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NPR censors 'torture'
Salon.com
(7/2/09)

The still-growing NPR "torture" controversy

There are several noteworthy developments since I wrote on Tuesday about the refusal of NPR's Ombudsman, Alica Shepard, to be interviewed by me about NPR's ban on using the word "torture" to describe the Bush administration's interrogation tactics. Given the utter vapidity of her rationale ("there are two sides to the issue. And I'm not sure, why is it so important to call something torture?"), I was momentarily amazed to learn that she actually teaches "Media Ethics" to graduate students at Georgetown University (my amazement quickly dissipated once I recalled that this is the same institution that, until last year, paid Doug Feith -- Doug Feith -- to teach students "national security policy" and that Berkeley Law School has John Yoo "teaching law" to its students; next semester at Georgetown: Karl Rove teaches Civility in a Post-Partisan Age, Bill Kristol lectures on Accountability in Punditry, while David Gregory examines The Role of Intellect in Adversarial Questioning).
NPR's "torture" ban and its Ombudsman's incoherent defense of it has now turned into a significant controversy for NPR -- and rightfully so. Yesterday, The Huffington Post trumpeted the controversy in a prominent headline all day long, focusing on Shepard's refusal to be interviewed here. The media reporter Simon Owens wrote a long column on Shepard's refusal to discuss her rationale with me despite my having been a primary critic of NPR's policy (indeed, this controversy began several weeks ago when I noted the ample documentation from NPR Check of NPR's steadfast refusal to use the word "torture" and the embarrassing contortions it employs to accomplish that) ...
What makes this practice particularly destructive in the torture context is that the central enabling deceit of the Bush administration was that there are no objective, verifiable standards for what "torture" is. Instead, it's just all in the eye of the beholder, easily re-defined to include or exclude anything we want, dependent upon who is doing it, devoid of any authoritative sources on what it means, and, ultimately, entirely subjective. It is that rotted premise -- that there is no fixed, known understanding of "torture" -- that outlets like NPR are not just accepting, but actively promoting, by refusing to use the term on the ground that "there are two sides to the question" (see ABC News' [past This is Hell! guest] Jake Tapper for an imperfect though still commendable exception: tactics used by CIA "qualify under international law as torture").

Washington Post publisher opens up her home to $250,000 a ticket 'salon' for lobbyists
Politico
(7/2/09)

Washington Post cancels lobbyist event

Amid uproar Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home where for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to "those powerful few" - Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper's own reporters and editors.
The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its "health care reporting and editorial staff."
With the Post newsroom in an uproar after POLITICO reported the solicitation, Weymouth and Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli both said today that they were not aware of the flier or the specifics of what it offered.
"This should never have happened," Weymouth told Post media reporter Howard Kurtz.
"The fliers got out and weren't vetted. They didn't represent at all what we were attempting to do. We're not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom."

Israelis shun Obama's pleas to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza
Inter Press Service
(7/1/09)

Nobel Laureate 'Abducted' by Israeli Navy

Twenty-one international peace activists were seized by Israeli naval frigates in international waters Tuesday as their boat 'The Spirit of Humanity' tried to carry humanitarian aid to Gaza.
The activists, including former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and Irish Nobel Peace laureate Mairead Maguire, and nationals from 11 other countries were part of the Free Gaza Movement (FGM) efforts to break Israel's naval and border blockade of Gaza.
The activists were taken to Israel's Ashdod port and from there to detention cells at Ben Gurion international airport in Tel Aviv where they await deportation.
"They simply kidnapped the passengers," said FGM founding member Greta Berlin. "I call on the Israeli occupation forces to release our people immediately. It's funny. What are they going to do? Deport us? The last place we wanted to reach was Israel."
The Spirit of Humanity left Cyprus Monday after receiving security clearance from the Cypriot authorities. It was carrying three tonnes of medical supplies and some toys.
The boat was intercepted by naval gun vessels in the early hours of Tuesday morning. The crew was warned that if they did not return to Cyprus they would be fired on. The boat refused to follow the Israeli order, and continued to make its way to Gaza.
The Israeli navy then jammed the boat's instrumentation, blocking its GPS, radar and navigation systems. The aid boat was surrounded by several naval gunboats until armed naval commandos forcibly boarded it and towed it back to Ashdod port.
"We didn't come with guns and weapons, but just with humanitarian aid, in an attempt to break the siege of Gaza and to tell the apathetic world about what is happening in the Strip, especially after the last war," FGM chairperson Huwaida Araf said in an interview with the Nazareth-based radio station Al- Shams.
"This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip," said former presidential candidate McKinney.
"President Obama just told Israel to let in humanitarian and reconstruction supplies, and that's exactly what we tried to do," she added.
"The aid we were carrying is a symbol of hope for the people of Gaza, hope that the sea route would open for them, and they would be able to transport their own materials to begin to reconstruct the schools, hospitals and thousands of homes destroyed during the onslaught of Operation Cast Lead," said Maguire, who won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work in Northern Ireland.
"Our mission is a gesture to the people of Gaza that we stand by them and that they are not alone," she added.

John Bolton wants Israel to bomb Iran now!
The Washington Post
(7/2/09)

Time for an Israeli Strike?

With Iran's hard-line mullahs and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unmistakably back in control, Israel's decision of whether to use military force against Tehran's nuclear weapons program is more urgent than ever. Iran's nuclear threat was never in doubt during its presidential campaign, but the post-election resistance raised the possibility of some sort of regime change. That prospect seems lost for the near future or for at least as long as it will take Iran to finalize a deliverable nuclear weapons capability.
Accordingly, with no other timely option, the already compelling logic for an Israeli strike is nearly inexorable. Israel is undoubtedly ratcheting forward its decision-making process. President Obama is almost certainly not ...
Those who oppose Iran acquiring nuclear weapons are left in the near term with only the option of targeted military force against its weapons facilities. Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people. This was always true, but it has become even more important to make this case emphatically, when the gulf between the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the citizens of Iran has never been clearer or wider.
Military action against Iran's nuclear program and the ultimate goal of regime change can be worked together consistently.
Otherwise, be prepared for an Iran with nuclear weapons, which some, including Obama advisers, believe could be contained and deterred. That is not a hypothesis we should seek to test in the real world. The cost of error could be fatal.

Rallying online around the Dr. Tiller killing, anti-choice groups are scaring the hell out of Canadian abortion clinic personnel
The Tyee
(6/25/09)

Tension High at Abortion Clinics

Abortion doctor George Tiller was murdered in Wichita, Kansas, nearly a month ago, but aftershocks still reverberate in Canada.
A Canadian anti-choice group is spreading an essay slamming "Tiller the Killer" on the Internet, Ontario abortion clinics are said to face "renewed aggression", and outside a Vancouver clinic, two people were arrested last week for protesting too close ...
According to the National Abortion Federation (NAF), in Canada and the U.S. combined, there have been eight murders of abortion providers since 1997, seventeen attempted murders, 41 clinic bombings and 175 clinics torched by arsonists.
For the same time period, the organization, which represents abortion providers in North America, reports 1400 acts of clinic vandalism, 179 assaults against clinic staff and clients and 763 clinic blockades.

