From ths at psalience.org Mon Dec 26 12:39:46 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:39:46 +0100 Subject: [THS] How Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories May Pose a Genuine Threat to Humanity Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111226123248.059f12e8@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/153554/how_right-wing_conspiracy_theories_may_pose_a_genuine_threat_to_humanity?page=entire AlterNet / By Joshua Holland How Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories May Pose a Genuine Threat to Humanity Tea Partiers, freaking out about "Agenda 21" and convinced global warming isn't real, are gumming up the works for those trying to save the planet. December 25, 2011 | Photo Credit: Agence-France Presse {AFP] The paranoia infecting a broad swath of the American right-wing can be comical at times -- think about Orly Taitz and her fellow Birthers. But we laugh at our own peril, because what Richard Hofstadter famously characterized as "the paranoid style in American politics" poses a serious threat to our future: the right's snowballing conspiracy theories could ultimately lead to disaster. Consider what's happening in Virginia's Middle Peninsula on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, among the areas in the U.S. most vulnerable to climate change. Earlier this month, Darryl Fears, reporting for the Washington Post, offered a glimpse into the madness that city planners have faced in recent months as a local Tea Party group, convinced that a nefarious plot by scientists and city officials is afoot, have disrupted their work trying to mitigate the potential impacts of rising sea levels. "The uprising," wrote Fears, "began at a February meeting about starting a business park for farming oysters in Mathews County." He continued: The program to help restore the Chesapeake Bay oyster population was slated for land owned by the county, but it was shouted down as a useless federal program that would expand the national debt. The proposal was tabled. As the opposition grew over the summer, confrontations became so heated that some planners posted uniformed police officers at meetings and others hired consultants to help calm audiences and manage the indoor environment, several planners said. In James City County, speakers were shouted away from a podium. In Page County, angry farmers forced commissioners to stop a meeting. In Gloucester County, planners sat stone-faced as activists took turns reading portions of the 500-page Agenda 21 text, delaying a meeting for more than an hour. "Agenda 21" is one of a number of silly but dangerous conspiracy theories sweeping through the fever swamps of the right. Although admittedly sinister-sounding, Agenda 21 is just a blueprint for sustainable development, especially in emerging economies. It outlines how wealthier countries can contribute to smarter growth through technology transfers and public education. It stresses the importance of fighting deforestation and conserving bio-diversity -- all things that normal people would consider wise. The important thing to understand about Agenda 21 is that there is absolutely nothing binding or compelling member countries to implement any part of it. It's not a treaty -- it is entirely voluntary and certainly doesn't have any connection to local governments. Yet for the right, with its long John Birch Society undercurrent of paranoia about international institutions, Agenda 21 represents some kind of dark UN conspiracy to impose socialism on the "free world." That craziness lies at the heart of Michele Bachmann's quixotic war on energy-efficient lightbulbs. Tim Murphy reported, "The Minnesota congresswoman is part of a movement that considers 'sustainability' an existential threat to the United States, one with far-reaching consequences for education, transportation, and family values." Last year, during the Denver mayoral race, Tea Party candidate Dan Maes argued that a local bike-sharing program, a popular initiative among city residents, was a "very well-disguised" part of a plan by then-Denver mayor (and now Colorado governor) John Hickenlooper for "converting Denver into a United Nations community." Alex Jones constantly hawks the conspiracy. Glenn Beck warned it would lead to "centralized control over all of human life on planet Earth." And in September, Newt Gingrich, hoping to burnish his wingnutty creds, told a group of Orlando Tea Partiers that, if elected, his first order of business would be "to cease all federal funding of any kind of activity that relates to United Nations Agenda 21." (Currently, no federal funding of any kind is used for implementing Agenda 21.) It's causing uprisings like that seen in Virginia at ordinarily dull city planning board meetings across the country. As Stephanie Mencimer reported for Mother Jones, "Agenda 21 paranoia has swept the Tea Party scene, driving activists around the country to delve into the minutiae of local governance... they're descending on planning meetings and transit debates, wielding PowerPoints about Agenda 21, and generally freaking out low-level bureaucrats with accusations about their roles in a supposed international conspiracy." Agenda 21 is inextricably linked to the most dangerous conspiracy theory going: that 97 percent of the world's climate scientists are lying when they say human activities are contributing to global climate change. This, too, is supposedly in service of the goal of destroying capitalism, which means one has to believe that climatologists around the world are not only all very political -- enough to conspire to deceive the entire world -- but they also all share the same largely discredited ideology. Back in Virginia, the Coastal Zone Management program is struggling to "help prepare for the predicted effects of climate change, especially sea-level rise on Virginia's coastal resources." The area is uniquely imperiled; in June, Darryl Fears, a science correspondent, reported that Hampton Roads is especially vulnerable because several rivers run through it on their way to the Chesapeake Bay. He continued: Unfortunately, this crowded, low-lying area also has long-term geological issues to deal with. Thirty-five million years ago, a meteor landed relatively close by and created the Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater. Hampton Roads is also home to a downward-pressing glacial formation created during the Ice Age. Scientists theorize that these ancient occurrences are causing the land to sink -- and together account for about one-third of the sea-level change. Fears notes that "the water has risen so much that Naval Station Norfolk is replacing 14 piers at $60 million each to keep ship-repair facilities high and dry," but "this geology is lost in local meetings, where distrust of the local and federal governments is at center stage." And their harassment is having the desired effect of "freaking out low-level bureaucrats" trying to prepare the area for the changes to come, preparations that have absolutely nothing to do with the United Nations, Agenda 21 or "socialism." According to Fears, Shereen Hughes, a former planning commissioner, is "worried that some officials are giving ground to fearmongers. The uprising against smart growth 'is ridiculous' and 'a conspiracy theory,' she said. But it's effective." Planners aren't saying this is wrong, Hughes said, because "most are afraid they won't have a job if they're too vocal about this issue." Tea Party members have political allies who "might stand up" against planners who complain, Hughes said. In his excellent book, Collapse, scientist Jared Diamond looked at a number of societies that had seen their physical climates change. He tried to determine what made some cultures die out while others persevered. According to Diamond, it wasn't the severity of the change, or its speed that was the determining factor. One important variable was the foresight of those societies' leaders -- their ability to properly diagnose the problem and adapt, to come up with proactive solutions to the problems they faced. Diamond, in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, said, "one always has to ask about people's cultural response. Why is it that people failed to perceive the problems developing around them, or if they perceived them, why did they fail to solve the problems that would eventually do them in? Why did some peoples perceive and recognize their problems and others not?" Diamond explained: A theme that emerges...is insulation of the decision-making elite from the consequences of their actions. That is to say, in societies where the elites do not suffer from the consequences of their decisions, but can insulate themselves, the elite are more likely to pursue their short-term interests, even though that may be bad for the long-term interests of the society, including the children of the elite themselves. Today, oil and gas corporations are still funding a bunch of crank climate change deniers in order to avoid regulations that might slow their "short-term interests" in extracting as much wealth as they can from traditional hydrocarbons. And here we have Tea Partiers -- a "movement" nurtured by business-friendly Republican operatives and backed by the Koch brothers' dirty energy money -- being whipped into a frenzy by the likes of Glenn Beck and shouting down local planners trying to do something about rising water levels. They're freaking out about energy-efficient lightbulbs and bike-sharing programs, the very sorts of things we need in order to stave off disaster. So the next time you hear a wingnut spewing feverish nonsense about "climategate" or the "globalist agenda," remember that this is not just fodder for late-night TV monologues, but the kind of stuff that has in the past brought societies faced with changing environments to their ultimate end. Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. From ths at psalience.org Mon Dec 26 12:45:10 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:45:10 +0100 Subject: [THS] How the Pentagon Will Privatize an International War on Drugs Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111226124134.059d8b20@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/153363/selling_the_drug_war_for_%243_billion_how_the_pentagon_will_privatize_an_international_war_on_drugs?page=entire Huffington Post / By Aurelia Fierros Selling the Drug War for $3 Billion? How the Pentagon Will Privatize an International War on Drugs In part of a move to transfer tactics from the "war on terror" to the "war on drugs", the Pentagon is paying private security firms millions to fight the drug war internationally. December 7, 2011 | There is an increasing perception that the war on drugs is simply unwinnable. The scandalous death toll and socioeconomic impact so far suffered in the countries implicated either as producers or as transit routes has led to such assessment. Inadequate, inefficient combat strategies and a continuously renewed global net of corruption are part of the complex problem. Unlike terrorists or guerrilla groups, cartels are not motivated by ideology or ideals but rather by profit goals; and of course, by the ambition of power. The cartels' multileveled chains of command, recurrent reorganization, consistent recruiting, international criminal alliances, increasing lethal force and sophistication, make it an omnipresent enemy: hard to target, and even harder to undermine if the battle is being fought with artillery alone. Yet, the United States has spent billions fighting such a foe during the last four decades, mainly, through no other strategy than the use of weaponry, and war tactics. The 'heart' of the criminal organizations - their finances - is mysteriously left untouched. It is all engraved on the records of the very much criticized U.S. drug policy, even prior to President Richard Nixon first coining of the term "War on Drugs" in 1971. No substantial results have been achieved since then. The Pentagon's Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office (CNTPO) - a technically unknown entity created in 1995 - just announced a $3 billion contract for U.S.-funded anti-narcotics operations around the world, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Colombia, and now also Mexico. The bids were open to private security firms starting Nov. 9 and the budget breakdown by category includes as much as $950 million for "operations, logistics, and minor construction," up to $975 million for training foreign forces, $875 million for "information" tasks, and $240 million for "program and programmatic support," as posted in the official announcement. The Pentagon's and Department of Defense strategy though the CNTPO, is part of the plan for the privatization of military assistance and intelligence services, which turns to be a very profitable business, and part of the U.S. secretive move to transfer tactics from the so called "war on terror", to the "war on drugs." According to the description given by the US federal government, the CNTPO seeks to provide a wide variety of security services, which, in Mexico's case, would include instruction for pilots and mechanics of UH-60 (Black Hawk,) Schweizer 333 or OH-58 and Bell 206 helicopters; development and delivery of curriculum, provide all personnel, equipment and materials, and conduct training for night vision helicopter pilots and crew. Other contracts would include delivery of equipment and training to exchange information on drug trafficking activity. The Mexican government hasn't addressed thus far, the potential presence of private foreign firms teaching on how to patrol the many conflicted areas of its territory, where the drug war, has resulted in 50,000 deaths in the last five years. But, as unknown as it is, and despite the fact of not having a physical office inside The Pentagon, the CNTPO does have some history: in 2009, this entity unsuccessfully tried to award a contract worth $1 billion to the Blackwater military services corporation. According to Wired News, Blackwater employees had been accused of corruption, theft and human rights violations through service of contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The scandal led to a change of name. Blackwater is now Xe Services LLC. Beyond the specific case of Blackwater, some military experts have expressed concern that mercenaries under the identity of private corporations could win lucrative contracts, exceeding their boundaries into a wide variety of activities, ranging from servicing criminals as a source of intelligence, to the violation of civil and human rights. In Mexico, many analysts have the strong belief -based in supposed hard evidence- that some mercenaries already operate in the country, paid by wealthy civilians, governors or other authorities, to do the 'dirty work' of what is called a 'social clean-up' that intends to eliminate individuals or small groups of people presumably working or being forced to work for 'x' or 'y' gang or cartel. In that sense, the argument is that foreign mercenaries disguised as security service providers would just worsen the existent climate of violence and fear. It is also import to recognize, there are some structural contradictions that are critical for this so called drug war. As it happened in Colombia, past efforts that achieved a significant decline of drug trafficking inevitably pushing it into other latitudes; in Mexico, the combat against cartels has caused the criminal activity to move and expand to other states, and even to Central America and the Caribbean. But in this 'route' rearrange cycle, is just inevitable, that eventually, the traffickers will return to the regions where they once had their business hubs. Derived of that situation, there are some questions to ask. Is the U.S. enforcing the right drug policy? Is Mexico congruent with pushing the drug war to the limit, being aware that a gigantic consumers' market is at the front door? What is the perspective for a long term? Are there alternatives? Should we consider all of them into the discussion? What is the cost? What is the benefit of each alternative? Increased incarceration rates and smuggling crackdown efforts, have not diminished the number of illicit drug users in the U.S., which is conservatively over 20 million. And although drug treatment is essential to any demand reduction, is not enough. The endeavor must begin with prevention. Because of all of this, drug policy can't be isolated. Economic and healthcare policies are also drug policy. And in this case, foreign policy becomes also drug policy. Will our governments make them ever coincide? That is the ultimate question. Meanwhile, the CNTPO will begin the disbursement of the contracts' cash in August 2012. That will be, again, $3 billion. Aurelia Fierros is an independent, veteran journalist with more than two decades experience. She has been a reporter, script writer, producer and host for TV and Radio newscasts, as well as columnist and article writer for print media. She has participated in several political campaigns as an elections beat reporter, as communications strategy advisor and as a speech writer. From ths at psalience.org Mon Dec 26 12:49:52 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2011 12:49:52 +0100 Subject: [THS] Patriot Missiles Seized, Sold To China by Israel Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111226124927.0416e758@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/12/23/breaking-patriot-missiles-seized-sold-to-china-by-israel/ Breaking: Patriot Missiles Seized, Sold To China by Israel (Updates) Iron Dome Defense Missiles Seized by Finland, Labeled ?Fireworks? 