Chicago – Ma’an – Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, said on Monday the Palestinian Authority (PA) urged him to step down after he criticized the PA’s treatment of a UN war crimes report. Falk confirmed reports that the joint PA-PLO mission to the UN in Geneva also delayed consideration in the UN Human Rights Council of his most recent report alleging Israeli abuses of Palestinians’ rights. Arabic-language news reports of the delay surfaced last week. Falk said PA officials formally approached him in February asking him to resign, arguing that he is unable to carry out his responsibilities since Israel detained him at Ben Gurion International Airport and deported him in late 2008. But, he stressed in an interview, “what they [the PA] say formally and what they say informally are quite different.” “Informally they say different things, things that are essentially untrue, that my health doesn’t me allow to do the job or that I’m a partisan of Hamas,” he added. Falk’s mandate is narrowly defined to include only the human rights record of the occupying power, Israel, in the occupied West Bank and Gaza – he does not report to the UN on the actions of the PA or the Hamas government in Gaza. But Falk did raise hackles in Ramallah when he publicly criticized the PA for delaying UN action on judge Richard Goldstone’s report that accused Israel and Palestinian militias of committing war crimes during the 2008-2009 Gaza war. Goldstone’s report dealt with the three-week attack that left some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead. President Mahmoud Abbas’ decision, under US pressure, to delay a vote in the UN Human Rights Council on Goldstone’s report provoked a political crisis, including calls for Abbas to step down, and for the dissolution of the PA. Rights groups slammed Abbas for harming their efforts to bring accused war criminals to justice. Now, Falk says Abbas’ men have done the same to his own report. He says the PA-appointed ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Ibrahim Khreishah, put forward a resolution in a recent plenary session of the Human Rights Council that delayed a discussion of his own report on Israeli rights violations from March until June. The resolution passed unanimously. Falk, a Princeton international law expert, said he is “not happy” about the PA’s actions, but has no plans to resign. “I feel that it’s very important not to succumb to this pressure…We’re supposed to be independent,” he added. Although Israel has not allowed him to visit the occupied territories since his deportation, Falk says he follows up with reports by respected human rights NGOs on the ground. He further said that, as in the case of the Goldstone report, the US and Israel could have pressured the PA into scuttling international action on his own report. Riyad Mansour, the PLO’s ambassador to the UN in New York, said he was not aware of any official calls for Falk to resign, and was “not involved” with the decision to delay consideration of Falk’s report. “I would check with Geneva about their reasoning,” he said over the phone from New York. Mansour added that he enjoys good relations with Falk and planned to meet with him on Thursday. Ma’an’s repeated phone calls to the Palestinian mission at the UN in Geneva were not returned. The PA’s apparent attempt to isolate Falk has also triggered criticism from civil society. Commentator Nadia Hijab, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Palestine Studies, wrote that Falk “has been attacked by Israel for years. But now, in a new twist, he is being hung out to dry by the Palestinian Authority in perhaps the unkindest cut of all.” Writing for Agence Global, Hijab also reported that in February, 11 Palestinian human rights groups wrote to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay expressing dismay at the PA actions toward Falk. According to Hijab, the rights groups’ letter called Falk’s reports “powerful instruments to advocate for Palestinian people’s rights.” Hijab also wrote that 19 Palestinian groups further wrote to Abbas, criticizing Falk’s treatment and “pointing out the repercussions for the Palestinians’ internationally recognized human rights. The delay of Falk’s report also caught the attention of Hamas leaders in Gaza. On Monday, The justice minister in the Hamas-controlled government in Gaza, Muhammad Faraj Al-Ghoul, held a news conference denouncing the delay as an effort to “kill the report and give Israel a cover for its crimes.”

MOUVEMENT ANARCHISTE DU CANADA/CANADIAN ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-MONTRÉAL:
MICHAEL SCHMIDT TOUR-CONFÉRENCE EN MONTRÉAL/MICHAEL SCHMIDT TOUR MEETING IN MONTRÉAL:
Molly a été mentionné précédemment la tournée livre pour promouvoir > en Ontario. Il y aura également une réunion à Montréal. Voici nouvelles du le blog Voix De Faits.
Molly has previously mentioned the book tour to promote 'Black Flame' in Ontario. There will also be a meeting in Montréal. Here's the news from the Voix De Faits blog.
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De la visite sud-africaine à Montréal
Pour les gens de Montréal, une activité qui risque fort d'être intéressante (tiré du blogue La Commune).
Black Flame tour-Conférence montréalaise avec l'auteur Michael Schmidt.
L'UCL-Montréal vous convie à une conférence de l'auteur sud-africain Michael Schmidt qui présentera son livre Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. La tournée ontarienne organisée par nos camarades de Common Cause s'arrêtera pour une seule conférence au Québec. La conférence montréalaise organisée par l'UCL aura lieu vendredi le 19 mars. Nous aurons plus de détails à vous fournir dans les prochains jours. Inscrivez donc cette soirée dès maintenant à votre agenda...
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The South African Visit to Montréal
For the people in Montreal, an activity that is likely to be interesting (from the La Commune blog).
Black Flame Montreal conference tour with author Michael Schmidt.
The UCL-Montréal invites you to a conference with the South African writer Michael Schmidt, who will present his book Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. The Ontario tour organized by our comrades of Common Cause will stop for a single conference in Québec. The Montreal conference organized by the UCL will be held Friday, March 19. We'll have more details for you in the coming days. Mark this evening now on your calendar ...

Want to see what happens to you if you honestly oppose imperial war? Want to see what happens to you if you honestly oppose a horrendous corporate boondoggle that will effectively kill genuine health care reform for years, if not generations? This is what happens to you: The Liberal Case Against Dennis Kucinich.

Yes, if you stand up against endless, pointless, profiteering slaughter in foreign lands, if you stand up against an astonishingly brazen, deeply dirty deal cut in the White House itself to enrich some of the most brutal, rapacious corporate sharks ever to feast, quite literally, on the bodies of nation's working people and the poor, then those Fightin' Progressives at Salon.com will come around and slap you with the cold, wet fish of their withering scorn.

They will join with the very model of a modern major general of the "Progressive Forces," Commander Kos his own self, to belittle you and denounce you -- no, not just denounce you, but accuse you, on national television, of being directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.

That's right; according to the Commander, if Dennis Kucinich dares to vote against whatever corporate blank check the bought-and-sold bagmen in Congress and the White House come up with to deliver millions of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans into the clutches of the health care and insurance conglomerates (which, as our Progressives themselves rightly remind us, are the ones with the real "death panels"), then Kucinich will be a mass murderer of Americans on a scale far outstripping the petty efforts of Al Qaeda and the Taliban during the long twilight struggle of our noble global Terror War.

And isn't it odd that these discrediting blasts from "the left" undermining Kucinich come just as his resolution for a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan is about to come up for debate on the House floor? Well, no, it's actually not odd at all; it is entirely predictable. The empire simply could not exist in its current form without the diligent self-policing of the "serious," "respectable" "left." They take great pains -- and inflict great pains -- in their efforts to mock and marginalize anyone who steps outside the narrow, suffocating boundaries of "savvy" Beltway gamesmanship. You cannot seriously oppose our empire of military dominion; you can only debate on the best, most "efficient" way to perpetuate it. You cannot seriously oppose the overwhelming sway of Big Money; you can only propose the mildest of mitigations of its depredations -- but only if Big Money agrees, of course.

The main thing you must be is savvy. You cannot be a real live Fightin' Progressive unless you know how to play the game. Look how the Commander's amen chorister at Salon, Alex Koppleman, drips sniffling scorn on Kucinich's legislative record: "of the 97 bills Kucinich has sponsored since taking office in 1997, only three have become law. Ninety-three didn't even make it out of committee." And even those three, Koppleman notes, were just silly little proclamations, of interest only to the hicks back in Kucinich's district somewhere out there in flyover land.

But just think what a howling pig circus the United States Congress has been during Kucinich's 13-year tenure in the House. Look around at the vast wreckage these poltroons have helped perpetrate, from the deregulation of the Bankster gangs to the imposition of draconian bankruptcy laws (championed by our super-progressive vice president) to the panicky, pants-wetting trashing of the constitution in the Patriot Acts and Military Commission Acts and Retroactive Immunity for Telecom Lawbreakers Act (supported by our super-progressive president) to support for the Hitlerian war crime of military aggression in Iraq (supported by our super-progressive secretary of state) to the redistribution of the nation's wealth (for generations) from working people and the poor to those same Banksters whose Congressionally-deregulated scams have plunged millions around the world into ruin.

This is only a fraction of an overall record of towering cupidity, stupidity and evil that almost beggars description. Why would anyone with even the slightest speck of honor or decency want to be considered a major, "savvy" contributor to such a legacy? And considering the conglomeration of political whores, bribe-takers, liars, warmongers, lackeys and outright lunatics that constitutes the bipartisan bulk of Congress, isn't it actually a badge of honor -- rather than a mark of shame -- for your legislation to be rejected by them?

Not for our "progressives." Koppelman's scorn for Kucinich's lack of "savvy" is palatable. His agreement with Kos's blood libel -- "holding people like Dennis Kucinich responsible for the 40,000 Americans that die each year from a lack of health care" -- is evident. The president who literally sold out genuine health care reform is not responsible. The Congress that concocted a series of hideous, confusing, corporate-crafted boondoggles that utterly reject the highly popular notion of a public option is not responsible. And evidently the dark, satanic mills of the health care, pharmaceutical and insurance industries are not responsible either.

No; Dennis Kucinich -- and "people like him" -- are responsible. Why? Because they cannot find it in their conscience to support what they fervently believe to be a harmful bill. This is their crime; to act according to their conscience on a piece of bad legislation that has somehow been elevated into a sacred totem, a holy grail by our respectable Fightin' Progressives. It doesn't matter what the Grail actually contains (or doesn't contain); all that matters is its symbolic significance as a great "victory" for our "progressive" president, and indeed, for all the progressive forces of our higher progressivism.

But what this "symbolic" victory will really do, of course, is lock into place -- for decades probably -- a rancid, corrupt and ill-serving system that will leave millions of the most vulnerable Americans at the untender mercy of corporate predators. However, if the bill were defeated, one could simply start all over -- with genuine reform this time.

But who wants that? It's too much like hard work. Symbolism is a lot easier than substance -- especially if you're a rootin', tootin', savvy, serious Fightin' Progressive. Anyway, symbolism is all you're gonna get from our imperial overlords. So you better just be happy with that little crumb. After all, as Commander Kos says, it's "a foot in the door." Who knows? If we all stay real serious and respectable, they just might throw us another little crumb somewhere down the line!

This, then, is what now passes for "the left" in America: snippy derision -- and thundering condemnation -- for anyone who dares suggest, even mildly, that a goddamn crumb is not good enough.
 

I felt nauseated when I heard that the big gesture by Joe Biden, in response to Israel announcing more settlements on his arrival in Jerusalem, was being late to dinner. Paul Woodward nails it:

The administration either needs to threaten to apply real pressure on the Israeli government, or, if it wants to confine itself to diplomatic gestures then it should do so under the tutelage of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In response to Israel’s latest contemptuous behavior, Biden could — he really could — have turned around and said adiós. He does after all belong to an administration that less than a year ago was advising Netanyahu to complete his “homework” on freezing settlements before it would be worth arranging a meeting.

I don’t think it would take that much by the U.S. government to break the Netanyahu coalition. Why not try? And yes, the U.S. are finally talking about a break in the special relationship; but Chris Matthews and the Washington Post both called East Jerusalem "disputed East Jerusalem." It’s not disputed. It’s annexed, unilaterally, in defiance of international law, the so-called future Palestinian capital.

Oh and here’s Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post saying it’s Biden’s mistake, and Obama doesn’t know how to reassure the Israelis.

Related posts:

photo: kamper vision via Flickr

So once again, here we are with the bigotry of the Catholic Church on display, this time coming to us from Denver, CO.

A few days ago, I first noticed the stories on how the Archdiocese of Denver had banned a child from re-enrolling at one of their schools because the parents were lesbians. Of course, the Archdiocese is defending the decision:

“The Church does not claim that people with a homosexual orientation are ‘bad,’ or that their children are less loved by God,” wrote Archbishop Charles J. Chaput in an article to be published in Thursday’s edition of the Denver Catholic Register.

It appears to me, that the Archdiocese has taken to heart the admonition from Exodus 20:5-6 :

You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.

But somehow, it seems the folks at the Archdiocese making this decision missed the admonitions from Jesus in Matthew 19:14:

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

Apparently, the Archdiocese (like many of the fundamentalist “Christians” organizations) gives far more credence to the Old Testament rather than the New Testament, even though they all profess their love for Jesus and his teachings.

My question for them is do they really want to take this path? Especially given the concurrent reports over the last couple of weeks about the Vatican Choir? Combined with allegations of physical and sexual abuse in a choir run by the Pope’s brother?

Maybe the Archdiocese and the Roman Catholic Church as a whole should once again be reminded of Jesus’s statement in John 8:7:

When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”

But then, this is the church that has been active in covering up for pedophile priests across the world for decades, so I think I already have the answer to my questions.

Tags: Bigotry, Catholic Church, Christianity, religious intolerance

2010 is the last year of the new century and millennium and is the tenth consecutive year of the United States’ war in Afghanistan and in the 15-nation area of responsibility subsumed under Operation Enduring Freedom. In early March American military deaths in the Greater Afghan War theater – Afghanistan, Cuba (Guantanamo Bay), Djibouti, Eritrea, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, the Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Yemen – surpassed the 1,000 mark.

This year is also the tenth year of the first ground and the first Asian war fought by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which wages wars from and not to protect the nations of the northern Atlantic Ocean.

2010 is the tenth and deadliest year in Washington’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) for targeted assassinations and untargeted “collateral damage.”

Originally designed for battlefield surveillance and reconnaissance, albeit often to call in lethal military strikes, drones have been employed by the U.S. since 2001 to identify and kill human targets.

The first “hunter-killer” unmanned combat air vehicle, the Predator, was used by the Pentagon in Bosnia in 1995 and later in the 78-day air war against Yugoslavia in 1999.

In 2001 Predators were equipped with Hellfire missiles and were deployed from Pakistan and Uzbekistan to launch attacks inside Afghanistan. The following year they were flown from the U.S. military base at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti for the same purpose in Yemen.

The Predator and its successor, the Reaper, capable of carrying fifteen times more weaponry and flying at three times the speed, have been used for deadly attacks in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and with particularly murderous effect in Pakistan since the autumn of 2008. They are equipped with cameras connected by satellite links to bases in the United States.

In October Vice Admiral Robert Moeller, deputy commander of U.S. Africa Command, announced that Reapers, “capable of carrying a dozen guided bombs and missiles,” [1] were deployed to Seychelles off the eastern coast of the African continent to patrol the Indian Ocean.

Radio Australia ran a story on March 8 that stated “US President Barack Obama may have taken his time to decide on his Afghanistan policy, but he’s also now become more of an enthusiast for drone missile strikes than his predecessor.” [2] In both Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as in Yemen.

Discussing a report by the New America Foundation, the station documented that deadly U.S. drone missile strikes on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border have been increased by 50 per cent since the Obama administration took over the White House a year ago January 20.

Citing the above-mentioned think tank, the Radio Australia report said there have been 64 drone strikes in South Asia in the past fourteen months compared to 45 under the George W. Bush administration between the invasion of Afghanistan in October of 2001 and January of 2009.

Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal, was interviewed and said “there is an average five to seven strikes a month although in January there were 11.”

He was further quoted describing the qualitative as well as the quantitative escalation of American drone warfare in Afghanistan and Pakistan: “The main drone is the ‘Predator’ which carries the ‘Hellfire’ anti-tank missile.