Mexico's drug war leads to deadly Canadian turf battles between international coke gangs
Los Angeles Times
(6/30/09)

Drug war on another border: Canada

It got so bad this spring that police erected concrete barriers outside the homes of two gangsters to slow down potential drive-by assassins.
"Let's get serious. There is a gang war, and it's brutal. What we have seen are new rules of engagement for the gangsters," Vancouver's chief police constable, Jim Chu, told reporters in March.
Authorities trace the violence to the recent government crackdown on cocaine traffickers in Mexico, which has squeezed profit margins for cocaine north of the US border.
Canada's outlaw retailers are fighting to the death over market share, police say, a situation exacerbated by personal vendettas and power vacuums left by the arrests of gang leaders.
"The war in Mexico directly impacts on the drug trade in Canada. . . . There's a complete disruption of the flow of cocaine into Canada, and we are seeing the result," said Pat Fogarty, operations officer for the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, British Columbia's main law enforcement agency targeting organized crime.
The province became an important player in the Mexican cocaine marketplace in part by bartering its powerful home-grown marijuana, "B.C. Bud," which helps fuel what is estimated to be a $6.3-billion-a-year industry ...
The worst violence can be traced to the verdant Fraser Valley southeast of Vancouver, where the Red Scorpions gang has been at war with a multi-ethnic criminal organization called the United Nations.
The founder of the U.N. is Clayton Roueche, 33, son of a scrap metal dealer from Chilliwack, population 80,000.
Authorities believe Roueche was going to attend a wedding and meet trafficking associates in Mexico in May 2008 when authorities there turned him away. He was flown to Dallas, where US agents arrested him on a drug indictment out of Seattle. He pleaded guilty in April to conspiracy and money-laundering charges and faces as many as 30 years in prison.
Two months later, the man he allegedly was going to meet in Mexico was shot to death in a Guadalajara restaurant, along with another UN associate.
The UN adopted its name in honor of the variety of nationalities it encompasses, including Iraqis, Chinese and Guatemalans. It is known for its Asian mystic-themed motto of "Honor-Loyalty-Respect," created by Roueche, who has a passion for martial arts and Buddhism.
The cemetery in Chilliwack is dominated by the graves of two former UN members, flanked by a pair of 5-foot-tall granite monuments inscribed with the same "UN" monogram found on the gang's packets of cocaine. The phrase "Warrior of the United Nations" is engraved in Chinese characters. At the foot of the graves, a pair of stone Chinese foo lions stands guard.
The carnage between the UN and the Red Scorpions is believed to stem from the fatal shootings of six men in an apartment in the comfortable suburb of Surrey in 2007.
Jonathan Bacon, 28, and his brothers, Jarrod, 26, and Jamie, 23, are the rock stars of the Fraser Valley underworld, their exploits and the efforts of the police to keep them alive documented regularly in the media.
Jamie Bacon, who was charged in April in one of the Surrey Six slayings, survived a mid-afternoon shooting at an Abbotsford intersection Jan. 20, when a gunman fired as many as eight bullets into his Mercedes.
Jonathan Bacon was shot and wounded in the driveway of his parents' home in Abbotsford in 2006.
Not surprisingly, the Bacons have changed residences several times, and their car has armored plating and bulletproof windows. They kept an arsenal for protection: As part of a plea bargain for an associate in 2007, Jonathan Bacon delivered to police 114 sticks of dynamite, a grenade, seven handguns, two shotguns, a rifle and an Uzi submachine gun.
With so many people apparently eager to kill a Bacon brother, police took the unusual step this year of warning citizens to avoid the family or risk being caught in the crossfire ...
With the Winter Olympics only a year away, officials in British Columbia have made it clear that the gang problem must end. Money has poured in for new officers. Legislation is being proposed to expand surveillance capability, toughen sentences, crack down on firearms smuggled in from the U.S., and outlaw armored cars and flak jackets ...
"In some ways, we've lost this generation of gangsters, they're so immersed in the gang world," said Sgt. Keiron McConnell, standing nearby in the red-and-blue glare of the police lights. "About the only thing we can do is incarcerate them."

• While you'll never go wrong underestimating the accuracy of wire reports on crime - let alone international gangs' transnational drug trafficking - this almost glorifying glimpse into the Canadian-Mexican netherworld is entertaining. Besides, it's fun to read the phrase, 'with so many people apparently eager to kill a Bacon brother ... ' CM

Human Rights Watch condemns Rwanda for forced sterilization and mandatory HIV testing
BBC News
(7/1/09)

Rwanda denies sterilisation plans

Rwanda has strongly denied reports that its parliament is considering a draft law which would forcibly sterilise people who are mentally disabled ...
Rwanda has successfully managed to lower the spread of Aids in recent years thanks to its HIV campaign, according to World Bank figures.
"While Rwanda has made notable progress in fighting stigma and responding to the Aids epidemic, and has pledged to advance the rights of persons with disability, forced sterilisation and mandatory HIV testing do not contribute to those goals," said Mr Amon, the health and human rights director at Human Rights Watch.
"These elements of the bill undermine reproductive health goals and undo decades of work to ensure respect for reproductive rights."

From human trafficking to money laundering, soccer's global footprint runs the gamut of crime
Reuters
(7/1/09)

Soccer "perfect" for money laundering - report

Criminals are increasingly using soccer for money laundering and tax evasion, helped by the globalisation of the sport and financial needs of clubs, an anti-corruption body said on Wednesday.
The world's most popular sport is attracting criminals with its huge cross-border money transfers and often obscure accounting methods, a unit of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said in a report.
"Football clubs are indeed seen by criminals as the perfect vehicles for money laundering," the OECD's Financial Action Task Force (FATF) said.
While other sports like cricket, rugby, horse racing or motor racing were also under threat, soccer was "an obvious candidate to examine money laundering through sport" because it dwarfed all the others in its global scale ...
The report cites several examples of clubs in financial difficulties whose deficits were funded by suspected criminals.
Investors may get their "laundered" funds back by selling the club's equipment and services at inflated prices, or via sales of media rights, tickets, players and merchandise.
Global transfers of young football players can also attract human traffickers, the report said. The task force recommends building better awareness and improving governance and financial transparency as ways of fighting crime in soccer.

Introducing the new one gram, one millimeter thick, one and-a-half volt printable battery
LiveScience
(7/2/09)

Tiny New Battery Is Printable

A new battery, small and thin, weighs almost nothing and can be printed in a process similar to silk-screening shirts.
The printable battery is expected to cheap and easy to mass produce and could be used in disposable receipts or cards, engineers in Germany announced today.
"Our goal is to be able to mass produce the batteries at a price of single digit cent range each," said Andreas Willert, of the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS, where Reinhard Baumann led the battery's development.
The battery weighs less than 1 gram and is less than 1 millimeter thick. It runs at 1.5 volts. Placing several in a row can produce up to 6 volts.
A standard AAA battery weighs about 11.5 grams and also runs at 1.5 volts.

McCain's problems with Palin reveal much about who she is and where she may be going
Vanity Fair
(August 2009)

