Showing posts with label "Hope and Change". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "Hope and Change". Show all posts

October 23, 2009

Allied Strategy at Risk as Afghan Police Run Out of Recruits

Low Pay, Dangerous Conditions a Recipe Most Afghans Eager to Avoid

by Jason Ditz, October 22, 2009

US efforts to dramatically expand Afghanistan’s domestic security forces are running into a brick wall as officials say they simply aren’t able to recruit enough people to meet the Western goals.

Perhaps even more worrisome is that about a third of the police force is quitting now in any given year, so the recruitment effort is having a hard enough time replacing the outgoing police, let alone adding to the force.

It’s not hard to see why. Afghan police make only $120 a month and are often placed on the front lines of the nation’s security, facing some of the most dangerous conditions possible. In the end only the desperate are willing to take such low paying jobs.

The low pay is likely also a source corruption, as $120 a month is only about half of what is required to support a family, and it is generally understood that recruits will make up the different with bribes. As one of the trainers put it “the best we can hope for is that if they are taking bribes, at least they know it’s wrong.”

But likely the ones who know it’s wrong are the ones leaving in droves, and those remaining are either those incapable of doing any better or those that have found ways to supplant their meager income in one of the most corrupt governments on earth. This is likely part of the reason why Western officials aren’t even willing to hazard a guess how much longer this war will take.

Source

October 22, 2009

Leaving Waziristan

M. Idrees -

A force of 28,000 Pakistani army personnel is at the moment conducting an operation in South Waziristan. The operation was preceded by months of aerial bombing, and as the following Al Jazeera reports show the human cost in terms of lives lost, and displacement is high. A BBC crew earlier found the refugees so outraged with the Pakistani military’s operation that they were chanting slogans in support of Hakimullah Mehsud, the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and Maulvi Faqir Muhammad and other TTP leaders.

Thousands flee Pakistan conflict – 22 Oct 09

Civilians caught up South Waziristan fighting – 20 Oct 09

October 21, 2009

New US Drone Strike Complicates Pakistan Battle

12 Reported Slain in Blast

by Jason Ditz, October 21, 2009

An apparent US drone strike along the border between Pakistan’s North and South Waziristan Agencies has left at least 12 dead, including several children. A “Taliban leader” named Abu Musa al-Misri was reported slain in the strike, but rebels were quick to note that he was also reported slain in two other recent US drone strikes in the same area.

Pakistani intelligence sources confirmed it was a drone strike, though some other sources speculated that it may have been a surface to surface missile fired from inside Afghanistan or an explosion mistakenly set off by the Taliban themselves.

Complicating matters is that the missiles reportedly struck the territory of Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a militant leader which has just recently signed a neutrality agreement with the Pakistani government.

With the war in South Waziristan having a very real impact on life across Pakistan, the Pakistani military has been very keen to maintain pacts with some of the militants, if for no other reason than to prevent having to fight an unwinnable battle against nearly the entire population of the region.

But Pakistan’s war effort has focused on militants fighting inside Pakistan, and have made deals chiefly with groups fighting inside Afghanistan. The US is obviously keen to see Pakistan take on the later, but with them having trouble enough taking over small villages on South Waziristan’s periphery, the drone strikes risk worsening Pakistan’s instability.

Source

US vows to join Israel in 'fight against Goldstone'

October 21, 2009

Bethlehem – Ma’an – The US pledged on Tuesday to help Israel combat the Goldstone report documents alleged war crimes committed during the attack on Gaza last winter.

This offer to “fight the Goldstone report” came during a meeting between US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice and Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, according to a statement from Peres’ office.

“It is outrageous that a respected institution like the United Nations provides a platform to spread lies and stories about Israel,” Peres told Rice during their closed-door meeting, according to the statement.

“We will not tolerate our youth being labeled war criminals. We must do everything to stop the deceptions and wrongs produced by the Goldstone report,” he continued. “The United Nations provides a stage for [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmedinejad, who threatens to annihilate Israel, and lets him stand judge. This is nothing short of ridiculous.”

The statement says that, in response to the President’s remarks, “Rice promised that the United Sates will continue to stand by Israel as a loyal friend in the fight against the Goldstone report.”

Justice Richard Goldstone’s four-person team visited Gaza twice this year, and compiled a 575-page report based on hundreds of individual testimonies and thousands of documents. The report accuses both Israel and Palestinian armed groups of committing war crimes during Israel’s three-week assault against Gaza last December and January.

Last Friday the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva voted to endorse the report and refer the document to the UN bodies in New York.

October 20, 2009

President Peace’s Predators

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, October 19, 2009

Seems like President Barack Obama — Nobel Peace Laureate Obama – has taken his predecessor’s predator drone program and jacked it up with steroids. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reports this week that the number of Obama-authorized strikes in Pakistan equals the sum launched by the Bush Administration — in the last three years of his tenure. Wow. And the Republicans were worried that he wouldn’t be man enough. Mayer’s article goes on to detail two predator drone programs — one publicly acknowledged by the U.S Military, the other directed by the C.I.A:

From Mayer: The U.S. government runs two drone programs. The military’s version, which is publicly acknowledged, operates in the recognized war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and targets combatants in support of U.S. troops stationed there. The C.I.A.’s program is aimed at terror suspects around the world, including in places where U.S. troops are not based. The program is classified as covert, and the C.I.A. declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed. Nevertheless, reports of fatal air strikes in Pakistan emerge every few days. According to a new study by the New America Foundation, the number of drone strikes has gone up dramatically since Obama became President. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, the defense contractor that manufactures the Predator and its more heavily armed sibling, the Reaper, can barely keep up with the government’s demand. With public disenchantment mounting over the U.S. troop deployment in Afghanistan, many in Washington support an even greater reliance on Predator strikes. And because of the program’s secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place. Peter W. Singer, the author of “Wired for War,” a recent book about the robotics revolution in modern combat, argues that the drone program is worryingly “seductive,” because it creates the perception that war can be “costless.” Cut off from the realities of the bombings in Pakistan, Americans have been insulated from the human toll, as well as the political and moral consequences.

October 19, 2009

Obama regime vows to "engage" Sudan

Sudan policy review

Aletho News
October 19, 2009

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton unveiled the new Sudan policy of the Obama administration today expressing a goal of preventing Sudan from becoming a haven for international "terror" groups. Anonymous officials have said that they are eager to see steps taken to eliminate support for Palestinian militant groups, including Hamas. U.S. Sudan special envoy, Retired General Scott Gration, has also said the administration’s new approach was intended to prevent Sudan from serving as a terrorist haven. Barak Obama described Sudan as a "global security challenge" in his July speech in Ghana.

"We have a menu of incentives and disincentives," Clinton said, refusing to specify the potential punitive measures, though in January the Secretary of State said the Obama administration was considering the creation of no-fly zones and increased economic and trade sanctions.

The "incentives" could possibly include removing Sudan from the U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism or ending the existing trade sanctions which have been imposed against the nation for over a decade. An executive order, signed in 1997 by then- President Bill Clinton, bans most U.S. trade with Sudan, including any imports of Sudanese goods and the export to the country of anything except food, clothing and medicine. It also bars the extension of U.S. credit to the Sudanese government. The Darfur Accountability Act, passed in 2006, requires the administration to get congressional approval and certify that Sudan is taking certain steps before those sanctions under the executive order can be lifted. The same "steps" appear to apply regarding the state sponsor of terror list; "Getting off the terrorism list is something that could happen if and only if they have taken the right steps" an unnamed source told Reuters.

