Now we know that while he can still disagree without being disagreeable, he has no principles that can never be compromised.  His absurdly protracted attempt at bipartisanship with the Party of No has made him one of the most ineffective first-term presidents in modern history, and he has been beating the waves ever since.

His first days began with a triumph in Congress that did give hope to the progressive base that elected him when he signed the Lilli Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.  It’s been all down hill from there.  To look on any given day at a news-montage website, from The HuffingtonPost to The Drudge Report, is to see a wide spectrum of failure and impotence, and what is worse, a seemingly aloof unwillingness by the President to take charge in addressing the catastrophic problems of the day with anything like presidential authority and strength – or at least like a man whose « principals can never be compromised ».  We want to see the best in him, but are consistently reminded of the worst.

While Republicans are certainly to blame for just about everything but the weather, the fact that President Obama has been such an ineffective leader in opposing their madness is down to him. He needs to be far more disagreeable towards Wall Street, and downright hostile to those who oppose any and all sorts of legislation that eases the burden on the multimillions of unemployed, those bilked out of their homes by unscrupulous lenders, and the sick and dying who are still at the non-existent mercies of a medieval healthcare system.  This is not the spirit of « bleeding-heart » liberalism; it’s what was called, pre-Reagan, the American Way.

Now, the oil spill has become metaphoric of his presidency and those who oppose him: they are the toxic filth streaming into the helpless ocean, while he can find no way to stop it.

Unless Mr Obama can bring some powerful “change” to the scene, it is hard to see the United States succeeding in avoiding a “third depression”, as Economist Paul Krugman has direly warned.  With the tsunami his inattention to reforming the Minerals Management Service has unleashed, and the McCrystall debacle that throws into question the entire American war effort in that region, combined with the snowballing power of the right-wing lunatic fringe which threatens American freedoms more than any terrorist cell could ever hope to do, Mr Obama looks like a young antelope being systematically separated from the herd by slavering jackals in close pursuit.

At the very least, Mr Obama must immediately engage a new Cabinet that is not in the pocket of Wall Street, advisors who could not double as lobbyists for the war-machine (or vicious 17th century Puritans), and stop relying on “consensus” for decisions which he has been empowered by the voting public to make himself – in other words, “change Washington”, for real.  The ruthless watering-down of his healthcare and financial reform bills reflects the treacherous disunity in the Democratic Party, who look at times as though they are pulling away from the straggler, almost sacrificing him to the GOP/Tea Party jackals so that they can escape to compromise another day.  Mr Obama must go from being the hunted to the hunter, the pursued to the pursuer.  FDR has shown that it CAN be done – all that remains is for Mr Obama to finally wake up and begin to do it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/feb/10/barackobama

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/us/politics/30ledbetter-web.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/opinion/28krugman.html

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So it has come to this. A Disney-esque storyline is now the latest narrative for Why We Were Right. “$1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits”, the New York Times gushes breathlessly, as though the Good News mustn’t wait another moment to comfort our hearts, “far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself.”

No, seriously, it gets better: “The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists.” See, and you thought they were just paying off warlords and subsidizing opium.

“While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.

“’There is stunning potential here,’ Gen. David H. Petraeus of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. ‘There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.’”

Even Petraeus is on board this time! The Joe Biden of the military has been successfully briefed on the importance of stating how important this is. Those “ifs” he’s speaking of probably refer to the utter intransigence of the Taliban and the impossibility of actually creating the mines that will save the country. But hey, no plan is 100% perfect:

“Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.

“The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources. Just last year, Afghanistan’s minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. The minister has since been replaced.

“Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts. Afghanistan has a national mining law, written with the help of advisers from the World Bank, but it has never faced a serious challenge.

“’No one has tested that law; no one knows how it will stand up in a fight between the central government and the provinces,’ observed Paul A. Brinkley, deputy undersecretary of defense for business and leader of the Pentagon team that discovered the deposits.

“At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.

“Another complication is that because Afghanistan has never had much heavy industry before, it has little or no history of environmental protection either. ‘The big question is, can this be developed in a responsible way, in a way that is environmentally and socially responsible?’ Mr. Brinkley said. ‘No one knows how this will work.’

“With virtually no mining industry or infrastructure in place today, it will take decades for Afghanistan to exploit its mineral wealth fully. ‘This is a country that has no mining culture,’ said Jack Medlin, a geologist in the United States Geological Survey’s international affairs program.”

You have to hand it to them:  there’s even a mining-backstory that should be read as it slides away from you in white letters against a background of stars in the blackness of space.   http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html?pagewanted=2&hp

Kids, this latest retelling of Why We Are Right is not only meant to justify the means by the glorious end, those future bags of liberated wealth that would fill Scrooge McDuck with glee. This is the beginning of justifying even further escalation. The U.S. is having serious problems keeping Russia and China onside when it comes to Israel, Africa and Iran. Is the promise of a shared goldmine what’s on the table, or something more sinister?

From this ridiculous fantasy, full of loopholes and disclaimers at every turn, there’s no way to tell. It’s a comic-book cliffhanger, we’ll have to wait for the next installment in this fabulous adventure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/asia/14minerals.html?hp

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Mr Obama has stayed the course on unconstitutional domestic spying, and on many other relics from the disastrous “Patriot Act”, allowing the freedoms of Americans to continue to be compromised and lost. By siding with those forces which have brought American to its knees – a path blazed by Ronald Reagan and turned into a superhighway by Bush Jr. – he doomed his presidency from the start.

Who can take him seriously when he says he’s going to “kick ass…at BP”? He followed March Madness closer than the corrupt Minerals Management Service, missing the free shots one after another, first by declaring he will allow more off-shore drilling to appease the GOP mad dogs of “drill baby drill”, and then, when disaster struck, by putting the fox in charge of cleaning up the henhouse to pacify the BP Englishmen. Now, 50 days later, while the Gulf of Mexico lies dead and bleeding hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil per day, there is still no real plan.

This is not merely “disappointing”, as if the “hope” promised by his campaign was not a matter of restoring law and order, constitutional integrity and reclaiming the dignity of freedom’s defender that the US had once stood for, before hawks and vultures ran it into the ground for personal gain to their own interests and those of their shady friends. It is a catastrophe that has all but ended the chances of the U.S. to recover its balance, to enfranchise the middle and lower classes, precisely so that they do NOT have to “cling to their guns and religion”.

But the moment is being lost, is almost past. President Obama has chosen to remain one of them, rather than represent the us who elected him in hope that change would come, change for the better. But all we got is chump change, still holding the bag for Too Big To Fail banks, still watching helplessly as the coastline turns black and dies, still sending young soldiers to die in a futile war, or teaching them to kill by remote-control until they go insane and seek death in suicide. The much-lauded “Health-care Reform Bill” is a weak, compromised version of what even much poorer countries take for granted, filled with the dirty footprints of lobbyists which have trampled the hard-won liberties of women, with little or no change to the system of putting Big Pharma and the Insurance Companies first, the American citizen last.

When will it end? Don’t hold your breath – while the rest of the world reacted in open horror and condemnation, the spinelessness shown by the U.S. over the latest Israeli massacre, which included the killing of an American citizen, shows clearly the direction in which Obama is following the country – DOWN. No one is saying a Republican president wouldn’t have been unthinkably worse, but that is not the issue. Mr Obama has compared himself to two of the greatest leaders this country ever had, Lincoln, who risked everything to maintain the union of the states and end slavery, and FDR, who decided to invest the country’s wealth in the future of its human capital. But President Obama has not been a leader, though, to use the “saddest words of tongue or pen”, he “might have been”. What the future holds for the rudderless, off-course ship of state looks like Scylla and Charybdis without an Odyssius to guide it through.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_christian_fascists_are_growing_stronger_20100607/
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/suic-j06.shtml
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/03/george-w-bush-defends-waterboarding_n_598806.html
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/07/assassinations
http://www.truthout.org/cheney-admits-war-crimes-media-yawns-obama-turns-other-cheek56924

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A new disgrace, a new atrocity, same old rhetoric from Israel – but this time, criticism is raining down with new force from all over the world. It’s as if some governments have just woken up to the fact that it is Israel which has spawned some of the fiercest terrorist attacks, (and inspiring terrorist recruiting propaganda) over the last decades, always coming back to their shameful, inhuman treatment of Palestinians, always aided and abetted by the U.S. and its other “allies”. The apartheid that has existed, virtually without challenge, is now being seen as just cause to bring the fanatical factions running the country to book, and a call for Israel to abide by accepted standards of international law has been echoed in unexpected halls of justice.

