countries surreptitiously.? The dangers of this policy are obvious, as a UN report on ?extrajudicial killings? noted in December 2004: ? Empowering governments to identify and kill ?known terrorists? places no verifiable obligation upon them to demonstrate in any way that those against whom lethal force is used are indeed terrorists While it is portrayed as a limited ?exception? to international norms, it actually creates the potential for an endless expansion of the relevant category to include any enemies of the State, social misfits, political opponents, or others.? It?s hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an ?enemy.? It?s hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is what the great and good in America have done. Like the boyars of old, they not only countenance but celebrate their enslavement to the ruler. [Note from Washington's Blog: 9/11 allowed those who glorify war to implement plans they had lusted after for many years (and see this), even though 9/11 happened because Dick Cheney was - at best - totally incompetent, and the government is now doing things which increase the risk of terrorism, instead of doing the things which could actually make us safer.] *** This was vividly demonstrated in Bush?s State of the Union address in January 2003, delivered to Congress and televised nationwide during the final frenzy of war-drum beating before the assault on Iraq. Trumpeting his successes in the Terror War, Bush claimed that ?more than 3,000 suspected terrorists? had been arrested worldwide ? ?and many others have met a different fate.? His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: ?Let?s put it this way. They are no longer a problem.? In other words, the suspects ? and even Bush acknowledged they were only suspects ? had been murdered. Lynched. Killed by agents operating unsupervised in that shadow world where intelligence, terrorism, politics, finance and organized crime meld together in one amorphous, impenetrable mass. Killed on the word of a dubious informer, perhaps: a tortured captive willing to say anything to end his torment, a business rival, a personal foe, a bureaucrat looking to impress his superiors, a paid snitch in need of cash, a zealous crank pursuing ethnic, tribal or religious hatreds ? or any other purveyor of the garbage data that is coin of the realm in the shadow world. Bush proudly held up this hideous system as an example of what he called ?the meaning of American justice.? And the assembled legislators applauded. Oh, how they applauded! This is, of course, the real meaning of the famous Star Wars scene: From ths at psalience.org Wed Dec 7 14:19:08 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:19:08 +0100 Subject: [THS] It's Your Choice, Europe: Rebel Against the Banks or Accept Debt-Serfdom Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111207141608.085a4d60@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29898.htm It's Your Choice, Europe: Rebel Against the Banks or Accept Debt-Serfdom The European debt Bubble has burst, and the repricing of risk and debt cannot be put back in the bottle. By Charles Hugh Smith December 06, 2011 "Of Two Minds" -- It's really this simple, Europe: either rebel against the banks or accept decades of debt-serfdom. All the millions of words published about the European debt crisis can be distilled down a handful of simple dynamics. Once we understand those, then the choice between resistance and debt-serfdom is revealed as the only choice: the rest of the "options" are illusory. 1. The euro enabled a short-lived but extremely attractive fantasy: the more productive northern EU economies could mint profits in two ways: A) sell their goods and services to their less productive southern neighbors in quantity because these neighbors were now able to borrow vast sums of money at low (i.e. near-"German") rates of interest, and B) loan these consumer nations these vast sums of money with stupendous leverage, i.e. 1 euro in capital supports 26 euros of lending/debt. The less productive nations also had a very attractive fantasy: that their present level of productivity (that is, the output of goods and services created by their economies) could be leveraged up via low-interest debt to support a much higher level of consumption and malinvestment in things like villas and luxury autos. According to Europe's Currency Road to Nowhere (WSJ.com): Northern Europe has fueled its growth through exports. It has run huge trade imbalances, the most extreme of which with these same Southern European countries now in peril. Productivity rose dramatically compared to the South, but the currency did not. This explains at least part of the German export and manufacturing miracle of the last 12 years. In 1999, exports were 29% of German gross domestic product. By 2008, they were 47%?an increase vastly larger than in Italy, Spain and Greece, where the ratios increased modestly or even fell. Germany's net export contribution to GDP (exports minus imports as a share of the economy) rose by nearly a factor of eight. Unlike almost every other high-income country, where manufacturing's share of the economy fell significantly, in Germany it actually rose as the price of German goods grew more and more attractive compared to those of other countries. In a key sense, Germany's currency has been to Southern Europe what China's has been to the U.S. Flush with profits from exports and loans, Germany and its mercantilist (exporting nations) also ramped up their own borrowing--why not, when growth was so strong? But the whole set-up was a doomed financial fantasy. The euro seemed to be magic: it enabled importing nations to buy more and borrow more, while also enabling exporting nations to reap immense profits from rising exports and lending. Put another way: risk and debt were both massively mispriced by the illusion that the endless growth of debt-based consumption could continue forever. The euro was in a sense a scam that served the interests of everyone involved: with risk considered near-zero, interest rates were near-zero, too, and more debt could be leveraged from a small base of productivity and capital. But now reality has repriced risk and debt, and the clueless leadership of the EU is attempting to put the genie back in the bottle. Alas, the debt loads are too crushing, and the productivity too weak, to support the fantasy of zero risk and low rates of return. The Credit Bubble Bulletin's Doug Nolan summarized the reality succinctly: "The European debt Bubble has burst." Nolan explains the basic mechanisms thusly: The Mythical "Great Moderation": For years, European debt was being mispriced in the (over-liquefied, over-leveraged and over-speculated global) marketplace. Countries such as Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy benefitted immeasurably from the market perception that European monetary integration ensured debt, economic and policymaking stability. Similar to the U.S. mortgage/Wall Street finance Bubble, the marketplace was for years content to ignore Credit excesses and festering system fragilities, choosing instead to price debt obligations based on the expectation for zero defaults, abundant liquidity, readily available hedging instruments, and a policymaking regime that would ensure market stability. Importantly, this backdrop created the perfect market environment for financial leveraging and rampant speculation in a global financial backdrop unsurpassed for its capacity for excess. The arbitrage of European bond yields was likely one of history?s most lucrative speculative endeavors. (link via U. Doran) In simple terms, this is the stark reality: now that debt and risk have been repriced, Europe's debts are completely, totally unpayable. There is no way to keep adding to the Matterhorn of debt at the old cheap rate of interest, and there is no way to roll over the trillions of euros in debt that are coming due at the old near-zero rates. Never mind actually paying down debt, sovereign, corporate and private--the repricing of risk and debt mean even the interest payments are unpayable. Consider this chart of one tiny slice of total EU debt: There is no way to push the repricing genie back in the bottle, and so there is no way to roll over this debt and add to it--and to support the high-cost structure of Euroland's welfare-state governments and their astounding debt, then debt must be added, and in staggering quantities. Austerity won't put the repricing/bubble burst genie back in the bottle. A funny thing happens when more of the national income is diverted to debt service (making interest payments and rolling over existing debt into new higher-interest debt): there is less surplus available for investment and consumption, which means that both productivity based on investment and consumption based on debt will plummet. This leaves the nation with lower productivity and lower GDP, which means there is also less tax revenues being collected and more bankruptcies as companies and individuals accept the reality that their debts cannot be paid. The repricing genie responds to this decline in national income, surplus and taxes by repricing risk of default even higher, and so the interest rate is also repriced higher. This makes servicing the mountain of existing debt even more costly, and so even less national income is available for consumption, investment and taxes. This is called a positive feedback loop: each action reinforces the other, i.e. a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Debt and risk are repriced higher, the burden of debt service reduces national income available for investment, consumption and taxes, which further reprices risk higher, and so on. So you see, Europe, there is only one choice: either accept the endless debt serfdom of ever-rising interest payments and lower income and productivity, or rebel against your pathetic lackey leadership and renounce the entire mountain of unpayable debt. Grasp the nettle and renounce the euro as the fundamental cause of your fantasy and collapse, and revert to national currencies which enable the market to discover the price of your underlying productivity and ability to borrow money. Renouncing the euro does not mean renouncing the freedoms of the European Union: the two are only bound at the hip in the minds of your enfeebled leadership, who are in thrall to the leveraged-26-to-1 banks that are poised on the edge of insolvency. Let the banks implode in bankruptcy, clear the worthless "assets" of debt from the books, and let the market price currencies and everything else. The only other choice is debt-serfdom. All the other schemes and proposals are simply variations of one single fantasy: that the feckless leadership can fool the repricing genie with parlor tricks. They can't. Everybody with any understanding of the situation knows that the debt bubble has already burst, and risk and debt cannot be repriced back to fantasy levels. That repricing has already occurred, and cannot be revoked or shoved back in the bottle. The Great European Debt Bubble has already burst, and so now it boils down to a simple choice: debt serfom or open rebellion against the banks that profited so handsomely from the euro-fantasy. There is no middle ground, as the debt cannot be repaid, not now and not in the future. It cannot be reshuffled, masked, or hidden; it can only be renounced. It's your choice, Europe; choose wisely. If you want a model for sanity and growth, look to Iceland. They renounced their unpayable debts and debt-serfdom, and let the market reprice their currency, debt and risk. The nightmare is past for them; they chose wisely. Now it's your turn to choose. The debt-serfdom will fall to you, not the banks or your Elites. From ths at psalience.org Wed Dec 7 14:24:08 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:24:08 +0100 Subject: [THS] WikiLeaks' Assange given green light to appeal extradition Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111207142256.085a4ad0@mail.messagingengine.com> http://english.ruvr.ru/2011/12/06/61645324.html WikiLeaks' Assange given green light to appeal extradition Tags: Julian Assange , Society, Wikileaks, Commentary, World Tim Walklate Dec 6, 2011 12:36 Moscow Time Download Julian Assange. Photo: AFP Print Email Add to blog The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, has been given permission to continue his legal battle to Britain?s Supreme Court to avoid extradition to Sweden over alleged sex offences. Julian Assange entered the Royal Court of Justice on Monday morning with the knowledge that within 24 hours he could well have been on a plane to Sweden. However, as he left court he was greeted with cheers from supporters after being granted permission to apply to Britain?s Supreme Court in a bid to stay in the UK. The whistleblower faces extradition to Sweden. Now he has 14 days to submit a written request rather than a direct appeal to the Supreme Court, as he still has no automatic right to be heard in the UK?s highest court. Assange was arrested in London last year after the Swedish authorities issued a European arrest warrant accusing him of rape and molestation following encounters with two Swedish women in August 2010. After being released on bail, he lost a High Court battle last month to be extradited over sex offences, which he denies. Assange?s legal team has claimed that his life would be in danger if he?s extradited to Sweden, saying he could face rendition from there to the US, where calls have been made for his arrest on grounds of national security after thousands of leaked US embassy cables were published on WikiLeaks. Earlier on Monday, Israel Shamir, a friend and supporter of Assange, spoke to Tim about whistleblower?s legal battle. Tim first asked Shamir what he felt was the significance of today?s decision. ?It means that e battle of Julian Assange for his freedom can go on. We were all very anxious and then there was a thought that he will be just today gerrymandered to a plane and sent to Sweden. But in a way the danger of an immediate extradition seems to have faded away.? It?s reported widely in the British media about the potential extradition. Is it that we doubt the integrity of the Swedish legal system? Or is it the fact that Sweden is likelier to give him over to the US? I think that?s the bigger picture, isn?t it? ?It?s not unusual. Everyone knows that there is a possibility that a fair trial would be impossible. In my view and in the view of some friends of Julian Assange, this is the case now in Sweden, because one of the most important media lords of Sweden is carrying out a relentless vendetta against Julian Assange. He has many newspapers and TV stations at his disposal and he is leading a 24/7 campaign against Julian Assange in Swedish media. In such occasions, it?s very difficult to believe that a fair trial is possible at all. And obviously there is a question of possibility of his extradition o the US. The US seems to be nowadays a place that is so far from the ideals of freedom, which once powered it. And obviously many authorities in the US feel that Julian Assange acted against them ? and in a way he did.? Tim Walklate spoke to Swedish journalist Stefan Lisinski, who has been covering the Assange story for Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden?s most popular newspapers. He told Tim public opinion in Sweden isn?t strongly against Assange. ?Nowadays, I believe it?s more against than in favour of him. It doesn?t mean people believe he is guilty. I think the way he?s been acting, not coming to Sweden, has not been in favour of him. I think most people believe that it would be better if he came here as soon as possible, go through this investigation and see what?s happening.? We?ve been speaking to Israel Shamir, who is a friend of Julian Assange. And he feels that if he went to Sweden he wouldn?t be given a fair trial. What do you say to that? ?I think he has a better chance than the most people to get a fair trial because the media would be covering this case very closely.? Israel Shamir has alleged that some people in the Swedish media are ?plotting a vendetta? against Assange. Is that really the case? ?There?s been a lot of discussion about him, f course, as it would be in any case. But I can?t see this vendetta. I wouldn?t say all media in Sweden are doing this perfect. We should have our critics too. But, in this case, I think the chance to get an objective trial is much better than in most cases.? From ths at psalience.org Wed Dec 7 14:37:02 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:37:02 +0100 Subject: [THS] Noam Chomsky: Marching Off the Cliff Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111207143542.0812dfa0@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.truth-out.org/marching-cliff/1323195281 Marching Off the Cliff Tuesday 6 December 2011 by: Noam Chomsky, Truthout | Op-Ed (Image: JR / TO; Adapted: Mikael Miettinen, Bob Jagendorf) A task of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, now under way in Durban, South Africa, is to extend earlier policy decisions that were limited in scope and only partially implemented. These decisions trace back to the U.N. Convention of 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which the U.S. refused to join. The Kyoto Protocol?s first commitment period ends in 2012. A fairly general pre-conference mood was captured by a New York Times headline: ?Urgent Issues but Low Expectations.? As the delegates meet in Durban, a report on newly updated digests of polls by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Program on International Policy Attitudes reveals that ?publics around the world and in the United States say their government should give global warming a higher priority and strongly support multilateral action to address it.? Most U.S. citizens agree, though PIPA clarifies that the percentage ?has been declining over the last few years, so that American concern is significantly lower than the global average ? 70 percent as compared to 84 percent.? ?Americans do not perceive that there is a scientific consensus on the need for urgent action on climate change ?(euro) [ A large majority think that they will be personally affected by climate change eventually, but only a minority thinks that they are being affected now, contrary to views in most other countries. Americans tend to underestimate the level of concern among other Americans.? These attitudes aren?t accidental. In 2009 the energy industries, backed by business lobbies, launched major campaigns that cast doubt on the near-unanimous consensus of scientists on the severity of the threat of human-induced global warming. The consensus is only ?near-unanimous? because it doesn?t include the many experts who feel that climate-change warnings don?t go far enough, and the marginal group that deny the threat?s validity altogether. The standard ?he says/she says? coverage of the issue keeps to what is called ?balance?: the overwhelming majority of scientists on one side, the denialists on the other. The scientists who issue the more dire warnings are largely ignored. One effect is that scarcely one-third of the U.S. population believes that there is a scientific consensus on the threat of global warming ? far less than the global average, and radically inconsistent with the facts. It?s no secret that the U.S. government is lagging on climate issues. ?Publics around the world in recent years have largely disapproved of how the United States is handling the problem of climate change,? according to PIPA. ?In general, the United States has been most widely seen as the country having the most negative effect on the world?s environment, followed by China. Germany has received the best ratings.? To gain perspective on what?s happening in the world, it?s sometimes useful to adopt the stance of intelligent extraterrestrial observers viewing the strange doings on Earth. They would be watching in wonder as the richest and most powerful country in world history now leads the lemmings cheerfully off the cliff. Last month, the International Energy Agency, which was formed on the initiative of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1974, issued its latest report on rapidly increasing carbon emissions from fossil fuel use. The IEA estimated that if the world continues on its present course, the ?carbon budget? will be exhausted by 2017. The budget is the quantity of emissions that can keep global warming at the 2 degrees Celsius level considered the limit of safety. IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said, ?The door is closing ?(euro) [ if we don?t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum (for safety). The door will be closed forever.? Also last month, the U.S. Department of Energy reported the emissions figures for 2010. Emissions ?jumped by the biggest amount on record,? The Associated Press reported, meaning that ?levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario? anticipated by the International Panel on Climate Change in 2007. John Reilly, co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?s program on climate change, told the AP that scientists have generally found the IPCC predictions to be too conservative ? unlike the fringe of denialists who gain public attention. Reilly reported that the IPCC?s worst-case scenario was about in the middle of the MIT scientists? estimates of likely outcomes. As these ominous reports were released, the Financial Times devoted a full page to the optimistic expectations that the U.S. might become energy-independent for a century with new technology for extracting North American fossil fuels. Though projections are uncertain, the Financial Times reports, the U.S. might ?leapfrog Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world?s largest producer of liquid hydrocarbons, counting both crude oil and lighter natural gas liquids.? In this happy event, the U.S. could expect to retain its global hegemony. Beyond some remarks about local ecological impact, the Financial Times said nothing about what kind of a world would emerge from these exciting prospects. Energy is to burn; the global environment be damned. Just about every government is taking at least halting steps to do something about the likely impending catastrophe. The U.S. is leading the way ? backward. The Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives is now dismantling environmental measures introduced by Richard Nixon, in many respects the last liberal president. This reactionary behavior is one of many indications of the crisis of U.S. democracy in the past generation. The gap between public opinion and public policy has grown to a chasm on central issues of current policy debate such as the deficit and jobs. However, thanks to the propaganda offensive, the gap is less than what it should be on the most serious issue on the international agenda today ? arguably in history. The hypothetical extraterrestrial observers can be pardoned if they conclude that we seem to be infected by some kind of lethal insanity. ? 2011 Noam Chomsky Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate. ? 2011 The New York Times Company From ths at psalience.org Wed Dec 7 23:42:14 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:42:14 +0100 Subject: [THS] Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor? Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111207234148.07f10500@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29905.htm Did FDR Provoke Pearl Harbor? By Patrick J. Buchanan December 06, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- On Dec. 8, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt took the rostrum before a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war on Japan. A day earlier, at dawn, carrier-based Japanese aircraft had launched a sneak attack devastating the U.S. battle fleet at Pearl Harbor. Said ex-President Herbert Hoover, Republican statesman of the day, "We have only one job to do now, and that is to defeat Japan." But to friends, "the Chief" sent another message: "You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bit." Today, 70 years after Pearl Harbor, a remarkable secret history, written from 1943 to 1963, has come to light. It is Hoover's explanation of what happened before, during and after the world war that may prove yet the death knell of the West. Edited by historian George Nash, "Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath" is a searing indictment of FDR and the men around him as politicians who lied prodigiously about their desire to keep America out of war, even as they took one deliberate step after another to take us into war. Yet the book is no polemic. The 50-page run-up to the war in the Pacific uses memoirs and documents from all sides to prove Hoover's indictment. And perhaps the best way to show the power of this book is the way Hoover does it ? chronologically, painstakingly, week by week. Consider Japan's situation in the summer of 1941. Bogged down in a four year war in China she could neither win nor end, having moved into French Indochina, Japan saw herself as near the end of her tether. Inside the government was a powerful faction led by Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye that desperately did not want a war with the United States. The "pro-Anglo-Saxon" camp included the navy, whose officers had fought alongside the U.S. and Royal navies in World War I, while the war party was centered on the army, Gen. Hideki Tojo and Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, a bitter anti-American. On July 18, 1941, Konoye ousted Matsuoka, replacing him with the "pro-Anglo-Saxon" Adm. Teijiro Toyoda. The U.S. response: On July 25, we froze all Japanese assets in the United States, ending all exports and imports, and denying Japan the oil upon which the nation and empire depended. Stunned, Konoye still pursued his peace policy by winning secret support from the navy and army to meet FDR on the U.S. side of the Pacific to hear and respond to U.S. demands. U.S. Ambassador Joseph Grew implored Washington not to ignore Konoye's offer, that the prince had convinced him an agreement could be reached on Japanese withdrawal from Indochina and South and Central China. Out of fear of Mao's armies and Stalin's Russia, Tokyo wanted to hold a buffer in North China. On Aug. 28, Japan's ambassador in Washington presented FDR a personal letter from Konoye imploring him to meet. Tokyo begged us to keep Konoye's offer secret, as the revelation of a Japanese prime minister's offering to cross the Pacific to talk to an American president could imperil his government. On Sept. 3, the Konoye letter was leaked to the Herald-Tribune. On Sept. 6, Konoye met again at a three-hour dinner with Grew to tell him Japan now agreed with the four principles the Americans were demanding as the basis for peace. No response. On Sept. 29, Grew sent what Hoover describes as a "prayer" to the president not to let this chance for peace pass by. On Sept. 30, Grew wrote Washington, "Konoye's warship is ready waiting to take him to Honolulu, Alaska or anyplace designated by the president." No response. On Oct. 16, Konoye's cabinet fell. In November, the U.S. intercepted two new offers from Tokyo: a Plan A for an end to the China war and occupation of Indochina and, if that were rejected, a Plan B, a modus vivendi where neither side would make any new move. When presented, these, too, were rejected out of hand. At a Nov. 25 meeting of FDR's war council, Secretary of War Henry Stimson's notes speak of the prevailing consensus: "The question was how we should maneuver them (the Japanese) into ... firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves." "We can wipe the Japanese off the map in three months," wrote Navy Secretary Frank Knox. As Grew had predicted, Japan, a "hara-kiri nation," proved more likely to fling herself into national suicide for honor than to allow herself to be humiliated Out of the war that arose from the refusal to meet Prince Konoye came scores of thousands of U.S. dead, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the fall of China to Mao Zedong, U.S. wars in Korea and Vietnam, and the rise of a new arrogant China that shows little respect for the great superpower of yesterday. If you would know the history that made our world, spend a week with Mr. Hoover's book. Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. From ths at psalience.org Thu Dec 8 13:35:05 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:35:05 +0100 Subject: [THS] Global Research: US Caught Meddling in Russian Elections! Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111208133334.067af690@mail.messagingengine.com> BOMBSHELL: US Caught Meddling in Russian Elections! Putin compares US funded NGOs to Judas the betrayer By Tony Cartalucci URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28060 Global Research, December 6, 2011 landdestroyer.blogspot.com - 2011-12-05 December 4, 2011 - What would Americans say if they found their polling stations and certain political parties entirely infiltrated by Chinese money, Chinese observers, and Chinese-backed candidates promoting China's interests in an AMERICAN election? The answer ranges from incarceration, to trials featuring charges ranging from fraud, to sedition and even treason with sentences ranging from decades to life in prison, perhaps even death, as well as possible military action for what could easily be considered an act of war. Indeed, the attempted subversion of a foreign nation and/or meddling in its elections are acts of war, an act of war the United States government through its various "Non-Governmental Organizations" (NGOs) have been committing on and off for decades around the globe. In fact, the very "Arab Spring" is a geopolitical conflagration tipped off by this vast network of Western backed NGOs. The New York Times in its article, "U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings," clearly stated as much when it reported, "a number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington." The Times would continue by explaining, "the Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department." These same NGOs have also just recently played a central role in Myanmar, blocking the construction of a mega-dam that would have begun the development of the nation's rural areas, provided electricity for export and domestic use, and help irrigate surrounding agricultural land. These NGOs are currently creating a social divide in Thailand to subvert an 800 year old independent political institution that has for centuries weathered Western encroachment. There is also documented evidence of these NGOs attempting to destabilize the government of Malaysia and reinstall IMF minion Anwar Ibrahim back into power. In Russia's neighboring country and ally, Belarus, this network of US-funded NGOs have attempted to start a "Belarusian Spring" to overthrow leader Alexander Lukashenko, who has adamently opposed NATO's creep toward its, and Russia's borders. And now Russia itself has just rooted out a plot by these very same NGOs creeping in and around the nation's political institutions, in an attempt to subvert and replace them. Russia's Long Fight Against US-funded Subversion. This is not the first time Russia has faced this insidious creep from abroad. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there proceeded a lawless free-for-all where foreigners began rushing in in an attempt to create their own order out of the chaos. Leading this charge was billionaire oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky who fashioned an "Open Russian Foundation" and even had western corporate-financier elitists Jacob Rothschild and Henry Kissinger chair its board of directors. In a now all too familiar scenario, Khodorkovsky and his networks of foreign-funded NGOs attempted to consolidate and transfer Russia's wealth, power, and the destiny of its people into the hands of Wall Street and London's global "corporatatorship." http://images.forbes.com/media/2010/05/26/0526_billionaires-jail-mikhail-khodorkovsky-intro_485x340.jpg Image: Khodorkovsky, safely behind bars. In Russia, Wall Street and London's mafia banksters go to prison. .... Russia, however, was not entirely defenseless. In a devastating backlash, Khodorkovsky was thrown into a Siberian prison where he remains to this day, while other oligarchs serving Western interests scattered like cockroaches back to London and New York. In a hollow attempt to portray Russia's efforts to preserve its national sovereignty as "human rights abuses," Wall Street and London assembled a legal defense led by globalist lawyer Robert Amsterdam, who while still representing Khodorkovsky, is also defending another loser in Wall Street's game to place their puppets in positions of power around the globe, Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand. Most recently, as Russia's elections approach, AFP has claimed that NGOs such as US NED-funded Golos and New Times' slon.ru, which regularly features columns by the now jailed and above mentioned Khodorkovsky, were attacked in order to prevent the exposure of "mass election fraud." Why opposition groups and foreign-funded NGOs who have a direct vested interest in preventing Putin's United Russia Party from obtaining a clean victory at the polls, should be trusted to reveal "mass election fraud" in the first place, is never quite explained by AFP. NED's official website lists an astounding number of meddlesome NGOs conducting activities across the Russian Federation that no American in their right mind would allow on US soil. Golos is just one of many NGOs funded by the United States government, overseen by the US Embassy in Russia, and used to meddle in the sovereign internal affairs of their nation. AFP reported, "Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, whose United Russia party has won Sunday's polls but with a reduced majority, has denounced non-governmental organisations like Golos, comparing them to the disciple Judas who betrayed Jesus." And indeed, Golos is certifiably betraying the Russian people by taking foreign money and pursing a foreign agenda, masquerading as "pro-democracy" crusaders. Golos' activities, mirroring those in the US-engineered Arab Spring, include an online "Map of Violations" site detailing "claims" of fraud across Russia, in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of upcoming elections Putin and is party are predicted to easily win. Golos' Liliya Shibanova described their "Map of Violations" project as being a place where people could upload any information or evidence of election violations. This, being far from actual evidence, again mirrors the same tactics of manipulating public opinion in the midst of uprisings around the world, fueled by identical foreign-funded organizations where baseless claims of abuse, violence, and "human rights" violations made up the entirety of accusations then used by Western governments to diplomatically and militarily (in the case of Libya and now Syria) pressure targeted nations. As in Belarus, where the the vice president of NED-funded FIDH, and ring leader of foreign-funded sedition within the Eastern European country, was imprisoned for over 4 years, in Russia, the government is openly exposing the enemy by name. This has also happened in Malaysia, where the ruling government has outed the "Bersih Clean and Fair Elections" movement as a conspiracy of foreign-corporate-financier interests aimed at destabilizing the country and installing a more favorable, proxy regime led by IMF minion Anwar Ibrahim. Russian Subversion Coordinated by US Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul. Russia would also wisely turn their attention to the US Embassy and recently confirmed Ambassador Michael McFaul, who serves on the board of directors of Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy, both now implicated in directly interfering in Russia's sovereign affairs. Photo: Michael McFaul, confirmed in November as US Ambassador to Russia, immediately set out to work, not to represent the interests, aspirations, and good will of the American people, but to execute the agenda of corporate-financier oligarchs, who in October sang praises regarding his accomplished background in foreign agitation and the possibilities his presence in Russia could yield. It also should be noted that McFaul is a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, fully funded by the Fortune 500, Soros' Open Society, and other corporate-funded foundations. .... It was warned during October 2011 in "Agitator Nominated for Next US ?Ambassador? to Russia," as corporate-financier interests voiced their recommendations for McFaul that: "The Brookings Institution recently published a ?letter of recommendation? of sorts for McFaul, titled, ?Give the Next Russian Ambassador a Powerful Tool to Guard Human Rights.? Already out of the gates, the article is disingenuously using the concept of ?human rights? to leverage US interests over Russia. Written by Brookings? own arch-Neo-Conservative Robert Kagan and Freedom House President David Kramer, the piece begins by immediately calling on the US Senate to confirm McFaul. Kagan and Kramer claim the US should then arm McFaul with a bill to ?sanction? Russian officials accused of ?human rights abuses.? Judging from previous US-Russian relations, and in particular, Robert Amsterdam?s transparent, almost cartoonish crusade for his jailed client, Mikhail Khodorovsky, it can be assumed these ?abuses? are referring to the jailing of political operatives for grave criminal activities while in the process of serving US corporate-financier interests. The Brookings piece goes on to enumerate McFaul?s ?merits? which include, ?democracy promotion? (read: extraterritorial meddling), meeting with ?civil society? representatives both in Russia and in neighboring nations (read: conspiring with US-funded NGOs and political opposition leaders), as well as having a good rapport with Russian opposition activists operating in Washington. Brookings notes in particular how important it is to have McFaul in Russia, on the ground to give his ?assessment? of up-coming Russian elections. Unspoken, but sure to trickle through the headlines in coming months will be McFaul?s ?democracy promotion? on behalf of select opposition parties in Russia?s political landscape. As if to alleviate any doubt regarding just what Brookings means by ?human rights abuses,? Kagan and Kramer then cite the case of UK financier operative Sergei Magnitsky of Hermitage Captial Mangement, an enterprise that while operating primarily in Russian markets, maintained its headquarters in the Cayman Islands. Magnitsky was arrested and imprisoned over tax evasion and tax fraud, and would die of illness while in prison. The US and UK would predictably trump up the circumstances surrounding the death of Magnitsky, with corporate foundation-funded Redress (page 28) of the UK submitting a ?report? to the UN in yet another classic example of leveraging issues of ?human rights? against a target nation to serve Western interests. This is but a taste of what is to come with McFaul presiding over the next leg of Anglo-American global destabilization. Brookings? Kagan and Freedom House?s Kramer have nominated McFaul with the intention of further meddling in Russia?s sovereign affairs, as well as destabilizing its neighbors in a bid to hedge Russia?s reemergence as a sovereign world power, or perhaps even in an attempt to play a grand strategy of global tension, forcing the besieged developing world to consolidate under the West?s more overt attacks, only for the ?union? to be co-opted and integrated into the Wall Street-London ?international order? at a later point in time. Either way, McFaul does not represent the ideals, principles, or laws of the American people or the US Constitution, nor does he represent universal values of respecting national sovereignty. His confirmation by the US Senate will indicate duplicity amongst the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and a further divergence between their actions and the will and aspirations of the American people who put them in office. McFaul represents a corporate-financier elite and their agenda of building an ?international order? (read: empire) at the cost of yet more American treasure and lives, leaving an immensely wealthy elite lording over a destitute American majority. By exposing both McFaul?s true ?credentials? and intentions, as well as who he really works for and why, and by systematically boycotting and replacing the consumerist troughs that fuel this corporate-financier oligarchy we can rectify this obvious and ever-expanding divergence between what is best for America and what is pursued by the oligarchs that presume dominion over us." Russia and a growing number of other nations are openly exposing and holding accountable agents of sedition operating in their country, sent and funded by US tax payers' money. It is time for the other shoe to drop, and for the people of the West to hold their governments accountable. As targeted nations begin exposing and jailing members of this global conspiracy, likewise the West must begin exposing the disingenuous peddlers of this agenda - namely the board of directors and trustees organizing these ploys and dolling out the funds used in this global destabilization, and hold them duly accountable for using tax payers' money to fund political chaos abroad while economic and social decay consume Americans and Europeans at home. Please support Global Research Global Research relies on the financial support of its readers. Your endorsement is greatly appreciated Subscribe to the Global Research e-newsletter From ths at psalience.org Thu Dec 8 13:38:01 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:38:01 +0100 Subject: [THS] War on Iran has already begun. Act before it threatens all of us Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111208133730.04722620@mail.messagingengine.com> War on Iran has already begun. Act before it threatens all of us Escalation of the covert US-Israeli campaign against Tehran risks a global storm. Opposition has to get more serious Seumas Milne guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 December 2011 20.59 GMT Iranians honour dead Revolutionary Guards commander Iranians carry honorary coffins and pictures of a Revolutionary Guards commander killed in an explosion at the Alghadir missile base. Photograph: Reuters They don't give up. After a decade of blood-drenched failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, violent destabilisation of Pakistan and Yemen, the devastation of Lebanon and slaughter in Libya, you might hope the US and its friends had had their fill of invasion and intervention in the Muslim world. It seems not. For months the evidence has been growing that a US-Israeli stealth war against Iran has already begun, backed by Britain and France. Covert support for armed opposition groups has spread into a campaign of assassinations of Iranian scientists, cyber warfare, attacks on military and missile installations, and the killing of an Iranian general, among others. The attacks are not directly acknowledged, but accompanied by intelligence-steered nods and winks as the media are fed a stream of hostile tales ? the most outlandish so far being an alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the US ? and the western powers ratchet up pressure for yet more sanctions over Iran's nuclear programme. The British government's decision to take the lead in imposing sanctions on all Iranian banks and pressing for an EU boycott of Iranian oil triggered the trashing of its embassy in Tehran by demonstrators last week and subsequent expulsion of Iranian diplomats from London. It's a taste of how the conflict can quickly escalate, as was the downing of a US spyplane over Iranian territory at the weekend. What one Israeli official has called a "new kind of war" has the potential to become a much more old-fashioned one that would threaten us all. Last month the Guardian was told by British defence ministry officials that if the US brought forward plans to attack Iran (as they believed it might), it would "seek, and receive, UK military help", including sea and air support and permission to use the ethnically cleansed British island colony of Diego Garcia. Whether the officials' motive was to soften up public opinion for war or warn against it, this was an extraordinary admission: the Britain military establishment fully expects to take part in an unprovoked US attack on Iran ? just as it did against Iraq eight years ago. What was dismissed by the former foreign secretary Jack Straw as "unthinkable", and for David Cameron became an option not to be taken "off the table", now turns out to be as good as a done deal if the US decides to launch a war that no one can seriously doubt would have disastrous consequences. But there has been no debate in parliament and no mainstream political challenge to what Straw's successor, David Miliband, this week called the danger of "sleepwalking into a war with Iran". That's all the more shocking because the case against Iran is so spectacularly flimsy. There is in fact no reliable evidence that Iran is engaged in a nuclear weapons programme. The latest International Atomic Energy Agency report once again failed to produce a smoking gun, despite the best efforts of its new director general, Yukiya Amano ? described in a WikiLeaks cable as "solidly in the US court on every strategic decision". As in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, the strongest allegations are based on "secret intelligence" from western governments. But even the US national intelligence director, James Clapper, has accepted that the evidence suggests Iran suspended any weapons programme in 2003and has not reactivated it. The whole campaign has an Alice in Wonderland quality about it. Iran, which says it doesn't want nuclear weapons, is surrounded by nuclear-weapon states: the US ? which also has forces in neighbouring Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as military bases across the region ? Israel, Russia, Pakistan and India. Iran is of course an authoritarian state, though not as repressive as western allies such as Saudi Arabia. But it has invaded no one in 200 years. It was itself invaded by Iraq with western support in the 1980s, while the US and Israel have attacked 10 countries or territories between them in the past decade. Britain exploited, occupied and overthrew governments in Iran for over a century. So who threatens who exactly? As Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, said recently, if he were an Iranian leader he would "probably" want nuclear weapons. Claims that Iran poses an "existential threat" to Israel because President Ahmadinejad said the state "must vanish from the page of time" bear no relation to reality. Even if Iran were to achieve a nuclear threshold, as some suspect is its real ambition, it would be in no position to attack a state with upwards of 300 nuclear warheads, backed to the hilt by the world's most powerful military force. The real challenge posed by Iran to the US and Israel has been as an independent regional power, allied to Syria and the Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas movements. As US troops withdraw from Iraq, Saudi Arabia fans sectarianism, and Syrian opposition leaders promise a break with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, the threat of proxy wars is growing across the region. A US or Israeli attack on Iran would turn that regional maelstrom into a global firestorm. Iran would certainly retaliate directly and through allies against Israel, the US and US Gulf client states, and block the 20% of global oil supplies shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. Quite apart from death and destruction, the global economic impact would be incalculable. All reason and common sense militate against such an act of aggression. Meir Dagan, the former head of Israel's Mossad, said last week it would be a "catastrophe". Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, warned that it could "consume the Middle East in confrontation and conflict that we would regret". There seems little doubt that the US administration is deeply wary of a direct attack on Iran. But in Israel, Barak has spoken of having less than a year to act; Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has talked about making the "right decision at the right moment"; and the prospects of drawing the US in behind an Israeli attack have been widely debated in the media. Maybe it won't happen. Maybe the war talk is more about destabilisation than a full-scale attack. But there are undoubtedly those in the US, Israel and Britain who think otherwise. And the threat of miscalculation and the logic of escalation could tip the balance decisively. Unless opposition to an attack on Iran gets serious, this could become the most devastating Middle East war of all. From ths at psalience.org Fri Dec 9 13:24:15 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:24:15 +0100 Subject: [THS] WE WAS BRUNG UP PROPER !! Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111209132039.06b82f28@mail.messagingengine.com> [forwarded] WE WAS BRUNG UP PROPER !! "And we never had a whole Mars bar until 1993"!!! CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL MY FRIENDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1940's, 50's, and 60's First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank Sherry while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos... They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, bread and dripping, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer. Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints. We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking. As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle. Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds , KFC, Subway or Nandos. Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn't open on a Sunday, somehow we didn't starve to death! We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this. We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy Toffees, Gobstoppers and Bubble Gum. We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter,milk from the cow,and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because....... WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!! We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O..K. We would spend hours building our go-carts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with matchbox cars. We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii , X-boxes, no video games at all, no 999 channels on SKY , no video/dvd films, or colour TV no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms...........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them! We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no Lawsuits from these accidents. Only girls had pierced ears! We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever. You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time.... We were given air guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays, We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them! Mum didn't have to go to work to help dad make ends meet because we didn't need to keep up with the Jones's! Not everyone made the rugby/football/cricket/netball team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!! Getting into the team was based on MERIT Our teachers used to hit us with canes and gym shoes and throw the blackboard rubber at us if they thought we weren't concentrating ... We can string sentences together and spell and have proper conversations because of a good, solid three R's education. Our parents would tell us to ask a stranger to help us cross the road. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law! Our parents didn't invent stupid names for their kids like 'Kiora' and 'Blade' and 'Ridge' and 'Vanilla' We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL ! And YOU are one of them! CONGRATULATIONS! You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good. And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were. From ths at psalience.org Fri Dec 9 13:36:12 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:36:12 +0100 Subject: [THS] Greg Palast was floating in a kayak off the Alaska coast in 1997... Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111209133545.048ec320@mail.messagingengine.com> Greenpeace poisoned me by Kert Davies, Research Director, Greenpeace USA Read the Greenpeace blog and listen to the Greenpeace Radio Podcast with Greg Palast, author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores. Then read this. It's my soul on a plate. Then pass it on so others can taste it. - gp "Occupy," Big Oil and the U.S. Media with Muckraking Journalist Greg Palast By Kevin J. Kelley [12.07.11] Seven Days Magazine Greg Palast was floating in a kayak off the Alaska coast in 1997 when he had an epiphany. He was working at the time as an investigator for the Chugach native people, whose lands had been slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. In the course of his study, Palast uncovered information about Exxon's culpability for the disaster, but he had no way of publicizing it. So he decided to become a journalist. It's proven a successful second career for Palast, 59, who studied business at the University of Chicago under right-wing economist Milton Friedman. He's won six Project Censored awards for reporting important stories ignored by the mainstream press. He's also the author of two international best sellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. A native Californian, Palast reports regularly for Britain's Guardian newspaper and for the BBC. Nation magazine writer Jim Hightower calls Palast "a cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes." Corporate executives he's outed as wrongdoers call Palast other things. Palast spoke with Seven Days in advance of his scheduled talk next week at Burlington's Main Street Landing Film House. Seven Days: You must be sympathetic to Occupy Wall Street. Do you think it will have a lasting impact on U.S. politics? Greg Palast: It's not a setback for Occupy to no longer be occupying. No one gives a shit about Wall Street. It's just a piece of tarmac. It was never the point of the movement. The point has been to expose the 1 percent, the movers and shakers who are moving and shaking us, all those rich motherfuckers. Now we know their names, where they live, how they made their billions. So yeah, the impact has been huge. And it's just starting. I'm deeply involved with Occupy. SD: You've got a new book out: Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High- Finance Carnivores. Can you summarize what it's about? GP: Vultures are financial speculators who seize the assets of the poorest nations by claiming these countries owe money that the speculators try to collect through intimidation, bribery and theft. One guy associated with this is Paul Singer; he's Mitt Romney's top economic adviser. I've been investigating how Romney's "job creator" makes his money, and that's a story Singer doesn't want you to hear. By the way, I'm totally nonpartisan. Even though Singer owns the Republican Party, I point out that he rents the Democratic Party. Most of the book is a five-continent investigation of British Petroleum. I'm bringing you the stuff you don't get from CNN or the Petroleum Broadcasting System. BP's blowout in the Gulf in 2010 was actually the second big disaster it had. There was also a blowout in the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan in 2008, but BP covered it up with a combination of bribery, beatings and blow jobs. [Azerbaijani officials] kept their lips closed and their zippers open. SD: So your talk in Burlington is part of a book tour? GP: I'm on a troublemaking tour. My talks are platforms for Occupy activists in their transition away from their fixation with real estate. SD: You obviously come at stories from a left-wing perspective. Do you ever worry that your ideology might blind you to facts? GP: I don't have an ideology. There's really only the truth and the not-truth. I'm just an old-fashioned gumshoe reporter. The worst fucking thing about American journalism, by the way, is its "on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-that" approach. It really distorts or omits truth. I exposed [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris for purging thousands of black voters from the electoral rolls. That cost [Al] Gore the 2000 election. It was stolen from him. I documented it. I could not get that story into the U.S. media. There was a total news blackout of what had happened. It finally got picked up by the L.A. Times, and they played the story as "Democrats accuse Republicans of removing black voters from the rolls; the Republicans deny that." Jesus Christ! We don't have balanced news in the United States; it doesn't fucking exist. News here isn't reporting; it's repeating. SD: Hang on. You write mostly for British outlets. Are you saying the British press is less influenced by corporate interests than the American press? The same financial dynamics are at work, right? GP: Wrong. The Guardian is owned by a not-for-profit charitable trust. That's allowed it to become the most influential English-language paper in the world. SD: More influential than the New York Times? GP: The New York Times is influential in New York. People elsewhere see that it's - what shall we say? - incomplete. The BBC is the gold standard of journalism. It's important to know it's neither corporate owned nor government owned. It's owned by subscribers, the people who pay 100 pounds a year for a TV license. SD: Yeah, but Britain doesn't have a First Amendment or a Freedom of Information Act. GP: That's true, but the Brits could borrow our First Amendment, because we're not using it. And have you tried using FOIA lately? Good luck. It's also true that I don't have any legal protection for stories in the British press. The resulting degree of self-censorship by some reporters is just astonishing. But it's still not as bad as it is here. The entire front page of the Guardian last week had my coverage of Singer, Romney's biggest funder. There wasn't one mention of his role in the U.S. press. SD: Staying with journalism for a minute, do you have a journalist hero? George Orwell, maybe? GP: Only Christopher Hitchens is pompous enough to compare himself with Orwell. My model is Jack Anderson [a Pulitzer Prize-winning modern muckraker who broke scandals involving both Democrats and Republicans]. I also always admired Ron Ridenhour, the soldier who revealed the My Lai massacre [in which 500 Vietnamese villagers were killed by U.S. troops on March 16, 1968]. Ridenhour was the greatest investigative reporter of the last century. He died way too young [of a heart attack in 1998 at age 52]. The TV show "Columbo" had a big influence on me, too. I learned a lot from it about how to do investigations. Lt. Columbo was just totally dogged. SD: How about Hunter Thompson? You've got an image like his. GP: People make that connection all the time because we have Rolling Stone in common. But Thompson was a brilliant social analyst, and I'm just a gumshoe guy. SD: You do look like an old-school reporter with that Humphrey Bogart hat of yours. GP: I wear the hat because I'm bald and I'll get painfully sunburned otherwise. SD: Matt Drudge wears the same kind of hat. GP: Yeah, some people say I'm a left-wing Matt Drudge, but there's a big difference: Drudge is full of shit, and I'm full of information. SD: You must be embarrassed that one of the first things on Google for "Greg Palast" is a 2009 piece you wrote saying what a great job Obama is doing. GP: It was right after he took office. And it was nice to see him acting for one week like a real president. SD: So what happened? GP: Obama was reminded of who elected him. He brought into power guys like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers - Wall Street operatives and prot?g?s of Robert Rubin, who was Clinton's Treasury secretary [and a Goldman Sachs and Citigroup executive]. Remember, it wasn't Bush who destroyed the economy; it was a guy named Bill Clinton. They put the arm on Obama. They reminded him he's just a tenant. SD: Do you worry about your safety? GP: I very much fear for the safety of my sources. Some of them do end up in jail and/or beaten up. It's insanely dangerous for some of them to talk to me. One of my great sources was just charged with sedition. These guys are insanely courageous. But please don't give the impression that your life will be threatened if you become my source. That wouldn't be helpful. SD: You're talking about incidents in other countries, right? You haven't had sources jailed or beaten up in the U.S., have you? GP: Look at Bradley Manning, America's most heroic political prisoner [the U.S. Army soldier accused of supplying a cache of secret diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks]. Lots of Americans are facing the ruin of their careers for whistle-blowing. ****** Greg Palast will talk about "Why We Occupy: How Wall Street Picks the Bones of America," on December 12 at 7 p.m. in Burlington?s Main Street Landing Film House. Palast's One-Percent Tour travels this week to Houston on Thursday, Baltimore Friday and next week to Burlington VT (Monday), and Atlanta (Thursday). Greg Palast is the author of Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, released in the US and Canada by Penguin. You can read Vultures' Picnic, "Chapter 1: Goldfinger," or download it, at no charge: click here. Subscribe to Palast's Newsletter and podcasts. Follow Palast on Facebook and Twitter. GregPalast.com From ths at psalience.org Fri Dec 9 13:51:16 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:51:16 +0100 Subject: [THS] The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111209134055.04c9ea98@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/153378/understanding_the_conservative_mind%3A_why_reactionaries_from_edmund_burke_to_sarah_palin_have_fought_real_liberty?page=entire Oxford University Press / By Corey Robin Understanding the Conservative Mind: Why Reactionaries from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin Have Fought Real Liberty Historically, conservatism has been driven by the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back. December 8, 2011 | The following excerpt is reprinted from The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright ? 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Click here to buy a copy. Since the modern era began, men and women in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors in the state, church, workplace, and other hierarchical institutions. They have gathered under different banners--the labor movement, feminism, abolition, socialism--and shouted different slogans: freedom, equality, rights, democracy, revolution. In virtually every instance, their superiors have resisted them, violently and nonviolently, legally and illegally, overtly and covertly. That march and demarche of democracy is the story of modern politics or at least one of its stories. This book is about the second half of that story, the demarche, and the political ideas--variously called conservative, reactionary, revanchist, counterrevolutionary--that grow out of and give rise to it. These ideas, which occupy the right side of the political spectrum, are forged in battle. They always have been, at least since they first emerged as formal ideologies during the French Revolution, battles between social groups rather than nations; roughly speaking, between those with more power and those with less. To understand these ideas, we have to understand that story. For that is what conservatism is: a meditation on--and theoretical rendition of--the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back. Despite the very real differences between them, workers in a factory are like secretaries in an office, peasants on a manor, slaves on a plantation--even wives in a marriage--in that they live and labor in conditions of unequal power. They submit and obey, heeding the demands of their managers and masters, husbands and lords. They are disciplined and punished. They do much and receive little. Sometimes their lot is freely chosen--workers contract with their employers, wives with their husbands--but its entailments seldom are. What contract, after all, could ever itemize the ins and outs, the daily pains and ongoing sufferance, of a job or a marriage? Throughout American history, in fact, the contract often has served as a conduit to unforeseen coercion and constraint, particularly in institutions like the workplace and the family where men and women spend so much of their lives. Employment and marriage contracts have been interpreted by judges, themselves friendly to the interests of employers and husbands, to contain all sorts of unwritten and unwanted provisions of servitude to which wives and workers tacitly consent, even when they have no knowledge of such provisions or wish to stipulate otherwise. Until 1980, for example, it was legal in every state in the union for a husband to rape his wife. The justification for this dates back to a 1736 treatise by English jurist Matthew Hale. When a woman marries, Hale argued, she implicitly agrees to give "up herself in this kind [sexually] unto her husband." Hers is a tacit, if unknowing, consent "which she cannot retract" for the duration of their union. Having once said yes, she can never say no. As late as 1957--during the era of the Warren Court--a standard legal treatise could state, "A man does not commit rape by having sexual intercourse with his lawful wife, even if he does so by force and against her will." If a woman (or man) tried to write into the marriage contract a requirement that express consent had to be given in order for sex to proceed, judges were bound by common law to ignore or override it. Implicit consent was a structural feature of the contract that neither party could alter. With the exit option of divorce not widely available until the second half of the twentieth century, the marriage contract doomed women to be the sexual servants of their husbands. A similar dynamic was at work in the employment contract: workers consented to be hired by their employers, but until the twentieth century that consent was interpreted by judges to contain implicit and irrevocable provisions of servitude; meanwhile, the exit option of quitting was not nearly as available, legally or practically, as many might think. Every once in a while, however, the subordinates of this world contest their fates. They protest their conditions, write letters and petitions, join movements, and make demands. Their goals may be minimal and discrete--better safety guards on factory machines, an end to marital rape--but in voicing them, they raise the specter of a more fundamental change in power. They cease to be servants or supplicants and become agents, speaking and acting on their own behalf. More than the reforms themselves, it is this assertion of agency by the subject class--the appearance of an insistent and independent voice of demand--that vexes their superiors. Guatemala's Agrarian Reform of 1952 redistributed a million and a half acres of land to 100,000 peasant families. That was nothing, in the minds of the country's ruling classes, compared to the riot of political talk the bill seemed to unleash. Progressive reformers, Guatemala's archbishop complained, sent local peasants "gifted with facility with words" to the capital, where they were given opportunities "to speak in public." That was the great evil of the Agrarian Reform. In his last major address to the Senate, John C. Calhoun, former vice president and chief spokesman of the Southern cause, identified the decision by Congress in the mid-1830s to receive abolitionist petitions as the moment when the nation set itself on an irreversible course of confrontation over slavery. In a four-decade career that had seen such defeats to the slaveholder position as the Tariff of Abominations, the Nullification Crisis, and the Force Bill, the mere appearance of slave speech in the nation's capital stood out for the dying Calhoun as the sign that the revolution had begun. And when, a half-century later, Calhoun's successors sought to put the abolitionist genie back into the bottle, it was this same assertion of black agency that they targeted. Explaining the proliferation across the South in the 1890s and 1900s of constitutional conventions restricting the franchise, a delegate to one such convention declared, "The great underlying principle of this Convention movement . . . was the elimination of the negro from the politics of this State." American labor history is filled with similar complaints from the employing classes and their allies in government: not that unionized workers are violent, disruptive, or unprofitable but that they are independent and self-organizing. Indeed, so potent is their self-organization that it threatens--in the eyes of their superiors-- to render superfluous the employer and the state. During the Great Upheaval of 1877, striking railroad workers in St. Louis took to running the trains themselves. Fearful the public might conclude the workers were capable of managing the railroad, the owners tried to stop them--in effect, launching a strike of their own in order to prove it was the owners, and only the owners, who could make the trains run on time. During the Seattle general strike of 1919, workers went to great lengths to provide basic government services, including law and order. So successful were they that the mayor concluded it was this, the workers' independent capacity to limit violence and anarchy, that posed the greatest threat. The so-called sympathetic Seattle strike was an attempted revolution. That there was no violence does not alter the fact . . . . True, there were no flashing guns, no bombs, no killings. Revolution, I repeat, doesn't need violence. The general strike, as practiced in Seattle, is of itself the weapon of revolution, all the more dangerous because quiet . . . . That is to say, it puts the government out of operation. And that is all there is to revolt-- no matter how achieved. Into the twentieth century, judges regularly denounced unionized workers for formulating their own definitions of rights and compiling their own register of shop-floor rules. Workers like these, claimed one federal court, saw themselves as "exponents of some higher law than that . . . administered by courts." They were exercising "powers belonging only to Government," declared the Supreme Court, constituting themselves as a "self-appointed tribunal" of law and order. Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite. Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. "We are all agreed as to our own liberty," declared Samuel Johnson. "But we are not agreed as to the liberty of others: for in proportion as we take, others must lose. I believe we hardly wish that the mob should have liberty to govern us." Such was the threat Edmund Burke saw in the French Revolution: not merely an expropriation of property or explosion of violence but an inversion of the obligations of deference and command. "The levellers," he claimed, "only change and pervert the natural order of things." The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person--to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule. Even when the left's demands shift to the economic realm, the threat of freedom's extension looms large. If women and workers are provided with the economic resources to make independent choices, they will be free not to obey their husbands and employers. That is why Lawrence Mead, one of the leading intellectual opponents of the welfare state in the 1980s and 1990s, declared that the welfare recipient "must be made less free in certain senses rather than more." For the conservative, equality portends more than a redistribution of resources, opportunities, and outcomes--though he certainly dislikes these, too. What equality ultimately means is a rotation in the seat of power. The conservative is not wrong to construe the threat of the left in these terms. Before he died, G. A. Cohen, one of contemporary Marxism's most acute voices, made the case that much of the left's program of economic redistribution could be understood as entailing not a sacrifice of freedom for the sake of equality, but an extension of freedom from the few to the many. And, indeed, the great modern movements of emancipation--from abolition to feminism to the struggle for workers' rights and civil rights--have always posited a nexus between freedom and equality. Marching out of the family, the factory, and the field, where unfreedom and inequality are the flip sides of the same coin, they have made freedom and equality the irreducible yet mutually reinforcing parts of a single whole. The link between freedom and equality has not made the argument for redistribution any more palatable to the right. As one conservative wag complained of John Dewey's vision of social democracy, "The definitions of liberty and of equality have been so juggled that both refer to approximately the same condition." Far from being a sleight of the progressive hand, however, this synthesis of freedom and equality is a central postulate of the politics of emancipation. Whether the politics conforms to the postulate is, of course, another story. But for the conservative, the concern is less the betrayal of the postulate than its fulfillment. One of the reasons the subordinate's exercise of agency so agitates the conservative imagination is that it takes place in an intimate setting. Every great political blast--the storming of the Bastille, the taking of the Winter Palace, the March on Washington--is set off by a private fuse: the contest for rights and standing in the family, the factory, and the field. Politicians and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power. "Here is the secret of the opposition to woman's equality in the state," Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote. "Men are not ready to recognize it in the home." Behind the riot in the street or debate in Parliament is the maid talking back to her mistress, the worker disobeying her boss. That is why our political arguments--not only about the family but also the welfare state, civil rights, and much else--can be so explosive: they touch upon the most personal relations of power. It is also why it has so often fallen to our novelists to explain to us our politics. At the height of the civil rights movement, James Baldwin traveled to Tallahassee. There, in an imagined handshake, he found the hidden transcript of a constitutional crisis. I am the only Negro passenger at Tallahassee's shambles of an airport. It is an oppressively sunny day. A black chauffeur, leading a small dog on a leash, is meeting his white employer. He is attentive to the dog, covertly very aware of me and respectful of her in a curiously watchful, waiting way. She is middle-aged, beaming and powdery-faced, delighted to see both the beings who make her life agreeable. I am sure that it has never occurred to her that either of them has the ability to judge her or would judge her harshly. She might almost, as she goes toward her chauffeur, be greeting a friend. No friend could make her face brighter. If she were smiling at me that way I would expect to shake her hand. But if I should put out my hand, panic, bafflement, and horror would then overtake that face, the atmosphere would darken, and danger, even the threat of death, would immediately fill the air. On such small signs and symbols does the southern cabala depend. The conflict over American slavery--the looming precedent to this set piece of Baldwin's imagination--offers an instructive example. One of the distinguishing characteristics of slavery in the United States is that unlike slaves in the Caribbean or serfs in Russia, many slaves in the South lived on small holdings with their masters in residence. Masters knew their slaves' names; tracked their births, marriages, and deaths; and held parties to honor these dates. The personal interaction between master and slave was unparalleled, leading a visiting Frederick Law Olmsted to remark upon the "close cohabitation and association of black and white" in Virginia, the "familiarity and closeness of intimacy that would have been noticed with astonishment, if not with manifest displeasure, in almost any chance company at the North." Only the "relations of husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister," wrote the slavery apologist Thomas Dew, produced "a closer tie" than that of master and slave; the latter relationship, declared William Harper, another defender of slavery, was "one of the most intimate relations of society." Conversely, after slavery was abolished, many whites lamented the chill in relations between the races. "I'm fond of the Negro," said one Mississippian in 1918, "but the bond between us is not as close as it was between my father and his slaves." Much of this talk was propaganda and self-delusion, of course, but in one respect it was not: the nearness of master to slave did make for an exceptionally personal mode of rule. Masters devised and enforced "unusually detailed" rules for their slaves, dictating when they had to get up, eat, work, sleep, garden, visit, and pray. Masters decided upon their slaves' mates and marriages. They named their children, and when the market dictated, separated those children from their parents. And while masters--as well as their sons and overseers--availed themselves of the bodies of their female slaves whenever they wished, they saw fit to patrol and punish any and all sexual congress between their slaves. Living with their slaves, masters had direct means to control their behavior and a detailed map of all the behavior there was to control. The consequences of this proximity were felt not just by the slave but by the master as well. Living every day with his mastery, he became entirely identified with it. So complete was this identification that any sign of the slave's disobedience--much less her emancipation--was seen as an intolerable assault upon his person. When Calhoun declared that