From ths at psalience.org  Tue Jan 31 00:42:51 2012
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:42:51 +0100
Subject: [THS] Ellen Brown: A Web of Financial Fraud and Criminality
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120131004215.039afc10@mail.messagingengine.com>

A Web of Financial Fraud and Criminality: America's Shadow Banking System

By Ellen Brown

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28878

Global Research, January 26, 2012
Web of Debt

The Wall Street Journal reported on January 19th that the Obama Administration was pushing heavily to get the 50 state attorneys general to agree to a settlement with five major banks in the ?robo-signing? scandal.  The scandal involves employees signing names not their own, under titles they did not really have, attesting to the veracity of documents they had not really reviewed.  Investigation reveals that it did not just happen occasionally but was an industry-wide practice, dating back to the late 1990s; and that it may have clouded the titles of millions of homes.  If the settlement is agreed to, it will let Wall Street bankers off the hook for crimes that would land the rest of us in jail ? fraud, forgery, securities violations and tax evasion. 

To the President?s credit, however, he seems to have shifted his position on the settlement in response to protests before his State of the Union address.  In his speech on January 24th, President Obama did not mention the settlement but announced instead that he would be creating a mortgage crisis unit to investigate wrongdoing related to real estate lending.  ?This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans,? he said.

The Deeper Question Is Why

Whether massive robo-signing occurred is no longer in issue.  The question that needs to be investigated is why it was being done.  The alleged justification?that the bankers were so busy that they cut corners?hardly seems credible given the extent of the practice. 

The robo-signing largely involved assignments of mortgage notes to mortgage servicers or trusts representing the investors who put up the loan money.  Assignment was necessary to give the trusts legal title to the loans.  But assignment was delayed until it was necessary to foreclose on the homes, when it had to be done through the forgery and fraud of robo-signing.  Why had it been delayed?  Why did the banks not assign the mortgages to the trusts when and as required by law?

Here is a working hypothesis, suggested by Martin Andelman: securitized mortgages are the ?pawns? used in the pawn shop known as the ?repo market.?  ?Repos? are overnight sales and repurchases of collateral.  Yale economist Gary Gorton explains that repos are the ?deposit insurance? for the shadow banking system, which is now larger than the conventional banking system and is necessary for the conventional system to operate.  The problem is that repos require ?sales,? which means the mortgage notes have to remain free to be bought and sold.  The mortgages are left unendorsed so they can be used in this repo market.

The Evolution of the Shadow Banking System

Gorton observes that there is a massive and growing demand for banking by large institutional investors ? pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds ? which have millions of dollars to park somewhere between investments.  But FDIC insurance covers only up to $250,000.  FDIC insurance was resisted in the 1930s by bankers and government officials and was pushed through as a populist movement: the people demanded it.  What they got was enough insurance to cover the deposits of individuals and no more.  Today, the large institutional investors want similar coverage.  They want an investment that is secure, that provides them with a little interest, and that is liquid like a traditional deposit account, allowing quick withdrawal.

The shadow banking system evolved in response to this need, operating largely through the repo market. ?Repos? are sales and repurchases of highly liquid collateral, typically Treasury debt or mortgage-backed securities?the securitized units into which American real estate has been ground up and packaged, sausage-fashion. The collateral is bought by a ?special purpose vehicle? (SPV), which acts as the shadow bank. The investors put their money in the SPV and keep the securities, which substitute for FDIC insurance in a traditional bank. (If the SPV fails to pay up, the investors can foreclose on the securities.) To satisfy the demand for liquidity, the repos are one-day or short-term deals, continually rolled over until the money is withdrawn. This money is used by the banks for other lending, investing or speculating. Gorton writes:

This banking system (the ?shadow? or ?parallel? banking system)?repo based on securitization?is a genuine banking system, as large as the traditional, regulated banking system.  It is of critical importance to the economy because it is the funding basis for the traditional banking system. Without it, traditional banks will not lend and credit, which is essential for job creation, will not be created.  

All Behind the Curtain of MERS 

The housing shell game was made possible because it was all concealed behind an electronic smokescreen called MERS (an acronym for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc.).  MERS allowed houses to be shuffled around among multiple, rapidly changing owners while circumventing local recording laws.  Title would be recorded in the name of MERS as a place holder for the investors, and MERS would foreclose on behalf of the investors.  Payments would be received by the mortgage servicer, which was typically the bank that signed the mortgage with the homeowner.  The homeowner usually thinks the servicer is the lender, but in fact it is an amorphous group of investors.          

This all worked until courts started questioning whether MERS, which admitted that it was a mere conduit without title, had standing to foreclose.  Courts have increasingly held that it does not. 

Making matters worse for the servicing banks, Fannie Mae sent out a memo telling servicers that in order to be reimbursed under HAMP?a government loan modification program designed to help at-risk homeowners meet their mortgage payments?the servicers would have to produce the paperwork showing the loan had been assigned to the trust.

The hasty solution was a rash of assignments signed by an army of ?robosigners,? to be filed in the public records.  But the documents are patent forgeries, making a shambles of county title records. 

Complicating all this are tax issues.  Since 1986, mortgage-backed securities have been issued to investors through SPVs called REMICs (Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduits).  REMICs are designed as tax shelters; but to qualify for that status, they must be ?static.?  Mortgages can?t be transferred in and out once the closing date has occurred.  The REMIC Pooling and Servicing Agreement typically states that any transfer significantly after the closing date is invalid.  Yet the newly robo-signed documents, which are required to begin foreclosure proceedings, are almost always executed long after the trust?s closing date.  The whole business is quite complicated, but the bottom line is that title has been clouded not only by MERS but because the trusts purporting to foreclose do not own the properties by the terms of their own documents.

John O?Brien, Register of Deeds for the Southern Essex District of Massachusetts, calls it a ?criminal enterprise.?  On January 18th, he called for a full scale criminal investigation, including a grand jury to look into the evidence.  He sent to Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz over 30,000 documents recorded in the Salem Registry that he says are fraudulent. 

From Lending Machines to Borrowing Machines

The bankers have engaged in what amounts to a massive fraud, not necessarily because they started out with criminal intent, but because they have been required to in order to come up with the collateral (in this case real estate) to back their loans.  It is the way our system is set up: the banks are not really creating credit and advancing it to us, counting on our future productivity to pay it off, the way they once did under the deceptive but functional fa?ade of fractional reserve lending.  Instead, they are vacuuming up our money and lending it back to us at higher rates.  

?Instead of lending into the economy,? says British money reformer Ann Pettifor, ?bankers are borrowing from the real economy.?  She wrote in the Huffington Post in October 2010:

[T]he crazy facts are these: bankers now borrow from their customers and from taxpayers. They are effectively draining funds from household bank accounts, small businesses, corporations, government Treasuries and from e.g. the Federal Reserve. They do so by charging high rates of interest and fees; by demanding early repayment of loans; by illegally foreclosing on homeowners, and by appropriating, and then speculating with trillions of dollars of taxpayer-backed resources.

Not only has the system destroyed county title records, but it is highly vulnerable to bank runs and systemic collapse.  In the shadow banking system, as in the old fractional reserve banking system, the collateral is being double-counted: it is owed to the borrowers and the depositors at the same time.  This allows for expansion of the money supply, but bank runs can occur when the borrowers and the depositors demand their money at the same time.  And unlike the conventional banking system, the shadow banking system is largely unregulated.  It doesn?t have the backup of FDIC insurance to prevent bank runs.

That is what happened in September 2008 following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, a major investment bank.  Gary Gorton explains that it was a run on the shadow banking system that caused the credit collapse that followed.  Investors rushed to pull their money out overnight.  LIBOR?the London interbank lending rate for short-term loans?shot up to around 5%.  Since the cost of borrowing the money to cover loans was too high for banks to turn a profit, lending abruptly came to a halt. 

Fixing the System

The question is how to eliminate this systemic risk.  As noted by The Business Insider:

Regulate shadow banking more tightly, and you probably have to also provide government backstops. Shudder. Try to shut the thing down or restrict it and you suck credit out of the system, credit which much of the non-financial ?'real? economy uses and needs.

Interestingly, countries with strong public sector banking systems largely escaped the 2008 credit crisis.  These include the BRIC countries?Brazil Russia, India, and China?which contain 40% of the global population and are today?s fastest growing economies.  They escaped because their public sector banks do not need to rely on repos and securitizations to back their loans.  The banks are owned and operated by the ultimate guarantor?the government itself.  The public sector banking model deserves further study. 

Whatever the solution, a system that requires the slicing and dicing of mortgages behind an electronic smokescreen so they can be bought and sold as collateral for the pawn shop of the repo market is obviously fraught with perils and is unsustainable.  Please contact your state attorney general and urge him or her not to go through with the robo-signing settlement, which will be granting immunity for crimes that are not yet fully known.  Phone numbers are here.  The surface of this great shadowy second banking system has barely been scratched.  It needs a very thorough investigation.    

Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.  In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back.  Her websites are http://WebofDebt.com and http://EllenBrown.com.

 


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From ths at psalience.org  Tue Jan 31 00:49:23 2012
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:49:23 +0100
Subject: [THS] Will Israel Attack Iran?
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120131004524.05365258@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/magazine/will-israel-attack-iran.html?_r=1&comments=&pagewanted=all

Will Israel Attack Iran?
Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, on right, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
By RONEN BERGMAN
Published: January 25, 2012

    
As the Sabbath evening approached on Jan. 13, Ehud Barak paced the wide living-room floor of his home high above a street in north Tel Aviv, its walls lined with thousands of books on subjects ranging from philosophy and poetry to military strategy. Barak, the Israeli defense minister, is the most decorated soldier in the country?s history and one of its most experienced and controversial politicians. He has served as chief of the general staff for the Israel Defense Forces, interior minister, foreign minister and prime minister. He now faces, along with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and 12 other members of Israel?s inner security cabinet, the most important decision of his life ? whether to launch a pre-emptive attack against Iran. We met in the late afternoon, and our conversation ? the first of several over the next week ? lasted for two and a half hours, long past nightfall. ?This is not about some abstract concept,? Barak said as he gazed out at the lights of Tel Aviv, ?but a genuine concern. The Iranians are, after all, a nation whose leaders have set themselves a strategic goal of wiping Israel off the map.?
The Nuclear Assassinations
Six key strikes against Iran thought to be made by the Mossad.

Related

    Times Topics: Iran's Nuclear Program | Israel
    Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life (November 13, 2011)
    The 6th Floor: Ronen Bergman on Israeli Plans to Strike Iran

Related in Opinion

    Bill Keller's Blog: How About Not Bombing Iran? (January 22, 2012)

More in the Magazine ?

When I mentioned to Barak the opinion voiced by the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and the former chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi ? that the Iranian threat was not as imminent as he and Netanyahu have suggested and that a military strike would be catastrophic (and that they, Barak and Netanyahu, were cynically looking to score populist points at the expense of national security), Barak reacted with uncharacteristic anger. He and Netanyahu, he said, are responsible ?in a very direct and concrete way for the existence of the State of Israel ? indeed, for the future of the Jewish people.? As for the top-ranking military personnel with whom I?ve spoken who argued that an attack on Iran was either unnecessary or would be ineffective at this stage, Barak said: ?It?s good to have diversity in thinking and for people to voice their opinions. But at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us ? the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.?

Netanyahu and Barak have both repeatedly stressed that a decision has not yet been made and that a deadline for making one has not been set. As we spoke, however, Barak laid out three categories of questions, which he characterized as ?Israel?s ability to act,? ?international legitimacy? and ?necessity,? all of which require affirmative responses before a decision is made to attack:

1. Does Israel have the ability to cause severe damage to Iran?s nuclear sites and bring about a major delay in the Iranian nuclear project? And can the military and the Israeli people withstand the inevitable counterattack?

2. Does Israel have overt or tacit support, particularly from America, for carrying out an attack?

3. Have all other possibilities for the containment of Iran?s nuclear threat been exhausted, bringing Israel to the point of last resort? If so, is this the last opportunity for an attack?

For the first time since the Iranian nuclear threat emerged in the mid-1990s, at least some of Israel?s most powerful leaders believe that the response to all of these questions is yes.

At various points in our conversation, Barak underscored that if Israel or the rest of the world waits too long, the moment will arrive ? sometime in the coming year, he says ? beyond which it will no longer be possible to act. ?It will not be possible to use any surgical means to bring about a significant delay,? he said. ?Not for us, not for Europe and not for the United States. After that, the question will remain very important, but it will become purely theoretical and pass out of our hands ? the statesmen and decision-makers ? and into yours ? the journalists and historians.?

Moshe Ya?alon, Israel?s vice prime minister and minister of strategic affairs, is the third leg in the triangle supporting a very aggressive stance toward Iran. When I spoke with him on the afternoon of Jan. 18, the same day that Barak stated publicly that any decision to strike pre-emptively was ?very far off,? Ya?alon, while reiterating that an attack was the last option, took pains to emphasize Israel?s resolve. ?Our policy is that in one way or another, Iran?s nuclear program must be stopped,? he said. ?It is a matter of months before the Iranians will be able to attain military nuclear capability. Israel should not have to lead the struggle against Iran. It is up to the international community to confront the regime, but nevertheless Israel has to be ready to defend itself. And we are prepared to defend ourselves,? Ya?alon went on, ?in any way and anywhere that we see fit.?

For years, Israeli and American intelligence agencies assumed that if Iran were to gain the ability to build a bomb, it would be a result of its relationship with Russia, which was building a nuclear reactor for Iran at a site called Bushehr and had assisted the Iranians in their missile-development program. Throughout the 1990s, Israel and the United States devoted vast resources to weakening the nuclear links between Russia and Iran and applied enormous diplomatic pressure on Russia to cut off the relationship. Ultimately, the Russians made it clear that they would do all in their power to slow down construction on the Iranian reactor and assured Israel that even if it was completed (which it later was), it wouldn?t be possible to produce the refined uranium or plutonium needed for nuclear weapons there.

But the Russians weren?t Iran?s only connection to nuclear power. Robert Einhorn, currently special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control at the U. S. State Department, told me in 2003: ?Both countries invested huge efforts, overt and covert, in order to find out what exactly Russia was supplying to Iran and in attempts to prevent that supply. We were convinced that this was the main path taken by Iran to secure the Doomsday weapon. But only very belatedly did it emerge that if Iran one day achieved its goal, it will not be by the Russian path at all. It made its great advance toward nuclear weaponry on another path altogether ? a secret one ? that was concealed from our sight.?

That secret path was Iran?s clandestine relationship with the network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan?s atom bomb. Cooperation between American, British and Israeli intelligence services led to the discovery in 2002 of a uranium-enrichment facility built with Khan?s assistance at Natanz, 200 miles south of Tehran. When this information was verified, a great outcry erupted throughout Israel?s military and intelligence establishment, with some demanding that the site be bombed at once. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did not authorize an attack. Instead, information about the site was leaked to a dissident Iranian group, the National Resistance Council, which announced that Iran was building a centrifuge installation at Natanz. This led to a visit to the site by a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who were surprised to discover that Iran was well on its way to completing the nuclear fuel cycle ? the series of processes for the enrichment of uranium that is a critical stage in producing a bomb.

Despite the discovery of the Natanz site and the international sanctions that followed, Israeli intelligence reported in early 2004 that Iran?s nuclear project was still progressing. Sharon assigned responsibility for putting an end to the program to Meir Dagan, then head of the Mossad. The two knew each other from the 1970s, when Sharon was the general in charge of the southern command of the Israel Defense Forces and Dagan was a young officer whom he put in charge of a top-secret unit whose purpose was the systematic assassination of Palestine Liberation Organization militiamen in the Gaza Strip. As Sharon put it at the time: ?Dagan?s specialty is separating an Arab from his head.?

Sharon granted the Mossad virtually unlimited funds and powers to ?stop the Iranian bomb.? As one recently retired senior Mossad officer told me: ?There was no operation, there was no project that was not carried out because of a lack of funding.?

At a number of secret meetings with U.S. officials between 2004 and 2007, Dagan detailed a ?five-front strategy? that involved political pressure, covert measures, counterproliferation, sanctions and regime change. In a secret cable sent to the U.S. in August 2007, he stressed that ?the United States, Israel and like-minded countries must push on all five fronts in a simultaneous joint effort.? He went on to say: ?Some are bearing fruit now. Others? ? and here he emphasized efforts to encourage ethnic resistance in Iran ? ?will bear fruit in due time, especially if they are given more attention.?

From 2005 onward, various intelligence arms and the U.S. Treasury, working together with the Mossad, began a worldwide campaign to locate and sabotage the financial underpinnings of the Iranian nuclear project. The Mossad provided the Americans with information on Iranian firms that served as fronts for the country?s nuclear acquisitions and financial institutions that assisted in the financing of terrorist organizations, as well as a banking front established by Iran and Syria to handle all of these activities. The Americans subsequently tried to persuade several large corporations and European governments ? especially France, Germany and Britain ? to cease cooperating with Iranian financial institutions, and last month the Senate approved sanctions against Iran?s central bank.

In addition to these interventions, as well as to efforts to disrupt the supply of nuclear materials to Iran, since 2005 the Iranian nuclear project has been hit by a series of mishaps and disasters, for which the Iranians hold Western intelligence services ? especially the Mossad ? responsible. According to the Iranian media, two transformers blew up and 50 centrifuges were ruined during the first attempt to enrich uranium at Natanz in April 2006. A spokesman for the Iranian Atomic Energy Council stated that the raw materials had been ?tampered with.? Between January 2006 and July 2007, three airplanes belonging to Iran?s Revolutionary Guards crashed under mysterious circumstances. Some reports said the planes had simply ?stopped working.? The Iranians suspected the Mossad, as they did when they discovered that two lethal computer viruses had penetrated the computer system of the nuclear project and caused widespread damage, knocking out a large number of centrifuges.

In January 2007, several insulation units in the connecting fixtures of the centrifuges, which were purchased from a middleman on the black market in Eastern Europe, turned out to be flawed and unusable. Iran concluded that some of the merchants were actually straw companies that were set up to outfit the Iranian nuclear effort with faulty parts.

Of all the covert operations, the most controversial have been the assassinations of Iranian scientists working on the nuclear project. In January 2007, Dr. Ardeshir Husseinpour, a 44-year-old nuclear scientist working at the Isfahan uranium plant, died under mysterious circumstances. The official announcement of his death said he was asphyxiated ?following a gas leak,? but Iranian intelligence is convinced that he was the victim of an Israeli assassination.

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physicist, was killed in January 2010, when a booby-trapped motorcycle parked nearby exploded as he was getting into his car. (Some contend that Mohammadi was not killed by the Mossad, but by Iranian agents because of his supposed support for the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi.) Later that year, on Nov. 29, a manhunt took place in the streets of Tehran for two motorcyclists who had just blown up the cars of two senior figures in the Iranian nuclear project, Majid Shahriari and Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani. The motorcyclists attached limpet mines (also known as magnet bombs) to the cars and then sped away. Shahriari was killed by the blast in his Peugeot 405, but Abbassi-Davani and his wife managed to escape their car before it exploded. Following this assassination attempt, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appointed Abbassi-Davani vice president of Iran and head of the country?s atomic agency. Today he is heavily guarded wherever he goes, as is the scientific head of the nuclear project, Mohsin Fakhri-Zadeh, whose lectures at Tehran University were discontinued as a precautionary measure.

This past July, a motorcyclist ambushed Darioush Rezaei Nejad, a nuclear physicist and a researcher for Iran?s Atomic Energy Organization, as he sat in his car outside his house. The biker drew a pistol and shot the scientist dead through the car window.

