| To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (254) | 5/20/2009 8:19:31 AM | | From: LTK007 | | | | American Death Squad
Obama inherits Cheney's army of assassins – and promotes their commander
by Justin Raimondo, May 20, 2009
As the story of Bush administration’s war crimes comes out in fits and starts, it appears that torture is only one aspect – and not the worst, by any means – of this horrific history. In an interview in mid-March, Seymour Hersh let slip the following:
"After 9/11 – I haven’t written about this yet – but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen."
Well, yes, that’s hardly surprising. The PATRIOT Act and other legislation [.pdf] passed by Congress gives the government the legal "right" to spy on American citizens and, in the case of Jose Padilla, lock them up without a trial and throw away the key. But, as Hersh reveals, it gets worse. Much worse:
“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command – JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …
“Congress has no oversight of it.It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. … Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us."
Well, yes, that’s not too surprising, either, actually. It’s so – what’s the word? – Cheneyesque. Those Rethuglicans! Well, we’re past all that now. The Dear Leader’s in the White House, and it’s time to move on, right? Oh wait…
It turns out the commander of this international order of assassins has just been appointed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. As part of the "fresh thinking" in the Obama administration, epitomized by the COIN crowd, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal replaces Gen. David McKiernan. So who is McChrystal? A 2006 profile in Newsweek put it this way:
"JSOC is part of what Vice President Dick Cheney was referring to when he said America would have to ‘work the dark side’ after 9/11. To many critics, the veep’s remark back in 2001 fostered his rep as the Darth Vader of the war on terror and presaged bad things to come, like the interrogation abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. But America also has its share of Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls ‘the shadows.’ And McChrystal, an affable but tough Army Ranger, and the Delta Force and other elite teams he commands are among them."
The dark side includes McChrystal’s overseeing of Camp Nama, a detainee center outside of Baghdad (since renamed and relocated) notorious for its brutality. The very same administration that is up on its high horse about forbidding torture has just elevated one of the chief torturers to direct Obama’s war in Afghanistan. It is hardly inconceivable that what we saw at Camp Nama – beatings, degradation of prisoners, and outright, cold-blooded murder – is going to be replicated on a nationwide scale.
That’s what they call "fresh thinking" over at Obama’s Pentagon.
The response to all this – or, rather, the non-response – indicates to me that torture is not really the issue, as far as the Obamaites and their amen corner in the media are concerned, it’s who’s doing the torturing. If Bush and Cheney ordered it, it’s reprehensible and might even be a war crime. If, however, a known torture-enabler is elevated by Obama’s secretary of defense to the position of commander of our armed forces in Afghanistan – well, then, that’s a far different matter.
Yes, I know, it’s hard to believe such brazen hypocrisy really exists, but here it is, right in front of us, in the person of Human Rights Watch investigator Marc Garlasco. Garlasco, who investigated and helped expose the abuses at Camp Nama, thinks the question of whether McChrystal ought to be confirmed as Afghan commander is "a tough one." Really? Well, yes, according to him:
"I defend McChrystal to myself because I think he’s the right guy for the job. [He is] in the Petraeus model, a new-thinking guy who is not thinking in terms of massive troops and kinetic kills, but non-lethal power – economic issues, winning the population over. In that mold, he’s the right guy.”
It was McChrystal who had operational command over Camp Nama. He kept out the International Red Cross, and he was personally present in the camp while torture was going on. Now he’s going to be overseeing the conduct of the "Af-Pak" war, so don’t be too surprised to see an entire country, and portions of another, turned into one giant Camp Nama. What gets me is that it’s all being done in the name of a kinder, gentler approach to the "art" of counterinsurgency, and presided over by the best, the brightest, the most liberal administration since FDR.
I don’t know what’s worse: the crimes themselves, or those who rationalize them, such as the author of the Esquire piece that exposed Camp Nama, linked to above, who has decided that McChrystal is one of the good guys – and that Cheney might not be that bad after all. A more egregious apologia has never been uttered, at least not since the war criminals of yesteryear declared they were only following orders. Okay, he admits, excusing Cheney may be going a bit "too far," but hands off McChrystal – and, of course, Obama.
