Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land provides a striking comparison of U.S. and international media coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, zeroing in on how structural distortions in U.S. coverage have reinforced false perceptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This pivotal documentary exposes how the foreign policy interests of American political elites–oil, and a need to have a secure military base in the region, among others–work in combination with Israeli public relations strategies to exercise a powerful influence over how news from the region is reported.

The Haitian prime minister has warned that the case of 10 US missionaries charged with child abduction is a “distraction” from earthquake recovery.

Jean-Max Bellerive said more than 200,000 people had died in the quake and one million still needed help.

The missionaries have been charged with child abduction and criminal conspiracy.

They deny allegations they tried to smuggle 33 children across the border to the Dominican Republic.

When stopped on the border last Friday, the group said they were taking the children to an orphanage. But it has since emerged some of the youngsters’ parents were still alive.

‘In good faith’

Mr Bellerive said the case of the missionaries risked diverting international attention from the plight of Haitians who had lost their homes and livelihoods.

“I believe it’s a distraction for the Haitian people because they are talking more now about 10 people than they are about one million people suffering in the streets,” he said.

The missionaries’ lawyer, Edwin Coq, said his clients were “naive” but not malicious in their actions.

“They had no idea they were violating the law. They were acting in good faith and they just wanted to help,” he said.

But he reiterated the group’s leader, Laura Silsby, knew that documentation would be needed to remove the children from Haiti.

“I’m going to do everything I can to get the nine [other missionaries] out. They were naive.

“They had no idea what was going on, and they did not know that they needed official papers to cross the border. But Silsby did,” Mr Coq said, according to Associated Press.

In Washington, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the two governments were discussing the diplomatically sensitive case.

“It was unfortunate, whatever their motivation, that this group of Americans took matters into their own hands,” Mrs Clinton added.

Haitian officials have said that the cases of the 10 US citizens will now be sent to an investigating judge who will decide how to proceed.

If convicted they face lengthy jail terms, says the BBC’s Paul Adams, in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

‘Kidnappers’

After Thursday’s hearing the 10 missionaries were taken back to the jail where they have been kept since last Friday.
Amid chaotic scenes, the group was bundled into a van outside the court.

“I feel good,” Ms Silsby told reporters. “I trust in God.”

The five men and five women, most of them from Idaho, were due to have a hearing earlier in the week.

The case was postponed because of a lack of interpreters.

US media reported that Ms Silsby also faces court cases in Boise, Idaho, relating to unpaid wages and legal bills.

Former employees from her shopping website business filed 14 claims for unpaid wages in the past two years.

Some have been resolved, but Ms Silsby is due on court next week for one case, and another is set to begin in March, the Idaho Statesman newspaper reported.

Mr Bellerive has labelled the Americans “kidnappers”.

Justice Minister Paul Denis has said that the missionaries should be tried in Haiti, despite the damage to the country’s judicial infrastructure and casualties among judges and court staff.

There had been suggestions that the 10 could be tried in the US.

But Mr Denis told the AFP news agency: “It is Haitian law that has been violated, it is up to the Haitian authorities to hear and judge the case.

“I don’t see any reason why they should be tried in the United States.”

The US ambassador to Haiti, Kenneth Merten, said that the US would do all it could to ensure the missionaries were treated fairly and in accordance with Haitian law.

Single village

The children, who are from aged from two to 12, are now in the care of the Austrian-run SOS Children’s Village in Port-au-Prince.

Twenty-one of the children were from a single village outside the capital and were handed over willingly by their parents, our correspondent says.

Residents in the village of Callebas told an Associated Press news agency reporter that they had handed their children over through a local orphanage worker who said he was acting on the Americans’ behalf.

The worker is said to have promised the families that the missionaries would educate their children in neighbouring Dominican Republic.

A number of parents in the badly-damaged village said they would find it difficult to provide for their children if they came back.

Ms Silsby has said her group had met a Haitian pastor by chance when it arrived last week, and that he had helped them gather the children. She also admitted that the missionaries did not have the proper paperwork.

“Our intent was to help only those children that needed us most, that had lost either both their mother and father, or had lost one of their parents and the other had abandoned them,” she said from her jail cell on Wednesday.

Ref: BBC

Six days after the earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. Southern Command finally began to drop bottled water and food (MREs) from an Air Force C-17. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates had previously rejected such a method because of “security concerns.”

The Guardian reports that people are dying of thirst. And if they do not get clean water, there can be epidemics of water-borne diseases that could greatly increase the death toll.

But the United States is now sending 10,000 troops and seems to be prioritizing “security” over much more urgent, life-and-death needs. This is in addition to the increase of 3,500 UN troops scheduled to arrive.

The world-renowned humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders has complained that a plane carrying its portable hospital unit was re-routed by the US military through the Dominican Republic. This cost a crucial 24 hours and an unknown number of lives.

Jarry Emmanuel, air logistics officer for the UN’s World Food Program, said, “There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an incredible amount for a country like Haiti,” adding, “But most flights are for the U.S. military.”

Yet Lt. General P.K. Keen, deputy commander of the U.S. Southern Command, reports that there is less violence in Haiti now than there was before the earthquake hit.

Doctor Evan Lyon, of Partners in Health, a medical aid group famous for its heroic efforts in Haiti, referred to “misinformation and rumours … and racism” concerning security issues.

“We’ve been circulating throughout the city until 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning every night, evacuating patients, moving materials. There’s no UN guards. There’s no U.S. military presence. There’s no Haitian police presence. And there’s also no violence. There is no insecurity.”
To understand the United States government’s obsession with “security concerns,” we must look at the recent history of Washington’s involvement there.

Long before the earthquake, Haiti’s plight has been comparable to that of many homeless people on city streets in the US: too poor and too black to have the same effective constitutional and legal rights as other citizens. In 2002, when a US-backed military coup temporarily toppled the elected government of Venezuela, most governments in the hemisphere responded quickly and helped force the return of democratic rule. But two years later, when Haiti’s democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was kidnapped by the US and flown to exile in South Africa, the response was muted.

Unlike the two centuries of looting and pillage of Haiti since its founding by a slave revolt in 1804, the brutal occupation by U.S. Marines from 1915-1934, the countless atrocities under dictatorships aided and abetted by Washington, the 2004 coup cannot be dismissed as “ancient history.” It was just six years ago, and it is directly relevant to what is happening there now.

The United States, together with Canada and France, conspired openly for four years to topple Haiti’s elected government, cutting off almost all international aid in order to destroy the economy and make the country ungovernable. They succeeded. For those who wonder why there are no Haitian government institutions to help with the earthquake relief efforts, this is a big reason. Or why there are three million people crowded into the area where the earthquake hit. U.S. policy over the years also helped destroy Haitian agriculture, for example, by forcing the import of subsidized U.S. rice and wiping out thousands of Haitian rice farmers.

Aristide’s first democratic government was overthrown after just seven months in 1991, by military officers and death squads later discovered to be in the pay of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Now Aristide wants to return to his country, something that the majority of Haitians have demanded since his overthrow. But the United States does not want him there. And the Preval government, which is completely beholden to Washington, has decided that Aristide’s party – the largest in Haiti – will not be allowed to compete in the next elections (originally scheduled for next month).

Washington’s fear of democracy in Haiti may explain why the United States is now sending 10,000 troops and prioritizing “security” over other needs.

This military occupation by U.S. troops will raise other concerns in the hemisphere, depending on how long they stay – just as the recent expansion of the U.S. military presence in Colombia has been met with considerable discontent and distrust in the region. And non-governmental organizations have raised other issues about the proposed reconstruction: Understandably they want Haiti’s remaining debt cancelled and grants rather than loans (the IMF has proposed a $100 million dollar loan). Reconstruction needs will be in the billions of dollars: Will Washington encourage the establishment of a functioning government? Or will it prevent that, channeling aid through NGOs and taking over various functions itself, because it of its long-standing opposition to Haitian self-rule?