Four months later, in November, a huge explosion occurred at a Revolutionary Guards base 30 miles west of Tehran. The cloud of smoke was visible from the city, where residents could feel the ground shake and hear their windows rattle, and satellite photos showed that almost the entire base was obliterated. Brig. Gen. Hassan Moghaddam, head of the Revolutionary Guards? missile-development division, was killed, as were 16 of his personnel. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran?s spiritual leader, paid respect by coming to the funeral service for the general and visiting the widow at her home, where he called Moghaddam a martyr.

Just this month, on Jan. 11, two years after his colleague and friend Massoud Ali Mohammadi was killed, a deputy director at the Natanz uranium-enrichment facility named Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan left his home and headed for a laboratory in downtown Tehran. A few months earlier, a photograph of him accompanying Ahmadinejad on a tour of nuclear installations appeared in newspapers across the globe. Two motorcyclists drove up to his car and attached a limpet mine that killed him on the spot.

Israelis cannot enter Iran, so Israel, Iranian officials believe, has devoted huge resources to recruiting Iranians who leave the country on business trips and turning them into agents. Some have been recruited under a false flag, meaning that the organization?s recruiters pose as other nationalities, so that the Iranian agents won?t know they are on the payroll of ?the Zionist enemy,? as Israel is called in Iran. Also, as much as possible, the Mossad prefers to carry out its violent operations based on the blue-and-white principle, a reference to the colors of Israel?s national flag, which means that they are executed only by Israeli citizens who are regular Mossad operatives and not by assassins recruited in the target country. Operating in Iran, however, is impossible for the Mossad?s sabotage-and-assassination unit, known as Caesarea, so the assassins must come from elsewhere. Iranian intelligence believes that over the last several years, the Mossad has financed and armed two Iranian opposition groups, the Muhjahedin Khalq (MEK) and the Jundallah, and has set up a forward base in Kurdistan to mobilize the Kurdish minority in Iran, as well as other minorities, training some of them at a secret base near Tel Aviv.

Officially, Israel has never admitted any involvement in these assassinations, and after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke out against the killing of Ahmadi-Roshan this month, President Shimon Peres said he had no knowledge of Israeli involvement. The Iranians vowed revenge after the murder, and on Jan. 13, as I spoke with Ehud Barak at his home in Tel Aviv, the country?s intelligence community was conducting an emergency operation to thwart a joint attack by Iran and Hezbollah against Israeli and Jewish targets in Bangkok. Local Thai forces, reportedly acting on information supplied by the Mossad, raided a Hezbollah hideout in Bangkok and later apprehended a member of the terror cell as he tried to flee the country. The prisoner reportedly confessed that he and his fellow cell members intended to blow up the Israeli Embassy and a synagogue.

Meir Dagan, while not taking credit for the assassinations, has praised the hits against Iranian scientists attributed to the Mossad, saying that beyond ?the removal of important brains? from the project, the killings have brought about what is referred to in the Mossad as white defection ? in other words, the Iranian scientists are so frightened that many have requested to be transferred to civilian projects. ?There is no doubt,? a former top Mossad official told me over breakfast on Jan. 11, just a few hours after news of Ahmadi-Roshan?s assassination came from Tehran, ?that being a scientist in a prestigious nuclear project that is generously financed by the state carries with it advantages like status, advancement, research budgets and fat salaries. On the other hand, when a scientist ? one who is not a trained soldier or used to facing life-threatening situations, who has a wife and children ? watches his colleagues being bumped off one after the other, he definitely begins to fear that the day will come when a man on a motorbike knocks on his car window.?

As we spoke, a man approached and, having recognized me as a journalist who reports on these issues, apologized before asking: ?When is the war going to break out? When will the Iranians bomb us?? The Mossad official smiled as I tried to reassure the man that we wouldn?t be nuked tomorrow. Similar scenes occur almost every day ? Israelis watch the news, have heard that bomb shelters are being prepared, know that Israel test-fired a missile into the sea two months ago ? and a kind of panic has begun to overtake Israeli society, anxiety that missiles will start raining down soon.

Dagan believes that his five-fronts strategy has succeeded in significantly delaying Iran?s progress toward developing nuclear weapons; specifically ?the use of all the weapons together,? he told me and a small group of Israeli journalists early last year. ?In the mind of the Iranian citizen, a link has been created between his economic difficulties and the nuclear project. Today in Iran, there is a profound internal debate about this matter, which has divided the Iranian leadership.? He beamed when he added, ?It pleases me that the timeline of the project has been pushed forward several times since 2003 because of these mysterious disruptions.?

Barak and Netanyahu are less convinced of the Mossad?s long-term success. From the beginning of their terms (Barak as defense minister in June 2007, Netanyahu as prime minister in March 2009), they have held the opinion that Israel must have a military option ready in case covert efforts fail. Barak ordered extensive military preparations for an attack on Iran that continue to this day and have become more frequent in recent months. He was not alone in fearing that the Mossad?s covert operations, combined with sanctions, would not be sufficient. The I.D.F. and military intelligence have also experienced waning enthusiasm. Three very senior military intelligence officers, one who is still serving and two who retired recently, told me that with all due respect for Dagan?s success in slowing down the Iranian nuclear project, Iran was still making progress. One recalled Israel?s operations against Iraq?s nuclear program in the late 1970s, when the Mossad eliminated some of the scientists working on the project and intimidated others. On the night of April 6, 1979, a team of Mossad operatives entered the French port town La Seyne-sur-Mer and blew up a shipment necessary for the cooling system of the Iraqi reactor?s core that was being manufactured in France. The French police found no trace of the perpetrators. An unknown organization for the defense of the environment claimed responsibility.

The attack was successful, but a year later the damage was repaired and further sabotage efforts were thwarted. The project advanced until late in 1980, when it was discovered that a shipment of fuel rods containing enriched uranium had been sent from France to Baghdad, and they were about to be fed into the reactor?s core. Israel determined that it had no other option but to launch Operation Opera, a surprise airstrike in June 1981 on the Tammuz-Osirak reactor just outside Baghdad.

Similarly, Dagan?s critics say, the Iranians have managed to overcome most setbacks and to replace the slain scientists. According to latest intelligence, Iran now has some 10,000 functioning centrifuges, and they have streamlined the enrichment process. Iran today has five tons of low-grade fissile material, enough, when converted to high-grade material, to make about five to six bombs; it also has about 175 pounds of medium-grade material, of which it would need about 500 pounds to make a bomb. It is believed that Iran?s nuclear scientists estimate that it will take them nine months, from the moment they are given the order, to assemble their first explosive device and another six months to be able to reduce it to the dimensions of a payload for their Shahab-3 missiles, which are capable of reaching Israel. They are holding the fissile material at sites across the country, most notably at the Fordo facility, near the holy city Qom, in a bunker that Israeli intelligence estimates is 220 feet deep, beyond the reach of even the most advanced bunker-busting bombs possessed by the United States.

Barak serves as the senior Israeli representative in the complex dialogue with the United States on this topic. He disagrees with the parallels that some Israeli politicians, mainly his boss, Netanyahu, draw between Ahmadinejad and Adolf Hitler, and espouses far more moderate views. ?I accept that Iran has other reasons for developing nuclear bombs, apart from its desire to destroy Israel, but we cannot ignore the risk,? he told me earlier this month. ?An Iranian bomb would ensure the survival of the current regime, which otherwise would not make it to its 40th anniversary in light of the admiration that the young generation in Iran has displayed for the West. With a bomb, it would be very hard to budge the administration.? Barak went on: ?The moment Iran goes nuclear, other countries in the region will feel compelled to do the same. The Saudi Arabians have told the Americans as much, and one can think of both Turkey and Egypt in this context, not to mention the danger that weapons-grade materials will leak out to terror groups.

?From our point of view,? Barak said, ?a nuclear state offers an entirely different kind of protection to its proxies. Imagine if we enter another military confrontation with Hezbollah, which has over 50,000 rockets that threaten the whole area of Israel, including several thousand that can reach Tel Aviv. A nuclear Iran announces that an attack on Hezbollah is tantamount to an attack on Iran. We would not necessarily give up on it, but it would definitely restrict our range of operations.?

At that point Barak leaned forward and said with the utmost solemnity: ?And if a nuclear Iran covets and occupies some gulf state, who will liberate it? The bottom line is that we must deal with the problem now.?

He warned that no more than one year remains to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weaponry. This is because it is close to entering its ?immunity zone? ? a term coined by Barak that refers to the point when Iran?s accumulated know-how, raw materials, experience and equipment (as well as the distribution of materials among its underground facilities) ? will be such that an attack could not derail the nuclear project. Israel estimates that Iran?s nuclear program is about nine months away from being able to withstand an Israeli attack; America, with its superior firepower, has a time frame of 15 months. In either case, they are presented with a very narrow window of opportunity. One very senior Israeli security source told me: ?The Americans tell us there is time, and we tell them that they only have about six to nine months more than we do and that therefore the sanctions have to be brought to a culmination now, in order to exhaust that track.?

Many European analysts and some intelligence agencies have in the past responded to Israel?s warnings with skepticism, if not outright suspicion. Some have argued that Israel has intentionally exaggerated its assessments to create an atmosphere of fear that would drag Europe into its extensive economic campaign against Iran, a skepticism bolstered by the C.I.A.?s incorrect assessment about Iraqi W.M.D. before to the Iraq war.

Israel?s discourse with the United States on the subject of Iran?s nuclear project is more significant, and more fraught, than it is with Europe. The U.S. has made efforts to stiffen sanctions against Iran and to mobilize countries like Russia and China to apply sanctions in exchange for substantial American concessions. But beneath the surface of this cooperation, there are signs of mutual suspicion. As one senior American official wrote to the State Department and the Pentagon in November 2009, after an Israeli intelligence projection that Iran would have a complete nuclear arsenal by 2012: ?It is unclear if the Israelis firmly believe this or are using worst-case estimates to raise greater urgency from the United States.?

For their part, the Israelis suspect that the Obama administration has abandoned any aggressive strategy that would ensure the prevention of a nuclear Iran and is merely playing a game of words to appease them. The Israelis find evidence of this in the shift in language used by the administration, from ?threshold prevention? ? meaning American resolve to stop Iran from having a nuclear-energy program that could allow for the ability to create weapons ? to ?weapons prevention,? which means the conditions can exist, but there is an American commitment to stop Iran from assembling an actual bomb.

?I fail to grasp the Americans? logic,? a senior Israeli intelligence source told me. ?If someone says we?ll stop them from getting there by praying for more glitches in the centrifuges, I understand. If someone says we must attack soon to stop them, I get it. But if someone says we?ll stop them after they are already there, that I do not understand.?

Over the past year, Western intelligence agencies, in particular the C.I.A., have moved closer to Israel?s assessments of the Iranian nuclear project. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta expressed this explicitly when he said that Iran would be able to reach nuclear-weapons capabilities within a year. The International Atomic Energy Agency published a scathing report stating that Iran was in breach of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and was possibly trying to develop nuclear weapons. Emboldened by this newfound accord, Israel?s leaders have adopted a harsher tone against Iran. Ya?alon, the deputy prime minister, told me in October: ?We have had some arguments with the U.S. administration over the past two years, but on the Iranian issue we have managed to close the gaps to a certain extent. The president?s statements at his last meeting with the prime minister ? that ?we are committed to prevent ? and ?all the options are on the table? ? are highly important. They began with the sanctions too late, but they have moved from a policy of engagement to a much more active (sanctions) policy against Iran. All of these are positive developments.? On the other hand, Ya?alon sighed as he admitted: ?The main arguments are ahead of us. This is clear.?

Now that the facts have been largely agreed upon, the arguments Ya?alon anticipates are those that will stem from the question of how to act ? and what will happen if Israel decides that the moment for action has arrived. The most delicate issue between the two countries is what America is signaling to Israel and whether Israel should inform America in advance of a decision to attack.

Matthew Kroenig is the Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and worked as a special adviser in the Pentagon from July 2010 to July 2011. One of his tasks was defense policy and strategy on Iran. When I spoke with Kroenig last week, he said: ?My understanding is that the United States has asked Israel not to attack Iran and to provide Washington with notice if it intends to strike. Israel responded negatively to both requests. It refused to guarantee that it will not attack or to provide prior notice if it does.? Kroenig went on, ?My hunch is that Israel would choose to give warning of an hour or two, just enough to maintain good relations between the countries but not quite enough to allow Washington to prevent the attack.? Kroenig said Israel was correct in its timeline of Iran?s nuclear development and that the next year will be critical. ?The future can evolve in three ways,? he said. ?Iran and the international community could agree to a negotiated settlement; Israel and the United States could acquiesce to a nuclear-armed Iran; or Israel or the United States could attack. Nobody wants to go in the direction of a military strike,? he added, ?but unfortunately this is the most likely scenario. The more interesting question is not whether it happens but how. The United States should treat this option more seriously and begin gathering international support and building the case for the use of force under international law.?

In June 2007, I met with a former director of the Mossad, Meir Amit, who handed me a document stamped, ?Top secret, for your eyes only.? Amit wanted to demonstrate the complexity of the relations between the United States and Israel, especially when it comes to Israeli military operations in the Middle East that could significantly impact American interests in the region.

Almost 45 years ago, on May 25, 1967, in the midst of the international crisis that precipitated the Six-Day War, Amit, then head of the Mossad, summoned John Hadden, the C.I.A. chief in Tel Aviv, to an urgent meeting at his home. The meeting took place against the background of the mounting tensions in the Middle East, the concentration of a massive Egyptian force in the Sinai Peninsula, the closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and the threats by President Gamal Abdel Nasser to destroy the State of Israel.

In what he later described as ?the most difficult meeting I have ever had with a representative of a foreign intelligence service,? Amit laid out Israel?s arguments for attacking Egypt. The conversation between them, which was transcribed in the document Amit passed on to me, went as follows:

Amit: ?We are approaching a turning point that is more important for you than it is for us. After all, you people know everything. We are in a grave situation, and I believe we have reached it, because we have not acted yet. . . . Personally, I am sorry that we did not react immediately. It is possible that we may have broken some rules if we had, but the outcome would have been to your benefit. I was in favor of acting. We should have struck before the build-up.?

Hadden: ?That would have brought Russia and the United States against you.?

Amit: ?You are wrong. . . . We have now reached a new stage, after the expulsion of the U.N. inspectors. You should know that it?s your problem, not ours.?

Hadden: ?Help us by giving us a good reason to come in on your side. Get them to fire at something, a ship, for example.?

Amit: ?That is not the point.?

Hadden: ?If you attack, the United States will land forces to help the attacked state protect itself.?

Amit: ?I can?t believe what I am hearing.?

Hadden: ?Do not surprise us.?

Amit: ?Surprise is one of the secrets of success.?

Hadden: ?I don?t know what the significance of American aid is for you.?

Amit: ?It isn?t aid for us, it is for yourselves.?

That ill-tempered meeting, and Hadden?s threats, encouraged the Israeli security cabinet to ban the military from carrying out an immediate assault against the Egyptian troops in the Sinai, although they were perceived as a grave threat to the existence of Israel. Amit did not accept Hadden?s response as final, however, and flew to the United States to meet with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Upon his return, he reported to the Israeli cabinet that when he told McNamara that Israel could not reconcile itself to Egypt?s military actions, the secretary replied, ?I read you very clearly.? When Amit then asked McNamara if he should remain in Washington for another week, to see how matters developed, McNamara responded, ?Young man, go home, that is where you are needed now.?

From this exchange, Amit concluded that the United States was giving Israel ?a flickering green light? to attack Egypt. He told the cabinet that if the Americans were given one more week to exhaust their diplomatic efforts, ?they will hesitate to act against us.? The next day, the cabinet decided to begin the Six-Day War, which changed the course of Middle Eastern history.

Amit handed me the minutes of that conversation from the same armchair that he sat in during his meeting with Hadden. It is striking how that dialogue anticipated the one now under way between Israel and the United States. Substitute ?Tehran? for ?Cairo? and ?Strait of Hormuz? for ?Straits of Tiran,? and it could have taken place this past week. Since 1967, the unspoken understanding that America should agree, at least tacitly, to Israeli military actions has been at the center of relations between the two countries.

During my lengthy conversation with Barak, I pulled out the transcript of the Amit-Hadden meeting. Amit was his commander when Barak was a young officer, in a unit that carried out commando raids deep inside enemy territory. Barak, a history buff, smiled at the comparison, and then he completely rejected it. ?Relations with the United States are far closer today,? he said. ?There are no threats, no recriminations, only cooperation and mutual respect for each other?s sovereignty.?

In our conversation on Jan. 18, Ya?alon, the deputy prime minister, was sharp in his criticism of the international community?s stance on Iran. ?These are critical hours on the question of which way the international community will take the policy,? he said. ?The West must stand united and resolute, and what is happening so far is not enough. The Iranian regime must be placed under pressure and isolated. Sanctions that bite must be imposed against it, something that has not happened as yet, and a credible military option should be on the table as a last resort. In order to avoid it, the sanctions must be stepped up.? It is, of course, important for Ya?alon to argue that this is not just an Israeli-Iranian dispute, but a threat to America?s well-being. ?The Iranian regime will be several times more dangerous if it has a nuclear device in its hands,? he went on. ?One that it could bring into the United States. It is not for nothing that it is establishing bases for itself in Latin America and creating links with drug dealers on the U.S.-Mexican border. This is happening in order to smuggle ordnance into the United States for the carrying out of terror attacks. Imagine this regime getting nuclear weapons to the U.S.-Mexico border and managing to smuggle it into Texas, for example. This is not a far-fetched scenario.?

Ehud Barak dislikes this kind of criticism of the United States, and in a rather testy tone in a phone conversation with me on Jan. 18 said: ?Our discourse with the United States is based on listening and mutual respect, together with an understanding that it is our primary ally. The U.S. is what helps us to preserve the military advantage of Israel, more than ever before. This administration contributes to the security of Israel in an extraordinary way and does a lot to prevent a nuclear Iran. We?re not in confrontation with America. We?re not in agreement on every detail, we can have differences ? and not unimportant ones ? but we should not talk as if we are speaking about a hostile entity.?

Over the last four years, since Barak was appointed minister of defense, the Israeli military has prepared in unprecedented ways for a strike against Iran. It has also grappled with questions of how it will manage the repercussions of such an attack. Much of the effort is dedicated to strengthening the country?s civil defenses ? bomb shelters, air-raid sirens and the like ? areas in which serious defects were discovered during the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Civilian disaster exercises are being held intermittently, and gas masks have been distributed to the population.

On the operational level, any attack would be extremely complex. Iran learned the lessons of Iraq, and has dispersed its nuclear installations throughout its vast territory. There is no way of knowing for certain if the Iranians have managed to conceal any key facilities from Israeli intelligence. Israel has limited air power and no aircraft carriers. If it attacked Iran, because of the 1,000 or so miles between its bases and its potential targets, Israeli planes would have to refuel in the air at least once (and more than once if faced with aerial engagements). The bombardment would require pinpoint precision in order to spend the shortest amount of time over the targets, which are heavily defended by antiaircraft-missile batteries.

In the end, a successful attack would not eliminate the knowledge possessed by the project?s scientists, and it is possible that Iran, with its highly developed technological infrastructure, would be able to rebuild the damaged or wrecked sites. What is more, unlike Syria, which did not respond after the destruction of its reactor in 2007, Iran has openly declared that it would strike back ferociously if attacked. Iran has hundreds of Shahab missiles armed with warheads that can reach Israel, and it could harness Hezbollah to strike at Israeli communities with its 50,000 rockets, some of which can hit Tel Aviv. (Hamas in Gaza, which is also supported by Iran, might also fire a considerable number of rockets on Israeli cities.) According to Israeli intelligence, Iran and Hezbollah have also planted roughly 40 terrorist sleeper cells across the globe, ready to hit Israeli and Jewish targets if Iran deems it necessary to retaliate. And if Israel responded to a Hezbollah bombardment against Lebanese targets, Syria may feel compelled to begin operations against Israel, leading to a full-scale war. On top of all this, Tehran has already threatened to close off the Persian Gulf to shipping, which would generate a devastating ripple through the world economy as a consequence of the rise in the price of oil.