That someone so conversant with the abuses perpetrated by Commander Dark Side could take this position is an indicator of just how far the moral corruption that characterized the Bush era has penetrated – and how long it’s going to take for us to return to some semblance of normality. Author John H. Richardson ridicules McChrystal’s critics as "armchair moralists," to which the only appropriate reply is: Better an armchair moralist than an armchair torturer and executioner.
Yet Camp Nama is hardly the worst of McChrystal’s walks on the "dark side." Remember, Hersh reported that JSOC was (and presumably still is) going around killing "high-value targets" on a global scale, murdering people from the Middle East to Central America. The criterion for selecting the victims was (and presumably still is) whether, in Hersh’s phrase, they had engaged in or were planning "anti-American activities."
Isn’t anyone curious as to who qualified for a hit? Congress is threatening to investigate the use of torture techniques during interrogations, but what about the murderous rampage we’ve been conducting for the past eight years? Who fell victim to our army of assassins?
Along these lines, I note a completely phony – and obviously planted – story that "reports" Hersh saying JSOC murdered Rafik Hariri, the Lebanese leader whose assassination set off a countrywide crisis. He has naturally denied saying this, but what’s interesting is that the false story was timed just as questions about McChrystal’s tenure at JSOC and Camp Nama were being raised. Not that the U.S. government or anyone connected with it would ever try to discredit one of its most credible critics – heaven forbid!
With the appointment, and likely confirmation, of McChrystal, it is clear that the "change" we were promised by Obama is just a change of faces: the policies, at least on the foreign policy front, are remarkably similar. Indeed, the Obamaites may prove to be even more brutal and arrogant than their immediate predecessors, and they’ll get away with it far longer than the Bushies did. That’s because the media is in the tank for Obama, as our fundraising copy put it the other day – just like Marc Garlasco. |
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| To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (254) | 5/20/2009 1:22:05 PM | | From: LTK007 | | | | What’s Netanyahu Really Afraid Of?
( i Boldface at the point where Sahimi pins down his answer to the question he asks.Max)
by Muhammad Sahimi, May 20, 2009
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Although the Obama administration has made it clear that it wants to pursue diplomacy with Iran and the president himself has made overtures toward Iran, Israel continues to threaten Iran with military attacks. Its lobby in the United States, led by AIPAC and its supporters in the War Party, continues to issue dire warnings about Iran’s nuclear program and the danger that it allegedly poses to not just Israel and the Middle East, but the entire "free world." Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has reaffirmed time and again that all of Iran’s known nuclear facilities and nuclear materials, including its stockpile of low-enriched uranium, are safeguarded and monitored by the agency; there is no evidence for a secret parallel nuclear program, or one that is aimed at developing nuclear weapons; and all the issues regarding Iran’s six cases of noncompliance with its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA have been resolved to the agency’s satisfaction.
Over the past several months, the chief mouthpiece for Israel, particularly Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, has been Elliott Abrams, a convicted criminal (later pardoned) in the Iran-Contra scandal, son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz (former editor of Commentary and the man who prayed that George W. Bush would order military attacks on Iran), and deputy national security adviser for the Middle East in the Bush White House. Abrams is now at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Acting as Netanyahu’s alter ego and trying to deflect attention from what Israel did to the Gaza Strip in December and January, in March Abrams propagated the absurd notion that Iran was sending weapons to Hamas by a route through Sudan and Egypt. The story first appeared in January on a Web site that has close ties with Israel’s intelligence services. Then the Times of London, the Rupert Murdoch-owned bastion of truthfulness, ran a story about it. Abrams suggested that Iran ships arms to Sudan, which are then transported through Egypt and the Sinai Desert to reach Hamas in Gaza. How the weapons smugglers could evade the intelligence services of Egypt, a nation that has been ruled by president-for-life Hosni Mubarak with emergency laws since 1981, is beyond the comprehension of the author and, indeed, most objective analysts.
When the allegations regarding Iran sending weapons to Hamas did not catch fire, Abrams created a new twist in the propaganda campaign against Iran. In an article in the Weekly Standard on March 2, Abrams, declaring his opposition to the withdrawal of Israel’s forces from the occupied territories, opined, "he Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now part of a broader struggle in the region over Iranian extremism and power. Israeli withdrawals now risk opening the door not only to Palestinian terrorists but to Iranian proxies."
