Crow on a Wire

Study: Fallujah’s health fallout ‘worse’ than Hiroshima, Nagasaki

2010-07-27T14:59:00.000-07:00

You, the American people, are supporting this kind of result of spending, fighting an illegal occupation and war against Iraq. Why are we doing this in America's name?

By Stephen C. Webster
Saturday, July 24th, 2010 -- 2:27 pm

'Mutagenic and carcinogenic agents' blamed for soaring infant mortality, cancers

In Fallujah, a city just 50 miles from Baghdad, life has never been the same since April 2004, when U.S. Marines declared the entire area a free-fire zone and proceeded to do what Marines do best. Packing the most destructive weaponry in the world, American soldiers laid siege to the city, deploying depleted uranium munitions, white phosphorus and tons of conventional ballistics.

Operation Vigilant Resolve went on for a full month. Though U.S. forces allowed an estimated 70,000 women, children and elderly leave the city, to this day the campaign to recapture Fallujah is beset with allegations of war crimes.

In the wake of America's "shock and awe" bombing campaign to take Baghdad, radiation detectors as far away as the United Kingdom noticed a fourfold spike in radioactivity in the atmosphere. At the time, the Department of Defense bragged that the substance, a nuclear byproduct with a fraction of the radioactivity as standard uranium, is commonly ingested by Americans, in food, drinking water and the air, allegedly with no ill effects. Officials went on to say its use would cause "no impact on the health of people and the environment."

READ MORE!
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0724/study-health-effects-felt-fallujah-widespread-nuking-hiroshima-nagasaki/

The Ultimate Injustice - Lynn Stewart's sentencing! Outrageous!

2010-07-16T16:16:00.000-07:00

Need any more evidence that our Justice system is completely devoid of anything resembling fairness and justice? I mean, this woman, Lynn Stewart, if you've followed her story, is incredible. She was defending Muslims in court in 2002 and with Bush's DOJ went after her to set an example. And seems like there is no change in Obama DOJ. They went after her to increase her sentence - a 70 year old woman - from 24 months to 10 years. That's enough of an outrage. She shouldn't have been prosecuted in the first place! Unreal, this life in AMERIKA.

OpEdNews

July 15, 2010
The Veil is Lifted, The Gloves Are Off
By Elaine Brower

There is no dignity in this system. There is no justice in this system. There never was, and never will be. There is only hatred, fear, and an elite system of injustice. The judge is only a puppet of the state and did what he was told to do. The prosecutor is a prostitute and regurgitates enough bullshit to make people afraid enough to go home and lock their doors so they too won't wind up like Lynn Stewart. When she was wrongfully sentenced to 10 years behind bars, there should have been a riot in the courtroom. Instead, everyone left.

Folks, it has always been like this. I didn't live through the McCarthy era, and was happy I didn't. I am a child of the 60's and the radicalness of the 70's. I thought, in my naiveté, that this country stood for something good, and protected freedom of speech, the rights of people of color to live and work without the threat of police oppression, and most of all, it was a nation that was accepting and tolerant of those who came here from all over the world to experience the "American dream."

What a bunch of crap. It has always been a bad system. Sometimes there would be breakthroughs in civil rights, or women's rights, but those where aberrations. Not the norm. The system would again rise up to take it all away, because it wasn't meant to be fair and just for all people, only those who are the elite in this society. It always brings me back to how this country was founded, on the blood of those who already lived here.

And so it goes, we see the true face of American justice. Take a good look while the veil is lifted, because it will be dropped again, and you will be fooled into thinking if only we had more hope.

READ MORE

OpEdNews

July 16, 2010
Darkness in America: Lynne Stewart's Resentencing
By Stephen Lendman

Darkness in America: Lynne Stewart's Resentencing - by Stephen Lendman

Describing Lynne, one of this writer's previous articles said the following:

She worked selfishly, tirelessly, and heroically for 30 years as a human rights champion, defending America's poor, underprivileged, and unwanted - people never afforded due process and judicial fairness without an advocate like her. She knew the risks, yet took them courageously until bogusly indicted on April 9, 2002 for:

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Telling it like it is! If this was your child and he had to live like he does, what would you think?

2010-07-16T16:06:00.000-07:00

The bravest, most eloquent 9 year-old kid in the world (English subtitles)

CONFIRMED - LAB TESTED Gulf Coast Water Samples are 'VERY TOXIC' - Sea Spray is POISONOUS

2010-07-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

Think that it's safe to swim or even be in the area of "The Spill?" Guess again. This is just the beginning, I'm afraid.

Video of Native American Prophecy - Two Parts

2010-07-16T16:04:00.000-07:00

Indigenous Native American Prophecy (Elders Speak)

Want a Great Link to Music Videos? Here is one!

2010-07-16T16:01:00.001-07:00

EcoVersity’s You Tube Music Channel

http://www.youtube.com/user/ecoversity#grid/user/BA5D42B69971E47C

Rep. Nadler: Investigate torture or face road to ‘tyranny’

2010-07-16T16:00:00.000-07:00

US is facing tyranny...in its own backyard. The enemy is within. It's not Al Queda or some other fake terrorism threat. It's right here. Anti-War movement needs something to get it on its way. Thanks for Congressman Nadler, at least he speaks the truth on this issue.

By Sahil Kapur
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 -- 12:51 pm

WASHINGTON – A New York Democrat argued that failing to prosecute former Bush administration officials complicit in the use of torture would create a dangerous precedent and place America on a path to "tyranny.

In an interview with Raw Story, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) invoked a "supremacy of laws" when critiquing President Barack Obama’s decision to "look forward and not backwards" on his predecessor’s abuses of power.

"Those who misuse government power to break the law and subject people to improper pressure or torture ought to be prosecuted," said Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. "That’s why we have laws."

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Flotilla journalists to sue Israel

2010-07-16T15:55:00.000-07:00

Thank you, European courts for even accepting this case! Israel seems to live in a world by itself. There seems to be one set of rules for Israel and another for the rest of us. We're all Palestinians NOW!

More than 30 journalists were on board the flotilla when it was intercepted by Israel [AFP]

A group of journalists has announced that it plans to sue Israel over its deadly raid on a flotilla of aid ships bound for the Gaza Strip in May.

Lawyers have already begun preparing lawsuits in several European countries, according to several of the journalists, who met in Istanbul on Wednesday. The group accused Israel of violating international law.

One of the nine people killed on board the Mavi Marmara, the main ship, was Cevdet Kulclar, a Turkish journalist.

Reporters who were on board the ships say the Israeli government never returned their equipment or passports, and that Israeli soldiers later used their credit cards.

An Italian journalist, Manolo Luppichini, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in June that his credit card was used to make NIS250 ($65) worth of purchases in Israel.
In a statement released after their meeting, the journalists said they are demanding compensation for their losses, the return of their equipment, and an international inquiry into Israel's treatment of the reporters on board the flotilla.

The group of more than 30 journalists includes reporters from Turkey, Spain, Germany, Lebanon, Egypt, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Several of the journalist on board the ship were from Al Jazeera.

Charging Wikileaks Source: The Nail in the Coffin of Whistblowers

2010-07-09T17:11:00.000-07:00

Given that the Pentagon is in panic mode over the soon-to-be-released video by Wikileaks on a US massacre in Afghanistan, this is no surprise. Whistleblowers who know truth, beware! One can hope there are more Daniel Ellsberg-types out there, willing to sacrifice in these times for the good of the country. Support the website noted below, please!

FROM OPED NEWS

FULL ARTICLE HERE

July 7, 2010

Charging Wikileaks Source: The Nail in the Coffin of Whistblowers

By Jesselyn Radack

Even the Washington Post gets it. In its article on the criminal charges brought against Army intelligence analyst Pfc. Bradley Manning, the sub-headline to the article reads:

U.S. TAKING TOUGH LINE ON LEAKS

The opening paragraph states that the military charging Bradley Manning

is likely to further deter would-be whistleblowers.

I don't care if it's Bush or Obama at the helm. The biggest crimes of our generation--torture, warrantless wiretapping, and extraordinary rendition--would not have come to light but for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. For the hand-wringing "but we can't willy-nilly reveal classified information" crowd, do you think Abu Ghraib wasn't classified?

We are told (though there has been not a shred of evidence other than the government saying this, and even the charges do not reflect this number) that Manning gave some 250,000 classified State Department cables to Wikileaks.org. All we really KNOW is that the website published a horrific video of an American helicopter massacring unarmed Iraqi civilians, including children, and the shooters cheering on each other as if it were a video game.

And the former senior National Security Agency (NSA) official Thomas Drake? The party line is that he "leaked" classified material to a newspaper. If you read the indictment, he has really been indicted under the Espionage Act, a 93-year-old law meant to catch spies, for allegedly "retaining" classified information. What the government is really mad about is that an article appeared in the Baltimore Sun describing how and why the NSA opted for an billion-dollar, failed invasive surveillance program called "Trailblazer" over one that could more adequately collect intelligence information without violating people's privacy.

Author's Website

Author's Bio: My name is Jesselyn Radack and I am the former Justice Department ethics attorney and whistleblower in the case of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh. In today's issue of The National Law Journal (Feb. 19, 2007), I have an Op-Ed entitled "Targeting Lawyers" on what it really looks like when the government tries to control attorneys acting on behalf of terrorism suspects and, if it cannot control them, punish them. I speak from personal experience in being blacklisted by this Administration.
Back

Pentagon and the Truth - Still Waiting

2010-07-08T17:49:00.000-07:00

The Wikileaks military leaker is about to be railroaded.... and the Pentagon's new rules on media relations is now in effect, as if there ever was openness, transparency and/or truth telling. The word is sssshush. Hush up. This is "national security."

Are you kidding me? A man who exposes war crimes, murder and mayhem is gone after for revealing the truth? He certainly caused no danger to the American troops and may even end up saving a few of their arms and limbs if these stories would be shown to the American public. By exposing the ferocity and callousness of the state of American "warrior" class mentality, then change might happen. People would revolt against this occupation and war. However, reality is a mish-mash of lies, deceit and madness. Orwell, move over to make way for some even more serious applications of your state of 1984 mindset. Expose truth and you're under attack, buddy. Daniel Elssberg comes to mind. Mi Li Massacre, Pat Tillman.

Murderous terrorism and occupation-ism is the norm today with further proof that "we're not kidding" on this democratic-facade, fascist thing that passes for public discourse these days...the "we're controlling the message here" attitude and commitment by Wall Street, K-Street and Awash in Arms crowd. The message is clear to journalists or civilians or soldiers who might question the powers that be... "you leak what we are doing and you're going to jail."

What kind of exploitative, cruel, inhumane "democracy" it has sold to its people, and still selling to the uneducated. Don't hold your breath on finding out the truth from America's military structure. It's putting our way of life and well-being at extreme risk. The military is no more under order from the President than my dog is off leash. Stop the fighting. Stop the "war." and stop killing innocent people in our name!

(Wire Reports)

The Pentagon on Tuesday defended stricter rules on media relations for the US military, saying the department needed to better manage its contacts with reporters. The new rules, laid out by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a July 2 memo, drew criticism from the media rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and concern from journalists at a Pentagon briefing. Press Secretary Geoff Morrell acknowledged that the Pentagon public affairs office would have the authority to vet and veto some interviews as necessary, but insisted that the rules would not stifle media coverage. "Hopefully, if we do this right, you will not notice the impact of this memo," Morrell told reporters. The secretary's guidelines, first reported in the New York Times, came only days after the commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, was forced to step down over a Rolling Stone magazine profile, in which he and his aides made disparaging remarks about administration officials.

Thorold, Ontario Amputee Has His Artificial Leg Ripped Off By Police And Is Slammed In Makeshift Cell During G20 Summit – At Least One Ontario MPP Calls The Whole Episode “Shocking”

2010-07-08T01:13:00.000-07:00

Happy Independence Day - Wherever these big multinational meetings meet, there are agent provocateurs abound, creating a need to keep people in line. It's an old trick that always happens at these big events. Want more proof that we are run by corporations? This is it.

Here is the way other countries treat the infidels. These troops were hyped up on violence, driven by Jolt and the militarization of local police forces. Who were they? Were they even Canadian? It's not the UN, tea-baggers and patriots (sic). It's your neighbor down the street on that force. It's the cop with new military gear. It's your father. It's your brother. He is you. That man on the ground is also you. With whom do you identify?

July 5, 2010

By Doug Draper

How could he be after the way he was treated a few days earlier in Toronto by figures of authority most of us were brought up to respect, our publicly paid-for police forces who are supposed to be there to serve and protect peaceful, law-abiding citizens like him.

The 57-year-old Thorold, Ontario resident – an employee with Revenue Canada and a part-time farmer who lost a leg above his knee following a farming accident 17 years ago – was sitting on the grass at Queen’s Park with his daughter Sarah and two other young people this June 26, during the G20 summit, where he assumed it would be safe.

As it turned out, it was a bad assumption because in came a line of armoured police, into an area the city had promised would be safe for peaceful demonstrations during the summit. They closed right in on John and his daughter and the two others and ordered them to move. Pruyn tried getting up and he fell, and it was all too slow for the police. As Sarah began pleading with them to give her father a little time and space to get up because he is an amputee, they began kicking and hitting him.

