Weazl's Revenge

Bucky promotes Bush assassin specialist, who then assembles team to take assassination to higher levels. Change? Yeah, the bad just got worse.

2009-06-12T14:00:00.001+03:00

New US commander in Afghanistan assembles team of assassins

By Bill Van Auken

Confirmed Wednesday as President Barack Obama’s new commander for the widening war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, General Stanley McChrystal has been given extraordinary powers to assemble his own staff.

According to press reports published Thursday, in forming a permanent war council-dubbed the Afghanistan-Pakistan Coordination Cell-McChrystal is drawing heavily from a super-secret assassination squad that he commanded under the Bush administration.

That unit, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), was formed in December 1980 in the wake of the military’s abortive operation to free US hostages in Iran. Comprised of the Army’s Delta Force and Navy SEALs, the command directs Special Mission Units that carry out classified operations, often in collaboration with CIA squads.

Commanded by McChrystal between 2003 and 2008, JSOC has been linked to assassinations in over a dozen countries as well as abduction and torture. Under the Bush administration, it was reportedly used to carry out covert operations inside Iran, which included the abduction and assassination of officials suspected of aiding Iraqi militia groups.

Earlier this year, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who is writing a book on the subject, termed the command “an executive assassination wing.” He said that it was tasked with “going into countries...finding people on a list and executing them and leaving.” Hersh added that, under the Bush administration, the unit reported to Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.

According to the New York Times, McChrystal “has been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans.” The newspaper attributed the “extraordinary leeway” granted to the general to the Obama administration’s concern over the war, which over the past year has registered the highest levels of violence since the US invasion of the country in October 2001 and has seen the Taliban and other insurgent elements gain control over much of the country.

Citing Pentagon figures, McClatchy News reported, “The first five months of this year have seen a 59 percent increase in insurgent attacks in Afghanistan, a 62 percent increase in coalition deaths and a 64 percent increase in the use of improvised explosives compared to the same period last year.”

Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the sudden ouster of Gen. David McKiernan and his replacement by McChrystal, a move that reflected increasing desperation in Washington. The shakeup followed the findings of a Pentagon task force headed by McChrystal in May that reported in relation to Afghanistan that the “security situation in key areas is poor, stalemated or deteriorating.”

Tapped to serve as McChrystal’s deputy and assigned to oversee day-to-day operations in Afghanistan is Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who was chosen last year by Defense Secretary Gates as his personal military assistant. Rodriguez is reportedly a longtime friend and protégé of McChrystal.

McChrystal has selected Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn as his intelligence advisor for Afghanistan, the Times reported. Flynn, who is currently director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, had previously served as McChrystal’s intelligence chief in the shadowy operations of JSOC.

Chosen as commander of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Coordination Cell is the longtime special operations officer Gen. Scott Miller, who as a captain commanded Delta Force troops in the US military’s “Blackhawk Down” debacle in Mogadishu, Somalia.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the so-called coordination cell is “modeled on a system Gen. McChrystal put in place in Iraq, when he commanded the Navy Seals and other Special Operations personnel.”

The units that he commanded in Iraq are reported to have carried out an assassination program in that country aimed at eliminating suspected leaders of Iraqi insurgent groups hostile to the US occupation. Personnel under his command also ran a detention and interrogation center near the Baghdad airport known as Camp Nama, where prisoners were subjected to systematic abuse amounting to torture. The motto of the unit running the camp was “No Blood, No Foul,” meaning that any form of abuse that did not draw blood was acceptable and would not result in investigations or prosecution. Soldiers assigned to the facility have reported that McChrystal was a regular visitor.

Given this background, it is noteworthy that the Democratic-led Senate Armed Services Committee subjected McChrystal to no serious or sustained questioning during his confirmation hearing last week. The committee’s chairman, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, disposed of the torture issue at the outset by helping McChrystal to lay the blame on then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and on orders from Washington.

The right-wing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal gloated over the Democrats’ failure to make an issue out of torture, writing on June 4 that it assumed this was the case “because General McChrystal happens to have been nominated by President Obama, not President Bush.”

In the end, the only obstacle placed in the way of McChrystal’s nomination was general procedural foot-dragging by the Republicans.

To break the logjam, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went to the Senate floor Wednesday and made a dramatic announcement that he had received a telephone call from Adm. Mike Mullen. The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman had told him, Reid said, that McChrystal had to fly to Afghanistan that very night and was “literally waiting by an airplane,” because there was no commander on the ground in Afghanistan.

“Let’s get the man approved tonight so he can go,” Reid said. Senate Republicans responded by moving to confirm McChrystal and two other military nominees.

Media coverage of McChrystal’s confirmation and the changes in war strategy surrounding the creation of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Coordination Cell has centered on innocuous suggestions that the planned rotation of this core group of 400 between the war in Afghanistan and Afghanistan-related planning in Washington would allow these personnel to “accumulate expertise.”

McChrystal’s military career and those of the chief officers he is selecting as his aides, however, suggest that what is being prepared is a dramatic escalation of the killing in Afghanistan, through the utilization of the type of methods employed during Operation Phoenix in Vietnam or the death squad killings during the US intervention in El Salvador.

Speaking to reporters during a flight to a NATO meeting in Brussels, Defense Secretary Gates reiterated the repeated warnings from senior military officials that, as the US continues to build up its forces in Afghanistan to a target of nearly 70,000 troops by the end of the year, the bloodshed will grow accordingly.

“We've been very upfront about the fact that as we send in more troops, and go into areas that have not had an Afghan government or ISAF International Security Assistance Force presence yet, that there will be more combat and the result of that will be more casualties,” Gates said.

In its escalation of the US war in Afghanistan, and its increasing extension across the border into Pakistan, the Obama administration has chosen as its senior commander an officer who is among those most deeply implicated in the criminal operations carried out under Bush and Cheney. This appointment, and its confirmation by the Democratic-controlled Senate, is a clear warning that the ruling establishment in Washington is pursuing a consensus policy that will involve even greater war crimes against the Afghan people, as Washington continues its attempt to assert hegemony in Central Asia by military means.

Original article posted here.

Obama to use all means in his power to stop torture photos from being released and gives $100 Billion to IMF

2009-06-12T13:51:00.002+03:00

Abuse Photos Part of Agreement on Military Spending

By CARL HULSE and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON — Congressional negotiators reached tentative agreement on Thursday on a $105.9 billion spending measure that would provide money for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through September but would drop a ban on the release of photographs showing abuse of foreign prisoners held by United States forces.

The deal was concluded after Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, went to the Capitol to assure Senate Democrats that President Obama would use all administrative and legal means to prevent the photos’ release. At the same time, a federal court issued a ruling effectively ensuring that the photos would not be released for months, if ever.

Mr. Obama followed up with a letter, promising to work with Congress if legislation was necessary to keep the photos from being publicized but urging lawmakers not to let the dispute interfere with freeing up the money for the armed forces.

“Given the singular importance of providing funding for our troops, it is essential that Congress pass the supplemental appropriations bill,” Mr. Obama wrote in the letter, which was read publicly at the negotiating session by Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii and the Appropriations Committee chairman.

The photo restriction, approved by the Senate, was viewed by some Democratic House members as an end run around federal freedom of information laws. It was dropped to appease Democrats already uneasy about approving nearly $80 billion for combat and more money for aid to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Democrats said they could not secure enough votes to pass the bill if the photo ban were included. But Republicans threatened to try to block the measure if the ban were cut out, saying the photos could incite terrorists and endanger Americans overseas.

“What good are we to our soldiers if we can’t protect them in a time like this?” asked Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “Every photo is a bullet for our enemy.”

He and his allies, including Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, said Mr. Obama should take executive action to block the release of the photos by ordering them classified.

The administration’s cause was bolstered when a federal appeals court in New York announced last Thursday that it had granted a request by the Obama administration and recalled its April 27 order to release the photographs, permitting the administration to take the case to the Supreme Court.

In effect, the decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit means it will be months before there is any chance that the Defense Department could be ordered to release the photographs.

Amrit Singh, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is seeking the release of the photographs as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, said she was disappointed by the court’s ruling. “It will only serve to delay further the release of these photographs, which are critical for informing the ongoing public debate about the treatment of prisoners,” she said.

Ms. Singh said the photos portrayed abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq in places other than Abu Ghraib prison, the Iraq jail made infamous in 2004 by photographs of abuse there, and would therefore show that abuse was “not aberrational but systemic.”

The photo issue is just one of several that are likely to generate opposition to the bill, which would also set aside $7.7 billion to prepare for a flu pandemic, provide $1 billion to encourage consumers to trade in older cars for more fuel-efficient models and allow detainees at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, center to be brought to the United States for trial.

The measure also clears the way for a $100 billion line of credit for the International Monetary Fund, which was the initial source of trouble for the spending bill. Republicans strongly supported the spending legislation when it was considered this year, but have threatened to withhold their support over the foreign aid, saying some of the money could go to unfriendly governments.

With Republicans abandoning the measure, Democrats need as many votes as they can win over and the ban on releasing the photos emerged as a major obstacle. In the meeting of House and Senate negotiators late Thursday afternoon, efforts to reinstate the ban were beaten back.

Some lawmakers also questioned including $1 billion to encourage owners of older cars to trade them in for more fuel-efficient models. That program, known as Cash for Clunkers, is nominally aimed at helping the environment and reducing carbon emissions, but many lawmakers who pushed for it were primarily interested in lifting vehicle sales to prop up the struggling auto industry.

The provision had not originally been included by either the House or Senate. And critics, mainly Republicans but also some Democrats, charged that it was a brazen giveaway of tax dollars to bankrupt auto companies that had already received billions in federal bailout assistance. But an effort to eliminate the money was defeated.

The bill also includes $8 million to pay for a new commission to examine the causes of the financial and economic crisis.

Scott Shane contributed reporting.

Original article posted here.

A little good news: ending apartheid in Bahgdad.

2009-06-12T13:48:00.002+03:00

Baghdad tears down security barriers

Government starts to remove network of concrete walls set up at height of Iraq's sectarian conflict

Security may still be unpredictable, but officials in the Iraqi capital are planning to tear down Baghdad's network of concrete barriers and razor wire in the coming months as a measure of reconciliation creeps through its neighbourhoods.

The towering grey concrete barriers, known as T-walls, sprang up as sectarian conflict intensified in 2006 and 2007. Streets were closed and checkpoints established. Entire communities were isolated or divided, and familiar landmarks all but disappeared. Residents cowered or fled.

Now, improved security means that teams of cranes and trucks are stealing out under cover of darkness from municipal depots across the capital and removing the barriers, street by street.

A ministry of defence spokesman told the Guardian most of the concrete barriers would be gone by the end of 2009. "They are now the biggest obstacle to breathing new life into our city," said Ali Dawoud, the head of reconstruction and development at Baghdad's city council. He said that since January, 10-15% of the streets that were closed had been reopened and the barrier removal programme was growing month by month, security permitting.

Security concerns still abound. Bombs and mortars are still a regular occurrence in Baghdad; violence has flared in Iraq before a June 30 deadline for US troops to withdraw from urban areas; and yesterday the volatility of the situation was underscored by a car bomb in the Shia heartland of Nasiriya that killed more than 30 people.

But the Baghdad wall removal plan is part of a wider effort to beautify a city scarred by years of conflict. Sabah Sami, a spokesman for the Baghdad municipality, said: "Our role is to rehabilitate the streets and repair the damage made by the concrete walls to streets and pavements and because of their weight to the city's drainage and sewerage system." Each T-wall weighs about five tons. "Once they have gone from an area, we will clean and pave and then paint and plant," Sami said.

The only barriers to stay would be those protecting ministries and other official buildings.

Nobody knows how many of the barriers were deployed in the capital. Some residents likened them to tombstones, others to a thousand Berlin Walls.

But as a result of the beautification campaign, city authorities find themselves in possession of thousands of unwanted reinforced concrete slabs, standard measurement 12ft by 5ft.

On a recent trip to a southern suburb, the Guardian glimpsed a T-wall graveyard, which appeared to stretch for miles.

Suggestions have ranged from deploying them along Iraq's notoriously porous borders to massing them into a large heap as a monument to the madness of war.

"There's really not much you can do with them, other than build more walls," offered an engineer serving with the US military in Iraq.

Original article posted here.

Both Left and Right using killer to distort unpleasant truths...Throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sorry, Keith: 9/11 WAS an inside job.

2009-06-12T11:44:00.004+03:00

Just because a racist killer does something reprehensible (and stupid) doesn't make everything that he says wrong.

Sen Whitehouse: The Storyline We Have Been Told About Torture Is False In Every Dimension!

2009-06-12T08:22:00.002+03:00

Part 2

Part 3

Weazl's kind of country music

2009-06-06T09:35:00.001+03:00

Bucky on 9/11: Liar, liar, your pants on fire!

2009-06-06T09:14:00.003+03:00

What happens when you give up sovreignty: These provisions will be deemed illegal before the WTO if challenged

2009-06-06T09:00:00.002+03:00

"Buy American" provision in House climate bill

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A new "Buy American" provision in a massive climate change bill working its way through Congress is a worrisome sign of increased U.S. protection, a business official said on Friday.

The provision offers financial aid to automakers building plug-in electric cars. But it stipulates those cars must be "developed and produced in the United States."

"All of us are trying to do everything we can to help the automakers here. But provisions like this smell of Buy America," said Christopher Wenk, senior director of international policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The language could violate U.S. obligations under the World Trade Organization, he said, risking possible retaliation from U.S. trading partners.

The Canadian government is already worried about the impact of a "Buy American" provision in the U.S.economic stimulus package passed by Congress in February. It says public works projects should use iron, steel and other goods made in the United States.

Ottawa says that as a result, Canadian companies are being discriminated against by U.S. state and municipal governments on some water and sewage treatment projects funded by the bill.

Two other bills that have passed the House of Representatives this year, to improve water quality and build "greener" schools, also included "Buy American" mandates.

The provision offering aid to automakers building electric cars in the United States was attached to a bill requiring reductions of industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, which passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee in May.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants the bill to pass the full House in June or July. Its fate is uncertain in the Senate.

Adam Benson, spokesman for one of the lawmakers who inserted the provision, Representative John Dingellof Michigan, said it was written to comply with trade laws and wasn't specific to the "Big Three" U.S. automakers, General Motors Corp,, Ford Motor and Chrysler LLC.

But, Wenk pointed out the wording called for the cars to be developed and built in the United States, which he said was likely to preclude a foreign company if its research and development took place abroad.

Original article posted here.

Helpful news roundup

2009-06-06T08:40:00.001+03:00

More on Bucky's rhetorical flourishes

2009-06-06T08:25:00.002+03:00

Obama Fuzzed Up Reality in Speech

By David Swanson

Editor’s Note: There were some head-scratching moments in Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world, like when the President claimed that American blacks overcame slavery and segregation without the need for violence (there was, however, that event called the Civil War in which black regiments played an important part).

There was also the condemnation of small Hamas rockets threatening children in southern Israel, when he and various predecessors have fired remote-controlled missiles which have had far more deadly consequences for Afghan and other children. In this guest essay, David Swanson of AfterDowningStreet.org looks at other anomalies:

President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo probably did a world of good. It was packed with noble sentiments and some truth-telling. But imagine how much more good would be done if all the best parts of it corresponded to reality.

If we treated people around the world with "respect," would we continue occupying their nations against their adamant desires?

If we truly "seek no military bases" in Afghanistan, why are we building them on such massive scale?

And why are we locking up hundreds of people there whom Obama hopes to keep outside the rule of law and never bring to trial (or at least he's fighting for that power in court and recently declared that he possessed it), people who will not all die any time soon?

If we respect the Iraqi people, why must our president tell them they are better off now? Why not ask them whether they think they are better off?

If we have a "dual responsibility" to help Iraq and to leave Iraq, is it relevant that the people of Iraq reject that idea, and that we would reject it if imposed on our own nation by another?

If we "pursue no bases" in Iraq and will remove "combat brigades by next August" and will "remove combat troops from Iraqi cities by July" and "remove all our troops from Iraq by 2012," why are we renaming troops "non-combat troops", why are we redrawing city boundaries to avoid withdrawing, why are we in fact creating exceptions in order to remain in cities?

And why do the Commander in Chief's immediate subordinates keep telling reporters that the United States will never leave Iraq?

If we were "respectful of the sovereignty of nations and the rule of law," would we occupy other nations, would we use preventive detention, would we decline to prosecute torturers, assassins, and war criminals, would we object to Iran's possible future nuclear power while refusing to acknowledge that of Israel?

If we do not "accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," why do we fund them, and why do we accept every existing one?

If we respected the people of Gaza, wouldn't our president accept an invitation to visit there and acknowledge the responsibility of having paid for the weapons that caused the destruction?

Imagine if we truly supported "governments that reflect the will of the people." Does the king of Saudi Arabia reflect the will of his people better than Hamas reflects the will of their people?

And what about here at home? If the will of the American people were at all relevant, we'd end the wars, end the super-militarism, close bases, fund schools and green energy, throw corporations out of government, create single-payer healthcare, pass the Employee Free Choice Act, and so forth.
I'm not blaming Obama for the Senate, but the idea that our own government reflects the basic will of its people is absurd.

The speech, of course, was better than I've made it sound. It's good for Obama to have said we don't want bases and that we'll leave.

That's better than had he not said those things. It's tremendous for him to have acknowledged our overthrow of Iran's democratically elected president. It's important that he acknowledged the good and the admirable in Muslim culture.

But I do wish his interfaith closing had not kicked sand in the teeth of those of us who are not religious, and I wish the best of what he said were being acted on rather than spoken about.

David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can pre-order it for a discount price at http://tinyurl.com/daybreakbook

Original article posted here.

Maybe some good news regarding Democrats standing up against secrecy (but is still ongoing and we must wait and see)

2009-06-06T08:21:00.001+03:00

Glenn Greenwald

Are House Democrats about to block Obama's new secrecy law?

(updated below - Update II)

Earlier this week, I noted that the Senate had passed -- with Obama's support -- a pernicious amendment to the spending supplemental bill, jointly sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, that empowers Obama and the Pentagon, at their sole discretion, to suppress any "photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009 relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States." The amendment has no purpose other than to expressly allow the President to conceal evidence of war crimes (torture) and to block the Supreme Court from ruling (as two federal courts have already held) that the Freedom of Information Act compels disclosure of those photographs. For more on why this new secrecy law is so dangerous, see my post here; even The Washington PostEditorial Page excoriated the amendment and Obama's support for it.

When I wrote about this several days ago, the Senate had passed the Graham-Lieberman secrecy law as an amendment to the spending supplemental bill (which includes funding for Iraq and Afghanistan) without even bothering to take a formal roll call vote (on a voice vote). Although the House version of the supplemental bill did not contain this amendment, it was widely expected that it would simply be inserted in the House-Senate conference and then easily passed along with the final bill.

But passage of Graham-Lieberman now appears much less certain because of what appears to be the refusal of some key liberal House Democrats -- including Barney Frank -- to support it. The votes of liberal House Democrats actually matter (for once) because most House Republicans are refusing to support the overall supplemental bill due to their objections to a provision for $5 billion in funding to increase the IMF's lending capacity. To pass the supplemental spending bill, House leaders need the votes of numerous House Democrats who are currently refusing to vote for anything that contains the photo suppression amendment. If Congressional Democrats succeed in blocking enactment of this amendment, that would be a critical assertion for the first time of Congressional checks on Obama's desired powers and would, independently, prevent a truly odious new secrecy power from being enacted.

First there is this report, yesterday, from Congress Daily:

Democratic leaders postponed a House-Senate conference meeting they hoped would produce a compromise fiscal 2009 war supplemental spending bill Thursday after it appeared they might not have enough votes to pass the measure in the House. . . .
Democratic leaders are counting on convincing 18 of 51 self-described liberal or progressive Democrats who previously opposed the supplemental to now support it, enough Caucus members to ensure its passage. . . .
But liberal Democrats are threatening to withhold their support for the supplemental if it includes a provision in the Senate-passed billthat would allow Defense Secretary Robert Gates to withhold any "photograph relating to the treatment of individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States" if he certifies that the release of the photos could endanger citizens or the armed forces.
The provision, which is supported by President Obama, was offered as an amendment by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn.
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. -- who initially opposed the package and is now trying to help Democratic leaders raise support for it -- said he recently told Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner that liberal Democrats would not likely support the package if it includes the Lieberman amendment.
"I made it clear to the administration that I believe that we can get liberals like myself who are against the war [to] vote for it because the IMF is so important, but not if the [Freedom of Information Act] exception is in it," Frank said.
Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., previously supported the supplemental but said she would not vote for the bill if it includes the amendment.
"There is no reason in the world for us to vote to suspend" FOIA, Slaughter said.
While House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha, D-Pa., conceded "we got big problems" with trying to pass the supplemental, he asserted that it would clear Congress by July 1. The military has said it needs the funding by July to avoid a disruption in other accounts, which would have to be raided to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bolstering that report, Jane Hamsher yesterday spoke with Barney Frank, who told her that continued inclusion of the Graham-Lieberman photo suppression amendment would prevent House leaders from getting the votes they need to pass the supplemental bill (either that, Frank said, or they would be forced to remove the IMF funding provision -- which Obama promised G-20 allies -- in order to re-attract GOP votes and then pass the bill with the Graham-Lieberman amendment included but without the IMF funding).

It would seem that Nancy Pelosi has a special obligation to ensure that the House bill does not include the Graham-Lieberman amendment. Despite her vocal support for a "Truth Commission" to investigate Bush crimes, she has been continuously accused of enabling the Bush administration's torture regime by helping to keep it a secret and doing nothing to impede it. If she ends up voting for the supplemental spending bill (as she will) which includes a provision allowing the indefinite suppression of photographic evidence of torture, that would certainly bolster those accusations. Having been briefed early on to some still-disputed extent on the Bush torture regime, does Pelosi now want to vote to vest the Pentagon with the unreviewable power to suppress evidence of torture even where FOIA compels its disclosure?

If, as Obama claims, there are legitimate reasons to suppress these photos under FOIA's exemptions (including its very broad national security exemptions), then the Supreme Court can reverse the two lower court rulings ordering disclosure -- as Obama is asking it to do. But there is no good reason to vest the Obama administration with the unilateral power to simply waive FOIA requirements simply because it loses in court and decides it doesn't want to comply with court rulings and with current transparency laws.

FOIA was enacted by Congress in 1966 -- more than 40 years ago -- and, in 1974, Congress overrode a presidential veto (.pdf) of amendments that expanded its disclosure requirements in the wake of Nixonian secrecy abuses. Congress should defend and insist on presidential compliance with the important transparency law it passed and repeatedly strengthened -- not allow the White House and Republicans to jointly render it illusory by retroactively narrowing its provisions, all because the Obama White House wants to suppress evidence of Bush's war crimes in the face of clear FOIA requirements compelling disclosure.

I hope to post some information in just a little bit about which members of Congress should be called today by those who want to see House Democrats stand their ground. Preventing passage of the Graham-Lieberman amendment would be an important step both for transparency and the re-assertion of Congressional checks on still-expanding presidential powers and secrecy abuses.

UPDATE: As Jane Hamsher noted after speaking with Barney Frank yesterday (read Jane's analysis here), the White House and House Leadership are now working jointly to convince 18 House Democrats who currently oppose the bill [H.R 2346] to vote for it. That's how many are needed to ensure its passage. You can call those key members -- here -- and encourage them to continue to oppose this bill, particularly as long as it contains the FOIA-eroding, torture-protecting Graham-Lieberman photo suppression amendment. Those interested can and should call as many members as possible, and it's particularly important if any of them are your actual representatives. It would also be helpful, once you call, to use the program provided to convey what you were told as each member's response to your call.

UPDATE II: Nick Baumman of Mother Jones cheers the efforts of House Democrats to block this amendment and writes:

The photo suppression bill is an abomination that is reminiscent of the worst Bush-era excesses. It gives the executive branch the power to withhold an entire category of information from public scrutiny without any review. This law is Example A of the theory of the Presidency that says citizens should just trust the benevolent executive to do the right thing. Even if you oppose releasing some of the photos, I don't see why you would want to give the White House the power to unilaterally decide what's best. It says a lot about the Congress that members are willing to give Obama this kind of power. It says a lot about Obama that he supports this bill.

Exactly. We already have a law in place -- FOIA -- that is incredibly permissive in what it allows the government to keep secret. Obama is perfectly within his rights to appeal the two court decisions ruling that these photographs must be disclosed under FOIA. But passing a new law because you don't want to abide by the old one and because courts have rejected the President's claimed powers was one of the most defining and abusive strategies of the Bush administration. The fact that this proposed amendment vests unilateral, unchallengeable power in the Pentagon to decide, with no review and standards, what will remain secret makes it all the worse.

The issue is not whether disclosure of these photographs will produce value (although given that we are in the midst of an ongoing debate over both torture and accountability for it, it seems obvious that there is great value in having more evidence released showing how brutal and lawless our Government's treatment of detainees was). But that isn't the issue. The issue is whether or not you believe in transparency in government (a major plank of Obama's campaign), and whether you want the President to have the unilateral, unreviewable power to simply decree that the 4o-year-old FOIA law need not be complied with when it comes to all photographic evidence of detainee abuse.

-- Glenn Greenwald

Original article posted here.

Tide turning against Israel: EU may exert pressure on settlement

2009-06-06T08:15:00.001+03:00

EU seeks to increase pressure on Israel for settlement freeze

The European Union is considering using its trade clout to bolster U.S. pressure for an Israeli freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank, diplomats said on Friday.

The EU is Israel's biggest trading partner and one option it may have is to crack down on fruit, vegetables, olive oil and other farm produce grown by settlers in the Palestinian territories.

Some European governments have long suspected such products are entering the EU at low import tariffs reserved for output labeled as coming from Israel proper.
Advertisement
Aside from the possibility of a concerted push to deny tariff concessions to settlement produce coming into the European Union, diplomats said EU nations also were looking at using economic and scientific research exchanges with Israel as an area where they could apply leverage on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In addition to being Israel's largest market for exports, the EU is its second largest source of imports after the United States.

But diplomats said Europe would follow Washington's lead. Concerted EU action will be difficult because of divisions within the bloc, so piecemeal steps are more likely, they added.