The proponents of an attack argue that the problems delineated above, including missiles from Iran and Lebanon and terror attacks abroad, are ones Israel will have to deal with regardless of whether it attacks Iran now ? and if Iran goes nuclear, dealing with these problems will become far more difficult.

The Israeli Air Force is where most of the preparations are taking place. It maintains planes with the long-range capacity required to deliver ordnance to targets in Iran, as well as unmanned aircraft capable of carrying bombs to those targets and remaining airborne for up to 48 hours. Israel believes that these platforms have the capacity to cause enough damage to set the Iranian nuclear project back by three to five years.

In January 2010, the Mossad sent a hit team to Dubai to liquidate the high-ranking Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was coordinating the smuggling of rockets from Iran to Gaza. The assassination was carried out successfully, but almost the entire operation and all its team members were recorded on closed-circuit surveillance TV cameras. The operation caused a diplomatic uproar and was a major embarrassment for the Mossad. In the aftermath, Netanyahu decided not to extend Dagan?s already exceptionally long term, informing him that he would be replaced in January 2011. That decision was not well received by Dagan, and three days before he was due to leave his post, I and several other Israeli journalists were surprised to receive invitations to a meeting with him at Mossad headquarters.

We were told to congregate in the parking lot of a movie-theater complex north of Tel Aviv, where we were warned by Mossad security personnel, ?Do not bring computers, recording devices, cellphones. You will be carefully searched, and we want to avoid unpleasantness. Leave everything in your cars and enter our vehicles carrying only paper and pens.? We were then loaded into cars with opaque windows and escorted by black Jeeps to a site that we knew was not marked on any map. The cars went through a series of security checks, requiring our escorts to explain who we were and show paperwork at each roadblock.

This was the first time in the history of the Mossad that a group of journalists was invited to meet the director of the organization at one of the country?s most secret sites. After the search was performed and we were seated, the outgoing chief entered the room. Dagan, who was wounded twice in combat, once seriously, during the Six-Day War, started by saying: ?There are advantages to being wounded in the back. You have a doctor?s certificate that you have a backbone.? He then went into a discourse about Iran and sharply criticized the heads of government for even contemplating ?the foolish idea? of attacking it.

?The use of state violence has intolerable costs,? he said. ?The working assumption that it is possible to totally halt the Iranian nuclear project by means of a military attack is incorrect. There is no such military capability. It is possible to cause a delay, but even that would only be for a limited period of time.?

He warned that attacking Iran would start an unwanted war with Hezbollah and Hamas: ?I am not convinced that Syria will not be drawn into the war. While the Syrians won?t charge at us in tanks, we will see a massive offensive of missiles against our home front. Civilians will be on the front lines. What is Israel?s defensive capability against such an offensive? I know of no solution that we have for this problem.?

Asked if he had said these things to Israel?s decision-makers, Dagan replied: ?I have expressed my opinion to them with the same emphasis as I have here now. Sometimes I raised my voice, because I lose my temper easily and am overcome with zeal when I speak.?

In later conversations Dagan criticized Netanyahu and Barak, and in a lecture at Tel Aviv University he observed, ?The fact that someone has been elected doesn?t mean that he is smart.?

In the audience at that lecture was Rafi Eitan, 85, one of the Mossad?s most seasoned and well-known operatives. Eitan agreed with Dagan that Israel lacked the capabilities to attack Iran. When I spoke with him in October, Eitan said: ?As early as 2006 (when Eitan was a senior cabinet minister), I told the cabinet that Israel couldn?t afford to attack Iran. First of all, because the home front is not ready. I told anyone who wanted and still wants to attack, they should just think about two missiles a day, no more than that, falling on Tel Aviv. And what will you do then? Beyond that, our attack won?t cause them significant damage. I was told during one of the discussions that it would delay them for three years, and I replied, ?Not even three months.? After all, they have scattered their facilities all over the country and under the ground. ?What harm can you do to them?? I asked. ?You?ll manage to hit the entrances, and they?ll have them rebuilt in three months.? ?

Asked if it was possible to stop a determined Iran from becoming a nuclear power, Eitan replied: ?No. In the end they?ll get their bomb. The way to fight it is by changing the regime there. This is where we have really failed. We should encourage the opposition groups who turn to us over and over to ask for our help, and instead, we send them away empty-handed.?

Israeli law stipulates that only the 14 members of the security cabinet have the authority to make decisions on whether to go to war. The cabinet has not yet been asked to vote, but the ministers might, under pressure from Netanyahu and Barak, answer these crucial questions about Iran in the affirmative: that these coming months are indeed the last opportunity to attack before Iran enters the ?immunity zone?; that the broad international agreement on Iran?s intentions and the failure of sanctions to stop the project have created sufficient legitimacy for an attack; and that Israel does indeed possess the capabilities to cause significant damage to the Iranian project.

In recent weeks, Israelis have obsessively questioned whether Netanyahu and Barak are really planning a strike or if they are just putting up a front to pressure Europe and the U.S. to impose tougher sanctions. I believe that both of these things are true, but as a senior intelligence officer who often participates in meetings with Israel?s top leadership told me, the only individuals who really know their intentions are, of course, Netanyahu and Barak, and recent statements that no decision is imminent must surely be taken into account.

After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012. Perhaps in the small and ever-diminishing window that is left, the United States will choose to intervene after all, but here, from the Israeli perspective, there is not much hope for that. Instead there is that peculiar Israeli mixture of fear ? rooted in the sense that Israel is dependent on the tacit support of other nations to survive ? and tenacity, the fierce conviction, right or wrong, that only the Israelis can ultimately defend themselves.

 

Ronen Bergman, an analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, is the author of ??The Secret War With Iran?? and a contributing writer for the magazine.

Editor: Joel Lovell

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 29, 2012

An article on Page 22 this weekend about Israel?s response to the possibility of Iran?s acquiring a nuclear weapon misstates part of the name of a treaty that the International Atomic Energy Agency claimed Iran was in breach of. It is the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (not Proliferation).

A version of this article appeared in print on January 29, 2012, on page MM22 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Will Israel Attack Iran?.


From ths at psalience.org  Tue Jan 31 10:54:15 2012
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:54:15 +0100
Subject: [THS] UK: Drug Users Could Escape Jail Under New Rules
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120131105250.04798828@mail.messagingengine.com>


UK: Drug Users Could Escape Jail Under New Rules

Sky News

Tuesday 24 Jan 2012

 Friends socially sharing drugs and those using cannabis for medicinal
purposes could escape jail under new guidelines for judges. [sic!]

Drug runners and small-time dealers caught with heroin, cocaine or
thousands of pounds worth of cannabis could also avoid prison.

Instead, low-level operatives caught with 6kg of cannabis, 20 ecstasy
tablets, or five grams of heroin or cocaine could instead receive a
community sentence.

The guidelines, which come into force on February 27, are expected to
be met with a mixed reaction.

They state a prison sentence may not be necessary for people who
supply small amounts of narcotics to share with their friends for no
personal gain.

They also urge judges to reduce sentences for cannabis possession if
it is being used "to help with a diagnosed medical condition".

It is the first time all courts in England and Wales have been given a
comprehensive guideline setting out how the role of the offender and
the quantity of drugs should influence sentencing.

So-called drug "mules", often women forced or tricked into the crime,
could face a starting point of six years if deemed to be playing a
"lesser role" in bringing up to 1kg of heroin or cocaine into the
country.

This is compared to the 11-year starting point if the offender is one
of the leading figures.

But the Sentencing Council said offenders who were employed by someone
else to import or export drugs regularly for profit would still face
tough sentences of up to life in prison.

It said tougher sentences could also be handed down to key players
guilty of producing drugs on a large scale.

Offenders in a leading role in the production or cultivation of 11lb
(5kg) of heroin or cocaine or tens of thousands of ecstasy tablets
could face up to 16 years in prison.

Those producing industrial quantities of cannabis for commercial
purposes could also face up to 10 years in jail.

Anyone dealing to those aged under 18 would also face tougher
penalties.

Under the guidelines, street dealers will still face jail, with those
playing a key role in selling class A drugs facing a starting point of
four and a half years, with up to 16 years for a single incident,
depending on the quantity of drugs involved.

Professor David Nutt, the former government drugs adviser sacked in
2009, told Sky News he supports reform.

"The drug laws are not based on any kind of sense or evidence so any
sentencing for drugs is questionable," he said.

"What we should be doing is properly revising the drug laws so that
the sentencing is proportional to the harm of drugs," he added.

http://news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/16155188


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Feb  1 12:58:53 2012
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:58:53 +0100
Subject: [THS] Iran increasingly willing to launch US attack,
 top  intelligence official warns
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120201125253.04321728@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30401.htm

[Saw on TV news, probably RT, that the US Navy has all sorts of ships that ought to be mothballed, but no. Maybe one is being prepared for a false flag operation in the Persian Gulf. Also saw on TV that "scientists are tracking a giant asteroid that may pass close to earth". The news spot went on to say how officials were considering ways that the earth might be saved from the impact of a giant asteroid... including sending a nuke out there to blow it up. Seems to me we'd be alot wiser were we to devote our resources to protecting the earth from the impact of giant assholes../.. -ths]

Engineering Consent For An Attack On Iran?
Iran increasingly willing to launch US attack, top intelligence official warns

James Clapper, US director of national intelligence, also says Tehran is keeping option open to develop nuclear weapons

By Julian Borger, diplomatic editor

January 31, 2012 "The Guardian" -- America's top intelligence official has claimed that Iran's leadership was now more willing than before to carry out an attack inside the US, and that intelligence agencies were worried about plots against US and allied interests around the world.

In a report to Congress, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said a plot to blow up the Saudi ambassador in a Washington restaurant - which the US blamed on Iran's Revolutionary Guard - "shows that some Iranian officials, probably including supreme leader Ali Khamenei, have changed their calculus and are now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States in response to real or perceived US actions that threaten the regime".

Clapper added: "Iran's willingness to sponsor future attacks in the United States or against our interests abroad probably will be shaped by Tehran's evaluation of the costs it bears for the plot against the ambassador as well as Iranian leaders' perceptions of US threats against the regime."

US officials have expressed concern that the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, responsible for external operations, could have sleeper cells in the US or over the border in Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

Clapper's statement was the latest salvo in a war of words between the west and Iran over Tehran's nuclear programme and planned oil embargos by both the US and European Union.

Clapper said Iran was "keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons".

"We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons," Clapper said, pointing out in answer to questions from senators that there were "certain things [the Iranians] have not done" that would be necessary to build a warhead.

The intelligence chief said despite the threatened oil embargos, due to take effect in five months' time, "Iran's economic difficulties probably will not jeopardise the regime".
 


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Feb  1 13:19:36 2012
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:19:36 +0100
Subject: [THS] The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake - review
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120201131038.043237f0@mail.messagingengine.com>

The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake - review

We must find a new way of understanding human beings

Mary Midgley
guardian.co.uk, Friday 27 January 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/27/science-delusion-rupert-sheldrake-review 

The unlucky fact that our current form of mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of matter isn't often mentioned today. It's a mess that can be ignored for everyday scientific purposes, but for our wider thinking it is getting very destructive. We can't approach important mind-body topics such as consciousness or the origins of life while we still treat matter in 17th-century style as if it were dead, inert stuff, incapable of producing life. And we certainly can't go on pretending to believe that our own experience ? the source of all our thought ? is just an illusion, which it would have to be if that dead, alien stuff were indeed the only reality.

The Science Delusion
by Rupert Sheldrake


We need a new mind-body paradigm, a map that acknowledges the many kinds of things there are in the world and the continuity of evolution. We must somehow find different, more realistic ways of understanding human beings ? and indeed other animals ? as the active wholes that they are, rather than pretending to see them as meaningless consignments of chemicals.

Rupert Sheldrake, who has long called for this development, spells out this need forcibly in his new book. He shows how materialism has gradually hardened into a kind of anti-Christian faith, an ideology rather than a scientific principle, claiming authority to dictate theories and to veto inquiries on topics that don't suit it, such as unorthodox medicine, let alone religion. He shows how completely alien this static materialism is to modernphysics, where matter is dynamic. And, to mark the strange dilemmas that this perverse fashion poses for us, he ends each chapter with some very intriguing "Questions for Materialists", questions such as "Have you been programmed to believe in materialism?", "If there are no purposes in nature, how can you have purposes yourself?", "How do you explain the placebo response?" and so on.

In short, he shows just how unworkable the assumptions behind today's fashionable habits have become. The "science delusion" of his title is the current popular confidence in certain fixed assumptions ? the exaltation of today's science, not as the busy, constantly changing workshop that it actually is but as a final, infallible oracle preaching a crude kind of materialism.

In trying to replace it he needs, of course, to suggest alternative assumptions. But here the craft of paradigm-building has chronic difficulties. Our ancestors only finally stopped relying on the familiar astrological patterns when they had grown accustomed to machine-imagery instead ? first becoming fascinated by the clatter of clockwork and later by the ceaseless buzz of computers, so that they eventually felt sure that they were getting new knowledge. Similarly, if we are told today that a mouse is a survival-machine, or that it has been programmed to act as it does, we may well feel that we have been given a substantial explanation, when all we have really got is one more optional imaginative vision ? "you can try looking at it this way".

That is surely the right way to take new suggestions ? not as rival theories competing with current ones but as extra angles, signposts towards wider aspects of the truth. Sheldrake's proposal that we should think of natural regularities as habits rather than as laws is not just an arbitrary fantasy. It is a new analogy, brought in to correct what he sees as a chronic exaggeration of regularity in current science. He shows how carefully research conventions are tailored to smooth out the data, obscuring wide variations by averaging many results, and, in general, how readily scientists accept results that fit in with their conception of eternal laws.

He points out too, that the analogy between natural regularities and habit is not actually new. Several distinctly non-negligible thinkers ? CS Peirce, Nietzsche, William James,AN Whitehead ? have already suggested it because they saw the huge difference between the kind of regularity that is found among living things and the kind that is expected of a clock or a calcium atom.

Whether or no we want to follow Sheldrake's further speculations on topics such asmorphic resonance, his insistence on the need to attend to possible wider ways of thinking is surely right. And he has been applying it lately in fields that might get him an even wider public. He has been making claims about two forms of perception that are widely reported to work but which mechanists hold to be impossible: a person's sense of being looked at by somebody behind them, and the power of animals ? dogs, say ? to anticipate their owners' return. Do these things really happen?

Sheldrake handles his enquiries soberly. People and animals do, it seems, quite often perform these unexpected feats, and some of them regularly perform them much better than others, which is perhaps not surprising. He simply concludes that we need to think much harder about such things.

Orthodox mechanistic believers might have been expected to say what they think is wrong with this research. In fact, not only have scientists mostly ignored it but, more interestingly still, two professed champions of scientific impartiality, Lewis Wolpert and Richard Dawkins, who did undertake to discuss it, reportedly refused to look at the evidence (see two pages in this book). This might indeed be a good example of what Sheldrake means by the "science delusion".

1206 wds? Mary Midgley's The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene is published by Acumen.
? 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Feb  1 13:24:37 2012
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:24:37 +0100
Subject: [THS] Michael Hudson: How the Banks Broke the Social Compact
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120201132327.047dc0c0@mail.messagingengine.com>

How the Banks Broke the Social Compact, Promoting their Own Special Interests

By Prof. Michael Hudson

Global Research, January 28, 2012

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28938

Banks Weren?t Meant to Be Like This.  What will their future be ? and what is the government?s proper financial role?

The inherently symbiotic relationship between banks and governments recently has been reversed. In medieval times, wealthy bankers lent to kings and princes as their major customers. But now it is the banks that are needy, relying on governments for funding ? capped by the post-2008 bailouts to save them from going bankrupt from their bad private-sector loans and gambles.

Yet the banks now browbeat governments ? not by having ready cash but by threatening to go bust and drag the economy down with them if they are not given control of public tax policy, spending and planning. The process has gone furthest in the United States. Joseph Stiglitz characterizes the Obama administration?s vast transfer of money and pubic debt to the banks as a ?privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a ?partnership? in which one partner robs the other.?2 Prof. Bill Black describes banks as becoming criminogenic and innovating ?control fraud.?3 High finance has corrupted regulatory agencies, falsified account-keeping by ?mark to model? trickery, and financed the campaigns of its supporters to disable public oversight. The effect is to leave banks in control of how the economy?s allocates its credit and resources.

If there is any silver lining to today?s debt crisis, it is that the present situation and trends cannot continue. So this is not only an opportunity to restructure banking; we have little choice. The urgent issue is who will control the economy: governments, or the financial sector and monopolies with which it has made an alliance.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to re-invent the wheel. Already a century ago the outlines of a productive industrial banking system were well understood. But recent bank lobbying has been remarkably successful in distracting attention away from classical analyses of how to shape the financial and tax system to best promote economic growth ? by public checks on bank privileges.

How banks broke the social compact,  promoting their own special interests

People used to know what banks did. Bankers took deposits and lent them out, paying short-term depositors less than they charged for risky or less liquid loans. The risk was borne by bankers, not depositors or the government. But today, bank loans are made increasingly to speculators in recklessly large amounts for quick in-and-out trading. Financial crashes have become deeper and affect a wider swath of the population as debt pyramiding has soared and credit quality plunged into the toxic category of ?liars? loans.?

The first step toward today?s mutual interdependence between high finance and government was for central banks to act as lenders of last resort to mitigate the liquidity crises that periodically resulted from the banks? privilege of credit creation. In due course governments also provided public deposit insurance, recognizing the need to mobilize and recycle savings into capital investment as the Industrial Revolution gained momentum. In exchange for this support, they regulated banks as public utilities.

Over time, banks have sought to disable this regulatory oversight, even to the point of decriminalizing fraud. Sponsoring an ideological attack on government, they accuse public bureaucracies of ?distorting? free markets (by which they mean markets free for predatory behavior). The financial sector is now making its move to concentrate planning in its own hands.

The problem is that the financial time frame is notoriously short-term and often self-destructive. And inasmuch as the banking system?s product is debt, its business plan tends to be extractive and predatory, leaving economies high-cost. This is why checks and balances are needed, along with regulatory oversight to ensure fair dealing. Dismantling public attempts to steer banking to promote economic growth (rather than merely to make bankers rich) has permitted banks to turn into something nobody anticipated. Their major customers are other financial institutions, insurance and real estate ? the FIRE sector, not industrial firms. Debt leveraging by real estate and monopolies, arbitrage speculators, hedge funds and corporate raiders inflates asset prices on credit. The effect of creating ?balance sheet wealth? in this way is to load down the ?real? production-and-consumption economy with debt and related rentier charges, adding more to the cost of living and doing business than rising productivity reduces production costs.

Since 2008, public bailouts have taken bad loans off the banks? balance sheet at enormous taxpayer expense ? some $13 trillion in the United States, and proportionally higher in Ireland and other economies now being subjected to austerity to pay for ?free market? deregulation. Bankers are holding economies hostage, threatening a monetary crash if they do not get more bailouts and nearly free central bank credit, and more mortgage and other loan guarantees for their casino-like game. The resulting ?too big to fail? policy means making governments too weak to fight back.

The process that began with central bank support thus has turned into broad government guarantees against bank insolvency. The largest banks have made so many reckless loans that they have become wards of the state. Yet they have become powerful enough to capture lawmakers to act as their facilitators. The popular media and even academic economic theorists have been mobilized to pose as experts in an attempt to convince the public that financial policy is best left to technocrats ? of the banks? own choosing, as if there is no alternative policy but for governments to subsidize a financial free lunch and crown bankers as society?s rulers.