One of the police officers used his knee to press Pruyn’s head down so hard on the ground, said Pruyn in an interview this July 4 with Niagara At Large, that his head was still hurting a week later. Accusing him of resisting arrest, they pulled his walking sticks away from him, tied his hands behind his back and ripped off his prosthetic leg.

Then they told him to get up and hop, and when he said he couldn’t, they dragged him across the pavement, tearing skin off his elbows , with his hands still tied behind his back. His glasses were knocked off as they continued to accuse him of resisting arrest and of being a “spitter,” something he said he did not do.

They took him to a warehouse and locked him in a steel-mesh cage where his nightmare continued for another 27 hours.

READ MORE

In the Religion of 100% Americanism, Ignorance is Strength

2010-07-08T01:02:00.000-07:00

(Fourth of July) 2010 - Ignorance lying like a serpent in the belly of the American mind-set, rears its ugly head daily. This observation below, shows that this "ignorance" is Strength in the hands of those who sell it, buy it and consume it.

If you can create ignorance, you gain power, you can manipulate. This is the essence of the situation we face as American citizens and world citizens. Our fight is against ignorance and injustice. This Fourth and most in recent memories have been taken over by the 100% Americanism show, with military glorification at the top.

It's now patriotic to back torture, detain anyone indefinitely, spy on them, read your email, all in the name of the "war on terror" movie being shown on the nightly news. Patriotism isn't what it used to be. In fact, from the beginning, this grand experiment of American independence has been gradually and sometimes violently turned into blue fascism, the kind of "corporacracy of desire", consumption, growth and its resulting pollution, crime and rampant inequities amongst its people.

The Justice Department is in shambles, unable to prosecute war criminals in the military, thieves dressed as banks, collusion and corruption at the highest levels. We are a nation in turmoil.

The enemy is not out there, it is in the house. We all expected in the 60s that America was being destroyed from within. A culture war on peace and common sense. No one would listen. We are paying for it now. A new American Revolution is needed. Let's get to work. Ignorance is our only enemy.

By Kevin Carson

July 05, 2010 "C4SS" -- Bill Kristol, at the Weekly Standard, questions whether a military strike on Iran’s alleged nuclear development program would be as dangerous as everyone seems to think. A limited, target strike against selected military and terrorist-training targets, he argues, would most likely result in a similarly limited Iranian response. The reason: the rational self-interest of Iran’s leadership.

“It’s unclear… that Iran would want to risk broadening the conflict and creating the prospect of regime decapitation. Iran’s rulers have shown that their preeminent concern is maintaining their grip on power. If U.S. military action is narrowly targeted, and declared to be such, why would Iran’s leaders… want to escalate the conflict, as even one missile attack on a U.S. facility or ally or a blockade of the Strait would obviously do?” In other words, the Iranian leadership’s likely response is a rational assessment of the results of their own past actions: “This attack is punishment for our reckless policies.

Clearly, we must adjust our course of action to avoid such punishment in the future.” Now consider the reaction among most of the Republican base when Ron Paul, in 2008 GOP primary debates, made a similar assessment of 9-11 as blowback from American adventurism overseas. The howls of outrage were swift, loud, and predictable: “Defeatism!” “Moral equivalence!” “Blame America first!” Imagine the United States being subjected to a limited Chinese strike against its military forces, aimed at limiting the American government’s ability to intervene overseas and deterring its leadership from adventurism.

What seems more likely to you? That the American people would pressure the U.S. government to refrain from further adventures overseas in order to avoid more such attacks, and that the U.S. leadership — obsessed, after all, with holding onto power — would avoid any response that might result in a decapitating second strike? Or that the American people would rally around the flag and the “Commander-in-Chief,” and that the U.S. government would wage total war to punish this totally unjustified foreign aggression?

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Death by Remote: But Is It Legal?

2010-07-08T00:37:00.000-07:00

This is where America has fallen the farthest. What was deemed illegal in '76 when the Church hearings brought forth the information of CIA wrongdoings, is now, well, part of the "war on terrorism" which unfortunately, President Obama is unable to counter. When Bush got the power to do these things, given by a willing Democratic and Republican en masse caving in, we all assumed that if we elected Barrack, that he would make it "all right." Unfortunately, we have been brainwashed that assassination and torture is "okay." President Obama has misled millions of liberal, progressives, who thought he was the promised man. A principled man and Congress would not okay torture, spying and covert operations that continue to diminish our freedom here at home. We are war criminals. Clear and simple. Nuremberg would not be kind to America.

By William Fisher

June 05, 2010 "IPS" -- NEW YORK - As the Barack Obama administration continues to roll out justifications for its policy of targeting U.S. citizens and others thought to be attacking U.S. troops, legal and national security experts are pondering a central question: What if there's a mistake and the wrong person gets killed?

There are no do-overs. It is a death sentence. That, in fact, has already happened. A Reuters cameraman was killed by a U.S. drone strike when the operator mistook his camera's long-range lens for a rocket-propelled grenade. Nevertheless, a top Obama counter-terrorism official is defending the government's right to target U.S. citizens perceived as terror threats for capture or killing, citing the example of the renegade al Qaeda-linked cleric Anwar al- Awlaki.

Al-Awlaki, 39, was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and is an Islamic lecturer who is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Yemen. He is a spiritual leader and former imam who has purportedly inspired Islamic terrorists. His sermons are said to have been attended by three of the 9/11 hijackers.

Michael Leiter, director of the National Counter-terrorism Center, does not say whether al-Awlaki is on a U.S. target list, but a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official has previously confirmed that the cleric is among terror targets sought to be captured or killed.

What does the law say about targeting and killing people?

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Justice Project Urges 'No' Vote On Kagan

2010-07-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

This is just another example of why Kagen is not the right choice. She should be rejected. Not just because of her documented support of the Bush Justice Department in the Siegelman case, but also, SHE IS A CORPORATIST and will rule, right along with the Scalia-Roberts gang for corporations and against the INDIVIDUAL. This is proof that having a Democrat in the Oval Orifice is not a guarantee of people-oriented governance. Dump Kagen - she's a shill for the Corporations, not you and me! How long can we hold our noses and vote for Democrats who won't bring up Kagen and Siegelman case in the hearings?

June 30, 2010

By Andrew Kreig

The Senate should reject Elena Kagan's Supreme Court nomination because she seeks to expand executive branch authority at the expense of the public's historic civil rights. Also, she is part of an Obama Department of Justice leadership team that has failed to redress unconstitutional lawbreaking by overzealous prosecutors and greedy judges.

The Justice Integrity Project (JIP), a bipartisan civil rights group I lead, announced this week our opposition to Kagan, based on our research on prosecutors and judges.

The implications of the current debate extend far beyond the politics of whether she'll be confirmed.This nominee is part of an expanding and almost unprecedented threat to our core heritage of due process, checks-and-balances and other constitutional protections.

Although this nominee is by all accounts a pleasant and brilliant person, her track record on key civil rights issues does not deserve public trust or confirmation. This is especially so given her direct involvement as DOJ solicitor general in several notorious cases advocating for more executive branch power without effective oversight.

On June 28, for example, the Court met to decide whether to concur with Kagan's request in November to deny a hearing for former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman and former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy.

Fortunately, she and the Justice Department lost.

The Court vacatedconvictions in the nation's most notorious political prosecution in memory. Also, it remanded the case to a federal appeals court for reconsideration in light of the Court's decision the previous week that the "honest services" law used by DOJ in official corruption investigations can be unconstitutionally vague.

OpEd News readers by now are well aware that Siegelman and Scrushy were out-and-out framed, not simply mistreated. Does Kagan know? Does she care?

When you see a summary of the investigative reporting below you won't be surprised that neither political party wants to get into it at a public hearing.

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New study documents media's servitude to government

2010-07-01T11:40:00.000-07:00

Again, nothing new here. But this is how it's done. War propaganda. This is how torture is now, well, something we Americans do to get evidence. Do you realize that the entire case of 9/11 and Al Queda is based on testimony given under torture? The entire "proof." Seems as if that's how Bush, now Obama Justice Department operates. If we can just get a confession..."torture" just isn't what it used to be. A brilliantly done report. Something that CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc. just aren't doing.

WEDNESDAY, JUN 30, 2010 05:31 ET

BY GLENN GREENWALD

A newly released study from students at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government provides the latest evidence of how thoroughly devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than checking) government officials. This new study examines how waterboarding has been discussed by America's four largest newspapers over the past 100 years, and finds that the technique, almost invariably, was unequivocally referred to as "torture" -- until the U.S. Government began openly using it and insisting that it was not torture, at which time these newspapers obediently ceased describing it that way.

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CIA Hints Bin Laden Dead Since Early 2000's

2010-07-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

Is the CIA trying to prepare the American Public for the real truth about Bin Laden? Leon Panetta, CIA director admits as such. And remember Bhutto's statement just before her death about Bin Laden being dead since December 2001? Look it up. This is just another nail in the coffin of the Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz/Pearle false information on pinning 9/11 on Bin Laden, then invading Iraq and Afghanistan and occupying them. False Flag 9/11 here is the groundwork for the further coverup. Panetta knows it and is trying to slip it on the American public that oh, by the way, we haven't any reliable intel or communications from Bin Laden since 2001. And, oh, what about those videos of Bin Laden, just "rogue" CIA guys havin' a good laugh.

By Gordon Duff

This week, CIA director Leon Panetta, admitted there has been no information on Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts since “the early 2000?s.” During briefings with the directors of Paksitan’s information and intelligence agencies it was confirmed that Osama bin Laden had been killed, as stated by Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, in 2001. “Informed sources,” senior Pakistani commanders who worked with the CIA and bin Laden against the Soviets back in the 1980s, had confirmed Osama bin Laden’s death, as reported in the mainstream Islamic news, as having occurred on December 15, 2001. Confirmations this week by CIA Director Panetta that Al Qaeda strength is negligible is preparation for a accompanying “sea change” in the US approach toward ending the conflict in Afghanistan.

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Israel: The Eternal Victim

2010-07-01T11:27:00.000-07:00

I know it's creepy, but the comparisons to Nazi Germany are here. Ironic that Germany said, "it's the Jews," and proceeded to round them up and exterminate them. Now, we have the State of Israel, or the Likud-ites or far-right of Israel doing the same thing. This time to the Palestinians. Victimhood only lasts so long. When you've got nuclear weapons and the massive, lethal military might that Israel has, then we've got a problem here.

Article appearing in Desert Peace blog.

Amid the continuing fallout over the deadly confrontation on the Gaza aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, there is a critical historical lesson: There is only one real victim, and that is Israel. Sure, the “small, isolated” (WSJ, 6/1/10) nation may appear to have been the aggressor, having surrounded a humanitarian convoy in international waters with naval assault boats and helicopters before storming in with heavily armed elite forces killing and wounding dozens of civilians, but it was the one acting in self-defense.

Appearances are deceiving because understanding Israel’s eternal victimhood requires the proper mindset. First, The New Republic lets us know, the incident involved “a ship of terrorists” attempting “to open an arms importation route to Gaza” (6/9/10). With that fact established, the Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who has been hanging “around a lot of Israeli generals lately,” kindly advises us that there should be “no particular pain felt for the dead on the boat.”

On the other hand, “There’s real pain in Israel … pain at the humiliation of the flotilla raid, pain on behalf of the injured soldiers, and pain that the geniuses who run this country could not figure out a way to outsmart a bunch of Turkish Islamists and their useful idiot fellow travelers” (6/1/10). The White House sees no point in condemning Israel’s killing of civilians in the flotilla because “nothing can bring them back” (briefing by U.S. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, 6/1/10).

Hillary Clinton (Village Voice, 6/12/05) provides further insight, explaining how benighted Arabs who “are not sure what democracy means” should look to Israel — “a beacon of democracy” — as an example. Clearly, Israelis are the only true humans worthy of our sympathy, a point the Washington Post understands, stating, “We have no sympathy for the motives of the participants in the flotilla” (6/1/10).

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State Terror, Israeli Style

2010-07-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

Here is one of the most cognizant and reliable accounts of the Flotilla Incident by a great writer and researcher. Highly recommended.

by Stephen Lendman

Ongoing since its May 14, 1948 "Declaration of Independence," Israel systematically reigned terror against Palestinians and neighboring states, always claiming self-defense - bogus then, bogus now, historian Ilan Pappe describing Israel as a "settler Prussian state: a combination of colonialist policies....manifested in the dominance of the army over political, cultural and economic life," then adding:

"You probably have to be born in Israel, as I was, and go through the whole process of socialisation (sic) and education - including serving in the army - to grasp the power of this militarist mentality and its dire consequences. And you need such a background to understand why the whole premise on which the international community's approach to the Middle East is based, is utterly and disastrously wrong," so much so that Israel is slowly self-destructing, preventable only by an entirely new mindset.