“The ‘Reaper,’ the older brother of the Predator, they made that so it could carry larger Hellfire missiles as well as it can carry, again, the 500 pound GPS (global position system)-guided bombs. So they’re very, you know, this is sort of a revolution in air warfare.” [3]

The Reaper carries a thousand pounds of munitions and is also equipped for the Sidewinder heat-seeking air-to-air missile. Plans for adding Stinger air-to-air missiles are underway.

In terms of the human cost of Obama’s 2008 Afghan war campaign pledge – “If we have actionable intelligence about high-level al Qaeda targets in Pakistan’s border region, we must act if Pakistan will not or cannot” – at the beginning of this year Pakistan’s influential Dawn News published an account of what that policy has meant to Pakistanis. In an article titled “Over 700 killed in 44 drone strikes in 2009,” the source, quoting Pakistani government statistics, wrote:

“Of the 44 predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians.”

For each alleged al-Qaeda or Taliban member killed by missiles fired from U.S. drones “140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities….On average, 58 civilians were killed in these attacks every month, 12 persons every week and almost two people every day.” [4]

The dead may have been armed or unarmed, males or females, adults or children. What they have in common is that they were targeted based on “actionable intelligence” provided by someone on the ground, not necessarily a disinterested party.

Last October, as the killing had begun in earnest, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions Philip Alston warned:

“My concern is that these drones, these Predators, are being operated in a framework which may well violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

“The onus is really on the government of the United States to reveal more about the ways in which it makes sure that arbitrary executions, extrajudicial executions, are not in fact being carried out through the use of these weapons.” [5]

Undaunted, the U.S. substantially intensified the attacks.

This January China’s Xinhua News Agency interviewed Pakistani political analyst Farrukh Saleem, who said that American drone missile attacks in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas had increased from 17 in 2008 to 43 in 2009 with more than 70 expected to be delivered this year.

Saleem was quoted warning that “Such attacks always trigger violence, suicide attacks and casualties in Pakistan. So more drone attacks mean more violence in Pakistan.” [6]

On the same day Senator John McCain was in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad and praised the drone attacks as “an effective part of the U.S. strategy.” [7]

It was reported last December 17 that a U.S. drone strike had killed at least 20 people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency and on the 27th that 13 more were killed in the same region.

Since the New Year began the lethal attacks have only intensified. The following is not an attempt at a comprehensive account, but is gathered from assorted press reports.

On January 1 it was reported that five people were killed and several more injured by two American drone attacks east of the North Waziristan capital. As to the identities of the slain, Reuters quoted a local security official as saying, “The bodies were burned beyond recognition. We are trying to determine their identity.” [8] The previous night two more were killed and several injured in another strike.

Reports continued to detail missile strikes and deaths in the nation’s tribal areas.

January 3: Five more people were killed in North Waziristan in a drone attack.

January 6: At least thirteen were killed and eight wounded by two back-to-back missile strikes. “According to Pakistan’s Geo News, a suspected drone fired two missiles at a house in the Datta Khel region in the first attack, killing seven people.

“Another strike occurred as local people began retrieving bodies from the rubble of the house, killing five people. The identities of those killed in the attacks were unknown.” [9]

January 8: Five were killed in a village in North Waziristan.

January 9: An American drone fired two missiles into a village, Ismail Khan, in North Waziristan which killed four people.

January 13: Thirteen people were killed in the village of Tappi in the same agency. “A senior security official confirmed the death toll, and said four missiles were fired from unmanned planes in the remote area.” [10]

January 15: Fifteen were killed in the village of Zannini in North Waziristan. Six were killed in the village of Bichi.

January 17: At least twenty were killed in the Shaktoi area of South Waziristan.

January 19: Six people were killed in the village of Booya in North Waziristan according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

January 24: Pakistani insurgents claimed to have shot down a U.S. drone in North Waziristan, one of eight drones seen flying over the area.

January 29: Between six and fifteen people were killed in the North Waziristan town of Muhammad Khel in a reported attack on the Haqquani Network by three American missiles.

February 2: The U.S. fired as many as eight missiles into four villages in North Waziristan, killing twenty nine people.

February 14: Five people were killed in a drone attack in the same agency. At least three others were wounded.

February 15: A drone strike allegedly killed a Chinese Uighur separatist leader in the same district.

February 17: A U.S. missile strike killed three and injured two victims in North Waziristan.

February 18: Four people were killed in a missile strike on a vehicle in the same agency.

February 24: At least thirteen alleged militants were killed in a U.S. drone attack in the Dargah Mandi area of North Waziristan.

March 8: An American drone fired five missiles into a house near Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan, killing at least five people and wounding four.

Approximately 160 people have been killed in drone missile strikes in Pakistan in slightly over two months this year. If that pace continues, 2010 will be far deadlier than the year before: 960 to 700. If, as seems more likely, the amount of the attacks increases, the death toll will be even higher than the nearly 140 per cent increase the above extrapolation threatens.

Drone missile attacks are increasingly becoming the weapon of choice of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (as in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq), the Joint Special Operations Command (Yemen) and the Air Force, which as of last year had 195 Predators and 28 Reapers.

All indications are that they will soon have more.

This year the Obama administration has sought from Congress $33 billion more for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq “on top of a record request for $708 billion for the Defense Department next year.” [11]

With the new Quadrennial Defense Review, “The pilotless drones used for surveillance and attack missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan are a priority, with a goal of speeding up the purchase of new Reaper drones and expansion of Predator and Reaper drone flights through 2013.” [12]

A February 1 article called “China, Iran Prompt U.S. Air-Sea Battle Plan in Strategy Review,” revealed that in line with the new Quadrennial Defense Review a “joint Air Force-Navy plan would combine the strengths of each service to conduct long-range strikes that could utilize a new generation of bombers, a new cruise missile and drones launched from aircraft carriers.” [13]

As the U.S. is massively expanding its military buildup on the Pacific island of Guam, “The Army is building a missile defense system on the island and the Air Force is adding more drones.” [14]

In mid-January prominent U.S. senator Carl Levin called for “using drones to launch airstrikes” in Yemen, adding the demand for “everything from physical actions that could be accomplished in terms of use of drones or air attacks” to “clandestine actions.” [15]

Regarding the strengthening of military ties between the U.S. and Yemen, a Russian news source disclosed that “Under a new classified cooperation agreement, the U.S. would be able to fly cruise missiles, fighter jets or unmanned armed drones against targets in the country, but would remain publicly silent on its role in the airstrikes.” [16]

In late January the Wall Street Journal reported:

“The U.S. military’s involvement in Yemen has already begun to grow….[T]he U.S. has increased the number of surveillance drones flying over Yemen, as well as the number of unmanned aircraft outfitted with missiles capable of striking targets on the ground, according to a senior U.S. official with direct knowledge of the deployments.

“Most drones operating outside of Iraq and Afghanistan are controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency, but the official said the drones operating over Yemen belong to the military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command.” [17]

The commander of Joint Special Operations Command until 2008 was now General Stanley McChrystal, chief commander of what will soon be 150,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Drone missile assassinations and the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians that often accompany them are an integral component of his counterinsurgency strategy in South Asia. The qualitative escalation of drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan began when McChrystal replaced David McKiernan as top U.S. and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force commander in Afghanistan last June.

In other parts of the world, the Pentagon is to contribute military drones for the Northern Coasts maneuvers in Finland this September, the “largest naval military exercise that has ever been seen in Finnish territorial waters.” [18]

A resolution issued by the Finnish Peacefighters in Lapland last month mentioned “a program on Finnish TV about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles being tested in Lapland at the Kemijarvi Airfield. This actual training area stretches to the Russian border and follows the border for tens of kilometers.

“The strategy for Star Wars, which the US is developing, means that the pilotless plane is directed from a command center in Nevada, and follows the terrain and movements on a data screen thousands of kilometers away and maneuvers the drones. These drones have been used in Afghanistan and they have killed a lot of civilians.” [19]

While Stanley McChrystal was commander of the Joint Special Operations Command the U.S. conducted eleven deadly predator attacks in Iraq in April of 2008. At the time “Defense Secretary Robert Gates prodded the Air Force to do more to rush drones to the war zone.”

An American newspaper reported at the time that “Commanders are expected to rely more on unmanned systems as 30,000 U.S. troops sent last year are withdrawn. The military has dozens of Predators in Iraq and Afghanistan. In all it operates 5,000 drones, 25 times more than it had in 2001.” [20]

Last December the government of Venezuela called on the world community to condemn incursions into its airspace by U.S. military drones operating from Aruba and from Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles. The type of drones that flew for several days over Venezuelan territory wasn’t specified, but under both bilateral and NATO military obligations the Netherlands would not refuse the U.S. the right to station Predator and Reaper drones on bases in their Caribbean island colonies.

The United States has not only increased its arsenal of unmanned aerial vehicles by twenty five times over the past decade, it has massively increased the range and lethality of its hunter-killer drones. A recent report disclosed that beginning in 2008 the Air Force Research Laboratory started to “build the ultimate assassination robot,” described as “a tiny, armed drone for U.S. special forces to employ in terminating ‘high-value targets.’” [21]

Formerly special forces teams were deployed or cruise missiles were fired to assassinate intended victims. In the case of the second and frequently the first the risk was that they couldn’t be used twice.

Predator and Reaper drones return after missions and their supply of Hellfire missiles is replenished for further deadly attacks.

They have become Washington’s preferred 21st century weapons for perpetrating international assassinations.

1) Associated Press, October 25, 2009
2) Radio Australia, March 8, 2010
3) Ibid
4) Dawn News, January 2, 2010
5) BBC News, October 28, 2009
6) Xinhua News Agency, January 8, 2010
7) Ibid
Reuters, January 1, 2010
9) ADN Kronos International, January 6, 2010
10) Agence France-Presse, January 14, 2010
11) Associated Press, January 12, 2010
12) Ibid
13) Bloomberg News, February 1, 2010
14) Voice of America News, January 19, 2010
15) Press TV, January 13, 2010
16) Russian Information Agency Novosti, December 30, 2009
17) Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2010
18) Helsingin Sanomat, January 28, 2010
19) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/message/44296
20) USA Today, April 29, 2008
21) Wired, January 5, 2010

Source: Yahoo Finance

House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank caused a bit of an uproar Friday when he suggested the U.S. government does not guarantee the debts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Rep. Frank later recanted and backed a Treasury Department statement reassuring investors that, yes, Fannie and Freddie Mae debt is guaranteed by the U.S. government. “Going forward,” he said in a statement, we “will make sure that there are no implicit guarantees, hints, suggestions, or winks and nods…we will be explicit about what is and is not an obligation of the federal government.”

But after years of winks and nods, there’s no doubt that Fannie and Freddie now enjoy an explicit guarantee, according to most observers. The U.S. government placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in conservatorship in September 2008: “This means that the U.S. Taxpayer now stands behind $5 trillion of GSE debt,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

The problem is that $5 trillion of so-called agency paper is not treated as if it is a debt of Uncle Sam for accounting purposes, says Richard Suttmeier, chief market strategist at Niagara International Capital and ValueEngine.com.

“Get it on the balance sheet – that’s where it belongs,” Suttmeier says. “Add it to the $14.2 trillion in [federal] debt and let’s move on.”

Another Time Bomb Ticking But $5 trillion is a lot of money – even by government standards — and moving on may be the problem because of ongoing problems in the housing market, Suttmeier says. “There’s a general concern on Main Street U.S.A. that ‘my neighbors are throwing in their keys, there’s more for sale signs in my community…do I want to buy a new home, risking there’s still downside risk to housing?’ ”

Noting the Case-Shiller 20-City Home Price Index is still 50% above 1999 levels and mortgage delinquencies are still rising despite the rebound in GDP, Suttmeier says “victory is nowhere in sight, particularly when the drain we’re going to see from Fannie and Freddie is unlimited losses between now and the end of 2012 — on top of the $400 billion that’s already been allocated.”

Coincidentally (or not), the FDIC is allowing U.S. banks until 2012 before forcing them to fully write-down bad or toxic loans, which is “another time bomb ticking,” Suttmeier says. “They’re hoping the public market comes back into the mortgage arena, which is going to be hard to do.”

Unlimited losses from Fannie and Freddie? Keeping zombie banks alive on the backs of the taxpayer? Suttmeier’s right: There’s no accounting for

Jerusalem, March 10, 2010 (Pal Telegraph; by Jonathan Cook) - Israel has been told that its accession to an exclusive club of the world's most developed economies is all but assured when the 30 member states meet in May.

But a draft report of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), seen by The National, concedes that Israel has breached one of the organisation's key requirements on providing accurate and transparent data on its economic activity.

The information supplied by Israel, the report notes, includes not only the economic activity of its citizens inside its recognised borders but also Jewish settlers who live in the occupied territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan in violation of international law.

Israel's accession to the OECD on such terms threatens to severely embarrass many of the organisation's member states, especially those in the European Union that are publicly committed to avoiding collusion with the occupation.

The OECD report proposes that these legal difficulties may be circumvented by asking Israel to produce new statistics within a year of its accession excluding the settler population - even though, an OECD official has admitted, Israel would have the power to veto such a demand after it becomes a member.

"The OECD seems to be so determined to get Israel through its door that it is prepared to cover up the crimes of the occupation," said Shir Hever, a Jerusalem-based economist.

Israel has been lobbying for nearly 20 years to be admitted to the OECD, founded in 1961 for wealthy industrialised democracies to meet and co-ordinate economic and social policies. It includes the United States and most of Europe.

"The financial privileges are relatively modest, but there is great prestige to being accepted," Mr Hever said. "Israel has worked so hard to gain admission because it believes accession will confer international legitimacy on its occupation."

Several countries with a lower development level than Israel have already been accepted, including Turkey, Mexico and the Czech Republic.

Israel's past rejections, it is widely assumed, were because many states were uncomfortable about admitting Israel while it was occupying the Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank and the Syrian-owned Golan Heights.

However, Israel was formally invited to begin discussions about membership in 2007 after intense lobbying by Stanley Fischer, the governor of the Bank of Israel. Membership is expected to bring financial stability to Israel's economy, attract investment and reduce the country's risk premium.

The OECD's secretary general, Angel Gurria, visited in January, after a review of Israel's economy, and suggested that admission this year was a sure thing.

However, a leaked draft report by the OECD's committee on statistics, produced last month after the review, shows there are major problems with the data presented by Israel.

According to its rules, the OECD takes account of economic activity outside a candidate state's recognised borders in very limited circumstances, such as with remittances from migrant workers.

But given that this status does not apply to the illegal settlers living in the occupied territories, the OECD committee argues that either the settlers be excluded from the data or everyone living in the territories - including Palestinians - should be factored in.

"Israel has been caught out because it has always refused, even in its own internal data, to differentiate between Israel and the occupied territories," Mr Hever said. Both East Jerusalem and the Golan have been annexed by Israel in violation of international law.

"The OECD is treating Israel as though it has seven million citizens when, in reality, it has 11 million subjects, of whom four million are Palestinians living under occupation," Mr Hever said. "If they were included in the figures submitted to the OECD, Israel would have to be refused accession because of the enormous disparities in wealth."

Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, noted recently that there was a 20:1 ratio in the difference in gross domestic product per capita between an Israeli and a Palestinian living in Gaza.

But rather than conclude that Israel has failed to meet the organisation's entry criteria, the committee proposes a workaround: Israel can be accepted to the organisation and given a year to submit new data excluding the settlers.

Tim Davis, an OECD official with the statistics committee in Paris, said he could not comment on the report because its contents were confidential but agreed that there was nothing to stop Israel reneging on such a commitment in the future. "In a case like that, nothing could be done in practice. We work on the basis of co-operation, not pressure."