In other words, Abrams suggested that not only must the Palestinians wait decades to get their independent state, if ever, but also that they will not get it unless Iran is contained first. By then, of course, the facts on the ground, i.e., Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, will have dramatically changed.
Since then it has become an article of faith among Israel’s supporters and the War Party that, in order to achieve a lasting peace in the Middle East, Iran’s nuclear program must first be halted. Never mind that the Israel-Palestinian conflict existed long before the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979 and that Israel maintained secret relations with Iran, selling it weapons and spare parts for the its American-made armament, until the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Abrams himself played a leading role, put an end to the engagement.
Tying the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the containment of Iran’s nuclear program is part of the absurd argument that Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program poses an "existential threat" to the Jewish state. This false notion has been repeated so often that any opposition to it is treated as tantamount to treason or supporting Iran’s "mad mullahs." Never mind that, Tzipi Livni, Israel’s former prime minister, stated last year that, even if Iran did develop a nuclear arsenal, it would pose little threat to Israel. She even criticized Ehud Olmert, her predecessor, for exaggerating the Iranian nuclear issue for political gain.
Despite Livni’s admission, the myth of Iran’s "existential threat" to Israel is very much alive. In the latest twist, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, while conceding that Netanyahu has a reputation for "conspicuous insincerity," claimed that his preoccupation with the Iranian nuclear program seems sincere and deeply felt. Writing in the New York Times on May 17, Goldberg stated, "I recently asked one of his [Netanyahu’s] advisers to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran. His answer: ‘Think Amalek.’" According to the Old Testament, the Amalekites were great enemies of the Jews, attacking them on their escape from Egypt. Thus, metaphorically, Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program is our era’s Amalek’s arsenal. In the past Netanyahu has also repeatedly claimed that it is 1938 all over again, Iran is the new Nazi Germany, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler, an absurd and baseless notion I have refuted before.
Another notion propagated by Israel’s supporters is that Iran is ruled by a messianic, apocalyptic group so bent on destroying Israel that it does not care about retaliatory strikes. This is sheer nonsense. Iran’s leaders, despite their rhetoric, are rational and pragmatic politicians, at least when it comes to foreign policy. What better evidence for their pragmatism than the fact that they bought weapons from Israel in the 1980s; that in the conflict between Christian Armenia and Shi’ite Azerbaijan, Iran sided with the former; that Iran played a crucial role in the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, when its ally, the Northern Alliance, took Kabul? Moreover, Iran’s leaders are also fully aware that any attack on Israel will provoke a massive counterattack by both Israel and the U.S. that will destroy Iran and kill millions of Iranians.
So what is the crux of the issue? Goldberg quotes Netanyahu as saying that "Iran’s militant proxies would be able to fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella." This statement provides some insight into Netanyahu’s thinking.
Netanyahu, the Likud, and Israel’s far Right, including quasi-fascist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, would like to be able to do to their occupied territories whatever they please without any hindrance. They do not recognize the internationally recognized right of the Palestinians to have their own independent, viable state, and they want to continue building settlements in the West Bank.
At the same time, about half of the water used in Israel is captured and diverted from its neighbors, including the occupied territories of the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Many of these water sources are running out. Thus, Israel needs new sources. One such source is the Litani River in southern Lebanon, which, at its closest point, is about two miles from the border with Israel. Even before Israel’s establishment, its leaders have had their eyes on the Litani. David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan both advocated Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and the Litani. As early as 1941, Ben-Gurion thought that the Litani should be Israel’s northern border. Israel’s invasions of southern Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 were partly motivated by its desire to control the Litani. In fact, there was a big row in 1994 when Israel was accused of diverting water from the Litani, just as it steals the water resources of the Golan Heights. All that ended when Hezbollah forced Israel to leave southern Lebanon after an 18-year occupation.
So the crux of the issue is not that Iran is ruled by a messianic, apocalyptic group, or that it has a secret nuclear weapon program, or that if it gets its hands on nuclear warheads, it will attack Israel. None of these are true.
The crux of the issue is not that, emboldened by Iran’s nonexistent nuclear weapons, Hezbollah and Hamas will keep firing rockets into Israel. Both are supported by Iran, but neither is its proxy. Hamas’ ambition is limited to recovering the occupied territories. It has never carried out any military or terrorist operation outside of historical Palestine, and it has offered to go into a decades-long cease-fire with Israel in exchange for Israel’s complete evacuation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Iran is also not the only Muslim state that supports Hamas.