slavery "has grown up with our society and institutions, and is so interwoven with them, that to destroy it would be to destroy us as a people," he wasn't just referring to society in the aggregate or abstract. He was thinking of individual men absorbed in the day-to-day experience of ruling other men and women. Take that experience away, and you destroyed not only the master but also the man--and the many men who sought to become, or thought they already were like, the master. Because the master put so little distance between himself and his mastery, he would go to unprecedented lengths to keep his holdings. Throughout the Americas slaveholders defended their privileges, but nowhere with the intensity or violence of the master class in the South. Outside the South, wrote C. Vann Wood-ward, the end of slavery was "the liquidation of an investment." Inside, it was "the death of a society." And when, after the Civil War, the master class fought with equal ferocity to restore its privileges and power, it was the proximity of command, the nearness of rule, that was uppermost in its mind. As Henry McNeal Turner, a black Republican in Georgia, put it in 1871: "They do not care so much about Congress admitting Negroes to their halls . . . but they do not want the negroes over them at home." One hundred years later, a black sharecropper in Mississippi would still resort to the most domestic of idioms to describe relations between blacks and whites: "We had to mind them as our children mind us." When the conservative looks upon a democratic movement from below, this (and the exercise of agency) is what he sees: a terrible disturbance in the private life of power. Witnessing the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Theodore Sedgwick lamented, "The aristocracy of virtue is destroyed; personal influence is at an end." Sometimes the conservative is personally implicated in that life, sometimes not. Regardless, it is his apprehension of the private grievance behind the public commotion that lends his theory its tactile ingenuity and moral ferocity. "The real object" of the French Revolution, Burke told Parliament in 1790, is "to break all those connexions, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination; to raise soldiers against their officers; servants against their masters; tradesmen against their customers; artificers against their employers; tenants against their landlords; curates against their bishops; and children against their parents." Personal insubordination rapidly became a regular and consistent theme of Burke's pronouncements on the unfolding events in France. A year later, he wrote in a letter that because of the Revolution, "no house is safe from its servants, and no Officer from his Soldiers, and no State or constitution from conspiracy and insurrection." In another speech before Parliament in 1791, he declared that "a constitution founded on what was called the rights of man" opened "Pandora's box" throughout the world, including Haiti: "Blacks rose against whites, whites against blacks, and each against one another in murderous hostility; subordination was destroyed." Nothing to the Jacobins, he declared at the end of his life, was worthy "of the name of the publick virtue, unless it indicates violence on the private. By virtue of membership in a polity, Burke allowed, men had a great many rights--to the fruits of their labor, their inheritance, education, and more. But the one right he refused to concede to all men was that "share of power, authority, and direction" they might think they ought to have "in the management of the state." So powerful is that vision of private eruption that it can turn a man of reform into a man of reaction. Schooled in the Enlightenment, John Adams believed that "consent of the people" was "the only moral foundation of government." But when his wife suggested that a muted version of these principles be extended to the family, he was not pleased. "And, by the way," Abigail wrote him, "in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could." Her husband's response: We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bands of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and Negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the fi rst intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all of the rest, were grown discontented. Though he leavened his response with playful banter--he prayed that George Washington would shield him from the "despotism of the petticoat"--Adams was clearly rattled by this appearance of democracy in the private sphere. In a letter to James Sullivan, he worried that the Revolution would "confound and destroy all distinctions," unleashing throughout society a spirit of insubordination so intense that all order would be dissolved. "There will be no end of it." No matter how democratic the state, it was imperative that society remain a federation of private dominions, where husbands ruled over wives, masters governed apprentices, and each "should know his place and be made to keep it." Historically, the conservative has sought to forestall the march of democracy in both the public and the private spheres, on the assumption that advances in the one necessarily spur advances in the other. "In order to keep the state out of the hands of the people," wrote the French monarchist Louis de Bonald, "it is necessary to keep the family out of the hands of women and children." Even in the United States, this effort has periodically yielded fruit. Despite our Whiggish narrative of the steady rise of democracy, historian Alexander Keyssar has demonstrated that the struggle for the vote in the United States has been as much a story of retraction and contraction as one of progress and expansion, "with class tensions and apprehensions" on the part of political and economic elites constituting "the single most important obstacle to universal suffrage . . . from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s." Still, the more profound and prophetic stance on the right has been Adams's: cede the field of the public, if you must, stand fast in the private. Allow men and women to become democratic citizens of the state; make sure they remain feudal subjects in the family, the factory, and the field. The priority of conservative political argument has been the maintenance of private regimes of power--even at the cost of the strength and integrity of the state. We see this political arithmetic at work in the ruling of a Federalist court in Massachusetts that a Loyalist woman who fled the Revolution was the adjutant of her husband, and thus should not be held responsible for fleeing and should not have her property confiscated by the state; in the refusal of Southern slaveholders to yield their slaves to the Confederate cause; and the more recent insistence of the Supreme Court that women could not be legally obliged to sit on juries because they are "still regarded as the center of home and family life" with their "own special responsibilities." Conservatism, then, is not a commitment to limited government and liberty--or a wariness of change, a belief in evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue. These may be the byproducts of conservatism, one or more of its historically specific and ever-changing modes of expression. But they are not its animating purpose. Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians, and warriors, for that fusion is impelled by a more elemental force--the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere. Such a view might seem miles away from the libertarian defense of the free market, with its celebration of the atomistic and autonomous individual. But it is not. When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees. No simple defense of one's own place and privileges--the conservative, as I've said, may or may not be directly involved in or benefit from the practices of rule he defends; many, as we'll see, are not--the conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, base, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse. When Burke adds, in the letter quoted above, that the "great Object" of the Revolution is "to root out that thing called an Aristocrat or Nobleman and Gentleman," he is not simply referring to the power of the nobility; he is also referring to the distinction that power brings to the world. If the power goes, the distinction goes with it. This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer's untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father's rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth. Each in his own way subscribes to this typical statement, from the nineteenth century, of the conservative creed: "To obey a real superior . . . is one of the most important of all virtues--a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting." Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author ofThe Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin From ths at psalience.org Fri Dec 9 14:02:24 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:02:24 +0100 Subject: [THS] How the US Is Undermining Critical Climate Talks and Putting the World in Jeopardy Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111209140034.048ebf48@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/153382/how_the_us_is_undermining_critical_climate_talks_and_putting_the_world_in_jeopardy?page=entire YES! Magazine / By Jamie Henn How the US Is Undermining Critical Climate Talks and Putting the World in Jeopardy The only thing the U.S. brought to the table was a wrecking ball. This isn't just a delay, it's a death sentence. December 8, 2011 | The U.N. climate talks desperately need a crisis. For the last 10 days, negotiations here in Durban, South Africa, have made little progress on the fundamental challenge these talks were set up to confront: how the world can come together to avoid catastrophic climate change. Instead, the pace of negotiations has been set by the one country the rest of the world should be turning their back on: the United States. The U.S. never signed the Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding international agreement designed to reduce emissions, but it is allowed to take part in the negotiations in a separate track dedicated to securing a long-term climate agreement. After President Obama's election, the international community had high hopes the new administration would bring a new sense of ambition and commitment to talks. Instead, the only thing the U.S. brought to the table was a wrecking ball. Rather than standing out of the way and letting the rest of the world get on with setting up an international architecture to facilitate cutting emissions, stopping deforestation, and investing in renewable energy, the U.S. has spent the years since Copenhagen attempting to systemically dismantle the U.N. process. Highest on the U.S. hit list is the Kyoto Protocol, an imperfect treaty (thanks in large part to U.S. recalcitrance), but currently the best instrument in the global climate toolbox. Next on the list is the very idea of legally binding commitments--the U.S. would prefer a "pledge and review" world where countries make their own voluntary commitments and then report out on what they've decided. Here in Durban, however, the U.S. has taken on an even more insidious role by pushing a proposal that the international community adopt a "mandate" to negotiate a new climate treaty that will take effect in--wait for it--2020. This isn't just a delay, it's a death sentence. Scientists have stated over and over that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, emissions must peak by 2015 or 2020 at the absolute latest. (For a closer look at the scientific reasoning, read David Roberts.) It is especially callous and cold-hearted for the U.S. to be pushing the 2020 timeline here in Durban. Africa is already seeing the devastating impacts of the climate crisis, from the deadly drought still ravaging the Horn of Africa to terrible flooding, including here in Durban where heavy rains killed at least eight people just last week. But instead of being recognized as yet another delay tactic from the world's biggest historical emitter, the 2020 timeline seems to be gaining traction here at the talks. Brazil and India have vaguely expressed support, China has made cryptic comments about the proposal, and the European Union has yet to stand up clearly and strongly against the delay. If the talks here in Durban are allowed to simply stumble to the closing gavel, there's a chance that the U.S. proposal could become the new mandate for the U.N. climate talks. It's time for a crisis moment. The world has successfully stood up to the United States at the U.N. climate talks before. On the final day of the talks in Bali in 2007, delegates actively booed Bush administration negotiators over their repeated attempts to hold up progress. Finally, the delegate from Papua New Guinea challenged the U.S.: "If you're not willing to lead, get out of the way." Minutes later, the U.S. negotiators relented and allowed a deal to move forward. Civil society needs to do everything we can to create a similar crisis moment here in Durban. If African nations stand up to the U.S. and are backed up by Brazil, India, and the E.U., there's a chance that the world can save Kyoto, beat back the 2020 delay, and set a mandate for new agreements within the next year or by 2015 at the latest. The world stood up to the U.S. in Bali, it can do it again in Durban. In the words of a South African freedom-fighter-turned-president, "It's always impossible until it's done." Jamie Henn co-founded 350.org, where he serves as Communications Director and East Asia Coordinator. From ths at psalience.org Fri Dec 9 14:11:52 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:11:52 +0100 Subject: [THS] NYPD Continues to Make Thousands of Illegal, Racially Biased Pot Arrests Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111209140951.048ebcb8@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/153381/police_commissioner%27s_order_was_not_enough%3A_nypd_continues_to_make_thousands_of_illegal%2C_racially_biased_pot_arrests_?page=entire AlterNet / By Gabriel Sayegh Police Commissioner's Order Was Not Enough: NYPD Continues to Make Thousands of Illegal, Racially Biased Pot Arrests While arrests have dropped ever so slightly since Police Commissioner Kelly issued his order, the NYPD is still using stop-and-frisk to make thousands of unwarranted pot arrests. December 8, 2011 | Last September, in the face of rising pressure to end racially biased, illegal and costly marijuana arrests in NYC ? which have skyrocketed to more than 50,000 annually ? NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly issued an uncharacteristically stern order to officers, directing them to follow the state?s existing decriminalization law. But new data released this week show that while arrests have dropped ever so slightly -- just 13% -- since Kelly issued his order, NYPD is continuing with its marijuana arrest crusade. In the state of New York, since 1977, possession of a small amount of marijuana has been a mere violation, which is a non-arrestable offense ? unless it?s burning or in plain public view. But in 2010 one out of every seven arrests in New York City was for marijuana possession in public view ? even though the vast majority of the people arrested did not actually possess marijuana in public view. Research by Queens College professor Harry Levine and valuable investigative work by WNYC?s Ailsa Chang clearly demonstrates that the vast majority of the marijuana arrests in New York City ? up to 75 or even 80 percent in some precincts ? are the result of illegal searches and false charges. "Commissioner Kelly is all talk and no walk when it comes to following the law around marijuana possession in New York City," said Carl Stubbs, an openly HIV-positive member of VOCAL-NY from South Jamaica, Queens who has been illegally arrested for marijuana possession. "Too many people in neighborhoods like mine have been treated like criminals when the real law-breakers have been police illegally searching people and then charging them with having marijuana in plain sight. Either Commissioner Kelly can't control the police force or he's not taking tens of thousands of improper arrests seriously." These marijuana arrests are just one of the problematic outcomes of NYPD?s controversial stop-and-frisk program. Last year, NYPD stopped more than 600,000 people ? mostly young black and Latino men ? and frisked nearly half of them. For many people, a frisk soon turns into an illegal search. For others, the police ask them to empty their pockets, and, after following police instructions, they are then charged with possession of marijuana in public view ? which is a misdemeanor and an arrestable offense. While the Kelly order directed police to stop this practice, the ugly cycle continues largely unabated, at a cost of over $75 million a year. ?Regardless of what the numbers show, the impact is still tremendously felt by the communities that are illegally and disproportionately arrested for something that has been decriminalized for over 30 years,? said Chino Hardin with the Institute for Juvenile Justice Reform and Alternatives and an expert trainer for Know Your Rights workshops. ?The crusade continues because the 13 percent drop isn?t enough. When we see the numbers decrease by 80%, then we will know that the NYPD is meaningfully following and upholding the law. We have to build a movement to stop this.? To address these issues, advocates launched a campaign last year to stop NYPD?s marijuana arrest crusade. Led by the Institute for Juvenile Justice Reform and Alternatives, VOCAL-NY, and the Drug Policy Alliance, the campaign has built momentum over the past year, leading Commissioner Kelly to issue his executive order. In Albany, bi-partisan legislation has been introduced to change the law and reduce the number of illegal marijuana arrests. And in New York City, a group of City Council members have introduced a resolution calling on NYPD to end its practice of ignoring the state?s decriminalization law. Although NYPD is attempting to cast the small 13% drop in a positive light, ultimately, the new arrest data is cause for outrage. Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD are wasting millions of tax dollars by using illegal searches and false charges to sweep tens of thousands of black and Latino youth into the criminal justice system. Professor Levine summed it up succinctly: ?As of November 18, 2011, the NYPD made more marijuana possession arrests than by November 18 in 2010. By the end of the year, the NYPD is likely to have made 50,000 of the arrests, further establishing the city's position as the marijuana capital of the world.? Gabriel Sayegh is New York state director at the Drug Policy Alliance. He can be reached at gsayegh at drugpolicy.org. From ths at psalience.org Fri Dec 9 22:39:42 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:39:42 +0100 Subject: [THS] MILDT: "La prohibition est efficace" Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111209223417.043c7300@mail.messagingengine.com> "La prohibition est efficace" Pour le pr?sident de la MILDT, moins les produits sont disponibles, plus la consommation est ma?trisable Le Nouvel Observateur: P?naliser l'usage des drogues est-il efficace ? Etienne Apaire: Oui, clairement. L'id?e re?ue selon laquelle la loi interdisant l'usage n'est pas appliqu?e est totalement fausse. L'ann?e derni?re, les tribunaux ont condamn? 53 000 usagers et 17 000 personnes ont d? suivre un stage de sensibilisation. En 2002, il n'y avait eu que 12 700 condamnations. Plus globalement, notre ?tude montre que la consommation de drogues illicites stagne ou diminue chez les jeunes au rythme o? les saisies polici?res augmentent. Peut-on ?radiquer le ph?nom?ne ? Tant que l'homme sera l'homme, la drogue existera. La responsabilit? des pouvoirs publics est de cantonner la consommation ? son niveau le plus faible. C'est ce que nous faisons avec des r?sultats appr?ciables. Si je compare les tendances de consommation de drogues illicites et licites, je remarque que la prohibition est une strat?gie efficace. Il y a dix ans, la France ?tait le premier consommateur de cannabis en Europe. Aujourd'hui, elle a recul? ? la quatri?me ou cinqui?me place selon les tranches d'?ge. La vente d'alcool et de cigarettes aux mineurs est th?oriquement interdite et pourtant leur consommation nefaiblitpas... Nous avons beaucoup travaill? avec les d?bitants de boissons et les alcooliers. Mais l'interdiction de vente dans les magasins n'est pas suffisamment effective. Il va falloir travailler avec les acteurs de la grande et la petite distribution d'alcool et avec les buralistes pour qu'ils comprennent l'enjeu de sant? publique. Et sans doute r?primer plus s?v?rement les infractions. Propos recueillis par 0. T. Le Nouvel Observateurs d?cembre 2011 - n? 2457 From ths at psalience.org Fri Dec 9 22:46:14 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:46:14 +0100 Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?An_Idiot=92s_Overview_Of_Why_Western__Capita?= =?iso-8859-1?q?lism_Is_Crashing?= Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111209224602.047454b8@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29932.htm An Idiot?s Overview Of Why Western Capitalism Is Crashing By Alan Hart December 08, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- The idiot of the headline is me in the sense that I am not an economist and have never had any formal association with study of the theory and practise of economics, but I began to understand why what is today called Western capitalism was bound to crash way back in the early 1970's when I was researching and producing an epic documentary on the everyday reality of global poverty and its implications for all. When I reflected on what I had witnessed and learned while researching in 120 countries (as well as at the World Bank and many UN agencies) and filming in 69 of them, I let commonsense be my guide. It led me to the conclusion that capitalism was not of itself the problem. It was the short-sighted and stupid way Western capitalism was managed. Now I?ll put some flesh on that bone. By the early 1970's truly informed development experts were drawing attention to the fact that our one small planet was divided into two worlds ? the Rich World containing about 20% of humankind (and known in development jargon as the North), and the Poor World containing about 80% of humankind (and known in development jargon as the South). In the Poor World an estimated 15 million children under five were dying each year from malnutrition and related and easily preventable diseases such as diahorrea, measles and whooping cough ? in a word poverty, abject poverty. And an estimated 300 million more were born brain damaged because of malnutrition in the wombs of their mothers. But those statistics told only a part of the story. The majority of the human inhabitants of Planet Earth were living on the margins of life, without some and in many cases all of the basic necessities for life ? shelter, adequate nutrition, clean water, health care, education and work/job opportunities. On each and every continent I asked the poorest parents what was the one thing they most wanted. This was before the age of the mobile telephone and I expected many of them to say a television or some such gadget. What they all said in their various ways echoed one of the poorest Indian women. Her answer was, ?Education for my children so they don?t have to live like animals as we do.? The rich nations were creating their wealth by selling goods and services. It followed that if this wealth creating process was to have a sustainable future and Rich World citizens were to enjoy ever rising material standards of living as promised by their politicians, the global market place needed more and more consumers with the purchasing power to buy what the Rich World nations had to sell. If the managers of Western capitalism (corporate chiefs, bankers and politicians) had not been short-sighted and stupid, they would have said to themselves something like the following. ?If we don?t now invest in the development of the poor of the world and bring them progressively into the market place with purchasing power, we are going to run out customers in the numbers needed to buy what we have to sell in order to sustain our system.? If the necessary investment had been made over 10, 15 and even 20 years, (it would have needed that amount of time in order to guarantee that the money and other development assistance provided could be absorbed and put to best use with minimum corruption), victory in the war against global poverty and underdevelopment ? the only war that matters ? would have been assured. To give just one example The disastrous population drift from the rural areas where there was a future to the urban centres where there was not and is not a future for many of the drifters could have been halted and even reversed. Making the investment needed on the necessary scale would have meant that the investing Rich World nations would not have grown so rapidly and their citizens would have had to accept a little less in the way of ever rising material standards of living, but that would have been a small price to pay for giving Western capitalism a sustainable future and all of our children wherever they live the prospect of a future worth having. (Whereas today they do not have a future worth having). Instead of starting down the road to making capitalism work for the benefit of all in global terms, the system?s Western managers opted to keep things going by flooding the Rich World with credit cards to enable its citizens to live beyond their means and get deeper and deeper into debt. ?I need? was replaced with ?I want?. (My working class father used to say to me, ?Boy, if we can?t afford it, we don?t look in the shop window.?) There was bound to come a time when Rich World citizens simply could not afford to go on buying on the scale needed to keep Western consumer capitalism going. Then, partly to fuel debt-driven