But most urgently, there is a need for rapid delivery of water. The U.S. Air Force has the capability to deliver enough water for everyone who needs it in Haiti, until ground supply chains can be established. The more water is available, the less likely there is to be fighting or rioting over this scarce resource. Food and medical supplies could also be supplied through air drops. These operations should be ramped up, immediately.

The Wall Street Journal reported that according to Partners in Health, in the week following the quake 20,000 people a day died because of lack of access to medical treatment. The necessary supplies can be delivered if they are prioritised.

There is no time to lose.

Ref: Guaridan

Mark Weisbrot is an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

This article originally appeared in the Guardian.

Obama, straight down the middle

Political combat sometimes stresses personal antagonisms and obsessive antipathies too much. The need for an all-out attack on an opponent makes for diverse alliances motivated solely by the desire to destroy the common enemy. But once that enemy has been brought down, the problems begin. What next? To make political decisions, the grey areas which in opposition had made an alliance possible have to be dispelled, and that brings disenchantment. Before you know it, the hated adversary is back in power, made no more appealing by his time in opposition.

That scenario has already been played out in Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy. Berlusconi was defeated in 1995 by an insipid ragtag left that lacked a plan, only to be returned to power six years later. In Sarkozy’s France, marriages of convenience have been made between parties (ecologists, centrists and socialists) and also between individuals (Dominique de Villepin, prime minister under Jacques Chirac, has made common cause with the revolutionary socialist Olivier Besancenot, with whom he has almost nothing in common, long enough to attack the government). Their common target is Sarkozy; but what comes next?

The combination of casual coalitions, uncertain policies and then disappointment also describes the current US political landscape. A year ago the rout of the Republicans and the end of George W Bush’s presidency brought a moment of jubilation.

Even if some of the electorate whose lot has not improved continue to put their faith in Obama (see report on Detroit), their jubilation seems to have evaporated. Pacifists despair over the intensification of the war in Afghanistan, health reform has fallen short of reasonable expectations, as has environmental policy. The general verdict is less than great, but better than nothing. That contributes to a mood of despondency. Political passion is once again changing sides.

Such a stalemate strengthens the power of the lobbies and raises questions about the real power of the US president. Obama isn’t Bush; Romano Prodi wasn’t Silvio Berlusconi either. But not being Bush isn’t enough to tell you where Obama is heading, or to make you want to follow him. The US is suffering: the unemployment rate has risen sharply, there are whole neighbourhoods of repossessions. The president is not short on talk and explanations, and the desire to convince. But what does it add up to? In Cairo he condemned Israeli settlements then resigned himself to the fact that they continue to expand. He backed an ambitious health care reform, but when Congress watered it down, he put up with it.

One day he tells West Point cadets he is sending reinforcements to Afghanistan, the next he accepts the Nobel peace prize. But there is a remedy for this dissonance: a stream of words to balance each pronouncement with its opposite. The refrain almost always turns out to be “my progressive friends say this; my Republican friends reply that. The first are demanding too much and the second aren’t conceding enough. Therefore, I’m opting for the middle course.”

Obama encouraged the West Point cadets to “show restraint in the use of force”. And he told the Oslo jury that the fact that “force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism: it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason”. The jury members were also invited to ponder the example of President Nixon who, despite the “Cultural Revolution’s horrors”, agreed to meet Mao in Beijing in 1972. Being so very particular on the question of human rights, Nixon had to get over the experience by ordering the bombing of Vietnamese cities shortly after, and backing General Pinochet’s putsch in Chile… Obama made no mention of this in his speech. Ever the impeccable centrist, he preferred to pay tribute to Martin Luther King and Ronald Reagan.

Yet it all began so well. In November 2008 nearly two-thirds of the US voting age population (and 89.7% of registered voters) took part in the election. The man they voted into the White House was a candidate whose trajectory suggested the scale of the change to come: “I don’t fit the typical pedigree, and I haven’t spent my career in the halls of Washington.” For precisely that reason he was able to mobilise young and black and Hispanic voters as well as an unprecedented proportion of the white vote (43%). Achieving a higher share of the vote than Reagan in his 1980 victory (52.9% compared with 50.7%), Obama could rightly pride himself on having a genuine mandate. There was no one to challenge it. The Republicans had been utterly routed. Their neoliberal philosophy, which was concisely summed up by the new president (“we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else”), was in tatters. And the Democrats had a large majority in both houses of Congress.
History lessons

Three months before his election, Obama had warned: “The greatest risk we can take is to try the same old politics with the same old players and expect a different result. You [grassroots supporters] have shown what history teaches us – that at defining moments like this one, the change we need doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington. Change happens because the American people demand it – because they rise up and insist on new ideas and new leadership, a new politics for a new time.”

Grassroots activism would, one might assume, make it possible to shake the conservative inertia of the capital, where all the lobbyists are based. One year on, while there’s no trace of a popular movement, there are innumerable examples of planned legislation that has been blocked, diluted or neutered by the “same old politics with the same old players”.

It’s true that Obama’s pedigree is different from those of his predecessors, not just for the obvious visible reason, but also because it’s unusual for a White House incumbent to have decided as a young man to pass up the chance to get rich practising law in New York, and instead help the people of Chicago’s poor neighbourhoods. But when one looks at Obama’s choices for his cabinet, the novelty is less striking. For every minister such as Hilda Solis (Obama’s labour secretary, who has close links with the unions and promises a break with old policies), there is a Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose diplomatic position is little different from the past. Then there’s the defence secretary, Robert Gates, a direct holdover from the Bush administration. Or the finance minister, Timothy Geithner, who’s too close to Wall Street to want or be able to reform it, or economic adviser Lawrence Summers, architect of the financial deregulation that brought his country close to meltdown. And the diversity of his team turns out to be not so diverse after all: 22 of Obama’s 35 top nominations hold a degree from an elite American or British university.

Since the early 20th century, the Democrats have been particularly susceptible to the technocratic illusion of competence, pragmatism, government by “the best and the brightest”, excellence, and expertise which seeks to impose its will on a political world they suspect of permanent demagogy. This philosophy views mass mobilisation and populism with distrust. It’s one Obama subscribes to, which is paradoxical given his trajectory (perhaps it’s to avoid any confusion with Afro-American activism).

At the outset Obama hoped that the most reasonable part of the Republican Party would go along with him to get the country out of its present predicament. But he reached out to them in vain. He recently commented on this rebuff: “We were forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party, which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that had led to the crisis, decided to hand it over to others to solve” (1). This is an odd, but revealing, way of putting it. It overlooks the fact that after the 2008 presidential election, the Republicans didn’t decide to hand over the reins of power to the Democrats: the people voted them out of office.
Media frenzy

Republicans find this intolerable, hence their strength of feeling. Already back in June 1951, there had been a Democrat in the White House, Harry Truman. As president, he had devoted himself to the fight against communism and the Soviet Union, the defence of the empire and the profits of General Electric. But in the eyes of a significant part of the Republican electorate, he was a traitor no matter what he did. Senator Joseph McCarthy asked: “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principal shall be forever deserving of the malediction of all honest men.” For four years, McCarthy terrorised US progressives, artists and trade unionists, and also high officials, including the military.

We haven’t reached that point yet. But the atmosphere is again being poisoned by the paranoia of rightwing activists whipped into a frenzy by the radio talk shows, the rolling “news” from Fox News, the editorials of the Wall Street Journal, the fundamentalist churches and the crazy rumours spread by the internet. These invade the mind and block out thought about other things. Millions of Americans who are passionate about politics are convinced that their president lied about his birth and is ineligible to occupy the White House because he was born abroad. They are adamant that his victory, won by 8,500,000 votes, was the result of fraud, a “conspiracy on a scale so immense”…

They loathe the idea of having a leader who spent two years in a Muslim school in Indonesia, a former leftwing activist and cosmopolitan intellectual (2). They have an unshakeable belief that health reform is just the precursor to the creation of death panels, tribunals that will decide which patients will receive treatment. These cohorts form the hard core of the Republican Party. They rule with a rod of iron over the representatives with whom the good centrist Obama reckoned on negotiating his stimulus package, his health insurance reforms and financial regulation.