Hezbollah is a powerful sociopolitical movement in Lebanon that would continue to thrive without any help from Iran. It is part of Lebanon’s government and has a significant presence in the Lebanese parliament. It is expected to increase its votes in the parliamentary elections on June 7. It is regarded by many Lebanese people as the guardian of southern Lebanon and the Litani.
The crux of the issue is also not what Netanyahu told Goldberg, namely, that a nuclear Iran "would embolden Islamic militants far and wide, on many continents." Those Islamic militants, including both the Taliban and al-Qaeda, are almost exclusively Salafi Sunnis who hate Shi’ite Iran.
The crux of the issue is that, Netanyahu, Israel’s military, and the War Party in the U.S. all believe that an Iran equipped with the technological capability for enriching uranium would have a credible nuclear deterrent and, therefore, would be unattackable. That scenario, as Thomas P.M. Barnett, the author of The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, has put it, "would level the playing field by finally allowing the Muslim Middle East to sit one player at the negotiating table as Israel’s nuclear equal." Thus, Israel would no longer be able to force its will on its neighbors, a prospect that is not acceptable to the Israeli establishment and the American War Party.
Such a scenario would also have another consequence. A situation in which Israel’s government maintains a permanent state of war with its neighbors, but in which Israel and the Muslims are in equilibrium militarily, would halt immigration to Israel, even reverse it. That would be the ultimate existential threat to Israel. The only realistic way to prevent this from happening is for Israel to reach a just peace with the Palestinians and Syria and give up the dream of controlling the Litani River. But, Netanyahu, the Likud, and the Israeli establishment are incapable of making these happen, and the progressive forces that could force such a solution have practically disappeared from Israel’s political scene. |
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| To: LTK007 who wrote (258) | 5/20/2009 5:42:08 PM | | From: Crimson Ghost | | | | Pro-Israel Mouthpiece Says Freedom of Speech Dangerous
By: Michael Collins Piper on: 20.05.2009 [15:47 ] (71 reads)
AFP Issue # 21, May 25, 2009
‘JINSA’ article says outlets who oppose future wars should be silenced—killed if necessary—by military strike
(7072 bytes) [c]
ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL voices of the pro-Israel lobby has published a shocking essay suggesting that, in the future, there should be “military attacks” on journalists and media outlets that oppose American military ventures on behalf of Israel.
In the spring 2008 issue of its Journal of International Security Affairs, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a particularly vocal force of the Jewish lobby, published a series of articles devoted to the subject: “The U.S. Military Faces the Future.”
One article, entitled “Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars,” written by Ralph Peters (described as “a retired U.S. Army officer”) states flatly that “Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.”
The JINSA essay says “Freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.”
JINSA’s suggestion that the media in America opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq—a key demand by Israel and JINSA—flies in contrast to the truth. In fact, the major media banged the drum for war. AMERICAN FREE PRESS and a few independent newspapers strongly opposed this needless war.
So what JINSA is saying is that those independent media voices—such as AMERICAN FREE PRESS—that opposed the drive for war should ultimately face military violence if they oppose the Jewish lobby’s future military aims.
One analyst, University of Pennsylvania Prof. Edward Herman, has described JINSA as “organized and run by individuals closely tied to the Israeli lobby and can be regarded as a virtual agency of the Israeli government.”
JINSA was founded in the mid-1980s by Stephen Bryen. He, along with several of his close associates—including future George W. Bush administration officials Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith—was investigated by the FBI on charges of spying for Israel at various times. JINSA has worked to forge alliances between the Jewish lobby and former American military officials, treating them to international junkets and a variety of business and other financial bonanzas provided by Israeli sympathizers in America and around the globe in return for support for their blatantly pro-Israel policies.
Peters—whose pro-Israel articles are published regularly in The New York Post, owned by pro-Zionist billionaire Rupert Murdoch—is just one of those whose views on the military appeared in JINSA’s journal.