The Bubble Economy and its austerity aftermath could not have occurred without the banking sector?s success in weakening public regulation, capturing national treasuries and even disabling law enforcement. Must governments surrender to this power grab? If not, who should bear the losses run up by a financial system that has become dysfunctional? If taxpayers have to pay, their economy will become high-cost and uncompetitive ? and a financial oligarchy will rule.

The present debt quandary

The endgame in times past was to write down bad debts. That meant losses for banks and investors. But today?s debt overhead is being kept in place ? shifting bad loans off bank balance sheets to become public debts owed by taxpayers to save banks and their creditors from loss. Governments have given banks newly minted bonds or central bank credit in exchange for junk mortgages and bad gambles ? without re-structuring the financial system to create a more stable, less debt-ridden economy. The pretense is that these bailouts will enable banks to lend enough to revive the economy by enough to pay its debts.

Seeing the handwriting on the wall, bankers are taking as much bailout money as they can get, and running, using the money to buy as much tangible property and ownership rights as they can while their lobbyists keep the public subsidy faucet running.

The pretense is that debt-strapped economies can resume business-as-usual growth by borrowing their way out of debt. But a quarter of U.S. real estate already is in negative equity ? worth less than the mortgages attached to it ? and the property market is still shrinking, so banks are not lending except with public Federal Housing Administration guarantees to cover whatever losses they may suffer. In any event, it already is mathematically impossible to carry today?s debt overhead without imposing austerity, debt deflation and depression.

This is not how banking was supposed to evolve. If governments are to underwrite bank loans, they may as well be doing the lending in the first place ? and receiving the gains. Indeed, since 2008 the over-indebted economy?s crash led governments to become the major shareholders of the largest and most troubled banks ? Citibank in the United States, Anglo-Irish Bank in Ireland, and Britain?s Royal Bank of Scotland. Yet rather than taking this opportunity to run these banks as public utilities and lower their charges for credit-card services ? or most important of all, to stop their lending to speculators and gamblers ? governments left these banks operating as part of the ?casino capitalism? that has become their business plan.

There is no natural reason for matters to be like this. Relations between banks and government used to be the reverse. In 1307, France?s Philip IV (?The Fair?) set the tone by seizing the Knights Templars? wealth, arresting them and putting many to death ? not on financial charges, but on the accusation of devil-worshipping and satanic sexual practices. In 1344 the Peruzzi bank went broke, followed by the Bardi by making unsecured loans to Edward III of England and other monarchs who died or defaulted. Many subsequent banks had to suffer losses on loans gone bad to real estate or financial speculators.

By contrast, now the U.S., British, Irish and Latvian governments have taken bad bank loans onto their national balance sheets, imposing a heavy burden on taxpayers ? while letting bankers cash out with immense wealth. These ?cash for trash? swaps have turned the mortgage crisis and general debt collapse into a fiscal problem. Shifting the new public bailout debts onto the non-financial economy threaten to increase the cost of living and doing business. This is the result of the economy?s failure to distinguish productive from unproductive loans and debts. It helps explain why nations now are facing financial austerity and debt peonage instead of the leisure economy promised so eagerly by technological optimists a century ago.

So we are brought back to the question of what the proper role of banks should be. This issue was discussed exhaustively prior to World War I. It is even more urgent today.

How classical economists hoped to modernize banks as agents of industrial capitalism

Britain was the home of the Industrial Revolution, but there was little long-term lending to finance investment in factories or other means of production. British and Dutch merchant banking was to extend short-term credit on the basis of collateral such as real property or sales contracts for merchandise shipped (?receivables?). Buoyed by this trade financing, merchant bankers were successful enough to maintain long-established short-term funding practices. This meant that James Watt and other innovators were obliged to raise investment money from their families and friends rather than from banks.

It was the French and Germans who moved banking into the industrial stage to help their nations catch up. In France, the Saint-Simonians described the need to create an industrial credit system aimed at funding means of production. In effect, the Saint-Simonians proposed to restructure banks along lines akin to a mutual fund. A start was made with the Cr?dit Mobilier, founded by the P?reire Brothers in 1852. Their aim was to shift the banking and financial system away from debt financing at interest toward equity lending, taking returns in the form of dividends that would rise or decline in keeping with the debtor?s business fortunes. By giving businesses leeway to cut back dividends when sales and profits decline, profit-sharing agreements avoid the problem that interest must be paid willy-nilly. If an interest payment is missed, the debtor may be forced into bankruptcy and creditors can foreclose. It was to avoid this favoritism for creditors regardless of the debtor?s ability to pay that prompted Mohammed to ban interest under Islamic law.

Attracting reformers ranging from socialists to investment bankers, the Saint-Simonians won government backing for their policies under France?s Second Empire. Their approach inspired Marx as well as industrialists in Germany and protectionists in the United States and England. The common denominator of this broad spectrum was recognition that an efficient banking system was needed to finance the industry on which a strong national state and military power depended.

Germany develops an industrial banking system

It was above all in Germany that long-term financing found its expression in the Reichsbank and other large industrial banks as part of the ?holy trinity? of banking, industry and government planning under Bismarck?s ?state socialism.? German banks made a virtue of necessity. British banks ?derived the greater part of their funds from the depositors,? and steered these savings and business deposits into mercantile trade financing. This forced domestic firms to finance most new investment out of their own earnings. By contrast, Germany?s ?lack of capital ... forced industry to turn to the banks for assistance,? noted the financial historian George Edwards. ?A considerable proportion of the funds of the German banks came not from the deposits of customers but from the capital subscribed by the proprietors themselves.[4] As a result, German banks ?stressed investment operations and were formed not so much for receiving deposits and granting loans but rather for supplying the investment requirements of industry.?

When the Great War broke out in 1914, Germany?s rapid victories were widely viewed as reflecting the superior efficiency of its financial system. To some observers the war appeared as a struggle between rival forms of financial organization. At issue was not only who would rule Europe, but whether the continent would have laissez faire or a more state-socialist economy.

In 1915, shortly after fighting broke out, the Christian Socialist priest-politician Friedrich Naumann published Mitteleuropa, describing how Germany recognized more than any other nation that industrial technology needed long?term financing and government support. His book inspired Prof. H. S. Foxwell in England to draw on his arguments in two remarkable essays published in the Economic Journal in September and December 1917: ?The Nature of the Industrial Struggle,? and ?The Financing of Industry and Trade.? He endorsed Naumann?s contention that ?the old individualistic capitalism, of what he calls the English type, is giving way to the new, more impersonal, group form; to the disciplined scientific capitalism he claims as German.?

This was necessarily a group undertaking, with the emerging tripartite integration of industry, banking and government, with finance being ?undoubtedly the main cause of the success of modern German enterprise,? Foxwell concluded (p. 514). German bank staffs included industrial experts who were forging industrial policy into a science. And in America, Thorstein Veblen?s The Engineers and the Price System (1921) voiced the new industrial philosophy calling for bankers and government planners to become engineers in shaping credit markets.

Foxwell warned that British steel, automotive, capital equipment and other heavy industry was becoming obsolete largely because its bankers failed to perceive the need to promote equity investment and extend long?term credit. They based their loan decisions not on the new production and revenue their lending might create, but simply on what collateral they could liquidate in the event of default: inventories of unsold goods, real estate, and money due on bills for goods sold and awaiting payment from customers. And rather than investing in the shares of the companies that their loans supposedly were building up, they paid out most of their earnings as dividends ? and urged companies to do the same. This short time horizon forced business to remain liquid rather than having leeway to pursue long?term strategy.

German banks, by contrast, paid out dividends (and expected such dividends from their clients) at only half the rate of British banks, choosing to retain earnings as capital reserves and invest them largely in the stocks of their industrial clients. Viewing these companies as allies rather than merely as customers from whom to make as large a profit as quickly as possible, German bank officials sat on their boards, and helped expand their business by extending loans to foreign governments on condition that their clients be named the chief suppliers in major public investments. Germany viewed the laws of history as favoring national planning to organize the financing of heavy industry, and gave its bankers a voice in formulating international diplomacy, making them ?the principal instrument in the extension of her foreign trade and political power.?

A similar contrast existed in the stock market. British brokers were no more up to the task of financing manufacturing in its early stages than were its banks. The nation had taken an early lead by forming Crown corporations such as the East India Company, the Bank of England and even the South Sea Company. Despite the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, the run-up of share prices from 1715 to 1720 in these joint-stock monopolies established London?s stock market as a popular investment vehicle, for Dutch and other foreigners as well as for British investors. But the market was dominated by railroads, canals and large public utilities. Industrial firms were not major issuers of stock.

In any case, after earning their commissions on one issue, British stockbrokers were notorious for moving on to the next without much concern for what happened to the investors who had bought the earlier securities. ?As soon as he has contrived to get his issue quoted at a premium and his underwriters have unloaded at a profit,? complained Foxwell, ?his enterprise ceases. ?To him,? as the Times says, ?a successful flotation is of more importance than a sound venture.??

Much the same was true in the United States. Its merchant heroes were individualistic traders and political insiders often operating on the edge of the law to gain their fortunes by stock-market manipulation, railroad politicking for land giveaways, and insurance companies, mining and natural resource extraction. America?s wealth-seeking spirit found its epitome in Thomas Edison?s hit-or-miss method of invention, coupled with a high degree of litigiousness to obtain patent and monopoly rights.

In sum, neither British nor American banking or stock markets planned for the future. Their time frame was short, and they preferred rent-extracting projects to industrial innovation. Most banks favored large real estate borrowers, railroads and public utilities whose income streams easily could be forecast. Only after manufacturing companies grew fairly large did they obtain significant bank and stock market credit.

What is remarkable is that this is the tradition of banking and high finance that has emerged victorious throughout the world. The explanation is primarily the military victory of the United States, Britain and their Allies in the Great War and a generation later, in World War II.

The regression toward burdensome unproductive debts after World War I

The development of industrial credit led economists to distinguish between productive and unproductive lending. A productive loan provides borrowers with resources to trade or invest at a profit sufficient to pay back the loan and its interest charge. An unproductive loan must be paid out of income earned elsewhere. Governments must pay war loans out of tax revenues. Consumers must pay loans out of income they earn at a job ? or by selling assets. These debt payments divert revenue away from being spent on consumption and investment, so the economy shrinks. This traditionally has led to crises that wipe out debts, above all those that are unproductive.

In the aftermath of World War I the economies of Europe?s victorious and defeated nations alike were dominated by postwar arms and reparations debts. These inter-governmental debts were to pay for weapons (by the Allies when the United States unexpectedly demanded that they pay for the arms they had bought before America?s entry into the war), and for the destruction of property (by the Central Powers), not new means of production. Yet to the extent that they were inter-governmental, these debts were more intractable than debts to private bankers and bondholders. Despite the fact that governments in principle are sovereign and hence can annul debts owed to private creditors, the defeated Central Power governments were in no position to do this.

And among the Allies, Britain led the capitulation to U.S. arms billing, captive to the creditor ideology that ?a debt is a debt? and must be paid regardless of what this entails in practice or even whether the debt in fact can be paid. Confronted with America?s demand for payment, the Allies turned to Germany to make them whole. After taking its liquid assets and major natural resources, they insisted that it squeeze out payments by taxing its economy. No attempt was made to calculate just how Germany was to do this ? or most important, how it was to convert this domestic revenue (the ?budgetary problem?) into hard currency or gold. Despite the fact that banking had focused on international credit and currency transfers since the 12th century, there was a broad denial of what John Maynard Keynes identified as a foreign exchange transfer problem.

Never before had there been an obligation of such enormous magnitude. Nevertheless, all of Germany?s political parties and government agencies sought to devise ways to tax the economy to raise the sums being demanded. Taxes, however, are levied in a nation?s own currency. The only way to pay the Allies was for the Reichsbank to take this fiscal revenue and throw it onto the foreign exchange markets to obtain the sterling and other hard currency to pay. Britain, France and the other recipients then paid this money on their Inter-Ally debts to the United States.

Adam Smith pointed out that no government ever had paid down its public debt. But creditors always have been reluctant to acknowledge that debtors are unable to pay. Ever since David Ricardo?s lobbying for their perspective in Britain?s Bullion debates, creditors have found it their self-interest to promote a doctrinaire blind spot, insisting that debts of any magnitude could be paid. They resist acknowledging a distinction between raising funds domestically (by running a budget surplus) and obtaining the foreign exchange to pay foreign-currency debt. Furthermore, despite the evident fact that austerity cutbacks on consumption and investment can only be extractive, creditor-oriented economists refused to recognize that debts cannot be paid by shrinking the economy.5 Or that foreign debts and other international payments cannot be paid in domestic currency without lowering the exchange rate.

The more domestic currency Germany sought to convert, the further its exchange rate was driven down against the dollar and other gold-based currencies. This obliged Germans to pay much more for imports. The collapse of the exchange rate was the source of hyperinflation, not an increase in domestic money creation as today?s creditor-sponsored monetarist economists insist. In vain Keynes pointed to the specific structure of Germany?s balance of payments and asked creditors to specify just how many German exports they were willing to take, and to explain how domestic currency could be converted into foreign exchange without collapsing the exchange rate and causing price inflation.

Tragically, Ricardian tunnel vision won Allied government backing. Bertil Ohlin and Jacques Rueff claimed that economies receiving German payments would recycle their inflows to Germany and other debt-paying countries by buying their imports. If income adjustments did not keep exchange rates and prices stable, then Germany?s falling exchange rate would make its exports sufficiently more attractive to enable it to earn the revenue to pay.

This is the logic that the International Monetary Fund followed half a century later in insisting that Third World countries remit foreign earnings and even permit flight capital as well as pay their foreign debts. It is the neoliberal stance now demanding austerity for Greece, Ireland, Italy and other Eurozone economies.

Bank lobbyists claim that the European Central Bank will risk spurring domestic wage and price inflation of it does what central banks were founded to do: finance budget deficits. Europe?s financial institutions are given a monopoly right to perform this electronic task ? and to receive interest for what a real central bank could create on its own computer keyboard.

But why it is less inflationary for commercial banks to finance budget deficits than for central banks to do this? The bank lending that has inflated a global financial bubble since the 1980s has left as its legacy a debt overhead that can no more be supported today than Germany was able to carry its reparations debt in the 1920s. Would government credit have so recklessly inflated asset prices?

How debt creation has fueled asset-price inflation since the 1980s

Banking in recent decades has not followed the productive lines that early economic futurists expected. As noted above, instead of financing tangible investment to expand production and innovation, most loans are made against collateral, with interest to be paid out of what borrowers can make elsewhere. Despite being unproductive in the classical sense, it was remunerative for debtors from 1980 until 2008 ? not by investing the loan proceeds to expand economic activity, but by riding the wave of asset-price inflation. Mortgage credit enabled borrowers to bid up property prices, drawing speculators and new customers into the market in the expectation that prices would continue to rise. But hothouse credit infusions meant additional debt service, which ended up shrinking the market for goods and services.

Under normal conditions the effect would have been for rents to decline, with property prices following suit, leading to mortgage defaults. But banks postponed the collapse into negative equity by lowering their lending standards, providing enough new credit to keep on inflating prices. This averted a collapse of their speculative mortgage and stock market lending. It was inflationary ? but it was inflating asset prices, not commodity prices or wages. Two decades of asset price inflation enabled speculators, homeowners and commercial investors to borrow the interest falling due and still make a capital gain.

This hope for a price gain made winning bidders willing to pay lenders all the current income ? making banks the ultimate and major rentier income recipients. The process of inflating asset prices by easing credit terms and lowering the interest rate was self-feeding. But it also was self-terminating, because raising the multiple by which a given real estate rent or business income can be ?capitalized? into bank loans increased the economy?s debt overhead.

Securities markets became part of this problem. Rising stock and bond prices made pension funds pay more to purchase a retirement income ? so ?pension fund capitalism? was coming undone. So was the industrial economy itself. Instead of raising new equity financing for companies, the stock market became a vehicle for corporate buyouts. Raiders borrowed to buy out stockholders, loading down companies with debt. The most successful looters left them bankrupt shells. And when creditors turned their economic gains from this process into political power to shift the tax burden onto wage earners and industry, this raised the cost of living and doing business ? by more than technology was able to lower prices.

The EU rejects central bank money creation, leaving deficit financing to the banks

Article 123 of the Lisbon Treaty forbids the ECB or other central banks to lend to government. But central banks were created specifically ? to finance government deficits. The EU has rolled back history to the way things were three hundred years ago, before the Bank of England was created. Reserving the task of credit creation for commercial banks, it leaves governments without a central bank to finance the public spending needed to avert depression and widespread financial collapse.

So the plan has backfired. When ?hard money? policy makers limited central bank power, they assumed that public debts would be risk-free. Obliging budget deficits to be financed by private creditors seemed to offer a bonanza: being able to collect interest for creating electronic credit that governments can create themselves. But now, European governments need credit to balance their budget or face default. So banks now want a central bank to create the money to bail them out for the bad loans they have made.

For starters, the ECB?s 489 billion euros in three-year loans at 1% interest gives banks a free lunch arbitrage opportunity (the ?carry trade?) to buy Greek and Spanish bonds yielding a higher rate. The policy of buying government bonds in the open market ? after banks first have bought them at a lower issue price ? gives the banks a quick and easy trading gain.

How are these giveaways less inflationary than for central banks to directly finance budget deficits and roll over government debts? Is the aim of giving banks easy gains simply to provide them with resources to resume the Bubble Economy lending that led to today?s debt overhead in the first place?

Conclusion

Governments can create new credit electronically on their own computer keyboards as easily as commercial banks can. And unlike banks, their spending is expected to serve a broad social purpose, to be determined democratically. When commercial banks gain policy control over governments and central banks, they tend to support their own remunerative policy of creating asset-inflationary credit ? leaving the clean-up costs to be solved by a post-bubble austerity. This makes the debt overhead even harder to pay ? indeed, impossible.

So we are brought back to the policy issue of how public money creation to finance budget deficits differs from issuing government bonds for banks to buy. Is not the latter option a convoluted way to finance such deficits ? at a needless interest charge? When governments monetize their budget deficits, they do not have to pay bondholders.

I have heard bankers argue that governments need an honest broker to decide whether a loan or public spending policy is responsible. To date their advice has not promoted productive credit. Yet they now are attempting to compensate for the financial crisis by telling debtor governments to sell off property in their public domain. This ?solution? relies on the myth that privatization is more efficient and will lower the cost of basic infrastructure services. Yet it involves paying interest to the buyers of rent-extraction rights, higher executive salaries, stock options and other financial fees.

Most cost savings are achieved by shifting to non-unionized labor, and typically end up being paid to the privatizers, their bankers and bondholders, not passed on to the public. And bankers back price deregulation, enabling privatizers to raise access charges. This makes the economy higher cost and hence less competitive ? just the opposite of what is promised.

Banking has moved so far away from funding industrial growth and economic development that it now benefits primarily at the economy?s expense in a predator and extractive way, not by making productive loans. This is now the great problem confronting our time. Banks now lend mainly to other financial institutions, hedge funds, corporate raiders, insurance companies and real estate, and engage in their own speculation in foreign currency, interest-rate arbitrage, and computer-driven trading programs. Industrial firms bypass the banking system by financing new capital investment out of their own retained earnings, and meet their liquidity needs by issuing their own commercial paper directly. Yet to keep the bank casino winning, global bankers now want governments not only to bail them out but to enable them to renew their failed business plan ? and to keep the present debts in place so that creditors will not have to take a loss.

This wish means that society should lose, and even suffer depression. We are dealing here not only with greed, but with outright antisocial behavior and hostility.

Europe thus has reached a critical point in having to decide whose interest to put first: that of banks, or the ?real? economy. History provides a wealth of examples illustrating the dangers of capitulating to bankers, and also for how to restructure banking along more productive lines. The underlying questions are clear enough:

* Have banks outlived their historical role, or can they be restructured to finance productive capital investment rather than simply inflate asset prices?

