Iraqi Kurdish Leader Sees Turkish Invasion as Declaration of War

Leader of the Regional Iraqi Kurdistan government, Massoud Barzani, sees a Turkish invasion as a declaration of war. He believes that all the talk about PKK is just an excuse to reign in the Kurdish moves to acquire Kirkuk, a traditional Kurdish area acquired by Saddam forcibly because of it's rich reserves of oil.
Hürriyet

The leader of the regional northern Iraq Kurdish government, Massoud Barzani, commented this weekend that any move by Turkish forces with respect to northern Iraqi land would be considered a declaration of war.


Speaking to the British The Times newspaper sources in Erbil, Barzani noted "Ankara, which is using its problems with the PKK to justify itself, wants actually to blockade the Iraqi Kurds, who are themselves becoming more prosperous and more independent every day."


Barzani was very blunt in his interview with The Times, asserting: "Whether Turkey invades or occupies, either way it means war. If our people, our land, or our interests are attacked, there are no limits left. When that happens, it means everything has been attacked."


Barzani implied in his words this weekend that Ankara might have other reasons behind its stance on the PKK, noting that PKK terror was not a new factor for Turkey. He said "I am about ready to believe that the PKK is just an excuse. Turkey's stance towards the Kurdish region, and its direct and indirect threats towards the region, make me think this. The real target is the Kurdistan region, otherwise why would we even want to get involved in a struggle between Turkey and the PKK?"

Informed Comment reports that Turkish helicopter gunships have fired into Iraq. He also notes that Turkey is attempting an embargo against the financial interests of firms connected to Kurdistan leader Massoud Barzani. If true, this would seem to confirm Barzani's perception that the Turkish interest in Iraq goes well beyond the PKK.

Indian NDTV is reporting Tuesday morning that Turkish Cobra helicopter gunships have fired into Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) positions inside northern Iraq. The action comes after following on an engagement in the border region on the Turkish side that began on Monday and went late into the night. AP does not mention the strikes inside Iraq, but NDTV apparently has a reporter in the area. If the Indian account is true, it is a step up in the building Turkish-Kurdish confrontation.


Turkey is also squeezing Iraqi Kurdistan economically, putting embargoes on firms connected to Kurdistan leader Massoud Barzani.

Trading Corporate Republicans For Corporate Democrats

Senator Edwards delivered Monday at St. Anselm’s College in New Hampshire. He tells the truth.
John Edwards

It's time to tell the truth. And the truth is the system in Washington is corrupt. It is rigged by the powerful special interests to benefit the very few at the expense of the many. And as a result, the American people have lost faith in our broken system in Washington, and believe it no longer works for ordinary Americans. They're right.


As I look across the political landscape of both parties today -- what I see are politicians too afraid to tell the truth -- good people caught in a bad system that overwhelms their good intentions and requires them to chase millions of dollars in campaign contributions in order to perpetuate their careers and continue their climb to higher office.


This presidential campaign is a perfect example of how our politics is awash with money. I have raised more money up to this point than any Democratic candidate raised last time in the presidential campaign -- $30 million. And, I did it without taking a dime from any Washington lobbyist or any special interest PAC.


I saw the chase for campaign money at any cost by the frontrunner in this race -- and I did not join it -- because the cost to our nation and our children is not worth the hollow victory of any candidate. Being called president while powerful interests really run things is not the same as being free to lead this nation as president of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. If protecting the current established structure in Washington is in your interest, then I am not your candidate. I ran for president four years ago -- yes, in part out of personal ambition -- but also with a deep desire to stand for working people like my father and mother -- who no matter how hard things were for our family, always worked even harder to make things better for us.


[...]While the American people personally rose to the occasion with an enormous outpouring of support and donations to both the victims of Katrina and 9/11 -- we all saw our government's neglect. And we saw greed and incompetence at work. Out of more than 700 contracts valued at $500,000 or greater, at least half were given without full competition or, according to news sources, with vague or open ended terms, and many of these contracts went to companies with deep political connections such as a subsidiary of Haliburton, Bechtel Corp., and AshBritt Inc.


And in Iraq -- while our nation's brave sons and daughters put their lives on the line for our country -- we now have mercenaries under their own law while their bosses sit at home raking in millions.


We have squandered millions on building Olympic size swimming pools and buildings that have never been used. We have weapons and ammunition unaccounted for that may now be being used against our own soldiers. We literally have billions wasted or misspent -- while our troops and their families continue to sacrifice. And the politically connected lobby for more. What's their great sacrifice -- higher profits.


It goes on every minute of every day.


Corporate executives at United Airlines and US Airways receive millions in compensation for taking their companies into bankruptcy, while their employees are forced to take cuts in pay.


Companies like Wal-Mart lobby against inspecting containers entering our nation's ports, even though expert after expert agrees that the likeliest way for a dirty bomb to enter the United States is through a container, because they believe their profits are more important than our safety. What has become of America when America's largest company lobbies against protecting America?


Trade deals cost of millions of jobs. What do we get in return? Millions of dangerous Chinese toys in our children's cribs laden with lead. This is the price we are made to pay when trade agreements are decided based on how much they pad the profits for multinational corporations instead of what is best for America's workers or the safety of America's consumers.


We have even gotten to the point where our children's safety is potentially at risk because nearly half of the apple juice consumed by our children comes from apples grown in China. And Americans are kept in the dark because the corporate lobbyists have pushed back country of origin labeling laws again and again.


This is not the America I believe in.


And a few weeks ago, around the sixth anniversary of 9/11, a leading presidential candidate held a fundraiser that was billed as a Homeland Security themed event in Washington, D.C. targeted to homeland security lobbyists and contractors for $1,000 a plate. These lobbyists, for the price of a ticket, would get a special "treat" -- the opportunity to participate in small, hour long breakout sessions with key Democratic lawmakers, many of whom chair important sub committees of the homeland security committee. That presidential candidate was Senator Clinton.


Senator Clinton's road to the middle class takes a major detour right through the deep canyon of corporate lobbyists and the hidden bidding of K Street in Washington -- and history tells us that when that bus stops there it is the middle class that loses.


When I asked Hillary Clinton to join me in not taking money from Washington lobbyists -- she refused. Not only did she say that she would continue to take their money, she defended them.


Today Hillary Clinton has taken more money from Washington lobbyists than any candidate from either party -- more money than any Republican candidate.


She has taken more money from the defense industry than any other candidate from either party as well.


She took more money from Wall Street last quarter than Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Barack Obama combined.


The long slow slide of our democracy into the corporate abyss continues unabated regardless of party, regardless of the best interests of America.


We have a duty -- a duty to end this.


[...]America lives because 20 generations have honored the one moral commandment that makes us Americans.


To give our children a better future than we received.


I stand here today the son of Wallace and Bobbie Edwards. The father of Wade, Cate, Emma Claire and Jack -- and I know, as well as you, that we must not be the first generation that fails to live up to our moral challenge and keep the promise of America.


That would be an abomination.


There is a dream that is America. It is what makes us American. And I will not stand by while that dream is at risk.


I am not perfect -- far from it -- but I do understand that this is not a political issue -- it is the moral test of our generation.


Our nation's founders knew that this moment would come -- that at some point the power of greed and its influence over officials in our government might strain and threaten the very America they hoped would last as an ideal in the minds of all people, and as a beacon of hope for all time.


That is why they made the people sovereign. And this is why it is your responsibility to redeem the promise of America for our children and their future.


It will not be easy -- sacrifice will be required of us -- but it was never easy for our ancestors, and their sacrifices were far greater than any that will fall on our shoulders.


Yet, the responsibility is ours.


We, you and I, are the guardians of what America is and what it will be.


The choice is ours.


Down one path, we trade corporate Democrats for corporate Republicans; our cronies for their cronies; one political dynasty for another dynasty; and all we are left with is a Democratic version of the Republican corruption machine.


It is the easier path. It is the path of the status quo. But, it is a path that perpetuates a corrupt system that has not only failed to deliver the change the American people demand, but has divided America into two -- one America for the very greedy, and one America for everybody else.


And it is that divided America -- the direct result of this corrupt system -- which may very well lead to the suicide Lincoln warned us of -- the poison that continues to seep into our system while none notice.


Or we can choose a different path. The path that generations of Americans command us to take. And be the guardians that kept the faith.

The Anatomy of a Blackwater Coverup

New York Times

State Department investigators offered Blackwater USA security guards immunity during an inquiry into last month’s deadly shooting of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad — a potentially serious investigative misstep that could complicate efforts to prosecute the company’s employees involved in the episode, government officials said Monday.