Turkey, not a little ironically, is now in a position to call out an even worse offender against human rights and decency. Egypt has declared Israel to have lost all credibility. Diaspora Jews everywhere, as well as many within the country, are calling for a change in the barbaric practices against a weak and disenfranchised people, who have been repeatedly attacked with overwhelming force, imploring leaders to engage a constructive, forward-looking policy on the road to a two-state solution, which is the only way to bring peace and restore the dignity of the long-abused Palestinian people.

Everyone who, like me, has lived in Israel, or even those who have paid attention to what news they could get, ignoring the deafening propaganda of Israel’s right (and center), has known for decades that the treatment of Palestinians has been outrageous and untenable. What is different now is the amount of outside coverage, the new voices, with their cell-phone videos and photos, that show it was yet another massacre. No sooner did reporters attempt to get a story, when Israel denied access to the eye-witnesses that would challenge and refute their party-line as to what happened. But even though the spin-machine has been working overtime, like the BP oil gushing uncontrolled into the Gulf, the sickening details are emerging and staining the waters black. Op-Idiot Thomas Friedman claims to be torn between two lovers (Turkey and Israel), but in more rational corners there is no question of loyalties: Israel cannot remain a lawless, violent aggressor in the region which most needs a serious direction toward justice and peace.

It has been many, many years since Israel faced any kind of serious threat from Palestinians, but if they are threatened now by other Arab and Muslim nations, it is in large part down to their duplicitous behavior over treaties (they always break them), and their berserker-approach in reacting to minor threats.

For the first time in ages people are realizing that when your back is to the wall, the “nothing to lose” view is what has driven men, women and children to strap on suicide bombs, that a policy of backing generations of people to the wall is what has given rise to these fearful tactics as the only attainable form of resistance. It goes without saying that Israel should have been the first to refrain from Gestapo-like methods of intimidation, and ghettoizing in order to create a sense of helplessness and desperation. But the bitterest comparisons are finally being spoken of out loud, the criticism that should have ended this horrific state of affairs is only now emerging with accepted legitimacy from other places than liberal journals or academic institutions. The days of shouting « anti-Semitism » at every critic, and allowing Israel to claim its own offensive attacks are justified self-defense, are rightly over. The only thing lacking now is for Israel to hear the message and change its self-defeating and world-threatening policies. And for the U.S. to do the same.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-scheer/treat-palestinians-like-j_b_597195.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/02/barney-frank-as-a-jew-ashamed_n_597331.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/searchS/?q=egypt+israel+flotilla
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bradley-burston/the-second-gaza-war-israe_b_595155.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opinion/02friedman.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/world/middleeast/03flotilla.html?hp
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/02/gaza-flotilla-raid-gunfire-ship-blood

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In The Four Quartets, Eliot wrote that « humankind cannot bear very much reality ». But how dare we allow ourselves the dubious luxury of ignoring the suffering directly caused by our “way of life”? Because these things don’t go away, they return, they come back on us with devastating force, and will utterly destroy us.
So this is what They do:
They cover up.
They disappear data.
They destroy evidence.
They run the governments, and their bought friends do their bidding: Senators, Congressmen, Generals, the C.I.A. As do their counterparts all over the world, in governments like and even more like our own.

Because what else does it mean when the President of the United States authorizes a policy of allowing the assassination of a citizen without trial, except that we’ve become no better than the most fanatical thugs? What does it mean when the Justice Department says detainees who have been held almost a decade without being charged cannot challenge their detention, except that the very bedrock of our Constitution and Justice System is reduced to rubble? What does it mean when the whereabouts of trillions of dollars in tax-payer funded bail-out money to Wall Street are “unknown”, except that banks and corporations now run the Treasury Department? What does it mean when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan roll on at a cost of $3 billion per week while killing untold numbers of civilians and accomplishing no recognizable mission, except that war has become the ‘business of America’? And what does it mean when an oil company can walk away from the destruction of the entire Gulf of Mexico, by being allowed to cover up or erase all information pertaining to the true scope of the spill, except that the life of the planet earth is less important than capital gains for oil companies?

It means that citizens and lawmakers who would represent their true interests are no longer a part of the process in the United States, and in much of the world which has come to follow it off the cliff.

This is the bitter reality of the American present, a period in which big business has cemented an unholy alliance with big government against the interests of ordinary Americans, who, of course, are the great majority of Americans. The great majority of Americans no longer matter.*

With the end of the rule of law, habeas corpus, democracy itself, the U.S. and its powerful allies around the world are literally getting away with murder, global pillage, genocidal pollution of the planet. These allies are not just “western democracies”, my friends: the West is allied with every one of those countries they tell you are “enemies”. What we’re being told is nothing other than outright lies; the truth consists of what we may never know. Orwell predicted it:  « who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present controls the past » — and when the cover up is this systematic and reflexive, the future will read like a Texas history textbook.  How long will this go on before  « the great majority of people » realize that there is NO SUCH THING AS SELF-INTEREST????

*NYTimes, Sunday, 23 May, 2010, Bob Herbert
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/14/last-seven-hours-of-data-_n_576096.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/world/16contractors.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/opinion/22herbert.html?hp
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daphne-eviatar/court-ruling-highlights-n_b_585400.html
http://www.armscontrolcenter.org/policy/securityspending/articles/gwot_spending_burn_rate/

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In the reality-based universe, what Brown is describing is what socialism was originally intended to produce: a fairer distribution of wealth, a respect for the laborer, a dedication to a mutually beneficial society. In the 19th century, this might have been called “Christian Socialism”, and before that, simply “Christian”. In that sense, there was a good deal of what was once known as the American Way, as in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, in Brown’s words, and he intended them, “as the son of a Church of Scotland minister”.

So why are these Tea Partiers, who insist that America’s Founding Fathers were devout followers of Jesus, so adamant that President Obama’s “socialist agenda” (when it is not being called “communist” or “facist”) is so alien to the true American spirit? Since when is the putrid greed of Goldman Sachs a defensible creed and rallying cry for “real” America? And now that “drill, baby, drill!” is shown to be a war cry against our own land and sea, an environmental catastrophe that caused even Professor Krugman to leave aside his premier role as America’s Economist to plead the environmentalist cause for preserving the protections the GOP and its lobbyists have largely revoked, (like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, things so basic one wonders why they ever needed Acts to begin with), why can’t they admit their error and repent, as the President himself must surely do, if only to retain liberal support?

The mean-spiritedness behind the Conservative right is more than a policy failure; it is a human failure, a failure to understand the nature of society itself, a failure to take human interest seriously, in favor of an anti-humanist agenda that destroys not only the fabric of society but the earth as well. It is not simply the politicians which need changing, it is our minds.

Recently, some tone-deaf Germans have been quoted suggesting that Greece “sell its gorgeous islands” to pay its debt. Leaving aside the 900-pound gorilla of irony of Germany playing a blame-game for a moment, one wonders what a “united Europe” would mean if only the four most prosperous members were included. It is a macrocosm of the Tea Party mentality: the rich are literally worth more and must be paid deference, the excess they already have should be added to, and the wretched poor should get about the business of dying (to paraphrase none other than that icon of misanthropy, Ebeneezer Scrooge). What other message can one take away from such insanity as opposing universal health care, or supporting the deportation of children who are U.S. citizens born to illegal aliens? This age of cruelty cannot harbinger progress; it is a regression to the worst of times, a return to feudalism and worse.