* Would a public option provide less costly and better directed credit?

* Why not promote economic recovery by writing down debts to reflect the ability to pay, rather than relinquishing more wealth to an increasingly aggressive creditor class?

Solving the Eurozone?s financial problem can be made much easier by the tax reforms that classical economists advocated to complement their financial reforms. To free consumers and employers from taxation, they proposed to levy the burden on the ?unearned increment? of land and natural resource rent, monopoly rent and financial privilege. The guiding principle was that property rights in the earth, monopolies and other ownership privileges have no direct cost of production, and hence can be taxed without reducing their supply or raising their price, which is set in the market. Removing the tax deductibility for interest is the other key reform that is needed.

A rent tax holds down housing prices and those of basic infrastructure services, whose untaxed revenue tends to be capitalized into bank loans and paid out in the form of interest charges. Additionally, land and natural resource rents ? along with interest ? are the easiest to tax, because they are highly visible and their value is easy to assess.

Pressure to narrow existing budget deficits offers a timely opportunity to rationalize the tax systems of Greece and other PIIGS countries in which the wealthy avoid paying their fair share of taxes. The political problem blocking this classical fiscal policy is that it ?interferes? with the rent-extracting free lunches that banks seek to lend against. So they act as lobbyists for untaxing real estate and monopolies (and themselves as well). Despite the financial sector?s desire to see governments remain sufficiently solvent to pay bondholders, it has subsidized an enormous public relations apparatus and academic junk economics to oppose the tax policies that can close the fiscal gap in the fairest way.

It is too early to forecast whether banks or governments will emerge victorious from today?s crisis. As economies polarize between debtors and creditors, planning is shifting out of public hands into those of bankers. The easiest way for them to keep this power is to block a true central bank or strong public sector from interfering with their monopoly of credit creation. The counter is for central banks and governments to act as they were intended to, by providing a public option for credit creation.

Notes

2 Joseph E. Stiglitz, ?Obama?s Ersatz Capitalism,? The New York Times, April 1, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/01/opinion/01stiglitz.html.

3 http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com , and The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One (2005).

4 George W. Edwards, The Evolution of Finance Capitalism (New York: 1938):68.

5 review the literature from the 1920s, its Ricardian pedigree and subsequent revival by the IMF and other creditor institutions in Trade, Development and Foreign Debt: A History of Theories of Polarization v. Convergence in the World Economy (1992; new ed. ISLET 2010). I provide the political background in Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972; 2nd ed., London: Pluto Press, 2002),



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From ths at psalience.org  Wed Feb  1 22:59:00 2012
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:59:00 +0100
Subject: [THS] What Is Really Going On In Syria: Insider Update
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120201225837.04c986f0@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30412.htm

An Alternative View

What Is Really Going On In Syria: Insider Update

By Boris DOLGOV

February 01, 2012 "ICF" --  The current situation in Syria remains one of the most important components of the Middle Eastern and international policies. Using Syria?s domestic crisis and pursuing their own goals NATO, Israel, Turkey and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf are trying to undermine the Syrian regime.

Since the beginning of the crisis in Syria I have made two trips to that country as a member of international delegations in August 2011 and in January 2012. If we watch the dynamics of situation?s development over that period on the one hand we can state intensification of terrorist groups in Syria and on the other hand we see a broader people?s support of President Bashar Assad and a clear demarcation of political forces? positions.

In the last two months Syria has seen a number of terrorist attacks. The terrorist attacked Syrian servicemen and military facilities, law enforcement agencies institutions, blasts on oil pipelines, railroads, murders and taking of hostage among peaceful citizens (In the city of Homs insurgents killed five well known scientists), arson of schools and killing of teachers (since March 2011, 900 schools have been set on fire and 30 teachers have been killed).

Terrorist attacks in Damascus became one of the bloodiest. Two of them were carried out on December 23, 2011 when cars loaded with explosives went off in front of the buildings of state security service killing 44 and injured about 150 people. On January 6, 2012 on a busy street a suicide bomber attack killed 26 and wounded 60. There were officers of the law enforcement agencies among the victims but most of the victims were occasional by-passers.

In January 2012, Damascus has a more severe look in comparison with summer of 2011. Security officers check passports on the way to the airport, asking people what country they are from. Entrances of many state institutions are protected with concrete blocks. There are check points with sand bags near the police stations which are protected by soldiers in bullet proof vests. Lifting gates which close entrances to some of the streets are also by guarded by soldiers and young people with machine guns ? these are volunteers from pro-governmental youth movements. But everyday life has not drastically changed. There are no servicemen, armed vehicles or document checks in the city. Damascus is still a busy city, with no vacant seats in internet cafes and on weekends streets are crowded with family couples and young people.

After terrorist attacks in Damascus demonstrations with slogans supporting Bashar Assad and condemning terrorists were held everyday. Similar demonstrations were organized in other large cities such as Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Daraa, Deir az Zor. These demonstrations were covered by the Syrian TV. During our stay in Syria we could move around the city freely and speak with people as we liked but we did not see any single anti-governmental rally. Most of the rallies? participants were young people.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad waves at supporters during a public appearance in Damascus on January 11, 2012 in which he vowed to defeat a "conspiracy" against Syria.

The most massive rally which gathered tens thousands of people was held on January 1 in the center of Damascus. At that rally Bashar Assad addressed to the nation starting his speech with the words: ?Brothers and sisters!? He was speaking about a thousands year long history, the need to fight terrorism and the support terrorists receive from abroad. Assad?s speech was received with real enthusiasm and there were no signs that this reaction had been staged.

The whole square (tens thousands of people) shouted a popular slogan ?Allah, Syria, Bashar!? (?Allah, Syria va Bashar bas!?). On January 8, in the memory of victims of terrorist attacks in Damascus a commemoration ceremony was held in St. Cross Cathedral in Damascus. The Mufti of Syria Ahmad Badr Al-Din Hassoun, the metropolitan of the Syrian Orthodox Church and the prior of the Catholic monastery spoke at the ceremony. In their speeches they condemned ?the killers and those who put weapons in their hands and sent them to Syria?. The tragedy of the mufti of Syria, whose son was killed by the members of the Islamist terrorist group after the mufti had refused to act on the side of the foreign opposition, which goal was to overthrow Bashar Assad, is a telling example in itself.

After the adoption of a new law on political parties an active process of their creation has been underway in Syria. Although formally the constitution envisaged a multiparty system and seven parties were represented in the parliament, in compliance with clause 8 the leading role belonged to the ruling Baath party. Currently there is a wide discussion in Syria about this clause. An official with the Syrian Foreign Ministry told us that in the new constitution (on which the national referendum would be held in February), this clause would be abolished if most of the public and political forces spoke for it.

In his address to the nation Bashar Assad said that the new constitution would be approved in March 2012. The parliamentary elections are to be held in May-June 2012. Along with the law on political parties new laws on general elections, local administration and mass media were adopted. In compliance with the new law in December 2011 elections to the local governments were held. But because of the threat of terrorist attacks the turnout was only 42%, which was confirmed by the Baath officials. Nevertheless, the local administrations were elected and began to work. Under the recently adopted law new mass media are being formed in addition to the current 20 TV channels, 15 radio stations and 30 newspapers.

At present there are three main trends in the Syrian patriotic opposition ? democratic, liberal and left, which is mainly a communist one. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party is the most influential party among the democratic forces. It is also the oldest party which was established in 1932. As Iliah Saman, a member of the political bureau of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party said, the party?s program is more conservative in comparison with the Baath?s program. Nevertheless there are no differences of principle between the two parties. According to him, the policy of the US, France and England is the main destabilizing factor in Syria. He said that those countries were acting in the interests of Israel and had the goal to divide Syria into five state formations on the basis of religious and ethnical differences.

The liberal trend of the opposition is represented by the recently registered secular democratic social movement led by Nabil Feysal, one of the Syrian intellectuals, a writer and a translator. He is an outright opponent of the Islamic fundamentalism, supporter of the liberal democracy. His goal is to turn Syria into ?Middle Eastern Denmark?.

The National Committee for the Unity of Syrian Communists is the most influential component of the left (communist) trend of the opposition within the country. Recently it has changed its name for the Popular Will Party which is headed by Qadri Jamil, a prominent Syrian economist and the professor at the Damascus University. He is the only representative of the opposition who entered the committee on the design of the new constitution. Jamil believes that the national dialogue and creation of the government of the national unity (which would include representatives of the patriotic opposition) is the only way out of the crisis. At the same time he thinks that it is necessary to remove all the politicians who are not interested in conduction of reforms from the government, to clean up the opposition from destructive factors and to suppress its radical members who tend to use violence.

The coordination committees are also significant political force which has contacts with the Popular Will Party. These committees on the one hand organize demonstrations demanding concrete reforms and better living conditions on the other hand act as self-defense units which armed people protect their districts from attacks of terrorist groups in particular from a so called Free Syrian Army. It should be noted that although in the beginning of protests in Syria, part of the population, including intellectuals shared the opposition discontent with the regime and supported demands on democratization now, after intensification of terrorist groups, they tend to support the regime and the reforms proposed by the government.

A telling example of terrorist crimes was the shelling of a quarter in Homs on January 11 which killed eight local residents. Giles Jacquier, a reporter with France-2 TV, became one more victim of the attack. We spoke with Jacquier shortly before his tragic death and he was convinced that people?s protests were suppressed by the authoritarian regime in Syria. He was looking for the opposition everywhere trying to make a report. On failing to find it in Damascus he moved with a group of Dutch and Swiss colleagues to Homs. But in Homs he also met people who were supporting Bashar Assad and demanding to protect them from terrorists. A group of local residents and Giles Jacquier who happened to be near came under a grenade thrower fire, which was a common thing in that district. Commenting the tragic death of the French reporter Mother Agnes Mariam, who is the prior of the St James Catholic Cathedral in Damascus, said that there is no protesting opposition in Syria but only bandits who are killing people.

Many people we contacted in Syria including independent foreign reporters told us about the information war against Syria. According to them, Qatari channel Al Jazeera, for example, in order to broadcast a report on mass anti-governmental rallies in Syria made a fake footage with the help of computer editing using dozens of atmosphere players and decoration of Syrian streets, a kind of ?Hollywood village?.

As for the Syrian opposition abroad, its political part is represented by the Syrian National council with the headquarters in Istanbul. It is headed by Burhan Ghalioun, a Syrian-French political scientist at the Sorbonne University in Paris. It is quite a heterogeneous formation which comprises groups with different goals. They represent the Muslim Brotherhood and other Sunnite organizations, Kurdish separatists, Liberal-Democratic dissidents who usually reside in Europe and in the US.

The armed opposition which conducted terrorist attacks in Syria is represented by a number of groups from a military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood to the Libyan radical Islamists and Al Qaeda. According to the information we receive from our Syrian colleagues there are training camps for insurgents in Lebanon and Turkey. The officers of security services of NATO, Turkey and some Arab states are in charge for the training and armament of the insurgents, while the monarchies of the Persian Gulf provide the financing.

The future development of the situation in Syria depends in many ways on the ability of the ruling regime to consolidate public forces and conduct the announced reforms. Other priorities are the liquidation of terrorist groups and stabilization of the domestic situation. In its turn this issue is directly linked to the development of the global policies and will depend on the activities of the leading countries of NATO, Turkey, the Arab League (which sent its monitors to Syria) Russia and China.

As for Russia, it firmly declares that repetition of the ?Libyan scenario? in Syria is inadmissible.

Boris Dolgov is Cand. Sc. (History), Senior research fellow of the Centre for Arabic Studies of the Russian Institute of Oriental Studies.

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Feb  1 23:00:21 2012
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:00:21 +0100
Subject: [THS] John Pilger: In The Assange Case We Are All Suspects Now
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120201225951.04c98460@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30410.htm

In The Assange Case We Are All Suspects Now

Washington's enemy is not "terrorism" but the principle of free speech and voices of conscience within its militarist state.

By John Pilger

February 01, 2012 "Information Clearing House" --- This month's Supreme Court hearing in the Julian Assange case has profound meaning for the preservation of basic freedoms in western democracies.

This is Assange's final appeal against his extradition to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct that were originally dismissed by the chief prosecutor in Stockholm and constitute no crime in Britain.

The consequences, if he loses, lie not in Sweden but in the shadows cast by America's descent into totalitarianism. In Sweden, he is at risk of being "temporarily surrendered" to the US, where his life has been threatened and he is accused of "aiding the enemy" with Bradley Manning, the young soldier accused of leaking evidence of US war crimes to WikiLeaks.

The connections between Manning and Assange have been concocted by a secret grand jury in Virginia that allowed no defence counsel or witnesses, and by a system of plea-bargaining that ensures a 90 per cent conviction rate. It is reminiscent of a Soviet show trial.

Moral choice

The Obama administration's determination to crush Assange is revealed in secret Australian government documents, released under Freedom of Information, which describe Washington's pursuit of WikiLeaks as "unprecedented". It is unprecedented because it subverts the First Amendment of the US constitution, which protects truth-tellers such as WikiLeaks.

In 2008 Barack Obama said, "Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal." Obama has since prosecuted twice as many whistleblowers as all previous US presidents.

With US courts demanding to see the worldwide accounts of Twitter, Google and Yahoo, the threat to Assange, an Australian, extends to any internet user anywhere. Washington's enemy is not "terrorism" but the principle of free speech and voices of conscience within its militarist state and those journalists brave enough to tell their stories.

?How do you prosecute Julian Assange and not the New York Times?" a former administration official told Reuters.

The threat is well understood by the New York Times, which in 2010 published a selection of the WikiLeaks cables. The editor at the time, Bill Keller, boasted that he had sent the cables to the state department for vetting. His obeisance extended to his denial that WikiLeaks was a "partner" - which it was - and to personal attacks on Assange.

The message to all journalists was clear: do your job as it should be done and you are traitors; do your job as we say you should and you are journalists.

Much of the media's depiction of Bradley Manning illuminates this. The world's pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, Manning remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to a "moral choice".

But according to the New York Times, he is weird or mad, a "geek". In an "exclusive investigation", the Guardian reported him as an "unstable" gay man who got "out of control" and who "wet himself" when he was "picked on".

Such psycho-hearsay serves to suppress the truth of the outrage Manning felt at the wanton killing in Iraq, his moral heroism and the criminal complicity of his military superiors. "I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy," he reportedly said.

The treatment handed out to Assange is well documented, though not the duplicitous and cowardly behaviour of his own government. Australia remains a colony in all but name. Australian intelligence agencies are branches of the main office in Washington. The Australian military has played a regular role as US mercenary.

When Prime Minister Gough Whitlam tried to change this in 1975 and secure Australia's partial independence, he was dismissed by a governor general using archaic "reserve powers" who was revealed to have intelligence connections.

Don't explain

WikiLeaks has given Australians a rare glimpse of how their country is run. In 2010, leaked US cables disclosed that top government figures in the Labor Party coup that brought Julia Gillard to power were "protected" sources of the US embassy: what the CIA calls "assets". Kevin Rudd, the prime minister Gillard ousted, apparently had displeased Washington by being disobedient, even suggesting that Australian troops withdraw from Afghanistan.

In the wake of her portentous rise to power, Gillard attacked WikiLeaks's actions as "illegal" and her attorney general threatened to withdraw Assange's passport. Yet the Australian Federal Police reported that Assange and Wiki?Leaks had broken no law.

Freedom of Information files have since shown that Australian diplomats have colluded with the US in its pursuit of Assange. This is not unusual. The government of John Howard ignored the rule of law and conspired with the US to keep David Hicks, an Australian citizen, in Guantanamo Bay, where he was tortured.

Australia's principal intelligence organisation, Asio, is allowed to imprison refugees indefinitely without explanation, prosecution or appeal.
 

Every Australian citizen in grave difficulty overseas is said to have the right to diplomatic support. The denial of this to Assange, bar the perfunctory, is an unreported scandal.

Last September his London lawyer, Gareth Peirce, wrote to the Australian government warning that Assange's "personal safety and security has become at risk in circumstances that have become highly politically charged". Only when the Melbourne Age reported that she had received no response did a dissembling official letter turn up.

In November, Peirce and I briefed the Australian consul general in London, Ken Pascoe. One of Britain's most experienced human rights lawyers, Peirce told him she feared a unique miscarriage of justice if Assange was extradited and his government remained silent. The silence remains

John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker, is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US. In a New Statesman survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. "John Pilger," wrote Harold Pinter, "unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I salute him."

This article was forst posted at www.newstatesman.com 


From ths at psalience.org  Wed Feb  1 23:01:50 2012
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:01:50 +0100
Subject: [THS] It Is Always Darkest Right Before It Goes Completely Black
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120201230102.04c981d0@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30414.htm

A Journey To The End Of Empire:
It Is Always Darkest Right Before It Goes Completely Black

By Phil Rockstroh

February 01, 2012 "Information Clearing House" ---  "When the poet stands at nadir the world must indeed be upside-down. If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.?? Excerpt from, The Time of the Assassins, a study of Rimbaud, by Henry Miller 

There is no reality-based argument denying this: The present system, as defined by the neoliberal economic order, is as destructive to the balance of nature as it is to the individual, both body and psyche. One's body grows obese while Arctic ice and wetlands shrink. Biodiversity decreases as psyches are commodified by ever-proliferating, corporatist/consumer state banality.

But the raging soul of the world will not be assaulted without consequence. Mind and body are intertwined and inseparable from nature, and, when nature responds to our assaults, her replies are known to humankind as the stuff of mythic tragedy and natural catastrophe.

"When the poet lives his hell, it is no longer possible for the common man to escape it."? Excerpt from, The Time of the Assassins, a study of Rimbaud, by Henry Miller

But take heart. As the saying goes, it is always darkest right before it goes completely black.

Rejoice in this: Seeds of futurity require the darkness within soil to dream.

"To go into the dark with a light is to know the light. /To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,/ and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,/ and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings."-- Wendell Berry, To Know The Dark

What "tangible" and "constructive" things can a poetic sensibility contribute to everyday existence? Here's one: The atomized denizens of neoliberal culture are in dire need of a novel yet durable sensibility, one bearing the creativity and stamina required, for example, to withstand the police state rebuffs inflicted by the ruthless authoritarian keepers of the present order
as is the case, when OWS dissidents initiate attempts to retake, inhabit, and re-imagine public space.

Yet, while it is all well and good to be politically enlightened, approaching the tumult of human events guided by reason and restraint, if the self is not saturated in poetry, one will inhabit a dismal tower looking over a desiccated wasteland.

The crackpot realist?s notion that poetry has no value other than what can be quantified in practical terms emerges from the same mindset that deems nature to be merely worth what it can be rendered down to as a commodity. The trees of a rain forest can be pulped to paper cups. A human being is only the content of his resume. The underlying meaning of this sentiment: The value of one's existence is derived by the act of being an asset of the 1%.

Resultantly, the tattered remnants of the neoliberal imagination (embodied in lofty but content-devoid Obama speechifying and the clown car demolition derby of Republican politics) spends its days in a broken tower of the mind, insulated from this reality: The exponentially increasing consequences (e.g., economic collapse, perpetual war, ecocide) created by the excesses of the present paradigm will shake those insular towers to theirs foundations, and, will inevitably caused the structures to totter and collapse.

    The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;

    And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave

    Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score

    Of broken intervals...And I, their sexton slave!

    -- Hart Crane , excerpt from The Broken Tower

We have been "sexton slave" to this destructive order long enough; its lodestar is a death star.

In polar opposition, a poetic view of existence insists that one embrace the sorrow that comes at the end of things. The times have bestowed on us a shuffle to the graveside of our culture, and, we, like members of a New Orleans-style, second line, funeral procession, must allow our hearts to be saturated by sorrowful songs. Yet when the service is complete, the march away from the boneyard should shake the air with the ebullient noise borne of insistent brass.

