The other (wannabe) CIA

The release of some 5 million documents by WikiLeaks as part of a "Global Intelligence File" is an eye-opener.   There is wannabe CIA at work out there.  And the corporations and people associated with it are a force to be reckoned with.   Mother Jones puts what has been released into context - and it makes for frightening reading.

"Coca-Cola asked about stability problems in China in advance of the Beijing Olympics. Northrup Grumman asked—twice—about the possibility of Japan getting nuclear weapons. Intel asked about Hezbollah's presence in Latin America "and their general ability to blow things up." And the owner of the Radisson Hotel chain inquired: "[D]o you have an expected completion date for the Militant Islamist Perception Report we ordered?"

The 200-plus emails that have been released from WikiLeaks' cache of "Global Intelligence Files"—more than 5 million messages lifted from Stratfor, a private "global intelligence" firm—are a comical mix of breathless geopolitical intrigue and workplace chitchat, equal parts Tom Clancy and Office Space. But the trove also offers insights into the business of corporate intelligence, showing how multinational companies paid Stratfor tens of thousands of dollars to watch global hotspots, cover their competitors, and even monitor pesky activists.

It was all part of Stratfor's "Global Vantage" plan, a subscription-based program for companies to obtain personalized intelligence briefings. Launched in 2006, the service became an overnight success: Organizations as diverse as Coke, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, the Marine Corps, Duke Energy, and Georgetown University plunked down $20,000 or more a year to get their hands on tailored sensitive information. As Stratfor's leaked master client list shows, major military contractors were well represented, as were Big Oil and agribusiness.

Internal documents show how Global Vantage helped build the reputation—and the 300,000-strong client list—of Stratfor, a Texas-based private intelligence company. In an email last year, CEO and founder George Friedman told his employees that the CIA saw them as direct competitors: "Everyone in Langley knows that we do things they have never been able to do with a small fraction of their resources. They have always asked how we did it. We can now show them and maybe they can learn." After Osama bin Laden was killed, Stratfor's vice president for intelligence (a former State Department security agent) claimed in an internal email, "I can get access to the materials seized from the OBL safe house."

Continue reading here.

He who pays the piper calls the tune

Who said that money doesn't buy influence!    This piece from the Global Times puts into context how big money can buy influence including directing policy outcomes.    And it's not confined to the USA.....

"The story begins in 1886, with an obscure court case in California, Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad. In that Supreme Court decision, a corporation was deemed to have the same legal protections under state law as any individual would have. It was originally intended to be used for enforcing a real-estate contract. But fast-forward to 2010. The Supreme Court decided in a new case, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission that corporations had the right to make unlimited financial contributions for political purposes, just as a person does.

Corporations and individuals are still limited to $2,500 in direct contributions to a political campaign for federal office. But they may give unlimited funds to a Political Action Committee (PAC), as long as that PAC is not "officially" part of the campaign which they support.

In reality, it means that the PAC can spend whatever it wants as long as they maintain the fiction that they are acting independently. So now we have a Republican presidential primary in full swing, with vast amounts of corporate money being poured into the PACs which support the major candidates. Some of that money is publicly disclosed. But there are also non-profit 501(c) organizations that do not have to say where the money came from.

Why should you care? It means that candidates are no longer being elected, even in the limited sense that they were before. They are being hired, bought and paid for by their supporters whose interests do not in any way reflect the concerns of average citizens. They are supported by energy companies, drug companies, media companies, insurance companies, arms merchants, and bankers.

The candidate will be a de facto lobbyist for the industries that hired them. And they will enact policies supporting only those industries, regardless of the will of the majority. If you're a citizen concerned about global warming, or gun control, or abortion, or social justice and human rights, well, tough. You can't afford to play this game, which is estimated will cost $2 billion or more by the time of the general election in November.

The priorities of the corporate world, and the ultra-rich, will be to secure more power and control for themselves. But this does not extend only to US companies or US citizens. The many loopholes in the law now allow foreign citizens, companies, and even nations to directly inject money into campaigns that will support their vested interests.

Israel, for one, will use its considerable clout to insure that whoever is the next president will advocate for them and against countries like Syria and Iran, which will in turn have an impact on China's foreign policy. Secret or undisclosed financial influence will extend to issues like copyright infringement and intellectual property and censorship, all subjects about which the US and China may have one clear public policy and another quite different clandestine one.

It is impossible to predict exactly how this Supreme Court decision will affect the current and future election cycles. It is a matter that is hotly contested and is being openly challenged by state legislatures and concerned citizens who clearly see the threat it poses to participatory politics. To reverse it would require a constitutional amendment, a legislative effort so difficult and convoluted that it's virtually unthinkable, or a radical change in the makeup of the Supreme Court and a new case hearing. 

 But don't think for a moment that this decision and its consequences are limited only to one country. That country happens to still be the wealthiest in the world, and to control the largest military on the planet. And that country has not hesitated to use its military to further its goals, even when actively opposed by large sections of the population.

People got rich because of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Now, swords are being sharpened for Iran. How many players in the Middle East and elsewhere are interested in seeing this happen? All they need to do is pick up the phone or write a check, and it gets closer every day."

Rich people are #x^!*

Are you surprised by the revelations in this piece from CommonDreams?    Most won't be....

"A couple of new studies have found, somewhat unsurprisingly, that the rich really are different from the rest of us, but not in any way you'd want to emulate. One analysis by the Wall Steet Journal found that the rare 1% facing foreclosure get to stay in their mansions six months longer than regular folks faced with losing their homes. Another study by researchers at UC Berkeley found that rich folks, more nakedly governed by self-interest and thus more ethically-challenged, are far more likely to do slimy things: cutting others off at intersections, cheating to win a prize, stealing candy from kids, keeping the wrong change. An interesting note that Marx would revel in: It also found that if you suddenly win the Lottery, you likely will too."

A postscript to that Koran burning

Glenn Greenwald adds a postscript to his piece on Salon - on yesterday's post here on MPS  - on the burning of the Korans in Afghanistan and the American response to it.

"Beyond all these points, it’s perversely fascinating to watch all of this condescension — it’s just a book: who cares if it’s burned?  – pouring forth from a country whose political leaders were eager to enact a federal law or even a Constutional amendment to make it a criminal offense to burn the American flag (which, using this parlance, is “just a piece of cloth”). In fact, before the Supreme Court struck down such statutes as unconstitutional in 1989 by a 5-4 vote, it was a crime in 48 states in the nation to burn the flag. Here is what Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in dissent about why the Constitution permits the criminalization of flag burning (emphasis added):

The American flag, then, throughout more than 200 years of our history, has come to be the visible symbol embodying our Nation. It does not represent the views of any particular political party, and it does not represent any particular political philosophy. The flag is not simply another “idea” or “point of view” competing for recognition in the marketplace of ideas. Millions and millions of Americans regard it with an almost mystical reverence, regardless of what sort of social, political, or philosophical beliefs they may have.

Might one say the same for Muslims and the Koran? Along those lines, just imagine what would happen if a Muslim army invaded the U.S., violently occupied the country for more than a decade, in the process continuously killing American children and innocent adults, and then, outside of a prison camp it maintained where thousands of Americans were detained for years without charges and tortured, that Muslim army burned American flags — or a stack of bibles — in a garbage dump. Might we see some extremely angry protests breaking out from Americans against them? Would American pundits be denouncing those protesters as blinkered, primitive fanatics?"

China’s Billionaire Congress Makes Its US Peer Look Poor

If there was ever an indication of being a top-dog in China has its substantial financial rewards - bearing in mind that we are talking about a Communist country! - this report from Bloomberg that Chinese legislators leave their US Congressional colleagues in the shade is illuminating.