EU members have in recent months said that ties between the EU and Israel depend on the Israeli government's commitment to a two-state solution in the peace process with Palestinians.

Following the three-week-long Operation Cast Lead, diplomatic bodies in a number of European countries called for a freeze on upgrading relations with Israel, citing the pressure of domestic public opinion.

Original article posted here.

Great summary of what is wrong with the United States by the man who should be king. Well, not king, but President

2009-06-05T13:47:00.001+03:00

Weazl's Return

2009-06-05T13:40:00.000+03:00

Russell Means on Colonialism by the Imperial Power

2008-12-16T18:02:00.000+02:00

Do I have to tell you that this reeks of black op bullshit? Hope not

2008-11-27T17:34:00.000+02:00

More on what we thought about our new President-elect

2008-11-25T17:49:00.001+02:00

Obama's Foreign Policy: The Case for Pessimism

Justin Raimundo

His appointments augur ill

We know the sellout is a reality when we listen to Jamie Kirchick praise Barack Obama's national security appointments: "Barack Obama isn't even president yet, and he's already angering some of his most devoted followers on the party's left wing. This is the mark of what could be a very successful presidency," he snarks.

Kirchick, in his role as Marty Peretz's alter ego, is pleased as punch with the incoming Obama-ites, who appear to have abandoned their "netroots" early on and ceded the foreign policy realm to the pro-war Clinton wing of the party. He is mostly concerned with gloating over the fact that Joe Lieberman wasn't expelled from the Democratic caucus, but the larger issue is the party's foreign policy stance in general, which looks to be shaping up as distinctly right-of-center. ("Right," in this sense, means neocon, rather than authentically conservative, but then you knew that.)

As the last surviving representative of the Scoop Jackson Democrats, who have long been on the politically endangered species list, Lieberman has a special place in the hearts of neocons everywhere, but especially in the editorial offices of The New Republic, which, in spite of unconvincing efforts to suck up to the "new politics" wing, exists to hold high the banner of that hoary tradition.

Obama's personal intervention on Lieberman's behalf hints at where the Democrats are going as a governing party, and his appointments are rapidly confirming this trend: not only Hillary Clinton at State and Robert Gates at Defense, but also retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones as national security adviser. The former commander of U.S. forces in Europe and military head of NATO was described last year as a political "hot commodity" by the Wall Street Journal. In a piece that detailed the courting of the general by both political parties, Hillary is cited as saying she'd put him in her Cabinet, perhaps as defense secretary, although her campaign qualified this by saying that "it's way premature" to speculate about such matters, as indeed it was. Jones is best buddies with John McCain, and, although he assiduously avoided a formal endorsement, he made an appearance with his old friend during the campaign. When Jones served on a commission evaluating our military operations in Iraq, he concluded that we ought to stay the course: "Understand the fact that regardless how you got there, there is a strategic price of enormous consequence for failure in Iraq." His point of agreement with President-elect Obama is that he believes we've been grievously amiss in not escalating the fighting on the Afghan front sooner.

The argument for Gen. Jones as national security chieftain echoes the case for Hillary at State: "If Obama engages Iran," avers The New Republic, "it'll be harder to dismiss his overtures as soft-headed or naïve with Jones coordinating foreign policy." The same malarkey is being uttered with a straight face by defenders of the Clinton appointment, such as Obamacon-in-chief Andrew Sullivan, who claim it will somehow give Obama the credibility to pull off a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This assumes, however, that his "team of rivals," as the pundits have deemed it, won't mutiny. It assumes presidential omnipotence, when the reality is that without the cooperation of the vast and powerful national security bureaucracy, the White House will find it difficult to carry out its program. It also assumes Clinton and her menagerie won't actively sabotage the policies she attacked during the primaries as "naïve" and "dangerous."

On the key question of withdrawal from Iraq, Jones is a mixed bag. The Jones commission set up to evaluate Iraq's move toward creating its own military and police forces praised the Iraqi army but dissed the police as sectarian bullies and recommended they be disbanded. Of course, the police are run by the ruling Shi'ite parties, each of which has its own militia, and these will never be disbanded. The Jones plan is to reorient the U.S. mission in Iraq to protect the borders and leave internal security to the Iraqi military. At the congressional hearings held to present the commission's findings, Jones was questioned by Sen. Carl Levin:

"You say that significant reductions, consolidations and realignments would appear to be possible and prudent – is that your finding?"

"That's correct," was Jones' reply. However, when it came John McCain's turn to question his old bud, Jones told the Arizona senator what he no doubt wanted to hear. Asked if it would be in our interest to set a definite timetable for U.S. withdrawal, Jones said:

"Senator, I'll speak for myself on this, but I think deadlines can work against us, and I think a deadline of this magnitude would be against our national interest."

Is it really possible that a candidate for president elevated to front-runner status by antiwar voters in the primaries – and elected over a rival who made support for the war the leitmotif of his losing campaign – is enabling the hijacking of American foreign policy by a new cabal of warmongers?

The idea that by surrounding himself with advisers who have a long history of opposing any change in our bipartisan foreign policy orthodoxy Obama can somehow immunize himself from criticism is logical only in a Bizarro World kind of way. In that alternate universe, where up is down and black is white, it makes perfect "sense" for a president to appoint people to key posts who oppose his policies. In our own world, however, such an approach would be crazy – yet it seems to be happening right before our eyes.

Another disturbing aspect of the Jones appointment is that it underscores the rebirth of NATO as an engine of American aggression. No doubt the Bushian-neocon campaign to enlarge the archaic alliance and extend the Euro-American military umbrella into the Caucasus will be taken up by the Obama administration with fresh enthusiasm. The "unilateralist" approach attacked by Bush's Democratic critics as a strategic mistake is now about to be corrected, with a renewed NATO as its symbol. While the ostensible enemy is, at present, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, NATO is, first and foremost, a challenge to Russia. Founded as the Western shield against the Soviet empire, now it is a sword pointed straight at Putin's throat, as the Alliance moves inexorably eastward. If a new confrontation with the Russians is in the making, then it makes sense to put a former NATO military chieftain in as national security adviser.

The new president's appointments resound like slaps in the faces of his liberal supporters: Rahm Emanuel (a fierce opponent of the antiwar wing of the party), Hillary, Robert Gates (they're trying to persuade him to stay on), and now Gen. Jones. It looks like antiwar voters voted for one thing, but are getting quite another – although it won't be the first time that's happened. From "he kept us out of war" in Woodrow Wilson's day to George W. Bush's pledge of "a more humble foreign policy," presidents seem to have a penchant for inverting their campaign promises in the foreign policy realm, and Obama's appointments could presage a lot of surprises – and bitter disappointments – for his supporters.

Just how docile is the rank-and-file of the Obama "movement" – will they take this lying down? We're about to find out. So far, the outrage of the "netroots" and the Rachel Maddow crowd seems limited to the triumph of Lieberman over the attempt to purge the evil spirit of Scoop Jackson from party precincts once and for all. And even this has nothing to do with Lieberman's rabidly pro-war views, per se, only with the Connecticut senator's endorsement of McCain.

As it slowly dawns on the netroots that they've been had, however, don't expect "netroots" entrepreneur Arianna Huffington to start asking uncomfortable questions. After all, she has a lot to lose. As the Times of London reports:

"Arianna Huffington looks set to cement her position as the Queen of Capitol Hill in the next few days.

"The Times has learnt that the Huffington Post, her influential political Web site, will confirm within the next week that it has completed a $15 million (£10 million) fundraising from investors.

"The money will finance the expansion of HuffPo, as it is known, into the provision of local news across the United States and into more investigative journalism. And it will ensure that Ms. Huffington's influence continues to spread across the U.S. political scene.

"She is a close friend of Barack Obama, the president-elect – who, with Hillary Clinton, has posted on her site – and, at a dinner in London on Wednesday night, joked: 'I only text three people – my two teenage children and Barack Obama.'"

Arianna criticize the Dear Leader's appointments? That might get her blocked from the presidential cell, not to mention alienate those generous investors whose interest in her money-losing, aesthetically disastrous, and painstakingly trite Web site might lessen considerably. Which just goes to show that no matter how high the price, a whore is still a whore – and what better occupation for the Queen of Capitol Hill?

The circus aspect of all this may be amusing, if you take your humor black, but the joke is on the rest of us when the Obama-ites take office, because that's when our real problems will begin.

Obama's appointments on the foreign policy front prefigure a policy of paralyzing caution and indecision. Just look at the cast of characters who will be major players on the national security field: not only Hillary and Gen. Jones, but also Joe Biden, who fancies himself a foreign policy maven and will no doubt want to play a major role in the decision-making process. This has all the makings of a three-way bureaucratic turf war, and the result is bound to be paralysis, rather than change of any desirable sort. Obama's first concern, as he takes office, will be facing America's economic crisis, and his full attention will be required for an extended period – plenty of time for the built-in rivalry in the foreign policy apparatus to take root and fester.

The outlook for the foreign policy of the new administration is not good. I foresee a protracted period of confusion and internal struggle, punctuated by periodic foreign crises in which Team Obama will be all too eager to prove their "toughness." Diverted by trouble on the home front, President Obama is likely to let the tremendous opportunities opened up by his international popularity and stature go to waste. Putting Hillary Clinton to work on forging a Middle East peace agreement is another example of Bizarro World logic in action: Obama might as well assign the task to Norman Podhoretz.

Original article posted here.

Interesting news regarding US cronies in Georgia

2008-11-25T17:10:00.000+02:00

Moscow: 'Georgia used foreign soldiers'

Russia's top investigator claims to have evidence that citizens from Nato member states including the US and Turkey fought for Georgia in the five-day war in August.

Asked to list the nationalities of the foreign fighters it believes were involved, Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Prosecutor-General's investigative committee said: "America, the Czech Republic, Chechnya, the Baltic States, Ukraine and Turkey."

"There were also two snipers - one from Ukraine and I believe a Latvian woman" - Alexander Bastrykin"It was a fairly small number of people. They mainly fulfilled support roles", Mr Bastrykin told reporters in Russia's second city of St Petersburg.

Suggesting that some had conducted training for the Georgian armed forces, he said: "There were also two snipers - one from Ukraine and I believe a Latvian woman."

He added that he considered the presence of foreign fighters a criminal offence and would raise the issue at a meeting with representatives of Interpol.

A senior security official in Tbilisi dismissed the statement and said by law only Georgian nationals could serve in the country's armed forces.

Kakha Lomaia, the Secretary of Georgia's National Security Council, said: "The statement that almost half of the world was fighting in our army in August is just a fantasy of those in the Russian leadership who would like to justify killings of the peaceful population."

Russia launched a massive counter-offensive on land and sea in August after Georgian forces tried to retake South Ossetia, a Moscow-backed separatist region that rejects Tbilisi's rule.

Original article posted here.

Not a global warming scientist, but am open to the possibility that we are being scammed and scared a bit.

2008-11-25T17:05:00.001+02:00

Stubborn glaciers fail to retreat, awkward polar bears continue to multiply

By Christopher Booker

Second only to the melting of the Arctic ice and those "drowning" polar bears, there is no scare with which the global warmists, led by Al Gore, more like to chill our blood than the fast-vanishing glaciers of the Himalayas, which help to provide water for a sixth of mankind. Recently one newspaper published large pictures to illustrate the alarming retreat in the past 40 years of the Rongbuk glacier below Everest. Indian meteorologists, it was reported, were warning that, thanks to global warming, all the Himalayan glaciers could have disappeared by 2035.

Read more from Christopher Booker
Yet two days earlier a report by the UN Environment Program had claimed that the cause of the melting glaciers was not global warming but the local warming effect of a vast "atmospheric brown cloud" hanging over that region, made up of soot particles from Asia's dramatically increased burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

Furthermore a British study published two years ago by the American Meteorological Society found that glaciers are only shrinking in the eastern Himalayas. Further west, in the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, glaciers are "thickening and expanding".

Meanwhile, all last week, ITV News was running a series of wearisomely familiar scare stories on the disappearing Arctic ice and those "doomed" polar bears - without telling its viewers that satellite images now show ice cover above its 30-year average, or that polar bear numbers are at record level. But then "polar bears not drowning after all - as snow falls over large parts of Britain" doesn't really make a story.

Original article posted here.

Maybe be wishful thinking or propaganda, but I thought it was good news so posted. Caveat emptor: I wouldn't rely on its prognostication.

2008-11-25T16:59:00.001+02:00

End of Saakashvili rule is near - Georgian opposition leader

TBILISI. Nov 25 (Interfax) - Georgian opposition leader Giorgy
Khaindrava believes Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is losing
popularity, but is doing everything to retain power.

"Saakashvili realizes that his days [as president] are numbered,
and he is doing everything to hold on to power to ensure his security,"
Khaindrava told Interfax on Tuesday.

"After the August catastrophe," Saakashvili is "a political corpse"
and "is unlikely to stay in power before the end of his second (and
last) presidential term," said Khaindrava.

"What is dangerous in Georgia now is not so much Saakashvili, but
the criminal group that has usurped power and that can create a lot more
problems," he said.

"We have more than once warned Western politicians that the coming
to power of Saakashvili and people close to him is dangerous not only
for Georgia, but nobody listened to the Georgian opposition. Now the
West is probably reconsidering its attitude to Saakashvili because he
was the catalyst of the aggravation of relations between the West and
Russia," said Khaindrava.

Khaindrava did not rule out that the situation in Georgia may
seriously aggravate in the next few months as a result of the August
events and the world crisis and that "Saakashvili and the Georgian
opposition will no longer be able to control it and people will take to
the streets."

When asked how pragmatic it would be for the Georgian opposition to
come to power in this situation, Khaindrava said: "There will be no
other way out, because otherwise Georgia will face a humanitarian
catastrophe."

"After the August events, Georgia virtually lost its statehood and
its fate is now being decided in the capitals of other countries, but it
cannot go on like this," he said.

Khaindrava accused the Russian authorities of "aggression and
occupation of Georgia." "Russia's imperialist policy is interested in
chaos in Georgia, and a second occupation stage is possible to maintain
it," he said, adding that the issue of Georgia's territorial integrity
and the return of Abkhazia and South Ossetia "will not be taken off the
agenda under any circumstances" if the Georgian opposition comes to
power in Georgia.

Commenting on the November 23 attack on the cars carrying the
presidents of Georgia and Poland, Khaindrava called this incident "a
prank by Saakashvili and [Polish President Lech] Kaczynski, who have
long lost the trust of their people in their countries."

Original article posted here.

As Obummer continues his fucked up policies of throwing money to the people who least need it, the middle class is getting crushed

2008-11-25T16:57:00.000+02:00

76 percent of American middle-class households not financially secure

As the economy continues to reel, a new report finds that 4 million American households lost economic security between 2000 and 2006, and that a majority of America's middle class households are either borderline or at high risk of falling out of the middle class altogether. The new report, "From Middle to Shaky Ground: The Economic Decline of America's Middle Class, 2000-2006" was published by the policy center Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy (IASP) at Brandeis University.

"From Middle to Shaky Ground" is based on the Middle Class Security Index, co-developed by Demos and IASP/Brandeis, which uses government data and measures the financial security of the middle class by rating household stability across five core economic factors: assets, educational achievement, housing costs, budget and healthcare. Based on how a family ranked in each of these factors, they were defined as financially "secure," "borderline" or "at risk". In addition to the report, Demos and IASP/Brandeis have published an "Economic Security Scorecard" that the average family can use to measure where they fall on the Middle Class Security Index.

"The increases we're witnessing in housing costs and the number of families who lack health insurance, coupled with the extreme volatility of the average household's savings, show that a large percentage of America's middle class are not well equipped to weather this current economic storm," said Jennifer Wheary, one the report's co-authors and a Senior Fellow at Demos.

"From Middle to Shaky Ground" shows some worrying trends in America's households, including:

-- The median financial assets held by middle-class families declined by 22 percent. This means that for every dollar in median assets that middle-class families held in 2000, they held just 78 cents in 2006. These figures do not include home equity and therefore do not reflect additional losses families may have experienced due a decline in their home values.

-- Monthly housing expenses for the middle class rose by 9 percent. As a result, the percentage of middle-class families who match the Department of Housing and Urban Development's definition of "housing burdened" rose from 31 percent in 2000 to 37 percent in 2006.

-- The number of middle-class families in which at least one member lacks health insurance grew from 18 percent in 2000 to 25 percent in 2006.

"Declines such as these in any one area are alarming," said Tom Shapiro, Professor of Law and Director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis. "Bad news across a range of areas supporting financial stability means the middle class is confronting its greatest challenge since the Great Depression."

Original article posted here.

Lee Atwater: Shithead, whose politics are nearly as dead as he is.

2008-11-20T18:32:00.000+02:00

O'bummer and the recycled warmongers

2008-11-16T15:04:00.001+02:00

Obama transition points to more war and repression

President-elect Barack Obama owes his victory, both in the Democratic primaries and the general election, in large part to the overwhelming hostility of the American people to the years of military aggression, torture, extraordinary rendition, domestic spying and all of the other crimes that will constitute the indelible legacy of the Bush administration.

Thanks to his carefully calibrated criticisms of these policies, as well as his indictment of his principal Democratic opponent, Senator Hillary Clinton, for her October 2002 vote authorizing the US invasion of Iraq, Obama’s “change you can believe in” was perceived by many, both in the US and abroad, as a promise that his election would signal an end to militarism and attacks on democratic rights.

As the transition to the new administration unfolds, however, belief in Obama’s promise of change can be sustained only to the extent that one fails to examine the political record of those who are involved in this process.

For the most part, the Obama-Biden transition team is staffed by veterans of the Clinton administration, associated with the US wars in the Balkans and the policy of regime change in Iraq that set the stage for the war that followed under the Bush presidency.

Symbolic of this relationship is Obama’s decision to send Clinton’s former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, to this weekend’s Group of 20 meeting in Washington as his personal emissary. Confronted in a 1996 interview on the CBS News program “60 Minutes” with the fact that US sanctions against Iraq had led to the deaths of half a million Iraqi children, Albright replied, “It’s a hard choice, but the price, we, think, is worth it.” She subsequently became a key architect of the US-backed dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the subsequent war against Serbia, which was marked by the widespread bombing of civilian targets. Such is Obama’s face to the world.

In terms of the military policy of an incoming Obama presidency, the most telling indication of the narrow character of the change that can be anticipated are the persistent reports that Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, may be kept at his post after the change in administrations.

Citing two of the president-elect’s advisers, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that “President-elect Barack Obama is leaning toward asking Defense Secretary Robert Gates to remain in his position for at least a year.”

The retention of Gates, as the Journal points out, would send the clearest signal of essential continuity with the militarist foreign policy of the Bush administration. “Like the president-elect, Mr. Gates supports deploying more troops to Afghanistan,” the paper noted. “But the defense secretary strongly opposes a firm timetable for withdrawing American forces from Iraq, and his appointment could mean that Mr. Obama was effectively shelving his campaign promise to remove most troops from Iraq by mid-2010.”

The substantial support within the Democratic leadership for keeping Gates on was expressed last weekend by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat of Nevada) in an interview with CNN. “Why wouldn’t we want to keep him?” said Reid. “He’s never been a registered Republican.”

The other figure most often cited as a potential pick as defense secretary is former Clinton-era Navy Secretary Richard Danzig. Last June, Danzig delivered his own endorsement for retaining Gates, telling the Times of London, “My personal position is Gates is a very good secretary of defense and would be an even better one in an Obama administration.”

Whether Gates stays or goes, Obama’s selection of key personnel on his Pentagon transition team signals that the incoming administration “will handle Iraq and Afghanistan differently from the Bush administration—but will stop well short of a complete restructuring of American military strategy in the two war zones,” the Journal’s Yochi Dreazen reported in a subsequent column.

The co-leader of this team, Michele Flournoy, who was in the Defense Department under Clinton, is the current president of the Center for New American Strategy, a bipartisan think tank on military policy. She has publicly opposed the idea of setting a fixed timetable for withdrawing US troops from Iraq. In March 2007, she co-wrote a position paper on Iraq for the center, declaring, “The US has enduring interests in that besieged country and the surrounding region, and these interests will require a significant military presence there for the foreseeable future.”

Another prominent member of the transition team is Sarah Sewall, a Harvard University “human rights” specialist who served as an adviser to Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq and participated in the drafting of the military’s counterinsurgency field manual.

Also serving as senior adviser to the Pentagon transition effort is Sam Nunn, who was chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services from 1987 to 1995. A right-wing Democrat and cold warrior, Nunn left the Senate after leading a campaign against President Bill Clinton over the proposal to lift the ban on gays serving openly in the military.

The character of this transition team is in keeping with the real intentions of the incoming Obama administration: the continued occupation of Iraq by tens of thousands of US troops and a sharp escalation of the ongoing colonial war in Afghanistan.

The same picture emerges with the transition team at the Central Intelligence Agency. According to published reports, the leading figure in that effort is John Brennan, who headed up what is now known as the National Counter-Terrorism Center and previously served as CIA deputy executive director and former CIA Director George Tenet’s chief of staff. He left the agency in 2005.

It must be assumed that Brennan, a senior operator in the so-called global war on terrorism, was intimately familiar with and involved in decisions to carry out torture, assassinations, extraordinary rendition and domestic spying that were implemented during his tenure at the CIA.

Also figuring prominently in Obama’s intelligence transition team is Jamie Miscik, who headed the CIA’s analytical operations under Tenet. She played a leading role in manufacturing the phony intelligence about Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” and ties to Al Qaeda that was used to sell the war, and in suppressing reports from agency analysts that rejected both claims as unfounded. After leaving the agency at the end of 2004, she found a lucrative—though relatively short-lived—position as the head of global sovereign risk analysis at the now-bankrupt Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers.

While on the campaign trail, Obama on occasion denounced the Bush administration’s intelligence abuses—warrantless wiretapping, waterboarding, indefinite detention without trial—but when it came to a vote in the Senate last summer, he supported vastly expanded domestic spying powers for the National Security Agency and retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that collaborated with the Bush administration in carrying out the illegal wiretapping.

As with Gates, it is not ruled out that those in charge of US intelligence under Bush will stay on under Obama. Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell and CIA Director Michael Hayden have both indicated they are prepared to remain at their posts in the incoming Democratic administration. McConnell, who gave Obama a presidential-style intelligence briefing last week, described the president-elect’s team as “very smart, very strategic.”

While Obama’s overall transition chief, John Podesta, stressed last weekend that the incoming president would swiftly repeal a number of executive orders issued by the Bush administration, the specific ones he cited—stem cell research, domestic oil drilling, etc. —did not include the multiple directives authorizing US military and intelligence forces to carry out acts of aggression around the world.

Given that Obama has vowed to escalate cross-border raids against Pakistan and prosecute the so-called war on terror—the pretext used to justify Washington’s use of military force to dominate the oil-rich regions of the globe—he will in all likelihood adopt these orders as his own.

It has been less than two weeks since Obama was swept to victory in the presidential election by a wave of popular hostility to the Bush administration. Yet the actions of the president-elect and his advisers are already making it clear that the longing of millions of Americans for an end to the growth of US militarism and international criminality are not to be realized after the inauguration in January.

Original article posted here.

New version of September Clues

2008-11-16T10:39:00.002+02:00

Looks like there would be a down side for Obama not negotiating . . . (Hint: Get rid of the Polish and Czech missiles)

2008-11-14T17:17:00.002+02:00

Belarus President Seeks to Deploy Russia Missiles

By ALAN CULLISON

MINSK, Belarus -- President Alexander Lukashenko is in talks with Moscow about placing in Belarus advanced Iskander missiles that could hit targets deep inside Europe.

President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, left, who met Oct. 26 near Moscow with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, says that Belarus would like to deploy missiles even if it doesn't reach an agreement with Moscow.
The talks raise the ante in the debate over a U.S. plan to deploy missile defense in Europe. They also complicate Western hopes for warmer ties with Belarus, which some in the U.S. and Europe hope could help to counterbalance an increasingly hostile Kremlin.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Lukashenko said that he would like to see closer relations with the West but that he sympathizes with Russia on two flashpoints that have rocked relations -- the conflict in Georgia and U.S. plans to place antimissile systems in Europe to counter a potential threat from Iran.

Mr. Lukashenko said he "absolutely supports" Russia's plans to place Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad that would target the U.S. missile system. Kaliningrad is a Russian enclave in Europe that borders NATO members Poland and Lithuania, and missiles there could reach the proposed U.S. missile sites in Poland.

Mr. Lukashenko said Russia also had proposed putting Iskander missiles in Belarus, which is situated between Russia and Poland. And if a deal on the issue isn't reached, Belarus itself would like to deploy the missiles, he said.

"Even if Russia does not offer these promising missiles, we will purchase them ourselves," said Mr. Lukashenko, who said the technology for the Iskander optics and fire-control systems comes from Belarus. "Right now we do not have the funds, but it is part of our plans -- I am giving away a secret here -- to have such weapons."

Analysts said it is far from clear that Russia would really need to place missiles inside Belarus. The Kremlin has offered to give up its Kaliningrad plans if Washington drops its missile-defense system. Mr. Lukashenko's missile ambitions also could be a bargaining chip in his maneuvering between Russia and the West.

Though closely allied with and heavily dependent on Moscow, Mr. Lukashenko, a former collective-farm boss who has kept a tight grip on Belarus since he was elected president 14 years ago, has resisted the Kremlin's embrace.

But financial necessity may be tugging harder at Minsk than before. On Wednesday, Russia announced that it agreed to grant Belarus a $2 billion stabilization loan to shore up the government's finances, which have been strained by the credit crisis.

Under loan terms, Belarus agreed to pay for future oil and gas debts in rubles, a major priority of the Kremlin, which has sought to expand the use of the Russian currency beyond its borders.

Advisers to Mr. Lukashenko said he has lately put out feelers to improve relations with the U.S. and Europe, which slapped his government with sanctions in 2006 after he was accused of rigging his re-election. Sanctions were eased this year, after Mr. Lukashenko ordered the release of some political prisoners.

Like other leaders of former Soviet states, he has resisted Moscow pressure to side with the Kremlin in its conflict with Georgia by recognizing the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. So far the only countries to confer recognition are Russia and Nicaragua.