So why is this not cognizable to those supposed « freedom lovers » on the right? Is the conservative noise-machine (GOP “leaders”, FOX News, right-wing lunatics on talk radio, Evangelical fanatics, et al) so loud that the voice of reason is completely drowned out? Is it, as Frank Rich seems to think, plain old racism rearing its pointy-hooded head? Or is it the staggering ignorance that has arisen from decades of declining educational standards, especially in the teaching of modern science? All these things and more; a lotto-winner mentality that a windfall is the answer to all one’s problems – even if it solves no one else’s.

Other countries not so caught up in the pursuit of wealth at the cost of everything else that makes life worth living, are taking on the big questions: how to deal with climate change, how to develop and use new medical technologies and genetic discoveries, how to enrich human experience in all fields while preserving the splendours of our planet. But others, following the dog-shit smear on the heel of Ayn Rand’s disciples, can see nothing but a bottom line in matters of social programs, education, health care, infrastructure, labor, and human dignity itself. These people must not be allowed to hijack and squander any more of the world’s resources. The Halliburtons, the Goldman Sachs’, the Tea Partiers, and the Camerons, must become part of history. The visionaries are those who believe in a future for humanity – as a whole.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/erich-pica/obama-on-energy-two-steps_b_525861.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/30/duncan-hunter-deport-ille_n_558137.html

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This, ultimately, is what the “Tea Partiers” will end up accomplishing with their insane anti-government activism: a retreat into an America where workers had no rights whatsoever, where the barons of industry treated their employees like mere serfs, where the ‘owners’ left no recourse to workers but to submit to their shoddy, dangerous standards or be fired. An America without labor unions, (as indeed, it almost is already), without any worker rights. This is what Republicans are allowing to pass for a party line, a sop to the most uneducated, unenlightened sector of the population. With the overt racism at its core, this is grass roots at its dirtiest and most soiled.

And not only workers, of course, but immigrants are suffering draconian penalties for existing in a country whose être, up until the present age (which is paying the consequences of the Culture of Greed), has been to give immigrants a shot at a better life. Every white face in the United States is that of an immigrant, a brutal usurper at the country’s inception, and a self-serving overlord at its Goldman Sachs-level conclusion. But now, we have to endure, from a Congressman no less, an ignorant diatribe that is the typical parody of every Klan-loving Southerner in history:

Rep. Bilbray:”[Law Enforcement Officials] will look at the kind of dress you wear, there’s different type of attire, there’s different type of—right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes. But mostly by behavior it’s mostly behavior, just as the law enforcement people here in Washington, DC does it based on certain criminal activity there is behavior things that professionals are trained in across the board and this group shouldn’t be exempt from those observations as much as anybody else.”

SIC. That Bush-worthy final sentence tells you more than you’d like to know about the state of the police, who are now trained to jail as many people as possible from the jailable classes (ONE IN EVERY 32 ADULTS!) or Taser the insane or disabled (having lost sight of their job to serve and protect, and not to become judge and jury with lethal force, or to torture or humiliate, which is why laws protecting the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ have been established in the U.S. for generations. Or has the Abu Ghraib/Guantanamo Bay mentality become the standard even for domestic police?)

This is traditionally where the ACLU steps in, alongside all those Liberals in the United Nations, who use every legal means to protect our freedoms – not in the moronic sense of the word ‘freedoms’ so notoriously abused by the Teabaggers, but in the sense that citizens of « free » countries around the world are defended from the real abuses of tyranny, facism, and all the other specious titles ignorantly and irresponsibly thrown at the Obama Administration.

So basically, life in the United States – and the world – without liberalism would completely suck. Who doesn’t know that? The richest percentage of the population, which, thanks to the Bush Administration’s redistribution of wealth, controls most of the money in the U.S. This week, “financial legislation” is being voted on to stop the raping of the domestic and world economy by Goldman Sachs (currently under federal indictment for fraud) – and people are actually expecting it to fail, expecting that no one can possibly reign in the madness that is derivatives and the rest of their crooked industry. Now, the country of Greece, the “cradle of democracy”, has forfeited its sovereignty to foreign banks and authorities, and again we find Goldman Sachs at the black heart of the troubles. Will the new financial regulation be tough enough to bring down this “giant vampire squid”? Or will it be more like climate change denial, where the penalty for willful ignorance is death, yet the top few insist on pretending we’re getting away with something wonderful?

Seeing every inconvenient truth ignored, it’s no wonder the Gaia Theory is winning over more and more people each day: the human race may indeed be, as one scientist put it, ‘too stupid to survive’.

____________________________________________________________
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/us/26obama.html?hp
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/04/rep-brian-bilbray-says-he-can-spot-illegal-immigrants-based-on-their-shoes.php
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113000912.html
http://wonkette.com/415016/arizona-gov-jan-brewer-signs-everyones-favorite-arrest-the-browns-law
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100503/kaufmann_video
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock-climate-change
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-pettifor/does-greece-have-a-tea-pa_b_551313.html

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Well, there is one thing: the U.N. Security Council can stop pretending they are in control of Iran and start treating them like a nuclear-capable government, so that Iran, like the above-mentioned countries, will never use their nuclear weapons. And that is what a “coherent Iran policy” is going to look like, whether John McCain likes it or not.

The U.S., the United Nations, NATO – no country or alliance in this world is going to be able to regulate nuclear power in Iran, unless diplomatic channels are opened and a “defacto enemy” attitude is abandoned. There can be no more “axis of evil” talk in a world where billions of people believe the turning point of that axis is the United States and its allies. Things have changed. We have to move on.

Today, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen spoke at Columbia University, and his message was clear: “Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be incredibly destabilizing. Attacking them would also create the same kind of outcome…In an area that’s so unstable right now, we just don’t need more of that.”

“From my perspective,” Mullen added, “the last option is to strike.”

For Democratic Senator for-the-time-being Joe Lieberman, however, the primary criterion that should shape American policy toward Iran is the security of Israel. He has more than once advocated “bombing” Iran. This kind of mentality will not do for 21st century reality.

But Mullen goes on with the same futile rhetoric anyway: “I worry about Iran achieving a nuclear weapons capability. There are those that say, ‘C’mon Mullen, get over that. They’re gonna get it. Let’s deal with that.’ Well, dealing with it has [results] that I don’t think we’ve all thought through. I worry other countries in the region will then seek -– actually, I know they will seek — nuclear weapons as well. And the spiral headed in that direction is a very bad outcome.”

Ironically, Tehran claims its recent arms buildup is a direct response to threats by the West of creating missile systems that can destroy large areas believed to be nuclear development sites within Iran’s borders. Iran has stated that its nuclear ambitions are to generate civilian power. OK, so nobody believes that last bit entirely; but the idea that a superpower like Iran can be more easily manipulated than North Korea or Pakistan is completely absurd. President Obama is going to have to lead the way into a more constructive relationship with Iran, no matter what is being said in Tel Aviv. Surely we have learned something from the Cold War: no one really wants to use nuclear weapons. So we must negotiate. There is no other way forward.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinijad said last week that “ »We do not welcome the idea of threat or sanctions, but we would never implore those who threaten us with sanctions to reverse their sanctions against us.” Iranian Major General Hassan Firouzabadi was also quoted making his own threats against America and Israel should they attempt to use force within his country. And the article gratuitously reminds us, “U.S. troops are engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which border Iran.”

Meanwhile, last week President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a nuclear reduction treaty.

“At this moment…Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.”

______________________________

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/mullen-please-for-the-love-of-god-dont-attack-iran/

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-iran19-2010apr19,0,5679903.story

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/4/8/worldupdates/2010-04-08T185913Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_-475366-4&sec=Worldupdates

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

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Today we read that NATO forces shot at a civilian coach and killed 4, wounded 18, including women and children. “President Hamid Karzai, who has wept in public demanding Nato stop killing innocent people, issued a statement condemning the attack and offering his condolences to the victims yesterday.”