From now on, the United States will maintain that genocide "is taking place" in Darfur, anonymous officials told the Washington Post, a rhetorical assertion that is backed only by "political statements" made by intervention advocates that the GAO has characterized as lacking in "objective analysis", relying on "too few data points extrapolated to an excessive degree." This new characterization of genocide addresses a prior dispute between U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, who says that there is "ongoing genocide" in Darfur, and Scott Gration over how to characterize the violence in Darfur. Rice has long been a proponent of tough action against Khartoum. The genocide claims have been parroted ubiquitously in the Western press which has likewise parroted the demonization of Hamas by U.S. officials since Hamas won the 2006 elections.

To acquit itself of the "ongoing genocide" designation, Sudan is being asked to prove a negative, a logical impossibility. President of the Save Darfur Coalition, Jerry Fowler, says "the burden of proof is on the government of Sudan", while Ms. Rice said the administration would insist that Sudan show real evidence that conditions for civilians had begun to improve before offering incentives. The administration said that the policy calls for quarterly reviews of conditions in Darfur.

In Orwellian fashion the NYT presents the policy as "more balanced", presumably more balanced than the Bush policy which applied the 1997 sanctions and defined Sudan as a State sponsor of terrorism, but did not apply enough "pressure" according to Sudan hawks. Sudan interventionists are quite pleased with the new policy review. House Sudan caucus co-chairman Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican from Virginia, said "considering the rumors we’ve been hearing, this policy seems very positive". Representative Donald M. Payne, Democrat of New Jersey, also a co-chairman of the Sudan caucus, said "I think the only thing the government of Sudan understands is bluntness and power." John Prendergast, co-chairman of the Enough Project, said the new policy appeared to be "a fine one."

Left unmentioned in the coverage of the policy review is the impact that the review will likely have on the heretofore promising peace talks which are underway due to the efforts of Egypt, Libya and Qatar. The next round of talks between the rebel movements of Darfur and the Sudanese government are scheduled to begin on November 16 in Doha, Qatar. Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Taha welcomed the Qatari hosted peace initiative saying "I think the solution to the crisis in Darfur is (above all) in the hands of the Sudanese and the citizens of Darfur."

U.S. Attacks Iran Via CIA-Funded Jundullah Terror Group

Bankrolling and arming Al-Qaeda offshoot part of 2007 White House directive to destabilize Iranian government

U.S. Attacks Iran Via CIA Funded Jundullah Terror Group 191009top

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
October 19, 2009

The U.S. government effectively attacked Iran yesterday after its proxy terror group Jundullah launched a suicide bomb attack against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard at their headquarters in Pishin, near the border with Pakistan.

Leaders of the Al-Qaeda affiliated Sunni terrorist group Jundullah have claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Iran that killed over 40 people yesterday. The group is funded and trained by the CIA and is being used to destabilize the government of Iran, according to reports out of the London Telegraph and ABC News.

In the aftermath of the attack, which killed at least five commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard along with scores of others, media reports have swung between Iranian accusations of US and British involvement and blanket denials on behalf of the U.S. State Department.

However, the fact that Jundullah, who have since claimed responsibility for the attack and named the bomber as Abdol Vahed Mohammadi Saravani, are openly financed and run by the CIA and Mossad is not up for debate, it has been widely reported for years.

“President George W Bush has given the CIA approval to launch covert “black” operations to achieve regime change in Iran, intelligence sources have revealed. Mr Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs,” reported the London Telegraph in May 2007.

Part of that destabilization campaign involved the the CIA “Giving arms-length support, supplying money and weapons, to an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, which has conducted raids into Iran from bases in Pakistan,” stated the report.

Jundullah is a Sunni Al-Qaeda offshoot organization that was formerly headed by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The fact that it is being directly supported by the U.S. government under both Bush and now Obama destroys the whole legitimacy of the “war on terror” in an instant.

The group has been blamed for a number of bombings inside Iran aimed at destabilizing Ahmadinejad’s government and is also active in Pakistan, having been fingered for its involvement in attacks on police stations and car bombings at the Pakistan-US Cultural Center in 2004.

The group also produces propaganda tapes and literature for al-Qaeda’s media wing, As-Sahab, which is in turn closely affiliated with the military-industrial complex front IntelCenter, the group that makes available Al-Qaeda videos to the western media.

In May 2008, ABC News reported on how Pakistan was threatening to turn over six members of Jundullah to Iran after they were taken into custody by Pakistani authorities.

“U.S. officials tell ABC News U.S. intelligence officers frequently meet and advise Jundullah leaders, and current and former intelligence officers are working to prevent the men from being sent to Iran,” reported ABC news, highlighting again the close relationship between the terror group and the CIA.

In July 2009, a Jundullah member admitted before a court in Zahedan Iran that the group was a proxy for the U.S. and Israel.

Abdolhamid Rigi, a senior member of the group and the brother of the group’s leader Abdolmalek Rigi, who was one of the six members of the organization extradited by Pakistan, told the court that Jundullah was being trained and financed by “the US and Zionists”. He also said that the group had been ordered by America and Israel to step up their attacks in Iran.

Jundullah is not the only anti-Iranian terror group that US government has been accused of funding in an attempt to pressure the Iranian government.

Multiple credible individuals including US intelligence whistleblowers and former military personnel have asserted that the U.S. is conducting covert military operations inside Iran using guerilla groups to carry out attacks on Iranian Revolution Guard units.

It is widely suspected that the well known right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), once run by Saddam Hussein’s dreaded intelligence services, is now working exclusively for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and carrying out remote bombings in Iran.

After a bombing inside Iran in March 2007, the London Telegraph also reported on how a high ranking CIA official has blown the whistle on the fact that America is secretly funding terrorist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear program.

A story entitled, US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran, reveals how funding for the attacks carried out by the terrorist groups “comes directly from the CIA’s classified budget,” a fact that is now “no great secret”, according to a former high-ranking CIA official in Washington who spoke anonymously to The Sunday Telegraph.

Former US state department counter-terrorism agent Fred Burton backed the claim, telling the newspaper, “The latest attacks inside Iran fall in line with US efforts to supply and train Iran’s ethnic minorities to destabilise the Iranian regime.”

John Pike, the head of the influential Global Security think tank in Washington, said: “The activities of the ethnic groups have hotted up over the last two years and it would be a scandal if that was not at least in part the result of CIA activity.”

The timing of the bombing that targeted Iranian Revolutionary Guard members yesterday was clearly orchestrated to coincide with talks between representatives from Iran, Russia, France, the U.S. and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna today concerning Iran’s nuclear intentions.

October 12, 2009

October Surprise: Peace Prize to a War Criminal

By Stephen Lendman
October12, 2009

The Nobel Committee's tradition is long and inglorious, but for the well-informed no surprise. Consider its past honorees:
-- Henry Kissinger;

-- Shimon Peres;

-- Yitzhak Rabin;

-- Menachem Begin;

-- FW de Klerk;

-- Al Gore;

-- The Dalai Lama, a covert CIA asset;

-- Kofi Annan, a reliable imperial war supporter;

-- UN Peacekeeping (Paramilitary) Forces that foster more conflicts than they resolve;

-- Elie Wiesel, a hawkish Islamophobe;

-- Norman Borlaug, whose "green revolution" wheat strains killed millions;

-- Medecins Sans Frontieres, co-founded by rabid war hawk Bernard Kouchner, now France's Minister of Foreign and European Affairs;

-- Woodrow Wilson who broke his pledge to keep "us out of war,"

-- Jimmy Carter who backed an array of tyrants and drew the Soviets into its Afghan quagmire that took a million or more lives;

-- George C. Marshall, instrumental in creating NATO and waging war against North Korea;

-- Theodore Roosevelt who once said "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one;" and

-- other undeserving winners...."War is peace," what Orwell understood and why the award legitimizes wars and the leaders who wage them.

