Obama: Warrior in Chief

A timely op-ed piece  in The New York Times in this American election year on the so-called liberal Obama - a president worse than Bush in many respects and certainly in relation to war-mongering.   One thing is for sure.  Obama was in no way deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize.

"The president who won the Nobel Peace Prize less than nine months after his inauguration has turned out to be one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.

Liberals helped to elect Barack Obama in part because of his opposition to the Iraq war, and probably don’t celebrate all of the president’s many military accomplishments. But they are sizable.

Mr. Obama decimated Al Qaeda’s leadership. He overthrew the Libyan dictator. He ramped up drone attacks in Pakistan, waged effective covert wars in Yemen and Somalia and authorized a threefold increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. He became the first president to authorize the assassination of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and played an operational role in Al Qaeda, and was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. And, of course, Mr. Obama ordered and oversaw the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Ironically, the president used the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech as an occasion to articulate his philosophy of war. He made it very clear that his opposition to the Iraq war didn’t mean that he embraced pacifism — not at all.

“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” the president told the Nobel committee — and the world. “For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man, and the limits of reason.”

If those on the left were listening, they didn’t seem to care. The left, which had loudly condemned George W. Bush for waterboarding and due process violations at Guantánamo, was relatively quiet when the Obama administration, acting as judge and executioner, ordered more than 250 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2009, during which at least 1,400 lives were lost."

Now the PLO joins the web censors

Troubling to read that the PLO is getting into the business of web censorship.

"The Palestinian Authority has quietly instructed Internet providers to block access to news websites whose reporting is critical of President Mahmoud Abbas, according to senior government officials and data analyzed by network security experts.

As many as eight news outlets have been rendered unavailable to many Internet users in the West Bank, after technicians at the Palestinian Telecommunications Company, or PalTel, tweaked an open source software called Squid to return error pages, a detailed technical analysis indicates. Several small companies are using a similar setup.

The decision this year to begin blocking websites marks a major expansion of the government's online powers. Experts say it is the biggest shift toward routine Internet censorship in the Palestinian Authority’s history. Aside from one incident in 2008, Palestinians have generally been free to read whatever they wanted."  

Another ugly side to Israeli behaviour

The actions of the Israelis know no bounds.     Forget about acting legally!   Forget about decency!  Forget about humanity!    The latest outrage as reported on Mondoweiss (essential reading if one wants to keep up with events in the Middle East especially relating to Israel and the Palestinian issue).

"Earlier this week, Israel ordered Palestinian farmers in Deir Istiya, a major West Bank olive producing village, to uproot 1,400 trees by the end of this month. By comparison, this order is 400 more trees than the total number uprooted in all of 2011.

"This is the largest order for uprooting trees that the farmers of Wadi Qana have ever been given," said the International Women's Peace Service (IWPS). And Amal Salem, 63, from Deir Istiya, but now living in St. Louis says unearthing olive trees effects everyone in the village, "When I visited last year, every house I went to has had uprooted trees."

Amal's family has farmed olive for five generations.  It was their livelihood, and afforded her to attend school in Cairo. "I went to school because of the olive trees. I went to school because in Cairo because of the trees. My father had no other income but the olive trees." In Amal's family, Israeli authorities uprooted 300 trees of her 83-year old uncle's land. Amal described them as ancient growth, "1,000 years old," stemming from the Roman period. The day the bulldozers arrived, her cousins protested, clinging to the trees, although they were uprooted regardless. But within a day or two, her family proudly re-planted what was unearthed. Yet Amal's uncle has night terrors from this incident, stirring over the sight of seeing his child nearly smashed by a bulldozer.

Since the Mamluk period, Deir Istiya has been one of the largest olive producing regions in the West Bank. But, even with 10,000 dunums of agricultural land, the village's full farming capacity is weakened by Israel's military and civilian occupation. Nearby, eight settlements are built on, or adjacent to, a total of 15,000 dunums of Palestinian land. "From my parents' house we can see were they built a settlement on our land," says Amal. And from the outposts, wastewater seeps into and is illegally dumped into a natural spring used by Palestinians producing olives.  Amal says the wastewater flows down from the settlements like a river, "but it isn't a river." At times, the wastewater overflows from the dumping site to onto Palestinian orchards. Last fall, over 100 trees in Deir Istiya were destroyed by flooded wastewater.

Additionally, the settlers themselves cause problems to Deir Istiya's farmers through acts of harassment and violence, including arson to agricultural lands and "price tag" attacks. Amal has seen them holding guns a schoolchildren and earlier this year, settlers desecrated a mosque during a wave of price tag actions sparked by the demolition of an illegal Israeli outpost.  And devastatingly, Amal says a few years ago a settler ran over one villager with a car.

Today IWPS held an action in support of the farmers and released the following statement:

On April 25, 2012 nine farmers of Deir Istiya, Salfit were given orders to uproot 1400 olive trees in the Wadi Qana agricultural area by May 1, 2012. This is the largest order for uprooting trees that the farmers of Wadi Qana have ever been given. Most of the trees were planted approximately 5 years ago on privately owned Palestinian property. The orders, placed on retaining terraces, rocks and fences in the vicinity of the trees, state that if the farmers do not uproot their trees they will face punishment which could, according to Deir Istiya mayor Nazmi Salman include large fines and imprisonment."

It is Rupert M who is the "wanker".......

Apart from the likes of Andrew Bolt, there can be few who believed a word of what Rupert Murdoch said in evidence the other day to the Leveson Inquiry. 

Bruce Guthrie was a senior News Limited executive from 1987-89 and from 2003-08 and is author of Man Bites Murdoch.    He comments on Murdoch's evidence....

"The News chief can't have been serious with his evidence.