consumer and government spending, the greed-driven, totally irresponsible bankers drove the final nail into Western capitalism?s coffin by playing their leveraging games, producing debt instruments with a face value of hundreds of trillions of U.S. dollars but which were not backed and supported by real assets. (A good friend of mine was the senior risk manager for one of the world?s biggest banks headquartered in London. She told me that for five years she and her team tried to warn top management that leveraging with Mickey Mouse instruments was creating a catastrophe, but top management didn?t want to listen. It was focused only on bonuses). If Jeremy Clarkson had said that banking chiefs should have been taken out and shot in front of their families, I would have smiled and said to myself, ?If only.? And I would not have bailed out the banks with taxpayers? money. I would have let them go bust. (The first rule of capitalism is supposed to be that if you get it wrong you go bust). But before making that decision public I (as prime minister) would have said to my people something like the following. ?Don?t panic. The money we would have to put into bailing out reckless and irresponsible banks will instead be used to create a new national bank which, rather like the High Street banks of the old days, will exist only to serve the needs of their customers.? There?s no question that banking chiefs were short-sighted, greedy and stupid, but They were not the architects of what future historians will call the crash of Western capitalism. They, the architects, were the politicians who deregulated the banks and financial markets. The leading architect was Britain?s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. On 27 October 1986, she initiated the ?Big Bang? in the City of London, the sudden deregulation of the banks and financial markets. In the name of ?financial liberalism? she truly believed that markets would work better, more efficiently, if they were free of rules and restrictions. In her view millions of decisions made every day by traders in a free market would be better for all of us than decisions that had to be made with reference to rules and regulations drawn up by committees of the great and the good. Though I might be exaggerating to make a point and may be misrepresenting her to some extent, she seemed to be saying, ?We need not bother too much with our old industries and ways of creating wealth, the banks and the markets will do it for us.? Events were to prove that she could not have been more naive and more wrong, but before they did American presidents starting with Ronald Reagan had followed her lead. My understanding of the situation today can be summarized as follows. The debts of Western governments are so big that no Western country will be able to generate the growth and so the money needed to repay them. On that basis I can see only two scenarios for the future. One is that in order to repay the debts, governments slash expenditure across the board, cutting, cutting and cutting back massively on budgets for everything including state pensions and social welfare benefits and services. Unemployment rises to unthinkable levels and living standards plunge to unacceptable levels. Eventually the citizens revolt and violence escalates. What passes for democracy is shut down and martial law is established. Orwell?s 1984 finally arrives. (Soon after Edward Heath ceased to be prime minister, my wife and I had lunch with him. I asked him what his biggest fear for the future was. I expected it to be related to global poverty because he had been a member of the Brandt Commission which studied it. His reply, calm in delivery and matter of fact in tone, was, ?That Britain will become the first police state in the democratic world.?) In the other scenario all debts, including mortgages on homes, are written off and we all start again. By definition a re-start would have to be based on a rock-solid commitment to fairness with a real intention to make capitalism work for the benefit of all. This idiot is in quite good company. American Martin Weiss is the founder of the Weiss Rating Agency (WRA). In his latest presentation he makes the following claims about his agency?s astonishing success in predicting economic disasters of the past 40 years, a claim which is confirmed by all the major American newspapers and economic journals. Months in advance WRA warned about the S&L crisis of the 1980's; the great insurance company failures of the 1990's; plus the great ?Tech Wreck? of the early 2000's. WRA was the only firm in the world to warn of the financial crisis of 2008 more than a year in advance, specifically naming nearly every major company that later collapsed. Today Martin Weiss says this: ?Baring a miracle, an historic, world-changing event is about to end the American way of life as we know it. This monumental event will plunge vast numbers of families into the nightmare of poverty, homeless and hunger. In a worst case scenario you will see soaring crime, the confiscation of property, the suspension of civil rights, and even the enforcement of martial law by the U.S. military.? The world-changing event he is anticipating is a decision by China to stop buying U.S. debt, which will mean, he says, that America will no longer be able to borrow money; and that, he adds, will see the beginning of ?America?s Financial Doomsday?. My own biggest fear which I have been expressing to friends in private for a number of years is that the unfolding economic crisis may take us all the way to World War 111. It could happen for two related reasons. One is the need of governments to deflect the attention of their own people away from the mess within. The other is the need to have an outside party to blame. There?s a case for saying that some American politicians are already setting up China for blame. We shall see Footnote European plans to bring in tough budget controls are irrelevant, even a farce. They are designed to stop the present unfolding catastrophe from happening again, but they won?t do anything to solve the present debt crisis. European leaders are shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Alan Hart - http://www.alanhart.net From ths at psalience.org Fri Dec 9 22:51:32 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:51:32 +0100 Subject: [THS] Gary Younge: Land of the Free, Home of the Hungry Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111209224821.045146c8@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29939.htm Land of the Free, Home of the Hungry Nowhere is the chasm between America's political class and its working poor more vast than in the demand to cut food stamps By Gary Younge December 09, 2011 "The Guardian" -- On Monday afternoon this week, Rachelle Grimmer went into a Department of Health and Human Services in Texas with her two children, Timothy, aged 10, and Ramie, aged 12, and asked for a new case worker who could assist her application for food stamps. She had first applied in July but had been told she hadn't provided enough information and, by most accounts, had been struggling to get by and get help since she moved from Ohio. She was taken to a small room, where she pulled a gun, sparking a seven-hour standoff with police. Shortly before midnight, three shots were heard. Rachelle had shot both herself and her kids. Police rushed in to find the mother dead and Ramie and Timothy in critical condition. Earlier that morning, Ramie had posted a Facebook message, saying: "may die 2day". She actually hung on until Wednesday. Timothy's condition remains critical. The tragic unravelling of this particular episode is hardly typical. But the desperation that underpins it is. For, in this period between Thanksgiving and Christmas (when many Americans are worrying about what overindulging will do to their waistline), a significant number is wracked with an entirely different concern: not having enough to eat. This is no marginal group, no handful of unfortunates and ne'er-do-wells in a time of crisis. Indeed, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, food insecurity is a common, growing and enduring problem. According to Gallup polling, one in five Americans reported not having enough money to buy food in the past 12 months ? the highest level since the month Barack Obama was elected. Around the country, food banks are feeling the pinch of market forces: as poverty climbs, demand is rising and supply is falling as people who would have donated have less left to spare. An analysis by the New York Times revealed a 17% increase in the number of school students receiving free and reduced lunches across the country between 2006/07 and now. In Rockdale County, east of Atlanta, 63% of students now have subsidised food ? up from 46% four years ago. Between 2008 and 2011, the number of those living on food stamps, assistance to those who lack sufficient money to feed themselves and their families, soared by 50%, putting one American in seven in the programme. Catholic Charities recently revealed that requests for the working poor were up 80% over the second quarter, and up 59% for the middle class. Similarly, Operation Homefront, a national organisation that feeds the families of military personnel, has seen demand for help double over the last two years. The Washington Post reported that in Fort Hood, Texas, military families stayed up after midnight to register for a free turkey online for Thanksgiving. The 450 birds were gone within an hour. Even as soldiers fight for empire abroad, their families struggle for food at home. You would think this would be a national disgrace. The land of the free ? and the home of the hungry. The sheer scale and intensity of the problem refutes any suggestions of the undeserving poor. But want has become a term of political abuse, with Newt Gingrich launching his campaign earlier this year by branding Obama "the food stamp president" and continues to berate him as such. Indeed, behind the partisan posturing over deficit reduction, it is rarely noted that rather than impose taxes on millionaires, Republicans are eager to balance the budget on the stomachs of the hungry. As editor of the Left Business Observer, Doug Henwood, points out in a recent blog posting, these benefits are not particularly generous. "The average [food stamp] recipient gets $134 a month in assistance, which works out to $4.40 a day. That's 10% less than the US Department of Agriculture's "thrifty" meal budget, and about half its "moderate" budget. For your average well-fed American, living on a daily ration of less than $5 for food prepared at home would be hard to imagine. But without SNAP benefits, 46 million people would be in a state of anguish rather than just scraping by." Yet, this is one area the Republicans are keen to target for cuts. They want to reduce spending on food stamps by around 20%, and in June, voted to slash a different health and nutrition scheme (WIC) for poor pregnant women and children by 10%, which would have denied assistance to around a quarter of a million people. This will be the primary terrain on which the forthcoming elections will be fought: the needs and aspirations of the working poor. Not so much the destitute ? America is always forgetting about them ? but the working poor and those who fear descending among them. But for the Democrats to capitalise on these anxieties, they will have to shift the country's sense of what it takes to be poor and convince them that government has a role in alleviating that condition before desperation kicks in. You'd think that would be straightforward. But illusions of meritocracy, equal opportunity, class fluidity and social mobility die hard. This a country where, according to a Pew survey in 2008, 91% believe they are either middle-class, upper middle-class or lower middle-class, and a Gallup poll in 2005 showed that while only 2% of Americans described themselves as "rich", 31% thought it very likely or somewhat likely they would "ever be rich". Sooner or later, though, reality tends to intrude. As thousands of people gathered at New Orleans convention centre following Hurricane Katrina, Michael Brown, the hapless head of the disaster relief agency, Fema, was asked why he was not tending to them with shelter and water. "We're seeing people that we didn't know exist," he said. This has been the official policy of America's political class for some time. "This is a special interest group that not many people talk about because they don't have the wealth to lift a candidate to be president of the United States," explained D Jermaine Husser, the former executive director of South Carolina's Low Country Food Bank. But there is only so long you can pretend that such a large group of people doesn't exist, and as the poverty rates grow, more and more people who are likely to vote become ensnared in it. Gallup's Basic Access Index, which tracks access to basic needs like food, shelter and healthcare or medicines, is at the lowest it's been since its inception in January 2008. A new measurement of poverty by the Census Bureau, which takes regional cost of living, medical payments and other expenses that do not intrude on the official poverty count, found a third of Americans are either in poverty or desperately close to it. "These numbers are higher than we anticipated," Trudi Renwick, the bureau's head poverty statistician, told the New York Times recently. "There are more people struggling than the official numbers show." Poverty may be relative but hunger is absolute. The third world is alive and struggling in the heart of the first. No one can deny it exists. And those who claim they can't see it, either refuse to see it for what it is or simply do not want to look. From ths at psalience.org Sat Dec 10 00:30:27 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 00:30:27 +0100 Subject: [THS] Marijuana may be good for your brain and more-video Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111210003011.048e04c0@mail.messagingengine.com> Most Shocking WikiLeaks Yet Marijuana may be good for your brain and more-video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GioZuOQI7jM&feature=share From ths at psalience.org Sat Dec 10 00:34:31 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2011 00:34:31 +0100 Subject: [THS] Veteran Israeli activist warns against 'neo-fascist' legislation Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111210003416.049c8f08@mail.messagingengine.com> Published 10:56 09.12.11Latest update 10:56 09.12.11 Veteran Israeli activist warns against 'neo-fascist' legislation Uri Avnery, whose Haolam Hazeh magazine was the target of past anti-libel legislation, says the current 'anti-democratic' wave of bills will affect all levels of society, and the media aren't doing much to help the situation By Ofra Edelman When Israel's so-called Libel Law was passed in 1965, Uri Avnery, editor of the weekly Haolam Hazeh, declared war from the pages of his decidedly left-leaning magazine. "It's either go to the Knesset or go to jail," he wrote. As in any other war, he added, "this editorial staff has operated as a journalistic commando squad for 15 years, with commando techniques, in the spirit of commandos. Now, we are being compelled to act as political commandos. We will make our way into the electoral system as commandos. We will operate as commandos in the Knesset." Avnery, who was born in Germany in 1923, decided to run for a Knesset seat in the hope he could win diplomatic immunity for both himself and his magazine against libel suits. "The Libel Law ... has been passed because Haolam Hazeh threatens the regime's existence," he wrote. "If they are saying that there is no room in one country for both this regime and Haolam Hazeh, and thus we have to liquidate Haolam Hazeh, then we have to reply: Correct, there is no room in one country for this regime and for Haolam Hazeh, so we have to liquidate this regime. And we are going to liquidate it." Sitting in the living room of his home in Tel Aviv this week, Avnery shared his recollections of that time. "The law was adopted on the final day of the Fifth Knesset, in the summer of 1965, and the press, the media in general, woke up to the matter only at the last minute," he says. "They did not take it seriously. Nobody thought that such a thing could even pass." Avnery recalls that he "had decided beforehand that if this law passed, I would form a party to run for Knesset. We listened to the news and when it became clear that the Knesset had adopted the defamation law, I said, that's it, I'm going to the Knesset. We launched a war against the law." The 1965 statute, which has been changed to some extent over the years by legislative amendments, toughened the demands placed on media outlets that are sued for defamation: It required them to prove conclusively that their publication of certain information served the public interest. It expanded the definitions of libel, mentioning the specific position-holders in the media who would be held responsible for acts of defamation. This section of the law specifically named the "head of the editorial staff," a position that Avnery says existed at the time only at Haolam Hazeh. The clause made Avnery think the law was directed at his publication, and that it was the latest in a series of attempts to silence him. These included an ad boycott of Haolam Hazeh by the state and the Histadrut labor federation; complaints against the weekly, which sometimes published nude photographs of women, based on obscenity laws; and physical assaults on staff members. In elections to the Sixth Knesset, Avnery mustered about 14,000 votes, enough to pass the threshold and gain a seat for himself. 'Competition of insanity' "Lethal," is how Avnery describes the current amendment to the bill drafted by MKs Meir Sheetrit (Kadima) and Yariv Levin (Likud), which would broaden the scope of compensation set in the 1965 law from NIS 50,000 to NIS 300,000 without need to prove damage. Avnery says the threat of monetary damages can be much more damning to journalism than the threat of jail. "Everyone has an editor and the editor has a publisher and the publisher has an owner," he says. "What this means is that no one will publish a story that has even the slightest doubt. Please don't think I am against defamation laws. Absolutely, the press can be reckless, just like every other body. Democratic defamation laws are not improper - on the contrary," he adds. "Yet on the other hand, the more esteemed and exalted you are, the weaker the defamation laws should be. Anyone who wants to change that legislation always claims he is doing it for the little guy. But his true intentions are always aimed at the big guys. No one cares what happens to the little guy." Avnery says the new law is part what he calls a "neo-fascist anti-democratic" wave of legislation meant to stifle dissent. In your opinion, what is this wave of legislation stemming from? "Today, before the Likud primary, it is intended to draw attention. After all, what is the object of a Knesset member? I say this from experience: From the moment a Knesset member is elected, he has one objective in life - to be reelected - and he dedicates four years to that end. That is why he needs to get into the media, and that is why, short of killing his own mother, he is willing to do anything and everything. "A person comes, tries to have a totally insane legislative bill passed, while his sole objective is to get a headline the next day, with a big photo of him. Haaretz comes out the next day, giving him a quarter-page with a dazzling picture - and, hey, you are encouraging him to do it. Another MK sees that and thinks: Why, I'll propose something even more monstrous ... So there is this sort of competition of insanity, of gluttony." But if a newspaper didn't report on such a legislative bill, you would scream bloody murder, that it failed to fill its function. "However, it is also possible to run the story in a different, not so grandiose, manner. Not with a flattering photo. The obligation to report exists, but not to award a prize to someone. This is how a suicidal media operates. "Subconsciously, the normal reader is influenced not only by what is written, but also by the intensiveness of the emotion invested in the article. Is this thing good, or is it not very nice, or is it something terrible and tragic that serves those who would destroy Israel? What I am missing here is a moral emotionalism, condemning these new laws." What, in your opinion, should journalists do? Does everyone have to run for Knesset to receive immunity? "It helps. That's what I did." That's a pretty big step to take. "I exploited it infrequently, but when I did exploit it, I did so in full. I am in favor of personal sanctions against anyone who proposes these laws: not running a photo [of them] or anything flattering in a paper, and not allowing media interviews. This is something that should be thought of more often. It wouldn't harm freedom of reporting, but it would make it possible to punish people. "Nevertheless, the first thing that should have been done is to call a strike. That is clear, so that the public would begin to understand ... The public only knows there is some sort of argument going on over some sort of law, it doesn't understand and neither is it all that interested. Most certainly, it doesn't think that it affects the public. And if the press itself is not taking measures to make it clear to the reader or the viewer that this is important or serious, why should someone else think so? The first thing that should have been done is to call a strike, as happened then. "We have to organize a very broad front, to rescue democracy, and the front should start with the idea that the public at large doesn't even understand why this affects it. The public thinks: So it'll be this judge and not that judge, what's the difference? The media? So they will be a little more careful, that would be very good, right? The nongovernmental organizations? Who even needs them? Taking money from abroad? A scandal. Social protest? Okay, it happened, now we've moved on. People don't understand that it pertains to their lives, to their wages. Today's generation in Israel never lived under a nondemocratic regime. "Can anyone even imagine what it means to live under a regime in which if you do not sign a declaration in favor of a certain party and you are the chief physician in a brain-surgery department - the next day you are washing windows? Can anyone even imagine such a thing that journalists are being killed in the street, as is happening in Russia? ... People don't get it, they don't make the connection. "First, you have to explain to the public that it affects them. It's not a matter of 'the higher-ups' quarreling among themselves. ... It is that tomorrow the police arrest you for a crime you did not commit, and there won't be a newspaper that will publish the story, because the papers will be banned from publicizing the arrests of individuals, and people will begin to disappear from the street and might disappear completely, as happened in Argentina ... on the pretext that it protects the citizens. This affects every person in the country. It is not something abstract, not some theoretical disagreement between the parliamentarians and the judges." In a column that you wrote, you draw a link between present-day legislation and the collapse of the Weimar republic. "I was nine when the Nazis came to power, and as a child in a very political household I was very much aware of what happened. Especially when the child sees what is going on, in a very visual way: the uniforms, the parades, the music. So I know how the republic fell. I was aware of it, stage by stage, one small step followed by another small step, and then the whole thing collapsed. Collapsed because the public did not understand why it was important. The public did not summon up from within the emotional strength to oppose. "When I see the first sign, that first red light goes on for me. I wake up a little earlier than the others. Others are waking up, too, but it takes time. At the beginning they said to us: How can you make a comparison to Nazi Germany? How could you even compare the two? So it doesn't have to be Nazi Germany, which truly was unique in human history ... It doesn't have to be Hitler - what about Mussolini? And if not Mussolini, how about Franco? Or Pinochet in Chile? Or the colonels in Greece? And if not any of these, how about Ceausescu, or Putin now? There are so many levels - from the very worst to the less worst, but each of them creates hell." And where are we in the hierarchal ranking you described? "We are past the first step. We are far from the last step, but in my opinion it is the first step that determines where it will head. The barricades have fallen. Things that are not to be believed are being believed. Things that it would have been impossible to imagine are imaginable, and that is one small step, but a very decisive step. Our nerve endings are beginning to be dulled. But civil rights aren't 'left.' They don't have to do with 'left'. Civil rights affect every individual. "How do you impart to the common citizen that the struggle is his struggle? That the freedom of expression is his? That the High Court of Justice is his? That the democracy is his? This is where you need a public campaign the likes of which there's never been. Ultimately, we are speaking of Israel's future, the future of our lives. An undemocratic state won't last, it's as simple as that." Avnery paraphrases the famous poem by German pacifist Martin Niemoller, "First they came..." about public silence in the face of encroaching fascism, as describing what is happening in Israel today. "This is one of the most profound statements," he explains. "And you could translate it into today's reality: First they came to destroy the court, then they came to destroy the media, then they came to destroy the NGOs, I was silent - in the end, when I will want to protest, I will not be able to, because there will not be anyone before whom I can do so ... and that will be dangerous. People don't understand." http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/veteran-israeli-activist-warns-against-neo-fascist-legislation-1.400513 From ths at psalience.org Sun Dec 11 01:27:38 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 01:27:38 +0100 Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?Robert_Parry=3A_The_Warning_in_Gary_Webb=92s?