A recurring theme in the essays emphasized the need for the United States to coordinate its international ventures with its “allies,” that is, Israel. The essays underscore the idea that it is vital for the United States to engage in covert action to bring down regimes that stand in the way of Israel’s agenda. Written in “code,” so to speak, the essays carry the theme that Israel’s interests are those of America and vice-versa and that those who oppose Israel are “anti-American,” and that includes American military officers.
An essay by one Patrick Poole alleges that the distinguished Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College is in the state of “strategic collapse” because it published a study saying that Hamas, the Palestinian faction, has been misunderstood due to misreporting by what the War College report says are “Israeli and Western sources that villainize the group.”
JINSA’s propagandist claims the War College “is only representative of a larger rot in the U.S. military’s halls of higher learning . . . that apparently runs through all levels of our military senior service schools. . . .”
The author of these attacks on American military leaders who refuse to pander to the Jewish lobby, Patrick Poole, is a ubiquitous Internet presence, writing pro-Israel screeds for Frontpagemag.com, the website of ex-communist-turned-neoconservative pro-Israel publicist David Horowitz.
The record shows that increasing numbers of American military figures, and a host of ex-diplomats, intelligence officers and others are publicly challenging the Jewish lobby. They include Adm. “Fox” Fallon, former ambassadors Charles Freeman and Richard Peck, ex-CIA officers Michael Scheuer and Ray McGovern as well as top academics such as Dr. John Mearsheimer and Dr. Stephen Walt. And former President Jimmy Carter as well.
It is thus no surprise that influential Jewish voices, such as Forward, published in Manhattan, complain there is opposition to Israel within higher circles, a point that surprises many Americans who believe Israel has a firm stranglehold on the American intelligence, diplomatic and law enforcement apparatus.
On May 11, 2005, Forward reported that Barry Jacobs of the Washington office of the American Jewish Committee said there were high-ranking officials in the U.S. intelligence community who were hostile to Israel and unreceptive to pro-Israel lobbyists.
Citing the then-ongoing FBI investigation of espionage by officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Forward noted that this top Jewish leader believed, in Forward’s summary, that “the notion that American Jews and Pentagon neo-conservatives conspired to push the United States into war against Iraq, and possibly also against Iran, is pervasive in Washington’s intelligence community.”
Although the Justice Department recently dropped its case against the AIPAC duo, the FBI investigators remained confident that their criminal case against the intriguers would have resulted in a conviction.
It has been a long-standing concern of JINSA that many in the military are tired of fighting wars for Israel. In the fall of 2006, JINSA’s journal suggested that a full-fledged witch-hunt was in order, designed to root out critics of Israel at high levels, implying that Israel’s critics were allied to “jihadist” fundamentalist Muslims. JINSA asked:
How deeply have jihadist elements infiltrated the U.S. government and federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and various military commands, either through sympathizers or via actual operatives?
Since there are few Muslims in the FBI, Homeland Security, the Department of Defense etc, the suggestion that “jihadist” elements have “infiltrated” our government might seem silly to the average American. But JINSA—determined to enforce Israel’s demands on American foreign policy and military might—is concerned that there are growing numbers in the military, the FBI and the CIA who are opposed to wars for Israel—and this, in JINSA’s view, constitutes collaboration with the dreaded “jihadists.”
atheonews.blogspot.com |
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| To: LTK007 who wrote (261) | 5/21/2009 7:18:20 AM | | From: Crimson Ghost | | | | Watching Obama Morph Into Dick Cheney
by Paul Craig Roberts, May 21, 2009
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America has lost her soul, and so has her president.
A despairing country elected a president who promised change. Americans arrived from every state to witness in bitter cold Obama’s swearing-in ceremony. The mall was packed in a way that it has never been for any other president.
The people’s good will toward Obama and the expectations they had for him were sufficient for Obama to end the gratuitous wars and enact major reforms. But Obama has deserted the people for the interests. He is relying on his non-threatening demeanor and rhetoric to convince the people that change is underway.
The change that we are witnessing is in Obama, not in policies. Obama is morphing into Dick Cheney.
Obama has not been in office four months and already a book could be written about his broken promises.
Obama said he would close the torture prison, Guantanamo, and abolish the kangaroo courts known as military tribunals. But now he says he is going to reform the tribunals and continue the process, but without confessions obtained with torture. Getting behind Obama’s validation of the Bush/Cheney policy, House Democrats pulled the budget funding that was to be used for closing Guantanamo.