Typifying all that is wrong with allied attitudes, this from Canada’s Defence Minister Peter McKay:  “’I called for more constructive and active engagement. People need to see a more visible presence of the Afghan government in Kandahar province,’ explaining [President Karzai's] comments have a ‘corrosive impact on Canadian soldiers and citizens.’ Raising the topic, he said, was ‘very uncomfortable for them.’ The Defence Minister added that he purposely decided not to meet with Mr. Karzai during his weekend visit.”

You see, he didn’t meet with Karzai, “on purpose” – that’ll show him! And after all, lets not forget how distressing all this is for Canadian soldiers and citizens, it’s so uncomfortable for them!

These portrayals – that Afghanistan is an ungrateful, spoiled little narco-economy that could have had democracy and women’s rights and everything, if only they’d, you know, let the U.S. and their allies do whatever they wanted, including wantonly killing civilians (and covering it up if deemed necessary) – is unsupportable. The U.S. IS “acting like an invader and occupier” because that is what it is. The war in Afghanistan is an excuse, a symptom of U.S. failure to understand that it no longer freely dominates world-affairs, precisely because it has failed to reject the illegal and out-of-control military policies established by the corrupt and criminal Bush administration (which are the natural progression from the corrupt and criminal Reagan administration).

This morning people were chanting not only “Death to America” but “Death to Karzai” – how he is supposed to be an effective leader when his rise to power made no attempt to hide the puppet strings connecting him to the U.S., is a question few are concerned to answer, as it seems simply condemning him is enough to content the western media. Meanwhile, “Elsewhere in the city of Kandahar, three suicide bombers attacked an Afghan intelligence services compound, but were killed after security forces shot at them, said the provincial government spokesman. Four intelligence agents and six civilians, including a teacher at a nearby school, were wounded in the attack, said the spokesman, Zelmai Ayubi.” In April alone we heard of several successful Taliban attacks:  on U.S. tanks killing all the soldiers inside, attacks on a British tank patrol killing or wounding all soldiers inside, attacks on police stations, fatal attacks on foot patrols and a Kandahar police station, and only days ago, “a deadly assault by militants on the American consulate in the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar. The Pakistani Taliban say they carried out the attack, which left three guards and four militants dead. …The raid came hours after 43 people died in a suicide attack just to the north-east, near the Swat Valley. “

What can be done? What IS being done? Nothing is being done, nothing can be done.  Slowly, the sick workings of these unjust wars will unwind themselves into useless heaps of gears and broken war machinery, and the “allies” will walk away, the “winners” rewriting the ‘history’ in their wake. Meanwhile, the “war on terror” continues to claim lives, claim freedoms and liberties in the name of a “security” that will never come. Will just getting out of Afghanistan be enough? I believe it will be another decade until that question is finally asked in earnest. War is now the business of America: “…an incoming administration inherited a strategy heavily weighted toward high-intensity warfare among well-equipped adversaries, mostly in Europe and Asia; now, as then, the response has been to redirect the Pentagon’s attention toward low-intensity combat on the fringes of the developing world. The result back then was Vietnam; today it is Afghanistan and an unknown number of ‘future Afghanistans.’ »

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100426/dreyfuss
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article7095461.ece
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/world/asia/13afghan.html?hp
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/mackay-snubs-karzai-on-afghan-visit/article1531429/
http://www.statestimes.com/2010/2010/04/02/afghanistan-attacks-on-us-led-forces-and-on-afghan-police-several-killed-taliban/
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100426/klare

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Violence against women increases world-wide, new laws being made to marginalize and control women are enacted, while the old laws protecting hard-won rights and freedoms are coming under attack where they are not being outright repealed. Ignoring the mass-rape in Africa is direct evidence of the brutalization of humanity. When women receive their full human rights, including the right to rule, at least equally with men, then I will believe there may be some hope for the world, and not before.  (One bright star: Iceland.)

Corporations, which we now know as never before since their Supreme Court ‘victory’ over the democratic process, openly run the country and make its most significant decisions, almost outside of Washington’s control. Hapless Obama administration officials try to walk the cat back in the media while leaving the Wall Street lions loose to devour the millions duped into the arena. Oversated with tax-payer billions and trillions, they continue to rampage unmolested while “financial reform” remains toothless.

But I’ll leave that and the Catholic Church to Maureen Dowd. Let’s talk war: the lawless and budgetless Military Industrial Complex as the Business of America. Afghanistan: the mother of all quagmires. Iraq: revealed for the oil-grab it always was. Sabre-rattling over Iran, a non-starter, as the U.S. and what are left of its allies are in no position to take on the Islamic superpower. And at the head of the stinking fish, Israel, which recognizes neither the laws of YHWH nor man, setting new precedents each day for brutality without any real consequences.

We read of “The Soft-Kill Solution” which outlines the latest military and police strategies to develop technology which completely subdues dissent and crushes all protest with weapons that merely cripple without killing. Taking away our rights to oppose injustice, through a corrupt media, covert ‘intelligence’ operations that end one up on a no-fly list for example, and now these weapons of mass obstruction, are the hallmarks of a society that has abandoned civilization in favor of brutalization.  This is the legacy of 9/11.

The acceptance of violence as a means of government is one side of it; there is also the determined effort to force us to accept an ever-growing amount of violence in our social society. Note the absence of new gun-control laws in the face of escalating incidents of mass-killing and assassination. Note the sickening orgy of “tradecraft” that sent the Mossad into paroxysms of self-justification and the usual claims of “self-defense” after their 25+ agent operation to wipe out a Hamas leader in Dubai, using cloned passports of innocent British citizens, provoked the merest fraction of the outcry that was due to such an outrageous violation of international law. Gaza bombings, illegal settlements, arrogant statements which continually poke the eyes of Islamic militantism — and American and allied soldiers continue to die.  What is being done about it?

‘“We have an absolute commitment to Israel’s security,” [U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton] said at a news conference. “We have a close, unshakable bond between the United States and Israel.”’

Well I say we are being broken down. We are being cowed, conditioned like dogs, to accept brutality, not only against our “enemies” but against members of our own societies. In the name of “security” we are being trained to relinquish the security of the rule of law, the security of the right to protest, to pursue justice for the disenfranchised. The prosecution of thought-crime cannot be far behind when the law will not even stand up to defend the right of free citizens to be heard.

But some voices of protest are being heard in America – the problem is, they are the voices of howling schizophrenics who belong in an institution. The cowards of racism, the left-behind ignorant religious rabble, the hate-mongering anti-gay crowd, always shouting for someone to be tortured, crucified.

Will there be an Easter Morning in America, when Law will work for the preservation of actual human beings, rather than the protection of ruthless and insatiable corporate interest? When international laws and alliances will protect their allies and prosecute the blatant lawbreakers – including those in our own camp – by ending torture in black-op prisons and allowing the Goliaths to bomb the rock-slinging Davids into annihilation, (while they in turn ratchet up terrorism to levels as yet unimagined, with no hope of an alternative)? Oh no, I don’t believe it. But I’m betting that nature – not the supernatural – will solve the problem for us. Unless a real revolution of human understanding can be brought about, where all countries learn to evolve and work together for our mutual preservation, for civilization, it will be climate-change, way ahead of technology’s ability to turn it back, that will eventually reveal the Earth’s final solution to human brutality.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/mar/25/iceland-most-feminist-country
Arike, Ando, “The Soft-Kill Solution”, Harpers Magazine, March 2010, p. 38-54.

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2010/03/05/israel-will-benefit-from-the-hamas-assassination.aspx

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/world/middleeast/17mideast.html?scp=1&sq=unshakable%20bond&st=cse

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Compassion? You could say compassion is needed. You could more accurately say a commitment by so-called civilized governments to address these crimes against humanity – which actually does include women – should be a top priority for their world agenda. But how can protecting women and children in Congo be taken seriously when not only do they have no oil, but it would mean having to stand up to our own allies when they commit war crimes?  It would mean having to take responsibility for our own war crimes.