The State Department investigators from the agency’s investigative arm, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, offered the immunity grants even though they did not have the authority to do so, the officials said. Prosecutors at the Justice Department, who do have such authority, had no advance knowledge of the arrangement, they added.


Most of the guards who took part in the Sept. 16 shooting were offered what officials described as limited-use immunity, which means that they were promised that they would not be prosecuted for anything they said in their interviews with the authorities as long as their statements were true. The immunity offers were first reported Monday by The Associated Press.


The officials who spoke of the immunity deals have been briefed on the matter, but agreed to talk about the arrangement only on the condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss a continuing criminal investigation.


The precise legal status of the immunity offer is unclear. Those who have been offered immunity would seem likely to assert that their statements are legally protected, even as some government officials say that immunity was never officially sanctioned by the Justice Department.

Hope For Free Speech in America

Has there ever been freedom of speech in America? It seems to me that there has always been a risk of social-political consequences for expressing an opinion. But when that prohibition prevents us from looking at the wisdom of some of our central assumptions and values in foreign policy, the risk of not discussing is akin to abdicating policy to a hidden agenda. This is exactly what has happened in US policy towards Israel. Anyone who dares disagree with Israel is a candidate for the label of "anti-Semite".
What do you think? Does Jimmy Carter hate Jews? Henry Ford did, and he got away with helping build the German war machine before war broke out. Jimmy just spoke out in public.
Newsweek.com

If it weren't for that single word, apartheid, Carter's book would likely not have become a best seller. "I devised the title myself," he told an audience of former aides and supporters after a screening Tuesday evening in Washington. "I wanted to precipitate a debate that has been totally absent and is still totally absent." It was the first time he had seen the film on the big screen, and he felt it had turned out well despite his initial trepidation. He commended Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for convening a Mideast summit in Annapolis, Md., next month, but decried what he called "a complete dearth" of leadership among the presidential candidates for a balanced approach in the Middle East. In Carter's view, the pro-Israel lobby has made an open discussion "political suicide."

Biofuels Are a Poison Pill

TomPaine.com - Biofuel Backfire

With Congress still wrestling behind closed doors over energy legislation, people are starting to take a closer look at the issue. And what they're seeing isn't pretty.


Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, has stalled formal Senate and House negotiations on energy in part out of concern than more ethanol use could further drive up animal feed prices.


She's far from the only one concerned. The Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute predicts that more use of biofuels could drive food prices 20-40 percent higher between now and 2020.


"Fuel made from food is a dumb idea, to put it succinctly," observed Ronald Steenblik, research director at the International Institute for Sustainable Development's Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) in Geneva, Switzerland, who has studied Europe's experience with biofuels.


A follow-up analysis, released this week by my friends with the Boston-based Clean Air Task Force, ought to give everyone pause.


These researchers took an unbiased look at the European Union's effort to ramp up biofuels use. That mandate was driven primarily by farm policy (just like in the U.S., though we pretend otherwise), to create new markets for agricultural and forestry products.


But the Task Force found that the mandate "exacerbated some of the very problems it was designed to solve, driving up food prices, leading to increased deforestation in tropical countries, worsening global warming, and increasing imports of bio-oils."


Though reduced global warming emissions was supposed to be a side benefit of the mandate, the Task Force concluded that it actually led to the draining, clearing and burning of peat lands in Southeast Asia—making Indonesia the third largest source of global warming pollution after the U.S. and China.


Even biofuels produced within Europe didn't produce such great results. New analyses are suggesting that increased use of nitrogen-based fertilizers and deforestation could erase any global warming gains.

Bush Lies About Iran

Informed Comment

Among the more fantastic charges that Bush made against Iran was that its government was actively arming and helping the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. In fact, the Taliban are extremist Sunnis who hate, and have killed large numbers of Shiites. Shiite Iran is unlikely to support them. The neo-Taliban are a threat to the Karzai government, which represents the Northern Alliance (Tajiks, Hazara and Uzbeks) along with non-Taliban Pushtuns. The Hazara are Shiite clients of Iran, and both the Tajiks and the Uzbeks are close to Tehran. The neo-Taliban are being supported by Pakistan, which resents the Northern Alliance, not by Iran, which favors it.


That Iran is trying to destabilize the Shiite government in Baghdad is absurd. The Bush administration charge that Iran is the source of explosively formed projectiles is based on very little evidence and flies in the face of common sense; in fact these bombs are probably made in Iraq itself or perhaps come from Hizbullah in Lebanon.


The charges are frankly ridiculous, and certainly are so if proportionality is taken into account. That is, if one bomb was sold by an Iranian arms dealer to the Taliban for profit, a hundred bombs were given to the Taliban by Pakistan for tactical reasons. Likewise, the Shiite militias in Iraq have killed very few American troops when the US troops have left the Shiites alone; most attacks on the US come from Sunni Arabs.


The Senate Kyl-Lieberman resolution helped legitimize this new Bush policy, which is why the senators should not have voted for it. It took us one more step down the road to war with Iran.

Turk forces attacked rebels in N.Iraq

It begins. Turkey will continue these raids and will escalate as necessary in response to further attacks in Turkey. Reports indicated Turkey has anywhere from 10,000 to 140,000 troops at it's border with Iraq. I believe the larger figure.
Reuters

Turkish warplanes and ground troops attacked Kurdish rebel positions just inside northern Iraq between Sunday and Tuesday evening, military sources told Reuters on Wednesday.


The warplanes flew as deep as 20 km (13 miles) into Iraqi territory and some 300 ground troops advanced about 10 km, killing 34 rebels of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the sources said.


They made clear these were small sorties of a kind that Turkish forces have been known to conduct in the past across the mountainous border, not a large-scale offensive that U.S. and Iraqi authorities are trying to avert.


"Further 'hot pursuit' raids into northern Iraq can be expected, though none have taken place so far today (Wednesday)," a military official said, adding that all Turkish troops involved in the operations were now back in Turkey.

The War Rollout Keeps Rolling Along.....

Informed Comment: Global Affairs

Scott Horton at Harper's has an update on the fall product rollout for war with Iran. He analyzes the full text of Dick Cheney's speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which I discussed yesterday based only on press reports. Horton summarizes Cheney's discussion of Iran: "Is Cheney threatening war against Iran? Yes, that’s exactly what he is doing."


[..]The consensus has now spread beyond Iraq. In this week's Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria observes, "The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality." Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International, is the former managing editor of Foreign Affairs and a Harvard Ph.D. (Yale B.A.), who studied under Samuel Huntington. He is the very image of the calm, intellectual realist (and he has written a wine column too). He's had it. Zakaria to Earth (come in, Earth):

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

Earth, over and out.


Zakaria too comes back to the sage of Princeton:

Last year, the Princeton scholar, Bernard Lewis, a close adviser to Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal predicting that on Aug. 22, 2006, President Ahmadinejad was going to end the world. The date, he explained, "is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the Prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to 'the farthest mosque,' usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back. This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world" (my emphasis). This would all be funny if it weren't so dangerous.

Comcast Traffic Monitoring a Slap in the Face to Net Neutrality

Free Press

As we’ve mentioned before, Comcast does, despite what the company says, limit BitTorrent traffic. The Associated Press recently ran some tests and discovered that, yes, Comcast does throttle BitTorrent traffic. So how can Comcast say it doesn’t throttle traffic when in fact it does? The answer is in semantics.


Comcast has previous told Wired News that “we do not block access to any applications,” it does however admit that it uses traffic shaping tools to “manage our network to provide a quality experience for all Comcast subscribers.” In other words, Comcast doesn’t block BitTorrent applications, but it does block BitTorrent traffic.


Now it would seem that the fun doesn’t end there for Comcast subscribers. The EFF reports that Comcast also limits Gnutella traffic and Kevin Kanarski claims that Lotus Notes traffic is similarly choked.


In all three cases Comcast’s limiting technique is quite insidious and would be difficult for the average user to notice. Comcast’s network monitoring tools (most likely Sandvine) sits between your connection and the outside world and sends reset packets to both both ends, disrupting your connection. From the the end user point of view it will merely look like your connection is slow. Very, very slow.


This is more or less the two-tiered internet that net neutrality proponents have long warned about.

If this type of conduct is allowed to continue, many innovators will have to get active assistance from an ISP in order to have their protocols allowed through the ISP’s web of spoofing and forgery. Technologies like BitTorrent and Joost, which are used to distribute licensed movies and are in direct competition with Comcast’s cable TV services, will be at Comcast’s mercy.