The policy of kidnapping people (usually on the basis of disinformation supplied by their enemies) and whisking them off to Third World prisons to be interrogated is to be continued. Again, Obama has substituted a "reform" for his promise to abolish an illegal policy. Rendition, Obama says, has also been reformed and will no longer involve torture. How would anyone know? Is Obama going to assign a U.S. government agent to watch over the treatment given to disappeared people by Third World thugs? Given the proclivity of American police to brutalize U.S. citizens, nothing can save the victims of rendition from torture.
Obama has defended the Bush/Cheney warrantless wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency and broadened the government’s legal argument that "sovereign immunity" protects government officials from prosecution and civil suits when they violate U.S. law and constitutional protections of citizens. Obama’s Justice Department has taken up the defense of Donald Rumsfeld against a case brought by detainees whose rights Rumsfeld violated.
In a signing statement this month, Obama abandoned his promise to protect whistleblowers who give information of executive branch illegality to Congress.
Obama is making even more expansive claims of executive power than Bush. As Bruce Fein puts it: "In principle, President Obama is maintaining that victims of constitutional wrongdoing by the U.S. government should be denied a remedy in order to prevent the American people and the world at large from learning of the lawlessness perpetrated in the name of national security and exacting political and legal accountability."
Obama, in other words, is committed to covering up the Bush regime’s crimes and to ensuring that his own regime can continue to operate in the same illegal and unconstitutional ways.
Obama is fighting the release of the latest batch of horrific torture photos that have come to light. Obama claims that release of the photos would anger insurgents and cause them to kill our troops. That, of course, is nonsense. Those resisting occupation of their land by U.S. troops and NATO mercenaries are already dedicated to killing our troops, and they know that Americans torture whomever they capture. Obama is fighting the release of the photos because he knows the barbaric image that the photos present of the U.S. military will undermine the public’s support for the wars that enrich the military/security complex, appease the Israel Lobby, and repay the campaign contributions that elect the U.S. government.
As for bringing the troops home from Iraq, this promise, too, has been reformed. To the consternation of his supporters, Obama is leaving 50,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The others are being sent to Afghanistan and to Pakistan, where on Obama’s watch war has broken out big time with already one million refugees from the indiscriminate bombing of civilians.
Meanwhile, war with Iran remains a possibility, and at Washington’s insistence, NATO is conducting war games on former Soviet territory, thus laying the groundwork for future enrichment of the U.S. military/security complex. The steeply rising U.S. unemployment rate will provide the needed troops for Obama’s expanding wars.
Obama can give a great speech without mangling the language. He can smile and make people believe his rhetoric. The world, or much of it, seems to be content with the soft words that now drape Dick Cheney’s policies in pursuit of executive supremacy and U.S. hegemony. |
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| To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (262) | 5/21/2009 12:23:24 PM | | From: Broken_Clock | | | | Obama OKs nuclear deal with United Arab Emirates
May. 21, 2009
Associated Press , THE JERUSALEM POST
President Barack Obama agreed Wednesday to share US nuclear power technology with the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, giving his consent to a deal signed in the final days of George W. Bush's administration.
The pact now goes to Congress, which will have 90 days to amend or reject it.
The agreement creates a legal framework for the US to transfer sensitive nuclear items to the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven Middle Eastern states that wants nuclear power to satisfy growing demand for electricity.
Although flush with oil, the emirates imports 60 percent of the natural gas they use to generate electricity. The United Arab Emerates wants to break its dependence on outside sources for its energy needs and settled on nuclear power as the best option |
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| To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (262) | 5/21/2009 1:34:42 PM | | From: LTK007 | | | | i will be putting be this quote at the TOP of My Thread Header, and will write, the Verdict is In, Obama guilty as charged.
"Watching Obama Morph Into Dick Cheney
America has lost her soul, and so has her president." Paul Craig Roberts, May 21, 2009 |
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| From: Crimson Ghost | 5/23/2009 5:29:13 PM | | | | | | Another Bogus 'Terror' Plot
posted by ROBERT DREYFUSS on 05/22/2009 @ 07:56am
By the now, it's maddeningly familiar. A scary terrorist plot is announced. Then it's revealed that the suspects are a hapless bunch of ne'er-do-wells or run-of-the-mill thugs without the slightest connection to any terrorists at all, never mind to Al Qaeda. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle: the entire plot is revealed to have been cooked up by a scummy government agent-provocateur.