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Kucinich: ‘We are losing our nation to lies about the necessity of war’

2010-06-30T17:08:00.000-07:00

Kucinich for President 2012! This is the only hope we have of a candidate to oppose Obama for his second term. Running an opposition candidate to Obama could bring him to his senses. If not, we get Bush light on the war, the economy, healthcare (Okay Bush was worse on this one) and the further deterioration of our Justice Department. Let's get Dennis to run again. The left and progressives need him badly!

Corruption Suspected in Airlift of Billions in Cash From Kabul

2010-06-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

Okay, I get it. Billions of dollars, three billion of them, are being "transferred" out of Afghanistan. Mostly drug money? Mmmm...Yes, it's the Taliban or Al Queda doing the drug dealing. That's what the US government says. That's what the mainstream media says. It must be true. Anyone looking? No, just move on.

ASIA NEWS
JUNE 25, 2010

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

KABUL—More than $3 billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years, a sum so large that U.S. investigators believe top Afghan officials and their associates are sending billions of diverted U.S. aid and logistics dollars and drug money to financial safe havens abroad.

The cash—packed into suitcases, piled onto pallets and loaded into airplanes—is declared and legal to move. But U.S. and Afghan officials say they are targeting the flows in major anticorruption and drug trafficking investigations because of their size relative to Afghanistan's small economy and the murkiness of their origins.

Officials believe some of the cash, if not most, is siphoned from Western aid projects and U.S., European and NATO contracts to provide security, supplies and reconstruction work for coalition forces in Afghanistan. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization spent about $14 billion here last year alone. Profits reaped from the opium trade are also a part of the money flow, as is cash earned by the Taliban from drugs and extortion, officials say.

The amount declared as it leaves the airport is vast in a nation where the gross domestic product last year totaled $13.5 billion. More declared cash flies out of Kabul each year than the Afghan government collects in tax and customs revenue nationwide. "It's not like they grow money on trees here," said a U.S. official investigating corruption and Taliban financing. "A lot of this looks like our tax dollars being stolen. And opium, of course."

Most of the funds passing through the airport are being moved by often-secretive outfits called "hawalas," private money transfer businesses with roots in the Muslim world stretching back centuries, officials say.

The officials believe hawala customers who have sent millions of dollars of their money abroad include high-ranking officials and their associates in President Hamid Karzai's administration, including Vice President Mohammed Fahim, and one of the president's brothers, Mahmood Karzai, an influential businessmen.

Where they allegedly get the money is one of the questions under investigation.
Vice President Fahim, responded through his brother, A.H. Fahim, a businessman, who denied the allegations. "My brother? He doesn't know anything about money," Mr. Fahim said.

Mahmood Karzai said in an interview he has engaged in only legitimate businesses and has never transferred large sums of cash from the country.

In a Jan. 22 financial disclosure form that he gave the Wall Street Journal to review, Mr. Karzai declared his net worth was $12,157,491 with assets of $21,163,347 and liabilities of $9,006,106. He reported an annual income of just over $400,000 but didn't provide dates.

Mahmood Karzai, an American citizen, blamed the allegations that he was transferring illicitly earned cash from Afghanistan on political opponents.

"Yes, millions of dollars are leaving this country but it is all taken by politicians. Bribes, corruption, all of it," he said. "But let's find out who is taking it. Let's not go on rumors. I've said this to the Americans."
President Karzai addressed the matter at a news conference Saturday, calling for greater scrutiny of business run by relatives of officials.

"Making money is fine and taking money out of the country is fine," he said. "The relatives of government officials can do this, starting with my brothers. But there's a possibility of corruption," he said without being specific.

Between the beginning of 2007 and February of this year, at least $3.18 billion left through the airport, according to Afghan customs records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Jo'l van Houdt for The Wall Street Journal

The Sharay-e-Shahzada financial trading center, the main money exchange market in Kabul. More than $3 billion in cash has been openly flown out of Kabul International Airport in the past three years.

U.S. officials say the sum of declared money may actually be higher: One courier alone carried $2.3 billion between the second half of 2008 and the end of 2009, said a senior U.S. official, citing other documents that are in the possession of investigators.

The officer said officials believe the money was declared, and that Afghan customs records may not be complete.

In their declarations, couriers must record their own names and the origins of the money they are transporting. Instead, they usually record the name of the Afghan hawala that is making the transfer and the one in Dubai that is accepting the cash. Often, the actual sender of the money isn't named, officials said.

"We do not even know about it. We don't know whose it is, why it is leaving, or where it is going," Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal said at a December conference about the money leaving the airport.

The capital flight has continued apace in 2010. In the week ending May 29, more than $20 million, about half of it in U.S. currency, left the airport, according to a senior Afghan customs official. Apart from U.S. dollars, the currencies being flown out range from Saudi riyals and Pakistani rupees to Norwegian kroners and even outdated Deutsche marks now redeemable for euros.

"You get boxes loaded on the back of airplanes. You get guys, literally, bringing boxes of cash onto the plane," said the senior U.S. official.

The declared cash is believed to represent only "a small percentage" of the money moving out of the airport and all of Afghanistan, said Gen. M. Asif Jabar Khail, the chief customs officer at Kabul's airport.

Hundreds of millions of undeclared dollars, maybe billions, are being carried across Afghanistan's porous border with Iran and Pakistan, where a number of Afghan hawalas have branches, he said.

One figure often cited by Afghan and Western officials is $10 million a day leaving Afghanistan. That is $3.65 billion a year, more than a quarter of the current GDP.
Officials can't say how much money is coming into Afghanistan; that isn't tracked by Afghan authorities.

Afghanistan's endemic corruption and the suspected involvement of high-ranking officials in the opium trade has left the government deeply unpopular and fueled support for the Taliban, undercutting a war effort that is now focused on convincing Afghans to support their own state and turn away from the insurgents.

U.S. officials are also trying to disrupt the flow of money to the Taliban.
The insurgency is believed to earn a sizable portion of its operating expenses from extortion and the opium trade, funds that can easily be moved abroad to avoid detection or seizure.

But anticorruption efforts have increasingly taken center stage for the U.S. and its Western allies.

Restoring the credibility of the Afghan government is a central tenet in the American counter-insurgency strategy. Combating corruption by the government is now as important a priority as actually fighting insurgents. The investigations into the money flow are part of the shift in focus.

The U.S.-led initiatives carry significant risks: many of those believed by U.S. officials to be involved in shipping money out of the country are key Afghan power brokers who are important allies in the fight against the Taliban.

Balancing demands to clean up the government with the need to keep them on the same side will not be easy, especially after so many years of Western officials effectively turning a blind eye to allegations of wrongdoing by their Afghan allies, U.S. officials say.

Gen. David Petraeus, who is to take over shortly as top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, faces the added burden of getting to know many of the main players in the country at the same time that officials under his command are investigating some of them and their associates.

The formal banking system here is in its infancy, and hawalas form the backbone of the financial sector. The State Department says that 80% to 90% of all financial transactions in Afghanistan run through hawalas.

Hawala networks run on what is effectively an honor system and much of the business they do is legitimate.

At their simplest, a customer drops off money at one dealer and is given a numeric code or password, which is then used by the money's recipient when the cash is picked up elsewhere.

The hawala operators then settle up among themselves.

Hawala fees are far cheaper than standard banks, often as little as $150 to move $100,000, and transfers can be done in minutes or hours as opposed to days.
The United Nations, NATO and international aid groups in Afghanistan have at times even used hawalas to move money and pay staff.

Afghanistan, shattered by three decades of war, is a predominantly cash society. "Afghanistan is a country that is built on personal connections and trust.
If someone trusts them, he will do business with them," said Haji Najib, the chairman of Kabul's hawala association. "It is the same for hawala."

But those ties also make hawalas especially difficult for investigators to penetrate to find the identity of funds being transferred.

Most of the cash loads are taken on one of the eight flights a day from Kabul to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Wealthy Afghans have long parked their money in Dubai.

Dubai and neighboring emirates, with their tight banking secrecy laws, also have been used by the Taliban and al Qaeda as a convenient locale to move or stash money, although Emirati authorities have aided American efforts to shut the flow of terror money.

Investigators say it is tough to trace where the Afghan money goes from Dubai. Some of it likely stays in Dubai, either in banks or property, some is probably moved to U.S. and Europe or back to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Dubai officials didn't respond to requests to comment.

Over the past year, U.S. and other Western officials have grown alarmed by the ways in which corruption was fueling support for the Taliban and indications that the massive infusions of poorly monitored Western dollars were helping foster a culture of graft.

A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration-led operation to disrupt Taliban finances created last year is now largely focused on corruption, and military intelligence is dedicating more assets to fighting the problem.

NATO is also creating a task force to scrutinize contracts given to provide security, supplies and reconstruction work for coalition forces.

American officials have been working with Afghanistan's central bank to impose Western-style regulation on hawalas.

Under Afghan regulations enacted in the last few years, hawalas must report to the central bank every transaction they made monthly.

When they suspect illicit activity, they are required to file suspicious activity reports, as banks do in the U.S.

Compliance has been spotty, say central bank officials. Most still keep track of their transactions in handwritten ledger books, sometimes transcribed in code.

So far, not one suspicious activity report has been filed, said a central bank official who deals with enforcement matters.

Cash also moves easily without detection or declaration through the airport's VIP section, where officials aren't searched and often driven straight up to their planes, according to Gen. Asif and U.S. and Afghan officials.

Gen. Asif said that last year, his men found a "pile of millions of dollars," all undeclared, and tried to stop it from being put on a flight to Dubai.

But "there was lots of pressure from my higher ups," Gen. Asif said. He refused to name the officials who were pressuring him, but said: "It came from very, very senior people. They told me there was an arrangement with the central bank and told me to let it go."

Mark Schoofs in New York and Maria Abi-Habib in Kabul contributed to this article.

Sirhan Sirhan: In His Own Words

2010-06-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

If anyone thinks that Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK and wasn't manipulated by CIA mind control techniques, read this. Great article by OpEd.com and Baltimore Chronicle columnist Lendman. Powerful evidence.

by Stephen Lendman

Saturday, 26 June 2010

Evidence strongly suggests that Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan Sirhan were patsies, blamed for state-sponsored assassinations, likely carried out by CIA operatives or hired guns they enlisted.

Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot, The New York Times headlining:

"Kennedy is Dead, Victim of Assassin; Suspect, Arab Immigrant, Arraigned; Johnson Appoints Panel on Violence"

Sirhan Sirhan was the alleged assassin, convicted, and serving a life sentence at (no pun intended) Pleasant Valley State Prison, CA, despite convincing evidence of his innocence.

In his October 17, 2008 article "The Assassinations of the 1960s as 'Deep Events,' " Peter Dale Scott discussed the killings of both Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, saying:

"The more that I look at these deep events comparatively, ranging over the past five decades, the more similarities I see between them, and the more I understand them in the light of each other."

With respect to both Kennedys and King, official accounts obscured the events, suppressed key facts, enough to question the guilt of the alleged suspects, concealing the real culprits and why men of this stature were assassinated - what Scott called "some continuing and hostile force within our society..."

In his June 13, 2010 article titled, "JFK and RFK: The Plots that Killed Them, The Patsies that Didn't," James Fetzer debunked the official accounts, saying:

"we are looking at staged events that fit into a recurrent pattern in US and world history where innocent individuals (or 'patsies') are baited and framed for cover-up purposes," RFK's killing "in part intended to prevent a reinvestigation into his brother's death....

The assassinations of RFK and JFK were both conspiracies. Both involved the destruction of evidence. Both involved the fabrication of evidence. Both involved framing their patsies. Both involved complicity by local officials. Both involved planning by the CIA. Both were used to deny the American people (their) right to be governed by leaders of their own choosing." Both put a myth to the rule of law, judicial fairness, and democratic freedoms.

Both crimes and MLK's assassination eliminated figures dark American forces wanted silenced, blaming innocent "patsies" for the killings, Sirhan Sirhan for RFK's. Fetzer's article explains numerous important facts:

"Multiple shots targeted him, more "than could have come from Sirhan Sirhan's gun" that was also the wrong caliber;

"RFK was shot behind the right ear from about 1.5 inches, but Sirhan was never that close and always in front of him;"

the coroner and LAPD reports were contradictory;

LAPD "engaged in massive destruction of evidence from the pantry of the hotel because 'it would not fit into a card file,' " as part of an official cover-up to blame Sirhan for a state-sponsored assassination, evidence suggesting CIA involvement in both Kennedy brothers and MLK killings;

Sirhan's gun was a ".22 caliber, eight-round revolver (serial number H-53725);

"he "emptied his weapon from a location in front of Bobby Kennedy;"

Dr. Thomas Hoguchi's autopsy "showed RFK was hit by four bullets, all of which were fired from behind at upward angles;

five others were wounded by separate shots;"
as many as 13 shots were fired;

Dr. Noguchi's autopsy "did not point to Sirhan as the killer;"
an eyewitness, DeWayne Wofler, "testified that the bullets fired at RFK had come from an entirely different gun," not Sirhan's;

a security guard, Eugene Cesar, standing right behind RFK, had a drawn gun of the same caliber as the murder weapon; it was never examined nor was he charged; and
"a woman in a polka dot dress" left the scene hurriedly, "shouting, "We shot him! We shot him! We shot Kennedy!"

