From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 14:24:04 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:24:04 +0100 Subject: [THS] A Funny Thing Happened on the Road to (Regime Change in) Damascus... Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102142007.06eba4e0@mail.messagingengine.com> "I am not an optimist, because I am not sure that everything ends well. Nor am I a pessimist, because I am not sure that everything ends badly. I just carry hope in my heart. Hope is the feeling that life and work have a meaning. You either have it or you don't, regardless of the state of the world that surrounds you." - Vaclav Havel http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30128.htm A Funny Thing Happened on the Road to (Regime Change in) Damascus... By Daniel McAdams January 01, 2011 "LRB" -- The Western press has dutifully ? and uncritically ? repeated harrowing tales of the Syrian government's "siege of Homs" ? the 4,000 government forces randomly shelling the city, the snipers everywhere killing anyone on the streets, even the troops' digging trenches to prevent the people from escaping the mass slaughter of the innocents. The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, whose information is dependent on reports from their allied rebel contacts inside Syria (as was the case with the myriad Libyan "human rights groups" operating in the UK, US, and Switzerland), has peppered its website with lurid tales of death and destruction in Homs, calling it a "Bloody Christmas" Sunday. The Syrian Observatory claimed that 34 were slaughtered in Homs on Monday alone. The New York Times reported that the Arab League monitors were urged to speed to Homs before the destruction of that city was complete. But somebody did not get the memo. Upon arrival and inspection of Homs, the Arab League monitors reported seeing ?nothing frightening? in the city of Homs ? supposedly the focal point in the uprising against the Assad government. They were ?reassured? by what they saw. Surely the thousands of tanks, the death moat, the random mortaring of the city by government forces, the near total destruction, would have been visible to the observers. The reaction was prompt and severe. The rebels screamed "foul," as they fully expected the monitors to take the script and run with it. Caught in what appears to be another big lie to gain foreign military support for regime change, the rebel groups and their allies in London doubled down: "Basma Kodmani, a spokesperson for the Syrian National Council (SNC), told French radio France Inter on Tuesday that the monitors were subject to 'all sorts of manipulation'. She said that some 40,000 prisoners had been removed from the prison they were being held in, installed in a military barracks five kilometres away and replaced by false prisoners who gave observers a scripted account of events. She also added that entire families were posing as armed gangs to back up government claims about the militants' identity." Sound a little hysterical? The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that the Syrian regime had secretly changed the street signs so as to trick the observer teams! Other rebels claimed that the government had pulled its tanks out at the last minute. Syrian Observatory president Rami Rahmane, claimed in the French press that "the retreat of the tanks was a 'ruse' and bombing could have started again at any moment." But if the government had been bombing the neighborhoods in Homs where the observers were headed and only removed their tanks at the last minute, surely there would be ample evidence of the shelling. Street sign changing is one thing, covering up destruction left by mortar rounds fired into buildings is quite another. Perhaps there were secret teams of stonemasons dispatched in the night to patch up the buildings? This moment of clarity will no doubt be short-lived, however. It will be explained away as the mistaken conclusions of a few rogue observers. Already the head of the mission, a military general from Sudan, is being discredited as a "human rights violator." France is blasting the monitor team, with its foreign ministry releasing a statement that ?The Arab League observers should return to the city of martyrs (Homs) without delay and ... establish the necessary contact with the civilian population.? The rebel "Free Syrian Army" has called a cease-fire and is attempting to contact the observer teams. (Ceasefire? I thought these were peaceful protests.) And the hundreds of thousands of pro-government protestors are ignored in the Western press ? they do not fit in with the regime change script. As with Libya, evidence to the contrary will be dismissed and evidence to support regime change will be even more exaggerated and will be repeated without skepticism in the Western media. Remember in Libya, not that long ago after all, where the chief engine driving the military intervention, Soliman Bouchuiguir of the Swiss-based Libyan League for Human Rights, admitted on video that his evidence of Gaddafi's slaughter was simply made up out of thin air by the rebels. Evidence? "There is no evidence," he stated. Pepe Escobar says the monitors will have to investigate both the official and the opposition armies. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30133.htm Arab League Mission to Syria Becomes Focus of Demands for Military Intervention By Chris Marsden January 01, 2012 "WSWS" - -The visit by Arab League observers to Homs, Hama, Idlib, Deraa , the Damascus suburb of Douma and other conflict zones has become the focus of concerted demands for the Western powers to intervene militarily into the ongoing civil war in Syria. The mission was endorsed by Syria, in line with an Arab League plan calling for the withdrawal of military forces, a halt to violence against civilians and the release of detainees. The opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) initially responded with a media campaign designed to discredit the mission. Demonstrations were staged wherever the observers visited. The Arab League monitors are clearly under orders from Washington to come up with a hostile report on the regime of President Bashir al-Assad. On Tuesday, the US State Department warned that ?if the Syrian regime continues to resist and disregard Arab League efforts, the international community will consider other means to protect Syrian civilians.? There is no reason to assume that the Arab League will disappoint the US. The head of the observers, Sudanese intelligence chief General Mustafa al-Dabi, has been denounced for his involvement in war crimes in Darfur, especially after he said the ?situation seemed reassuring? on his initial visit to Homs. But Sudan?s Islamist government was given charge of the mission as reward for its support for the war to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. By Friday, amid mass opposition rallies following prayers in several cities, there was a marked change in tone towards the mission. Washington urged critics to allow the monitors to finish their work and businessman Rami Abdul Rahman, head of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, described the Arab League?s presence as ?the only ray of light? for Syrians. Foreign Policy magazine this week wrote that ?top officials in President Barack Obama?s administration are quietly preparing options for how to assist the Syrian opposition,? including the option of setting up a no-fly zone. The US National Security Council (NSC) ?has begun an informal, quiet interagency process,? led by NSC Senior Director Steve Simon. In mid-December, former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds wrote that US troops have been stationed on the Jordanian and Syrian borders. Foreign Policy cites a policy paper of the Syrian National Council, entitled ?Safe Area for Syria,? which lays out the argument for armed intervention. The magazine fails to explain that the paper was produced by the Strategic Research and Communication Centre, whose head, Ausama Monajed, was previously in charge of Barada TV, a London-based US government-funded satellite network. An Arab front for military operations with the aim of deposing Assad is considered politically expedient by Washington and other Western powers. This would deprive their ultimate target, Iran, of its main regional ally and help consolidate US hegemony of the entire Middle East, to the detriment of Russia and China. SNC head Burhan Ghalioun has made clear that the SNC understands the Arab League plan to be a diversionary tactic behind which imperialist intervention is being prepared. He urged the Arab League and the United Nations ?to defend Syrians by establishing isolated and secure areas inside Syria.? The Arab League ?plan to defuse the crisis? is a ?good? plan,? he said, ?but I do not believe the Arab League really has the means? to enforce it. ?It is better if the UN Security Council takes this (Arab League) plan, adopts it and provides the means for its application. That would give it more force.? Events in Syria closely mirror the run-up to the military campaign to depose Gaddafi in Libya, with the SNC acting as a front for the operations of US, British and French forces and those of the Gulf regimes. On December 27, the right-wing Israeli web site DEBKAfile alleged that Qatar was building up a ?Sunni intervention force of Libyan, Iraqi terrorists against Assad.? It wrote, ?The new highly mobile force boosts the anti-Assad Free Syrian Army, whose numbers have jumped to 20,000 fighters, armed and funded by Qatar and now forming into military battalions and brigades at their bases in Turkey the Qatari and Saudi rulers approved a crash program for the Qatari chief of staff, Maj.-Gen Hamas Ali al-Attiya, to weld this mobile intervention Sunni Muslim force out of Al Qaeda-linked operatives for rapid deployment on the Turkish-Syrian border.? DEBKAfile reports that the force numbers 2,500, including 1,000 members of the Islamic Fighting Group in Libya (IFGL) and 1,000 operatives of the Iraqi Ansar al-Sunna. The report cannot be verified, but it is in line with statements made by Britain?s Sir David Richards, chief of the defence staff, to the Royal United Service Institute in London this month. He insisted that the ?key? to the success of the Libyan intervention, providing a model for future UK foreign policy, was ?integrating the Qataris, Emiratis and Jordanians into the operation.? These countries had made up the key land element of the war in Libya, Richards said. ?Without them and their defence chiefs? leadership,? he declared, ?especially the huge understanding they brought to the campaign, it is unlikely that the NTC?s [National Transitional Council] militias could have successfully acted as the land element without which the right outcome would have been impossible.? Qatar first admitted its role in providing ground troops to Libya in late October. Chief-of-Staff Major-General Hamad bin Ali al-Atiya, said, ?We were among [the NTC] and the numbers of Qataris on the ground were hundreds in every region. Training and communications had been in Qatari hands We acted as the link between the rebels and NATO forces.? The Wall Street Journal on October 17 reported: ?With the blessing of Western intelligence agencies, Qatar flew at least 18 weapons shipments in all to anti-Gaddafi rebel forces this spring and summer,? the majority directly to ?militias run by Islamist leaders.? Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan were all also active in the Libyan intervention. Back in November, Richards told Sky News that Britain had contingency plans should Iran?s nuclear program or a deteriorating situation in Syria necessitate action. ?We?ve got a lot of plans in the locker, and we talk to other nations who would inevitably be involved in them so that if ever the situation deteriorated to the stage where armed force would have to be used, we could do it quickly and efficiently,? he said. On December 29, Reuters issued an eyewitness account of the real situation on the ground in Homs. He describes a ?vicious sectarian fight tearing Homs apart and overshadowing peaceful protest. Roads are blocked with checkpoints and some neighbourhoods are carved up by trenches. Kidnappings are an almost daily occurrence.? The Free Syrian Army ?launch attacks with increasing frequency,? Reuters wrote, while in Alawite neighbourhoods armed men and the security forces have formed their own squads. Copyright ? 1998-2011 World Socialist Web Site From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 14:29:39 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:29:39 +0100 Subject: [THS] !!!!! US Threatens War in the Persian Gulf Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102142614.07048858@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30134.htm US Threatens War in the Persian Gulf By Peter Symonds January 01, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - - The Obama administration?s bellicose stance towards Iran is setting the stage for a dangerous slide towards war in the Persian Gulf. Having provoked Tehran with legislation for what amounts to an oil embargo, the US is threatening Iran with military action if it retaliates by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. The press immediately added fuel to the flames by backing Washington and vilifying the Iranian regime. An editorial in the New York Times on Thursday fully supported the Obama administration?s threat of military action against any Iranian attempt to block the Persian Gulf. The editorial condemned Iran for ?its recklessness and its contempt for international law,? declaring, ?This is not a government any country should want to see acquire nuclear weapons.? Other sections of the media went one step further, giving voice to the clamour in ruling circles in the US and Israel for a pre-emptive attack on Iran to destroy its nuclear and military facilities. The Wall Street Journal editorial seized on the tensions over the Strait of Hormuz to warn of the dangers of an Iranian regime ?fortified by a nuclear threat,? concluding that it would be ?better to act now to stop Iran.? The cynicism is staggering. Having waged wars of aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq and backed the NATO bombing of Libya, the US is now deliberately and recklessly raising tensions in the Persian Gulf by threatening severe penalties against any foreign company doing business with Iran?s central bank, thereby effectively blocking Iranian oil exports. It is hardly surprising that Tehran has reacted to an act of economic war that would collapse its already fragile economy. The US and Israel are already engaged in a dirty covert war against Iran?s nuclear and missile programs that involves computer viruses, bombings and assassinations. Any one of these illegal acts of sabotage and murder could have precipitated a slide into military conflict. The US has not only drawn up its own detailed war plans, but is arming its allies in the Gulf against Iran. The White House gave great media prominence on Thursday to a huge $30 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, including 84 of the latest F-15SA fighter aircraft. As for the Iranian ?nuclear threat,? it is necessary to recall the lies about WMDs that were used to justify the criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003. The modus operandi of the Obama administration, acting with the bipartisan support of Congress, is no different. Dubious and dated ?evidence? is being deliberately distorted and magnified, with the complicity of the new International Atomic Energy Agency chief, Yukiya Amano, into claims that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. Tehran?s denials are dismissed out of hand. The media is silent on Washington?s rank hypocrisy in demanding an end to Iran?s nuclear programs while fully backing the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East?its ally Israel, which is notorious for its wars of aggression. The glaring double standard only underscores the fact that Obama?s belligerence towards Iran is no more about the ?nuclear threat? than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were about ?terrorism? and WMDs. US aggression against all three countries has been driven by longstanding American ambitions to consolidate its dominance over the region. Iran not only has its own huge oil and gas reserves but forms the strategic bridge between the energy-rich areas of the Middle East and Central Asia. US imperialism has never reconciled itself to the loss of American hegemony in Tehran that followed the overthrow its ally, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979. The Bush administration backed away from more aggressive action against Iran only because the American military was bogged down in quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now the Obama administration is exploiting the political upheavals in the Middle East to refashion the region in line with its strategic and economic interests. Having ousted Gaddafi in Libya, the US and its allies are applying similar methods to Syria, where oppositional Sunni factions, supported and armed by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, are exploiting popular discontent to force out the pro-Iranian regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The anti-Assad opposition is now pushing for foreign military intervention along the lines of NATO?s war against Libya. In neighbouring Iraq, the US and its regional allies are fanning sectarian hostility to the Maliki government, which rests on Shiite parties sympathetic to Tehran. Washington is exploiting the Sunni-based Iraqiya coalition as a means for pressuring, or if need be refashioning, the Iraqi government to distance it from Iran. At the same time, the US maintains a studied silence on the repressive measures used by its Gulf allies, including Saudi Arabia, to suppress political opposition to their autocratic regimes. The central focus of these machinations in the Middle East is the Iranian regime, which is regarded in Washington as the key obstacle to American ambitions?despite its efforts on more than one occasion to reach an accommodation with the US. In 2009, the Obama administration was centrally involved in orchestrating the international cacophony in support of the failed ?Green Revolution??a movement largely composed of more privileged sections of the Iranian upper middle class. Now US military plans are being dusted off. The relentless intensification of tensions always poses the danger of precipitating conflict, even if at a particular point in time it is unintended. A war against Iran, a country that is crucial to the geopolitical calculations not only of the US, but also major rivals such as Russia and China, inevitably risks escalating into a far broader regional and international conflict with catastrophic implications for humanity. The driving force behind the eruption of American militarism is the economic decline of the United States, now compounded by the worsening global economic crisis. The only social force capable of preventing the slide into new and more horrific wars is the international working class, through the overthrow of the bankrupt profit system and its outmoded nation-state system and their replacement by a planned world socialist economy. Copyright ? 1998-2011 World Socialist Web Site ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ An Act Of War Obama Signs Iran Banking Sanctions By Reuters The bill, aims to reduce Tehran's oil revenues Senior U.S. officials said Washington was engaging with its foreign partners to ensure the sanctions can work without harming global energy markets. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30124.htm From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 14:45:58 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:45:58 +0100 Subject: [THS] !!!!!!! Ray McGovern and Elizabeth Murray: Urging Obama to Stop Rush to Iran War Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102143113.06eba4e0@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30122.htm Urging Obama to Stop Rush to Iran War Exclusive: A torrent of war propaganda against Iran is flooding the American political scene as U.S. neocons and Israeli hardliners see an opening for another war in the Middle East, a momentum that ex-CIA analysts Ray McGovern and Elizabeth Murray urge President Obama to stop. By Ray McGovern and Elizabeth Murray ~~~~~~~ Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served a total of 30 years as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA intelligence analyst. Elizabeth Murray served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council before retiring after a 27-year career in the U.S. government, where she specialized in Middle Eastern political and media analysis. She is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). ~~~~~~~~ December 31, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --- President Obama needs to put an abrupt halt to the game of Persian Roulette about to spin out of control in the Persian Gulf. If we were still on active duty at the CIA, this is what we would tell him: This informal memorandum addresses the escalating game of chicken playing out in the waters off Iran and the more general issue of what can be done to put the exaggerated threat from Iran in some kind of perspective. In keeping with the informality of this memo and our ethos of speaking truth to power, we may at times be rather blunt. If we bring you up short, consider it a measure of the seriousness with which we view the unfolding of yet another tragic mistake. The stakes are quite high, and as former intelligence analysts with no axes to grind, we want to make sure you understand how fragile and volatile the situation in the Gulf has become. We know you are briefed regularly on the play by play, and we will not attempt to replicate that. Your repeated use of the bromide that ?everything is on the table,? however, gives us pause and makes us wonder whether you and your advisers fully recognize the implications, if hostilities with Iran spin out of control. You have the power to stop the madness, and we give you some recommendations on how to lessen the likelihood of a war that would be to the advantage of no one but the arms merchants. If your advisers have persuaded you that hostilities with Iran would bring benefit to Israel, they are badly mistaken. In our view, war with Iran is just as likely in the longer term to bring the destruction of Israel, as well as vast areas of Iran ? not even to mention the disastrous consequences for the world economy, of which you must be aware. Incendiary (but false) claims about how near Iran is to having a nuclear weapon are coming ?fast and furious,? (and are as irresponsible as that ill-fated project of giving weapons to Mexican drug dealers). In our view, the endless string of such claims now threaten to migrate from rhetoric to armed clashes to attempted ?regime change,? as was the case nine years ago on Iraq. You know, we hope, that influential ? but myopic ? forces abound who are willing to take great risk because they believe such events would redound to the benefit of Israel. We make reference, of course, to the reckless Likud government in Israel and its equally reckless single-issue supporters here at home. Inept Advisers Judging by recent performance, your foreign policy and military advisers, including the top generals now in place, appear unable to act as sensible counterweights to those who think that, by beginning hostilities with Iran, they will help Israel do away with a key regional rival. You are not stuck with such advisers. You?re the President; you deserve better. You need some people close to you who know a lot more about the outside world. You may wish to think also about how the recent remarks of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Martin Dempsey, during an interview with the Washington Post?s Greg Jaffe, reflect on the chairman?s acumen in the strategic matters in which he has been immersed for decades. In the interview with Jaffe, Dempsey referred to his 20-year involvement with Iraq (where he made his mark) and, according to Jaffe, Dempsey acknowledged that ?he and his Army did not fully understand the nature of the conflict they were fighting.? Jaffe quotes a particularly telling lament by Dempsey: ?People say, ?For God?s sakes, you were a two-star general. How could you say you didn?t understand?? I don?t know how I can say it, but I lived it. And I mean it.? Suffice it to say that there are serious questions as to how much Gen. Dempsey understands about Iran and whether his meteoric rise to Chairman of the JCS is due more to the crisp salute with which he greets any idea voiced by those above him. Discussing last week the possibility of military action against Iran, Dempsey said, ?The options we are developing are evolving to a point that they would be executable, if necessary.? He added that his ?biggest worry is that (Iranians) will miscalculate our resolve.? That?s not our biggest worry. Rather it is that Dempsey and you will miscalculate Iran?s resolve. We haven?t a clue as to what, if anything, the Chairman is telling you on that key issue. Our distinct impression, however, is that you cannot look to him for the kind of stand-up advice you got from his predecessor, Adm. Mike Mullen. The consummate military professional, Mullen pointed to the military and strategic realities ? and the immense costs ? associated with a war with Iran, which in turn buttressed those who successfully withstood pressure from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for war with Iran. Dempsey = No Mullen During the Bush administration, Mullen argued strongly that there would be no way a ?preventive war? against Iran would be worth the horrendous cost. He did all he could to scuttle the idea. Mullen was among those senior officials who forced Bush and Cheney to publish the unclassified Key Judgments of the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran?s nuclear program ? the NIE that judged ?with high confidence that in the fall of 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.? As Bush and Vice President Cheney have since acknowledged, that drove an iron rod through the wheels of the juggernaut then rolling off to war with Iran. And, as you know, that judgment still stands despite Herculean efforts to fudge it. In his memoir, Decision Points, Bush, complains bitterly that, rather than being relieved by the surprising news that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in late 2003, he was angry that the news ?tied my hands on the military side.? In January 2008, Bush flew to Israel to commiserate with senior Israeli officials who were similarly bitter at the abrupt removal of a casus belli. Tellingly, in his book Bush added this lament: ?But after the NIE, how could I possible explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?? Israel?s Last Chance, Until Now The new estimate on Iran did not stop the Israelis from trying. And in mid-2008, they seemed to be contemplating one more try at provoking hostilities with Iran before Bush and Cheney left office. This time, with Bush?s (but not Cheney?s) support, Mullen flew to Israel to tell Israeli leaders to disabuse themselves of the notion that U.S. military support would be knee-jerk automatic if they somehow provoked open hostilities with Iran. According to the Israeli press, Mullen went so far as to warn the Israelis not to even think about another incident at sea like the deliberate Israeli attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, which left 34 American crew killed and more than 170 wounded. Never before had a senior U.S. official braced Israel so blatantly about the Liberty incident, which was covered up by the Johnson administration, the Congress, and Mullen?s Navy itself. The lesson the Israelis had taken away from the Liberty incident was that they could get away with murder, literally, and walk free because of political realities in the United States. Not this time, said Mullen. He could not have raised a more neuralgic issue. Unintended Consequences As long as he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mike Mullen kept worrying, often publicly, over what he termed ?the unintended consequences of any sort of military action against Iran.? We assume that before he retired last fall he shared that concern with you, just as we tried to warn your predecessor of ?the unintended consequences? that could flow from an attack on Iraq. The Israelis, for their part, would not relent. In February of this year, Mullen returned with sweaty palms from a visit to Israel. On arrival there, he had warned publicly that an attack on Iran would be ?a big, big, big problem for all of us.? When Mullen got back to Washington, he lacked the confident tone he had after reading the Israelis the riot act in mid-2008. It became quickly clear that Mullen feared that, this time, Israel?s leaders did not seem to take his warnings seriously. Lest he leave a trace of ambiguity regarding his professional view, upon his return Mullen drove it home at a Pentagon press conference on Feb. 22, 2011: ?For now, the diplomatic and the economic levers of international power are and ought to be the levers first pulled. Indeed, I would hope they are always and consistently pulled. No strike, however effective, will be, in and of itself, decisive.? In 2008, right after Mullen was able, in late June, to get the Israelis to put aside, for the nonce, their pre-emptive plans vis-?