It Came from Wasilla

Soon Palin will take a crack at her own story: she has signed a book contract for an undisclosed but presumably substantial sum, and has chosen Lynn Vincent, a senior writer at the Christian-conservative World magazine, as co-author of the memoir, which is to be published next year not only by HarperCollins but also in a special edition by Zondervan, the Bible-publishing house, that may include supplemental material on faith. During the presidential campaign, Palin’s deep ignorance about most aspects of foreign and domestic policy provided her with a powerful political reason not to submit to interviews. The forthcoming book adds a powerful commercial reason.
Palin is a cipher by choice. When she chooses to reveal herself, what she reveals is not always the same thing as the truth. Her singular refusal to have in-depth conversations with the national media—even Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney, among the most saturnine political figures in modern American history, each submitted to countless detailed interviews over the years—has compounded the challenge of understanding who she really is. There has been Hollywood talk that Palin could star in a reality-TV show about running Alaska, but nothing has come of it yet. Recently, Palin did star in a week-long seriocomic feud with David Letterman over some of his borderline jokes. Meanwhile, she has begun sharing insights several times a day on Twitter, with chipper reports on her own doings and those of her husband, Todd, and the rest of what she calls the “first family.” “Look forward to today’s staff discussion re: my 3rd justice appt to highest court in 3 yrs. Supreme Court truly effects AK’s future,” reads one. And another: “Picking up my handsome little man to rtrn to Juneau, Trig got 1st haircut so my little hippie baby’s ready for AK sunshine on his shoulders.”
The caricature of Sarah Palin that emerged in the presidential campaign, for good and ill, is now ineradicable. The swift journey from her knockout convention speech to Tina Fey’s dead-eyed incarnation of her as Dan Quayle with an updo played out in real time, no less for the bewildered McCain campaign than for the public at large. It is an ironclad axiom of politics that if a campaign looks troubled from the outside the inside reality is far worse, and the McCain-Palin fiasco was no exception. As in any sudden marriage of convenience in which neither partner really knows the other, there were bound to be bumps. Palin had been on the national Republican radar for barely a year, after a cruise ship of conservative columnists, including The Weekly Standard’s William Kristol, had stopped in Juneau in 2007 and had succumbed to her charms when she invited them to the governor’s house for a luncheon of halibut cheeks. McCain had spent only a couple of hours in Palin’s presence before choosing her, and she had pointedly failed to endorse him after he clinched the nomination in March. The difficulties began immediately, with the McCain team’s delivery of the bad news that the pregnancy of Palin’s daughter Bristol, which was already common knowledge in Alaska and had been revealed to the McCain team at the last minute, could not be kept secret until after the Republican convention.
By the time Election Day rolled around, the staff had been serially pummeled by unflattering press reports about the gaps in Palin’s knowledge, her stubborn resistance to direction, and the post-selection spending spree in which she ran up bills of $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family at high-end stores. The top McCain aides who had tried hard to work with Palin—Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist; Nicolle Wallace, the communications ace; and Tucker Eskew, her traveling counselor—were barely on speaking terms with her, and news organizations were reporting that anonymous McCain aides saw Palin as a “diva” and a “whack job.” Many of the details that led to such assessments have remained obscure. But in a recent series of conversations, a range of people from the McCain-Palin campaign, including members of the high command, agreed to elaborate on how a match they thought so right ended up going so wrong ...
By all accounts, Palin was either unwilling, or simply unable, to prepare. In the run-up to the Couric interview, Palin had become preoccupied with a far more parochial concern: answering a humdrum written questionnaire from her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman. McCain aides saw it as easy stuff, the usual boilerplate, the work of 20 minutes or so, but Palin worried intently. At the same time, she grew concerned that her approval ratings back home in Alaska were sagging as she embraced the role of McCain’s bad cop. To keep her happy, the chief McCain strategist, Steve Schmidt, agreed to conduct a onetime poll of 300 Alaska voters. It would prove to Palin, Schmidt thought, that everything was all right ...
Palin worked hard, and the results were adequate. Palin’s winking “Can I call you Joe?” performance against Biden was nothing like a disaster. In fact, it seems to have emboldened her enough that the next day she openly voiced disagreement with the McCain team’s decision to pull out of active competition in Michigan. When orders or advice from McCain headquarters began to conflict with her own impulses, aides told me, she simply did what she wanted to do. “The problem was she came down from Alaska with basically Todd as a sort of trusted bellwether adviser,” one McCain friend says. “She was given this staff of 20. It was probably too big a staff. To be real honest with you, I don’t think she could figure out who to trust.” All the while, Palin was coping not only with the crazed life of any national candidate on the road but also with the young children traveling with her. Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression? (Palin’s youngest son was less than six months old.) Palin maintained only the barest level of civil discourse with Tucker Eskew, the veteran G.O.P. operative who had been made her chief minder. A third party had to shuttle between them to convey even the most rudimentary messages. “She started to hedge her bets,” the same McCain friend says. “Frequently, she would be concerned about how something would play in Alaska. What? You’re worried about your backside in Alaska when there are hundreds of millions of dollars being spent?” One longtime McCain friend and frequent companion on the trail was heard to refer to Palin as “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Election Night brought what McCain aides saw as the final indignity. Palin decided she would make her own speech at the ticket’s farewell to the faithful, at the Arizona Biltmore, in Phoenix. When aides went to load McCain’s concession speech into the teleprompter, they found a concession speech for Palin—written by Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully, who had also been the principal drafter of her convention speech—already on the system. Schmidt and Salter told Palin that there was no tradition of Election Night speeches by running mates, and that she wouldn’t be giving one. Palin was insistent. “Are those John’s wishes?” she asked. They were, she was told. But Palin took the issue to McCain himself, raising it on the walk from his suite to the outdoor rally. Again the answer was no ...
The narrative that the McCain campaign employed to explain Palin’s selection and to promote her qualifications—that she was a fresh-faced reformer who had taken on Alaska’s big oil companies and the corrupt Republican establishment, governing with bipartisan support—was never more than superficially true. In dozens of conversations during a recent visit to Alaska, it was easy to learn that there has always been a counter-narrative about Palin, and indeed it has become the dominant one. It is the story of a political novice with an intuitive feel for the temper of her times, a woman who saw her opportunities and coolly seized them. In every job, she surrounded herself with an insular coterie of trusted friends, took disagreements personally, discarded people who were no longer useful, and swiftly dealt vengeance on enemies, real or perceived. “Remember,” says Lyda Green, a former Republican state senator who once represented Palin’s home district, and who over the years went from being a supporter of Palin’s to a bitter foe, “her nickname in high school was ‘Barracuda.’ I was never called Barracuda. Were you? There’s a certain instinct there that you go for the jugular” ...
As Palin has piled misstep on top of misstep, the senior members of McCain’s campaign team have undergone a painful odyssey of their own. In recent rounds of long conversations, most made it clear that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt: they can’t quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be. They quietly ponder the nightmare they lived through. Do they ever ask, What were we thinking? “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah,” one longtime McCain friend told me with a rueful chuckle. “You nailed it.” Another key McCain aide summed up his attitude this way: “I guess it’s sort of shifted,” he said. “I always wanted to tell myself the best-case story about her.” Even now, he said, “I don’t want to get too negative.” Then he added, “I think, as I’ve evaluated it, I think some of my worst fears … the after-election events have confirmed that her more negative aspects may have been there … ” His voice trailed off. “I saw her as a raw talent. Raw, but a talent. I hoped she could become better.”
None of McCain’s still-loyal soldiers will say negative things about Palin on the record. Even thinking such thoughts privately is painful for them, because there is ultimately no way to read McCain’s selection of Palin as reflecting anything other than an appalling egotism, heedlessness, and lack of judgment in a man whose courage, tenacity, and character they have extravagantly admired—and as reflecting, too, an unsettling willingness on their own part to aid and abet him. They all know that if their candidate—a 72-year-old cancer survivor—had won the presidency, the vice-presidency would be in the hands of a woman who lacked the knowledge, the preparation, the aptitude, and the temperament for the job. To ask why none of them dared to just walk away is to ask why Colin Powell did not resign in protest over the Bush administration’s foreign policy, or why none of Bill Clinton’s disillusioned aides resigned after he lied to them about Monica Lewinsky. The question cannot comprehend the intense bonds that the blood sport of modern politics produces. To leave a campaign—especially a struggling, losing campaign—is akin to desertion in wartime, and even as they began to understand her limitations, plenty of McCain aides still saw Palin as the campaign’s best hope. Some still believe that, simply in terms of the electoral math, she helped at least as much as she hurt, and maybe helped more.
McCain has delivered his own postmortem on Palin with the patented brand of winking-and-nodding ironic detachment that he usually reserves for painful political questions, an approach that simultaneously seeks to confess his sin and presume absolution for it. In November, he told Jay Leno he was proud of Palin and did not blame her for his defeat, but by April, when Leno asked him about who was running the Republican Party, McCain declined to mention Palin: “We have, I’m happy to say, a lot of choices out there: Bobby Jindal, Tim Pawlenty, Huntsman, Romney, Charlie Crist—there’s a lot of governors out there who are young and dynamic.” McCain went on, “There’s a lot of good people out there, and I’ve left out somebody’s name and I’m going to hear about it.” When I ask Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime speechwriter and co-author, about that comment, he says simply, “McCain always talks unscripted,” and adds that he has heard “not one word of regret” about Palin ever pass McCain’s lips. McCain’s daughter Meghan, who has continued the blog she began on the campaign last year, has said that Palin is the one topic on which she will have no public comment ...
And her national ambitions? “What it looks like to me she’s trying to do is try the same formula that got her the governorship,” John Bitney says. “You sort of start off with a conservative base. The right-wing base is obviously out on the far end of the spectrum, but it’s a very motivated base. They show up, they’re committed. It gets you that political beachhead. She did not get started with the blessing of the Republican Party. She started with a dedicated corps of sort of right-wing true believers who killed themselves for her, and got her going. And then she began to build on that, and after she crossed the primary hurdle, she moderated her message on some points" ...
Palin has disappointed many of those who once had the highest hopes for her. She has stumbled over innumerable details. But as she said to Andrew Halcro years ago, “Does any of this really matter?” Palin has shown herself to have remarkable gut instincts about raw politics, and she has seen openings where others did not. And she has the good fortune to have traction within a political party that is bereft of strong leadership, and whose rank and file often demands qualities other than knowledge, experience, and an understanding that facts are, as John Adams said, stubborn things. It is, at the moment, a party in which the loudest and most singular voices, not burdened by responsibility, wield disproportionate power. She may decide that she does not need office in order to have great influence—any more than Rush Limbaugh does.