= =?iso-8859-1?q?__Death?= Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111211012717.04672e58@mail.messagingengine.com> http://consortiumnews.com/2011/12/09/the-warning-in-gary-webbs-death/ The Warning in Gary Webb?s Death December 9, 2011 Special Report: Modern American history is more complete because journalist Gary Webb had the courage to revive the dark story of the Reagan administration?s protection of Nicaraguan Contra cocaine traffickers in the 1980s. However, Webb ultimately paid a terrible price, as Robert Parry reports. By Robert Parry Every year since investigative journalist Gary Webb took his own life in 2004, I have marked the anniversary of that sad event by recalling the debt that American history owes to Webb for his brave reporting, which revived the Contra-cocaine scandal in 1996 and forced important admissions out of the Central Intelligence Agency two years later. But Webb?s suicide on the evening of Dec. 9, 2004, was also a tragic end for one man whose livelihood and reputation were destroyed by a phalanx of major newspapers ? the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times? serving as protectors of a corrupt power structure rather than as sources of honest information. Journalist Gary Webb In reviewing the story again this year, I was struck by how Webb?s Contra-cocaine experience was, in many ways, a precursor to the subsequent tragedy of the Iraq War. In the 1980s, the CIA?s analytical division was already showing signs of politicization, especially regarding President Ronald Reagan?s beloved Contras and their war against Nicaragua?s Sandinista government ? and the U.S. press corps was already bending to the propaganda pressures of a right-wing Republican administration. Looking back at CIA cables from the early-to-mid-1980s, you can already see the bias dripping from the analytical reports. Any drug accusation against the leftist Sandinistas was accepted without skepticism and usually with strong exaggeration, while the opposite occurred with evidence of Contra cocaine smuggling; then there was endless quibbling and smearing of sources. So, to put these reports in anything close to an accurate focus, you would need special lenses to correct for all the politicized distortions. Yet, the U.S. news media, which itself was under intense pressure not to appear ?liberal,? worsened the Reagan administration?s fun-house reflection of reality and attacked any dissident journalist who wouldn?t go along. Thus, Americans heard a lot about how the evil Sandinistas were trying to ?poison? America?s youth with cocaine, although there was not a single interception of a drug shipment from Nicaragua during the Sandinista reign, except for one planeload of cocaine that the United States flew into and out of Nicaraguan in a clumsy ?sting? operation. On the other hand, substantial evidence of Contra-related cocaine shipments out of Costa Rica and Honduras was kept from the American people with Reagan?s Justice Department and CIA intervening to head off investigations and thus prevent embarrassing disclosures. The chief role of the big newspapers in this upside-down world was to heap ridicule on anyone who told the truth. During that time frame of the early-to-mid-1980s, the patterns were set for CIA analysts to advance their careers (by giving the president what he wanted) and mainstream journalists to protect theirs (by accepting propaganda). By 2002-2003, these patterns had become deeply engrained, leaving almost no one to protect the American people from a new round of falsehoods ? aimed at Iraq. Though I was not in touch with Webb in the last months of his life in 2004, I have always wondered if he saw this connection between his own valiant efforts to correct the historical record about Contra-cocaine trafficking in 1996 and the victory of lies over truth regarding Iraq?s WMD in 2002-2003. In the weeks before Webb?s suicide, there also was the intervening fact of George W. Bush?s reelection ? and with it, the dashed expectation that the CIA analysts and the mainstream journalists who played along with the Iraq-WMD fabrications might face some serious accountability. At the moment when Webb picked up his father?s pistol and put it to his head, there must have appeared little hope that anything would change. Indeed, we are now seeing yet another replay of this systematic distortion of information, this time regarding Iran and its alleged nuclear weapons program. Any tidbit of information against Iran is exaggerated, while exculpatory data is downplayed or ignored. So, it may be timely again to recount what happened to Gary Webb and to reflect on the dangers of allowing this corrupt disinformation system to press ahead unchecked. Dark Alliance For me, the tragic story of Gary Webb began in 1996 when he was working on his ?Dark Alliance? series for the San Jose Mercury News. He called me at my home in Arlington, Virginia, because, in 1985, I and my Associated Press colleague Brian Barger had been the first journalists to reveal the scandal of Reagan?s Nicaraguan Contras funding themselves in part by collaborating with drug traffickers. Webb explained that he had come across evidence that one Contra-connected drug conduit had funneled cocaine into Los Angeles, where it helped fuel the early crack epidemic. Unlike our AP stories a decade earlier ? which focused on the Contras helping to ship cocaine from Central America into the United States ? Webb said his series would examine what happened to the Contra cocaine after it reached the streets of Los Angeles and other cities. Besides asking about my recollections of the Contras and their cocaine smuggling, Webb wanted to know why the scandal never gained any real traction in the U.S. national news media. I explained that the ugly facts of the drug trafficking ran up against a determined U.S government campaign to protect the Contras? image. In the face of that resistance, I said, the major publications ? the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post ? had chosen to attack the revelations and those behind them rather than to dig up more evidence. Webb sounded confused by my account, as if I were telling him something that was foreign to his personal experience, something that just didn?t compute. I had a sense of his unstated questions: Why would the prestige newspapers of American journalism behave that way? Why wouldn?t they jump all over a story that important and that sexy, about the CIA working with drug traffickers? I took a deep breath, sensing that he had no idea of the personal danger he was about to confront. Well, he would have to learn that for himself, I thought. It surely wasn?t my place to warn a journalist away from a significant story just because it carried risks. So, I simply asked Webb if he had the strong support of his editors. He assured me that he did. I said their backing would be crucial once his story was out. He sounded perplexed, again, as if he didn?t know what to make of my cautionary tone. I wished him the best of luck, thinking that he would need it. The Safe Route When I hung up, I wasn?t sure that the Mercury News would really press ahead with the story, considering how the big national news outlets had dismissed and ridiculed the notion that President Reagan?s beloved Contras had included a large number of drug traffickers. It never seemed to matter how much evidence there was. It was much easier ? and safer, career-wise ? for Washington journalists to reject incriminating testimony against the Contras, especially when it came from other drug traffickers and from disgruntled Contras. Even U.S. law-enforcement officials who discovered evidence were disparaged as overzealous and congressional investigators were painted as partisan. In 1985, as we were preparing our first AP story on this topic, Barger and I knew that the evidence of Contra-cocaine involvement was overwhelming. We had a broad range of sources both inside the Contra movement and within the U.S. government, people with no apparent ax to grind who had described the cocaine-smuggling problem. One source was a field agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); another was a senior official on Reagan?s National Security Council (NSC) who told me that he had read a CIA report about how a Contra unit based in Costa Rica had used cocaine profits to buy a helicopter. However, after our AP story was published in December 1985, we came under attack from the right-wing Washington Times. That was followed by dismissive stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post. The notion that the Contras, whom President Reagan had likened to America?s Founding Fathers, could be implicated in the drug trade was simply unthinkable. Yet, it was always odd to me that many of the same newspapers had no problem accepting the fact that the CIA-backed Afghan mujahedeen were involved in the heroin trade, but bristled at the thought that the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras might be cut from the same cloth. A key difference, which I learned both from personal experience and from documents that surfaced during the Iran-Contra scandal, was that Reagan had assigned a young group of ambitious intellectuals such as Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan to oversee the Contra war. These neoconservatives worked with old-line anticommunists from the Cuban-American community, such as Otto Reich, and CIA propagandists, such as Walter Raymond Jr., to aggressively protect the Contras? image. And the Contras were always on the edge between getting congressional funding or having it cut off. So, that combination ? the propaganda skills of Reagan?s Contra-support team and the fragile consensus for continuing Reagan?s pet Contra war ? meant that any negative publicity about the Contras would be met with a fierce counterattack. Going to Editors The neoconservatives were also bright, well-schooled, and skilled in their manipulation of language and information, a process they privately called ?perception management.? They proved adept, too, at ingratiating themselves with senior editors at major news outlets. By the mid-1980s, these patterns had become well-worn in Washington. If a journalist dug up a story that put the Contras in a negative light, he or she could expect the Reagan administration?s propaganda team to make contact with a senior editor or bureau chief and lodge a complaint, apply some pressure, and often offer up some dirt about the offending journalist. Also, many news executives in that time frame were sympathetic toward Reagan?s hard-line foreign policy, especially after the humiliations of the Vietnam War and the Iranian revolution. Supporting U.S. initiatives abroad ? or at least not allowing your reporters to undercut those policies ? was seen as patriotic. At the New York Times, executive editor Abe Rosenthal was one of the news media?s most influential neoconservatives, declaring that he was determined to steer the newspaper back to ?the center,? by which he meant to the right. At AP, general manager Keith Fuller was known to be a strong Reagan supporter and his preferences were sometimes expressed forcefully to AP?s Washington bureau where I worked. At the Washington Post and Newsweek (where I went to work in 1987), there was also a strong sense that Reagan-era scandals should not reach the president, that it would not be ?good for the country.? In other words, on the issue of Contra drug trafficking, there was a confluence of interests between the Reagan administration, which was determined to protect the Contras? public image, and senior news executives, who wanted to adopt a ?patriotic? posture after convincing themselves that the country shouldn?t endure another wrenching battle over wrongdoing by a Republican president. The popular image of courageous editors standing up for their reporters in the face of government pressure was not the reality, especially not where the Contras were concerned. Reverse Rewards So, instead of a process that outsiders might imagine ? where journalists who dug out tough stories got rewarded ? the actual system worked in the opposite way. The careerists in the news business quickly grasped that the smart play when it came to the Contras was either to be a booster or at least to pooh-pooh evidence of the Contras? brutality or drug traffickers. The same rules applied to congressional investigators. Anyone who pried into the dark corners of the Nicaraguan Contra war faced ridicule, as happened to Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts when he followed up the early AP stories with a courageous investigation that discovered more ties between cocaine traffickers and the Contras. When his Contra-cocaine report was released in 1989, its findings were greeted with yawns and smirks. News articles were buried deep inside the major newspapers and the stories focused more on alleged flaws in his investigation than on his revelations. For his hard work, Newsweek summed up the prevailing ?conventional wisdom? on Kerry by calling him a ?randy conspiracy buff.? Being associated with breaking the Contra-cocaine story was also regarded as a black mark on my own career. To function in this upside-down world, where reality and perception often clashed ? and perception usually won ? the big news outlets developed a kind of cognitive dissonance that could accept two contradictory positions. On one level, the news outlets did accept the undeniable reality that some of the Contras and their backers, including the likes of Panamanian General Manuel Noriega, were implicated in the drug trade, but then simultaneously treated this reality as a conspiracy theory. Squaring the Circle Only occasionally did a major news outlet seek to square this circle, such as during Noriega?s drug-trafficking trial in 1991 when U.S. prosecutors called as a witness Colombian Medell?n cartel kingpin Carlos Lehder, who ? along with implicating Noriega ? testified that the cartel had given $10 million to the Contras, an allegation first unearthed by Sen. Kerry. ?The Kerry hearings didn?t get the attention they deserved at the time,? a Washington Post editorial on Nov. 27, 1991, acknowledged. ?The Noriega trial brings this sordid aspect of the Nicaraguan engagement to fresh public attention.? However, the Post offered its readers no explanation for why Kerry?s hearings had been largely ignored, with the Post itself a leading culprit in this journalistic misfeasance. Nor did the Post and the other leading newspapers use the opening created by the Noriega trial to do anything to rectify their past neglect. And, everything quickly returned to the status quo in which the desired perception of the noble Contras trumped the clear reality of their criminal activities. So, from 1991 until 1996, the Contra-cocaine scandal remained a disturbing story not just about the skewed moral compass of the Reagan administration but also about how the U.S. news media had lost its way. The scandal was a dirty secret that was best kept out of public view and away from a thorough discussion. After all, the journalistic careerists who had played along with the U.S. government?s Contra defenders had advanced inside their media corporations. As good team players, they had moved up to be bureau chiefs and other news executives. They had no interest in revisiting one of the big stories that they had downplayed as a prerequisite for their success. Pariahs Meanwhile, those journalists who had exposed these national security crimes mostly saw their careers sink or at best slide sideways. We were regarded as ?pariahs? in our profession. We were ?conspiracy theorists,? even though our journalism had proven to be correct again and again. The Post?s admission that the Contra-cocaine scandal ?didn?t get the attention it deserved? didn?t lead to any soul-searching inside the U.S. news media, nor did it result in any rehabilitation of the careers of the reporters who had tried to put a spotlight on this especially vile secret. As for me, after losing battle after battle with my Newsweek editors (who despised the Iran-Contra scandal that I had worked so hard to expose), I departed the magazine in June 1990 to write a book (called Fooling America) about the decline of the Washington press corps and the parallel rise of the new generation of government propagandists. I was also hired by PBS Frontline to investigate whether there had been a prequel to the Iran-Contra scandal ? whether those arms-for-hostage deals in the mid-1980s had been preceded by contacts between Reagan?s 1980 campaign staff and Iran, which was then holding 52 Americans hostage and essentially destroying Jimmy Carter?s reelection hopes. [For more on that topic, see Robert Parry?s Secrecy & Privilege.] Then, in 1995, frustrated by the pervasive triviality that had come to define American journalism ? and acting on the advice of and with the assistance of my oldest son Sam ? I turned to a new medium and launched the Internet?s first investigative news magazine, known as Consortiumnews.com. The Web site became a way for me to put out well-reported stories that my former mainstream colleagues seemed determined to ignore or mock. So, when Gary Webb called me that day in 1996, I knew that he was charging into some dangerous journalistic terrain, though he thought he was simply pursuing a great story. After his call, it struck me that perhaps the only way for the Contra-cocaine story to ever get the attention that it deserved was for someone outside the Washington media culture to do the work. When Webb?s ?Dark Alliance? series finally appeared in late August 1996, it initially drew little attention. The major national news outlets applied their usual studied indifference to a topic that they had already judged unworthy of serious attention. It was also clear that the media careerists who had climbed up their corporate ladders by accepting the conventional wisdom that the Contra-cocaine story was a conspiracy theory weren?t about to look back down and admit that they had contributed to a major journalistic failure to inform and protect the American public. Hard to Ignore But Webb?s story proved hard to ignore. First, unlike the work that Barger and I did for AP in the mid-1980s, Webb?s series wasn?t just a story about drug traffickers in Central America and their protectors in Washington. It was about the on-the-ground consequences, inside the United States, of that drug trafficking, how the lives of Americans were blighted and destroyed as the collateral damage of a U.S. foreign policy initiative. In other words, there were real-life American victims, and they were concentrated in African-American communities. That meant the ever-sensitive issue of race had been injected into the controversy. Anger from black communities spread quickly to the Congressional Black Caucus, which started demanding answers. Secondly, the San Jose Mercury News, which was the local newspaper for Silicon Valley, had posted documents and audio on its state-of-the-art Internet site. That way, readers could examine much of the documentary support for the series. It also meant that the traditional ?gatekeeper? role of the major newspapers ? the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times ? was under assault. If a regional paper like the Mercury News could finance a major journalistic investigation like this one, and circumvent the judgments of the editorial boards at the Big Three, then there might be a tectonic shift in the power relations of the U.S. news media. There could be a breakdown of the established order. This combination of factors led to the next phase of the Contra-cocaine battle: the ?get-Gary-Webb? counterattack. The first major shot against Webb and his ?Dark Alliance? series did not come from the Big Three but from the rapidly expanding right-wing news media, which was in no mood to accept the notion that some of President Reagan?s beloved Contras were drug traffickers. That would have cast a shadow over the Reagan Legacy, which the Right was elevating to mythic status. It fell to Rev. Sun Myung Moon?s right-wing Washington Times to begin the anti-Webb vendetta. Moon, a South Korean theocrat who fancied himself the new Messiah, had founded his newspaper in 1982 partly to protect Ronald Reagan?s political flanks and partly to ensure that he had powerful friends in high places. In the mid-1980s, the Washington Times went so far as to raise money to assist Reagan?s Contra ?freedom fighters.? Self-Interested Testimony To refute Webb?s three-part series, the Washington Times turned to some ex-CIA officials, who had participated in the Contra war, and quoted them denying the story. Soon, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times were lining up behind the Washington Times to trash Webb and his story. On Oct. 4, 1996, the Washington Post published a front-page article knocking down Webb?s series, although acknowledging that some Contra operatives did help the cocaine cartels. The Post?s approach was twofold, fitting with the national media?s cognitive dissonance on the topic of Contra cocaine: first, the Post presented the Contra-cocaine allegations as old news ? ?even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers,? the Post sniffed ? and second, the Post minimized the importance of the one Contra smuggling channel that Webb had highlighted in his series, saying that it had not ?played a major role in the emergence of crack.? A Post sidebar story dismissed African-Americans as prone to ?conspiracy fears.? Next, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times weighed in with lengthy articles castigating Webb and ?Dark Alliance.? The big newspapers made much of the CIA?s internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 ? almost a decade earlier ? that supposedly had cleared the spy agency of any role in Contra-cocaine smuggling. But the CIA?s cover-up began to weaken on Oct. 24, 1996, when CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz conceded before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the first CIA probe had lasted only12 days, and the second only three days. He promised a more thorough review. Mocking Webb Webb, however, had already crossed over from being a serious journalist to a target of ridicule. Influential Post media critic Howard Kurtz mocked Webb for saying in a book proposal that he would explore the possibility that the Contra war was primarily a business to its participants. ?Oliver Stone, check your voice mail,? Kurtz chortled. However, Webb?s suspicion was no conspiracy theory. Indeed, White House aide Oliver North?s chief Contra emissary, Robert Owen, had made the same point in a March 17, 1986, message about the Contras leadership. ?Few of the so-called leaders of the movement . . . really care about the boys in the field,? Owen wrote. ?THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM.? [Emphasis in original.] In other words, Webb was right and Kurtz was wrong, even Oliver North?s emissary had reported that many Contra leaders treated the conflict as ?a business.? But accuracy had ceased to be relevant in the media?s hazing of Gary Webb. In another double standard, while Webb was held to the strictest standards of journalism, it was entirely all right for Kurtz ? the supposed arbiter of journalistic integrity who was also featured on CNN?s Reliable Sources ? to make judgments based on ignorance. Kurtz would face no repercussions for mocking a fellow journalist who was factually correct. The Big Three?s assault ? combined with their disparaging tone ? had a predictable effect on the executives of the Mercury News. As it turned out, Webb?s confidence in his editors had been misplaced. By early 1997, executive editor Jerry Ceppos, who had his own corporate career to worry about, was in retreat. On May 11, 1997, Ceppos published a front-page column saying the series ?fell short of my standards.? He criticized the stories because they ?strongly implied CIA knowledge? of Contra connections to U.S. drug dealers who were manufacturing crack cocaine. ?We did not have enough proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship,? Ceppos wrote. Ceppos was wrong about the proof, of course. At AP, before we published our first Contra-cocaine article in 1985, Barger and I had known that the CIA and Reagan?s White House were aware of the Contra-cocaine problem. However, Ceppos had recognized that he and his newspaper were facing a credibility crisis brought on by the harsh consensus delivered by the Big Three, a judgment that had quickly solidified into conventional wisdom throughout the major news media and inside Knight-Ridder, Inc., which owned the Mercury News. The only career-saving move ? career-saving for Ceppos even if career-destroying for Webb ? was to jettison Webb and his journalism. A ?Vindication? The big newspapers and the Contras? defenders celebrated Ceppos?s retreat as vindication of their own dismissal of the Contra-cocaine stories. In particular, Kurtz seemed proud that his demeaning of Webb now had the endorsement of Webb?s editor. Ceppos next pulled the plug on the Mercury News? continuing Contra-cocaine investigation and reassigned Webb to a small office in Cupertino, California, far from his family. Webb resigned from the paper in disgrace. For undercutting Webb and other Mercury News reporters working on the Contra-cocaine investigation, Ceppos was lauded by the American Journalism Review and was given the 1997 national Ethics in Journalism Award by the Society of Professional Journalists. While Ceppos won raves, Webb watched his career collapse and his marriage break up. Still, Gary Webb had set in motion internal government investigations that would bring to the surface long-hidden facts about how the Reagan administration had conducted the Contra war. The CIA published the first part of Inspector General Hitz?s findings on