Rupert Murdoch was having a lend, surely? How else to explain some of his extraordinary statements this week before the Leveson inquiry on the British press. Statements such as: ''We have never pushed our commercial interests in our newspapers''; ''I have never asked a prime minister for anything''; and my absolute favourite, ''I do try very hard to set an example of ethical behaviour and make it quite clear that I expect it''.

I giggled at that one about commercial interests, remembering the last News Limited editors' conference I attended, in 2008. An entire session was devoted to discussing how papers could best promote the then forthcoming Fox film, Australia, directed by Baz Luhrmann, and when it finally came out - I'd been sacked in the interim - Murdoch's tabloids competed with one another to gush about it on front pages around the country.

As for encouraging ethical behaviour, I could barely contain my mirth. As I've written on this page before, the only time I discussed ethics in front of Murdoch during seven years of working for him he called me a ''wanker'' for doing so."

The nuns as pawns in the Church

Maureen Dowd, writing her regular op-ed column in The New York Times - this one headed "Bishops Play Church Queens as Pawns" - rightly ponders on the priorities of the Catholic Church when it is seen attempting to bring seemingly errant nuns, who are helping the poor, into line.  She asks whether the Church hasn't a greater issue confronting it and with which to deal. Those priests who have abused and molested young boys.

"It is an astonishing thing that historians will look back and puzzle over, that in the 21st century, American women were such hunted creatures.

Even as Republicans try to wrestle women into chastity belts, the Vatican is trying to muzzle American nuns.

Who thinks it’s cool to bully nuns? While continuing to heal and educate, the community of sisters is aging and dying out because few younger women are willing to make such sacrifices for a church determined to bring women to heel.

Yet the nuns must be yanked into line by the crepuscular, medieval men who run the Catholic Church.

“It’s not terribly unlike the days of yore when they singled out people in the rough days of the Inquisition,” said Kenneth Briggs, the author of “Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns.”

How can the church hierarchy be more offended by the nuns’ impassioned advocacy for the poor than by priests’ sordid pedophilia?"

A peaceful protest to attain peace

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against the then South African apartheid was at the time said to have been successful in seeing the end of the regime.     It has been a "tactic' sought to be employed by protest and activist groups against Israel in so far as it relates to good manufactured by Israeli companies in the West Bank, especially those in so-called settlements.

The movement has gained traction and success over the years despite heavy Israeli pressure to prevent it.    The latest "success" in the protect comes with the announcement in Britain of one of the largest food retailers banning the sale of goods sourced from Israeli settlements.

"One of the largest supermarket chains in Britain has announced that it intends to boycott Israeli agricultural exporters that market also produce from the West Bank settlements.

While British food retailers have for some years now been labeling products that are grown or manufactured in settlements and in some cases boycotting them entirely, this is the first move by a major company to end all dealings with companies that export products from within the Green Line and from the settlements. The main companies that will be impacted by this decision are Agrexco, Mehadrin and Arava.

The announcement came this weekend following years of campaigning by pro-Palestinian organizations in Britain that have been lobbying for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) of Israel. Co-op, the fifth biggest supermarket chain in Britain has emphasized that this is not a boycott of Israel and that it will continue doing business with companies that can guarantee none of their products originate from outside the Green Line.

The attempts to limit the export of settlement produce to Europe were led in the past by the European Union and the British government. In 2009, the British government, at the express instructions of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, issued guidelines to retailers on clear labeling of produce made in settlements, differentiating it from Palestinian produce and products that were made within the Green Line. These guidelines followed Israeli refusals to label settlement products before being exported to the EU. The issue of labeling settlement produce was a major bone of contention between the British and Israeli governments at the time.

In recent years, the BDS movement has targeted companies such as Agrexco, an export cooperative that serves thousands of farmers, kibbutzim and small agricultural companies in Israel that has continued to export settlement produce."

Ann Romney: What planet does she occupy?

You read some of the observations and statements by Mick and Ann Romney and wonder what planet they occupy.    The latest "revelation" from Mrs R leaves one more than gasping....

“I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids. Thank goodness that we value those people too. And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.”

Eh?    She "loves" what?     Sounds like a woman quite at one with millions of working women in America who have no choice but to juggle work, family and budgets!!!!

Women in the Middle East. Out of sight and mind?

Much has been written of the Arab Spring.   A new dawn?  For women?    Well-known Egyptian-American journalist and activist would say a definite no.......as she does in this piece on FP (Foreign Policy) "Why Do They Hate Us?"

"Yes, women all over the world have problems; yes, the United States has yet to elect a female president; and yes, women continue to be objectified in many "Western" countries (I live in one of them). That's where the conversation usually ends when you try to discuss why Arab societies hate women.

But let's put aside what the United States does or doesn't do to women. Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt -- including my mother and all but one of her six sisters -- have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating "virginity tests" merely for speaking out, it's no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband "with good intentions" no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are "good intentions"? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is "not severe" or "directed at the face." What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it's not better than you think. It's much, much worse. Even after these "revolutions," all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian's blessing -- or divorce either.

Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet's rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women. Neighbors Saudi Arabia and Yemen, for instance, might be eons apart when it comes to GDP, but only four places separate them on the index, with the kingdom at 131 and Yemen coming in at 135 out of 135 countries. Morocco, often touted for its "progressive" family law (a 2005 report by Western "experts" called it "an example for Muslim countries aiming to integrate into modern society"), ranks 129; according to Morocco's Ministry of Justice, 41,098 girls under age 18 were married there in 2010.

It's easy to see why the lowest-ranked country is Yemen, where 55 percent of women are illiterate, 79 percent do not participate in the labor force, and just one woman serves in the 301-person parliament. Horrific news reports about 12-year-old girls dying in childbirth do little to stem the tide of child marriage there. Instead, demonstrations in support of child marriage outstrip those against it, fueled by clerical declarations that opponents of state-sanctioned pedophilia are apostates because the Prophet Mohammed, according to them, married his second wife, Aisha, when she was a child."