"Often we're not so much afraid of our own limitations, as we are of the infinite within us."--Nelson Mandela (from an interview from his prison cell, conducted by the late Irish poet and priest, John O'Donnahey)

In this way, we are nourished by the ineffable, whereby unseen components of consciousness provide us the strength to carry the weight of darkness. Therefore, to those who demand this of poets: that all ideas, notions, flights of imagination, revelries, swoons of intuition, Rabelaisian rancor, metaphysical overreach, unnerving apprehensions, and inspired misapprehensions be tamed, rendered practical, and only considered fit to be broached in reputable company when these things bring "concrete" answers to polite dialog--I ask you this, if the defining aspects of our existence were constructed of concrete, would not the world be made of the material of a prison?

Moreover, is this not the building material and psychic criteria comprising the neoliberal paradigm? Is it any wonder that the concept of freedom is under siege? 

Carl Jung averred, when a disconnect occurs between the inner life of the individual and the outward exigencies of daily life that "the Gods [
] become diseases." One way, this assertion can be taken is: There are multiple forces, tangible and intangible, in play in our lives and the trajectory of events e.g., the personal, in the form of the ghosts of trauma that haunt individual memory, but there exist, as well, extant and within, the collective spirit of an age. Tragically, in our own time, within the precincts of power, our national house of spirits has become a madhouse.

Yet beneath the gibbering cacophony of the insane asylums of past eras, beneath the haze of pharmacologically induced stupors of the institutions of the present, there exists much pain. This is the toll taken by a manic flight from honest suffering. At present, this is what we're given in our age of cultural and political disconnect and its attendant sense of nebulous dread.

Paradoxically, while the forces of nature are impersonal, the dilemma feels very personal. Therefore, on this journey to the end of empire, when impersonal elements are in play, one can become alienated from the dehumanizing trajectory of the times. Likewise, as exemplified by the U.S. political system, what process is more impersonal than the process of decay? Apropos, the air is permeated with a reek of putrefaction.  

Yet the earth is kind, for one can use putrescent material in the process of renewal. The loam of earth is enriched by the rancid
just don't swallow it down whole
doing so, will cause you to become ill.

Importantly, because a cultural breakdown is occurring, and culture carries the criteria of psyche, the acts of social engagement through dissent, cultural re-imagining and rebuilding can have a propitious effect upon individual consciousness, an endeavor James Hillman termed "soul-making". Remember to disguise yourself as yourself when approached by ghosts of calcified habit and gods of tumultuous change. This is essential: Because what takes hold and brings about the collapse of an empire
is a loss of collective soul e.g., the type of loss of meaning and purpose evinced when only a meaningless, zombie-like drive remains, because, even though, the culture is dead, it refuses to accept the shroud of the earth's enveloping soil
to have its decomposing remains broken down and returned to the cycle of all things.

As circumstances stand, at present, for the 1%, their refusal to accept the inevitable has yielded grave ramifications for the people, fauna, and flora of the planet. Although, due to their seemingly vacuum-sealed insularity, ensured by vast wealth, the economic and political elite have yet to be touched by the consequences of their actions, much less forced down to earth.

Of course, this behavior defies logic, is in breach of the law, and is an affront to any workable code of ethics--as well as, stands in defiance to the laws of nature, including the force of gravity. But you can count on this, "the unseen hand of the market" (actually the buckling backs of the 1%) can?t hold up the 99%'s swaying tower of hubris for much longer, and when it comes down, stand clear, for there are no bystanders when an empire crumbles.

"That's just the way it is."

As exhibited by the often bland, "normal" outward appearance of a serial killer, when the apologists and operatives of an exploitive, destructive system appear to be reasonable, they can go about their business without creating general alarm. By the same token, while many present day Republicans are zealots--barnburners raving into the flames of the conflagrations created by the militarist/national security/police/prison industrial state--Barack Obama and the Democratic Party serve as normalizers of the pathologies of late empire.

In this manner, atrocious acts can be committed by the state, with increasing frequency, because, over the passage of time, such outrages will have been allowed to pass into the realm of the mundane, and are thus bestowed with a patina of acceptability. 

In nineteenth century Britain, the sugar that sweetened the tea of oh-so civilized, afternoon teatime was harvested by brutalized, Caribbean slaves, who rarely lived past the age of thirty, as, for example, in our time, in our blood-wrought moments of normalcy, we trudge about in sweatshop sewn clothing, brandishing i-Phones manufactured by factory enslaved teenage girls who are forced to work 14 hour plus shifts.

"That's just the way it is" might be one of the most soul-defying phrases in the human lexicon.

Contrast this with the OSW slogan, "The beginning is near.? Hold both sentiments in your mind and discover which one allows your own heart to beat in sync with the heart of the world, and which will grant the imagination and stamina required to remake the world anew.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil at philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's website or at FaceBook.


From ths at psalience.org  Fri Feb  3 15:30:00 2012
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:30:00 +0100
Subject: [THS] Syria. Text Of Leaked Arab League Mission Report
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120203152639.071b8a48@mail.messagingengine.com>

Syria. Text Of Leaked Arab League Mission Report 
Report Reveals Media Lies Regarding Syria
Commentary by Michel Chossudovsky


Global Research, February 1, 2012

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29025

Global Research Editor's Note

We bring to the attention of our reader's the Observers Mission Report of the League of Arab States to Syria.

The report acknowledges the existence of  "an armed entity" involved in the killings of civilians and police as well as the conduct of terrorist acts, which contributed to triggering actions by government forces. 

The Report refers to "armed opposition groups" as well as to the "Free Syrian Army",  both of which, according to the AL Mission, are involved in the deliberate killing of innocent civilians:

In some zones, this armed entity reacted by attacking Syrian security forces and citizens, causing the Government to respond with further violence. In the end, innocent citizens pay the price for those actions with life and limb. 

 "In Homs, Idlib and Hama, the Observer Mission witnessed acts of violence being committed against Government forces and civilians that resulted in several deaths and injuries. Examples of those acts include the bombing of a civilian bus, killing eight persons and injuring others, including women and children, and the bombing of a train carrying diesel oil. In another incident in Homs, a police bus was blown up, killing two police officers. A fuel pipeline and some small bridges were also bombed. "

"Such incidents include the bombing of buildings, trains carrying fuel, vehicles carrying diesel oil and explosions targeting the police, members of the media and fuel pipelines. Some of those attacks have been carried out by the Free Syrian Army and some by other armed opposition groups." 

The Mission also underscored to role of media distortion in the coverage of events in Syria as well as the campaign to discredit ithe Mission's findings. 

"The Mission noted that many parties falsely reported that explosions or violence had occurred in several locations. When the observers went to those locations, they found that those reports were unfounded.

The Mission also noted that, according to its teams in the field, the media exaggerated the nature of the incidents and the number of persons killed in incidents and protests in certain towns."

The Report also underscored attempts to discredit the Mission and dismiss its findings:

Arab and foreign audiences of certain media organizations have questioned the Mission?s credibility because those organizations use the media to distort the facts. It will be difficult to overcome this problem unless there is political and media support for the Mission and its mandate. It is only natural that some negative incidents should occur as it conducts its activities because such incidents occur as a matter of course in similar missions. 

Also of significace were attempts by officials of AL governments to pressure several of the observers into providing "exaggerated accounts of events". 

Some observers reneged on their duties and broke the oath they had taken. They made contact with officials from their countries and gave them exaggerated accounts of events. Those officials consequently developed a bleak and unfounded picture of the situation.

Also of significance is the fact that the Mission acknowledged that peaceful protests by unarmed civilians against the government were not the object of government crackdowns: 

group team leaders [of the Observation mission] witnessed peaceful demonstrations by both Government supporters and the opposition in several places. None of those demonstrations were disrupted, except for some minor clashes with the Mission and between loyalists and opposition. These have not resulted in fatalities since the last presentation before the Arab Ministerial Committee on the Situation in Syria at its meeting of 8 January 2012.

While the Mission does not identify the foreign powers behind "the armed entity", the report dispels the mainstream media lies and fabrications. It largely confirms independent media reports including Global Research's coverage of the armed insurrection since April 2011. See Global Research's Syria Dossier


Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, February 1, 2012


SELECTED EXCERPTS OF OBSERVERS' MISSION REPORT

Report of the Head of the League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria. December 24, 2011 to January 18, 2012

Relevant Excerpts of the Report are indicated below: bold added, Scroll down for Complete Text of Observers' Mission Report): 

The complete leaked report of the Arab League Observers Mission with annexes (pdf) 

"The Mission determined that there is an armed entity that is not mentioned in the protocol. This development on the ground can undoubtedly be attributed to the excessive use of force by Syrian Government forces in response to protests that occurred before the deployment of the Mission demanding the fall of the regime. In some zones, this armed entity reacted by attacking Syrian security forces and citizens, causing the Government to respond with further violence. In the end, innocent citizens pay the price for those actions with life and limb. 
...

In Homs, Idlib and Hama, the Observer Mission witnessed acts of violence being committed against Government forces and civilians that resulted in several deaths and injuries. Examples of those acts include the bombing of a civilian bus, killing eight persons and injuring others, including women and children, and the bombing of a train carrying diesel oil. In another incident in Homs, a police bus was blown up, killing two police officers. A fuel pipeline and some small bridges were also bombed. 

...

28. The Mission noted that many parties falsely reported that explosions or violence had occurred in several locations. When the observers went to those locations, they found that those reports were unfounded.

29. The Mission also noted that, according to its teams in the field, the media exaggerated the nature of the incidents and the number of persons killed in incidents and protests in certain towns.

According to their latest reports and their briefings to the Head of the Mission on 17 January 2012 in preparation for this report, group team leaders witnessed peaceful demonstrations by both Government supporters and the opposition in several places. None of those demonstrations were disrupted, except for some minor clashes with the Mission and between loyalists and opposition. These have not resulted in fatalities since the last presentation before the Arab Ministerial Committee on the Situation in Syria at its meeting of 8 January 2012.
...

Some observers reneged on their duties and broke the oath they had taken. They made contact with officials from their countries and gave them exaggerated accounts of events. Those officials consequently developed a bleak and unfounded picture of the situation.

Arab and foreign audiences of certain media organizations have questioned the Mission?s credibility because those organizations use the media to distort the facts. It will be difficult to overcome this problem unless there is political and media support for the Mission and its mandate. It is only natural that some negative incidents should occur as it conducts its activities because such incidents occur as a matter of course in similar missions. 

...

75. Recently, there have been incidents that could widen the gap and increase bitterness between the parties. These incidents can have grave consequences and lead to the loss of life and property. Such incidents include the bombing of buildings, trains carrying fuel, vehicles carrying diesel oil and explosions targeting the police, members of the media and fuel pipelines. Some of those attacks have been carried out by the Free Syrian Army and some by other armed opposition groups. 

...

Since its establishment, attitudes towards the Mission have been characterized by insincerity or, more broadly speaking, a lack of seriousness. Before it began carrying out its mandate and even before its members had arrived, the Mission was the target of a vicious campaign directed against the League of Arab States and the Head of the Mission, a campaign that increased in intensity after the observers? deployment. The Mission still lack the political and media support it needs in order to fulfil its mandate. Should its mandate be extended, the goals set out in the Protocol will not be achieved unless such support is provided and the Mission receives the backing it needs to ensure the success of the Arab solution." 

COMPLETE TEXT (WITHOUT ANNEXES)

Report of the Head of the League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria. December 24, 2011 to January 18, 2012

[relevant sections of this report have bewen highlighted in bold]

Report of the Head of the League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria for the period from 24
December 2011 to 18 January 2012

The complete leaked report of the Arab League Observers Mission with annexes (pdf) 
In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate

?We offered the trust to the heavens and the earth and the mountains, but they refused to carry it, and were
afraid of it; and man carried it. Surely he is sinful, very foolish? [Qur?an 33:72]

I . Legal bases

1. By resolution 7436 of 2 November 2011, the Council of the League of Arab States adopted the Arab
plan of action annexed thereto, welcomed the Syrian Government?s agreement to the plan, and emphasized the
need for the Syrian Government to commit to the full and immediate implementation of its provisions.

2. On 16 November 2011, the Council of the League of Arab States adopted resolution 7439 approving
the draft protocol of the Legal Centre and the mandate of the League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria,
namely to verify implementation of the provisions of the Arab plan of action to resolve the Syrian crisis and
protect Syrian civilians. The resolution requested the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States to take
such steps as he deemed appropriate to appoint the Head of the League of Arab States Observer Mission and to
make contact with the Syrian Government with a view to signing the Protocol.

3. By resolution 7441 of 24 November 2011, the Council of the League of Arab States requested the
Secretary-General of the League to deploy the Observer Mission to the Syrian Arab Republic in order to fulfil
its mandate under the protocol immediately on its signature.

4. The Syrian Arab Republic and the General Secretariat of the League of Arab States signed the protocol
on 19 December 2011. The protocol provided for the establishment and deployment to the Syrian Arab
Republic of a Mission comprising civilian and military experts from Arab countries and Arab nongovernmental
human rights organizations. Paragraph 5 stated that the Mission should transmit regular reports
on the results of its work to the Secretary-General of the League of Arab State and the Syrian Government for
submission ? via the Arab Ministerial Committee on the Situation in Syria ? to the Council of the League at
the ministerial level for its consideration and appropriate action.

5. On 20 December 2011, the Council of the League approved the appointment of General Muhammad
Ahmad Mustafa Al-Dabi from the Republic of the Sudan as Head of the Observer Mission.

II. Formation of the Mission

6. The General Secretariat requested Member States and relevant Arab organizations to transmit the
names of its candidates for the Mission. On that basis, 166 monitors from 13 Arab countries and six relevant
Arab organizations have thus far been appointed.

III. Visit of the advance delegation of the General Secretariat to Syria

7. In preparation for the Mission, an advance delegation of the General Secretariat visited the Syrian
Arab Republic on 22 December 2011 to discuss the logistical preparations for the Mission.

8. In accordance with the protocol, the Syrian Government confirmed its readiness to facilitate the
Mission in every way by allowing the free and safe movement of all of the observers throughout Syria, and by
refraining from hindering the work of the Mission on security or administrative grounds. The Syrian
Government side also affirmed its commitment to ensuring that the Mission could freely conduct the necessary
meetings; to provide full protection for the observers, taking into consideration the responsibility of the
Mission if it were to insist on visiting areas despite the warning of the security services; and to allow the entry
to Syria of journalists and Arab and international media in accordance with the rules and regulations in force in
the country.

IV. Arrival and preliminary visits of the Head of Mission

9. The Head of the Mission, General Muhammad Ahmad Mustafa Al-Dabi, arrived in the Syrian Arab
Republic on the evening of Saturday 24 December 2011. He held a series of meetings with the Minister for
Foreign Affairs, Mr. Walid Al-Moualem, and with Syrian Government officials, who stated that they stood 
prepared to cooperate fully with the Mission and to endeavour to ensure its success, overcoming any obstacles
that may arise. The necessary logistical and security arrangements were agreed.

10. The Syrian side stated that there were certain areas that the security protection detail would not be able
to enter with the observers for fear of the citizens? reaction. The Head of the Mission replied that that situation
would enable the Mission to engage with citizens and opposition parties without government monitoring, 
thereby removing the citizens? fear of repercussions as a result of communicating with the Mission.

11. The Head of the Mission completed the technical field preparations and secured the necessary
transportation and communication devices in order to start work. He met with the observers who arrived
successively in Syria and briefed them on their duties and the bases of their work under the protocol. The
observers took a special oath for the Mission which had been drafted by the Head.

12. On 27 December 2011, the Head of the Mission and ten observers conducted a preliminary visit to the
city of Homs, one of the epicentres of tension, which has seen acts of violence and armed confrontation
between the Army and the Syrian opposition. Some security barriers separating districts remain in place.

13. Immediately on arriving in Homs, the Head of the Mission met with the Governor of the city, who
explained that there had been an escalation in violence perpetrated by armed groups in the city. There had been
instances of kidnapping and sabotage of Government and civilian facilities. Food was in short supply owing to
the blockade imposed by armed groups, which were believed to include some 3000 individuals. The Governor
further stated that all attempts by religious figures and city notables to calm the situation had failed. He made
enquiries regarding the possibility of addressing the issue of soldiers and vehicles blocked inside Baba Amr.

14. The Mission visited the residential districts of Baba Amr, Karam Al-Zaytun, Al-Khalidiyya and Al-
Ghuta without guards. It met with a number of opposition citizens who described the state of fear, blockade
and acts of violence to which they had been subjected by Government forces. At a time of intense exchanges of
gunfire among the sides, the Mission witnessed the effects of the destruction wrought on outlying districts. The
Mission witnessed an intense exchange of gunfire between the Army and opposition in Baba Amr. It saw four
military vehicles in surrounding areas, and therefore had to return to the Governorate headquarters. It was
agreed with the Governor that five members of the Mission would remain in Homs until the following day to
conduct field work and meet with the greatest possible number of citizens.

15. Immediately on returning from Homs, the Head of the Mission met with the Government and insisted
that it withdraw military vehicles from the city, put an end to acts of violence, protect civilians, lift the
blockade and provide food. He further called for the two sides to exchange the bodies of those killed.

16. At that meeting, the Syrian side agreed to withdraw all military presence from the city and residential
areas except for three army vehicles that were not working and had been surrounded, and one that had been
taken from the Army by armed groups. The Syrian side requested the Mission?s assistance to recover and
remove those vehicles in exchange for the release of four individuals, the exchange of five bodies from each
side, the entry of basic foods for families in the city, and the entry of sanitation vehicles to remove garbage. It
was agreed at the end of the meeting that the Mission would conduct another visit to Homs on the following
day in the company of General Hassan Sharif, the security coordinator for the Government side.

17. During that visit, the Mission was introduced to one of the leading figures in the opposition, who acted
as media representative of the National Council. An extensive discussion took place regarding the offer of the
Syrian Government and the best way to implement the agreement. As a result, the military vehicles were
returned and removed; the bodies of those killed were exchanged; trucks entered the city with food; and three
detainees and two women were released and returned to their families in the presence of the Mission, thereby
calming the situation inside the city.

18. Five days after the monitors were deployed to five zones, the Ministerial Committee requested that the
Head of the Mission report on the Mission?s work. He travelled to Cairo and gave an oral presentation to the
members of the Committee at their meeting of 8 January 2012. It was decided that the work of the Mission
should continue and that the Head of the Mission should submit a report at the end of the period determined in
the protocol, on 19 January 2012. After the Head's return to Damascus to resume his duties, the Mission faced
difficulties from Government loyalists and opposition alike, particularly as a result of statements and media
coverage in the wake of the Committee meeting. That did not, however, affect the work of the Mission or its
full and smooth deployment across the country.

19. Following its arrival, and to this date, the Mission has received numerous letters from the Syrian
committee responsible for coordination with the Mission. The letters refer to the material and human losses
sustained by Government institutions and offices as a result of what is described as sabotage. They assert that
all of the States? vital services have been affected.

V. Deployment of the Observer Mission to Syria

20. The observers were divided into 15 zones covering 20 cities and districts across Syria according to the
time frame set out below. The variation in dates was a result of shortcomings in administrative and technical
preparations, such as the arrival of cars and personnel. Care was taken to ensure even distribution of observers.
Each unit comprised some ten observers of different Arab nationalities. The groups were deployed to Syrian
governorates and towns as follows:

? On 29 December 2011, six groups travelled to Damascus, Homs, Rif Homs, Idlib, Deraa and Hama.
? On 4 January 2012, a group travelled to Aleppo.
? On 9 January 2012, two groups went to Deir Al-Zor and Latakia. However, both returned to Damascus on
10 January 2012 owing to attacks that led to the injury of two of the monitors in Latakia and material
damage to the cars.
? On 10 January 2012, a group travelled to Qamishli and Hasaka.
? On 12 January 2012, a group travelled to Outer Damascus.
? On 13 January 2012, four groups travelled to Suwaida, Bu Kamal, Deir Al-Zor, Palmyra (Tadmur),
Sukhna, Banyas and Tartous.
? On 15 January 2012, two groups travelled to Latakia, Raqqa and Madinat Al-Thawra.
Annex 1. List of observers, their nationalities and their distribution.
21. The observers were provided with the following:
? A map of the region;
? A code of conduct for observers;
? The duties of the group leaders;
? The duties of the observers;
? Necessary equipment such as computers, cameras and communication devices.