"The richest 70 members of China’s legislature added more to their wealth last year than the combined net worth of all 535 members of the U.S. Congress, the president and his Cabinet, and the nine Supreme Court justices.

The net worth of the 70 richest delegates in China’s National People’s Congress, which opens its annual session on March 5, rose to 565.8 billion yuan ($89.8 billion) in 2011, a gain of $11.5 billion from 2010, according to figures from the Hurun Report, which tracks the country’s wealthy. That compares to the $7.5 billion net worth of all 660 top officials in the three branches of the U.S. government.

The income gain by NPC members reflects the imbalances in economic growth in China, where per capita annual income in 2010 was $2,425, less than in Belarus and a fraction of the $37,527 in the U.S. The disparity points to the challenges that China’s new generation of leaders, to be named this year, faces in countering a rise in social unrest fueled by illegal land grabs and corruption.

“It is extraordinary to see this degree of a marriage of wealth and politics,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Washington’s Brookings Institution. “It certainly lends vivid texture to the widespread complaints in China about an extreme inequality of wealth in the country now.”

No " food, glorious food", here

Do you recall the almost immortal phrase from Charles Dickens' Oliver "Food, Glorious Food"?   
If you follow what AlterNet discusses in this piece "Big Food Must Go: Why We Need to Radically Change the Way We Eat" it's high time we do something about the food we eat.  

"It is no longer news that a few powerful corporations have literally occupied the vast majority of human sustenance. The situation is perilous: nearly all of human food production, seeds, food processing and sales, is run by a handful of for-profit firms which, like any capitalist enterprise, function to maximize profit and gain ever-greater market share and control. The question has become: What do we do about this disastrous alignment of pure profit in something so basic and fundamental to human survival?

It is time -- now, not next year -- to de-occupy Walmart. And Archer Daniels Midland. And Tyson Foods. And Monsanto. And Cargill. And Kraft Foods. And the other large corporations that decide what ends up on our plates. Take all our money out, public and personal, from our shopping dollars to school district lunch contracts to the corporate subsidies that uphold these firms' grip on our food supply, and invest it in a new system that's economically diverse and ecologically sustainable.

These corporations' stranglehold over food has wreaked havoc on the environment, our health, farmers, workers, and our very future. It is time for an end to Big Food, and a societal shift to something radically different. We all deserve a future where what we eat feeds community and land, instead of eroding soils, polluting water and air, and tossing away small farmers and immigrant workers as if they were balance sheet losers."

Syria in graphic detail

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words.    These photos - one of which is below -  from The Atlantic, prove the point to a tee.   View all photos here.

A bizarre "relationship"

From Tikun Olum a report of what can only be described as a bizarre "relationship":

"AP reports that Israel’s leading aerospace contractor has inked a $1.6-billion deal to supply Azerbaijan with drones, missiles, and other advanced military hardware, which would be used to arm a potential frontline state in the war against Iran. Israel has used such arms deals to create intimate military and intelligence links with nations as varied as Georgia, Russia and India.

Sheera Frenkel also reported recently on Azerbaijan as a Wild West outpost. It plays a major role in the war of nerves among Iran, Israel and the west. She interviews a Mossad agent who has served years there and only set foot in the Israeli embassy once. She tells of a country riddled with spy networks working one or both sides of the street. The officials of the government seem to be available to the highest bidder. It’s a bit like a central American or Caribbean country packed with corrupt drug dealers using the country for trans-shipments of drugs and guns. Except that in Azerbaijan the drug dealers are spooks and assassins.

Iran accuses the country of being a safe harbor for the Mossad/MEK conspirators who’ve been knocking off Iran’s nuclear scientists. Though there are many Iranian Azeris living on both sides of the border, there seems little love lost among these two neighbors. Brotherly relations have become corrupted by money, power, oil and arms.

It is especially the sort of place where one side or the other will decide to make an example of Azerbaijan for its collusion with the other. If not a plot to bomb the Israeli embassy then some other suitably gory plan. Baku would be a perfect Sarajevo as a catalyst for regional war, just as the latter city was a site for the assassination that initiated World War I. the Azeris and their willing foreign co-conspirators are playing with fire and it’s only a matter of time before the conflagration breaks out with a vengeance."

Destroying Korans in Afghanistan. US misses the point

The widespread unrest and violence in Afghanistan arising from the destruction of Korans by personnel at a US military base should come as no surprise to anyone who has even a remote understanding, and appreciation, for other religions and cultures.   It seems that the Americans haven't cottoned on that destroying the Koran is almost certain to cause the upheaval now underway in Afghanistan.

"Most American media accounts and commentary about the ongoing violent anti-American protests in Afghanistan depict their principal cause as anger over the burning of Korans (it’s just a book: why would people get violent over it?) — except that Afghans themselves keep saying things like this:

Protesters in Kabul interviewed on the road and in front of Parliament said that this was not the first time that Americans had violated Afghan cultural and religious traditions and that an apology was not enough.

'This is not just about dishonoring the Koran, it is about disrespecting our dead and killing our children,” said Maruf Hotak, 60, a man who joined the crowd on the outskirts of Kabul, referring to an episode in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent erroneous airstrike on civilians in Kapisa Province that killed eight young Afghans.

“They always admit their mistakes,” he said. “They burn our Koran and then they apologize. You can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology.'

And:

'Members of Parliament called on Afghans to take up arms against the American military, and Western officials said they feared that conservative mullahs might incite more violence at the weekly Friday Prayer, when a large number of people worship at mosques.

“Americans are invaders, and jihad against Americans is an obligation,” said Abdul Sattar Khawasi, a member of Parliament from the Ghorband district in Parwan Province, where at least four demonstrators were killed in confrontations with the police on Wednesday.'

The U.S. has violently occupied their country for more than a decade. It has, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal himself explained, killed what he called an “amazing number” of innocent Afghans in checkpoint shootings. It has repeatedly — as in, over and over — killed young Afghan children in air strikes. It continues to imprison their citizens for years at Bagram and other American bases without charges of any kind and with credible reports of torture and other serious abuses. Soldiers deliberately shot Afghan civilians for fun and urinated on their corpses and displayed them as trophies."

Continue reading this op-ed piece on Salon (from Glenn Greenwald) here.

They're back! WikiLeaks with 5 million 'Shadow Cia' emails

A lot of people will be sucking in their collective breaths when they see what WikiLeaks has just released.    No less than some 5 million "Shadow CIA' emails.

"WikiLeaks announced tonight that it is publishing documents it is calling "The Global Intelligence Files" which includes over 5 million e-mails from the US-based "Global Intelligence" company Stratfor, according to a statement the organization released Sunday night.
 

WikiLeaks has partnered with 25 media organizations to publish the documents including the McClatchy newspapers and Rolling Stone.

"The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods."

As they say, watch this space.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky on the upcoming Russian election

Mikhail Khodorkovsky is an inmate of a prison colony in northern Karelia. Prior to his arrest in 2003, he was head of Yukos.    It will be recalled that Khodorkosky challenged Putin and since then has been charged, and convicted, on what many claim are trumped up charges.    He writes on the upcoming Russian election in an op-ed piece in the International Herald Tribune.

"It is my hope that we will see a large turnout, with my fellow citizens taking a long hard look at the four “candidates” who appear on the ballot, even if many voters would have preferred other candidates, who were not allowed to run.