Rupe tell the truth? You gotta be kidding!

Rupert Murdoch - and his son, James - have passed through the witness box at the Leveson Inquiry in London.     No one would believe James - who in all likelihood would have never landed the positions he did in the Murdoch empire but for Daddy!     Old Rupe!   Wily, and many informed pundits would say, living in a parallel orbit.    The Global Mail considers the evidence....

"As for much of the rest of his seven-hour testimony - gripping for media junkies; like watching paint dry for the most that aren't - Murdoch's former editor at London's The Sunday Times, Sir Harold Evans, saw Murdoch's performance more akin to the fanciful plots scriptwriters at News Corp's Fox Studios might concoct.

"Everything he says should be taken as the diametric opposite," Sir Harold told an interviewer on his wife Tina Brown's Daily Beast website afterwards. Murdoch's testimony showed, he said, that the mogul had "discovered a huge imagination. Frankly it's pathetic. I haven't stopped laughing all morning." Perhaps Evans, sacked by Murdoch, was miffed that Rupert said he hadn't read his famous account of their brief liaison, Good Times, Bad Times.

Others, including Murdoch's raucous cheerleader in Australia, Andrew Bolt, thought it "a brilliant rebuttal of the sniggering reports of his intellectual decline." Writing on the website of the Murdoch-owned Melbourne Herald-Sun, Bolt wrote: "Murdoch at 81 showed his memory of events of decades ago was as sharp as a razor, and his wit was just as keen. No stumbles, no doddering, no embarrassment, no lack of command."

At this point, it's useful to remember why Murdoch was there in the first place and why the world was treated to a rare, public and proper grilling by a skilled and well-researched interrogator of The Man Who Owns the News, the title of a celebrated Murdoch biography by the New York journalist Michael Wolff.

Murdoch was there ostensibly to explain how things were allowed to fester inside News Corporation's British division, News International — the now notorious phone-hacking scandal and its derivatives, which have seen more than 40 of his former staff arrested, some jailed."

The New Yorker covers the Murdoch evidence thus.

Royalty Chinese style

Let it not be said that one cannot do very well in China....depending on the connections of course.

"They are referred to as "princelings" for a reason — mainly because these children of Communist leaders are resented by many in China, and elsewhere, for the privileges they receive as a birthright. What they do with these privileges is what determines how the headlines about them are worded.

Bo Guagua, son of the disgraced former Chongqing Party boss Bo Xilai, has been the most recent princeling to capture the limelight, but he is far from alone in this honor. Guagua, a 24-year-old post-graduate student at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, has been called out for being "an academically indifferent bon vivant with a weakness for European sports cars, first-class air travel, equestrian sports and the tango," according to the Times.

But, apparently, Sabrina Chen, granddaughter of one of the Eight Immortals (leaders who helped steer China out of upheaval in the 1980s), can keep up with him; the two were seen together cavorting in Tibet.

And then there's Mao Zedong's grandson, Mao Xinyu, who was recently taken to task in the press for his poor penmanship.

While her penmanship may be better, as daughter of Mao's English tutor, Hong Huang regularly gets attention for being "China's Oprah Winfrey" — a reputation that arguably takes more upkeep than, say, being known primarily for buying a really big house Down Under (that's Zeng Wei, another spawn of the Eight Immortals).

Chart the course of these colorful characters — along with their peer Jasmine Li — in the infographic below.

Also, let the record show that Bo Guagua wrote an open letter to the Harvard Crimson earlier this week, defending his lifestyle ("I have never driven a Ferrari") and hoping, it seems, to show that the apple can in fact fall far from the tree."

The GOP's wing-nut

Shake your head in disbelief as you read the rantings of this GOP member of Congress.   Remember we are in the 21st century!   Hasn't anyone told this wing-nut?    Veteran journalist and commentator Bill Moyers reflects on how McCarthyism is rearing its head again....

"We’ve talked at times about George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, and the amnesia that sets in when we flush events down the memory hole, leaving us at the mercy of only what we know today. Sometimes, though, the past comes back to haunt, like a ghost. It happened recently when we saw Congressman Allen West of Florida on the news.

A Republican and Tea Party favorite, he was asked at a local gathering how many of his fellow members of Congress are “card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists.”

He replied, “I believe there’s about 78 to 81 members of the Democrat Party who are members of the Communist Party. It’s called the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

By now, little of what Allen West says ever surprises. He has called President Obama “a low level socialist agitator,” said anyone with an Obama bumper sticker on their car is “a threat to the gene pool” and told liberals like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to “get the hell out of the United States of America.” Apparently, he gets his talking points from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or the discredited right wing rocker Ted Nugent.

But this time, we shook our heads in disbelief: “78 to 81 Democrats… members of the Communist Party?” That’s the moment the memory hole opened up and a ghost slithered into the room. The specter stood there, watching the screen, a snickering smile on its stubbled face. Sure enough, it was the ghost of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin farm boy who grew up to become one of the most contemptible thugs in American politics."

Iran? A threat? Seems not!

When the former head of Israel's security service speaks about the country's leaders - not complimentary at all - and his assessment of whether Iran poses a threat or not you sit up and listen.     Hear then!....

"They are misleading the public on the Iran issue. They tell the public that if Israel acts, Iran won't have a nuclear bomb. This is misleading. Actually, many experts say that an Israeli attack would accelerate the Iranian nuclear race," said the former security chief. 

In March, former Mossad chief Meir Dagan also spoke out publicly against a military option on Iran, telling CBS' 60 Minutes that an Israeli attack would have "devastating" consequences for Israel, and would in any case be unlikely to put an end to the Iranian nuclear program."