Madoff wrote the financial regulations he subverted
The Nation
(7/1/09)

The Root of Madoff's Evil

Past This is Hell! guest Robert Scheer writes ...

How convenient for the judge and the media to paint Bernard Madoff as Mr. Evil, a uniquely venal blight on an otherwise responsible financial industry in which money is handled honestly and with transparency.
Madoff, sentenced Monday to 150 years in prison for bilking investors of billions, should be exhibit A in why the dark world of totally unregulated private money managers and hedge funds should be opened to the light of systematic government supervision. Instead, he is being treated as an aberrant menace, with the danger removed once the devil incarnate, as his victims describe him, is locked up and the key thrown away.
For goodness' sake this was not some sort of weird outsider who flipped out, but rather a key developer of the modern system of electronic trading and a founder and chairman of Nasdaq. Madoff often was called upon to help write the rules on financial regulation and therefore became quite expert at subverting them.
As Securities and Exchange Commission Inspector General H. David Kotz testified before Congress, the inspector general's office is looking into "[t]he extent to which the reputation and status of Bernard Madoff, and the fact that he served on SEC Advisory Committees, participated on securities industry boards and panels, and had social and professional relationships with SEC officials, may have affected commission decisions regarding investigations, examinations and inspections of his firm."
Those relationships were close (the personal ties included the marriage of one of Madoff's nieces to an SEC official) and stretched out over the decades during which Madoff was a major player on Wall Street. At the very time back in 1999 when the SEC was being formally warned that a Madoff scam was under way, Madoff was consulting with then-SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. on regulatory matters. When Levitt retired a year later, Madoff was quoted in the trades as paying tribute to him: "He brought all of us to the negotiating table time and time again, on a whole host of issues, and to a greater extent than any other SEC chairman" ...
Money for proper oversight was not allocated because the prevailing ideology regarding private investment firms--embraced by President Bill Clinton ever as fervently as President George W. Bush would later--was the gospel of radical financial deregulation, a practice that has landed us in the larger banking mess. As with the trading in unregulated derivatives, all of the operations of private investor groups, such as hedge funds, were thought not to require government supervision because these were conducted by professional financiers dealing with sophisticated investors who knew what they were doing. If the investment went south, it was on their dime and there would be no innocent victims.
As we saw with the collapse of AIG and now Madoff, that notion is false because private investment contracts can involve the resources of charitable organizations and pension funds and can end up costing the homes, savings and jobs of ordinary citizens who have no idea of which end of this arcane stuff is up.
When Levitt worked for Clinton as head of the SEC, he teamed up with Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers to destroy what remained of financial service industry regulation imposed by President Franklin Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression. In recent years Levitt, alone among that gang of four, has criticized that action and accepted some personal responsibility for the subsequent financial meltdown.

Why hasn't US condemnation of Honduran coup been as loud as others in the Americas?
The Guardian
(7/1/09)

Does the US back the Honduran coup?

Past This is Hell! guest Mark Weisbrot writes ...

The military coup that overthrew Honduras's elected president, Manuel Zelaya, brought unanimous international condemnation. But some country's responses have been more reluctant than others, and Washington's ambivalence has begun to raise suspicions about what the US government is really trying to accomplish in this situation ...
Many press reports have contrasted the Obama administration's rejection of the Honduran coup with the Bush administration's initial support for the 2002 military coup that briefly overthrew President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. But actually there are more similarities than differences between the US response to these two events.
Within a day, the Bush administration reversed its official position on the Venezuelan coup, because the rest of the hemisphere had announced that it would not recognise the coup government. Similarly, in this case, the Obama administration is following the rest of the hemisphere, trying not to be the odd man out but at the same time not really sharing their commitment to democracy.
It was not until some months after the Venezuelan coup that the state department admitted that it had given financial and other support "to individuals and organisations understood to be actively involved in the brief ouster of the Chávez government."
In the Honduran coup, the Obama administration claims that it tried to discourage the Honduran military from taking this action. It would be interesting to know what these discussions were like. Did administration officials say, "You know that we will have to say that we are against such a move if you do it, because everyone else will?" Or was it more like, "Don't do it, because we will do everything in our power to reverse any such coup"? The administration's actions since the coup indicate something more like the former, if not worse.
The battle between Zelaya and his opponents pits a reform president who is supported by labour unions and social organisations against a mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite who is accustomed to choosing not only the supreme court and the Congress, but also the president. It is a recurrent story in Latin America, and the US has almost always sided with the elites.
In this case, Washington has a very close relationship with the Honduran military, which goes back decades. During the 1980s, the US used bases in Honduras to train and arm the Contras, Nicaraguan paramilitaries who became known for their atrocities in their war against the Sandinista government in neighbouring Nicaragua.
The hemisphere has changed substantially since the Venezuelan coup in April of 2002, with 11 more left governments having been elected. A whole set of norms, institutions and power relations between south and north in the hemisphere have been altered. The Obama administration today faces neighbours that are much more united and much less willing to compromise on fundamental questions of democracy.

Brit says he was tortured into confessing to 7/7 bombings
Daily Mail
(6/25/09)

'If I didn't confess to 7/7 bombings MI5 officers would rape my wife,' claims torture victim

A British man spoke publicly for the first time yesterday to accuse MI5 officers of forcing him to confess to masterminding the July 7 bombings.
Jamil Rahman claims UK security officers were behind his arrest in 2005 in Bangladesh.
He says he was beaten repeatedly by local officials who also threatened to rape him and his wife.
Mr Rahman, who is suing the Home Office, said a pair of MI5 officers who attended his torture and interrogation would leave the room while he was beaten.
He claims when he told the pair he had been tortured they merely answered: 'They haven't done a very good job on you.'
Mr Rahman told the BBC: 'They were questioning me on the July 7 bombings, showing me pictures of the bombers ...
'They threatened my family. They go to me, "In the UK, gas leaks happen, if your family house had a gas leak and everyone got burnt, there's no problems, we can do that easily".'
He says he eventually made a false confession of involvement in the July 7 bomb plots ...
The extraordinary allegations will add to pressure on UK ministers to come clean over the way Britain's intelligence agencies have been allowed to gather evidence around the world in the eight years since the September 11 attacks ...
Jamil Rahman is one of a number of former detainees who accuse the British Government colluded in their torture abroad.
His account echoes that of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed, who said he was tortured in Pakistan and Morocco with MI5's knowledge.
The 30-year-old Ethiopian says he was beaten and deprived of sleep to try to make him confess to an Al Qaeda 'dirty bomb' plot, and his treatment is now the subject of an unprecedented police investigation into MI5's conduct.

Church tortured patients clean in drug rehabilitation program
Inter Press Service
(6/30/09)

Balkans: Church Hands Out Shock Treatment

The torture of drug addicts who had turned to the Serbian Orthodox Church for help has sent shock waves across the country.
The methods used at the Crna Reka monastery and its rehabilitation centre, some 300 kilometres southwest of capital Belgrade, had been secret for years until the weekly Vreme placed two cellphone videos made by a former patient on its website.
The videos show head priest Branislav Peranovic and an employee repeatedly beating patients with shovels, and kicking them inside a room decorated with icons. The patient who made videos told the weekly he witnessed at least 40 to 50 such beatings.
The authenticity of the videos was confirmed by Peranovic, who told Serbian media that the methods were "used only occasionally." He denied participating in them, although the videos show him severely beating up a young man.
The SPC has removed Peranovic as head priest at the Crna Reka monastery and appointed a successor. Bishop Artemije, in charge of the Rasko- Prizrenska diocese that the Crna Reka monastery belongs to, said he has ordered an inquiry into the activities at the centre.
"We will shut down the facility if the reports about beatings and violence persist," Artemije said in a statement. The bishop said he had decided against shutting down the centre "after numerous pleadings by the patients and their parents."
Before these revelations, the public believed that dozens of similar church- run centres were bringing drug addicts back to normal life by traditional methods such as cultivating land, and a return to religion. The success of several centres was widely praised in Serbian media.
"This is one of the most shameful incidents for the Church, but also for Serbian society and the Serbian state," analyst Mirko Djordjevic told IPS. "The Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC) should re-examine its attitude towards the so-called 'treatment' applied at several of its centres of this kind."