69 Newest Patriot Missiles Bound For Reds ? Thorco Shipping representative, Thomas Mikkelsen said he was unaware any such cargo was on board his vessel? a statement that categorically ?debunks? attempts at denial ? Editor) by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor Finnish authorities have confirmed the seizure of 69 Patriot missiles manufactured by Raytheon Corporation today. During a routine search of the MS Thor Liberty, a ship flagged by the Isle of Man, at the Finnish port of Kotka, authorities found 69 Patriot missiles of a type capable of intercepting ICBMs, the most modern available and America?s most sensitive military technology. Update: Germany officials have offered to take responsibility for the shipment to China though there is no record of Germany ever having received the missiles in the first place. There had been a shipment of PAC 2 missiles, 64, several months ago, which had been completed. No further shipment had been scheduled. Germany is responding to a request from Netanyahu to Merkel to save Israel from a potential spy scandal. Similarly, a South Korean paper has published a story about the missiles but at no time has the South Korean embassy in Helsinki, made a statement or made contact with authorities as would be expected. This one gets more interesting every day. Germany has a long history of working with Israel, call it ?war guilt? or profiteering. The centrifuges used to develop nuclear weapons that were distributed by Israel, first to South Africa then by Israeli Johann Meyer to Libya were of Germany origin. Saddam Hussein received his biological and chemical warfare equipment from Germany, but through Bush family sources, not Israel. We are told the missiles heading to China were to be ?cloned? for sale along with radar and launch units, already there. They would be sold worldwide under Israeli branding in competition with the US. Israel is free to sell to clients the US would be likely to refuse. The JA 20 Stealth fighter, built from plans stolen by Bush era White House Israeli ?dual-citizens? is only one of dozens of defense projects stolen by Israeli spies and sent to China. China has every current nuclear weapons design and plans to upgrade its submarine fleet and will be building aircraft carriers eventually. All will be done with American technology. Here is the Photo of the Ship's 'Very Special' Explosives in Shrink Wrapped Cardboard Boxes. Do You Really Think Western Allied/NATO Countries Transport Like This, or Would Allow Hugely Expensive ABMs to be Put on a Ship Like This? If there Was a Detonation Device in One of These Boxes That Could Set It Off, It Would Go Up Like an A-bomb. Attempts to represent this as a sale of ?second hand? PAC 2 missiles, stories filling the blogosphere, fail to address that these are PAC 3 advanced missiles and labeled for shipment to China, not Korea. Patriot ICBM Interceptor - PAC3 The next stop for this cargo, valued at over $4 billion even without the associated radar, which may well have been shipped via some other method, was Shanghai, China. Yet the Chinese government has given an official denial of any knowledge of this transaction. They went even further, they claimed the missiles were heading to South Korea. However, were China to have given the issue a second?s thought, it would have been advisable to have failed to acknowledge any familiarity with the issue whatsoever. China walked into a trap, one that uncovered their espionage cooperation agreements that involved, not the receipt of advanced Patriot missile systems but the full plans for the F22 stealth fighter. Initial stories from 2009 indicating China has received plans for the F35 though espionage with Israel were false. The F22 is a far more advanced aircraft. On April 21, 2009, the Department of Defense announced the theft of 1.5 terabytes of data on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the platform meant give the United States and her allies air superiority for the next 40 years. In a flash, all that was gone, $300 billion dollars of funding down the drain, every system, defense, offense, stealth, everything needed to build one or shoot it down, all gone. Day one, China was accused but it wasn?t China, it wasn?t Iran, it wasn?t Pakistan. The theft left a clear signature, one identical to the data Wikileaks has been receiving, sources inside the Pentagon repeating the actions of Israeli-Soviet spy, Jonathan Pollard. As vital as the F-35 is to America?s defense, Pollard?s triumph on behalf of Soviet Russia and Israel dwarfs the current espionage coup. Since the 2009 announcement, there has been nothing but silence. Now we learn the Pentagon story was ?cover? and it was the F22 Raptor, not the F35, an ?export plane,? that was compromised: F-22A Raptors - America Top Fighter The Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 Raptor is a single-seat, twin-engine fifth-generation super maneuverable fighter aircraft that uses stealth technology. It was designed primarily as an air superiority fighter, but has additional capabilities that include ground attack, electronic warfare, and signals intelligence roles.[6]Lockheed Martin Aeronautics is the prime contractor and is responsible for the majority of the airframe, weapon systems and final assembly of the F-22. Program partner Boeing Defense, Space & Security provides the wings, aft fuselage, avionics integration, and training systems. The aircraft was variously designated F-22 and F/A-22 during the years prior to formally entering USAF service in December 2005 as the F-22A. Despite a protracted and costly development period, the United States Air Force considers the F-22 a critical component of US tactical air power, and claims that the aircraft is unmatched by any known or projected fighter.[7] While Lockheed Martin claims that the Raptor?s combination of stealth, speed, agility, precision and situational awareness, combined with air-to-air and air-to-ground combat capabilities, makes it the best overall fighter in the world today.[8] Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, former Chief of the Australian Defence Force, said in 2004 that the ?F-22 will be the most outstanding fighter plane ever built.?[9] Raptor Formation The high cost of the aircraft, a lack of clear air-to-air combat missions because of delays in the Russian and Chinese fifth-generation fighter programs, a US ban on Raptor exports, and the ongoing development of the planned cheaper and more versatile F-35 resulted in calls to end F-22 production.[N 1] In April 2009 the US Department of Defense proposed to cease placing new orders, subject to Congressional approval, for a final procurement tally of 187 Raptors.[11] The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 lacked funding for further F-22 production. The final F-22 Raptor fighter jet rolled off the assembly line on 13 December 2011 during a ceremony at the Lockheed Martin aircraft plant at Dobbins Air Reserve Base.[2] China is testing a 5th generation fighter, 20 years earlier than estimated, the JA 20. It is based on systems from the Raptor and is considered a far superior plane to the F 35. From a January, 2011 Guardian story suppressed in the United States: Chinese F22 Raptor Clone, 20 Years Early A photograph of what is reported to be a new Chinese stealth fighter and ?carrier-killer? missile has prompted concerns that a tilt in the balance of military power in the western Pacific towards China may come sooner than expected. The emergence of the hi-tech weaponry ? which would make it more difficult for the US navy and air force to project power close to Taiwan and elsewhere on China?s coastline ? comes at a politically sensitive time. Later this month, President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, will hold a summit in Washington aimed at patching up their differences after a niggling year in bilateral relations. The photograph, of what appears to be a prototype J-20 jet undergoing runway tests, has been circulating on the internet since last week, fueling speculation that China?s fifth-generation fighter may fly ahead of forecast. The defence ministry has yet to comment on the image, which seems to have been shot from long-distance near the Chengdu aircraft design institute. The photographer is also unknown, which has added to the mystery about its origins and authenticity as well as the motive of the distributor. But defence analysts believe this is the first glimpse of the twin-engined, chiseled-nosed plane that mixes Russian engine technology with a fuselage design similar to that of the US air force?s F-22 ?stealth? fighter, which can avoid detection by radar. If confirmed, it would be an impressive step forward for the Chinese air force, which until now has largely depended on foreign-made or designed planes. ?I?d say these are, indeed, genuine photos of a prototype that will make its maiden flight very soon,? said Peter Felstead, the editor of Jane?s Defence Weekly. The J20 is likely to be many years from deployment, but the US defence secretary, Robert Gates ? who visits Beijing next week ? may have to revise an earlier prediction that China will not have a fifth generation aircraft by 2020. It is not the only challenge to US superiority in the region. China has refurbished a Ukrainian aircraft carrier and wants to build its own by 2020. The US and Israel had scheduled an air defense exercise this week but no Patriot missiles were to be shipped to Israel as part of their mission, DOD sources indicate. This week?s exercise was to use Patriot missiles deployed from American ships in the eastern Mediterranean to test Israeli missile defenses. Reports indicate that all missiles for this exercise have been accounted for. " Patriots Away " These units, the most advanced Patriot system had only been supplied to nation, Israel. The 69 Patriot ICBM interceptors are believed to be a highly secret consignment demanded by Israel as protection from any retaliatory strike by Iran were war to break out in the region. Instead of deploying them, the missiles were apparently sold to China labeled as ?fireworks? according to Interior Minister Paivi Rasanen. Though the missiles themselves were worth only $4 billion, the technology transfer itself would be worth over $125 billion, and represent a significant loss of defense capability for the United States. Sources termed it, ?An absolute disaster, even if they only received the radar systems alone, much less the missiles. That this would go unreported though the story was broken in Europe 48 hours ago is astounding. Nobody in Washington has this although even the BBC report contains more than enough information to bring Washington to a halt. DOD sources indicate that it would be unusual for these missiles to be moved without radar and launch facilities to have been moved in advance. It was also indicated that the Department of Defense denies shipping any such missiles to Germany or anywhere else in Europe, labeled as ?fireworks? or anything else. The owner of the ship of record is Thorco Shipping. Their representative, Thomas Mikkelsen said he was unaware any such cargo was on board his vessel. Patriot Command Control Center Claims were made that the missiles were destined for South Korea but an examination of documentation indicated that there were no South Korean ports scheduled. Additionally, the likelihood that the US government would ship its most valuable and secret missile technology through Germany mislabeled as ?fireworks? rather than on a C 17 under military security supports the Finnish claim. Finnish police say they opened all 69 units, are recording serial numbers and have been unable to find any documentation indicating the real ownership of the seized cargo. And they certainly have found nothing involving the any of the claimed ?cover stories? involving Germany or Korea, otherwise, of course, the cargo would never have been seized nor would there have been arrests made. Detective Superintendent Timo Virtanen of the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation is in charge of the case. He has stated: ?Actually, in our investigation at the moment, we have got the information that we found 69 Patriot missiles on the ship and around 160 tonnes of explosives.? The explosives are identified as nitroguandine, a low sensitivity explosive with a very high detonation speed. These explosives have several uses, among them launching shipboard or submarine launched missiles or in the development and testing of nuclear weapons design. Finnish authorities indicate the explosives were packed in an ?informal? and highly dangerous manner. Finnish authorities indicate that the Thor Liberty?s captain and chief officer are under arrest on suspicion of arms trafficking. Both are citizens of the Ukraine. The government of China has denied all knowledge of the incident although the cargo was destined for their ports. The head of Finnish Customs CID, Petri Louatmaa said this was not the first such incident but by far the most serious he has ever heard of. Finland has requested ?information? from several countries. The US Department of Defense has assured all involved that these missiles were not being sent to South Korea and that their presence on a civilian ship either being loaded in Germany or in port in Finland was in now way a part of any exercise nor any accepted methodology for the handling of this type of ultra-high technology weaponry. American sources further indicated confusion at the odd number of missiles: ?There are two missiles per launch container. The containers can?t be easily opened and the missiles can?t be removed for examination without damage to the launch mechanism. They are delivered for mounting to ships or land based mobile launchers. Thus, the packaging indicated either demonstrates confusion or serious unprofessional tampering.? Israeli officials have failed to respond to questions about the consignment. Air Force transport command personnel indicate that high tech transfers to Israel are routinely offloaded at Schipol Airport in the Netherlands where Israel maintains secure facilities. Editing: Jim W. Dean Patriot PAC3s Are Shipped in Pairs - Ground to Air Patriots are Shipped With Lauchers From ths at psalience.org Tue Dec 27 18:28:32 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:28:32 +0100 Subject: [THS] William Bowles: Empire and the Lies of the Corporate Media: Are we Living in a Fool's Paradise? Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111227182542.04c33608@mail.messagingengine.com> Empire and the Lies of the Corporate Media: Are we Living in a Fool's Paradise? By William Bowles URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28308 Global Research, December 21, 2011 williambowles.info Well 2011 has been nothing if not eventful but frankly, in spite of all the #Occupy this and #Occupy that, it's not been a good year for us progresssives or the planet. The Empire acts with increasing, not decreasing impunity, desperate now to try and keep ahead of events lest events take control of it. Are we living in a fool's paradise? A question keeps nagging at me: Are all of us, including the left, reacting to an entirely engineered reality, fed to us via an all-embracing media? We get blown this way and that, all of it being determined by whatever 'event' the globalized media decides to feed us with. Then, just as 'mysteriously', the 'event' disappears to be replaced by yet another 'event'. The old Anarchist cry of 'Do not adjust your mind, there's a fault in reality' takes on an entirely new kind of import given the power of the media to determine what's 'real' for us. What this means is that the media effectively acts as an agent provocateur for the state and big business as it decides for us what is actually going on in the world. In turn, progressives make decisions based not on what needs to be done, but as a reaction to the 'news' in a weird political version of the Heisenberg Effect. Press coverage of the Summer Riots is a perfect example of this process in action whereby the media, by focusing solely on the violence and destruction, not only transformed it into a 'riot without a cause' but in doing so actually incited even more violence and destruction, just as ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) are worn as 'badges of honour' by alienated youth who actually go out of their way to get one (or two). Aside from anything else it demonstrates just how out-of-touch the political elite is with the reality of life as it is really lived by a goodly chunk of the population; the so-called underclass. Life as supplied to us is now an endless succession of 'crises' or public spectacles (the lines between the two often blur): 'Ground-to-air missiles 'may protect' London 2012 games' -- BBC News, 14 November 2011. In fact, the very nature of BBC's headlines betray the essence of how to report the 'news' as a succession of dramas to be played out, not in the real world that you and I live in but in the world created by a globalized, corporate media machine. 'Crises' are played out in the TV equivalent of 'flaming' (shooting off at the mouth without thinking). Dictators come and go... All but the dramatic essence is removed and along with it real meaning disappears. This is the triumph of television, the ability to be able to cut and paste reality in its entirety. And the question, what of life outside the media-supplied 'reality' has been brought home to me by MSM's coverage of the #Occupy 'movement'. The left debates its relevance and its potential endlessly but within the confines of a media-supplied reality. All that's solid melts into air, or in this case bits and bytes. The #Occupy movement exists for as long as it grabs the headlines and for said headlines to work, an element of violence is an absolutely necessary ingredient for it to become 'news'. But once the 'confrontations' are gone and the 'struggle' safely removed to the controllable environment of the High Court, the story is no longer 'newsworthy' except as a footnote to '2011 - Year of Occupations'. We are now literally, passive observers of our own funerals in a world of total media saturation and control. A world of endless tragedy but at a distance, mediated by an unseen hand and fed to us pretty much like an out-of-control soap opera, where events break and at first reporting is chaotic and normally wrong but as soon as the MSM has gotten hold of the 'right script' then 'reasons', 'causes' and 'solutions' can then be inserted for each unfolding, dramatic episode. Gaddafi's tortured, broken and abused body presented to us as the rightful end to a 'weirdo celebrity', a victim of his own success and failure. First courted then betrayed, an epic worthy of a plot by Shakespeare. The 'story' can then be handled as spectacle and for as long as it remains spectacle it's a product that can be safely and passively consumed. In this sense the #Occupy movement has also become a victim of its own success. It plays out its life not in the real world but in that other reality, that the rest of us live in, the one supplied by the corporate media machine. In turn this determines our relationship with it or lack of one. The media for example talks of how occupations or strikes affect the public, as if by some miraculous process, the occupiers or strikers are no longer part of the 'public'. They've been relocated to media-land to live lives as ephemeral as the photons they are made of. It's for this reason that the question of the role of class in the proceedings rarely if ever figures in media-land, for if it were to explore the role of class with as much zeal as it explores the 'role' of violence, it would have to redefine its use of the word 'public' let alone violence. It would also have to reveal which side of the class divide it's actually on. If it's true, and I think it is, that it's working people who are paying the price for the crimes of the 1%, the ones who own the capital that (just about) makes capitalism work, then it's a question of a struggle between two classes; those who own capital and those who don't. Currently the media represents the interests of the 1% of the 'public' that imposes its reality on the proceedings as if it's ours. A reality in which certain fundamentals are a 'given', for example, the rule of private capital, the primacy of the state to act with impunity in all things in order to 'protect our national interest'. In a phrase, the preservation of the existing order and way of doing things. Even the tools that we now have including blogs, social networking and instantaneous video have proved to be very powerful tools of propaganda for the Empire. Tools that have been turned against us as is the case with Libya and now Syria. The BBC's use of video from cellphones--mostly unattributed and revealing nothing about what is actually going on in Syria--have become the staple diet of the BBC's alleged news coverage of Syria, claiming that they're not allowed into the country. And 'bloggers' are now a regular feature of MSM coverage, which is fine except that only a couple of years ago, the MSM was ranting on about how 'blogging' was going to be the death of 'professional' journalism. If only... But no more, the MSM realized that 'reality' video was the perfect tool of propaganda, as it appears that it's 'the people' speaking. The BBC is merely relaying 'reality' to its public and in the process it accrues the authenticity needed to make it believable. To make it credible. And in doing so, the MSM has jettisoned the last remnants of what it chooses to call 'impartial and objective' journalism. The drama and (hidden) tragedy of the destruction of Libya was played out for us as if it were cin?ma verit?, all grainy footage and hand-held cameras swinging about wildly all over the place, inter-cut with BBC propagandists masquerading as news men standing in front of a weapon of death boasting to the viewer of its awesome fire power. As the Empire acts with increasing impunity, so too does the media. The Media and the Empire in total lockstep. 