General Pace Was Fired

GlobalResearch.ca

Remember General Peter Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking military official in the United States government, who stated that there is no evidence Iran is supplying weapons to Shi’ite insurgents in Iraq? Well guess what, he’s getting fired. As former Reagan administration economist Paul Craig Roberts wrote in an article outlining why Pace is being replaced, it could be a result of two very important comments Pace has made in recent times, “In the first statement General Pace says that every member of the US military has the absolute responsibility to disobey illegal and immoral orders. In the second statement, General Pace says that an order to use weapons of mass destruction is an illegal and immoral order,” and that “The Bush regime’s plan to attack Iran with nuclear weapons puts General Pace’s departure in a different light. How can President Bush succeed with an order to attack with nuclear weapons when America’s highest ranking military officer says that such an order is ‘illegal and immoral’ and that everyone in the military has an ‘absolute responsibility’ to disobey it?” and “Pace’s departure removes a known obstacle to a nuclear attack on Iran, thus advancing that possible course of action.”11 Pace, for the record, is set to leave in September of 2007, and will be replaced by Michael Mullen, who, according to USA Today, “Adm. Michael Mullen accused Iran, without being more specific, of giving aid to insurgent forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.”12 So, as you can see for yourself, the incoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is towing the party line, lock in step with the Administration’s lunacy-ridden claims and statements about Iran, which only seek to provide an excuse for a military assault on the country. As for the nuclear option, it seems that not much has changed, as it was recently reported that “The U.S. is retrofitting its B-2 Stealth bombers with massive bunker-buster bombs - a move that could be a prelude to an attack on Iran and its nuclear facilities.”13

War's Dirty Little Secret: Atrocity

Part of the intrinsic horror of war is atrocity and the subsequent cover-up. Part of what is covered up in the pervasive nature of atrocity. While no one knows how prevalent it is, there is enough documented in history and in recent events to demonstrate to me that it occurs repeatedly in every war-time event, perpetrated by both sides, by a large proportion of combatants. And it is systematically covered up to protect the idea that there is such a thing as honorable behavior in war.
Observer

A study by an Israeli psychologist into the violent behaviour of the country's soldiers is provoking bitter controversy and has awakened urgent questions about the way the army conducts itself in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.


Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, interviewed 21 Israeli soldiers and heard confessions of frequent brutal assaults against Palestinians, aggravated by poor training and discipline. In her recently published report, co-authored by Professor Yoel Elizur, Yishai-Karin details a series of violent incidents, including the beating of a four-year-old boy by an officer.


The report, although dealing with the experience of soldiers in the 1990s, has triggered an impassioned debate in Israel, where it was published in an abbreviated form in the newspaper Haaretz last month. According to Yishai Karin: 'At one point or another of their service, the majority of the interviewees enjoyed violence. They enjoyed the violence because it broke the routine and they liked the destruction and the chaos. They also enjoyed the feeling of power in the violence and the sense of danger.'


In the words of one soldier: 'The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That's when I enjoy it. It's like a drug. If I don't go into Rafah, and if there isn't some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.'


Another explained: 'The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides... As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.'


The soldiers described dozens of incidents of extreme violence. One recalled an incident when a Palestinian was shot for no reason and left on the street. 'We were in a weapons carrier when this guy, around 25, passed by in the street and, just like that, for no reason - he didn't throw a stone, did nothing - bang, a bullet in the stomach, he shot him in the stomach and the guy is dying on the pavement and we keep going, apathetic. No one gave him a second look,' he said.


[..]Yishai-Karin, in an interview with Haaretz, described how her research came out of her own experience as a soldier at an army base in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. She interviewed 18 ordinary soldiers and three officers whom she had served with in Gaza.


[..]Yishai-Karin concluded that the main reason for the soldiers' violence was a lack of training. She found that the soldiers did not know what was expected of them and therefore were free to develop their own way of behaviour. The longer a unit was left in the field, the more violent it became. The Israeli soldiers, she concluded, had a level of violence which is universal across all nations and cultures. If they are allowed to operate in difficult circumstances, such as in Gaza and the West Bank, without training and proper supervision, the violence is bound to come out.


A spokeswoman for the Israeli army said that, if a soldier deviates from the army's norms, they could be investigated by the military police or face criminal investigation.


She said: 'It should be noted that since the events described in Nufar Yishai-Karin's research the number of ethical violations by IDF soldiers involving the Palestinian population has consistently dropped. This trend has continued in the last few years.'

This is the usual response from the military establishment, training will prevent another atrocity. But train as they must, atrocities keep happening.
Juan Cole has another common perspective in his blog Informed Comment.

The idea that these sorts of actions derive from 'lack of training' is absurd. They derive from hatred and from being able to act with impunity. They are a burden of the strong who have the opportunity to abuse the weak.

While it may be true that dominance and absolute power breeds atrocities. Islamic Jihadis have hardly experienced dominance in their home culture, they are not immune to atrocity. No, atrocity is fundamental to war, as much as killing is. Anything hard we do a lot of, we are strongly motivated to do it more efficiently. Atrocity is just efficient killing or terrorizing one's enemy. It goes hand in hand with war. It's war's dirty little secret.

Papal Meddling in Politics: Voting, Abortion, and Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion

Papal Letter

• Regarding the grave sin of abortion or euthanasia, when a person’s formal cooperation becomes manifest (understood, in the case of a Catholic politician, as his consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws), his Pastor should meet with him, instructing him about the Church’s teaching, informing him that he is not to present himself for Holy Communion until he brings to an end the objective situation of sin, and warning him that he will otherwise be denied the Eucharist.


• When "these precautionary measures have not had their effect or in which they were not possible," and the person in question, with obstinate persistence, still presents himself to receive the Holy Eucharist, "the minister of Holy Communion must refuse to distribute it" (cf. Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts Declaration "Holy Communion and Divorced, Civilly Remarried Catholics" [2002], nos. 3-4). This decision, properly speaking, is not a sanction or a penalty. Nor is the minister of Holy Communion passing judgment on the person’s subjective guilt, but rather is reacting to the person’s public unworthiness to receive Holy Communion due to an objective situation of sin.


• A Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate’s permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia. When a Catholic does not share a candidate’s stand in favour of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.

Building God's (Christian) Army

AlterNet

At Speicher base in Iraq, U.S. Army Spec. Jeremy Hall got permission from a chaplain in August to post fliers announcing a meeting for atheists and other nonbelievers. When the group gathered, Specialist Hall alleges, his Army major supervisor disrupted the meeting and threatened to retaliate against him, including blocking his reenlistment in the Army.


Months earlier, Hall charges, he had been publicly berated by a staff sergeant for not agreeing to join in a Thanksgiving Day prayer.


On Sept. 17, the soldier and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) filed suit against Army Maj. Freddy Welborn and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, charging violations of Hall's constitutional rights, including being forced to submit to a religious test to qualify as a soldier.


The MRFF plans more lawsuits in coming weeks, says Michael "Mikey" Weinstein, who founded the military watchdog group in 2005. The aim is "to show there is a pattern and practice of constitutionally impermissible promotions of religious beliefs within the Department of Defense."


For Mr. Weinstein -- a former Air Force judge advocate and assistant counsel in the Reagan White House -- more is involved than isolated cases of discrimination. He charges that several incidents in recent years -- and more than 5,000 complaints his group has received from active-duty and retired military personnel -- point to a growing willingness inside the military to support a particular brand of Christianity and to permit improper evangelizing in the ranks. More than 95 percent of those complaints come from other Christians, he says.

Richard Bruce Cheney, the country's most notorious traitor

Informed Comment

What is clear is that Dick Cheney's desperate bid to grab Iraq for US petroleum corporations and for proprietary contracts to supply the US is backfiring big time. Instead of reducing the importance of Saudi Arabia, Cheney and the Neocons have magnified it. Instead of bringing online a big new supplier (Iraq) they have actually reduced the average production from Iraq as compared to the days of the UN sanctions on Saddam! Instead of assuring the US position as a superpower by assuring it special access to Gulf petroleum through military means, Cheney and his friends have destabilized the key energy-producing regions of the world and are driving some producers to deliberately seek proprietary contracts with China s so as to avoid over-dependence on an overbearing US that openly announces it would like to overthrow their governments. (I'm thinking of Venezuela here; with tweaking the same thing could be said of Iran).


