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Limiting politics to 'the art of the possible ... sacrifices the poor, the hungry, the vulnerable, the desperate on the altar of self-serving pragmatism'
The Guardian
(2/8/10)

The power of utopianism

Past This is Hell! guest Mike Marqusee writes ...

Whenever a commentator declares that "politics is the art of the possible", I'm on my guard. I suspect that I'll soon be told to accept apparent present conditions as immutable facts of life, and to trim my goals accordingly. I'll be told to let injustices stand.
Like all banalities, the familiar dictum contains an obvious truth. To be politically effective, you have to be able to distinguish between desire and reality, between aspirations and resources.
But like most banalities, it raises more questions than it answers. How is "the possible" defined? Where are its limits drawn? Who draws them? Theoretically, the possible is an elastic and speculative category. But the dictum draws no distinctions between the immediately unlikely and the ultimately impossible; it takes no notice of the gradations between them, or of the impact of human agency in shifting an outcome from one category to another.
What's usually meant when politics is pronounced "the art of the possible" is that politics is a calculation of the probable: an exercise in the pragmatic, the expedient or the opportune. The adage implies forcefully that minimal improvements or lesser evils are the only realistic aim - and any demand for more is self-indulgence. It's an injunction not only to compromise, but to get your compromise in first, to placate hostile forces in advance, as Obama tried to do (unsuccessfully) with healthcare reform ...
Usually, when people speak of politics as "the art of the possible", they imply a world of unexamined assumptions about the limits of the possible - a world which embodies only the limits of their own experience or imagination. In its unreflective way, the dictum treats the superficial conditions of the moment as unchangeable realities. In effect, it serves as a denial of possibility, a closing of the aperture into the future.
It also urges us not to feel the urgency of injustice. The dictum is cold comfort to the oppressed, the victims of poverty, discrimination and violence, who are asked to continue suffering while distant arbiters decide what is or is not "possible" in their case. It sacrifices the poor, the hungry, the vulnerable, the desperate on the altar of self-serving pragmatism. Impatience is, in fact, a necessary political virtue. Without it, even the most gradual change is inconceivable. And a politician who is not impatient with injustice, with needless death and destruction, is worse than useless.
Those who dispute the dictum are accused of utopianism, which is condemned as an intellectual and emotional error, not just a mistake but a danger. Of course utopias are no substitute for the practice of politics, and they can serve as an evasion of present responsibilities. But a practical politics stripped of serious ideas about what would constitute a just human society is a greater and more common menace.
Utopias can be powerful motivators and thus a real influence on human destinies. For evidence one only has to look at the Indian independence movement or the African-American civil rights movement, at Gandhi and King, who defied assumed limitations to build great mass movements. By word and deed, they alerted people to the greater range of possibilities that lay within their grasp
Utopias provide a perspective from which the assumed limitations of the present can be examined, from which familiar social arrangements can be revealed as unjust, irrational or unnecessary. You can't chart the surface of the earth or compute distances without a point of elevation - a mountain top, star or satellite. You can't chart the possible in society without an angle of vision, a mental mountain top that permits the widest sweep.
The pundits championing the art of the possible are the flat-earthers of today, afraid to venture too far from shore lest they fall off the planet's edge.
This is very much the vice of the centre-left. The right are bolder, more confident, more reckless and strongly driven by their own utopian visions (which would be dystopias for the rest of us). In contrast, liberals advise each other to trim their ambitions, to sacrifice their goals in order to remain "politically viable".

Wall Street fears stronger policing proposals, shifts campaign donations from Democrats to Republicans
The New York Times
(2/7/10)

In a Message to Democrats, Wall St. Sends Cash to G.O.P.