Jan. 29, 1998. Though the CIA?s press release for the report criticized Webb and defended the CIA, Hitz?s Volume One admitted that not only were many of Webb?s allegations true but that he actually understated the seriousness of the Contra-drug crimes and the CIA?s knowledge of them. Hitz conceded that cocaine smugglers played a significant early role in the Contra movement and that the CIA intervened to block an image-threatening 1984 federal investigation into a San Francisco?based drug ring with suspected ties to the Contras, the so-called ?Frogman Case.? After Volume One was released, I called Webb (whom I had met personally since his series was published). I chided him for indeed getting the story ?wrong.? He had understated how serious the problem of Contra-cocaine trafficking had been. It was a form of gallows humor for the two of us, since nothing had changed in the way the major newspapers treated the Contra-cocaine issue. They focused only on the press release that continued to attack Webb, while ignoring the incriminating information that could be found in the body of the report. All I could do was highlight those admissions at Consortiumnews.com, which sadly had a much, much smaller readership than the Big Three. Looking the Other Way The major U.S. news media also looked the other way on other startling disclosures. On May 7, 1998, for instance, Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, introduced into the Congressional Record a Feb. 11, 1982, letter of understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department. The letter, which had been requested by CIA Director William Casey, freed the CIA from legal requirements that it must report drug smuggling by CIA assets, a provision that covered both the Nicaraguan Contras and the Afghan mujahedeen. In other words, early in those two covert wars, the CIA leadership wanted to make sure that its geopolitical objectives would not be complicated by a legal requirement to turn in its client forces for drug trafficking. The next break in the long-running Contra-cocaine cover-up was a report by the Justice Department?s Inspector General Michael Bromwich. Given the hostile climate surrounding Webb?s series, Bromwich?s report also opened with criticism of Webb. But, like the CIA?s Volume One, the contents revealed new details about government wrongdoing. According to evidence cited by Bromwich, the Reagan administration knew almost from the outset of the Contra war that cocaine traffickers permeated the paramilitary operation. The administration also did next to nothing to expose or stop the crimes. Bromwich?s report revealed example after example of leads not followed, corroborated witnesses disparaged, official law-enforcement investigations sabotaged, and even the CIA facilitating the work of drug traffickers. The report showed that the Contras and their supporters ran several parallel drug-smuggling operations, not just the one at the center of Webb?s series. The report also found that the CIA shared little of its information about Contra drugs with law-enforcement agencies and on three occasions disrupted cocaine-trafficking investigations that threatened the Contras. As well as depicting a more widespread Contra-drug operation than Webb had understood, the Justice Department report provided some important corroboration about a Nicaraguan drug smuggler, Norwin Meneses, who was a key figure in Webb?s series. Bromwich cited U.S. government informants who supplied detailed information about Meneses?s drug operation and his financial assistance to the Contras. For instance, Renato Pena, a money-and-drug courier for Meneses, said that in the early 1980s the CIA allowed the Contras to fly drugs into the United States, sell them, and keep the proceeds. Pena, who was the northern California representative for the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) Contra army, said the drug trafficking was forced on the Contras by the inadequate levels of U.S. government assistance. DEA Troubles The Justice Department report also disclosed repeated examples of the CIA and U.S. embassies in Central America discouraging DEA investigations, including one into Contra-cocaine shipments moving through the international airport in El Salvador. Inspector General Bromwich said secrecy trumped all. ?We have no doubt that the CIA and the U.S. Embassy were not anxious for the DEA to pursue its investigation at the airport,? he wrote. Bromwich also described the curious case of how a DEA pilot helped a CIA asset escape from Costa Rican authorities in 1989 after the man, American farmer John Hull, had been charged in connection with Contra-cocaine trafficking. Hull?s ranch in northern Costa Rica had been the site of Contra camps for attacking Nicaragua from the south. For years, Contra-connected witnesses also said Hull?s property was used for the transshipment of cocaine en route to the United States, but those accounts were brushed aside by the Reagan administration and disparaged in major U.S. newspapers. Yet, according to Bromwich?s report, the DEA took the accounts seriously enough to prepare a research report on the evidence in November 1986. In it, one informant described Colombian cocaine off-loaded at an airstrip on Hull?s ranch. The drugs were then concealed in a shipment of frozen shrimp and transported to the United States. The alleged Costa Rican shipper was Frigorificos de Puntarenas, a firm controlled by Cuban-American Luis Rodriguez. Like Hull, however, Frigorificos had friends in high places. In 1985-86, the State Department had selected the shrimp company to handle $261,937 in non-lethal assistance earmarked for the Contras. Hull also remained a man with powerful protectors. Even after Costa Rican authorities brought drug charges against him, influential Americans, including Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, demanded that Hull be let out of jail pending trial. Then, in July 1989 with the help of a DEA pilot ? and possibly a DEA agent ? Hull managed to fly out of Costa Rica to Haiti and then to the United States. [See Consortiumnews.com?s ?John Hull?s Great Escape.?] Despite these new disclosures, the big newspapers still showed no inclination to read beyond the criticism of Webb in the press release and the executive summary. Major Disclosures By fall 1998, Washington was obsessed with President Bill Clinton?s Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, which made it easier to ignore even more stunning Contra-cocaine disclosures in the CIA?s Volume Two, published on Oct. 8, 1998. In the report, CIA Inspector General Hitz identified more than 50 Contras and Contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations throughout the 1980s. According to Volume Two, the CIA knew the criminal nature of its Contra clients from the start of the war against Nicaragua?s leftist Sandinista government. The earliest Contra force, called the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (ADREN) or the 15th of September Legion, had chosen ?to stoop to criminal activities in order to feed and clothe their cadre,? according to a June 1981 draft of a CIA field report. According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, two ADREN members made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981. ADREN?s leaders included Enrique Berm?dez and other early Contras who would later direct the major Contra army, the CIA-organized FDN which was based in Honduras, along Nicaragua?s northern border. Throughout the war, Berm?dez remained the top Contra military commander. The CIA later corroborated the allegations about ADREN?s cocaine trafficking, but insisted that Berm?dez had opposed the drug shipments to the United States that went ahead nonetheless. The truth about Berm?dez?s supposed objections to drug trafficking, however, was less clear. According to Hitz?s Volume One, Berm?dez enlisted Norwin Meneses, a large-scale Nicaraguan cocaine smuggler and a key figure in Webb?s series, to raise money and buy supplies for the Contras. Volume One had quoted a Meneses associate, another Nicaraguan trafficker named Danilo Bland?n, who told Hitz?s investigators that he and Meneses flew to Honduras to meet with Berm?dez in 1982. At the time, Meneses?s criminal activities were well-known in the Nicaraguan exile community. But Berm?dez told the cocaine smugglers that ?the ends justify the means? in raising money for the Contras. After the Berm?dez meeting, Contra soldiers helped Meneses and Bland?n get past Honduran police who briefly arrested them on drug-trafficking suspicions. After their release, Bland?n and Meneses traveled on to Bolivia to complete a cocaine transaction. There were other indications of Berm?dez?s drug-smuggling tolerance. In February 1988, another Nicaraguan exile linked to the drug trade accused Berm?dez of participation in narcotics trafficking, according to Hitz?s report. After the Contra war ended, Berm?dez returned to Managua, Nicaragua, where he was shot to death on Feb. 16, 1991. The murder has never been solved. The Southern Front Along the Southern Front, the Contras? military operations in Costa Rica on Nicaragua?s southern border, the CIA?s drug evidence centered on the forces of Ed?n Pastora, another top Contra commander. But Hitz discovered that the U.S. government may have made the drug situation worse, not better. Hitz revealed that the CIA put an admitted drug operative ? known by his CIA pseudonym ?Ivan Gomez? ? in a supervisory position over Pastora. Hitz reported that the CIA discovered Gomez?s drug history in 1987 when Gomez failed a security review on drug-trafficking questions. In internal CIA interviews, Gomez admitted that in March or April 1982, he helped family members who were engaged in drug trafficking and money laundering. In one case, Gomez said he assisted his brother and brother-in-law in transporting cash from New York City to Miami. He admitted that he ?knew this act was illegal.? Later, Gomez expanded on his admission, describing how his family members had fallen $2 million into debt and had gone to Miami to run a money-laundering center for drug traffickers. Gomez said ?his brother had many visitors whom [Gomez] assumed to be in the drug trafficking business.? Gomez?s brother was arrested on drug charges in June 1982. Three months later, in September 1982, Gomez started his CIA assignment in Costa Rica. Years later, convicted drug trafficker Carlos Cabezas alleged that in the early 1980s, Ivan Gomez was the CIA agent in Costa Rica who was overseeing drug-money donations to the Contras. Gomez ?was to make sure the money was given to the right people [the Contras] and nobody was taking . . . profit they weren?t supposed to,? Cabezas stated publicly. But the CIA sought to discredit Cabezas at the time because he had trouble identifying Gomez?s picture and put Gomez at one meeting in early 1982 before Gomez started his CIA assignment. While the CIA was able to fend off Cabezas?s allegations by pointing to these discrepancies, Hitz?s report revealed that the CIA was nevertheless aware of Gomez?s direct role in drug-money laundering, a fact the agency hid from Sen. Kerry in his 1987 investigation. Cocaine Coup There was also more to know about Gomez. In November 1985, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) learned from an informant that Gomez?s two brothers had been large-scale cocaine importers, with one brother arranging shipments from Bolivia?s infamous drug kingpin Roberto Suarez. Suarez already was known as a financier of right-wing causes. In 1980, with the support of Argentina?s hard-line anticommunist military regime, Suarez bankrolled a coup in Bolivia that ousted the elected left-of-center government. The violent putsch became known as the Cocaine Coup because it made Bolivia the region?s first narco-state. By protecting cocaine shipments headed north, Bolivia?s government helped transform Colombia?s Medell?n cartel from a struggling local operation into a giant corporate-style business for delivering cocaine to the U.S. market. Flush with cash in the early 1980s, Suarez invested more than $30 million in various right-wing paramilitary operations, including the Contra forces in Central America, according to U.S. Senate testimony by an Argentine intelligence officer, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse. In 1987, Sanchez-Reisse said the Suarez drug money was laundered through front companies in Miami before going to Central America. There, other Argentine intelligence officers ? veterans of the Bolivian coup ? trained the Contras in the early 1980s, even before the CIA arrived to first assist with the training and later take over the Contra operation from the Argentines. Inspector General Hitz added another piece to the mystery of the Bolivian-Contra connection. One Contra fund-raiser, Jose Orlando Bolanos, boasted that the Argentine government was supporting his Contra activities, according to a May 1982 cable to CIA headquarters. Bolanos made the statement during a meeting with undercover DEA agents in Florida. He even offered to introduce them to his Bolivian cocaine supplier. Despite all this suspicious drug activity centered around Ivan Gomez and the Contras, the CIA insisted that it did not unmask Gomez until 1987, when he failed a security check and confessed his role in his family?s drug business. The CIA official who interviewed Gomez concluded that ?Gomez directly participated in illegal drug transactions, concealed participation in illegal drug transactions, and concealed information about involvement in illegal drug activity,? Hitz wrote. Protecting Gomez But senior CIA officials still protected Gomez. They refused to refer the Gomez case to the Justice Department, citing the 1982 agreement that spared the CIA from a legal obligation to report narcotics crimes by people collaborating with the CIA who were not formal agency employees. Gomez was an independent contractor who worked for the CIA but was not officially on staff. The CIA eased Gomez out of the agency in February 1988, without alerting law enforcement or the congressional oversight committees. When questioned about the case nearly a decade later, one senior CIA official who had supported the gentle treatment of Gomez had second thoughts. ?It is a striking commentary on me and everyone that this guy?s involvement in narcotics didn?t weigh more heavily on me or the system,? the official acknowledged to Hitz?s investigators. A Medell?n drug connection arose in another section of Hitz?s report, when he revealed evidence suggesting that some Contra trafficking may have been sanctioned by Reagan?s NSC. The protagonist for this part of the Contra-cocaine mystery was Moises Nunez, a Cuban-American who worked for Oliver North?s NSC Contra-support operation and for two drug-connected seafood importers, Ocean Hunter in Miami and Frigorificos De Puntarenas in Costa Rica. Frigorificos De Puntarenas was created in the early 1980s as a cover for drug-money laundering, according to sworn testimony by two of the firm?s principals ? Carlos Soto and Medell?n cartel accountant Ramon Milian Rodriguez. (It was also the company implicated by a DEA informant in moving cocaine from John Hull?s ranch to the United States.) Drug allegations were swirling around Moises Nunez by the mid-1980s. Indeed, his operation was one of the targets of my and Barger?s AP investigation in 1985. Finally reacting to these suspicions, the CIA questioned Nunez about his alleged cocaine trafficking on March 25, 1987. He responded by pointing the finger at his NSC superiors. ?Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council,? Hitz reported, adding: ?Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions, but indicated it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC. Nunez refused to identify the NSC officials with whom he had been involved.? After this first round of questioning, CIA headquarters authorized an additional session, but then senior CIA officials reversed the decision. There would be no further efforts at ?debriefing Nunez.? Hitz noted that ?the cable [from headquarters] offered no explanation for the decision? to stop the Nunez interrogation. But the CIA?s Central American Task Force chief Alan Fiers Jr. said the Nunez-NSC drug lead was not pursued ?because of the NSC connection and the possibility that this could be somehow connected to the Private Benefactor program [the Contra money handled by North] a decision was made not to pursue this matter.? Joseph Fernandez, who had been the CIA?s station chief in Costa Rica, confirmed to congressional Iran-Contra investigators that Nunez ?was involved in a very sensitive operation? for North?s ?Enterprise.? The exact nature of that NSC-authorized activity has never been divulged. At the time of the Nunez-NSC drug admissions and his truncated interrogation, the CIA?s acting director was Robert Gates, who nearly two decades later became President George W. Bush?s second secretary of defense, a position he retained under President Barack Obama. Drug Record The CIA also worked directly with other drug-connected Cuban-Americans on the Contra project, Hitz found. One of Nunez?s Cuban-American associates, Felipe Vidal, had a criminal record as a narcotics trafficker in the 1970s. But the CIA still hired him to serve as a logistics coordinator for the Contras, Hitz reported. The CIA also learned that Vidal?s drug connections were not only in the past. A December 1984 cable to CIA headquarters revealed Vidal?s ties to Rene Corvo, another Cuban-American suspected of drug trafficking. Corvo was working with Cuban anticommunist Frank Castro, who was viewed as a Medell?n cartel representative within the Contra movement. There were other narcotics links to Vidal. In January 1986, the DEA in Miami seized 414 pounds of cocaine concealed in a shipment of yucca that was going from a Contra operative in Costa Rica to Ocean Hunter, the company where Vidal (and Moises Nunez) worked. Despite the evidence, Vidal remained a CIA employee as he collaborated with Frank Castro?s assistant, Rene Corvo, in raising money for the Contras, according to a CIA memo in June 1986. By fall 1986, Sen. Kerry had heard enough rumors about Vidal to demand information about him as part of his congressional inquiry into Contra drugs. But the CIA withheld the derogatory information in its files. On Oct. 15, 1986, Kerry received a briefing from the CIA?s Alan Fiers Jr., who didn?t mention Vidal?s drug arrests and conviction in the 1970s. But Vidal was not yet in the clear. In 1987, the U.S. Attorney?s Office in Miami began investigating Vidal, Ocean Hunter, and other Contra-connected entities. This prosecutorial attention worried the CIA. The CIA?s Latin American division felt it was time for a security review of Vidal. But on Aug. 5, 1987, the CIA?s security office blocked the review for fear that the Vidal drug information ?could be exposed during any future litigation.? As expected, the U.S. Attorney?s Office did request documents about ?Contra-related activities? by Vidal, Ocean Hunter, and 16 other entities. The CIA advised the prosecutor that ?no information had been found regarding Ocean Hunter,? a statement that was clearly false. The CIA continued Vidal?s employment as an adviser to the Contra movement until 1990, virtually the end of the Contra war. FDN Connections Hitz also revealed that drugs tainted the highest levels of the Honduran-based FDN, the largest Contra army. Hitz found that Juan Rivas, a Contra commander who rose to be chief of staff, admitted that he had been a cocaine trafficker in Colombia before the war. The CIA asked Rivas, known as El Quiche, about his background after the DEA began suspecting that Rivas might be an escaped convict from a Colombian prison. In interviews with CIA officers, Rivas acknowledged that he had been arrested and convicted of packaging and transporting cocaine for the drug trade in Barranquilla, Colombia. After several months in prison, Rivas said, he escaped and moved to Central America, where he joined the Contras. Defending Rivas, CIA officials insisted that there was no evidence that Rivas engaged in trafficking while with the Contras. But one CIA cable noted that he lived an expensive lifestyle, even keeping a $100,000 Thoroughbred horse at the Contra camp. Contra military commander Berm?dez later attributed Rivas?s wealth to his ex-girlfriend?s rich family. But a CIA cable in March 1989 added that ?some in the FDN may have suspected at the time that the father-in-law was engaged in drug trafficking.? Still, the CIA moved quickly to protect Rivas from exposure and possible extradition to Colombia. In February 1989, CIA headquarters asked that the DEA take no action ?in view of the serious political damage to the U.S. Government that could occur should the information about Rivas become public.? Rivas was eased out of the Contra leadership with an explanation of poor health. With U.S. government help, he was allowed to resettle in Miami. Colombia was not informed about his fugitive status. Another senior FDN official implicated in the drug trade was its chief spokesman in Honduras, Arnoldo Jose ?Frank? Arana. The drug allegations against Arana dated back to 1983 when a federal narcotics task force put him under criminal investigation because of plans ?to smuggle 100 kilograms of cocaine into the United States from South America.? On Jan. 23, 1986, the FBI reported that Arana and his brothers were involved in a drug-smuggling enterprise, although Arana was not charged. Arana sought to clear up another set of drug suspicions in 1989 by visiting the DEA in Honduras with a business associate, Jose Perez. Arana?s association with Perez, however, only raised new alarms. If ?Arana is mixed up with the Perez brothers, he is probably dirty,? the DEA said. Drug Airlines Through their ownership of an air services company called SETCO, the Perez brothers were associated with Juan Matta-Ballesteros, a major cocaine kingpin connected to the murder of a DEA agent, according to reports by the DEA and U.S. Customs. Hitz reported that someone at the CIA scribbled a note on a DEA cable about Arana stating: ?Arnold Arana . . . still active and working, we [CIA] may have a problem.? Despite its drug ties to Matta-Ballesteros, SETCO emerged as the principal company for ferrying supplies to the Contras in Honduras. During congressional Iran-Contra hearings, FDN political leader Adolfo Calero testified that SETCO was paid from bank accounts controlled by Oliver North. SETCO also received $185,924 from the State Department for ferrying supplies to the Contras in 1986. Furthermore, Hitz found that other air transport companies used by the Contras were implicated in the cocaine trade as well. Even FDN leaders suspected that they were shipping supplies to Central America aboard planes that might be returning with drugs. Mario Calero, the chief of Contra logistics, grew so uneasy about one air freight company that he notified U.S. law enforcement that the FDN only chartered the planes for the flights south, not the return flights north. Hitz found that some drug pilots simply rotated from one sector of the Contra operation to another. Donaldo Frixone, who had a drug record in the Dominican Republic, was hired by the CIA to fly Contra missions from 1983 to 1985. In September 1986, however, Frixone was implicated in smuggling 19,000 pounds of marijuana into the United States. In late 1986 or early 1987, he went to work for Vortex, another U.S.-paid Contra supply company linked to the drug trade. By the time that Hitz?s Volume Two was published in fall 1998, the CIA?s defense against Webb?s series had shrunk to a fig leaf: that the CIA did not conspire with the Contras to raise money through cocaine trafficking. But Hitz made clear that the Contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of Contra crimes from the Justice Department, Congress, and even the CIA?s own analytical division. Besides tracing the evidence of Contra-drug trafficking through the decade-long Contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the Contra-drug problem but didn?t want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow Nicaragua?s leftist Sandinista government. According to Hitz, the CIA had ?one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. . . . [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the Contra program.? One CIA field officer explained, ?The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war.? Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the Contras hid evidence of Contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA?s analysts. Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly concluded in the mid-1980s that ?only a handful of Contras might have been involved in drug trafficking.? That false assessment was passed on to Congress and to major news organizations ? serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his ?Dark Alliance? series in 1996. CIA Admission Although Hitz?s report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it went almost unnoticed by the big American newspapers. On Oct. 10, 1998, two days after Hitz?s Volume Two was posted on the CIA?s Web site, the New York Times published a brief article that continued to deride Webb but acknowledged the Contra-drug problem may have been worse than earlier understood. Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times never published a story on the release of Hitz?s Volume Two. In 2000, the House Intelligence Committee grudgingly acknowledged that the stories about Reagan?s CIA protecting Contra drug traffickers were true. The committee released a report citing classified testimony from CIA Inspector General Britt Snider (Hitz?s successor) admitting that the spy agency had turned a blind eye to evidence of Contra-drug smuggling and generally treated drug smuggling through Central America as a low priority. ?In the end the objective of unseating the Sandinistas appears to have taken precedence over dealing properly with potentially serious allegations against those with whom the agency was working,? Snider said, adding that the CIA did not treat the drug allegations in ?a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner.? The House committee ? then controlled by Republicans ? still downplayed the significance of the Contra-cocaine scandal, but the panel acknowledged, deep inside its report, that in some cases, ?CIA employees did nothing to verify or disprove drug trafficking information, even when they had the opportunity to do so. In some of these, receipt of a drug allegation appeared to provoke no specific response, and business went on as usual.? Like the release of Hitz?s report in 1998, the admissions by Snider and the House committee drew virtually no media attention in 2000 ? except for a few articles on the Internet, including one at Consortiumnews.com. Unrepentant Press Because of this misuse of power by the Big Three newspapers ? choosing to conceal their own journalistic failings regarding the Contra-cocaine scandal and to protect the Reagan administration?s image ? Webb?s reputation was never rehabilitated. After his original ?Dark Alliance? series was published in 1996, Webb had been inundated with attractive book offers from major publishing houses, but once the vilification began, the interest evaporated. Webb?s agent contacted an independent publishing house, Seven Stories Press, which had a reputation for publishing books that had been censored, and it took on the project. After Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion was published in 1998, I joined Webb in a few speaking appearances on the West Coast, including one packed book talk at the Midnight Special bookstore in Santa Monica, California. For a time, Webb was treated as a celebrity on the American Left, but that gradually faded. In our interactions during these joint appearances, I found Webb to be a regular guy who seemed to be holding up fairly well under the terrible pressure. He had landed an investigative job with a California state legislative committee. He also felt some measure of vindication when CIA Inspector General Hitz?s reports came out. However, Webb never could overcome the pain caused by his betrayal at the hands of his journalistic colleagues, his peers. In the years that followed, Webb was unable to find decent-paying work in his profession ? the conventional wisdom remained that he had somehow been exposed as a journalistic fraud. His state job ended; his marriage fell apart; he struggled to pay bills; and he was faced with a move out of a modest rental house near Sacramento, California. On Dec. 9, 2004, the 49-year-old Webb typed out suicide notes to his ex-wife and his three children; laid out a certificate for his cremation; and taped a note on the door telling movers ? who were coming the next morning ? to instead call 911. Webb then took out his father?s pistol and shot himself in the head. The first shot was not lethal, so he fired once more. Even with Webb?s death, the big newspapers that had played key roles in his destruction couldn?t bring themselves to show Webb any mercy. After Webb?s body was found, I received a call from a reporter for the Los Angeles Times who knew that I was one of Webb?s few journalistic colleagues who had defended him and his work. I told the reporter that American history owed a great debt to Gary Webb because he had forced out important facts about Reagan-era crimes. But I added that the Los Angeles Times would be hard-pressed to write an honest obituary because the newspaper had not published a single word on the contents of Hitz?s final report, which had largely vindicated Webb. To my disappointment but not my surprise, I was correct. The Los Angeles Times ran a mean-spirited obituary that made no mention of either my defense of Webb, nor the CIA?s admissions in 1998. The obituary was republished in other newspapers, including the Washington Post. In effect, Webb?s suicide enabled senior editors at the Big Three newspapers to breathe a little easier ? one of the few people who understood the ugly story of the Reagan administration?s cover-up of the Contra-cocaine scandal and the U.S. media?s complicity was now silenced. To this day, none of the journalists or media critics who participated in the destruction of Gary Webb has paid a price for their actions. None has faced the sort of humiliation that Webb had to endure. None had to experience that special pain of standing up for what is best in the profession of journalism ? taking on a difficult story that seeks to hold powerful people accountable for serious crimes ? and then being vilified by your own colleagues, the people that you expected to understand and appreciate what you had done. On the contrary, many were rewarded with professional advancement and lucrative careers. For instance, Howard Kurtz still hosts the CNN program, ?Reliable Sources,? which lectures journalists on professional standards. [For more on related topics, see Robert Parry?s Lost History, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a three-book set for the discount price of only $29. For details, click here.] Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ?Project Truth? are also available there. From ths at psalience.org Sun Dec 11 13:52:43 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 13:52:43 +0100 Subject: [THS] What if there is no Higgs boson? Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111211134919.04888028@mail.messagingengine.com> [Im sure this is a question that has been on all our minds recently] What if there is no Higgs boson? Updated 22:39 09 December 2011 by Lisa Grossman http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21259-what-if-there-is-no-higgs-boson.html?full=true&print=true The ATLAS detector (Image: David Parker/Science Photo Library) This could be it. The Large Hadron Collider finally has enough data to explore every nook and cranny where the elusive Higgs boson could be hiding. LHC physicists will announce the results of their latest hunt on Tuesday at CERN in Switzerland. What if they find nothing? New Scientist takes a look at alternatives to the Higgs. What is the Higgs boson? It is the last undiscovered member of the standard model of particle physics, the leading theory describing how particles and forces interact. The mysterious particle is thought to give all other particles mass, but the standard model can't predict what the Higgs itself weighs. Where might the Higgs be hiding? The Higgs may be produced fleetingly when particles smash into each other at high speeds, and for years physicists have been looking for evidence of it at various particle colliders. They have gradually ruled out its existence at different masses, but there is still a narrow mass range, between 115 and 141 gigaelectronvolts, where the simplest version of the Higgs could take refuge. What will LHC physicists report next week? Rumour has it they have found hints of the Higgs at a mass of 125 gigaelectronvolts, about 133 times the mass of a proton. What is known for sure, though, is that researchers from the LHC's main detectors, ATLAS and CMS, will separately present the past year's worth of data from the proton collider. That represents more than 300 trillion high-speed particle collisions, more than twice the amount of data reported at a conference in August. That is still not enough data to be able to rule the Higgs definitively in or out, but it should be enough to show hints of the Higgs if it exists in the mass range that had previously not been scrutinised. What if there is still no sign of the Higgs? This time, if nothing materialises, physicists will really start giving up. "If we witness a lack of events in the full mass range, then clearly we will start disfavouring the presence of the standard model Higgs boson in LHC data," says CMS spokesperson Guido Tonelli. "To really exclude it we would need additional data. But if in this amount of data we don't see any indication that something is happening, the most likely hypothesis is that we have to look for another solution." Are there other solutions? "I think there are alternatives to the Higgs," says Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin, who, together with Sheldon Glashow of Boston University and Abdus Salam of Imperial College London, wrote the standard model in the 1960s. Giving up on the Higgs boson opens the door for more exotic kinds of physics, including extra particles and extra forces. Do we need a Higgs boson to give things mass? No, says theorist Matt Strassler of Rutgers University in New Jersey. The Higgs boson is just a ripple in the so-called Higgs field, which is really what is thought to give all other particles mass. "The poor Higgs field labors in obscurity, protecting the universe from catastrophe but getting none of its deserved credit," Strassler writes in his blog. Physicists are only looking for the Higgs particle because it is the easiest way to access the field. If they don't see it, then it suggests the field is different from the one predicted by the standard model. Normally, particles in fields are like ripples in ponds ? photons are ripples in the electromagnetic field, for example. But if the field is more like molasses than water, then the ripples die away too quickly for us to detect. That means matter might get its mass from a thick Higgs-like field that has no associated particle. To get such a goopy field, theorists need to add in more exotic possibilities ? such as new particles or forces of nature. "You can't get the situation where there's no Higgs particle there unless you add something else," Strassler told New Scientist. What about more exotic possibilities? The existence of a new force, called technicolour, could also give particles mass without the need for a Higgs boson. Technicolour would act like a heavy-duty version of the strong nuclear force, which binds quarks together in the nuclei of atoms. The technicolour force would fill space with pairs of still more new particles, which would form a soup through which other particles would travel, gaining mass in the process. "That would be an outstanding alternative if the Higgs isn't there," Weinberg says. "In that case there would be a whole host of other particles, probably at higher energy, that the LHC might discover. But it wouldn't find the Higgs. There wouldn't be a Higgs, in the usual sense." Are there even more exotic ideas? The existence of a fourth dimension of space, beyond the three we experience, could explain why particles have different masses ? a fact that is usually attributed to the Higgs boson. Different types of particles are thought to have different masses because they interact with the Higgs field with varying strengths. But if there is an extra dimension of space, particles can have higher-energy modes that show up only in the extra dimension. In ordinary particle physics, particles have a baseline energy called the ground state and can have more energetic "excited" states above that. Because energy is linked to mass through E=mc2, the excited states weigh slightly more than the ground state. In a world with four spatial dimensions, particles have a full range of excited states, but most of their energy is trapped in the extra dimension, where we can't see it. The unseen states of a single type of particle end up looking like different particles to us in our 3D world. You still need a Higgs-like field to give the ground state mass, but an extra dimension can explain why we see particles of different masses without invoking the usual Higgs boson. "This would be a way of discriminating between particles and giving them different masses, which doesn't make any reference to any Higgs boson or anything at all," says CERN theorist John Ellis. Why take these alternative ideas seriously? "It's the job of theoretical physicists to game out all the different possibilities, so that the experimentalists have all the tools that they need when they eventually discover or don't discover whatever it is the LHC will or will not reveal," says Ellis. Whatever the LHC finds, the prospect of getting such a flood of data is thrilling, says Tonelli. "This is the atmosphere here. People are feeling that we are really touching something important." From ths at psalience.org Sun Dec 11 19:08:32 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:08:32 +0100 Subject: [THS] Robert Fisk: Bankers are the dictators of the West Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111211190817.06a24e38@mail.messagingengine.com> Robert Fisk: Bankers are the dictators of the West Robert Fisk Saturday, 10 December 2011 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-bankers-are-the-dictators-of-the-west-6275084.html# Writing from the very region that produces more clich?s per square foot than any other "story" ? the Middle East ? I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis. But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard "experts" who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster. Let's kick off with the "Arab Spring" ? in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East ? and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have "taken a leaf" out of the "Arab spring" book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been "inspired" by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and ? up to a point ? Libya. But this is nonsense. The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people. And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business ? a perfectly justified cause ? and against "governments". What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties ? which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of "experts" from America's top universities and "think tanks", who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters. The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed ? and still believe ? they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have ? through the gutlessness and collusion of governments ? become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine. I didn't need Charles Ferguson's Inside Job on BBC2 this week ? though it helped ? to teach me that the ratings agencies and the US banks are interchangeable, that their personnel move seamlessly between agency, bank and US government. The ratings lads (almost always lads, of course) who AAA-rated sub-prime loans and derivatives in America are now ? via their poisonous influence on the markets ? clawing down the people of Europe by threatening to lower or withdraw the very same ratings from European nations which they lavished upon criminals before the financial crash in the US. I believe that understatement tends to win arguments. But, forgive me, who are these creatures whose ratings agencies now put more fear into the French than Rommel did in 1940? Why don't my journalist mates in Wall Street tell me? How come the BBC and CNN and ? oh, dear, even al-Jazeera ? treat these criminal communities as unquestionable institutions of power? Why no investigations ? Inside Job started along the path ? into these scandalous double-dealers? It reminds me so much of the equally craven way that so many American reporters cover the Middle East, eerily avoiding any direct criticism of Israel, abetted by an army of pro-Likud lobbyists to explain to viewers why American "peacemaking" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be trusted, why the good guys are "moderates", the bad guys "terrorists". The Arabs have at least begun to shrug off this nonsense. But when the Wall Street protesters do the same, they become "anarchists", the social "terrorists" of American streets who dare to demand that the Bernankes and Geithners should face the same kind of trial as Hosni Mubarak. We in the West ? our governments ? have created our dictators. But, unlike the Arabs, we can't touch them. The Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, solemnly informed his people this week that they were not responsible for the crisis in which they found themselves. They already knew that, of course. What he did not tell them was who was to blame. Isn't it time he and his fellow EU prime ministers did tell us? And our reporters, too? From ths at psalience.org Sun Dec 11 19:12:10 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:12:10 +0100 Subject: [THS] Brian Aldiss: Kepler 22-b? I was there first Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111211191131.06a29dd8@mail.messagingengine.com> Kepler 22-b? I was there first by Brian Aldiss Helliconia, the new Earth I imagined 30 years ago, has now been located by Nasa just a few light years away Brian Aldiss guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 December 2011 18.40 GMT Kepler-22b: artist's illustration An artist's illustration of Kepler-22b, an Earth-like planet discovered by Nasa circling a star 600 light years away. Photograph: Handout/Reuters I have always been fascinated with the arbitrary nature of the world we live in. Why are there still seven days in a week, or 52 weeks in a year? Our modern world is built at least in part on ancient ones: those calendars date back to ancient Mesopotamia, where they were of religious import. Time is fascinating: a day so short, a life so long. And our little tinpot year, composed of a mere 365 days ? the period our planet takes to orbit the sun. Supposing we lived on a planet whose orbit round its sun took 5,000 years. What then? This planet of mine was imaginary, with strips of science and history in its palisades as mortar. Little did I know or care that there was a real counterpart, awaiting discovery in the future. And now revealed to us by Nasa's Kepler space telescope. There is a saying that curiosity killed the cat, but it's curiosity that keeps many of us alive. Some time ago I started to do some research for a new book. Immediately I had a name for the planet that was to be involved:Helliconia. I drew a plan. I made lists of figures and their relationships. The figures became more real when they gave way to words, to names. Freyr was the name of the sun. It was a modest sun, much like our own. But that planet, Helliconia, with its seasons, orbiting Freyr, was insufficient for belief. So it was that planet and sun were drawn into the orbit of a much larger sun, passing a few light years away, becoming known to the Helliconian humans as Batalix. And the smaller bodies took 5,000 years to achieve their Batalix-ruled orbit. For a while I was stumped about the local vegetation. On a train one evening, I looked out to see Didcot power station in the waning light. Steam poured forth and, by a curious effect of shadow, the clouds were turned black with shadow. I had it! This was a Helliconian tree in the long summer, with its foliage on display; come winter, the leaves and branches would sink back into the hollow trunks. They would melt into a kind of tallow, sealing themselves off from the long winter. From this astonishing vision, all alien vegetation was born. My planet possesses three large continents, the central and most hospitable being Campanlatt (although to the east, there is mountainous country, where several peaks rise into the lower stratosphere). We learn of life on this planet because Earth has established an observation post in Campanlatt. The observers living there cannot visit the world below; that would mean death (I required an unfilterable virus to fill the air). Helliconia Spring, the first novel in the trilogy, appeared in 1982, dedicated to my elder son. The amazing thing is that Helliconia has now turned up in what we call "reality", just a few light years away. "Kepler 22-b", as the spoilsports call it, was first located by Nasa's telescopes in 2009, but the discovery of this "new Earth" was feted by the press this week. This real Helliconia, Nasa reveals, is situated 600 light years away, its surface temperature reported as 72F. So there is little chance that we can visit it to discover whether my two opposed races ? the humans dominant in summer, the phagors dominant in the long winter ? also exist in reality. Fans from all over the world have written to me to congratulate me on my prescience. No word from those who once jeered at the unlikelihood of my saga. Science always has something new for us in store. Cern's scientists ? underground in Switzerland, secluded from the problems of the EU, working at the Large Hadron Collider ? are hoping to discover how our universe came to be as it now is. I wait with curiosity; no guesses right or wrong, this time. But one can only wonder if the entire caboodle of our universe is not the outburst of some gigantic extra-cosmos writerly imagination. From ths at psalience.org Sun Dec 11 19:19:11 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:19:11 +0100 Subject: [THS] Pearl Harbor: 70 Years on, Is Iran the New Japan? Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111211191856.06ace648@mail.messagingengine.com> Pearl Harbor: 70 Years on, Is Iran the New Japan? By Finian Cunningham URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28117 Global Research, December 8, 2011 Is Iran the new Japan ? 70 years after the Pearl Harbour incident that led to a US declaration of war and an unspeakable nuclear nightmare? Two concurrent articles on Global Research deserve close reading because taken together they suggest that history is in danger of repeating itself, with even greater catastrophic consequences. Firstly, Patrick Buchanan?s historical review of the run-up to the ?surprise? attack by Japan on the US Navy at Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941 indicates that it was in fact no surprise to Washington planners [1]. Indeed, the evidence presented by Buchanan shows (not for the first time) that the attack by the Japanese air force was a carefully laid trap engineered at the highest level in Washington with the coldly premeditated aim of precipitating US entry to World War II. As Buchanan notes the Japanese ?provocation? at Pearl Harbour was preceded by of a series of US provocations against imperial Japan, including severing Tokyo?s oil economy and isolating the country into a diplomatic corner. ?The question was how we should maneuver them [Japan] into firing the first shot...? then US secretary of war Henry Stimson is quoted in records from November 1941. Such contrivance of casus belli by the US is not without historical parallel, before or after: the sinking of USS Maine in Havana Harbour in 1898, triggering the American-Spanish War; the torpedoing of the Lusitania in 1915, prompting US entry into World War I; the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in 1964, escalating America?s genocidal war on Vietnam; and the 9/11 ?terror attacks? in 2001, presaging Washington?s ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this historical context of Washington?s contrived wars, the present day provocations against Iran take on a much more urgent significance. In a separate Global Research article, Tom Burghardt makes a convincing case that the US (and Israel) are conducting a covert war inside Iran, including deadly explosive attacks on Iranian military sites ? two in the past month alone which claimed the lives of more than 30 Iranian personnel. As the headline of Burghardt?s article puts it: War with Iran ? a Provocation Away? The author quotes an Iranian military official saying that Iran?s armed response to suspected US/Israeli sabotages ?would not be limited to our borders?. The latest US provocation-for-a-provocation is the intrusion of a CIA stealth drone some 140 miles inside Iran?s eastern territory [3]. It is now clear that the sophisticated RQ-170 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ? which can fly at 50,000 feet undetected by radar ? was on a deliberate spying mission over Iranian territory, most probably with a view to target Iranian installations for the preemptive air strikes ? the very kind of air strikes that Washington and its allies have for months been threatening the Islamic Republic with. The Washington Post described the revelation of the latest CIA drone intrusion of Iranian territory as marking the Obama administration?s ?shift toward a more confrontational approach ? one that includes increased arms sales to Iran?s potential rivals in the Middle East as well as bellicose statements by US officials and key allies?. Included in the category of ?bellicose? statements is that from US defence secretary Leon Panetta who last week cited contingency plans for ?a wide range of military options? against Iran. Bear in mind that the decade-long confrontation with Iran is premised on the wholly unproven assertion that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons ? a claim that Iran has repeatedly denied and which years of intrusive inspections of its legitimate civilian nuclear energy facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency have failed to verify, even in spite of Western intelligence and mainstream media manipulation. The Washington Post again tells us: ?The sharpened [US] tone [against Iran] comes against a backdrop of increased diplomatic efforts in ratcheting up the economic pain for the Iranian regime, as Washington enlists European and Asian allies in coordinated efforts to choke Iran?s economy.? Reading that last paragraph again and we could easily, and frighteningly, substitute Japan in 1941 for Iran in 2011. Then the words of secretary of war Henry Stimson echo with sinister contemporary meaning: ?The question is how we maneuver them into firing the first shot.? And recall too that Washington?s war machinations with Japan led to a conflagration that engulfed the Asia-Pacific hemisphere and the unleashing of perhaps history?s single worst barbarity ? a nuclear holocaust. Only this time around, the much more advanced technological means to utterly destroy would make that nuclear barbarity appear as a mere shadow of what could be unleashed in the present day. Finian Cunningham is Global Research?s Middle East and East Africa correspondent cunninghamfin at yahoo.com Notes [1] http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28088 [2] http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28045 [3] http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28082 Please support Global Research Global Research relies on the financial support of its readers.