The vanity of such a hope quickly became apparent. Less than a month after Obama arrived in the White House, his plan to increase public expenditure failed to receive the support of any of the 177 Republicans in the House of Representatives. In November came health reform; just one opposition member voted with the Democrat majority. In December legislation designed to protect consumers from abusive practices by credit companies was also passed by the House of Representatives without a single Republican supporter. On every occasion, however, the bills put to the vote were amended in the hope that the president could present them as bipartisan.
High price to pay

In finance reform, no one can tell what the law he will eventually sign will be like. If less than 60 of the 100 senators demand a vote, the discussions could go on indefinitely. As there are 40 Republican senators, each of them – and any refractory Democrats – can exact a high price for their support. One such Democrat, Joseph Lieberman (who endorsed John McCain, the Republican candidate in the 2008 election), has already obstructed the creation of a public option for Americans without medical cover. Private medical insurance companies are among Senator Lieberman’s main funders.

On 28 September 2008, when a $700bn rescue package for the banks approved by candidate Obama was being discussed, a representative on the left, Dennis Kucinich, asked: “Is this the US Congress or the board of directors of Goldman Sachs?” The question is still pertinent, as Obama recently found it necessary to point out that “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street”. Nonetheless, in 2008 Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan, UBS and Morgan Stanley were among his top 20 campaign funders (3). Journalist William Greider summed the situation up: “The Democrats face a dilemma: can they serve the public interest without discomforting the bankers who help fund their campaigns?” (4).

So can the US be reformed? Its system is supposed to be characterised by checks and balances. But really it consists of different centres of powers all governed by the dollar. In 2008 millions of young people threw themselves into the political struggle, reckoning that with Obama as president, nothing would be as it was before. But now he too is engaged in horse-trading, buying a vote that he needs, courting a figure he despises.

Could he do otherwise? The personality of a single individual doesn’t count for all that much weighed against the tyranny of the whole system, especially when the opposition has turned hysterical and the grassroots movement boils down to some crumbling unions, black activists co-opted by the executive and bloggers who think that activism can be spread from their keyboards. For things to take a progressive turn in the US would require an almost perfect alignment of the planets. In contrast, in order massively to reduce the tax burden on the rich, Ronald Reagan didn’t even need a majority in Congress.

Some of the misunderstanding may stem from Obama’s biography. First, because it has concentrated all the fire and all the expectations on him as an individual. And second, because it’s been a long time since the president resembled the radical adolescent described in his memoirs – the Obama who attended socialist lectures; who was shocked by the anti-communist coup in Indonesia in 1965; and who worked in Harlem for an association with links to Ralph Nader. Nor does there remain a trace of the Afro-American activist who, “to avoid being mistaken for a sellout, chose [his] friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy” (5).

For Republicans, this journey is all the proof they need that the man is dangerous – alien to the individualist culture of the US, indulgent towards the enemies of liberty and disposed “to socialise the US health system”. Democratic activists are hoping their president, who has disappointed them thus far, will put into action more progressive policies as soon as he can, and that such is his intention. The fears of one group stir up the hopes of the other. To paraphrase the journalist Alexander Cockburn, the left that pokes among the entrails of bills presented to Congress to divine the smallest evidence of mini-victories knows that its days are numbered: next November’s legislative elections, likely to take place in a gloomy economic climate, will thin the Democratic ranks.

Paranoid style

There is too much talk about Obama. The man has taken on the aspect of a demi-god believed to be capable of taming a range of social forces, institutions and interests. This immature personalisation of power is also characteristic of France and Italy, but there the devil is on the other side (if only Berlusconi and Sarkozy were to fall, the thinking goes, then the left would be saved). Half a century ago, the US historian Richard Hofstadter popularised the expression “paranoid style” to capture this political mood. What he had in mind was the McCarthyite right and its immediate successors, but he claimed that his ideal type would find other applications in the course of time.

So it has proved. Today the rise of individualism, intellectual laziness, the hysterical direction of debate, the harmful role of the media and the decline of Marxism have made widespread the illusion according to which, as Hofstadter explained in 1963, “unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself the victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depression, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced” (6). Rush Limbaugh, the neocon radio host, accuses some of Obama’s supporters of taking him for the Messiah. Maybe so, but then why does he persist in denouncing Obama as the Antichrist?

Ultimately, the miracle of the election in November 2008 could be to remind us that there’s no such thing as a miracle. And that the destiny of the US, like that of other countries, mustn’t be confused with the personality of one man or the will of a president.

Ref: le Monde
Translated by George Miller
More by Serge Halimi

(1) Address to the Brookings Institution, 8 December 2009.

(2) See “US: phoney culture wars”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, June 2006.

(3) According to the list produced by the Center for Responsible Politics. See also “Top contributors to Barack Obama”.

(4) William Greider, “The money man’s best friend”, The Nation, New York, 11 November 2009.

(5) Barack Obama, Dreams from my Father, Crown Books, New York, 2004.

(6) Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1966.

My Lai massacre- 40 years later

The My Lai Massacre (Vietnamese: thảm sát Mỹ Lai [mǐˀ lɐːj]; English pronunciation: /ˌmaɪˈleɪ, ˌmaɪˈlaɪ/  ( listen),[1] Vietnamese: [mǐˀlaːj]) was the mass murder conducted by a unit of the U.S. Army on March 16, 1968 of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, all of whom were civilians and a majority of whom were women, children, and elderly people.

Many of the victims were sexually abused, beaten, tortured, and some of the bodies were found mutilated.[2] The massacre took place in the hamlets of Mỹ Lai and My Khe of Sơn Mỹ village during the Vietnam War.[3][4] While 26 US soldiers were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions at My Lai, only William Calley was convicted. He served only three years of an original life sentence, while on house arrest.

When the incident became public knowledge in 1969, it prompted widespread outrage around the world. The massacre also reduced U.S. support at home for the Vietnam War. Three U.S. servicemen who made an effort to halt the massacre and protect the wounded were denounced by U.S. Congressmen, received hate mail, death threats and mutilated animals on their doorsteps.[5] Only 30 years after the event were their efforts honored.[6]

The massacre is also known as the Sơn Mỹ Massacre (Vietnamese: thảm sát Sơn Mỹ) or sometimes as the Song My Massacre.[7] The U.S. military codeword for the hamlet was Pinkville.[8]

Ref: Wikipedia

On Christmas eve, the New York Times delivered forth a call for war.  “There’s only one way to stop Iran,” declared Alan J. Kuperman, and that is “military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Kuperman is described as the “director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas at Austin,” but his Christmas eve call to war relies on disinformation and contradiction, not on objective scholarly analysis.

For example, Kuperman contradicts the unanimous report of America’s 16 intelligence agencies, the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Russian intelligence with his claim that Iran has a nuclear weapon program.  Astonishingly, it does not occur to Kuperman that readers might wonder how an academic bureaucrat in Austin, Texas, has better information than these authorities.

Kuperman is so determined to damn President Obama’s plan to have other countries enrich Iran’s uranium for Iran’s nuclear energy program and medical isotopes that he commits astounding blunders.  After claiming that Iran has a “bomb program,” Kuperman claims that “Iran’s uranium contains impurities” and that Ahmadinejad’s threat “to enrich uranium domestically to the 20 per cent level . . . is a bluff, because even if Iran could further enrich its impure uranium, it lacks the capacity to fabricate the uranium into fuel elements.”

What was the New York Times op ed editor thinking when he approved Kuperman’s article?  Iran, Kuperman writes, needs “90 per cent enriched uranium” to have weapons-grade material, but cannot reach 20 per cent or even make fuel elements for its nuclear energy.  So, how is Iran going to produce a bomb?  Yet, Kuperman writes that “we have reached the point where air strikes are the only plausible option with any prospect of preventing Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. The sooner the United States takes action, the better.”