After the October 9 announcement, The New York Times quoted 2007 winner Al Gore saying it was "thrilling" without explaining it was as undeserved as his own. Writers Steven Erlanger and Sheryl Gay Stolberg called it a "surprise." For others it shocked and betrayed.

Palestinian Muhammad al-Sharif asked: "Has Israel stopped building settlements? Has Obama achieved a Palestinian state yet?"

Iyad Burnat, one of the West Bank's non-violent protest leaders, "started to go crazy" after hearing about the award. "I asked myself why. The Americans are still in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Palestine is still occupied....Why didn't (they) give the prize to (George Bush. He) worked very hard (for) eight years killing children, starting wars and supporting the occupation, and they gave the prize to (other choices). I think (the) prize makes the people more violent. Do you think that Obama can make peace....why didn't (they) wait until he actually made" it.

Straddling both sides, The Times said that the "unexpected honor....elicited praise and puzzlement around the globe."

It called it a rebuke of Bush's foreign policies instead of explaining it legitimizes wars and conflicts, the same ones Obama's pursuing more aggressively in Afghanistan and Pakistan under a general (Stanley McChrystal) James Petras calls a "notorious psychopath" - responsible for committing war crime atrocities when he headed the Pentagon's infamous Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). No matter, according to Erlanger and Stolberg's Times-speak:
"Mr. Obama has generated considerable goodwill overseas (and) has made a series of speeches with arching ambition. He has vowed to pursue a world without nuclear weapons; reached out to the Muslim world (and) sought to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, at the expense of offending some of his Jewish supporters."

In fact, his speeches are disingenuous and lie-filled. He disdains peace. The renamed "Global War on Terror" is now the "Overseas Contingency Operation." Torture remains official US policy. His administration reeks of Islamophobes. The Israeli Lobby remains comfortably dominant. Muslims are still target one. His ambition is global dominance. His method - imperial wars with a first-strike nuclear option.

The Nobel Committee's Twisted Logic in Announcing the Award

It reflects Obama's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."
Fact Check:

In less than nine months in office, Obama has been confrontational through destabilizing belligerence towards numerous countries, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, China, Occupied Palestine, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Somalia, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Honduras by deposing a democratically elected president and obstructing efforts to reinstate him.

"Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons."
Fact Check:

America has the world's largest, most threatening arsenal and global delivery systems. Besides Israel, it's the only major power with a first-strike nuclear policy against any country called a threat. Its drawdown plans will replace old weapons with better new ones, and so-called "missile defense" is solely for offense.

"Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multinational diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions play."
Fact Check:

Obama is pursuing the same policies as George Bush:

-- permanent wars and occupations;

-- record amounts of military spending at a time America has no enemies;

-- supplying arms and munitions to rogue state allies;

-- confronting independent ones with sanctions, belligerent threats, and more war;

-- subverting the rule of law;

-- pursuing a global jihad against human rights and civil liberties;

-- using Security Council pressure and intimidation to enforce policy and block constructive measures through vetoes; and

-- overall continuing America's hegemonic pursuit of "full spectrum dominance" over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.

Under Obama, "the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climate challenges the world is confronting."
Fact Check:

Obama's House-passed "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009" is environmentally destructive, lets corporate polluters reap huge windfall profits by charging consumers more for energy and fuel, and creates new Wall Street bubble potential through carbon trading derivatives speculation.

According to Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the "US stance retards progress at Bangkok climate talks" the way it's obstructed earlier efforts.

"Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened."
Fact Check:
Obama's polices have weakened them at home and abroad. Torture remains official US policy. Muslims, Latino immigrants, and environmental and animal rights activists are repeated victims. So are peaceful protestors. Police state measures are still law and tough new ones are planned. Civil and human rights issues are nonstarters. Warrantless illegal spying continues. Health care reform schemes will ration a human right, and the new Swine Flu vaccines are covert bioweapons.

"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future."
Fact Check:

Under Obama, growing millions in America face poverty, unemployment, hunger, homelessness, despair, ill health, and early deaths at a time of permanent wars.

"For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely the international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman."
Fact Check:

Skirting the truth, the Committee's twisted logic picks honorees who should face prosecutions for their crimes.

A 110-Year Tradition


Alfred Nobel (1833 - 1896) began it in 1901. Swedish- born, he was a wealthy 19th century chemist, engineer, dynamite inventor, armaments manufacturer, and war profiteer, later reinventing himself as a peacemaker.

Past nominees included Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Tony Blair, Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush. Mahatma Gandhi got four nominations but never won. Nor did three-time nominee Kathy Kelly and other deserving choices, passed over for war hawks like Henry Kissenger whose credentials include:
-- three - four million Southeast Asian deaths;

-- many tens of thousands more worldwide;

-- backing coups and despots;

-- stoking global conflict and violence; and

-- compiling an overall breathtaking criminal record.

Others like:
-- Israeli leaders Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin matched him against Palestinian civilians;

-- Kofi Annan backed Western imperialism, years of genocidal Iraqi sanctions, the 2003 invasion and occupation, and the same lawlessness against Afghanistan; and

-- Al Gore, the 2007 choice, was infamous for putting politics above principles and made a career out of being pro-war, pro-business, anti-union, and no friend of the earth - credentials descriptive of Obama and his national security team, ideologically stacked with hawks.

As a result, American war making continues, sanctified and legitimized under Obama's peacemaker mantle. Or as CounterPunch's Alexander Cockburn put it in his October 10 "War and Peace" article:
The award is "a twist on the Alger myth, inspiring to youth (and future Nobel hopefuls): you too can get to murder Filipinos, or Palestinians, or Vietnamese or Afghans and still win a Peace Prize. That's the audacity of hope at full stretch." Nobel hypocrisy also by scorning peace in favor of war. The tradition continues.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.


Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com

October 11, 2009

Obama Awarded the Nobel Prize for Making War With Muslims

{Nobel peace prize with Obama and peace with Netanyahu} by Jalal Al Rifai-Al Dustour newspaper-Jordan

(Nobel peace prize with Obama and peace with Netanyahu) by Jalal Al Rifa'i-Al Dustour newspaper-Jordan

By Abid Mustafa,

On October 9 2009, US President Barack Obama was awarded Nobel Peace Prize for astounding services in the name of world peace. In its statement, the Nobel Committee said he had “created a new climate in international politics. …

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.” It continued, “His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.” Usually awards are conferred upon people when they have accomplished something tangible and not for mere pledges to achieve meaningful results. In Obama’s case he has neither achieved peace nor has he undertaken efforts to establish the foundations for world peace. On the contrary, he is a warmonger and a crusader who is spearheading America’s war against Islam and the Muslim world.

No sooner had Obama received the prize for peace he convened his war council to discuss how best to wage war in Afghanistan. “The president had a robust conversation about the security and political challenges in Afghanistan and the options for building a strategic approach going forward,” an administration official told AFP. One of the measures Obama will endorse is to increase the number of US soldiers deployed in Afghanistan. This will be on top of the huge number of private security contractors that already work for the Pentagon and are responsible for much of the mayhem and the slaughter of innocent Afghan civilians.