-vis Iran, he moved to put a structure in place that could short-circuit military escalation. Specifically, he thought through ways to prevent unintended (or, for that matter, deliberately provoked) incidents in the crowded Persian Gulf that could lead to wider hostilities. In a widely unnoticed remark, Adm. Mullen conceded to the press that Iran could shut down the Strait of Hormuz, but quickly added de rigueur assurance that the U.S. could open it up again (whereas the Admiral knows better than virtually anyone that this would be no easy task). Mullen sent up an interesting trial balloon at a July 2, 2008, press conference, when he suggested that military-to-military dialogue could ?add to a better understanding? between the U.S. and Iran. But nothing more was heard of this overture, probably because Cheney ordered him to drop it. We think it is high time to give this excellent idea new life. (See below under Recommendations.) The dangers in and around the Strait of Hormuz were still on Mullen?s mind as he prepared to retire on Sept. 30, 2011. Ten days before, he told the Armed Force Press Service of his deep concern over the fact that the United States and Iran have had no formal communications since 1979: ?Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, we had links to the Soviet Union. We are not talking to Iran. So we don?t understand each other. If something happens, it?s virtually assured that we won?t get it right, that there will be miscalculations.? Playing with fire: With the macho game of chicken currently under way between Iranian and U.S. naval forces in the area of the Strait of Hormuz, the potential for an incident has increased markedly. An accident, or provocation, could spiral out of control quickly, with all sides ? Iran, the U.S. and Israel making hurried decisions with, you guessed it, ?unintended consequences.? or Intended Consequences? With your campaign for the presidency in full swing during the summer of 2008, you may have missed a troubling disclosure in July by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. He reported that Bush administration officials had held a meeting in the Vice President?s office in the wake of the January 2008 incident between Iranian patrol boats and U.S. warships in the Strait of Hormuz. The reported purpose of the meeting was to discuss ways to provoke war with Iran. HERSH: There were a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don?t we build in our shipyard four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can?t have Americans killing Americans. That?s the kind of ? that?s the level of stuff we?re talking about. Provocation. Silly? Maybe. But potentially very lethal. Because one of the things they learned in the [January] incident was the American public, if you get the right incident, the American public will support bang-bang-kiss-kiss. You know, we?re into it. Look, is it high school? Yeah. Are we playing high school with you know 5,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal? Yeah we are. We?re playing, you know, who?s the first guy to run off the highway with us and Iran. and Now Iran?s Responsibility for 9/11! On the chance you missed it, this time your government is getting ?incriminating? information from Iranian, not Iraqi, ?defectors.? Iranian ?defectors? have persuaded Manhattan Federal Judge George Daniels to sign an order accusing Iran and Hezbollah ? along with al-Qaeda ? of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. On Dec. 15, in response to a lawsuit brought by family members of 9/11 victims, Daniels claimed that Iran provided material support to al-Qaeda and has assessed Iran $100 billion in damages Watching the blackening of Iranians on virtually all parts of the U.S. body politic, it is no surprise that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu believes he holds the high cards, enjoying the strong support of our Congress, our largely pro-Israel media, and our courts as well. He sees himself in the catbird seat ? particularly during the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election. We know that you have said you have to deal with Netanyahu every day. But for those of us who have not had the pleasure, never did his attitude toward Washington come through so clearly as in a video taped nine years ago and shown on Israeli TV. In it Netanyahu brags about how he deceived President Bill Clinton into believing he (Netanyahu) was helping implement the Oslo accords when he was actually destroying them. The tape displays a contemptuous attitude toward ? and wonderment at ? a malleable America so easily influenced by Israel. Netanyahu says it right out: ?America is something that can be easily moved. Moved in the right direction. They won?t get in our way Eighty percent of the Americans support us. It?s absurd.? Israeli columnist Gideon Levy has written that the video shows Netanyahu to be ?a con artist who thinks that Washington is in his pocket and that he can pull the wool over its eyes,? adding that such behavior ?does not change over the years.? On Dec. 29, the strongly pro-Israel Washington Times ran an unsigned editorial, ?Tehran?s moment of truth: The mullahs are playing with fire in Strait of Hormuz.? After a fulsome paragraph of bragging about how the U.S. Navy capabilities dwarf those of Iran?s, the Washington Times editors inadvertently give the game away: ?A theater-wide response to the strait closure would involve air strikes on military and leadership targets throughout the country, and the crisis could be a useful pretext for international action against Iran?s nuclear program.? Hopefully, pointing out Israel?s overarching objective will strike you as gratuitous. No doubt your advisers have told you that ?regime change? (what we used to call overthrowing a government) is Israel?s ultimate goal. Just so you know. Recommendations We hope that, when we assume you wish to thwart Israel and any other party who might want to get the U.S. involved in hostilities with Iran, we are not assuming too much. With that as our premise, we recommend that you: 1- Make public, as soon as possible, a declassified version of the key judgments of the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran?s nuclear development program, with whatever updating is necessary. You know that the Herculean efforts of U.S. intelligence to find evidence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iran have found nothing. Do not insult Americans with Rumsfeldian nostrums like: ?The absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence.? Rather, be up-front with the American people. Tell them the truth about the conclusions of our intelligence community. Bush was helped to launch the aggressive war on Iraq by a deliberately dishonest National Intelligence Estimate on weapons of mass destruction there. Let yourself be fortified by an honest NIE on Iran, and stand up to the inevitable criticism from Israelis and their influential surrogates. 2- Pick up on Adm. Mike Mullen?s suggestion at his press conference on July 2, 2008, that military-to-military dialogue could ?add to a better understanding? between the U.S. and Iran. If there were ever a time when our navies need to be able to communicate with each other, it is now. It was a good idea in 2008; it is an even better idea now. Indeed, it seems likely that a kind of vestigial Cheneyism, as well as pressure from the Likud Lobby, account for the fact that the danger of a U.S.-Iranian confrontation in the crowded Persian Gulf has still not been addressed in direct talks. Cheney and those of his mini-National Security Staff who actually looked forward to such confrontations are gone from the scene. If the ones who remain persist in thwarting time-tested structural ways of preventing accidents, miscalculation and covert false-flag attacks, please consider suggesting that they retire early. Order the negotiation of the kind of bilateral ?incidents-at-sea? agreement concluded with the Russians in May 1972, which, together with direct communications, played an essential role in heading off escalation neither side wanted, when surface or submarine ships go bump in the night. 3- Get yourself some advisers who know more about the real world than the ones you have now, and make sure they owe allegiance solely to the United States. 4- Issue a formal statement that your administration will not support an Israeli military attack on Iran. Make it clear that even though, after Dec. 31, the U.S. may not be technically responsible for defending Iraqi airspace, you have ordered U.S. Air Force units in the area to down any intruders. 5- Sit back and look toward a New Year with a reasonable prospect of less, not more, tension in the Persian Gulf. Happy New Year. Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served a total of 30 years as an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA intelligence analyst. Elizabeth Murray served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council before retiring after a 27-year career in the U.S. government, where she specialized in Middle Eastern political and media analysis. She is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). This item was first posted at www.consortiumnews.com From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 14:47:49 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:47:49 +0100 Subject: [THS] Gareth Porter: Muslim Haters Tie Iran to 9/11 Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102144638.06eb9d30@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30123.htm Muslim Haters Tie Iran to 9/11 By Gareth Porter December 31, 2011 "Information Clearing House" - Behind a mysterious Dec. 22 Associated Press story about ?finding of fact? by a district judge in Manhattan Friday that Iran assisted al-Qaeda in the planning of the 9/11 attacks is a tapestry of recycled fabrications and distortions of fact from a bizarre cast of characters. The AP story offers no indication of the nature of the evidence in the case except that former members of the 9/11 Commission and three Iranian defectors provided testimony. What it didn?t say was that at least two of the Iranian defectors have long been dismissed by U.S. intelligence as ?fabricators? and that the two ?expert witnesses? who were supposed to determine the credibility of those defectors? claims are both avowed advocates of crackpot conspiracy theories about Muslims and Shariah law who believe the United States is at war with Islam. The ostensible purpose of the case brought by families of 9/11 terror attack victims was to win damages from those responsible for 9/11. Dozens of such cases involving different terrorist attacks have been brought to U.S. courts over the years, in which ?default judgments? have been made against Iran over various attacks in which Iran was allegedly involved, but there is no chance of getting any money for the families. The only real effect of the case is to promote right-wing political myths about Iran. One of the peculiarities of such cases is that the witnesses are not subject to cross examination in court. The witnesses have every incentive, therefore to indulge in false testimony, knowing that there will be no one to challenge them. ?A Fabricator of Monumental Proportions? The lawyers and the ?expert witnesses? behind the accusation of Iran in regard to 9/11 hoped to sell the press and public on recycled claims first made by Iranian ?defectors? several years ago that they had personal knowledge of Iranian participation in the 9/11 plot. The lawyers produced videotaped affidavits by three such defectors who were identified, with a dramatic flourish, as Witnesses ?X,? ?Y,? and ?Z.? In the one public hearing held on the case, the lawyers revealed the identity of purported former Iranian intelligence official Abolghasem Mesbahi ? probably a pseudonym ? and described his testimony that he had received a series of ?coded messages? from a former colleague in the Iranian government in the late summer and early fall of 2001 warning that a terrorist attack against the United States was being planned and that it was a plan that had been concocted by Tehran in the late 1980s. Although the judge and the public were being led to believe that this is somehow new information going beyond what was known by the 9/11 Commission report, it is, in fact, very old information and has long been completely discredited. Mesbahi?s story doesn?t hold up, for several reasons, and the most obvious is that, despite his claim that he was warned nearly a month before the 9/11 attacks that civilian airliners would be crashed into buildings in major U.S. cities, including Washington and New York on Sept. 11, he never conveyed that information to the U.S. government before that date. In October 2001, Mesbahi claimed to right-wing journalist Kenneth R. Timmerman, as reported in Timmerman?s 2005 book, that he had tried calling the legal attach? at the U.S. embassy in Berlin but was ?unsuccessful in several attempts.? But he did not claim any other attempt to reach a U.S. consulate or the U.S. embassy in Germany by fax, e-mail, or letter before Sept. 11, nor did he go to the U.S. embassy in person to convey this warning. He told Timmerman that he called an Iranian dissident contact in the United States who, he believed, had contacts with U.S. intelligence agencies only some hours after the attacks on New York and Washington. It wasn?t the first time Mesbahi had claimed inside information about Iranian involvement in a terrorist attack only after the attack had taken place. He had told investigators working on the December 1988 terror bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that Iran had asked Libya and Abu Nidal to carry out the attack on the personal orders of Ayatollah Khomeini. Unfortunately for his credibility, however, he had not come forward with the allegation until after the bombing had happened. He had also provided affidavits to Argentine investigators in the case of the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, claiming his well-informed friends in Iranian intelligence had tipped him off that the decision to bomb the Jewish Community Center had been made at a meeting attended by top Iranian officials in August 1993. But in fact, by his own admission Mesbahi had not worked for Argentine intelligence since 1988, and the FBI?s Hezbollah Office?s James Bernazzani, who had helped the Argentine intelligence service with the investigation in 1997, told me in a November 2006 interview that American intelligence officials had concluded Mesbahi did not have the continued high-level access to Iranian intelligence officials throughout the 1990s and beyond that he was claiming. They regarded him as someone who was desperate for money and ready to ?provide testimony to any country on any case involving Iran,? according to Bernazzani. Mesbahi wasn?t even consistent in the story he told about the alleged ?coded messages.? In an interview with Timmerman, Mesbahi stated that he had gotten two messages from his contact, one on Sept. 1, 2001, and a second three days later. And Timmerman wrote that his alleged contact had ?phoned him again? on Sept. 4, indicating that Mesbahi had made no reference to an elaborate scheme to send coded messages through articles in Iranian newspapers. But in his affidavit to the 9/11 court case, he said he had gotten three messages ? on July 23, Aug. 13, and Aug. 27 ? and that the coded messages were placed in newspaper articles. Timmerman, who referred the lawyers to Mesbahi, discretely avoided pointing out the huge discrepancy between the two stories, which clearly indicates that Mesbahi fabricated the tale of messages in newspaper articles to make it more dramatic and convincing. The second defector, Hamid Reza Zakeri, claimed he had been an officer of Iran?s Ministry of Information and Security and had provided security for a meeting at an airbase near Tehran on May 4, 2001, attended by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Osama bin Laden?s son Saad bin Laden. He also claimed to have seen replicas of the twin towers, the White House, the Pentagon, and Camp David in the entry hall to the main headquarters of the MOIS with a missile suspended above the targets and ?Death to America? written in Arabic (rather than Farsi) on the side. Like Mesbahi, Zakeri also first told his tale to Timmerman, who recounts it in his 2005 book. Zakeri, who apparently defected from Iran in late July 2001, claimed he had told the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan on July 26, 2001, about the alleged meeting and replicas, warning them that he believed the Iranians and al-Qaeda were planning an attack on those targets that would occur Sept. 11. But CIA officials denied categorically to Timmerman that Zakeri had given any such warning to the embassy and called Zakeri ?a fabricator of monumental proportions? and ?a serial fabricator.? Zakeri failed an FBI polygraph test in 2003, according to Timmerman. Crackpot Hate-Islam Extremists as ?Expert Witnesses? Significantly, no reputable retired intelligence analyst on Iran was asked to help judge the testimony of the Iranian defectors. Instead, Clare M. Lopez and Bruce Tefft, both former CIA covert operations case officers, were invited to be ?expert witnesses,? in large part to view the videotaped testimony of the three Iranian defectors and assess their credibility. Based on the record of their public statements, however, they were selected for that role because they could be counted upon to endorse the defectors? allegations of Iranian involvement in planning the 9/11 attacks and any other assertion, no matter how outlandish, that suggested Iranian guilt. Lopez has been linked with the neoconservative faction of the Bush administration and the pro-Likud Party extreme right ever since she became executive director of the Iran Policy Committee in 2005. Through a series of policy papers issued that year, the Committee sought to support from outside the push by a group of pro-Likud officials within the administration for a policy of regime change in Iran. In particular, the Committee called for using the Mujahedin-E-Khalq, or MEK, the armed opposition group listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist group because of its assassinations of U.S. officials during the regime of the shah and bombings of large civilian events in Iran. The MEK had long enjoyed close working relations with Israel but not with the United States, and the State Department had continued to oppose delisting and alliance with the MEK against Tehran, as proposed by the Defense Department and the vice president?s office. Since 2009, Lopez has been a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy, founded and headed by notorious Islam-hating extremist Frank J. Gaffney. One of Lopez?s projects has been to stir up public fear over an alleged threat to America ? not from al-Qaeda attacks, but from subversion by Muslim-Americans. She is one of a number of authors of a book published by Gaffney?s Center in October 2010 called Shariah: The Threat to America, which declares, ?The United States is under attack by foes who are openly animated by what is known as Shariah (Islamic Law).? Revealing the project?s anti-Islam paranoia, the book asserts, ?Shariah dictates that non-Muslims be given three choices: convert to Islam and conform to Shariah, submit as second class citizens (dhimmis), or be killed.? In a videotaped talk she gave on Feb. 23, 2011, Lopez said Muslims ?believe they should be in charge of the world.? The main threat from Islam, she said, is ?stealth jihad? waged by Muslims who ?hide behind a moderate image? but whose ?purpose is still the same? as that of al-Qaeda. A second aspect of Lopez?s work for Gaffney has been to intimidate opponents of the hard-line policies toward Iran ? and especially the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) ? by accusing them of being covert lobbyists for Iran. Tefft, who retired from the CIA?s Operations Division in 1995, is even more explicit in arguing that there is a worldwide war against Islam. ?We are fighting a 14-century war against Islam and its adherents, Muslims,? he declared in an interview with the right-wing website FrontPageMag in October 2007. ?And it is a war that they have declared on all non-Muslims .? Islamic ideology requires Muslims to ?make the world Islamic under the Caliphate, and to convert, kill or enslave all non-Muslims.? When the interviewer suggested that there are ?moderate Muslims,? Tefft responded, ?I don?t think so . Were there ?good? or ?moderate? Nazis?? Tefft referred to the way ?the West? had ?prevailed? over Islam with the ?defeat of the marauding armies of Islam at the Gates of Vienna in 1529? and added, ?We need to recall that period and again contain Islam to its existing borders.? When asked by this writer in a phone interview last week if he had been aware of the advocacy of Islamophobe arguments by Lopez and Tefft, Thomas Mellon Jr., one of two lead lawyers in the case, did not answer directly, but said, ?To the extent that you are accurate, we would say, fine, take them out.? He insisted that the lawyers for the case had not relied on any one of the 10 ?expert witnesses? listed on the case. Also playing a central role in weaving the tale of Iranian complicity in the 9/11 attacks for the court case was the right-wing author and anti-Iran activist Kenneth R. Timmerman. According to the lawyers? brief on the case, it was Timmerman who sought out one of the attorneys, Timothy B. Fleming, and brought to his attention the three Iranian ?defectors? who claimed personal knowledge that Iran was involved in the planning of 9/11. Like Lopez, Timmerman has been linked with hard-line pro-Likud organizations and involved in efforts to overthrow the regime in Tehran. Along with Joshua Muravchik and a group of Iranian exile foes of the Islamic regime, he established the Foundation for Democracy in Iran in 1995. Timmerman has also expressed views sympathetic to the hate-Islam movement. His 2003 book, Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War Against America, portrays the United States and Israel as innocent victims of a vicious campaign against the West by whole Islamic societies that refuse to accept the U.S.