22. An operations room was established at the offices of the League of Arab States in Damascus. The
office is open 24 hours a day and is directly linked to the League of Arab States operations room in Cairo and
to the groups deployed across Syria. The room receives daily reports from the field teams and conveys special
instructions for monitoring. Owing to the volume of work, an additional operations room was opened at the
Mission headquarters in Damascus with the task of allocating individuals and assigning committees on followup,
detainees, the media and financial affairs. It coordinates with the main operations room at the offices of the
League of Arab States.

23. In Latakia and Deir Al-Zor, the Mission faced difficulties from Government loyalists. In Latakia,
thousands surrounded the Mission?s cars, chanting slogans in favour of the President and against the Mission.
The situation became out of control and monitors were attacked. Two sustained light injuries and an armoured
car was completely crushed. In order to address the matter, the Head of Mission contacted the Syrian
committee responsible for coordination with the Mission. Nevertheless, the Head of the Mission ordered the
immediate return of the two groups to Damascus. He met the Minister for Foreign Affairs and made a stronglyworded
formal protest. The Syrian side strongly condemned the incident and extended a formal apology,
explaining that the events were not in any sense deliberate. In order to emphasize the point, the Syrian Deputy
Minister for Foreign Affairs met with the members of the Latakia team and stated that the Syrian Government
would address the shortcoming immediately and guarantee the safety and security of observers everywhere. He
apologized to them for the unfortunate and unintentional incidents. The members were then assigned to new
zones after four days? rest.

VI. Implementation of the Mission?s mandate under the protocol

24. The Head of the Mission stresses that this assessment in terms of the provisions of the protocol
summarizes the findings of the groups as relayed by group leaders at their meeting with the Head of the
Mission on 17 January 2012. 

A. Monitoring and observation of the cessation of all violence by all sides in cities and residential
areas

25. On being assigned to their zones and starting work, the observers witnessed acts of violence
perpetrated by Government forces and an exchange of gunfire with armed elements in Homs and Hama. As a
result of the Mission?s insistence on a complete end to violence and the withdrawal of Army vehicles and
equipment, this problem has receded. The most recent reports of the Mission point to a considerable calming of
the situation and restraint on the part of those forces.

26. In Homs and Dera?a, the Mission observed armed groups committing acts of violence against
Government forces, resulting in death and injury among their ranks. In certain situations, Government forces
responded to attacks against their personnel with force. The observers noted that some of the armed groups
were using flares and armour-piercing projectiles.

27. In Homs, Idlib and Hama, the Observer Mission witnessed acts of violence being committed against
Government forces and civilians that resulted in several deaths and injuries. Examples of those acts include the
bombing of a civilian bus, killing eight persons and injuring others, including women and children, and the
bombing of a train carrying diesel oil. In another incident in Homs, a police bus was blown up, killing two
police officers. A fuel pipeline and some small bridges were also bombed.

28. The Mission noted that many parties falsely reported that explosions or violence had occurred in
several locations. When the observers went to those locations, they found that those reports were unfounded.

29. The Mission also noted that, according to its teams in the field, the media exaggerated the nature of the
incidents and the number of persons killed in incidents and protests in certain towns.

B. Verifying that Syrian security services and so-called shabiha gangs do not obstruct peaceful
demonstrations

30. According to their latest reports and their briefings to the Head of the Mission on 17 January 2012 in
preparation for this report, group team leaders witnessed peaceful demonstrations by both Government
supporters and the opposition in several places. None of those demonstrations were disrupted, except for some
minor clashes with the Mission and between loyalists and opposition. These have not resulted in fatalities since
the last presentation before the Arab Ministerial Committee on the Situation in Syria at its meeting of 8
January 2012.

31. The reports and briefings of groups leaders state that citizens belonging to the opposition surround the
Mission on its arrival and use the gathering as a barrier from the security services. However, such incidents
have gradually decreased.

32. The Mission has received requests from opposition supporters in Homs and Deraa that it should stay
on-site and not leave, something that may be attributable to fear of attack after the Mission?s departure.
C. Verifying the release of those detained in the current incidents

33. The Mission received reports from parties outside Syria indicating that the number of detainees was
16,237. It also received information from the opposition inside the country that the number of detainees was
12,005. In validating those figures, the teams in the field discovered that there were discrepancies between the
lists, that information was missing and inaccurate, and that names were repeated. The Mission is
communicating with the concerned Government agencies to confirm those numbers.

34. The Mission has delivered to the Syrian Government all of the lists received from the Syrian
opposition inside and outside Syria. In accordance with the protocol, it has demanded the release of the
detainees.

35. On 15 January 2012, President Bashar Al-Assad issued a legislative decree granting a general amnesty
for crimes perpetrated in the context of the events from 15 March 2011 through to the issuance of the decree.
In implementation of the amnesty, the relevant Government authorities have been periodically releasing
detainees in the various regions so long as they are not wanted in connection with other crimes. The Mission 
has been supervising the releases and is monitoring the process with the Government?s full and active
coordination.

36. On 19 January 2012, the Syrian government stated that 3569 detainees had been released from military
and civil prosecution services. The Mission verified that 1669 of those detained had thus far been released. It
continues to follow up the issue with the Government and the opposition, emphasizing to the Government side
that the detainees should be released in the presence of observers so that the event can be documented.

37. The Mission has validated the following figures for the total number of detainees that the Syrian
government thus far claims to have released:
? Before the amnesty: 4,035
? After the amnesty: 3,569.
The Government has therefore claimed that a total of 7,604 detainees have been released.

38. The Mission has verified the correct number of detainees released and arrived at the following figures:
? Before the amnesty: 3,483
? After the amnesty: 1,669
The total number of confirmed releases is therefore 5152. The Mission is continuing to monitor the
process and communicate with the Syrian Government for the release of the remaining detainees.

D. Confirming the withdrawal of the military presence from residential neighbourhoods in which
demonstrations and protests occurred or are occurring

39. Based on the reports of the field-team leaders and the meeting held on 17 January 2012 with all team
leaders, the Mission confirmed that all military vehicles, tanks and heavy weapons had been withdrawn from
cities and residential neighbourhoods. Although there are still some security measures in place in the form of
earthen berms and barriers in front of important buildings and in squares, they do not affect citizens. It should
be noted that the Syrian Minister of Defence, in a meeting with the Head of the Mission that took place on 5
January 2012, affirmed his readiness to accompany the Head of the Mission to all sites and cities designated by
the latter and from which the Mission suspects that the military presence had not yet been withdrawn, with a
view to issuing field orders and rectifying any violation immediately.

40. Armoured vehicles (personnel carriers) are present at some barriers. One of those barriers is located in
Homs and some others in Madaya, Zabadani and Rif Damascus. The presence of those vehicles was reported
and they were subsequently withdrawn from Homs. It has been confirmed that the residents of Zabadani and
Madaya reached a bilateral agreement with the Government that led to the removal of those barriers and
vehicles.

E. Confirming the accreditation by the Syrian Government of Arab and international media
organizations and that those organizations are allowed to move freely in all parts of Syria

41. Speaking on behalf of his Government, the Syrian Minister of Information confirmed that, from the
beginning of December 2011 to 15 January 2012, the Government had accredited 147 Arab and foreign media
organizations. Some 112 of those organizations entered Syrian territory, joining the 90 other accredited
organizations operating in Syria through their full-time correspondents.

42. The Mission followed up on this issue. It identified 36 Arab and foreign media organizations and
several journalists located in a number of Syrian cities. It also received complaints that the Syrian Government
had granted some media organizations authorization to operate for four days only, which was insufficient time,
according to those organizations. In addition to preventing them from entering the country until they had
specified their destinations, journalists were required obtain further authorization once they had entered the
country and were prevented from going to certain areas. The Syrian Government confirmed that it grants media
organizations operating permits that are valid for 10 days, with the possibility of renewal.

43. Reports and information from some sectors [teams] indicate that the Government places restrictions on
the movement of media organizations in opposition areas. In many cases, those restrictions caused journalists
to trail the Mission in order to do their work.

44. In Homs, a French journalist who worked for the France 2 channel was killed and a Belgian journalist
was injured. The Government and opposition accused each other of being responsible for the incident, and both
sides issued statements of condemnation. The Government formed an investigative committee in order to
determine the cause of the incident. It should be noted that Mission reports from Homs indicate that the French
journalist was killed by opposition mortar shells.

Annex 2. A list of media organizations identified and a list of media organizations that entered Syria, according
to the official information.

VII. Obstacles encountered by the Mission

A. Monitors

45. Some of the experts nominated were not capable of taking on such a responsibility and did not have
prior experience in this field.

46. Some of the observers did not grasp the amount of responsibility that was being placed on them and
the importance of giving priority to Arab interests over personal interests.

47. In the course of field work, some observers were unable to deal with difficult circumstances, which are
at the core of their duties. Monitors must have certain traits and the specializations required for such work.

48. A number of the observers are elderly, and some of them suffer from health conditions that prevent
them from performing their duties.

49. Twenty-two observers declined to complete the mission for personal reasons. Some observers offered
unfounded reasons, which were not accepted by the Head of the Mission, while others had a personal agenda.
Annex 3. List of the names of observers who declined to complete the Mission.

50. Some observers reneged on their duties and broke the oath they had taken. They made contact with
officials from their countries and gave them exaggerated accounts of events. Those officials consequently
developed a bleak and unfounded picture of the situation.

51. Some of the observers in the various zones are demanding housing similar to their counterparts in
Damascus or financial reimbursement equivalent to the difference in accommodation rates resulting from the
difference in hotel standards or accommodation in Damascus. These issues do not warrant comment.

52. Some observers are afraid to perform their duties owing to the violent incidents that have occurred in
certain locations. The unavailability of armoured cars at all the sites and the lack of bulletproof vests have
negatively affected some observers? ability to carry out their duties.

Comments of the Head of the Mission concerning the observers

53. Some of the observers, unfortunately, believed that their journey to Syria was for amusement, and
were therefore surprised by the reality of the situation. They did not expect to be assigned to teams or to have
to remain at stations outside the capital or to face the difficulties that they encountered.

54. Some of the observers were not familiar with the region and its geography. The unavailability of
armoured vehicles and protective vests had a negative effect on the spirits of some observers.

55. Some of the observers experienced hostility both from the Syrian opposition and loyalists. This
hostility also had a negative effect on their spirits.

56. Despite the foregoing comments, the performance of many of the observers was outstanding and
praiseworthy. Those who underperformed will improve with experience and guidance.

B. Security restrictions

57. Although it welcomed the Mission and its Head and repeatedly emphasized that it would not impose
any security restrictions that could obstruct the movement of the Mission, the Government deliberately
attempted to limit the observers? ability to travel extensively in various regions. The Government also
attempted to focus the attention of the Mission on issues in which it is interested. The Mission resisted those
attempts and responded to them in a manner that allowed it to fulfil its mandate and overcome the obstacles
that stood in the way of its work.

C. Communication equipment

58. The Mission communicates with the various groups by mobile phones and facsimile machines
connected to the local Syrian telephone network. Occasional cuts in service prevent the Mission from
communicating with the groups.

59. The Mission was equipped with 10 Thuraya satellite phones. Such devices are hard to use inside
buildings owing of the difficulty in obtain a satellite signal. As a result, ordinary phones and fax machines,
which are not considered secure communications equipment, were used to send daily reports, instead.

60. The communication equipment the Qatari observers brought with them was held at the Jordanian
border, despite demands made by the Head of the Mission to the Syrian authorities to permit entry of that
equipment. That notwithstanding, the amount of equipment would not have been enough to meet the needs of
all sites and station.

61. The Mission does not have portable two-way radios for communication between team members. The
Chinese Embassy provided 10 such radios as a gift to the Mission. They were used in three sectors only.

62. Internet service is unavailable in some regions, and in other areas it is intermittent, including in the
capital.

63. There are no cameras attached to the vehicles used by the Mission, which would facilitate observers?
work in dangerous areas.

D. Transportation

64. The Mission has 38 cars at its disposal (23 armoured and 15 non-armoured), including 28 four-wheel
drive vehicles and 10 sedans. It should be noted that the Mission?s mandate requires the used of armoured fourwheel
drive vehicles, given the nature of the Mission. The number of such vehicles currently available does not
satisfy the needs of the Mission, particularly for transportation into trouble spots.

65. When it was first deployed, the Mission rented several cars from local sources for use in monitoring
operations. However, owing to some acts of violence directed against the field teams, the rental companies
recalled those vehicles and their drivers out of fear for their safety.

66. The Mission encountered difficulties in hiring drivers because the opposition groups refused to allowf
local drivers to enter their areas because they believed the drivers were members of the security services,
which forces the observers to drive the vehicles themselves.

67. Some of the observers demanded to use vehicles sent by their countries, a demand that was denied by
the Head of the Mission, who allocated the vehicles according to the needs of each zone.

Annex 4. List showing the number, types and distribution of vehicles and the countries that provided them.
E. The media

68. Since it began its work, the Mission has been the target of a vicious media campaign. Some media
outlets have published unfounded statements, which they attributed to the Head of the Mission. They have also
grossly exaggerated events, thereby distorting the truth.

69. Such contrived reports have helped to increase tensions among the Syrian people and undermined the
observers? work. Some media organizations were exploited in order to defame the Mission and its Head and
cause the Mission to fail.

VIII. Basic needs of the Mission, should its mandate be renewed

? 100 additional young observers, preferably military personnel
? 30 armoured vehicles
? Light protective vests
? Vehicle-mounted photographic equipment
? Modern communications equipment
? Binoculars, ordinary and night-vision

IX. Evaluation:

70. The purpose of the Protocol is to protect Syrian citizens through the commitment of the Syrian
Government to stop acts of violence, release detainees and withdraw all military presence from cities and
residential neighbourhoods. This phase must lead to dialogue among the Syrian sides and the launching of a
parallel political process. Otherwise, the duration of this Mission will be extended without achieving the
desired results on the ground.

71. The Mission determined that there is an armed entity that is not mentioned in the protocol. This
development on the ground can undoubtedly be attributed to the excessive use of force by Syrian Government
forces in response to protests that occurred before the deployment of the Mission demanding the fall of the
regime. In some zones, this armed entity reacted by attacking Syrian security forces and citizens, causing the
Government to respond with further violence. In the end, innocent citizens pay the price for those actions with
life and limb.

72. The Mission noted that the opposition had welcomed it and its members since their deployment to
Syria. The citizens were reassured by the Mission?s presence and came forward to present their demands,
although the opposition had previously been afraid to do so publicly owing to their fear of being arrested once
again, as they had been prior to the Mission?s arrival in Syria. However, this was not case in the period that
followed the last Ministerial Committee statement, although the situation is gradually improving.

73. The Mission noted that the Government strived to help it succeed in its task and remove any barriers
that might stand in its way. The Government also facilitated meetings with all parties. No restrictions were
placed on the movement of the Mission and its ability to interview Syrian citizens, both those who opposed the
Government and those loyal to it.

74. In some cities, the Mission sensed the extreme tension, oppression and injustice from which the Syrian
people are suffering. However, the citizens believe the crisis should be resolved peacefully through Arab
mediation alone, without international intervention. Doing so would allow them to live in peace and complete
the reform process and bring about the change they desire. The Mission was informed by the opposition,
particularly in Dar?a, Homs, Hama and Idlib, that some of its members had taken up arms in response to the
suffering of the Syrian people as a result of the regime?s oppression and tyranny; corruption, which affects all
sectors of society; the use of torture by the security agencies; and human rights violations.

75. Recently, there have been incidents that could widen the gap and increase bitterness between the
parties. These incidents can have grave consequences and lead to the loss of life and property. Such incidents
include the bombing of buildings, trains carrying fuel, vehicles carrying diesel oil and explosions targeting the
police, members of the media and fuel pipelines. Some of those attacks have been carried out by the Free
Syrian Army and some by other armed opposition groups.

76. The Mission has adhered scrupulously to its mandate, as set out in the Protocol. It has observed daily
realities on the ground with complete neutrality and independence, thereby ensuring transparency and integrity
in its monitoring of the situation, despite the difficulties the Mission encountered and the inappropriate actions
of some individuals.

77. Under the Protocol, the Mission?s mandate is one month. This does not allow adequate time for
administrative preparations, let alone for the Mission to carry out its task. To date, the Mission has actually
operated for 23 days. This amount of time is definitely not sufficient, particularly in view of the number of
items the Mission must investigate. The Mission needs to remain on the ground for a longer period of time,
which would allow it to experience citizens? daily living conditions and monitor all events. It should be noted
that similar previous operations lasted for several months or, in some cases, several years.

78. Arab and foreign audiences of certain media organizations have questioned the Mission?s credibility
because those organizations use the media to distort the facts. It will be difficult to overcome this problem
unless there is political and media support for the Mission and its mandate. It is only natural that some negative
incidents should occur as it conducts its activities because such incidents occur as a matter of course in similar
missions.

79. The Mission arrived in Syria after the imposition of sanctions aimed at compelling to implement what
was agreed to in the Protocol. Despite that, the Mission was welcomed by the opposition, loyalists and the
Government. Nonetheless, questions remains as to how the Mission should fulfil its mandate. It should be
noted that the mandate established for the Mission in the Protocol was changed in response to developments on
the ground and the reactions thereto. Some of those were violent reactions by entities that were not mentioned 
in the Protocol. All of these developments necessitated an expansion of and a change in the Mission?s mandate.
The most important point in this regard is the commitment of all sides to cease all acts of violence, thereby
allowing the Mission to complete its tasks and, ultimately, lay the groundwork for the political process.

80. Should there be agreement to extend its mandate, then the Mission must be provided with
communications equipment, means of transportation and all the equipment it requires to carry out its mandate
on the ground.

81. On the other hand, ending the Mission?s work after such a short period will reverse any progress, even
if partial, that has thus far been made. This could perhaps lead to chaos on the ground because all the parties
involved in the crisis thus remain unprepared for the political process required to resolve the Syrian crisis.

82. Since its establishment, attitudes towards the Mission have been characterized by insincerity or, more
broadly speaking, a lack of seriousness. Before it began carrying out its mandate and even before its members
had arrived, the Mission was the target of a vicious campaign directed against the League of Arab States and
the Head of the Mission, a campaign that increased in intensity after the observers? deployment. The Mission
still lack the political and media support it needs in order to fulfil its mandate. Should its mandate be extended,
the goals set out in the Protocol will not be achieved unless such support is provided and the Mission receives
the backing it needs to ensure the success of the Arab solution.

X. Recommendations:

83. In view of the above and of the success achieved in executing the provision of the Protocol, which the
Syrian Government pledged to implement, I recommend the following:

? The Mission must be provided with administrative and logistic support in order allow it to carry out its
tasks. The Mission must also be give the media and political support required to create an appropriate
environment that will enable it to fulfil its mandate in the required manner.

? The political process must be accelerated and a national dialogue must be launched. That dialogue should
run in parallel with the Mission?s work in order to create an environment of confidence that would
contribute to the Mission?s success and prevent a needless extension of its presence in Syria.