Cheney's militarism is too blunt an instrument for the delicate job of assuring US energy security. Nearly $90 a barrel is not security for us-- it is a threat to our economy. Prices may not stay this high all that long in the short term, since primary commodity markets to fluctuate. But as the peak oil people point out, no new big fields have been found or exploited for a very long time, and demand from China, India and elsewhere is growing rapidly. It is going to be an expensive or cold winter for a lot of Americans. It likely won't be the last. Courtesy in some part, the short-sighted and counter-productive policies of one of the country's most notorious traitors, Richard Bruce Cheney.

Nuclear-armed Iran risks 'World War III,' Bush says

Clearly Bush is frustrated he's been unable to raise the ire against Iran to get authorization to attack them. But now he says something incredibly stupid to attempt to stir a war fever out of pure fear.
So is Bush suggesting he's willing to annihilate human kind if Iran gets the bomb? Or is he willing to allow the conflict to escalate to that point? Certainly, he is threatening first use of nuclear weapons for it is clear that Iran is not stupid. They'd never use nukes first, only as a deterrent. A nuclear war is the only war that would endanger Iran as it stands. A bombing campaign might mess up the infrastructure, but most of the population would be unaffected except to rally to support their less than popular government with nationalistic fervor that has yet to be stoked. The drop in oil production would send the US and world into a recession or worse.
Who is he intimidating? Only people who don't understand will be stirred by his words.
International Herald Tribune

President George W. Bush said Wednesday that he thought Russia still wanted to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. But stepping up his own rhetoric, the president warned that for Tehran to possess such a weapon raised the risk of a "World War III."


That comment, made during a 45-minute news conference, came as reporters probed for the president's reaction to a warning Tuesday by President Vladimir Putin of Russia against any military strikes on Iran to halt the nuclear work it has continued in defiance of much of the world. Iran says the program is purely peaceful.

Bill Maher on Neocon Think Tanks

Thanks to PoliticsPlus

Pentagon Is Using the FBI to Spy on Americans

AlterNet
The Department of Defense has conspired with the FBI to "circumvent the law" in accessing hundreds of Americans' telephone, e-mail and financial records, say two civil liberties groups that released reams of new documents obtained in a contested public records request.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which has challenged the Bush Administration's post-Sept. 11 spying authority, says the Pentagon has issued 455 National Security Letters in concert with the FBI to obtain Americans' private information it is not entitled to receive.
"The documents make clear that the Department of Defense may have secretly and illegally conducted surveillance beyond the powers it was granted by Congress," ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said. "It also appears as if the FBI is serving as a lackey for the DoD in misusing the Patriot Act powers. At the very least, it certainly looks like the FBI and DoD are conspiring to evade limits placed on the Department of Defense's surveillance powers."
The 455 letters were issued to investigate potential terror threats posed by people directly connected to the Defense Department, including civilian employees, contractors, active duty troops, reservists and their families, military officials told the New York Times.
Recipients of the letters -- usually financial institutions, telephone companies or internet service providers -- are prohibited from disclosing that they received them, the ACLU says. And although the Pentagon-issued letter do not require cooperation, those from the FBI are mandatory, records show that the letters are coercive and unclear that compliance to Defense-issued letters is voluntary.
"The expanded role of the military in domestic intelligence gathering is troubling. These documents reveal that the military is gaining access to records here in the U.S. – in secret and without any meaningful oversight," said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project. "There are real concerns about the use of this intrusive surveillance power."

Hands off Iran, Putin Warns U.S.

ABC News has a report of an ominous sign of the growing renewed Cold War between Russia and the US. Putin apparently allies himself with Iran and warns the US and any former Soviet state from conspiring against Iran.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin met his Iranian counterpart Tuesday and implicitly warned the U.S. not to use a former Soviet republic to stage an attack on Iran. He also said countries bordering the Caspian Sea must jointly back any oil pipeline projects in the region.


At a summit of the five nations that border the inland Caspian Sea, Putin said none of the nations' territory should be used by any outside countries for use of military force against any nation in the region. It was a clear reference to long-standing rumors that the U.S. was planning to use Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic, as a staging ground for any possible military action against Iran.


"We are saying that no Caspian nation should offer its territory to third powers for use of force or military aggression against any Caspian state," Putin said.


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also underlined the need for solidarity.


"The Caspian Sea is an inland sea and it only belongs to the Caspian states, therefore only they are entitled to have their ships and military forces here," he said.

China Warns U.S. on Dalai Lama Award

Some might ask why would China care about a tiny country of Tibet, a seemingly harmless pacifistic guy called Dalai Lama and a bunch of 15 year old boys? The Dalai Lama is seen as the spiritual leader of many Buddhists around the world. Those Buddhists make up a large proportion of China's restive population. China is a totalitarian state because those in power don't believe they can hold together China as a democracy. It seems likely that all the diverse cultures of China would rebel and fracture the state along the lines of the Soviet Union. China's leadership sees it's strength and future in a united China. It's population is concerned about mundane things like food and shelter.
They see the Dalai Lama and his successor as a potent key in the future subjugation of it's Buddhist population.
New York Times

Chinese officials warned the United States not to honor the Dalai Lama, saying a planned award ceremony for the Tibetan spiritual leader would have “an extremely serious impact” on relations between the two countries.


Speaking at a Foreign Ministry briefing and on the sidelines of the Communist Party’s ongoing 17th National Congress, the officials condemned the Dalai Lama as a resolute separatist and said foreign leaders must stop encouraging his “splittist” mission.


“Such a person who basely splits his motherland and doesn’t even love his motherland has been welcomed by some countries and has even been receiving this or that award,” Tibet’s Communist Party boss, Zhang Qingli, told reporters during the congress.


“We are furious,” Mr. Zhang said. “If the Dalai Lama can receive such an award, there must be no justice or good people in the world.”


The Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile since the Chinese army crushed an uprising in his homeland in 1959, is revered as the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate is scheduled to receive the Congressional Gold Medal on Wednesday after President Bush hosts him at the White House today.


China has pressed the United States to cancel the award event for months. Foreign Ministry Spokesman Liu Jianchao said today that Beijing was “strong dissatisfied” and warned of an “extremely serious impact” if the events are held as scheduled. But he did not say what steps China planned to take.


[..]Ethnic tensions have risen in Tibet in recent months, prompting tough police action.


Rights groups said a group of Tibetan boys were detained in the northwestern province of Gansu last month after they were accused of scribbling slogans on walls calling for the Dalai Lama’s return.


Four of the boys, all 15 years old, were still in detention. Police had used electric prods on them and were demanding payment for their release, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say.

Strange Bedfellows in Iraq

It continues to amaze me that the Bush Administration could think they could control events in Iraq while dealing with an Iraqi government dominated by allies of Iran and handmaidens with the organization that inspired Hezbollah, the Islamic Dawa Party led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Clearly, there was never hope the US would benefit from a Shia revolution in Iraq.
Informed Comment

Ammar al-Hakim, who has been acting head of ISCI in his father's absence, preached a sermon in which he pledged to work against enduring US bases in Iraq. (On December 4, 2006, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim stood next to Bush in the Rose Garden and asked for US troops to remain in Iraq, so this pronouncement seems to be the beginnings of a reversal). Al-Hakim also argued for forging ahead with a Shiite provincial confederation in the south. He argued for a complete return of sovereignty to Iraq, according to AFP.


You have to wonder whether the recent Iran-brokered pact between al-Hakim and Muqtada al-Sadr, plus the new ISCI / Sistani consensus on reining in the US military and ultimately pushing it out altogether are a sign of new Iranian and Iraqi Shiite strategizing about the future. It also seems to me that the constant US drumbeat against Iran may have alarmed the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which is an Iranian client and which needs Iranian money and support to maintain its political position in Iraq. Iran is therefore working to position ISCI as anti-Occupation over the medium to long run, and as responsible and orderly (thus the pact with Sadr.)


[...](It is ironic that the US government is currently waging a campaign against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, but is turning southern Iraq over to groups like the Badr Corps, which was trained by . . . the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.)

NSA Retaliated After CEO Refused to Turn Over Phone Records; Now He's Facing Jail

What isn't clear is whether his prosecution was related to his refusal to play ball with the NSA. But certainly the implication is there. Read on:
Free Press

The National Security Agency and other government agencies retaliated against Qwest because the Denver telco refused to go along with a phone spying program, documents released Wednesday suggest.


The documents indicate that likely would have been at the heart of former CEO Joe Nacchio’s so-called “classified information” defense at his insider trading trial, had he been allowed to present it.


The secret contracts — worth hundreds of millions of dollars — made Nacchio optimistic about Qwest’s future, even as his staff was warning him the company might not make its numbers, Nacchio’s defense attorneys have maintained. But Nacchio didn’t present that argument at trial.