Israel is reported to have failed other entry conditions, including corruption and copyright violations.

The OECD has required member states to crack down on corrupt practices since it approved a convention against bribery in 1997. Israel, however, was ranked in 32nd place in a major index on corruption last year, with much of it relating to the country's US$6 billion arms industry.

European and US defence firms have threatened to derail Israel's OECD bid if it does not clean up its act.

Israel is also believed to be violating intellectual property rights, again in breach of OECD rules. US and Swiss firms have accused Israel of failing to regulate the international marketing of drugs produced by its largest pharmaceuticals company, Teva.

Israel's bid for OECD membership has been opposed by the leaders of its Arab minority, one-fifth of the population. Last month the Higher Follow-Up Committee, the minority's main political body, petitioned the OECD to reject Israel.

It has pointed out that half of Israel's Arab citizens are living below the poverty line, a rate three times higher than among Israeli Jews, and that on average Arab citizens earn salaries that are one-third less than Jews. Mohammed Zeidan, head of the committee, blamed the disparities in wealth on what he called Israel's "racist and discriminatory polices".

Another OECD report, published in January, showed that, even on the basis of Israel's figures excluding the Palestinians, Israel would still have the widest social gaps of any member state if it were accepted.

This article first appeared in The National.

Unemployment decreased in nine U.S. states in January, led by an improvement in Michigan that demonstrates factories are driving the economic rebound. Michigan's jobless rate fell to 14.3 percent, still the highest in the nation, from 14.5 percent in December, according to figures issued today by the Labor Department in Washington. Nationwide, unemployment unexpectedly fell to 9.7 percent from 10 percent, the Labor Department reported last month. The jobless rate climbed in 30 states at the start of 2010, today's report showed, signaling the thawing of the labor market is not broad-based after the loss of 8.4 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007. Industrial states like Michigan are benefiting as overseas demand rebounds and companies including General Motors Co. call back some dismissed workers.

Coming up at 12 Noon Pacific — 3pm Eastern — 20:00 GMT
Live Broadcast from Canada — Stay Tuned for Live Breaking News from Calgary Canada
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LIVE KEVIN BARRETT Breaking News BROADCAST –Splitting the Sky — attempted arrest of Bush Trial
Splitting-The-Sky trial report including Splitting the Sky himself, Anthony Hall & Cynthia McKinney. LIVE FROM CANADA– WE ARE EXPECTING a call-in from Splitting-the-Sky and supporters Professor Anthony Hall of the University of Lethbridge and former Presidential Candidate Cynthia McKinney, who will give us an update on STS trial currently underway in Canada.

BELOW: “Professor Anthony J. Hall gives context and background on the trial of Mohawk activist, Splitting the Sky. STS attempted a citizens arrest on George W. Bush in Calgary, AB, Canada on March 17th 2009.”

Watch for Live Broadcast STS Updates Below.
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Last week, the German Constitutional Court issued a much-anticipated decision, striking down its data retention law as violating human rights. It was an important victory for Europe’s Freedom Not Fear movement, which was formed to oppose the EU Data Retention Directive. But it was also a reminder of the political work which remains to be done to defeat it.

When the European Union first passed the Data Retention Directive in 2006, despite a hard-fought campaign by European activists, it seemed like the beginning of the end for Internet privacy. The directive sought to require telecommunications service providers operating in Europe to retain a detailed history of each of their customers' activity for up to 2 years for possible use by law enforcement; including phone calls made, web pages viewed, and emails sent and received.

The response from European citizens was swift and outraged. Under the banner of Freedom Not Fear, mass protests were held in cities all across Europe and beyond. The charge was led by the German Working Group on Data Retention (AK Vorrat), which in 2007 filed a class-action lawsuit of nearly 35,000 people challenging the German law.

The suit's complaints were mostly upheld by last week's German Constitutional Court decision. The court held that the blanket data retention mandated by the EU directive violated Article 10 of the German Constitution, which guarantees the basic right to private life and correspondence. The Court said that an infrastructure of exploratory surveillance results in an exceptional intensity of interference with human rights, which must be proportionately protected with appropriate safeguards. It also significantly narrowed the options for similar EU retention laws on other types of data. The court ordered the immediate deletion of all the data stored since the law went into effect in 2008 and ordered the suspension of data collection until a revised national law is proposed.

However, the court did choose to leave many important questions about the EU directive unanswered. In highlighting the need for increased safeguards, the court failed to recognize that the storage of data itself is what violates human rights. For instance, a survey of German citizens in 2008 found that 1 in 2 people would not have conversations with counselors or therapists by phone or email because of their concern about data retention.

A bolder stance was taken in October 2009 by the Romanian Constitutional Court, which ruled that the EU directive fundamentally violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to respect for private life and correspondence. Data retention itself, the court wrote, is "likely to overturn the presumption of innocence and to transform a priori all users of electronic communication services or public communication networks into people suspected of committing terrorism crimes or other serious crimes." As a result, all citizens would become "permanent subjects to this intrusion into their exercise of their private rights to correspondence and freedom of expression."

The rulings in Romania and now Germany set the stage for an imminent series of decisions on the status of national data retention laws across Europe. The recent Bulgarian vote on data retention legislation met with sharp criticism and protests. Petitions against the Belgian data retention law are available in both French and Flemish. The constitutional challenge against the Retention of Data Bill brought by Digital Rights Ireland may be referred to the European Court of Human Rights. In the meantime, despite the fact that the European Commission won its lawsuit against the government of Sweden for failing to implement the directive, the minimal penalty turns out to be worth the political risk.

In order to overturn a directive, the European Commission, Parliament, and Council have to agree. Viviane Reding, the incoming European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, declared at her confirmation hearings her dedication to defending the right to privacy. The members of the European Parliament, inaugurating their new term, flexed their political muscle when they recently rejected assenting to the SWIFT agreement that would have enabled the wholesale transfer of Europeans' financial data to the US. The European Council, representing the ministries of the individual Member States, will respond to the political climate in their home countries.

All in all, the threats to privacy and free speech posed by the Data Retention Directive are on their way to being nullified. In Germany, AK Vorrat launched its campaign against the new law being devised and set its sights on ending data retention on the European level. They will need the help of citizens across Europe to raise awareness and speak out for their rights on national levels.

Freedom Not Fear is planning another series of protests later this year – stay tuned to Deeplinks or sign up for FNF's mailing list to find out what is being planned near you.

I’ve seldom seen so much rubbish written by people who ought to know better in a single day. Many able people have heaped the scorn and incredulity on three articles, one a piece on Rahm Emanuel slotted to run in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, another an artfully packed laudatory piece on Timothy Geithner by John Cassidy in the New Yorker and a more even handed looking one (I stress “looking”) in the Atlantic.

Ed Harrison has skillfully shredded parsed the Geithner pieces . Simon Johnson thrashed the New Yorker story. A key paragraph below:

The main feature of the plan, of course, was – following the stress tests – to communicate effectively that there was a government guarantee behind every major bank or quasi-bank in the United States. Of course this works in the short-term – investors like such guarantees. But there’s a good reason we usually don’t guarantee all financial institutions – or act happy when other countries do the same. Unconditional bailouts lead to trouble, encouraging reckless risk-taking and undermining responsible governance. You can’t run any form of reasonable market system when some big players hold “get out of bankruptcy free” cards.

Banking expert Chris Whalen was so disturbed by the numerous distortions in the New Yorker piece that he had already fired off a long letter to the editor by the time I pinged him, with these starting paragraphs:

Jack Cassidy tells us that “Timothy Geithner’s financial plan is working—and making him very unpopular.” Unfortunately this is completely wrong. Cassidy’s comment just illustrates why the New Yorker has fallen into such obscurity, namely because it is more Vanity Fair than its vivacious sibling and unable to perform critical journalism.

In fact, the banking system is continuing to sink under bad loans and even worse securities losses. Telling the public that the banks are “fixed” is irresponsible. Unfortunately this false perception is widespread, including among major media such as CNBC and also with a number of my clients in the hedge fund world.

And from Marshall Auerback, who had a ringside view of the aftermath of the Japanese bubble:

Cassidy’s article brings to mind a retort by Chou En Lai when he was asked about the success of the French Revolution. He said, “It’s too early to tell”. Yet here we have John Cassidy from the New Yorker and Joshua Green from The Atlantic both making the assumption that the Geithner plan “worked”. This whole line about “taxpayers to recover bailout money” is based on an accounting fraud, because accounting abuses are the primary means by which TARP recipients have repaid bailout money — putting us at greater risk. That may seem paradoxical, but the rush to repay is driven by a desire to have unrestrained executive bonuses (a very bad thing associated with far greater accounting fraud and failures — requiring future, larger taxpayer bailouts) and accounting abuses produce the (fictional) ability to repay the United States (primarily by failing to recognize existing losses). The TARP recipients weakened their financial condition, and increased moral hazard, when they rushed to repay the TARP funds. Both factors increase the risk of making more expensive future bailouts more likely.

Yves here. The reason that people who can discern clearly what is afoot are so deeply disturbed is simple, and all the comments touch on it. The campaign to defend Geithner and Emanuel, both architects of the administration’s finance friendly policies has gone beyond what most people would see as spin into such an aggressive effort to manipulate popular perceptions that it is not a stretch to call it propaganda.

This strategy, of relying on propaganda to mask their true intent, has become inevitable, given the strategic corner the Obama Adminstration has painted itself in. And this campaign has become increasingly desperate as the inconsistency between the Adminsitration’s “product positioning” and observable reality become increasingly evident.

Recall how we got here. Early in 2009, the banking industry was on the ropes. Both the stock and the credit default swaps markets said that many of the big players were at serious risk of failure. Commentators debated whether to nationalize Citibank, Bank of America, and other large, floundering institutions.

The case for bold action was sound. The history of financial crises showed that the least costly approach is to resolve mortally wounded organizations, install new management, set strict guidelines, and separate out the bad loans and investments in order to restructure and sell them. An IMF study of 124 banking crises concluded that regulatory forbearance, the term of art for letting impaired banks soldier on, found:

The typical result of forbearance is a deeper hole in the net worth of banks, crippling tax burdens to finance bank bailouts, and even more severe credit supply contraction and economic decline than would have occurred…

Shuttering sick banks is hardly a radical idea; the FDIC does it on a routine basis. So the difference here was not in the nature of the exercise, but its operational complexity.

This juncture was a crucial window of opportunity. The financial services industry had become systematically predatory. Its victims now extended well beyond precarious, clueless, and sometimes undisciplined consumers who took on too much debt via credit cards with gotcha features that successfully enticed into a treadmill of chronic debt, or now infamous subprime and option-ARM mortgages.

Over twenty years of malfeasance, from the savings and loan crisis (where fraud was a leading cause of bank failures) to a catastrophic set of blow-ups in over the counter derivatives in 1994, which produced total losses of $1.5 trillion, the biggest wipeout since the 1929 crash, through a 1990s subprime meltdown, dot com chicanery, Enron and other accounting scandals, and now the global financial crisis, the industry each time had been able to beat neuter meaningful reform. But this time, the scale of the damage was so great that it extended beyond investors to hapless bystanders, ordinary citizens who were also paying via their taxes and job losses. And unlike the past, where news of financial blow-ups was largely confined to the business section, the public could not miss the scale of the damage and how it came about, and was outraged.

The widespread, vocal opposition to the TARP was evidence that a once complacent populace had been roused. Reform, if proposed with energy and confidence, wasn’t a risk; not only was it badly needed, it was just what voters wanted.

But incoming president Obama failed to act. Whether he failed to see the opportunity, didn’t understand it, or was simply not interested is moot. Rather than bring vested banking interests to heel, the Obama administration instead chose to reconstitute, as much as possible, the very same industry whose reckless pursuit of profit had thrown the world economy off the cliff. There would be no Nixon goes to China moment from the architects of the policies that created the crisis, namely Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers.

Defenders of the administration no doubt will content that the public was not ready for measures like the putting large banks like Citigroup into receivership. Even if that were true (and the current widespread outrage against banks says otherwise), that view assumes that the executive branch is a mere spectator, when it has the most powerful bully pulpit in the nation. Other leaders have taken unpopular moves and still maintained public support.

Obama’s repudiation of his campaign promise of change, by turning his back on meaningful reform of the financial services industry, in turn locked his Administration into a course of action. The new administration would have no choice other that working fist in glove with the banksters, supporting and amplifying their own, well established, propaganda efforts.

Thus Obama’s incentives are to come up with “solutions” that paper over problems, avoid meaningful conflict with the industry, minimize complaints, and restore the old practice of using leverage and investment gains to cover up stagnation in worker incomes. Potemkin reforms dovetail with the financial service industry’s goal of forestalling any measures that would interfere with its looting. So the only problem with this picture was how to fool the now-impoverished public into thinking a program of Mussolini-style corporatism represented progress.

How did the Administration and financial services message control teams work together?

The first was the refusal to consider investigations of any kind. Obama is widely reported to have studied the early days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration for inspiration; it would be impossible for him to miss the dramatic steps FDR took, including supporting the continuation of a Senate Banking Committee investigation into the misdeeds of the Roaring Twenties, the Pecora Commission. The Pecora Commission not only kept the bankers on the defensive, but it also did the forensic work into the abuses. It was critical to bring the nefarious practices to light to devise durable and lasting reforms.

Why were there no inquiries into how the firms that needed bailouts got themselves into a mess? This was an obvious and comparatively easy avenue of inquiry which would make a great deal of useful background accessible and identified issues for further examination. For instance, after the rescue of UBS, the Swiss Federal Banking Commission required UBS to provide an extensive report of what went wrong, and also had the bank make considerable portions of that information public, via a special report to its shareholders. Yet no US firm has been asked to make any explanation of how it managed its affairs so badly as to require extensive public support to keep from failing.

The choice here was obvious. A refusal to investigate was tantamount to a refusal to reform. A good understanding of what had happened was essential, not merely to develop sound new rules, but also to keep the industry from muddying the waters, which would be easy to do, given how complex and opaque many of the products are

More compelling evidence of the Administration’s lack of interest in reining in the money-changers came via Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s first presentation on his reform plan, which was more accurately a plan to have a plan. It was widely criticized for its sketchiness, but most observers missed the true significance. Had the Obama transition team done any serious thinking about the financial crisis? Obviously not, because you don’t need to think too hard if the game plan is to go back to business as usual to the extent possible. Geither’s presentation came nearly three weeks after Obama was sworn in, and all its initiatives were Bush/Paulson wine in new bottles: a new go at the failed idea of having the government overpay for bad bank assets; “stress tests” to put more discipline around the process of handing out TARP funds to the needy; and a mortgage modification program which pretended to be able to square the circle of saving borrowers without taking on investors in mortgage securitizations.

Geithner’s not-much-of-a-plan exemplified the second tool in the Obama campaign to sell doing as little as possible to the financiers: the Theory of Positive Thinking.
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That notion has a proud tradition in America and was much in evidence in the run-up to the crisis. It promises that the economy will be fine as long as everyone thinks happy thoughts about it. For instance, I noted in a March 2007 blog post that while the tone of the Financial Times as of March 2007 had become generally grim, the US had become a Tinkerbell market, where valuations are held aloft by faith, and participants conspire to stoke true belief. And as the crisis wore on, other magical personages intervened. As a hedge fund manager who writes as Augustus Melmotte noted,

The market responded with enthusiasm to reports that the Tooth Fairy has agreed to acquire Lehman. The purchase price has not yet been determined and will be set by Dick Fuld wishing upon a star, clicking his heels three times, and being transported back to that magical place where Lehman still sells for over $70 per share….. Meanwhile, the SEC has announced an investigation of mean, evil, bad short-seller David Einhorn. …. Einhorn reportedly suggested that the Tooth Fairy does not exist and that wishing upon a star is not a wholly reliable price discovery mechanism. Christopher Cox, chairman of the SEC, said, “Vicious rumors attacking the Tooth Fairy will not be tolerated. Our entire financial system and indeed the American way of life depend on the Tooth Fairy and wishing upon a star…” The SEC is reportedly planning to set up re-education camps for short-sellers.