But he signaled he may tip toward Moscow on the issue and echoed Russia's argument that the West paved the way for the independence of Georgia's breakaway regions by recognizing Kosovo.

Original article posted here.

Lukashenko, in His Own Words

Below, excerpts from Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko's interview with The Wall Street Journal Tuesday. The interview was conducted in Russian, and translated by the Journal.

On the release of political opponent Alexander Kozulin earlier this year:

"The West perceived this as some kind of step toward democracy. You are welcome, thank you very much. You know, strictly between us, sometimes I think if they could find five or six more political prisoners here and told us to free them, and that then perhaps we would make a few more steps forward, we would do it readily. We could free even more. But they haven't found any more."

On the possibility of recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia:

"If you [the West] recognized Kosovo, why not recognize Abkhazia? I don't see any problems here. There is a precedent[hellip] Europe and America understand our position and our situation. And I will be honest, they are no longer pushing it as rigidly with us as before. So I don't think there would be negative repercussions for our relations or the like. I think this question is finished. It is no longer as acute as it was two months ago."

On the financial crisis:

"And I warned the Americans and others. No one listened to me. As it turned out, I was right. Now in America they are talking about an alternative to this ultraliberal market system, where everything is allowed, where you can eat more than what you make, and spend more than what you earn."

On Barack Obama:

"I look at Obama, a young man, a good-looking person. That is my first impression, I feel sorry for him. He looks 100% like Lukashenko, when I came to power after the downfall of the Soviet Union. The store shelves were empty, a severe financial crisis."

The never-ending legal charade of 9/11 insider Jacob Kobi Alexander

2008-11-14T12:34:00.001+02:00

Namibia: High Court Rules in Alexander's Favour

Government has complied with the High Court ruling, in effect concurring with fugitive Jacob Kobi Alexander's legal team, that a chief of Lower Court is a public ser-vant and not a magi-strate, hence a person occupying that office could not hear cases such as Alexander's extradition case.

Cabinet has now instructed the Ministry of Justice to delete the definition of the chief of Lower Court in the Magistrate Act and substitute it with the proper definition and expressions.

Alexander, wanted in the United States to face 33 criminal charges consisting mostly of counts of fraud, has been fighting extradition to the US since his arrest in Windhoek in September 2006.

Alexander's legal team has to date mounted a successful legal fight, that has been characterised by legal delaying tactics as well as a challenge that parts of the Extradition Act are not constitutional.

The biggest challenge, however, was when Alexander's legal team protested that the Chief of Lower Court, Petrus Unengu, could not hear the extradition case because he is a public ser-vant and not a magistrate. The legal team wanted the case to appear before Uaatjo Uanavi, the magistrate before whom the case was first heard and who granted the N$10 million bail to Alexander in October 2006.

The legal team argued that as a public servant, the chief of Lower Court could neither be nor regarded as independent. The case went before the High Court that ruled in favour of Alexander. The High Court ruled that the concept of judicial independence stands on two inseparable pillars of individual independence and institutional independence, which as such means complete liberty of individual judges and magistrates to hear and decide the cases that come before them.

At its 20th ordinary meeting on October 28, Cabinet, in principle, permitted the Ministry of Justice to make the required amendments. The amendments are "so as to delete the definition of chief of Lower Court to define the expression chief magistrate, to provide for the administrative head of the magistracy, to substitute the expression chief magistrate for the expression chief of Lower Court, wherever it occurs in certain legislation and to provide for incidental matters," a statement from Cabinet said.

It is alleged Alexander committed fraud while he was Chief Executive Officer of the New York-based Comverse Technology, a software and system company he co-founded in the 1980s. Alexander is alleged to have profited illegally through illegal stock option backdating schemes, earning himself nearly US$10 million in profits.

Original article posted here.

Deja vu all over again. CIA setting itself up for another Bay of Pigs, demanding that Obama cede conventional control of military to spooks. Kennedy 2

2008-11-12T14:58:00.003+02:00

CIA Wants Obama to ‘Have Its Back’ When Things Go Wrong

By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff

Let’s say that on Jan. 21 a massive car bomb meant for Osama bin Laden goes off in a Pakistani village, killing 120 local citizens but missing the elusive al Qaeda leader, who was riding in another vehicle.

In an elaborate press conference, the president of Pakistan blames the CIA. On an easel next to him is a three-by-five foot photo of the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, who is sent packing.

President Obama, in office for mere hours, finds out that the CIA did, in fact, plant the bomb, based on what it thought was solid intelligence that bin Laden was in the car.

How will the new president react?

That’s much on the mind of intelligence officials awaiting the Jan. 20, 2009, inauguration of Obama, a short-time U.S. senator with no discernable record and little demonstrated interest, so far, in intelligence issues.

“I was with a group of intelligence officers today,” Roger Cressey, a counterterrorism official in the Clinton White House, said on MSNBC Thursday night, “and I think the most important thing for the president to say is, ‘We’ve got your back.’ That ‘we want you to take risks — risks that conform with our law and our values as a country.’

“What the intelligence community is afraid of more than anything is the game of ‘Gotcha,’” Cressey said. “Which is, if they make a mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, the White House doesn’t support them, they’re left out to dry, and Congress crushes them. And then you get into that risk-averse mentality, which we saw for awhile. So that is what they want. They want support, so they know that the president is going to be behind them. But also that he’s going to lead them.”

CIA spokesman George Little parried a query about the agency’s expectations of Obama, but said, “Risk-taking is, of course, an essential and inherent part of what we do.

“CIA officers work hard every day to confront national security challenges, such as terrorism and weapons proliferation, with a level of creativity, agility, and sense of mission that the American people undoubtedly expect — and do so in accord with U.S. law,” Little said.

The bin Laden car bomb scenario, of course, isn’t far fetched.

In Beirut in 1985, the CIA hatched a plot to kill Sheikh Fadlallah, a leading figure in the Iran-backed Hezbollah movement of Lebanon, with a car bomb, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. The bomb killed 80 people, but not Fadlallah.

But the CIA, at least back then, wasn’t adverse to hiring killers.

In 1969, CIA Beirut station chief Robert Ames recruited a spy at the highest levels of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a charismatic terrorist by the name of Ali Hassan Salameh, AKA The Red Prince.

Three years later Salameh was an architect of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.

How would it play out today if something like that came out? Will Obama permit his CIA to recruit a stone-cold al Qaeda killer, not to mention stand by it if something goes wrong?

(The Israelis took care of the Salameh problem by killing him, according to various accounts.)

Or how about this scenario: The CIA, which has been trying to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program, gets caught shipping centrifuges to Iran?

How will the new president react?

Such questions will only be answered when the new president enters the White House and “takes off the gloves,” in one of those tiresome post-9/11 phrases, with the world’s nasty boys.

I have no doubt the Chicago-made man will do it, and be smarter at it than his feckless predecessor.

And when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, that he’ll stand up and take it like a man, as John F. Kennedy did in April 1961, after he green-lighted his predecessor’s ridiculous plan for the CIA to invade Cuba with a force of 1,511 men.

“There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” Kennedy said at a White House press conference, adding, “I am the responsible officer of the government.”

But the best favor a President Obama could do for the CIA is to nix such hare-brained schemes before they hatch, as Kennedy later wished he’d done with the Bay of Pigs caper.

For inspiration, he could take a page from the late Sen. Barry Goldwater. In 1985 the colorful Arizonan was presiding over the Senate Intelligence Committee when a CIA official mentioned the agency was thinking about overthrowing the leftist government of Suriname.

Goldwater was incensed. The CIA should be worrying about bigger things than a tiny country in South America.

“That,” Goldwater said, “is the dumbest f***** operation I’ve ever heard of in my life.”

“Do you really need this?” he asked President Reagan.

The idea was dropped.

Obama will need such friends of his own.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

Original article posted here.

Never mind reality, al CIAda is STILL coming to getcha!

2008-11-12T14:31:00.001+02:00

US facing second wave of 9/11 attacks

Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden

Added By: Streem

NEXT FEATURE

Boy hailed as Buddha's reincarnation

Thousands of people flocked to see a boy who reappeared after missing for more than a year and who some believe is a reincarnation of Buddha.

Al-Qaeda is reportedly planning a terrorist attack against the United States which will "outdo by far" the attacks of September 11 in 2001.

Arab newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi in London reports a senior Yemen official close to Al-Qaeda as warning of a new wave of terror attacks against the western nation.

The source, who is not named, is quoted as being "very close to Al-Qaeda"

The newspaper is edited by Abdel al-Bari Atwan, who was the last journalist to edit Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 1996.

The newspaper report, contained on the front page, suggests bin Laden has ordered a large scale attack against the United States which would "outdo by far" the attacks of September 11.

It comes as reports in Britain say there is clear evidence that thousands of extremists are living inside the United Kingdom.

In a message to loyalists, bin Laden is reported to have asked that his followers ignore all efforts to reconcile with Governments and other political parties - in effect keeping extremists isolated.

The newspaper's source said it was likely a sign of an imminent attack may be sent within the coming weeks.

The September 11 attacks against the United States killed nearly 3,000 people.

Original article posted here.

Russia's Pravda breaks the media silence and states the obvious

2008-11-12T14:22:00.001+02:00

Al Qaeda does not exist and never has

The basic truth is that Al Qaeda does not exist and never has. Al Qaeda is a manufactured enemy who was created by the Bush Administration in order to have an excuse to wage a war for the control of the world’s oil resources.

Did an American even hear the words “Al Qaeda” before 9-11? Or were we told that its alleged leader Osama Bin Laden has family who themselves have personal business relationships with George W. Bush’s family and that both families had financially profited considerably from the “War on Terror”?

If “Al Qaeda” was such an organized group terrorists as we are being told then why weren’t we the people notified of this evil threat when the US Cole was bombed a few months before 9-11? “Al Qaeda” is nothing more than a broad euphemistic umbrella classification used to group any Middle Eastern fighter under the Sun as an enemy. The most diabolical aspect of this public relations stunt is that it enables the current Administration to label any group it feels necessary to attack to appear to be related to an unprovable organized enemy while at the same time actually increasing its approval ratings by exploiting the basic primal fears of the American public. Furthermore when one realizes the questionable motivations that this Administration has used previously to attack an enemy, as what is now surfacing about the Iraq War, one begins to get the strange feeling that this Orwellian double-speak is nothing more than a smoke and mirror illusion whose true intentions would of made Goebbels himself jealous.

Think about it: How could a bunch of technologically unadvanced group of people from third-world nations such as “Al Qaeda” ever have any real central organization structure? If they had any real organization they would have most certainly attacked us again after September eleventh. Where are all the terrorist cells in this country? Contrary to what has been implicitly presented in the media there HAS NEVER been a single domestic terror cell caught since Bush has been in office! The majority of suspects that have been arrested and detained in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 with the exception of a handful have not been charged with crimes in anyway associated with terrorism. All of their crimes are minor and for the most part are ! related to immigration violations of some sort. There is some ambiguity in all of this though because to this day the Ashcroft Justice Department has been less than forthcoming with the specifics of these arrests. Why would this be the case if the justifications for these arrests were really legitimate? We have been bombarded by the media with every indignity from the duck-tape chronicles to the crop dusting threat. You would think that with all this seeming sensitivity by our government about informing the general populace about possible terror threats, especially when some of their sources came from “unnamed and confidential secondary sources”, that the Ashcroft Justice Department would have gone out of it’s way to mention to the public any terrorist connections that the people detained after 9-11 had and would of sworn by it on a stack of Bibles.

To date the only really suspicious activity of people detained after 9-11 were a group of Israelis who were caught in Jersey City, New Jersey filming themselves in the foreground of the burning World Trade Center with “looks of jubilation on their faces”. It was later confirmed that two of the gentlemen detained had known Mossad ties. While they were detained it is of no matter now as they were subsequently released from jail a few! weeks later and were allowed to go back to Israel with no questions asked by the direct authorization of the Justice Department. I guess they were just dropping off a box of cigars to Governor McGreevy?

What is even more illuminating about all of this is that to this day nobody has taken responsibility for the attacks of 9-11, including “Al Qaeda”. The only thing to link these attacks to anyone is the video tape of Osama Bin Laden that was conveniently found in a cave in Afghanistan that had him talking about the physical structure of the World Trade Center and the plane strike. The audio quality of this tape is so poor that any objective Arab-speaking analyst who was asked to give their opinion was unable to do so! as they claimed that just about all the words on it were inaudible. I believe an objective investigation into this original tape’s authenticity could verify if this admission is in fact genuine and could shed some light on the truth of the existence of “Al Qaeda”. But even if this tape is genuine what would this really prove? As I have already mentioned it is common knowledge that Osama Bin Laden is connected to George W. Bush’s family by a minimum of two degrees of separation. So in the grand scheme of things what does this really matter? That the Cobra Commander said he did it?

In summary, “Al Qaeda” does not exist nor has it ever. If it really existed to anywhere near the extent that we have been told then there would have been an attack on our homeland. Of course this proof of a negative is used by the Administration to justify themselves to the American public that they are doing their jobs, but when one realizes that “Al Qaeda” is really nothing more than an artificially manufactured enemy then what job are they really doing other than capitalizing off of people’s fears? What other issue does the present Administration have to offer the average working-class citizen other than security? And if security is really only a Red Herring platform issue, then of what use are they to begin with? In addition, ! if there were any degree of truth in the strength of “Al Qaeda” or even of their very existence then there would have been a much larger resistance in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq. If an organization structure existed within “Al Qaeda” then you would have seen the Iraqi resistance be a much more conventional ! one. They would have had the communication capability and weapons arsenal to mount a more traditional counter-offensive against our troops and they would have been successful doing it because our force’s numbers are so minimal. This would have been a prime opportunity to defeat “the great satan” in front of the entire world. Their motivation to do so would have been so strong that in order for them to of not of done this one must make the quantum leap and conclude that “Al Qaeda” is much to do about nothing and always has been. The emperor is naked and running through the courtyard with a great big barrel of oil.

Original article posted here.

The fucking scam marches on . . .

2008-11-10T22:41:00.001+02:00

Fed Defies Transparency Aim in Refusal to Disclose

By Mark Pittman, Bob Ivry and Alison Fitzgerald

Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsonsaid in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn't require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.

``The collateral is not being adequately disclosed, and that's a big problem,'' said Dan Fuss, vice chairman of Boston- based Loomis Sayles & Co., where he co-manages $17 billion in bonds. ``In a liquid market, this wouldn't matter, but we're not. The market is very nervous and very thin.''

Bloomberg News has requested details of the Fed lending under the U.S.Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure.

The Fed made the loans under terms of 11 programs, eight of them created in the past 15 months, in the midst of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

``It's your money; it's not the Fed's money,'' said billionaire Ted Forstmann, senior partner of Forstmann Little & Co. in New York. ``Of course there should be transparency.''

Treasury, Fed, Obama

Federal Reserve spokeswoman Michelle Smith declined to comment on the loans or the Bloomberg lawsuit. Treasury spokeswoman Michele Davisdidn't respond to a phone call and an e-mail seeking comment.

President-elect Barack Obama's economic adviser, Jason Furman, also didn't respond to an e-mail and a phone call seeking comment from Obama. In a Sept. 22 campaign speech, Obama promised to ``make our government open and transparent so that anyone can ensure that our business is the people's business.''

The Fed's lending is significant because the central bank has stepped into a rescue role that was also the purpose of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, bailout plan -- without safeguards put into the TARP legislation by Congress.

Total Fed lending topped $2 trillion for the first time last week and has risen by 140 percent, or $1.172 trillion, in the seven weeks since Fed governors relaxed the collateral standards on Sept. 14. The difference includes a $788 billion increase in loans to banks through the Fed and $474 billion in other lending, mostly through the central bank's purchase of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds.

Sept. 14 Decision

Before Sept. 14, the Fed accepted mostly top-rated government and asset-backed securities as collateral. After that date, the central bank widened standards to accept other kinds of securities, some with lower ratings. The Fed collects interest on all its loans.

The plan to purchase distressed securities through TARP called for buying at the ``lowest price that the secretary (of the Treasury) determines to be consistent with the purposes of this Act,'' according to the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, the law that covers TARP.

The legislation didn't require any specific method for the purchases beyond saying mechanisms such as auctions or reverse auctions should be used ``when appropriate.'' In a reverse auction, bidders offer to sell securities at successively lower prices, helping to ensure that the Fed would pay less. The measure also included a five-member oversight board that includes Paulson and Bernanke.

At a Sept. 23 Senate Banking Committee hearing in Washington, Paulson called for transparency in the purchase of distressed assets under the TARP program.

`We Need Transparency'

``We need oversight,'' Paulson told lawmakers. ``We need protection. We need transparency. I want it. We all want it.''

At a joint House-Senate hearing the next day, Bernanke also stressed the importance of openness in the program. ``Transparency is a big issue,'' he said.

The Fed lent cash and government bonds to banks, which gave the Fed collateral in the form of equities and debt, including subprime and structured securities such as collateralized debt obligations, according to the Fed Web site. The borrowers have included the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Banks oppose any release of information because it might signal weakness and spur short-selling or a run by depositors, said Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs for the Financial Services Roundtable, a Washington trade group.

Frank Backs Fed

``You have to balance the need for transparency with protecting the public interest,'' Talbott said. ``Taxpayers have a right to know where their tax dollars are going, but one piece of information standing alone could undermine public confidence in the system.''

The nation's biggest banks, Citigroup, Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, declined to comment on whether they have borrowed money from the Fed. They received $120 billion in capital from the TARP, which was signed into law Oct. 3.

In an interview Nov. 6, House Financial Services Committee ChairmanBarney Frank said the Fed's disclosure is sufficient and that the risk the central bank is taking on is appropriate in the current economic climate. Frank said he has discussed the program with Timothy F. Geithner, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a possible candidate to succeed Paulson as Treasury secretary.

``I talk to Geithner and he was pretty sure that they're OK,'' said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. ``If the risk is that the Fed takes a little bit of a haircut, well that's regrettable.'' Such losses would be acceptable, he said, if the program helps revive the economy.

`Unclog the Market'

Frank said the Fed shouldn't reveal the assets it holds or how it values them because of ``delicacy with respect to pricing.'' He said such disclosure would ``give people clues to what your pricing is and what they might be able to sell us and what your estimates are.'' He wouldn't say why he thought that information would be problematic.

Revealing how the Fed values collateral could help thaw frozen credit markets, said Ron D'Vari, chief executive officer of NewOak Capital LLC in New York and the former head of structured finance at BlackRock Inc.

``I'd love to hear the methodology, how the Fed priced the assets,'' D'Vari said. ``That would unclog the market very quickly.''

TARP's $700 billion so far is being used to buy preferred shares in banks to shore up their capital. The program was originally intended to hold banks' troubled assets while markets were frozen.

AIG Lending

The Bloomberg lawsuit argues that the collateral lists ``are central to understanding and assessing the government's response to the most cataclysmic financial crisis in America since the Great Depression.''

The Fed has lent at least $81 billion to American International Group Inc., the world's largest insurer, so that it can pay obligations to banks. AIG today said it received an expanded government rescue package valued at more than $150 billion.

The central bank is also responsible for losses on a $26.8 billion portfolio guaranteed after Bear Stearns Cos. was bought by JPMorgan.

``As a taxpayer, it is absolutely important that we know how they're lending money and who they're lending it to,'' said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Arlington, Virginia- based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Ratings Cuts

Ultimately, the Fed will have to remove some securities held as collateral from some programs because the central bank's rules call for instruments rated below investment grade to be taken back by the borrower and marked down in value. Losses on those assets could then be written off, partly through the capital recently injected into those banks by the Treasury.

Moody's Investors Service alone has cut its ratings on 926 mortgage-backed securities worth $42 billion to junk from investment grade since Sept. 14, making them ineligible for collateral on some Fed loans.

The Fed's collateral ``absolutely should be made public,'' said Mark Cuban, an activist investor, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks professional basketball team and the creator of the Web site BailoutSleuth.com, which focuses on the secrecy shrouding the Fed's moves.

The Bloomberg lawsuit is Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 08-CV-9595, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

Original article posted here.

Michael Ratner echoes weazls same concerns on Barack Obama

2008-11-10T09:35:00.002+02:00

And now for a little good news . . .

2008-11-09T16:00:00.001+02:00

Obama Positioned to Quickly Reverse Bush Actions
Stem Cell, Climate Rules Among Targets of President-Elect's Team

By Ceci Connolly and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 9, 2008; A16

Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.

A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition.

In some instances, Obama would be quickly delivering on promises he made during his two-year campaign, while in others he would be embracing Clinton-era policies upended by President Bush during his eight years in office.

"The kind of regulations they are looking at" are those imposed by Bush for "overtly political" reasons, in pursuit of what Democrats say was a partisan Republican agenda, said Dan Mendelson, a former associate administrator for health in the Clinton administration's Office of Management and Budget. The list of executive orders targeted by Obama's team could well get longer in the coming days, as Bush's appointees rush to enact a number of last-minute policies in an effort to extend his legacy.

A spokeswoman said yesterday that no plans for regulatory changes had been finalized. "Before he makes any decisions on potential executive or legislative actions, he will be conferring with congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle, as well as interested groups," Obama transition spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said. "Any decisions would need to be discussed with his Cabinet nominees, none of whom have been selected yet."

Still, the preelection transition team, comprising mainly lawyers, has positioned the incoming president to move fast on high-priority items without waiting for Congress.

Obama himself has signaled, for example, that he intends to reverse Bush's controversial limit on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, a decision that scientists say has restrained research into some of the most promising avenues for defeating a wide array of diseases, such as Parkinson's.

Bush's August 2001 decision pleased religious conservatives who have moral objections to the use of cells from days-old human embryos, which are destroyed in the process.

But Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said that during Obama's final swing through her state in October, she reminded him that because the restrictions were never included in legislation, Obama "can simply reverse them by executive order." Obama, she said, "was very receptive to that." Opponents of the restrictions have already drafted an executive order he could sign.

The new president is also expected to lift a so-called global gag rule barring international family planning groups that receive U.S. aid from counseling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal, said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he rescinded the Reagan-era regulation, known as the Mexico City policy, but Bush reimposed it.

"We have been communicating with his transition staff" almost daily, Richards said. "We expect to see a real change."

While Obama said at a news conference last week that his top priority would be to stimulate the economy and create jobs, his advisers say that focus will not delay key shifts in social and regulatory policies, including some -- such as the embrace of new environmental safeguards -- that Obama has said will have long-term, beneficial impacts on the economy.

The president-elect has said, for example, that he intends to quickly reverse the Bush administration's decision last December to deny California the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles. "Effectively tackling global warming demands bold and innovative solutions, and given the failure of this administration to act, California should be allowed to pioneer," Obama said in January.

California had sought permission from the Environmental Protection Agency to require that greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles be cut by 30 percent between 2009 and 2016, effectively mandating that cars achieve a fuel economy standard of at least 36 miles per gallon within eight years. Seventeen other states had promised to adopt California's rules, representing in total 45 percent of the nation's automobile market. Environmentalists cheered the California initiative because it would stoke innovation that would potentially benefit the entire country.

"An early move by the Obama administration to sign the California waiver would signal the seriousness of intent to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil and build a future for the domestic auto market," said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Before the election, Obama told others that he favors declaring that carbon dioxide emissions are endangering human welfare, following an EPA task force recommendation last December that Bush and his aides shunned in order to protect the utility and auto industries.

Robert Sussman, who was the EPA's deputy administrator during the Clinton administration and is now overseeing EPA transition planning for Obama, wrote a paper last spring strongly recommending such a finding. Others in the campaign have depicted it as an issue on which Obama is keen to show that politics must not interfere with scientific advice.

Some related reforms embraced by Obama's transition advisers would alter procedures for decision-making on climate issues. A book titled "Change for America," being published next week by the Center for American Progress, an influential liberal think tank, will recommend, for example, that Obama rapidly create a National Energy Council to coordinate all policymaking related to global climate change.

The center's influence with Obama is substantial: It was created by former Clinton White House official John D. Podesta, a co-chairman of the transition effort, and much of its staff has been swept into planning for Obama's first 100 days in office.

The National Energy Council would be a counterpart to the White House National Economic Council that Clinton created in a 1993 executive order.

"It would make sure all the oars are rowing in the right direction" and ensure that climate change policy "gets lots of attention inside the White House," said Daniel J. Weiss, a former Sierra Club official and senior fellow with the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The center's new book will also urge Obama to sign an executive order requiring that greenhouse gas emissions be considered whenever the federal government examines the environmental impact of its actions under the existing National Environmental Policy Act. Several key members of Obama's transition team have already embraced the idea.

Other early Obama initiatives may address the need for improved food and drug regulation and chart a new course for immigration enforcement, some Obama advisers say. But they add that only a portion of his early efforts will be aimed at undoing Bush initiatives.

Despite enormous pent-up Democratic frustration, Obama and his team realize they must strike a balance between undoing Bush actions and setting their own course, said Winnie Stachelberg, the center's senior vice president for external affairs.

"It took eight years to get into this mess, and it will take a long time to get out of it," she said. "The next administration needs to look ahead. This transition team and the incoming administration gets that in a big way."

Original article posted here.

Political Prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal's timeless assessment of Barack Obama

2008-11-07T00:44:00.000+02:00

The incontrovertible proof of the 911 controlled demolition -- new video of building 7

2008-11-06T13:08:00.002+02:00

After black-slapping about the restoration of democracy, the next civil rights battle will be the ongoing fight for 9/11 Truth. And, make no mistake, the President-elect will be a gatekeeper, not a truth seeker.

weazl on recent events

2008-11-06T11:17:00.001+02:00

The shoes in which Barack Obama walks . . .

2008-11-05T13:55:00.001+02:00

weazl will make his own comment soon. Right now, here's Ron Paul

2008-11-05T13:46:00.002+02:00

Keith Olbermann dissects the propaganda

2008-10-29T13:05:00.001+02:00

The Congressional Acquiesence of the Moron's Crimes Continues

2008-10-29T02:06:00.001+02:00

The gig is up. World starting to call the US on its shell game.