If the Democratic Party has a stronghold on Wall Street, it is JPMorgan Chase.
Its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, is a friend of President Obama’s from Chicago, a frequent White House guest and a big Democratic donor. Its vice chairman, William M. Daley, a former Clinton administration cabinet official and Obama transition adviser, comes from Chicago’s Democratic dynasty.
But this year Chase’s political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message. While it has contributed to some individual Democrats and state organizations, it has rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees. Instead, it gave $30,000 to their Republican counterparts.
The shift reflects the hard political edge to the industry’s campaign to thwart Mr. Obama’s proposals for tighter financial regulations.
Just two years after Mr. Obama helped his party pull in record Wall Street contributions — $89 million from the securities and investment business, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics — some of his biggest supporters, like Mr. Dimon, have become the industry’s chief lobbyists against his regulatory agenda.
Republicans are rushing to capitalize on what they call Wall Street’s “buyer’s remorse” with the Democrats. And industry executives and lobbyists are warning Democrats that if Mr. Obama keeps attacking Wall Street “fat cats,” they may fight back by withholding their cash.
“If the president doesn’t become a little more balanced and centrist in his approach, then he will likely lose that support,” said Kelly S. King, the chairman and chief executive of BB&T. Mr. King is a board member of the Financial Services Roundtable, which lobbies for the biggest banks, and last month he helped represent the industry at a private dinner at the Treasury Department.
“I understand the public outcry,” he continued. “We have a 17 percent real unemployment rate, people are hurting, and they want to see punishment. But the political rhetoric just incites more animosity and gets people riled up.”

Iraq war veteran waterboards his 4 year-old daughter
ABC News
(2/8/10)

Joshua Tabor, Who Served in Iraq, Accused of Waterboarding Daughter

An Army sergeant who served in Iraq for 15 months has been restricted to his Washington military base after being accused of waterboarding his 4-year-old daughter because she refused to recite her ABCs.
Joshua Ryan Tabor, 27, was arrested on Jan. 31 and charged with assaulting a child after police in Yelm, Wash., responded to a call of a disturbance at Tabor's home and then later found the little girl hiding in a locked bathroom, according to Police Chief Todd Stancil.
"We had a report of [Tabor] walking around his neighborhood holding a Kevlar helmet and threatening to bust out windows," Stancil told ABCNews.com today. "In the process of talking to Tabor's girlfriend about what was going on, we learned that he had also been abusing his daughter."
Stancil said that when the cops coaxed the little girl out of the bathroom they saw that she was covered in "multiple bruises pretty much all over her body."
"She was very open with us," Stancil said of the young girl, whose name is not being released because she is a minor. "She basically came right out and said, 'Daddy does this to me. He uses his hands.'"
Both the girl and the father admitted to the torture, even detailing how Tabor would sit the girl on the edge of the bathroom sink and hold her head down until it was nearly submerged in water, dunking her if she refused to recite the alphabet, said Stancil.

The last-minute lie that swung British support for an Iraq invasion
The Guardian
(2/4/10)