Obama’s war council is also deliberating options to expand America’s war in Pakistan. American officials are openly debating whether to launch missile attacks on Quetta– Baluchistan’s largest city. If the nod is given this will mark a new phase in America’s war against Pakistan and means that fortification of the US embassy in Islamabad–one of the largest in the Muslim world– will be used as the nerve centre to plan and orchestrate the killing of Muslims.

Additionally, America has mandated two private US security firms Blackwater and InterRisk to hound and terrorize Pakistanis.

In Iraq, Obama’s so called draw down policy masks a similar sinister plan that relies heavily on private security contractors to strengthen America’s military presence in the country and to compensate for the withdrawal of US troops. The private security contractors operate with complete impunity, spilling Muslim blood and humiliating ordinary Iraqis.

According to new statistics released by the Pentagon this year, there has been a 23% increase in the number of private security contractors working for the Department of Defense in Iraq in the second quarter of 2009. The figure for the same period in Afghanistan is a 29% increase. Overall, contractors (armed and unarmed) now make up approximately 50% of the “total force in Centcom AOR [Area of Responsibility].” This means there are a 242,657 contractors working on these two US wars under the leadership of commander in chief Barack Obama. This exceeds the present number of forces in Iraq and Afghanistan which amounts to 132,610 and 68,197 respectively.

Under Obama’s watch the civil war in Somalia is mushrooming at an alarming rate. The war is fuelled by Washington through the supply of US arms and weapons to the beleaguered US puppet government of Sharif Ahmed. Last month, Obama gave the signal to his military to directly intervene in Somalia and conduct air strikes against militants–very much reminiscent of America’s invasion of Somalia in 1993.

Against Iran, Obama is not advocating peace, but urging crippling sanctions that will surely hurt ordinary Iranians and incubate resentment against America for decades to come. Likewise Obama’s continued support for autocratic rulers of the Muslim world has convinced many Muslims that Obama is no different to his predecessor George Bush.

However, nowhere is Obama’s failure to deliver peace more pronounced than Palestine. As a prelude to his inauguration, Obama displayed resolute determination not to condemn Israeli savagery in Gaza. In fact, Obama’s refusal to censure Israel over war crimes has ushered in a new standard that pays pittance to the value of Muslim life, blood and honour. In office, Obama’s indifference to the Jewish state’s intransigence to halt settlements has shot down all efforts to commence pseudo peace talks.

Clearly then, Obama’s peace endeavors equate to making pieces of Muslim countries through war and bloodshed. The political climate Obama has presided over is one of intimidation and tyranny. The values Obama espouses are based on deceit and injustice. By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama, the Nobel committee has avowed that waging war against Muslims and Islam under the guise of peace is a noble action. Obama may have captured the hearts of the Nobel committee, but amongst Muslims and much of the world, Obama epitomizes an imperialistic empire that is an enemy of humanity and world peace.

- Abid Mustafa is a political commentator who specializes in Muslim affairs.

Source

Mercenaries and paramilitaries arrive in Honduras

By Honduras Delegation
Press Release
Saturday, Oct 10, 2009

The situation is grave in Tegucigalpa. According to a message from the organization, Pastors for Peace, Radio Globo from Honduras is reporting that snipers are shooting into the Brazilian Embassy where President Zelaya and hundreds of supporters have taken refuge. There is no word yet on injuries.
More snipers outside of Brazilian Embassy in Honduras

The following is a report from the delegation of U.S. activists in Honduras, who will be holding a news conference today, October 9, at 5pm EST at the offices of the Bottlers’ Union, a center in Tegucigalpa of the National Front for Resistance Against the Coup:

In the last 24 hours, the situation in Honduras has reached a profound level of urgency. The illegal, de facto Micheletti regime is clearly reaching a point of desperation—and there is a serious danger in this, as the rightwing can and will do anything when they are desperate.

Last night, we received word that at the Brazilian embassy, where President Manuel Zelaya has been seeking refuge, two scaffolds had been erected and two snipers placed on them—one from the Honduran police and one from the Honduran army. Heavy military activity was also occurring on the ground around the embassy, with military convoys placed at strategic places all around the windows and doors of the embassy. The fear is that an assassination attempt on Zelaya’s life may be carried out soon.

Another alarming report relayed to us today from Honduran human rights leaders is of the presence of 120 paramilitaries—experts in killing—from other Latin American countries in Honduras. Many of these paramilitaries have been trained at the School of the Americas based in Georgia.

Today while we were in a meeting, the human rights leader we were meeting with received a phone call that police at the pedagogical university had given protesters there 10 minutes to disperse or face dire consequences. Military convoys had been brought in to surround the protesters.

As this email is being written, members of the U.S. Delegation in Solidarity with the Honduras Resistance are at the U.S. embassy, attempting to meet with representatives there to alert them of the situation and demand the discontinuation of U.S. aid to the de facto regime, a freeze on the assets of the golpista government members, and the abandonment of any electoral process that doesn’t first involve the restitution of President Zelaya, as is the will of the Honduran people.

Platforms with highly armed sharpshooters installed outside the embassy, using telescopic and infrared targeting systems, just meters away from the windows of the building where the president, his family, and many others are held hostage by the regime.
The delegation also reports that despite the coup government’s announcement that it had lifted the ban on civil liberties, the country still remains under martial law. The coup government is telling the world that it has lifted martial law, but they haven’t told anyone in the police or military, from the top commanders to the troops in the streets. There is still a massive armed presence, and protesters and dissidents are still being brutally attacked and arrested.

That’s why it is so important for us to support the Delegation in Solidarity with the Honduran Resistance. The corporate media is echoing the coup government’s press releases claiming that martial law has been lifted and civil liberties restored, and ignoring the fact that repression is intensifying. We need you to help get the word out.

What you can do now:

Call – Honduras Desk, U.S. State Department 202-647-3482
State Department Main Switchboard 202-647-4000
White House 202-456-1111
OAS Washington Office 202-458-3000

Demand an end to the attacks on Zelaya and Honduran activists. Demand a restoration of civil liberties in Honduras.

Sign the Petition – Demand safe passage for the U.S. delegation.

Honduras Delegation

October 10, 2009

Time for a War Tax

How to Pay for Escalation in Afghanistan

By STEVE BREYMAN
October 10, 2009

The United States has spent $228.2 billion on combat operations in Afghanistan since October 2001, so the Congressional Research Service tells us. The White House recently said that the single most cost-effective option--withdrawing US fighting forces--was not on the table during its ongoing review of AfPak strategy. This means, among other things, that the cost will continue to mount whether General McChrystal gets his additional tens of thousands of troops or not. The quarter trillion dollar figure does not include the current cost of recruiting young men and women to fight the war (hundreds of millions of dollars per year), the future cost of veterans’ benefits (likely to be gigantic), nor the cost of debt service on the borrowed money. The latter figure could rise as high as $200 billion, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. Put together, these figures rival those of the Wall Street bailout.

This has been a war, as is the war in Iraq, and as was the war in Vietnam, that the US waged on future taxpayers’ dimes. One consequence of the Johnson- and Nixon-era war splurge was the stagflation of the 1970s, and the withering of Great Society programs. The self-imposed pay-as-you-go spending rule enacted by Congress in 1990 expired in 2002 just as George W. Bush prepared to invade Iraq. This was a period during which the US ran budget surpluses for the first time since the 1950s. The rule mandated that any new spending be budget neutral: new spending had to be offset by spending cuts or tax increases elsewhere in the budget. A new version of the rule recently passed the House and is currently before the Senate. President Obama has said he will sign the bill into law. As written, the bill does not exempt war spending.