The last time Putin ran for president he won resoundingly in the first round. We will have to wait to see what happens this time. But let’s be clear: If Putin is forced into a runoff, it will be an altogether different situation. A second round would confirm that the change we all seek is on its way; that an evolutionary and not a revolutionary approach can be the way forward. We do not want the bloodshed on our streets that we have seen elsewhere, but we do want things to be different. It must be the role of our generation to change the paradigm in Russia without a civil war.

Abuse of power in Russian politics has been allowed to flourish for too long. We need to modernize our economy, to build a genuine civil society, to end legal nihilism and to stamp out corruption. We need to do this to build a better life for our children and our children’s children. We also need to do this for the country we love to prosper and to be engaged usefully in a changed and changing world.

We have only to reflect on the Arab Spring to recognize the transformation taking place in the compact between the rulers and the ruled. While there are certainly many differences between those countries and Russia, there are some fundamental similarities.

First, from Cairo to Damascus, from Moscow to Magadan, people the world over want to be treated with dignity and respect. Second, the Arab Spring has showed us that nobody can hold back the power of modern technology to inform and to mobilize. Technology has empowered the people.

Meanwhile, Russia’s educated middle classes are growing and should comprise a majority in just 10 years’ time. They will continue to demand a real seat at the table in a system of democracy and pluralism and they will not take “no” for an answer.

Nobody expects this to happen overnight, but next Sunday’s vote holds out the chance to end the would-be president’s monopoly of power.

We should not be afraid. By forcing a second round we will push our country down the path of positive change. Presidential power that previously answered to no one would have to start listening to the people it serves. The state that until now took the monopolistic presidential power for granted would be more wary of its hold and start moderating its behavior.

The politicians who gathered the opposition votes could become a force to be reckoned with, a voice for articulating the thoughts and views that have been ignored. The establishment would have to start negotiating with the opposition and an evolutionary transition could begin.

I would also welcome a change of position from Western countries. They should stop dancing to the whistle of the gas pipe. They need to speak loud and clear with one voice about real democratic reforms, recognizing that the only way to secure our mutual interests in the long term is for governments to stop hiding behind the stability myth, legitimizing a regime deceiving its own people — the people who are starting to wake up.

And so I ask you to watch with interest the results of this year’s election. In France and in the United States, the presidential vote is about choosing between differing political visions. In my country, the electoral calculus is a little simpler: choose Putin in the first round or in the second round. But do not be fooled: “President” Putin’s return to the Kremlin, after either manipulating the first round or being forced into a second round, puts the world on notice that real political change in Russia is unavoidable. It will be welcomed."

It all depends on your perspective

Credited to Patrick Chappatte, IHT

Homs update

The photos tell it all........as the southern city of Homs continues to be relentlessly pounded by shells and the death toll and injuries rise daily.

Attempting to escape sniper fire in Homs

From France 24:

"Most images coming out of Homs these days show relentless shelling, sniper fire, horrible wounds, and corpses. However, one resident braved the snipers to take photographs showing daily life in Homs – a daily life that’s far from normal.

Mulham Al-Jundi took these pictures in the eastern Homs neighbourhoods of Bab Sbaa, Khalidié, Bayada, and Karm Al-Zeitoun over the course of several days this week. These Sunni-majority neighbourhoods are not in quite as desperate a situation as Baba Amr further to the south, which is completely cut off by the army, but they are nevertheless full of snipers and subject to frequent shellfire. Its residents lack many basic necessities, not the least of which is medical care.

We reached Al-Jundi on Skype, as he was recovering from being shot in the leg by a sniper.

“Snipers have tried to shoot me so many times,” he says. “Today, they got their goal.” He was treated in a poorly-equipped field hospital, much like the one he photographed earlier in the week.

Before he had to go back to resting, he expressed anger that kids were out in the streets, selling cigarettes and gasoline to get by. “They should be in school!” Schools, of course, are closed for the time being."

 Go here for more photographs from Homs.

Out of Order

Credited to Nick Anderson

A quest for justice for Bradley Manning

The case against Bradley Manning, alleged leaker of information to WikiLeaks, continues unabated.    Anyone who values freedom and government accountability, should be watching the Manning "saga" - as that connected with Julian Assange - with concern.    It's a topic taken up by Logan Price in this op-ed piece in The Guardian's Comment is Free.  The question raised at a tribunal hearing - referred to in the second-last paragraph of this piece - is well worth remembering.

"In a small military court room at Fort Meade, two weeks after he was nominated for a Nobel Peace prize, I watched Bradley Manning appear before a judge – for the second time in his 635-day stint of pre-trial detainment. He sat silently while the prosecution read his 22 charges.

We won't hear his plea until the hearing is continued in March. Manning will likely be tried in early August. If all goes to plan for the prosecution, he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Before the charges were read, Manning's attorney asked the judge about her prior knowledge of the case, the issues surrounding it, and any previous opinions she may have had about it. She stated that she had known nothing of the case besides Manning's name "and that it involved classified material". When asked if she had spoken to friends or colleagues about the case, she said she hadn't. She held no prior opinion, we were told.

"For what must be the biggest controversy of the decade, I found this hard to believe. It reaffirmed my skepticism and brought to mind what many have already said: this trial is a sham.

President Obama, ultimately the judge's commander, does have an opinion about the matter – as he told me when I asked for his view at a fundraiser in San Francisco last April, at the end of Manning's extended solitary confinement at Quantico Marine Base.

In his mind, Bradley Manning was already guilty. The conversation was caught on tape, and legal experts have argued that the president's statement should be grounds for dismissal.

"We're a nation of laws," Obama told me. "He broke the law."

Some people are held to the law and others are not. Recalling the killing of journalists working for Reuters in the "Collateral Murder" video allegedly released by Manning, this is exactly this kind of selective enforcement that motivated WikiLeaks' revelations – and which brought me and my peers to Zuccotti Park last fall to use the only means we have to hold accountable those whose criminal acts brought us to economic crisis.

A generation before Bradley Manning, Daniel Ellsberg understood that some laws were worth breaking to expose and bring accountability to far greater crimes. Ellsberg tried to voice his grievances within his chain of command, as Manning did, before being ignored.

I have heard many people justify the government's treatment of Manning simply because of the risks he allegedly took. "He should have known better," they say, missing the point. Asked in 1971 if he was prepared to go to prison for releasing the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg's reply was simple: "Wouldn't you go to jail to end this war?"

Ellsberg's stand came back to me, sitting at Manning's arraignment. "I want people to see the truth," Bradley is alleged to have typed to the hacker who turned him in.

As the judge announced the recess and prepared to leave the room, someone stood up and shouted: "Your honor! Isn't it a soldier's responsibility to report war crimes?"

The judge silently looked away. It's an argument that the court will have to contend with, before the trial ends. When that happens, I hope the world is watching."

Nuclear Iran: Reality v the hype

It is almost impossible to avoid the ever-louder calls for an attack on Iran because of what is said to be its increasing nuclear capacity.    Witness this, as reported on ctpost.com:

"Sen. Joe Lieberman is leading a congressional move to push U.S. policy toward a more belligerent stance against Iran by urging President Obama to take action to "prevent the Iranian government from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability."

The key policy change would shift the U.S. objective from preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons to that of preventing Iran from having the "capability" to make the weapons.

The resolution is sponsored by Lieberman, Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Bob Casey, D-Pa., and signed onto by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and 28 other senators.

Tough rhetoric about Iran usually invokes a "red line" that the Teheran regime would cross at its peril.
For example, any Iranian move to shut down shipping through the Straits of Hormuz would be a vivid red line that would trigger a quick U.S. military response.

The red line on nuclear weapons is murky."