Remember that the US has an entire cable channel devoted to the Theory of Positive Thinking, namely CNBC, and a goodly portion of the financial media falls into CNBC-style cheerleading with more than occasional abandon.

Now it is true that this idea has a kernel of truth. John Maynard Keynes attributed the Depression to a change in investor “liquidity preferences,” which meant they had suddenly become very risk averse and preferred to hold cash until they felt conditions had improved, with devastating consequences for economic activity. Uncertainty can morph into a self-reinforcing downcycle. But it is one thing to use confidence boosting as a tool, quite another to regard it as a magic bullet. Merely clapping our hands all together will not cure the long-standing ailments in the economy.

Moreover, the Theory of Positive Thinking has been used, upon occasion, to suggest that conditions will only deteriorate if the public examines the financial services industry critically. It isn’t hard to see whose interests benefit from that posture.

Now it is hard to prove in a tidy way that the tone of financial press coverage had shifted suddenly, and decisively, to optimism as of early March. But many professional investors in my circle started regularly talking of cheerleading. Two Wall Street veterans, Sandy Lewis and William Cohan, weighed in on this pattern at the New York Times:

Whether at a fund-raising dinner for wealthy supporters in Beverly Hills, or at an Air Force base in Nevada, or at Charlie Rose’s table in New York City, President Obama is conducting an all-out campaign to try to make us feel a whole lot better about the economy as quickly as possible… We’re concerned that nothing has really been fixed. We’re doubly concerned that people appear to feel the worst of the storm is over — and in this, they are aided and abetted by a hugely popular and charismatic president and by the fact that the Dow has increased by 35 percent or so since Mr. Obama started to lay out his economic plans in March.

This result relied on more than mere dint of personality. A Pew Research Center study found that roughly government and businesses originated over half the economics-related news after the crisis. Obama himself “dominated” the key images and ideas. The reporting had a clear arc. The early coverage focused on the struggles over the stimulus plan and the banking industry plans, and as those faded, so did coverage of the crisis in any form. The tacit assumption was that the crisis was over, and the performance of the supposedly forward looking stock market was proof. But as anyone with a modicum of detachment could see, the market was a false positive, treating an aversion of utter disaster as an imminent return to normalcy.

The stock market has rallied over 60% from its early March lows, enabling the wounded banks to sell new equity to the public and avoid further contentious taxpayer-funded rescue measures. But the justification for the soft glove treatment of the banking classes, that what was good for them would prove to be good for everyone else, has proven to be wildly false. When the Dow levitated over 10,000, mainstream news outlets celebrated the event, with nary a mention of the continued train wreck in the real economy. As Matt Taibbi observed, “the dichotomy between the economic health of ordinary people and the traditional ‘market indicators’ is not merely a non-story, it is a sort of taboo — unmentionable in major news coverage.”

But banking boosterism has succeeded all too well, allowing Team Obama to fantasize that it can get away with creating Potemkin prosperity in lieu of waging the pitched battles needed to lay the groundwork for the real thing.

Indeed, the adoption of the Theory of Positive Thinking has virtually guaranteed that nothing will change, unless there is sufficient deterioration in the real economy or the financial markets to provide compelling counter-evidence. One example is the “paying back the TARP” charade. As the banks continued to post improved earnings, no matter how phony they were, they argued that they were now healthy and should be allowed to pay back the TARP funding that had been crucial to their survival. The reason they were so keenly motivated to do should have been reason enough to deny their request: namely, that they wanted to escape restraints on executive compensation, virtually the only demand that the government had made. But overpaying staff and keeping too little in the way of risk reserves was precisely the behavior that led to the near collapse of the financial system. Going back to business as usual would virtually guarantee more looting of major financial firm and another series of collapses.

But the Obama administration miscalculated badly. First, it bought the financiers’ false promise that massive subsidies to them would kick start a economy. But economists are now estimating that it is likely to take five years to return to pre-crisis levels of unemployment. Obama took his eye off the ball. A Democratic President’s most important responsibility is job creation. It is simply unacceptable to most Americans for Wall Street to be reaping record profits and bonuses while the rest of the country is suffering. Second, it assumed finance was too complicated to hold the attention of most citizens, and so the (non) initiatives under way now would attract comparatively little scrutiny. But as public ire remains high, the press coverage has become almost schizophrenic. Obvious public relations plants, like Ben Bernanke designation as Time Magazine’s Man of the Year (precisely when his confirmation is running into unexpected opposition) and stories in the New York Times that incorrectly reported some Goldman executive bonus cosmetics as meaningful concessions have co-existed with reports on the abject failure of Geithner’s mortgage modification program. While mainstream press coverage is still largely flattering, the desperation of the recent PR moves versus the continued public ire and recognition of where the Adminsitrations’s priorities truly lie means the fissures are becoming a gaping chasm.

So with Obama’s popularity falling sharply, it should be no surprise that the Administration is resorting to more concerted propaganda efforts. It may have no choice. Having ceded so much ground to the financiers, it has lost control of the battlefield. The banking lobbyists have perfected their tactics for blocking reform over the last two decades. Team Obama naively cast its lot with an industry that is vastly more skilled in the the dark art of the manufacture of consent than it is.

“The Human Terrain project is fundamentally incompatible with the professional ethics by which we anthropologists live.”

From Hugh Gusterson, “Do professional ethics matter in war?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 04 March 2010:

….In the fall of 2007, the executive board of the American Anthropological Association issued an unusually strongly worded statement condemning the Human Terrain project: “The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association concludes (i) that the [Human Terrain System] program creates conditions which are likely to place anthropologists in positions in which their work will be in violation of the [the association's] Code of Ethics and (ii) that its use of anthropologists poses a danger to both other anthropologists and persons other anthropologists study. Thus the Executive Board expresses its disapproval of the HTS program [italics in original].” The executive board also appointed a special commission to investigate the project. The 10-member commission, which included two military anthropologists and another who works for Sandia National Laboratories, unanimously concluded in December 2009 that the Human Terrain project was inconsistent with anthropologists’ code of ethics and couldn’t “be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.”

Since then a group called the Network of Concerned Anthropologists has launched a signature campaign petitioning Congress to pull the plug on this rogue exercise in anthropology. (Full disclosure: I am on the network’s steering committee.) So far 720 anthropologists have signed on to this word-of-mouth campaign. They include 6 former presidents of the American Anthropological Association, 37 distinguished professors, 40 department chairs, and 10 journal editors. The signatures, which fill up 20 densely packed pages, are, for this anthropologist, a wonder to behold. One finds there the signatures of crusty emeritus professors, mid-career academics, and job-hungry graduate students. The big names of anthropology at leading Ivy League departments lie side by side with those toiling away in community colleges. The signatures represent an extraordinary outpouring of opinion from anthropologists of all ages, from untenured beginners to the securely tenured alike, that the Human Terrain project is fundamentally incompatible with the professional ethics by which we anthropologists live.

Anthropologists condemn the Human Terrain project because it’s widely perceived as violating our ethics code in three regards. The first concern is that it contravenes what we might think of as the prime directive of anthropological ethics, an analogue to medicine’s Hippocratic Oath, stipulating that anthropologists shouldn’t do harm to those people and communities they study. Asking an anthropologist to gather intelligence that may lead to someone’s death or imprisonment, even if it’s supposedly to save the lives of others, is like asking an army doctor to kill a wounded insurgent, a therapist to turn over an addicted client to the police, or a priest to violate the sanctity of the confessional. Just as doctors are supposed to care for the wounded without asking which side they’re on, so too, anthropologists have a professional obligation toward those they study.

The anthropologists’ second concern, grounded in the Nuremberg Code’s insistence that all research be based upon free and informed consent, is that when Iraqis and Afghans are asked by men with guns if they would like to chat with an anthropologist, they’re not really free to say no.

The third concern is that anthropologists have an obligation not to do research that might endanger other anthropologists. Many anthropologists are concerned that if their discipline becomes perceived as the human relations branch of military occupation, the lives of genuinely civilian anthropologists working as academics or for development projects elsewhere in the Middle East will be endangered.

U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), the branch of the U.S. Army in charge of the Human Terrain project, is well aware of the anthropological community’s objections. It would be nice to report that faced with such protests military leaders had found other methods to achieve their goals. But, TRADOC hasn’t engaged the American Anthropological Association about its ethical objections. Instead it has intensified its attempts to recruit anthropologists, using contractors to approach individuals with job offers and is seeking expanded funding for the program and a permanent line for it in the defense budget. When Montgomery McFate, one of the architects of the project, spoke at George Mason University, where I teach, my department chair pointed out to her that the project risked undermining the efficacy and integrity of the entire field of anthropology. Her reply: “Do you think the interest of anthropologists doing research trumps national security?”

Construing the choice as one between anthropology and national security is wrong-headed, since there’s now plenty of evidence that the Human Terrain project isn’t only unethical, but also ineffective. Leaks from within the program suggest that on some teams relations between civilian anthropologists and soldiers are toxic; that the failure to recruit many anthropologists who are trained in Middle Eastern cultures is crippling; that the expensive information technology promised for the project hasn’t materialized, so that information gathered by some teams is inaccessible to others; and that embedded anthropologists are hampered from doing serious work by their own lack of language skills and suggestions that they talk to subjects for no longer than seven minutes to avoid getting shot by snipers. (I recommend this eye-opening account of the training of Human Terrain anthropologists from the point of view of a recruit who eventually resigned on principle.) It’s not just academics that find fault with the program: One civilian advisor to the British military recently told me that although a U.S. Human Terrain team had been offered to them they see the teams as more trouble than they’re worth and are trying to find a polite way to decline.

Some in the military also criticize the program. In an article in Military Review, U.S. Marine Maj. Ben Connable argues that the military would do better relying on the cultural knowledge of their own junior officers than on civilian anthropologists, who usually know more about academic theory than about the reality inside Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s also clear that the Human Terrain project has inflicted a kind of collateral damage on anthropology’s relationship with the military, making it harder for the military to enlist anthropologists for other less controversial work.

U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will tell you they’re fighting for freedom and democracy. Yet just as we can fight terrorists without waterboarding and without downgrading our standards for fair trials (a case that has been made courageously by military interrogators and military lawyers who have refused to compromise their professional codes of honor), so we can press Al Qaeda and the Taliban without forcing anthropologists to eviscerate the ethics code they have built over more than a century. We don’t have to ask anthropologists to choose between their code of conduct and national security. This is like saying, “we had to destroy the village in order to save the village.” We can do better.

Read the complete article here.

Filed under: COLONIALISM/IMPERIALISM Tagged: ethics, HTS, Hugh Gusterson, Human Terrain System

Community leaders and organizers speak out:
“Why I’m marching on March 20”

The Saturday, March 20 demonstration to demand "U.S. Out of Afghanistan and Iraq Now" has been endorsed by over 1,500 organizations and individuals.

Here is what some of the organizations that are mobilizing have to say:

Whether Bush or Obama, when it comes to war and occupation, there’s no difference. It’s the same soup, just a different bowl. The U.S. government is still engaged in a war of empire and occupation. It wages a war against Muslims abroad and at home.

The government spends billions of dollars dropping smart bombs on dumb missions, while the American people go without jobs, homes, health care, and decent, accessible education.

Muslims must unite with those who resist oppression and love freedom and justice. Our strength is in our unity and our resistance. Therefore, we march.

– Mahdi Bray
Executive Director, Muslim American Society Freedom

The NCA, a fundamental constituent of the anti-war movement, in alignment with other coalition partners, are drawing attention to the massive shift of resources from development and fighting poverty to fund useless wars and destruction. Irrespective of who’s in the White House, the policies have proven to be identical in maintaining a hegemonistic empire. Our community, in particular, is subjected to harsh profiling and alienation policies; but remains determined to fight the source of injustice. …

We call on our Arab-American community, and their friends, to mobilize on March 20th denouncing wars and shifting dire resources, and to tear down the wall of fear and intimidation.

Click here to read the full statement.

– Mounzer Sleiman
Vice Chair, National Council of Arab Americans

Visible protest—marching to stop the crimes of our government—makes a difference because we show what we won’t accept, and we learn what we’re up against. These wars are not legitimate. People around the world must see that we don’t support them, and know that to us, American lives are not more important than their own.

Join World Can’t Wait Saturday March 20 in protest!

Click here to read the full statement.

– Debra Sweet
National Coordinator, World Can't Wait

Please make an urgently needed donation to support our March 20 student travel fund!

Make a generous donation to help high school students travel to Washington D.C. for the March on Washington. It costs a lot for organizations to rent buses and for individuals to buy tickets to come to Washington, D.C. We are setting up a scholarship fund to help cover the transportation costs for high school students. How much we can provide will be based on how much we raise. Please click here to make a generous donation and help a new generation of activists take their place in today's anti-war movement.

More information about March 20 is available at www.AnswerCoalition.org.

Help build the March 20 March on Washington!

Find out about transportation from around the country

Organize Transportation

Download literature

Volunteer

Endorse March 20

See the list of endorsers

We turned off the main road to Awassa, talked our way past security guards and drove a mile across empty land before we found what will soon be Ethiopia's largest greenhouse. Nestling below an escarpment of the Rift Valley, the development is far from finished, but the plastic and steel structure already stretches over 50 acres* -- the size of 20 soccer fields. The farm manager shows us millions of tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables being grown in 1,500 foot rows in computer controlled conditions. Spanish engineers are building the steel structure, Dutch technology minimises water use from two bore-holes and 1,000 women pick and pack 50 tons of food a day. Within 24 hours, it has been driven 200 miles to Addis Ababa and flown 1,000 miles to the shops and restaurants of Dubai, Jeddah and elsewhere in the Middle East. Ethiopia is one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13-million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least 7.5 million acres of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world's most wealthy individuals to export food for their own populations.

What you can do on March 20

The March 20 National March on Washington to demand "U.S. Out of Afghanistan and Iraq Now" is shaping up to be a dramatic and highly significant demonstration.

People will be coming to D.C. by bus, van, car, train, plane and metro from over 50 different cities and towns across the East Coast, South and Midwest. Large numbers of veterans, service members, and their families; members of the Arab and Muslim community; students and teachers; representatives of local anti-war and peace groups; and many others are mobilizing to join the demonstration.

We will gather at 12 noon at the White House (Lafayette Park on the north side).

We will march from the White House, making stops at the offices of Halliburton, Washington Post, Mortgage Bankers Association of America, National Endowment for Democracy, a military recruitment center and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

On the march, we will carry hundreds of coffins representing the victims of war from Iraq to Afghanistan, Palestine, Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen, and the U.S. GIs who have been killed in the various fronts of these wars of aggression. We will deliver the coffins to the doorsteps of those who profit from and promote these wars.

There are several ways that you can be a part of this important action:

1) Be part of a team that carries a coffin in the march
2) Bring a coffin to carry in the march
3) Participate in the worksession to prepare the coffins

White House (start and end of the march)
The White House is the decision-making center of the U.S. empire, where all high-level decision on war and occupation are ultimately made.

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
Faced with few and inadequate services, veterans are increasingly left to cope with the devastating psychological and physical impact of war on their own. Soldier suicides now surpass combat-related deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Military Recruitment Center
As school funds are slashed across the country, recruitment centers are hard at work luring youth to kill and be killed in wars of aggression with false promises of money, education and job opportunities.

Halliburton
Once headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, Halliburton has become synonymous with war profiteering.