2008-10-28T17:56:00.002+02:00

In America we distrust

The crisis of the U.S. financial system is the crisis of its imperial system, after it managed to defeat the U.S.S.R. and start a huge technological revolution. It might be the end of a period, but last century the United States came back twice from similar problems

by Francesco Sisci

BEIJING --

In these days the U.S. dollar is no longer what it used to be. For decades, concrete sign of power and wealth, it is now beleaguered, despite the recent rallies that have boosted its value against the European competitor – the euro. The American financial system in fact is crumbling day after day, and nobody knows when the fall of this extremely volatile market will stop or how much money it will have to burn before it can start all over again. At the moment nobody trusts the U.S. financial system, heart if not mind of the (formerly?) almighty American empire. So the once proud motto on the greenback “in God we trust” sounds now like the prayer of the despairing who cast their lot with God because everything else has failed.

Yet it did not begin yesterday, and it did not start with the financial derivatives, which now have become almost byword for deceit and trickery.

[1]

These two sets of data reveal the problem that, according to many economists, is at root of the present financial crisis: At the end of September, the overgrowth of the U.S. deficit reached the extraordinary total of U.S. $10.2 trillion—and it keeps growing!

The growth of public debt was an intentional policy started during the Ronald Reagan administration, and it was coupled with wide-ranging deregulation intended to boost America’s economy after the doldrums of the Vietnam War and the failures of the Carter administration. And, indeed, it did do so.

These policies worked miracles. They were a strategic weapon, as they provided the funds to engage the U.S.S.R. in an armament race that eventually bankrupted and thus defeated the Soviet enemy.

They also provided cheap credit that allowed America's stillborn computer industry to engage and defeat the competing Japanese computer giants then poised to surpass the United States.

Furthermore, the strategies endowed the American people with cheap money to start a spending spree, which proved to them U.S. affluence and guaranteed consensus for the ruling parties. The psychological depression of the Vietnam War and the former fear of being defeated by the communists were all gone.

It was a God-send all around. Besides, the largest part of this debt was domestic, and thus not influenced by the vagaries or blackmail of foreign governments. For many years, it was well below 60 percent of the GDP, the golden mark fixed by the European countries during the pact on the euro in the early 1990s as a standard of public discipline and well-being.

Snags

However, there were snags in this process. The debt was sold to the open market as bonds, and it was also monetized. That is, the Federal Reserve created an entry on its books to credit the U.S. Fractional Reserve Banking, this new checkbook money was treated as an asset to lend against for an amount equal to the dollar amount of the bonds the Federal Reserve was acquiring. The money created in this process not only included the new dollars that came into existence just to purchase the bonds, but also much more because this new money was now sitting in the form of checkbook money at the Federal Reserve.

The expansion of the money supply was many times the initial money created. That exact amount ended up being a function of the percentage of deposits banks must set aside as "reserves."[2]

The monetization of U.S. debt expanded the money supply, which tended to dilute the value of dollars already in circulation, put downward pressure on the dollar for short-term interest rates (thus, the banks had more to lend), and put upward pressure on inflation. Typically, this situation causes an inflationary boom that ends in a deflationary bust to complete the business cycle. However, the debt soared and inflation ultimately stayed relatively low in the 1990s, partly because China, Japan, and other Asian exporters were willing to sell America cheap products and get paid with money accumulated in reserves denominated in U.S. dollars.

Monetization might not be the core of the problem, as Spengler argues in a private exchange:

“Robert Mundell's groundbreaking paper in 1965 argued that an expansion of government debt relative to GDP could represent an increase in market efficiency, if it were issued in context of tax cuts that increased growth (market efficiency measured by the portion of total future income streams that could be discounted by the market). That was the foundation of what later became known as supply-side economics. In that sense the growth of debt was not necessarily a bad thing. As for monetization, the growth rate of the monetary base between 2001 and 2008 fell gradually to zero before spiking during the last few weeks due to massive intervention by the Fed. I don't believe that issuing public debt and monetizing it was the root cause of the crisis, although the deficit certainly was too large during much of this period. Rather, the massive increase in effective leverage by the banks due to use of derivatives created vulnerabilities that blew up starting in July 2007… Once the prospective returns to high-quality U.S. agency-backed mortgage-backed securities collapsed during the mid-2000s due to massive buying from Asia and Europe, the banks turned to manufacturing structured credit instead. The structured credit leverage machine in the banks, in turn, absorbed almost all the financing for corporate leverage (leveraged buyouts), and so forth.”

However, from abroad it is easier to see the continuity of the faults of a 25-year-old ballooning public debt sold abroad, and in times of crisis, the whole strategy is put under scrutiny. As the U.S. financial system asks for money, support, and understanding from foreign countries, it is hard to imagine that foreign creditors will be willing to carry on with a policy of buying bonds while accepting relatively minor fixing of the problem. A major overhaul and rethinking is due, and this can’t avoid issue of the American public debt.

Still, before rebutting the issue of public debt, one has to make clear that it was part of a complex program that brought many positive results.

Benefits of the snags

This practice immensely expanded the money in circulation, and this money was seminal for the growth of the computer and telecommunication industry, which revolutionized the world in the 1990s. It contributed to the risk funds that placed their bets with small-garage enterprises: One of them could succeed and 20 could fail, but the initial investor would still be rewarded with 100 times returns. Google, Yahoo, and many other present giants were engendered by this wealth of money supply and generosity of conditions. If interest rates had been higher and lending conditions stricter, this revolution might have not taken off.

Moreover, the technological and productivity boost contributed by the advances in computers created major economic growth that rewarded the easy money supply.

However, in the late 1990s, the Internet was already a bubble. Returns were not that great, and the public and advertising industry did not move from traditional media to the Internet fast enough to justify expectations from lenders and investors. Still, this could be dealt with. Asians, and especially the thrifty Chinese, were willing to save money and lend it to squandering Americans, building a virtuous chain linking the two economies. Americans would invest in China, upgrading the local technology and know-how. American and Chinese factories, which had learned the American ways, would send cheap exports to the U.S. This kept down world inflation and aided in the growth of the American service industry, which was selling more Asian products to Americans and shifting away from manufacturing. Part of the profit was returned to China, which in turn invested in U.S. debt to finance new American spending.

Yet, to pay off the interest on the bonds and keep alive this virtuous circle of Asian money looking for great returns in America, the U.S. had to provide grand new growth venues similar to the computer and Internet industries in the 1980s and 1990s. First of all, the money supply had to be kept abundant for it to move around looking for investment opportunities, such as new technologies that could replicate the computer revolution in other areas. A money crunch or a spike in interest rates in America would make the U.S. pay high interests on its bonds and could also sap Asian confidence in continuous economic growth in the United States and thus could push investors away from the golden sidewalks of Wall Street and its neighborhood.

With so much cheap money and investment flourishing, the only task for banks was to allocate the funds, without paying too much attention on the solidity of the assets financed. In the late 1990s, there was this crunch.

As the Washington Post reported:

“The Clinton administration, supported by then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, refused to tighten regulations on financial derivatives, memorably dubbed ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’ by Warren Buffett. The 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law separating commercial banking and investment banking, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.”[3]

But this did not change the overall economic situation because technological revolutions do not turn up every day, and technological improvements do not deliver the same returns as a new product. An electric lamp that illuminates the night or a computer providing fast computation tools and instant, free telecommunication can promise immense returns. Improved brighter lamps and faster communication and computation facilities provide only incremental returns. These returns would not justify the massive amount of public debt in America in the first years of this century. Therefore, the George W. Bush administration, then in power, could choose to either (1) carry on with the Clinton policy of managed decrease of the public debt, (2) let the existing Internet bubble burst open and allow the market start afresh after the explosion, or (3) look for new expansion drives and bet on them.

In a way, there was no choice: Bush had to go for option (3) if he wanted to try to be reelected. If he chose option (1), he would have imposed harsher discipline on Americans who were looking for signs of recovery and welfare after the meager Clinton years, and he therefore might have lost votes. If he had chosen the purely liberal recipe (2), he could have opened a Pandora's box of social tensions that might have toppled him. The safest course was option (3), which could keep the growth going until reelection time, and then, in the following four years, he could assess the situation and recalibrate it, if necessary.

Politicians are no saints, and their political survival is the precondition for any policy. Therefore, Bush de facto had only option (3). Besides, the "war on terror" could have been a golden opportunity. The computer industry and Internet developed as spin-offs of military research in the 1980s—a new military campaign could have provided the same momentum for a technology revolution as the Cold War in the 1980s had done before.

War in Central Asia and the Middle East could have been a good thing. It gave the U.S. several things that were necessary at the time. (1) It had an inspirational ideological drive (the fight against Islam fundamentalism-terrorism) that was as real a threat to the world as communism had been before. (2) It promised to deliver cheap oil supplies that would grease the rusty clogs of American capitalism and help restart it. (3) It would democratize and stabilize the region, thus making it a part of the “Western world” market value system. This shift would definitively defeat the OPEC oil-producing cartel. It would also open a world of new consumers and producers and brush up the old continental Silk Road, which linked the Mediterranean to the Far East, placing it under American influence.

It was a promise of bonanza that—if it worked—would have more than justified the continuous growth of the U.S. debt, which Asians, in turn, would have been more than willing to keep financing just to be part of the game led by America. By the time this was over, new technologies and investment opportunities might have sprung up to reignite the whole process.

Who could have resisted the temptation? Yet, it did not work out. The strategy may have failed because of the deregulation of derivatives or the initial strategic approach to the war in Iraq. Still, with hindsight one can see it was ultimately because of hubris: There were too many goals (from oil to democracy) with too little thorough thinking.

Besides, after keeping the dollar exchange rate high vis-à-vis the euro, Bush let the dollar drop against the European counterpart. The objective bet was that, prompted by the cheap dollar, U.S.U.S. counterparts, abetted by the cheap dollar, simply grew lazy and did not invest in greater productivity and incremental improvements. manufacturers would bankrupt or at least beat their European competitors, who were hindered by the expensive euro, leaving American industries in globally dominant position. However, this did not occur. Prickled by the expensive euro, many European manufactures improved efficiency and productivity. Many U.S. counterparts, abetted by the cheap dollar, simply grew lazy and did not invest in greater productivity and incremental improvements.

Meanwhile, oil prices soared, clogging the arteries of the American-Asian industrial system with growing production prices and new inflationary pressures felt first in Asia and indirectly in America, too. High energy prices also boosted Russian confidence to the point that for a while the country dreamed of being an empire again and almost challenged the U.S. in Georgia.

And America, the ultimate consumer of Russian energy and Asian goods, could not find the money to foot the bill.

The sensible course of action should have been in 2007—or, even better, in 2006—to stop the run: drastically slow down money supply, import less, and cool down the economy. There were important signs that things were getting out of hand. An alarm bell should have sounded when the troubled Chinese economy, with foreign trade making up about 70 percent of its G.D.P. and exports about 40 percent of the G.D.P., was running a U.S. $300 billion surplus with America. In 2006 and 2007, China showed strong signs of economic overheating, and Beijing took steps to cool down the economy and rein in the money supply that was then going into the stock market and real estate. Because of the strong links between the two economies, if China has a fever, America will catch a cold sooner or later. But Americans did not realize it, and neither did the Chinese, who were worshipping the U.S. economy. There was greed, also. The Chinese were still hoping to get paid for their sacrifices and thriftiness through American bonds, which financed the squandering U.S. consumers. And the U.S. consumer lost track of who would pay the bill.

The paradigm of growth that had worked since Reagan was falling apart, but for months, many economists thought the worst was over and that this was a limited crisis. What had happened in America was the same as what was happening in China: There was a large money supply without rewarding returns in industry and new technologies, so investors found they could get better returns in the stock exchange and real estate. But at this point, the volumes were immense because they had multiplied the starting cash through the new derivatives.

This was not pure greed. The Clinton administration, coming to power after the fall of the Soviet empire, did not have enough money to finance the world order, which had doubled in size. The U.S. had to shoulder not just half of the world (the rest was formerly a Soviet burden) but all of it. The new derivatives and deregulation would provide the resources for new needs.

The current system worked for more than two decades, but now all of that is gone. Reaganomics, which started this whole process, does not work anymore—but what should be done?

After Reaganomics

The negative legacy of this disaster is huge. Its first victim is the reliability of the U.S. financial system, which, in turn, is the very heart of American power—Napoleon said he needed three things for war: money, money, money. Being dependable and reliable is the core of finance—it goes along with the saying “you can bank on it,” and it goes along with trading real goods and gold for banknotes, which are ultimately just sheets of paper. That was what made the world trust America in 1971, when it abandoned the gold standard, fixed in the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, convincing everybody that the dollar greenback was as good as a bullion.

Sure, it is not the first time that America has gone under. In the 20th century, it happened twice.

In 1929, the crash of its stock exchange sunk the whole world into a depression for years. The U.S. itself seemed on the brink of disappearing, but it came back with vengeance by winning World War II and setting a new world order.

The second time was in early 1970s with the Vietnam War. The U.S. thought it was on the verge of not a local but a global defeat at the hands of the communists. That prompted Nixon to embrace the extraordinary opening of China. It was the last resort in the face of an overwhelming encroachment by an enemy threatening to take over Asia and the world. Yet, less than a decade later, the situation was reversed and the Soviets were being definitively beaten.

Will America come back after this, or is its position permanently compromised? To answer this question, one must see what was lost—or seriously dented—in this crisis: trust in the dollar (as an absolute symbol of the overall American strategy dating back to Reagan or from the 1971 drop of the gold standard) and trust in the “bankability” of its financial system.

However, after the fall of the U.S.S.R. in the 1990s, the world America took over was too big for its economy. This was unlike the situation at the end of World War II, when the U.S. economy was about half of the world economy. In 1945, America had de facto the only surviving and fully functional industrial complex. And in fact, America took over less than half of the world while the other half was under the influence of the Soviets.

In 1992, with the fall of the U.S.S.R., America was one of three main pillars of industrial production. The others were Western Europe and Japan, whose economies could challenge America’s but whose politics were subservient to the United States. They were pulled into post-Cold War efforts but dragged their feet. In fact, other countries wanted the U.S. to take the lead in many new political challenges, such as the war in Yugoslavia, during which America sent troops basically because the European powers had no stomach for a fight there or elsewhere.

In the 1990s, America tried to do too much with too little—and didn’t realize it. It overstretched its capability and economy, and this also sapped its spirit. But the U.S. still could have pulled through if the Iraqi war were better thought out and conducted or if derivatives were kept under control.

Now, the loss is not absolute, since it produced gigantic results, including the fall of the Soviet empire and the technological revolution of the Internet. Even in the face of the dramatic present crisis, it is hard to see a currency or a country replacing the dollar or the U.S. But, the present crisis proves that the dollar and the U.S. can’t answer for everything and can’t sustain the whole world alone. America's current search for support in Europe and Asia proves that America can’t do it alone. The U.S. soft power has been seriously dented, and this can’t be compensated for by the hard power of its military. If done at gunpoint, whatever the amount of money we talk about, justified earnings in financial transactions become simple highway robbery.

In a way, America has to recognize that the world has become too complex and large for the present American resources, and thus it needs to embrace some power-sharing.

On the other hand, the world can’t deny that, although no longer paramount, the dollar is still central.

This is a double challenge that likely future American President Barack Obama will have to address. The answer could be from the book of old Chinese imperial recipes: “Use foreigners against foreigners.” Or, translated in Roman imperial terms, use barbarian troops against barbarian hordes. America has been trying to do the opposite in the past two decades: doing everything itself, trusting none but its own troops and its own banks. The opposite should be true. By diluting its shares in the global stake-holding system, America could have a better grasp of the world, just like a rich man who agrees to scale down from 100 percent of a small company to 51 percent of a larger company.

This is the positive side for America, but the bitter pill is that power-sharing requires more responsible behavior. America's honor, its financial system, must be restored, as it will have to be more transparent to more stake-holders. The U.S. papers rightly complained about the scandal of the Chinese milk faked with melamine, and the world looked in horror at a history of Chinese low-quality paint for toys laced with lead and other substandard products. However, all of these scandals are dwarfed by the dimension of Wall Street's habit of producing pyramids of paper receipts leveraging 100 times the original collateral.

Let’s make no mistake, it will take years to restore America’s honor, and this restoration can’t be done in isolation, without other “stake-holding” countries. However, honor is the key for everything. Ancient China knew it.

The 4th century philosopher Wuma zi was quoted in the Mozi arguing as follows[4]:

“In the myriad things, nothing is to be valued above honor [yi, the sense of what is right].

If you tell a man ‘I’ll give you cap and shoes if you let me cut off your hands and feet,’ will he do it? Certainly he will not. Why? Because cap and shoes are less valuable than hands and feet. If you continue: ‘I’ll give you the rule of the world if you let me execute your person,’ will he do it? Certainly he will not. Why? Because the world is less valuable than one’s own person.”

However, concludes Wuma zi:

“One will fight to death over a single word, which makes honor being more valuable than one’s own person.”

Why, then, do people go to war, when they could lose their lives and benefits are very uncertain? Because for people, honor can be more valuable than one’s life.

In banking, as we saw, honor is everything. Otherwise, it is robbery, and to resist a robbery people may be willing to die or go to war. If America wants to restore its honor, it needs to thoroughly clean its financial system and have a bigger strategy for the future, together with its stakeholders. It is much more than a new Bretton Woods—it is a new world order that Obama will have to help organize. He can’t do it alone, but he could lead it. If he doesn’t, it will not be just the U.S. banks that will suffer.

I am grateful to Pansak Vinyaratn, Gianni De Michelis, Lorenzo Infantino and Enrico Colombatto for important discussions and advise.

nnnn

[1] U.S. Debt from 1940 on. Red lines indicate the public debt and black lines indicate the gross debt. The difference is that the gross debt includes funds held by the government (i.e. the Social Security Trust Fund). The second chart shows debt as a percentage of the U.S. G.D.P. or dollar value of economic production per year. (Note: The two charts above do not include the recent rise of the public debt to above $10 trillion on September 30, 2008.) Data from the FY 2009 U.S. Budget historical tables is available at [whitehouse.gov/omb].
[2] See, for instance, "The Macro Economy Today" by Bradley Schiller and "Secrets of the Temple" by William Greider.
[3] Editorial, Washington Post, October 20, 2008.

[4] Mozi yinde 47/1-3, translation adapted from A.C. Graham “Disputers of the Tao” p. 62, La Salle, Illinois, 1999.

Original article posted here.

Obama's and our masters

2008-10-28T14:49:00.000+02:00

For the third time, Japanese parlimentarian, Yukihisa Fujita, challenges 9/11 fairly tale in Japanese Diet

2008-10-28T14:14:00.001+02:00

This video should go viral. Spread the word. Share the link.

2008-10-27T21:19:00.000+02:00

Nearly a trillion dollars. No accountability.

2008-10-27T12:23:00.001+02:00

China targets second prong of US global strength (after nuclear arsenal)

2008-10-27T12:21:00.001+02:00

U.S. has plundered world wealth with dollar: China paper

BEIJING (Reuters) - The United States has plundered global wealth by exploiting the dollar's dominance, and the world urgently needs other currencies to take its place, a leading Chinese state newspaper said on Friday.

The front-page commentary in the overseas edition of the People's Daily said that Asian and European countries should banish the U.S. dollar from their direct trade relations for a start, relying only on their own currencies.

A meeting between Asian and European leaders, starting on Friday in Beijing, presented the perfect opportunity to begin building a new international financial order, the newspaper said.

The People's Daily is the official newspaper of China's ruling Communist Party. The Chinese-language overseas edition is a small circulation offshoot of the main paper.

Its pronouncements do not necessarily directly voice leadership views. But the commentary, as well as recent comments, amount to a growing chorus of Chinese disdain for Washington's economic policies and global financial dominance in the wake of the credit crisis.

"The grim reality has led people, amidst the panic, to realize that the United States has used the U.S. dollar's hegemony to plunder the world's wealth," said the commentator, Shi Jianxun, a professor at Shanghai's Tongji University.

Shi, who has before been strident in his criticism of the U.S., said other countries had lost vast amounts of wealth because of the financial crisis, while Washington's sole concern had been protecting its own interests.

"The U.S. dollar is losing people's confidence. The world, acting democratically and lawfully through a global financial organization, urgently needs to change the international monetary system based on U.S. global economic leadership and U.S. dollar dominance," he wrote.

Shi suggested that all trade between Europe and Asia should be settled in euros, pounds, yen and yuan, though he did not explain how the Chinese currency could play such a role since it is not convertible on the capital account.

A two-day Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) of 27 EU member states and 16 Asian countries was set to open on Friday. Though few analysts expect much in the way of concrete agreements, Shi said it could prove momentous.

"How can Europe and Asia grasp each other's hands and together confront the once-in-a-century global financial crisis sparked by the U.S.; how can they construct a new equitable and safe international financial order?" he said.

"The world is waiting for this Asian-European meeting to achieve big results in financial cooperation."

Original article posted here.

Not exactly an endorsement, but I do like the ad

2008-10-25T23:18:00.000+03:00

Breaking Babylon

2008-10-25T23:07:00.000+03:00

Wrecked Iraq

What was once the most advanced Middle Eastern society - economically, socially, and technologically - has become an economic basket case, rivaling the most desperate countries in the world

Michael Schwartz.

What the Good News from Iraq Really Means

As the Smoke Clears in Iraq: Even before the spectacular presidential election campaign became a national obsession, and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression crowded out other news, coverage of the Iraq War had dwindled to next to nothing. National newspapers had long since discontinued their daily feasts of multiple — usually front page – reports on the country, replacing them with meager meals of mostly inside-the-fold summary stories. On broadcast and cable TV channels, where violence in Iraq had once been the nightly lead, whole news cycles went by without a mention of the war.

The tone of the coverage also changed. The powerful reports of desperate battles and miserable Iraqis disappeared. There are still occasional stories about high-profile bombings or military campaigns in obscure places, but the bulk of the news is about quiescence in old hot spots, political maneuvering by Iraqi factions, and the newly emerging routines of ordinary life.

A typical "return to normal life" piece appeared October 11th in the New York Times under the headline, "Schools Open, and the First Test is Iraqi Safety." Featured was a Baghdad schoolteacher welcoming her students by assuring them that "security has returned to Baghdad, city of peace."

Even as his report began, though, Times reporter Sam Dagher hedged the "return to normal" theme. Here was his first paragraph in full:

"On the first day of school, 10-year-old Basma Osama looked uneasy standing in formation under an already stifling morning sun. She and dozens of schoolmates listened to a teacher's pep talk — probably a necessary one, given the barren and garbage-strewn playground."

This glimpse of the degraded conditions at one Baghdad public school, amplified in the body of Dagher's article by other examples, is symptomatic of the larger reality in Iraq. In a sense, the (often exaggerated) decline in violence in that country has allowed foreign reporters to move around enough to report on the real conditions facing Iraqis, and so should have provided US readers with a far fuller picture of the devastation George Bush's war wrought.

In reality, though, since there are far fewer foreign reporters moving around a quieter Iraq, far less news is coming out of that wrecked land. The major newspapers and networks have drastically reduced their staffs there and — with a relative trickle of exceptions like Dagher's fine report — what's left is often little more than a collection of pronouncements from the US military, or Iraqi and American political leaders in Baghdad and Washington, framing the American public's image of the situation there.

In addition, the devastation that is now Iraq is not of a kind that can always be easily explained in a short report, nor for that matter is it any longer easily repaired. In many cities, an American reliance on artillery and air power during the worst days of fighting helped devastate the Iraqi infrastructure. Political and economic changes imposed by the American occupation did damage of another kind, often depriving Iraqis not just of their livelihoods but of the very tools they would now need to launch a major reconstruction effort in their own country.

As a consequence, what was once the most advanced Middle Eastern society — economically, socially, and technologically — has become an economic basket case, rivaling the most desperate countries in the world. Only the (as yet unfulfilled) promise of oil riches, which probably cannot be effectively accessed or used until US forces withdraw from the country, provides a glimmer of hope that Iraq will someday lift itself out of the abyss into which the US invasion pushed it.

Consider only a small sampling of the devastation.

The Economy: Fundamental to the American occupation was the desire to annihilate Saddam Hussein's Baathist state apparatus and the economic system it commanded. A key aspect of this was the closing down of the vast majority of state-owned economic enterprises (with the exception of those involved in oil extraction and electrical generation).

In all, 192 establishments, adding up to 35% of the Iraqi economy, were shuttered in the summer and fall of 2003. These included basic manufacturing processes like leather tanning and tractor assembly that supplied other sectors, transportation firms that dominated national commerce, and maintenance enterprises that housed virtually all the technicians and engineers qualified to service the electrical, water, oil, and other infrastructural systems in the country.

Justified as the way to bring a modern free-enterprise system to backward Iraq, this draconian program was put in place by the President's proconsul in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III. The result? An immediate depression that only deepened in the years to follow.

One measure of this policy's impact can be found in the demise of the leather goods industry, a key pre-invasion sector of Iraq's non-petroleum economy. When a government-owned tanning operation, which all by itself employed 30,000 workers and supplied leather to an entire industry, was shuttered in late 2003, it deprived shoe-makers and other leather goods establishments of their key resource. Within a year, employment in the industry had dropped from 200,000 workers to a mere 20,000.

By the time Bremer left Iraq in the spring of 2004, the inhabitants of many cities faced 60% unemployment. Meanwhile, the country's agriculture, a key component of its economy, was also victimized by the dismantling of government establishments and services. The lush farming areas between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers suffered badly. The once-thriving date palm industry was a typical casualty. It suffered deadly infestations of pests when the occupation eliminated a government-run insecticide spraying program. Even oil refinery-based industrial towns like Baiji became cities of slums when plants devoted to non-petroleum activities were shuttered.

This economic devastation fueled the insurgency by generating desperation, anger, and willing recruits. The explosion of resistance, in turn, tended to obscure — at least for western news services — the desperate circumstances under which ordinary Iraqis labored.

As violence has subsided in Baghdad and elsewhere, demands for relief have come to the fore. These are not easily answered by a still largely non-functional central government in Baghdad whose administrative and economic apparatus was long ago dismantled, and many of whose key technical personnel had fled into exile. Meanwhile, in early 2006, the American occupation declared that further reconstruction work would be the responsibility of Iraqis. It is not clear into what channels the growing discontent over an economy that remains largely in the tank and a government that still cannot deliver ordinary services will flow.