Meanwhile The New York Times reports in "U.S. Agencies See No Move by Iran to Build a Bomb" on the facts:

"Even as the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said in a new report Friday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment program, American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.
Multimedia

Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

At the center of the debate is the murky question of the ultimate ambitions of the leaders in Tehran. There is no dispute among American, Israeli and European intelligence officials that Iran has been enriching nuclear fuel and developing some necessary infrastructure to become a nuclear power. But the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to resume a parallel program to design a nuclear warhead — a program they believe was essentially halted in 2003 and which would be necessary for Iran to build a nuclear bomb. Iranian officials maintain that their nuclear program is for civilian purposes."

The Emperor's Messenger (Thomas Friedman) Has No Clothes

As readers of this blog know all too well, it is no friend of Thomas Friedman, author and op-ed writer for The NY Times.   He is superficial and all too often glib and bereft of any critical analysis.   He often comes across, as he did in Tahrir Square, as an American tourist posing as some sort of informed commentator.    A book just out about Friedman does not paint a flattering picture of the man.   truthout reports:

"What's scary about Thomas Friedman is not his journalism, with its underinflated insights and twisted metaphors. Annoying as his second-rate thinking and third-rate writing may be, he's not the first - or the worst - hack journalist.

What should unnerve us about Friedman is the acclaim he receives in political and professional circles.

Friedman's New York Times column appears twice a week on the most prestigious op-ed page in the United States; he has won three Pulitzer Prizes; his books are best-sellers; he's a darling of the producers of television news shows; and he fills lecture halls for a speaking fee as high as $75,000.

Although his work is stunningly shallow and narcissistic, Friedman is celebrated as a big thinker.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews was so excited after a 2005 "Hardball" interview with Friedman that he proclaimed: "You have a global brain, my friend. You're amazing. You amaze me every time you write a book."

How does a journalist with a track record of bad predictions and a penchant for superficial analysis - a person paid to reflect about the world yet who seems to lack the capacity for critical self-reflection - end up being treated as an oracle?

The answer is simple: Friedman tells the privileged, and those who aspire to privilege, what they want to hear in a way that makes them feel smart; his trumpeting of US affluence and power are sprinkled with pithy-though-empty anecdotes, padded with glib turns of phrases. He's the perfect oracle for a management-focused, advertising-saturated, dumbed-down, imperial culture that doesn't want to come to terms with the systemic and structural reasons for its decline. In Friedman's world, we're always one clichéd big idea away from the grand plan that will allow us to continue to pretend to be the shining city upon the hill that we have always imagined we were/are/will be again.

As a reporter, columnist, author or speaker, Friedman's secret to success is in avoiding the journalistic ideals of "speaking truth to power" or "afflicting the comfortable." Those ideals are too rarely met in mainstream journalism, but Friedman never goes very far beyond parroting the powerful and comforting the comfortable. Friedman sees the world from the point of view of the privileged, adopting in his own words the view of "a tourist with an attitude" when reporting on the rest of the world."

Continue reading here.

Beware of that GM corn

Unless the populace takes action to protect its health and well-being, governments will increasingly allow the manufacturers or growers to tamper with food.    The French government is to be applauded for seeking to have Monsanto prevented from selling its GM corn.

"France has asked the European regulators to suspend the authorization to plant Monsanto's genetically modified (GM) MON810 corn. France's ecology minister says the decision is based on studies showing GM crops "pose significant risks for the environment."

The request is "based on the latest scientific studies" which show that the use of the GM crops "pose significant risks for the environment," the ministry said in a statement.

The ministry pointed to a recent study by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) that raised concerns with another form of GM crop, BT11, that it said could also be applied to MON 810.

"If the European Union does not act, we can invoke the safeguard clause" which allows EU nations to independently restrict or prohibit the sales of products, it said.

President Nicolas Sarkozy in November pledged to seek new legal measures after the European Court of Justice and France's top administrative court overturned a French ban on GM crops from US agriculture giant Monsanto.
France tv info writes that six countries in the EU also ban the cultivation of genetically modified corn: Germany, Hungary, Greece, Luxembourg, Austria et Bulgaria.

* * *

Last week a French court found Monsanto legally responsible for the 2004 poisoning of a farmer with one of its herbicides."

It most certainly is apartheid

Try as Israel and its supporters claim otherwise, anyone who witnessed or lived through the apartheid era in South Africa confirms that Israel, and its policies, has established an apartheid regime.     

John Dugard is a professor of international law, authored a comprehensive study of the law of apartheid and was for seven years the special rapporteur to the UN Human Rights Council on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory.   He was interviewed on bitter lemons international.org

"BI: Does the system in place in the occupied territories fit the UN definition of "apartheid"?

Dugard: The apartheid convention does list a number of "inhuman acts" and quite a number of those inhuman acts are committed by the [Israel Defense Forces] in the Palestinian territory. There are unlawful killings--here one speaks of "targeted assassinations". There is detention without trial and inhuman acts of the kind that are listed in the apartheid convention. And then the act must be committed with the intentional purpose of domination of one racial group over another. Here, too, I think that one can correctly say that the purpose of these inhuman acts is to maintain the domination of settlers in the Palestinian territory."






Read the complete Q & A here.

One effective way to take money out of American politics

Perish the thought for those who are now so largely funding the political agenda in America, but Professor Juan Cole, writing on truthdig suggests one effective way the large amounts of money pouring into electioneering could be curbed.    All too sadly it is unlikely to happen.

"Big money has always been a problem in American politics, but now humongous money threatens to capsize the ship of state. Billionaires are very, very good at getting rich, mostly through stealth monopolies, relatively sure things (e.g., casinos) or through riding investment bubbles. But they are seldom scientists, physicians or educators, and can often entertain rather cranky beliefs, such as climate change denial or misogyny. Thus, the GOP super wealthy, having produced the tea party in 2010, have now given us national candidates so extreme that they often seem to be running for Supreme Leader of Iran instead of president of the United States. Although the Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court contributed to this problem, the culprits here are, fundamentally, the length of U.S. campaigns and the cost of television advertising for them.

Ari Berman has shown that about four-fifths of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 for the Republican primary contests was donated by only 196 individuals, who gave $100,000 or more each. Politics has become a game of the super rich, but the money they donate is significant only because of the way it is spent. An increasingly large percentage of it pays for television and radio commercials, and it is used by our new aristocracy to keep pet candidates alive. Newt Gingrich, for instance, might not have made it to South Carolina, where he won, without the backing of a single individual, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, owner of the Venetian in Las Vegas.

In the 2008 campaign year, about $2.8 billion was spent on television campaign spots nationwide, and the figure is expected to be much larger this time. Although television advertising is not always decisive, politicians can’t afford to bet that it won’t be. Mitt Romney spent $15 million in negative advertising against Gingrich in the Florida primary, which arguably blunted Gingrich’s momentum coming off his South Carolina win. Why should private broadcasters, licensed by the U.S. government in preference of other possible licensees, have been allowed to make massive profits off a public political campaign?

As early as the Iowa campaign, Gingrich began complaining about super PAC-funded television advertisements he said were spreading falsehoods about him on behalf of Romney. Romney responded, “Could I come out and speak about ads, generally, and speak about positive ads and negative ads? Of course, that’s available to everybody. But I’m not in any way coordinating the ads or the approach that’s taken by the super PAC.” Gingrich replied scornfully, “It tells you a lot about Governor Romney ... I’m happy to go all over Iowa and point out that he doesn’t mind hiding out behind millions of dollars of negative ads, but he doesn’t want to defend them. The ads are false.”