Israel.....with blinkers on

"Israel is perceived as a brutal state living in well-fanned hysteria and existential anxiety, which sees any political process as a conspiracy, any move on the ground as a justification for war and any criticism as an anti-Semitic campaign. In the 64th year of its independence, there is a strange contradiction in Israel: on the one hand, the apparent acceptance of the perpetuity of the conflict and of the view that it has no solution, and on the other hand the loss of the skills and sense of strength needed to withstand this conclusion.

Instead of steeling itself in the face of a conflict that will last for generations, it seems Israel is only becoming more fragile and more sensitive to every touch, even the slightest. The shadow of mountains looks like mountains; anything that in some way benefits the Palestinians is perceived as a threat to us. Any act of demonstrative protest is considered an "airlift" by the Luftwaffe or a terrifying "flotilla" in the style of the Spanish armada, and every foreign observer is perceived as an enemy requiring an "operation" and a "confrontation." How does neurotic sensitivity like this accord with the apparent readiness for eternal war? Perhaps the psychiatrist of "The Big Brother" reality show has answers.

Israel appears enclosed in a bizarre egocentric bubble: On the one hand, in the outer shell there is relative security and quiet, which in a rare and wonderful way has been going on for three years now. However, from within, instead of a sense of strength and some calm, fears are seething and jumpiness and violence are bubbling over. In the absence of a positive vision and under a leadership that sends a message of contrarianism only, Israel just seems to be waiting in ambush for any threat or criticism of it so it can pounce on its critics and then wait for the next provocation. This is how we prefer to conduct our affairs these days.

This dissonant bubble - perhaps produced by the prime minister's personality and perhaps itself producing his leadership - cannot continue to exist in the long run. One day it will crack and break open: with a bang or a whimper, from within or without. But until then, to paraphrase Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's remarks: If we discount the Arabs, the ultra-Orthodox, the Palestinians, Gush Dan, the demonstrators, the left, the center, Haaretz, The New York Times, Channel 10, Europe, Asia, Africa, U.S. President Barack Obama, the present and the future - our situation has never been better."

The above written by some anti-semite, anti-Zionist or self-hating Jew?    No!  It was written  by Israeli Doron Rosenblum - and published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Up date on Bradley Manning

Anyone who values open government and access (or at least knowledge of) to what illegal or other nefarious activities Governments are up to, will have welcomed the myriad of revelations via Wikileaks over the last months.     Not so fortunate in the fallout of the Wikilaeaks "saga" is the charging of the American military man, Bradley Manning.    Yahoo! News provides an update on what is not a happy "picture" for Manning.

"A US military judge ruled Thursday that WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning can be tried for "aiding the enemy" over allegedly leaking documents to the site -- a charge that carries a potential life sentence.

The decision was another setback for Manning, whose attorneys had argued for the espionage charge to be tossed out unless the government was prepared to prove the US Army private had intended to help Al-Qaeda when he allegedly passed files to WikiLeaks.

The 24-year-old could be jailed for life if convicted of "aiding the enemy," one of 22 criminal charges that judge Colonel Denise Lind let stand at pre-trial hearings this week at Fort Meade in Maryland.

Lind said she would issue instructions on the espionage count to make clear what prosecutors will have to prove against Manning when his trial starts on September 21.

The government will have to show that Manning "knowingly" and without permission passed classified information to the enemy "through indirect means," she said.

Defense lawyers insisted the government's case implies any soldier could be prosecuted for espionage if they inadvertently divulged secrets online or discussed sensitive information with news reporters.

Prosecutors, however, maintained Manning's intent was not at issue and that the government only needed to prove that the intelligence analyst knew Al-Qaeda would see the leaked information on the anti-secrecy WikiLeaks site.

The hearing underlined the legal dilemmas of a digital era as rights groups voiced alarm at the prosecution's tough line over online leaks.

"The implications of the government's argument are breathtaking," said Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"In its zeal to throw the book at Manning, the government has so overreached that its 'success' would turn thousands of loyal soldiers into criminals," Wizner wrote on ACLU's website.

Manning is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of military logs from Iraq and Afghanistan and US diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks between November 2009 and May 2010, when he served as a low-ranking intelligence analyst in Iraq.

The judge earlier on Thursday rejected defense motions asking for some of the other counts to be tossed out or combined, after Manning's lawyers alleged the prosecution had "over-charged" their client.

Given the "volume of records" leaked, the counts were reasonable and prosecutors had not "piled on the charges" as the defense argued, the judge said.

The baby-faced Manning, who appeared in court clad in a blue Army dress uniform, has yet to enter a plea in the case.

Lawyers also sparred Thursday over whether the effect of the massive leak was pertinent to the case.

The charges do "not require the United States to prove actual harm" was done but only that secrets were revealed, said prosecutor Major Ashden Fein, who argued for a motion to exclude any discussion of the leak's impact.

Manning was transferred a year ago from a military prison at Quantico, Virginia -- where he had been imprisoned since July 2010 -- to another in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

During Manning's eight months of solitary confinement at Quantico, he was subjected to "cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment," according to a UN special rapporteur."

Whose decision is it?

What is there to say?  This in a supposed civilised society?    CommonDreams reports on what ought to astound women in particular.

"The National Women's Law Center has launched a Not Up for Debate campaign against the "conscience clauses" in pending legislation that would allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control if they deem it immoral, a slippery slope if ever there was one, especially in small or college towns."

A massive hunger strike

It is typical of most of the media, that it hasn't reported on what are now some 2000 Palestinians on hunger-strike under Israeli detention - many not imprisoned as a result of a conviction, but rather under so-called military detention.     The Guardian newspaper is one exception which reports on the strike.

"The number of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israeli jails has grown to 2,000, with more preparing to join the protest next week, according to human rights groups in the West Bank.