It could not be made any clearer that, as with the US invasion of Iraq, a military attack on Iran has nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction.  An “Iranian nuke” is just another canard behind which hides an undeclared agenda.

One wonders about Kuperman’s non-proliferation credentials.  How does a wanton military attack on a country encourage non-proliferation?  Aren’t America’s bullying, threats and acts of war more likely to encourage countries to seek nuclear weapons?

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the United States has wars ongoing in Iraq where the ancient Chaldean Christian community was destroyed–not by Saddam Hussein but by the neoconservatives’ illegal invasion of Iraq–in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Sudan. The US initiated a war, which it lost, between its puppet ruler in the former Soviet province of Georgia and Russia.

The US, the world’s greatest supporter of terrorism, is the main financier of terrorist groups that stage attacks within Iran. It was American money, weapons, and diplomatic cover that enabled the Israeli war crimes against the Lebanese people during 2006 and against Palestinian civilians in Gaza during 2008-2009, crimes documented in the Goldstone Report.

Iran has never interfered in US internal affairs, but the US has a long record of interfering in Iranian affairs.  In 1953 the US overthrew Iran’s popular prime minister, Mohammed  Mosaddeq and installed a puppet who tortured Iranians who desired political independence.

Despite this and other American offenses against Iran, Ahmadinejad has repeatedly expressed Iran’s interest to be on friendly terms with the United States, only to be repeatedly rebuffed.  The US wants war with Iran in order to expand US world hegemony.

One might expect a non-proliferation expert to take history into account, but Kuperman fails to do so.  Kuperman also has nothing to say about Israel’s, India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.  Unlike Iran, none of these countries are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel, India, and Pakistan all developed their nuclear weapons in secret, and many experts believe Israel had American help, an act of treason.  All three countries have been rewarded by Washington despite their perfidy. Why is Kuperman concerned about Iran, which submits to the IAEA inspections, but is unconcerned with Israel, a country that has never permitted a single inspection?

The answer is that the Israel Lobby, the US military-security complex, and the “Christian” Zionists have succeeded in demonizing Iran.  Every real expert knows that an Iranian nuclear weapon would have no function other than deterring an attack on Iran.  Ever since the US lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons, after using them offensively and pointlessly against a defeated Japan, nuclear weapons have served no purpose other than deterrence.

The US has no conflicting economic interests with Iran.  Iran is simply a supplier of oil, an important one.  A US attack on Iran, such as the one advocated by Kuperman, would most likely shut down oil flows to the West through the Strait of Hormuz.  This might benefit refiners, who sell gasoline to the West and could charge enormous prices, but no one else would benefit.

Adding to the war cry are congregations of fake Christians.  A great number of them, organized by someone’s money under the banner, “Christian Leaders for a Nuclear-free Iran,”  has written to Congress demanding sanctions against Iran that amount to an act of war. The roll call  includes the “Christian” Zionist John Hagee, who, according to reports, denigrates Jesus Christ and preaches to his congregation that it is God’s will for Americans to fight and die for Israel, the oppressor of the Palestinian people.

Among the signatories of the “Christians” demanding an act of war against Iran, are Dr. Pat Robertson, president of Christian Broadcasting Network, Nixon-era criminal Chuck Colson, and Richard Land, president of Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Southern Baptist Convention.  Obviously, for southern baptists ethics means murdering Islamists, and religious liberty excludes everyone but “Christian” Zionists.

It is a simple matter for an educated person to make fools of these morons who profess to be Christians.  However, these morons have vast constituencies numbering in the tens of millions of Americans.  There are, in fact, more of them than there are intelligent, informed, moral, and real Christian Americans.

The votes of the morons will prevail.

In the second decade of the 21st century, America’s Zionist wars against Islam will expand.  America’s wars in behalf of Israel’s territorial expansion will complete the bankruptcy of America.  The Treasury’s bonds to finance the US government’s enormous deficits will lack for buyers.  Therefore, the bonds will be monetized by the Federal Reserve.  The result will be rising rates of inflation.  The inflation will destroy the dollar as world reserve currency, and the US will no longer be able to pay for its imports.  Shortages will appear, including food and gasoline, and “Superpower America” will find itself pressed to the wall as a third world country unable to pay its debts.

America has been brought low, both morally and economically, by its obeisance to the Israel Lobby.  Even Jimmy Carter, a former President of the United States and Governor of Georgia recently had to apologize to the Israel Lobby for his honest criticisms of Israel’s inhumane treatment of the occupied Palestinians in order for his grandson to be able to run for a seat in the Georgia state senate.

This should tell the macho super-power American tough guys who really runs “their” country.

Ref: Counterpunch

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. His new book, How the Economy was Lost, will be published next month by AK Press / CounterPunch. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

The call for over 30,000 more troops to be sent to Afghanistan is a travesty for the people of that country who have already suffered eight brutal years of occupation.

It is also a harsh blow to the US soldiers facing imminent deployment.

As Barack Obama, the US president, gears up for a further escalation that will bring the total number of troops in Afghanistan to over 100,000, he faces a military force that has been exhausted and overextended by fighting two wars.

Many from within the ranks are openly declaring that they have had enough, allying with anti-war veterans and activists in calling for an end to the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with some active duty soldiers publicly refusing to deploy.

This growing movement of military refusers is a voice of sanity in a country slipping deeper into unending war.

The architects of this war would be well-advised to listen to the concerns of the soldiers and veterans tasked with carrying out their war policies on the ground.

Many of those being deployed have already faced multiple deployments to combat zones: the 101st Airborne Division, which will be deployed to Afghanistan in early 2010, faces its fifth combat tour since 2002.

“They are just going to start moving the soldiers who already served in Iraq to Afghanistan, just like they shifted me from one war to the next,” said Eddie Falcon, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Soldiers are going to start coming back with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), missing limbs, problems with alcohol, and depression.”

Many of these troops are still suffering the mental and physical fallout from previous deployments.

Rates of PTSD and traumatic brain injury among troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been disproportionately high, with a third of returning troops reporting mental problems and 18.5 per cent of all returning service members battling either PTSD or depression, according to a study by the Rand Corporation.

Marine suicides doubled between 2006 and 2007, and army suicides are at the highest rate since records were kept in 1980.

Resistance in the ranks

US army soldiers are refusing to serve at the highest rate since 1980, with an 80 per cent increase in desertions since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to the Associated Press.

These troops refuse deployment for a variety of reasons: some because they ethically oppose the wars, some because they have had a negative experience with the military, and some because they cannot psychologically survive another deployment, having fallen victim to what has been termed “Broken Joe” syndrome.

Over 150 GIs have publicly refused service and spoken out against the wars, all risking prison and some serving long sentences, and an estimated 250 US war resisters are currently taking refuge in Canada.

This resistance includes two Fort Hood, Texas, soldiers, Victor Agosto and Travis Bishop, who publicly resisted deployment to Afghanistan this year, facing prison sentences as a result, with Bishop still currently detained.

The war in Afghanistan is losing support in the US [AFP]

“There is no way I will deploy to Afghanistan,” wrote Agosto, upon refusing his service last May. “The occupation is immoral and unjust.”

Within the US military, GI resisters and anti-war veterans have organised through broad networks of veteran and civilian alliances, as well as through IVAW, comprised of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

This organisation, which is over 1,700 strong, with members across the world, including active-duty members on military bases, is opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and openly supports GI resistance.

“Iraq Veterans Against the War calls on Obama to end the war in Afghanistan (and Iraq) by withdrawing troops immediately and unconditionally,” wrote Jose Vasquez, the executive director of IVAW, in a December 2 open letter.

“It’s not time for our brothers and sisters in arms to go to Afghanistan. It’s time for them to come home.”

No clear progress

GI coffee houses have sprung up at several military bases around the country. In the tradition of the GI coffee houses of the Vietnam war era, these cafes provide a space where active duty troops can speak freely and access resources about military refusal, PTSD, and veteran and GI movements against the war.