The media's tall tales over Iraq

Why did Ann Clwyd get such an easy ride during her appearance at the Chilcot inquiry this week, from both m'luds and the media? Clwyd is at least as complicit as her former boss Tony Blair in the dissemination of tall tales designed to justify the attack on Iraq.
Clwyd is Labour MP for Cynon Valley and head of Indict, a group that campaigned for many years for the arrest and punishment of Saddam Hussein and his cronies under international law. On the eve of the Iraq War - 18 March 2003 to be precise - Clwyd wrote an article for the Times in which she claimed that Saddam had a people-shredding machine.
Apparently the Ba'athists would dump their opponents into a machine "designed for shredding plastic", and later put their minced remains into "plastic bags" so they could eventually be used as "fish food".
It gets worse: apparently these unfortunate men were put into the shredder feet first so that they could briefly behold their own mutilation before death.
Not surprisingly, Clwyd's shocking claims spread around the world like a virus. The then prime minister of Australia, John Howard, talked of Saddam's "human-shredding machine" in a speech justifying his decision to send troops to Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, the Bush administration's hawkish deputy defence secretary, expressed his admiration for Clwyd's article and a link to it was posted on the US state department's website.
Numerous pro-war journalists repeated Clwyd's claims.
There was only one problem: there was no strong evidence, and there still isn't, that Saddam had anything like a people-shredding machine ...
It seems Clwyd based her story on the uncorroborated claims of one individual from northern Iraq. Neither Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch, in their numerous investigations into human rights abuses in Iraq, had ever heard anyone talk of a human-shredding machine ...
It's worth remembering the role that Clwyd's claims played back in mid-March 2003.
There was widespread opposition to the war, as evidenced by the million-strong march in Hyde Park in February 2003.
People were already asking questions about the "dodgy dossier" and Blair's claims about WMD. The story of the shredder seemed designed to jolt us all out of our stupidity and convince us to back the government's war against evil. As the headline on Clwyd's article in the Times put it: "See men shredded, then say you don't back war."
The shredder story was used in a last-ditch effort to change people's minds. As Trevor Kavanagh at the Sun rather wishfully argued: "British resistance to war changed when we learned how sadist Saddam â€| fed dissidents feet first into industrial shredders." If Blair's dodgy dossier was cynically used to drum up support in the run-up to the invasion, then Clwyd's shredder story was cynically used to batter the last bit of war-scepticism out of the British public.
And yet Clwyd has not been subjected to anything like the same level of media criticism as Blair has been. This points to a problem with the way we remember the Iraq war. In the mythical version of events that is being promoted by the media off the back of the Chilcot inquiry, Blair, and his evil sidekick Alastair Campbell, single-handedly duped the cabinet, parliament, the media and some of the public into supporting the war.

Media reports claim Egypt secretly helped Israeli navy slip through Suez
Yedioth Ahronoth
(2/6/10)

Arab media: 2 Israeli Navy ships passed through Suez Canal

Two Israeli missile boats reportedly passed through the Suez Canal Thursday morning, according to Arab media reports over the weekend.
Egyptian authorities reportedly adopted strict security measures to ensure the ships' safety. According to the reports, the two Navy ships traveled through the canal en route to the Red Sea.
The sources did not provide the exact ultimate destination of the missile boats. However, Egyptian maritime sources quoted in the Arab media estimated that both ships were headed to the Persian Gulf and may reach it within four days. The veracity of these estimates is unclear.
The sail through the Suez Canal was coordinated with Egyptian authorities, which reportedly adopted strict security arrangements to ensure the safe passage of the two Israeli ships. According to Arab media, Egyptian forces prevented any vessels from passing through the Canal and also stopped the vehicular traffic on the road leading to it.

Nigerian election plagued by reports of fraud
BBC News
(2/8/10)

Nigeria Anambra state election 'gravely flawed'

An election for governor of Nigeria's Anambra state has been condemned amid reports of vote-buying and ballot-box theft.
Peter Obi was re-elected but just 300,000 people cast their ballots from an electorate of 1.8 million.
Gangs of youths intimidated and harassed voters and snatched three ballot boxes from polling stations.
The chaos has dampened hopes of improvements to Nigeria's voting system ahead of national elections in 2011.
President Umaru Yar'Adua had promised to sort out Nigeria's notoriously corrupt elections after he was elected in a widely-criticised poll in 2007 ...
The BBC's Fidelis Mbah in Anambra says he witnessed three ballot boxes being stolen by gangs of youths - at least one of whom was armed and dressed in police uniform.
He says one polling station had 500 registered voters but just three people could find their names on the list.
Although the manipulation appeared to be politically motivated, our correspondent says it is not clear who was responsible.
Many polling stations opened hours late and there were confrontations as voters discovered their names were not on the electoral register.
Mr Obi received almost 98,000 votes - little more than 5% of the total electorate. He is from the All Progressives Grand Alliance, which is in opposition at the federal level.
He beat Chris Ngige, from the opposition Action Congress, who came second with 60,240 ballots and Mr Soludo, of the governing People's Democratic Party, with 59,755.