The Israeli prison service is taking punitive measures against hunger strikers, including solitary confinement, the confiscation of personal belongings, transfers and denial of family visits, say Palestinian organisations.

Seven prisoners have been transferred to a prison medical centre, including Tha'er Halahleh, 34, and Bilal Diab, 27, who by Thursday had been on hunger strike for 58 days. Their appeals against imprisonment without charge – known as administrative detention – were dismissed by a military court earlier this week.

The men's condition is rapidly deteriorating, according to Addameer, a prisoners' rights group. It expressed "grave concern that these hunger strikers are not receiving adequate healthcare … and that independent doctors are still being denied visits to them".

Administrative detention is one of the main issues behind the protest. More than 300 Palestinians – a 50% increase since last year – are being held without charge, trial or even being informed of accusations or evidence against them. Their term of imprisonment is determined by an Israeli military judge. Halahleh has been held for 22 months; Diab since last August."

It's always the same. Hear, see and do nothing!

This blog published a piece by Robert Fisk the other day about the tragedy of the children of Fallujah, Iraq, as a consequence of the pounding the city received from the Americans and Brits during the Iraq War.     Go here to see Fisk's reports on Iraq.

In today column in The Independent Fisk writes:

"It's the same old story. Know nothing. See nothing. Say nothing. When children died in a plague of cancers in southern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, the Americans and the Brits didn't want to know about it. Nor, of course, did Saddam Hussein. If children had been poisoned by our depleted uranium munitions, then Saddam would lose face, wouldn't he? Independent readers contributed $250,000 for medicines for the children we met in Iraq who were suffering from cancers and leukaemia after that war.

Margaret Hassan of Care – later murdered by unknown killers months after her kidnapping, following the "liberation" of Iraq – helped us distribute the medicines from our readers across the country. No thanks from Saddam, of course. And all the children died. And not a word from our masters, armaments manufacturers and jolly generals.

It's the same again in Fallujah today. The doctors talk of a massive increase in child birth deformities. The Americans used phosphorous munitions – possibly also depleted uranium (DU) – in the 2004 battles of Fallujah. Everyone in Fallujah knows about these deformities. Reporters have seen these children and reported on them. But it's know nothing, see nothing, say nothing. Neither the Iraqi government nor the US government nor the British will utter a squeak about Fallujah. Even when I found in the Balkans a 12-year-old Serb girl with internal bleeding, constant vomiting and nails that repeatedly fell out of her hands and feet – she had handled the shrapnel of depleted uranium munitions after a Nato air strike near Sarajevo in 1995 – Nato refused to respond to my offer to take a military doctor to see her."

How those rich and famous, and tiresome, other half live

From today's The Guardian newspaper a background piece on how the rich and famous - vacuous, boring and tiresome to boot - live.  Well, they look at it as some sort of "life".

"We lay our scene in January 2010, in the waters surrounding the Tobago Cays, five tiny uninhabited islands in the Grenadines. Here, "a gaggle of billionaires' yachts" are anchored. There is David Geffen on Rising Sun, the world's biggest yacht. (Cowell is "depressed" by its size compared with his, Slipstream.) Then there's that nice Philip Green on Lionheart, while erstwhile M&S boss Stuart Rose is staying with Matthew Freud and Elisabeth Murdoch on their yacht. Next to them is Angle Share, James Murdoch's boat, and nearby is the floating holiday home of Carphone Warehouse boss Charlie Dunstone. Right in the middle is a craft whose precious cargo is Rupert Murdoch.

As is the way with the unimaginatively super-rich, they all adore one another's company, devising evening entertaininment such as a "public school vs showbiz" Trivial Pursuit game. The mornings sound still more delightful.

"Rupert Murdoch stopped by Slipstream on his tender," we learn, "delivering that morning's newspapers, published by News International in Britain, America and Australia. They had been reproduced on a printing press installed on Murdoch's yacht. 'The world's most expensive newspaper boy,' Stuart Rose had quipped, digging for a coin to tip the deliverer."

What to say? Other than: can the Bermuda Triangle please raise its bleeding game."

War crimes. A case of double standards?

On the very day that countries are hailing the conviction of Charles Taylor, the former Liberian leader, for crimes against humanity - the first such case since the Nuremberg Trials - what does Obama do?    Seemingly engaging in his own war crime.   In fact, the actions of the likes of George Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard, and now Obama - think Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan to name but a few - would seem to fit the definition of a war crime. 

"Ten days ago, I wrote about a request made by CIA Director David Petraeus to expand the drone war in Yemen in accordance with the following, as expressed by the first paragraph of The Washington Post article reporting it:

At the time, I wrote that “it’s unclear whether Obama will approve Petraeus’ request for the use of ‘signature strikes’ in Yemen,” though that was true only in the most technical sense. It was virtually impossible to imagine that a request from David Petraeus, of all people, to Barack Obama, of all people, for authority to target even more people in Yemen for death, now without even knowing who they are, would be anything but quickly and eagerly approved. And that is exactly what has now happened, as the Post‘s Greg Miller reports today:

The United States has begun launching drone strikes against suspected al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen under new authority approved by President Obama that allows the CIA and the military to fire even when the identity of those who could be killed is not known, U.S. officials said. . . .

The decision to give the CIA and the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) greater leeway is almost certain to escalate a drone campaign that has accelerated significantly this year, with at least nine strikes in under four months. The number is about equal to the sum of airstrikes all last year. . . .

Congressional officials have expressed concern that using signature strikes would raise the likelihood of killing militants who are not involved in plots against the United States, angering Yemeni tribes and potentially creating a new crop of al-Qaeda recruits. . .

Gregory Johnsen, a Yemen expert at Princeton University, has questioned . . . the wisdom of the expanded drone operations. . . . ”I would argue that U.S. missile strike[s] are actually one of the major — not the only, but a major — factor in AQAP’s growing strength.”