In their book, "The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy," Jonn Christian and William Turner made a convincing case "indicting Cesar for the crime," concluding "that Sirhan may have been firing blanks."

Fetzer's article has detailed information on both JFK and RFK assassinations.

Below, Sirhan gives his own account of what happened that night and why he was at the Ambassador Hotel.

"My Morning with Sirhan"
On January 21, 2010, Academic Prison Teacher, Gerald B. Reynolds, spent time with Sirhan and wrote it up in detail. An account below follows.

At the Delta Facility library, a prison guard let him in. His ID said Sirhan Sirhan. "He looked at me in a calm way with a half-smile. I looked at him....There was an eerie, prolonged silence." He's now 66 years old, 42 of them in prison for a crime he didn't commit.

After another "calm silence....I swiveled in my chair to face Sirhan Sirhan and asked, 'Did you do it?' "

"Did I do what," he responded.

Reynolds: "You know."

Sirhan: "What do you want to know?"

Reynolds: "Did you kill Robert F. Kennedy?"

Sirhan: "No, I did NOT kill Robert F. Kennedy!"

Reynolds: "I know you didn't."

Sirhan: "How do you know?"

Reynolds explained that he studied the details of his case, learned that RFK was killed at point blank range by a bullet to the back of his head.

"The real assassin appears to be Kennedy's 26 year old Ace Security Company bodyguard....Thane Eugene Cesar. At least one eye witness claims to have seen Cesar with a smoking gun in his hand immediately after Kennedy fell to the floor. An audio recording made during the assassination indicates that there were at least 11 shots fired (perhaps more) from possibly three different guns."

"The conclusion is that Kennedy was shot three times from behind with a fourth bullet passing through his suit coat. The fact that you (Sirhan) were standing in front of Kennedy is undisputed and yet according to the coroner's report not one bullet entered Robert F. Kennedy from the front of his body."

Sirhan: "Oh my! I knew this morning when I woke up that God was telling me he had something great in store for me today and this is it! God has sent you to me!....I was beginning to lose hope so you were sent to lift my spirits. Now I can be hopeful again. Thank goodness somebody else knows."

Reynolds: "Have you ever talked to anybody else in prison that knows the truth of your case?"

Sirhan: "Yes. One person, that's all....He was one who drives a truck around and empties the dumpsters....I had a job where I had to take the garbage out of the kitchen....to the dumpster....once in a while he would talk to me. He told me he believed I was innocent."

Reynolds: "Did you talk to this guy often?"

Sirhan: "Actually no. He and I only talked maybe about three times and each time it was only for about five minutes or so."

He explained that he never met anyone in prison, besides him, who knows. He said friends on the outside set up a web site for him - rfkmustdie.com, with information about him, RFK, and whether CIA operatives killed him, framing Sirhan for the crime.
Reynolds: "Do you have an appeal on file right now?"

Sirhan: "Not now. Everything has run its course. I had a great attorney named Lawrence Teeter....He was a wonderful man and a great attorney. He tried several times to win me an appeal and even just to get a new evidentiary hearing but the courts seemed biased against me. The judges wouldn't budge....Teeter died in 2005, and I haven't really tried to work on any appeal since then."

Yet he feels, one day, he can be cleared and set free. "The truth will win out," he believes. Earlier he was on San Quentin's death row for three years. "They thought they were rid of me but then something happened they didn't plan on."

Led by Chief Justice Rose Bird, "the California Supreme Court intervened and ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional. The ruling was retroactive and my sentence was commuted to life in prison. They thought I was dead and yet after 41 and a half years I'm still alive!" Now it's over 42.

But "they stole my life!....I've been rotting in that stinking prison for (over four decades) for nothing!....The bastards stole my life....I have been denied parole 13 times. I am scheduled for another parole hearing in 2011. (Against long odds), Maybe if there was a grassroots movement, like perhaps millions of people finding out how the authorities have buried me unjustly, and coming together in demonstrations all over the country they would have to reconsider and let me go."

Saying to Reynolds, "You do it for me. Become a guest speaker at colleges and universities and speak on my behalf....I hereby give you my permission....I will notify the press of your name and mission."

Reynolds: "Ah, no, not my name. My name can't be attached to this. I could get in big trouble. You know the monsters that run this place."

Sirhan: "OK, I understand. We will keep you anonymous."

Reynolds offered to make this conversation available to anyone "responsible enough to appreciate it." Sirhan suggested sending to magazines and newspapers. Reynolds said he'd try, sent it to one on the progressive left that wouldn't publish it, one reason for discussing it here.

Sirhan also explained he's Palestinian, born in Jerusalem in 1944, "alive during the turmoil that erupted when the United Nations stole our country and gave it to the Jews."

In fact, its 1947 Partition Plan (General Assembly Resolution 181) gave them 56% of historic Palestine, placing Jerusalem (declared a corpus separatum, a separate body) under UN trusteeship as an international city, binding to this day. At the time, Palestinians comprised two-thirds of the population, owning 93% of the land, most of it now stolen. All of it occupied illegally.

Ever since, Israelis treated "my people....like dogs. (They) shoot rockets and tank fire into the West Bank (and Gaza) killing everyone, including women and children. They drop bombs and spray machine gun fire into crowded marketplaces. They are treating my people the same way they were treated by the Nazis....It breaks my heart to see how my people are suffering."

Reynolds: "So, then, you're a Muslim?"

Sirhan: "No....I am a Christian. My whole family is Christian....We have been Christians for at least 800 years. We are Palestinian Christians."

He came to America at age 11, moved to Los Angeles, and settled in Pasadena, attending Altadena's Eliot Junior High School, graduating from John Muir High School, then completing two years of junior college..."

Reynolds asked if he had any connections to Middle East or organized terrorists?
Sirhan: "No. No way! I am alone. I am by myself. I do have a few people in the West Bank that I correspond with but they are just regular people. I have a brother in Los Angeles. But I definitely do not have any terrorist connections and I am not a member of any groups, any groups at all."

Spurious prison information circulated that on 9/11, he "gleefully clapped (his) hands and (was) delighted" to see the twin towers collapse, adding that he had confidential information of the impending attack "by a Middle Eastern terrorist organization whose members revere you as an icon and a hero and do everything they can to honor you."

Sirhan: "Oh my God, that's ridiculous. I've never had anything to do with any terrorist groups. Who said this about me?"

Reynolds: "It was Chief Deputy Warden James Mattingly."

Sirhan said he'll sue him for libel and slander, adding he wants to see his evidence. Reynolds asked what he thought of the incident, Sirhan explaining that he cried because his country was attacked and "felt sadness and anger and wanted to punish the people responsible...."

Reynolds: "Sirhan, what were the events that led up to you being in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel on the night" JFK was shot there?

Sirhan: "In the evening, I had something to eat at Bob's Big Boy. Then later in the evening, I decided to drive downtown....The Jews were going to be having a big party to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Israel's" Six Day War victory."

Reynolds: "What did you intend to do once your got there?"

Sirhan: " I don't know exactly but I wanted to protest. The Jews should not have been allowed to fill the streets in celebration of stealing more of our land. I can remember driving down Highway 5 with my 22 caliber hand gun lying next to me on the passenger seat."

Reynolds: "Why did you have a gun with you in the car?"

Sirhan: "I had been shooting at the range earlier that day."

Reynolds: "Was the gun....out in the open?"

Sirhan: "No, it was in the plastic box it came in, you know, with the cloth, the cleaning rod, and oil."

Reynolds: "and what did you do when you got downtown?"

Sirhan: "I realized that I was a day early and that the event was to take place the next night. So I just drove back up the freeway."

Reynolds: "Why did you stop at the Ambassador Hotel?"

Sirhan: "I don't know. I can't remember parking and going in there but I must have because I was there."

Reynolds: "What did you do when you got there?"

Sirhan: "It was hot that night and I was very thirsty. I remember that....I went to the bar and had four drinks within about 15 minutes. I couldn't seem to get enough to drink....They were Tom Collins's....(but) I wasn't drunk. I felt drugged. I think somebody slipped something into my drinks. My legs and arms became rubbery. I remember standing by my car but I couldn't drive so I went back inside and got some coffee."

Reynolds: "How did you get downstairs to the pantry?"

Sirhan: "Somebody guided me. I don't know who."

Reynolds: "Did you have your gun with you?"

Sirhan: "Yes. When I was in the pantry, the gun was in my hand."

Reynolds: "Did you know Robert Kennedy was going to be walking toward you?"

Sirhan: "No. I didn't know where I was and I don't know how I got there. I was in a state of blackout."

Reynolds: "You were a Manchurian candidate....It's something the CIA uses. They assassinate a president, or senator, or anyone they wish, and make it look like some crazed, lone-nut assassin did it. But he has been heavily drugged, possibly with LSD, and undergone intense brainwashing followed by reprogramming. Everything you're saying about yourself follows the established pattern of the drugged, duped, CIA patsy."

Sirhan: "They used me, framed me, and they set me up to die."

Reynolds: "Do you remember firing the gun that was in your hand?"

Sirhan: "I can't remember. I was blacked out. I remember feeling woozy and it felt like I was falling down....I don't remember the things that happened that night."

Reynolds: "Do you remember being led in handcuffs out of the Ambassador Hotel and made to sit in the back seat of a police car?"

Sirhan: "I remember being led away but I didn't know why they were doing this to me. Nobody told me anything."

He was interrogated by the police for about 24 hours, detectives telling him he murdered JFK. "They yelled at me. They kept shoving papers at me demanding that I sign...They were documents saying I killed Kennedy. Confession.

They insisted I had murdered Robert F. Kennedy and they demanded I confess and sign the papers....At first I resisted, but later I confessed and signed the papers. They broke me down and I told them I would do anything they wanted me to do. I just wanted it to stop."

After he confessed, he was taken to a cell and allowed to sleep. A court trial followed where his "interrogators convinced me to plead guilty and ask for the death penalty....I told the judge I was guilty and wanted the death penalty," explaining he was ashamed.

"They made me believe I had murdered Robert Kennedy in cold blood and I was remorseful and ashamed. Everyone said I was guilty. They said I would get the death penalty....no matter what I said or did. They said it was an open and shut case and that I might as well give up. I just wanted to get the whole thing over with and if it meant me being dead, so be it. I didn't have anything left to live for anyway."

A trial followed, Sirhan represented by attorney Grant Cooper, a man he called "crooked. He had mafia and CIA connections," Sirhan explaining what he knew and his mob involvement. "He was (picked) to make sure I was convicted and sent to my death, and Cooper complied because they were planning to kill him" otherwise.

Reynolds asked him to portray what he remembered doing at the Ambassador Hotel. Sirhan stood up, swayed, his arms gently rising, looked straight ahead, then made a gun shape with his right hand, his arm parallel to the ground pretending to shoot, saying:

"At a specific moment, and I can't remember when or why, I shot my 22 caliber pistol three times. My arms were unsteady but level with the ground. Two of the shots missed. I saw them miss. One of the shots may have bounced off him like a BB. All of a sudden people were grabbing me. They were forcing me down....Did anybody say I reached around behind and shot Robert Kennedy in the back of the head?"

Reynolds: "Nobody."

Sirhan: "But that's what I would've had to do" to kill him....So, what do you think of me now? Do you think I am crazy like they say?"

Not at all, said Reynolds, Sirhan adding "I am just a man. I am a man just like you. I am trained never to allow an inmate to touch me."

In parting, he embraced Reynolds, both of them now "secret friends in a desolate place."

A Final Comment

Evidence strongly suggests that Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan Sirhan were patsies, blamed for state-sponsored assassinations, likely carried out by CIA operatives or hired guns they enlisted.

Jack Ruby, with known mob and police connections, fatally shot Oswald on November 22, 1963. Incarcerated without trial, James Earl Ray died in prison on April 23, 1998, proclaiming his innocence. Sirhan Sirhan has been imprisoned since 1968, despite no evidence proving his guilt.

In these and hundreds more cases in US courts, justice was denied, revealing the myth of the rule of law, under a system absolving high-level crime, getting patsies punished for offenses they didn't commit, the major media always going along, supporting official accounts without question.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM to 1PM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national topics. All programs are archived for easy listening.
Mr. Lendman's stories are republished in the Baltimore Chronicle with permission of the author.

Extreme Measures: Arming the Zealotocracy, Serving the Elite Only Machiavelli would be proud of them.

2010-06-29T11:34:00.000-07:00

Separation of Church and State? This is one thoughtful and well-researched article by a great writer of our time, Chris Floyd! Zealots are making our life miserable, wrecking the planet, killing thousands of people and spreading not the word of "God" but the word of "Death."

by Chris Floyd

First published in Empire Burlesque Saturday, 26 June 2010

In country after country, life is being made "far less easy-going" by the unholy alliance of rapacious corporate-militarist elites and the Zealotocracy of religious nationalists they have helped propel to heights of power and influence.

One of the most significant developments in the modern world -- history may find it to be a decisive one -- has been the deliberate cultivation of religious extremism by ruling elites trying to sustain and expand their power.