I've seen this movie before.
In this case, the alleged perps -- Onta Williams, James Cromitie, David Williams, and Laguerre Payen -- were losers, ex-cons, drug addicts. Al Qaeda they're not. Without the assistance of the agent who entrapped them, they would never have dreamed of committing political violence, nor would they have had the slightest idea about where to acquire plastic explosives or a Stinger missile. That didn't stop prosecutors from acting as if they'd captured Osama bin Laden himself. Noted the Los Angeles Times:
Prosecutors called it the latest in a string of homegrown terrorism plots hatched after Sept. 11.
"It's hard to envision a more chilling plot," Assistant U.S. Atty. Eric Snyder said in court Thursday. He described all four suspects as "eager to bring death to Jews."
Actually, it's hard to imagine a stupider, less competent, and less important plot. The four losers were ensnared by a creepy FBI agent who hung around the mosque in upstate New York until he found what he was looking for. Here's the New York Times account:
Salahuddin Mustafa Muhammad, the imam at the mosque where the authorities say the confidential informant first encountered the men, said none of the men were active in the mosque. ...
Mr. Cromitie was there last June, and he met a stranger.
He had no way of knowing that the stranger's path to the mosque began in 2002, when he was arrested on federal charges of identity theft. He was sentenced to five years' probation, and became a confidential informant for the F.B.I. He began showing up at the mosque in Newburgh around 2007, Mr. Muhammad said.
The stranger's behavior aroused the imam's suspicions. He invited other worshipers to meals, and spoke of violence and jihad, so the imam said he steered clear of him.
"There was just something fishy about him," Mr. Muhammad said. Members "believed he was a government agent."
Mr. Muhammad said members of his congregation told him the man he believed was the informant offered at least one of them a substantial amount of money to join his "team."
So a creepy thug buttonholes people at a mosque, foaming at the mouth about violence and jihad? This is law enforcement? Just imagine if someone did this at a local church, or some synagogue. And the imam says the people "believed he was a government agent."
Preying on these losers, none of whom were apparently actual Muslims, the "confidential informant" orchestrated the acquisition of a disabled Stinger missile to shoot down military planes and cooked up a wild scheme about attacking a Jewish center in the Bronx.
It gets even more pathetic:
The only one of the four suspects who appears to have aroused any suspicion was Payen, a Haitian native who attended the Newburgh mosque. Assistant imam Hamid Rashada said his dishevelment and odd behavior disturbed some members, said the assistant imam, Hamid Rashada.
When Payen appeared in court, defense attorney Marilyn Reader described him as "intellectually challenged" and on medication for schizophrenia. The Associated Press said that when he was asked if he understood the proceedings, Payen replied: "Sort of."
Despite the pompous statements from Mayor Bloomberg of New York and other politicians, including Representative Peter King, the whole story is bogus. The four losers may have been inclined to violence, and they may have harbored a virulent strain of anti-Semitism. But it seems that the informant whipped up their violent tendencies and their hatred of Jews, cooked up the plot, incited them, arranged their purchase of weapons, and then had them busted. To ensure that it made headlines, the creepy informant claimed to be representing a Pakistani extremist group, Jaish-e Muhammad, a bona fide terrorist organization. He wasn't, of course.
It is disgusting and outrageous that the FBI is sending provocateurs into mosques.
The headlines reinforce the very fear that Dick Cheney is trying to stir up. The story strengthens the narrative that the "homeland" is under attack. It's not. As I've written repeatedly, since 9/11 not a single American has even been punched in the nose by an angry Muslim, as far as I can tell. Plot after plot -- the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge! bombing the New York Subways! taking down the Sears Tower! bombing the Prudential building in Newark! -- proved to be utter nonsense. |
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| To: Crimson Ghost who wrote (265) | 5/26/2009 1:42:56 AM | | From: Broken_Clock | | | | Obama’s Democratic Authoritarianism
He's bad – really bad – on civil liberties
by Justin Raimondo, May 25, 2009
He’s not closing Guantanamo, he’s continuing the "preventive detention" policy of the Bush administration under a new rubric ("prolonged detention"), he’s on board with military commissions ("reformed," of course) and the denial of habeas corpus – and last, but certainly not least, his supporters in Congress have launched a campaign to give him and his cabinet officials the power to close down the Internet in the name of "national security."