Would the Florida electoral contest, for instance, have yielded more light and less heat if each candidate had been apportioned airtime based on an equitable formula? Might not Jon Huntsman or Tim Pawlenty have been able to stay in the race and perhaps overcome initial handicaps if they had been able to advertise for free? We are choosing our presidential candidates the way we choose our favorite television shows, by which one generates the most advertising revenue for the broadcaster. Is that really what the founding generation of Americans had in mind?"

Marie Colvin: Bearing witness

A fitting tribute to an intrepid journalist just killed in Homs, Syria - in what increasingly looks like a targeted killing.

"Hours before being killed in the besieged Syrian city of Homs, Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times of London filed a story on the death of a two-year-old child from shrapnel wounds as his family watched, wailed, wept. Colvin was in the room; the camera stayed on the child as he struggled for breath. This is Assad's reality, she said: He is "shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.” Colvin bravely made it her own, too. Also killed was award-winning French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik, 28, and at least 80 Syrians.

"These are twenty-eight thousand civilians, men, women and children, hiding, being shelled, defenseless. That little baby is one of two children who died today, one of the children being injured every day. That baby probably will move more people to think, “What is going on, and why is no one stopping this murder in Homs that is happening every day?”

Go here to view graphic videos of Colvin's last report.

Read a tribute in "POSTSCRIPT: MARIE COLVIN, 1957-2012" by the editor of The New Yorker magazine here.

Girl Guides in the USA are what?

Take a deep breath.....as you read this more than breathtaking piece on CommonDreams about the threat posed by the Girl Guides in America.   

"Okay, deep breath here as we confront yet another insidious threat to our great Republic. Asked to sign an Indiana House resolution honoring the 100th anniversary of the Girl Scouts, alert GOP lawmaker Rep. Bob Morris did some research and found "disturbing" evidence that the group is a “radicalized organization” and "tactical arm of Planned Parenthood" that supports abortion, promotes homosexuality, encourages girls to have sexy sex, believes in giving basic human rights to transgender females and otherwise works for "the destruction of traditional American family values." Understandably, Morris thus voted - alone - to oppose the resolution. He also plans to yank his daughters out of the grasp of these heathens and take them to American Heritage Girls Little Flowers, where they will "learn about values and principles that will not confuse their conservative Hoosier upbringing," and hopefully enter a 12-step program to free themselves of the addictive grasp of Thin Mints and other ungodly items. We wish them well."

Read on here.

Peaceful means to obtain justice

Mustafa Barghouthi, a doctor and member of the Palestinian Parliament, is secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative, a political party.  He writes in an op-ed piece in today's New York Times:

"Over the past 64 years, Palestinians have tried armed struggle; we have tried negotiations; and we have tried peace conferences. Yet all we have seen is more Israeli settlements, more loss of lives and resources, and the emergence of a horrifying system of segregation.

Khader Adnan, a Palestinian held in an Israeli prison, pursued a different path. Despite his alleged affiliation with the militant group Islamic Jihad, he waged a peaceful hunger strike to shake loose the consciences of people in Israel and around the world. Mr. Adnan chose to go unfed for more than nine weeks and came close to death. He endured for 66 days before ending his hunger strike on Tuesday in exchange for an Israeli agreement to release him as early as April 17.

Mr. Adnan has certainly achieved an individual victory. But it was also a broader triumph — unifying Palestinians and highlighting the power of nonviolent protest. Indeed, all Palestinians who seek an independent state and an end to the Israeli occupation would be wise to avoid violence and embrace the example of peaceful resistance.

Mr. Adnan was not alone in his plight. More than 300 Palestinians are currently held in “administrative detention.” No charges have been brought against them; they must contend with secret evidence; and they do not get their day in military court.

Britain’s practices in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s were not so different from Israel’s today — and they elicited a similarly rebellious spirit from the subjugated population. In 1981, Bobby Sands, an imprisoned member of the Irish Republican Army, died 66 days after beginning a hunger strike to protest Britain’s treatment of political prisoners. Mr. Sands was elected to Parliament during his strike; nine other hunger strikers died before the end of 1981; and their cases drew worldwide attention to the plight of Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland.

Just as Margaret Thatcher, then the British prime minister, unsympathetically dismissed Mr. Sands as a “convicted criminal,” Israeli officials have accused Mr. Adnan of being an active member of Islamic Jihad. But if this is the case, Israel should prove it in court.

Mr. Adnan’s actions over the past nine weeks demonstrated that he was willing to give his life — nonviolently and selflessly — to advance Palestinian freedom. Others must now show similar courage.

What is needed is a Palestinian version of the Arab revolutions that have swept the region: a mass movement demanding freedom, dignity, a just peace, real democracy and the right to self-determination. We must take the initiative, practice self-reliance and pursue a form of nonviolent struggle that we can sustain without depending on others to make decisions for us or in our place.

In the last several years, Palestinians have organized peaceful protests against the concrete and wire “separation barrier” that pens us into what are best described as bantustans. We have sought to mobilize popular resistance to this wall by following in the nonviolent traditions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi — and we remain determined to sustain peaceful protest even when violently attacked.

Using these techniques, we have already succeeded in pressuring the Israeli government to reroute the wall in villages like Jayyous and Bilin and helped hundreds of Palestinians get their land back from settlers or the Israeli Army.

Our movement is not intended to delegitimize Israel, as the Israeli government claims. It is, instead, a movement to delegitimize the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which we believe is the last surviving apartheid system in the world. It is a movement that could free Palestinians from nearly 45 years of occupation and Israelis from being part of the last colonial-settler system of our time.

I remember the days when some political leaders of the largest Palestinian political parties, Al Fatah and Hamas, laughed at our nonviolent struggle, which they saw as soft and ineffective. But the turning point came in the summer of 2008, when we managed to break the Israeli naval siege of Gaza with small boats. Suddenly, I saw great respect in the eyes of the same leaders who had doubted the power of nonviolence but finally recognized its potential.

The power of nonviolence is that it gives Palestinians of all ages and walks of life the tools to challenge those subjugating us. And thousands of peace activists from around the world have joined our movement. In demonstrations in East Jerusalem, Silwan and Hebron we are also being joined by a new and younger Israeli peace movement that categorically rejects Israeli occupation.

Unfortunately, continuing Israeli settlement activity could soon lead us to the point of no return. Indeed, if we do not soon achieve a genuinely independent Palestinian state, we will be forced to press instead for a single democratic state with equal rights and responsibilities for both Palestinians and Israelis.

We are not sure how long it will take before our nonviolent struggle achieves its goal. But we are sure of one thing: it will succeed, and Palestinians will one day be free."

George Orwell alive and well at UNESCO

What can one say?...other than bizarre and that George Orwell is alive and well at UNESCO.

"WikiLeaks has lodged a strong protest with the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) for “banning’’ it from an international conference it is hosting at its headquarters in Paris on the impact of the whistleblower website’s activities.
 

* * *

UNESCO describes the 2-day conference on their website:

The conference “The Media World after WikiLeaks and News of the World” aims to gather leading media representatives, professional and “citizen” journalists and media law experts to exchange views on these issues and to discuss good practices in traditional professional journalism and citizen journalism in the digital era.

With a stunning 2 billion persons estimated to be using the Internet and producing 156 million public blogs in 2011, there has been a surge of social networks, user-generated content and micro-blogging that has enabled all Internet users to become public communicators. Along with the spread of the Internet, WikiLeaks' release of a massive number of classified government documents and its initial collaboration with traditional news media has modified the media landscape and raised crucial questions for journalism.