As usual, when investigated by the United Nations for offenses as serious as they come – using the horrific and illegal chemical weapon white phosphorous against civilians in bombing campaigns in Gaza one year ago, firing guns into the faces of children, bombing safe-houses and other non-military targets full of civilians – Israel decided to brazen it out with full denials of any wrongdoing, dismissing all charges in the name of its own ‘self-defense’.  (As if there are no international laws regarding what is justifiable and what is not – hence the UN investigation.) Though it was found that “A report…commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, described how UN staff that day called Israeli authorities at least seven times asking them to stop the shelling of the compound…three high-explosive shells and seven white phosphorus artillery shells, probably from a 155mm howitzer, had hit the compound. It concluded that the Israeli military violated customary international law” – yet, “So far only one Israeli soldier has been prosecuted over the war – for stealing a credit card from a Palestinian house” – an exception which seems intended to mock the thousands of dead and homeless.

These crimes have been documented by the UN investigators, and hundreds of eye-witnesses, as well as photographs and video footage, have testified to the rabid excesses Israeli soldiers committed in their attacks on Gaza. And this also is a zone that has seen decades of unpunished abuse, which some have credibly cited as being the original cause of sentiment in the Islamic world uniting against America and its allies, the progenitor of desperate acts like suicide bombing and ‘jihad’. And yet, aside from a handful of officers being “disciplined” – and what form this will take has not been released – it seems that once again there will be no redress for aggrieved Palestinians.

So yes, how is it that a natural disaster can bring the world to a poor island’s doorstep, arms laden with aid, supplies and hope, while the wretched of Congo must live the daily nightmare of rape with sticks and bayonets, without hope of safety for decades, and the victims of Israel’s illegal expansion suffer horrendously disproportional military attacks, which reduce civilian areas to dust and rubble?

Or to put it more simply, how is it possible to continually claim the moral high ground when mired in moral quicksand? Extending a lifeline to Haiti is the least the richest, freest countries in the world can do.  It is not enough to be better than the worst countries on earth, and then throw some charity around to create a benign image (and that goes for the too-rich and too-powerful corporations manipulating the world financial scene as well).

(Read more by The Poliskeptic: http://www.lepanoptique.com/category/formats/blogues/nikilambros/)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-daou/travesty-if-the-world-can_b_424995.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/opinion/31kristof.html?scp=2&sq=nicholas%20d.%20kristoff&st=cse

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/01/israeli-soldiers-disciplined-un-attack-gaza

UN SECURITY COUNCIL FULL REPORT: http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/5ba47a5c6cef541b802563e000493b8c/3800655e522591fd852575cb004ca773?OpenDocument

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/17/gaza-israel-invasion-children-traumatised

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President Obama extends war in Afghanistan to include relentless drone-bomber strikes on Pakistan, receives Nobel Peace Prize!

Supreme Court credits Corporations with ‘personhood’, human beings credited with colluding in ending Constitutional government and rule of law.

After Democrats FAIL to get their bill through Congress, the GOP plans to take credit for passing a [stripped down, worthless] healthcare bill!

Osama Bin Laden is taking ‘credit’ for the Nigerian Underwear (FAILED) Bomber!

Pat Robertson gives Satan credit for earthquake in Haiti! (The Devil’s power is awesome! God, not so much.)

Nude Cosmo Boy Scott Brown takes credit for winning Massachusetts Senate Seat!

But credit where credit is due. President Obama and his administration could have prevented the rewrite of history, where Moron-In-Chief George W. Bush evades responsibility for the misdirected trillion-dollar war in Iraq and the world-crippling financial crisis, where Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney walk away from the abominations of CIA-directed Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and Bagram torture prisons, where being in power means never having to say you’re sorry. Had there been any sense of the urgency, of the dire need to restore the ‘reality-based universe’ and vanquish the lords of misrule that had so completely taken over the United States government, the Obama administration could have been the ones to do it – that’s over now.

President Obama will not even get to return to square one. Squandering his political credibility in one short year, he and his party will be fighting an uphill battle against such ridiculous opponents as the Teapartiers, Sarah Palin, and Glenn Beck, while their puppetmasters – sinister old pros like Gingrich and Kristol, cynical strategists like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, looking exactly like hypocrite televangelists, and their pawns, like the hapless Michael Steele and ‘Blue Dog’ Democrats like Bart Stupak – are working non-stop to destroy America so they can save it – for themselves. Rallying what they call the “real” America, the backwards-looking America of racism and sexism, the America in thrall to would-be terrorists who’s most powerful threat is as a tool in the hands of a ruthless GOP that wants back in to power at whatever cost, these political predators have all but ended the era of freedom and liberty. These are the elements, the dregs of American society, who are now saying “Yes We Can”, and selling “hope” to an angry, stupid mob. They are claiming the political credit that President Obama needlessly wasted on the self-indulgent folly of “bipartisanship”, thwarting the will of the people who elected him with a huge majority. It didn’t have to be this way, but unless Obama leaves his ivory tower and does some history making of his own, it’s only going to get worse.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/credit_crisis/bailout_plan/index.html

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/press.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/21/new-dem-worry-gop-taking_n_432271.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/24/bin-laden-claims-responsi_n_434536.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/13/pat-robertson-haiti-curse_n_422099.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/us/politics/24union.html?hp

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The infamous memo of August 6, 2001, presented at President George W. Bush’s Daily Briefing, was actually titled, “Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States”. Multiple reports detailed suspicions of an imminent al Qaeda plot to hijack planes and fly them like suicide bombs into skyscrapers. All the operatives were known to various intelligence agencies, even that they were attending flight schools on false passports, and had ties to extremist groups. And yet…

In November of last year, a Senate report was released stating that the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld deliberately let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora, Afghanistan into Pakistan. The Taliban, mostly defeated after NATO forces dispersed them in 2001, have now rallied to rule most of rural Pakistan and continue to directly influence the Karzai puppet government.

No sooner did President Barack Obama commit fully to war in Afghanistan, which he identified during his campaign as the war the U.S. should have been fighting all along, when Pakistan became the new front. The President, following the advice of his generals, has chosen to step up the use of unmanned drones, perhaps thinking this strategy will be more acceptable to allies who have declined to supply soldiers for a prolonged conflict. This has increased the amount of attacks in the region, and multiplied civilian casualties exponentially, enraging Islamist militants in Muslim countries around the world.

Iraq is all but forgotten, except by those hoping to cash in on rebuilding contracts and private security operations. And now a new “intelligence” failure has led the U.S. back to the original site of Bin Laden’s first major act of terrorism in October 2000, the suicide bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen. At that time, future Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was National Security Advisor. “According to Dr. Rice, the decision not to respond militarily to the Cole bombing was President Bush’s. She said he ‘made clear to us that he did not want to respond to al Qaeda one attack at a time. He told me he was ‘tired of swatting flies.’ »

So back to Yemen we go. Though the technique the Yemeni-al Qaeda-trained Nigerian bomber used to smuggle explosives on board, thwarting airport security measures, was detailed to a White House advisor last October, and though the bomber’s own father alerted U.S. Embassy officials to his son’s involvement with extremist groups, a man who was refused a U.K. visa and on a No-Fly list, who bought a one-way ticket to Detroit, for $3000 in cash, with no luggage – “intelligence failures” were casually blamed and then explained away by everyone from the President down to the lowly TSA who ought to have prevented him from boarding.

As Jon Stewart quipped, “[we don’t expect security to] catch everything, but we do expect you to catch the EXACT same thing. »  (Referring to the attempt to blow up a plane using smuggled explosives by the so-called « Shoe Bomber » of December, 2001.)