-Israeli narrative on terrorism. And his new novel, St. Peter?s Bones, has been praised by notorious Islam-hater Robert Spencer for revealing the ?long-hidden origins of Islam.? The ?Material Support? and ?Save Haven? Ploys The most egregious allegations of Iranian complicity in 9/11 come from three former staff members of the 9/11 Commission ? Daniel Byman, Dietrich Snell, and Janice Kephart. They had all worked on the section of the 2004 report that had given heavy emphasis to the fact that Iran had not stamped the passports of Saudis who later became hijackers in the 9/11 attacks when they entered Iran. The section had suggested that this and other evidence could indicate Iranian complicity in the plot, even if it could not yet be proven. In their affidavits to the court, those three former staffers, two of whom (Snell and Kephart) are lawyers, argue that Iran?s failure to stamp the passports of the al-Qaeda operatives constituted provision of ?material support? to al-Qaeda in executing the 9/11 attacks. U.S. anti-terrorist law specifies that the provision of ?material support? to terrorists includes any ?service? to terrorists if the provider is ?knowing or intending that they are to be used in preparation for, or in carrying out? a terrorist action. However, a key piece of information in a different chapter of the 9/11 Commission report shows that Iran?s failure to stamp passports was not intended to aid al-Qaeda. On page 169, the report says that, in order to avoid the confiscation by Saudi authorities of passports bearing a Pakistani stamp, the Saudi al-Qaeda operatives ?either erased the Pakistani visa from their passport or traveled through Iran, which did not stamp visas directly into passports.? In other words, the Iranian practice of not stamping visas directly into passports applied to everyone. And since, as the Commission report acknowledged, there was no evidence of Iranian foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the existence of that policy did not support the thesis of Iranian ?material support? for the al-Qaeda plot. The Commission staff went back to the two senior planners of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Bin al Shibh, in July 2004, to ask them specifically about the Iranian failure to stamp the passports of the hijackers, but, strangely, the Commission report gives no indication of what they said about whether the Iranian practice was intended to assist al-Qaeda. Either the staff never asked the question, or the answer was ignored because it contradicted the line that those staff members were pushing in 2004 and are still pushing today. The former Commission staffers also joined right-wing activists in highlighting the intelligence Commission report statements that ?an associate of a senior Hezbollah operative? was on the same mid-November flight from Beirut to Tehran as a group of future hijackers and that Hezbollah officials in Beirut and Iran had been ?expecting the arrival of a group [from Saudi Arabia] during the same time period.? The former staffers insist that these could not have been coincidences and that they had to mean that Iran was involved in the al-Qaeda plot. The argument that the presence of an ?associate? of a top Hezbollah official on the same flight as future al-Qaeda hijackers could not have been a coincidence is absurd. There were obviously many ?associates? of top Hezbollah officials, most whom would have had occasion to travel to Iran frequently. The statistical likelihood that one of them would be on the same flight as the future hijackers would not be so small as to merit suspicion. And the very same section of the Commission report provides a clear explanation of the anticipation of a group traveling from Saudi Arabia to Iran that reveals the conspiratorial interpretation as dishonest. It says that a senior Hezbollah operative ? said to have been Imad Mughniyah ? visited Saudi Arabia in October 2000 to ?coordinate activities? there, that he planned to assist a group traveling to Iran in November, and that intelligence reports showed the planned visit to Iran involved a ?top Hezbollah commander? and ?Saudi Hezbollah contacts.? But that didn?t stop the lawyers for the case from twisting the Commission report to fit the desired narrative: ?The ?activities? that Mughniyah went to coordinate,? clearly revolved around the hijackers? travel, their obtaining new Saudi passports and/or U.S. visas for the 9/11 operation, as several of them did, as well as the hijackers? security, and the operation?s security.? Paul Pillar, who was the CIA?s senior intelligence officer on the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005 and had previously been the senior analyst at the agency?s Counterterrorism Center, was categorical about the matter when I interviewed him in 2006. The facts detailed in the Commission Report about passports, travel of the hijackers through Iran, and the presence of a Hezbollah official on one of the flights ?don?t show Iranian collusion with al-Qaeda,? he told me. The lawyers? brief refers to ?the existence of a secret network of travel routes and safe houses? worked out from the mid-1990s onward as being ?confirmed by al-Qaeda military chief Saef al Adel in a May 2005 interview.? That implies that secret arrangements on such ?travel routes and safe houses? were made between al-Qaeda and the Iranian government. But al-Adel said nothing of the sort. He made it clear in his interview with a Saudi journalist that the Iranians who helped them with housing and logistics were not connected with the Iranian regime. The ?expert witnesses? and the lawyers carefully skirt the fact that in the latter half of the 1990s ? at a time when the United States was officially still ?neutral? on the civil war in Afghanistan ? Iran was providing funding, arms, and other support to the Northern Alliance, the non-Pashtun forces seeking to overthrow the Taliban regime that bin Laden and al-Qaeda were helping to keep in power. That Iranian support for the Northern Alliance was still ongoing when the organization?s chief, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was assassinated Sept. 10, 2001, by two Arabs posing as journalists. The leader of the CIA?s post-9/11 covert paramilitary team in Afghanistan, Gary Schroen, reported that there were two IRGC colonels attached to the commander of the Northern Alliance, Bismullah Khan, when the CIA team arrived. Nevertheless, Lopez and Tefft as well as Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman, a former intelligence officer in the Israeli Defense Forces who boasts of his ?close personal contacts? with senior Israel intelligence and military officials, cite reports supposedly originating with German intelligence that Iran helped al-Qaeda operatives carry out the Massoud assassination. All the ?expert witnesses? insist vehemently that Iran continued to provide ?safe haven? for al-Qaeda operatives who fled from Afghanistan to Iran after 9/11, allowing them to direct terrorist activities against Saudi Arabia in particular. But that accusation merely recycles the claim first made in early 2002 by Bush administration officials seeking to prevent negotiations between the United States and Iran and push for the adoption of a regime-change strategy in Iran. The central pretense of the neoconservative ?safe haven? ploy was that, if any al-Qaeda operatives were able to function in Iran, Iran must have deliberately permitted it. But the United States has been unable to shut down al-Qaeda?s operation in Pakistan after a decade of trying, despite the cooperation of the Pakistani intelligence service and the drone coverage of the tribal areas. If the same criteria applied to Iran were to be applied to the Bush administration and the government of Germany, they could be accused of having provided ?safe haven? for al-Qaeda operatives prior to 9/11. In fact, after U.S. complaints about al-Qaeda presence in Iran in late 2001, Tehran detained nearly 300 al-Qaeda operatives and gave a dossier with their names, passport pictures, and fingerprints to the United Nations. Iran also repatriated at least 200 of those detainees to the newly formed government of Afghanistan. U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker revealed last year that, in late 2001, Iran had been willing to discuss possible surrender of the senior al-Qaeda officials it was detaining to the United States and share any intelligence it had gained from its investigations as part of a wider understanding with Washington. But the neoconservative faction in the administration rejected that offer, demanding that Iran give them the al-Qaeda detainees without getting anything in return. Iran?s crackdown on al-Qaeda continued in 2002-03 and netted a number of top officials. One of the senior al-Qaeda detainees apparently detained by Iran during that period, Saif al-Adel, later told a Jordanian journalist that Iran?s operations against al-Qaeda had ?confused us and aborted 75 percent of our plan.? The arrests included ?up to 80 percent? of Abu Musab al Zarqawi?s group, he said, and those who had not been swept up were forced to leave for Iraq. In further negotiations with the Bush administration in May 2003, Iran again offered to turn over the senior al-Qaeda detainees to the United States in return for the MEK captured by U.S. forces in Iraq. The Bush administration again refused the offer. By 2005, a ?senior U.S. intelligence official? was publicly admitting that 20 to 25 top al-Qaeda leaders were in detention in Iran and that they were ?not able to do much of anything.? In 2008, one U.S. official told ABC News that administration officials had not been raising the al-Qaeda issue publicly, because ?they believe Iran has largely kept the al-Qaeda operatives under control since 2003, limiting their ability to travel and communicate.? But in the world of the right-wing Islam-hating extremists and others pushing for confrontation with Iran, reality is no obstacle to spinning tales of secret Iranian assistance to al-Qaeda. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006. This article was first published by Truthout From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 15:04:03 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:04:03 +0100 Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?James_Petras=3A_Imperialism_and_the_=93Anti-?= =?iso-8859-1?q?Imperialism_of_the_Fools=94?= Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102150255.06e7b9f0@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30127.htm Imperialism and the ?Anti-Imperialism of the Fools? By James Petras January 01, 2012 "Information Clearing House" - One of the great paradoxes of history are the claims of imperialist politicians to be engaged in a great humanitarian crusade designed to liberate nations and peoples, while practicing the most barbaric conquests, destructive wars and large scale bloodletting of conquered people in historical memory. In the modern capitalist era, the ideologies of imperialist rulers vary over time, from the early appeals to ?the right? to wealth, power, colonies and grandeur to later claims of a ?civilizing mission?. More recently imperial rulers have propagated, many diverse justifications adapted to specific contexts, adversaries, circumstances and audiences. This essay will concentrate on analyzing contemporary US imperial ideological arguments for legitimizing wars and sanctions to sustain dominance. Contextualizing Imperial Ideology Imperialist propaganda varies according to whether it is directed against a competitor for global power, or whether as a justification for applying sanctions, or engaging in open warfare against a local or regional socio-political adversary. With regard to established imperial (Europe) or rising world economic competitors (China), US imperial propaganda varies over time. Early in the 19th century, Washington proclaimed the ?Monroe Doctrine?, denouncing European efforts to colonize Latin America, privileging its own imperial designs in that region. In the 20th century when the US imperial policymakers were displacing Europe from prime resource based colonies in the Middle East and Africa, it played on several themes. It condemned ?colonial forms of domination and promoted ?neo-colonial? transitions that ended European monopolies and facilitated US multi-national corporate penetration. This was clearly evident during and after World War 2, in the Middle East petrol-countries. During the 1950s as the US assumed imperial primacy and radical anti-colonial nationalism came to the fore, Washington forged alliances with the declining colonial power to combat a common enemy and to prop up post-colonial powers. Even with the post World War 2 economic recovery, growth and unification of Europe, it still works in tandem and under US leadership in militarily repressing nationalist insurgencies and regimes. When conflicts and competition occur, between US and European regimes, banks and enterprises, the mass media of each region publish ?investigatory findings? highlighting the frauds and malfeasance of its competitors ..and US regulatory agencies levy heavy fines on their European counterparts, overlooking similar practices by Wall Street financial firms. In recent times the rising tide of militarist imperialism and colonial wars fueled by Israeli proxies in the US state has led to some serious divergences between US and European imperialism. With the exception of England, Europe made a minimum symbolic commitment to the US wars and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Germany and France concentrated on expanding their export markets and economic capacities; displacing the US in major markets and resource sites. The convergence of US and European empires led to the integration of financial institutions and the subsequent common crises and collapse but without any coordinated policy of recovery. US ideologists propagated the idea of a ?declining and decaying European Union?, while the European ideologues emphasized the failures of Anglo-American de-regulated, ?free markets? and Wall Street swindles. Imperial Ideology, Rising Economic Powers and Nationalist Challengers There is a long history of imperialist ?anti-imperialism?, officially sponsored condemnation, expos?s and moral indignation directed exclusively against rival imperialists, emerging powers or simply competitors, who in some cases are simply following in the footsteps of the established imperial powers. English imperialists in their heyday justified their world-wide plunder of three continents by perpetuating the ?Black Legend?, of Spanish empire?s ?exceptional cruelty? toward indigenous people of Latin America, while engaging in the biggest and most lucrative African slave trade. While the Spanish colonists enslaved the indigenous people, the Anglo-American settlers exterminated them .. In the run-up to World War II, European and US imperial powers, while exploiting their Asian colonies condemned Japanese imperial powers? invasion and colonization of China. Japan, in turn claimed it was leading Asia?s forces fighting against Western imperialism and projected a post-colonial ?co-prosperity? sphere of equal Asian partners. The imperialist use of ?anti-imperialist? moral rhetoric was designed to weaken rivals and was directed to several audiences. In fact, at no point did the anti-imperialist rhetoric serve to ?liberate? any of the colonized people.In almost all cases the victorious imperial power only substituted one form colonial or neo-colonial rule for another. The ?anti-imperialism? of the imperialists is directed at the nationalist movements of the colonized countries and at their domestic public. British imperialists fomented uprisings among the agro-mining elites in Latin America promising ?free trade? against Spanish mercantilist rule; they backed the ?self-determination? of the slave holding cotton plantation owners in the US South against the Union; they supported the territorial claims of the Iroquois tribal leaders against the US anti-colonial revolutionaries exploiting legitimate grievances for imperial ends. During World War II, the Japanese imperialists supported a sector of the nationalist anti-colonial movement in India against the British Empire. The US condemned Spanish colonial rule in Cuba and the Philippines and went to war to ?liberate? the oppressed peoples from tyranny .and remained to impose a reign of terror, exploitation and colonial rule The imperial powers sought to divide the anti-colonial movements and create future ?client rulers? when and if they succeeded. The use of anti-imperialist rhetoric was designed to attract two sets of groups. A conservative group with common political and economic interests with the imperial power, which shared their hostility to revolutionary nationalists and which sought to accrue greater advantage by tying their fortunes to a rising imperial power. A radical sector of the movement tactically allied itself with the rising imperial power, with the idea of using the imperial power to secure resources (arms, propaganda, vehicles and financial aid) and, once securing power, to discard them. More often than not, in this game of mutual manipulation between empire and nationalists, the former won out as is the case then and now. The imperialist ?anti-imperialist? rhetoric was equally directed at the domestic public, especially in countries like the US which prized its 18th anti-colonial heritage. The purpose was to broaden the base of empire building beyond the hard line empire loyalists, militarists and corporate beneficiaries. Their appeal sought to include liberals, humanitarians, progressive intellectuals, religious and secular moralists and other ?opinion-makers? who had a certain cachet with the larger public, the ones who would have to pay with their lives and tax money for the inter-imperial and colonial wars. The official spokespeople of empire publicize real and fabricated atrocities of their imperial rivals, and highlight the plight of the colonized victims. The corporate elite and the hardline militarists demand military action to protect property, or to seize strategic resources; the humanitarians and progressives denounce the ?crimes against humanity? and echo the calls ?to do something concrete? to save the victims from genocide. Sectors of the Left join the chorus, finding a sector of victims who fit in with their abstract ideology, and plead for the imperial powers to ?arm the people to liberate themselves? (sic). By lending moral support and a veneer of respectability to the imperial war, by swallowing the propaganda of ?war to save victims? the progressives become the prototype of the ?anti-imperialism of the fools?. Having secured broad public support on the basis of ?anti-imperialism?, the imperialist powers feel free to sacrifice citizens? lives and the public treasury, to pursue war, fueled by the moral fervor of a righteous cause. As the butchery drags on and the casualties mount, and the public wearies of war and its cost, progressive and leftist enthusiasm turns to silence or worse, moral hypocrisy with claims that ?the nature of the war changed? or ?that this isn?t the kind of war that we had in mind ?. As if the war makers ever intended to consult the progressives and left on how and why they should engage in imperial wars.! In the contemporary period the imperial ?anti-imperialist wars? and aggression have been greatly aided and abetted by well-funded ?grass roots? so-called ?non-governmental organizations? which act to mobilize popular movements which can ?invite? imperial aggression. Over the past four decades US imperialism has fomented at least two dozen ?grass roots? movements which have destroyed democratic governments, or decimated collectivist welfare states or provoked major damage to the economy of targeted countries. In Chile throughout 1972-73 under the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, the CIA financed and provided major support ? via the AFL-CIO?to private truck owners to paralyze the flow of goods and services. They also funded a strike by a sector of the copper workers union (at the El Teniente mine) to undermine copper production and exports, in the lead up to the coup. After the military took power several ?grass roots? Christian Democratic union officials participated in the purge of elected leftist union activists. Needless to say in short order the truck owners and copper workers ended the strike, dropped their demands and subsequently lost all bargaining rights! In the 1980?s the CIA via Vatican channels transferred millions of dollars to sustain the ?Solidarity Union? in Poland, making a hero of the Gdansk shipyards worker-leader Lech Walesa, who spearheaded the general strike to topple the Communist regime. With the overthrow of Communism so also went guaranteed employment, social security and trade union militancy: the neo-liberal regimes reduced the workforce at Gdansk by fifty percent and eventually closed it, giving the boot to the entire workforce. Walesa retired with a magnificent Presidential pension, while his former workmates walked the streets and the new ?independent? Polish rulers provided NATO with military bases and mercenaries for imperial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2002 the White House, the CIA , the AFL-CIO and NGOs, backed a Venezuelan military-business ? trade union bureaucrat led ?grass roots? coup that overthrew democratically elected President Chavez. In 48 hours a million strong authentic grass roots mobilization of the urban poor backed by constitutionalist military forces defeated the US backed dictators and restored Chavez to power. Subsequently oil executives directed a lockout backed by several US financed NGOs. They were defeated by the workers? takeover of the oil industry. The unsuccessful coup and lockout cost the Venezuelan economy billions of dollars in lost income and caused a double digit decline in GNP. The US backed ?grass roots? armed jihadists to liberate Bosnia and armed the?grass roots? terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army to break-up Yugoslavia. Almost the entire Western Left cheered as, the US bombed Belgrade, degraded the economy and claimed it was ?responding to genocide?. Kosovo ?free and independent? became a huge market for white slavers, housed the biggest US military base in Europe, with the highest per-capita out migration of any country in Europe. The imperial ?grass roots? strategy combines humanitarian, democratic and anti-imperialist rhetoric and paid and trained local NGO?s, with mass media blitzes to mobilize Western public opinion and especially ?prestigious leftist moral critics? behind their power grabs. The Consequence of Imperial Promoted ?Anti-Imperialist? Movements: Who Wins and Who Loses? The historic record of imperialist promoted ?anti-imperialist? and ?pro-democracy? ?grass roots movements? is uniformly negative. Let us briefly summarize the results. In Chile ?grass roots? truck owners strike led to the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and nearly two decades of torture, murder, jailing and forced exile of hundreds of thousands, the imposition of brutal ?free market policies? and subordination to US imperial policies. In summary the US multi-national copper corporations and the Chilean oligarchy were the big winners and the mass of the working class and urban and rural poor the biggest losers. The US backed ?grass roots uprisings? in Eastern Europe against Soviet domination, exchanged Russian for US domination; subordination to NATO instead of the Warsaw Pact; the massive transfer of national public enterprises, banks and media to Western multi-nationals. Privatization of national enterprises led to unprecedented levels of double-digit unemployment, skyrocketing rents and the growth of pensioner poverty. The crises induced the flight of millions of the most educated and skilled workers and the elimination of free public health, higher education and worker vacation resorts. Throughout the now capitalist Eastern Europe and USSR highly organized criminal gangs developed large scale prostitution and drug rings; foreign and local gangster ?entrepeneurs? seized lucrative public enterprises and formed a new class of super-rich oligarchs Electoral party politicians, local business people and professionals linked to Western ?partners? were the socio-economic winners. Pensioners, workers, collective farmers, the unemployed youth were the big losers along with the formerly subsidized cultural artists. Military bases in Eastern Europe became the empire?s first line of military attack of Russia and the target of any counter-attack. If we measure the consequences of the shift in imperial power, it is clear that the Eastern Europe countries have become even more subservient under the US and the EU than under Russia. Western induced financial crises have devastated their economies; Eastern European troops have served in more imperial wars under NATO than under Soviet rule; the cultural media are under Western commercial control. Most of all, the degree of imperial control over all economic sectors far exceeds anything that existed under the Soviets. The Eastern European ?grass roots? movement succeeded in deepening and extending the US Empire; the advocates of peace, social justice, national independence, a cultural renaissance and social welfare with democracy were the big losers. Western liberals, progressives and leftists who fell in love with imperialist promoted ?anti-imperialism? are also big losers. Their support for the NATO attack on Yugoslavia led to the break-up of a multi-national state and the creation of huge NATO military bases and a white slavers paradise in Kosovo. Their blind support for the imperial promoted ?liberation? of Eastern Europe devastated the welfare state, eliminating the pressure on Western regimes? need to compete in providing welfare provisions. The main beneficiaries of Western imperial advances via ?grass roots? uprisings were the multi-national corporations, the Pentagon and the right-wing free market neo-liberals. As the entire political spectrum moved to the right a sector of the left and progressives eventually jumped on the bandwagon. The Left moralists lost credibility and support, their peace movements dwindled, their ?moral critiques? lost resonance. The left and progressives who tail-ended the imperial backed ?grass roots movements?, whether in the name of ?anti-Stalinism?, ?pro-democracy? or ?anti-imperialism? have never engaged in any critical reflection; no effort to analyze the long-term negative consequences of their positions in terms of the losses in social welfare, national independence or personal dignity. The long history of imperialist manipulation of ?anti-imperialist? narratives has found virulent expression in the present day. The New Cold War launched by Obama against China and Russia, the hot war brewing in the Gulf over Iran?s alleged military threat, the interventionist threat against Venezuela?s ?drug-networks?,and Syria?s ?bloodbath? are part and parcel of the use and abuse of ?anti-imperialism? to prop up a declining empire. Hopefully, the progressive and leftist writers and scribes will learn from the ideological pitfalls of the past and resist the temptation to access the mass media by providing a ?progressive cover? to imperial dubbed ?rebels?. It is time to distinguish between genuine anti-imperialism and pro-democracy movements and those promoted by Washington, NATO and the mass media. James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of 64 books published in 29 languages. He has a long history of commitment to social justice, working in particular with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. In 1973-76 he was a member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America. He writes a monthly column for the Mexican newspaper, Le Jornada, and previously, for the Spanish daily, El Mundo. He received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 15:10:18 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:10:18 +0100 Subject: [THS] A World in Denial of What It Knows Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102150608.06a30598@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30131.htm A World in Denial of What It Knows By Geoffrey Wheatcroft January 01, 2011 "NYTimes" -- COULD there be a single phrase that explains the woes of our time, this dismal age of political miscalculations and deceptions, of reckless and disastrous wars, of financial boom and bust and downright criminality? Maybe there is, and we owe it to Fintan O?Toole. That trenchant Irish commentator is a biographer and theater critic, and a critic also of his country?s crimes and follies, as in his gripping if horrifying book, ?Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger.? He reminds us of the famous if gnomic saying by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the United States secretary of defense, that ?There are known knowns... there are known unknowns ... there are also unknown unknowns.? But the Irish problem, says Mr. O?Toole, was none of the above. It was ?unknown knowns.? What he means is something different from denial, or evasion, irrational exuberance or excess optimism. Unknown knowns were things that were not at all inevitable, and were easily knowable, or indeed known, but which people chose to ?unknow.? Unknown knowns were everywhere, from Wall Street to Brussels, from the Pentagon to Penn State. Ireland merely happened to offer an extreme case, where ?everyone knew.? They just chose to forget that they knew ? about the way that Irish banks ran wild, how easy credit fueled a monstrous explosion of property prices and speculative house-building. Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister at the time of the rapid economic growth, merely boasted, ?The boom is getting boomier,? preferring to unknow the truth that booms always go bust. Beginning in 2008, the skies were lighted up by financial conflagrations, from Lehman Brothers to the Royal Bank of Scotland. These were dramatic enough ? but were they unforeseeable or unknowable? What kind of willful obtusity ever suggested that subprime mortgages were a good idea? An intelligent child would have known that there is no good time to lend money to people who obviously can never repay it. Or recall how we were taken into the Iraq war. That was the origin of Mr. Rumsfeld?s curious words 10 years ago. When he murmured about ?things we do not know we don?t know,? he was touching on the unconventional weapons that Saddam Hussein might ? or might not ? have held. In a sense, Mr. Rumsfeld was more right than he realized. Those of us who opposed the war may be asked to this day whether we knew what weaponry Iraq possessed, to which the answer is that of course we didn?t. Nor, as it transpired, did President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld or Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. But that was the wrong question. It should have been not ?what weaponry does Saddam Hussein possess?? but ?Is Saddam Hussein?s weaponry, whatever it may be, the real reason for the war, or is it a pretext confected after a decision for war had already been taken?? The answer to that was obvious and could have been known to all, but too many people chose to unknow it. Then there was another unknown known: the likely consequences of an invasion. Shortly before it began, Mr. Blair met President Jacques Chirac of France. As well as reiterating his opposition to the coming war, Mr. Chirac offered the prime minister specific warnings. Mr. Blair and his friends in Washington seemed to think that they would be welcomed with open arms in Iraq, Mr. Chirac said, but that they shouldn?t count on it. It was foolish to think of creating a modern democracy in an artificial country with a divided society like Iraq. And Mr. Chirac asked whether Mr. Blair realized that, by invading Iraq, they might yet precipitate a civil war. This has been described in a BBC documentary by someone present, Sir Stephen Wall, a Foreign Office man then attached to Downing Street. As the British team was leaving, Mr. Blair turned and said, ?Poor old Jacques, he just doesn?t get it,? to which Sir Stephen now adds dryly that he turned out to get it rather better than ?we? did. At that time, Mr. Chirac was reviled in America, and his career has just ended in disgrace, with a court conviction for embezzlement. But who was right about Iraq? All the calamities that followed the invasion were not only foreseeable, they were foreseen. And yet for Mr. Blair, as well as Washington, they were unknown knowns. One more such, bitter as it is to say so when many people have been ruined, was the Bernard L. Madoff fraud. For years, his investors gratefully and unquestioningly accepted returns that were strictly incredible. Loud warning voices sounded. Harry Markopolos, a former investment officer, exhaustively back-analyzed Mr. Madoff?s supposed figures by computer. He spent nearly nine years repeatedly trying to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that these figures were not merely incredible but mathematically impossible. And still the S.E.C. chose to unknow it. Leos Janacek wrote a harrowing opera called ?The Makropulos Affair?; Peter Gelb at the Met should commission someone to write ?The Markopolos Affair? as a fable for our times. In a very different kind of scandal, not everyone at Penn State, and certainly not every fan, knew what had happened in the showers. But quite enough was known by people who could have acted. They chose instead to unknow. And so to another classic unknown known, the euro. The recent summit in Brussels turned into a silly melodrama, with a British prime minister, David Cameron this time, once more playing the pantomime villain. But Mr. Cameron was right, if for the wrong reasons, to oppose the European Union?s latest frantic (and doomed) plan to prop up the euro. If truth be told (but it so rarely is!), the euro cannot work and could never have worked. That is, a single currency embracing countries as diverse in social culture, productivity, work practices and taxation as Germany and Greece, or the Netherlands and Portugal, is economically impossible without much closer fiscal and financial union ? which is politically impossible. Anyone could have known that at the time the euro was introduced, but for the rulers of the European Union it was their very own unknown known. ?The Cloud of Unknowing? is a medieval classic of mystical writing, and unknowing still hangs over us. It will be a happier new year if we can dispel some of that cloud, try to unknow less, and know a little more. Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of ?The Controversy of Zion,? ?The Strange Death of Tory England? and ?Yo, Blair!? ? 2012 Geoffrey Wheatcroft. From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 15:18:22 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:18:22 +0100 Subject: [THS] ACLU: Obama Signs Indefinite Detention Bill Into Law Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102151228.06eb9810@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30125.htm [We can be sure that this law, and/or its successors, will sooner or later be used to stifle dissent and premanently remove from the scene (without actually killing them) anyone who might pose an ideological, informational, or propaganda threat to U.S. power. Like the writers you read on THS, and those who propagate their articles.] Obama Signs Indefinite Detention Bill Into Law By ACLU January 01, 2012 "Reuters" - -WASHINGTON ? President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law today. The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision. While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had ?serious reservations? about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations. The White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA, but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill. ?President Obama's action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,? said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. ?The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.? Under the Bush administration, similar claims of worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again. The ACLU believes that any military detention of American citizens or others within the United States is unconstitutional and illegal, including under the NDAA. In addition, the breadth of the NDAA?s detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war. ?We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court,? said Romero. ?Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today. Thankfully, we have three branches of government, and the final word belongs to the Supreme Court, which has yet to rule on the scope of detention authority. But Congress and the president also have a role to play in cleaning up the mess they have created because no American citizen or anyone else should live in fear of this or any future president misusing the NDAA?s detention authority.? The bill also contains provisions making it difficult to transfer suspects out of military detention, which prompted FBI Director Robert Mueller to testify that it could jeopardize criminal investigations. It also restricts the transfers of cleared detainees from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to foreign countries for resettlement or repatriation, making it more difficult to close Guantanamo, as President Obama pledged to do in one of his first acts in office. ===== The Worst Part of the Signing Statement: Section 1024 By Emptywheel December 31, 2011 "Emptywheel" -- As I explained here, Obama?s signing statement on the defense authorization was about what I expected. He included squishy language so as to pretend he doesn?t fully support indefinite detention. And he basically promised to ignore much of the language on presumptive military detention. But there was one part of the signing statement I (naively) didn?t expect. It?s this: Sections 1023-1025 needlessly interfere with the executive branch?s processes for reviewing the status of detainees. Going forward, consistent with congressional intent as detailed in the Conference Report, my Administration will interpret section 1024 as granting the Secretary of Defense broad discretion to determine what detainee status determinations in Afghanistan are subject to the requirements of this section. [my emphasis] Section 1024, remember, requires the Defense Department to actually establish the provisions for status reviews that Obama has promised but not entirely delivered. SEC. 1024. PROCEDURES FOR STATUS DETERMINATIONS. (a) IN GENERAL.?Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a report setting forth the procedures for determining the status of persons detained pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107?40; 50 U.S.C. 1541 note) for purposes of section 1021. (b) ELEMENTS OF PROCEDURES.?The procedures required by this section shall provide for the following in the case of any unprivileged enemy belligerent who will be held in long-term detention under the law of war pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force: (1) A military judge shall preside at proceedings for the determination of status of an unprivileged enemy belligerent. (2) An unprivileged enemy belligerent may, at the election of the belligerent, be represented by military counsel at proceedings for the determination of status of the belligerent. (c) APPLICABILITY.?The Secretary of Defense is not required to apply the procedures required by this section in the case of a person for whom habeas corpus review is available in a Federal court. As I?ve noted, Lindsey Graham (and other bill supporters, both the right and left of Lindsey) repeatedly insisted on this review provision. Lindsey promised every detainee would get real review of his status. I want to be able to tell anybody who is interested that no person in an American prison?civilian or military?held as a suspected member of al-Qaida will be held without independent judicial review. We are not allowing the executive branch to make that decision unchecked. For the first time in the history of American warfare, every American combatant held by the executive branch will have their day in Federal court, and the government has to prove by a preponderance of the evidence you are in fact part of the enemy force. [my emphasis] And yet, in spite of the fact that Section 1024 includes no exception for those detained at Bagram, Obama just invented such an exception. Section 1024 was one of the few good parts of the detainee provisions in this bill, because it would have finally expanded the due process available to the thousands of detainees who are hidden away at Bagram now with no meaningful review. But Obama just made that good part disappear. Update: I?m still trying to figure out where Obama gets the Congressional intent to let the Defense Secretary pick and choose which detainees 1024 applies to. The managers? statement says this about 1024: The Senate amendment contained a provision (sec. 1036) that would require the Secretary of Defense to establish procedures for determining the status of persons captured in the course of hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40), including access to a military judge and a military lawyer for an enemy belligerent who will be held in long-term detention. The House bill contained no similar provision. The House recedes with an amendment clarifying that the Secretary of Defense is not required to apply the procedures for long-term detention in the case of a person for whom habeas corpus review is available in federal court. Because this provision is prospective, the Secretary of Defense is authorized to determine the extent, if any, to which such procedures will be applied to detainees for whom status determinations have already been made prior to the date of the enactment of this Act. The conferees expect that the procedures issued by the Secretary of Defense will define what constitutes ?long-term? detention for the purposes of subsection (b). The conferees understand that under current Department of Defense practice in Afghanistan, a detainee goes before a Detention Review Board for a status determination 60 days after capture, and again 6 months after that. The Department of Defense has considered extending the period of time before a second review is required. The conferees expect that the procedures required by subsection (b) would not be triggered by the first review, but could be triggered by the second review, in the discretion of the Secretary. [my emphasis] This seems to be saying two things. First, DOD doesn?t have to go back and grant everyone they?ve given the inadequate review process currently in place a new review. The 3,000 detainees already in Bagram are just SOL. In addition, this says DOD gets to decide how long new detainees will have to wait before they get a status review with an actual lawyer?and Congress is perfectly happy making them wait over six months before that time. Obama seems to have taken that language and pushed it further still: stating that DOD will get broad discretion to decide which reviews will carry the requirement of a judge and a lawyer. It sort of makes you wonder why the Obama Administration wants these men to be held for over six months with no meaningful review? From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 15:23:45 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:23:45 +0100 Subject: [THS] Democracy? We are now a nation living under military dictatorship, whether you realize it or not. Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102151930.06eb9580@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30130.htm R.I.P. Bill of Rights 1789 - 2011 By Mike Adams January 01, 2012 "NaturalNews" -- One of the most extraordinary documents in human history -- the Bill of Rights -- has come to an end under President Barack Obama. Derived from sacred principles of natural law, the Bill of Rights has come to a sudden and catastrophic end with the President's signing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the U.S. military the "legal" right to conduct secret kidnappings of U.S. citizens, followed by indefinite detention, interrogation, torture and even murder. This is all conducted completely outside the protection of law, with no jury, no trial, no legal representation and not even any requirement that the government produce evidence against the accused. It is a system of outright government tyranny against the American people, and it effectively nullifies the Bill of Rights. In what will be remembered as the most traitorous executive signing ever committed against the American people, President Obama signed the bill on New Year's Eve, a time when most Americans were engaged in the consumption of alcohol. It seems appropriate, of course, since no intelligent American could accept the tyranny of this bill if they were sober. This is the law that will cement Obama's legacy in the history books as the traitor who nullified the Bill of Rights and paved America's pathway down a road of tyranny that will make Nazi Germany's war crimes look like child's play. If Bush had signed a law like this, liberals would have been screaming "impeachment!" Why the Bill of Rights matters While the U.S. Constitution already limits the power of federal government, the Bill of Rights is the document that enumerates even more limits of federal government power. In its inception, many argued that a Bill of Rights was completely unnecessary because, they explained, the federal government only has the powers specifically enumerated to it under the U.S. Constitution. There was no need to have a "First Amendment" to protect Free Speech, for example, because there was no power granted to government to diminish Free Speech. This seems silly today, of course, given the natural tendency of all governments to concentrate power in the hands of the few while destroying the rights and freedoms of their own people. But in the 1780's, whether government could ever become a threat to future freedoms was hotly debated. By 1789, enough revolutionary leaders had agreed on the fundamental principles of a Bill of Rights to sign it into law. Its purpose was to provide additional clarifications on the limitation of government power so that there could be absolutely no question that government could NEVER, under any circumstances, violate these key principles of freedom: Freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, freedom from illegal searches, the right to remain silent, the right to due process under law, and so on. Of course, today's runaway federal government utterly ignores the limitations placed on it by the founding fathers. It aggressively and criminally seeks to expand its power at all costs, completely ignoring the Bill of Rights and openly violating the limitations of power placed upon it by the United States Constitution. The TSA's illegal searching of air travelers, for example, is a blatant violation of Fourth Amendment rights. The government's hijacking of websites it claims are linking to "copyright infringement" hubs is a blatant violation of First Amendment rights. The government's demand that all Americans be forced to buy private health insurance is a blatant violation of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution -- the "commerce clause." Now, with the passage of the NDAA, the federal government has torpedoed the entire Bill of Rights, dismissing it completely and effectively promising to violate those rights at will. As of January 1, 2012, we have all been designated enemies of the state. America is the new battleground, and your "right" to due process is null and void. Remember, this was all done by the very President who promised to close Guantanamo Bay and end secret military prisons. Not only did Obama break that campaign promise (as he has done with nearly ALL his campaign promises), he did exactly the opposite and has now subjected all Americans to the possibility of government-sponsored kidnapping, detainment and torture, all under the very system of secret military prisons he claimed he would close! "President Obama?s action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Obama's signing statement means nothing Even while committing an act of pure treason in signing the bill, the unindicted criminal President Obama issued a signing statement that reads, in part, "Moving forward, my administration will interpret and implement the provisions described below in a manner that best preserves the flexibility on which our safety depends and upholds the values on which this country was founded..." Anyone who reads between the lines here realizes the "the flexibility on which our safety depends" means they can interpret the law in any way they want if there is a sufficient amount of fear being created through false flag terror attacks. Astute readers will also notice that Obama's signing statement has no legal binding whatsoever and only refers to Obama's momentary intentions on how he "wishes" to interpret the law. It does not place any limits whatsoever on how a future President might use the law as written. "The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield," says the ACLU (http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-s...). What this means is that the next President could use this law to engage in the most horrific holocaust-scale mass round-up of people the world has ever seen. The NDAA legalizes the crimes of Nazi Germany in America, setting the stage for the mass murder of citizens by a rogue government. United States of America becomes a rogue nation, operating in violation of international law Furthermore, the NDAA law as written and signed, is a violation of international law as it does not even adhere to the fundamental agreements of how nations treat prisoners of war: "...the breadth of the NDAA?s detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war" says the ACLU (http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-s...). In 1789, today's NDAA law would have been called "treasonous," and those who voted for it would have been shot dead as traitors. This is not a call for violence, but rather an attempt to provide historical context of just how destructive this law really is. Men and women fought and died for the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. People sacrificed their lives, their safety and risked everything to achieve the freedoms that made America such a great nation. For one President to so callously throw away 222 years of liberty, betraying those great Americans who painstakingly created an extraordinary document limiting the power of government, is equivalent to driving a stake through the heart of the Republic. In signing this, Obama has proven himself to be the most criminal of all U.S. Presidents, far worse than George W. Bush and a total traitor to the nation and its People. Remember, Obama swore upon a Bible that he would "protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic," and yet he himself has become the enemy of the Constitution by signing a law that overtly and callously nullifies the Bill of Rights. This is nothing less than an act of war declared on the American people by the executive and legislative branches of government. It remains to be seen whether the judicial branch will go along with it (US Supreme Court). Origins of the Bill of Rights The Bill of Rights, signed in 1789 by many of the founding fathers of our nation, was based on the Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted in 1776 and authored largely by George Mason, one of the least-recognized revolutionaries who gave rise to a nation of freedom and liberty. Mason was a strong advocate of not just states' rights, but of individual rights, and without his influence in 1789, we might not even have a Bill of Rights today (and our nation would have slipped into total government tyranny all the sooner). In fact, he openly opposed ratification of the U.S. Constitution unless it contained a series of amendments now known as the Bill of Rights (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George...) SECTION ONE of this Virginia declaration of rights states: "That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." (http://www.constitution.org/bcp/vir...) Section Three of the declaration speaks to the duty of the Citizens to abolish abusive government: "That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community; of all the various modes and forms of government, that is best which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety and is most effectually secured against the danger of maladministration; and that, when any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community hath an indubitable, inalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter, or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal." By any honest measure, today's U.S. government, of course, has overstepped the bounds of its original intent. As Mason wrote over 200 years ago, the People of America now have not merely a right but a duty to "reform, alter or abolish it," to bring government back into alignment with its original purpose -- to protect the rights of the People. Obama violates his Presidential Oath, sworn before God Article II, Section I of the United States Constitution spells out the oath of office that every President must take during their swearing in: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." In signing the NDAA law into office, Obama has blatantly and unambiguously violated this sacred oath, meaning that his betrayal is not merely against the American people, but also against the Divine Creator. Given that the Bill of Rights is an extension of Natural Law which establishes a direct heritage of sovereign power from the Creator to the People, a blatant attack upon the Bill of Rights is, by any account, an attack against the Creator and a violation of universal spiritual principles. Those who attempt to undermine the Bill of Rights are attempting to invalidate the relationship between God and Man, and in doing so, they are identifying themselves as enemies of God and agents of Evil. Today, as 2012 begins, we are now a nation led by evil, and threatened with total destruction by those who would seek to rule as tyrants. This is America's final hour. We either defend the Republic starting right now, or we lose it forever. Read the language analysis of WHY and HOW the NDAA applies to American citizens Many people have been fooled by the obfuscated language of the bill, and they wrongfully believe the NDAA does not apply to American citizens. They have been hoodwinked! In this follow-up article, I parse the language of the NDAA and explain, in plain language, how and why the NDAA does apply to American citizens: http://www.naturalnews.com/034538_N... Also, read this explanation by Rep. Justin Amash, who voted against the