The WikiLeaks episode raised many issues related to freedom of expression, freedom of information, national security, privacy and ethics. The WikiLeaks developments raise basic questions about how journalists do their jobs. The conference aims to explore a wide range of new questions for traditional media and journalism posed by the WikiLeaks phenomenon:

• How can journalists deal with the massive explosion of primary source data made available on the Internet?

• Should journalists' roles and their professional and ethical standards be reconsidered?

• What is the relationship between “citizen journalism” and traditional journalistic professionalism?

• What are the challenges for international and domestic law related to privacy, national security, public order and Internet freedom?

• What is the future of government-media relations?"

Thankfully, an end to that 66 day hunger strike

Those who have followed the case of the Palestinian man detained, administratively, as the Israeli's describe it, without charge, and who has been on a hunger strike for 66 days, will be pleased to read this report from Al Jazeera that the fast has ended after a deal struck with the Israelis.     The whole matter highlights the travesty of Israeli actions.   The man is to be admired.   And what will the world do or say?   Don't hold your breath!

"A Palestinian detained by Israel, Khader Adnan, has agreed to end his 66-day hunger strike as part of a deal under which he will be released without charge, sources tell Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera's Nisreen El-Shamayleh, reporting from Adnan's hometown of Jenin in the occupied West Bank, quoted officials as saying on Tuesday that "Adnan has informed his lawyers that he has suspended his hunger strike and agreed to the offer to serve his sentence until April 17".

A spokesperson for the Israeli Supreme Court earlier told Al Jazeera that based on the deal reached between Adnan's lawyers and the Israeli justice ministry, he would end his fast in return for the court's decision to "erase" his file and release him on April 17, ending his "administrative detention".

Israel's supreme court had been expected to hear an urgent appeal by Adnan's lawyer later on Tuesday, but the hearing was cancelled after news of the deal became public.

“This man had no charges until now, no interrogation came up with any conclusions, no evidence against him. This is the truth, this is the reality," Jawad Bulus, one of Adnan's lawyers, told Al Jazeera.

"After three weeks of severe interrogation they shifted him as administrative detainee, where no charges could be faced. The only phrase that came out of them is that this man is a prominent activist in the Islamic Jihad of Palestine, which can be said against anybody in the world."

Adnan has become a potent symbol of protest against Israel's practice of holding suspects without trial.

The continued detention of the 33-year-old Palestinian from the occupied West Bank had led to global anger, with protesters clashing with police on Tuesday in the latest such incident in the occupied West Bank.

Israel arrested Adnan, a baker by profession, on December 17 near the northern West Bank town of Jenin.

Israel accuses him of being a spokesman for the Palestinian group, Islamic Jihad.

Adnan's protest has seen him break the record for the longest hunger strike by a Palestinian prisoner, with the previous record set in 1976 when a group of prisoners refused food for 45 days.

Married for seven years, Adnan has two small daughters, Maali, four and 18-month-old Bissan. His wife, Randa, is five months pregnant with a baby boy.

Speaking to the AFP news agency on Monday, his wife described him as a determined man with very strong principles who would "stick to his message, even if he has to sacrifice his life".

"For him, a principle is a principle," she said.

Adnan is one of some 5,000 Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails, and one of more than 300 currently being held in administrative detention.

His case sparked expressions of concern from the EU and the UN, and has gained widespread support among Palestinians."

A "silent" and more "comfortable" war

What this piece "Uncle Sam, Global Gangster" on TomDispatch so clearly shows, is that warfare, as we have come to know it, is undergoing a seismic shift.      And even more troubling is that even in this era of Wikileaks, and possibly because of it, much of what will be happening will be unknown to the general populace.

"If all goes as planned, it will be the happiest of wartimes in the U.S.A.  Only the best of news, the killing of the baddest of the evildoers, will ever filter back to our world.

After all, American war is heading for the “shadows” in a big way.  As news articles have recently made clear, the tip of the Obama administration’s global spear will increasingly be shaped from the ever-growing ranks of U.S. special operations forces.  They are so secretive that they don’t like their operatives to be named, so covert that they instruct their members, as Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room blog notes, “not to write down important information, lest it be vulnerable to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.”  By now, they are also a force that, in any meaningful sense, is unaccountable for its actions.

Although the special ops crew (66,000 people in all) exist on our tax dollars, we’re really not supposed to know anything about what they’re doing -- unless, of course, they choose the publicity venue themselves, whether in Pakistan knocking off Osama bin Laden or parachuting onto Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard to promote Act of Valor.  In case you somehow missed the ads, that’s the new film about “real terrorist threats based on true stories starring actual Navy SEALs.” (No names in the credits please!)

Of course, those elite SEAL teams are johnnies-come-lately when compared to their no less secretive “teammates” in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia -- our ever increasing armada of drones.  Those robotic warriors of the air (or at least their fantasy doppelgangers) were, of course, pre-celebrated -- after a fashion -- in the Terminator movies.  In Washington’s global battle zones, what’s called our “traditional combat role” -- think big invasions, occupations, counterinsurgency -- is going, going, gone with the wind, even evidently in Afghanistan by 2013.  War American-style is instead being inherited by secretive teams of men and machines, both hunter-killers who specialize in assassination operations, and both of whom, as presented to Americans, just couldn’t be sexier.

And we’ll all be just so happy -- as a recent poll indicates we are -- with our robotic warriors and their shadowy special ops teammates, if with nothing else in our fraying world.  They present such an alluring image of the no-pain, all-gain battlefield and are undoubtedly a relief for many Americans, distinctly tired -- so the polls also tell us -- of wars that aren’t covert and don’t work.  So who even notices that, as Andrew Bacevich, bestselling author and (most recently) editor of The Short American Century: A Postmortem, points out, we’re being plunged into a real-life war novel that has no plot and no end.  How post-modern!  How disastrous, if only we have the patience to wait!"

The folks behind peddling the lie

This Los Angeles Times editorial encapsulates the war on climate change proponents being waged by the likes of The Heartland Institute.   What is troubling is who the companies are which fund this Institute.  Think AT & T and Pfizer and the like.

"The culture wars have been fought in the classroom for decades, waged over such issues as school prayer, the teaching of evolution and whether the Pledge of Allegiance should include the phrase "under God." But the conflict usually pits backers of religious instruction against secularists. The latest skirmish, by contrast, is centered on a scientific issue that has nothing to do with religious teaching: climate change.

Leaked documents from the Heartland Institute in Chicago, one of many nonprofits that spread disinformation about climate science in hopes of stalling government action to combat global warming, reveal that the organization is working on a curriculum for public schools that casts doubt on the work of climatologists worldwide. Heartland officials say one of the documents was a fake, but the curriculum plans were reportedly discussed in more than one. According to the New York Times, the curriculum would claim, among other things, that "whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy."

That is a lie so big that, to quote from "Mein Kampf," it would be hard for most people to believe that anyone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." On one side of the "controversy" are credentialed climatologists around the globe who publish in reputable, peer-reviewed scientific journals and agree that the planet is warming and that humans are to blame; on the other are fossil-fuel-industry-funded "experts" who tend to have little background in climatology and who publish non-peer-reviewed papers in junk magazines disputing established truths. These are quickly debunked, but not before their findings have been reported by conservative blogs and news outlets, which somehow never get around to mentioning it when these studies are proved to be badly flawed.

Fortunately, if we're about to enter a battle over classroom instruction on climate change, it won't go on for decades, because the impacts of global warming are already patently obvious. Seven of the 10 warmest years since global record-keeping began in 1880 have occurred in the 21st century. Despite an intense campaign to discredit his work, Pennsylvania State University professor Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph, which shows that temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century soared to their highest level in 1,000 years, has been validated repeatedly. Last year set a record for the most climate-related disasters in the United States costing more than $1 billion in damage each — drought-fueled wildfires in Texas, Hurricane Irene, and Mississippi River flooding were among the 14 cases.