The rise of virulent extremism in almost every major religion -- Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism -- has many other causes, of course. Chief among these is the turbulent encounter between modernity and tradition, a confrontation that has played out -- and is playing out -- in so many different ways both within and across various cultures.

Modernity encompasses not only the technologies and techniques of capitalism that in its many guises (including state capitalism) has plowed up so much ancient ground and overturned so many ancient certainties, but also the historic development of ideas and ideals based, ultimately, on the notion of the inherent (even inalienable) autonomy and worth of the individual. These ideas too have found expression in myriad -- and often conflicting -- forms. And of course, there has never been and can never be any kind of clear dividing line between all of these swirling currents, the multifaceted dimensions of modernity and tradition; like a jar of colored sands, they mix and meld in innumerable, unstable combinations as they are sifted and shaken through the course of time.

So it would be wrong to say that the rise of sectarian zeal can be ascribed solely to its manipulation by elites. But it would be equally wrong -- and dangerously blind -- to deny the fact of these manipulations, or to minimize in any way the pernicious, atrocious effect they have had -- and are having -- on human existence. They have placed a deep -- and entirely unnecessary -- shadow over humanity for generations: a shadow that only gets darker, and more poisonous, as time goes on.

For the last 50 years, in country after country, ruling elites -- those factions which hold a disproportionate and thus illegitimate sway over society -- have fostered the growth of religious extremism for two main reasons: to distract the populace from the way their lives are unjustly diminished by the elitist agenda -- and to throttle and demonize any popular movement that might threaten the elite's hegemony.

This happened throughout the Middle East, for example, as tyrants of every stripe (often clients of the West) turned to hitherto marginal fundamentalist religious groups to dilute and drive back secular challenges to their rule. These challenges were often, although not always, led by movements that could be characterized as "leftist" to one degree or another. (Although it is also true that any challenge whatsoever to elite rule is almost always categorized as some kind of dangerous, revolutionary "leftism," even if it has little or no socialist content at all -- and even if it is entirely non-violent, or gradualist, or merely mildly reformist.)

Usually with Western help, the tyrants cultivated religious extremists both as shock troops and cultural warriors to attack and divide any opposition. As the London Review of Books noted recently (in a piece highlighted this weekend by As'ad AbuKhalil):

The Islamisation of Egyptian society deepened after the 1967 war; it became explicit government policy under Sadat, the self-styled ‘believer president’ who supported radical Islamists in his battles with the left, and who made the sharia ‘the principal source’ of law in 1980 – a year before his assassination by an Islamist. Under Mubarak, praying has become as popular as shopping or football and now serves a roughly similar function as a distraction from the innumerable frustrations of Egyptian life. Indeed, Islam as observed by Egyptians is increasingly an Islam that caters to consumerist needs.

The popular televangelist Amr Khaled mixes Quranic citations with boosterish advice of a more general kind. This variety of Islam is no threat to the regime, but it has made life far less easy-going. ‘My neighbour used to water his plants in his pyjamas on the balcony, where he’d be joined by his wife in her nightie,’ a friend tells me. ‘They’d drink beer in the open, and then he’d go downstairs for the sunset prayers in the local mosque. Today he’d be killed for this, but at the time he would have seen no contradiction.’

Over the past half century, this same dynamic has played out in various ways, and to various degrees, in countries all over the world. It has happened in Iran, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia (Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo), and many others. It is happening at an astonishingly accelerated rate today in Israel, which has become by far the most religiously and ethnically intolerant of any nation considered part of "the West." And it is most palpably happening on many levels in the United States, as Chris Hedges and many others have documented.

In most cases, this dynamic involves a strong fusion of religious extremism with a strident, exclusionary nationalism. Indeed, religious nationalism is one of the hallmarks of our age. At various times, and in various quarters, one element -- the religious or the nationalist -- might predominate over the other. We can see this in, say, the Tea Party movement, where exclusionary nationalism -- the self-defined "Real Americans" vs. the strange, traitorous Others -- is now in ascendance, occluding somewhat the sex-obsessed, church-based "Focus on the Family"-style religious nationalism that was somewhat more prevalent earlier in the decade.

The whole career of Sarah Palin exemplifies this oscillation, as she has tracked back and forth between the most virulent, primitive, casting-out-devils Christian fundamentalism and the bellicose, militarist nationalism she shares with the Beltway neo-cons, a number of whom are, of course, Jews and/or atheists whom Palin, like George W. Bush, believes will burn in eternal hellfire.

Although these kinds of contradictions demonstrate the utter incoherence and moral vacuity of religious nationalism, they rarely lessen the power of these movements, which -- once unleashed, encouraged (and heavily funded) -- feed on the nuclear fuel of raw, unexamined emotions, fears and needs: a fuel that is constantly replenished by the relentless propagation of artfully filtered (and often fabricated) outrages and threats.

Here's an example from personal experience. I came of age in the mid-70s, in the Bible Belt, in a family rooted in that old-time Southern Baptist religion. This was the era when the TV preachers -- Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, and others -- first began flooding the late-night airwaves.

These televangelists, just beginning the fusion of religion and nationalism noted above, were widely, almost universally, regarded by the good, God-fearing, church-going grownups of my acquaintance as extremely marginal, even comical figures, of little note and little worth.

Yet in just a few years' time, many of these figures, and others like them, would be trooping to the White House to be courted and honored; they were commanding vast media networks, college campuses and commercial empires. One of them, Robertson, even ran for president. They had become an integral and important part of the nation's power structure, pushing "hot button" issues, almost always related to sex -- homosexuality, abortion -- and "traditional values" (e.g., submission to authority: biblical authority, corporate authority, military authority, male authority, etc.).

They constructed a false history of a paradisiacal past that had been "stolen" from "real" Americans by liberals, feminists, unions, queers, darkies, commies, college professors, Mexicans, etc. etc. And all the while, the elite interests who helped bankroll and magnify these marginal movements into national juggernauts were in fact beggaring the believers themselves, destroying their communities -- indeed, their "traditional values," their family and social networks, and their quality of life -- by gutting their towns and cities, driving family farmers from their land, sending tens of millions of jobs to near-slave labor overseas, befouling the environment, degrading public amenities and vital infrastructure, relentlessly restricting legal recourse against corporate predation and depredation, and corrupting the democratic process to send a steady stream of spineless hacks and whores to Washington to perpetuate the bipartisan corporate-militarist agenda.  

The result has been poisonous rancor, social division, economic ruin, vast anxiety, endless war and the relentless, systematic degradation of the quality of life for working people, the poor, the sick, the vulnerable -- indeed, for everyone outside the small circle of the elite, and their sycophants and servants in the media-political class.

And at every step of the way, this ever-growing dynamic of religious nationalism -- which has found its highest, most complete expression in the war-profiteering militarist empire of the Terror War and its attendant atrocities, foreign and domestic -- has been aided and abetted and strengthened and expanded by the so-called "liberals" and "progressives" of the Democratic Party (and their own innumerable outriders, servitors and sycophants) who have been and remain among the fiercest proponents of ... the war-profiteering militarist empire.

("Progressives," of course want to "reform" the empire -- that is, make its deadly operations more efficient and codify its most heinous atrocities into law -- but none of them, not one, call for it to be dismantled.)

Just as in Mubarak's Egypt or the Shah's Iran, any secular opposition to the thuggish (indeed criminal) American elites has been effectively neutralized. The resultant anger and confusion of a people who are indeed being robbed and screwed over is thus diverted from its true perpetrators, and instead is channeled into one of few avenues of "protest" against the "system" allowed to operate freely and fully on a mass scale: religious nationalism in its various forms. Of course, this kind of "protest" only strengthens the genuine systems of rapacious power, and thus, ultimately, serves both sides of the partisan divide. (Or rather the factional divide between two groups of squabbling courtiers jockeying for the top perks of the imperial state they both avidly serve.) And, as we have seen in Iran and will likely see in Egypt, these movements, once unleashed and empowered, cannot be completely controlled by their elite patrons (as some Republican incumbents and insiders have already learned to their sorrow).

On every side, in country after country, and at varying levels, life is being made "far less easy-going" by the unholy alliance of rapacious corporate-militarist elites and the Zealotocracy of religious nationalists they have helped propel to heights of power and influence. And as long as the imperial system keeps churning its way around the globe, this murderous, retrograde, life-strangling dynamic will continue to accelerate.

Chris Floyd has been a writer and editor for more than 25 years, working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University. Floyd co-founded the blog Empire Burlesque, and is also chief editor of Atlantic Free Press. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.
Sunday, 20. June 2010

Transforming Afghanistan into a Central Asian Saudi Arabia

2010-06-29T11:22:00.000-07:00

Sunday, 20. June 2010

It seems that Afghanistan is a never ending font of surprises. For decades U.S. officials took the position that Afghanistan held nothing of value for the United States, especially in the form of vital strategic resources. That assumption was a major reason for America’s consistently dismissive attitude towards Afghanistan up until the Soviet invasion of 1979 and why the U.S. was content to turn the country over to Pakistan and Saudi Arabian interests following the Soviet departure. Then on June 13, 2010 the New York Times in a front-page story reported how a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists had suddenly discovered a vast treasure of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth worth nearly $1 trillion dollars.

But the story of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth isn’t a new one nor did the Pentagon just “discover” it. According to a Reuters report of March 16, 2009, over a year ago, Afghanistan’s minister of mines Mohammed Ibrahim Adel cited U.S. Geological Survey Data in declaring that “In the field of minerals, Afghanistan is the richest country in the region, much more, hundreds of times more.”

Even the New York Times’ story admits that the survey information, on which the Pentagon assessment was based, came from data collected by Soviet mining experts nearly 30 years ago. American geologists became aware of it in 2004, but the data languished until 2009.

But the most revealing quote in the Pentagon report wasn’t so much that Afghanistan did indeed contain a vast wealth of minerals or even that the U.S. had carelessly overlooked a vast source of wealth for an impoverished nation. No. The key to understanding the report was framed by the reference that “Afghanistan could become the ‘Saudi Arabia of lithium,’” and Saudi Arabia is where the real story behind the headlines begins.

This is not the first time that Saudi Arabia has been used to as a model for Afghanistan’s future. One might go so far as to say today’s Afghanistan and its Taliban scourge already bears the stamp of being made in Saudi Arabia.

According to author, Gerald Posner in his book, Secrets of the Kingdom, the anti-Soviet Afghan war was as much a godsend for the Saudi Royal family as it was for the Afghan Islamists. “Some prominent Saudi officials, like Prince Bandar, as well as his father, defense minister Prince Sultan, saw the Soviet aggression as a chance to form a closer bond with Washington. It was a rare chance, they argued to other Saudi ministers, to replace Israel as America’s strategic partner in the Middle East. And as far as the Americans were concerned, the Saudis had suddenly become a cash cow.”

The term “Taliban” and the movement itself were unheard of in Afghanistan until 1994. Prior to the Soviet invasion, the Taliban mentality and the madrassa structure did not exist. As an invention of Pakistan’s military intelligence with outside help, the Taliban were not recruited from inside Afghanistan but from Pakistani madrassas. This process was funded, not by Afghans, but by the Saudis and other Arab countries who continue to seek the long term goal of a political and religious transformation of South Asia combined with the dissolution of Afghanistan as a nation state.

The Taliban version of Deobandi Islam practiced in Pakistan and the Wahhabism practiced in Saudi Arabia were both alien to Afghan practice. Suicide bombings did not exist in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation nor even when the Taliban took control in 1996. The Afghan people never willingly embraced extremist Islam. These ideas were forced upon them under circumstances beyond their control.

From the very beginning, the United States really had no conception of what to do in Afghanistan except to follow the lead of the Saudis, with some American diplomats benignly visualizing that a Taliban victory would simply turn Afghanistan into a miniature Saudi Arabia. In his book, Taliban, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid quotes one diplomat as saying, “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”

The Obama administration has nothing good to report to the American people on Afghanistan. New revelations of the hopelessness of government corruption arrive daily. Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai is in open confrontation with Washington on dozens of issues. Not only is reconstruction dead and the war failing, but so far, General McChrystal’s application of Counter Insurgency (COIN) has failed miserably.

The heralded U.S. assault on Marja and the establishment of government control has come to a dead stop. According to the Washington Post, the failure at Marja has now caused the summer assault on Kandahar to be postponed indefinitely and threatens the Obama administration’s plans for a July 2011 drawdown of U.S. troops.

So, without a legitimate rationale for staying in Afghanistan and no conceivable way of justifying countless more billions of dollars or American lives – Washington has finally admitted that the country is not only important, but is vital to the future of America’s strategic mineral interests. But even now as the Obama administration dredges up a new reason for staying in Afghanistan past the 2011 deadline, it appears that the old motivation of transforming Afghanistan into a Central Asian Saudi Arabia remains the real motivation underlying America’s war.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media. Their next book Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.

Was Pat Tillman Murdered by an American Sharpshooter to Shut Him up?

2010-06-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

This is one explosive article! This is, I believe, much closer to the truth as to what happened to Pat Tillman. He was silenced. Just like Senator Paul Wellstone. Among other casualties of war propaganda: how about Phil Donahue, being relieved of his MSNBC show right at the outset of the Iraq illegal war? General McCrystal was the architect of the coverup and should be investigated at part of a real murder investigation!