“Here at Fort Lewis, we’ve lost 20 soldiers from the most recent round of deployments,” said Seth Menzel, an Iraq combat veteran and founding organiser of Coffee Strong, a GI coffee house at the sprawling Washington army base.

“We’ve seen resistance to deployment, mainly based on the fact that soldiers have been deployed so many times they don’t have the patience to do it again.”

As the occupation of Afghanistan passes its eighth year, with no clear progress, goals that remain elusive, and a high civilian death count, this war is coming to resemble the Iraq war that has been roundly condemned by world and US public opinion.

The never-ending nature of this conflict belies the real project of establishing US dominance in the Middle East and control of the region’s resources, at the expense of the Afghan civilians and US soldiers being placed in harm’s way.

The voices of refusal coming from within the US military send a powerful message that soldiers will not be fodder for an unjust and unnecessary war. By withdrawing their labour from a war that depends on their consent, these soldiers have the power to help bring this war to an end, as did their predecessors in the GI resistance movement against the Vietnam war.

And the longer the war in Afghanistan drags on – the more lives that are lost and destroyed – the more resistance we will see coming from within the ranks.

Ref: Al jazeera

Sarah Lazare is an anti-militarist and GI resistance organiser with Dialogues Against Militarism and Courage to Resist. She is interested in connecting struggles for justice at home with global movements against war and empire.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversightsubcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo[PDF] released by McCaskill’s staff,

“From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.”

At present, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. According to a report this week from the Congressional Research Service, as a result of the coming surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, there may be up to 56,000 additional contractors deployed. But here is another group of contractors that often goes unmentioned: 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors. That means that the current total US force in Afghanistan is approximately 189,000 personnel (68,000 US troops and 121,000 contractors). And remember, that’s right now. And that, according to McCaskill, is a conservative estimate. A year from now, we will likely see more than 220,000 US-funded personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.

The US has spent more than $23 billion on contracts in Afghanistan since 2002. By next year, the number of contractors will have doubled since 2008 when taxpayers funded over $8 billion in Afghanistan-related contracts.

Despite the massive number of contracts and contractors in Afghanistan, oversight is utterly lacking. “The increase in Afghanistan contracts has not seen a corresponding increase in contract management and oversight,” according to McCaskill’s briefing paper. “In May 2009, DCMA [Defense Contract Management Agency] Director Charlie Williams told the Commission on Wartime Contracting that as many as 362 positions for Contracting Officer’s Representatives (CORs) in Afghanistan were currently vacant.”

A former USAID official, Michael Walsh, the former director of USAID’s Office of Acquisition and Assistance and Chief Acquisition Officer, told the Commission that many USAID staff are “administering huge awards with limited knowledge of or experience with the rules and regulations.” According to one USAID official, the agency is “sending too much money, too fast with too few people looking over how it is spent.” As a result, the agency does not “know … where the money is going.”

The Obama administration is continuing the Bush-era policy of hiring contractors to oversee contractors. According to the McCaskill memo:

In Afghanistan, USAID is relying on contractors to provide oversight of its large reconstruction and development projects. According to information provided to the Subcommittee, International Relief and Development (IRD) was awarded a five-year contract in 2006 to oversee the $1.4 billion infrastructure contract awarded to a joint venture of the Louis Berger Group and Black and Veatch Special Projects. USAID has also awarded a contract Checci and Company to provide support for contracts in Afghanistan.

The private security industry and the US government have pointed to the Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker(SPOT) as evidence of greater government oversight of contractor activities. But McCaskill’s subcommittee found that system utterly lacking, stating: “The Subcommittee obtained current SPOT data showing that there are currently 1,123 State Department contractors and no USAID contractors working in Afghanistan.” Remember, there are officially 14,000 USAID contractors and the official monitoring and tracking system found none of these people and less than half of the State Department contractors.

As for waste and abuse, the subcommittee says that the Defense Contract Audit Agency identified more than $950 million in questioned and unsupported costs submitted by Defense Department contracts for work in Afghanistan. That’s 16% of the total contract dollars reviewed.

Ref: Counterpunch

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.His new website is RebelReports.com

US president offers no further commitment on reducing emissions or on finance to poor countries. Barack Obama stepped into the chaotic final hours of the Copenhagen summit today saying he was convinced the world could act “boldly and decisively” on climate change. But his speech offered no indication America was ready to embrace bold measures, after world leaders had been working desperately against the clock to try to paper over an agreement to prevent two years of wasted effort — and a 10-day meeting — from ending in total collapse.

Obama, who had been skittish about coming to Copenhagen at all unless it could be cast as a foreign policy success, looked visibly frustrated as he appeared before world leaders. He offered no further commitments on reducing emissions or on finance to poor countries beyond Hillary Clinton’s announcement yesterday that America would support a $100bn global fund to help developing nations adapt to climate change. He did not even press the Senate to move ahead on climate change legislation, which environmental organisations have been urging for months.

The president did say America would follow through on his administration’s clean energy agenda, and that it would live up to its pledges to the international community. “We have charted our course, we have made our commitments, and we will do what we say,” Obama said. But in the absence of any evidence of that commitment the words rang hollow and there was a palpable sense of disappointment in the audience.

Instead, he warned African states and low island nations who have been resisting what they see as a weak agreement that the later alternative — no agreement — was far worse. “We know the fault lines because we’ve been imprisoned by them for years. But here is the bottom line: we can embrace this accord, take a substantial step forward, and continue to refine it and build upon its foundation,” he said. “Or we can again choose delay, falling back into the same divisions that have stood in the way of action for years. And we will be back having the same stale arguments month after month, year after year – all while the danger of climate change grows until it is irreversible.”

He also took a dig at China, drawing attention to its status as the world’s biggest emitter and reinforcing America’s hardline on the issue of accountability for greenhouse gas emissions. The lacklustre speech proved a huge frustration to a summit that had been looking to Obama to use his stature on the world stage – and his special following among African leaders – to try to come to an ambitious deal. The president was drawn into the chaos within minutes of his arrival at Copenhagen, ditching his schedule to take part in a meeting of major industrialised and rapidly emerging economies.

Responding to Obama’s speech, a British official said: “Gordon Brown is committed to doing all he can and will stay until the very last minute to secure a deal… but others also need to show the same level of commitment. The prospects of a deal are not great.”

Tim Jones, a spokesman for the World Development Movement, said: “The president said he came to act, but showed little evidence of doing so. He showed no awareness of the inequality and injustice of climate change.If America has really made its choice, it is a choice that condemns hundreds of millions of people to climate change disaster.”

Friends of the Earth said in a statement, “Obama has deeply disappointed not only those listening to his speech at the UN talks, he has disappointed the whole world.”

The World Wildlife Fund said Obama had let down the international community by failing to commit to pushing for action in Congress: “The only way the world can be sure the US is standing behind its commitments is for the president to clearly state that climate change will be his next top legislative priority.”

The extent of crisis in the talks has taken leaders by surprise. The Brazilian leader, Lula da Silva, told the conference that the all-night negotiating sessions took him back to his days as a trade union leader negotiating with his bosses.

Ref: Guardian

Michael Moore Says Capitalism Killed Newspaper Industry

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9pYp2M4444]

Documentarian Michael Moore argues that media executives have ‘killed’ newspapers by laying off beat reporters, dumbing down news coverage and endorsing “anti-education” Republican political candidates. “They’ve slit their own throats,” claims Moore. “They’ve eliminated the very people they need to read their paper.”

—–

Who are we and why do we behave the way that we do? Writer, director and producer Michael Moore has been trying to answer that question his entire filmmaking career. His latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story, investigates the powerful forces behind the calamitous predicament in which countless Americans are finding themselves: losing their homes, jobs and savings to foot the bill for past spending.

What is the price that America – and the rest of the world – pays for its love of capitalism?

Michael Moore: What We’re Seeing is the End of Capitalism

Tortured Law, a new 10-minute documentary by Alliance for Justice, examines the role U.S. lawyers played in authorizing torture. Join those calling on Attorney General Eric Holder to release the report of the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility, and hold accountable those who ordered, designed, and justified torture.