Electricity: A critical factor in Iraq's collapse has been its decaying electrical grid. In areas where the insurgency raged, facilities involved in producing and transmitting electricity were targeted, both by the insurgents and US forces, each trying to deprive the other of needed resources. In addition, Bremer eliminated the government-owned maintenance and engineering enterprises that had been holding the electrical system together ever since the U.N. sanctions regime after the 1991 Gulf War deprived Iraq of material needed to repair and upgrade its facilities. Maintenance and replacement contracts were given instead to multinational companies with little knowledge of the existing system and — due to cost-plus contracting — every incentive to replace facilities with their own proprietary technology. In the meantime, many Iraqi technicians left the country.

The successor Iraqi governments, deprived of the capacity to manage the system's reconstruction, continued the US occupation policy of contracting with foreign companies. Even in areas of the country relatively unaffected by the fighting, those companies did the lucrative thing, replacing entire sections of the electric grid, often with inappropriate but exquisitely expensive equipment and technology.

A combination of factors — including pressure from the insurgency, the soaring costs of security, and an almost unparalleled record of endemic waste and corruption — led to costs well beyond those originally offered for the already overpriced projects. Many were then abandoned before completion as funding ran out. Completed projects were often shabbily done and just as often proved incompatible with existing facilities, introducing new inefficiencies.

In one altogether-too-typical case, Bechtel installed 26 natural gas turbines in areas where no natural gas was available. The turbines were then converted to oil, which reduced their capacity by 50% and led to a rapid sludge build-up in the equipment requiring expensive maintenance no Iraqi technicians had been trained to perform. In location after location, the turbines became inoperative.

Even before the invasion, the decrepit electrical system could not meet national demand. No province had uninterrupted service and certain areas had far less than 12 hours of service per day. The vast investments by the occupation and its successor regimes have increased electrical capacity since the invasion of 2003, but these gains have not come close to keeping up with skyrocketing demand created by the presence of hundreds of thousands of troops, private security personnel, and occupation officials, as well as by the introduction of all manner of electronic devices and products in the post-invasion period. Recent U.N. reports indicate that, in the last year, electrical capacity has slipped to less than half of demand. With priority going to military and government operations, many Baghdad neighborhoods experience less than two hours of publicly provided electricity a day, forcing citizens and business enterprises to utilize expensive and polluting gasoline generators.

In spring of this year, 81% of Iraqis reported that they had experienced inadequate electricity in the previous month. During the heat of summer and the cold of winter, these shortages create real health emergencies.

In 2004, the U.N. estimated that $20 billion in reconstruction funds would be needed for a fully operative electrical grid. The estimates now range from $40 billion to $80 billion.

Water: The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which flow through the country from the northwest to the southeast, have since time immemorial irrigated the rich farming land that lay between them, nurtured the fish that are a staple of the Iraqi diet, and provided water for animal and human consumption. American-style warfare, with its reliance on tank, artillery, and air power, often resulted in the cratering of streets in upstream Sunni cities like Tal Afar, Falluja, and Samarra where the insurgency was strongest. One result was the wrecking of already weakened underground sewage systems. In the Sadr City section of Baghdad, for instance, where much fighting has taken place and American air power was called in regularly, there is now a lake of sewage clearly visible on satellite photographs.

The ultimate destination of significant parts of the filth from devastated sewage systems was the two rivers. Five years worth of such waste flowing through the streets and into those rivers has left them thoroughly contaminated. Their water can no longer be safely drunk by humans or animals, the remaining fish cannot be safely eaten, and the contaminated water reportedly withers the crops it irrigates.

Iraq's never-adequate water purification system has proven woefully insufficient to handle this massive flow of contamination, while inadequate electric supplies insure that the country's few functional purification plants are less than effective.

In many cities, the sewage system must be entirely reconstructed, but repairs cannot even begin without a viable electrical system, a reinvigorated engineering and construction sector, and a government capable of marshalling these resources. None of these prerequisites currently exist.

Schools: Education has been a victim of all the various pathologies current in Iraqi society. During the initial invasion, the US military often commandeered schools as forward bases, attracted by their well-defined perimeters, open spaces for vehicles, and many rooms for offices and barracks. Two incidents in which American gunfire from an occupied elementary school killed Iraqi civilians in the conservative Sunni city of Falluja may have been the literal sparks that started the insurgency. Many schools would subsequently be rendered uninhabitable by destructive battles fought in or near them.

Under the US occupation's de-Baathification policy, thousands of teachers who belonged to the Baath Party were fired, leaving hundreds of thousands of students teacherless. In addition, the shuttering of government enterprises deprived the schools of supplies — including books and teaching materials — as well as urgently needed maintenance.

The American solution, as with the electric grid, was to hire multinational firms to repair the schools and rehabilitate school systems. The result was an orgy of corruption accompanied by very little practical aid. Local school officials complained that facilities with no windows, heating, or toilet facilities were repainted and declared fit for use.

The dwindling central government presence made schools inviting arenas for sectarian conflict, with administrators, teachers, and especially college professors removed, kidnapped, or assassinated for ideological reasons. This, in turn, stimulated a mass exodus of teachers, intellectuals, and scientists from the country, removing precious human capital essential for future reconstruction.

Finally, in Baghdad, the US military began installing ten-foot tall cement walls around scores of communities and neighborhoods to wall off participants in the sectarian violence. As a result, schoolchildren were often separated from their schools, reducing attendance at the few intact facilities to those students who happened to live within the imprisoning walls.

This fall, as some of these walls were dismantled, residents discovered that many of the schools were virtually unusable. The Times's Dagher offered a vivid description, for instance, of a school in the Dolaie neighborhood which "is falling apart, and overwhelmed by the children of almost 4,000 Shiite refugee families who have settled in the Chukouk camp nearby. The roof is caving in, classroom floors and hallways are stripped bare, and in the playground a pile of burnt trash was smoldering."

The Dysfunctional Society: Much has been made in the US presidential campaign of the $70 billion oil surplus the Iraqi government built up in these last years as oil prices soared. In actuality, most of it is currently being held in American financial institutions, with various American politicians threatening to confiscate it if it is not constructively spent. Yet even this bounty reflects the devastation of the war.

De-Baathification and subsequent chaos rendered the Iraqi government incapable of effectively administering projects that lay outside the fortified, American-controlled Green Zone in the heart of Baghdad. A vast flight of the educated class to Syria, Jordan, and other countries also deprived it of the managers and technicians needed to undertake serious reconstruction on a large scale.

As a consequence, less than 25% of the funds budgeted for facility construction and reconstruction last year were even spent. Some government ministries spent less than 1% of their allocations. In the meantime, the large oil surpluses have become magnets for massive governmental corruption, further infuriating frustrated citizens who, after five years, still often lack the most basic services. Transparency International's 2008 "corruption perceptions index" listed Iraq as tied for 178th place among the 180 countries evaluated.

The Iraq that has emerged from the American invasion and occupation is now a thoroughly wrecked land, housing a largely dysfunctional society. More than a million Iraqis may have died; millions have fled their homes; many millions of others have been scarred by war, insurgency and counterinsurgency operations, extreme sectarian violence, and soaring levels of common criminality. Education and medical systems have essentially collapsed and, even today, with every kind of violence in decline, Iraq remains one of the most dangerous societies on earth.

As its crisis deepened, the various areas of social and technical devastation became ever more entwined, reinforcing one another. The country's degraded sewage and water systems, for example, have spawned two consecutive years of widespread cholera. It seems likely that this year, the disease will only subside when the cold weather makes further contagion impossible, but this "solution" also guarantees its reoccurrence each year until water purification systems are rebuilt.

In the meantime, cholera victims cannot rely on Iraq's once vaunted medical system, since two-thirds of the country's doctors have fled, its hospitals are often in a state of advanced decay and disrepair, drugs remain scarce, and equipment, if available at all, is outdated. The rebuilding of the water and medical systems, however, cannot get fully underway unless the electrical system is restored to reasonable shape. Repair of the electrical grid awaits a reliable oil and gas pipeline system to provide fuel for generators, and this cannot be constructed without the expertise of technicians who have left the country, or newly trained specialists that the educational system is now incapable of producing. And so it goes.

On a daily basis, this cauldron of misery renews powerful feelings of discontent, which explains why American military leaders regularly insist that the country's current relative quiescence is, at best, "fragile." They believe only the most minimal reductions in US forces in Iraq (still hovering at close to 150,000 troops) are advisable.

Even if Washington prefers to ignore Iraqi realities, military officials working close to the ground know that the country's state of disrepair, and an inability to deal with it in any reasonably prompt way, leaves a population in steaming discontent. At any moment, this could explode in further sectarian violence or yet another violent effort to expel the US forces from the country.

Michael Schwartz's new book, War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context (Haymarket, 2008), has just been released. It explains just how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the US to dismantle the Iraqi state and economy while fueling sectarian civil war inside that country. A professor of sociology at Stony Brook State University, Schwartz has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. His work on Iraq has appeared in numerous outlets, including TomDispatch, Asia Times, Mother Jones, and Contexts. A video of him discussing "wrecked Iraq" can be seen by clicking here. His email address is ms42@optonline.net.

Original article posted here.

Even the puppet stops dancing

2008-10-25T10:16:00.001+03:00

Iraq's prime minister won't sign U.S. troop deal, official says

By ROY GUTMAN

Fearing political division in the parliament and the country at large, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki won't sign the just-completed agreement on the status of U.S. troops in Iraq, a leading lawmaker said on Friday.

Shelving the new accord would constitute a major setback both for the Bush administration, which has been seeking to establish a legal basis for the extended presence of the 151,000 U.S. troops in this country, and for Iraq, which gained notable concessions in the draft accord reached one week ago.

"No, he will not" submit the agreement to the parliament, Sheikh Jalal al-Din al-Sagheer, the deputy head of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, told McClatchy Newspapers. "For this matter, we need national consensus."

Instead, al-Sagheer said, Iraq's political leaders are thinking about seeking an extension of the United Nations mandate for the presence of U.S. troops that expires on Dec. 31. Russia, a member of the U.N. Security Council, had given Iraq a direct assurance that it wouldn't veto an extension, he said, adding that it was likely to last between six months and a year.

Ali al-Adeeb, the chief of staff of al-Maliki's Dawa party, said Wednesday that the Iraqi parliament "cannot approve this pact in its current form."

Top U.S. military officials have warned of serious consequences should the agreement not be signed. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said earlier this week that Iraq's forces "will not be ready to provide for their security" after the current U.N. mandate runs out. "And in that regard there is great potential for losses of significant consequence," Mullen said.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told USA Today: "Without (a security agreement), we would potentially have to cease all operations."

Iraqis, however, are adamant that the accord must be open to further amendments if they are to approve it.

"The problem is that when we were given the latest draft, we were told the American negotiators will accept no amendments to it, and the Iraqi government has more requirements," said al-Sagheer, an Islamic cleric who later led the Friday prayers broadcast on national television.

He said al-Maliki had come to the Political Council for National Security, a top decision-making body, and said the new accord was the best he could obtain, but it did not include everything Iraq wanted.

If al-Maliki signed the accord and turned it over to the parliament, "I'm sure that the agreement will not be approved for 10 years," Sagheer said.

The cleric said the draft accord was "good, in general," but its timing was bad. If an Iraqi negotiator accepted the agreement, "he will be taken as an agent for the Americans," and if he were to reject it, "he will be taken for an agent for Iran."

A second factor is that the accord comes just before the U.S. elections, and an Iraqi negotiator had to ask whether it was best to negotiate with the lame-duck Bush administration or its successor. Still more important, al-Sagheer said, was the approaching provincial elections in Iraq, which could be held early next year.

"Iraqi politicians don't want to give their competitors the chance to use this agreement to destroy them," he said.

The accord contains a number of American concessions, calling for a U.S. troop withdrawal onto their bases by June 2009 and a complete withdrawal by the end of 2011 - both dates subject to extension but only if the Iraqi government requests it.

The accord also would allow Iraq to prosecute U.S. troops except when they're on bases or on military operations, strips private military contractors of U.S. legal protection and reclaims control over Baghdad's "Green" zone, the location of U.S. missions and many of the government headquarters.

Al-Sagheer said the setting of a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal was a "historic" accomplishment.

He also acknowledged that an extension of the current U.N. mandate might not reflect the gains made in the status of forces draft.

"For everything there is a price," he said. "And although (the accord) has many advantages, it also has many disadvantages, as it does for the coalition forces."

The problem for Iraqis, he said, was "the feeling with some of the parties that America has no intention of withdrawing within the timetable." Iraqis, he said, had so many negative experiences while a British mandate under the League of Nations from 1920 to 1932 that they fear a written agreement. "We have the feeling that if the Iraqi government accepts the demands, it will give a legal right to be occupied, so we don't have any kind of sovereignty."

Other politicians say that if Washington agrees to extend the negotiations, the talks will never end.

"This is all a game to win time. When the current issues are settled, they will just find new ones. ... They are delaying to appease Iran," said Mithal al-Alusi, a secular Sunni legislator who is critical of the current Shiite-led government.

Original article posted here.

More black ops, false flags and setting up Iraq for the slaying

2008-10-25T09:38:00.001+03:00

Abu Nidal, notorious Palestinian mercenary, 'was a US spy'

Secret papers claim the feared assassin was hired to find links between Saddam and al-Qa'ida. Robert Fisk reports

Iraqi secret police believed that the notorious Palestinian assassin Abu Nidal was working for the Americans as well as Egypt and Kuwait when they interrogated him in Baghdad only months before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Hitherto secret documents which are now in the hands of The Independent – written by Saddam Hussein's brutal security services for Saddam's eyes only – state that he had been "colluding" with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and Kuwaitis, was trying to find evidence linking Saddam and al-Qa'ida.

President George Bush was to use claims of a relationship with al-Qa'ida as one of the reasons for his 2003 invasion, along with Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. Western reports were to dismiss Iraq's claim that Abu Nidal committed suicide in August 2002, suggesting that Saddam's own security services murdered him when his presence became an embarrassment for them. The secret papers from Iraq suggest that he did indeed kill himself after confessing to the "treacherous crime of spying against this righteous country".

The final hours of Abu Nidal, the mercenary whose assassinations and murderous attacks in 20 countries over more than a quarter of a century killed or wounded more than 900 civilians, are revealed in the set of intelligence reports drawn up for Saddam's "presidency intelligence office" in September of 2002. The documents state that Egyptian and Kuwaiti intelligence officers had asked Abu Nidal, whose real name was Khalil al-Banna, to spy for them "with the knowledge of their American counterparts". Five days after his death, Iraq's head of intelligence, Taher Jalil Habbush, told a press conference in Baghdad that Abu Nidal had committed suicide after Iraqi agents arrived at the apartment where he was hiding in the city, but the secret reports make it clear that the notorious Palestinian had undergone a long series of interrogations prior to his violent demise. The records of these sessions were never intended to be made public and were written by Iraqi "Special Intelligence Unit M4" for Saddam. While Abu Nidal may have lied to his interrogators – torture is not mentioned in the reports – the documents appear to be a frank internal account of what the Iraqis believed his mission in Iraq to be. The papers name a Kuwaiti major, a member of the ruling Kuwaiti al-Sabbah family, as his "handler" and state that he was also tasked to "perform terrorist acts inside and outside Iraq". His presence in the country "would provide the Americans with the pretext that Iraq was harbouring terrorist organisations," the reports say.

"Coded messages indicate that the Kuwaitis asked him indirectly to find out whether al-Qa'ida elements were present in Iraq. Our conclusions were confirmed when he Abu Nidal started to mitigate his actions with irrational answers when asked about the data against him. He attempted to sidetrack his answers by not being specific and referring to historical matters. It was noted by the investigators that he went from short, ambiguous and unclear replies to generalities ... he seemed perturbed ... But once he became convinced of the weight of the evidence against him concerning his collusion with both the American and Kuwaiti intelligence apparatuses in co-ordination with Egyptian intelligence, he realised that his treacherous crime of spying against this righteous country had been exposed ..."

Abu Nidal was no stranger to Iraq. He had operated from Baghdad, Damascus and the Libyan capital of Tripoli when the regimes wanted to use him as a "gun for hire". It was Iraq which paid him to organise the attack on the Israeli ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, in 1982, an attempted assassination which prompted Israel to accuse Yasser Arafat of responsibility and to begin its disastrous invasion of Lebanon, and Colonel Muammur Gaddafi later established a close relationship with Abu Nidal. In 1985, his crazed gunmen attacked Israeli-bound passengers at Rome and Vienna airports, killing a total of 18 people. His biographer Patrick Seale, who suggests that for some time Abu Nidal even worked for Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, has written of how, when he feared treachery in his own ranks, a suspected spy would be buried alive, fed through a tube for days and then – if Abu Nidal's "court" deemed death appropriate – a bullet would be fired down the tube.

His own interrogation at the hands of Saddam's secret police, will therefore appear equally appropriate punishment for so cruel a man. Among the other crimes of which he was accused in the Iraqi intelligence report was the preparation of 14 booby-trapped suitcase bombs to be used on foreigners – Swiss and Austrian, according to the intelligence file – in the northern Kurdish area of Iraq, at the time a US-supported "safe haven", and an attempt to recruit new members for his so-called Fatah Revolutionary Council among Palestinians wounded by the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza who were recovering in Baghdad hospitals.

There are some oddities in the report and some unanswered questions. It says, for example, that Abu Nidal originally infiltrated Iraq from Iran on a false Yemeni passport years earlier, but that this was facilitated by his own representative in Kuwait, named as Nabil Uthman. Abu Nidal was said to have communicated to Kuwait via coded messages sent through Lebanon and Dubai. The papers give his date of birth as 1939 – he is believed to have been born in Jaffa in what was then Palestine in 1937 – and state that he resided in Libya in 1984 but "had no links with the Libyan authorities". He is also stated to have been imprisoned by the Egyptian security services for two months. The man who is said to have provided Abu Nidal with a "safe house" in Baghdad was interrogated in 2002 alongside the Palestinian and is named as Abdulkareem Mohammed Mustapha.

Could Abu Nidal really have entered Iraq from Iran, whose own intelligence services, would surely have questioned him? Could Abu Nidal have lived in secret in the Baathist state of Iraq without Saddam's own mukhabarat finding him? And for how long was he interrogated? The documents give us no answers to these questions.

His end is, however, recorded bleakly. "Upon being asked to accompany those charged with guarding him to a more secure location to continue the interrogation procedures, he requested that he be allowed to change his clothes. On entering his bedroom, he committed suicide. Unsuccessful attempts were made to resuscitate him ..." Nothing is known of the fate of Abdulkareem Mustapha, only that he was "submitted to court". But we do know where Abu Nidal now lies.

"The corpse of Sabri al-Banna", the final report concludes, "was buried on 29/8/2002 in al-Karakh's Islamic cemetery in Baghdad. Until a final resting place is found, a marker designates the place of burial and it was documented on video as well as on still photographs as 'M7'." No "final resting place" for this savage man appears ever to have been found.

Years of terror: A man as feared as Bin Laden

Abu Nidal, was once as feared as Osama bin Laden. His most notorious attacks included:

1978 His "Black June" movement blamed for murdering PLO members in London, Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Kuwait and Rome.

1982 Israeli ambassador to Britain, Shlomo Argov, shot in Mayfair, leaving him permanently paralysed.

1984 Jordanian airliner attacked by rocket on take-off from Athens. Assassinations included the British cultural attaché in Athens and the British deputy high commissioner in Mumbai.

1985 Egyptian airliner hijacked – six passengers murdered and 60 killed when the plane is stormed by Egyptian commandos

1985 Gunmen massacre 18 and wound 120 in attacks on El Al ticket desks at Vienna and Romeairports, bottom left.

1986 Machine-gun attack kills 22 in a synagogue inIstanbul; at least 20 passengers and crew are killed when Pan Am jet hijacked in Karachi, bottom right.

1988 Nine killed and 98 wounded when gunmenattack the Greek cruise ship the City of Poros.

Original article posted here.

How to destroy a propagandist

2008-10-23T16:57:00.000+03:00

The John and Sarah courtship

2008-10-22T16:48:00.001+03:00

How John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin.

by Jane Mayer

“Here’s a little news flash,” Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced in September, during her début at the Party’s Convention, in St. Paul. “I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment. And I’ve learned quickly these past few days that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington élite then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone.” But, she added, “I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion.”

In subsequent speeches, Palin has cast herself as an antidote to the élitist culture inside the Beltway. “I’m certainly a Washington outsider, and I’m proud of that, because I think that that is what we need,” she recently told Fox News. During her first interview as John McCain’s running mate, with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, Palin was asked about her lack of experience in foreign policy. She replied, “We’ve got to remember what the desire is in this nation at this time. It is for no more politics as usual, and somebody’s big fat résumé, maybe, that shows decades and decades in the Washington establishment . . . Americans are getting sick and tired of that self-dealing, and kind of that closed-door, good-ol’-boy network that has been the Washington élite.”

Palin’s sudden rise to prominence, however, owes more to members of the Washington élite than her rhetoric has suggested. Paulette Simpson, the head of the Alaska Federation of Republican Women, who has known Palin since 2002, said, “From the beginning, she’s been underestimated. She’s very smart. She’s ambitious.” John Bitney, a top policy adviser on Palin’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign, said, “Sarah’s very conscientious about crafting the story of Sarah. She’s all about the hockey mom and Mrs. Palin Goes to Washington—the anti-politician politician.” Bitney is from Wasilla, Palin’s home town, and has known her since junior high school, where they both played in the band. He considers Palin a friend, even though after becoming governor, in December, 2006, she dismissed him. He is now the chief of staff to the speaker of the Alaska House.

Upon being elected governor, Palin began developing relationships with Washington insiders, who later championed the idea of putting her on the 2008 ticket. “There’s some political opportunism on her part,” Bitney said. For years, “she’s had D.C. in mind.” He added, “She’s not interested in being on the junior-varsity team.”

During her gubernatorial campaign, Bitney said, he began predicting to Palin that she would make the short list of Republican Vice-Presidential prospects. “She had the biography, I told her, to be a contender,” he recalled. At first, Palin only laughed. But within a few months of being sworn in she and others in her circle noticed that a blogger named Adam Brickley had started a movement to draft her as Vice-President. Palin also learned that a number of prominent conservative pundits would soon be passing through Juneau, on cruises sponsored by right-leaning political magazines. She invited these insiders to the governor’s mansion, and even led some of them on a helicopter tour.

* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this

Throughout the campaign, Palin has mocked what she calls “the mainstream media.” Yet her administration made a concerted effort to attract the attention of East Coast publications. In late 2007, the state hired a public-relations firm with strong East Coast connections, which began promoting Palin and a natural-gas pipeline that she was backing in Alaska. The contract was for thirty-seven thousand dollars. The publicist on the project, Marcia Brier, the head of MCB Communications, in Needham, Massachusetts, was asked to approach media outlets in Washington and New York, according to the Washington Post. “I believe Alaska has a very small press organization,” Brier told me. “They hired an outside consultant in order to get that East Coast press.” Brier crafted a campaign depicting Palin as bravely taking on powerful oil interests by choosing a Canadian firm, TransCanada, rather than an American conglomerate such as ExxonMobil, to build the pipeline. (“Big Oil Under Siege” was the title of a typical press release.) Brier pitched Palin to publications such as the Times, the Washington Post, and Fortune.

From the start of her political career, Palin has positioned herself as an insurgent intent on dislodging entrenched interests. In 1996, a campaign pamphlet for her first mayoral run—recently obtained by The New Republic—strikes the same note of populist resentment that Palin did at the Convention: “I’m tired of ‘business as usual’ in this town, and of the ‘Good Ol’ Boys’ network that runs the show here.” Yet Palin has routinely turned to members of Washington’s Old Guard for help. After she became the mayor of Wasilla, Palin oversaw the hiring of a law firm to represent the town’s interests in Washington, D.C. The Wasilla account was handled by Steven Silver, a Washington-area lobbyist who had been the chief of staff to Alaska’s long-serving Republican senator Ted Stevens, who was indicted in July on charges of accepting illegal gifts and is now standing trial. (Silver declined to discuss his ties to Palin.) As the Washington Post reported, Silver’s efforts in the capital helped Wasilla, a town of sixty-seven hundred residents, secure twenty-seven million dollars in federal earmarks. During this election season, however, Palin has presented herself as more abstemious, saying, “I’ve championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress.”

In February, 2007, Adam Brickley gave himself a mission: he began searching for a running mate for McCain who could halt the momentum of the Democrats. Brickley, a self-described “obsessive” political junkie who recently graduated from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, told me that he began by “randomly searching Wikipedia and election sites for Republican women.” Though he generally opposes affirmative action, gender drove his choice. “People were talking about Hillary at the time,” he recalled. Brickley said that he “puzzled over every Republican female politician I knew.” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas, “waffled on social issues”; Senator Olympia Snowe, of Maine, was too moderate. He was running out of options, he recalled, when he said to himself, “What about that lady who just got elected in Alaska?” Online research revealed that she had a strong grassroots following; as Brickley put it, “I hate to use the words ‘cult of personality,’ but she reminded me of Obama.”

Brickley registered a Web site—palinforvp.blogspot.com—which began getting attention in the conservative blogosphere. In the month before Palin was picked by McCain, Brickley said, his Web site was receiving about three thousand hits a day. Support for Palin had spread from one right-of-center Internet site to the next. First, the popular conservative blogger InstaPundit mentioned Brickley’s campaign. Then a site called the American Scene said that Palin was “very appealing”; another, Stop the A.C.L.U., described her as “a great choice.” The traditional conservative media soon got in on the act: The American Spectator embraced Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, the radio host, praised her as “a babe.”

Brickley’s family, once evangelical Christians, now practice what he calls “Messianic Judaism.” They believe that Jesus is the Messiah, but they also observe the Jewish holidays and attend synagogue; as Brickley puts it, “Jesus was Jewish, so to be like Him you need to be Jewish, too.” Brickley said that “the hand of God” played a role in choosing Palin: “The longer I worked on it the less I felt I was driving it. Something else was at work.”