These are facts, not philosophical or religious dogma. Another fact: Sophisticated climate models show that things are going to get a lot worse. It's bad enough that we're gambling our children's futures by doing so little to fight this problem; let's not ask their teachers to lie to them about it too."

An insight into vulture capitalism

Antony Loewenstein on his blog, here, has received, anonymously, a missive from a retired navy officer explaining vulture capitalism:

"Somebody’s civilian friends or benefactors have always been making money on our wars. The funny twist is how the “military industrial complex” of years gone by has evolved into a “personnel support complex” in addition. When I went to Iraq in 09 I brought all the learning CDs for Arabic in anticipation of that being the language I would need to know. When I came home I spoke more Hindi and Swahili. KBR and others take their contracts …and sub-contract to some Arab company,, like in Dubai. They in turn hire “third” world country employees for peanuts..say $500 a month…charge them a finders fee for the job and front them their airfare to Iraq. Then the worker has to work for 5 or 6 months to repay the debt before they can send dollar one home to their starving family in Nepal, India, Peru, Uganda or the Philippines. Sounding like slave labor yet? Hold your horses…then some of them live in unsafe shanty towns built right inside our bases, like Camp Victory. Add insult to that already abusive relationship and some, like from Sri Lanka, get a small portion of some nondescript “chicken” dish two or three times a day as their sustenance. I gave most of my “care” packages from caring US citizens to them, just so they could have something better.

So where did that huge check for the contract go? …in some fat cat’s (corporation’s) pocket…with the second largest payment to the Dubai company. All the time, the workers keep at it for a small pittance of what any soldier or western worker would make. I befriended the Indians and Ugandans the most. The Indians ran all the mess halls and the Ugandans provided armed security for the ECPs (Entry Control Points – to wit: entrance gates and provided the armed guards at the mess hall entrees). Did you get that one? Our personal safety was placed in the hands of someone from a continent where they could likely have been a child soldier….and they had guns with bullets at the entrance of the mess hall to keep you out if you didn’t have the right ID or uniform.

and as for the why? Have you all forgotten? We were downsizing in Iraq. D.C. had to show the numbers of military going down. You have never seen a report in the media showing the numbers of civilians working for the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan unless you dig pretty deep into Google. You also didn’t see the numbers of those civilians killed in the nightly news reports.

When Blackwater got a all the bad press they passed those same contracts over to foreign companies like Aegis (British) who had an excess of UK infantrymen from the IRA war that were unemployed. So get this, US Army generals have all their security detail from the UK. It’s all numbers. Of course, we are entirely out of Iraq now, right? Maybe not! Who is doing the “on the ground” security for the US State Dept now that we have left? I think you get the picture.

Reinstate the DRAFT! America now has 1% of the population defending our freedom. There is a Warrior Class now that is not understood. When we pull our troops out of Afghanistan how many Americans will thank those in uniform for their service when they travel in the airports?

As the Roman Empire got weaker, the emperors hired Germanic people to work as Roman soldiers. It all went down from there. Do a Google for “Romans hired Germanics. It’s all academic from there.

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” George Santayana (1863 – 1952), The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905. When Rome ran out of money, the empire collapsed.

I hope the USA can last as long as Rome…but I don’t hold much faith in that proposition.

Let’s start a pool. Which “next” war comes first? Syria, Egypt or Iran? Extra point spread if it is another country.

Two State solution dead in the water

If you were one of those who still believes that there could be a two-State solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict think again.   The facts on the ground, as this piece by Director Jeff Halper of the The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions clearly shows, almost conclusively proves that a two-State solution is not longer a goer, if it ever was!  That being the case where to?

"Even as I write this, the bulldozers have been busy throughout that one indivisible country known by the bifurcated term Israel/Palestine. Palestinian homes, community centers, livestock pens and other “structures” (as the Israel authorities dispassionately call them) have been demolished in the Old City, Silwan and various parts of “Area C” in the West Bank, as well among the Bedouin – Israeli citizens – in the Negev/Nakab. This is merely mopping up, herding the last of the Arabs into their prison cells where, forever, they will cease to be heard or heard from, a non-issue in Israel and, eventually, in the wider world distracted from bigger, more pressing matters.

An as-yet confidential report submitted by the European consuls in Jerusalem and Ramallah raises urgent concerns over the “forced expulsion” of Palestinians – a particularly strong term for European diplomats to use –from Area C of the West Bank (the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control but which today contains less than 5% of the Palestinian population). Focusing particularly on the rise in house demolitions by the Israeli authorities and the growing economic distress of the Palestinians living in Area C, the report mentions the fertile and strategic Jordan Valley (where the Palestinian population has declined from 250,000 to 50,000 since the start of the Occupation), plans to relocate 3000 Jahalin Bedouins to a barren hilltop above the Jerusalem garbage dump and the ongoing but accelerated demolition of Palestinian homes (500 in 2011).

At the same time the “judaization” of Jerusalem continues apace, a “greater” Israeli Jerusalem steadily isolating the Palestinian parts of the city from the rest of Palestinian society while ghettoizing their inhabitants, more than 100,000 of which now live beyond the Wall. Some 120 homes were demolished in East Jerusalem in 2011; over the same period the Israeli government announced the construction of close to 7000 housing units for Jews in East and “Greater” Jerusalem. “If current trends are not stopped and reversed,” said a previous EU report, “the establishment of a viable Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders seems more remote than ever. The window for a two-state solution is rapidly closing….”

In fact, it closed long ago. In terms of settlers and Palestinians, the Israeli government treats the whole country as one. Last year it demolished three times more homes ofIsraeli citizens (Arabs, of course) than it did in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The demolition of Bedouin homes in the Negev/Nakab is part of a plan approved by the government to remove 30,000 citizens from their homes and confine them to townships.

None of this concerns “typical” Israelis even if they have heard of it (little appears in the news). For them, the Israeli-Arab conflict was won and forgotten years ago, somewhere around 2004 when Bush informed Sharon that the US does not expect Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders, thus effectively ending the “two-state solution,” and Arafat “mysteriously” died.

Since then, despite occasional protests from Europe, the “situation” has been normalized. Israelis enjoy peace and quiet, personal security and a booming economy (with the usual neoliberal problems of fair allocation). The unshakable, bi-partisan support of the American government and Congress effectively shields it from any kind of international sanctions. Above all, Israeli Jews have faith that those pesky Arabs living somewhere “over there” beyond the Walls and barbed-wire barriers have been pacified and brought under control by the IDF. A recent poll found that “security,” the term Israelis use instead of “occupation” or “peace,” was ranked eleventh among the concerns of the Israeli public, trailing well behind employment, crime, corruption, religious-secular differences, housing and other more pressing issues."

Continue reading here.

Anthony Shadid: Vale to a great journalist (in the true sense)

Real journalists rightly pour scorn on those who claim to be journalists but are no more than stenographers of what they have been told or, as happened in Iraq during the invasion, reported from downtown Baghdad hotels - or being embedded with the American military - instead of being out in the field.

Anthony Shadid was your true old-fashioned reporter and journalist.    All too sadly, he died last week, in Syria, at the age of 43.

"The death of journalist Anthony Shadid, doing what he'd done for years to tell the story of a Middle East in turmoil to the rest of us, is a huge loss. We will miss his grace and gifts. More here and here. May his memory be a blessing."