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 Tue Dec 27 19:10:59 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:10:59 +0100 Subject: [THS] Sue Blackmore: Will Timothy Leary's papers turn us on to LSD? Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111227190751.057b57e8@mail.messagingengine.com> Will Timothy Leary's papers turn us on to LSD? Leary was far from crazy in claiming psychedelics have healing powers. Hopefully the sale of his papers will help us learn more Sue Blackmore guardian.co.uk, Saturday 18 June 2011 11.00 BST [photo] Timothy Leary (centre) is led to customs following his arrest at La Guardia airport for re-entering the US as a narcotics user. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis What was Timothy Leary really up to? We may soon know more now that the New York public library is buying 335 boxes of his papers, videotapes, letters and photographs for $900,000. Once it has spent 18 months to two years sorting them out, the collection will be available to the public. These papers are not just the rants of this decidedly peculiar man ? the 1960s drugs guru whom Richard Nixon called "the most dangerous man in America". There is correspondence with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Cary Grant, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Arthur Koestler. Perhaps these papers will give a glimpse of great genius arising from the clash of creative minds with powerful drugs ? of insights gained and mystical peaks reached. Or perhaps they will show the horrors and mental decline of drug abuse and excess. Possibly the most interesting will be the numerous "session records", that is, descriptions of taking LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and other psychedelic drugs. These will presumably give a more realistic picture of what these poets, writers, professors and actors actually experienced at the time. Leary's is a sad story. A professor at Harvard, he took his first mushroom trip in 1960 and declared that he learned more in the following five hours than he had done in 15 years of study and research in psychology. This experience led to the Harvard Psilocybin Project, which Leary ran along with Ralph Metzner and fellow professor Richard Alpert. It was Alpert who subsequently swapped drugs for Eastern religion and became Baba Ram Dass. In 1962 Leary took LSD and reportedly had "the most shattering experience of his life". This new, purely synthetic drug seemed to revealpreviously hidden realities and he wanted to share his discoveries with the world. Yet his own world began falling apart. Having claimed he had given LSD (which was then legal) to hundreds of Harvard students he was eventually sacked for not turning up to teach classes. He was later convicted of possessing marijuana and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He escaped from a high security jail and fled with his wife to Algeria and then Switzerland but was finally arrested in Afghanistan and returned to prison for three more years. Once free, he devoted his undoubtedly extraordinary mind and the last 20 years of his life to virtual reality, programming and cyberculture. When dying from prostate cancer he worked with friends to document the whole messy process. He died in 1996 and a portion of his ashes was launched into space. Leary believed that psychedelic drugs, used at the right dosage, in the right company and setting and with appropriate psychological support, could provide better therapy than any conventional method, and even provoke magically rapid transformations. He explored the use of psychedelics to treat alcoholism and other addictions, and worked in prisons to use them as a means of reforming prisoners' lives. Many of his research participants reported mystical or spiritual experiences, and claimed that their drug experiences permanently changed their lives for the better. We now know that these claims are far from crazy, and that psychedelics have tremendous potential for good as well as harm. The tragedy is that Leary's own actions contributed to the disaster of drug prohibition. On 6 October 1966, LSD was made illegal in the US and was so tightly controlled that not only were supply and possession made crimes but all of the legitimate research programmes were closed down. Not only was this extraordinary drug demonised and access denied to everyone who might have benefited from it, but also even researchers were prevented from learning anything more about it. [the following paragraph completely ruins what was otherwise a promising retrospective - THS] Arguably Leary himself was responsible for wrecking any chance that psilocybin or LSD could become respected and well-used drugs. Possibly if he hadn't got so carried away, so drunk with celebrity, and so successful at spreading the catchy meme "Turn on, tune in, drop out" we might now be living in a better world. Nothing can now wipe away those disastrous decades of prohibition, even though they may now be nearing their end, but perhaps these papers will help us better understand how it all came about. From ths at psalience.org Tue Dec 27 19:20:17 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:20:17 +0100 Subject: [THS] A flawed but dazzling study of the origins of the renaissance Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111227191946.04ba1dc0@mail.messagingengine.com> The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt - review A flawed but dazzling study of the origins of the renaissance Colin Burrow guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 December 2011 22.55 GMT Engraving of Poggio Bracciolini Searcher for monastic treasures: Poggio Bracciolini. Photograph: Archive Photos/Getty Images In the winter of 1417 the papal secretary Poggio Bracciolini made a great discovery. In an abbey in Germany he came across a manuscript of a long-lost classical poem, Lucretius's De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of the Universe"). This event is vividly described by the renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt in The Swerve. He sees it as the origin of the renaissance and, in effect, of modernity. What was the poem that Poggio rediscovered? Lucretius was a passionate follower of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. He believed that the gods did not concern themselves with mortal affairs and did not create the universe, which was composed of minuscule particles. These atoms move perpetually and randomly through a void. As they do so they "swerve" from a direct course, and may strike against each other. Life is one result of this swerve, as atoms assemble themselves into forms that enable us to see and breathe. At some point our atoms will break free and move on in their eternal course through the void. That meant there was no afterlife, no eternal reward for virtue, and no perpetual punishment for vice. As a result human beings should not fear death. For the short period in which we live and feel desire, pleasure is the only end we should seek. Nothing else matters. Lucretius created from these philosophical beliefs a poem in the same league as Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost. De Rerum Natura contains passionate arguments against the fear of death, as well as some amazing descriptions. Lucretius describes an entirely god-free origin of life, in which living creatures simply heave themselves from the earth, not through the actions of a creator, but as a result of the vital forces of the universe. It's not hard to imagine why Lucretius was unpopular in the early middle ages. Other pagan philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, allowed for a creator. Their ethical systems could, with some whittling and squeezing, be fitted to Christian doctrine. Epicureanism, however, simply would not fit. Although it was in fact an austere philosophy in which "pleasure" meant freedom from pain and fear rather than self-indulgence, epicureanism became identified among most Christian writers with swinish self-indulgence. St Jerome even claimed in the fourth century that Lucretius (about whose life we know almost nothing) went mad with love, and then killed himself. Eventually, but unsurprisingly, the great medieval monasteries that preserved classical texts by patient copying of manuscripts came to neglect him. Most of The Swerve is devoted to this story of loss and retrieval. It begins with a crisis in the Catholic church and in the career of Poggio Bracciolini, who was personal secretary to John XXIII. In the early 15th century there were two popes, one at Rome and the other at Avignon. In 1414 a council was held at Constance in Germany to resolve the dispute. It led to the fall of John XXIII from power. With the end of his master's career, Poggio also lost his job. He set off to scour German monasteries for the classical texts that he was expert at finding and copying. And there he found his Lucretius, which he had copied and sent to his friend Niccol? Niccoli at Florence. Niccoli kept the manuscript for 12 years, and then finally allowed further copies to be produced. From these copies Lucretius found his way into print. With this spread of secularist and atomist thought, Greenblatt argues, the renaissance began. The story is told with all Greenblatt's style and panache. He brings the silent labours of a medieval scriptorium to life by describing the elaborate sign-language that scribes used to indicate which manuscript they needed to consult: a scribe called for a particularly offensive pagan text such as Lucretius by putting two fingers in his mouth "as if he were gagging". In order to show how the Roman elite valued epicureanism he takes us beneath the ash at Herculaneum into the so-called "House of the Papyri", where fragments of Lucretius and other epicurean writers have been discovered, and uses that setting to evoke the richness of Roman philosophical life. He conveys the passion for texts and for the classical past that drew humanists such as Poggio to scour monastic libraries because he himself shares their fascination with retrieval and discovery. But is it right to identify the recovery of Lucretius with the beginning of the renaissance? When Poggio found De Rerum Natura, Greenblatt argues, he discovered "a book that would help in time to dismantle his entire world" by bringing a concern for worldly pleasure to the moral life. Greenblatt traces Lucretius's atomism into Galileo's astronomy and Newton's physics. He follows "the swerve" of Lucretius's atoms briefly into the works of Shakespeare and Montaigne. He even sees the focus on pleasure in theUtopia of the devout Catholic Sir Thomas More as resulting from Lucretius. Poggio's discovery, he argues, brought about a liberation for scientific and religious thought that spread throughout Europe. The story told by the book ? epicureanism flourished at Rome, was lost, and then was suddenly rediscovered and transformed the world ? reflects the historical outlook of the humanists themselves. It was common for 14th and 15th-century scholars to claim that there was a destruction of classical learning in the middle ages, or, as Greenblatt calls it, "a Great Vanishing", and that they were bringing the classical past back to life. As Francesco Barbaro wrote to Poggio: "You have revived so many illustrious men and such wise men, who were dead from eternity." Was this story really true? It more or less works for De Rerum Natura, which was indeed "lost" (or at least not often recopied between the 13th and 15th centuries) and then found on a particular day by an individual humanist. But the story that the renaissance suddenly began with a great rediscovery of the pagan past does not work so well in relation to other classical authors. Virgil, Ovid and Aristotle were more or less continuously read from antiquity until the age of print. In many cases humanists found more reliable manuscripts, and they sometimes discovered whole texts. But they did not simply end the "ignorance" of the dark ages. Indeed they tended to exaggerate that ignorance to emphasise their own novelty. The reason for this is obvious. To have a "renaissance" or rebirth of classical learning, you have to imagine that it died. As well as sharing the humanists' passion for antiquity, Greenblatt shares their prejudice against medieval Christianity, which he portrays with the vividness but also the crudity of a cartoon. "If Lucretius offered a moralised and purified version of the Roman pleasure principle, Christianity offered a moralised and purified version of the Roman pain principle," Greenblatt declares. His descriptions of medieval monasticism emphasise the strict discipline of monastic orders, the erasure of personal identity among scribes and the mortification of the flesh. Greenblatt's version of the middle ages is more or less exactly that of the humanists, in which characterless monks and self-flagellating nuns rejoice in the savage discipline of the church. From this they needed Lucretius to set them free. Centuries before the rediscovery of Lucretius many Christians incorporated philosophical accounts of pleasure and love from the classical philosophers into their theology. Aquinas and Dante, who play little part in Greenblatt's description of medieval Christianity, found room for both love and pleasure in their philosophies. Those "classical" currents within Catholic thought are a much more likely source than Lucretius for Thomas More's descriptions of the rational pleasures enjoyed by his Utopians. They are among the many strands of thought that lie behind "renaissance" thinking, and indeed behind humanism too. Greenblatt's story of the unleashing of the pleasure principle on the European world after the discovery of Lucretius conveys his own passion for discovery, and displays his brilliance as a storyteller. The Swerve is, though, a dazzling retelling of the old humanist myth of the heroic liberation of classical learning from centuries of monastic darkness. The light of Rome fades into gloom, sheep graze in the Forum; then the humanists rebel against the orthodoxies of the church, bring about a great recovery of classical texts and generate a new intellectual dawn. This book makes that story into a great read, but it cannot make it entirely true. From ths at psalience.org Wed Dec 28 12:38:54 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:38:54 +0100 Subject: [THS] Joe Bageant - from 2004 - Is the President Nuts? Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111228123632.06290d18@mail.messagingengine.com> JOE BAGEANT IS THE PRESIDENT NUTS? AND, IF SO, DOES IT MATTER? ColdType WRITING WORTH READING FROM AROUND THE WORLD www.coldtype.net ? Joe Bageant 2004 Supposedly, if you put live frogs in a kettle of cold water on the stove, then raise the temperature very slowly, the frogs will eventually boil to death without trying to escape. I don?t know if that is true, but it does seem the perfect, if sometimes overused, analogy for what we see going on around us in America. My guess is that we frogs are about medium done for. Having neither cooked frogs nor lived in a fascist state, I am not a practiced judge of these things, but I?m quite sure the end result of either is in no way desirable for frogs or human beings. I do notice, however, that some frogs are turning quite red. Here in the States there is now a trend of wearing red on Fridays in silent protest of the Bush junta. Reportedly, this is modeled after a 1940 practice by citizens of Nazi-occupied Norway, though it is hard to imagine why oppressed Norwegians would do anything that might make them stand out to their oppressors. Still, urban legend or not, it?s all over the Internet and one would suppose quite a few people on the ?left-coast? are sporting red. By now, it?s probably old hat out there. Not so here in the Washington D.C. area, where we have always thought twice before expressing dissent with any administration, given that the government dominates employment and many other aspects of our lives, either directly or indirectly. If your employer does not sell something to the government, your spouse may well work in a federal agency, etc. Political views do affect things at work, and it is usually best to keep them to yourself. But these days many of us feel something stranger than normal Washington politics going on ? an unseen, mostly unspoken, but surely-felt atmosphere of spooky fear. Is it chilly in here, or is that the leer of a mad man? Still though, the Eastern Seaboard has always been more repressed than the West. So if you mention in polite company how spooky our current political regime seems, most people will look at you like you are crazy, or perhaps even explode into a fanatical defense of George W. Bush, in which case you know you have pressed a neo-con?s button. Only a minority here will openly discuss the chilling parallels that informed people see in the Bush junta with the rise of Nazi Germany. This is partly because the more hysterical liberals have abused that analogy to death since the beginning of the administration, before there was much evidence; so it has been considered off limits in moderate, intelligent circles. This is slowly changing I believe, because it is now becoming obvious that George W. Bush is not merely dumb ? he may well be nuts. Every day his actions look more like a genuinely disordered and dangerous mind at work. Not exactly news to those of us who long ago read the same observation on the Internet, or in recently published books to that effect. But what is news is that ordinary nonpolitical white collar working puds, the dreary commuter tribes, in the suburbs and outlying towns are starting to whisper it among themselves. People are beginning to more openly address the question of whether our commander in chief is a certifiable loopjob ? and if he is, just what kind of nuts he may be ? and to do so in language average literate folks can understand without covering the entire Jungian cosmology or diving into Freud?s turgid depths. In calling numerous psychiatrist friends, I learned it is considered unethical for licensed psychiatrists to comment publicly on the mental state of an American president, and I can?t say I disagree with that. But the mind of the guy who now has one finger on the red nuclear button and the other up his nose is a matter that should be talked about and is being talked about and I?ll be damned if I?m going to avoid it. So we will have to punt and hope for the best. Let?s keep it simple: Stupidity alone cannot account for George Bush?s behavior ? especially when his