Climate change deniers' threats frighten scientists; skeptic think-tanks funded by big oil
The Independent
(2/7/10)

Think-tanks take oil money and use it to fund climate deniers

An orchestrated campaign is being waged against climate change science to undermine public acceptance of man-made global warming, environment experts claimed last night.
The attack against scientists supportive of the idea of man-made climate change has grown in ferocity since the leak of thousands of documents on the subject from the University of East Anglia (UEA) on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit last December.
Free-market, anti-climate change think-tanks such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in the US and the International Policy Network in the UK have received grants totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds from the multinational energy company ExxonMobil. Both organisations have funded international seminars pulling together climate change deniers from across the globe.
Many of these critics have broadcast material from the leaked UEA emails to undermine climate change predictions and to highlight errors in claims that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. Professor Phil Jones, who has temporarily stood down as director of UEA's climactic research unit, is reported in today's Sunday Times to have "several times" considered suicide. He also drew parallels between his case and that of Dr David Kelly, found dead in the wake of the row over the alleged "sexing up" of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Professor Jones said he was taking sleeping pills and beta-blockers and had received two death threats in the past week alone.
Climate sceptic bloggers broadcast stories last week casting doubts on scientific data predicting dramatic loss of the Amazon rainforest. All three stories, picked up by mainstream media, questioned the credibility of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the way it does its work. A new attack on climate science, already dubbed "Seagate" by sceptics, relating to claims that more than half the Netherlands is in danger of being submerged under rising sea levels, is likely to be at the centre of the newest skirmish in coming weeks.
The controversies have shaken the IPCC, whose chairman, DR Rajendra Pachauri, was subjected to a series of personal attacks on his reputation and lifestyle last week. A poll this weekend confirmed that public confidence in the climate change consensus has been shaken: one in four Britons - 25 per cent - now say they do not believe in global warming; previously this figure stood at 15 per cent.
Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientific adviser to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and former chairman of the IPCC, said yesterday that the backlash is the result of a campaign: "It does appear that there's a concerted effort by a number of sceptics to undermine the credibility of the evidence behind human-induced climate change." He added: "I am sure there are some sceptics who may well be funded by the private sector to try to cast uncertainty."
A complicated web of relationships revolves around a number of right-wing think-tanks around the world that dispute the threats of climate change. ExxonMobil is a key player behind the scenes, having donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past few years to climate change sceptics. The Atlas Foundation, created by the late Sir Anthony Fisher (founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs), received more than $100,000 in 2008 from ExxonMobil, according to the oil company's reports.

Pennsylvania town - suffering from 48-year coal fire - "entering its final days"
The Associated Press
(2/7/10)