You can join the call by signing Alliance for Justice’s petition: http://ga1.org/campaign/release_tortu…

And by signing up to host a screening in your area: http://www.afj.org/films-and-programs…

This week Avi Lewis visits the people behind the native movement for self-determination in Hawaii. Well over 200 years old the movement has recently been gaining on strength.
Archive footage courtesy of www.namaka.com.

In the world of academia Noam Chomsky is the most cited author alive. He talks to Inside USA about politics in the United States and this Presidential election.

It took 25 years longer than George Orwell thought for the slogans of 1984 to become reality.

“War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength.”

I would add, “Lie is Truth.”

The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama, the person who started a new war in Pakistan, upped the war in Afghanistan, and continues to threaten Iran with attack unless Iran does what the US government demands and relinquishes its rights as a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty.

The Nobel committee chairman, Thorbjoern Jagland said, “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.”

Obama, the committee gushed, has created “a new climate in international politics.”

Tell that to the 2 million displaced Pakistanis and the unknown numbers of dead ones that Obama has racked up in his few months in office. Tell that to the Afghans where civilian deaths continue to mount as Obama’s “war of necessity” drones on indeterminably.

No Bush policy has changed. Iraq is still occupied. The Guantanamo torture prison is still functioning. Rendition and assassinations are still occurring. Spying on Americans without warrants is still the order of the day. Civil liberties are continuing to be violated in the name of Oceania’s “war on terror.”

Apparently, the Nobel committee is suffering from the delusion that, being a minority, Obama is going to put a stop to Western hegemony over darker-skinned peoples.

The non-cynical can say that the Nobel committee is seizing on Obama’s rhetoric to lock him into the pursuit of peace instead of war. We can all hope that it works. But the more likely result is that the award has made “War is Peace” the reality.

Obama has done nothing to hold the criminal Bush regime to account, and the Obama administration has bribed and threatened the Palestinian Authority to go along with the US/Israeli plan to deep-six the UN’s Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes committed during Israel’s inhuman military attack on the defenseless civilian population in the Gaza Ghetto.

The US Ministry of Truth is delivering the Obama administration’s propaganda that Iran only notified the IAEA of its “secret” new nuclear facility because Iran discovered that US intelligence had discovered the “secret” facility. This propaganda is designed to undercut the fact of Iran’s compliance with the Safeguards Agreement and to continue the momentum for a military attack on Iran.

The Nobel committee has placed all its hopes on a bit of skin color.

“War is Peace” is now the position of the formerly antiwar organization, Code Pink.
Code Pink has decided that women’s rights are worth a war in Afghanistan.

When justifications for war become almost endless–oil, hegemony, women’s rights, democracy, revenge for 9/11, denying bases to al Qaeda and protecting against terrorists–war becomes the path to peace.

The Nobel committee has bestowed the prestige of its Peace Prize on Newspeak and Doublethink.

Ref: counterpunch.org

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Nobel peace prize citation for Barack Obama

Barack Obama presides over a UN security council meeting on nuclear weapons.

Barack Obama at a UN security council meeting on nuclear weapons: the Nobel peace prize committee singled out his work on disarmament for praise. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP

“The Norwegian Nobel committee has decided that the Nobel peace prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

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. 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.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The committee endorses Obama’s appeal that ‘Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges’.”

US Congress is choosing to oppress more Americans than God or man ever intended for them to have the power to do. By pledging one-third or more of every American’s income to the insurance companies, young women and our children, elderly and disabled Americans will endure the greatest human rights violations of our time.

When my daughters (and yours) have a single-parent household making minimum wage or just above it, they will be legally required to submit one-third of their income to state and federal government coffers plus FICA and other fees for parking tickets and broken taillights and city ordinances. They will now be legally required to submit over two-thirds of their earned incomes to that plus the mandated health insurance premiums.

Another third or more of their income will be taken for health care insurance legally required of them and then whatever child care costs and car insurance just to have a job. Then where is the income that they have legally earned to support themselves and their children? Where is the return for spending nearly every hour of their time working? What do they have left for food, or to pay for their lights, heating, phone and gasoline? Has it improved their lives one bit to have over 75% of their income deprived of them, or in fact, hasn’t it literally taken away any and all opportunities to feed themselves and their children, clothe themselves and have any quality of life or opportunities to better their lot in life? And, without providing any real health care that should be available to them?

And, when women aged 50 and over will have over-paid the amounts charged to anyone else by twenty-eight times more for their health care insurance premiums as legally mandated by the new law, what will they have left to use from the money they have earned through their own efforts? What will they have available for food and light bills and water and heat and food and gasoline and car insurance and car payments and phone bills and house payments? What kind of poverty will they be forced to endure every day for the rest of their lives because of this?

In 2000, a presidential task force labelled medical errors a “national problem of epidemic proportions.” Members estimated that the “cost associated with these errors in lost income, disability, and health care costs is as much as $29 billion annually.” That same year the Institute of Medicine released an historic report, “To err is human: building a safer health system.” The report’s authors concluded that 44,000 to 98,000 people die each year as a result of errors during hospitalization.

http://www.iatrogenic.org/

Who are these people in Washington that are doing this to us and to our children? Why would they call it “health care reform” when the only thing it is designed to do will be to steal another one-third or more from the incomes of every American citizen, including those not even old enough to vote? And, it will mandate by law that every woman, female child, elderly, and every citizen aged 50 and over will be required to pay five times more to as much as twenty-eight times more for every insurance premium they are forced to pay.

What kind of government only serves the interests of corporations, is owned by corporations, run by corporations and serves only the interests of corporations? What form of government is that? Because whatever the form of government whose only purpose is to serve the corporations is what we have now and have had for awhile.

And, contrary to the viewpoints of the seat warmers up there in the Congress and Senate, when they abuse the power of the offices we have given them by perpetrating human rights abuses on great numbers of our population (the majority of it, in fact) and oppressing US citizens in the name of corporate profits – they are as evil and as corrupt as any Third World dictator that has ever existed.

And they are not doing anything to fix, reform or repair our health care system, nor to bring the health care costs down, nor to give anyone adequate health care services, nor to improve the lives of any American that put them there.

The report’s authors concluded that 44,000 to 98,000 people die each year as a result of errors during hospitalization.

Medical errors are the not only way that consumers are harmed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 2 million people annually acquire infections while hospitalized and 90,000 people die from those infections.

(from – )

http://www.iatrogenic.org/

The US will still have an infant mortality rate greater than that of some developing nations. MRSA, stapph and other infectious nightmares will still be rampant throughout our “health care system”, which is an industry that consistently kills and permanently maims more people more often than it heals anybody.

This totals 225,000 deaths per year from iatrogenic causes. In interpreting these numbers, note the following:

• most data were derived from studies in hospitalized patients.
• the estimates are for deaths only and do not include negative effects that are associated with disability or discomfort.
• the estimates of death due to error are lower than those in the IOM report. If higher estimates are used, the deaths due to iatrogenic causes would range from 230,000 to 284,000.^[1]

(from – )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatrogenesis

It will still be a health care industry that is filthy, dangerous and fraught with errors in care that cause more deaths than any of the wars that have been fought and more deaths than cancer and heart attacks combined. The “health care reform” bill does nothing to address, or fix any of those things.

In fact, after one-third of the income of every American is given to the health insurance companies by law – not one of our children or grandchildren will ever know anything of America except impoverishment, despair and oppression in an America that has no democracy, no freedom, no pursuit of happiness available, even fewer opportunities than anywhere else in the world and no opportunities to participate in a free market economy, capitalism or a representative government. And, they will have no opportunities to use their hard-earned money to cover their basic needs nor to save to buy a house nor to better themselves and their lives. But then, isn’t that what we have now?