behavior so well matches known pathologies. For example, if an ordinary citizen believed he was being directed by God to attack ?the governments where the Bible happened,? as he once described the Middle East, or thought that ordering the execution of a criminal was funny as hell, or saw everyone who disagreed with him as an agent of the Devil, he or she would be put on some heavy meds at the very least. Hell, I?ve been medicated for a lot less. A fellow named Paul Levy in Florida has circulated an email calling Bush?s condition ?malignant narcissism.? As an off-again-on-again enthusiast of Jung and Freud, I was naturally interested in this, and after dredging up what I remember from psychology classes, a few books (and yes, a long stint in therapy myself) his observations seem at least a little insightful. If nothing else, he has given us some terms and contexts in which to consider what is going on. Contexts we will certainly never hear or see in the media. According to Levy, Bush?s behavior would be normal behavior for a malignant narcissist who finds himself with the kind of power a US president has. The narcissist would conclude that he is divinely inspired by God and see his command of the world?s mightiest army and its wealthiest nation as proof God blesses his efforts. In some ways that makes him an average American. Thanks to our Puritan beginnings, we have long believed that power and wealth are manifestations of God?s preference for an individual or a nation, and unfortunately tend to act on this mystical assumption. Whether we are saving the world from communism by killing Southeast Asians or covertly assassinating the democratically-elected leftist president of a Latin American nation, it is viewed as liberating the planet from the evil boogers Americans see everywhere, but which emanate from our own national psyche. The world being imperfect, America?s quest to make it perfect it by destroying all it considers impure can only lead to much world destruction, of course. It also bears a nasty resemblance to the Nazi obsession with purification. Another characteristic of malign narcissism is said to be a near or absolute lack of com- passion. So when George Bush laughed and mocked the last-minute pleading of Carla Faye Tucker, whom he sent to the death chamber in Texas, (?Ohhh, pleeeeze don?t kill me!? he mimicked in a scornful whine on a conservative talk show) he had no idea saner people do not find this funny. I am told it is characteristic of malignant narcissists not to feel any remorse whatsoever. We might also assume that the deaths of American GIs have little effect on him either, though he must pretend so on camera. Ass-scratchers + God = strange times indeed Bush doesn?t fit our image of the hysterical madman exhorting a nation down a megalomaniacal path toward horror. In fact, most Americans, quite understandably, would rather have a beer and watch a game with George Bush than, say, with Al Gore. Meaning that George Bush has what campaign strategists call ?ass-scratcher appeal? with the average guy. He also seems to have a mesmerizing effect on conservative Americans that is totally inexplicable to the rest of us. He can lie, then lie about the lie, then all but admit he lied and they still come running and falling like wheat before the sickle. Personally, I think it is the power of delusion (having deluded some ex-wives, bosses and the IRS a few times myself), Bush?s own and our national one. In his personal delusion, Bush is so convinced of his own words that he comes off as very convincing to others. He is very seductive to most Americans? concept of themselves as a nation. To them he looks like the first president in a long time to assert what is ?right about America,? and especially so following a president who was deemed ?slick? and kept a woman under his desk (Which strikes some of us coarser types as pretty damned slick if you can get away with it.) Bush has charisma to those who believe the world is a mean place and that subtler considerations only get in the way. Especially fearful conservatives, always operating from the politics of scarcity, fearful of losing what they have gained materially, those being the core operating values of standard conservatism.Neo-conservatives, of course, are willing to kill you to get it in the first place. If Bush has given conservatives cause for joy, he has given fundamentalist Christians an absolute hard-on. With tears of joy and praise, they have embraced him as their longawaited national savior, and if the concept of malign narcissism is right, about the only thing a narcissist finds more appealing than being president is being the Messiah. So, hand-in-hand Bush and these Christian soldiers, clothed in the infallible rightness of their agenda ? an ultra-fundamentalist Christian America with dominion over a world hammered (bombed if need be) into a likeness of itself, they stomp forward in close hoplite ranks. Bush poses against backdrops that make halos of the presidential seal, appearing as Christ-like as possible. The adoring throng does not fail to be properly inspired, despite his congenital close-eyed squint. Even without psychological theories of narcissism, the whole idea of ecstatic Christian masses spotting a halo around Bush?s head in Newsweek seems a little nuts at face value, though it must make Karl Rove pee his pants with glee in that campaign headquarters known as the White House. Now comes the Hitler analogy, and I?ll be damned if I am going to apologize for it: Just as Hitler struck a chord deep in the German unconscious, Bush is touching something within the American unconscious. Whether he is a manifestation of our national mental state, or whether we are unwitting agents of his could be argued. It certainly seems symbiotic.We did elect him for a reason, and history will probably record that reason as not being a very pretty one, the similarities in our national behavior being unnervingly similar to those of pre-war Germany. Why do so many assumedly decent, normal Americans support insane actions such as the Iraq War, strange off-shore wire cage prisons in Cuba, the government?s own admission of a dozen secret prisons around the world, or stubborn opposition to the world tribunal for war criminals and ethnic cleansers? Doesn?t anyone find these things strange? In fact, doesn?t anyone find it strange that two Bushes were elected president so closely together, the father being less than gifted, and the son as useless as tits on a boar hog? (Except at escaping his many failed businesses with loads of cash, rather like the gambler who shoots out the lights and grabs the pot.) If that?s not strange I don?t know what is. When Fidel Castro offered to monitor the 2000 presidential election count in Florida, we probably could not have done any worse by taking him up on it. Yet most Americans, including their media, did not seem to find all this one bit odd, and pretended that the Brownshirts torching black votes on down in Florida (despite the Brownshirts being orchestrated by yet a third Bush!) was just another zany little election fracas. Since then, the ACLU has won a lawsuit proving that it was indeed a mugging going on in Florida, and the courts have ordered those tens of thousands of black voters restored to the rolls. The Republican dominated state?s reply has been an unspoken but clear as hell, ?fuck you!? Those black voters are still off the rolls as I write. I do not have to go as far as the Sunshine State to feel the chill of suspicious eyes upon me. Right here in Northern Virginia, the northernmost point of the American South, I get little moments of fear that make me wonder if I am being singled out.Maybe I?m just paranoid. The other day when the mailman delivered my subscriber copy of Socialist Worker, he felt perfectly comfortable questioning me rudely as to my national loyalty, as if I were some sort of fair game and not deserving of normal privacy or courtesy. A local rightwing politico, pissed about my liberal activism in housing, tells me she has friends in a government agency from which she retired, and has collected some pretty ugly facts about my past (none of which can be anything close to the alleged horrors in my divorce files.) I received an anonymous phone call regarding the same activism threatening a trumped-up lawsuit: ?We?ll break you, you liberal sonofabitch. Don?t make us own your house, boy!? In fact, last week the owner of a local Internet forum announced he had turned me in to the Homeland Security Administration due to the unpatriotic nature of my postings. Small things to be sure, but they add up. If nothing else, they say something about the political climate these days. When push comes to shove Someday historians may be tracking the spread of this malign political virus just as we now trace the rise of earlier fascist movements. And I think they will conclude that it began here in the American Sout ? breeding ground of all things politically dark and deep-fried in hate ? which gave us slavery, the Civil War, Orville Faubus, the Klan, Trent Lott, the fanatical Christian right; it?s the same sweat-soaked crooked venal South that that had no qualms about fixing a Florida election for George Bush. As a matter of fact, George W. Bush?s political career started in the South when he was organizing Christian support for his daddy. And it is through deal-making with some of its most scheming slimeballs (i.e., Pat Robertson delivering millions of holy-roller votes in exchange for government concessions worth tens of millions) that he helped get daddy elected. I believe that, like so many of our national carcinomas, the present one began in the South, too. It is as if yet another American congenital defect manifests itself from down in that unconscious realm of the national psyche, from the land of the tobacco-chawing sheriffs and snake-handling churches, to infect our entire political organism. But that?s another story. Meanwhile, it is hard not to notice that the administration polarized around Bush displays the same meanness. They see the same spooks, enemies and demons to be eliminated in every corner of the world and at home. The whole crew gives international law, the Geneva Conventions and civil liberties the same sneer. Are they as sick as he is? Or are they just one big happy dysfunctional family in which they play the role of enablers? Or did they simply end up there because of the twisted trajectory of their own career passage through the bowels of the military-industrial-political monolith? But when you stand back, and look at where they all came from, look at the entire interconnected apparatus of the military industrial war machine, the gutless complicity of big corporate media, our numbed, engorged culture of destruction and consumption and it all becomes too much to bear. Too much to bear.Well, if push comes to shove and shove comes to worse, some of us seem not about to bear it at all. One can get a dual passport as a safety precaution, as an escape option. Scarcely a week goes by that I do not meet a person who confides that he or she is considering just that, because of our present political condition (let?s be honest here in these lefty communications masquerading as Internet essays. How many readers have considered the idea?). I cannot verify it with immigration application figures, but I would suspect there is at least some increase in the number of Americans seeking to emigrate to places such as Great Britain or New Zealand or Canada. A New Zealand newspaper recently ran an editorial welcoming liberal Americans, called them asylum seekers and opining that New Zealand should ease its strict immigration standards for them because those fleeing tend to be educated, creative people with high ideals. They must be observing something from down there. Speaking for myself, I cannot decide about emigrating. Is it best to agree with Greg Palast and Gore Vidal that it is safer to shoot at the bastards from across the waters? Fighting from within is beginning to look like a lesser option every day. Or should one take the stance of Marine Corps hero Chesty Puller, who said: ?The enemy is in front of us. The enemy is behind us. He is to our right and to our left.We can?t miss ?em now, boys!? That sounds good, but one person never beats a mob. A whiff of hopelessness hangs in the air. After all, we live in a country in which nearly a million citizens marched for women?s lives last April in Washington D.C., yet barely made the local news, and then only because of the traffic congestion, not the issue. We are talking about a country whose non-elected leader called the largest global demonstrations in human history ? the worldwide demonstrations against the thenimpending war in Iraq ? a ?focus group.? Most Americans do not even know that it took place. Is it truly possible to be heard in such a nation? If it is impossible for sane dissent, (real dissent, not just the corporate-sponsored stage-prop Democratic Party opposition), to have a national voice, then all our frogs are already cooked. In which case it has ceased to matter that we may have another of history?s full blown wackjobs as our leader. As you can see, at the moment I am in a grim quandary. So are many others, I am sure. But given the vicissitudes of the human spirit,we can take comfort in that tomorrow is yet another summer day, one that can be traversed on the smooth plank of gin and tonic. Pour?em! Joe Bageant is a magazine editor and essayist who writes from Winchester, Virginia. He may be contacted at bageantjb at netscape.net. From ths at psalience.org Wed Dec 28 18:34:07 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:34:07 +0100 Subject: [THS] The March to War: Iran and the Strategic Encirclement of Syria and Lebanon Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111228183349.068b5658@mail.messagingengine.com> The March to War: Iran and the Strategic Encirclement of Syria and Lebanon By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28018 Global Research, December 24, 2011 Strategic Culture Foundation - 2011-12-02 The encirclement of Syria and Lebanon has long been in the works. Since 2001, Washington and NATO have started the process of cordoning off Lebanon and Syria. The permanent NATO presence in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Syrian Accountability Act are part of this initiative. It appears that this roadmap is based on a 1996 Israeli document aimed at controlling Syria. The document?s name is A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. The 1996 Israeli document, which included prominent U.S. policy figures as authors, calls for ?rolling back Syria? in 2000 or afterward. The roadmap outlines pushing the Syrians out of Lebanon, diverting the attention of Damascus by using an anti-Syrian opposition in Lebanon, and then destabilizing Syria with the help of both Jordan and Turkey. This has all respectively occurred from 2005 to 2011. This is also why the anti-Syrian March 14 Alliance and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) were created in Lebanon. As a first step towards all this the 1996 document even calls for the removal of President Saddam Hussein from power in Baghdad and even alludes to the balkanization of Iraq and forging a strategic regional alliance against Damascus that includes a Sunni Muslim Arab ?Central Iraq.? The sectarian nature of this project is very obvious as are its ties to opposing a so-called ?Shiite Crescent.? The roadmap seeks to foment sectarian divisions as a means of conquering Syria and creating a Shiite-Sunni rift that will oppose Iran and keep the Arab monarchs in power. The U.S. has now initiated a naval build-up off the Syrian and Lebanese coasts. This is part of Washington?s standard scare tactics that it has used as a form of intimidation and psychological warfare against Iran, Syria, and the Resistance Bloc. While Washington is engaged in its naval build-up, the mainstream media networks controlled by the Saudis and Arab clients of the U.S. are focusing on the deployment of Russian naval vessels to Syria, which can be seen as a counter-move to NATO. Al-Ramtha in Jordan is being used to launch attacks into Daraa and Syrian territory. The Jordanian Minister of State for Media Affairs and Communications, Rakan Al-Majali, has even publicly admitted this and dismissed it as weapons smuggling. For years, Jordanian forces have successfully prevented weapons from reaching the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank from Jordanian territory. In reality, Amman is sending weapons into Syria and working to destabilize Syria. Jordanian forces work as a frontline to protect Israel and the Jordanian intelligence services are an extension of the C.I.A. and Mossad. According to the Turkish media, France has sent its military trainers into Turkey and Lebanon to prepare conscripts against Syria. The Lebanese media also suggests the same. The so-called Free Syrian Army and other NATO-GCC front organizations are also using Turkish and Jordanian territory to stage raids into Syria. Lebanon is also being used to smuggle weapon shipments into Syria. Many of these weapons were actually arms that the Pentagon had secretly re-directed into Lebanon from Anglo-American occupied Iraq during the George W. Bush Jr. presidency. The French Foreign Minister, Alain Jupp?, has promised the Syrian National Council, that a so-called ?humanitarian corridor? will be imposed on Syria. Once again, the Syrian National Council is not an independent entity and therefore Jupp? did not really make a promise; he really made a declaration. While foreign companies like Suncor Energy were forced to leave Libya, they have not left Syria. The reason that these companies have stayed has been presented as being humanitarian, because they provide domestic local services in Syria. For example, Suncor Energy helped produce oil for export from Libya, but in Syria produces energy for local consumption. In reality, hostile governments are letting these companies stay, because they siphon money out of Syria. They want to prevent any money from going in, while they want to also drain the local economy as a catalyst to internal implosion in Syria. Along with the U.S. and its NATO allies, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is imposing sanctions that include an end to all flights to Syria. The GCC states and Turkey have joined the foreign ministries of NATO states in asking their citizens to leave Syria. Since the U.N. Security Council is no longer a viable route against Syria, the GCC may also try to impose a no-fly zone over Syria through the Arab League. Turkey: NATO?s Trojan Horse and Gateway into the Middle East Turkey was present at the Arab League meeting in Morocco, which demanded regime change in Damascus. Ankara has been playing a dirty game. Initially, during the start of NATO?s war against Libya, Ankara pretended to be neutral while it was helping the Transitional Council in Benghazi. The Turkish government does not care about the Syrian population. On the contrary, the demands that Turkish officials have made to the Syrians spell out that realpolitik is at play. In tune with the GCC, Turkey has demanded that Damascus re-orient its foreign policy and submit to Washington?s demands as a new satellite. Through a NATO initiative, the Turks have also been responsible for recruiting fighters against the Libyan and Syrian governments. For several years