Centralia's final days State officials push to finish demolition

Standing before the wreckage of his bulldozed home, John Lokitis Jr. felt sick to his stomach, certain that a terrible mistake had been made.
He'd fought for years to stay in the house. It was one of the few left standing in the moonscape of Centralia, a once-proud coal town whose population fled an underground mine fire that began in 1962 and continues to burn.
But the state had ordered Lokitis to vacate, leaving the fourth-generation Centralian little choice but to say goodbye - to the house, and to what's left of the town he loved.
"I never had any desire to move," said Lokitis, 39. "It was my home."
After years of delay, state officials are now trying to complete the demolition of Centralia, a borough that all but ceased to exist in the 1980s after the mine fire spread beneath homes and businesses, threatening residents with poisonous gases and dangerous sinkholes.
More than 1,000 people moved out, and 500 structures were razed under a $42 million federal relocation program.
But dozens of holdouts, Lokitis included, refused to go - even after their houses were seized through eminent domain in the early 1990s. They said the fire posed little danger to their part of town, accused government officials and mining companies of a plot to grab the mineral rights and vowed to stay put.
State and local officials had little stomach to oust the diehards, who squatted tax- and rent-free in houses they no longer owned.
Steve Fishman, attorney for the state Department of Community and Economic Development, said "benign neglect" on the part of state and local officials allowed the residents to stay for so long.
No more.
Fishman told The Associated Press that the state is moving as quickly as possible to take possession of the remaining homes and get them knocked down.
"Everyone agreed that we needed to move this along," he said.
In 2006, there were 16 properties left standing. A year ago, the town was down to 11. Now there are five houses occupied with fewer than a dozen holdouts.
Centralia appears to be entering its final days ...
"It was a real community, and people loved the place," said author and journalist Dave DeKok, who has been writing about Centralia for 30 years and recently published "Fire Underground," an updated version of his 1986 book on the town. "People lived their entire lives in that town and would have been quite happy to get rid of the mine fire and keep on living there."
With swifter action, DeKok said, that might have been Centralia's destiny.
The fire began at the town dump and ignited an exposed coal vein. It could have been extinguished for thousands of dollars then, but a series of bureaucratic half-measures and a lack of funding allowed the fire to grow into a voracious monster - feeding on millions of tons of slow-burning anthracite coal in the abandoned network of mines beneath the town.
At first, most Centralians ignored the fire. Some denied its existence, choosing to disregard the threat.
That changed in the 1970s, when carbon monoxide began entering homes and sickening people. The beginning of the end came in 1981, when a cave-in sucked a 12-year-old boy into a hot, gaseous void, nearly killing him. The town divided into two warring camps, one in favor of relocation and one opposed.
Finally, in 1983, the federal government appropriated $42 million to acquire and demolish every building in Centralia. Nearly everyone participated in the voluntary buyouts; by 1990, Census figures showed only 63 people remaining.
Two years later, Gov. Robert Casey decided to shut the town, saying the fire had become too dangerous. The holdouts fought condemnation, blocking appraisers from entering their homes. The legal process eventually ground to a halt.
Until recently, Lokitis Jr., who works a civilian job with the state police in Harrisburg, had been one of Centralia's most vocal defenders - star of a 2007 documentary on Centralia. He expressed hope that it could stage a comeback, claiming the fire had gone out or moved away.
State officials say the fire continues to burn uncontrolled and could for hundreds of years, until it runs out of fuel. One of their biggest concerns is the danger to tourists who often cluster around steam vents on unstable ground.

Why are New York cops dragging kids out of school in handcuffs for minor infractions like doodling on their desks?
Daily News
(2/4/10)

Queens girl Alexa Gonzalez hauled out of school in handcuffs after getting caught doodling on desk

A 12-year-old Queens girl was hauled out of school in handcuffs for an artless offense - doodling her name on her desk in erasable marker, the Daily News has learned.
Alexa Gonzalez was scribbling a few words on her desk Monday while waiting for her Spanish teacher to pass out homework at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills, she said.
"I love my friends Abby and Faith," the girl wrote, adding the phrases "Lex was here. 2/1/10" and a smiley face.
But instead of simply cleaning off the doodles after class, Alexa landed in some adult-sized trouble for using her lime-green magic marker.
She was led out of school in cuffs and walked to the precinct across the street, where she was detained for several hours, she and her mother said ...
City officials acknowledged Alexa's arrest was a mistake.
"We're looking at the facts," said City Education Department spokesman David Cantor. "Based on what we've seen so far, this shouldn't have happened."
"Even when we're asked to make an arrest, common sense should prevail, and discretion used in deciding whether an arrest or handcuffs are really necessary," said police spokesman Paul Browne.
Alexa is the latest in a string of city students who have been cuffed for minor infractions. In 2007, 13-year-old Chelsea Fraser was placed under arrest for writing "okay" on her desk at Intermediate School 201. And in 2008, 5-year-old Dennis Rivera was cuffed and sent to a psych ward after throwing a fit in his kindergarten.
A class action lawsuit was filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union last month against the city for using "excessive force" in middle school and high schools. A 12-year-old sixth-grader, identified in the lawsuit as M.M., was arrested in March 2009 for doodling on her desk at the Hunts Point School.
Alexa is still suspended from her school, her mother said. She and her mom went to family court on Tuesday, where Alexa was assigned eight hours of community service, a book report and an essay on what she learned from the experience.