bill: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?no... Make no mistake, folks: The U.S. government has just declared all Americans to be "enemy combatants," and that the USA is now a "battleground" over which the military has total control. We are now a nation living under military dictatorship, whether you realize it or not. Mike Adams is an independent journalist with strong ethics who does not get paid to write articles about any product or company. www.naturalnews.com From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 15:27:46 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:27:46 +0100 Subject: [THS] Iran: Several Stories Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102152610.06eb92f0@mail.messagingengine.com> US imposes sanctions on banks dealing with Iran: The sanctions target both private and government-controlled banks - including central banks - and would take hold after a two- to six-month warning period, depending on the transactions, a senior Obama administration official said. http://arabnews.com/middleeast/article557127.ece Ahmadinejad says Iran's central bank will face new U.S. sanctions with 'strength': Under the measures, foreign firms will have to choose between doing business with the Islamic republic or the economically mighty United States. http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/01/01/185777.html Iran currency slips to record low after new US sanctions: Iran, the second-biggest producer in OPEC after Saudi Arabia, depends on oil sales for 80 percent of its foreign revenues. http://bit.ly/tbO1J5 Iran central bank to file motion in US court to unfreeze funds - Bank Markazi, Iran's central bank, is preparing to file a motion in a New York federal court early in February asking for the release of about $2 billion of its frozen funds at Citigroup's Citibank unit, the Wall Street Journal said, citing attorneys for the bank. http://reut.rs/tYF4uM Iran invites world powers to new nuclear talks: The country's top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, said he has formally called on the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany to return to negotiations. http://bit.ly/vTLVsx Iran denies fuelling EU, Arab airlines: - Iran is refusing to refuel some European and Arab airlines at its main international airport in a tit-for-tat move over major oil companies denying fuel to Iranian planes abroad, the airport's chief said Saturday. http://bit.ly/sLxh6t Rick Santorum says he would bomb Iran nuclear sites: Santorum says President Barack Obama hasn't done enough to prevent the Iranian government from building a nuclear weapon and has risked turning the U.S. into a "paper tiger." http://bit.ly/sIcjP4 Ron Paul Assails Rivals' Criticism of His Policy on Iran: Mr. Paul, noted that others say Iran "might get a nuclear weapon someday, and wouldn't it be good if we have a pre-emptive attack on Iran right now to make sure they never got a weapon." "I would say no, I wouldn't do that, mainly because right now there are no signs they are" seeking to build a bomb, Mr. Paul said. http://nyti.ms/vguGEU From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 15:34:27 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:34:27 +0100 Subject: [THS] GUARDIAN: Economics in 2012: no gain, just pain Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102153019.06eb9060@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/01/2012-economics-year-ahead-austerity-eurozone Economics in 2012: no gain, just pain as austerity brings misery to all With the eurozone on the brink of a new recession, this will be the year when millions of people bear the brunt Heather Stewart o guardian.co.uk, Sunday 1 January 2012 17.34 GMT Economics in 2012: no gain, just pain as austerity brings misery to all This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 17.34 GMT on Sunday 1 January 2012. A version appeared on p9 of the Main section section of the Guardian on Monday 2 January 2012. It was last modified at 00.35 GMT on Monday 2 January 2012. Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Madrid's Puerta del Sol in October 2011: in 2012, the public's anger is likely to become more widespread and intense. Photograph: Susana Vera/Reuters The fluctuations of the financial markets and the relentless round of make-or-break euro-summits gripped the attention in 2011, but this will be the year when the shockwaves are felt by millions of people in Europe and beyond. Throughout 2011, the language of bond yields, AAA ratings and credit default swaps leapt from City trading floors into everyday chit-chat as the eurozone crisis spiralled out of control. Instead of answering first to their electorates, Europe's politicians became fixated on sating the demands of anxious investors in the bond markets for ever more drastic spending cuts. Preventing Italian bond yields from topping 7%, and protecting France's AAA credit rating became central policy aims. But reducing the eurozone's malaise to numbers flashing on a screen only served to mask the fact that millions of livelihoods were at stake in what the technocrats call the "real economy", but most of us would call real life. The policy of collective austerity imposed at the behest of the money men has driven the eurozone to the brink of a new recession. In 2012 it will be swept over the edge, carrying with it the jobs of millions. It's hardly surprising people became increasingly angry as they watched policymakers fail so comprehensively to protect them from the lash of the speculators. From the street sit-ins of Greece's Indignati, to the thousands of young people who gathered in Puerta del Sol square in Madrid to demand a stake in their country's future, the public expressed their exasperation. In 2012, their anger is likely to become more widespread and intense. A recent report by the International Labour Organisation in Geneva warned of rising discontent in many countries about "perceptions that the burden of the crisis is not being shared fairly". It said that even without a new global recession, it could take five years for employment rates to return to pre-crisis levels. Young people have borne the brunt everywhere. In Spain, where the new government announced a radical package of austerity measures on Friday, the youth unemployment rate is now an almost inconceivable 45%; in Greece, it is 42.9%; in Ireland, 29.8%. That will take a heavy toll in shattered dreams and frustrated expectations. As Heiner Flassbeck, of the UN Conference on Trade and Development puts it: "Those that were not part of the party are having hangovers: that's the problem." And it's only going to get worse. When Europe's leaders ? barring David Cameron ? pledged to boost the eurozone bailout fund and draw up a new "fiscal compact" to enforce budget discipline last month, they hoped (yet again) to draw a line under the eurozone debt crisis and escape the unforgiving glare of the world's financial markets. But even if the new framework is drawn up and agreed rapidly, Europe's economies, including Britain's, face a desperate 12 months. Across-the-board austerity ? the only prescription considered by "Merkozy" and their colleagues ? will weigh heavily on growth in the eurozone and beyond, even if the immediate crisis is resolved. Flassbeck fears that the global economy is facing a "lost decade", akin to the prolonged period of stagnation and deflation that has afflicted Japan since the early 1990s, as austerity is piled on austerity, and demand is depressed. Alongside the long-term danger of stagnation, there remains an acute risk that Europe's financial system will seize up. There is growing evidence that eurozone banks, with their exposures to the debts of peripheral eurozone economies, are finding it difficult to borrow at anything but punitive interest rates. Despite drastic emergency measures from the European Central Bank (ECB), including pumping almost ?500bn (?420bn) of low-cost loans into financial markets on 21 December, the banks are struggling to finance themselves. That means, as the ECB president, Mario Draghi, has acknowledged, that a credit crunch akin to that in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008 may already be under way. If that starts to undermine ordinary savers' confidence in their banks, it could be catastrophic. Italian and Greek consumers have been draining their banks of deposits for months in what amounts to a slow-motion bank run. If it became a full-blown collapse, the situation could quickly spiral beyond the control of the authorities, which is why George Osborne has told parliament that the Treasury and the Bank of England have drawn up detailed contingency plans to cope with a eurozone meltdown. It could yet happen ? and soon. Even if the financial system is stabilised and the eurozone holds together, though, the fragile banks are likely to cut back lending to Europe's households and businesses. And that's where the abstract idea of a credit crunch becomes reality: people lose their homes as mortgage lending is reined in; businesses lay off staff because they can no longer fund their operations. All this, ultimately, because of politicians' contorted efforts to placate the financial markets. Yet even at the IMF, usually considered the bastion of the so-called "Washington consensus" of privatisation, free-flowing capital and balanced budgets, chief economist Olivier Blanchard recently blogged that financial investors had contradictory feelings about austerity, because it can often hit growth, and make it harder, not easier for governments to repay their debts. "They react positively to news of fiscal consolidation, but then react negatively later, when consolidation leads to lower growth ? which it often does," he said. So even for the financial markets, at whose behest Europe's leaders are holding the axe over their hapless citizens, 2012 looks like being a very unhappy new year. From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 17:28:39 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:28:39 +0100 Subject: [THS] Humans have the need to read Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102172726.06fa0420@mail.messagingengine.com> Humans have the need to read It doesn't matter if books are delivered in print or by smartphone, the main thing is to get lost in reading them Gail Rebuck guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 December 2011 Reading books is vital for human development. Photograph: Martin Lee / Rex Features Why should we bother reading a book? All children say this occasionally. Many of the 12 million adults in Britain with reading difficulties repeat it to themselves daily. But for the first time in the 500 years since Johannes Gutenberg democratised reading, many among our educated classes are also asking why, in a world of accelerating technology, increasing time poverty and diminishing attention spans, should they invest precious time sinking into a good book? The beginnings of an answer lie in the same technology that has posed the question. Psychologists from Washington University used brain scans to see what happens inside our heads when we read stories. They found that "readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative". The brain weaves these situations together with experiences from its own life to create a new mental synthesis. Reading a book leaves us with new neural pathways. The discovery that our brains are physically changed by the experience of reading is something many of us will understand instinctively, as we think back to the way an extraordinary book had a transformative effect on the way we viewed the world. This transformation only takes place when we lose ourselves in a book, abandoning the emotional and mental chatter of the real world. That's why studies have found this kind of deep reading makes us more empathetic, or as Nicholas Carr puts it in his essay, The Dreams of Readers, "more alert to the inner lives of others". This is significant because recent scientific research has also found a dramatic fall in empathy among teenagers in advanced western cultures. We can't yet be sure why this is happening, but the best hypothesis is that it is the result of their immersion in the internet and the quickfire virtual world it offers. So technology reveals that our brains are being changed by technology, and then offers a potential solution ? the book. Rationally, we know that reading is the foundation stone of all education, and therefore an essential underpinning of the knowledge economy. So reading is ? or should be ? an aspect of public policy. But perhaps even more significant is its emotional role as the starting point for individual voyages of personal development and pleasure. Books can open up emotional, imaginative and historical landscapes that equal and extend the corridors of the web. They can help create and reinforce our sense of self. If reading were to decline significantly, it would change the very nature of our species. If we, in the future, are no longer wired for solitary reflection and creative thought, we will be diminished. But as a reader and a publisher, I am optimistic. Technology throws up as many solutions as it does challenges: for every door it closes, another opens. So the ability, offered by devices like e-readers, smartphones and tablets, to carry an entire library in your hand is an amazing opportunity. As publishers, we need to use every new piece of technology to embed long-form reading within our culture. We should concentrate on the message, not agonise over the medium. We should be agnostic on the platform, but evangelical about the content. We must also get better at harnessing the ability of the internet to inform readers, and potential readers, about all the extraordinary new books that are published every year, and to renew their acquaintance with the best of Britain's rich literary tradition. The research shows that if we stop reading, we will be different people: less intricate, less empathetic, less interesting. There can hardly be a better reason for fighting to protect the future of the book. ? Nicholas Carr's The Dreams of Readers features in Stop What You're Doing and Read This!, a book of essays about the transformative power of reading. A version of Michael Rosen's essay for that book will appear in G2 on Monday 2 January From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 17:42:42 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:42:42 +0100 Subject: [THS] Vampire Squid Watch: 4 Scary Economic Trends for 2012 Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102173155.04a38248@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/153604/vampire_squid_watch%3A_4_scary_economic_trends_for_2012?page=entire AlterNet / By Lynn Parramore Vampire Squid Watch: 4 Scary Economic Trends for 2012 Top economic thinkers explain why 2012 will be a year of continued ? and escalating ? predation by financiers. December 29, 2011 | Delmar catches a medium-sized Humboldt Squid, also known as the Red Devil or Diablo Rojo. Photo Credit: EMMANUEL RUIZ Having been seen to twitch ? ever so slightly ? in 2011 as global protests erupted, the vampire squid is stirring in its evil lair. Reports of sucking noises and new tentacles sprouting in every direction tell us that the global financial monster is poised to steal yet more wealth and resources from the public in the coming year. Top economic thinkers have shared their forecasts with AlterNet, and the focus is clear: 2012 will be a year of continued ? and escalating ? predation by financiers. Their influence over political, financial, and economic activity is likely to grow ? along with potential for harm. 1. Back-door Bailout of the Eurozone Would you like more of your hard-earned money to flow to fatcats? Wish granted! Attorney Walker Todd, who spent two decades in the legal departments of the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Cleveland, names the back-door bailout of the eurozone banking system by our very own Federal Reserve as the top economic story of the upcoming year ? or, at least one of the most outrageous. In a nutshell, the Fed is helping European banks by opening up the short-term ?emergency? lending pipeline, which means that U.S. taxpayers are indirectly bailing out private European capitalists. This is being done through a bit of financial hocus pocus called ?swaps? ? essentially the trading of dollars for euros. Such a maneuver allows the Fed to prop up European banks while claiming that it is not 'technically' directly lending. In other words, swaps are an attempt to hide the truth from the public. As Gerald O?Driscoll put it in the Wall Street Journal: ?This Byzantine financial arrangement could hardly be better designed to confuse observers, and it has largely succeeded on this side of the Atlantic, where press coverage has been light.? O'Driscoll observes that the Fed has no authority to bail out European banks and warns of what economists call ?moral hazard? ? the nasty habit of banks to engage in even riskier behavior when they get bailed out. Why is this happening? Well, because the squid is strangling morality, democracy, and the rule of law. We pay, they play. ?This is an attempt by our own governing elites to maintain a false vision of how the world works, or how ?we? think it should work,? Todd told AlterNet. ?This comes at the expense of many people who never will go to Europe, who know no European bankers, and who have no European bank accounts.? You may not know a European banker, but you can be sure that one is just now raising a glass of bubbly in your honor. After all, you paid for it. [Don't be fooled, American fat-cats are not concerned with Europe's welfare. The reason for the "bailouts" is obviously to get Europe so indebtted to the FED and Wall Street that it is they who will be able to dominate European politics and finance. We Europeans are to be forced to support and participate in American crimes against humanity and the final looting of the planet. -ths] 2. Record-breaking Political Finance What does corporate dough buy? Newspapers and elections and presidents, oh my! Thomas Ferguson of the University of Massachusetts, Boston and the Institute for New Economic Thinking suggested that next year?s very biggest stories could well be about corporate money influencing politics. He told AlterNet he saw a real possibility that a serious third party candidate for president might emerge; if one does, it will be bankrolled from the right while promoted in public as representing the political ?center.? And it will also be designed to give corporate America many of the policies it has long sought, such a trimming Social Security and eviscerating the social safety net. "People are going to be astonished at how lethal the combination of secret money and corporate mass media will be to the public?s interest," said Ferguson. Ferguson was confident that the 2012 elections would break all records for political finance, but he did add a sobering qualification. He thought there was an outside chance that the world economic slowdown would provoke really serious unrest in China or Europe on a scale that would put American developments in the shade. 3. Executive Pay Explosion Since the Great Recession of 2008-2009, the prime beneficiaries of the sluggish recovery have been you guessed it!....top corporate executives. And it looks like the good times will keep rolling ? for them. William Lazonick, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, predicts an escalation of the harmful practice of corporate stock buybacks, which produces the explosion in executive pay. As Lazonick explained to AlterNet, corporate honchos have enjoyed a windfall as they have cashed in their stock options in a generally rising stock market. This kind of thing does absolutely zilch for the economy. But here?s what it does do: spending on buybacks makes executives rich and results in manipulative boosts to stock prices in the short-term at the cost of investments in innovation and job creation. ?Look for buybacks to continue to increase in 2012, perhaps surpassing the record $600 billion done by S&P 500 companies in 2007,? predicted Lazonick. What to do? Maybe it?s time for Congress to confront the reality of that predatory monster, the financialized business corporation. Lazonick suggests that a ban on buybacks (which is already in the purview of the Securities Exchange Act) would be a good start. Unfortunately this idea is at odds with prediction #2. 4. Pathological Corporate Leadership Jamie Dimon never seems to seize an opportunity to keep his mouth shut. JP Morgan's CEO, who happens to be the highest-paid chief executive officer among the six biggest U.S. banks, has consequently regaled us with his worldview, in which bank regulations are ?anti-American? and ordinary folks have no right to be mad at rich people. He has become the poster-boy for Wall Street greed and has earned the especial ire of the Occupy movement, which recently marched to his digs on Park Avenue to offer to help him pack his bags and go wreak havoc somewhere else. In his universe, defrauding investors, spreading lies to manipulate markets, and foreclosing on military families are all part of a good day?s work. Dimon is a particularly nasty customer, but he is part of a new breed of sociopathic financiers. And his kind of distorted ?vision? has harmed the country?s prospects and created a gap in America between the richest and the poorest that puts us in close range of Rwanda and Serbia. When those at the top of the corporate pyramid are this tone-deaf and lacking in any sense of public responsibility, we are in treacherous waters. ?The biggest danger to America is that the people in the financial sector and corporate leadership convey no awareness of what is needed to create a coherent and prosperous society,? economist Rob Johnson, head of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, told AlterNet. ?Leadership is not simply about how much money one makes.? Many dollars. Very little sense. Ultimately, hoarding everything at the top is not sustainable, and bankers like Dimon will end up destroying the very society that makes their enormous wealth possible. If we let them. And that, Reader, is what's on the horizon. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, if you want a happy ending, see a Disney movie. From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 17:59:11 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:59:11 +0100 Subject: [THS] How the Recession Pulls Ordinary Families Into the Weed Game Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102174722.06f9ec88@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/153586/kids%2C_minivans%2C_and_drug-dealing%3A_how_the_recession_pulls_ordinary_families_into_the_weed_game?page=entire Mother Jones / By Tony D'Souza Kids, Minivans, and Drug-Dealing: How the Recession Pulls Ordinary Families Into the Weed Game Struggling to keep their house and feed their kids, a California family goes from typical to criminal. January 1, 2012 | For some time, I'd been hearing stories from my sources in the interstate marijuana racket about law-abiding "civilians" turning to the game because of the recession, and so, armed with introductions, I hit the road to meet some of these unlikely criminals face to face. That's how, on a hot evening in June, I found myself in Dan's Northern California kitchen. Dan isn't his real name. Nor are any of the names in this story, for obvious reasons. But his situation is a familiar, harsh reality for many Americans, as I learned while doing research for my recent novel on this subject. Dan is in his early 40s, a slim, soft-spoken former short-haul trucker who once owned all the toys: a used Mercedes, snowmobiles, Jet Skis. When they were both employed, he and his wife?a retail manager?easily cleared $100,000 a year. "We ate out breakfast, lunch, and dinner," Dan, now a minimum-wage laborer, tells me with folded arms. "That's the way life was for 17 years." Today, Dan's toys are gone, sold to support an underwater mortgage. His wife, who kept her job, left him three years ago, driving away in the Mercedes. "She didn't like the fact that I sat at home and she was going to work," he tells me. "There were no jobs. I filled out a thing for the city, and 400 people were there for one opening?a garbage truck driver." Keeping the house has been Dan's only real goal since 2008, when he was laid off. It's a simple three-bedroom, two-bath in a prefab, working-class subdivision off the I-5 corridor. "I wanted my kid to grow up in a safe community," he explains. "I have always made my house payment, and I've always made it on time." But he fretted over things like gas prices. "My daughter would say, 'Can I take your truck to the store?' That's 1.2 miles, which makes it 2.4 miles round-trip. If she went there once, I would not make it to work the next day. That's how my money was. I've fought for it the past three years working two and three jobs. I've even changed my morals." From his window, I can see the jagged outline of the Klamath range far off to the northwest. Surrounding those mountains is the Emerald Triangle: Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties?the heart of large-scale pot cultivation in California. In 2010, state voters rejected a proposal to legalize marijuana for recreational use. Nevertheless, in the 15 years sincethey passed Proposition 215?the state's vague and permissive medical-marijuana law?growing the drug has become more socially acceptable, local dispensaries have proliferated, and associated businesses have flourished like pilot fish on a shark. Mom-and-pop shops sell high-tech gardening gear and starter plants called clones. Pot "colleges" like Oakland'sOaksterdam University offer "quality training for the cannabis industry." An inexhaustible array of websites tout everything from fertilizer to legal advice and grow-room insurance. Pot prices have plummeted in California, in part because so many of the state's estimated 1.2 million medical-pot users now grow their own. But with a bargain-basement $1,500 pound of "Cali outdoor" fetching $5,000 or more in Eastern states, there are fortunes to be made in interstate commerce. "Between the recession and the large amount of money you can make, there is just too much money involved not to do it," Sgt. Barry Powell, head of the Shasta County Sheriff's Marijuana Eradication Team, tells me. "In Shasta County, medical-marijuana growers have tripled over the last three years. Just off our aerial flights, what we're seeing in people's backyards is unreal." About a year and a half ago at a wedding, an acquaintance approached Dan with a solution to his financial woes. "They wanted to do some indoor stuff, and no