I won’t go on at length about the brazen hypocrisy and general slipperiness exhibited by Obama and his fans when it comes to key civil liberties issues such as these. Jack Goldsmith, former head of George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, and Rachel Maddow, progressive commentator on MSNBC, have done a superlative job of that. Goldsmith, of course, notes the president’s turn on a dime with obvious approval, arguing that the Bush approach was haphazard and lacked any substantive legal basis, while Maddow is horrified that, instead of abolishing these Bush-era assaults on the Constitution, her former hero is intent on formalizing and "legalizing" them. Go here to see her deliver the kind of stinging rebuke to Obama and his administration that Rush Limbaugh and his fellow radio ranters could never hope to match.
Maddow strikes a powerful blow against Cheneyism-without-Cheney by pointing out that the president’s preventive detention policy – which claims for the U.S. government the right to hold anyone, including American citizens, indefinitely, without trial, without formal charges, and without telling anyone – is worse than anything Bush ever attempted in one important sense. The Bushian effort was secretive and strictly ad hoc; the Obamaites, however, are quite openly constructing what Obama calls "a new legal regime" to preside over this wholesale assault on the Constitution.
At least the Bush crowd had enough remnants of a moral sense to sneak around and try [.pdf] to hide their crimes against liberty and the rule of law. Although they tried to rationalize their actions with after-the-fact legal arguments, the effort seems to me rather halfhearted: they weren’t really all that concerned with legalizing their power grab. They just went ahead and did it, and damn the torpedoes.
The Obamaites, on the other hand, have a different style – but the substance is essentially the same, with the addition of a few minor tweaks and rhetorical flourishes. They want to bureaucratize and institutionalize the horrors of the past eight years and make what used to be unthinkable routine.
This Memorial Day should be devoted to reviving and refreshing the failing memory of the American people, or, at least, those millions who voted for Obama in hopes of a better day. Remember the campaign promises, the soaring rhetoric about "the rule of law" and our "constitutional liberties"? Remember this: "Gitmo. That’s an easy one: close it"? Remember the promise of "change"?
As for this last, well, yes, the Obama administration is indeed carrying out a sea change in the realm of civil liberties, there’s no doubt about that. It’s a continuation of the transformation effected by Team Bush and made possible by the post-9/11 hysteria, in which the leaders of both parties were caught up – and which they continue to stoke for political gain.
Witness Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s assertion that the jailing of terrorist suspects in American prisons somehow represents a threat to this country’s security. Obama himself is not above this: in rationalizing his escalation of the Afghan war and occupation, he continually harks back to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as if they justified the decades-long occupation of Afghanistan and surrounding areas envisioned by his favored policy wonks.
The baddies, Obama avers, are "plotting to attack America" from their "safe havens" in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. Which raises the question: So the f**k what? How much of a "safe haven" do they need to "plot," anyway? Answer: A space no bigger than an apartment in Hamburg, Germany, or a small town on Florida’s Atlantic coast, where the 9/11 attacks were plotted and carried out.
The 9/11 attacks provided the neoconservatives with the opportunity they had been waiting for: as the Twin Towers came down, so did the traditional safeguards against tyranny that had been erected over the past 200 years by the Founders and their successors. The neocons, in effect, pulled off a coup d’état: as Bob Woodward has pointed out, their method was to set up "a separate government," with Cheney at its head, that did an end-run around the institutional safeguards built into the system. Bush usurped the constitutional lines of authority that acted as a rein on the unrestrained use of government power. Obama’s "reforms" will make that usurpation permanent.
Change? You bet.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
I just have one thing to say about the recent arrest of four losers who were plotting to bomb New York-area synagogues: while the FBI was busy carefully setting up these would-be terrorists-without-a-clue, luring them into an improbable scheme involving Stinger missiles and in effect setting up a government-subsidized terrorist cell, how many al-Qaeda sleeper cells were going about their business undetected?
Now, don’t you feel safer already? |
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