Ankara has been silently trying to de-link Syria from Iran and to displace Iranian influence in the Middle East. Turkey has been working to promote itself and its image amongst the Arabs, but all along it has been a key component of the plans of Washington and NATO. At the same time, it has been upgrading its military capabilities in the Black Sea and on its borders with Iran and Syria. Its military research and development body, TUBITAK-SAGE, has also announced that Ankara will also start mass-production of cruise-missiles in 2012 that will be fitted for its navy and forthcoming deliveries of U.S. military jets that could be used in future regional wars. Turkey and NATO have also agreed to upgrade Turkish bases for NATO troops. In September 2011, Ankara joined Washington?s missile shield project, which upset both Moscow and Tehran. The Kremlin has reserved the right to attack NATO?s missile shield facilities in Eastern Europe, while Tehran has reserved the right to attack NATO?s missile shield facilities in Turkey or in the case of a regional war. There have also been discussions about the Kremlin deploying Iskander missiles to Syria. Since June 2011, Ankara has been talking about invading Syria. It has presented the invasion plans as a humanitarian mission to establish a ?buffer zone? and ?humanitarian corridor? under R2P, while it has also claimed that the protests in Syria are a regional issue and not a domestic issue. In July 2011, despite the close Irano-Turkish economic ties, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard made it clear that Tehran would support the Syrians and choose Damascus over Ankara. In August 2011, Ankara started deploying retired soldiers and its military reserve units to the Turkish-Syrian border. It is in this context, that the Russian military presence has also been beefing up in the port of Tartus. From Damascus to Tehran It is also no mere coincidence that Senator Joseph Lieberman started demanding at the start of 2011 that the Pentagon and NATO attack Syria and Iran. Nor is it a coincidence that Tehran has been included in the recent Obama Administration sanctions imposed against Damascus. Damascus is being targeted as a means of targeting Iran and, in broader terms, weakening Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing in the struggle for control over the Eurasian landmass. The U.S. and its remaining allies are about to reduce their forces in Iraq, but they do not want to leave the region or allow Iran to create a bridge between itself and the Eastern Mediterranean using Iraq. Once the U.S. leaves Iraq, there will be a direct corridor between Lebanon and Syria with Iran. This will be a nightmare for Washington and Tel Aviv. It will entrench Iranian regional dominance and cement the Resistance Bloc, which will pin Iran, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinians together. Israel and the U.S. will both be struck with major strategic blows. The pressure on Syria is directly tied to this American withdrawal from Iraq and Washington?s efforts to block Tehran from making any further geo-political gains. By removing Damascus from the equation, Washington and its allies are hoping to create a geo-strategic setback for Iran. Everything that Washington is doing is in preparation for the new geo-political reality and an attempt to preserve its regional standing. U.S. military forces from Iraq will actually be redeployed to the GCC countries in the Persian Gulf. Kuwait will host new combat units that have been designated to re-enter Iraq should security collapse, such as in the case of a regional war, or to confront Iran and its allies in a future conflict. The U.S. is now activating the so-called ?Coalition of the Moderate? that it created under George W. Bush Jr. and directing it against Iran, Syria, and their regional allies. On November 23, 2011 the Turks signed a military agreement with Britain to establish a strategic partnership and closer Anglo-Turkish military ties. During an important state visit by Abdullah G?l to London, the agreement was signed by Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond and the Deputy Chief of the Turkish General Staff, Hulusi Akar. The Anglo-Turkish agreement comes into play within the framework of the meetings that the British Chief of Defence Staff, General David Richards, and Liam Fox, the former scandal-ridden British defence minister, had with Israeli officials in Tel Aviv. After the visit of General Richards to Israel, Ehud Barak would visit Britain and later Canada for talks concerning Syria and its strategic ally Iran. Within this timeframe the British and Canadian governments would declare that they were prepared for war with both Syria and Iran. London has announced that military plans were also drawn for war with Syria and Iran. On the other side of the Atlantic, Canada?s Defence Minister, Peter MacKay, created shockwaves in Canada when he made belligerent announcements about war with Syria and Iran. He also announced that Canada was buying a new series of military jets through a major arms purchase. Days later, both Canada and Britain would also cut their banking and financial ties with Iran. In reality, these steps have largely been symbolic, because Tehran was deliberately curbing it ties with Britain and Canada. For months the Iranians have also openly been evaluating cutting their ties with Britain and several other E.U. members. The events surrounding Syria have much more to do with the geo-politics of the Middle East than just Syria alone. In the Israeli Knesset, the events in Syria were naturally tied to reducing Iranian power in the Middle East. Tel Aviv has been preparing itself for a major conflict for several years. This includes its long distance military flights to Greece that simulated an attack on Iran and its deployment of nuclear-armed submarines to the Persian Gulf. It has also conducted the ?Turning Point? exercises, which seek to insure the continuation of the Israeli government through the evacuation and relocation of the Israeli cabinet and officials, including the Israeli finance ministry, to secret bunkers in the case of a war. For half a decade Washington has been directing a military arms build-up in the Middle East aimed at Iran and the Resistance Bloc. It has sent massive arms shipments to Saudi Arabia. It has sent deliveries of bunker busters to the U.A.E. and Israel, amongst others, while it has upgraded its own deadly arsenal. U.S. officials have also started to openly discuss murdering Iranian leaders and military officials through covert operations. What the world is facing is a pathway towards possible military escalation that could go far beyond the boundaries of the Middle East and suck in Russia, China, and their allies. The Revolutionary Guard have also made it clear that if conflict is ignited with Iran that Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinians would all be drawn in as Iranian allies. Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is a Sociologist and award-winning author based in Ottawa. He is a Research Associate at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal. He was a witness to the "Arab Spring" in action in North Africa. While on the ground in Libya during the NATO bombing campaign, he reported out of Tripoli for several media outlets. He was Special Correspondent for Global Research and Pacifica's investigative program Flashpoints, broadcast out of Berkeley, California. His writings have been published in more than ten languages. Please support Global Research Global Research relies on the financial support of its readers. Your endorsement is greatly appreciated From ths at psalience.org Thu Dec 29 12:28:54 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:28:54 +0100 Subject: [THS] War is the spectacular and bloody projection of our everyday living Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111229121821.06e92d28@mail.messagingengine.com> "War is the spectacular and bloody projection of our everyday living. We precipitate war out of our daily lives; and without a transformation in ourselves, there are bound to be national and racial antagonisms, the childish quarreling over ideologies, the multiplication of soldiers, the saluting of flags, and all the many brutalities that go to create organized murder." - J. Krishnamurti http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30090.htm Gaza: Remembering Cast Lead By Stephen Lendman December 28, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- December 27 marks the third anniversary of Israel's lawless war on Gaza. Without provocation, three weeks of terror bombing and invasion devastated the Strip. Missiles, bombs, shells, and illegal weapons were used against defenseless people. Mass slaughter and destruction followed. Brazen crimes of war and against humanity were committed. Responsible officials remain unaccountable. Security Council no-fly zone protection wasn't ordered. International leaders shared culpability through silence. They still do. Washington was complicit by supplying Israel with weapons, munitions, and encouragement. Cast Lead?s one of history's great crimes. Before his fall from grace, Richard Goldstone said: "(T)here is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity." Over 1,400 Gazans were killed, 80% or more civilians. Thousands more were injured, many seriously, and extensive civilian infrastructure and private property were destroyed or damaged, including homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and businesses. Israel's internal investigations whitewashed horrendous crimes. According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR): "Rather than uphold the rule of law, the Israeli investigative and judicial system is artfully manipulated to provide an illusion of investigative and judicial rigour, while systematically perpetuating pervasive impunity" for crimes too extreme to ignore. For example, on April 29, 2009, then IDF Chief of Staff, General Gabi Ashkenazi authorized publication of the findings of five military investigate teams. Unsurprisingly, they concluded that: "(T)throughout the fighting in Gaza, the IDF operated in accordance with international law. The IDF maintained a high professional and moral level while facing an enemy that aimed to terrorize Israeli civilians whilst taking cover amidst uninvolved civilians in the the Gaza strip and using them as human shields." In detail, they brazenly justified Israel's crimes of war and against humanity. Human Rights Watch called them "indiscriminate, disproportionate (and) at times seemingly deliberate, in violation of the laws of war." PCHR marked the anniversary by calling December 27, 2008 "the single bloodiest day in the history of the occupation. On this day three years ago, 334 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces." Most were civilians, including women, children, and babies. In total, 1,419 Palestinians were killed in cold blood, including 1,167 civilians (82.2%). Another 5,300 were injured. "Israeli forces directly targeted and attacked private homes and civilian institutions, including hospitals and schools." Life in besieged Gaza was devastated. Other targets struck included 3,500 homes, civilian workshops, factories, municipal buildings, charitable foundations, fishing boats, and UN facilities. In addition, farmland was bulldozed. Irrigations systems were destroyed. Under siege, reconstruction is virtually impossible. PCHR submitted 490 criminal complaints to Israeli authorities on behalf of 1,046 victims. All documented grievous crimes. They demand redress and prosecution of culpable officials. So far, only two substantive replies followed. Most were ignored. "If the occupation taught us anything, it is that as long as Israel is granted impunity, it will continue to violate international law. Palestinians will continue to suffer the horrific consequences," and human suffering will remain extreme. Al-Haq remembered Cast Lead's anniversary, saying what's to prevent it repeating! Moreover, "the international community continues to show its complete lack of political will to achieve justice for the victims who have all but abandoned such expectations." Only three Israeli soldiers received punishments too minor to matter. Not for mass slaughter and destruction, but for using a Palestinian human shield during searches and credit card theft. For three years, accountability's been entirely absent. Impunity immunizes Israel. Not only is justice delayed, it's disdained, denied, scoffed at, and spat on. Moreover, Israel attacks Gaza regularly. Air and ground assaults repeat often. In 2011, dozens more Palestinians were killed, many others injured. "By eschewing the importance of justice and accountability, the international community has merely facilitated the ongoing violation of human rights by Israel. How many more anniversaries will pass before this comes to an end?" Hamas commemorated Cast Lead's anniversary by saying Gaza's a symbol of dignity in the face of adversity. "The siege imposed on Gaza has failed to realize Israel's goals when faced with the steadfastness and firmness of the Palestinian people," said spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri. "Instead of being erased from the map, Gaza has become the Qibla (direction Muslims face to pray) for the free people of the world and a symbol of dignity under challenge." Press TV remembered martyrs who died during Israel's aggression. It also noted illegal weapons used like white phosphorus bombs, able to burn flesh to the bone. Russia Today said though Gaza's war is over, the "battle for reparations continues in court. Saleh Abu Hajaj achieved a rare victory, a bitter sweet one, saying: "I am a broken man. The Israelis say their army has morals. Which morals are they talking about? I couldn't get to my home for 16 days, because the Israeli soldiers were firing all the time." "As soon as they left, I went there and inside. On the walls, the soldiers had written, 'You'll find the bodies 50 meters away.' I found the body of my mother, buried in the sand, and the body of my sister, Majda, covered with some bricks." Salah Talala al-Samoumi's had no redress three years after filing a claim. His mother was blown apart. His two-year old daughter, father, aunt, cousin, and entire family were killed by rocket and shell fire. No one was held accountable. China's xinhaunet.com remembered Cast Lead's horrors, including on December 27 when hundreds alone were killed. Western media scoundrels were silent. Unswervingly they support Israel's worst crimes. Not Gaza's Center for Political and Development Studies Yousef Aljamal, saying: He and his youngest sister hate war. "She could never forget the sounds of American-made F16s raiding Gaza's only power plant, burning it to ashes, which happened close to our house. I could not forget her screaming...." When war began, he was studying for final exams. Electricity went out. Many hundreds were killed. "We are not numbers. We are stories. We are feelings. We are Iman Hijjo sitting in her mother's arms and breastfeeding when the bomb tore her small innocent smile apart." "We are Mohammed Al-Durra, hiding behind his dad's arms bleeding, while his very dad screams tearfully: The boy died by a bullet. We are the Al-Samouni family," told to move to a tiny room for safety. "The next day, the entire family was erased....We are not invented numbers, sir." Remember Cast Lead and besieged Gaza's 1.6 million people on this and every day. Their suffering is ours. Only mass public outrage can end it! Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen at sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/. See also - Israeli army chief says second Gaza foray against Hamas inevitable: Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz on Tuesday marked the three- year anniversary of the Operation Cast Lead, hailing it "an excellent operation that achieved deterrence for Israel vis-a-vis Hamas Xinhua reported From ths at psalience.org Thu Dec 29 12:31:21 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:31:21 +0100 Subject: [THS] The last base: Exit America Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111229123018.06e0b810@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30096.htm Exit America By Vijay Prashad December 28, 2011 "Frontline" -- ON December 16, the United States armed forces handed over Camp Adder to the Iraqi government. It was the last base to be officially handed over, as the troops boarded their trucks for the convoy ride to Kuwait. ?We have turned the last page of the occupation,? Hussein al-Asadi told the assembled crowd at the base. Al-Asadi represented Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had spent some time with President Barack Obama earlier in the week and received assurances that the U.S. would remain engaged with Iraq. Several thousand U.S. forces are garrisoned in Iraq even after the withdrawal, and the U.S. will continue to maintain its sprawling embassy compound in Baghdad. The bases in general have come to resemble ghost towns, with plans for the construction of a luxury hotel being executed inside the former Green Zone. Sections of the country that saw the greatest resistance to the U.S. occupation remained unbending. In Fallujah, a thousand protesters burned American flags, and in Sadr City, protests welcomed the withdrawal of the U.S. troops. ?The Americans are leaving behind them a destroyed country. The Americans did not leave modern schools or big factories behind them,? said Mariam Khazim. ?They left thousands of widows and orphans.? DRUMS OF WAR By late 2001, it was clear that the Bush administration wished to extend the battlefield in its Global War on Terror from Afghanistan to Iraq. Hours after 9/11 itself, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld scrawled, ?Hit S.H. @ same time ? not only UBL,? which is to say hit Saddam Hussein (Iraq) at the same time, not only Osama bin Laden (Afghanistan). The drums of war beat louder and louder into 2002. By the end of the summer, it appeared as if war would be inevitable with pressure on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and on the European partners moving in one direction alone. By the summer of 2002, President George W. Bush had been making noises about the need to strike Iraq before it completed production of an array of biochemical weapons. Bush went to the United Nations in September, warning: ?Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.? A few weeks later, in his weekly radio address, Bush said: ?Saddam Hussein recently authorised Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons ? the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.? The narrative from the White House was simple: Iraq had chemical weapons, and if the U.S. does not act in some way (preferably militarily) then Saddam Hussein would use those weapons in a replay of 9/11. Washington?s narrative was thin. There was no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, and less that it had the capability or investment in a strike on the U.S. The IAEA?s then Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei cautioned the U.N. on the authenticity of the U.S. claims (the IAEA and ElBaradei won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2005). Nothing seemed to add up. In 2007, ElBaradei told Le Monde that the run-up to the invasion of Iraq was ?a glaring example of how, in many cases, the use of force exacerbates the problem rather than solves it?. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, otherwise quite amenable to Washington, brought back the Swedish politician Hans Blix to run a U.N. study team of Iraq?s weapons programme. Blix, who was quite outspoken about Iraq?s obduracy in the 1990s, was nonetheless cautious in 2002. There was simply no evidence that required the international community (namely the U.S.) to go to war. ?I have detractors in Washington,? Blix told The Guardian. ?There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media, not that I cared very much.? Blix is not known for such colourful language. He had, however, run up against a massive media blitz orchestrated by the White House and conducted enthusiastically by the Murdoch machine. (At Davos in 2007, Charlie Rose asked Murdoch if News Corp. had shaped the agenda for the Iraq War. ?No I don?t think so,? replied Murdoch. ?We tried. We basically supported the Bush policy in the Middle East [West Asia]?.) As debates continued in the U.N., with the White House eager for Security Council sanction for its new war, the anti-war movement germinated in the U.S. and elsewhere. It would come to a head when 10 million people marched against the impending war on Iraq in February 2003, perhaps the largest coordinated protests of all time (some estimate that the number is closer to 30 million). Three million people took to the streets of Rome, while about a million staggered through the very cold avenues of New York City. The alliance against the war was vast: it included those who were generally anti-war to those who were against what they saw as an unnecessary war. Among the latter was a State Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who gave a well-regarded anti-war speech in Chicago in October 2002. ?I don?t oppose all wars,? Obama told the crowd. ?What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That?s what I?m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.? The war nonetheless began on March 19, with a campaign known as ?Shock and Awe?. Saddam Hussein?s military collapsed. Resistance to the U.S. forces came not from the organised units of the Iraqi military but from new guerilla fighters, some Baathists, but mostly Iraqi nationalists of various stripes. Even as Bush declared that combat operations ended in May, this was far from the case. Combat operations would continue into 2010, with more U.S. personnel killed in Iraq (over 4,000) than Americans in the attacks on 9/11. The death toll of Iraqis is too horrendous to comprehend (some count a million dead, with The Lancet offering a slightly smaller number ? near 700,000). Soon after the invasion phase morphed into a U.S. occupation of Iraq, it became clear that all the reasons for the war had been false. As U.S. troops withdraw from Iraq, there is little discussion about this particular problem: that no chemical or biological weapons, or weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), were found, that no link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda could be established, and that Saddam Hussein had no plans to attack the U.S. In the past few years, memoirs by the main players in the Bush administration have appeared, with Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Rumsfeld defending their roles and State Department head Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice putting the onus on Cheney and Rumsfeld. Few recall the lies that led to war. Part of the problem for the Bush team is that despite the outcome, when the war was being planned they were all in agreement. ?On one major issue, Rice, Cheney and Rumsfeld were in total agreement ? the war in Iraq,? writes Elisabeth Bumiller in her biography of Rice. ?Rice helped conceive it and was one of its chief advocates, and when the President finally asked her if he should take the country to war, she said yes.? No one has taken responsibility for the Iraqi fiasco. At most the former managers of the country simply blame each other for poor execution of the war (too little planning, say some, too few troops, say others). Obama, who had made his own position clear in 2002, could not revisit them in 2011: he is now the Commander in Chief and would find it awkward to belittle the sacrifices of troops who were sent to fight a false war. At most Obama could acknowledge the debate before the war, with the lead-up ?a source of great controversy here at home, with patriots on both sides of the debate?. The Iraq war was not perfect, he accepted, but its outcome was good, with the troops leaving behind ?a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people?. American liberalism is not capable of any more than that. To go beyond this is to accept that Iraq was not a ?dumb war? but the outcome of a system premised on militarism and one that is capable of the harshest violence against its enemies. During the week of the pull-out, a reporter for The New York Times found 400 pages of U.S. military investigations on the 2005 massacres at Haditha, where U.S. marines killed 24 Iraqis (including a 76-year-old man in a wheelchair, children and toddlers). Most of the U.S. troops had been acquitted by their justice system, leaving a bad taste in the Iraqi body politic. As Michael Schmidt put it in The Times, ?That sense of American impunity ultimately poisoned any chance for American forces to remain in Iraq, because the Iraqis would not let them stay without being subject to Iraqi laws and courts, a condition the White House could not accept.? It was the aftermath of Haditha that forced the Iraqi government to no longer give a carte blanche to the U. S. troops (with the Sadrites, a parliamentary partner of Maliki?s government, putting pressure on the Prime Minister not to allow U.S. troops to continue on such terms that allow Iraqis to be humiliated). The Iraqi Parliament, in a sense, ejected the U.S. because Washington would not allow its troops to come under Iraqi jurisdiction. No one mentioned Haditha, nor did they remember Abu Ghraib, now renamed the Baghdad Central Prison. The same week as the withdrawal, the U.S. will finally bring Private First Class Bradley Manning to court. Manning is accused of handing over secret files to WikiLeaks. Among those files lay a secret video that documented the 2007 killing in cold blood of Reuters? photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver Saeed Chmagh. Like Haditha, the impunity towards the Apache helicopter pilots rankled the Iraqis. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees counts about two million Iraqis as displaced. That is a conservative estimate. Others would like to see the figure doubled. Either way, this is the largest displacement in West Asia, and it is entirely a product of the war. Instead of a discussion on how the war created this massive and ongoing refugee crisis, the U.S. tightened its own policy towards allowing in asylum seekers (when the Vietnam War went badly, the U.S. allowed its allies in Vietnam to seek entry into the U.S. ? not such an open policy for its Iraqi allies). The Bush war cost at least $1 trillion, if not more. It was to make Iraq a model private-sector country. All this failed as the Iraqis refused to be utterly pliant. The U.S. miscalculated the neighbourhood. The assumption was that the U.S. forces would be able to create a satellite in the area that could checkmate Iran?s ambitions in the region and provide some relief to Israel. Instead, the wave of democracy that swept the region was not inclined to U.S. power but was against it. Even Iraq?s government was not as docile as hoped. The costs of war suggest the law of intended consequences. The anti-war movement suggested that the bloodshed would not welcome U.S. troops into Iraq ?with sweets and flowers?, but it would open up sectarian fissures and create far more human suffering than imagined. Iraq has been resilient enough to demand more than a public relations withdrawal. Having Iraq exercise its sovereignty is not sufficient to justify the war in the first place. Eight years after the war, no justifications remain. It was a dumb war, and it remains so. Vijay Prashad - George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies - Send e-mail to Vijay Prashad Vijay is the author of eleven books, most recently, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (The New Press, paperback 2008), which was chosen as the best nonfiction book of 2008 by the Asian American Writers' Workshop and which won the 2009 Muzaffar Ahmad Book Prize. From ths at psalience.org Thu Dec 29 12:38:51 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:38:51 +0100 Subject: [THS] Michael Carmichael: War is God Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111229123209.06e0b640@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30091.htm War is God By Michael Carmichael Michael Carmichael's Talk to the Elders for Peace, Chapel Hill on December 19th, 2011. December 28, 2011 "Planetary Movements" -- Good afternoon. I am delighted to be here amongst all of you lovely people working together for peace. In fact, since we are the Elders for Peace, we are all veterans of the perpetual war against peace. Our side never wins, but we still keep working just the same. Never winning, because peace versus war is not a game. We are working for the survival of not only the human race, or even our tiny planet. In our time, when technology has finally led mankind to weapons of mass destruction of literally infinite power ? the power to destroy in virtual simultaneity every form of life on earth, we are among the relatively few humans who have embarked on the mission in search of the key to survival of life as we know it. Today, we find ourselves inside the vortex of a gigantic conundrum ? the United States of America. Our nation is the strongest military force in the history of the known universe. For the past century, we have been waging wars all over our tiny planet. The Great War, WWI was followed by WWII a war that many believe was even greater. Both world wars catapulted our nation into the leading role of all the nations on earth. We are the richest, the most respected, the most reviled, the most envied, the most powerful nation among nations. We are the most warlike nation. We must, therefore, be the most warlike people ever to have populated this planet. Over the past decade, our nation has prosecuted wars in the Middle East. A war of vengeance against Afghanistan. A war of cupidity against Iraq. Both wars have gone badly for America. While the final combat forces departed Iraq last week, more than 100,000 of our troops are still waging a twilight war in Afghanistan. But it is really worse than that, for our press, television and mainstream media do not reveal the truth to our people. We are already engaged in a third major land war in the Middle East, a war against Iran. Before we examine the onrushing Iran War, let us review a few of the latest developments. Good news 1 ? The United States is Pulling out of Iraq. The last combat forces departed from Iraq last week. 2 ? The United States is winding down our military operations in Afghanistan. 3 ? The United States is preparing to cut the military budget, and for the time being both principal parties appear to be engaged with this important idea. 4 ? Former President George W. Bush has been constrained to the confines of the USA by legal maneuvers that would swiftly lead to his indictment for violations of the Geneva Convention on Torture if he were to travel abroad. In recent months, Former President Bush was troubled by attempts to place him under arrest when he visited Canada very briefly, and he was forced to cancel his trip to Switzerland for fear of arrest for war crimes and torture. 5 -- Certain Key Elements of our government, the White House, the Obama Administration and the Department of State, are resisting increasingly shrill demands for war against Iran, and at the same time they are fighting for the right to conduct diplomatic contacts with Iran against an ominous array of forces recently unleashed in Congress and beyond. Bad News 1 - The War on Drugs is a multinational disaster with over 35,000 civilians killed in Mexico over the past five years. The War on Drugs is our most costly war and the most counterproductive. Little is being done to control it. Virtually nothing is being done to bring it to an end. 2 - The Military-Industrial-Complex (MIC) is moving inexorably toward war with Iran. 3 - Technology is totally autonomous ? it cannot be controlled. It cannot be managed. It cannot be suppressed. Technology in the hands of the MIC is advancing rapidly toward the robotification of war via drones for surveillance and targeted assassinations. This ominous trend in the technology of death will continue to gain momentum, and this dreadful development of technology is now unstoppable. Soon, we will be witnessing battlefields with many forms of robotic and cybernetic warriors ? cyborgs ? organisms with biological and cybernetic components. Cyborg assassins. Robotic assassins. The world of Terminator is racing rapidly toward us right now, and nothing whatsoever is being done to restrain it. 4 - Mind Control, Mental Programming, Brainwashing and Perception Management have reached or exceeded Orwellian levels, and we are now moving confidently toward Huxleyian levels of totalitarian enslavement as vividly portrayed in Brave New World ? a far more advanced dystopia than George Orwell?s Oceania, where torture was still applied to recalcitrant subjects. Brave New World programmed masses via propaganda, brainwashing and sensuality. Here are direct quotations from Aldous Huxley about the evolution of totalitarianism: It is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past, and it can be done even more effectively now because you can distract them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda. . . The nightmare of 1984 is destined to modulate into the nightmare of Brave New World ? the change will be brought about as a result of a self-need for increased efficiency . . . Totalitarian regimes of the future will not be based upon terror, because they will have other means ? brainwashing and propaganda ? which will be much more efficient and much more economical than terrorism and torture. 5 - As evidence of point 3 above, Congress is almost totally enthralled (literally in moral and intellectual bondage) to the Military Industrial Complex. We now live in a Military Dictatorship dressed up in the political refinement of democracy, but that is only a myth. The reality is Military Dictatorship. 6 - Three days ago by a margin of 410 to 11, Congress has just passed one of the most potentially dangerous pieces of legislation in world history, The Iran Threat Reduction Act. Every member of the North Carolina delegation voted in favor except for two who were absent ? both rock-ribbed Republicans (Myrick and Coble). While other nations and international organizations are attempting to criminalize war, the US congress is attempting to criminalize diplomatic contact and potential peace negotiations. This astonishing piece of legislation symbolizes the dangers Americans face from their elected representatives in government and those from the Military Industrial Complex who are actually in control of our government. The Iran War The buildup of the Iran War has been long and arduous. Over the past eight years, our military intelligence establishment working hand-in-glove with other shadow agencies of other nations has been building up the notion of a casus belli against Iran predicated upon their allegedly clandestine nuclear arms program. We all know that Iran is an Islamist state. In 1979, the populist uprising long incubated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini finally ejected the hated regime of the Shah, one of America?s most cherished allies in the oil-rich region. It must be said that the Shah was a great burden unto his people. While he lived in unparalleled luxury seated on a jewel-encrusted throne shaped like a peacock, the Shah entertained more lavishly than any other potentate on earth, even though his people suffered under the cruel heel of the Savak, one of the most brutal, repressive and predatory secret police forces ever devised. The United States was on intimate terms with Savak. We trained them. We armed them, and they served our purposes in their region. Richard Nixon loved the Shah, and the Shah loved Richard Nixon. The Shah granted Nixon the power and privilege of oil-riches, and Nixon tacitly granted the Shah immunity from the crime of heroin production, one of the largest and most profitable industries on earth, a fact known by Interpol for decades. We all know, the Shah fell, and Khomeini rose to power. What we often forget is that soon after the Iranian Revolution, our honorable ally, Saddam Hussein, at our beckoning and with our blessing, attacked Iran with arms we provided unto him. The Iran-Iraq War lasted 8 years. We do not know the exact number of casualties, but the figure of one million is probably far too small. We do know that Saddam Hussein did our bidding, and we do know that under the administration of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, we secretly armed Iran in order to permit the Reagan White House to wage an illegal war by arming the Nicaraguan Contras, a political movement that was nothing more than a death squad of gigantic proportions that murdered nuns, priests, women, children and poets in their campaign of carnage against a democratically elected government that sought to create economic justice within their own finite economy. Today, the Republican presidential candidates sing from the same songbook on Iran ? with one notable exception, Ron Paul. The official Republican line is: war with Iran to purge them of their Islamist regime and destroy their nuclear program. Rank and file Republicans bitterly criticize President Obama for being too soft on Iran. It is ironic that rank and file Democrats are beginning to believe the same thing. Last week, by a margin of 410 to 11 - the House of Representatives just passed a bill that would criminalize diplomatic contact between the USA and Iran. The bill barring diplomacy with Iran is the work of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, (R-FL) backed by Howard Berman, (D-CA). The White House, the Department of State and key members of the Senate are working to ensure the failure of this egregious piece of legislation. Our nation is suffering deeply in the throes of Islamophobia, and now we have developed an even more virulent phobia, Iranophobia, a fear of the nation and people of Iran. America is not the only nation afflicted with Iranophobia, the small and vulnerable nation of Israel is obsessed with the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation by an Iranian nuclear bomb, a weapon whose existence at this point in time is totally imaginary, the hypothetical component of a conspiracy theory. If America and Israel were psychiatric patients, their condition would be described as delusional. Instead, our government and our obeisant media are doing everything in their power to brainwash the American people to inculcate into their psyches the fear of every molecule of Iranian origin. The Iran War is the brainchild of the neocons of the Bush-Cheney administration. In top secret meetings of the national security