one had a place for it to go," he explains. "I had a place for it to go." The acquaintance was a veteran grower, part of a loosely knit criminal network supplying major distributors as far away as Indiana. "I've never smoked," Dan swears, raising his right hand. "I don't even drink. Even now, I will work wherever, whenever. It was a decision I made to try and catch up." He agonized for six months. Within days of his assent, a grow room was under construction in his garage. "The first time I got nervous was when they brought the lumber to my house," Dan tells me. "They broke out tape measures, started cutting two-by-fours, throwing up drywall, insulation, plastic." There were 10 lights, two AC units, fans, a carbon dioxide generator, and more than 130 plants. "It was way bigger than I wanted," he says. "That I felt pressured into a little bit. I felt bullied." One of the builders, a rural wiseguy I'll call Rocky, told me it cost $12,000 to outfit Dan's garage. "Everybody getting 'scrips thinks you can just plant and you'll get money," he says when I visit his surprisingly spare apartment in Redding. "That's not how it works. There's feeding schedules. The whole room is wrapped in plastic?you don't want bugs." With outdoor grows, Rocky adds, they're "picking and shoveling May to October. Then you gotta sleep out there with shotguns. Do you know how many people try to 'black mask' it and get as many buds as they can? You steal the tops off 10 plants, that's six, eight pounds, and they didn't do shit but swing a machete. It's a fucking war zone." The growers disabled Dan's garage door opener and reversed the lock on the garage's interior door to keep him out. The monthly electric bill, which they covered, shot from $45 to more than $1,000. Dan fretted that this might tip off the cops. The growers insisted that, with all the legal grows, the authorities no longer pay much attention to such things. "The way the prisons are packed, they're not going to throw someone in for growing halfway-legal weed," Rocky says. The first harvest arrived about three months later, and Dan was handed $10,000 in cash. "I caught up on all my house stuff, my property taxes," he says flatly, with no hint of a victory grin. "I paid off a family member who helped with an attorney about the divorce." The work crew is now preparing for a third planting. Dan is no longer in a money ditch, but the stress of hosting a criminal enterprise is wearing him down. "I'm standing here with a sick stomach," he says. "It's nice to be able to give your kids what they want, to be able to spend the time with them that they need, but the partners I have are greedy. They don't want to work. I don't not want to work. All of us have agreed not to tell anybody, but I've found out that there have been people here trimming, people in and out. I've never been in trouble. I hope they'd be lenient, give me probation." He's right to be worried. Growing or possessing small amounts of pot has been decriminalized or protected by 25 states and the District of Columbia, but the scale of cultivation in Dan's garage remains a felony punishable by up to three years in state prison. And while California police agencies have been hammered by budget cuts, generous federal anti-drug grants have helped fill that gap. Last year, Powell's boss, Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko, told the Wall Street Journal that marijuana eradication (for which his department received almost $720,000 in federal support this past year) is "where the money is." Two days after leaving Dan's place, I'm riding shotgun in a small car bound south for Sacramento, as the Central Valley blurs past outside my window. The commercial rice fields here are so vast they're fertilized by crop dusters, which buzz alongside the interstate like gigantic, low-flying bees. My driver, Colin, is a well-groomed white guy who lives with his wife and kid near the capital city. He keeps his hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel, stays with the flow of traffic, and glances in the rearview from time to time. I've warned him, just in case we get pulled over, not to tell me whether he's hauling a shipment. In turn, he's asked me not to publish too many details about him or his car. As we cruise down I-5 doing the speed limit, he fills me in on his livelihood. "One of the hardest things is getting the stuff from point A to point B," he says. "Everyone has the impression that if you're doing this, you're high or have a drug addiction. But if you're driving a trunk full of somebody's product, even have your own money in it, why would you want to be high?" Colin's no slouch. He has a master's degree and used to teach part-time at local colleges. Two years ago, after his wife was laid off from her job, he was approached by a friend, the husband of one of his former students. "They were always going on trips," Colin recalls. "I was always like, 'What do you do for a living?' He was always vague: 'Real estate, blah, blah, blah.' I'm not a dumb guy. He's like: 'We've known each other a long time. Want to make some money?' I was like, 'Yeah, what is it?'" The gig was transporting high-grade weed from California to far-flung Eastern states. Colin has since driven "thousands and thousands of miles," he says, and gotten to know everyone from big-time dealers who "roll with guns" down to working-class guys with families trying to make ends meet. "Cobbling together a full load between a bunch of different schools, plus teaching summers, I'd pull in about $20,000 a year," he says in edgy, rapid speech that hints of excessive caffeine, or nerves. "I made double that in a month driving East twice. When my wife lost her job, it just felt bleak. I would only have ever done this because of the recession." The friend, it turned out, was a major grower and distributor. He taught Colin how to launder his earnings and promised no repercussions if he wanted to quit. "This came my way, and honest to God, at the time it felt like manna from heaven," Colin says. Now he's made enough money to have a stake in the product. "I can make $2,000 a pound taking it across the country." He points to a shuttered auto dealership. "You see that?" he asks. "These are the times we live in. You could say I had a fallback career, but there are so many people with degrees. I'm past 30. If I start another career now, what am I going to start? A couple of years have gone by, and my r?sum? in my own field is not what it used to be." Througout our drive, Colin engages in a conflicted self-dialogue. "I'm not a bad person," he says. "I wouldn't get into other kinds of crimes. It's pot. It's practically legal out here now. This fit my morals: We needed money; I did something. I feel proud of that. I really do." To avoid arrest, he does his homework, scouring police profiling manuals and keeping current with the Office of National Drug Control Policy's High Intensity Drug Traf?cking Areas program, which helps local authorities target stretches of highway where they think growers are moving weight. The feds are focused on the Mexican cartels, Colin figures, not people who look like him. If he were arrested, he could face up to 5 years in federal prison?or up to 30 in some states, like Louisiana. So far, though, he's never been stopped. "You have to figure out how you're going to do your plates and not stick out," he says. "I don't like Texas; Texas always has a ton of cops. I don't like it, but?all right, here's the truth: It's scary. You've got to build a pretty good veneer around yourself." As if to prove it, he won't specify how much money he's made ("a lot") or what he does to his license plates. ("I gotta keep that to me.") He's also selective about which jobs he'll accept. ("Sometimes I get a feeling, 'I'm not going to do it this time.'") And yet he finds it hard to say no. "I definitely think about taking time off, but make everybody mad?" he says. "There's a whole lot of people with lives and families depending on what I do." Late the following night, my plane touches down in Austin, Texas. The rental-car desks are closed, so I call Charlie. "Not a problem, bro," he says. "I'm on my way." Soon, I'm riding with him in a minivan full of car seats and baby toys. Like my other sources, Charlie doesn't mention the names of funky pot strains, doesn't romanticize the drug. Unlike them, he's a bit of a stoner, but he's in this game solely for the money. A Frisbee-golf fanatic, he's the friendliest of the traffickers I've met so far. He's married, with two kids, and he repeats like a mantra the notion that everything he does, he does for them. "I felt like I was going to throw up," he tells me the next morning, as we sit watching Parks and Recreation. He's talking about his latest layoff, in May, from an IT job. The family's unremarkable suburban two-bedroom house is packed with stuffed animals and picture books. As we talk, his toddler wrestles on the living-room carpet with the family dog?an Akita. "My wife had just quit her job to focus on going to school." Charlie's recession story begins in Louisiana, where he ran a business producing records and promoting bands, taking home $80,000 to $90,000 a year. "When the recession came, people couldn't afford to pay us," he says. He lost the business, went into debt, and decided to move. "I thought we could have a good shot here in the music capital of the world, but we just became another small fish in a large pond." In 2005, he gave up and looked for other work, figuring there would be a market for a guy with two bachelor's degrees in the sciences. "All I could find were minimum-wage jobs," Charlie says. He sold retail electronics for almost three years. After the store folded, the family resorted to food stamps on and off. Things changed in early 2009, when a California friend offered to front him a pound of weed. "If other people were presented with the same gift of opportunity, a good percentage would do it," he tells me later. "We couldn't turn to our parents or anybody. If that wouldn't have happened, I think we would be homeless." A gregarious type, Charlie had a large circle of stoner friends. "My wife and I thought about it for a good month," he says. "There were heavy cons, but once it got here, it exceeded everyone's expectations. The first pound took less than five or six hours to sell. After that, it started getting bigger and bigger." Charlie buys wholesale for about $3,000 a pound. Selling by the quarter-pound, he more than doubles his stake, clearing $8,000 in a good month. "Austin has lots of weed festivals," he explains. "Then I can't get it fast enough." He spends the proceeds on "diapers, clothes, gas, rent, lights, food," and college fees. He and his wife, Kim, both still owe on student loans?in Kim's case a $600 monthly payment for a "useless" culinary-arts degree that a promoter convinced her would lead to a high-paying career as a chef. Charlie's drug dealing freed her up to quit waitressing and pursue a bachelor's degree online. Plus, she explains, "To give our kids the life I feel they deserve, you have to have money." Charlie recoils when I ask him about expensive toys. "God, no," he says. In fact, he hasn't given up searching for legitimate work, recently "shuffling around spas for $7 an hour." He worries about the prospect of a two-year Texas felony sentence: "That's always on my mind. If you don't watch everything you do, you're going to go away, lose your kids to Child Protective Services." But robbery is Charlie's most immediate concern. After all, he delivers. "I'm having to transport it all the time," he says. "When people catch on to that, you're done. That's what I fear. Luckily, I've never had a gun in my face." "There are lots of people with the same experience competing for the same jobs," he adds as we say goodbye. "If I could find the way to get out of this, I would. But it's gotten me by so far, and I'm not going to stop." Back home in Florida, I drive to a low-income, mixed-race neighborhood near Tampa to meet Tegan, a single mother and part-time restaurant hostess in her mid-20s. Like Charlie, she's been selling California weed to survive the recession. "I only deal with marijuana," she says. "I don't feel like a drug dealer." Tegan's side job has allowed her to get off food stamps, spend more time with her daughter, and attend college full time. But recently, she had a major scare. Hard up for a driver, her suppliers said they would FedEx the next shipment. They'd been doing this for months, they reassured her, and the package would bear false names. "So it came to my address," she recalls, laughing nervously. "And yeah, the cops came." She'd taken her daughter to the supermarket that day. When she pulled back into her driveway, an unmarked SUV sped down the street, and two burly undercover agents leaped out. "They were screaming, 'Do you speak English?'" Tegan says. (She's white but has a dark complexion.) The men asked if she was expecting a package, and she said no. "I was really surprised by how cool I was, because I was scared shitless," she recalls. Spotting her toddler in the back seat, the men lightened up and told her they'd detained a Latino man who ran when they approached. "They said he was saying, 'I just do the lawns!'" Tegan says. "They assumed because he was an immigrant, the package was for him." She let her suppliers know the delivery was a bust. Between hers and another abandoned shipment, Tegan estimates they lost $35,000 worth of product. "But nobody went to prison." Later, the agents returned to say they'd released the man for lack of evidence. Criminals regularly send drug shipments to the homes of innocent people, they warned. But courier services flag suspicious packages, and agents stake out the deliveries. "We don't tolerate the illegal use of our network, and [we] work closely with law enforcement," explains FedEx spokesman Jim McCluskey. When I ask how the company detects weed in its packages, he snorts incredulously. "We don't disclose that!" On the way home from Tegan's, I'm struck by how, despite such a close call, she doesn't seem at all eager to get out of the business. It reminds me of something Colin told me as we barreled down the interstate in his car. "Maybe I'll go back to school," he said when I asked how long he planned on doing this. "I don't know. These are scary times. The recession came, and I started looking for other options. Everyone's an amateur in the beginning. And then you're not an amateur anymore." Living near California's Emerald Triangle on and off during the past eight years, Tony D'Souza rubbed elbows with players in the interstate marijuana trade, some of whom became the subjects of "The New Dealers" as well as of his recent novel, Mule. From ths at psalience.org Mon Jan 2 20:16:56 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:16:56 +0100 Subject: [THS] Nature loves courage Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120102201216.067fad70@mail.messagingengine.com> "Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed." ? Terence McKenna ["Feather Bed" I'm not so sure, but it's at least not the eternal hellfires that await cowards who hide behind money, power and all the "police protection" that entails... -ths] From ths at psalience.org Wed Jan 4 01:08:42 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 04 Jan 2012 01:08:42 +0100 Subject: [THS] !!!!!!! Paul Craig Roberts: Tyranny in the Forecast Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120104005240.05943cf8@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28475 Tyranny in the Forecast: The Outlook for the New Year "The Bush/Obama regimes have put the foundation in place for imprisoning critics of the government without due process of law." by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts Global Research, January 2, 2012 paulcraigroberts.org Global Research announces Dr. Paul Craig Robert's New Website at http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/ In March 2010 when I resigned from my column with Creator?s Syndicate and put down my pen, I received so many protests from readers that two months later I began writing again. This renewed activity has resulted in this new year in a website of my own. My columns will first appear on my site. Sites on which readers are accustomed to find my columns are permitted to continue to post my columns as long as they link to my site and indicate my copyright. The site will stay up if reader support justifies it. Otherwise, I will conclude that the cost of the site exceeds the value of what I have to say. This past year has not been a good one for the 99%, and the new year is likely to be even worse. This column deals with the outlook for liberty. The next will deal with the economic outlook. The outlook for liberty is dismal. Those writers who are critical of Washington?s illegal wars and overthrow of the US Constitution could find themselves in indefinite detainment, because criticism of Washington?s policies can be alleged to be aiding Washington?s enemies, which might include charities that provide aid to bombed Palestinian children and flotillas that attempt to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/24/us-israel-usa-flotilla-idUSTRE75N4A620110624 The Bush/Obama regimes have put the foundation in place for imprisoning critics of the government without due process of law. The First Amendment is being all but restricted to rah-rah Americans who chant USA! USA! USA! Washington has set itself up as world prosecutor, forever berating other countries for human rights violations, while Washington alone bombs half a dozen countries into the stone age and threatens several more with the same treatment, all the while violating US statutory law and the Geneva Conventions by torturing detainees. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/06/18/41514/general-who-probed-abu-ghraib.html Washington rounds up assorted foreign politicians, whose countries were afflicted with civil wars, and sends them off to be tried as war criminals, while its own war crimes continue to mount. However, if a person exposes Washington?s war crimes, that person is held without charges in conditions that approximate torture. Bradley Manning is the case in point. Manning, a US soldier, is alleged to be the person who released to WikiLeaks the ?Collateral Murder? video, which, in the words of Marjorie Cohn, ?depicts U.S. forces in an Apache helicopter killing 12 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists. People trying to rescue the wounded were also fired upon and killed.? One of the Good Samaritans was a father with two small children. The video reveals the delight that US military personnel experienced in blowing them away from the distant skies. When it became clear that the Warriors Bringing The People Democracy had blown away two small children, instead of remorse we hear an executioner?s voice saying: ?that?s what he gets for bringing children into a war zone.? The quote is from memory, but it is accurate enough. When I first saw this video, I was astonished at the brazen war crime. It is completely obvious that the dozen or so murdered people were simply people walking along a street, threatening no one, unarmed, doing nothing out of the ordinary. It was not a war zone. The horror is that the US soldiers were playing video games with live people. You can tell from their commentary that they were having fun by killing these unsuspecting people walking along the street. They enjoyed killing the father who stopped to help and shooting up his vehicle with the two small children inside. This was not an accident of a drone, fed with bad information, blowing up a school full of children, or a hospital, or a farmer?s family. This was American soldiers having fun with high tech toys killing anyone that they could pretend might be an enemy. When I saw this, I realized that America was lost. Evil had prevailed. I was about to write that nothing has been done about the crime. But something was done about it. An American soldier who recognized the horrific war crime knew that the US military knew about it and had done nothing about it. He also knew that as a US soldier he was required to report war crimes. But to whom? War crimes dismissed as ?collateral damage? are the greatest part of Washington?s 21st century wars. A soldier with a moral conscience gave the video to WikiLeaks. We don?t know who the soldier is. Washington alleges that the soldier is Bradley Manning, but Washington lies every time it opens its mouth. So we will never know. All we know is that retribution did not fall on the perpetrators of the war crime. It fell upon the two accused of revealing it--Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. Manning was held almost two years without charges being presented to a court. In December?s pre-trial hearings all Washington could come up with was concocted accusations. No evidence whatsoever. The prosecutor, a Captain Fein, told the court, if that is what it is, that Manning had been ?trained and trusted to use multiple intelligence systems, and he used that training to defy that trust. He abused our trust.? In other words, Manning gave the world the truth of a war crime that was being covered up, and Washington and the Pentagon regard a truth teller doing his duty under the US military code as an ?abuser of trust.? In the 1970 My Lai Courts-Martial of Captain Ernest L. Medina, the Prosecution Brief states: ? A combat commander has a duty, both as an individual and as a commander, to insure that humane treatment is accorded to noncombatants and surrendering combatants. Article 3 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War specifically prohibits violence to life and person, particularly murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture. Also prohibited are the taking of hostages, outrages against personal dignity and summary judgment and sentence. It demands that the wounded and sick be cared for. These same provisions are found in the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. While these requirements for humanitarian treatment are placed upon each individual involved with the protected persons, it is especially incumbent upon the commanding officer to insure that proper treatment is given. Additionally, all military personnel, regardless of rank or position, have the responsibility of reporting any incident or act thought to be a war crime to his commanding officer as soon as practicable after gaining such knowledge. Commanders receiving such reports must also make such facts known to the Staff Judge Advocate. It is quite clear that war crimes are not condoned and that every individual has the responsibility to refrain from, prevent and report such unwarranted conduct. While this individual responsibility is likewise placed upon the commander, he has the additional duty to insure that war crimes committed by his troops are promptly and adequately punished. http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/Myl_law3.htm At the National Press Club on February 17, 2006, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that ?It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral.? General Pace said that the military is prohibited from committing crimes against humanity and that such orders and events must be made known. However, when Manning followed the military code, his compliance with law was turned into a crime. Captain Fein goes on to tell the ?court? [a real court would throw out the bogus charges, but Amerika no longer has real courts] that ?ultimately, he aided the enemies of the United States by indirectly giving them intelligence through WikiLeaks.? In other words, the ?crime? is an unintended consequence of doing one?s duty--like the ?collateral damage? of civilian casualties when drones, bombs, helicopter gunships, and trigger-happy troops kill women, children, aid workers, and village elders. Why is Washington only punishing Manning for the collateral damage attributed to him? Captain Fein could not have put it any clearer. If you tell the truth and reveal Washington?s war crimes, you have aided the enemy. Captain Fein?s simple sentence has at one stroke abolished all whistleblower protections written into US statutory law and the First Amendment, and confined anyone with a moral conscience and sense of decency to indefinite detention and torture. The illegal detention and treatment of Manning had a purpose, according to a number of informed people. Naomi Spencer, for example, writes that Manning?s long detention and delayed prosecution is designed to coerce Manning into implicating WikiLeaks in order that the US can extradite Julian Assange and either prosecute him as a terrorist or lock him away indefinitely in a military prison without any recourse to the courts, due process or the law. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30075.htm Assange?s case is mysterious. Assange sought refuge in Sweden, where he was seduced by two women. Both admit that they had sexual intercourse with him voluntarily, but afterwards they have come forth with claims that as they were sleeping with him in the bed, he again had sexual intercourse with them, and that they had not approved this second helping and that he was asked to use a condom but did not. The Swedish prosecutorial office, after investigating the charges, dismissed them. But, strangely, another Swedish prosecutor, a woman suspected of connections to Washington, resurrected the charges and is seeking to extradite Assange to Sweden from the UK for questioning. The legal question is whether a prosecutor can seek extradition for investigative purposes. The UK Supreme Court thinks that this is a valid question, and has agreed to hear the case. Normally, extradition requests come from courts and are issued for persons formally charged with a crime. Sweden has not charged Assange with a crime. The real question is whether the Swedish prosecutor is acting on behalf of Washington. Many who follow the case believe that Washington is behind the prosecutor?s re-opening of the case, and if Sweden gets hold of Assange Sweden will send him to Washington to be put in indefinite detention and tortured until he says what Washington wants him to say--that he is an Al Qaeda operative. This is the way that Washington intends to absolve itself of its war crimes revealed, allegedly, by Manning and Assange. Meanwhile, Washington in a brazen display of hypocrisy accuses other countries of human rights abuses, while Congress has passed and President Obama has signed an indefinite detention and torture bill that US Representative Ron Paul says will accelerate America?s ?slip into tyranny? and ?descent into totalitarianism.? In signing the Bill of Tyranny, President Obama indicated that he thought that the tyranny established by the bill did not go far enough. He announced that he was signing the bill with signing statements that reserved his right, regardless of any law, to send American citizens, deprived of due process and constitutional protection, abroad to be tortured. This is the US government that claims to be a government of ?freedom and democracy? and to be bringing ?freedom and democracy? to others with bombs and invasions. The past year gave us other ominous tyrannical developments. President Obama announced that he had a list of Americans whom he intended to assassinate without due process of law, and Homeland Security, itself an Orwellian name, announced that it had shifted its attention from terrorists to ?domestic extremists.? The latter are undefined and consist of whomever Homeland Security so designates. None of this was done behind closed doors. The murder of the US Constitution was a public crime witnessed by all. But like Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death in New York in 1964 in front of onlookers who failed to come to her aid, the media, Congress, bar associations, law schools, and the American public failed to come to the defense of the Constitution. In my lifetime the collapse in respect for, and authority of, the Constitution has been an horrific event. Compare the ho-hum response to the Obama regime?s police state announcements with the public anger at President Richard Nixon over his enemies list. Try to imagine President Ronald Reagan announcing that he had a list of Americans marked for assassination without impeachment proceedings beginning forthwith. Local and state police forces have been militarized not only in their equipment and armament but also in their attitude toward the public. Despite the absence of domestic terror attacks, Homeland Security conducts warrantless searches of cars and trucks on highways and of passengers using public transportation. A uniformed federal service is being trained to systematically violate the constitutional rights of citizens, and citizens are being trained to accept these violations as normal. The young have no memory of being able to board public transportation or use public roadways without intrusive searches or to gather in protest without being brutalized by the police. Liberty is being moved into the realm of myth and legend. In such a system as is being constructed in public in front of our eyes, there is no freedom, no democracy, and no liberty. What stands before us is naked tyranny. While America degenerates into a total police state, politicians constantly invoke ?our values.? What are these values? Indefinite imprisonment without conviction in a court. Torture. Warrantless searches and home invasions. An epidemic of police brutality. Curtailment of free speech and peaceful assembly rights. Unprovoked aggression called ?preemptive war.? Interference in the elections and internal affairs of other countries. Economic sanctions imposed on foreign populations whose leaders are not in Washington?s pocket. If the American police state were merely an unintended consequence of a real war against terror, it could be dismantled when the war was over. However, the evidence is that the police state is an intended consequence. The PATRIOT Act is a voluminous and clever attack on the Constitution. It is not possible that it could have been written in the short time between 9/11 and its introduction in Congress. It was waiting on the shelf. The dismantling of constitutionally protected civil liberties is purposeful, as is the accumulation of arbitrary and unaccountable powers in the executive branch of government. As there have been no terrorist events within the US in over a decade except for those known to have been organized by the FBI, there is no terrorist threat that justifies the establishment of a political regime of unaccountable power. It is being done on purpose under false pretenses, which means that there is an undeclared agenda. The threat that Americans face resides in Washington, D.C. Of the presidential candidates, only Ron Paul addresses the Constitution?s demise.Yet, the electorate is concerned with matters unimportant by comparison. Propagandized 24/7 by the Ministry of Truth, Americans are not sufficiently aware of their plight to elect Ron Paul president. It might be too late for even a President Ron Paul to turn things around. A president has no power unless his government supports him. What prospect would President Ron Paul have of getting his appointees confirmed by the Senate? The military/security complex is not going to vacate power. Powerful monied interests would block his appointments. If he persisted in being a problem for the Establishment, he would be victimized by a scandal and fail to be reelected if not forced to resign. Remember what the Washington Establishment did to President Carter. His budget director and chief of staff were framed, thus depriving Carter of the powers of his office. Even Ronald Reagan had to give away more than half of his government, including the White House chief-of-staff and vice presidency, to the Establishment. President Reagan told me that he wanted to end stagflation in order that he could end the cold war, but that he could not sign a tax bill if I could not get one out of his administration that he could send to Congress. I do not know, but I suspect that turning things around internally through the political system is not in the cards. Our chance to resurrect liberty might come from Washington?s hubris. Imperial ambitions and drive for power can produce unmanageable upheavals and a loss of allies. Overreach abroad with a demoralized, unemployed and downtrodden population at home are not the ingredients of success. How much longer will the Russian government permit NGOs funded by the US Endowment for Democracy to interfere in its elections and to organize political protests? How much longer will China confuse its strategic interests with the American consumer market? How much longer will Japan, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and the Middle East oil states remain US puppets? How much longer can the dollar retain the reserve currency role when the Federal Reserve is monetizing vast quantities of debt? How much longer can a ?superpower? survive when it is incapable of producing political leadership? America?s salvation will come when Washington suffers defeat of its hegemonic ambitions. Many readers, especially those who watch Fox ?News? and CNN and read the New York Times, might see hyperbole in my outlook for 2012. Surely, many believe, the draconian measures put in place will only be applied to terrorists. But how would we know? Indefinite detention and torture require no evidence to be presented. The American public has no way of knowing whether tortured detainees are terrorists or political opponents. The decision to detain and torture is an unaccountable decision. It relies on nothing but the subjective arbitrary decision of someone in the executive branch. Why are Americans prepared to take the word of a government that told them intentionally the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to America? Like cancer, tyranny metastasizes. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union?s most famous writer, was a twice-decorated World War II Red Army commander. He made mild critical comments about Stalin?s conduct of the war in a private letter to a friend, and for this he was sentenced, not by a court, but in absentia by the NKVD, the secret police, to eight years in the Gulag Archipelago for ?anti-Soviet propaganda.? Not even Stalin had indefinite detention. The closest the Soviets came to this medieval practice resurrected by the Bush and Obama regimes was internal exile in distant parts of the Soviet Union. During much of the Soviet era, even art, literature and music were scrutinized for signs of ?anit-Soviet propaganda.? America?s Dixie Chicks suffered a similar, but more frightening, fate. Bush did not need the NKVD. The American public did the job for the secret police. Wikipedia reports: ?During a London concert ten days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, lead vocalist Maines said ?we don't want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States (George W. Bush) is from Texas.? The statement offended many Americans, who thought it rude and unpatriotic, and the ensuing controversy cost the band half of their concert audience attendance in the United States. The incident negatively affected their career and led to accusations of the three women being "un-American", as well as hate mail, death threats, and the public destruction of their albums in protest.? In Nazi Germany, the mildest criticism could bring a midnight knock at the door. People with power use it. And power attracts the worst kind of persons. As Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prove, democracies are not immune to the evil use of power. Indeed, identical inhumane treatment of prisoners goes on inside the US prison system for ordinary criminals. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8451.htm A December 30, 2011, search on Yahoo for police brutality produced 20 million results. Over-fed goon cop thugs taser little children and people in wheel chairs. They body slam elderly grandmothers. The police are a horror. They represent a greater threat to citizens than do criminals. Preventative war, indefinite imprisonment, rendition, torture of people alleged to be ?suspects? (an undefined category), and assassination are all draconian punishments that require no evidence. Preventative war is an Orwellian concept. How do you prevent a war by initiating a war? How do we know that a country that did not attack us was going to attack us in the future? Preventative war is like Jeremy Bentham?s concept of preventing crime by locking up those thought by the upper crust to be predisposed to criminal activity before they commit a crime. Punishment without crime is now the American Way. The concepts that the Bush/Obama regimes have institutionalized are totally foreign to the Anglo-American concepts of law and liberty. In one decade the US has been transformed from a free society into a police state. The American population, to the extent it is aware of what has occurred, has simply accepted the revolution from the top. Ron Paul is the only American seeking the presidency who opposes the tyranny that has been institutionalized, and he is not leading in the polls. This tells us all we need to know about the value Americans place on liberty. Americans seem to welcome the era of tyranny into which they are now entering. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Paul Craig Roberts From ths at psalience.org Wed Jan 4 01:09:02 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 04 Jan 2012 01:09:02 +0100 Subject: [THS] Paul Craig Roberts: Tyranny in the Forecast Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120104010848.05943a68@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28475 Tyranny in the Forecast: The Outlook for the New Year "The Bush/Obama regimes have put the foundation in place for imprisoning critics of the government without due process of law." by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts Global Research, January 2, 2012 paulcraigroberts.org Global Research announces Dr. Paul Craig Robert's New Website at http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/ In March 2010 when I resigned from my column with Creator?s Syndicate and put down my pen, I received so many protests from readers that two months later I began writing again. This renewed activity has resulted in this new year in a website of my own. My columns will first appear on my site. Sites on which readers are accustomed to find my columns are permitted to continue to post my columns as long as they link to my site and indicate my copyright. The site will stay up if reader support justifies it. Otherwise, I will conclude that the cost of the site exceeds the value of what I have to say. This past year has not been a good one for the 99%, and the new year is likely to be even worse. This column deals with the outlook for liberty. The next will deal with the economic outlook. The outlook for liberty is dismal. Those writers who are critical of Washington?s illegal wars and overthrow of the US Constitution could find themselves in indefinite detainment, because criticism of Washington?s policies can be alleged to be aiding Washington?s enemies, which might include charities that provide aid to bombed Palestinian children and flotillas that attempt to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/24/us-israel-usa-flotilla-idUSTRE75N4A620110624 The Bush/Obama regimes have put the foundation in place for imprisoning critics of the government without due process of law. The First Amendment is being all but restricted to rah-rah Americans who chant USA! USA! USA! Washington has set itself up as world prosecutor, forever berating other countries for human rights violations, while Washington alone bombs half a dozen countries into the stone age and threatens several more with the same treatment, all the while violating US statutory law and the Geneva Conventions by torturing detainees. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/06/18/41514/general-who-probed-abu-ghraib.html Washington rounds up assorted foreign politicians, whose countries were afflicted with civil wars, and sends them off to be tried as war criminals, while its own war crimes continue to mount. However, if a person exposes Washington?s war crimes, that person is held without charges in conditions that approximate torture. Bradley Manning is the case in point. Manning, a US soldier, is alleged to be the person who released to WikiLeaks the ?Collateral Murder? video, which, in the words of Marjorie Cohn, ?depicts U.S. forces in an Apache helicopter killing 12 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists. People trying to rescue the wounded were also fired upon and killed.? One of the Good Samaritans was a father with two small children. The video reveals the delight that US military personnel experienced in blowing them away from the distant skies. When it became clear that the Warriors Bringing The People Democracy had blown away two small children, instead of remorse we hear an executioner?s voice saying: ?that?s what he gets for bringing children into a war zone.? The quote is from memory, but it is accurate enough. When I first saw this video, I was astonished at the brazen war crime. It is completely obvious that the dozen or so murdered people were simply people walking along a street, threatening no one, unarmed, doing nothing out of the ordinary. It was not a war zone. The horror is that the US soldiers were playing video games with live people. You can tell from their commentary that they were having fun by killing these unsuspecting people walking along the street. They enjoyed killing the father who stopped to help and shooting up his vehicle with the two small children inside. This was not an accident of a drone, fed with bad information, blowing up a school full of children, or a hospital, or a farmer?s family. This was American soldiers having fun with high tech toys killing anyone that they could pretend might be an enemy. When I saw this, I realized that America was lost. Evil had prevailed. I was about to write that nothing has been done about the crime. But something was done about it. An American soldier who recognized the horrific war crime knew that the US military knew about it and had done nothing about it. He also knew that as a US soldier he was required to report war crimes. But to whom? War crimes dismissed as ?collateral damage? are the greatest part of Washington?s 21st century wars. A soldier with a moral conscience gave the video to WikiLeaks. We don?t know who the soldier is. Washington alleges that the soldier is Bradley Manning, but Washington lies every time it opens its mouth. So we will never know. All we know is that retribution did not fall on the perpetrators of the war crime. It fell upon the two accused of revealing it--Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. Manning was held almost two years without charges being presented to a court. In December?s pre-trial hearings all Washington could come up with was concocted accusations. No evidence whatsoever. The prosecutor, a Captain Fein, told the court, if that is what it is, that Manning had been ?trained and trusted to use multiple intelligence systems, and he used that training to defy that trust. He abused our trust.? In other words, Manning gave the world the truth of a war crime that was being covered up, and Washington and the Pentagon regard a truth teller doing his duty under the US military code as an ?abuser of trust.? In the 1970 My Lai Courts-Martial of Captain Ernest L. Medina, the Prosecution Brief states: ? A combat commander has a duty, both as an individual and as a commander, to insure that humane treatment is accorded to noncombatants and surrendering combatants. Article 3 of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War specifically prohibits violence to life and person, particularly murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, and torture. Also prohibited are the taking of hostages, outrages against personal dignity and summary judgment and sentence. It demands that the wounded and sick be cared for. These same provisions are found in the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. While these requirements for humanitarian treatment are placed upon each individual involved with the protected persons, it is especially incumbent upon the commanding officer to insure that proper treatment is given. Additionally, all military personnel, regardless of rank or position, have the responsibility of reporting any incident or act thought to be a war crime to his commanding officer as soon as practicable after gaining such knowledge. Commanders receiving such reports must also make such facts known to the Staff Judge Advocate. It is quite clear that war crimes are not condoned and that every individual has the responsibility to refrain from, prevent and report such unwarranted conduct. While this individual responsibility is likewise placed upon the commander, he has the additional duty to insure that war crimes committed by his troops are promptly and adequately punished. http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/Myl_law3.htm At the National Press Club on February 17, 2006, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that ?It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral.? General Pace said that the military is prohibited from committing crimes against humanity and that such orders and events must be made known. However, when Manning followed the military code, his compliance with law was turned into a crime. Captain Fein goes on to tell the ?court? [a real court would throw out the bogus charges, but Amerika no longer has real courts] that ?ultimately, he aided the enemies of the United States by indirectly giving them intelligence through WikiLeaks.? In other words, the ?crime? is an unintended consequence of doing one?s duty--like the ?collateral damage? of civilian casualties when drones, bombs, helicopter gunships, and trigger-happy troops kill women, children, aid workers, and village elders. Why is Washington only punishing Manning for the collateral damage attributed to him? Captain Fein could not have put it any clearer. If you tell the truth and reveal Washington?s war crimes, you have aided the enemy. Captain Fein?s simple sentence has at one stroke abolished all whistleblower protections written into US statutory law and the First Amendment, and confined anyone with a moral conscience and sense of decency to indefinite detention and torture. The illegal detention and treatment of Manning had a purpose, according to a number of informed people. Naomi Spencer, for example, writes that Manning?s long detention and delayed prosecution is designed to coerce Manning into implicating WikiLeaks in order that the US can extradite Julian Assange and either prosecute him as a terrorist or lock him away indefinitely in a military prison without any recourse to the courts, due process or the law. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30075.htm Assange?s case is mysterious. Assange sought refuge in Sweden, where he was seduced by two women. Both admit that they had sexual intercourse with him voluntarily, but afterwards they have come forth with claims that as they were sleeping with him in the bed, he again had sexual intercourse with them, and that they had not approved this second helping and that he was asked to use a condom but did not. The Swedish prosecutorial office, after investigating the charges, dismissed them. But, strangely, another Swedish prosecutor, a woman suspected of connections to Washington, resurrected the charges and is seeking to extradite Assange to Sweden from the UK for questioning. The legal question is whether a prosecutor can seek extradition for investigative purposes. The UK Supreme Court thinks that this is a valid question, and has agreed to hear the case. Normally, extradition requests come from courts and are issued for persons formally charged with a crime. Sweden has not charged Assange with a crime. The real question is whether the Swedish prosecutor is acting on behalf of Washington. Many who follow the case believe that Washington is behind the prosecutor?s re-opening of the case, and if Sweden gets hold of Assange Sweden will send him to Washington to be put in indefinite detention and tortured until he says what Washington wants him to say--that he is an Al Qaeda operative. This is the way that Washington intends to absolve itself of its war crimes revealed, allegedly, by Manning and Assange. Meanwhile, Washington in a brazen display of hypocrisy accuses other countries of human rights abuses, while Congress has passed and President Obama has signed an indefinite detention and torture bill that US Representative Ron Paul says will accelerate America?s ?slip into tyranny? and ?descent into totalitarianism.? In signing the Bill of Tyranny, President Obama indicated that he thought that the tyranny established by the bill did not go far enough. He announced that he was signing the bill with signing statements that reserved his right, regardless of any law, to send American citizens, deprived of due process and constitutional protection, abroad to be tortured. This is the US government that claims to be a government of ?freedom and democracy? and to be bringing ?freedom and democracy? to others with bombs and invasions. The past year gave us other ominous tyrannical developments. President Obama announced that he had a list of Americans whom he intended to assassinate without due process of law, and Homeland Security, itself an Orwellian name, announced that it had shifted its attention from terrorists to ?domestic extremists.? The latter are undefined and consist of whomever Homeland Security so designates. None of this was done behind closed doors. The murder of the US Constitution was a public crime witnessed by all. But like Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed to death in New York in 1964 in front of onlookers who failed to come to her aid, the media, Congress, bar associations, law schools, and the American public failed to come to the defense of the Constitution. In my lifetime the collapse in respect for, and authority of, the Constitution has been an horrific event. Compare the ho-hum response to the Obama regime?s police state announcements with the public anger at President Richard Nixon over his enemies list. Try to imagine President Ronald Reagan announcing that he had a list of Americans marked for assassination without impeachment proceedings beginning forthwith. Local and state police forces have been militarized not only in their equipment and armament but also in their attitude toward the public. Despite the absence of domestic terror attacks, Homeland Security conducts warrantless searches of cars and trucks on highways and of passengers using public transportation. A uniformed federal service is being trained to systematically violate the constitutional rights of citizens, and citizens are being trained to accept these violations as normal. The young have no memory of being able to board public transportation or use public roadways without intrusive searches or to gather in protest without being brutalized by the police. Liberty is being moved into the realm of myth and legend. In such a system as is being constructed in public in front of our eyes, there is no freedom, no democracy, and no liberty. What stands before us is naked tyranny. While America degenerates into a total police state, politicians constantly invoke ?our values.? What are these values? Indefinite imprisonment without conviction in a court. Torture. Warrantless searches and home invasions. An epidemic of police brutality. Curtailment of free speech and peaceful assembly rights. Unprovoked aggression called ?preemptive war.? Interference in the elections and internal affairs of other countries. Economic sanctions imposed on foreign populations whose leaders are not in Washington?s pocket. If the American police state were merely an unintended consequence of a real war against terror, it could be dismantled when the war was over. However, the evidence is that the police state is an intended consequence. The PATRIOT Act is a voluminous and clever attack on the Constitution. It is not possible that it could have been written in the short time between 9/11 and its introduction in Congress. It was waiting on the shelf. The dismantling of constitutionally protected civil liberties is purposeful, as is the accumulation of arbitrary and unaccountable powers in the executive branch of government. As there have been no terrorist events within the US in over a decade except for those known to have been organized by the FBI, there is no terrorist threat that justifies the establishment of a political regime of unaccountable power. It is being done on purpose under false pretenses, which means that there is an undeclared agenda. The threat that Americans face resides in Washington, D.C. Of the presidential candidates, only Ron Paul addresses the Constitution?s demise.Yet, the electorate is concerned with matters unimportant by comparison. Propagandized 24/7 by the Ministry of Truth, Americans are not sufficiently aware of their plight to elect Ron Paul president. It might be too late for even a President Ron Paul to turn things around. A president has no power unless his government supports him. What prospect would President Ron Paul have of getting his appointees confirmed by the Senate? The military/security complex is not going to vacate power. Powerful monied interests would block his appointments. If he persisted in being a problem for the Establishment, he would be victimized by a scandal and fail to be reelected if not forced to resign. Remember what the Washington Establishment did to President Carter. His budget director and chief of staff were framed, thus depriving Carter of the powers of his office. Even Ronald Reagan had to give away more than half of his government, including the White House chief-of-staff and vice presidency, to the Establishment. President Reagan told me that he wanted to end stagflation in order that he could end the cold war, but that he could not sign a tax bill if I could not get one out of his administration that he could send to Congress. I do not know, but I suspect that turning things around internally through the political system is not in the cards. Our chance to resurrect liberty might come from Washington?s hubris. Imperial ambitions and drive for power can produce unmanageable upheavals and a loss of allies. Overreach abroad with a demoralized, unemployed and downtrodden population at home are not the ingredients of success. How much longer will the Russian government permit NGOs funded by the US Endowment for Democracy to interfere in its elections and to organize political protests? How much longer will China confuse its strategic interests with the American consumer market? How much longer will Japan, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and the Middle East oil states remain US puppets? How much longer can the dollar retain the reserve currency role when the Federal Reserve is monetizing vast quantities of debt? How much longer can a ?superpower? survive when it is incapable of producing political leadership? America?s salvation will come when Washington suffers defeat of its hegemonic ambitions. Many readers, especially those who watch Fox ?News? and CNN and read the New York Times, might see hyperbole in my outlook for 2012. Surely, many believe, the draconian measures put in place will only be applied to terrorists. But how would we know? Indefinite detention and torture require no evidence to be presented. The American public has no way of knowing whether tortured detainees are terrorists or political opponents. The decision to detain and torture is an unaccountable decision. It relies on nothing but the subjective arbitrary decision of someone in the executive branch. Why are Americans prepared to take the word of a government that told them intentionally the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was a threat to America? Like cancer, tyranny metastasizes. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union?s most famous writer, was a twice-decorated World War II Red Army commander. He made mild critical comments about Stalin?s conduct of the war in a private letter to a friend, and for this he was sentenced, not by a court, but in absentia by the NKVD, the secret police, to eight years in the Gulag Archipelago for ?anti-Soviet propaganda.? Not even Stalin had indefinite detention. The closest the Soviets came to this medieval practice resurrected by the Bush and Obama regimes was internal exile in distant parts of the Soviet Union. During much of the Soviet era, even art, literature and music were scrutinized for signs of ?anit-Soviet propaganda.? America?s Dixie Chicks suffered a similar, but more frightening, fate. Bush did not need the NKVD. The American public did the job for the secret police. Wikipedia reports: ?During a London concert ten days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, lead vocalist Maines said ?we don't want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States (George W. Bush) is from Texas.? The statement offended many Americans, who thought it rude and unpatriotic, and the ensuing controversy cost the band half of their concert audience attendance in the United States. The incident negatively affected their career and led to accusations of the three women being "un-American", as well as hate mail, death threats, and the public destruction of their albums in protest.? In Nazi Germany, the mildest criticism could bring a midnight knock at the door. People with power use it. And power attracts the worst kind of persons. As Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prove, democracies are not immune to the evil use of power. Indeed, identical inhumane treatment of prisoners goes on inside the US prison system for ordinary criminals. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8451.htm A December 30, 2011, search on Yahoo for police brutality produced 20 million results. Over-fed goon cop thugs taser little children and people in wheel chairs. They body slam elderly grandmothers. The police are a horror. They represent a greater threat to citizens than do criminals. Preventative war, indefinite imprisonment, rendition, torture of people alleged to be ?suspects? (an undefined category), and assassination are all draconian punishments that require no evidence. Preventative war is an Orwellian concept. How do you prevent a war by initiating a war? How do we know that a country that did not attack us was going to attack us in the future? Preventative war is like Jeremy Bentham?s concept of preventing crime by locking up those thought by the upper crust to be predisposed to criminal activity before they commit a crime. Punishment without crime is now the American Way. The concepts that the Bush/Obama regimes have institutionalized are totally foreign to the Anglo-American concepts of law and liberty. In one decade the US has been transformed from a free society into a police state. The American population, to the extent it is aware of what has occurred, has simply accepted the revolution from the top. Ron Paul is the only American seeking the presidency who opposes the tyranny that has been institutionalized, and he is not leading in the polls. This tells us all we need to know about the value Americans place on liberty. Americans seem to welcome the era of tyranny into which they are now entering. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Paul Craig Roberts From ths at psalience.org Thu Jan 5 14:10:45 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:10:45 +0100 Subject: [THS] Occupy Wall Street's Livestream Operators Arrested Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120105141020.04784910@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.readersupportednews.org/news-section2/440-occupy/9269-focus-occupy-wall-streets-livestream-operators-arrested Occupy Wall Street's Livestream Operators Arrested By Adam Martin, The Atlantic Wire 04 January 12 Occupy Wall Street is in the middle of one of its day-long marches in New York Tuesday, protesting the National Defense Authorization Act, but for those following along on the Global Revolution livestream, the real action is happening in the broadcast studio itself. That's because police have apparently just raided the Brooklyn studio of Globalrevolution.tv and taken some of the project's key volunteers into custody. The raid Tuesday follows a notice to vacate that police delivered to the Bushwick studio on Monday night. Victoria Sobel, a Global Revolution volunteer, said Vlad Teichberg and a guy named Spike, both of whom maintain the live feed aggregator, had been taken into custody by police, along with four or five others. Update: The six arrested in Tuesday's raid lived at the Global Revolution space. See our latest here. In Manhattan, about 100 Occupy protesters (according to Animal New York's Twitter) marched to the offices of New York senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer, where they told stories and made impassioned cases for the wrongness of the NDAA. They plan a final rally at Grand Central station at 5 p.m., which should make for some fun interactions with hurried commuters. Lots of people were watching the proceedings on live feeds operated by Globalrevolution.tv, but now that site has stopped broadcasting the New York protest and is showing footage of Occupy Maui. If you were following along earlier today, you may have been startled at about 1:45 p.m. to see the live feed cut away from the street-level action and to the face of Vlad Teichberg, one of the main organizers of Global Revolution. The new shot showed a large, graffittied space where Teichberg and a couple of colleagues were confronting a man they identified as the landlord, who had apparently broken in their door. They put the camera on him, he threatened to call the police, they said he had no right to come into the space by force, and he eventually left. But Sobel said that was just the start of the day's conflict. Shortly after the confrontation, the police arrived. "Within the past hour, the police came in and removed people that were inside the studio," she said. "I believe the police just began knocking on the door and saying they would kick the door down and saying they would arrest people on the spot." The Global Revolution studio is now locked, Sobel said. The live feed has finished its Hawaiian broadcast and is playing a pre-recorded video. "The message is that even if they take the space, the [broadcast] will continue to be maintained," Sobel said. But right now, it seems to be out of commission. Police and buildings department officials had served the Buswhick, Brooklyn space with notices to vacate on Monday night, declaring it "imminently perilous to life." The blog A Great Big City picked up this photo of the notice to vacate from the studio from the Twitter stream of Glass Bead Collective: There is a handful of live streams that regularly cover Occupy events, such as Tim Pool's The Other 99 and Spencer Mills's OakFoSho. But Global Revolution is considered the main channel. It's an aggregator of live streams worldwide, borne of the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park. And this wouldn't be the first time the headquarters had moved. In an Oct. 4 profile, The New Yorker's Andrew Marantz wrote: "For the first few weeks of the protest, Global Revolution operated from under a tarp in Zuccotti Park, using wireless hot spots. Two weeks ago, the group, frustrated with the amount of equipment they were losing to theft and rain, moved to NoHo." Global Revolution operated from a building at Lafayette and Bleeker while journalists such as New York's John Heilemann and Wired's Sean Captain profiled it. Heilemann's Nov. 27 piece described the 39-year-old Teichberg as "so jacked in to the electronic grid that he comes across like a character out of Neuromancer." By Dec. 11,, when The New York Times wrote about the rise of live feeds in publicizing the Occupy protests, the Global Rev. headquarters had moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn. From ths at psalience.org Fri Jan 6 18:27:42 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:27:42 +0100 Subject: [THS] Marching Towards War: EU Reaches Agreement to Ban Imports of Iranian Oil Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120106182708.0639efa8@mail.messagingengine.com> Marching Towards War EU Reaches Agreement to Ban Imports of Iranian Oil By Reuters "The US talks about sanctioning our oil but they should know that if Iran's oil exports from the Persian Gulf are sanctioned, then no one will have the right to export oil through the Strait of Hormuz." http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30162.htm From ths at psalience.org Fri Jan 6 18:29:51 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:29:51 +0100 Subject: [THS] Gareth Porter: Obama Seeks to Distance U.S. from Israeli Attack Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120106182820.0639ed18@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30158.htm Obama Seeks to Distance U.S. from Israeli Attack By Gareth Porter January 04, 2012 - WASHINGTON, Jan 3 (IPS) - President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are engaged in intense maneuvering over Netanyahu's aim of entangling the United States in an Israeli war against Iran. Netanyahu is exploiting the extraordinary influence his right-wing Likud Party exercises over the Republican Party and the U.S. Congress on matters related to Israel in order to maximise the likelihood that the United States would participate in an attack on Iran. Obama, meanwhile, appears to be hoping that he can avoid being caught up in a regional war started by Israel if he distances the United States from any Israeli attack. New evidence surfaced in 2011 that Netanyahu has been serious about dealing a military blow to the Iranian nuclear programme. Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who left his job in September 2010, revealed in his first public appearance after Mossad Jun. 2 that he, Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) chief Gabi Ashkenazi and Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin had been able to "block any dangerous adventure" by Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak. The Hebrew language daily Maariv reported that those three, along with President Shimon Peres and IDF Senior Commander Gadi Eisenkrot, had vetoed a 2010 proposal by Netanyahu to attack Iran. Dagan said he was going public because he was "afraid there is no one to stop Bibi and Barak". Dagan also said an Israeli attack on Iran could trigger a war that would "endanger the (Israeli) state's existence", indicating that his revelation was not part of a psywar campaign. It is generally agreed that an Israeli attack can only temporarily set back the Iranian nuclear programme, at significant risk to Israel. But Netanyahu and Barak hope to draw the United States into the war to create much greater destruction and perhaps the overthrow of the Islamic regime. In a sign that the Obama administration is worried that Netanyahu is contemplating an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta tried and failed in early October to get a commitment from Netanyahu and Barak that Israel would not launch an attack on Iran without consulting Washington first, according to both Israeli and U.S. sources cited by The Telegraph and by veteran intelligence reporter Richard Sale. At a meeting with Obama a few weeks later, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen Martin Dempsey and the new head of CENTCOM, Gen. James N. Mattis, expressed their disappointment that he had not been firm enough in opposing an Israeli attack, according to Sale. Obama responded that he "had no say over Israel" because "it is a sovereign country." Obama's remark seemed to indicate a desire to distance his administration from an Israeli attack on Iran. But it also made it clear that he was not going to tell Netanyahu that he would not countenance such an attack. Trita Parsi, executive director of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), who has analysed the history of the triangular relationship involving the United States, Israel and Iran in his book "Treacherous Alliance", says knowledgeable sources tell him Obama believes he can credibly distance himself from an Israeli attack. In a Dec. 2 talk at the Brookings Institution, while discussing the dangers of the regional conflict that would result from such an attack, Panetta said the United States "would obviously be blamed and we could possibly be the target of retaliation from Iran, sinking our ships, striking our military bases." Panetta's statement could be interpreted as an effort to convince Iran that the Obama administration is opposed to an Israeli strike and should not be targeted by Iran in retaliation if Israel does launch an attack. Parsi believes Obama's calculation that he can convince Iran that the United States has no leverage on Israel without being much tougher with Israel is not realistic. "Iran most likely would decide not to target U.S. forces in the region in retaliation for an Israeli strike only if the damage from the strike were relatively limited," Parsi told IPS in an e-mail. The Obama administration considers the newest phase of sanctions against Iran, aimed at reducing global imports of Iranian crude oil, as an alternative to an unprovoked attack by Israel. But what Netanyahu had in mind in proposing such an initiative was much more radical than the Obama administration or the European Union could accept. When Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is closely aligned with Netanyahu's Likud Party, pushed the idea of sanctions against any financial institution that did business with Iran's Central Bank, the aim was to make it impossible for countries that import Iranian crude to continue to be able to make payments for the oil. Dubowitz wanted virtually every country importing Iranian crude except China and India to cut off their imports. He argued that reducing the number of buyers to mainly China and India would not result in a rise in the price of oil, because Iran would have to offer discounted prices to the remaining buyers. Global oil analysts warned, however, that such a sanctions regime could not avoid creating a spike in oil prices. U.S. officials told Reuters Nov. 8 that sanctions on Iran's Central Bank were "not on the table". The Obama administration was warning that such sanctions would risk a steep rise in oil prices worldwide and a worsening global recession, while actually increasing Iranian oil revenues. But Netanyahu used the power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over Congressional action related to Israel to override Obama's opposition. The Senate unanimously passed an amendment representing Netanyahu's position on sanctions focused on Iran's oil sector and the Central Bank, despite a letter from Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner opposing it. A similar amendment was passed by the House Dec. 15. The Obama administration acquiesced and entered into negotiations with its European allies, Saudi Arabia and the UAE on reducing imports of Iranian crude oil while trying to fill the gaps with other sources. But a number of countries, including Japan and Korea, are begging off, and the EU is insisting on protecting Greece and other vulnerable economies. The result is likely to be a sanctions regime that reduces Iranian exports only marginally - not the "crippling sanctions" demanded by Netanyahu and Barak. Any hike in oil prices generated by sanctions against Iran's oil sector, moreover, would only hurt Obama's re- election chances. In an interview with CNN in November, Barak warned the international community that Israel might have to make a decision on war within as little as six months, because Iran's efforts to "disperse and fortify" its nuclear facilities would soon render a strike against facilities ineffective. Barak said he "couldn't predict" whether that point would be reached in "two quarters or three quarters or a year". The new Israeli "red line" would place the timing of an Israeli decision on whether to strike Iran right in the middle of the U.S. presidential election campaign. Netanyahu, who makes no secret of his dislike and distrust of Obama, may hope to put Obama under maximum pressure to support Israel militarily in a war with Iran by striking during a campaign in which the Republican candidate would be accusing him of being soft on the Iranian nuclear threat. If the Republican candidate is in a strong position to win the election, on the other hand, Netanyahu would want to wait for a new administration aligned with his belligerent posture toward Iran. Meanwhile, the end of U.S. Air Force control over Iraqi airspace with the final U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq has eliminated what had long been regarded as a significant deterrent to Israeli attack on Iran using the shortest route. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006. From ths at psalience.org Fri Jan 6 18:33:02 2012 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:33:02 +0100 Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?Former_=93Dumbest_Member_of_Congress=94__Sco?= =?iso-8859-1?q?rches_Romney?= Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120106183249.0639ea88@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30164.htm Former ?Dumbest Member of Congress? Scorches Romney By Alexander Cockburn January 04, 2011 "Counterpunch" - - A Catholic former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania once rated the dumbest man in the US Congress crested Tuesday night in Iowa?s see-saw battle among candidates for the Republican nomination and ran a virtual tie with Mormon millionaire Mitt Romney. Well after chilly midnight on caucus night in the Midwestern state, Iowa?s Republican Party declared Romney the winner by 8 votes, a count that Santorum will inevitably question and perhaps contest. Each hovered just below 30,000 votes, with libertarian Republican Ron Paul of Texas running third with a respectable 26,000-plus votes. Only a couple of weeks ago Newt Gingrich seem poised for exactly the same unexpected surge that blessed Santorum across the last week. But battered by volleys of viciously negative campaign ads financed by big Republican money backing Romney, Gingrich ran fourth with just under 16,000 votes. Hobbling along in the rear came Texas governor Rick Perry, Tea Party star Michele Bachmann and ? with 668 votes ? Utah millionaire Jon Huntsman. Exactly four years ago, Santorum?s surprise showing last night was prefigured by the upset victory of a Protestant evangelical, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee who won with 41,000 votes, Romney came second on that occasion with 30,000 votes, a little more more than he managed yesterday, with a similar 25 per cent of the vote. Third, with 15,000 votes came the man who actually won the Republican nomination, John McCain. So, as far as Republicans are concerned, Iowa can be a poor predictor. On January 10 the surviving candidates will be going head to head in New Hampshire. Romney has spent months in the state and has one of his several dreary homes there. Santorum, who committed months of seemingly fruitless effort clasping the hands of countless Iowans, has little presence in New Hampshire and a tiny war chest of campaign cash. Romney?s big-money attack dogs who were too busy battering Gingrich in Iowa to notice Santorum?s late surge, will unleash a torrent of abuse via tv and radio. New Hampshire is a must-win for Romney if he is to escape the charge that he simply can?t clinch any race. Two debates are scheduled and an embittered Newt Gingrich, no slouch in the campaign-debate setting, will be quivering to get his revenge. Watching the Iowa results with some satisfaction are Obama?s campaign chieftains. To them, the Iowa contest showed that Iowa?s Republicans simply couldn?t figure out who to vote for. No one pleased them for long. Bachmann, Perry, Cain and Gingrich each had their moment in the sun, then faded. A week ago Ron Paul seemed set to win. Had the Iowa vote been held a week from now, Santorum might too have been eclipsed and Huntsman limped to the front. The Republican high command decided some time ago that Romney is their best chance of beating Obama. Though infinitely elastic in political doctrine he?s not a nut. It?s imaginable that the all-important independent voters in the general election in the fall could vote for him. He made his millions buying and selling companies, very often firing workers in the process. He governed Massachusetts without egregious failure, passing the precursor to Obama?s health insurance reform, which achievement has been a red rag to the conservatives, who regard him as (a) a crypto-liberal and (b) an agent of Satan, since he is a Mormon. No mormon has ever been president and reservation about the Church of Latterday Saints extends beyond conservatives. For example, Mormon theology is not friendly to the children of Ham. Troubling to this same Republican high command is Ron Paul who has won passionate adherents across the political spectrum. The right likes him for his libertarian economics, which prompt Paul to denounce the basic elements of the social safety net ? Social Security and Medicare. He would abolish the Federal Reserve ( a laudable objective). He?s a gold bug, and in his speech to his supporters last night he shouted a line which I?ll hazard has never before been uttered on an election night podium ? ?We?re all Austrians now? ? thereby proclaiming his allegiance to the economist Ludwig van Mises and parodying the line actually coined by Milton Friedman, though often attributed to Richard Nixon, ?We?re all Keynesians now.? A lot of leftists like Paul because he really is an ardent anti-imperialist ? the only one in the race ? vigorously denouncing America?s wars, its overseas bases and its alliance with Israel. He?s also an eloquent foe of the imperial presidency and of constitutional abuses such as the law signed by Obama on December 31, giving the military a role in domestic enforcement against terrorists and opening US citizens to military detention without benefit of counsel, without charges, and without trial, Part of Paul?s vote in Iowa was undoubtedly leftists who, under Iowa?s rules, could cross over and vote in the Republican caucus. Republicans fear that if Paul gets sufficiently incensed at his treatment by their party, he might bolt and run on the Libertarian third party ticket, thereby draining votes from the Republican candidate next November. For their part the Obama forces similarly fear that Paul would steal vital left votes from those thoroughly disillusioned with the President. In the run-up to the Iowa vote The New York Times ran more than one aggressive onslaught on Paul for newsletters, racist in content, which ran under Paul?s name twenty years ago, and which he has since disavowed. It?s hard to imagine Santorum getting long term traction. He?s a very conservative Catholic who crept into the US senate in 1998 after the incumbent Pennsylvania senator, John Heinz. It?s hard to imagine him cutting a wide swathe through the Baptist south, though against Romney, who knows? Santorum says that as president he would bomb Iran tomorrow. Romney and Gingrich don?t lag far behind in their ravings against the Islamic Republic. Obama ratchets up sanctions against Iran while supposedly telling Netanyahu that the US will not endorse any attack by Israel on Iran. Only Ron Paul stands out against this deranged chorus. Given a chance, I?ll vote for Paul, even though he hasn?t a prayer of taking over the Oval Office. One has to draw the line somewhere, though I don?t feel in the least Austrian. Alexander Cockburn can be reached at: alexandercockburn at asis.com