In Iraq, 'absence of occupation's external interference and imposed incompetence' could help fight against corruption
openDemocracy
(7/1/09)

Iraq: face of corruption, mask of politics

Everyone understands that corruption must be brought under control - even senior Iraqi officials, who in fact care little for the welfare of their people but would like to maintain the appearance that they do; hence the publicity that has been given to the window-dressing efforts made by some institutions in the first half of 2009. The most transparent of these is the initiative launched by the Iraqi parliament to exercise oversight over ministries that are suspected of financial and administrative oversight. At a distance, a victory for transparent government was achieved: the minister of trade - popularly believed to be amongst the most corrupt of Iraq's ministers - was forced to resign and is now being prosecuted for massive fraud.
Upon closer inspection however, there is no escaping the conclusion that very little if anything will change, and that individual ministers and political parties will continue making use of the institutions that they control as private bank-accounts. ...
In Iraq, oversight has taken on a completely different dimension. The key facts that corruption is the result of both an institutional and legislative breach, that that breach is deliberately being kept open by the powers that be, and that those same powers are willing to defend their prize with violence, made it pointless for the parliamentary majority to deal with corruption's outward manifestation without first dealing with the underlying cause. It should have been obvious that the breach would merely be filled by someone else. A more effective approach, which would also have helped it avoid accusations of electoral posturing, would have been to reduce opportunities for corruption by requiring all political parties, politicians and officials to declare their financial interests, by setting out the procedures that are to be followed by anti-corruption bodies, while at the same time defending their independence from the bodies that they are overseeing. ...
Just as stability and democracy in Iraq could never be the by-product of a self-interested and twisted occupation, no one should expect corruption to be reduced in Iraq through the efforts of a group of political parties to remain relevant by imprisoning their rivals. The only solution is to rebuild institutions from the bottom up, and to fill the legal and regulatory breach that has been opened. All the better that the occupation will be coming to an end, so that progress can be made in the absence of its external interference and imposed incompetence.

US helps expand Afghan drug trade
McClatchy Newspapers
(6/28/09)

U.S.-built bridge is windfall — for illegal Afghan drug trade

In August 2007, the presidents of Afghanistan and Tajikistan walked side by side with the U.S. commerce secretary across a new $37 million concrete bridge that the Army Corps of Engineers designed to link two of Central Asia's poorest countries ...
Today, the bridge across the muddy waters of the Panj River is carrying much more than vegetables and timber: It's paved the way for drug traffickers to transport larger loads of Afghan heroin and opium to Central Asia and beyond to Russia and Western Europe ...
The roots of the global drug trade are often a murky tangle of poverty, addiction, violence and corruption. However, it's clear why the dirt-poor former Soviet Central Asian republic of Tajikistan is on the verge of becoming a narco-state ...
Much of the ballooning supply of drugs shipped across Afghanistan's northern border, up to one-fifth of the country's output, has traveled to and through Tajikistan. The opium and heroin funded rampant corruption in Tajikistan and turned the country, still hobbled by five years of civil war in the 1990s, into what at times seems like one big drug-trafficking organization.
Every day last year — extrapolating from United Nations estimates — an average of more than 4 metric tons of opium, which can be made into some 1,320 pounds of heroin, moved on the northern route. Put another way, the equivalent of nearly 6 million doses of pure heroin — at 100 milligrams each — is carried across the northern Afghan border each day ...
Although the United States wields enormous influence in both countries, their drug problems have taken a back seat to the war against the Taliban. Until the past year, Afghanistan's growing drug production was at best a midlevel priority for Washington, and the US hasn't pressed Tajik President Emomali Rahmon to rein in his country's drug trafficking, Western officials said. Nor, they said, has any other Western government with troops in Afghanistan ...
The spoils of the drug trade are as obvious as the shiny new BMWs speeding down the dusty roads that cut from south to north across the steppes of Tajikistan, passing hunched old men who tend the cotton fields with hoes. It's an ancient setting: Alexander the Great and his men conquered parts of the territory in the fourth century B.C, and they're said to have crossed the Panj River by floating on leather hides.
These days, in a nation where some 50 percent of the population makes less than $41 a month, there's a steady stream of new Mercedes and Lexus sedans, not only in Dushanbe, but also in the hamlets that dot the way to the Afghan border.
Locals say the cars often are given in trade for loads of heroin shipped north to the Russian border. The stuff is easy to get.

Karzai condemns US-backed Afghans killing Kandahar's top cop
The Washington Post
(6/28/09)

Karzai: Afghan guards employed by US killed police

President Hamid Karzai accused Afghan guards working for US coalition forces of killing a provincial police chief and at least four other security officers during a gunbattle outside a government office Monday.
In a harshly worded statement, Karzai demanded that coalition forces hand over the private security guards involved. But the governor of Kandahar later said 41 guards connected to the incident had been disarmed and arrested by Afghan authorities ...
It was not clear who the Afghan security guards were. US and NATO forces employ lightly trained Afghan security to guard the exterior of bases. The group also may have been Afghan special forces, which train on a joint U.S.-Afghan base in Kandahar.
A US military spokesman, Chief Petty Officer Brian Naranjo, said no American military forces from any branch - including special operations forces - were present or involved in the incident. US military officials do not speak for any other security branches of the government, such as the CIA.
"The incident was an Afghan-on-Afghan incident and did not involve US or international personnel or equipment," a US military statement said.
The area was sealed by US forces after the shooting, an Associated Press reporter at the scene said.
Later, the governor, Thoryalai Wesa, said 41 private guards had been disarmed and arrested and would be sent to Kabul for a military trial.
The killing of Kandahar's top police officer is a blow to security efforts in a province from which Taliban leader Mullah Omar once ruled the country. US soldiers are deploying to Kandahar later this summer, part of a surge that will see the total number of American forces in the country brought to 68,000, more than double the 32,000 troops here last year.

Instead of disarming militias, Kenya's military allegedly beat, tortured, raped civilians
Inter Press Service
(6/30/09)

Report Charges Killing, Torture and Rape by Security Forces

Human Rights Watch (HRW) is calling for an immediate investigation of Kenyan security officials it says were sent to protect civilians in the country’s northeastern Mandera district during the move to disarm the heavily militarised region in October 2008, but who beat and tortured those civilians instead, according to the report released Monday.
The report, "’Bring the Gun or You’ll Die’: Torture, Rape, and Other Serious Human Rights Violations by Kenyan Security Forces in the Mandera Triangle," follows abuses by the officials during and since the operation in four of the 10 targeted regions.
The report is the latest sign that tensions in Kenya remain high despite an agreement last year that ended months of post-election violence. Ethnic violence and economic woes have contributed to instability in Kenya, which was considered a stable model for Africa as recently as two years ago.
The HRW report documents abuse against men, women and children that left at least 1,200 people wounded and one dead from his injuries. Almost all of those tortured were civilians who security forces were supposed to be protecting them from local militias. It is also reported that over a dozen women were raped over the three-day operation.
HRW has said that this is "part of a broader pattern of similar abuses by security forces".
"Instead of protecting Mandera's residents, the military and police systematically beat and tortured them," said (past This is Hell! guest) Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW, in the press release on the report. "Unless the behaviour of the security forces changes, and perpetrators and especially commanders are held to account, all the government talk about police reform is meaningless."
The operation, which began on Oct. 25, 2008, was made up of military and police officials and was meant to disarm local militias who were suspected of bringing in weapons from Ethiopia and Somalia. It lasted three days and took place in villages across Mandera East and Central and followed clashes between the local Garre and Murulle clans.