The documents suggest U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham refused to allow Nacchio to present the argument about retaliation. Nottingham also said Nacchio would have to take the stand to raise the classified defense.


Prosecutors have said they were prepared to poke holes in Nacchio’s classified defense.


Nacchio was convicted last spring on 19 counts of insider trading for $52 million of stock sales in April and May 2001, and sentenced to six years in prison. He’s free pending appeal.


The partially redacted documents were filed under seal before, during and after Nacchio’s trial. They were released Wednesday.


Nacchio planned to demonstrate at trial that he had a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., to discuss a $100 million project. According to the documents, another topic also was discussed at that meeting, one with which Nacchio refused to comply.


The topic itself is redacted each time it appears in the hundreds of pages of documents, but there is mention of Nacchio believing the request was both inappropriate and illegal, and repeatedly refusing to go along with it.


The NSA contract was awarded in July 2001 to companies other than Qwest.


USA Today reported in May 2006 that Qwest, unlike AT&T and Verizon, balked at helping the NSA track phone calling patterns that may have indicated terrorist organizational activities. Nacchio’s attorney, Herbert Stern, confirmed that Nacchio refused to turn over customer telephone records because he didn’t think the NSA program had legal standing.


In the documents, Nacchio also asserts Qwest was in line to build a $2 billion private government network called GovNet and do other government business, including a network between the U.S. and South America.


The documents maintain that Nacchio met with top government officials, including President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice in 2000 and early 2001 to discuss how to protect the government’s communications network.


They portray U.S. government officials, even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, worried about a “Pearl Harbor” type of attack on the Internet. As early as 1997, a three-star general talked to Nacchio about using Qwest’s new fiber-optic network for government purposes, according to the defense.


One key meeting with a government official was held at Qwest founder Phil Anschutz’s ranch near Greeley, with former Chief Financial Officer Robin Szeliga prevented from attending presumably because she lacked security clearance.


Nacchio was on a Bush-appointed national security telecommunications advisory panel. In March 2001, then-counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke asked the panel if it would be possible to build a private network for the government to protect it from cyberwarfare.


Nacchio piped up: “I already built this network twice” for other government agencies. The defense asserts Nacchio believed Qwest would be asked to build the network and that it could do so in six months.


But the contract didn’t materialize.

Retired General Sanchez Blasts Bush Administration; Sistani Blasts Occupiers

Informed Comment

Retired Gen. Rick Sanchez lambasted the Bush administration's Iraq War in a speech on Friday, as "a nightmare with no end in sight". Sanchez implied that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would have been court-martialled if he had been in the active duty military. The NYT reports him saying, '“There was been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders,” he said, adding later in his remarks that civilian officials have been “derelict in their duties” and guilty of a “lust for power.” ' Sanchez dismissed the current troop escalation ('surge') as highly unlikely to improve the situation in Iraq significantly, saying that the best the US can realistically hope to achieve is to stave off defeat.


To Sanchez's trenchant critique was added on Friday a fatwa from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiites. AFP says,

The foreign security companies working in Iraq belittle innocent Iraqi citizens," a statement from Karbalai said. "The occupying forces do the same in some of their operations, adding to the criminal acts of the takfiris (Sunni militants).

Sistani is said to be demanding legislation in parliament to hold the security companies accountable. In addition, this is the strongest condemnation I have seen by Sistani of the US military ('the occupying forces') and it may be a turning point.

Victims of Bridge Disaster Say, "You've Forgotten Us!"

While politicians debate and posture about culpability and new bridge design, the real problem festers.
StarTribune.com

Kimberly Brown, a passenger in a car on the way to a soccer game, and other survivors who went down with the Interstate 35W bridge say their needs are being forgotten.


[..]Brown said in an interview Thursday evening that she wants leaders to set aside blame and help people simply because they need it. She said she wants survivors to recoup what they're losing because of the collapse.


"I want these innocent people ... taken care of by the entities that were in charge, or partially in charge, of that bridge," she wrote in her letter. "And not just today, but months and years from now.
"It's time to slow down and back up," she wrote. "Your new bridge is going up too fast. You still have a huge mess from the old one. Fix this."

Cheney-Bush: Given the influence to match their ambition they will wreck the planet

Electric Politics | EP Podcast

In the 18th century elites predominated among the politically active. So it was natural for the founding fathers to worry mainly about faction while blissfully overlooking fanaticism or the problems of followership. Given the 20th century experience with authoritarian rule one wonders, however, whether contemporary government structures or ideas about democracy suffice. Clearly, for exactly the wrong reasons, the Cheney-Bush administration thinks not. We really must get into the details of who's doing what to us (and why) if we wish to avoid terminal difficulties. For that I turn to a pioneer in the study of authoritarianism, Dr. Bob Altemeyer, who frames the problem in an accessible way — please see his recent e-book (PDF) — yet communicates a most vexing, profound message: a small, energetic, organized minority that's impervious to reason will always do harm to everybody else. Given the influence to match their ambition they will wreck the planet. It's a critically important insight. The question (for which I don't have an answer) should be what to do about them. Total runtime here of an hour and forty two minutes. Please think carefully about this one and redistribute widely.
Download

Big names withdraw from Michigan primary - Florida Convention is Cancelled!

There is no excuse for this. DNC, get your act together!! There are more important issues than primary dates!
Los Angeles Times

What if a state held a presidential primary election and nobody came? Michigan may be about to find out.


Half of the Democratic presidential candidates withdrew from Michigan's Jan. 15 primary Tuesday, leaving Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York as the only top-tier candidate still on the ballot and effectively ending Michigan's hopes of cutting in near the head of the primary lineup.


[..]Currently, the Iowa caucuses are set for Jan. 14 and the Nevada caucuses for Jan. 19. The Democratic National Committee has recommended that New Hampshire hold its primary Jan. 22, and the South Carolina primary is scheduled for Jan. 29. But all of those dates are in flux.


The state Democratic parties in Michigan and Florida decided to flout DNC rules that allowed only Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina to hold a presidential primary or caucus before Feb. 5.


Republicans are facing a similar revolt but none of the GOP candidates asked to be dropped from the Michigan ballot, said Kelly Chesney, spokeswoman for the Michigan secretary of state.

China and Taiwan flex military muscles

Ominous sounds from the China Sea.
International Herald Tribune

China has blanketed its territory with air defense radar that almost matches the performance of similar networks in developed countries, state media reported Wednesday, as its rival Taiwan held its first National Day military parade in 16 years.


A senior officer from Chinese Air Force headquarters, Fang Lei, said a seamless network of all-weather air defense radars had been installed to cover all Chinese airspace, according to a report on the Web site of the official military newspaper, the Liberation Army Daily. The network's detection and surveillance capability was "very close" to those deployed in developed countries and could also assist Chinese forces in offensive operations, the report quoted Fang as saying.


The development of a high-performance air defense system to complement China's increasingly potent force of surface-to-air missiles and jet fighter interceptors has been a top priority for the People's Liberation Army, military experts say.


Senior Taiwanese and U.S. military officers have acknowledged the improvement in Chinese air defenses as a significant indication of the country's rapid military modernization.


This system is a direct challenge for self-governing Taiwan as it seeks to counter the mainland's growing military power. China regards the democratic island as part of its territory and has threatened to use force under a range of circumstances, including a formal declaration of independence by the government in Taipei.


In a televised National Day speech Wednesday, Taiwan's pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bian, called on the international community to demand that China withdraw its missiles aimed at the island and halt threatening military exercises.


He also called on China to follow Taiwan's example and adopt democracy.


"We believe that only through China's democratic awakening can there be lasting peace in the world," he said.


Tensions between the two sides have been mounting over the determination of Chen and his governing Democratic Progressive Party to press ahead with a public referendum on the island's bid to enter the United Nations under the name of Taiwan rather than its official title, the Republic of China.


Senior Chinese officials have condemned the referendum as a step toward independence and warned of dangerous consequences for Taiwan.


Chen's decision to revive the traditional military parade, on the day that commemorates the 1911 overthrow of China's last imperial dynasty, was an attempt to draw attention to the threat facing Taiwan, analysts said.


It was also aimed at galvanizing support for the ruling party ahead of legislative and presidential elections next year.


[..]In 1991, Taiwan's ruling Kuomintang party halted the parades in an effort to placate Beijing.


As part of its military response to China's buildup, Taiwan has developed a long-range, land-attack cruise missile with sufficient range to strike targets as far away as Shanghai.