Washington Post
This "independent media" has been a staunch supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and continues to operate as an apologist for U.S. aggression.

National Endowment for Democracy
As NED founder Allen Weinstein put it, the NED does overtly what the CIA used to do covertly. The NED has been responsible for numerous government destabilization operations in Latin America over the past three decades.

Mortgage Bankers Association of America
While war rages abroad, it also wages against working people at home. The housing crisis, driven by speculation from mortgage bankers, made the profits-over-people orientation of Wall Street and Washington clearer than ever.

Please make an urgently needed donation to support our March 20 student travel fund!

Make a generous donation to help high school students travel to Washington D.C. for the March on Washington. It costs a lot for organizations to rent buses and for individuals to buy tickets to come to Washington, D.C. We are setting up a scholarship fund to help cover the transportation costs for high school students. How much we can provide will be based on how much we raise. Please click here to make a generous donation and help a new generation of activists take their place in today's anti-war movement.

More information about March 20 is available at www.AnswerCoalition.org.

Help build the March 20 March on Washington!

Find out about transportation from around the country

Organize Transportation

Download literature

Volunteer

Endorse March 20

See the list of endorsers

Toyota announced plans to close its New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. plant in Fremont, Calif. on April 1. The closure of the NUMMI plant will put 4,700 workers out of work, and into the growing mass of recently unemployed workers struggling to survive the economic crisis. According to a state commission, the NUMMI closure will affect 25,000 additional workers who work at suppliers that conduct business with the plant.

Some ruling-class politicians and state government officials have implored Toyota to keep the plant open. California Treasurer Bill Lockyer said the closure would cost taxpayers an estimated $2.3 billion and further damage the state’s already crippled economy.

Bob King, vice president of the United Auto Workers, has taken a tougher stance, calling for a boycott of Toyota until the company reverses its decision.

The NUMMI case shows just how irrational, wasteful and undemocratic capitalism really is. The factory works fine, the workers are ready and willing to work, and its closure will have a devastating impact on the local economy. Under such conditions, no rational economic and political system would allow the plant to simply be shut down.

Economic decisions of this magnitude impact millions of working-class people, yet we have no say in them. For that matter, neither do politicians, as the unheeded supplications of Californian government officials have shown. Under capitalism, a tiny minority of super-rich corporate executives beholden only to investors rules over the economy.

These individuals have no obligation, either morally or legally, to make a decision in the interest of the majority. Quite the contrary: Extensive legislation mandates that corporate executives put the interests of investors above all other considerations. It does not matter if the NUMMI factory is still turning a profit. As long as the capitalists believe they can make a greater profit somewhere else, they will shut it down.

At this point, it appears that Toyota will, in fact, close NUMMI on April 1. Progressive organizations and individuals must continue to mobilize and pressure on Toyota to prevent this from happening. We must forcefully reject the corporate owners’ attempts to blame workers and their union for the company’s problems.

Above all, the case of NUMMI shows the necessity of building a militant labor movement, which will strike and occupy workplaces and mobilize affected communities to keep them open. It also is a lesson in why capitalism must be replaced with socialism—a social system that removes economic decision-making from the hands of the few, and gives it to the class that does all the work.

IMEMC
Five Palestinians women preferred to go home rather than heading to an Israeli prison to visit their detailed family members after Israeli soldiers stationed at a Roadblock near the central West Bank city of Ramallah demanded to strip-search them.

Qaddoura Fares, head of the Palestinian Prisoner Society, stated at a press conference on Tuesday that this is one of the illegal means Israel is using to target the detainees and their families.

He added that the families of the detainees decided to strike for a month in April to protest the illegal Israeli measures. They will not be visiting their detained family members and would be holding protests in front of the Red cross.

Israel is also denying 1200 detainees from any visitations as they are classified as “security risk”...

Palestinian Minister of Detainees, Issa Qaraqe’, said that Israel is always trying to strip-search the families of the detainees, especially the women, and that such demands are mainly made at the prisons.
He added that this is a direct violation to the Fourth Geneva Conventions, and all related human rights laws.

Qaraqe’ said that women and children are subjected to humiliation by the soldiers at different roadblocks, and are asked to strip in order to be searched, an issue which pushes them to return home instead of continuing their way to visit their detained family members.

He further stated that the strike comes in solidarity with the detainees from the Gaza Strip as their families were not able to visit them since more than three years.

Dozens of detainees are deprived from perusing education in prison, while Israel is also not allowing the entry of books, educational materials and even clothes. Full story

Video on stripsearching women and children:

A judge in the northern Israeli city of Haifa was due to be presented with evidence that 23-year-old Corrie was killed unlawfully as she stood in the path of the bulldozer, trying to prevent it from demolishing Palestinian homes in Rafah.

Corrie’s parents, Craig and Cindy, who arrived in Israel on Saturday, said they hoped their civil action would shed new light on their daughter’s killing and finally lead to Israel’s being held responsible for her death. They are also seeking damages that could amount to millions of dollars if the court finds in their favour.

An internal army investigation was closed shortly after Corrie’s death, exonerating both the bulldozer driver and the commanders who oversaw the operation.

Three Britons and one US citizen, who were standing close to Corrie when she was killed, are expected to challenge Israel’s version of events, arguing that the bulldozer driver knew Corrie was there when he ran her over.

The Israeli government had sought to block the activists from entering Israel for the hearing but finally relented three weeks ago, when Britain and the US exerted strong pressure.

The four, like Corrie, belonged to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which brings activists to Israel to resist the occupation non-violently alongside Palestinians.

Cindy Corrie, from Olympia, Washington, said: “My family and I are still searching for justice. The brutal death of my daughter should never have happened. We believe the Israeli army must be held accountable for her unlawful killing.”

For many observers, Rachel Corrie’s death in March 2003 rapidly came to symbolise the injustices of Israel’s occupation. Diary entries, many of them written while she was living with Palestinian families, were adapted into a play that has been performed around the world.

However, as one Israeli commentator noted in the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz on the first anniversary of her death: “In Israel, her name has been all but forgotten.”

Corrie’s family hopes the court case will rectify that.

Rachel, a film released last year about her life and the events in Rafah, is due to be screened in Tel Aviv on March 16, on the seventh anniversary of her death and in the midst of the legal proceedings.

Until the court case in Haifa, the Corrie family had run into a series of administrative and legal brick walls in trying to get their daughter’s death independently investigated and to hold those responsible to account.

Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister at the time of Corrie’s death, promised a “thorough, credible and transparent investigation” would be conducted.

But an internal military inquiry clearing the two soldiers operating the bulldozer was widely criticised, including by US officials. Human Rights Watch said it “fell far short of the transparency, impartiality and thoroughness required by international law”.

The army’s report claimed that Corrie had been “hidden from view” behind a mound of earth and that the bulldozer had never come into contact with her. It concluded that “Corrie was struck by dirt and a slab of concrete” as earth slipped on top of her.

The four former ISM activists due to appear in court this week have been told not to comment before giving their testimonies.

But previous witness statements, backed by photographic evidence, have questioned the army’s account. Photographs show Corrie, wearing an orange fluorescent jacket and holding a megaphone, confronting the bulldozer over several hours. They also show the bulldozer’s track marks over Corrie’s body moments after she was crushed.

Tom Dale, a British activist who was next to Corrie when she was killed, wrote two days later that she had climbed on top of a mound of earth as activists nearby shouted at the bulldozer driver to stop.

The bulldozer, he wrote, “pushed Rachel, first beneath the scoop, then beneath the blade, then continued till her body was beneath the cockpit. They waited over her for a few seconds, before reversing. They reversed with the blade pressed down, so it scraped over her body a second time.”

In 2007 a US court denied the Corrie family the right to sue the Caterpillar company, which supplies the Israeli army with the special D-9 bulldozers that killed their daughter and that Israel regularly uses to demolish Palestinian homes.

This week’s hearing is the outcome of a private lawsuit filed by the Corries in March 2005, at the suggestion of the US state department.

Mrs Corrie said: “We hope this trial will also illustrate the need for accountability for thousands of lives lost, or indelibly injured, by the Israeli occupation and bring attention to the assault on non-violent human-rights defenders.”

Mr Corrie added that the family had had to endure “lies and misrepresentations” about the circumstances of their daughter’s death. The family also accused Israel of resorting to procedural delays to drag the case out.

Although Israel has agreed to let in the four ISM witnesses, it has refused to allow Ahmed Abu Nakira, a doctor in Gaza who treated Corrie, to attend the hearing or to be questioned over a video link.

The lawsuit accuses the Israeli government of being responsible either for Corrie’s intentional killing or for the negligent conduct of its soldiers towards unarmed demonstrators.

Israel claims it is not liable because the army’s actions were “acts of war” and because Corrie recklessly endangered herself.

Around the time Corrie was killed, three Britons — Iain Hook, Tom Hurndall and James Millar — were fatally shot by Israeli soldiers. Only in the case of Hurndall, another ISM volunteer who was shot in Rafah a month after Corrie, did an investigation lead to a soldier being found guilty and jailed.

Hussein Abu Hussein, the Corrie family’s lawyer, said they were seeking $324,000 compensation for specific costs related to Corrie’s death, including the funeral, legal expenses and flights. In addition, the family will ask for general compensation for their suffering and Rachel’s loss of earnings, and punitive damages from the state.

In recent weeks the ISM’s office in the West Bank has been raided several times by the Israeli army, with computers and documents taken.

Mr Abu Hussein said he would be arguing in court that the D-9’s manual specifically states that work must not be carried out with civilians nearby, and that the state ignored a judicial decision that a US embassy representative be present at Corrie’s autopsy.

Source

Also view this short video….

Filed under: Activism, Assassinations, Gaza, Israel, Rachel Corrie

As you’ll see in our upcoming newsletter (just went to the printer, hooray!) Ruth has spent a lot of time breaking down how much of your tax bill goes to funding the military. It’s worth taking a moment to look at exactly how poorly the Pentagon spends that money.

As Spencer Ackerman at the Washington Independent documents this morning, systemic failures in the military contracting process mean that a certain notorious private security company may still be on the federal payroll:

By March 24, the private security corporation formerly known as Blackwater — last seen in Afghanistan shooting civilians and stealing weapons intended for the Afghan police — may win a new Defense Department contract to train the Afghan police. And nearly no one in the government wants to own up to how it could happen.

Interviews over the past week with numerous Pentagon officials and military officers in Washington and Kabul have presented a portrait of a contracting process in which it is remarkably difficult to deny a contract to a security company involved in numerous civilian deaths and possible fraud.

The whole article is worth a read.

Filed under: Budget, Peaceful Prevention Tagged: blackwater, defense spending, Xe

By John Ryskamp, an attorney and author of The Eminent Domain Revolt

Why, in their article on Latvia’s austerity budget, are Marshall Auerback and Robert Parenteau giving Latvia credit for warm, fuzzy feelings? Especially in the context of Draconian cuts? It’s because Auerback and Parenteau don’t know what they want—their emotions are not grounded in any articulated policies. So they sound friendly. But are they friendly?

Let’s take a look. Maybe they just haven’t got their terms straight. For example, they say: “Mainstream economics insists that one path to full employment is via lower wages.” No, that’s not mainstream economics—that’s police state economics. That’s simply liquidation. They seem blithely unaware that since the power structure in America decided the suburbanization binge was over—that our suburban cow had ceased to be a profit center and had turned into a cash guzzler—America is no longer a paying proposition. So power is taking its flunkey, Uncle Sam, out of government.

That’s liquidation: power is withdrawing government from American society—and right on cue, the rest of the world is following suit, including Latvia.

Memories are short—and sometimes, even truncated. Just because World War II cut short Mellonesque liquidation, don’t for a minute buy the argument that somehow it wasn’t still policy right through the Roosevelt Administration—or that it isn’t always waiting in the wings, asserting itself all the time against countervailing forces (we shall return to those forces).

Liquidation is what is going on in Latvia. There is no attempt to achieve full employment or any other level of employment. Check out liquidation’s repertoire of techniques:

1. monetization
2. cartelization
3. currency race to the bottom gambits
4. credit contraction
5. induced supply chain collapse

and that’s just a very few of them—including, of course, shrinking the budget. The problem is that we don’t have a SINGLE academic study of liquidation as a sociopathology. When and why is each technique picked up and put down by liquidation? We just don’t know. Indeed, according to a supply chain management professor in the UK, to whom I put this question, there is no academic study of supply chain deterioration.

Power goes to power. Power is the assumption AND deduction of power. Power is the means AND the end of power. So Andrew Mellon would have had us believe, and when the going gets tough guess what? We believe it. They seem to have swallowed it in Latvia, and in the United States. I see no evidence of tax strikes, uprisings or any organization revolutionary movement, calling liquidation what it is. The protests are as vague and helpless as the implied protests of Auerback and Parenteau. We must toughen our minds.

Look what Auerback and Parenteau say is the motive of the powerful in Latvia (and their superiors elsewhere). They say the policy of power is to “internally deflate.” This is imprecise. Latvia is liquidating, but also somehow the policy is to maintain full employment. Huh? For them, Latvia is acting “under the mistaken assumption that the [currency peg] was inviolable,” and then they go on to cite the numerous problems with a currency peg.

But it’s not a problem if liquidation is your goal, and looting the population is one way you go about it. I don’t think the powerful in Latvia were under any assumption, mistaken or otherwise, about a currency peg. It is a liquidation technique, a technique for looting—it is not tenable to believe it is invoked without knowing why it exists and what it does.

They call a “hidden assumption”—unknown to the powers in Latvia which provoked collapsing labor costs and prices—the idea that “a debt deflation spiral does not do the host country in as domestic private incomes are deflated.” It is not credible that anyone in a position to invoke a collapse in income, demand and prices, does not know the point of these gambits. It is liquidation. Nor do Auerback and Parenteau show any evidence that the powerful in Latvia share their concerns and are simply naïve, or wrongheaded.

Look at the other thoughts they put in the heads of the powerful in Latvia: “Policy makers have tied both their hands and their feet behind their backs so that markets could work their self-adjusting magic.” Where is the evidence that the powerful in Latvia believe there is such a thing as a market, much less that it is self-adjusting? There is none. Indeed, all the evidence Auerback and Parenteau put forward is that the powerful in Latvia are putting forward all the liquidationist tricks put forward under any police state, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin—you name it.

There is nothing magical, and no mystery, about a police state. What is mysterious is constantly imputing benign motives to people when the evidence shows they are carrying out police state acts.

Here’s another one: “In each of these nations, if the private sector is retrenching already, and the public sector tries to retrench on top of that, unless a massive swing in foreign trade can be accomplished, policy makers are unwittingly inviting falling private nominal incomes and private debt distress into the picture as they reverse fiscal stimulus.” Perhaps the problem with this notion is that Auerback and Parenteau regard as stimulus, bailing out bankrupt Ponzi schemes. Co-conspiring is stimulus? A new definition of the word “stimulus,” to quote the guy in Rules of the Game. But then, I guess if you believe it isn’t, then the logical conclusion is that those who promote “stimulus” are capable of doing things “unwittingly.”

In short, Auerback and Parenteau impute good faith where all the evidence shows there is only liquidation. Why? Because they’re soft on rights. Almost everyone else is, too. The day we gave the political system near absolute power over facts (we did it here in 1937 with West Coast Hotel v. Parrish), and thereby denied ourselves any rights, we let the political system define all the terms. In return for a middle class existence, we surrendered our right to find out the facts. It’s called “health and welfare.” We let the political system decide that. We are not allowed to intervene as individuals.

So we haven’t really inquired into the facts, and we’ve sort of lost the ability to inquire into the facts. Auerback and Parenteau are examples of this. It sounds like their approach tolerates “some” liquidation, “some” level of unemployment. They don’t really understand that the countervailing force to power, is rights. For example, the authors of the U.S. Constitution see only two forces. They see the police state (which wanted to hang them all), and important facts.