council, Dick Cheney argued for war against Iran as early as 2002 and 2003. Cheney?s daughter, Elizabeth Cheney served in the State Department as the conduit for $85 million per year in funds to ?pro-democracy? organizations inside Iran ? groups like the Mujaheddin e-Khalq, a Marxist Islamist paramilitary cult of celibate terrorists, commandos, assassins and agents who sublimate their sexual desires for the practice of assassination, bomb manufacture, espionage, torture and terrorism. Today, 3000 members of the MEK are stranded in Camp Ashraf, an encampment inside Iraq that is now scheduled for demolition by the government of Prime Minister Maliki. Astonishingly, Governor Howard Dean has combined forces with Republican neoconservatives to remove the MEK from the US listing of terrorist organizations, so we can continue to provide them with more aid for their cult of terror. While the tempo and pace of the buildup of the Iran War has been long, complicated and terrifying for those of us who monitor it, we must report that in the last few months, the pace is definitely quickening. ? Iran has arrested an untold number of Americans who languish in their prison system classified as ?spies.? Apparently, Americans are crossing the border between Afghanistan and Iran as if they were embarking on ?hikes? ? and we the people of the United States know very little about these cases, their number, the individuals, the circumstances. ? Just over a year ago, a cyber attack by the Stuxnet Worm was unleashed against the Iranian nuclear industry. This anonymous cyber attack made international headlines in most of the advanced nations on earth, but only a slight smear on the inner pages of our newspapers in the USA. ? In July of this year, an Iranian nuclear scientist was shot dead by an assassin on a motorcycle in Tehran. ? In America, ABC ran a story headlined: "Who is Killing Iran?s Nuclear Scientists?" ? In Britain, the BBC ran a story headlined: "Is Iran Already Under Covert Attack?" ? In London, the coverage read: "Iranian Scientist?s Death Probably the Work of Western Security Agencies: Analysts Suggest Mossad or CIA Behind the Murder." ? Recently, the Obama administration announced the interception of a disturbing terrorist plot allegedly masterminded by the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guards or the Quds Force. The US Drug Enforcement Administration intercepted intelligence about an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian Ambassador in Washington by outsourcing the murder to contract killers connected to a Mexican drug cartel. While this story was shocking, we have been advised by our government to take it seriously, even though it is considered to be risible, laughable and incredible in almost all other parts of the world. It may be worth reminding ourselves that propagandists have long operated with the principle of the big lie: the bigger the lie, the more likely people are to believe it. After the exposure of this fantastic plot, the United States elevated the level of monitoring and surveillance of the nation of Iran. ? In November, working under their new Director Yukiya Amano, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) issued a report on the Iranian nuclear program. The first Amano-Era IAEA report cited evidence that Iran was "studying nuclear weapons." Iranian officials immediately denied the report of nuclear weapons research. In America the most authoritative source on US-Iranian tension, Seymour Hersh described the Amano report on Iran as: "The shift in tone at the I.A.E.A. seems linked to a change at the top." and, "The new report, therefore, leaves us where we?ve been since 2002, when George Bush declared Iran to be a member of the Axis of Evil?with lots of belligerent talk but no definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons program." Thus, the IAEA report created more tension, but little more. Seymour Hersh appeared on Democracy Now in a lengthy interview explaining his reservations about the objectivity of the IAEA report. The Seymour Hersh story on Democracy Now was headlined: "Propaganda used ahead of Iraq War Now Being Reused Over Iran's Nuke Program." ? As you will know, a US drone spy plane was recently shot down over Iran. ? You may not know that only three weeks ago there were a mysterious series of explosions at a nuclear facility located in close proximity to the historic city of Isfahan in Iran. ? Shortly after these explosions, Iran ordered the closure of the British embassy. Throughout it all, we are being assured by our government that Iran is culpable of violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but we are given no conclusive evidence that this casus belli is any more credible than the risible case Colin Powell presented to the United Nations in February 2002 stating that Saddam Hussein posed a threat because of his vast and powerful arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. While Powell?s presentation impressed the domestic news media and its obedient audience ? the American public, I was in Europe at the time ? and nobody accepted Powell?s presentation as true. From the outset, Powell?s presentation was deemed to be a total fabrication. That lack of American credibility is why the global demonstrations of February 15th 2003 were so enormous. One million Romans marched in protest; one million Japanese marched to protest; in London, I was with Tony Benn in a vast throng estimated at one million in Hyde Park to protest the US-led march into the folly we now know as the Iraq War. War Humanity is perpetually marching into folly. War is the most violent form of folly. War is predicated on delusions: delusions of grandeur; delusions of demonization. While reading Cormac McCarthy?s historical novel, Blood Meridian, I met one of the most unforgettable villains in world literature: Judge Holden. The Judge joined a group of mercenaries led by John Joel Glanton who were commissioned to kill Indians in Mexico. Glanton?s force was made up of psychopaths, including a former priest, outlaws and a violence prone youth as well as Judge Holden. Glanton and his mercenaries murdered hundreds of Indians and took their scalps in exchange for generous bounties from Mexican authorities. But, the Glanton atrocity did not stop there. So lucrative was the project of war, that Glanton and his men would kill innocent Mexican civilians: men, women and children and take their scalps to exchange for hoards of gold and silver and furs and jewels and guns and clothes and horses and treasure from the Mexican authorities. In one episode as retold by McCarthy, surely one of our greatest literary artists, Judge Holden lectured the raw recruits on war. The Judge ? on war Around a campfire one evening after a series of murderous atrocities, Judge Holden engaged some of Glanton's Indian Fighters on the nature of war. After some noticed that the Bible warned those who lived by the sword that they would perish by it, the Judge responded: What right man would have it any other way? When someone reminded the group that the Bible recounted many tales of bloody wars, Judge Holden said: It makes no difference what men think of war. War endures. As well to ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way. After some banter with another character about the trade of the Indian Fighters, the Judge told the men that all human endeavor is concentrated in war. When asked if that was the reason war endures, the Judge said: No. It endures because young men love it, and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallow up game, player, all. At that point, the Judge provided a metaphor for war that is the major literary legacy of Blood Meridian: Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man?s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man?s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. The man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one?s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. As elders for peace, we have seen wars come and go and come again. We have seen the brutality of man against man. We have seen the brutality of man against animals, the deer of Orange County, the Tigers of China, the whales of the seven seas ? all slain for sport, for gold, for pleasure. We have seen men and women executed for crimes they did or did not commit. We have seen the relentless assault on the black and tan races by the white master-race. Perhaps, these visions of violence, torture, destruction and death are what unites us in our movement to protest, to oppose and to abolish war. With the pace of war against Iran now thundering in all its fury, it is time to mobilize once again to demand peace. From ths at psalience.org Thu Dec 29 12:40:33 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:40:33 +0100 Subject: [THS] Montanans Organize to Remove Senators Who Voted For Traitorous Detainment Bill Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111229124002.06e0b3b0@mail.messagingengine.com> Congress, Obama Codify Indefinite Detention By Sheldon Richman As Human Rights Watch put it: "President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law." http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30089.htm Recall: Montanans Organize to Remove Senators Who Voted For Traitorous Detainment Bill By Mac Slavo One thing is clear with the passage of this legislation, and that is those Senators and Congressman who voted for its passage are violating their oaths to support and protect the Constitution of the United States. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30095.htm From ths at psalience.org Thu Dec 29 12:59:20 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:59:20 +0100 Subject: [THS] Presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from reality TV Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111229125722.06e0b120@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30087.htm Vote Obama ? If You Want A Centrist Republican For US President Because Barack Obama has adopted so many core Republican beliefs, the US opposition race is a shambles By Glenn Greenwald December 28, 2011 "The Guardian" -- American presidential elections are increasingly indistinguishable from the reality TV competitions drowning the nation's airwaves. Both are vapid, personality-driven and painfully protracted affairs, with the winners crowned by virtue of their ability to appear slightly more tolerable than the cast of annoying rejects whom the public eliminates one by one. When, earlier this year, America's tawdriest (and one of its most-watched) reality TV show hosts, Donald Trump, inserted himself into the campaign circus as a threatened contestant, he fitted right in, immediately catapulting to the top of audience polls before announcing he would not join the show. The Republican presidential primaries ? shortly to determine who will be the finalist to face off, and likely lose, against Barack Obama next November ? has been a particularly base spectacle. That the contest has devolved into an embarrassing clown show has many causes, beginning with the fact that GOP voters loathe Mitt Romney, their belief-free, anointed-by-Wall-Street frontrunner who clearly has the best chance of defeating the president. In a desperate attempt to find someone less slithery and soulless (not to mention less Mormon), party members have lurched manically from one ludicrous candidate to the next, only to watch in horror as each wilted the moment they were subjected to scrutiny. Incessant pleas to the party's ostensibly more respectable conservatives to enter the race have been repeatedly rebuffed. Now, only Romney remains viable. Republican voters are thus slowly resigning themselves to marching behind a vacant, supremely malleable technocrat whom they plainly detest. In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity. In July, the nation's most influential progressive domestic policy pundit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, declared that Obama is a "moderate conservative in practical terms". Last October, he wrote that "progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion", because the president ? "once you get past the soaring rhetoric" ? has "largely accepted the conservative storyline". Krugman also pointed out that even the policy Democratic loyalists point to as proof of the president's progressive bona fides ? his healthcare plan, which mandates the purchase of policies from the private health insurance industry ? was designed by the Heritage Foundation, one of the nation's most rightwing thinktanks, and was advocated by conservative ideologues for many years (it also happens to be the same plan Romney implemented when he was governor of Massachusetts and which Newt Gingrich once promoted, underscoring the difficulty for the GOP in drawing real contrasts with Obama). How do you scorn a president as a far-left socialist when he has stuffed his administration with Wall Street executives, had his last campaign funded by them, governed as a "centrist Republican", and presided over booming corporate profits even while the rest of the nation suffered economically? But as slim as the pickings are for GOP candidates on the domestic policy front, at least there are some actual differences in that realm. The president's 2009 stimulus spending and Wall Street "reform" package ? tepid and inadequate though they were ? are genuinely at odds with rightwing dogma, as are Obama's progressive (albeit inconsistent) positions on social issues, such as equality for gay people and protecting a woman's right to choose. And the supreme court, perpetually plagued by a 5-4 partisan split, would be significantly affected by the outcome of the 2012 election. It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties where Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock. A staple of GOP politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling America's enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use violence, and subordinating US security to international bodies and leftwing conceptions of civil liberties. But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama has embraced the vast bulk of George Bush's terrorism policies; waged a war against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs; extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield and without due process? Reflecting this difficulty for the GOP field is the fact that former Bush officials, including Dick Cheney, have taken to lavishing Obama with public praise for continuing his predecessor's once-controversial terrorism polices. In the last GOP foreign policy debate, the leading candidates found themselves issuing recommendations on the most contentious foreign policy question (Iran) that perfectly tracked what Obama is already doing, while issuing ringing endorsements of the president when asked about one of his most controversial civil liberties assaults (the due-process-free assassination of the American-Yemeni cleric Anwar Awlaki). Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul, who vehemently condemns Obama's policies of drone killings without oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties assaults in the name of terrorism. In sum, how do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, and in some cases extended, what was rightwing orthodoxy for the last decade? The core problem for GOP challengers is that they cannot be respectable Republicans because, as Krugman pointed out, Obama has that position occupied. They are forced to move so far to the right that they render themselves inherently absurd. From ths at psalience.org Thu Dec 29 13:00:57 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:00:57 +0100 Subject: [THS] Homeland Security Using Fake Facebook and Twitter Accounts to Monitor Posts Containing Certain Keywords Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111229125951.06e0ae90@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30094.htm Department of Homeland Security Using Fake Facebook and Twitter Accounts to Monitor Posts Containing Certain Keywords Via: Electronic Privacy Information Center: EPIC has filed a Freedom of information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to force disclosure of the details of the agency?s social network monitoring program. In news reports and a Federal Register notice, the DHS has stated that it will routinely monitor the public postings of users on Twitter and Facebook. The agency plans to create fictitious user accounts and scan posts of users for key terms. User data will be stored for five years and shared with other government agencies. The legal authority for the DHS program remains unclear. EPIC filed the lawsuit after the DHS failed to reply to an April 2011 FOIA request. ======== Your 'Human-to-Animal' Tweets Aren't Safe, Privacy Watchdog Says By NICK MCCANN December 28, 2011 (CN) December 20, 2011 -- - Homeland Security spies on Facebook and Twitter users, recording the activity of people who search for terms like "human to animal," "collapse" and "infection," according to an online privacy advocacy group that has sued to peruse the agency's data. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) says Homeland Security announced plans to monitor social media sites in February. "The initiatives were designed to gather information from 'online forums, blogs, public websites, and message boards,' to store and analyze the information gathered, and then to 'disseminate relevant and appropriate de-identified information to federal, state, local, and foreign governments and private sector partners,'" according to the federal complaint filed in Washington, D.C. "Previously, DHS had developed surveillance initiatives of public chats and other online forums concerning specific events, such as the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the 2010 Winter Olympics, and the April 2010 BP oil spill," EPIC also claims. As part of the initiative, the agency would "establish [fictitious] usernames and passwords" to spy on users and record their activities based on a number of search terms, including "human to animal," "collapse," "outbreak," and "illegal immigrants," the complaint says. Homeland Security regularly plans to report their findings to "federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, foreign, or international government partners," the privacy group says. EPIC allegedly requested documents from Homeland Security in April related to third-party contractors that work on social-media monitoring. The companies included H.B. Gar Federal, Palantir Technologies, and Berico Technologies, according to the complaint. Homeland Security denied the request, and EPIC appealed the decision. A request under the Freedom of Information Act to access the documents has gone unanswered after the department forwarded it to several components for processing and future response, according to the federal complaint. EPIC is represented by Ginger McCall, in-house counsel for the group http://cryptogon.com/?p=26677 From ths at psalience.org Thu Dec 29 13:04:31 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:04:31 +0100 Subject: [THS] States That Legalized Medical Pot See Decrease In Traffic Fatalities, Beer Sales Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111229130331.06900278@mail.messagingengine.com> Pubdate: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 Source: Missoulian (MT) Copyright: 2011 Missoulian Contact: oped at missoulian.com Website: http://www.missoulian.