Is the fact that “intelligence” that could and should have prevented attacks by al Qaeda was all but totally ignored, the reason why « 9/11 Truthers” believe our own government is allowing terrorists to attack? Because they can’t believe it was just pure stupidity, the bungling of incompetent Inspector Clouseaus, or a “failure to communicate” between international security agencies?  Or is it the fact that billions and billions of U.S. tax dollars are going to fund military operations in these misbegotten war zones, while Wall Street gets ready to hand out billions in bonuses sheltered by the Obama Administration’s Financial Sector cronies?  Is it that they see a direct correlation between the cover-up of an out-of-control CIA and a failing economy that forces the majority of Americans concentrate on their own troubles while allowing any and everything to be gotten away with in the name of « fighting terror »?

And should we maybe stop calling it “intelligence”, when today’s New York Times front page headline declares, “Military Is Deluged In Intelligence From Drones”:

“Imagine you are tuning into a football game without all the graphics,” said Lucius Stone, an executive as Harris Broadcast Communications, a provider of commercial technology that is working with the military. “You don’t know what the score is. You don’t know what the down is. It’s just raw video. And that’s how the guys in the military have been using it.”

You don’t know what the score is. In military jargon, the state of U.S. intelligence is: SNAFU.

____________________________________

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/may/19/terrorism.september11

http://www.usasurvival.org/ck6902.shtml

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/29/osama-bin-laden-senate-report

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/23/AR2009012304189.html

.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing – cite_note-911Commission040408-25

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2010/01/02/white-house-advisor-briefed-in-october-on-underwear-bomb-technique.aspx

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/business/11drone.html?hp

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‘“We will decrease the role of international forces,” Mr. Karzai said at a midday ceremony held at the presidential palace in Kabul. “We want our security within five years to be entirely within the hands of the Afghan government and led by Afghans.”’

Wouldn’t we all. The thing is, for almost a decade, people have been making money off of this war, and the war in Iraq. Big, huge money, and they hope to continue making money: if not from the weapons themselves, or the private military ‘contractors’, or even the massive heroin profits, then from “rebuilding”, and investment in the country’s ‘future’.

Mere cynicism? In fact, the reason Afghanistan has been a killing field for any troops unfortunate enough to be deployed there, whether by Britain or Russia or the U.S. and it’s ‘allies’, is because it is the perfect spot for endless war. The borders of Afghanistan, like Pakistan, were created on paper maps, rather than by a realistic understanding of tribal loyalties which run far deeper than any sense of “national identity” as it is thought of elsewhere.

‘ »We welcome those who are not affiliated with any terrorist organisations and whose hands are not red with Afghans’ blood, » [Karzai] said.’  Ya think he means us?

Farcically, desperately, “Dignitaries from more than 40 countries, including the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, attended the ceremony in Kabul.”

Meanwhile, ‘ »It’s more of the same, » Abdullah [Abdullah, Karzai’s main rival] said. « He has spoken in these terms – in terms of bringing changes and reform, and fighting corruption, and bringing security and reconciliation – for the last eight years, and the situation has worsened. »’

‘Basher Dost, a candidate who came in third in the first round of the presidential election, has said Mr. Karzai’s lifelong orientation is toward his tribe and family, and those loyalties render him unable to make the deep changes needed in his government. “He believes his power is his warlords, it’s the chiefs of tribes,” he said recently. “It’s not important what is true; what is important is the interest of your family. It’s why he cannot fight the warlords and cannot fight the corruption,” Mr. Dost said.’

So it was with Saddam Hussein, so it is with the Taliban, and so it will continue to be with the Karzai regime, until one of two things happen: foreign troops really do just leave, lock, stock and smoking barrels, allowing the country to sink back into the 15th century while doing “business” through the usual channels of corruption and mafias, or Western leaders and forces will get honest about why they are in these areas to begin with – to control their oil – and try an approach whereby the billions of dollars sent to aid the civilian population and rebuild infrastructure and a viable, international business marketplace for legal goods and services, actually accomplish these goals with visible, convincing results.

Don’t hold your breath. « People should know that only the votes of the people can legitimise the government, » Karzai said. « I am the servant of all the people of Afghanistan, from every ethnicity, every tribe, from every place, from every province from every age, whether they are small children whether they are old people, women, I invite all the presidential candidates to come and help in serving this nation. »

Emptier words have seldom been spoken; but when they were, it’s likely it happened in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Pakistan of the 21st century.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/world/asia/20afghan.html?hp

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/19/hamid-karzai-afghanistan-inauguration-speech

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/karzai-sworn-in-as-afghan-leader-1823419.html

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Any “news” that can be trusted is damn scarce. We have heard about the car-bombings that have killed over 300 people. We have heard that two military helicopters collided killing 9 U.S. soldiers. And that President Hamid Karzai’s brother – Ahmed Wali Karzai, suspected to oversee the largest Afghan heroin trafficking ring – has been on the C.I.A. payroll for the last eight years.

We learn that Predator drones, warfare by unmanned stealth bombers inspired by the likes of Israel, make up the foremost military strategy for overcoming terrorism in Afghanistan, a tactic that has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and which has been deployed by President Obama more times since he’s taken office than in the last three years of the Bush Administration. Sold as a revolution in tactical warfare, “drones are the technological step that further isolates the American people from military action, undermining political checks on…endless war.” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defended the use of drones, saying, “there’s a war going on.” Really? Looks like a different military term would sum it up more clearly: FUBAR. The U.N. announced last week that the U.S. drone policy may violate international law.

And assassination – which was outlawed in 1976 by Pres. Ford – is now standard practice for fighting terrorists, as terrorism went from being a criminal act to an act of war. The suspension of all laws concerning terrorism has become the norm in countries that used to pride themselves on the rule of law. “The things we were complaining about from Israel a few years ago we now embrace”.

Posing as the Voice of Reason, Thomas Friedman’s latest NYTimes editorial advises pulling out of Afghanistan as soon as the last soldier can be put on a plane for home. It is clear that any mention or thought of ethical considerations in Afghanistan are off the table. While the Taliban increases its fighting power every day – thanks in part to the endless millions, coming in part from Karzai’s CIA-protected drug empire, along with the millions ‘gone astray’ in U.S. government programs and the thousands of weapons successfully stolen or diverted to Taliban forces in Pakistan – the Obama Administration is listening to the cooing of doves and chicken-hawks, who now want out of this disgraceful debacle for all the wrong reasons, while being besieged by his generals to increase troops and “win”, whatever that can possibly mean at this stage.

What I understand from all these ‘facts’ is that everything we are being told about the current situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan – including the circumstances under which Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire – is suspect. That’s not exactly news, of course; with the kidnapping and killing of reporters who try to remain within eye-witness range of events, and even U.N. workers being ruthlessly bombed in their sleep, as happened last week in Kabul , can anyone confirm what “government reports”, with their own twisted agendas, are telling us to be true?

Now, Hamid Karzai, puppet of the Bush regime, has been handed a second presidential term though his election was a fraud. As with the suspicious appointment of the man himself, this is just another indication that this is still Bush’s war, doomed to the criminal ineptitude of that administration.

________________________________________________
Mayer, Jane, “The Predator War”, The New Yorker, 26 October, 2009, pp.36-45.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/world/asia/30clinton.html?ref=asia

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/world/asia/02assess.html?ref=asia

http://www.defencetalk.com/un-questions-legality-of-us-use-of-drones-22781/

ibid, p. 40.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/world/asia/29afghan.html?ref=asia

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/world/asia/03afghan.html?hp

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/01/abdullah-withdrawal-afghanistan-election-clinton

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In no way does it matter if it is true, or even if the rumor is true; it is now on the Internet, on the Huffington Post, no less.  A live-blog of the mayhem, complete with video footage I wouldn’t let the kiddies near.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/iran-demonstrations-viole_n_215189.html

12:26 PM ET — Mousavi martyrdom. A message on Mousavi’s official Facebook page « confirms he is on the streets and has ‘washed in readiness to be martyred,’ » a Persian speaker emails.