Important facts are unchanging facts of human experience, facts which history has demonstrated, are robust and resilient in the face of attempts to affect them. For the Founders, these facts included protected speech. For us—or at any rate, for those of us who have persisted in factual investigations—these facts also include housing, liberty, maintenance, education and medical care.

When important facts are defended, power weakens; when important facts are not defended, power strengthens. That’s the sum total of the Constitution. How can you defend important facts against assault, when you can’t provide the evidence that they are important, because you don’t know that the issue is importance?

Police states know perfectly what important facts are—and they hate them. Does that put you, reader, in the crosshairs? Gee, d’ya think?

It would clarify the thinking of Auerback and Parenteau, and clarify our response to what they write, if they could tell us with regard to two facts they consider so important in their article—income and employment—whether they think those are important facts as defined above.

I think they are indicia or aspects of maintenance, and I think maintenance turns back attacks by interrelating maintenance with income and employment—and also with housing! And also with protected speech! The maintenance of important facts—which, according to this analysis, is what the law does, and only what it does—is a complex, ongoing venture which requires vigilance—political, and intellectual and observational vigilance.

If you practice this vigilance, you really see what Latvia is doing, even according to the generous (naïve?) interpretation of Auerback and Parenteau. It is saying that income and employment are goals, not facts. It is saying that income is maintained by destroying income, and employment is maintained by destroying income. In short, complete nonsense. The evidence shows that income and employment ARE facts, are important facts, not goals, and not policy.

This is why I say that the only response to liquidation, is individually enforceable rights. And that’s why I wrote the New Bill of Rights. It says:

No individual shall be involuntarily deprived of liberty;
No individual shall be involuntarily deprived of housing;
No individual shall be involuntarily deprived of maintenance;
No individual shall be involuntarily deprived of medical care;
No individual shall be involuntarily deprived of education.

If this was the law in Latvia, could the cuts described by Auerback and Parenteau, occur? No.

Is this a laundry list of worthy goals, a grab bag of ideals? No. It is the progress we have made—exercising the individually enforceable rights we have—toward investigating the facts of human experience. We have pretty conclusively demonstrated, with regard to the facts above, that they are important facts.

You only have to understand the issue, to find that this process of evaluation is continually going on. For example, is property an important fact. It may interest you to know that the investigation is inconclusive so far. Also, we are revisiting the settled principle that an exercise of religion is an important fact. Who knew?

If you want to see a perfect example of this investigation going on with respect to a fact—from an initial point of view that it should be left to politics, to a point of view that individuals have control over it—look at the new right to education in the state of New Jersey. I suggest you go to www.edlawcenter.org, to understand the exacting—but exactly vital—process we have to go through, in order to fight liquidation.

Update – March 8: Many thanks to 420 of you who have donated; your support is greatly appreciated! Please help us reach our 1000 donations benchmark.

Update – March 3: We are one third of the way there; 700 more needed! We can do it – together.

In October 2009 I launched Boiling Frogs Post with one purpose in mind: To establish a venue for investigative articles, editorials, analyses, discussions, and interviews on issues largely censored and blacked out by the media. After four months of a successful trial phase this venue is now ready to enter its next stage, and for that it needs your support.

Boiling Frogs Post is solely dependent on its readers, and has no ties to any institution, foundation, organization or corporation. This is the only model I see fit to be called an independent news and views venue, untainted by external pressures, special interests or partisan flavoring.

Our authors and analysts present their work, not agenda scripts or special recipes handed to them for creation of a particular propaganda to serve a particular interest. And, our weekly commercial-free Podcast Show hosts the voices of noteworthy guests on topics long-muffled and quashed by the mainstream media and their minions on lower levels posing as alternatives.

I’m happy to report that in the four months since the launching of Boiling Frogs Post we have accomplished and delivered every single objective set prior to the launching this site. I am proud to have established a distinguished team of journalists, analysts, authors, and an editorial cartoonist whose work is based on truth and real issues.

Whether it is going after hypocrisy-ridden foreign policy practices, the ever revolving doors of foreign lobbies, or our stomped upon and continuously assaulted civil liberties, our work transcends the webs put in place by partisanship and special interests and agendas.

Here are a few examples of our work:

Sibel Edmonds- The Makings of a Police State Series

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed- Yemen, Energy Crisis & the Nigerian Crutch Bomber Series

Mizgin Yilmaz- Richard Armitage Series

Dr. William Weaver – The Impulse to Secrecy: The Glomar Response

Peter Lance: Fort Hood & the KSM Trial Series

Sibel Edmonds- Op-ed Series

In this short time span the Boiling Frogs Show has been able to present you with over 20 distinguished experts and whistleblowers from the fields of journalism, intelligence, grassroots activism, academia, and foreign policy. Here is a list of select interviews:

James Bamford on NSA & Illegal Domestic Wiretapping

Pepe Escobar on the Current Energy Crisis & the Quest for Central Asia-Caspian Region

Russ Baker on the Concept of Shadow Government and the Real Power Centers in the US

Daniel Ellsberg on Obama Presidency & Whistleblowers

Andy Worthington on America’s Detention Center at Guantanamo Bay

Chris Hedges on the US Media & the Empire of Illusion

Coleen Rowley on Accountability, Whistleblowers & Activism

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Founder & Publisher, Boiling Frogs Post

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The Business of Water: Privatizing An Essential Resource
By Stephen Lendman

In her 2002 book titled, "Water Wars," noted author, social activist, and ecologist Vandana Shiva called privatizing water:

Shiva lists nine water democracy principles:

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On March 9, 2010, around noon, about 14 pro-Healthcare Reform activists were arrested at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in down town Washington, D.C. They attempted to cross a police line set up at an entrance to the hotel, where the Fat Cats of the Health Insurance Industry were holding a conference. Earlier, the protesters had convened at Dupont Circle for a rally. Then, they paraded down to the hotel, about ten blocks away. The crowd was estimated at about 5,500. The event was staged by Health Care for America Now (HCAN), along with more than 50 major Labor, grassroots and religious leaders. Background here.

The D.C. police decided, for their own reasons, not to place criminal charge against the parties that were detained at the hotel. Four of the 14 reportedly arrested were: an official from the SEIU union; Jonathan Tasini, Democratic candidate for U. S. Senate in NY; Jeff Blum of US Action and Sean Dobson of Progressive Maryland. The crowd shouted chants, like: 'Healthcare, now!' and 'Arrest the real criminals!"

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Drones Club Meets in San Diego
By Frank Green | Counter Punch

The manufacturers of drone airplanes, which have killed hundreds of civilians in Pakistan and Afghanistan, are about to see their prospects soar as the Pentagon expands its vast arsenal.

At least that was the message at Tuesday's "Unmanned Aircraft Systems West" conference in San Diego, where advocates of the lethal composite birds dispassionately described how unpiloted planes directed via satellite will soon come to largely replace the human element on the killing fields.

Use of the so-called Predator and Reaper drones to fight the U.S.-spawned war in the border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan have rapidly escalated during the opening months of the Obama administration, with 51 reported strikes in Pakistan in 2009 alone - up from 45 during the previous eight years, according to a recent report by the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

The foundation alleges in its "The Year of the Drone" account that more than 1,000 - or 32 per cent - of drone attack victims were civilians.

Tuesday's industry conference was held at the sprawling Sheraton Hotel on Harbor Island. A group of antiwar protesters picketed the event on a sidewalk near the facility's entrance. Read more.

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NATO Goes Anti-Nuclear?
Support for nuclear disarmament has spread to the heart of the Atlantic alliance and beyond.
By Alice Slater | Foreign Policy In Focus | March 9, 2010

President Obama's call for a nuclear-weapons-free world in Prague last April unleashed a great outpouring of support from international allies and grassroots activists demanding a process to actually eliminate nuclear weapons. One recent and unexpected initiative has come from America's NATO allies. Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway have called on NATO to review its nuclear policy and remove all U.S. nuclear weapons currently on European soil under NATO's "nuclear sharing" policy. Despite U.S. insistence on strict adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which prohibits the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear weapons states, several hundred U.S. nuclear bombs are housed in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey.

Citing Obama's announcement in Prague of "America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," the NATO allies have broken ranks with the United States. All five governments are experiencing domestic pressure to end the hypocrisy of the NPT, where nuclear "haves" disregard their disarmament requirements with impunity while using coercion, sanctions, threats of war, and even actual war (as in Iraq) to prevent the nuclear "have-nots" from acquiring nuclear bombs. Together with calls from major former political and military leaders to eliminate nuclear weapons, as well as UN Secretary General Ban-ki Moon's proposal for a five-point program "to rid the world of nuclear bombs," these NATO members have seized the political moment. They have decided to do their part to maintain the integrity of the NPT in advance of the five-year review conference this May at the UN in New York.

The NATO five put NATO's nuclear policy on the agenda for an April strategy meeting in Estonia. They have neither been dissuaded by Obama's cautionary note that the goal of a nuclear-weapons-free world "will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime," nor discouraged by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's mistaken qualification of Obama's remarks when she said that "we might not achieve the ambition of a world without nuclear weapons in our lifetime or successive lifetimes" (emphasis added). Read more.

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Party Time: Where Your Healthcare and Jobs Dollars are Going
By Ralph Lopez | Daily Kos

Rep. Dennis Kucinich is currently asking for a flood of calls to trigger a debate on war spending, through "yes" votes on his resolution now on the floor calling for U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of the year. A 3 hour debate and vote will take place tomorrow.

Just happened across a startling piece, even for me, by the Nation's Jeremy Scahill which details how Afghanistan has become U.S. private contractor piggy land even by Bush administration standards.

"In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo [PDF] released by [Sen. Claire] McCaskill’s staff, "From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000." Read more.

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Dear Supporter:

On March 16, 2003, human rights activist Rachel Corrie was killed while trying to protect a home in Gaza from demolition while the family was inside. An Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier ran over Rachel in a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer. Rachel was 23 years old. Seven years after her killing, Rachel's parents are still seeking truth and accountability. Today is Rachel's day in court and Israel must be held accountable for Rachel's killing - take action now.

After Rachel's killing, Israel conducted an investigation that even the U.S. State Department said was not thorough enough and neither credible nor transparent. The U.S. government advised Rachel's parents Cindy and Craig Corrie to sue Israel, which they did in March 2005. Their case is finally starting in the Haifa District Court in Israel today. Follow the trial at the Rachel Corrie Foundation website http://www.rachelcorriefoundation.org/.

CCR sued Caterpillar (view the details of the case Corri et al. v. Caterpillar) on behalf of Rachel's parents as well as four Palestinian families whose family members were killed or injured when Caterpillar bulldozers demolished their homes. The court dismissed that case in 2007 because it would put into question the U.S. government's decision to pay for the bulldozer sales.

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You may have noticed that our Vice President is having a spat with Israel that’s in all the headlines because of Israel’s plans to build more illegal settlements in East Jerusalem. The other day 5000 people demonstrated against the settlements. And today Andrew Sullivan has a piece on the Sheikh Jarrah evictions.

When I got to East Jerusalem in January, the first place I went was Sheikh Jarrah, a short walk from my hotel. And my busiest day was Friday. That was the day of the Sheikh Jarrah demo and all the demos on the West Bank! I wanted to witness the rise of the anti-Jim Crow passive resistance movement and went to three demos. In Sheikh Jarrah, I saw a number of journalists, Bernard Avishai, Rick Hertzberg of the New Yorker, and the writer David Shulman.

Now here is Ari Goldman’s seminar at the Columbia Journalism School, called Covering Religion, going to the Holy Land for 10 days, and if you check their itinerary, they’re not covering any of the demos on Friday. They’re going to Yad Vashem that day, the Holocaust memorial. And Mount Herzl. 

I know this is not a political class per se, but is Yad Vashem religious? If you look at the front page of "Covering Religion," they’re covering Christian Zionists (the usual dodge for the Israel lobby) and the I/P "conflict."

I wonder if the blinders on the big story don’t have something to do with Ari Goldman’s close connection to a traditional Jewish community and the time he spent in Israel.

Related posts:

Last night’s moving, silent protest outside the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan as Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi gave the keynote speech at the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces gala was powerful and inspiring.

I asked Dorothy Zellner, a founding member of Jews Say No!, whether the hundreds of people who showed up to march and the two dozen or so organizations who co-sponsored the action was indicative of a larger shift in public opinion regarding Israel.

“Something about Gaza, so horrible, so horrific, has pushed a lot of people who were sitting on the fence over,” the long-time civil rights activist replied. But, she said, “Last year, even though it was after Gaza, it hadn’t penetrated. And mostly it hadn’t penetrated because Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, those weren’t in the news. But the Goldstone report,” changed things.

But Americans who solely read and watch corporate, mainstream media don’t know—about Goldstone, about the crimes of Israel, about why it is that there is a fundraiser on behalf of a foreign army in New York City, or that hundreds of people, including many Jews, were outraged enough to demonstrate against it. We have here—exemplified in last night’s demonstration—the makings of a global, diverse, and loud movement against Israeli apartheid and the occupation, and of a growing rift between Jews and the mainstream Jewish establishment on the question of Israel. Yet, there’s not a peep from the mainstream media.

The local papers in New York didn’t touch it. The Daily News, which is owned by ultra Zionist Mort Zuckerman, or the Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, didn’t feel the need to send a reporter to the Waldorf. The New York Times didn’t either. Nor did any other corporate publication, or MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann. The list goes on and on. Instead, we’re stuck with Chris Matthews smiling with Joe Biden and Ethan Bronner in Israel, engaging in vapid conversation about a dead-end “peace process.”

Many outlets in Israel covered it, for god’s sake, another indication (as many others have said) of how constrained the American mainstream media conversation about Israel is.

It’s what I expect. Corporate media’s profit-model has no interest in social justice, nor do the advertisers behind their profit, nor do powerful media moguls who cozy up to those in power and who share their interests. And, particularly on this issue, we have the Israel lobby, and big journalists who march in lockstep with Israel.

Thankfully, we also have the Internet, where progressive, independent voices are being heard. Democracy Now!, Grit TV, and the Indypendent covered the protest in-depth, as did this site. Through the web, the Palestine solidarity movement, and the independent media who cover it, are circumventing mainstream media.

Photo above by Andrew.

Related posts:

I felt nauseated when I heard that the big gesture by Joe Biden, in response to Israel announcing more settlements on his arrival in Jerusalem, was being late to dinner. Paul Woodward nails it:

The administration either needs to threaten to apply real pressure on the Israeli government, or, if it wants to confine itself to diplomatic gestures then it should do so under the tutelage of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In response to Israel’s latest contemptuous behavior, Biden could — he really could — have turned around and said adiós. He does after all belong to an administration that less than a year ago was advising Netanyahu to complete his “homework” on freezing settlements before it would be worth arranging a meeting.

I don’t think it would take that much by the U.S. government to break the Netanyahu coalition. Why not try? And yes, the U.S. are finally talking about a break in the special relationship; but Chris Matthews and the Washington Post both called East Jerusalem "disputed East Jerusalem." It’s not disputed. It’s annexed, unilaterally, in defiance of international law, the so-called future Palestinian capital.

Oh and here’s Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post saying it’s Biden’s mistake, and Obama doesn’t know how to reassure the Israelis.

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Notice how the mainstream press (Time Magazine) dissed the Israeli government and Bibi. This is new. Change that we can believe in (We hope):

Guardian:

It doesn’t seem to realise it, but Israel cannot afford to keep on behaving in this disobliging manner towards its friends. Whether it is blatant disregard for international rules concerning the protection of civilian life, as in Gaza; whether it is calculated insults aimed at neighbours, as with Turkey; or whether it is the theft of passports and identities from friendly countries and the lawless assassination of its enemies, as in Dubai, it goes too far.