(Signed) Muhammad Ahmad Mustafa Al-Dabi
Head of the Mission

Annexes

1. List of observers, their nationalities and their distribution.
2. List of media organizations identified and a list of media organizations that entered Syria, according to the
official information.
3. List of the names of observers who declined to complete the Mission.
4. List showing the number, types and distribution of vehicles and the countries that provided them.

Translated from Arabic
League of Arab States Observer Mission to Syria


The complete leaked report of the Arab League Observers Mission to Syria (pdf)



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From ths at psalience.org  Sat Feb  4 12:08:43 2012
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:08:43 +0100
Subject: [THS] Iran : Fact Checking the Media
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120204115817.02b0ada0@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30437.htm

Iran : Fact Checking the Media

By Dennis Kucinich

February 03, 2012 "Information Clearing House" ---  During an interview last month on CBS' Face the Nation, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta set the record straight on Iran: "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No." But if you read recent news reports lately, you'd think otherwise.


The media coverage on Iran is mirroring the coverage in the lead-up to the Iraq war: grand claims about a smoking gun that doesn't exist. For example, The New York Times incorrectly reported last month that the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran concluded that their nuclear program had a military objective. The paper's public editor, Arthur Brisbane, was forced to acknowledge their mistake and wrote: "Some readers, mindful of the faulty intelligence and reporting about Saddam Hussein's weapons program, are watching the Iran nuclear coverage very closely." Other media outlets such as National Public Radio, PBS and The Washington Post have been challenged on their coverage too.

A recent publication from the Center for Strategic and International Studies titled "The IAEA's Iran Report and Misplaced Paranoia," noted that "With few exceptions, these revelations are not exactly new. More importantly, neither is the thrust of the report: that Iran is developing some capabilities that can only be understood as preliminaries to the development of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, early coverage of the report's release gives the opposite impression."

Many have recognized that the media failed to do its job in the lead-up to the Iraq war. The potential consequences of treading on that same path with Iran are grave. The U.S. has thus far spent over $1.2 trillion of borrowed money on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Military action against Iran would be disastrous for the region and for U.S. moral standing. A serious diplomatic track based on mutual trust and respect is the only way to achieve increased transparency.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

xclusive: Israel Warns US Jews: Iran Could Strike Here

 
By RICHARD ESPOSITO

 
Israeli facilities in North America -- and around the world -- are on high alert, according to an internal security document obtained by ABC News that predicted the threat from Iran against Jewish targets will increase. <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=iqnuv6bab&et=1109221212453&s=23112&e=001ISlxCltCqBySvOj87UbYaqtrSA9M1fN6jjwRdb8w8mZY9NcufOUedXiUbJHl5-YeoCeafdM_kLgdgG3lqMjo6QJDCz5uC94EGiokrpaJ37WO8V9y15M0lWJywMdIIWSYyFIYQHqxH78rPS24p9hiC_l6FRB9tnA1>http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30435.htm

 

 

 
Engineering Consent For An Attack On Iran
US Fears Iran's Links to Al Qaeda

 
BY SIOBHAN GORMAN

 
Officials believe country may have provided aid to terror group.  <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=iqnuv6bab&et=1109221212453&s=23112&e=001ISlxCltCqBzt7HPorOiEnZ3dRXIUeU2a9_eA4mz56x1IEv0DUlDUzOHUPAza7t_Mnck7llWSUGZ87JrSDx5r7-qnBzE_H0676R798O5jtrCDVeCmsgwykyA-jf3kXQ69nO8uSIv7De9CTHy4KA0a5eJE38zVfLLA>http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30434.htm

 
Iran is the Root of all Evil

 
By Glenn Greenwald

 
Is there anything those Persian Monsters aren't guilty of?  <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=iqnuv6bab&et=1109221212453&s=23112&e=001ISlxCltCqBxJV7mGqSpZL_yN6vz8HjXxliY22Fo-A2E-YXZYN3rwfA6fzVQOuiDtHyTVHHHS7pEYd-crfeDmIFWH29LxYQf7_oYnf3brpn9QB0gjAfZG1M-sa4bJNK6peBZmue3_RaoJ5D7_STQQ28dyWNXhAIYb>http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30430.htm

 

 

 
How Hollywood Spreads Propaganda.

 
By Danny Schechter

 
Iran seems to many observers to be next in line for the Iraqi freedom treatment, the latest in a long line of "enemy" nations menaced by overt and covert military threats by the United States and its allies.  <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=iqnuv6bab&et=1109221212453&s=23112&e=001ISlxCltCqBxIvLj6MZca--4ElNRJ0BDfqjuwej2BacP8ofx27d0q32J-dSmUdsrPhPh1LmgLaux0eCCaFjUwgk4mcYmvfBZ7CcxQvq4hMWGo42-L2OtkEY9jQo73suv1VY8W5O3tZYN2UUXDRnAOd_kPyDTqWvr0>http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30432.htm

 

 

 
US Preparing Something Against Iran

 
By Gennady Yevstafyev Retired Lieutenant-General of Russia's Foreign Intelligence.

 
Iran is a key, it is a lynchpin of the security situation in the Gulf as far as anti-American forces are concerned.  <http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=iqnuv6bab&et=1109221212453&s=23112&e=001ISlxCltCqBx4_VBC9v1Ke4KzwgowqtAb5eA_PS7h3D62iwh4XeUgYYAO871D_FEW6RlOj7EJETMPGw0u7FmUJIGYi8fBK0Ov8F68Rl0lJyZ4AK9JgT5JiHzEXTJSburm3gSSzUOvOWAwD08eneaSTsRH9l1iqnhL>http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30431.htm

 


From ths at psalience.org  Sat Feb  4 12:27:36 2012
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:27:36 +0100
Subject: [THS] Geoffrey Robertson: WikiLeaks aside,
 Assange case strikes core  of civil liberty
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120204121630.04843850@mail.messagingengine.com>

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/wikileaks-aside-assange-case-strikes-core-of-civil-liberty-20120202-1qvj2.html

WikiLeaks aside, Assange case strikes core of civil liberty
Geoffrey Robertson
February 3, 2012


Europe has blurred the line between enforcement and the judiciary.

JULIAN Assange's current court appearance in Britain has nothing to do with sex or United States diplomatic cables or even with WikiLeaks. But it may make an important contribution to European law.

The United Kingdom Supreme Court will be considering the point I raised on his behalf when a Swedish prosecutor claimed to be a ''judicial authority'' empowered to issue a warrant to have him extradited to prison in Stockholm. My written argument began quite bluntly: ''The notion that a prosecutor is a 'judicial authority' is a contradiction in terms.''

Judges must, as their defining quality, be independent of government. Police and prosecutors employed and promoted by the state obviously cannot be perceived as impartial if they are permitted to decide issues on the liberty of individuals.
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They are expected to be zealous in working up evidence against a suspect, so they are the last people who can be trusted to weigh up impartially the evidence they themselves have drummed up. That is a matter for a court.

So how comes it that in Sweden and many other European countries, prosecutors and even policemen and women are allowed to issue a so-called European arrest warrant, which has the draconian effect of requiring the arrest of people in another country and dragging them for trial in the state which has issued the warrant?

The answer partly derives from the lack of principle in the historical development of European criminal law, where for centuries prosecutors and ministers of justice have exercised powers that in the UK and Australia would need judicial approval. That Napoleonic figure, the ''investigating magistrate'' - a judicial official who conducts a pretrial investigation - has helped to muddy the distinction between law enforcement agencies and judges.

So when the major European countries got together 12 years ago to devise a fast-track extradition process, and decided that European arrest warrants requiring the arrest and surrender of individuals could be issued by ''judicial authorities'', there was some confusion about what that term meant, and whether police and prosecutors might qualify. Sweden and some other countries thought they did.

It will be inconvenient if Assange's appeal succeeds, because European countries will have to change their laws. But the argument from inconvenience is the classic way for civil liberties to be lost.

The principle of judicial independence is especially important in the Assange case, where an allegation of what Swedes describe as ''minor rape'' (another contradiction in terms) was dismissed by a very experienced Stockholm prosecutor.

It was later revived (in an unfair process from which Assange was excluded) by another prosecutor with a gender agenda who was given to issuing self-promoting press statements and withholding exculpatory evidence. She was, therefore, an inappropriate person to take what should have been an impartial decision about whether a European arrest warrant should be issued against her quarry.

So the point is important, as the UK's Supreme Court said in December when granting leave to appeal. Its decision can be expected in April or May this year.

A ruling in Assange's favour would not prevent Sweden from extraditing him eventually, but it would have to change its procedures and have his European arrest warrant issued by a court. Other countries - France and Germany among them - would have to change their practice of having police and prosecutors issuing European arrest warrants as well, if they want to get their hands on suspects in the UK.

The case comes at an interesting time in Britain, where there is a debate over whether the country's acceptance of the European Convention on Human Rights should be supplemented or replaced with a British Bill of Rights which would strengthen traditional liberties.

You cannot get anything more traditional than the liberty that flows from the independence of the judiciary.

The notion that anyone in the UK can be arrested, deported, denied bail and then tried in secret (the procedure for dealing with sex crime charges in Sweden), all on the say-so of an obviously prejudiced foreign prosecutor, could strike many as oppressive.

Former UN appeal judge Geoffrey Robertson, QC, advises Julian Assange and is the author of Crimes Against Humanity and The Justice Game.


From ths at psalience.org  Sun Feb  5 22:30:05 2012
From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary)
Date: Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:30:05 +0100
Subject: [THS] William Blum: The Anti-Empire Report
Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20120205222606.03dfb148@mail.messagingengine.com>

The Anti-Empire Report

February 3rd, 2012
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org
The Lord High Almighty Pooh-Bah of threats. The Grand Ayatollah of nuclear menace.

As we all know only too well, the United States and Israel would hate to see Iran possessing nuclear weapons. Being "the only nuclear power in the Middle East" is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. But ? in the real, non-propaganda world ? is USrael actually fearful of an attack from a nuclear-armed Iran? In case you've forgotten ...

In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion "Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel." She "also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears." 1

2009: "A senior Israeli official in Washington" asserted that "Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation." 2

In 2010 the Sunday Times of London (January 10) reported that Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, war hero, pillar of the Israeli defense establishment, and former director-general of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, "believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons."

Early last month, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a television audience: "Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No, but we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability." 3

A week later we could read in the New York Times (January 15) that "three leading Israeli security experts ? the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz ? all recently declared that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel."

Then, a few days afterward, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in an interview with Israeli Army Radio (January 18), had this exchange:

    Question: Is it Israel's judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

    Barak: People ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now ... in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently that is not the case.

Lastly, we have the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, in a report to Congress: "We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons. ... There are "certain things [the Iranians] have not done" that would be necessary to build a warhead. 4

Admissions like the above ? and there are others ? are never put into headlines by the American mass media; indeed, only very lightly reported at all; and sometimes distorted ? On the Public Broadcasting System (PBS News Hour, January 9), the non-commercial network much beloved by American liberals, the Panetta quote above was reported as: "But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that's what concerns us." Flagrantly omitted were the preceding words: "Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No ..." 5

One of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, was interviewed by Playboy magazine in June 2007:

    Playboy: Can the World live with a nuclear Iran?

    Van Creveld: The U.S. has lived with a nuclear Soviet Union and a nuclear China, so why not a nuclear Iran? I've researched how the U.S. opposed nuclear proliferation in the past, and each time a country was about to proliferate, the U.S. expressed its opposition in terms of why this other country was very dangerous and didn't deserve to have nuclear weapons. Americans believe they're the only people who deserve to have nuclear weapons, because they are good and democratic and they like Mother and apple pie and the flag. But Americans are the only ones who have used them. ... We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us. We cannot say so too openly, however, because we have a history of using any threat in order to get weapons ... thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S. and Germany."

And throughout these years, regularly, Israeli and American officials have been assuring us that Iran is World Nuclear Threat Number One, that we can't relax our guard against them, that there should be no limit to the ultra-tough sanctions we impose upon the Iranian people and their government. Repeated murder and attempted murder of Iranian nuclear scientists, sabotage of Iranian nuclear equipment with computer viruses, the sale of faulty parts and raw materials, unexplained plane crashes, explosions at Iranian facilities ... Who can be behind this but USrael? How do we know? It's called "plain common sense". Or do you think it was Costa Rica? Or perhaps South Africa? Or maybe Thailand?

Defense Secretary Panetta recently commented on one of the assassinations of an Iranian scientist. He put it succinctly: "That's not what the United States does." 6

Does anyone know Leon Panetta's email address? I'd like to send him my list of United States assassination plots. More than 50 foreign leaders were targeted over the years, many successfully. 7

Not long ago, Iraq and Iran were regarded by USrael as the most significant threats to Israeli Middle-East hegemony. Thus was born the myth of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the United States proceeded to turn Iraq into a basket case. That left Iran, and thus was born the myth of the Iranian Nuclear Threat. As it began to sink in that Iran was not really that much of a nuclear threat, or that this "threat" was becoming too difficult to sell to the rest of the world, USrael decided that, at a minimum, it wanted regime change. The next step may be to block Iran's lifeline ? oil sales using the Strait of Hormuz. Ergo, the recent US and EU naval buildup near the Persian Gulf, an act of war trying to goad Iran into firing the first shot. If Iran tries to counter this blockade it could be the signal for another US Basket Case, the fourth in a decade, with the devastated people of Libya and Afghanistan, along with Iraq, currently enjoying America's unique gift of freedom and democracy.

On January 11, the Washington Post reported: "In addition to influencing Iranian leaders directly, [a US intelligence official] says another option here is that [sanctions] will create hate and discontent at the street level so that the Iranian leaders realize that they need to change their ways."

How utterly charming, these tactics and goals for the 21st century by the leader of "The Free World". (Is that expression still used?)

The neo-conservative thinking (and Barack Obama can be regarded as often being a fellow traveler of such) is even more charming than that. Listen to Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at America's most prominent neo-con think tank, American Enterprise Institute:

    The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it's Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don't do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, "See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn't getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately." ... And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem. 8

What are we to make of that and all the other quotations above? I think it gets back to my opening statement: Being "the only nuclear power in the Middle East" is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. Is USrael willing to go to war to hold on to that card?
Please tell me again ... What is the war in Afghanistan about?

With the US war in Iraq supposedly having reached a good conclusion (or halfway decent ... or better than nothing ... or let's get the hell out of here while some of us are still in one piece and there are some Iraqis we haven't yet killed), the best and the brightest in our government and media turn their thoughts to what to do about Afghanistan. It appears that no one seems to remember, if they ever knew, that Afghanistan was not really about 9-11 or fighting terrorists (except the many the US has created by its invasion and occupation), but was about pipelines.

President Obama declared in August 2009: "But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans." 9

Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.

Never mind that the "plotting to attack America" in 2001 was devised in Germany and Spain and the United States more than in Afghanistan. Why hasn't the United States bombed those countries?

Indeed, what actually was needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does "an even larger safe haven" mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

The only "necessity" that drew the United States to Afghanistan was the desire to establish a military presence in this land that is next door to the Caspian Sea region of Central Asia ? which reportedly contains the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world ? and build oil and gas pipelines from that region running through Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is well situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of south Asia, pipelines that can bypass those not-yet Washington clients, Iran and Russia. If only the Taliban would not attack the lines. Here's Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, in 2007: "One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south." 10

Since the 1980s all kinds of pipelines have been planned for the area, only to be delayed or canceled by one military, financial or political problem or another. For example, the so-called TAPI pipeline (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) had strong support from Washington, which was eager to block a competing pipeline that would bring gas to Pakistan and India from Iran. TAPI goes back to the late 1990s, when the Taliban government held talks with the California-based oil company Unocal Corporation. These talks were conducted with the full knowledge of the Clinton administration, and were undeterred by the extreme repression of Taliban society. Taliban officials even made trips to the United States for discussions. 11 Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific on February 12, 1998, Unocal representative John Maresca discussed the importance of the pipeline project and the increasing difficulties in dealing with the Taliban:

    The region's total oil reserves may well reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels ... From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, leaders, and our company.

When those talks stalled in July, 2001 the Bush administration threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the government did not go along with American demands. The talks finally broke down for good the following month, a month before 9-11.

The United States has been serious indeed about the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf oil and gas areas. Through one war or another beginning with the Gulf War of 1990-1, the US has managed to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.

The war against the Taliban can't be "won" short of killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States may well try again to negotiate some form of pipeline security with the Taliban, then get out, and declare "victory". Barack Obama can surely deliver an eloquent victory speech from his teleprompter. It might even include the words "freedom" and "democracy", but certainly not "pipeline".
Love me, love me, love me, I'm a Liberal (Thank you, Phil Ochs. We miss you.)

Angela Davis, star of the 1960s, like most members of the Communist Party, was/is no more radical than the average American liberal. Here she is recently addressing Occupy Wall Street: "When I said that we need a third party, a radical party, I was projecting toward the future. We cannot allow a Republican to take office. ... Don't we remember what it was like when Bush was president?" 12

Yes, Angela, we remember that time well. How can we forget it since Bush, by all important standards, is still in the White House? Waging perpetual war, relentless surveillance of the citizenry, kissing the corporate ass, police brutality? ... What's changed? Except for the worse. Where's our single-payer national health insurance? Nothing even close. Where's our affordable university education? Still the most backward in the "developed" world. Where's our legalized marijuana ? I mean really legalized? If you think that's changed, you must be stoned. Where's our abortion on demand? What does your guy Barack think about that? Are the indispensable labor unions being rescued from oblivion? Ha! The ultra-important minimum wage? Inflation adjusted, equal to the mid-1950s.

Has the American threat to the environment and the world environmental movement ceased? Tell that to a dedicated activist-internationalist. Has the 50-year-old embargo against Cuba finally ended? It has not, and I can still not go there legally. The police-state War on Terror at home? Scarcely a month goes by without the FBI entrapping some young "terrorists". Are more Banksters and Wall Street Society-Screwers (except for the harmless insider-traders) being imprisoned? Name one. The really tough regulations of the financial area so badly needed? Keep waiting. How about executives of the BP Oil Spill Company being arrested? Or war criminals, mass murderers, and torturers with names like ... Oh, I don't know, let's see ... maybe like Cheney or Bush or Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or someone with a crazy name like Condoleezza? All walking completely free, all celebrated.

    "A major decline of progressive America occurred during the Clinton years as many liberals and their organizations accepted the presence of a Democratic president as an adequate substitute for the things liberals once believed in. Liberalism and a social democratic spirit painfully grown over the previous 60 years withered during the Clinton administration." ? Sam Smith13

    "A change of Presidents is like a change of advertising campaigns for a soft drink; the product itself still tastes the same, but it now has a new 'image'." ? Richard K. Moore

Volunteer help needed on e-books

If you have some expertise on the putting together of an e-book, including footnotes, my publisher, Common Courage, would like to communicate with you. Contact Greg Bates at gbates at commoncouragepress.com Thanks.
Notes

    Haaretz.com (Israel), October 25, 2007; print edition October 26 ?
    Washington Post, March 5, 2009?
    "Face the Nation", CBS, January 8, 2012; see video ?
    The Guardian (London), January 31, 2012" ?
    "PBS's Dishonest Iran Edit", FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), January 10, 2012?
    Reuters, January 12, 2012 ?
    http://killinghope.org/bblum6/assass.htm ?
    Video of Pletka making these remarks ?
    Talk given by the president at Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, August 17, 2009 ?
    Talk at the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, September 20, 2007 ?
    See, for example, the December 17, 1997 article in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, "Oil barons court Taliban in Texas". For further discussion of the TAPI pipeline and related issues, see this article by international petroleum engineer John Foster. ?
    Washington Post, January 15, 2012 ?
    Sam Smith was a longtime publisher and journalist in Washington, DC, now living in Maine. Subscribe to his marvelous newsletter, the Progressive Review. ?

?

William Blum is the author of:

    Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
    Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
    West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
    Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 [at] aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area.

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