Will Obama's Secretary of Education take school militarization nationwide?
truthout
(6/29/09)

The Chicago Model of Militarizing Schools

For the past four years, I have observed the military occupation of the high school where I teach science. Currently, Chicago's Senn High School houses Rickover Naval Academy (RNA). I use the term "occupation" because part of our building was taken away despite student, parent, teacher and community opposition to RNA's opening.
Senn students are made to feel like second-class citizens inside their own school, due to inequalities. The facilities and resources are better on the RNA side. RNA students are allowed to walk on the Senn side, while Senn students cannot walk on the RNA side. RNA "disenrolls" students and we accept those students who get kicked out if they live within our attendance boundaries. This practice is against Chicago policy, but goes unchecked. All of these things maintain a two-tiered system within the same school building.
This phenomenon is not restricted to Senn. Chicago has more military academies and more students in JROTC than any other city in the US. As the tentacles of school militarization reach beyond Chicago, the process used in this city seems to serve as a model of expansion. There was a Marine Academy planned for Georgia's Dekalb County, which includes 10 percent of Atlanta. Fortunately, due to protest, the school has been postponed until 2010. Despite it being postponed, it is still useful to analyze the rhetoric used to rationalize the Marine Academy. Many of the lies and excuses used to justify school militarization in Chicago and Georgia may well be used in other cities as militarism grows ...
Military academies are promoted as an option within the public school system for parents. We heard it from Arne Duncan (ex-CEO of CPS and current secretary of education) and we hear it from Dale Davis, public information officer for the Dekalb County School System, who calls the military school "an addition" for parents to consider. Compare that with what Colonel Mills said in December 2007 in the Online News Hour: "The purpose of the military academy programs is to offer our cadets and parents an educational choice among many choices in Chicago Public Schools and to provide an educational experience that has a college prep curriculum, combined with a military curriculum."
We must dissect what kind of "choice" parents are given. If one's only choices are a school in desperate need of repair or a shiny new military academy, parents will often "choose" the "better" school.
The unbalanced funding presents an incredibly difficult decision for many parents, as Marivel Igartua, mother of a cadet inside the Naval Academy, told me. She didn't want to have to send her daughter to RNA, but she felt squeezed into the choice because her area school was in such bad shape. The unequal allocation of resources, which favors military academies, can serve as a form of economic coercion upon parents.
If public schools were given the resources they need to improve, then we could offer parents a more real choice.
Military pushers also argue that the academies are a popular option among parents. According to Mills, quoted in In These Times in 2005, "These kinds of programs would not be in schools if there weren't kids who wanted it, parents who supported it and administrators who facilitated it."
Arne Duncan claimed there were waiting lists filled with children hoping to attend a military academy. However, CPS has never released the so-called waiting lists, and concrete numbers tell a different story. RNA's goal for student enrollment for this year was 500-600 students. RNA finished the year with 376 students. Where's the demand? ...
The push to destroy public schools and replace them with military academies and charter schools was further facilitated under the mayoral control of schools in Chicago. Mayoral control means that a city's once publicly elected school board is replaced by mayoral appointees partial to the agenda set forth by the mayor. In Chicago, it also meant replacing the school superintendent, who was legally mandated to have public education experience, with a CEO, who is only mandated by his scruples. Duncan served as the CEO for several years. He helped administer and finish off the largest militarization of a school system in the US, under the banner of "school improvement."
If we look at the history of Chicago's "school improvement" plan, we can see the hidden agenda pushed by the charter movement. According to Pauline Lipman, writing in Substance News in 2005, it is a plan whose blueprint was ripped from the Commercial Club of Chicago, a conglomerate of Fortune 500 companies in Chicago. Schools are closed and reopened while students are shuffled around to other schools, which are often performing worse than their original school. Little regard is paid to the education of the majority of students, almost all of them poor, black and Latino/a. Simply put, Chicago's plan is not a school improvement plan. It is the dismantling of a public good for the benefit of a chosen few. School militarization was accelerated as this plan was being implemented in Chicago.
The pushing of similar plans can be expected throughout the US now that Duncan is secretary of education. With the stimulus bill's $100 billion in emergency aid for public schools and colleges, Duncan is in an incredible position of power. He could use it to promote renovation and increase resources to existing public schools. Or he could spend it on costly privatization and militarization, squandering our tax money and endangering our children's futures.

America has its own child soldiers
The Final Call
(6/29/09)

Military recruiters wooing underage youth

ashawna Parker, 18, just graduated from Kenwood Academy on Chicago's south side. She can't wait to start classes at Northwestern University, where she will double-major in International Studies and Japanese Culture. But before she heads off to college, Ms. Parker plans on spending the summer working with the National Network Opposing Militarization of Youth.
A conference planned for Chicago from July 17-19, sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, will bring together activists from across the midwest to discuss strategies to combat Pentagon recruitment tactics—tactics aimed at children as young as 13, according to the activists ...
“Students are mostly concerned with getting a good education, and they should be able to do that without the pressure of military recruiters in their schools,” said Darlene Gramigna, an organizer with the Chicagoland Coalition Opposed to the Militarization of Youth.
Ms. Gramigna told The Final Call the U.S. Army is “entrenched in the Chicago public schools system, which is 91 percent non-White, and 85 percent from low-income families. According to the American Friends, 44 of the city's 93 high schools have a JROTC, with 1 out of 10 high schoolers wearing a military uniform. Chicago is also home to six military academies" ...
In 2008, a American Civil Liberties Union report called “Abusive US Military Recruitment and Failure to Protect Child Soldiers” charged exposing children younger than 17 to military recruitment violates an international protocol. The rights group also charged recruitment tactics disproportionately target low-income youth and students of color.
The ACLU presented its report to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which monitors compliance with the protocol. The UN group called on the US to end military training in schools and to stop targeting racial minorities and low-income children for recruitment.
Opponents say the US military continues to engage in tactics designed to recruit students under the age of 17. In Los Angeles, high school administrators have enrolled students involuntarily in JROTC as an alternative to overcrowded gym classes; while in Buffalo, New York the entire freshman class at the Hutchinson Central Technical School, average age 14, was involuntarily enrolled in JROTC.

Honduran troops in deadly fight with coup protesters
Xinhua
(6/30/09)

2 dead, 60 injured in Honduras anti-coup protests

The death toll from protests against the interim Honduran government installed after a military coup increased to two on Monday after a protestor died in hospital.
The man, a union member, died of injuries sustained in protests against Roberto Micheletti, who was appointed president hours after President Manuel Zelaya was seized at his residence by hooded and heavily armed troops and whisked to Costa Rica.
The man had been protesting the change of bosses in state-run Honduras Telecommunications Corp made by Micheletti.
Sixty people were injured and one died in clashes between Honduran troops and Zelaya's supporters outside the Palace of Government, local television channel Canal 51 reported earlier.
A few minutes earlier, Juan Barahona, who leads the United Workers Federation, told Xinhua by telephone that soldiers had opened fire on demonstrators outside the Palace of Government.
"When we were dispersed, I saw several people with bullet wounds," Barahona said. "Two ambulances arrived but so far I don't know if there are deaths."

Don't be afraid to criticize Israel just because someone might call you 'anti-Semitic'
truthout
(6/30/09)

Charge of Anti-Semitism

Past This is Hell! guest Ira Chernus writes ...