Tony Karon in Time:

Biden made no secret of his pique. He reportedly kept Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu waiting for 90 minutes before arriving at a scheduled dinner (a harsh slap-down in the vocabulary of diplomatic protocol) and issued a stern statement condemning the planned construction and accusing Israel of "undermining the trust we need right now" to relaunch peace talks.

Time’s blog:

The press pool following Biden reports that the Vice President showed up 90 minutes late for dinner with Netanyahu, and that reporters were wondering if he would show up at all.

Even the New York Post is honest about the "slap." Oh but look at today’s Pravda, the New York Times: smiling Bibi and Biden (photo) and a caption that downplays the tension and rift between Israel and the US.

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Astonishing interview of the Corrie family, mom Cindy, dad Craig, and sister Sarah Corrie Simpson, by Amy Goodman, just before they left for the civil suit trial that’s taking place in Israel this week. Baird portion is halfway down. Also Craig’s meeting with Obama in Iowa. Obama knew the name Rachel Corrie, who died in Rafah, Gaza, seven years ago next week. Of course.

Cindy Corrie:

She went—she chose to go to Gaza, to Rafah particularly, because she felt that it was maybe the most forsaken part of the Occupied Territories. It was where she felt her focus and attention was needed. She was there for about seven weeks. She was working, doing a lot of things during the time. Part of what she was doing was writing back and informing us about what she was seeing. And her words have since been incorporated into a play, and her writing from there is in a book of her work….

The home that Rachel stood in front of that day had two families in it—two brothers, an accountant and a pharmacist, and their five young children. Craig and I have come to know that family. We visit them whenever we go. We have communications with them. Part of the family came to the United States. The Israeli government had nothing against this family. They allowed them to go to Tel Aviv in order to get their visa to come to the United States to travel with us in the year 2005. And yet, their home was destroyed without any, you know, accommodation of any sort and under great threat to the family, as well. It didn’t happen the day Rachel stood there; it happened later that year.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Rachel standing there that day, what did she decide to do? What happened that day?

CINDY CORRIE: I think Rachel knew that Reem and Iman, that Kareem, that those children were behind that wall. She had been helping them with their English homework and with their—they were helping her learn Arabic. She had slept at the foot of their parent’s bed, because they couldn’t sleep in their own bedroom because of the shots that would be fired through the wall as Israeli military equipment drove past the house. So she slept at the foot of the family’s—the parent’s bed with the other children to offer some international protection to that family.

The bulldozer was coming toward their house, and she knew that the kids and the parents were behind her. I don’t think there’s any way that—you know, I think she also believed that the bulldozer would stop.

 Goodman: I asked Rachel’s father Craig to lay out the particulars of the court case.

CRAIG CORRIE: This is a culmination, really, of seven years of our family searching for some sort of justice in the killing of Rachel. And we’ve tried to do that through diplomatic means, and we’ve asked for a US-led investigation into Rachel’s killing. We also understand that the Israelis, through Prime Minister Sharon, promised President Bush a thorough, credible and transparent investigation of Rachel’s killing. But, by our own government’s measure, that has not happened. So we’re left with simply a civil lawsuit.

So, we’re accusing the state of Israel of either intentionally killing Rachel or guilty of gross negligence in her killing seven years ago. And so, we’re seeking—the only thing you can seek in a civil case is damages. You know, so it’s really a very small part of the story that’s gone on in our lives. But it’s critical to have our time in court.

AMY GOODMAN: Cindy Corrie, speaking of blocking information, the Palestinian doctor who first treated your daughter, who first treated Rachel, is not being allowed out of Gaza to testify? Is that right?

CINDY CORRIE: That’s our understanding at this point. We were alerted by our attorney, really about a week or so ago, that the Israeli government seemed to be dragging its feet about having our eyewitnesses. We have four international eyewitnesses. There were seven on the scene when Rachel was killed. Four will be coming to testify. Our attorney told us that the Israelis were not agreeing to let them into Israel. We sought help from the US government, from the State Department, and from our ambassador. And subsequently, the four international eyewitnesses have been given approval to come, and they will be entering the same day that we are.

But the doctor, who’s in Gaza, who was with Rachel at the end of her life, or soon after, who administered to her there in Gaza in the hospital, was called as a witness on our side, and the Israeli government has not yet approved entry for him. He also could testify, we hoped, by video conference. That’s what’s been offered, and they have not agreed either to having him come into Israel or to testify by video conference. And we are pursuing that. We know that Ambassador Cunningham has also been pursuing this with Israeli officials.

AMY GOODMAN: The US ambassador to Israel?

CINDY CORRIE: The US ambassador to Israel, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s been pushing for the Palestinian doctor to be able to testify.

CINDY CORRIE: To be able to testify by video conference, yes….

CRAIG CORRIE: It was. It’s our first meeting within—actually in the State Department in June of 2003, and we were discussing trying to get an independent investigation. And Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Larry Wilkerson, so chief of staff to Colin Powell, turned to me, and he said, “If it was my daughter, I’d sue them. I don’t care about money. I wouldn’t care about anything. I would sue the state of Israel.” And we were surprised—

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: And I think that was reiterated.

CRAIG CORRIE: —but ended up doing it.

… AMY GOODMAN: Sarah, this is your first time in Israel?

SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: Yes, it is. It will be my first time in Israel. And honestly, I wish that there would have been a way for me to go without the focus being entirely on the trial, because, you know, I do feel like I need to get a chance to experience a little bit of the culture, meet some of the people. And I’m sure there’ll be some opportunity, but the focus is entirely on the trial at this time, and, you know, it’s a difficult time for our family because of that.

I also—one of my main purposes in going was just, personally, I wanted to be able to hear the IDF’s side of the story. We were asked very early on whether or not we would want to meet any of the military that were involved in killing Rachel, and I’ve always said, “Yes, that’s true.” I’ve told our US government that if given the opportunity to meet the bulldozer driver, that’s something I would want to do. I know it would be very difficult and very challenging, but I think it’s a step that I would have to be open to. And now I feel like it’s been a real violation that in the time that it was set to go to see those soldiers hopefully testify, hopefully they would be called, that that opportunity is not going to be available to me. And I don’t know whether or not I’ll be able to travel back when the government presents its side. So, you know, it’s going to be a challenging time when we’re there.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you know, Craig, if the man who drove the bulldozer will be there?

CRAIG CORRIE: We don’t know that. If he comes, it’ll be because the state calls him as a witness, and that’ll allow our attorney to cross-examine him. And we certainly hope that he comes. As Sarah alludes, I mean, there’s another way to handle some of this. We would like to meet that person.

There are lots of victims, Amy, when you look at a war and what happens. And we lost Rachel, and that hurts every day, but that bulldozer driver lost a lot of his humanity when he crushed Rachel. We’re told by B’Tselem, for instance, that in 2004, I believe, the highest—the cause, proportionately, of deaths in the Israeli soldiers, the highest one is suicide. There’s a big toll to soldiers. And I guess I have to hold out my hand, in some way, that if that man could understand what he’s done, in terms of our loss, if he could mourn our loss of Rachel, I could mourn his loss of humanity.

There’s a lot of steps, as Sarah says, that would have to happen that way. But yeah, I’d like to meet him. And it’s not about trying to put him in jail. It doesn’t do me any good if his children don’t have a father, if he has children. But some way, like Desmond Tutu talks about, of mending the tear in society, and I think it’s more like a wound in your arm, and to expect that one half of a wound would heal and the other half stay unhealed is impossible. Both halves have to heal….

AMY GOODMAN: Before, then, I ask about Biden, OK, Craig, what did you ask—

CRAIG CORRIE: Well, actually, it’s a pretty—

AMY GOODMAN: —President-to-be Obama?

CRAIG CORRIE: Yeah, it was strange, because we were in Atlantic, Iowa, so western part of Iowa, farmland, huge farmland. We’re in county fairgrounds in a cow barn. And I’m sitting on a fence behind the crowd, and the President-to-be Obama is actually asking people for questions, and he called on me.

And so, I ask a very easy question, because I just simply said I have friends in Palestine whose homes are being destroyed, whose farms are being taken from them by the Israelis, with no compensation. And I also have—and it’s true—I have Israeli friends who have lost family members in suicide bombings and stuff. So what could he do to protect the farms of my friends in Palestine and also assure my friends in Israel that there wouldn’t be any more suicide bombings? And then I told him why I was interested in the case and about Rachel’s killing there. And he recognized the name Rachel Corrie. He was familiar with that without an aide or his wife or somebody explaining it to him.

And so, he went on about five minutes talking about what was necessary, and essentially a two-state solution is what he said, for that and giving his commitment to a viable, contiguous state of Palestine alongside a state of Israel, living in peace and dignity and having a future for their people. So it was pretty much a standard US stated foreign policy, not actually the foreign policy we often pursue and enforce, but what we state, and a pretty good answer. And he went on, like I say, for about five minutes. It was very personal.

AMY GOODMAN: So back to Joe Biden. Talk about the questioning—

CINDY CORRIE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —that he did of the—

CINDY CORRIE: Well, it was also during the Iowa campaign, with my Iowa family members. Rachel’s case was brought to his attention in quite a large way. He was asked repeatedly about her case. And he did become interested. He finally said he wanted to see what was going on. And we know—we have copies of questions that he then submitted to Ambassador-Designate—the American ambassador to Israel, James Cunningham, who now is the Israeli ambassador, questions that he asked about Rachel’s case. He asked about what had been done in the State Department and in the embassy in Tel Aviv to pursue a thorough, credible and transparent investigation. And he also asked whether or not they thought that there had been a thorough, credible and transparent investigation. Clearly, getting this is important to officials in the US government.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did James Cunningham answer?

CINDY CORRIE: He laid out the steps that had been taken in pursuit of a transparent investigation and the communications that have occurred between the Department of State and Israel about the case and indicated that they have continued to ask the Israelis to answer questions and to comply with a thorough, credible and transparent investigation….

CRAIG CORRIE: When we’re talking about US officials and US government showing some interest in this case, Congressman Brian Baird, who is our congressman and was the congressman for Rachel when she was killed—and it was his office that we were right after Rachel was killed. He has now written a letter to the judge and is asking that he be able to testify in the case, come to Israel overnight, but he needs that to be—him to be heard on either Sunday the 21st or Monday the 22nd, because, of course, there are votes in Congress and all that. But it’s pretty amazing to me that a US congressman would be willing to take a redeye to Israel, come and testify, and then pop back onto a redeye back to Washington, DC. And, you know, my thanks go out to the congressman. I hope he’s allowed to do that. But his willingness to do it is just flooring to me.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s very interesting. He also went to Gaza, right?

CINDY CORRIE: He did.

AMY GOODMAN: Along with Keith Ellison, the congressman.

CRAIG CORRIE: Three times ago. He just got back, actually, a couple of weeks ago from his third trip to Gaza. And so, you can see, with him, because he’s somebody that we now have, you know, had personal contact with over a number of years. And he got there and saw, you know, worse than what Rachel saw, but he got there and saw it, and it was, as his chief of staff said, life-changing. And you can see that in what he writes and says about it.

…SARAH CORRIE SIMPSON: One of my frustrations in all the work that we did in Congress was that I think we thought, in the initial days after Rachel was killed, if the US government took a very strong stance against her killing, that perhaps it would have given some more protection to the others—I mean, to US citizens that are traveling in that region. And what we know is that shortly after Rachel was killed, Tom Hurndall, who was a British peace activist, was killed in the same two-mile stretch of Rafah, Gaza. Then there was James Miller, who was a British reporter that was also shot and killed in that same two-mile stretch. On the US side, we had Brian Avery in the West Bank, who was severely injured when he was shot in the face by the IDF. And now we have Tristan Anderson. And some of the frustration was that if there was accountability in Rachel’s case, I wonder how many of those other cases would not have happened.

I do like to point out that in the case of the British citizens, that the British government took a very strong stance against those killings. In the case of Tom Hurndall, they actually managed to get a criminal conviction. And much of that came by the work of the family and the work of the UK government to put pressure on Israel to do a credible investigation. In the case of James Miller, that criminal process did not occur. It was very similar to our case. They closed the case without bringing charges. But the British government continued to push so that there would be basically a damages claim. I believe that it was about $2.4 or $2.5 million to that family. And I don’t think it’s about the dollar figure, but it’s about saying that there was something very wrong that went on in that case. Iain Hook was another British citizen that they did not get—he was killed, as well, and they did not get a criminal conviction in that case. But again, that damages claim does say that the [UK] government believed that there should be accountability in that case.

And I just think that the US government certainly has the ability to push for the rights of their citizens and the safety of their citizens as hard as the UK government does. And I think both President Obama and Vice President Biden would understand that and want to make sure that the safety of the US citizens that are traveling in Gaza and the West Bank is the highest priority, when we’re over there.

AMY GOODMAN: The anniversary of Rachel’s death will be taking place in the midst of the trial. Trial begins March 10th. Her death occurred on March 16th. What are you calling on people to do?

CINDY CORRIE: We’re calling on people to be visible on March 16th, calling for accountability in Rachel’s case, but also making the linkages between accountability for her and the lack of accountability that’s occurred in—particularly with Gaza, with what happened in Operation Cast Lead in December of 2008 and January of 2009, but really for all of the acts of violence against Palestinians and others in the Occupied Territories.

And we’re also calling for attention to the assault on nonviolent human rights observers and activists that continues in various ways. There are Palestinians, now a growing number of Palestinians, who have died in nonviolent protests to the wall in the West Bank. People can find their names, I think, by going to the International Solidarity Movement website.

AMY GOODMAN: The separation wall.

CINDY CORRIE: The separation wall. And sometimes I read the list of those names. Palestinians resist nonviolently in many different ways. But this is in nonviolent protest to the wall.

And also, I think it’s important for people to make the link between our ability to access the Israeli courts and the fact that Palestinians have really little opportunity to do that. We understand that currently Palestinians who want to operate in the courts or to take their cases to the courts have to put a bond forward of something between twenty and fifty thousand dollars in order to bring a suit. And this is, of course, very prohibitive to them to be able to do that.

B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch and other organizations have talked about the impunity that the Israeli military enjoys because of lack of accountability through the courts and in other ways. And I hope that people will be visible to say, “We’ve had enough of this,” and to call for accountability for Rachel, but to link it to these other larger issues.

CRAIG CORRIE: Amy, one other very specific thing that people could do, and I’m calling for people to do—the US government has come out against the blockade or the continued occupation and siege on Gaza. The children that were behind the wall that Rachel stood in front of are still under a state of siege. And I think that, very specifically, people around the world and certainly in this country could write, call or fax the White House and say, not only should we be working to have the Israelis lift that siege, but if they continue to be unwilling to do so, then the United States should come in there, work out a way that they could come in and—the Berlin airlift, it sent a message to the world about our ability to protect people around the world and our willingness to do so. If we did something similar by sea to the Gaza Strip, it would change the view of Americans around the world for maybe another fifty years. It is something that’s doable, and it’s something that the people out, your fans, could actually physically do and ask the White House to do that.

Related posts:

People are talking excitedly about a big new paper on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, coming out of the "Global Forum on Anti-Semitism,"a conference organized by the Israeli government. The paper is evidently authored by Israel lobbyists Mitchell Bard and Gil Troy, here it is:

BDS Working Group Final draft

I say excitedly because the authors admit they can’t defend their position in the west– settlement and occupation are indefensible. Well for now, anyway! Maybe not after the next big war?