So here’s yet another war that Obama is escalating, now ordering people’s death with greater degrees of recklessness, now without even bothering to know who is being targeted. Although Miller doesn’t bother to mention the likelihood of more deaths of innocent Yemenis, this is the same policy that has caused large numbers of civilian deaths in Pakistan (just read this heart-wrenching and amazing account of a 16-year-old Pakistani boy, Tariq Aziz, oh-so-coincidentally killed by an American drone, along with his 12-year-old cousin, just days after he attended a meeting to protest civilian deaths by drones). Anonymous officials claim that greater caution will be exercised in Yemen than in Pakistan, a claim Miller uncritically prints, but these types of nameless strikes are certain to kill far more civilians. Indeed, the oh-so-coincidental killing of Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son in Yemen a mere two weeks after his father was killed proves how easily civilians were already being killed. The problem will only worsen now. As Johnsen pointed out, “in Yemen, just because it has a beard, carries a gun, and talks about Islamic law doesn’t mean its al-Qaeda,” but no matter: that’s who will now be extinguished by Obama’s drone campaign."

Rupe's world

Credited to The Independent

The scars, and tragedy, of the US military's attack on Fallujah

Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent, has just started a series of articles on Iraq, including a piece on the attack by Americans on Fallujah during the Iraq war.     All too sadly the piece will most likely not even be read in America.

"After at first denying the use of phosphorous shells during the second battle of Fallujah, US forces later admitted that they had fired the munitions against buildings in the city. Independent reports have spoken of a birth-defect rate in Fallujah far higher than other areas of Iraq, let alone other Arab countries. No one, of course, can produce cast-iron evidence that American munitions have caused the tragedy of Fallujah's children."

***

"Studies since the 2004 Fallujah battles have recorded profound increases in infant mortality and cancer in Fallujah; the latest report, whose authors include a doctor at Fallujah General Hospital, says that congenital malformations account for 15 per cent of all births in Fallujah." 

***

"Fallujah: A history

The first battle of Fallujah, in April 2004, was a month-long siege, during which US forces failed to take the city, said to be an insurgent stronghold. The second battle, in November, flattened the city. Controversy raged over claims US troops had deployed white phosphorus shells. A 2010 study said increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in Fallujah exceeded those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

Read the full piece here. 

Coincidentally, truthdig also has a piece (together with a video) on the same topic:

"The U.S. government used depleted uranium, a known carcinogen and cause of birth defects, during strikes on Fallujah during the 2003 Iraq War, and generations of Iraqis and the families of American servicemen are living with the devastating consequences.

“Depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.7 billion years—that means thousands upon thousands of Iraqi children will suffer for tens of thousands of years to come,” said Dr. Ahmad Hardan, a special scientific adviser to the World Health Organization, the United Nations and the Iraqi Ministry of Health, in a 2006 article in The American Chronicle. “This is what I call terrorism.”

Hardan documented the effects of depleted uranium in Iraq between 1991 and 2002.

Below, Chris Busby, a British scientist known for his research on the human health effects of radiation, introduces a short film by Iraqi investigative journalist Feurat Alani on the longstanding impact on the Iraqi population of the U.S. military’s use of depleted uranium and the incendiary chemical white phosphorous. That film, “Fallujah: A Lost Generation,” immediately follows."  


Go here to view the video.

 

One more headache for the European Union

As if the EU hasn't enough problems on its plate - already in existence and looming - now member Hungary poses another dimension to a raft of issues.     Frank Bruni reports in this piece "Round Up the Usual Scapegoats" in The New York Times:

"Pay attention to Hungary. It may not have any great economic heft, and it’s home to only about 10 million people with a tropism toward beer and a talent for brooding. But it could turn out to be a test case of the E.U.’s imperiled sway in these days of debt and austerity. Brussels and Budapest have clashed already over the Hungarian government’s attempts at tighter control of the news media, the judiciary and the central bank.

Hungary could also be a window into just how potently economic anxiety fans the flames of bigotry. E.U. membership hasn’t brought Hungarians the broad prosperity they had hoped for; the country has had severe budgetary woes of late. And the far-right party I mentioned, Jobbik, has converted these disappointments into questions about the country’s orientation to the West and, for good measure, about its supposed coddling of Jews, gays and Roma: Hungary’s trusty trinity of scapegoats.

This month Jobbik introduced a bill that refers to homosexuality as a perversion and bans its promotion in language so vague, opponents say, that two men or two women holding hands in public could theoretically be imprisoned."

One person constitutes a bureau?

News organisations often refer to their overseas bureau here or there.    But one person doesn't constitute a bureau, right?    The news gatherers would have us believe otherwise.   Of course, it's a nonsense and highlights why the reporting from places outside the home country office is so poor, if at all.

"The Washington Post has 16 foreign “bureaus,” and 12 of them consist of just a single reporter, according to the newspaper’s website. The four remaining bureaus all consist of two journalists. Is the Post using the word bureau a bit loosely? One Post reporter, Sudarsan Raghavan in Nairobi, is listed as the paper’s “bureau chief in Africa.” Raghavan is the chief of a bureau of one in Kenya. For the continent of Africa.

A 2011 report in the American Journalism Review found that the number of full time foreign correspondents employed by US newspapers declined steeply since 2003. But news outfits that have slashed budgets for foreign reporting are nonetheless eager to present themselves as global news organizations. This is why NBC will at times feature a reporter in its London bureau discussing events in Athens or even Iraq. The correspondent might as well be in Hoboken. “Many news outlets that have no foreign staff are eager to pretend that they do,” former International Herald Tribune editor Mort Rosenblum wrote in Little Bunch of Madmen, a book about foreign reporting. News organizations want audiences to believe they have the resources to scour the globe, even when it isn’t true.