The president also (re)committed to paying for the wars through the regular budget process (this was a campaign promise)—following one 2009 supplemental war spending bill that overwhelmingly passed both houses. Supplementals required a straight up or down vote; no amendments were permitted, as in the regular budget process. Obama’s FY2010 defense budget reflects this more honest approach. But this forthcoming budget simply adds the rapidly growing tab of the wars to the national debt. A truly honest approach would pay for the wars with real money, not funds borrowed from the Chinese and our great-great-grandchildren.

The United States invented the telephone excise tax to help finance the Spanish-American War in 1898. Renewed many times afterwards, during times of both war and peace, the tax (which applies today only to local calls spelled out as such on a phone bill) has essentially been made obsolete by cell phones and bundled service. The revenues, which ended up in the general fund anyway, were never enough to pay the full toll for any war. The War Tax Act of 2010 could remedy this and other defects in the American tradition of paying (or not) for war.

A war tax, called such and sized to cover the full cost of the wars, would signal an important break from the lies and chicanery of the George W. Bush years. The tax should be progressive rather than regressive. It should be renewed or reinstated every year US forces engage in combat on foreign soil, air, or water. The Blackwaters, Lockheed Martins, and Halliburtons—contemporary war profiteers—should pay the lion’s share through targeted and loophole-free corporate income taxes. But none of us who make incomes above a genuine poverty level—not the federal government’s shameful underestimate--should be exempt. Why? Because war is too easy without basic fiscal responsibility.

A vote for war funding—a leading cause of deficit spending--is today without political risk for all but a handful of members of Congress. It does not take much if any deliberation for most members to vote “yes” on “authorizations for the use of force,” and for the supplemental bills to “pay” for the force. Indeed, the only risk they face comes should they vote against war spending. Presidents notice, and potential challengers back home notice. Hardly surprising then that Bush and Obama received everything they’ve asked for in Iraq and Afghanistan from Congress these past eight years.

That same Congress is unlikely to show much enthusiasm for a war tax. Why should it? The current arrangement works just fine for most members, thank you very much. Institution of a war tax would, like all good things, require a years long, focused and strategic grassroots campaign against extraordinary odds and fierce resistance. A war tax addresses the fiscal root of the problem by simply paying for war on an as-you-go basis. A war tax is the fiscal policy equivalent of universal single-payer health care. But it stands even less chance of implementation.

There is no cost-effective alternative to a war tax besides the off-the-table immediate exit strategy. The administration has boxed itself into a deficit-spending corner. It is virtually certain that whatever revised policy emerges from the present round of meetings, it will cost more than the exorbitant status quo.

Congressional war hawks (who double as deficit hawks, even during a recession) the Washington Post editorial board, and General McChrystal are pushing Obama to escalate the eight-year-old war. Again, the White House announced that declaring victory over al-Qaeda in Afghanistan (a fair claim, according to the president) and holding a parade is, unfortunately, not on the near-term horizon.

It’s a shame that the economic cost of the war has not figured at all in the current debate over US AfPak policy. Were it to, escalation would be the first option off the table.

Steve Breyman teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Reach him at breyms@rpi.edu

Source

October 09, 2009

Al-Walajah, a symbol of Israeli ethnic cleansing

Hasan Abu Nimah, The Electronic Intifada, 9 October 2009

Palestinians retrieve their possessions after the Israeli army demolished their home in the West Bank village of al-Walajah, near Bethlehem, December 2006. (Fadi Tanas/MaanImages)

While American officials continue to claim that the mission of US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell is by no means over, and that he will still pursue his efforts to convince the Israeli government to agree to some sort of settlement freeze, Israeli plans for further colonization of Palestinian land continue undisturbed. The latest Israeli plans call for the destruction of the West Bank village of al-Walajah for the second time in six decades.

According to Israeli press reports, Israel is planning a massive new settlement in the vicinity of Jerusalem, on land owned by Palestinians of al-Walajah. The project, expected to be approved by the Israeli ministry of the Interior, could become the single most populous settlement built in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1967 according to the Israeli daily Maariv. The project plans prepared by the ministry of the Interior and the Jerusalem municipality call for 14,000 housing units for 40,000 settlers on 3,000 dunums of land which would require the demolition of al-Walajah residents' homes, according to the paper.

The original village of al-Walajah was located on the opposite side of its current location, on a mountain slope facing east, just about six kilometers south of Jerusalem. It was very close to Battir, the village in which I was born and brought up. The two villages were separated by a valley, with Battir on the opposite slope from al-Walajah, though a little further south and were very closely linked.

The railway from Jerusalem to the Palestinian coastal city of Jaffa ran right through that valley, which also marks the 1949 armistice line following the end of the 1948 war (also known as the "Green Line.")

During October 1948, Zionist forces attacked and occupied al-Walajah. Its roughly 1,800 inhabitants were scattered in every direction, sharing the fate of Palestinians from hundreds of other towns and villages ethnically cleansed in the same period.

I have strong memories of visiting al-Walajah as a young child, which was walking distance from my village. Often when I was dispatched by one of my parents to purchase something for the house from the only shop in our village, I was advised to try the shop in al-Walajah if the item was not to be found in Battir.

There was active social interaction and intermarriage between the small, tight-knit populations of al-Walajah and Battir. There were daily exchanges of visits and sharing of most kinds of public events. That also applied to many other villages which were within walking distance from Battir such as Beit Safafa, al-Malhah, al-Jawrah, Ain Karem, al-Qabou and Sataf; all were occupied and ethnically cleansed in that first war.

That kind of cozy relationship amongst the small populations of Palestinian villages was all but destroyed by the 1948 war. When the inhabitants of Battir returned home after several months of forced refuge elsewhere when the village during the war came under direct fire, al-Walajah, which used to bustle with life was now silent and deserted. The demarcation line delineated following the 1949 armistice had left al-Walajah just west of the line, on the Israeli side. Battir was barely saved with the barbed wire running through the village cutting most of the village agricultural land, some houses and the boys school. Later, we watched as the Israeli army started to demolish al-Walajah, house by house. We would see a cloud of smoke and dust shoot up into the air over a house, followed by the sound of an explosion, leaving nothing but a heap of rubble. Al-Walajah was completely destroyed before Israel built the settlement of Aminadav and a park where Israelis picnic on its lands.

Apparently the people of al-Walajah owned land across the hills to the east, well within the West Bank, and that is where they decided to settle temporarily for the awaited hope of justice and redemption from the United Nations, which like many Palestinians, they still thought would come.

But time passed and justice never visited them, so they started to build homes and created a new al-Walajah. This new town is the one now threatened with ethnic cleansing. Of course the standard Israeli excuse for destroying Palestinians homes is that they were built "without permission."

The irony is that the Israelis have all along permitted themselves to massacre, ethnically cleanse, occupy, confiscate, destroy and commit every sort of crime against their Palestinian victims while Palestinians are severely punished for building on their land in their country. Al-Walajah in 1948 and now, bears witness to Israel's insatiable appetite for Palestinian land.

Israel's brazen acceleration of settlement construction on occupied Palestinian land is unquestionably a result of international, and particularly American, policy failures and the refusal to hold Israel accountable under international law.