June 26, 2010

By Richard Clark

Was Pat Tillman assassinated to prevent him from coming home to expose the fact that our troops have been ordered to guard, and even help produce and store the opium of Afghan warlords? Was it also because he had been corresponding with Noam Chomsky and was planning on returning to the US to help reinvigorate the anti-war movement?

Here's what Pat Tillman knew about and wanted to talk about to the US media:
A Marine commander pretends that the Afghan poppy growers will soon be growing vegetables, and Geraldo Rivera participates in the ruse:

Watch Video Here.

Wayne Madsen, interviewed by Alex Jones, gives a different account:

Also check out the video clips at this site:

This information, which in turn reflect and confirm this report from the Daily Mail in London:

"Is it coincidence that after more than three years it has been discovered that there were never-before-mentioned US snipers in the Ranger group following Tillman's? Could there have been a secret sniper on a mission to Afghanistan to assassinate the Army's poster boy?

Or perhaps three assassins, because as a general rule snipers fire in single shots, from specially tuned rifles, rather than in bursts of three.

Could the likelihood that Tillman (who had been corresponding with Noam Chomsky) was going to become a voice for the anti-war movement be why his journal, which he'd kept since age 16, went missing? It disappeared, along with most of his possessions, two days after he died.

"It's time to really ask who ordered the assassination of Pat Tillman," wrote blogger Josh Swiller on The Huffington Post, a mainstream website.

First there were tales of Tillman having a personal altercation with another member of his squad, and then there were the stories of Tillman demanding to know why all the poppy fields were so huge, growing so well, and "so well protected.'

What gives it away to me was the constant waffling of "the truth" and the final accounting that Tillman had been killed with three M16 .223 rounds to his forehead fired at close range. Tillman and his murderer must have looked each other in the eyes!

I think Tillman had been asking too many questions and wanted to know why we were doing nothing (except protecting) the many vast fields planted with opium poppies in Afghanistan. And he got murdered for it. The US Army and other organizations continue to cover up the real story behind Ranger Pat Tillman's murder."
http://drkentshow.com/wordpress/?tag=opium-poppy-fields

But could the CIA really stoop to the level of arranging for U.S. Marines to help protect opium poppy fields? Here's your answer, including photographs:

US/NATO Troops Patrolling Opium Poppy Fields in Afghanistan ...May 21, 2010 ... An Afghani farmer stands in the middle of his poppy field in Delaram, Afghanistan, watching U.S. Marines from 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment. Nice to know our military is protecting something important.

The photos in this article (see link below) have been released by the Department of Defense and ISAF over the last few years. Some of the photos show how troops "patrol" through and around the fields. In one instance, a US soldier even seems to be helping with cultivation. In a recent report from Geraldo Rivera which aired in late April on Fox News, a USMC Lt. Col. indicated that US forces encourage the Afghans to grow different crops. However, out of fear of losing stability in the country, poppy cultivation is tolerated and even supported by US and allied forces. In November 2009, the Afghan Minister of Counter Narcotics General Khodaidad Khodaidad actually stated that the majority of drugs are stockpiled in two provinces controlled by troops from the US, the UK, and Canada. He also said that NATO forces are taxing the production of opium in the regions under their control and that foreign troops are earning money from drug production in Afghanistan

What if Army poster boy Tillman were to have returned home and spilled this story to the mainstream media? What would that have done to Army recruiting and the war effort in Afghanistan?

Also, consider, this report from the New York Times:

"The relationship between Mr. Karzai and the C.I.A. is wide ranging, several American officials said. He helps the C.I.A. operate a paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, that is used for raids against suspected insurgents and terrorists. On at least one occasion, the strike force has been accused of mounting an unauthorized operation against an official of the Afghan government, the officials said.

Mr. Karzai is also paid for allowing the C.I.A. and American Special Operations troops to rent a large compound outside the city -- the former home of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's founder. The same compound is also the base of the Kandahar Strike Force. "He's our landlord," a senior American official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Karzai also helps the C.I.A. communicate with and sometimes meet with Afghans loyal to the Taliban. Mr. Karzai's role as a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban is now regarded as valuable by those who support working with Mr. Karzai, as the Obama administration is placing a greater focus on encouraging Taliban leaders to change sides.

The Pentagon's Threat to the Republic

2010-06-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

This makes the argument that there was more to McCrystal's actions than it seems. Quite possible. I think he was getting out and trying to save his spiteful reputation of being a torturer, coverup in chief of Pat Tillman case, and many more war atrocities. This is reminiscent of the war hawks in Kennedy's administration (see "Brothers" book). Read it and know your history of right-wing war hawks in American history!

June 28, 2010

By Melvin Goodman
Reprinted from Truthout

The New York Times' David Brooks minimized General Stanley McChrystal's remarks in Rolling Stone magazine as "kvetching." For the Times' Maureen Dowd, McChrystal and his "smart-aleck aides" were merely engaging in "towel-snapping" jocularity. The Washington Post editorial board noted that Afghan President Hamid Karzai called McChrystal the "best commander of the war," and concluded that the general should be retained as the Afghan commander. The Post and Times' editorial boards have called for the replacement of President Obama's key civilian advisors on Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, these papers and many others have downplayed the critical issue that dominates this sad affair - the fundamental importance of civilian supremacy in military policy and decision-making.

There is no more important task in political governance than making sure that civilian control of the military is not compromised and that the military remains subordinate to political authority. Unfortunately, President Obama has demonstrated too much deference to the military, retaining the Bush administration's secretary of defense as his own; appointing too many retired and active-duty general officers to such key civilian positions as national security adviser and intelligence tsar; and making the Pentagon's budget sacrosanct in an age of restraint.

The reappointment of General David Patraeus as commander of forces in Afghanistan places the general on an extremely high political plateau that makes it more difficult to discuss alternatives to the failed counter-insurgency strategy, and places too much influence in the hands of the Pentagon on decisions involving war and peace. President Obama recognized the McChrystal affair as a challenge to civilian control and leadership, but the appointment of Petraeus enhances the political power of the military and could become an obstacle to the president's exercise of civilian control in the near term. Too many influence people view Petraeus as the answer to our Afghan problems; he isn't.

The imbalance in civilian-military influence is far more threatening to the interests of the United States than any developments in Afghanistan. President Nixon's ending of the draft has created a professional military, which has fostered the very cultural behavior that General McChrystal demonstrated in his contempt for civilian leadership. The Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986 created regional commanders-in-chief (CINCs) who expanded the martial reach of the United States in the post-Cold War world; these CINCs have become more influential than U.S. ambassadors and assistant secretaries of state in sensitive Third World areas. The Act created a powerful chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, during Desert Storm in 1991, the chairman often ignored the secretary of defense and personally briefed war plans to the president. It is noteworthy that the Act passed the Senate without one vote of opposition.

The contemptuous remarks of McChrystal and his aides are very familiar to anyone who has spent a great deal of time around senior military officers, particularly special operations officers. Upon arrival at the National War College in 1986 to join the faculty after a 20-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, I assumed that the major threats to U.S. security emanated from the Soviet Union, China, and various Third World trouble spots. I soon learned that the typical U.S. military officer believed the major threats to U.S. security were the media, the Congress, and liberal Democrats. Since the end of the draft, the officer corps has become increasingly conservative and libertarian, and it is a rare officer who votes as a Democrat. In the 1970s, more than half of all senior officers considered themselves independents; currently, the overwhelming majority of senior officers are registered Republicans, and there are very few registered Democrats.

Special operations officers are even more conservative than their traditional brethren, and it is noteworthy that the nickname for all commanders of the Joint Special Operations Command, like McChrystal, is "The Pope." Ironically, McChrystal is a registered Democrat, a social liberal, and an Obama supporter in the 2008 election.

Key congressional figures and influential journalists are already calling for the resignation of the president's representative in Afghanistan, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, who provided the White House with two important cables in November 2009 warning against any additional military deployments to Afghanistan. Eikenberry's advice was lapidary: he warned that Karzai was not an "adequate strategic partner" and that his government lacked the "political will or capacity to carry out basic tasks of governance;" he said that we have "overestimated the ability of Afghan security forces to take over by 2013...and underestimated how long it will take to restore or establish civilian government;" and he argued that "more troops won't end the insurgency as long as Pakistan sanctuaries remain...and Pakistan views its strategic interests as best served by a weak neighbor." He bluntly argued against a premature decision regarding a troop increase, favoring "alternatives beyond strictly military counterinsurgency efforts within Afghanistan."

Eight months later, the situation in Afghanistan has worsened, and Eikenberry's diagnosis has become more prescient. Even McChrystal has said that there's no way we can kill our way out of Afghanistan. And there is no way that U.S. forces will be able to build a civilian government in Afghanistan and then mediate between the government and the Afghan people, objectives that are central to the Petraeus-McChrystal counter-insurgency strategy.

It is time for President Obama to remind the Pentagon that decisions regarding national security must be made by civilian officials and that the service academies and the war colleges must stress the central importance of civilian control. During my 18 years at the National War College, various commandants steadily cut back the number of hours devoted to the U.S. political process, and made it more difficult to introduce contrarian lecturers who understood the importance of disagreement and diversity of perspective. The military culture may require an authoritarian and hierarchical structure, but it must understand the importance and sanctity of the egalitarian and individualistic values of U.S. democracy.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's profound and prophetic Farewell Address in 1961 warned against the excesses of the military-industrial complex, and he also expressed the hope that his successors at the White House understood the demands of the military and the necessity for limiting and restraining those demands. Unfortunately, our most recent presidents in the wake of the end of the Cold War have not been willing to limit the influence of the military and have placed too much power in the hands of the Pentagon. President Obama must take note.

Author's Bio: Melvin A. Goodman is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA. He is a professor of international security studies and chairman of the international relations department at the National War College. Goodman worked at the CIA from 1966 to 1990 and was division chief and senior analyst at the agency's Office of Soviet Affairs from 1976 to 1986.

Alan Grayson powerfully channels Eisenhower's "Chance for Freedom' Speech

2010-06-29T11:07:00.000-07:00

Well, well, well Representative Grayson continues to be the voice of reason. A great little entry. Support him. He's one of the few willing to speak out against military and industrial complex which Ike warned us against. Brilliant!

By John Amato Friday Jun 25, 2010 3:00pm

We have a little exclusive from the great Congressman from Florida. Alan Grayson adapts Eisenhower's 1953 speech called: "The Chance For Peace" to make an enormous point in our country today. He's changed a few words to make it fit into our current narrative, but they are still important and explosive words that all Americans need to hear.

We waste over 600 billion dollars a year on the Military Industrial Complex and if we even cut back 20% on that monstrosity, how much good can we accomplish here? How much change and prosperity can be funneled to every day working class families that toil so hard just to make ends meet?

We have a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross, a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and the point of hope that come with this time. God created men to enjoy, not destroy, the fruits of the earth and of their own toil.

They aspire to this: the lifting from the backs and from the hearts of men, of their burden of arms and of fears, so that they may find before them a golden age, a golden age of freedom and of peace. Thank you.

We talk a lot about wingnut welfare and conservatives and Libertarians whine all day long about our tax dollars being used to fund programs that are used for the betterment of our society such as Social Security and Medicare.

Yet they remain quiet and mute, like scarecrows in the middle of a desert when billions upon billions are shifted out of their pockets and into the hands of companies like Blackwater aka Xe Services or some new Star Wars program that is useless unless you're the recipient of those funds -- for the sole purpose of mass destruction rather than enrichment.

Here' Alan Grayson's post called "The Longest War." In it he talks about our need to get out of Afghanistan and has introduced a new bill called The War is Making You Poor Act, HR 5353.

How strange. It turns out that America's chief military strategist for the past decade is Osama Bin Laden himself. We've been doing exactly what he has wanted us to do: spend staggering sums on the military, until the American economy is bled dry. But it doesn't have to be that way. We are a democracy. We can choose peace.
I have voted against Bin Laden's strategy to destroy America, and I will continue to do so. But I've done more than that. I have introduced a bill called The War is Making You Poor Act, HR 5353.

This bill requires that the war be funded by the Pentagon's base budget - "only" $549 billion. And it uses the resulting savings to eliminate federal income taxes on your first $35,000 of income - yours and every American's. It also reduces the deficit.

Bin Laden told us how he would destroy us. And we're following his instructions, to a "t." How absurd is that? No more. We have to make our so-called "leaders" listen to us. If we are to survive.

That's what we're going to do, together. Sign our petition, and show your support for HR 5353. Ask your friends to do the same. Let's stop the war, before it stops all of us.

Don't forget to throw Alan Grayson a few bob at our Blue America10 act blue page. If there is a politician out there who deserves our support, he certainly does.

The CIA/Likud Sinking of Jimmy Carter

2010-06-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

OpEdNews
Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-CIA-Likud-Sinking-of-J-by-Robert-Parry-100624-779.html

June 24, 2010
By Robert Parry

Reprinted from Consortium News

  As the Official Story of the 1980 October Surprise case crumbles with new revelations that key evidence was hidden from investigators of a congressional task force and that internal doubts were suppressed history must finally confront the troubling impression that remains: that disgruntled elements of the CIA and Israel's Likud hardliners teamed up to remove a U.S. president from office.