Brickley is an authentic heartland voice, but he is also the product of an effort by wealthy conservative organizations in Washington to train activists. He has attended several workshops sponsored by the Leadership Institute, a group based in the Washington area and founded in 1979 by the Christian conservative activist Morton Blackwell. “I’m building a movement,” Blackwell told me. Brickley also participated in a leadership summit held by Young America’s Foundation (motto: “The Conservative Movement Starts Here”) and was an intern at the Heritage Foundation. He currently lives in a dormitory, on Capitol Hill, run by the Heritage Foundation, and is an intern with townhall.com, a top conservative Web site.

While Brickley and others were spreading the word about Palin on the Internet, Palin was wooing a number of well-connected Washington conservative thinkers. In a stroke of luck, Palin did not have to go to the capital to meet these members of “the permanent political establishment”; they came to Alaska. Shortly after taking office, Palin received two memos from Paulette Simpson, the Alaska Federation of Republican Women leader, noting that two prominent conservative magazines—The Weekly Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.—were planning luxury cruises to Alaska in the summer of 2007, which would make stops in Juneau. Writers and editors from these publications had been enlisted to deliver lectures to politically minded vacationers. “The Governor was more than happy to meet these guys,” Joe Balash, a special staff assistant to Palin, recalled.

On June 18, 2007, the first group disembarked in Juneau from the Holland America Line’s M.S. Oosterdam, and went to the governor’s mansion, a white wooden Colonial house with six two-story columns, for lunch. The contingent featured three of The Weekly Standard ’s top writers: William Kristol, the magazine’s Washington-based editor, who is also an Op-Ed columnist for the Times and a regular commentator on “Fox News Sunday”; Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor and the co-host of “The Beltway Boys,” a political talk show on Fox News; and Michael Gerson, the former chief speechwriter for President Bush and a Washington Post columnist.

By all accounts, the luncheon was a high-spirited, informal occasion. Kristol brought his wife and daughter; Gerson brought his wife and two children. Barnes, who brought his sister and his wife, sat on one side of Governor Palin, who presided at the head of the long table in the mansion’s formal dining room; the Kristols sat on the other. Gerson was at the opposite end, as was Palin’s chief of staff at the time, Mike Tibbles, who is now working for Senator Stevens’s reëlection campaign. The menu featured halibut cheeks—the choicest part of the fish. Before the meal, Palin delivered a lengthy grace. Simpson, who was at the luncheon, said, “I told a girlfriend afterwards, ‘That was some grace!’ It really set the tone.” Joe Balash, Palin’s assistant, who was also present, said, “There are not many politicians who will say grace with the conviction of faith she has. It’s a daily part of her life.”

Palin was joined by her lieutenant governor and by Alaska’s attorney general. Also present was a local woman involved in upholding the Juneau school system’s right to suspend a student who had displayed a satirical banner—“Bong Hits 4 Jesus”—across the street from his school. The student had sued the school district, on First Amendment grounds, and, at the time of the lunch, the case was before the Supreme Court. (The school district won.)

During the lunch, everyone was charmed when the Governor’s small daughter Piper popped in to inquire about dessert. Fred Barnes recalled being “struck by how smart Palin was, and how unusually confident. Maybe because she had been a beauty queen, and a star athlete, and succeeded at almost everything she had done.” It didn’t escape his notice, too, that she was “exceptionally pretty.”

According to a former Alaska official who attended the lunch, the visitors wanted to do something “touristy,” so a “flight-seeing” trip was arranged. Their destination was a gold mine in Berners Bay, some forty-five miles north of Juneau. For Palin and several staff members, the state leased two helicopters from a private company, Coastal, for two and a half hours, at a cost of four thousand dollars. (The pundits paid for their own aircraft.) Palin explained that environmentalists had invoked the Clean Water Act to oppose a plan by a mining company, Coeur Alaska, to dump waste from the extraction of gold into a pristine lake in the Tongass National Forest. Palin rejected the environmentalists’ claims. (The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Coeur Alaska, and the dispute is now before the Supreme Court.) Barnes was dazzled by Palin’s handling of the hundred or so mineworkers who gathered to meet the group. “She clearly was not intimidated by crowds—or men!” he said. “She’s got real star quality.”

By the time the Weekly Standard pundits returned to the cruise ship, Paulette Simpson said, “they were very enamored of her.” In July, 2007, Barnes wrote the first major national article spotlighting Palin, titled “The Most Popular Governor,” for The Weekly Standard. Simpson said, “That first article was the result of having lunch.” Bitney agreed: “I don’t think she realized the significance until after it was all over. It got the ball rolling.”

The other journalists who met Palin offered similarly effusive praise: Michael Gerson called her “a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc.” The most ardent promoter, however, was Kristol, and his enthusiasm became the talk of Alaska’s political circles. According to Simpson, Senator Stevens told her that “Kristol was really pushing Palin” in Washington before McCain picked her. Indeed, as early as June 29th, two months before McCain chose her, Kristol predicted on “Fox News Sunday” that “McCain’s going to put Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, on the ticket.” He described her as “fantastic,” saying that she could go one-on-one against Obama in basketball, and possibly siphon off Hillary Clinton’s supporters. He pointed out that she was a “mother of five” and a reformer. “Go for the gold here with Sarah Palin,” he said. The moderator, Chris Wallace, finally had to ask Kristol, “Can we please get off Sarah Palin?”

The next day, however, Kristol was still talking about Palin on Fox. “She could be both an effective Vice-Presidential candidate and an effective President,” he said. “She’s young, energetic.” On a subsequent “Fox News Sunday,” Kristol again pushed Palin when asked whom McCain should pick: “Sarah Palin, whom I’ve only met once but I was awfully impressed by—a genuine reformer, defeated the establishment up there. It would be pretty wild to pick a young female Alaska governor, and I think, you know, McCain might as well go for it.” On July 22nd, again on Fox, Kristol referred to Palin as “my heartthrob.” He declared, “I don’t know if I can make it through the next three months without her on the ticket.” Reached last week, Kristol pointed out that just before McCain picked Palin he had ratcheted back his campaign a little; though he continued to tout her, he also wrote a Times column promoting Senator Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut.

On October 6th, in another Times column, Kristol cryptically acknowledged having been entertained by the Governor. He mentioned meeting Palin “in far more relaxed circumstances, in Alaska over a year ago.” The column featured one of the few interviews that Palin has granted to the national media since becoming McCain’s running mate. Kristol quoted Palin saying that the debate had been a “liberating” experience, then wrote, “Shouldn’t the public get the benefit of another Biden-Palin debate, or even two? If there’s difficulty finding a moderator, I’ll be glad to volunteer.”

On August 1, 2007, a few weeks after the Weekly Standard cruise departed from Juneau, Palin hosted a second boatload of pundits, this time from a cruise featuring associates of National Review. Her guests, arriving on the M.S. Noordam, included Rich Lowry, the magazine’s editor and a syndicated columnist; Robert Bork, the conservative legal scholar and former federal judge; John Bolton, who served as the Bush Administration’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 2004 to 2006; Victor Davis Hanson, a conservative historian who is reportedly a favorite of Vice-President Dick Cheney; and Dick Morris, the ideologically ambidextrous political consultant, who writes a column for The Hill and appears regularly on Fox News.

As Jack Fowler, National Review’s publisher, recalled it, when the guest speakers were invited to come to a special reception at the governor’s mansion, “We said, ‘Sure!’ There’s only so much you can do in Juneau.” The mansion itself, he said, was modest—“not exactly Newport.” But the food was great, and included an impressive spread of salmon. Palin, who circulated nimbly through the room, and spoke admiringly of National Review, made a good impression. Fowler said, “This lady is something special. She connects. She’s genuine. She doesn’t look like what you’d expect. My thought was, Too bad she’s way up there in Alaska, because she has potential, but to make things happen you have to know people.”

Hanson, the historian, recalled Palin in high heels, “walking around this big Victorian house with rough Alaska floors, saying, ‘Hi, I’m Sarah.’ ” She was “striking,” he said. “She has that aura that Clinton, Reagan, and Jack Kennedy had—magnetism that comes through much more strongly when you’re in the same room.” He was delighted that Palin described herself as a fan of history, and as a reader of National Review’s Web site, for which he writes regularly. She spoke about the need to drill for oil in Alaska’s protected wilderness areas, arguing that her husband had worked in nearby oil fields and knew firsthand that it wasn’t environmentally hazardous. Hanson, a farm owner, found it appealing that she was married to an oil worker, rather than to an executive. Bolton, for his part, was pleased that Palin, a hunting enthusiast, was familiar with his efforts to stave off international controls on the global flow of small weapons. She spoke knowledgeably about missile defense, too, he said, and discussed his role, in 2001, in guiding the Bush Administration’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor at National Review, had a more elemental response. In an online column, he described Palin as “a former beauty-pageant contestant, and a real honey, too. Am I allowed to say that? Probably not, but too bad.”

According to several accounts, however, no connection made that day was more meaningful than the one struck between Palin and Dick Morris. “He had this very long conversation with her,” Fowler recalled. Lowry laughed in remembering it: “The joke going around was that he was going to take credit for making her.” (Nordlinger’s column went on to say, “Her political career will probably take her beyond Alaska. Dick Morris is only one who thinks so.”)

In fact, in an admiring column published in the Washington Post two days after Palin was chosen, Morris wrote, “I will always remember taking her aside and telling her that she might one day be tapped to be Vice-President, given her record and the shortage of female political talent in the Republican Party. She will make one hell of a candidate, and hats off to McCain for picking her.”

Morris offered Palin some advice during their encounter in Juneau, several of those present recollected, which he shared with the rest of the gathering in a short speech. As Lowry recalled it, Morris had warned her that a reformer, in order to be successful, needed to maintain her “outsider cred.” In a similar vein, Simpson recalled that Morris “gave a little speech” in which he warned that “what happens to most people is that they campaign as outsiders, but when they get into power they turn into insiders. If you want to be successful, you have to stay an outsider.”

Clearly, Palin has taken this advice to heart. Still, when the moment came for Morris and other guests to depart, Palin was sad to see the Washington insiders go. Hanson recalled, “She said, ‘Hey—does anyone want to stay for dinner? We’re going to eat right now.’ She also invited everyone to come back the next day. ‘If any of you are in the area, all you have to do is knock. Yell upstairs, I’ll be right down.’ ”

By the end of February, 2008, the chorus of conservative pundits for Palin was loud enough for the mainstream media to take note. Chris Cillizza, reporting for the Web site of the Washington Post, interviewed Palin and asked her if she’d accept an offer to be McCain’s running mate. Though she dismissed the notion as a virtual “impossibility this go-round,” Palin, who had been in office for only fourteen months, said, “Is it generally something that I would want to consider? Yes.”

By the spring, the McCain campaign had reportedly sent scouts to Alaska to start vetting Palin as a possible running mate. A week or so before McCain named her, however, sources close to the campaign say, McCain was intent on naming his fellow-senator Joe Lieberman, an independent, who left the Democratic Party in 2006. David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, who is close to a number of McCain’s top aides, told me that “McCain and Lindsey Graham”—the South Carolina senator, who has been McCain’s closest campaign companion—“really wanted Joe.” But Keene believed that “McCain was scared off” in the final days, after warnings from his advisers that choosing Lieberman would ignite a contentious floor fight at the Convention, as social conservatives revolted against Lieberman for being, among other things, pro-choice.

“They took it away from him,” a longtime friend of McCain—who asked not to be identified, since the campaign has declined to discuss its selection process—said of the advisers. “He was furious. He was pissed. It wasn’t what he wanted.” Another friend disputed this, characterizing McCain’s mood as one of “understanding resignation.”

With just days to go before the Convention, the choices were slim. Karl Rove favored McCain’s former rival Mitt Romney, but enough animus lingered from the primaries that McCain rejected the pairing. “I told Romney not to wait by the phone, because ‘he doesn’t like you,’ ” Keene, who favored the choice, said. “With John McCain, all politics is personal.” Other possible choices—such as former Representative Rob Portman, of Ohio, or Governor Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota—seemed too conventional. They did not transmit McCain’s core message that he was a “maverick.” Finally, McCain’s top aides, including Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, converged on Palin. Ed Rogers, the chairman of B.G.R., a well-connected, largely Republican lobbying firm, said, “Her criteria kept popping out. She was a governor—that’s good. The shorter the Washington résumé the better. A female is better still. And then there was her story.” He admitted, “There was concern that she was a novice.” In addition to Schmidt and Davis, Charles R. Black, Jr., the lobbyist and political operative who is McCain’s chief campaign adviser, reportedly favored Palin. Keene said, “I’m told that Charlie Black told McCain, ‘If you pick anyone else, you’re going to lose. But if you pick Palin you may win.’ ” (Black did not return calls for comment.) Meanwhile, McCain’s longtime friend said, “Kristol was out there shaking the pom-poms.”

McCain had met Palin once, but their conversation—at a reception during a meeting of the National Governors Association, six months earlier—had lasted only fifteen minutes. “It wasn’t a real conversation,” said the longtime friend, who called the choice of Palin “the fucking most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Aides arranged a phone call between McCain and Palin, and scrutinized her answers to some seventy items on a questionnaire that she had filled out. But McCain didn’t talk with Palin in person again until the morning of Thursday, August 28th. Palin was flown down to his retreat in Sedona, Arizona, and they spoke for an hour or two. By the time he announced her as his choice, the next day, he had spent less than three hours in her company.

“It certainly was a risk—a risk a lot of people wouldn’t take,” Dan Coats, a former Indiana senator and now a volunteer with the McCain campaign, said. “But that’s what I like about John. There’s a boldness there.”

The thoroughness of the campaign’s vetting process, overseen by the Washington lawyer and former White House counsel Arthur B. Culvahouse, Jr., remains in dispute. The campaign insists that Palin’s record and personal history were carefully examined. (Culvahouse declined to comment for this story.) The Los Angeles Times, however, reported that the campaign never contacted several obvious sources of information on Palin, including Lyda Green—a Republican state senator in Alaska, and a former ally turned opponent. Also in dispute is whether Palin disclosed to the campaign, as she and officials have said, that her unwed teen-age daughter was pregnant. “I am a hundred per cent sure they didn’t know,” McCain’s longtime friend said. Another campaign source, however, insisted that McCain’s team knew about the pregnancy.

The selection of Palin thrilled the Republican base, and the pundits who met with her in Juneau have remained unflagging in their support. But a surprising number of conservative thinkers have declared her unfit for the Vice-Presidency. Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist, recently wrote, “The Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It’s no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain.” David Brooks, the Times columnist, has called Palin “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.” Christopher Buckley, the son of National Review’s late founder, defected to the Obama camp two weeks ago, in part because of his dismay over Palin. Matthew Dowd, the former Bush campaign strategist turned critic of the President, said recently that McCain “knows in his gut” that Palin isn’t qualified for the job, “and when this race is over, that is something he will have to live with. . . . He put the country at risk.”

Palin initially provided the McCain campaign with a boost, but polls now suggest that she has become a liability. A top Republican close to the campaign said that McCain’s aides have largely kept faith with Palin. They have been impressed by her work ethic, and by what a quick study she is. According to the Republican close to the campaign, she has sometimes discomfited advisers by travelling with a big family entourage. “It kind of changes the dynamic of a meeting to have them all in the room,” he told me. John McCain’s comfort level with Palin is harder to gauge. In the view of the longtime McCain friend, “John’s personal comfort level is low with everyone right now. He’s angry. But it was his choice.” ♦

Original article posted here.

A heavy price for idiocy and lassitude

2008-10-22T12:29:00.002+03:00

The Idiots Who Rule America

By: Chris Hedges

Our oligarchic class is incompetent at governing, managing the economy, coping with natural disasters, educating our young, handling foreign affairs, providing basic services like health care and safeguarding individual rights. That it is still in power, and will remain in power after this election, is a testament to our inability to separate illusion from reality. We still believe in "the experts." They still believe in themselves. They are clustered like flies swarming around John McCain and Barack Obama. It is only when these elites are exposed as incompetent parasites and dethroned that we will have any hope of restoring social, economic and political order.

"Their inability to see the human as anything more than interest driven made it impossible for them to imagine an actively organized pool of disinterest called the public good," said the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul, whose books "The Unconscious Civilization" and "Voltaire's Bastards" excoriates our oligarchic elites. "It is as if the Industrial Revolution had caused a severe mental trauma, one that still reaches out and extinguishes the memory of certain people. For them, modern history begins from a big explosion--the Industrial Revolution. This is a standard ideological approach: a star crosses the sky, a meteor explodes, and history begins anew."

Our elites--the ones in Congress, the ones on Wall Street and the ones being produced at prestigious universities and business schools--do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. Indeed, they will make it worse. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of the common good. They are stunted, timid and uncreative bureaucrats who are trained to carry out systems management. They see only piecemeal solutions which will satisfy the corporate structure. They are about numbers, profits and personal advancement. They are as able to deny gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company profits as they are able to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to blood-soaked dictatorships. The human consequences never figure into their balance sheets. The democratic system, they think, is a secondary product of the free market. And they slavishly serve the market.

Andrew Lahde, the Santa Monica, Calif., hedge fund manager who made an 870 percent gain last year by betting on the subprime mortgage collapse, has abruptly shut down his fund, citing the risk of trading with faltering banks. In his farewell letter to his investors he excoriated the elites who run our investment houses, banks and government.

"The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking," he said of our oligarchic class. "These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America."

"On the issue of the U.S. Government, I would like to make a modest proposal," he went on. "First, I point out the obvious flaws, whereby legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress over the past eight years, which would have reined in the predatory lending practices of now mostly defunct institutions. These institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislation designed to protect the common citizen. This is an outrage, yet no one seems to know or care about it. Since Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith passed, I would argue that there has been a dearth of worthy philosophers in this country, at least ones focused on improving government."

Democracy is not an outgrowth of free markets. Democracy and capitalism are antagonistic entities. Democracy, like individualism, is not based on personal gain but on self-sacrifice. A functioning democracy must defy the economic interests of elites on behalf of citizens. This is not happening. The corporate managers and government officials trying to fix the economic meltdown are pouring money and resources into the financial sector because they only know how to manage and sustain established systems, not change them. Financial systems, however, are not pure scientific and numerical abstractions that exist independently from human beings.

"When the elite begin to think that money is real, the crash is coming," Saul said in a telephone interview. "That is just a given in history. Because what they've done is pull themselves out of the possibility of looking in the mirror and thinking, this is inflation, speculation, this is fluff. They can't do it. And when you say to them, gosh, this is not real. And they say, oh, you don't understand, you're so old-fashioned, you still think this is about manufacturing. And of course, it's basic economics. And that's what happens every single time.

"The difficulty is you have a collapse, you have a loss of face by the people who are there, and it's not just George Bush, it's very, very deep," Saul said. "What we're talking about is the need to rethink the departments of economics, of political science. Then you have to rethink the whole analytic method of the World Bank. If I'm the secretary of the treasury, and not a guy like Henry Paulson, but I mean a sort of normal secretary of the treasury or minister of finance, and I say, OK, we've got a real problem, let's get the senior civil servants in here. Gentlemen, ladies, OK, clearly we have to go in another direction, give me some ideas. Well, those people don't have any other ideas because at this point they're about the fourth generation of what you might call neoconservative globalist managers, unfairly summarized. So they then go to the people who work for them, and you work down; there's no one in there with an alternate approach. I mean they'll have little alternatives, but no basic differences in opinion. And so it's very difficult to turn anything around because they've eliminated all opposing ideas inside. I mean it's the problem of the Soviet Union, right?"

Saul pointed out that the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s, those that went on to become part of the Fascist experience, were "to shift power directly to economic and social interest groups, to push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies" and to "obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest--that is, challenge the idea of the public interest."

Sound familiar?

"There are a handful of people who haven't been published in mainstream journals, who haven't been listened to, who have been marginalized in every way," Saul said. "There are a couple of them and you could turn to them. But then who do you give the orders to? And the people you give the orders to, they are not going to understand the orders because it hasn't been a part of their education. So it's a real problem of a good general who suddenly finds that his junior generals and brigadiers and corporals, you want them to do irregular warfare and they only know how to do trenches. And so how the hell do you get them to do this thing which they've never been trained to do? And so you get this kind of disorder, confusion inside, and the danger of what rises up there is populism; we've already had populism in a way, but we could get more populism, more fear and anger."

We may elect representatives to Congress to end the war in Iraq, but the war goes on. We may plead with these representatives to halt Bush's illegal wiretapping but the telecommunications lobbyists make sure it remains in place. We may beg them not to pass the bailout but 850 billion taxpayer dollars are funneled upward to the elites on Wall Street. We may want single-payer, not-for-profit health care but it is not even discussed as a possibility in presidential debates. We, as individuals in this system, are irrelevant.

"I've talked to several Supreme Court justices, several times in several countries," Saul told me, "and I say, look, in your rulings, can you differentiate easily in cases between the social contract and the commercial contract, and to which the answer is, we can no longer differentiate. And that lies at the heart of the problem. You don't have the concept of the other, and of obligation of the individual leading to individualism. You can't have that if the whole legal system has slipped over the last, really, 50 years, increasingly, to a confusion between the social contract and the commercial contract. Because they are two completely different things. The social contract is about the public good, responsible individualism, imagining the other. The commercial contract is a commercial contract. They're not supposed to be confused. They don't actually fit together. The commercial contract only works properly when the social contract works in a democracy."

The working class, which has desperately borrowed money to stay afloat as real wages have dropped, now face years, maybe decades, of stagnant or declining incomes without access to new credit. The national treasury meanwhile is being drained on behalf of speculative commercial interests. The government--the only institution citizens have that is big enough and powerful enough to protect their rights--is becoming weaker, more anemic and less able to help the mass of Americans who are embarking on a period of deprivation and suffering unseen in this country since the 1930s. Consumption, the profligate engine of the U.S. economy, is withering. September retail sales across the U.S. fell 1.2 percent. The decline was almost double the 0.7 percent drop analysts expected from consumers, whose spending represents two-thirds of U.S. economic activity. There were 160,000 jobs lost last month and three-quarters of a million jobs lost this year. The reverberations of the economic meltdown are only beginning.

I do not think George W. Bush or Barack Obama or John McCain or Henry Paulson are fascists. Rather, they are part of a cabal of naive, mediocre and self-deluded capitalists who are steadily weakening political and economic structures to a point where our democracy will become so impotent that it can be blown aside, probably with broad popular support. The only question is how this will happen. Will there be a steady and slow decline as in the late Roman Empire when the Senate ended as a farce? Will we see a powerful right-wing backlash from those outside the mainstream political system, as we did in Yugoslavia, and the rise of a militant Christian fascism? Will there be a national crisis that allows those in power to instantly sweep away all constitutional rights in the name of national security?

I do not know. But I do know that what is coming, as long as our oligarchy remains in charge, will not be good. We will either recover the concept of the public good, and this means a revolt against our bankrupt elite and the dynamiting of the corporatist structure, or we will extinguish our democracy.

Original article posted here.

A weakened America means genocide in Iran possibly on hold (as we expected, every day a weakened US signals greater peace prospects)

2008-10-22T12:22:00.001+03:00

Attack on Iran Off the Table?

By Ray McGovern

On Sept. 23, the neoconservative chiefs of the Washington Post's editorial page mourned, in a tone much like what one hears on the death of a close friend, that "a military strike by the United States or Israel on Iran is not likely in the coming months." One could almost hear a wistful sigh, as they complained that efforts to stop Iran's nuclear program has "slipped down Washington's list of priorities … as Iran races toward accumulating enough uranium for a bomb."

We are spared, this go-round, from "mushroom clouds." But racing to a bomb? Never mind that the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a formal National Intelligence Estimate last November that work on the nuclear weapons-related part of Iran's nuclear program was halted in mid-2003. And never mind that Thomas Fingar, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell's deputy for national estimates, reiterated that judgment as recently as Sept. 4. Never mind that the Post's own Walter Pincus reported on Sept. 10 that Fingar added that Iran has not restarted its nuclear weapons work. Hey, the editorial fellows know best.

The good news is that the bottom line of the Sept. 23 editorial marks one of those rare occasions when the Post's opinion editors have managed to reach a correct conclusion on the Middle East. It is true that the likelihood of an Israeli or U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran has receded in recent months. The more interesting questions are (1) why? And (2) under what circumstances might such an attack become likely again?

The Post attributes the stepping back by Israel and the U.S. to "the financial crisis and the worsening violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan." These are two contributing factors but, in my judgment, not the most important ones. Not surprisingly, the Post and other charter members of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) omit or play down factors they would prefer not to address.

Russia and Deterrence

More important than the bear market is the Russian bear that, after a 17-year hibernation, has awakened with loud growls commensurate with Russia's growing strength and assertiveness. The catalyst was the fiasco in Georgia, in which the Russians saw the hands of the neocons in Washington and their doppelgänger, the extreme Right in Israel.

You would hardly know it from FCM coverage, but the fiasco began when Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered his American- and Israeli-trained Georgian armed forces to launch an attack on the city of Tskhinvali, capital of South Ossetia, on the night of Aug. 6-7, killing not only many civilians but a number of Russian observers as well.

It may be true that our State Department officials had counseled Saakashvili against baiting the Russian bear, but it is abundantly clear to anyone paying attention to such things that State is regularly undercut/overruled by White House functionaries like arch-neocon Elliott F. Abrams (F. for Fiasco). His encomia include those earned for his key role in other major fiascoes like the one that brought about the unconscionable situation today in Gaza. (Would that the president's father had let Abrams sit in jail, rather than pardoning him after he was convicted for perjuring himself in testimony to Congress on the Iran-Contra fiasco.)

In any event, it is almost certainly true that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin saw folks like Abrams, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their Israeli counterparts as being behind the attack on South Ossetia. For centuries the Russians have been concerned – call it paranoid – over threats coming from their soft southern underbelly, and their reaction could have come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Russian history – or, by analogy, those familiar with American history and the Monroe Doctrine, for example.

Even neocon Randy Scheunemann, foreign policy adviser to Sen. John McCain and former lobbyist for Georgia's Saakashvili, would have known that. And this lends credence to speculation that that is precisely why Scheunemann is said to have egged on the Georgian president. Russia's reaction was totally predictable, and it enabled McCain to "stand up to Russia" with very strong rhetoric and not-so-subtle suggestions that his foreign policy experience provides an important advantage over his opponent in meeting the growing danger of a resurgent Russia.