- from CommonDreams

From NPR:

"Over the years, Anthony was beaten and abducted while covering the news. He knew he was taking risks. But he also knew (though his unassuming nature would have never let him say it) that he was fulfilling his life's mission, explaining the Arab world to Americans with a fluency and empathy perhaps no other reporter could match."

From The New Yorker:

"There are other great Middle East correspondents working today—Robert F. Worth of the Times, for example—but none with Anthony’s personal story and outlook, which flowed into his story choices, sentences, and techniques. Journalists recognize each other’s signatures and tricks. One of Anthony’s was to frame a story around the proprietor of a single café, bookstore, or university department. It’s not easy to bring a passive character and setting of that sort to life, but Anthony did it again and again. Reading the whole body of his work was like reading a linked series of stories about a world of (usually) men bathed in cigarette smoke, hyped up on coffee, and ready to talk about why the world is the way it is. Like a great short-story writer, Shadid’s use of these characters was neither too heavy nor too light; he let them breathe and speak, and they allowed the reader to join in, to slip inside worlds and ways of thinking normally closed off."

The ramifications of any attack on Iran

Whilst the threat of Israel - perhaps with American support, openly or in the background - attacking Iran increases daily, the ramifications could be devastating and widespread - and not necessarily confined to the region.    If Washington and the EU thought an assumed ally, Pakistan, would be supporting and of material help in any attack on Iran, they need to think again.    The Nation newspaper, Pakistan, reports:

"Pakistan will not assist the US if it attacks Iran, Islamabad Friday assured Tehran.
Pakistan will not provide Americans airbases to launch attack on its neighbour, President Asif Ali Zardari said after the third trilateral summit of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan.

At the summit the three states expressed their resolve to work collectively for peace and stability in the region and enhancement of mutual cooperation in different sectors, particularly economy and trade.

Addressing a joint news conference, along with his Iranian and Afghan counterparts Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hamid Karzai, President Zardari emphatically stated that Pakistan’s relationship with the brethren countries cannot be undermined by the international pressure of any kind. “Pakistan and Iran need each other and no foreign pressure can hinder their ties.”

This is the first categorical assurance of support to Tehran from the highest echelons of Islamabad, whose own ties with the Washington came under a severe strain in November last year after Nato airstrikes on two Pakistani Army checkposts in Mohmand Agency killed over two dozen soldiers  prompting Islamabad to take steps including stopping the passage of Nato supplies through the country and boycott of an international conference on Afghanistan."

Santorum: Another GOP presidential candidate to fear

Need anything more be added or said about to this op-ed piece "Santorum's Gospel of Inequality" in The New York Times excoriating GOP presidential hopeful, Rick Santorum.    Is Santorum really representative of the thinking of many in the USA?   Let's hope not....

“Santorum Praises Income Inequality.”

That was Fox News’s headline about Rick Santorum’s speech at the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday. Santorum said, “I’m not about equality of result when it comes to income inequality. There is income inequality in America. There always has been and, hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be.”

Unbelievable. Maybe not, but stunning all the same.

Then again, Santorum is becoming increasingly unhinged in his public comments. Last week, he said that the president was arguing that Catholics would have to “hire women priests to comply with employment discrimination issues.”

Also last week, he suggested that liberals and the president were leading religious people into oppression and even beheadings. I kid you not. Santorum said: “They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine.”

One man take on the system......and is suffering for it

The hunger-strike of one Palestinian one in Israel - 62 days so far - has not only brought worldwide attention to his plight but the whole "system" of detention of Palestinians by Israelis, the conditions under which Palestinians exist ("live" is hardly the appropriate word) in the West Bank and Israel itself and Israel's appalling legal (not "justice") system.

"A Palestinian man who has refused to eat since he was detained without charge two months ago by Israel “could die at any minute,” one of his lawyers told The Guardian newspaper on Thursday, day 61 of the hunger strike.

An Israeli medical charity’s report on the condition of the detained man, Khader Adnan, which was submitted in support of his appeal to Israel’s High Court, agreed that his life was in danger.

As Amira Hass reported for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last week, Mr. Adnan, 33, was arrested in December at his home in the West Bank and began his hunger strike to protest “what he regards as humiliating practices exercised by Shin Bet security service interrogators.” Three weeks after his arrest, an Israeli military prosecutor obtained an order that would initially keep Mr. Adnan in prison for four months, without charge or trial. According to Israeli authorities, classified information presented to the court suggested that Mr. Adnan was “a senior member of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad who is involved in organizational activity” on behalf of the militant group, which has killed Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Mr. Khader has acted as a spokesman for Islamic Jihad in the West Bank in the past, as my colleagues Christine Hauser and Steven Erlanger reported in 2005.

Under Israel’s system of military justice in the occupied West Bank, Palestinians can be held in detention under “administrative arrest orders” without the right to see the evidence against them. According to Ms. Hass, this puts lawyers for prisoners like Mr. Adnan in an impossible situation. In her account of a hearing on Mr. Adnan’s detention in a military court, Ms. Hass wrote: “The process of opposing administrative arrest turns into a guessing game, or a game of tag in which one side is blindfolded while the other side has a full view of events. There is no indictment, nor is there evidence to dispute.”

In a report for the Israeli news blog +972, Yossi Gurvitz explained, “Administrative detention in Israel is based on the British emergency laws, which were never repealed.” He added: “A person may be detained for up to six months without the government needing to show any evidence against him. Perhaps the most cruel element of administrative detention … is the fact that it may be extended time and time again.”

In an op-ed for Al Jazeera, Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American activist who has argued for Israelis and Palestinians to share a single state, explained that Mr. Adnan had explicitly stated that his strike was in protest at the system of administrative detention.

Adnan wrote in a letter published through his lawyer, “I have been humiliated, beaten, and harassed by interrogators for no reason, and thus I swore to God I would fight the policy of administrative detention to which I and hundreds of my fellow prisoners fell prey.”

According to Amnesty International, which has issued two urgent appeals on Adnan’s behalf, as of Dec. 31 last year, 307 Palestinians were in Israeli administrative detention, including 21 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council that was elected in January 2006.

“I hereby assert that I am confronting the occupiers not for my own sake as an individual, but for the sake of thousands of prisoners who are being deprived of their simplest human rights while the world and international community look on,” Adnan wrote in his letter.
Mr. Abunimah’s argument in favor of a shared Israeli-Palestinian state is based in part on what he sees as the example of Northern Ireland. On Thursday, he noted on Twitter that a spokesman for Sinn Féin, the political arm of the Irish Republican Army, called for Ireland’s government “to urgently intervene to save Khader Adnan’s life.” In the 1980s, 10 I.R.A. prisoners died after long hunger strikes protesting the conditions under which they were held in a Northern Ireland jail. The first striker to die, Bobby Sands, died 66 days into his fast."

This piece, here, is worth reading in order to get a sense of the issues in the hunger-strike. Meanwhile, Gideon Levy, in Haaretz, also writes about this Palestinian's situation.

"Khader Adnan was arrested on December 17. Israeli soldiers came to this house in the middle of the night. This was his seventh detention or arrest by Israel. The first time was in 1999, when he was held for half a year without trial. After that, he spent eight months in detention in 2000; he was arrested again in 2002-2003; detained in 2004; detained for 18 months in 2005-2006 and six months in 2008.

In 2010, the Palestinian Authority arrested him for 12 days. Then, too, he went on a hunger strike, for the first time in his life. Between arrests, he worked at a pita bakery in Qabatiya and was an Islamic Jihad activist. His family says he is a political activist."