While we have constantly witnessed the so-called "international community" relentlessly tracking down alleged violations and violators in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Lebanon, Kenya, Burma and among Palestinians not affiliated with US-backed Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, Israel is offered unconditional impunity.

It doesn't stop there; Israel is not only exempt from punishment but routinely rewarded for its crimes. After six months of defiant rejection of American requests to stop settlement construction, the Americans were the ones who finally dropped the demand and put pressure instead on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to drop its conditions to restart "negotiations."

Last month's New York summit of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, hosted by US President Barack Obama, was Netanyahu's first great diplomatic victory. Following the growing public outrage at the PA's shelving of the Goldstone report into Israel's war crimes in Gaza, it emerged (according to the BBC Arabic Service on 3 October) that Abbas agreed in New York to drop the Palestinian effort to have the report forwarded to the Security Council for further action. This is a second major Israeli victory. Netanyahu, it should be recalled, had dwelled heavily on the Goldstone report in his address to the UN General Assembly rejecting the report as a serious obstacle to peace. Abbas on his part ignored any mere mention of the report in his own UN speech. This indicates that Abbas had already acquiesced to public and private American and Israeli demands to shelve the Goldstone report.

Israel's third victory is the revelation that the Obama administration, like all its predecessors, has agreed to help Israel continue to hide its nuclear weapons arsenal that threatens the region and all of humanity, while the US and its allies escalate their pressure on Iran in response to Israeli incitement.

All of these events are directly linked to what happens to people in al-Walajah -- and indeed all over Palestine from Galilee to Gaza -- who from 1948 until now, continue steadfastly and stubbornly to defend their rights and existence even as they still hope for international justice that has yet to come.

Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations.

*****************************************************

In an endeavor for balanced coverage I am posting the Israeli narrative as elucidated by
Mort Zuckerman, Editor, U.S. News & World Report:

The Cruel Dilemma Facing the Jews of Israel

Published by Huffington Post
October 8, 2009

The Jews of Israel are facing a cruel dilemma. They came home to find peace and safety in their homeland of Israel; to find an end to that vulnerable status of a perpetual wandering minority; an end to exile, alienation, and powerlessness; and the beginning of a normal national existence. Instead, they found neighbors who were not reconciled to their living again together in this tiny piece of land the Jews have regarded as home for 4,000 years. How do you share a home with someone who says, "You have no right to be here"?

[...]

October 07, 2009

Qaddafi vexes US in forcing UN to take up Gaza report

Washington – Libya called a special closed-door session of the United Nations Security Council Wednesday afternoon to demand action on a UN report that criticizes Israel for committing "war crimes" during its December-January offensive into Gaza.

By bringing the report to the Security Council – a body Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi just last month said was more accurately called the "terror council" – Libya sets up a clash with the United States. He also creates a golden opportunity for Libya to raise its diplomatic star in the developing world, and for Colonel Qaddafi to refurbish his image with the Arab world.

"Libya will only be on the Security Council through December, so this was an opportunity [Libya and Qaddafi] would be loath to miss," says Melissa Labonte, an expert on Libya at Fordham University in New York. "If the P-5 [the council's five permanent members] say, 'We aren't talking about this,' it allows Qaddafi to say, 'This is what I meant by a terror council.' But if they do take it up," she adds, "what a coup for Qaddafi."

The US has sought to put off the impact of the report, first aired last month at the UN's Human Rights Council in Geneva, in the interest of keeping open the door to a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. But that door is closed at least temporarily anyway, and instead the US finds one of its partners in any future peace effort – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas – under pressure at home for bowing to the US and sitting on the Gaza report.

The 575-page Goldstone report – named for the South African jurist, Richard Goldstone, who authored it – finds that both Israel and Hamas committed "war crimes" in the course of the month-long war. But it is mainly critical of Israeli actions and suggests the possibility of taking Israeli officials responsible for the alleged crimes to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

The UN Human Rights Council considered condemning Israel for failing to cooperate with the Goldstone inquiry and sending the report to the Security Council. But at the same time, the Palestinian leadership was in intense negotiations with the US on restarting the peace talks, with President Obama hoping to announce their resumption at the UN during the General Assembly in September.

The Palestinians say they bowed to a request from the US, the European Union, and Russia to postpone any Human Rights Council action on the report until March.

The US expressed misgivings about the report soon after it came out, with the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, saying the US had "very serious concerns" about some of its recommendations.

At the time Ambassador Rice called the report's mandate as established by the Human Rights Council "unbalanced, one-sided, and basically unacceptable." The "appropriate venue" for a report like the Goldstone investigation, she added, was in the Human Rights Council and not the Security Council – perhaps presaging a US effort at Wednesday's meeting to deny any Security Council consideration of the report.

Full article

October 01, 2009

Dr. Chu's Energy Bait and Switch



They're short on renewables but they have a new generation of 'improved' and safer nuclear power plants and the costs can be charged


Atheo News - June 13, 2009

The goal claimed by both Obama, during his campaign, and promoters of climate change legislation, was that 25% of America's electricity come from renewable sources by 2025. An alternate rationale given for this goal has been "energy independence".

While competing bills currently before Congress appear to call for 15 to 20 percent of energy to be produced for renewable energy sources, they actually don't require utilities to achieve anything near these figures. The legislation is filled with exemptions and allowances which reduce as much as 40 percent of the requirement if 'efficiency improvements' are adopted. For example, both bills scale back mandates for renewable sources if utilities build new nuclear plants or increase power generation at an existing nuclear plant.

The congressional mandates "are very weak and really will not require any additional renewables beyond what states already are doing," says Mark Sinclair of Clean Energy States Alliance. "It will be meaningless. It's just a gesture."

Marchant Wentworth of the Union of Concerned Scientists came to a similar conclusion, seeing that absolute requirements for renewables, after allowances, would be as low as 8 percent of total electric power generation for each utility. This is hardly a challenge for most utilities in a nation that in 2006 generated almost 10 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, including hydro power.

In other words, the proposed renewable sources requirements amount to little more than shallow symbolism. The current public subsidies and underwriting for nuclear power already make the nuclear choice more economically viable for utilities to maximise return on utility investment. The legislation is, in fact, a thinly vieled mandate for building new nuclear power plants, or to increase output from existing ones. Republicans are offering a different plan that simply calls for building 100 new nuclear plants within the next twenty years.

These plans mirror similar policies across the Atlantic where the government in Britain is rushing a new generation of nuclear power plants, with a goal to begin construction within four years. Both 'energy independence' and climate change were cited as rationales by policy makers there as well.

Obama's Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is a staunch advocate of nuclear power, citing it as "essential" due to global warming while at the same time ignoring the carbon emissions of the "nuclear cycle" that are produced from the mining, milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication and disposal of spent fuel. The new appointee described nuclear power as "carbon free" at his confirmation in January.

Professor Karl Grossman views Chu as a product of a "military-industrial-scientific complex". Incidentally, the Lawrence Berkeley National Labortary from which Chu hails was the original laboratory of the Manhattan Project. After WWII, the Manhattan project was turned into the Atomic Energy Commission which was tasked to promote both military and civilian applications of nuclear technology. David E. Lilienthal, the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, wrote a book in 1963 titled "Change, Hope, and the Bomb", which pushed for food irradiation, nuclear powered airplanes, atomic excavation and other potential commercial uses for nuclear technology under the rubric of "the peaceful atom", an imperative being that there have always been symbiotic connections between military and civilian sectors of the nuclear industry.