Indeed, it is this disturbing conclusion perhaps even more than the idea of a Republican dirty trick that may explain the longstanding and determined cover-up of this political scandal.

Too many powerful interests do not want the American people to accept even the possibility that U.S. intelligence operatives and a longtime ally could intervene to oust a president who had impinged on what those two groups considered their vital interests.

To accept that scenario would mean that two of the great fears of American democracy had come true George Washington's warning against the dangers of "entangling alliances" and Harry Truman's concern that the clandestine operations of the CIA had the makings of an "American Gestapo."

It is far easier to assure the American people that no such thing could occur, that Israel's Likud whatever its differences with Washington over Middle East peace policies would never seek to subvert a U.S. president, and that CIA dissidents no matter how frustrated by political constraints would never sabotage their own government.

But the evidence points in that direction, and there are some points that are not in dispute. For instance, there is no doubt that CIA Old Boys and Likudniks had strong motives for seeking President Jimmy Carter's defeat in 1980.

Inside the CIA, Carter and his CIA Director Stansfield Turner were blamed for firing many of the free-wheeling covert operatives from the Vietnam era, for ousting legendary spymaster Ted Shackley, and for failing to protect longtime U.S. allies (and friends of the CIA), such as Iran's Shah and Nicaragua's dictator Anastasio Somoza.

As for Israel, Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin was furious over Carter's high-handed actions at Camp David in 1978 forcing Israel to trade the occupied Sinai to Egypt for a peace deal. Begin feared that Carter would use his second term to bully Israel into accepting a Palestinian state on West Bank lands that Likud considered part of Israel's divinely granted territory.

Former Mossad and Foreign Ministry official David Kimche described Begin's attitude in his 1991 book, The Last Option, saying that Israeli officials had gotten wind of "collusion" between Carter and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat "to force Israel to abandon her refusal to withdraw from territories occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state."

Kimche continued, "This plan prepared behind Israel's back and without her knowledge must rank as a unique attempt in United States' diplomatic history of short-changing a friend and ally by deceit and manipulation."

However, Begin recognized that the scheme required Carter winning a second term in 1980 when, Kimche wrote, "he would be free to compel Israel to accept a settlement of the Palestinian problem on his and Egyptian terms, without having to fear the backlash of the American Jewish lobby."

In his 1992 memoir, Profits of War, Ari Ben-Menashe, an Israeli military intelligence officer who worked with Likud, agreed that Begin and other Likud leaders held Carter in contempt.

"Begin loathed Carter for the peace agreement forced upon him at Camp David," Ben-Menashe wrote. "As Begin saw it, the agreement took away Sinai from Israel, did not create a comprehensive peace, and left the Palestinian issue hanging on Israel's back."

So, in order to buy time for Israel to "change the facts on the ground" by moving Jewish settlers into the West Bank, Begin felt Carter's reelection had to be prevented. A different president also presumably would give Israel a freer hand to deal with problems on its northern border with Lebanon.
CIA Within the CIA

As for the CIA Old Boys, legendary CIA officer Miles Copeland told me that "the CIA within the CIA" the inner-most circle of powerful intelligence figures who felt they understood best the strategic needs of the United States believed Carter and his naïve faith in American democratic ideals represented a grave threat to the nation.
"Carter really believed in all the principles that we talk about in the West," Copeland said, shaking his mane of white hair. "As smart as Carter is, he did believe in Mom, apple pie and the corner drug store. And those things that are good in America are good everywhere else. "

"Carter, I say, was not a stupid man," Copeland said, adding that Carter had an even worse flaw: "He was a principled man."

These attitudes of "the CIA within the CIA" and the Likudniks appear to stem from their genuine beliefs that they needed to protect what they regarded as vital interests of their respective countries.

The CIA Old Boys thought they understood the true strategic needs of the United States and Likud believed fervently in a "Greater Israel."

Read more

BBC HARDTALK with Kenneth O’Keefe on the Israeli Attack on FLOTILLA to Gaza

2010-06-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

BBC at least gives us news stories with investigative reports like this one. Think you'd see this guy on American TV? So, after seeing this, who do you believe? The Likud Party right-wing of the State of Israel's version? Or how about this ex-US Marine, with the scars to prove it? Note that Israel's response is all from the government, and none from the soldiers who were attacking the Flotilla. Has CNN interviewed even one of the members of the ship that was attacked? Fox News? Don't make me cry. One assumes they Israeli special ops soldiers are not allowed to talk. One of them will, someday and Americans will look as stupid and uninformed as they usually do.

Swine flu risk 'was vastly over-rated' by World Health Organisation

2010-06-29T10:54:00.000-07:00

Swine Flu was a scam only to give pharmaceutical industry cronies more cash. It's the old, "create the illusion of the problem, or the problem itself, then provide the solution." Big money here. Nothing new. From 9.11 to the fake war on "terror," it's all about the pocketbook. And it isn't ours, but giant multinational corporations and governments who want to control the public and put fear into the hearts and minds of Americans and anyone whom they might profit from.

By FIONA MACRAE Last updated at 8:23 AM on 25th June 2010

 Threats of a swine flu pandemic were 'vastly over-rated' by the World Health Organisation, an inquiry has concluded.
The Council of Europe last night also accused the UN's health arm of 'grave shortcomings' in the process that led it to declare a pandemic last year.
Plummeting confidence in health advice could prove 'disastrous' in the event of a severe future pandemic, parliamentarians at the Strasbourg-based senate said.

Read More

Termination Notice: McChrystal Sideshow Masks Murderous Reality

2010-06-24T11:11:00.000-07:00

Great article by one of OpEd News' best columnists and contributors, Chris Floyd. This quote from the article says it all. Considering that thousands of innocent Iraqi and Afghan men, women and children have been killed by the clearly illegal US war and occupation that "....we're supposed to care about the professional fortunes and political fates of the depraved, power-drunk thugs who run this brutal war machine?..." We have lost our way completely. The complicity of the US populace and mainstream media in this travesty is beyond reproach!

June 23, 2010
Termination Notice: McChrystal Sideshow Masks Murderous Reality
By Chris Floyd

Some people seem to think that the question of which uniformed goober is in charge of the imperial bloodbath in Afghanistan is a vitally important issue, worthy of endless exegesis. It is not. It is a meaningless sideshow. What does matter, vitally, deeply, urgently, is the imperial bloodbath itself, and the fact that it will go on, and on, no matter what Barack Obama does or doesn't do about Stanley McChrystal. [*Now we know what Barry did about Stanley. See update below.]  What really matters is this:

Ten civilians, including at least five women and children, were killed in NATO airstrikes in Khost Province, the provincial police chief said Saturday.

And this:
"We have received five bodies of civilians in our provincial public hospital," Khost provincial health director Amirbadshah Rahmatzai Mangal told AFP. "The dead include two female children of seven and eight years of age..."

McChrystal is in trouble for making disparaging remarks about fellow officers and civilian officials -- a military tradition that surely goes back to the armies of Hammurabi (and long before). Yet he faced no reprimand or remonstrance whatsoever for his admission, just a few months ago, that brazen war crimes were being carried out under his command:

"We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat," said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year. His comments came during a recent videoconference to answer questions from troops in the field about civilian casualties.
As I noted at the time:
Now, what would the authorities say if you or I shot "an amazing number of people who have never proven to be a threat?" Why, they would call us murderers -- even mass murderers. Yet this is precisely what "the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan" has just declared, on videotape. ...

Again, just think of it, let it sink in, attend to the word of the commander: "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat." Again: "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat." Again: "We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat."

Again: what do you call it when innocent, unarmed, defenseless people who "have never proven to be a threat" are gunned down in cold blood? What do you call such an act?
But such acts are not to be punished -- because they are an accepted part of the process of the military domination of foreign lands. Wanton murder of the innocent? No problem, no scandal, a one-day story. "Insubordination" toward a few imperial satraps whose hands are steeped in blood? Shock, horror, wall-to-wall coverage.  But again: McChrystal's fate does not matter. As Justin Raimondo notes (see the original for informative links):
Our empire of bases and global military presence has engendered a whole new subspecies of American, a class or caste that derives its income, its tradition, and in many cases its family history from the long record of US military intervention overseas. They are the knights of the American imperium, not only military but also civilians whose social, economic, and political interests are inextricably tied to the growth of the empire. This includes but is not limited to the military contractors, the administrators, the Washington policy wonks who come up with endless rationales for war and, really, the entire political class in Washington, and their vassals among the coastal elites.

Indeed. If McChrystal goes, another bureaucrat of death will take his place. Until the militarist empire itself is rolled back and broken up, we will continue to see, month after month, year after year, "an amazing number of people who have never proven to be a threat" killed in cold blood -- such as the two little girls who were slaughtered last weekend in Khost.  There they are, their bodies torn, their slender limbs twisted and broken, their lifeless eyes staring into eternal nothingness ... and we're supposed to care about the professional fortunes and political fates of the depraved, power-drunk thugs who run this brutal war machine?
***

UPDATE: Keep the Change "Another bureaucrat of death" indeed. Since the above post was written, Obama has appointed the top imperial proconsul of the age, bipartisan fave David Petraeus, to take direct control of the wars -- overt and covert -- in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Petraeus, as head of "Central Command" -- the core provinces of the eternal War of Terror -- is already in overall charge of the Af-Pak morass, having previously been in charge of the Iraq bloodbath.

This is No-Change with a vengeance -- as Obama himself made clear. The Washington Post reports:

[Obama] said [the move] should not be read by anyone as a change in the direction of the country's war effort.

"This is a change in personnel," Obama said, "but it is not a change in policy."
So the bitter harvest of dead children will go on. And on. And on. But the most important thing, of course, is that Obama looked "strong" in the savage squabbling for chunks of power amongst the jackals of the imperial court.

War is Making You Poor Act - Alan Grayson

2010-06-23T16:16:00.000-07:00

Alan Grayson interview on MSMBC - a brilliant bill in Congress, let's see if we can get support for it. Write your Congressperson now. Here's the website to support Grayson's ideas and bills.

June 23, 2010

"Shinto" by D. Loop/M. Kott, Santa Fe, NM 2010

2010-06-23T15:59:00.000-07:00

Dwight Loop (electronics) and Michael Kott (cello) live at Santa Fe Complex, May 2010.
Video slide show by DL.

Ray McGovern (Op Ed News)- Obama and Insubordination

2010-06-23T12:45:00.000-07:00

June 23, 2010
Obama and Insubordination: Is He Truman or Mr. Milquetoast?

By Ray McGovern

Journalist Michael Hastings has given Rolling Stone magazine a graphic account of the arrogance, disarray and ineptitude that distinguish what passes for President Barack Obama's policy on Afghanistan. For those of us with some gray in our hair, the fiasco is infuriatingly reminiscent of Vietnam.

In blowing off steam to Hastings, NATO/U.S. commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his top aides seem to have decided that, at this low point in the Afghanistan quagmire, political offense is the best defense for a military strategy sinking from waist to neck deep. In interviews with Hastings, McChrystal and his team direct mockery at many senior-level officials of the Obama administration. For instance, one of McChrystal's aides refers to Obama's national security adviser James L. Jones as a "clown."

Members of McChrystal's inner circle also quote the general as saying he was "pretty disappointed" with an Oval Office meeting and describing Obama as "intimidated" by McChrystal and other generals. Commenting on the controversy Tuesday, Obama said McChrystal and his team had shown "poor judgment" but the President added that he wanted to speak with McChrystal directly before making any decision on firing him. That happened today, according to press reports.

Two administration officials who are spared harsh criticism from McChrystal's team are Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who were considered key supporters of McChrystal's insistence last year that Obama boost U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan to about 100,000.

READ MORE: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Obama-and-Insubordination-by-Ray-McGovern-100623-721.html

Obama Gives BP a Get Out of Jail Free Card

2010-06-23T12:43:00.000-07:00

Obama Gives BP a Get Out of Jail Free Card
Max Kaiser Report (Russia Today)

Afghanistan a Mineral Treasure Trove - The story behind the story

2010-06-23T12:38:00.000-07:00

Webster Tarpley, on Russia Todayexplains in an interview very well, what is behind the "news" of extensive mineral deposits in Afghanistan. I think Tarpley's right. The Russians knew this. Everyone knew this. Why is it news now? That's the real question. Seems to be a set up for explaining to the American public that war is good, oil is good, let's stay and get the riches! Russia can tell you what happens when they kill a million Afghans in trying to secure these riches.

Why do we need to watch Russia Today for news and commentary that makes sense? Note that the interviewer makes Tarpley earn this fee by asking probing questions. Nice change from Wolf Blitzer's "We'll have to leave it there," routine.

The Terrorism Industry

2010-06-23T12:35:00.000-07:00

TV Gets it Right The Terrorism Industry
This is how it usually is. Agents, agent provocateurs, false-flag operations...all part of the territory of the War on Terror (or is it a war on us?) A TV show scenario mirrors real life.