There had been speculation that this missile would be paraded Wednesday alongside Taiwan's other advanced hardware, but officials in Taipei said early this week that the weapon was still under development and would not go on display.


China has yet to react to Taiwan's plan, but the Bush administration has said it is opposed to offensive missiles on either side of the Taiwan Strait.


Most analysts expect Taiwan to continue development of the missile, which would have a payload of 400 kilograms, or 882 pounds, and a range of up to 1,000 kilometers, or 621 miles, according to defense analysts and reports in military journals.


Up to 500 of the missiles could be deployed on mobile launchers on Taiwan and on the island's warships, analysts said.


China had about 900 short-range ballistic missiles deployed opposite Taiwan up to the end of last year, according to the Pentagon's annual report on China's military published in May.


"Defense means we should be able to strike back, at least taking out their military targets to prevent second or third wave attacks at least," said Lai I-chung, director of the Democratic Progressive Party's Department of International Affairs. "Missiles are relatively easy and cheap and will help us meet this need."


Lai added that Washington had been unable to persuade China to abandon its military buildup.


Until the early 1990s, when China's military hardware was largely obsolete by Western standards, Taiwan's more advanced strike aircraft could be expected to carry out that role.


But analysts in Taiwan say that the island's U.S.- and French-made strike aircraft could no longer be assured of penetrating China's air defenses.


In addition to sophisticated surface-to-air missiles, the Chinese Air Force now has hundreds of advanced Russian-designed fighters.


And earlier this year, China unveiled a locally developed fighter that compares favorably with its current Western counterparts, according to military specialists.


As the military balance shifted in China's favor, it was difficult for people in Taiwan to accept the Bush administration's opposition to the new missile, he said. Senior defense officials in Taiwan have argued for decades that the island needs to have the capability to strike targets in China.


China's arms buildup could also pose challenges to the United States if it is drawn into a conflict with Beijing over Taiwan. The commander of American forces in Japan, Lieutenant General Bruce Wright, told The Associated Press earlier this month that China's air defenses were now almost impenetrable to the U.S. F-15 and F-16 aircraft stationed in Asia.

Israeli Plays Bait and Switch on the West Bank

Yesterday
the London Times On-Line reported that Israeli Deputy Prime Minister said Israel is willing to hand over Arab east Jerusalem to the Palestinians as part of a new peace initiative. Today, we see that was an empty pledge because Israel is stealing more Arab land outside E. Jerusalem.
The Israelis aren't interested in peace without subjugating the Palestinians. This is a big win for Hamas. They can tell those loyal to Fatah that Abu Masen can't bring them a just peace.
The Daily Star

Israel has ordered the confiscation of Arab land outside East Jerusalem, officials said Tuesday, reviving fears that the Occupied West Bank could be split in two and challenging peace overtures. The appropriation orders come with Israelis and Palestinians preparing for a US-sponsored peace summit widely expected near Washington next month, and were immediately criticized by Arab authorities.


Hassan Abed Rabbo at the Palestinian Local Government Ministry said the late September order covers 110 hectares in four Palestinian villages between East Jerusalem and the Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim.


The land could create a bloc of settlements incorporating Maale Adumim and nearby Mishor Adumim and Kedar, he said, and "prevent Palestinian territorial continuity" between the West Bank and the Jordan Valley.


"They have usurped dozens of hectares of West Bank land for their greater Jerusalem settlement project that takes in Maale Adumim," Abed Rabbo added.


The Israeli Army orders given to landowners, a copy of which was seen by AFP, sought to justify the expropriation on "military grounds" and for "measures designed to stop terrorist acts."

Why Dems and Republicans Bow to the Israel Lobby

This has been needed to be said for a long time. Jimmy Carter has said it to a chorus of boos from the Israeli lobby. The authors of this book make a good start in their Introduction excerpted here:
AlterNet

[In the introduction of their best-selling new book, The Israel Lobby, the authors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, explain why they think Israel is such a touchy subject.]


Why is there so little disagreement among these presidential hopefuls regarding Israel, when there are profound disagreements among them on almost every other important issue facing the United States and when it is apparent that America's Middle East policy has gone badly awry? Why does Israel get a free pass from presidential candidates, when its own citizens are often deeply critical of its present policies and when these same presidential candidates are all too willing to criticize many of the things that other countries do? Why does Israel, and no other country in the world, receive such consistent deference from America's leading politicians?


Some might say that it is because Israel is a vital strategic asset for the United States. Indeed, it is said to be an indispensable partner in the "war on terror." Others will answer that there is a powerful moral case for providing Israel with unqualified support, because it is the only country in the region that "shares our values." But neither of these arguments stands up to fair-minded scrutiny. Washington's close relationship with Jerusalem makes it harder, not easier, to defeat the terrorists who are now targeting the United States, and it simultaneously undermines America's standing with important allies around the world. Now that the Cold War is over, Israel has become a strategic liability for the United States. Yet no aspiring politician is going to say so in public, or even raise the possibility.


There is also no compelling moral rationale for America's uncritical and uncompromising relationship with Israel. There is a strong moral case for Israel's existence and there are good reasons for the United States to be committed to helping Israel if its survival is in jeopardy. But given Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, moral considerations might suggest that the United States pursue a more evenhanded policy toward the two sides, and maybe even lean toward the Palestinians.


Yet we are unlikely to hear that sentiment expressed by anyone who wants to be president, or anyone who would like to occupy a position in Congress. The real reason why American politicians are so deferential is the political power of the Israel lobby. The lobby is a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively works to move U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. As we will describe in detail, it is not a single, unified movement with a central leadership, and it is certainly not a cabal or conspiracy that "controls" U.S. foreign policy. It is simply a powerful interest group, made up of both Jews and gentiles, whose acknowledged purpose is to press Israel's case within the United States and influence American foreign policy in ways that its members believe will benefit the Jewish state. The various groups that make up the lobby do not agree on every issue, although they share the desire to promote a special relationship between the United States and Israel. Like the efforts of other ethnic lobbies and interest groups, the activities of the Israel lobby's various elements are legitimate forms of democratic political participation, and they are for the most part consistent with America's long tradition of interest group activity.


Because the Israel lobby has gradually become one of the most powerful interest groups in the United States, candidates for high office pay close attention to its wishes. The individuals and groups in the United States that make up the lobby care deeply about Israel, and they do not want American politicians to criticize it, even when criticism might be warranted and might even be in Israel's own interest. Instead, these groups want U.S. leaders to treat Israel as if it were the fifty-first state. Democrats and Republicans alike fear the lobby's clout. They all know that any politician who challenges its policies stands little chance of becoming president.


[..]Many policies pursued on Israel's behalf now jeopardize U.S. national security. The combination of unstinting U.S. support for Israel and Israel's prolonged occupation of Palestinian territory has fueled anti-Americanism throughout the Arab and Islamic world, thereby increasing the threat from international terrorism and making it harder for Washington to deal with other problems, such as shutting down Iran's nuclear program. Because the United States is now so unpopular within the broader region, Arab leaders who might otherwise share U.S. goals are reluctant to help us openly, a predicament that cripples U.S. efforts to deal with a host of regional challenges. This situation, which has no equal in American history, is due primarily to the activities of the Israel lobby. While other special interest groups -- including ethnic lobbies representing Cuban Americans, Irish Americans, Armenian Americans, and Indian Americans -- have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions that they favored, no ethnic lobby has diverted that policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest. The Israel lobby has successfully convinced many Americans that American and Israeli interests are essentially identical. In fact, they are not. Although this book focuses primarily on the lobby's influence on U.S. foreign policy and its negative effect on American interests, the lobby's impact has been unintentionally harmful to Israel as well. Take Israel's settlements, which even a writer as sympathetic to Israel as Leon Wieseltier recently called a "moral and strategic blunder of historic proportions."


[..]Yet despite the lobby's efforts, a considerable number of Americans -- almost 40 percent -- recognize that U.S. support for Israel is one of the main causes of anti-Americanism around the world. Among elites, the number is substantially higher. Furthermore, a surprising number of Americans understand that the lobby has a significant, not always positive influence on U.S. foreign policy. In a national poll taken in October 2006, 39 percent of the respondents said that they believe that the "work of the Israeli lobby on Congress and the Bush administration has been a key factor for going to war in Iraq and now confronting Iran." In a 2006 survey of international relations scholars in the United States, 66 percent of the respondents said that they agreed with the statement "the Israel lobby has too much influence over U.S. foreign policy." While the American people are generally sympathetic to Israel, many of them are critical of particular Israeli policies and would be willing to withhold American aid if Israel's actions are seen to be contrary to U.S. interests.