Pressured by the Tea Party movement, Republican congressmen now embrace discredited conspiracy theories
Mother Jones
(2/5/10)

Obama's Secret Police

Does Obama want to impose martial law to shut down the Tea Party movement?
For months, much of the right-wing blogosphere has been fuming about Executive Order 12425, which Obama amended in mid-December. The one-paragraph document grants Interpol, the international law enforcement agency based in France, special privileges within the United States—mainly immunity from the Freedom of Information Act and from lawsuits over activity considered part of its official duties. It's no secret police conspiracy.
But thanks to Glenn Beck, the National Review, Newt Gingrich, and others, this obscure directive has fueled a firestorm of right-wing paranoia. Conservative activists warn that Obama intends to use Interpol as a "secret police" with the power to knock down doors and arrest law-abiding American citizens. No matter that Interpol agents don't even carry guns and have no right to arrest people, or that its American office boasts all of five people. And the hysteria over the executive order is not confined to the Tea Party movement. It has also reached the highest levels of politics—that is, the US Congress.
In January, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) introduced a resolution that would require a repeal of the order. "As a former FBI agent, I believe that giving INTERPOL blanket exemptions is dangerous," Rogers explained in a statement. "This change ties the hands of American law enforcement and prevents full access to information that could be crucial for on-going U.S. investigations related to criminal or national security activity. This is no time to be weakening the ability of law enforcement to defend our nation."
The online backlash to executive order 12425 became so intense that Ron Noble, Interpol's secretary-general, wrote a piece for Newsweek’s website debunking the conspiracy theory. "An executive order cannot legally authorize an unconstitutional act, and this one doesn't even come close," he wrote.
But Noble's appeal for reason isn't likely to quiet the storm. That's because the Obama executive order feeds a thriving narrative on the right about the current administration's nefarious intentions. Ever since Obama took office, certain corners of the Internet have been frothing with speculation that Obama fancies himself a Mobutu-style African dictator who is furtively plotting to use martial law to crush dissent or unrest over his economic policies ...
Other "evidence" that Obama has despotic designs: A Rand Corporation report released in April 2009, titled "A Stability Police Force for the United States." The think-tank study, commissioned by the US Army, weighs the possibility of creating a new national civilian police force that could be used to help stabilize foreign countries in conflict or after disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti. But because such a force would be insufficiently busy abroad, the authors also suggested that it might be used at home—for instance, to help respond to natural disasters.
The study has become Exhibit A for those who think Obama wants a domestic secret police to silence his political enemies, particularly those in the Tea Party movement. The conservative blogger YidwithLid wrote of the "brown shirt" report, "I wonder what kind of Domestic Role the Stability Police can have, controlling Tea Parties? 'Fixing' Fox News? A national police under the control of this or any president will do nothing less than signal the end of freedom in the United States. Any movement toward this force must be voted down." Of course, it didn't help that the Department of Homeland Security produced a 2009 report warning about the rising threat of right-wing extremism—convincing many conservative activists that they are being targeted by the federal government.
When I asked Rand spokesman Warren Robak about the study, he said jokingly, "Oh, you mean the Gestapo report?" The wonks at Rand were startled when their staid policy analysis became a rallying cry for anti-Obama and right-wing activists. Robak points out that the report was actually commissioned in 2007, during the Bush administration. He also explains that the military had been questioning its ability to shoulder nation-building responsibilities and thought it might be a job better performed by civilians. (After the post-invasion debacle in Iraq, it's not hard to see why police trained in dealing with civilians might be a good idea.)
None of this is likely to quiet Obama's critics—especially as many already believe that he is plotting to hold citizens in "FEMA-run concentration camps." Activists believe these were established under the Bush administration to hold US citizens should martial law be declared following an emergency like Hurricane Katrina. Their suspicions swelled when Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) Introduced a bill in January 2009 called the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act that would direct the secretary of homeland security to establish national emergency centers on military installations to be used in the event of such disasters.
By "disasters," Hastings was presumably referring to events such as the hurricanes that regularly buffet his home state. But conservative activists believe the bill would empower the president to detain pretty much anyone he wants at the centers. And when Obama designated the H1N1 flu outbreak a national emergency last fall, right-wingers seized on this as further evidence of a sinister government plot. Conservative bloggers warned darkly that anyone who refused to submit to the flu vaccine might be held in one of the government-run emergency facilities.
Leonard Zeskind, author of Blood and Politics, a history of the white nationalist movement, says that the Tea Partiers' conspiracy theories aren't new. Similarly hysterical warnings of government overreach were rife during the Clinton or Carter administrations. "In the militia days in the 1990s it was about a UN invasion. It's exactly the same phenomenon. Some of the same people are involved," he says.
But these extreme conspiracy theories aren't just confined to the radical fringe. They're being adopted by national politicians, as Rep. Rogers proved with his attempt to roll back Obama's Interpol order. Back in the 1990s, says Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University San Bernardino, "The black helicopter stuff was pretty well segregated from the mainstream world. But now you have Sarah Palin entertaining the Obama [born in] Kenya thing or [Gov.] Rick Perry from Texas toying with the secession idea." It's yet another sign of how much the Tea Party and the Republican Party are increasingly one and the same.