Aren’t the government officers we have elected, already decided in favor of the insurance companies and pledging two-thirds of our incomes to both the government and the insurance companies for the rest of our natural lives with no guarantees of anything in return? Aren’t they already taking from money we haven’t any right to even after we have earned it because they are allowing the insurance industry and health care industries to take our Congressional resources, manhours, information technology, IRS enforcement and other agency enforcement resources to do their bidding right now? Have they used those resources to serve anyone but themselves?

How many things could’ve actually been accomplished in all this time that has been used up in these Congressional sessions on the current health care reform bill which in its present form, only and exclusively serves the interests and profits of the health care insurance companies?

And after the health care reform bill passes, the amount of deductibles will be whatever they want, and the “co-pay” fees will be whatever they want and the premiums will be whatever they want, so that none of us, even after paying over a third of our incomes to them for insurance premiums will actually have any health care available to us anyway. There won’t be any money to do all that is required just to keep a job and to keep a roof overhead and pay insurance premiums for every member of the family and pay co-pays and pay deductibles and feed ourselves and care for our children and pay taxes and pay for education and pay for transportation and pay for utilities and pay and pay and pay and pay and pay.

We won’t have to worry about retailers anymore because those moneys we would’ve used to buy things or to buy clothing and shoes, will be paying our families’ insurance premiums and deductibles and prescription costs and co-payments even while we are being served up with the unhealthy sicknesses, infections, and medical errors caused by the profit-driven amoral health care industry that are rampant and common in the system right now.

If I had the position and resources to do so, I would bring a class action suit all the way to the Supreme Court for the waste of our national resources in time, efforts, manpower and Congressional intellectual capabilities which should’ve been used to actually solve the health care crisis in America, but instead have served the insurance companies and huge health industries profits and desires.

These Congressional members and insurance companies have no intention to provide healthy anything anywhere to anybody. The insurance companies and health care based industries including pharmaceutical corporations, hospitals, health care “professionals” and medical industries only want one thing and it has nothing to do with providing good health or high quality safe health care to America and to citizens of the United States. These corporate interests, were they considered as a human personality would be considered psychotic and deranged for the extent to which they serve only themselves and their obsessively greed driven profits.

Our government no longer belongs to the American people because it serves only the interests of corporations that are inhuman, cruel, vile, vicious, criminal, corrupt, murderous and inhumane in the name of profiting for only themselves at the expense of every one of us while providing nothing valuable in return. These corporations are the complete and total evil incarnate because they have no human conscience, they are not required to play by anyone’s rules and every day they exist this way, they steal our government’s time, our resources and our money while using money they have stolen from each of us to do it.

At the same time, these same corporations are directly responsible for driving costs up, for creating a system that is literally murdering people by incompetence and errors, for already taking our futures away and impoverishing us to the point of slavery and oppression. And now, they demand more while giving less and leaving the nightmarish unhealthy and dangerous health care system as it is. Those are human rights violations that would not be tolerated in any other country in the world by the international community at the behest of the United States government.

But here and now, these same corporations are denying the basic tenets of our Constitution by using our government to represent only them and only their interests as they use our elected leaders’ time and resources in order to even consider forcing each of us by law to submit a second third of our incomes to their private profits or have the full enforcement resources of our government come down against us as if we are criminals.

When they have taken two-thirds of the income of every American man, woman, and child, along with most of the small businesses in America, destroyed our retailers and the financial health of our communities, there will be any and every illegal immigrant who can get treated without one dime, but not one of the rest of us will be treated if we can’t pay the premiums or the deductible / co-pay when we come in the door. That is because the health care industry will serve them anyway in the conscientious  pursuit of humanity and then our indigent funds, and matching state and federal funds will cover it for them. – But they will damn sure not do that for any of us who are legally mandated to pay a third of our incomes to our government and at least a third of our incomes to the insurance companies.

Our community, county and state funds along with faith-based and charitable funds will continue to cover the costs of those unpaid health care bills for those who aren’t even citizens and be overwhelmed, as usual, before even one American is helped by the money we’ve all given to them.

The same is true for the aid to states for the incredulously high heating bills which after paying twenty-eight times higher insurance premiums to cover the sorriest health care in the world, most women, young families, single-parent households, elderly and disabled won’t be able to pay their heating and electric / natural gas / utility bills but funds to help won’t be available to pay them either.

The US government is literally setting up the next years of our lives to be frozen to death in the winter, die from heat stroke in the summer, have no food or adequate clothing, be permanently maimed by a despotic, greedy and filthy health care system and maybe go to jail on top of it and lose our homes for failing to give the required insurance premiums.

Even if we are able to find a job and work for a living or have our own business, over two-thirds of our income will be legally mandated to go to the government or the insurance companies who have not earned them. If the Madison clause of the Constitution is “for the common good,” and by this right the Congress believe that their authority extends to health care for all of us, then do that – provide high quality, healthy, safe, clean, adequate health care for all of us.

But, stealing our rights, denying our Constitutional freedoms, extorting our incomes, decimating our livelihoods, destroying our opportunities, taking moneys to enrich Washington business interests, misusing our resources, violating our human rights and, oppressing our time, efforts and quality of life by forcing us to remit another massive portion of our earned and business incomes to insurance corporations’ profits while leaving us with this pathetic excuse for health care that isn’t even in the top twenty of the world isn’t for the “common good.” It is an abomination of abuse of power, and a government corrupted by, run by and serving the interests of inhumane, greed based, unconscionable corporations serving no one but themselves.

And I know, there is nothing I could say and nothing I could do to stop our elected and selected leaders from creating this hell on earth for each and every one of my children’s lives and for my days ahead of me and for my family members and my community. Except maybe, I can create a way to generate heat or electricity or transportation or moneys that won’t require paying the utilities anymore, that won’t require putting gasoline in a car or insurance on it, and that won’t require paying the natural gas companies that we actually paid to create and support and then still suffer high bills for heating in spite of it.

Maybe I can work on that, because those things will never be available to my little grandchildren and the households of my children and to many in my community, if I don’t. And we can all just tell them what America was like and was supposed to be like and what freedom and individual human rights were before they were lost to the corporations who now own America that we are enslaved to serve because they also own our government and elected leaders.

There is a conspiracy afoot and it is the collusion between Congressional and Senatorial members who serve no one among us because they are serving corporate entities that don’t actually exist anywhere except on paper and in the thin air in the minds of the people who created them and profit from them.

It is a corrupt and inhumane government that steals what I have earned what I will ever be able to earn by over 75% of it to line their own pockets and their profit-making friends’ pockets. That is evil, but what can be expected from a bunch of people who worship their own sacred brass bull on a New York street and kiss the feet of Wall Street’s intellectually destitute money managers and who defer to worshiping  CEOs of any kind, and who gave our tax money away by the hundreds of billions of dollars without even a thought for any of us or for our interests.

- cricketdiane, 10-09-09

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The demise of the dollar

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading. In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

Read the rest of the article…

Ref: The Independent

“Torturing Democracy” Excerpt #5

PBS’ “Torturing Democracy” Exposes Brutal Torture

http://torturingdemocracy.org/

Gitmo Video – Guantanamo Bay

Winter Soldier (talking truth about Iraq, Vietnam)

Winter Soldier: Hundreds of Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan Gather to Testify in Echo of 1971 Vietnam Hearings
Hundreds of veterans and active-duty soldiers of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are gathering today for the Winter Soldier hearings. The soldiers plan to give eyewitness accounts of the occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War, the gathering is modeled after the 1971 Winter Solider hearings organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. [includes rush transcript]

With simple materials found around the house, you too can conduct an experiment to see what has happened to the economy.

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Welcome to another day in corporate America!

“The facts and Iraq’s behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction . . . These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

– Washington’s official justification for America’s war on Iraq, announced to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003.

Then in July 2003 the US Secretary of State reiterated that there was “very strong intelligence . . . that Saddam Hussein had biological and chemical weapons.” And there were many more unequivocal and detailed statements about the reliability, the certainty, of intelligence, notably from the British prime minister, Tony Blair, and Washington’s Dick Cheney.