Of course, the American public would be even more aware of the lobby's influence and more tough-minded with regard to Israel and its special relationship with the United States if there were a more open discussion of these matters. Still, one might wonder why, given the public's views about the lobby and Israel, politicians and policy makers are so unwilling to criticize Israel and to make aid to Israel conditional on whether its actions benefit the United States. The American people are certainly not demanding that their politicians support Israel down the line. In essence, there is a distinct gulf between how the broader public thinks about Israel and its relationship with the United States and how governing elites in Washington conduct American policy.


Any discussion of Jewish political power takes place in the shadow of two thousand years of history, especially the centuries of very real anti-Semitism in Europe. Christians massacred thousands of Jews during the Crusades, expelled them en masse from Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and other places between 1290 and 1497, and confined them to ghettos in other parts of Europe. Jews were violently oppressed during the Spanish Inquisition, murderous pogroms took place in Eastern Europe and Russia on numerous occasions, and other forms of anti-Semitic bigotry were wide spread until recently. This shameful record culminated in the Nazi Holocaust, which killed nearly six million Jews. Jews were also oppressed in parts of the Arab world, though much less severely.


Given this long history of persecution, American Jews are understandably sensitive to any argument that sounds like someone is blaming them for policies gone awry. This sensitivity is compounded by the memory of bizarre conspiracy theories of the sort laid out in the Protocols. Dire warnings of secretive "Jewish influence" remain a staple of neo-Nazis and other extremists, such as the hate-mongering former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, which reinforces Jewish concerns even more.


A key element of such anti-Semitic accusations is the claim that Jews exercise illegitimate influence by "controlling" banks, the media, and other key institutions. Thus, if someone says that press coverage in the United States tends to favor Israel over its opponents, this may sound to some like the old canard that "Jews control the media." Similarly, if someone points out that American Jews have a rich tradition of giving money to both philanthropic and political causes, it sounds like they are suggesting that "Jewish money" is buying political influence in an underhanded or conspiratorial way. Of course, anyone who gives money to a political campaign does so in order to advance some political cause, and virtually all interest groups hope to mold public opinion and are interested in getting favorable media coverage.


Evaluating the role of any interest group's campaign contributions, lobbying efforts, and other political activities ought to be a fairly uncontroversial exercise, but given past anti-Semitism, one can understand why it is easier to talk about these matters when discussing the impact of the pharmaceutical lobby, labor unions, arms manufacturers, Indian-American groups, etc., rather than the Israel lobby. Making this discussion of pro-Israel groups and individuals in the United States even more difficult is the age-old charge of "dual loyalty." According to this old canard, Jews in the diaspora were perpetual aliens who could never assimilate and be good patriots, because they were more loyal to each other than to the country in which they lived. The fear today is that Jews who support Israel will be seen as disloyal Americans. As Hyman Bookbinder, the former Washington representative of the American Jewish Committee, once commented, "Jews react viscerally to the suggestion that there is something unpatriotic" about their support for Israel.


Let us be clear: we categorically reject all of these anti-Semitic claims. In our view, it is perfectly legitimate for any American to have a significant attachment to a foreign country. Indeed, Americans are permitted to hold dual citizenship and to serve in foreign armies, unless, of course, the other country is at war with the United States. As noted above, there are numerous examples of ethnic groups in America working hard to persuade the U.S. government, as well as their fellow citizens, to support the foreign country for which they feel a powerful bond. Foreign governments are usually aware of the activities of sympathetic ethnically based interest groups, and they have naturally sought to use them to influence the U.S. government and advance their own foreign policy goals. Jewish Americans are no different from their fellow citizens in this regard. MORE

Blackwater is Mayhem on Wheels

Here is one of the reasons we've lost the war in Iraq. US mercenaries behaved with total disregard of Iraqi lives.
AlterNet

When I read this editorial by Janessa Gans in my L.A. Times yesterday, my mouth dropped open. Gans, a visiting political science professor at Principia College, was a U.S. official in Iraq from 2003 to 2005. She's not a big Blackwater fan:

As a U.S. official in Baghdad for nearly two years, I was frequently the "beneficiary" of Blackwater's over-the-top zeal. "Just pretend it's a roller coaster," I used to tell myself during trips through downtown Baghdad.


We would careen around corners, jump road dividers, reach speeds in excess of 100 mph and often cross over to the wrong side of the street, oncoming traffic be damned.


I began to wonder whether my meetings, intended to further U.S. policy goals and improve the lives of Iraqis, were doing more harm than good. With our drivers honking at, cutting off, pelting with water bottles (a favorite tactic) and menacing with weapons anyone in their way, how many enemies were we creating?


We were on a narrow stretch of highway with no shoulders and foot-high barriers on both sides. The lead Suburban in our convoy loomed up behind an old, puttering sedan driven by an older man with a young woman and three children.


As we approached at typical breakneck speed, the Blackwater driver honked furiously and motioned to the side, as if they should pull over. The kids in the back seat looked back in horror, mouths agape at the sight of the heavily armored Suburbans driven by large, armed men in dark sunglasses. The poor Iraqi driver frantically searched for a means of escape, but there was none. So the lead Blackwater vehicle smashed heedlessly into the car, pushing it into the barrier. We zoomed by too quickly to notice if anyone was hurt. "Where do you all expect them to go?" I shrieked. "It was an old guy and a family, for goodness' sake. Was it necessary for them to destroy their poor old car?"


My driver responded impassively: "Ma'am, we've been trained to view anyone as a potential threat. You don't know who they might use as decoys or what the risks are. Terrorists could be disguised as anyone."


"Well, if they weren't terrorists before, they certainly are now!" I retorted. Sulking in my seat, I was stunned by the driver's indifference.


The military has established rules of engagement, plus it is required to pay compensation for damages (though it is a difficult and bureaucratic process). Blackwater seemed to have no such rules, paid no compensation and, per long-standing Coalition Provisional Authority fiat, had immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law.


I've said it before, and I'll say it again: This is what BushCo has created. And to repeat what Clive Stafford Smith said, "The immoral has become so mundane."

And warnings from US officials were ignored.
Los Angeles Times

The State Department, which is facing growing criticism of its policy on private security contractors, overlooked repeated warnings from U.S. diplomats in the field that guards were endangering Iraqi civilians and undermining U.S. efforts to win support from the population, according to current and former U.S. officials.


Ever since the contractors were granted immunity from Iraqi courts in June 2004 by the U.S.-led occupation authority, diplomats have cautioned that the decision to do so was "a bomb that could go off at any time," said one former U.S. official.


But State Department leadership, unable to field U.S. troops or in-house personnel to guard its team, has clung to an approach that shielded the contractors from criminal liability, in the hope of ensuring continued protection to operate in the violent countryside.

Iraqi Gov't Plans Prosecution of Whiste-blower Judge

An Iraqi Government Judge charged with finding corruption is being charged with defaming the Prime Minister. It seems he found corruption so pervasive, his report to the US Congress implied al-Maliki has tolerated official corruption. al-Maliki has come up with a Busharian solution: prosecute the whistle-blower.
The Daily Star

Iraq's government announced Sunday it will take legal action against Judge Radhi al-Radhi, the former head of an anti-corruption committee who told US lawmakers this week that rampant graft is blocking progress in Iraq. "The government will sue the former head of the Commission on Public Integrity [CPI] for smuggling official documents and for defaming the prime minister," Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's office said in a statement. "We will work on getting him back to Iraq to submit him to the judiciary to investigate administrative and financial corruption charges against him." Radhi and a group of colleagues headed to Washington in August to undergo training with the US Justice Department. Maliki at the time accused him of fleeing the country to avoid being tried on graft charges and replaced him as head of the CPI, a position he had held since 2004, by Moussa Faraj. Radhi denies the graft allegations or that he has fled, saying he intends to return to Iraq once his training course is over and still regards himself as head of the CPI. He told the US Congress on Thursday that corruption was affecting virtually every ministry and that some of the most powerful officials in Iraq are implicated. He estimated that corruption has cost Iraq as much as $18 billion and has helped spawn sectarian militias, hampered political reconciliation and affected Iraq's oil industry.

Tutu Excluded - Double Standard at the University of St. Thomas

Here is evidence of incredible hypocrisy from the Mpls's St. Thomas University. Ann Coulter who calls for killing Muslims who won't convert to Christianity can speak there, but Desmond Tutu can't. He has been falsely attributed to comparing Israelis treatment of Palestinians to the Nazi's treatment of the Jews. This apparently lead to his being uninvited.
What incredible hypocrisy demonstrated by one of our honored "Liberal Arts University"!
Informed Comment

Bishop Desmond Tutu has stood all his life for nonviolent peace-making and an end to racism. Obviously, he would be upset about the Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians, and has said so. For that stance he was uninvited from speaking at the Catholic University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis.