Mousavi is talking about martyrdom.  Thank God he’s a progressive.  He can probably make that work for Obama, right?  I honestly do not know how people can not suspect neo-con forces from the Bush Administration of some kind of collusion at the very least.  It does not matter whether it is true or not – now that the suggestion is out there, whatever President Obama does will be potentially disastrous.  Are the only ones thinking that Dick Cheney, who was said by the Director of the CIA to “wish for another attack” – a remark unconvincingly retracted later – are wearing tinfoil hats if they believe he would be encouraged by the possibility of retribution against the United States?  To seize a chance to discredit Mr Obama?  Get more no-bid contracts for Halliburton?  He would deny it.

‘CIA Director Leon Panetta says former Vice President Dick Cheney’s criticism of the Obama administration’s approach to terrorism almost suggests « he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. »

Panetta told The New Yorker for an article in its June 22 issue that Cheney « smells some blood in the water » on the issue of national security.’

All but calling him a cold, dead-eyed shark.  Fox News followed up immediately with a veiled threat from Cheney in their headline: « I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted, » Cheney said, in a written statement to FOX News. « The important thing is whether the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the past eight years. »

The policies that have kept us safe for the past eight years. Friends, if he has the balls to say that now, you’d better believe he could be up to something.  Of the former CEO of Halliburton CBS reported:  “In 2002, Cheney’s total assets were valued at between $19.1 million and $86.4 million.”  Er, there’s near $70million in between there, and his present worth is said to be just under $100million.  This guy has been at this his whole life.  He will not stop now, even if he causes the U.S. to remain the #1 target for terrorists.

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http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=7837128

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/09/26/politics/main575356.shtml

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/06/15/cheney-hopes-panetta-misquoted-claiming-vp-wishes-attack/

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Who is Mir Hossein Mousavi, called by the AP, as if it were an established fact, the “reform candidate”?  The Independent’s Robert Fisk explains:

“Mr Ahmadinejad, the first non-clerical president in more than 25 years, basks in the support of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who called on Iranians to vote for an anti-Western candidate. The Ayatollah ultimately calls the shots in Iran, where the president can only influence policy, not decide it.

“Life for President Barack Obama would be a great deal easier if Mir Hossein Mousavi had won Iran’s election. The man who was prime minister during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s says he would seek detente with the West, ask Mr Obama to debate at the UN with him, and floated the idea of an international consortium overseeing uranium enrichment in Iran.”

Meanwhile, in the New York Times today, a breathless Thomas Friedman confided, “I knew something had changed when I sat down for coffee on Hamra Street in Beirut last week with my 80-year-old friend and mentor, Kemal Salibi, one of Lebanon’s greatest historians, and he told me about his Facebook group!”

Aside from the grotesque naivety of his theory of believable change in Iran, the notion that true, un-western (insert initials) interference has not played a part in the escalation of violence against protesters – and its subsequent non-stop coverage on 24-hour media – is a product of a grass-roots, Obama-like movement among your average Iranians, is, well, grotesquely naïve and recklessly misleading.  President Ahmadinijad will do what we all know he will do in these circumstances:  suppress a popular uprising by any means necessary.  That the media is cheering the “revolutionaries” on with such appalling gusto, as if their attempt at “democracy” carries a truly revolutionary chance for success, looks to me like manipulation by the very invisible, far-away internet forces Friedman lauds to the skies in his absurd editorial.  Watch some videos of the Iranian Army beating protesters – do they look like they fear serious reprisals? People are already being detained: (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/world/middleeast/15iran.html?hp)  Let’s face it:  if a thug like Mugabe could so easily get away with a « majority » in Zimbabwe’s « elections », who is going to school Iran?  Just sayin.

Here’s Fisk again, another journalist with an old mentor on the inside, but with a lot more seasoning and not so underdone:

“An interval here for lunch with a true and faithful friend of the Islamic Republic, a man I have known for many years who has risked his life and been imprisoned for Iran and who has never lied to me…He has often criticised the regime. A man unafraid. But I must repeat what he said. ‘The election figures are correct, Robert. Whatever you saw in Tehran, in the cities and in thousands of towns outside, they voted overwhelmingly for Ahmadinejad. Tabriz voted 80 per cent for Ahmadinejad. It was he who opened university courses there for the Azeri people to learn and win degrees in Azeri. In Mashad, the second city of Iran, there was a huge majority for Ahmadinejad after the imam of the great mosque attacked Rafsanjani of the Expediency Council who had started to ally himself with Mousavi. They knew what that meant: they had to vote for Ahmadinejad.’”

This is the media saying, “see, the Axis of Evil!”  And yet President Obama, of the United States, is going to have to negotiate with Ahmadinijad, and he’s going to have to prevail. One can see dark agendas in the continuing sabotage of U.S. foreign policy, just to keep the power/billion$ gravytrain on track.  For those behind escalating the war-machine, to let go is to risk real exposure.

I hope Mr. Obama will not listen to the Henry Kissengers; the time is now to ignore the howls of domestic fundamentalist know-nothings, expose the corruption of the Bush past, and continue with the real work of international diplomacy.

“And from Oceania, that’s the news about Eurasia.  On to Eastasia, where another Menace is celebrating a country-wide Day of Plutonium…”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/opinion/14friedman.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-iran-erupts-as-voters-back-the-democrator-1704810.html

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Since my last post, I have been trying to write something meaningful about Sri Lanka, but something told me I would have to wait to find the correct angle from which to view that mess and find something true in it.

Unfortunately, unless you want to go read the 30-year history of the war between the Sri Lankan Army and the Tamil Tigers, there’s nothing I can say that won’t sound like the typical generalizations that are made in a we-did-this/but-they-did-that conflict, though the levels of brutal violence are staggering.

And like many other long wars of this sort, the terrorist-style violence occurred on both sides.  So when earlier this month, after the Sri Lankan Army literally backed the Tamils up against the sea and massacred them wholesale, killing their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, (whose body, like Saddam Hussein’s, was displayed by the Sri Lankan Army like a war trophy) – while all I could read about in every international paper was the “victory” and “triumph” of the Sri Lankan Army – I knew I’d have to wait.

I waited another week.  And naturally, the U.N. finally brought up the human rights violations that everyone who was paying any attention at all already knew about – committed by the Army as well as the Tamil rebels.  And as I knew would also happen, today they are rescinding their allegations and dropping the investigation.

This is, in the most cynical way, called a news cycle for a conflict the West cannot interfere in, let alone solve.

We have seen it again and again and again:  a former colony is given sovereignty, its borders drawn according to the arbitrary conveniences of western alliances, in total denial of the existence of native peoples and their societies.  The minority group – which until that time had co-existed – is now forced to fight for its human right to exist, and are immediately branded guerillas, rebels, insurgents, et cetera.  The state-backed soldiers, however, in order to fight the increasingly strategic enemy, resort to the same terrorist tactics until the Army and those they are fighting have committed so many atrocities against each other, they are barely distinguishable.

While this fighting is going on, the U.N. sleeps.  No one wants to bear witness to what “our SOBs” are doing, and the media is shut out.  Until after the decisive “victory”, proclaimed when the killing that should never have been allowed to happen has instead been allowed to run its bloody course.

Amesty International calls for an “investigation” by the U.N., which is subsequently settled in favor of the establishment.  Remaining ‘rebels’ are now reviled refugees, or stuck in the country to live haunted, devastated lives.  Things aren’t so great on the other side, either, but hey, it’s “settled”.

“Sri Lanka last night scored a major propaganda coup when the UN human rights council praised its victory over the Tamil Tigers and refused calls to investigate allegations of war crimes by both sides in the final chapter of a bloody 25-year conflict.  In a shock move, which dismayed western nations critical of Sri Lanka’s approach, the island’s diplomats succeeded in lobbying enough of its south Asian allies to pass a resolution describing the conflict as a ‘domestic matter that doesn’t warrant outside interference’.”