For those of us who live in the United States, the anti-Semitism slur should recall the dark days of the 1950s, when right-wingers called left-leaning peace activists "un-American." The House Un-American Activities Committee struck fear in the hearts of the left simply by hurling the dreaded epithet, and with good reason. The committee wielded tremendous power because such a big portion of the public supported, or at least tolerated, it. By the end of the 1960s, though, after millions had marched to protest the war in Vietnam precisely because they wanted a better America, the charge of "un-American" sounded like the empty fulminations of a powerless right.
Now, as then, it's ultimately all about power. The "pro-Israel" right aims to use the "anti-Semitic" slur to put critics of Israeli policy in a politically powerless group - the true anti-Semitic fanatics, who have no credibility in the US political arena. The charge of anti-Semitism hurts not only because it is so unfair, but because it is so disempowering. If it sticks, it takes its victims out of any reasonable debate and renders them politically irrelevant. That's precisely why it is hurled so often.
So this slur, like any unjustified slur, is actually an invitation to do political battle, using words as weapons. No battle is without its risks. Yet, rather than shy away from talking about Israel for fear of being called anti-Semitic, peace advocates might want to accept the invitation, for two good reasons. First, they clearly have moral and political truth on their side. The equation "critical of Israel = anti-Semitic" is a propaganda ploy that is used to justify terrible immoralities. And it has no basis in fact.
The proof of that is also the second good reason to join in the political battle. If you accept the invitation, you will have a sizable army of Jewish critics of Israel, past and present, on your side. They are the clearest proof that you can condemn Israeli policies without being anti-Semitic.

'Iraq is the world’s premier kleptomaniac state'
Counterpunch
(6/29/09)

Why Iraq is Now the Most Corrupt Country on the Planet

Past This is Hell! guest Patrick Cockburn writes ...

"I paid $800 to get my job,” says Ahmed Abdul, a technician working for Karada municipality in Baghdad. “People know this is wrong, but there is no way round it.” In Iraq corruption is pervasive at every level.
“Corruption exists all over the world but is at its worst here,” laments Ateej Saleh Midhat, a 26-year-old employee of the state-owned Rafidain Bank. “In 2008 and 2009 it was difficult for any graduate to have a job without paying $500 to $1,500 according to what kind of job it was. But what about the people who cannot afford to pay?”
Iraq is the world’s premier kleptomaniac state. According to Transparency International the only countries deemed more crooked than Iraq are Somalia and Myanmar, while Haiti and Afghanistan rank just behind. In contrast to Iraq, which enjoys significant oil revenues, none of these countries have much money to steal.
Iraqis resent paying a bribe for almost everything, but do not see what they can do about it. Nor will they believe that the government is serious in its claim to be clamping down on corruption until senior officials are punished. The first sign that this might be beginning to happen came last month when rhe former Minister of Trade Abdul Falah al-Sudani was arrested after the plane on which he was travelling to Dubai was dramatically turned round in mid-air and ordered to return to Baghdad. The Trade Ministry is known to Iraqis as “the Ministry of Corruption” because it administers the $6 billion food rationing system, which gives endless opportunities for making money through taking bribes from suppliers or sending tainted goods to the shops. The trade ministry scandal had already become very public when Mr al-Sudani’s guards shot it out at the ministry headquarters with police come to arrest ten officials who were able to escape through a back entrance during the gun battle. A video circulated from phone to phone in Baghdad shows Trade Ministry officials cavorting with prostitutes at a party.
The corruption most Iraqis run into is at a humbler level and usually means that the smallest bureaucratic hurdle can only be overcome with a bribe. For instance several years ago the government starting issuing special new passports which were supposedly more secure than the old. But since the quickest and sometimes the only way to obtain one is through a bribe, in which case few questions are asked, the new passports are even more insecure than their predecessors. The same is true of other identity documents. If bribes are not paid to facilitate such transactions, officials subject their victim to bureaucratic harassment until they pay up.
It is not just that Iraqis object to paying off officials, but they are not sure they will get what they pay for.

The Iranian protests are NOT a CIA conspiracy
CommonDreams
(6/29/09)

Iran and Leftist Confusion

Past This is Hell! guest Reese Erlich writes ...

When I returned from covering the Iranian elections recently, I was surprised to find my email box filled with progressive authors, academics and bloggers bending themselves into knots about the current crisis in Iran. They cite the long history of US interference in Iran and conclude that the current unrest there must be sponsored or manipulated by the Empire.
That comes as quite a shock to those risking their lives daily on the streets of major Iranian cities fighting for political, social and economic justice.
Some of these authors have even cited my book, The Iran Agenda, as a source to prove US meddling. Whoa there, pardner. Now we're getting personal.
The large majority of American people, particularly leftists and progressives, are sympathetic to the demonstrators in Iran, oppose Iranian government repression and also oppose any US military or political interference in that country. But a small and vocal number of progressives are questioning that view, including authors writing for Monthly Review online, Foreign Policy Journal, and prominent academics such as (past This is Hell! guest) retired professor James Petras.
They mostly argue by analogy. They correctly cite numerous examples of CIA efforts to overthrow governments, sometimes by manipulating mass demonstrations. But past practice is no proof that it's happening in this particular case. Frankly, the multi-class character of the most recent demonstrations, which arose quickly and spontaneously, were beyond the control of the reformist leaders in Iran, let alone the CIA ...
This is no academic debate or simply fodder for bored bloggers. Real lives are at stake. A repressive government has killed at least 17 Iranians and injured hundreds. The mass movement may not be strong enough to topple the system today but is sowing the seeds for future struggles.
The leftist critics must answer the question: Whose side are you on?

UN holding unprecedented - and likely pointless - hearings on January's Israeli attacks in Gaza
The Christian Science Monitor
(6/29/09)

UN probe into Gaza conflict

In a tearful and gruesome testimony, Salah Al-Samouni spoke of the two days of Israeli helicopter attacks in the Zaytoun area of Gaza that claimed 29 members of his family on Jan. 5 and 6.
"They hit us, they hit us with Apaches," Mr. Samouni told United Nations war crimes investigators in Gaza City on Sunday. "I found my 2-year-old daughter, she was dead.... Why?"
Six months after Israel's winter military offensive that left over 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead (10 soldiers and three civilians), the UN is holding unprecedented public hearings in Gaza City and Geneva this week into allegations that war crimes were carried out during the conflict.
Led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, himself of Jewish descent, the fact-finding mission has a mandate to investigate all suspected violations of international law, including those carried out by Hamas and other Palestinian militants throughout the conflict.
A 15-member UN team came to Gaza earlier this month to speak with victims and survey the destruction.
Despite the mission's scope, however, serious doubts exist about its ability to yield prosecutions or produce a sense of justice for either side.

New UN drug war plan 'the worst of both worlds'
The Guardian
(6/29/09)

Yes, addicts need help. But all you casual cocaine users want locking up

It looked like the first drop of rain in the desert of drugs policy. Last week Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the UN office on drugs and crime, said what millions of liberal-minded people have been waiting to hear. "Law enforcement should shift its focus from drug users to drug traffickers … people who take drugs need medical help, not criminal retribution." Drug production should remain illegal, possession and use should be decriminalised. Guardian readers toasted him with bumpers of peppermint tea, and, perhaps, a celebratory spliff. I didn't.
I believe that informed adults should be allowed to inflict whatever suffering they wish – on themselves. But we are not entitled to harm other people. I know people who drink fair-trade tea and coffee, shop locally and take cocaine at parties. They are revolting hypocrites.
Every year cocaine causes some 20,000 deaths in Colombia and displaces several hundred thousand people from their homes. Children are blown up by landmines; indigenous people are enslaved; villagers are tortured and killed; rainforests are razed. You'd cause less human suffering if instead of discreetly retiring to the toilet at a media drinks party, you went into the street and mugged someone. But the counter-cultural association appears to insulate people from ethical questions. If commissioning murder, torture, slavery, civil war, corruption and deforestation is not a crime, what is? ...
We have a choice of two consistent policies. The first is to sustain global prohibition, while helping addicts and prosecuting casual users. This means that the drugs trade will remain the preserve of criminal gangs. It will keep spreading crime and instability around the world, and ensure that narcotics are still cut with contaminants. As Nick Davies argued during his investigation of drugs policy for the Guardian, major seizures raise the price of drugs. Demand among addicts is inelastic, so higher prices mean that they must find more money to buy them. The more drugs the police capture and destroy, the more robberies and muggings addicts will commit.
The other possible policy is to legalise and regulate the global trade. This would undercut the criminal networks and guarantee unadulterated supplies to consumers. There might even be a market for certified fair-trade cocaine.
Costa's new report begins by rejecting this option. If it did otherwise, he would no longer be executive director of the UN office on drugs and crime. The report argues that "any reduction in the cost of drug control … will be offset by much higher expenditure on public health (due to the surge of drug consumption)". It admits that tobacco and alcohol kill more people than illegal drugs, but claims that this is only because fewer illegal drugs are consumed. Strangely however, it fails to supply any evidence to support the claim that narcotics are dangerous. Nor does it distinguish between the effects of drugs themselves and the effects of the adulteration and disease caused by their prohibition.
Why not? Perhaps because the evidence would torpedo the rest of the report ...
Costa's half-measure, in other words, gives us the worst of both worlds: more murder, more destruction, more muggings, more adulteration. Another way of putting it is this: you will, if Costa's proposal is adopted, be permitted without fear of prosecution to inject yourself with heroin cut with drain cleaner and brick dust, sold illegally and soaked in blood; but not with clean and legal supplies ...
So Costa's office has produced a study comparing the global costs of prohibition with the global costs of legalisation, allowing us to see whether the current policy (murder, corruption, war, adulteration) causes less misery than the alternative (widespread addiction in poorer nations)? The hell it has. Even to raise the possibility of such research would be to invite the testerics in Congress to shut off the UN's funding. The drug charity Transform has addressed this question, but only for the UK, where the results are clear-cut: prohibition is the worse option. As far as I can discover, no one has attempted a global study. Until that happens, Costa's opinions on this issue are worth as much as mine or anyone else's: nothing at all.