Russia's leaders are likely to have seen in Saakashvili's provocation, in the attempt to get NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine, in the deployment of anti-missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic, and in hasty U.S. recognition of an independent Kosovo indignities that Russia should no longer tolerate.

I can visualize Russian generals telling Putin:

Enough! Look at the weakened Americans. They have destroyed what's left of their Army and Marine Corps, spreading them out and demoralizing them in two unwinnable wars. We know how bad it is with just one unwinnable war. It has not been that long since Afghanistan. But, Vladimir Vladimirovich, before we indulge ourselves with schadenfreude, consider what such actions betoken – total recklessness of a kind we have seen only rarely in Washington.

Who can assure us that "the crazies" – the Cheney-Abrams-Bush cabal – will not encourage the Israelis to precipitate the kind of armed provocation vis-à-vis Iran that would "justify" America's springing to the defense of its "ally" to bomb and missile-attack Iran? You are aware of the importance of the Israel lobby, and how American politicians vie with one another to prove themselves the most passionately in love with Israel.

Periodic attempts by Congress to require President Bush to seek congressional approval before ordering a strike on Iran have failed miserably. So his hands are free for another "preemptive war" before he leaves office. After all, Bush has publicly promised the Israelis he will deal with the "Iranian threat" before then. Besides, our political analysts suggest that Bush and Cheney might think that wider war would help the Republicans in the November election

No big bear likes to have its nose tweaked. But the Russian reaction to Georgia was not merely one of pique. It became a well-planned strategic move to disabuse Israel and the United States of the notion that Russia would sit still for an attack on Iran, a very important country in Russia's general neighborhood. After Georgia, the Russians were bent on sweeping such plans "off the table," so to speak, and seem to have succeeded.

The signs of new Russian assertiveness are in the public domain, although the FCM has not given them much prominence. What is more telling is the effect on Israel and the United States. Since early August there has been a sharp decline in the formulaic rhetoric against Iran's "path toward nuclear weapons," especially among U.S. policymakers and in American media following the conflict in Georgia and the expiration of the latest "ultimatum" served on Iran to stop its nuclear program.

The change in official Israeli statements was the most pronounced. After a consistently hawkish stance toward Iran, Israel's president, Shimon Peres told London's Sunday Times in early September:

"There are two ways to deal with Iran's nuclear threat; a military and a civilian way. I don't believe in the military option – any kind of military option … an attack can trigger a bigger war."

And then came the bombshell from Ehud Olmert in his valedictory interview appearing in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot on Sept. 29. Olmert argued that Israel had lost its "sense of proportion" in believing it could deal with Iran militarily.

Not Russia Alone

It is a curious twist, but to their great credit, senior military officers Adm. William Fallon, who quit rather than let himself be on the receiving end of an order to attack Iran, and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fought and continue to fight a rearguard action against the dreams and plans of "the crazies" in the White House to attack Iran. Fallon famously declared that the U.S. military was not going to "do Iran on my watch" as commander of Centcom.

In addition to his outspoken opposition to opening a "third front" in the area of Iraq and Afghanistan, Mullen has done much behind the scenes to talk sense into the Israelis. From the Israeli press we know that Mullen went so far as to warn his Israeli counterparts not to even think about another incident like the one on June 8, 1967, when Israeli jets and torpedo boats deliberately did their utmost to sink the intelligence collector USS Liberty off the Sinai coast.

A gutsy move. The Israelis know that Mullen knows that that attack was deliberate – not some sort of unfortunate mistake. Mullen could have raised no more neuralgic an issue in taking a shot across any Israeli bow that might be thinking of a provocation of some sort in the Persian Gulf.

Hats off to the new admirals… who outshine predecessor admirals who bowed to pressure from President Lyndon Johnson to portray the Israeli air and torpedo strikes on the USS Liberty, which took the lives of 34 U.S. sailors and wounded more than 170 others, as a mistake in the fog of war – despite unimpeachable evidence it was deliberate.

Hats off, too, to the grassroots movements that succeeded in quashing resolutions in both houses of Congress calling for the equivalent of a blockade of Iran. Several members actually withdrew their earlier sponsorship of the resolution in the wake of public pressure. Many of them came to realize that facilitating a new war might make them vulnerable to charges of poor judgment – the kind of charges that sabotaged Sen. Hillary Clinton, who, ironically, thought she had done the politically smart thing in voting to give the president authority to attack Iraq.

Not Completely Out of the Woods

There remain as many "crazies" among the Israeli leadership as there are here in Washington – crazies who continue to believe that Iran must be attacked while the going is good. And it will never be as good as it is with Bush and Cheney in the White House. If the Randy Scheunemanns of this world are capable of goading the likes of Saakashvili into irresponsible action, they can try to do the same with a wink and a nod to the crazies in Tel Aviv.

The fact that the McCain/Palin campaign seems to be in serious jeopardy provides still more incentive for recklessness. If, as all seem to agree, a terrorist event of some kind might give the edge to McCain, many could argue that the same result could be achieved by a wider war including Iran, requiring the senior, seasoned leadership of one who has "worn the uniform."

And there is still more incentive for Bush and Cheney to look with favor on an attack on Iran… very personal incentive. It is a safe bet that if John McCain loses, Bush and Cheney and others will be plagued by various legal actions against them for the war crimes for which they are clearly responsible. Such would also be possible under a President McCain or Palin – but much less likely.

But attacking Iran would be crazy, you say. Not for nothing have many of the folks around Bush and Cheney been referred to as "the crazies" since the early Eighties. Some are still there; and they do things.

In April 2006, one of my Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) colleagues, in a conversation with Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, asked the general if he thought the U.S. or the U.S.-cum-Israel would attack Iran. Zinni shook his head vigorously, saying, "That would be crazy." Then he stopped and quickly added that we are dealing with "the crazies."

Ray McGovern was chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch at the beginning of his 27-year career as a CIA analyst. He is co-founder of VIPS, and now works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.

Original article posted here.

Massive Iraqi resistance

2008-10-21T13:19:00.000+03:00

ANOTHER MILLION IRAQI DEMONSTRATORS: GET OUT OF OUR COUNTRY

Baghdad witnessed another demonstration with more than one million Iraqi, Arabs and Kurds and others, Muslims and Christians and others, Sunnis and Shiites and others demonstrated together against the occupation and the long term agreement, asking for a complete withdrawal the leaves no permanent bases, no troops, and no mercenaries.

Its really sad to watch how the mainstream U.S. media and politicians ignore Iraq's massive non violent resistance, whether it was the annual one million Iraqis demonstration, or whether it was the other forms of non-violent resistants like voting for the current anti-occupation parliament, signing petitions, writing poems and books, or even talking against the current occupation.

Ignoring the Iraqi non-violent resistance will definitely push more Iraqis to choose armed resistance as the way to get their country back. The bottom line is that people want their country back; if they manage to get it back through signing petitions and demonstrating, they'll be more than happy. If they can't they'll use force.

Choosing which type of resistance to adopt from the huge continuum (that starts from writing a word and ends by holding a gun) is a two way dialog: if the U.S. government reacted more to Iraqis demonstrating, i'm sure than more one million Iraqis will demonstrate.

Fighting fraud

2008-10-20T17:44:00.000+03:00

Obama Assembles U.S.'s `Largest Law Firm' to Monitor Election

By James Rowley

Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama and John McCain have a litigation game plan to accompany their election strategy.

Both candidates have armies of volunteers to ring doorbells and get voters to the polls. They are also forming squadrons of lawyers who are filing challenges and preparing in case Election Day doesn't settle the contest for the White House.

Legal battles unfolding in Ohio, Indiana and Wisconsin provide fresh evidence of the potential fights to come over ballot access in an election marked by unprecedented spending to increase the number of voters in strategically important states.

The millions of dollars that have been poured into registration drives have yielded millions of new voters across the country. Those same efforts have now generated heated battles in both parties with cries of voter fraud and intimidation that may threaten the integrity of the election.

Election officials, meanwhile, are braced for huge turnout and the problems that could create with long lines, malfunctioning machines and challenges to voters.

Already, the U.S. Supreme Court has handed Ohio Democrats a victory, dissolving a court order obtained by Republicans to force state officials to release the list of 200,000 new voters whose names or addresses don't match government databases.

Democrats' Accusations

Democrats accused Republicans of trying to improperly disqualify voters.

In Florida, Democratic lawyer Charles H. Lichtman has assembled almost 5,000 lawyers to monitor precincts, assist voters turned away at the polls and litigate any disputes that can't be resolved out of court.

``On Election Day, I will be managing the largest law firm in the country, albeit for one day,'' said Lichtman, 53, a Fort Lauderdale corporate lawyer and veteran of the five-week recount after the 2000 election when Florida eventually delivered the presidency to George W. Bush.

Obama's lawyers also have pressed allegations that Michigan Republicans planned to use mortgage-foreclosure lists to challenge voters. Indiana labor unions allied with Democratic presidential nominee Obama, an Illinois senator, are battling a Republican chairman over early voting in the state's second- largest county.

2002 Law

Much of the partisan disagreement is over enforcing a 2002 law enacted by Congress to help states prevent a Florida-type recount by requiring election officials to set up database checks to purge voters.

Ohio's Republican Party obtained a court order directing Jennifer Brunner, Ohio's secretary of state, to give county election officials the lists of new voters whose names didn't match drivers' licenses or Social Security records.

In her successful Supreme Court petition, Brunner called the order a recipe for ``disruption'' and ``chaos'' as the state prepares for a presidential vote that polls of Ohio voters predict will produce another razor-thin margin. Database checks are not ``a litmus test'' for the right to vote, she said in a statement announcing the appeal.

Republicans contend the federal law requires record checks to counter fraudulent voter registration, which they say has been perpetrated by a nationwide network of community activists known as ACORN. The party's presidential nominee, Arizona Senator McCain, has cried foul over the drive by ACORN -- an acronym for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- to register 1.3 million voters this year.

`Deceased Individuals'

``They're registering the same person at different addresses,'' said Sean Cairncross, the Republican National Committee's chief counsel. ``They're registering people at vacant lots'' as well as ``deceased individuals.''

ACORN says bogus applications are only a tiny percentage of the new voters it registered, and it flags suspicious cases to election officials.

On Oct. 2, Ohio Republicans won a separate court fight with Brunner over absentee ballots cast by McCain supporters. The state's Supreme Court countermanded Brunner's order that local election boards reject the ballots if the applicant hadn't checked a box that indicating they were a ``qualified voter'' when submitting the absentee ballot.

Democrats and voter-rights lawyers, meanwhile, accuse Republicans of twisting the Help America Vote Act to use identity-card or database checks as a method to prevent legitimate voters from casting ballots.

`No Basis'

``That is one of the oldest dumbest lines the Democratic Party uses,'' said John McClelland, spokesman for the Ohio Republicans in Columbus. ``There is no basis for it.''

Ohio doesn't require first-time voters to register party affiliation, though the Obama campaign said Democrats have a significant edge among the 660,000 new Ohio voters.

Michael McDonald, a political scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, said there is scant evidence of large numbers of people fraudulently casting ballots. ```We all know the stories of dead people voting in Chicago,'' he said. ``We don't have zombies showing up at polling places and casting ballots.''

Without ``any data,'' the argument over whether there is vote fraud or ballot suppression is ``the political equivalent of a religious debate,'' said Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org, a Washington-based unit of the Pew Charitable Trust that studies election law.

`Tenets of Faith'

``Both sides have deeply held tenets of faith, but no way to prove'' that ``they are right or the other side is wrong.''

Still, vote fraud has become an attack line for McCain, 72.

In an Oct. 15 debate, McCain said Obama, 47, was in league with ACORN and accused the group of ``perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history.''

Obama denied any connection with ACORN, and said the group was defrauded by people who filled out registration cards with fake names just to get paid.

Bob Bauer, the general counsel of Obama's campaign, charged that Republican efforts like the Ohio party's lawsuit, are ``grounded simply in an effort to intimidate voters and suppress the vote.''

In a conference call with reporters, Bauer vowed to mount ``ferocious response'' to any effort to purge voter rolls, such as the lawsuit by Wisconsin's Republican attorney general, J.B. Van Hollen.

Van Hollen, who co-chairs McCain's presidential campaign in Wisconsin, sued to force the state agency overseeing elections to perform database searches to check the validity of all voters registered since Jan. 1, 2006. A decision is expected next week.

Labor Unions

In Indiana, Republicans and Democratic-allied labor unions are battling over early voting in Lake County, an historically Democratic stronghold that includes Hammond, East Chicago and Gary near Chicago. John Curley, the county Republican chairman, argues that the election board lacked authority to open more than one site because state law requires a unanimous vote of the vote of the board.

The McCain campaign wouldn't say how many lawyers it has deployed or how it is preparing for possible court fights.

``We are not jumping to conclusions that litigation efforts are going to be widespread,'' said Ben Porritt, a McCain spokesman.

Hayden Dempsey, a Tallahassee lawyer who chairs Lawyers for McCain in Florida, said his party isn't ``trying to lawyer up nearly so much as the Democrats.'' Republicans are trying to mobilize voters while Florida Democrats appear to be trying to ``win this through having the greatest number of lawyers.''

To contact the reporter on this story: James Rowley at jarowley@bloomberg.net

Original article posted here.

The Rethuglican thievery

2008-10-20T15:58:00.001+03:00

THE REPUBLICAN FRAUD OVER VOTER FRAUD

Sunday, October 19th, 2008

Progressive Review - Although the poddle press continuous to play into the hands of the GOP on the issue, it is clear that fraud by a voter is a miniscule part of overall election corruption and mismanagement. For voter fraud to work on any scale, you need a large number of people who are not qualified to vote engaging in a conspiracy with a campaign or election officials. Since it is extremely difficult in America to get even registered voters to cast ballots, the idea that there are mass of illegal voters lining up to sway the polls falls on its face. In this election what has been called vote fraud involving ACORN has actually been fraud against ACORN, i.e. registrants who fill up sheets with false names to make their quotas. The idea of one of these non existent voters - let’s say Mickey Mouse - actually showing up at the polls is absurd.

Admittedly, once you could find some heavy manipulation going on in places like Chicago in the time of ward leaders like Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin. That era produced anecdotes such as the one in which a voter identified himself as William Croswell Doane, a prominent member of the Episcopal clergy. “Come off it,” said an election official, “You’re not Bishop Doane.” Replied the incensed voter, “The hell I ain’t, you bastard.”

The era also produced short pencil men - ward heelers who would go the polls early, but not cast their ballot. Rather they would take it outside and with an inconspicuous short pencil mark it and give it the first loyal member of the machine to come up. That voter would cast the marked ballot and bring another unmarked one back to the short pencil man and so on throughout the day.

But these cases did not involve false registration but rather false poll identification or voter ballot control by the machine, neither of which are among the current allegations.

What is happening today is not voter fraud by ACORN but election fraud by the Republican Party.

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT JOINS VOTER SUPPRESSION EFFORT

Two senior law enforcement officials have told a national reporter that the FBI is conducting an investigation into ACORN’s voter registration effort. The release of the story is a violation of Justice Department regulations that forbid the announcement of investigations still underway and particularly right before an election. It is an obvious attempt by the Bush regime to suppress voter turnout.

Steve Benen, Washington Monthly - Consider this piece that ran in the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page:

Allegations of fraud have tainted Acorn voter drives across the country. The good news for anyone who cares about voter integrity is that the Justice Department finally seems poised to connect these dots instead of dismissing such revelations as the work of a few yahoos.

The date on the editorial? November 3, 2006. The Justice Department has always had standing policy of avoiding election law prosecutions shortly before voters head to the polls, but just days in advance of the midterm elections two years ago, as part of the politicization of the Justice Department, Bradley Schlozman apparently rushed ACORN indictments for maximum political benefit to Republicans.

History, I’m afraid, may be repeating itself. The FBI is investigating whether the community activist group ACORN helped foster voter registration fraud around the nation before the presidential election. . .

Let’s be clear: the Bush administration’s politicized Justice Department pulled a scam, got caught, suffered through a massive scandal that forced an Attorney General to resign in disgrace, and now appears to be pulling the exact same scam just two years later. As Josh Marshall put it, “This is a big deal. It may be their last gasp to use the DOJ to help mitigate the scale of Republican defeat on November 4th.”

D-Day also had a good item on this: “The Justice Department is using its law enforcement arm to stir up doubt about a legitimate community organization as a means to delegitimize this election. This is designed to sap voter confidence in the process. It’s also designed to harass and intimidate low-income and minority voters.”

ROLLING STONE: IT’S ALREADY STOLEN

Rolling Stone - Republican secretaries of state of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls. Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge - ten times the average state’s rate of removal.

- While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations rejected under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.

- Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called “caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters. The Rolling Stone duo

- Since the last presidential race, “States used dubious ‘list management’ rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls.” Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, New Mexico - a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote. For Maez, the state’s purging his registration was particularly shocking - he’s the county elections supervisor.

THE MYTH OF VOTER FRAUD

Michael Collins, ACLU - We’re having our quadrennial encounter with the menace of voter fraud. We are to believe that gangs of undocumented aliens and the unemployed will vote illegally or, if registered, on multiple occasions. They’ll do this to capitalize on the fraudulent registrations secured by paid operatives who can’t make money in any other way. We’re told that this alleged pattern is a menace to democracy. . .

Given the danger proposed, here’s some important evidence. The U.S. Department of Justice has voter fraud at the top of its agenda. With their clear emphasis on law enforcement prerogatives, the goal to shut down alleged voter fraud produced next to nothing. [Between 2002 and 2005]: Three years, 38 cases, 11 guilty pleas, and 13 convictions. It is the best outcome the Department of Justice could get. They’ve been at it 30 years so you’d think they would have learned a trick or too. Yet, voter fraud has been a major focus of the department.

Here is the conclusion of an exhaustive review of voting evidence:

“Though voter fraud does happen, it happens approximately 0.0009% of the time. The similarly closely-analyzed 2004 election in Ohio revealed a voter fraud rate of 0.00004%. National Weather Service data shows that Americans are struck and killed by lightning about as often.” - Brennan Center for Justice

In 2005, two major studies were commissioned by the Election Assistance Commission. One was on voter intimidation and the other on polling place fraud. The results were in line with the Brennan Center and others: there is virtually no election fraud and voter suppression is a major problem.

The simple truth is that voter fraud is so rare that it has no relationship with our elections. Yet millions of dollars and countless hours are devoted to this legendary menace to democracy.

There is one obvious question from all of this:

How do you work in a system with people who deny the reality of what happens on Election Day? What does it say about an elections system that perseverates on the “voter” fraud fiction for decades in the repeated absence of any evidence to substantiate that fraud?

There are serious problems with elections in the United States: voter suppression; felon disenfranchisement; unsecured computerized voting on invisible ballots; vote counting conducted in secret; a billion dollars spent on campaigns; and few if any real issues discussed in a serious fashion. These and other manifest problems should be the focus, not a contrivance based on a fiction.

Lorraine C, Minnite, Bernard College - Voter fraud is the “intentional corruption of the electoral process by the voter.” This definition covers knowingly and willingly giving false information to establish voter eligibility, and knowingly and willingly voting illegally or participating in a conspiracy to encourage illegal voting by others. All other forms of corruption of the electoral process and corruption committed by elected or election officials, candidates, party organizations, advocacy groups or campaign workers fall under the wider definition of election fraud.

Voter fraud is extremely rare. At the federal level, records show that only 24 people were convicted of or pleaded guilty to illegal voting between 2002 and 2005, an average of eight people a year. The available state-level evidence of voter fraud, culled from interviews, reviews of newspaper coverage and court proceedings, while not definitive, is also negligible.

The lack of evidence of voter fraud is not because of a failure to codify it. It is not as if the states have failed to detail the ways voters could corrupt elections. There are hundreds of examples drawn from state election codes and constitutions that illustrate the precision with which the states have criminalized voter and election fraud. If we use the same standards for judging voter fraud crime rates as we do for other crimes, we must conclude that the lack of evidence of arrests, indictments or convictions for any of the practices defined as voter fraud means very little fraud is being committed.

Most voter fraud allegations turn out to be something other than fraud. A review of news stories over a recent two year period found that reports of voter fraud were most often limited to local races and individual acts and fell into three categories: unsubstantiated or false claims by the loser of a close race, mischief and administrative or voter error.

The more complex are the rules regulating voter registration and voting, the more likely voter mistakes, clerical errors, and the like will be wrongly identified as “fraud.” Voters play a limited role in the electoral process

There is a 200-year history in America of elites using voter fraud allegations to restrict and shape the electorate. In the late nineteenth century when newly freed black Americans were swept into electoral politics, and where blacks were the majority of the electorate, it was the Democrats who were threatened by a loss of power, and it was the Democratic party that erected new rules said to be necessary to respond to alleged fraud by black voters. Today, the success of voter registration drives among minorities and low income people in recent years threatens to expand the base of the Democratic party and tip the balance of power away from the Republicans. Consequently, the use of baseless voter fraud allegations for partisan advantage has become the exclusive domain of Republican party activists.

Original article posted here.

Our genocide

2008-10-20T14:03:00.000+03:00

Massive anti US demonstraton

2008-10-19T07:51:00.000+03:00

This should be your front page news

2008-10-18T22:03:00.000+03:00

Obama Rally Draws 100,000 in Missouri

Amy Chozick reports on the presidential race from St. Louis.

Barack Obama attracted 100,000 people at a Saturday rally here, his biggest crowd ever at a U.S. event.

The crowd assembled under the Gateway Arch on a sunny Saturday afternoon to hear Obama speak about taxes and slam the Republicans on economic issues.

Lt. Samuel Dotson of the St. Louis Police Department confirmed the number of attendees piled into the grassy lawn by the Mississippi River.

To be sure, big crowds don’t always signal a big turnout on Election Day. But Obama’s ability to draw his largest audience yet in a typically red state that just weeks ago looked out of reach, could signal a changing electoral map.

For months Missouri polls put Obama as much as ten percentage points behind Republican John McCain. It was widely believed that McCain’s pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate would have won over the state’s conservatives and boosted his chances there. So far, that hasn’t happened.

A Rasmussen poll released on Friday shows Obama leading in Missouri 52% to 46% for McCain.

Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill had harsh words for Palin when she introduced Obama on Saturday. Referring to comments Palin made earlier this week in North Carolina about “pro-America” states, McCaskill said “We have reached a new low in America politics when a candidate dares to say that one part of America is pro-America and another part is anti-America.”

She also took a dig at McCain for selecting a vice presidential nominee with limited experience. “One [candidate] picked one of the strongest candidates for vice president he could’ve picked in the United States and well, the other didn’t.”

Recognizing that big rallies don’t always result in cast ballots, the Obama campaign has dispatched thousands of field organizers and volunteers to Missouri to knock on doors in a statewide get out the vote effort.

Original article posted here.

Venezuela beefing up against potential US aggression

2008-10-18T21:35:00.001+03:00

Analysis: Venezuela buys Russian tanks

Russia to sell Venezuela rocket launchers: report
Moscow (AFP) Oct 15 - Russia plans to sell Venezuela armoured personnel carriers and multiple rocket launchers, the Russian arms export agency said Wednesday. "We are preparing to deliver a large number of BMP-3 armoured personnel carriers" and multiple rocket launchers, Igor Sevastyanov, deputy director of Rosoboronexport, was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency. Venezuela has already bought 24 Sukhoi fighter jets, 50 helicopters and 100,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles from Russia in contracts worth a total of 4.4 billion dollars signed between 2005 and 2007, officials said. During a visit by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Moscow last month, Russia announced it was giving Venezuela a one-billion-dollar credit to buy Russian weapons and the two countries discussed nuclear energy cooperation. They are also planning joint naval exercises in the Caribbean in November. US military chiefs have said they are concerned about the military build-up in Venezuela and the US State Department has said it will be watching the Russian-Venezuelan naval exercises "very closely."

by Jack Sweeney

In 2006 and 2007 Venezuela's air force purchased 36 Russian-built Sukhoi Su-30 "Flanker-C" fighters, of which 24 already are in service and the remaining 12 will be delivered before the end of 2009. However, President Hugo Chavez has also placed an order for 24 state-of-the-art Russian Sukhoi Su-35 "Flanker-E" fighters with delivery starting by 2010.

After the U.S. State Department thwarted Venezuela's plans to buy Spanish military air transports in 2006, Chavez purchased from Russia 10 Ilyushin IL-76E -- NATO designation Candid -- troop/cargo transports and two Ilyushin IL-78 -- NATO designation Midas -- in-flight tankers with the capacity to refuel three aircraft simultaneously.

These transport aircraft will be delivered between the fourth quarter of 2008 and the end of 2009, giving Venezuela's armed forces the largest strategic air lift capacity in Latin America, defense procurement officials say.

However, the arms purchases Venezuela made between 2005 and 2008 are only the start of a bilateral military and security alliance between Caracas and Moscow potentially worth billions of dollars in future sales by Russian arms manufacturers.

During Chavez's latest visit to Moscow on Sept. 25 and 26, his third trip this year, Russian Prime Minister and former President Vladimir Putin agreed to expand Venezuelan-Russian military cooperation. Underscoring Venezuela's importance to Moscow as a major client for Russian weapons, Chavez was granted $1 billion in credit to finance more arms purchases.

The first item on Chavez's arms shopping list is between 20 and 30 TOR-M1 9M330 air defense missile systems. Venezuela's president also wants at least three diesel-powered Varshavyanka (Kilo)-class submarines.

Venezuelan defense sources say Chavez also wants to replace his army's obsolescent AMX-30 main battle tanks with between 50 and 100 Russian-built T-90 main battle tanks. The army also wants to buy at least 100 Russian-made light tanks and armored fighting vehicles, and up to 400 BMP-3 armored personnel carriers.

The Chavez government also is expanding defense and security ties with China. During his visit to Beijing on Sept. 24, Chavez signed an agreement to purchase 24 Chinese-made K-8 light attack aircraft, which Venezuelan air force officials say will be used for training purposes. The K-8s, which are scheduled to arrive in Venezuela during 2009, will operate from the Teniente Vicente Landaeta Gil Air Base near the city of Barquisimeto in Lara state.