Chu is of the notion that nuclear energy is far less dangerous to our health than coal, stating that "The fear of radiation shouldn't even enter into this..." This idyllic notion contradicts several studies which indicate otherwise.

The Radiation and Public Health Project recently published the results of a study which show:

"a uniform pattern of increase in childhood leukemia [standard mortality ratio] from the earlier period to the most recent 20 years for the plants that remain in operation...

...the study, which uses data collected between 1985 and 2004, found a 13.9 percent increase in leukemia death rates of children living near nuclear plants that were built between 1957 and 1970 and a 9.4 percent increase in death rates of children living near nuclear plants built after 1970, compared to the national childhood leukemia death rate..."

The promoters of nuclear energy often assert with authority that nuclear energy has caused fewer deaths than other fuels.

The reality, however, is far less certain because we do not know if we are getting the full story in regards to incidents such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. The World Health Organization (WHO) has subordinated its role in protecting health in an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA). The WHO and the IAEA agreed to "inform" and "to consult with each other on the most efficient use of information, resources, and technical personnel in the field of statistics and in regard to all statistical projects dealing with matters of common interest". The IAEA's mission is to "accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world".

Professor Chris Busby, Science Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) states:
"The subordination of the WHO to IAEA is a key part of the systematic falsification of nuclear risk which has been under way ever since Hiroshima, the agreement creates an unacceptable conflict of interest in which the UN organisation concerned with promoting our health has been made subservient to those whose main interest is the expansion of nuclear power. Dissolving the WHO-IAEA agreement is a necessary first step to restoring the WHO's independence to research the true health impacts of ionising radiation and publish its findings."
Others claim that newer technology is safer, but Chernobyl was state of the art at one time as was Three Mile Island which was only three months old when it melted. Harvey Wasserman writes that:

As news of the accident poured into the global media, the public was assured there were no radiation releases. That quickly proved to be false.

The public was then told the releases were controlled and done purposely to alleviate pressure on the core.

Both those assertions were false.The public was told the releases were "insignificant." But stack monitors were saturated and unusable, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission later told Congress it did not know--- and STILL does not know---how much radiation was released at Three Mile Island, or where it went...

Mr. Wasserman goes on to detail that while the public was assured by the government that there would be follow up stories and health care provided to victims if needed, in reality, the state of Pennsylvania deleted the incidence of radiation induced cancers from the public record, abolished the states tumor registry, and misrepresented information it could not hide altogether, such as a tripling of the infant death rate in nearby locales. The federal government, meanwhile, did nothing to track the health histories of the residents. Independent surveys, in the meantime, showed substantial rises in the rates of cancers, birth defects, rashes, hair loss, and more. However, these studies are not allowed much play in the media, and even worse, class action lawsuits on the behalf of citizens are denied access to the federal court systems with the claim that there was not enough radiation to do such harm. On the side, Three Mile Island owners settled with some residents under-the- table, with the caveat being that there could be no more public claims made asserting the dangers and the results of the failed nuclear power plant.

All of this occurs while the Obama administration "is starting the process of finding a new strategy for nuclear waste" according to Stephanie Mueller, press agent for the U.S. Department of Energy. After more than half a century seeking a waste disposal solution, and having abandoned Yucca Mountain as a waste repository, the government does not even have an operational plan for the mounting nuclear waste that is being generated, an output that will only increase as more plants are put into production.

Amid continuing reports of the safety risks of nuclear power plants and without any fixed plan for managing waste, Chu and the Obama administration still continue to promote the nuclear option as a safe alternative fuel. Their lack of interest in renewable energy is made clear by their recent slashing of the already miniscule funding for wave and tidal energy research. While they claim on one hand to be working to turn the energy industry into one that relies on safe, renewable sources such as wind and solar power, they are in reality using this as a foil to push the nuclear agenda of the military industrial complex.

Atheo News

Obama rhetoric on Sudan counterproductive for peace

Atheo News - July 16, 2009

President Obama has mimicked the Bush regime's characterization of the Darfur conflict as "genocide" following criticism from the American Jewish World Service (an organization which seems to have Sudan as an almost singular focus).

"When there’s a genocide in Darfur or terrorists in Somalia, these are not simply African problems — they are global security challenges, and they demand a global response" Obama said in his recent speech at the Ghanaian parliament.

Such labeling which is not mirrored by the U.N. will likely impede current peacemaking efforts between rival factions and reduces the influence that the U.S. has over Sudan outside of military means.

In an email response to pro-war activists Obama pledged to ensure tough sanctions:

"As President, I will build on America’s efforts that I previously championed in the Senate. I led in calling for the joint African Union/United Nations peacekeeping force now on the ground, and insisted on comprehensive sanctions against the Khartoum government. Going forward, my Administration will continue this work with unstinting resolve to end the genocide."

"In my discussions with other nations, I will work to ensure that tough sanctions on the Khartoum government continue as a part of a growing global effort involving our allies, interested countries, and other multilateral institutions."
Alex Meixner, director of policy and government relations for the Save Darfur Coalition expects a new policy on Sudan to be announced by the White House soon. The Obama Cabinet includes Susan Rice who germinated the U.S. military Africa Command (Africom) during the Clinton Administration. Rice is considered a Sudan "hawk" and has established a position at the very extreme end of the interventionist spectrum by describing the situation as "ongoing genocide".

The relatively dovish former Bush regime Sudan envoy and USAID chief Andrew Natsios is critical of the position that seems to be unfolding under the new regime:
"Some policymakers continue to call Darfur an ongoing “genocide,” but in fact, the conflict has descended into anarchy. “Darfur today is a conflict of all against all,” Rodolphe Adada, the joint African Union-United Nations special representative, told the U.N. Security Council in April. Between Jan. 1, 2008, and March 31, 2009, he found some 2,000 fatalities from violence, one third of them civilian. The death of some 700 innocent civilians over a 15-month period, while morally repugnant, is not genocide. It is a low-level insurgency. More civilians died in southern Sudan during the past six months than in Darfur over the past 15 months. Despite such facts and extensive U.N. Security Office reports showing that genocide is not an accurate description, President Obama continues to use that weighted term."
A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) review of genocide claims found the estimates of high numbers of deaths related to the conflict to have methodology problems, relying on "too few data points extrapolated to an excessive degree". The three studies which generated the highest numbers of victims were determined to lack objectivity:
"Most experts rated the level of objectivity of the three estimates as low, particularly those by Drs. Coebergh and Reeves. The experts thought that the estimates were more characteristic of advocacy or journalistic material than objective analysis."
Explaining his estimates of victims to the GAO panel Coebergh described his study as a "political statement". Yet these are the figures which are routinely cited as fact by both intervention advocates and Western media reports.

September 24, 2009

Obama's peace effort has failed but our struggle continues

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 24 September 2009

There is the old joke about a man who is endlessly searching on the ground beneath a street light. Finally, a neighbor who has been watching him asks the man what he is looking for. The man replies that he lost his keys. The neighbor asks him if he lost them under the streetlight. "No," the man replies, pointing into the darkness, "I lost them over there, but I am looking over here because here there is light!"

The intense focus on the "peace process" is a similarly futile search. Just because politicians and the media shine a constant light on it, does not mean that is where the answers are to be found.

The meeting hosted by US President Barack Obama with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas at New York's Waldorf Astoria hotel on 22 September signaled the complete and terminal failure of Obama's much vaunted push to bring about a two-state solution to the Palestine/Israel conflict.