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/720 Author: Chelsi Moy Study: States That Legalized Medical Pot See Decrease In Traffic Fatalities, Beer Sales States like Montana that have passed laws legalizing medical marijuana have seen a decrease in traffic fatalities and a reduction in beer sales, a new study has found. A report authored by a D. Mark Anderson, a Montana State University economics professor, and Daniel Rees, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, discovered a 9 percent decrease in traffic fatalities in states that passed laws legalizing medical marijuana. The study points to marijuana as a substitute drug for alcohol. So far, 16 states have passed laws legalizing medical marijuana. Surveys show that residents in these states are reporting consuming less alcohol and retailers are reporting a 5 percent reduction in alcohol sales. "That was really compelling," Anderson said by phone Wednesday. "It's data that either wasn't analyzed or isn't analyzed as frequently as it should be." Most of the data collected between 1990 and 2009 came from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. The study includes the 13 states that had passed medical marijuana laws before 2009. The study was posted on the Institute for the Study of Labor at the end of November. The research idea came to Anderson a year ago as he watched medical marijuana dispensaries spring up along Grand Avenue in Billings and saw the issue in the news. "It seems like there would be spillover effects that would affect more than just the card-carrying users," he said. "With all the publicity that medical marijuana had been receiving, especially in states like Montana, it was hard to miss." A portion of the study examines alcohol consumption and marijuana consumption in three states: Montana, Rhode Island and Vermont. In Montana and Rhode Island, the authors found that the passage of laws legalizing medical marijuana led to increased marijuana use among adults in these states. In Montana, marijuana use rose 19 percent among people ages 18-25 after medical marijuana was legalized. While not all traffic fatalities are alcohol related, the study found that these kinds of traffic deaths decreased significantly. Traffic fatalities on the weekends and at night, when many alcohol-related traffic deaths occur, decreased after laws legalizing medical marijuana were passed, the study found. In addition, the researchers found that beer sales in these states dipped 5 percent after medical marijuana was legalized. Anderson recognizes that it's possible that residents in these states are driving less. And the study doesn't say that medical-marijuana laws cause a drop in traffic fatalities. Researchers also aren't saying that smoking marijuana impairs drivers less than alcohol, but "it could be that," Anderson said. "We're saying our results would be consistent with that." The study has been receiving mixed reviews since it was first presented to the public. Not everyone agrees with its findings. The study is under review by the Journal of Law and Economics. "We are hoping it will stimulate some kind of policy discussion beyond what's discussed in the press," Anderson said. "That's the goal of doing this research. Hopefully when states decide whether to legalize medical marijuana or decide to go back on legalizing it, that this will be some research that will be included in the discussion. ________________________________________________________ From ths at psalience.org Thu Dec 29 13:08:20 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:08:20 +0100 Subject: [THS] Reducing Hypertension: The more time in church, the better Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111229130715.06db9ee0@mail.messagingengine.com> Beliefs battle hypertension December 26th, 2011 in Psychology & Psychiatry As you are weighing whether or not to go to church services this Christmas, consider this: Does a belief in God confer any health benefits? With the help of a large Norwegian longitudinal health study called HUNT, researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) were able to find a clear relationship between time spent in church and lower blood pressure in both women and men. The more time in church, the better "We found that the more often HUNT participants went to church, the lower their blood pressure, even when we controlled for a number of other possible explanatory factors," says Torgeir S?rensen, a PhD candidate from the School of Theology and Religious Psychology Centre at Sykehuset Innlandet (Inland Hospital). "This is the first study of its kind in Scandinavia. Previous research from the United States has shown that there is a possible link between people who attend church and blood pressure. However, large religious and cultural differences between the US and Norway make it difficult to transfer these findings to the Norwegian context," says S?rensen. About 90% of the population of the county of Nord-Tr?ndelag, where the HUNT study was conducted, are members of the Norwegian state church, while Americans show a much broader distribution in their religious and ethical preferences. "About 40% of the US population goes to church on a weekly basis, while the corresponding figure in Nord-Tr?ndelag County is 4%. For that reason, we did not expect to find any correlation between going to church and blood pressure in Nord-Tr?ndelag. Our findings, however, are almost identical to those previously reported from the United States. We were really surprised," S?rensen said. The Bible and blood pressure "Since this is a cross-sectional study, it is not possible to say whether it was a health condition that affected the participants' religious activity, or whether it was the religious activity that affected the state of participants' health," says Professor Jostein Holmen from NTNU's Faculty of Medicine, and one of the authors of the study. A cross-sectional study says something about a group of people at a given time, but can say nothing about causation. "In order to determine what causes the effect, we need new studies that look at the same people at different times," says Holmen. For this study, church attendance was selected as a variable to represent religious activity, and blood pressure was selected as a variable that gives an indication of overall health with respect to a variety of diseases and conditions. The study found that the variable used to measure religious activities (church time) had a significant relationship to the variable used to measure health (blood pressure). In other words, those who were religiously active were healthier than those who were not religiously active. "The study of the relationship between religion and health has rarely focused on other religions, such as Judaism and Islam. It is therefore difficult to say anything about whether or not this same association can be found in these communities," says S?rensen. Humor, culture and faith The residents of Nord-Tr?ndelag County have participated in three HUNT surveys since 1984. These studies have not only examined risk factors for disease and death, but have also evaluated factors that might contribute to good health. The second survey, HUNT 2, which was conducted in 1995-97, included questions about the participant's sense of humor in the overall questionnaire. The HUNT 3 study (2006-08) included questions about participation in cultural activities and religious beliefs in the questionnaire that was used as a part of the survey. All told, the HUNT databases contain information about approximately 120,000 people, and make it possible to integrate family data and individual data that then can be linked to Norway's national health registries. "These factors have been poorly investigated in previous studies of different populations. The research into lifestyle and health issues mainly comes from the United States, while information from Europe and Scandinavia is very limited," says Holmen, who was one of the initiators of the first HUNT study in the early 1980s. Earlier HUNT studies have shown a positive correlation between humor and good health, and participation in different cultural activities and good health. "It would appear that the data we have been recording in the HUNT studies about religious beliefs is actually relevant to your health, and this is interesting in itself," Holmen says. "The fact that churchgoers have lower blood pressure encourages us to continue to study this issue. We're just in the start-up phase of an exciting research area in Norway," he said. More information: S?rensen T, Danbolt LJ, Lien L, Koenig HG, Holmen J. The relationship between religious attendance and blood pressure: The Hunt Study, Norway. Int J Psychiatry in Med, 2011;42(1):13-28 Svebak S, Romundstad S, Holmen J. A 7-year prospective study of sense of humor and mortality in an adult county population: the HUNT-2 study. Int J Psychiatry Med 2010;40(2):125-46. Cuypers K, Krokstad S, Lingaas HT, Skjei KM, Olov BL, Holmen J. Patterns of receptive and creative cultural activities and their association with perceived health, anxiety, depression and satisfaction with life among adults: the HUNT study, Norway. J Epidemiol Community Health 2011 May 23 Provided by Norwegian University of Science and Technology "Beliefs battle hypertension." December 26th, 2011. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-12-beliefs-hypertension.html From ths at psalience.org Fri Dec 30 19:08:26 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 19:08:26 +0100 Subject: [THS] Robert Parry: Slip-Sliding to War with Iran Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111230190538.0498d330@mail.messagingengine.com> [forwarded comment] Note the final four paras in this story by Robert Parry, one of America's top journalistic experts on Iran - who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 80s.. Slip-Sliding to War with Iran By Robert Parry, Consortium News 29 December 11 With the typical backdrop of alarmist propaganda in place, the stage is now set for a new war, this time with Iran. The slightest miscalculation (or provocation) by the United States, Israel or Iran could touch off a violent scenario that will have devastating consequences. Indeed, even if they want to, the various sides might have trouble backing down enough to defuse today?s explosive situation. After all, the Iranians continue to insist they have no intention of building a nuclear bomb, as much as Israeli and American officials insist that they are. So, this prospective war with Iran ? like the one in Iraq ? is likely to come down to intelligence assessments on Iran?s intentions and capabilities. And, as with Iraq?s alleged WMD, the many loud voices claiming that Iran is on pace to build a nuclear bomb are drowning out the relatively few skeptics who think the evidence is thin to invisible. For instance, the recent report from the International Atomic Energy Agency about Iran?s supposed progress toward a nuclear bomb was widely accepted as gospel truth without any discussion of whether the IAEA is an unbiased and reliable source. In framing the story in support of the IAEA, the major U.S. newspapers and TV networks ignored documentary evidence that the IAEA?s new director-general was installed with the support of the United States and that he privately indicated to U.S. and Israeli officials that he would help advance their goals regarding Iran. These facts could be found easily enough in WikiLeaks cables that the U.S. news media has had access to since 2010. Yet, the Big Media has ignored this side of the story, even as the IAEA report has been touted again and again as virtually a smoking gun against Iran. This pattern of ignoring ? or downplaying ? evidence that runs counter to the prevailing narrative was a notable feature during the run-up to war with Iraq. It is now being repeated not just by the right-wing news media, but by the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and other centrist-to-left-leaning outlets. The IAEA Cables Thus, very few Americans know that U.S. embassy cables from Vienna, Austria, the site of IAEA?s headquarters, revealed that the U.S. government in 2009 was celebrating its success in installing Japanese diplomat Yakiya Amano to replace Egyptian Mohamed ElBaradei, who famously had debunked some of President George W. Bush?s claims about Iraq?s supposed nuclear ambitions. In a July 9, 2009, cable, American charg? Geoffrey Pyatt said Amano was thankful for U.S. support of his election. ?Amano attributed his election to support from the U.S., Australia and France, and cited U.S. intervention with Argentina as particularly decisive,? the cable said. The appreciative Amano informed Pyatt that as IAEA director-general, he would take a different ?approach on Iran from that of ElBaradei? and he ?saw his primary role as implementing safeguards and UNSC [United Nations Security Council]/Board resolutions,? i.e. U.S.-driven sanctions and demands against Iran. Amano also vowed to restructure the IAEA?s senior ranks in ways favored by the United States. In return, Pyatt promised that ?the United States would do everything possible to support his [Amano?s] successful tenure as Director General and, to that end, anticipated that continued U.S. voluntary contributions to the IAEA would be forthcoming.? For his part, Amano stuck out his hand seeking more U.S. money, or as Pyatt put it, ?Amano offered that a ?reasonable increase? in the regular budget would be helpful.? Amano also rushed to meet with Israeli officials ?immediately after his appointment,? consulting with Israeli Ambassador Israel Michaeli and leaving Michaeli ?fully confident of the priority Amano accords verification issues.? That was another indication Amano's IAEA would take a hard line against Iran?s alleged nuclear ambitions while ignoring Israel?s undeclared nuclear arsenal. Michaeli also revealed that Amano?s public remarks about ?no evidence of Iran pursuing a nuclear weapons capability? were just for show, designed ?to persuade those who did not support him about his ?impartiality.?? In reality, Amano intended to be anything but impartial. Amano agreed to private ?consultations? with the head of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, Pyatt reported. The purpose was to hear Israel?s purported evidence about Iran continuing its work on a nuclear weapon, not to discuss Israel?s refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or to allow IAEA inspectors into Israeli nuclear sites. In a subsequent cable dated Oct. 16, 2009, the U.S. mission in Vienna said Amano ?took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded ambassador [Glyn Davies] on several occasions that he [Amano] was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran?s alleged nuclear weapons program.? Amano also continued to indicate that he needed to hide his true intentions. ?More candidly, Amano noted the importance of maintaining a certain ?constructive ambiguity? about his plans, at least until he took over for DG ElBaradei in December? 2009, the cable said. In other words, the emerging picture of Amano is of a bureaucrat eager to please the United States and Israel regarding Iran?s nuclear program. Wouldn?t that evidence be relevant for Americans deciding whether to trust the IAEA report? But the Big Media apparently felt that the American people shouldn?t know these facts whose disclosure has been limited to a few Internet sites. [See Consortiumnews.com?s ?America?s Debt to Bradley Manning.?] Similarly, the U.S. press corps is now reporting the dubious allegations about an Iranian assassination plot directed against the Saudi ambassador as flat fact, not as some hard-to-believe accusation comparable to Vice President Dick Cheney?s claims in 2002 that Iraqi officials had a hand in the 9/11 attacks. [See Consortiumnews.com?s ?Petraeus?s CIA Fuels Iran Murder Plot.?] Dangerous Cascade There is now a cascading of allegations regarding Iran, as there was with Iraq, with the momentum rushing toward war. Just as with Iraq?s Saddam Hussein, the U.S. news media treats Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a designated villain whose every word is cast as dangerous or crazy. Even left-of-center media personalities, like MSNBC?s Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow, talk tough against Ahmadinejad, just as many ?liberals? did regarding Hussein. Also, as happened with Iraq ? when harsher economic sanctions merged with a U.S. troop build-up, making an escalation toward war almost inevitable ? tougher and tougher Western sanctions against Iran have pushed the various sides closer to war. In November, Iranian anger at escalating sanctions and other hostile acts led to an assault on the British Embassy, which then prompted new European demands for a full-scale embargo of Iranian oil. As tensions have grown, the U.S. Senate tossed in its own hand-grenade, voting 100-0 in favor of hitting Iran with ever more stringent sanctions. In turn, Iran has threatened to retaliate against the West's economic warfare by blocking the Straits of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world?s oil flows, thus driving up oil prices and derailing the West?s already shaky economies. That threat has led to even more bellicose language from many U.S. political figures, especially the Republican presidential hopefuls who have denounced President Barack Obama for not being tougher on Iran. With the exception of Rep. Ron Paul, virtually all the leading Republican contenders including Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich ? have signaled a readiness to join Israel in a war against Iran.Romney has farmed out his foreign policy agenda to prominent neoconservatives, and Gingrich has gone so far as to suggest a full-scale U.S.-Israeli invasion of Iran to force ?regime change.? As the U.S. news media and politicians mostly reprise their performances on the Iraq invasion in regard to Iran, the principal obstacles to a new war appear to be President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Both are said to privately oppose a war with Iran, which was not true of how President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld felt about Iraq. Though Obama and Panetta have talked tough about ?all options on the table,? the Obama administration slipped loopholes into the Senate?s anti-Iran legislation, to allow the President to waive Iranian sanctions if he deemed them a threat to national security or to the economy. One intelligence source told me that Obama is playing a delicate game in which he must placate hawkish anti-Iranian sentiments in Israel and on Capitol Hill while he continues to seek a broader Middle East security arrangement that would include Iran in the mix. On Wednesday, administration officials sought to tamp down alarmist anti-Iran reports in the U.S. press. Still, whether Obama can head off a violent conflict with Iran remains to be seen. As the presidential election grows nearer ? and the likely GOP?s nominee hammers at Obama as soft on Iran ? a preemptive Israeli attack or a miscalculation by Iran could make war unavoidable. For its part, the major U.S. news media has done its best, again, to line up the American people behind another war. http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/289-134/9168-slip-sliding-to-war-with-iran