China also is supplying Venezuela's air force with 10 long-range JYL-1 radars, three of which already are operating at Paraguana and Mene Mauroa in Falcon state near state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela's 940,000 bpd Paraguana refining complex and in Apure state near Venezuela's border with Colombia. The air force expects to achieve almost 100 percent radar coverage of Venezuela's national territory by 2013 when all 10 radars are installed and operational.

Spain's Navantia shipyard at Cadiz is building eight seagoing vessels for Venezuela's navy, including four coastal patrol boats -- 39 dwt -- equipped with a helicopter deck aft and Oerlikon Contraves DMN 0008 Millennium 35mm anti-aircraft guns. But navy officials say the patrol boats probably also could be armed with air and anti-ship missiles or heavier guns forward.

The other four vessels Navantia is building are missile-capable frigates that Venezuelan navy officials describe as "similar in design" to Venezuela's Italian-made Lupo frigates, which have been in use for about 30 years.

Original article posted here.

Another resource hotspot in the grand chessboard

2008-10-18T21:27:00.001+03:00

Energy superpower emerges in the Caspian

By M K Bhadrakumar

Turkmenistan knows better than any other country that predators will go to any extent to take away its valuable possessions. Five successive empires - Scythian, Parthian, Ywati, Hun and Turkmen - invaded the area to locate the "Akhal" oasis nestled in the foothills of the Kopet Dag mountains in southern Turkmenistan, and laid waste everything that came across their way until they could take away the treasured Akhal-Teke horses as spoils of war.

The ancient race of Akhal-Teke horses, dating to 2,400 BC, were much fancied for their elegance, strength, stamina and beauty. Alexander the Great apparently took away with him hundreds of these horses as prized trophies during his campaign in Central Asia.

So Turkmenistan's collective memory will be stirred by the announcement on Monday that the country may have in the Yoloten-Osman deposits one of the world's four or five largest gas fields.

British consultancy firm Gaffney, Cline & Associates (GCA), making the announcement in Ashgabat regarding the first results of its audit of Turkmen gas reserves, said its low estimate under the established international and classification system is that the fields may have a minimum 4 trillion cubic meters of gas and as much as a staggering 14 trillion cubic meters.

This catapults Yoloten-Osman, in the southeast of the country, to the status of Turkmenistan's No 1 gas field, overtaking even the fabulous Dowalatabad, whose reserves it will exceed by at least five times. It should be kept in mind that many other of Turkmenistan's many gas fields have yet to be fully explored, and the GCA has just made its initial findings known.

Without doubt, Turkmenistan is closing its gap with Russia and Iran, hitherto listed as having the world's largest and second-largest gas reserves at 48 trillion cubic meters and 26 billion cubic meters, respectively. If the GCA results are confirmed, Turkmenistan will have reserves just 20% lower than that of Russia and outstrip Iran by far.

It seems the late Turkmenistan president Saparmurat Niyazov stands vindicated. Just before he died in December 2006, Niyazov remarked that Turkmenistan held reserves that were adequate to export 150 billion cubic meters (BCM) of gas for the next 250 years. The world, including the then visiting German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, didn't take Niyazov's statement seriously.

In March, Niayov's successor, Gurbanguly Berdimukhamedov, ordered the GCA audit to clear doubts about Turkmenbashi's controversial claim. In a British understatement, GCA manager Jim Gillet said in Ashgabat, "Given the huge gas reserves, it is now clear that whatever the results of any final clarification, I can confirm that there is more than sufficient gas to fulfill Turkmenistan's existing contract commitments." Turkmenistan has contracts to supply Russia with around 50 bcm annually, China with 40 bcm and with Iran 8 bcm.

Without doubt, the maths of energy security is being reset. October 13 will stand out as a watershed in the race for Caspian energy. Like the shy Akhal-Teke, Turkmenistan comes from behind and surges ahead on the race tracks, captivating the world audience, especially the main wagerers - Russian, European, Chinese and the ubiquitous Americans. For these seasoned hands betting on the race track, this will also be pari-mutuel wagering, as the French would say, meaning "among ourselves", with betting against each other and not against the race track.

Turkmenistan is undoubtedly a vital partner for Russia in gas supplies. The two countries have an agreement regarding gas prices and the volume of gas supplies for 2007-2009. Ashgabat has been extracting higher and higher prices from Russia for its gas supplies. The price was raised to $100 per 1,000 cubic meters last year from the level of $65. Then it was further raised to $130 for January-June 2008 and to $150 in the second half of 2008.

Ashgabat has been playing on the nerves of Russian energy giant Gazprom and its desperate need for Turkmen gas to meet its export obligations in the European market, which accounts for 70% of the Russian company's total revenue at the moment. Gazprom sells close to two-thirds of Russia's 550 bcm annual gas production in the rapidly growing domestic market, which compels it to secure Turkmen supplies to meet the contracted European commitments.

Russian newspaper Kommersant made an innocuous-sounding reference on Wednesday, quoting a source in Gazprom to the effect that the Russian monopoly's famous July 25 agreement with Turkmengaz does not involve Yoloten-Osman. It seems, in other words, that Russia held in its hands a chimera when it fancied that the July 25 agreement put Gazprom in complete charge of all of Turkmenistan's exports. Surely, that is proving to be a misconception of Himalayan proportions.

For Russia, arguably, the game now starts all over again. First and foremost, it is no longer the superpower in the world of natural gas as was widely regarded until last weekend. Turkmenistan is, unquestionably, also a gas superpower of comparable muscle power to Russia.

Again, Russia will need to come terms with a "multipolar" world of gas-producing countries. It needs to revisit its entire strategy toward consolidating a world gas market. The prospect of a gas cartel - a gas OPEC - materializing any time soon now recedes into the far background. There will be disappointment in Tehran that the idea will have to be thrown out of the window, but a collective sigh of relief can be heard in European capitals.

More important, Russia will have to rework its bonding with its Central Asian partners. Turkmenistan was a vital link in the Moscow-led energy chain of Central Asia's leading gas-producing countries - the others being Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Last year, Russia worked out plans - involving Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan - for a gas pipeline along the Caspian Sea's eastern coast for handling Turkmenistan's anticipated exports. In September, during Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's visit to Tashkent, Uzbekistan agreed to the Russian plan for an expansion of the Central Asian gas pipeline system for handling anticipated Turkmen gas exports.

These initiatives were predicated on the assumption that Russia must gear up to handle all of Turkmen gas exports. During last year, Russia gained rights over the gas exports of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan on the basis of its offer to make purchases at "European prices". The entire economics and logistics behind these complicated webs of Russian gas diplomacy in Central Asia now require updating - and rapid updating since, unlike previously, Russia's competitors by now know its tactics and work ethics and there is consequently now no more surprise element.

The immediate Russian concern will be regarding the Nabucco gas pipeline proposal mooted by the European Union and backed by the United States as an energy project that would somewhat reduce Europe's dependence on Russian gas supplies. Nabucco envisages the dispatch of Caspian gas to the European market via an energy hub in Turkey bypassing Russian territory. Nabucco's viability depends on access to Turkmen (or Iranian) gas supplies.

With GCA's announcement on Monday, the doubts have been dispelled at least in one direction - Turkmenistan indeed does have the capacity to feed Nabucco with all the gas it needs. This comes at an awkward time for Moscow when its rival project, South Stream, which aims at further tying up the European market with Russian gas supplies, is struggling to take off.

Nabucco will give South Stream a run for its money. If it materializes, it could also be a setback for the broader thrust of Russian diplomacy, which in the past two years has aimed at cultivating the countries in the southern tier of the European market - Austria, Italy, Greece and the Balkan and Central European countries. There is already immense pressure from the US on the South Stream's transit countries to back off from far-reaching energy collaboration with Russia.

Geopolitics is just one step behind. Russia hoped to temper the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's expansion and the US designs to roll back the Russian presence in the Black Sea region by working out a system of energy dependence with the US's allies in the region. Moscow recently offered a $4 billion loan to Ukraine for establishing two nuclear power plants in its western region. This is despite the pro-US stance of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko.

Moscow's strategy was working well. In a telling remark on Tuesday, at a joint press conference with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, president of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso virtually acknowledged the effectiveness of the Russian diplomacy in Europe. He said that if the EU is moving toward resuming negotiations with Russia on a new partnership deal even in the aftermath of the Caucasus conflict, that was not a "gift" for Russia but because it was in the interests of Europe. He said EU had economic, financial and investment interests to safeguard and needed to work out cooperation with Moscow in maintaining energy security.

"I think it is in the interest of the EU to keep the dialogue with Russia to promote stability in Europe," Barroso underlined in a virtual snub to the US doctrine of isolating Russia over the Caucasus crisis.

It is not only with the European countries but also with its partners in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) that Russian diplomacy has effectively used energy as a calculus for generating political and strategic influence. At the very least, with the emergence of Turkmenistan as an energy superpower, the "co-relation of forces" within the CIS undergoes a change. This is not only for Russia but also for the other countries which consider themselves as leading players in Central Asia and the Caspian - Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan (all of them have uneasy "partnerships" historically with post-Soviet Turkmenistan).

But Russia also has factors of advantage. It has a surplus of hard cash at a time when the Western banking system is collapsing. Gazprom can use this clout of financial liquidity as a bargaining chip to outsmart Western oil companies cultivating favor in Ashgabat. A Russian business daily reported on Tuesday that Putin is forthwith providing $9 billion to Russia's four largest oil and gas companies to "refinance" their foreign debt in the context of the meltdown of the Western banking system.

The government had earlier announced $5.5 billion in tax breaks for the Russian energy companies. The four Russian oil majors had addressed a letter to Putin last month asking for a total of $80 billion to pay off their foreign debts and finance strategic projects. Putin responded on Friday by saying the government would disburse up to $50 billion.

Now, how many Western governments can match Russia providing such backing out of sovereign wealth funds to its oil majors at the present time of global credit crunch? The decision-makers in Ashgabat are bound to factor in these hard realities when they weigh the relative merits of competing offers from Gazprom and Western oil and gas companies.

There is also a huge psychological factor. In the idiom of wagering, it is always the case that when you are essentially betting against all else, your chances of winning depend on making a more informed decision. Simply put, Moscow has multiple lines open to Ashgabat dating to the Soviet era.

All the same, the latest development provides the US with a window of opportunity to play itself back into the race for Caspian energy after Russia repeatedly outsmarted it in recent years. Clearly, there is now no dearth of a resource base if Washington is to push trans-Caspian gas pipeline projects.

The Turkmen government announced last week that it intended to increase its gas exports to 125 bcm annually by 2015. From the US perspective, that target seems reasonable enough to make a robust pitch for Nabucco in the short term even though Yoloten's gas will take time to be extracted for exports.

The US will make a pitch on behalf of Western companies as regards providing expertise. The deck has already been cleared. Washington no more harps on Turkmenistan's human-rights record, nor is it appealing to Western governments to pressure Ashgabat into making fundamental democratic reforms. As an American commentator put it, "It has become clear this year that the need for energy supplies has pushed rights concerns to the background in discussions with the Turkmen government".

Such pragmatism is nothing new to US diplomacy and Ashgabat can be expected to take note. Surely, the graph of US expectations is curving upward sharply. Washington would have had prior knowledge of the GCA's audit. A US expert on the Caspian wrote, "The implications of the GCA audit results are momentous for European and trans-Atlantic energy security ... Brussels and Washington can encourage Western companies to become involved in developing South Yoloten-Osman, Yaslar and other Turkmen gas fields with westbound pipeline outlets via Azerbaijan to Europe. This could significantly counterbalance Russian Gazprom's dominance in European markets."

Even so, he also acknowledged, "Conversely, the Kremlin will undoubtedly seek privileged access for Gazprom to the newly ascertained Turkmen resources, acting preemptively against the West. By combining those new resources (on top of the already committed Turkmen inputs) with its own volumes, Gazprom would boost its dominance in Europe to impregnable levels for a long time to come."

There is also much hyperbole in these expectations. The heart of the matter is that the US experts do not spot a dark horse. It is far too presumptuous to choreograph the battle scene in such straightforward terms of Russia versus the West. There is yet another serious player watching the fabulous Turkmen gas fields from the east - China.

US experts and cold warriors are obsessed with battling resurgent Russia on the beaches of the Caspian Sea, the mountains of the Caucasus and the steppes of Central Asia. But they are underestimating China's potential as a market for Turkmen gas and as a competitor to European countries.

Ashgabat is already committed to delivering up to 40 bcm gas annually to China through a $2.6 billion Central Asia-China gas pipeline that Beijing is financing. PetroChina (a subsidiary of China National Petroleum Corporation) and China National Oil and Gas Exploration and Development Company (CNOGEDC) have a 50-50 sharing of the project's costs and have formed the Trans-Asia Gas Pipeline Company Ltd as a wholly owned subsidiary for this purpose.

Interestingly, China is collaborating with local companies in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for the construction, which is an altogether new and interesting experience for the Central Asian countries.

China is a latecomer in Turkmenistan but it has already overtaken the West and is second only to Russia in that country. At the time of the signing of the July 2007 Sino-Turkmen agreement on supply of Turkmen gas, US analysts pooh-poohed the agreement as a typical ploy by Ashgabat to drive a hard bargain vis-a-vis Russian and Western companies bidding for contracts. They overlooked that China was dead serious.

CNOGEDC is far from a novice; its expertise in oil and gas exploration work is well known in diverse markets, not only in the Caspian (Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan) but also in Indonesia, Algeria, Oman, Niger, Chad, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela and Canada.

China holds many trump cards. First, it is a "virgin" market with a strong urge to expand. Beijing plans to raise its ratio of natural gas consumption to total energy use by 2.5 percentage points to 5.3% by 2010. This is still far below the global average of 25% and is indicative of China's potential as a market. Two, China carries no imperial baggage - unlike the US or Russia. It is not prescriptive. It is not peddling "color revolution". China doesn't hector on free market or human rights. The Central Asian countries find such an attitude extremely comfortable.

Three, China has a game plan. It will not appear avaricious, like Western companies. Energy cooperation will invariably form part a broad Chinese thrust in the direction of mutually beneficial economic cooperation. Thus, China will not hesitate to offer substantive assistance to Turkmenistan. Four, China will not overtly compete. Instead, China will most likely work with Russia on development packages to increase Turkmen gas production.

In contrast, the cold warriors in the US visualize the Western companies as lone rangers on the Central Asian steppe. In fact, the entire European energy diplomacy in the Caspian suffers almost fatally from the spirit of rivalry with Russia that Washington injects into it. Wherever German, Italian and French oil companies have shaken off the US tutelage and begun working with Russia, they have done far better. China's energy diplomacy in Central Asia and the Caspian offers a model for the European oil majors.

Of course, it will be fascinating to see how China learns from its own history. In 101 BC, Han emperor Wu-Ti was absolutely captivated by Akhal-Teke, which he called "heavenly blood-sweating horses". He wanted to buy a stallion as a model for making a horse statue made of gold in his palace. But the Turkmen for some obscure reason, rejected the Han request. Wu-Ti retaliated by dispatching an army of 80,000 to the inhospitable Turkmen deserts where the Akhal-Teke roams in abandon. The Chinese simply got hold of 30 purebred horses and some 3,000 partbreds and made their way back to Wu-Ti.

True, China has been absolutely mesmerized by the Akhal-Teke. Tu Fu, an 8th century Chinese poet wrote
The Ferghana horse is famed among nomad breeds.
Lean in build, like the point of a lance;
Two ears sharp as bamboo spikes;
Four hoofs light as though born of the wind.
Heading away across the endless spaces,
Truly, you may entrust him with your life.
All the same, today's China is unlikely to do what came naturally to Wu-Ti. Even if Ashgabat were to tell China that it cannot have the entire output of the Yoloten-Osman gas fields, Beijing will unlikely remonstrate. It will gladly settle for sharing the output with its friends in Russia or the West if that's indeed what Ashgabat wants.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

Original article posted here.

And this is before the repercussions of the crash post . . .

2008-10-18T09:28:00.001+03:00

Nearly 30% of US Families Subsist on Poverty Wages

By Tom Eley

A report released Tuesday by the Working Poor Families Project reveals that more than 28 percent of American families with one or both parents employed are living in poverty.

The report, “Still Working Hard, Still Falling Short,” is based on data for the period from 2004 through 2006 gathered from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.

The report finds that 9.6 million households can be described as low-income or “working poor”—defined as families that earn less than 200 percent of the official poverty level. There were 350,000 more such families in 2006 than in 2002. More than 21 million children now live in low-income working families—an increase of 800,000 in four years.

In 2006 there were more than 29 million jobs in the US that paid below the official poverty level—defined as $9.91 an hour for full-time labor—an increase of nearly 5 million poverty-wage jobs from 2002.

Family income inequality also increased rapidly between 2002 and 2006, the report says. In 2006, the top 20 percent of US households earned on average 9.2 times as much as the bottom quintile.

The report notes that working poor families “lack the earnings necessary to meet their basic needs—a struggle exacerbated by soaring prices for food, gas, health and education.” About 60 percent of low-income working families are forced to spend more than one-third of their income on housing, and nearly 40 percent lack health insurance for one or both parents.

These families struggle under poverty conditions despite parents working long hours. According to the report, “Adults in low-income working families worked on average 2,552 hours per year in 2006, the equivalent of almost one-and-a-quarter full-time workers.”

This total is about one third of all the hours that pass in a year. It is nearly twice the total yearly work hours of the average German worker, who works 1,362 hours per week, and 162 hours more per year than the average South Korean worker, according to statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The report documents the sharp decline in living standards for wide layers of the working class, the result of decades of corporate downsizing and wage-cutting presided over by Democratic and well as Republican administrations. It shows that poverty-level jobs are increasingly common and are held by broad sections of the population. Contrary to certain stereotypes promoted by the media, the majority of families living on poverty wages are neither immigrants, minorities or families with a single parent.

Some 72 percent of poor families, according to the report, hold jobs. More than half are headed by married couples, 69 percent have only American-born parents, 89 percent have a parent between the ages of 25 and 54, and 43 percent have white non-Hispanic parents. Only 25 percent receive food stamp assistance.

The study breaks its statistics down to the state level. In general, the conditions of working families are worst in the South and the non-Pacific West. Texas, for example, has the fourth highest number of working families defined as low-income, the second lowest percentage of low-income families who have a high school diploma or its equivalent, the second highest number with no post-secondary school experience, the fewest with health insurance, and the third highest family income inequality.

New York has the highest family income inequality in the nation, California the fourth highest.

The impoverishment of ever-larger sections of the working class population is the outcome of a number of processes: the dismantling of large sections of basic industry, the wave of union-busting and strike-breaking in the 1980s, the gutting of social welfare programs, the betrayal of the working class by the trade union organizations.

The other side of this process is the vast enrichment of the top 10 percent of the US population and the ever-greater concentration of wealth in the hands of the financial elite.

A survey carried out in March by Equilar and reported by the New York Times revealed that the CEOs of the 200 largest publicly traded companies earned an average of $11.7 million in 2007.

In 2005, the top 1 percent of US households accounted for 21.8 percent of all pre-tax income, twice the figure in 1970s. This represented the greatest concentration of income since the year before the onset of the Great Depression, 1928, when about 24 percent of national income went to the top percentile.

It should be noted that the “Still Working Hard, Still Falling Short” report reflects conditions that existed prior to the eruption of the financial crisis in August of 2007 and the subsequent slide into recession.

Original article posted here.

Nir Rosen discussing Afghanistan

2008-10-18T09:22:00.002+03:00

The dying Rethugs

2008-10-16T16:56:00.001+03:00

Goodbye, GOP

The neocons killed the Republican Party. Will they stay for the funeral?

by Justin Raimondo

Barring a catastrophe – a terrorist attack on American soil, a calamitous gaffe, or the documented revelation that he really is a Muslim after all – it looks like Barack Obama is going to be the 44th president of these United States. Not only that, but I'd bet the farm we'll have a Democratic Congress, one with a working majority that relegates the Republicans to the role of back bench naysayers whose dissent barely registers. Last year, Paul Craig Roberts expressed the hopes of many American voters when he wrote:

"If we are fortunate, Republicans will complete their self-destruction before they extinguish the Constitution and destroy America."

It looks like he's going to get his wish.

What killed the GOP was the war and its inevitable aftermath – the economic blowback that is even now whipping across the landscape and downing Wall Street's mightiest edifices. Not only that, but the general air of uncertainty and fear generated by the war and its economic and psychological ripple effects have created a crisis of confidence, one that threatens our well-being in an immediate way.

Entrepreneurs don't like uncertainty, because business relations require regularity, or at least some degree of predictability. They also assume a degree of honesty, but truth has been in short supply lately, as the history of the Iraq war, from conception to inception, sadly demonstrates. After the American people found out they'd been deceived – that there were no "weapons of mass destruction," that we never had a chance of being greeted as "liberators," and that, far from paying for itself, as Paul Wolfowitz infamously averred, we'd be stuck with a $3 trillion bill – they cut the GOP loose and haven't yet looked back.

This has always been the Republicans' war, no matter how enthusiastically most of the Democratic leadership initially supported it. The war we're supposedly "winning" has been the overarching theme of the McCain campaign, and he doesn't seem comfortable talking about anything else – unless it's why we must guarantee the borders of every obscure ex-Soviet "republic" for all time. The prime-time speakers at the Republican convention echoed the party line on the war, ad nauseam, and the entire event was one long paean to militarism and the glory of war. There were more uniforms in that convention hall than at the graduating ceremonies of West Point and Annapolis combined, and all the talk was of valor on the battlefield. Perhaps they should change their name to the Praetorian Party.

They put all their eggs in one basket, and those eggs were hatched by the cowbirds of conservatism, the fabled neoconservatives. The history of this crew is too well-known to go into here in any detail: indeed, their narcissism has provided researchers with an overabundance of material that documents their hegira from far Left to far Right. Suffice to say that this vexatious faction entered the bloodstream of the conservative movement during the Cold War years, when pro-war (that's the Vietnam War) Democrats jumped ship and joined the GOP in protest over "McGovernism," i.e., a Democratic Party that rejected the politics of LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, and the neocons' favorite Democratic politician, Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Boeing).

The sudden infusion of a bunch of highbrow leftist intellectuals into the conservative movement was welcomed by the organs of respectable conservative opinion, such as National Review. A few dissenters, such as Russell Kirk, Pat Buchanan, and the editors of Chronicles magazine, warned their fellows of trouble to come, but they were ignored. The neocons were bringing not only intellectual respectability and attention from liberal redoubts in the media and academia, but also hauling in plenty of dough. The big conservative foundations poured money into neocon projects and subsidized their up-and-coming intellectual dromedaries, driving out dissenters and imprinting the movement with their peculiar obsessions – first and foremost, an unmitigated militarism.

Whatever else the neocons believed in – and this often seemed to change with the political seasons – the one constant was and is a firm belief in the efficacy of U.S. military intervention around the world. The leading neocon magazine, the Weekly Standard, once published a screed by Max Boot entitled "The Case for American Empire" – a title that seems curiously archaic today. However, back in the neocons' heyday, when the Iraq war was still a "cakewalk," the big disagreement among Those in the Know was whether America should formally acknowledge being an empire (Niall Ferguson) or not (Robert Kagan). This intra-neocon fight was just a strategic dispute: no one disputed the wisdom of global intervention.

When Ron Paul warned his fellow Republicans that the empire is unsustainable, he was vilified by the neocons and the party establishment, derided as a kook, and practically drummed out of the party by the arbiters of political correctness, neocon style. They didn't even let him on the convention floor during McCain's coronation, and they refused to count his votes.

Now that the disaster Paul predicted has befallen them, one can only stand and watch their spectacular implosion with the utmost satisfaction. What's particularly entertaining is the speed with which the neocons are now deserting the sinking ship of the GOP, like those small mammalian creatures they resemble in mien and spirit. Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, David Frum – having destroyed the GOP and the conservative movement, they leave it a dried-up husk and move on to their next unwitting host.

It's in somewhat dubious taste to say "I told you so," but that hasn't stopped me yet, so I'll say it again, as I did in February of last year:

"We are in for some very dramatic times. With the leading figures in Congress and among the presidential candidates so far from the popular will on the major question of the day – the war – and with major economic problems on the horizon (if Alan Greenspan is right, Tuesday's huge drop in the stock market may be a hint of things to come), this country could be headed for some major turmoil. …

"The consequences of our foreign policy do not just redound overseas: the political and cultural 'blowback' of the Iraq war, and whatever other wars come out of our initial intervention, is already straining the limits of our constitutional form of government, as well as putting tremendous economic pressure on a system that could break down at any moment. We have borrowed our children into penury, and now we're working on their children, who are going to inherit much less than we had to start with.

"With all these rising crises looming, the American Empire promises to be the shortest-lived imperial expansion in world history. After a long and brilliant record as a successful ongoing project in limited government and representative democracy, will the American experiment end in a flashy display of military prowess punctuated by a noisy economic and political implosion?"

The events of the past few weeks have definitively answered that question in the affirmative.

I predict it won't be long before we're hearing the rhetoric of war employed by the re-designers of our economy: instead of a "war on terrorism," we'll soon be fighting a "war on recession" – and it will be considered close to treasonous if anyone so much as mentions the D-word in this regard.

In any case, the new reality – or, rather, the newly realized reality – imposes radical restraints on us that rule out foreign wars of aggression, or "liberation," and require a concentration of our resources at home. Yet such a sudden change is going to take some getting used to by the lords of Washington, who are accustomed to thinking of the world as their playground. In the wake of such a sea-change, very often people go right on acting as if absolutely nothing had occurred, oblivious to the new reality until they run right into it, head first. That's what's happened, so far: the imperial pretensions of our presidential candidates, for example, show no signs of abating. They're still talking about bailing out the Georgian economy (the one in the Caucasus), when people right here in this country are being foreclosed out of their homes. They don't understand the full implications of what's happening to their beloved empire, but they will soon enough.

The first politician to grasp the new reality, and successfully adapt to it, will go far. It's a pity that none of the current crop seem to get it.

~ Justin Raimondo

Original article posted here.

A bit of comic relief

2008-10-16T16:37:00.001+03:00