In the current climate, Israel advocates are always going to lose a fight over settlements and occupation, or at best get mired in stalemate. BDS shifts the terrain, making the battle one over Israel’s right to exist, over the legitimacy of Zionism, over the anti-Semitic tropes shaping the anti-Israel movement, and the rank anti-Semitism behind the disproportionate, obsessive focus on Israel.

So they need to smear the messenger with wild mischaracterizations of BDS: that it is connected to Islamists, and that the campaign is well funded, and that it is linked to 9/11. Why not Saddam Hussein?

BDS is also part of the broader Islamist strategy to undermine the West. Especially in North America, activists need to understand how positions they are taking are aiding the same people who support shooting up Fort Hood, trying to down commercial jets on Christmas, and succeeded in killing nearly three thousand people on September 11, 2001.

These people are in total denial that the boycott movement is a growing grassroots effort in response to Israeli intransigence and international compliance with same.

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Pesach is right around the corner. And while Israel will go through the motions of the holiday, it won’t reach the spirit of Passover. Why?

Israel has lost its moral compass.

I’m not talking about Gaza, the Occupation, or 1948, although the expulsion of the Palestinians is where Israel’s steps first foundered. With Pesach in mind, I’m talking about how Israel is treating the strangers in its land.

The Oz Unit, an arm of the immigration police, is on the streets now cracking down on illegal residents and those that employ them. The campaign, part of Israel’s ongoing attempt to rid the country of non-Jewish foreigners, has been given the revolting name "Clean and Tidy", evoking images not of law enforcement but of ethnic cleansing.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Oded Feller, an attorney with the Association of Civil Rights in Israel remarked, “The state authorities are of course entitled to enforce the law; what we oppose is the disgraceful language that accompanies these sorts of operations. Human beings are not dirt.” 

The Jerusalem Post continued, "Feller said names like ‘Clean and Tidy’ incite hatred of foreigners, and added that it is shameful the government chooses such titles for its operations."

During Pesach, a holiday that commemorates the ancient Hebrews’ flight from oppressive conditions in Africa, we read the Exodus portion of the Torah, which includes the reminder: “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, having been strangers in the land of Egypt.” 

It is shameful to me that Israel will speak these words out of one corner of its mouth while saying "Clean and Tidy" with the other side. Rather than caring for the foreigners in our midst, as Judaism instructs us to, the state is attempting to sweep them away. Considered fair game for deportation are children who were born and raised in Israel, African refugees who have fled war and genocide, and foreign workers who have lost their visas simply because they are were victimized by the flying visa scam—which the government is aware of and does nothing to stop. 

This isn’t a state guided by Judaic values. 

The Conversion Law, currently making its way through Knesset, also flies in the face of Jewish tradition. Under the proposed legislation, some converts—people who were once strangers but now stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Jewish people—will no longer have a home in Israel. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the bill includes a provision stating that those "who convert in Israel will only receive automatic citizenship if they were entitled to immigrate under the Law of Return." 

This means that even those who convert in Israel, under the auspices of an Orthodox rabbi, would still need to prove that they have at least one Jewish grandparent.

Taken together, the message of the "Clean and Tidy" campaign and the Conversion Law is loud and clear: whether you are a stranger past or present, you aren’t welcome in the land of Israel. Unless you meet her increasingly stringent ethnic standards.

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Often these days I hear people talk about how much progress the left has made in breaking open the Israel/Palestine issue in the U.S., and yes I make this claim myself, but last night offered clear evidence that we are doing so. At the behest of 20-odd peace groups, several hundred people marched around the Waldorf Astoria silently as the Israeli military held a million-dollar fundraiser inside. Now and then donors in black tie got out of cabs, but here we were in single file, most of us wearing black, stretching all the way round the hotel and holding signs naming 5-year-olds who were slaughtered in Gaza.

My guess is there were 700 of us. "We are marching single file in a silent, dignified, slow procession," our organizers had written on the slips of paper they handed out, and though they couldn’t stop us talking, we did as they planned for two hours as night fell. Slide show here.

The night was memorable for two things: the looniness of the counterdemonstators and a conversation I had about the possible end of Israel with a soulful Jewish friend.

The counterdemonstrators were unhinged angry. One of them followed people up and down the line talking about the training of three-year-old suicide bombers. Another screamed about the Arab countries being all dictatorships. Another said, "you don’t care what happens in Sudan, you don’t care when Assad senior kills 3000 people in Syria. [30 years ago!] No you only care when Israel was trying to defend itself." "You’re not liberals," an older guy in a suit kept shouting. A woman carried a sign with a Muslim crescent = a Swastika. Wow, creepy. A woman wrapped herself in an Israeli flag big as a bedsheet and tagged along with us for a while. The official sign of the counters was Hamas Is Destroying the Palestinian Future. A crazy statement, at many levels, beginning with the idea that Israel has no agency.

A friend said that the counterdemonstrators were getting aneurysms from the fact that we were so silent and in such abundance with our black signs saying "Israeli soldiers shot handcuffed civilians," "Israeli forces destroyed the Gaza water plant."

Their biggest signs asserted, "Israel has a right to exist and be secure." Or, "Israel has a right to exist and it is here to stay." So that is the ground they are choosing to fight on: the delegitimization issue.

That brings me to my conversation with my soulful Jewish friend. A couple years ago he told me he is a post-Zionist out of politeness, because he doesn’t want to take away the feeling of achievement that Jews in Israel have about what they created, and he understands the urgency that Israel came out of a generation ago. But tonight he told me he has very bleak feelings about the future. Israel is in crisis, and two states is over; and on the one hand he believes Israel will undertake a total ethnic cleansing operation, on the other that the South Africa declension is begun, and it won’t happen peacefully.

I said What if they have a handshake on the White House lawn, will you get behind that? He looked at me like I was crazy, then got a delighted smile. When that happens, I’ll give you an opinion, he said. Then: What could it be? I said, well, landswaps, warmed-over Geneva; that’s what Obama will announce.

Oh, he said, a deal with a bankrupt leadership for three Bantustans in the West Bank and Gaza? That will last another generation, and there will be no peace.

I said, how do you imagine the binational state comes about? He laughed and said he hadn’t really thought about it. But at best it is like South Africa and an Israeli leader understands that they have no choice. There is an internal crisis of national identity, there is no way forward, and they give in and say, let us give these people equal rights.

Sort of consociational, I thought, two federated entities? He shrugged. As more and more Jews leave and move to the west it becomes a mixed state, he said.

My friend was talking just like Henning Mankell, who sees the insurrection beginning from within, and also like a lot of Israelis who are trying to be creative now about civil outcomes.

I reflect that Noam Chomsky, who is for the two state solution, used to say that Israel has a right to exist but not on the land of its neighbors. It was a legitimate position for a long time, but you can’t promise people something forever, and Israel won’t disgorge that land and the Palestinians have balked at a piecemeal Jerusalem, and the world moves forward. I give the two state solution air time on this site, because I’m openminded and because I like status and power politics, but in spite of Chris Matthews and Ethan Bronner indulging happy-talk about the solution, it sure looks like the 25 years of the two state solution are over, the Palestinians helped kill it and so did the Israelis.

A lot of folks I know believe in Israel’s right to exist as much as China’s right to exist or Pakistan’s or John Gotti’s. I do myself. The problem is that the continued failure to base that existence on policies other than permanent war and ethnic cleansing means that American political support must be at stake, and as anyone who has set foot in West Jerusalem can tell you, American opinion is the ballgame. Some said there were 1000 of us last night, and what we stand for is pretty obvious: No more slaughter, no more Jim Crow, no more In-our-name (the lobby). 

The Jewish state has not figured out a way to be without Jim Crow and the lobby to grant it immunity, and so it is slowly destroying its raison-d’etre in the liberal discourse. That is what last night was about: 1, a wide consensus among progressives, many of them the Israel base (Jews) that we will condemn this behavior—-and 2, the resultant fear on the part of Israel’s supporters that our views are catching on, and that this grassroots process is undermining Israel’s legitimacy.

So the existential crisis has come here. Through its own actions, Israel is destroying the ground it stands on. The answer to the big sign is, Israel is not secure, it is casting away its own means of existence, it is not here to stay. Sorry but that is the news. The ultimate business of this site and the Jewish left too is to help those who were committed to Zionism out of a belief in the endurance of anti-semitism and the need for Jewish nationalism amid other nationalisms to understand that the moment is over, and that they should support other outcomes in the name of liberal democracy. The presence of Jews Say No and 20-odd other groups outside the Waldorf, as warmongers dined, suggests that there will be a lot of creative thinking towards those ends.

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Want to see what happens to you if you honestly oppose imperial war? Want to see what happens to you if you honestly oppose a horrendous corporate boondoggle that will effectively kill genuine health care reform for years, if not generations? This is what happens to you: The Liberal Case Against Dennis Kucinich.

Yes, if you stand up against endless, pointless, profiteering slaughter in foreign lands, if you stand up against an astonishingly brazen, deeply dirty deal cut in the White House itself to enrich some of the most brutal, rapacious corporate sharks ever to feast, quite literally, on the bodies of nation's working people and the poor, then those Fightin' Progressives at Salon.com will come around and slap you with the cold, wet fish of their withering scorn.

They will join with the very model of a modern major general of the "Progressive Forces," Commander Kos his own self, to belittle you and denounce you -- no, not just denounce you, but accuse you, on national television, of being directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.

That's right; according to the Commander, if Dennis Kucinich dares to vote against whatever corporate blank check the bought-and-sold bagmen in Congress and the White House come up with to deliver millions of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans into the clutches of the health care and insurance conglomerates (which, as our Progressives themselves rightly remind us, are the ones with the real "death panels"), then Kucinich will be a mass murderer of Americans on a scale far outstripping the petty efforts of Al Qaeda and the Taliban during the long twilight struggle of our noble global Terror War.

And isn't it odd that these discrediting blasts from "the left" undermining Kucinich come just as his resolution for a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan is about to come up for debate on the House floor? Well, no, it's actually not odd at all; it is entirely predictable. The empire simply could not exist in its current form without the diligent self-policing of the "serious," "respectable" "left." They take great pains -- and inflict great pains -- in their efforts to mock and marginalize anyone who steps outside the narrow, suffocating boundaries of "savvy" Beltway gamesmanship. You cannot seriously oppose our empire of military dominion; you can only debate on the best, most "efficient" way to perpetuate it. You cannot seriously oppose the overwhelming sway of Big Money; you can only propose the mildest of mitigations of its depredations -- but only if Big Money agrees, of course.

The main thing you must be is savvy. You cannot be a real live Fightin' Progressive unless you know how to play the game. Look how the Commander's amen chorister at Salon, Alex Koppleman, drips sniffling scorn on Kucinich's legislative record: "of the 97 bills Kucinich has sponsored since taking office in 1997, only three have become law. Ninety-three didn't even make it out of committee." And even those three, Koppleman notes, were just silly little proclamations, of interest only to the hicks back in Kucinich's district somewhere out there in flyover land.

But just think what a howling pig circus the United States Congress has been during Kucinich's 13-year tenure in the House. Look around at the vast wreckage these poltroons have helped perpetrate, from the deregulation of the Bankster gangs to the imposition of draconian bankruptcy laws (championed by our super-progressive vice president) to the panicky, pants-wetting trashing of the constitution in the Patriot Acts and Military Commission Acts and Retroactive Immunity for Telecom Lawbreakers Act (supported by our super-progressive president) to support for the Hitlerian war crime of military aggression in Iraq (supported by our super-progressive secretary of state) to the redistribution of the nation's wealth (for generations) from working people and the poor to those same Banksters whose Congressionally-deregulated scams have plunged millions around the world into ruin.

This is only a fraction of an overall record of towering cupidity, stupidity and evil that almost beggars description. Why would anyone with even the slightest speck of honor or decency want to be considered a major, "savvy" contributor to such a legacy? And considering the conglomeration of political whores, bribe-takers, liars, warmongers, lackeys and outright lunatics that constitutes the bipartisan bulk of Congress, isn't it actually a badge of honor -- rather than a mark of shame -- for your legislation to be rejected by them?

Not for our "progressives." Koppelman's scorn for Kucinich's lack of "savvy" is palatable. His agreement with Kos's blood libel -- "holding people like Dennis Kucinich responsible for the 40,000 Americans that die each year from a lack of health care" -- is evident. The president who literally sold out genuine health care reform is not responsible. The Congress that concocted a series of hideous, confusing, corporate-crafted boondoggles that utterly reject the highly popular notion of a public option is not responsible. And evidently the dark, satanic mills of the health care, pharmaceutical and insurance industries are not responsible either.

No; Dennis Kucinich -- and "people like him" -- are responsible. Why? Because they cannot find it in their conscience to support what they fervently believe to be a harmful bill. This is their crime; to act according to their conscience on a piece of bad legislation that has somehow been elevated into a sacred totem, a holy grail by our respectable Fightin' Progressives. It doesn't matter what the Grail actually contains (or doesn't contain); all that matters is its symbolic significance as a great "victory" for our "progressive" president, and indeed, for all the progressive forces of our higher progressivism.

But what this "symbolic" victory will really do, of course, is lock into place -- for decades probably -- a rancid, corrupt and ill-serving system that will leave millions of the most vulnerable Americans at the untender mercy of corporate predators. However, if the bill were defeated, one could simply start all over -- with genuine reform this time.

But who wants that? It's too much like hard work. Symbolism is a lot easier than substance -- especially if you're a rootin', tootin', savvy, serious Fightin' Progressive. Anyway, symbolism is all you're gonna get from our imperial overlords. So you better just be happy with that little crumb. After all, as Commander Kos says, it's "a foot in the door." Who knows? If we all stay real serious and respectable, they just might throw us another little crumb somewhere down the line!

This, then, is what now passes for "the left" in America: snippy derision -- and thundering condemnation -- for anyone who dares suggest, even mildly, that a goddamn crumb is not good enough.
 

I'm working on another piece right now, but this excerpt from wise man William Blum is too good to pass up. This is from his latest "Anti-Empire Report," which you should sign up for today, if you don't already get it.

About half the states in the US require that a woman seeking an abortion be told certain things before she can obtain the medical procedure. In South Dakota, for example, until a few months ago, staff was required to tell women: "The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being"; the pregnant woman has "an existing relationship with that unborn human being," a relationship protected by the U.S. Constitution and the laws of South Dakota; and a "known medical risk" of abortion is an "increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide." A federal judge has now eliminated the second and third required assertions, calling them "untruthful and misleading."

I personally would question even the first assertion about a fetus or an embryo being a human being, but that's not the point I wish to make here. I'd like to suggest that before a young American man or woman can enlist in the armed forces s/he must be told the following by the staff of the military recruitment office:

"The United States is at war [this statement is always factually correct]. You will likely be sent to a battlefield where you will be expected to do your best to terminate the lives of whole, separate, unique, living human beings you know nothing about and who have never done you or your country any harm. You may in the process lose an arm or a leg. Or your life. If you come home alive and with all your body parts intact there's a good chance you will be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Do not expect the government to provide you particularly good care for that, or any care at all. In any case, you may wind up physically abusing your spouse and children and/or others, killing various individuals, abusing drugs and/or alcohol, and having an increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide. No matter how bad a condition you may be in, the Pentagon may send you back to the battlefield for another tour of duty. They call this 'stop-loss'. Your only alternative may be to go AWOL. Do you have any friends in Canada? And don't ever ask any of your officers what we're fighting for. Even the generals don't know. In fact, the generals especially don't know. They would never have reached their high position if they had been able to go beyond the propaganda we're all fed, the same propaganda that has influenced you to come to this office."

Since for so many young people in recent years one of the determining factors in their enlistment has been the economy, this additional thought should be pointed out to them — "You are enlisting to fight, and perhaps die, for a country that can't even provide you with a decent job, or any job at all."