To be sure, all the traditional activities associated with the "peace process" -- shuttle diplomacy, meetings, ritual invocations of "two states living side by side," and even "negotiations" -- will continue, perhaps for the rest of Obama's time in office. But this sterile charade will not determine the future of Palestine/Israel. That is already being decided by other means.

Before coming to that, let's recall those heady days in May when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set out the Obama Administration's firm policy on Israel's colonization of the West Bank: "We want to see a stop to settlement construction -- additions, natural growth, any kind of settlement activity -- that is what the president has called for."

Obama's envoy, former Senator George Mitchell, traveled to the region almost a dozen times to convince Israel to implement a freeze. Every proposal he took, the Israelis rejected. And to emphasize the point, the Israeli government accelerated the approval of major new settlement plans. Instead of threatening consequences for such intransigence, Mitchell simply diluted American conditions to meet Israeli objections until finally there was little left of the American demands -- or credibility.

So it was that in his remarks at New York, Obama's call for a total construction freeze was reduced to a polite request to Israel merely to "restrain" itself from devouring more Palestinian land.

Speaking to reporters after the New York meeting, Mitchell dropped the demand for a settlement freeze and made the US surrender official. "We are not identifying any issue as being a precondition or an impediment to negotiation," Mitchell said, adding, "We do not believe in preconditions. We do not impose them and we urge others not to impose them."

This is of course completely untrue. The Obama Administration, like the Bush Administration before it, continues to boycott Hamas (which has a legitimate electoral mandate to represent Palestinians under occupation) on the grounds that Hamas has refused to meet one-sided American preconditions!

The next day in his UN speech, Obama repeated the call for negotiations without preconditions. He did not explain why such negotiations would be any more fruitful than the 200-odd negotiating sessions held between the PA and the previous Israeli government headed by Ehud Olmert. Obama may have told the UN that the peace process must "break the old patterns," but he is simply repeating them.

The New York meeting produced yet another image of an American president cajoling reluctant Israeli and Palestinian leaders to shake hands, a kitschy and tiresome reprise of the famous 1993 White House lawn handshake between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin with President Clinton looking on, that sealed the ill-fated Oslo accords. Unsatisfied by its failures to date, the Obama Administration apparently craves more. It aims for a resumption of "negotiations" within weeks, to be inaugurated with what a US official called a "launch event." Ideas under discussion, the unnamed US official told the Israeli daily Haaretz, include "a meeting in Sharm al-Sheikh in Egypt."

That this is the level of thinking within the Obama Administration is utterly depressing. I can see it now -- as we have so many times before -- another meeting at the Egyptian resort attended by all the usual suspects: Israeli and Palestinian leaders (except of course Hamas), "moderate" leaders of repressive US client regimes like Jordan's King Abdallah and Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, and the whole pack of peace process parasites led by Quartet representative Tony Blair and EU "High Representative" Javier Solana. We can expect more statements that there is a "window of opportunity," that this is "the only game in town," and that "time is running out."

If this is not absurd enough, consider what the US is really saying to the Palestinians in the wake of Mitchell's failure: "We, the greatest superpower on Earth, are unable to convince Israel -- which is dependent on us militarily, economically and diplomatically -- to abide by even a temporary settlement freeze. Now, you Palestinians, who are a dispossessed, occupied people whose leaders cannot move without an Israeli permit, go and negotiate on much bigger issues like borders, refugees, Jerusalem and settlements, and do better than we did. Good luck to you."

Even if Israel agreed to a settlement freeze and negotiations resumed, there is no chance for a viable two-state solution or any just resolution coming out of such talks. So like its predecessors, this administration is substituting process and gimmicks for substance.

If the "peace process" is not driving events, then what is? Israeli colonization -- as Obama initially understood -- is the major factor determining the present and future of Palestine/Israel. Geographer and former Israeli deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti, has observed that Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip effectively ended the 1948 partition. "The decades since the war have proved that 1967 was not a disjunction but quite the opposite, a union, and that the preceding period was merely a reprieve," Benvenisti wrote in 2007.

After more than 40 years, Benvenisti views the "occupier/occupied paradigm" as too limited and misleading to describe the post-1967 reality. It is, he writes, an "anachronism that hides behind the portrayal of a temporary condition." He proposes instead that we call the situation in Palestine/Israel a "de facto binational state ... because it describes the mutual dependence of both societies, as well as the physical, economic, symbolic and cultural ties that cannot be severed except at an intolerable cost."

Repartition of Palestine would only change the shape of the conflict, not solve it. Even if Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were given a state, an unreformed, ultranationalist "Jewish state" of Israel would be more likely to turn its aggression and ethnic cleansing against its own 1.5 million Palestinian citizens than live in peace. After all, as Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has asked repeatedly, what is the point of a two-state solution that doesn't produce an exclusively Jewish state?

The 1967 boundary may have legal and political salience, but it does not demarcate geographically compact, ethnically homogenous and economically independent geo-political units. Ramallah Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Salam Fayyad may harbor fantasies about creating a "de facto" Palestinian state in the West Bank, but the close collaboration between Israel and the PA only confirms the trend towards binationalism -- of the wrong sort to be sure.

Isn't it ironic that the most enthusiastic boosters of the ugly collaboration between the Israeli occupation army and US-trained PA militias to suppress resistance to the occupation, simultaneously insist that it is implausible for Palestinians and Israelis to build a joint society under conditions of equality? Apparently Palestinians and Israelis can collude to maintain oppression and injustice but not to transcend them!

A second factor determining the present and future is the resistance in all its forms that Israeli colonization continues to generate: the movement of Palestinians within Israel for full equality in a state of all its citizens; the refugees' steadfast insistence that Israel not be allowed to prevent them returning home just because they are the wrong religion; the refusal of Palestinians in Gaza to buckle under a crippling blockade. During Ramadan, hundreds of thousands of fasting Palestinians endured unbelievable hardships to break Israel's ring of steel around Jerusalem to enter the occupied city for Friday prayers at al-Aqsa Mosque.

This spirit of resistance is expressed in millions of daily acts and refusals by individual Palestinians, but also in highly directed, creative and organized ways such as the weekly demonstrations against Israel's apartheid wall in the West Bank, or the rapidly expanding Palestinian-directed international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS).

These forms of organized resistance and solidarity are changing the balance of moral and political power and have the potential to force Israeli Jews to abandon their quest for ethno-religious purity and domination just as Afrikaners did in South Africa, Unionists did in Northern Ireland, and white Americans did in the southern US. They are bolstered by the growing calls for international accountability, the most recent of which include the Goldstone report's recommendation that Israeli leaders be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Official complicity with Israel's crimes -- such as the Obama Administration's despicable decision to attack and quash the Goldstone report -- are likely only to spur further support for BDS. These sources of power are still comparatively small compared to Israel's military and diplomatic might, but their momentum is increasing and official Israel's panic in the face of the growing challenge is palpable.

For years, scholars and activists calling for serious research and discussion about a unified state guaranteeing the rights of all who live in it, were ignored or ridiculed by defenders of the failed two-state solution. But the growing appeal of a vision that inspires and attracts individuals because of its universalism is terrifying the high priests of partition. The peace process industry, its think tanks and "experts," understand that they can no longer monopolize the discussion. Peace will not be made at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan; it will be made everywhere that people of conscience are prepared to join the struggle for liberation, justice and equality for all the people who live in Palestine/Israel.

In one sense then, the significance of the New York meeting was its utter insignificance. The real struggle for justice carries on regardless.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.