The word bureau should be retired when used to describe a single employee. I am not the Columbia Journalism Review’s bureau chief in Orono, Maine. I’m a columnist for CJR and I happen to live in New England. The use of the word bureau to describe a single correspondent in Islamabad or Buenos Aires is meant to trick audiences into believing the news organization funds a sprawling newsroom in that location. Years ago, many news organizations did have big newsrooms in foreign countries. Today, though, budgets have been cut and priorities have shifted. The Los Angeles Times had 24 foreign correspondents in 2003, according to the AJR report, a roster which fell to 13 by 2011.

Today, The Los Angeles Times has ten foreign “bureaus,” and eight of them consist of just one person. The Times’s website does not, however, list any reporters manning single-person bureaus as “chiefs.” In December, Al Jazeera English announced the founding of a Chicago bureau, staffed with one journalist (former ABC reporter John Hendren). Of course, the founding and maintaining of foreign news facilities is something we should celebrate, but news organizations should never use flashy language to exaggerate their global reach. Al Jazeera hired a Chicago correspondent in order to expand its 2012 US presidential election coverage, and this is a good thing, but the organization has not built a branch campus in the Windy City.

The New York Times’s bio of Rachel Donadio lists her as the paper’s chief of a one-woman bureau in Rome. I’m aware that the difference between being called a “bureau chief” rather than “correspondent” at some news organizations is similar to the difference between assistant and associate professors at universities: the coronation often nets greater job security and a bump in salary (and in some cases demands greater responsibilities). Still, journalists are supposed to use clear language. Period. A bureau in one’s bedroom is a chest of multiple drawers, and a furniture peddler who refers to a banker’s box as a bureau is being dishonest.

Some news organizations are more straightforward about their foreign operations: GlobalPost, for example. Its Cairo-based reporter, Erin Cunningham, is listed as “Senior Correspondent for the Middle East and North Africa,” which concedes that she has massive ground to cover, but at least doesn’t falsely imply she’s the chief of a bustling GlobalPost office in Egypt. Nichole Sobecki is listed as “covering Turkey for GlobalPost,” not as the chief of a bureau in Istanbul. The Christian Science Monitor similarly lists its foreign reporters as, simply, staff reporters in a foreign locale.

Contrary to contemporary speculation, foreign reporting is by no means dead. The Associated Press still has an army of reporters throughout the world, and NPR, Reuters, Bloomberg, and The Wall Street Journal all have vibrant, and in some cases expanding, operations overseas. Al Jazeera has a global editorial staff in the thousands. Nonetheless, many US newspapers and television networks have downsized their global operations, and they shouldn’t use embellishments to suggest otherwise."

Zionism at the crossroads

MPS is a fan of Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner and op-ed writer for The New York Times.

His short but very direct and blunt piece "The Crisis of Zionism" in the Times says it all.....

"Something I’ve been meaning to do — and still don’t have the time to do properly — is say something about Peter Beinart’s brave book The Crisis of Zionism.

The truth is that like many liberal American Jews — and most American Jews are still liberal — I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going. It seems obvious from here that the narrow-minded policies of the current government are basically a gradual, long-run form of national suicide — and that’s bad for Jews everywhere, not to mention the world. But I have other battles to fight, and to say anything to that effect is to bring yourself under intense attack from organized groups that try to make any criticism of Israeli policies tantamount to anti-Semitism.

But it’s only right to say something on behalf of Beinart, who has predictably run into that buzzsaw. As I said, a brave man, and he deserves better."

Two different worlds

There have always been haves and have-nots.   It's a sad fact of life.   However, what we are witnessing in so-called Western democracies is an ever growing divide between the rich and the poor.    The middle class is an ever-diminishing group in society.    This piece "The Middle Class Hasn't Disappeared. It's Just Sliding Toward the Bottom" from CommonDreams in the bluntest and most direct terms paints the picture of how things are in America.

"It used to be that the average American resided halfway between two extremes:

Steven Schwarzman's home was being partially replicated in a Park Avenue hall for his gala $5 million 60th birthday party. The guest of honor's full-length portrait greeted the invitees as they proceeded past rows of orchids and palm trees to the dining area, where they feasted on lobster, filet mignon, baked Alaska, and the finest of wines. Martin Short provided the laughs, and the music came compliments of Marvin Hamlisch, Patti LaBelle, and Rod Stewart.

Eloise Pittman's home had been purchased in the 1950s by her mother, who washed dishes to pay off the mortgage. In 1985 the younger Ms. Pittman, a schoolteacher, went to Chase Bank and took out a loan on the house. It was a predatory loan with balloon payments, and Ms. Pittman was forced to borrow more and more money to keep from defaulting. When she died in November 2011, she was $400,000 in debt. A week after her death her family received an eviction notice.

There's no 'average' anymore, in the sense of a normal curve with most of the people and most of the money in the middle.

Today, 400 individuals have as much wealth as an entire HALF of America.

Yet it's still argued by some conservatives that in real life the two extremes are split by a substantial group of average Americans in the middle. The income of the middle quintile, we are told, grew by over 35% percent between 1979 and 2007. But, as Jared Bernstein points out, 35% over 28 years is 1.1% per year, over a period when productivity grew at twice that rate. Census data shows that the inflation-adjusted salary of a full-time male worker in 2010 was almost exactly the same as in 1979.

In real life just 2 percent of Americans own HALF of all wealth outside the home. The top quintile owns 93% of all wealth outside the home. The poor half of America owns nothing outside of their homes, because most of them owe more than they own. And their homes have lost much of their value.

Conservatives counter that the 1% hasn't increased its share of wealth for many years, and that the "democratization of stock ownership" is beginning to spread the wealth around.