Mark Rudd "Underground"

2010-06-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

Activist Extraordinaire Mark Rudd

Mark RuddWebsite Here!

Mark Rudd, and his book "Underground" documents a most important time in US history. A man of change, Mark Rudd was a teacher, educator, now retired as of 2007 - but still a community organizer, writer, broadcaster and activist, keeping the work for peace alive in Albuquerque, NM.

He is also has an Internet radio show on the Progressive Radio Network

But the book! Published by HarperCollins.
Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and, especially, your local independent bookseller.

From the book jacket:

In 1968, Mark Rudd led the legendary occupation of five buildings at Columbia University, a dramatic act of protest against the university’s support for the Vietnam War and its institutional racism. Rudd was the charismatic chairman of the Columbia chapter of SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, the largest radical student organization in the U.S. After a violent police bust, the Columbia occupation turned into a student strike that closed down the entire campus, turning Rudd into a national symbol of student revolt. Rudd went on to become the cofounder of the Weatherman faction of SDS which took control of the student organization and helped organize the notorious Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969.

But Mark Rudd wanted revolution.

Truth Will Out, Perhaps not in the U.S. (UK Guardian)

2010-06-23T01:03:00.000-07:00

This is where we are at in the world's eyes, this one from England. Our Justice System is Broken! Laws? What laws?
Human rights? No justice, no peace, really means just that. If the laws are not upheld by the government and their corporate or private agents, then there is anarchy. Is this what "they" want? No, we don't have to go that way, we have to DEMAND justice in all matters relating to the human condition. The peace will come when there is justice.

Rupert Skilbeck
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 June 2010 19.55 BST

Courts around the world are being asked to uphold society's right to the truth about human rights violations and to hold public inquiries. The "Don't Look Back" policy of the Obama administration fails to do the same for victims of rendition.

In 1972, a small guerrilla movement of students and workers emerged from the Araguaia River region in Brazil, seeking to foment a popular uprising to overthrow the military dictatorship that had been in power since 1964. Over the next two years the Brazilian army brutally suppressed the movement, arresting and torturing members. More than 60 disappeared, their fate still unknown.

With the restoration of democracy in 1982, legal proceedings were brought by the families of the disappeared who sought the truth about what happened to their sons, brothers and fathers, where they were buried, as well as an official recognition of their deaths. But the claims ran foul of Brazil's 1979 amnesty laws which prohibit any legal action over torture and killings by the military dictatorship. On 30 April this year, the country's supreme court upheld the amnesty, finding that the actions of the military regime were political in nature and therefore covered by the law.

Three weeks later, the question of the legitimacy of the amnesty was heard by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica in a different case brought by the family of one of the guerrillas. The family argued that the amnesty laws violated their right to information, their right to justice, and their right to the truth, all of which are elements of personal integrity protected by article 5 of the American convention on human rights.

At the Open Society Justice Initiative, we have filed an amicus curiae brief which argued that there is a legally enforceable right to the truth for both the victims of human rights violations and for society as a whole. Judicial decisions and soft law standards have confirmed that the right is a broad one, sufficient to allow the public to know about the underlying conditions that led to past abuses which should ensure that such conditions do not reoccur.

The long-awaited publication of the Saville report into Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland is an example of a very public truth-telling exercise. The unequivocal findings of the report were welcomed by the families of the victims as a vindication of their campaign for the truth, demonstrating the importance of that right even 38 years later. In his statement to the House of Commons, David Cameron quoted the family member of a victim who said "the truth coming out can help set people free." In a different context, William Hague's swift decision – as the new foreign secretary – to order a full public inquiry into allegations of involvement in torture by the previous government has been welcomed by the Council of Europe as a "proper response" that might be an example to other countries.

These efforts to expose the truth stand in stark contrast to the "Don't Look Back" policy of Barack Obama, who has made clear that there will be no accountability for human rights violations that occurred under the Bush administration. This week, the US supreme court declined to review the government claim of "state secrets" in the case of Mohamed Arar, the Canadian who was seized at JFK airport in New York on the basis of incorrect information provided by Canada's mounted police and then rendered to Syria for torture. In the absence of any US prosecutions, it appears that the Canadian mounted force is now mounting an investigation into crimes committed allegedly by US agents.

Also this week, the Justice Initiative announced the filing of a case against Macedonia to the European court of human rights for collusion in the CIA rendition of a German citizen, Khaled El-Masri, to Afghanistan, where he was held for four months in terrible conditions. The Strasbourg-based court is being asked to give an opinion on whether the behaviour of the CIA rendition team at Skopje airport amounted to torture, and whether by knowingly assisting in sending him to Afghanistan, Macedonia is responsible for what happened next. Legal proceedings in the US also fell victim to the "state secrets" doctrine, and now Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, seems to be maintaining the position of her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, in refusing even to acknowledge in public that the operation occurred.

The story of the secret rendition programme is sufficiently compelling to prevent it from being forgotten – and the full details will eventually be revealed. But given the attitude of the Obama administration, it seems that justice for the victims will not come from a public inquiry in the US, but from the dogged persistence of foreign investigators, lawyers, prosecutors, and judges who are determined to find the truth.

Rupert Skilbeck is a barrister and litigation director for the Open Society Justice Initiative in New Yor

"It's the End of the World as we know it?"

2010-06-23T00:44:00.000-07:00

Oil Rain in Louisianna. Nice going BP. Nice going regulators. We're in it deep.

Who Says You Can't Criticize Israel?

2010-06-23T00:37:00.000-07:00

No one, not on this blog! Any country acting like Israel would get the same treatment. Some scrutiny, please of this rogue country and it's far right "leaders."

June 20, 2010

Who says we can't criticize the state of Israel?

By Peter Ewart

Like a postage stamp that has been licked too often, a word can lose its power and authority if it is used indiscriminately.

So it is with the word "terrorist" that is now routinely applied by governments all over the world to demonize and marginalize political opposition. And likewise with the word "anti-semitic" which is a label stuck on just about anyone who is not in total support of the state of Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians.
Indeed, Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States, was given precisely that label after calling Israel an "apartheid state".

Even South African Judge Richard Goldstone, himself Jewish, who led a UN authorized fact-finding mission into Israel's invasion of Gaza last year has been called anti-semitic for his findings which have been labeled as "anti-Israel" by the Israeli government.

Closer to home, the aid organization Kairos had its funding cut off by the Harper government because of, the government alleges, its support for the boycott movement against Israel and its "anti-semitism". Kairos is a joint venture of thirteen Canadian churches and church organizations, including Catholic, Anglican, Christian Reformed, Evangelical Lutheran, Mennonite, Presbyterian, Society of Friends, and United Church.

The latest public figure to get the "anti-semitic" label is NDP MP for East Vancouver, Libby Davies. She has had this pinned on her because she expressed support for the international campaign to boycott and sanction Israel for its blockade of Gaza, as well as suggesting that Israel has been "occupying" the land since 1948.

Prime Minister Harper has since called for Davies to resign as deputy NDP leader and Liberal Bob Rae has accused her of "hostility and ignorance". Even some members of her own party, the NDP, have attacked her, with Thomas Mulcair NDP MP calling her comments "egregious" and out of step with her party.

It is quite interesting that, while the caucuses of the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP are very quick to jump on Davies, they have made no criticism of the killings by Israeli commandoes of the nine people on the ships attempting to break the blockade of Gaza by Israel.

It is also quite interesting that, as a 2007 BBC poll shows (see footnote 1), 52% of Canadians have a negative view towards Israel, while only 23% had a positive one. The question should be asked: Just who is out of step with who? Is it Libby Davies or is it the three federal parties in parliament who are out of step with the Canadian people?
Indeed, it is these same three federal political parties that have formed "The Canadian Parliamentary Committee to Combat Anti-semitism", the members of which are claiming that criticizing Israel is a "new form" of anti-semitism. Dylan Penner, founding member of Independent Jewish Voices, believes that the ultimate objective of this Parliamentary Committee is "to introduce legislation that would make it a crime to criticize Israel".

All of this raises serious questions about freedom of speech and right to conscience in Canada. Parliamentarians and Canadians themselves should have the right to criticize the policies and practices of any of the 190+ countries in the world as they see fit, and that includes Israel. If criticism of Israel is "off limits" and "illegal", how soon before it become a crime to criticize the Canadian government itself?

In an interview, Libby Davies has also said that there are other federal MPs who do not approve of Israeli actions, such as the blockade of Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon, but who "are actually afraid to speak out." According to her, this constitutes a new type of "McCarthyism" in Canada.

Why are they afraid to speak out? A number of analysts have commented about the strength of the Israel lobby in the U.S. and that members of Congress are afraid to criticize Israel for fear of being targeted by this well-financed lobby. Is that the case in Canada? More than a few believe that is also true (see footnote 2).

So what are the implications for politics in Canada if MPs are afraid to speak out because they fear reprisal from the lobbyists and supporters of a foreign government? For one thing, perhaps such MPs should not be in Parliament. If they are intimidated by these lobbyists, how can they be expected to stand up for their own constituents?

Secondly, rather than having a parliamentary committee examining and dissecting the beliefs of ordinary Canadians, maybe its time would be better spent looking at the power of lobbyists in Ottawa who lobby on behalf of foreign governments and who seek to make criticism of these governments off limits or even illegal.
Now that is a postage stamp that might just stick.

Peter Ewart is a writer and columnist based in Prince George, British Columbia. He can be reached at: peter.ewart@shaw.ca
(1) BBC World Service poll. March 6, 2007.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/06_03_07_perceptions.pdf
(2) Canada's Israel Lobby. By Peyton Vaughan Lyon, Professor Emeritus, Political Science, Carleton University.
http://www.theprogressivemind.info/?p=40424

Elena Kagan - Willing Accomplice

2010-06-23T00:06:00.000-07:00

This article on Crow on a Wire is yet another capitulation by President Obama. Is Kagan compromised by her involvement in the Siegelman? Was it on purpose? Or, is this yet another disappointing appointment by Obama. This is yet, another instance of just how far the US Justice Department has fallen. Brilliantly researched and speculation.

By Michael Collins

Should Elena Kagan be approved as a justice to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States?

As it turns out there's a supremely simple method of testing her suitability. Once applied, citizens of any political persuasion will see that her nomination should be rejected outright.

As Solicitor General of the United States, Kagan argued against an appeal to the Supreme Court by former Alabama Governor, Don Siegelman in November, 2009. The Siegelman prosecution is viewed by many as one of the gravest injustices of the modern era, a purely political prosecution initiated by the Gonzales Justice Department.

Forty four former state attorneys general were so concerned that they issued a public petition on Siegelman's behalf in 2007. The petition to the United States House of Representatives urged prompt investigation of the many shady dealings in the Siegelman case, before, during and after his trial. They framed their petition in this simple sentence: "The U.S. justice system should be above reproach." It wasn't.

READ MORE!

Vital Documentaries Series Post #1-Al Qaeda Doesn't Exist

2010-06-22T18:11:00.000-07:00

This is the first in a series at Crow on a Wire blog of important, interesting, thought provoking documentaries available on You Tube. This is a three part series. Click on "View other videos in this Playlist" on You Tube Screen following the first episode.

Think Al Qaeda is real? Think again! You have been deceived! It was created after 911 and for 911 propaganda purposes!

Astrological Summer Solstice 2010

2010-06-22T10:42:00.000-07:00

2010 Summer Solstice: June 21, 2010
by BARBARA HAND CLOW (HAND CLOW 2012.COM)

The Summer Solstice has arrived, so it is time to breathe, relax, and be sensual; it is time to become fully embodied.

Because the spring season was so characterized by exponential evolution, letting down will be difficult this summer unless you assess the great changes in your life and in the world.

Otherwise, you will be very confused because so much is going on, just so much chatter. It could be so easy to miss the summer's potential to help flesh out and deepen what you've been creating.

Take a look at your Spring Equinox intentions to see how you are doing, and also take note of other things you are involved in that you didn't even plan on.

Something very new is going on: In light of this spring's tripling of time acceleration, are you beginning to see that you and the planetary collective are capable of critical leaps that you never really imagined before? Are you beginning to feel that you are capable of advancing to levels beyond what you previously thought were possible?

You must be wondering whether this great acceleration during spring 2010 is going to increase even more?

Astrologically, due to coming eclipses with Grand Squares, it looks like the unique spring expansion will lock into entirely new forms during summer 2010.

MORE: Read here

McChrystal, The guy who covered up Pat Tillman...

2010-06-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

In Rolling Stone feature, McChrystal mocks Biden while aides slam Obama

By Agence France-Presse
Monday, June 21st, 2010 -- 11:07 pm

The US commander in Afghanistan mocks the vice president and denounces a top diplomat in a magazine interview, while his aides speak dismissively of President Barack Obama.

Tensions between General Stanley McChrystal and the White House are on full display in an unflattering profile in Rolling Stone of the commander of US and NATO forces in the Afghan war.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0621/rolling-stone-feature-mcchrystal-mocks-biden-aides-slam-obama/

Crows Sitting, Natives Restless

2010-06-21T23:45:00.000-07:00

Summer Solstice, 2010.

The Kuxan Suum shivers.

The Hunab Ku shifts.