Far from being “shocked”, I have seen this pattern so often, I simply knew if I waited a few weeks, it would play out like clockwork, and it has.  They pay the usual lip-service by calling it a “propaganda coup”, but think about it:  in the last four years alone we have seen this happen over and over, in Iraq, in Pakistan, and most devastatingly in the recent raids by Israel against Lebanon and Gaza.  These countries are all propped up by the U.S. and their allies, while the civilian populations are made to endure every indignity and hardship, and any effort to resist their own subjugation to injustice is deemed illegal and therefore subject to the harshest retaliation.

The U.N. then does an “investigation” and finds the government-backed perpetrators of atrocities “not guilty”.  What’s worse, they stand back while it’s happening and then claim shock and horror, but time and time again the pattern is not only repeated but reinforced.  (see my Feb/March, Nov 08 archives)

Why do the newspapers now consent to call Burma, “Myanmar”?  A coup d’etat by a military junta in a former colony is left almost unmolested to commit untold thousands of murders and detentions, and we are recognizing that as a “government”?  The Chinese in Tibet, ethnic cleansing in Eritria, unspeakable acts by the Army in Congo – and choosing sides means backing the western-approved “government”, no matter how loosely committed to « democracy » they are, arming them to the teeth and then sitting back and waiting for “triumph” over the “rebels”, i.e. the civilians who have been systematically brutalized into organizing a resistance.

I saw it coming – the cynical cycle of the ramped up arming of an uncontrollable state-backed Army against a ruthless but desperate group of civilian guerillas, followed by a “victorious triumph”, a spurious “investigation”, and the announcing of all charges dropped – in Sri Lanka; if you care to take notice of it in other similar conflicts, you will too.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/world/asia/20lanka.html

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090518/wl_afp/srilankaunrest

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/18/tamil-tigers-killed-sri-lanka

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/tamil-leaders-killed-as-they-tried-to-surrender-1687790.html

http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article31205

http://www.tamilguardian.com/article.asp?articleid=2313

http://alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LQ944700.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/28/sri-lanka-un-war-crimes-investigation

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What the hell is going on in Afghanistan?  Business as usual.  What about Pakistan?  They’re all hotted up, killing “hundreds”** of Taliban fighters near the Swat valley.  Where was all this energy when the Bush Administration was handing over $100m checks with zero accountability for the money?  But never mind all that, right Mr Obama?  It’s a new day, after all.

“The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the US war raging on the Afghan border. US policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations – the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?”

“It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The ‘Durand Line’ is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border.  And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan.”

Let’s take this moment to reflect on the West’s partitioning of so many, many places in the world, their peoples thrown into dire internal conflict, because at some point, it was expedient for western rulers to divide countries as they saw fit, from the most egregious example of unconsidered consequences – Palestine turned into ‘Israel’ – to the latest example, a plan to partition Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurd states.  The days are long gone when native peoples will endure this kind of western interference.  And it is clear they will chose their own brand of chaos over Western ‘control’, and that they have gained the weapons and ‘tactics’ (learned from the C.I.A.) to do it.

“The Pakistani army is composed mostly of Punjabis. The Taliban is entirely Pashtun. For centuries, Pashtuns living in the mountainous borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan have fought to keep out invading Punjabi plainsmen. So sending Punjabi soldiers into Pashtun territory to fight jihadists pushes the country ever closer to an ethnically defined civil war, strengthening Pashtun sentiment for an independent « Pashtunistan » that would embrace 41 million people in big chunks of Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Let their own governments handle it?  But we’re in it now, up to – I’d say our balls, but do we still have the guts to face the mess we’ve created?  Do we have any commitment to the women and girls being grotesquely abused in that primitive region?  What about the children growing up with a worldview of hatred towards “infidels”, and all their “science”?  The allies in the “war on terror” had better figure out not only whom they are fighting, but what they are defending.  Losses have been tremendous, on all sides.  In Iraq, hundreds of thousands have been killed, wounded, or made homeless or refugees, in Pakistan thousands of civilians have been killed or wounded, and hundreds of thousands made homeless or refugees.  In the U.S., besides our own loss of thousands of troops, the entire Bush Administration is openly seen as lawless war criminals, hypocrites of the most abhorrent stamp.

No, greed is not good.

Meanwhile, has anyone been keeping track of what’s happening in Sri Lanka?  I didn’t think so.  I’ll have something on that when there’s more actual news released than the staggering daily death-tolls.

** “…there is guarded support from the common man, but questions are beginning to be asked – where are all these dead Taliban for one?”
“Why is artillery being used to attack the Taliban rather than infantry who can then hold the position they have just taken? What is the physical state of the centre of towns like Mingora and why can’t we have a couple of ‘embedded’ correspondents who can write a pooled dispatch for the English and Urdu press every day?” the editorial wondered.
“We know surprisingly little – in fact beyond official daily briefings almost nothing – about the war with the Taliban,” it said.

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http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/south-asia/751-taliban-killed-heliborne- troops-land-in-swat-lead_100191540.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/29/AR2006042901142.html

http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentID=2009051037557

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/10/AR2009051001959.html

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Unfinished business, eh?  The entire NY Times editorial from which this is quoted sounds like an excuse wrapped up in a subterfuge.

“The problem isn’t Mr. Obama’s order to end America’s longest-running war. It is the failure of Iraq’s Shiite-led government to make the political changes that are the only chance for holding the country together.”

But no one is going to hold Iraq together. It goes on to suggest that there may be a Shiite-Sunni-Kurd Coalition government in the works.  Just who are you kidding? Fortunately, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  That much we know.
However, there are plenty floating around Pakistan, and this is the reason why Mr Obama has “correctly refocused” the military there.  (And weren’t we not saying “war on terror” anymore?)

“President Obama said last week that he remained confident that keeping the country’s nuclear infrastructure secure was the top priority of Pakistan’s armed forces.… the United States does not know where all of Pakistan’s nuclear sites are located, and its concerns have intensified in the last two weeks since the Taliban entered Buner, a district 60 miles from the capital. The spread of the insurgency has left American officials less willing to accept blanket assurances from Pakistan that the weapons are safe.

“But Pakistani officials have continued to deflect American requests for more details about the location and security of the country’s nuclear sites, the officials said. Some of the Pakistani reluctance, they said, stemmed from longstanding concern that the United States might be tempted to seize or destroy Pakistan’s arsenal if the insurgency appeared about to engulf areas near Pakistan’s nuclear sites.”

The latest president of Pakistan, Asif Zardari, widowed husband of Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated last December, has almost no control over the Taliban, and not much more over their army.   “…there have been only limited, poorly-coordinated attempts to re-engage with communities devastated by armed operations against the Taliban. As a result the Army and government authorities have sheepishly ended up signing peace deals with the Taliban over the past four years. They have all consistently broken down, the Taliban using the lull in hostilities to regroup and rearm.  The most recent peace deal, over the Swat valley, is on the verge of collapse owing to continued Taliban operations in neighbouring areas.”  “Mr. Zardari heads the country’s National Command Authority, the mix of political, military and intelligence leaders responsible for its arsenal of 60 to 100 nuclear weapons. But in reality, his command and control over the weapons are considered tenuous at best…”

What will be done?  The disgraceful abdication of Iraq to the forces of chaos gives me a pretty good idea of what would happen if it weren’t for the one thing needful, chasing down the nukes.  The Pakistani people – most especially those women Laura Bush was supposedly so concerned about – are only the latest victims of 9/11.

It is not enough to “correctly refocus” on the indigenous militaries that remain in Afghanistan and Pakistan (or a shambolic “government” in Iraq).  Whether it was the fault of the wretched Dubya or is the responsibility of Mr Obama, treating the people of these countries like collateral damage in the war-for-oil is why the U.S. is estranged and powerless against an enemy of well-armed and committed mass-murderers.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/opinion/04mon1.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/world/asia/04nuke.html?hp

http://www.hrw.org/en/node/10527/section/3

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/03/pakistan-taliban-military-swat

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