At that time those of us who considered these assertions to be nonsense were shocked and chastened. After all, the leaders of the world’s largest military and surveillance machine were declaring that they had “solid intelligence” regarding a terrifying arsenal of evil weaponry that would be used by Iraq’s maniacal leader. All the intelligence gathered by thousands of US spooks and amazingly sophisticated technical devices couldn’t be wrong, could it?

Before the war on Iraq the US was spending about 50 billion dollars a year on gathering and processing information (it’s now about $70 billion), and with that sort of cash and exotic technical activity being devoted to discovering that Saddam’s “efforts to reconstitute his nuclear program have been focused on acquiring the third and last component – sufficient fissile material to produce a nuclear explosion,” as we were assured, then all the official reports and announcements and New York Times’ revelations must have been true.

But they weren’t.

The whole thing was a farrago of baloney : it was tripe, hogwash, codswallop and claptrap from beginning to end. There were no nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs of any sort. And there were no apologies, either, from the demented barbarians in Washington who lied to the world and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and wrecked their country.

And now we are being told that Iran’s nuclear program is as dangerous as the one Saddam didn’t have.

On September 25 London’s Times newspaper (among others) reported that “The West warned Iran that it will face fresh sanctions by December unless it can persuade the world of a “profound change” in its nuclear stance after the existence of its secret underground uranium enrichment plant was uncovered.”

But the plant was not “uncovered” by the West. An International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman stated that “on September 21 Iran informed the IAEA in a letter that a new pilot fuel-enrichment plant is under construction in the country. The letter stated that the enrichment level would be up to 5 per cent.” So then the Times tried to save face by claiming that “Reports from Washington [more of these generous but always anonymous sources] indicate that Iran had learnt of the West’s move and declared [the plant] formally to the IAEA.”

How fascinating. So Iran knows so much about America’s surveillance of its nuclear facilities – and the intentions of its State and Defense Departments, not to mention the White House – that just before the omniscient US intelligence agencies were about to reveal Iran’s secrets to the world they were pre-empted by the equally all-knowing Iranians.

Some other reports were also intriguing. The New York Times, ever attentive to anonymous “senior officials,” (possibly like those who caused it to believe, endorse and publicize the “intelligence” that led to the war on Iraq), carried a piece on September 26 to the effect that “officials said that they developed a detailed picture about work on the facility from multiple human intelligence sources, as well as satellite imagery. A senior official said that intelligence was regularly shared among American, British and French spy agencies, and that Israeli officials were told about the complex years ago.”

“Multiple human intelligence sources,” indeed. So the CIA has spies lurking and working in Iran’s nuclear establishment and government. Not only that, but America’s premier Intelligence Agency tells “officials” who tell reporters, and thus the world, that it has such assets. How professional, to be sure.

But if the CIA has all these sources with such amazing access, then there must be information available on the level of enrichment of uranium that is planned. Perhaps the “officials” who so generously leak highly classified information to selected reporters could indicate what it is?

The deranged Iranian President Ahmadinejad, in one of his clearer moments, said that the newly disclosed nuclear facility was not scheduled to begin operations for another 18 months and that “It’s not a secret site. If it was, why would we have informed the IAEA about it a year ahead of time?” Then Ahmadinejad said that the Agency was welcome to inspect the facility.

If it is found that the enrichment capability is in fact 5 per cent, then there will be a lot of stupid-looking people in the US and other western countries, as this is nowhere near the approximately 90 percent needed to manufacture nuclear weapons. But be assured, if this majestically hyped affair collapses into nothing because the “multiple human intelligence sources” (if they exist) are found to be fantasizing liars, and if the IAEA inspections find no evidence of weapon-grade enrichment, then those responsible for spreading the story will not confess their blunders.

The last lot of liars, under Bush, have never admitted that they deliberately led their country into an unnecessary, disastrous and fantastically costly war. And if the current bunch of war fanatics have their way this time, and persuade Mr Obama to attack Iran because they imagine it may one day be nuclear-capable, they will never admit that they made a total mess of the whole thing, either.

President Obama emphasized nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation at the UN Security Council meeting he chaired in September. He declared he had “outlined a comprehensive agenda to seek the goal of a world without nuclear weapons,” adding that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty “says that all nations have the right to peaceful nuclear energy; that nations with nuclear weapons have a responsibility to move toward disarmament.”

Quite so. Most gratifying. Majestically desirable. But the elephant in the UN room, the critical mass, as it were, whose nuclear arsenal is steadfastly ignored by all nuclear powers and the west in general, is Israel, the country that pays no attention to anything that is said by the UN Security Council regarding any of its illegal actions.

Israel has hundreds of undeclared nuclear weapons. It has signed no treaty concerning their construction or control. Its uranium enrichment facilities have never been seen by any inspector, and never will be. It has no intention of “moving towards” nuclear disarmament, and Mr Obama knows this perfectly well.

But we might ask why that ever-willing “senior official” told the New York Times that intelligence about Iran’s nuclear program was not only “regularly shared among American, British and French spy agencies,” but that “Israeli officials were told about the complex years ago.”

How intriguing. Here we have three members of the UN Security Council, with nuclear capability, swapping intelligence about Iran. But why did Washington (according to the New York Times’ anonymous sources) tell Israel about it?

In fact the complex wasn’t known about “years ago”, but it’s still intriguing that Israel is well and truly in the loop about US intelligence concerning possible nuclear developments in other countries.

Why is Israel so privileged as to be informed about America’s most sensitive intelligence operations?

* * *

Iran is in the grip of a bunch of quasi-religious bigots who are as wild-eyed as they are ignorant. They are being deliberately provocative towards the western bloc, whose leaders and establishment figures regard them as pariahs and lose no opportunity to vilify them and try to make their lives difficult.

But the trouble is that when you penalize pariahs, they get back at you in ways that you might never have thought of.

The move towards inflicting penal sanctions on Iran is strong, but if these do not come about, most likely because Russia and China will veto them, then the attack option will be even more attractive. This way lies utter disaster. The world would be a much more dangerous place if the US mounted an attack on Iran.

If Israel attacked, the US would have to be party to its operation, if only because Israeli aircraft would have to fly through airspace totally controlled by America. The reaction of Muslim nations would be, to put it mildly, robust. The standing of the US around the world, which has received a bit of a boost from Mr Obama’s policies, would be dealt a final, dramatic, deadly blow from which it would never recover. The entire world would suffer.

On September 30 the UN’s chief weapons inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, said he had seen “no credible evidence” that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Predictably, the smear campaign against him was ramped up and his pronouncement was met with vehement contradiction. We’ll eventually know who was right, however.

The leaked stories in the media about Iran’s supposed nuclear posture have been planted by US and Israeli sources. Israel is intent on hyping the supposed threat because it draws attention away from its genocidal activities in Palestine and its continuing defiant and illegal building of settlements on stolen Arab land.

There is no proof that there is an Iranian nuclear weapons’ programme.

So remember what we were told last time, during the military build-up based on “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence,” that led to the disastrous war on Iraq.

And think, this time round, about “multiple human intelligence sources,” who are supposedly providing the same sort of “solid intelligence” about the Iranian nuclear programme. Let’s hope President Obama doesn’t read the New York Times.

Ref: counterpunch

Brian Cloughley’s book about the Pakistan army, War, Coups and Terror, is to be published in the US by Skyhorse next month. His website is www.beecluff.com.

This film, set in Afghanistan, Iraq and Washington, looks at President Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and the ‘liberation’ of countries where bloodshed and repression continue. In Afghanistan, Pilger investigates the claim that life has improved for the women of Iraq now that the Taliban have gone. In Washington, he interviews leading American officials, ‘neo-cons’ in the Bush regime. John Bolton, of the State Department, now the US Ambassador to the United Nations, says he regards the figure of 10,000 civilian deaths in Iraq as ‘quite low’. Breaking the Silencewon a number of awards, and was nominated for a BAFTA, a British Academy Award.