While it's true that the share of wealth held by the 1% has remained at the same high level since the 1980s, the rest of the richest 5% increased their share by almost 20%. The percentages for the poorest 80% of the population DECREASED by almost 20%.

In other words, the share of wealth owned by the top 1% leveled off because the "democratization of stock ownership" spread the wealth among just 5% of the population, those earning an average of $500,000 per year. A few people -- 5 out of 100 -- got very rich, but everyone else lost ground.

How can there be a "middle class" with such a lopsided wealth distribution? Is the middle class part of the 65 million households who have virtually NONE of the non-home wealth? Is it part of the 117 million households who have received NONE of the productivity gains over 30 years?

The middle class is somewhere between two extremes, sliding toward the bottom:

• In California Paul Hannum eagerly awaited the birth of his daughter. He got sick, but he didn't have health insurance. His brother Curtis said, "He had a little girl on the way. He didn't want the added burden of an ER visit to hang on their finances. He thought 'I'll just wait,' and he got worse and worse." But he died from a burst appendix without ever holding his baby in his arms. Access to even a single health care worker might have saved his life.

• In 2007 John Paulson had an idea: bet against the mortgage market. He went to Goldman Sachs to help design a financial instrument that would group bad loans in an attractive-looking package. Then he - and Goldman - could take out an insurance policy against their own financial instrument. It worked perfectly. Paulson made $4 billion, enough to pay the salaries of 100,000 health care workers."

What worldwide military spending amounted to in 2011

Take a deep breath as you read this piece on what the world's nations spent on the military in 2011 - and reflect on how that money could have been directed to worthwhile causes.....like, for instance, finding a cure for cancer, Alzheimers, etc. etc.

"On April 17, 2012, as millions of Americans were filing their income tax returns, the highly-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest study of world military spending. In case Americans were wondering where most of their tax money — and the tax money of other nations — went in the previous year, the answer from SIPRI was clear: to war and preparations for war.

World military spending reached a record $1,738 billion in 2011 — an increase of $138 billion over the previous year.  The United States accounted for 41 percent of that, or $711 billion.

Some news reports have emphasized that, from the standpoint of reducing reliance on armed might, this actually represents progress.  After all, the increase in “real” global military spending — that is, expenditures after corrections for inflation and exchange rates — was only 0.3 percent. And this contrasts with substantially larger increases in the preceding thirteen years.

But why are military expenditures continuing to increase — indeed, why aren’t they substantially decreasing — given the governmental austerity measures of recent years?
Amid the economic crisis that began in late 2008 (and which continues to the present day), most governments have been cutting back their spending dramatically on education, health care, housing, parks, and other vital social services. However, there have not been corresponding cuts in their military budgets."

A fig-leaf of an "agreement"

The news, yesterday, that the US and Afghanistan have concluded an agreement in relation what is to happen post 2014 after the Americans have left the war-torn country, in reality amounts to little.     What it all means will be swept from scrutiny and any analysis and in the end the agreement, as Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard suggests, is no more than a fig-leaf.

"Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but the new "strategic partnership" agreement between the United States and Afghanistan strikes me as little more than a fig leaf designed to make a U.S. withdrawal (which I support) look like a mutually agreed-upon "victory." It is already being spun as a signal to the Taliban, Iran, and Pakistan that the United States remains committed, and the agreement will undoubtedly be used as "evidence" that the 2009 surge is a success and that's now ok for the US to bring its forces home.

I have no problem with cosmetic gestures that facilitate doing the right thing, but let's be clear about the limited significance of the agreement itself. Although the final text of the agreement has not been made public (which itself makes one wonder both what it says and what it doesn't say), the New York Times account says that there is no specific agreement on the magnitude of future U.S. aid. Indeed, it describes the agreement as "more symbolic than substantive." We're told that Washington has pledged to support Afghanistan for another ten years, but the actual aid amounts are unspecified and will have to be voted each year by Congress. Long-term U.S. support may also be conditional on reduced corruption and Afghan reforms, but given their track record to date, it is hard to believe that the Afghans will make much progress on that front.

Ten years is a pretty long time, and a lot will happen -- including three U.S. presidential elections -- between now and 2022. The Obama and Karzai governments can make whatever promises they want to each other, but those agreements will have to be carried out by their successors and both sides can always renege by claiming that "conditions have changed." I'm not saying that the agreement is worthless, but in the end the two states will abide by its terms only if it is in their respective interest to do so. Given the volatile nature of politics throughout Central Asia, it would be folly to assume that a deal hatched now will remain in force for ten years."

More illegal "settlements" by the Israelis

There is no stopping the Israelis in taking over Palestinian land in the West Bank - contrary to international law.   The latest episode:

"Israel has decided to make legal under Israeli law three settlement outposts in the West Bank, the prime minister's office has said in a statement.

It said that a ministerial committee had decided to "formalise the status" of Bruchin and Rechelim, in the north, and Sansana, near Hebron in the south.

The Palestinian Authority strongly condemned the decision.

"Every single settlement built on Palestinian land is illegal", Chief Negotiator, Saeb Erekat, told the BBC.

The Israeli government had told the Supreme Court that it would regulate the status of the three outposts, which have a total of about 830 residents."

Look at the photograph and wonder whether this is a so-called "settlement" - one of the 3 now made "legal" by the Israelis.  It's a fully established town - not some outpost of tents and caravans, as the Israelis often like to portray.

"The Israeli settlement watchdog, Peace Now, has also criticised the Israeli government's legalisation of the outposts.

"This is the first time since 1990 that the Israeli government has decided to establish new settlements," said Hagit Ofran from the group.

"The government tries to deceive the Israeli public, bypassing the need to officially declare these three new settlements. However these tricks do not cover up their real policy to establish new settlements and not move towards peace and a two-state solution," she added."