US communities get nervous when Nestlé offers a water deal
In These Times
(6/28/09)

Small Towns vs. Nestlé

When Nestlé Waters North America, the world’s largest bottler of water, comes a-courting, promising jobs and increased tax revenues in exchange for local water rights, many small, rural towns get nervous.
Deborah Lapidus, an organizer with the Think Outside the Bottle campaign, says this skepticism stems from Henderson, Texas, which in the ’90s saw Nestlé suck one of its wells dry.
“The company prioritizes its own use over the environment and other uses,” says Lapidus.
As well as draining water, Nestlé also attempts to deplete these communities’ finances, Lapidus says. Towns trying to defend their reservoirs have found themselves in costly legal battles. Fryeburg, Maine, for example, has been sued five times by Nestlé for “interfering with the right to grow their market share.”

As Detroit goes, so goes America
TomDispatch
(6/23/09)

Touring Empire's Ruins

Past This is Hell! guest Greg Grandin writes ...

The empire ends with a pull out. Not, as many supposed a few years ago, from Iraq. There, as well as in Afghanistan, we are mulishly staying the course, come what may, trapped in the biggest of all the "too-big-to-fail" boondoggles. But from Detroit.
Of course, the real evacuation of the Motor City began decades ago, when Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler started to move more and more of their operations out of the downtown area to harder to unionize rural areas and suburbs, and, finally, overseas. Even as the economy boomed in the 1950s and 1960s, 50 Detroit residents were already packing up and leaving their city every day. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Detroit could count tens of thousands of empty lots and over 15,000 abandoned homes. Stunning Beaux Arts and modernist buildings were left deserted to return to nature, their floors and roofs covered by switchgrass. They now serve as little more than ornate bird houses.
In mythological terms, however, Detroit remains the ancestral birthplace of storied American capitalism. And looking back in the years to come, the sudden disintegration of the Big Three this year will surely be seen as a blow to American power comparable to the end of the Raj, Britain's loss of India, that jewel in the imperial crown, in 1948. Forget the possession of a colony or the bomb, in the second half of the twentieth century, the real marker of a world power was the ability to make a precision V-8 ...
In Rome, the ruins came after the empire fell. In the United States, the destruction of Detroit happened even as the country was rising to new heights as a superpower.

One video and one blog later, a city that was closing the gap on police-citizen relations is now in an “us vs. them” online war
New America Media
(6/28/09)

When Cops Attack Online

A few months back, I wrote an article called “Copwatch 2.0”. It was about the shooting death of Oscar Grant by law enforcement, the fact that the act was shown on YouTube, and how our Internet culture has changed the landscape of police accountability.
I think the San Jose Police Officers Association just read the title because based on their recent Internet postings, they have their own ideas of what happens to police accountability in a hyper-communications era. They feel that if activists are using new media to expose what they feel is police abuse -- posting videos and blogs of civilians getting tased, beaten, or otherwise mistreated -- cops can create their own media as well.
In activists’ circles, there is a common phrase used these days: "Media is a weapon." That just means we may not have money or political clout, but if you’ve got a laptop and a cause, anything is possible. But that message is presumably for the disempowered. When applied to groups like law enforcement that actually have real weapons, that message takes on a different set of possibilities.
And with that, I found myself the subject of a law enforcement YouTube video produced by the Police Officers Association, and the lead story of a new blog they created, called, Protectsanjose.com”. The fact that a police association would use the devices presumed to be the tools of activists created quite a political buzz here in technology-obsessed San Jose. Cops were using YouTube and blogs to call activists “bullies" ...
The video, which was put together by a PR firm contracted by the POA, was an edited clip of me speaking at City Hall about police issues, and the need for accountability and transparency. It airs pieces of my testimony, with pop-up words that are intended to dismiss what I am talking about. It even takes a jab at the fact I’m wearing a T-shirt.
It was an awkward production and reminiscent of liberals attempts to use AM radio to talk tough about conservatives: They just seemed desperate and out of sorts. At one point in the video, its most dramatic, they contend that I am making a “threat” to City Council when I talk about a “street response.” I was speaking of rallies, marches, public forums – things people are doing right now in Iran for democracy, and the gay rights community is doing in San Francisco for equality. But the viewer is led to believe I am actually warning the city council that I am going to lead a violent riot. Mind you, the same week this broke, my organization was awarded a grant from the city, based on the deliberation of the mayor, the police department, and the district attorney’s office in support of our violence prevention work.
In justifying the video, the POA executive branch wrote on their website that they felt I was indeed “threatening elected officials with violence,” and blogged that my organization, which is comprised mostly of young people of color who come together to produce community media through their art and writings, were “thugs, who attempt to get their way by threatening anyone who opposes them with physical violence.” The executive message then poses an ominous ultimatum to the mayor and the City Council to choose which side they are going to be to on, and asks, “Are they on the side of us, the protectors of the weak and vulnerable? Or are they on the side of the thugs, who attempt to get their way by threatening anyone who opposes them with physical violence?”
And there you have it, one video and one blog later, a city that was once working towards resolving issues between the police and particular communities now finds itself in an “us vs. them” online war. The comment boxes of the blogs overflowed with the web 2.0 equivalent of chest bumps from police officers applauding the POA for finally standing up to the “Anti-American” activists, as well as plenty of “F--k the Cops” rantings.

Minutemen allegedly kill two in break-in to finance group through money, drugs
The New York Times
(6/26/09)

New Border Fear: Violence by a Rogue Militia

“Somebody just came in and shot my daughter and my husband!” the woman shouted to the 911 dispatcher. “They’re coming back in! They’re coming back in!”
Multiple gunshots are then heard on a tape of the call.
The woman, Gina Gonzalez, survived the attack after arming herself with her husband’s handgun, but both he and their 10-year-old daughter died.
The killings, last month, have terrified this small town near the Mexican border, in part because the authorities have now tied them to what they describe as a rogue group engaged in citizen border patrols.
The three people arrested in the crime include the leader of Minutemen American Defense, a Washington State-based offshoot of the Minutemen movement, in which citizens roam the border looking for people crossing into the country illegally. Former members describe the group’s leader, Shawna Forde, 41, as having anti-immigrant sentiments that are extreme, at times frightening, even to people accustomed to hard-line views on border policing.
The authorities say that the three suspects were after money and drugs that they intended to use to finance vigilantism, and that members of the group may have been involved in at least one other home invasion, in California.
“There was an anticipation that there would be a considerable amount of cash at this location,” said Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, since, he said, Ms. Gonzalez’s husband, Raul J. Flores, had previously been involved in narcotics trafficking, an assertion the family denies.
A Pima County public defender representing Ms. Forde had no comment on the case. Nor d