The "quote" attributed to Bishop Tutu supposedly comparing Israel to Hitler and Nazi Germany was completely made up by the Zionist Organization of American (which has a long history of such cult-like lying and smearing) and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency printed it without fact-checking.


The Israel lobby strikes again, limiting what can be heard in public in the United States about those policies of Israel that are contrary to basic human rights norms.


And here is the kicker. UST is guilty of a whopper of a double standard. Two years ago, the university allowed Ann Coulter to speak on its campus.


Ann Coulter once said of Muslims, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."


Coulter can speak at UST. But not Desmond Tutu.

Only a U.S. Withdrawal Will Stop Al Qaeda in Iraq

AlterNet

One of the last justifications for continuing the U.S. occupation of Iraq despite overwhelming opposition from Iraqis, Americans and the rest of humanity has come down to this: U.S. forces must remain in order to battle "Al Qaeda in Iraq."


Like so many of the arguments presented in the United States, the idea is not only intellectually bankrupt, it's also the 180-degree opposite of reality. The truth of the matter is that only the presence of U.S. forces allows the group called "Al Qaeda in Iraq" (AQI) to survive and function, and setting a timetable for the occupation to end is the best way to beat them. You won't hear that perspective in Washington, but according to Iraqis with whom we spoke, it is the conventional wisdom in much of the country.


The Bush administration has made much of what it calls "progress" in the Sunni-dominated provinces of central Iraq. But when we spoke to leaders there, the message we got was very different from what supporters of a long-term occupation claim: Many Sunnis are, indeed, lined up against groups like AQI, but that doesn't mean they are "joining" with coalition forces or throwing their support behind the Iraqi government.


Several sources we reached in the Sunni community agreed that AQI, a predominantly Sunni insurgent group that did not exist prior to the U.S. invasion -- it started in 2005 -- will not exist for long after coalition forces depart. AQI is universally detested by large majorities of Iraqis of all ethnic and sectarian backgrounds because of its fundamentalist interpretation of religious law and efforts to set up a separate Sunni state, and its only support -- and it obviously does enjoy some support -- is based solely on its opposition to the deeply unpopular U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.


We spoke by phone with Qasim Al-jumaili, a former member of Falluja's City Council, who was confident that his local militias would eliminate Al Qaeda in Iraq from Fallujah if U.S. forces were to withdraw. "The U.S. presence is making our work harder," he said. "For example, the Anbar Salvation Front [the Sunni tribal leadership group that declared war against Al Qaeda in Iraq], is not getting a lot of public support because they think we're collaborating with the U.S. and the Al-Maliki government."


Al Jumaili was confident that Iraqis wouldn't tolerate Al Qaeda in Iraq's presence in an independent Iraq. "If the U.S. was to pull out from Iraq and let Iraqis have a national government instead of the puppet one now, Iraqis with their government and tribal leaders would quickly eliminate Al Qaeda from all Iraq," he said. It's a credible statement -- most estimates of the terror group's strength suggest its membership is in the low thousands, no match for the larger organized militias or the fledgling security forces without the support of some of the residents of the areas in which they operate.


[..]In July, three of the most prominent Sunni insurgent groups agreed to join forces in a concerted effort to end the occupation. Abd al Rahman al Zubeidy, a spokesman for one of the groups, told the Guardian: "Resistance isn't just about killing Americans without aims or goals. Our people have come to hate Al Qaeda, which gives the impression to the outside world that the resistance in Iraq are terrorists. We are against indiscriminate killing, fighting should be concentrated only on the enemy." He added that "a great gap has opened up between Sunni and Shia under the occupation and Al Qaeda has contributed to that … Most of Al Qaeda's members are Iraqis but its leaders are mostly foreigners. The Americans magnify their role, even though they are responsible for a minority of resistance operations."


The public opinion research shows that those views are shared by overwhelming majorities of ordinary Iraqis. All of Iraq's ethnic groups oppose Al Qaeda. They reject AQI's attacks on Iraqis, its harshly fundamentalist brand of Islam and its attempts to form a separate Sunni "caliphate" -- an independent theocratic state -- in central Iraq, but significant pluralities -- and a huge majority of Sunnis -- support AQI's attacks on occupation forces. A recent poll by the BBC found that almost half of all Iraqis backed AQI's attacks on coalition troops, but only one in 100 favored its larger separatist agenda (PDF).

Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations

New York Times

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations. But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.


The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures. Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.


Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.


The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.


Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics. MORE

PTSD a Factor in Blackwater Killings?

What is it about war does America not understand?
ABC News

Anyone who has spent more than a few months in Iraq is bound to have mental health issues," [an unidentified military contractor] said. "You put a bunch of jittery guys into a situation where everyone wants to bomb or kill Americans and that's a recipe for a really bad situation."

Supreme Court Judge Bought and Paid For by Murdoch

The Nation

The long-awaited publication of Clarence Thomas's memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," out Monday, makes you wonder: how come none of the presidential candidates have said a word about the Supreme Court in any of their debates? Three sitting justices are expected to resign in the next four years--and they're all on the liberal side: John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.


The publication facts behind Thomas's book ought to be discussed by all the candidates: he received an advance of $1.5 million in 2003 from HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. If you thought the Court dealt with any issues of relevance to Murdoch, you might call it a conflict of interest for Thomas to accept that payment--far more than any sitting justice ever received from any single source. At least you might mention the fabled "appearance of impropriety." You might call the $1.5 million a thank-you gift from Murdoch for services rendered. You might even wonder if it might be a subtle suggestion to other justices who will be ruling on Murdoch-related issues in the future.


Of course Thomas could avoid that "appearance of impropriety" by recusing himself for the rest of his career from any case raising issues concerning Murdoch, Fox, the First Amendment, copyright law, libel, or any other issues in media or communications law. That would give him a lot of time off.

ATT Demonstrates the Need for Net Neutrality

Scholars and Rogues

Slashdot broke the news on Saturday that AT&T's updated terms of service for its high-speed Internet packages essentially forbid you from criticizing the company on pain of cancellation. The full terms of service are here, and here's the offending passage highlighted, courtesy of Ars Technica:

AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.

This is the exact kind of overbroad legalese that gets companies in trouble in ways they probably never thought of. If I am an AT&T subscriber, for example, and I post derogatory comments about AT&T on a site they own, does this give them leave to terminate my service? What if I post or send a complaint about AT&T to a complaint site or consumer news site, like ConsumerAffairs.Com (whom I write for), and they publish said complaint? Am I liable if I was using my AT&T ISP while writing said complaint? What if I did so while using my laptop at a Wi-Fi hotspot? The mind boggles.


This goes well beyond the already-vast power companies exert over customers through TOS, EULAs, and other such agreements. This isn't pointed at a customer who's using AT&T's service to download copyrighted content, bandwith hog, or hack other users - no, this is deliberately designed to punish customers simply for speaking out against the company. You wouldn't tolerate that from the government, so why should you tolerate it from a corporation? I think this Ars commenter has it right:

This is another step in the codification of corporate behavior of the every day lives of Americans. Increasingly, we are being forced to behave in private as we would at work. This simply won't work. I do not serve the board of directors as a paying customer of a system. What AT&T is doing might not be a violation of the letter of the law, but it certainly is a raping of the spirit of free speech and a free society. Corporations are slowly becoming proxies for governments to do things governments couldn't otherwise do.

What amazes me about this is the sheer gall with which AT&T thought it could get away with such an egregious jab in the eye to its customers. The company has already gotten itself in hot water over censoring Pearl Jam for criticizing Bush - are they going to claim this was a "mistake" or "glitch" as well? And coming on the heels of Verizon's about-face after blocking text messages from NARAL, does AT&T really think it'll be able to defend or justify this kind of abrogation of its customers' rights without some kind of backlash?


Needless to say, this is yet another reason why we need net neutrality as codified law. AT&T's lawyers may have written this just to enforce its rules against hate sites, spammers, and such, but they've written it so broadly that it could easily be interpreted as a "chiller" against legitimate criticism of a company. Not to mention that this is the same company that gleefully assisted the NSA in spying on Americans without warrants or oversight for years. Like I said, what utter gall.


Corporations do not have the right to control what you say or think any more than governments do, and the idea that we can excuse abrogations of these rights if they come from business is a slippery slope indeed.