In the US, 'our incarceration practices are expensive, ineffective, and border on insanity'
Newsweek
(1/28/10)

A New Jim Crow?

No mortal, of course, could have transformed American society in one year—especially with the US economy weathering its worst crisis in nearly a century. It was inevitable that Obama would scale back his ambitions for health-care reform and focus more on propping up banks than on creating new green jobs. Now is probably not the best time to suggest another big—and potentially unpopular—policy battle. Yet, I still find myself wishing that Obama could throw the full weight of his office behind one of the most unacknowledged, and yet most important, issues of this era: repairing the American system of justice ...
The Obama administration is clearly aware of the issue. The Justice Department has taken aim at the disparity in crack- and cocaine-sentencing practices that have disproportionately hit black men. "We know that even as we imprison more people of all races than any nation in the world, an African-American child is roughly five times as likely as a white child to see the inside of a jail," Obama told the NAACP last year.
The subject deserves presidential attention. But to tackle it requires a willingness to risk being tarred as soft on crime. That's an especially difficult issue for a black president: for Obama to speak the simple truth—that our incarceration practices are expensive, ineffective, and border on insanity—would open him up to the charge of pandering to minorities. We saw that a few months back when Obama initially sided with black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., whom a white cop had arrested for breaking into his own home. The president's relatively mild statement—that the cop had acted "stupidly"—drew so much fire he had to backpedal. Precisely because of his race, this president must walk on eggshells when approaching a racially charged subject. Much safer to talk about deficits and jobs.
Given that, now (as midterm panic has broken out in Democratic quarters in the wake of the Massachusetts Senate defeat) may not be the best moment for Obama to tackle the matter head-on. But at some point any president aiming for greatness must grapple with a set of policies that have forced us to build prisons instead of schools. And ultimately even the most hardheaded critics must concede that rethinking a failed policy is not weakness but the only wise way to proceed.

Senate investigation shows how US banks, lawyers, real estate and escrow agents hide foreign government officials' illicit cash
IPS News Service
(2/3/10)

US Banks Abetting Corrupt Regimes, Probe Finds

The global bank HSBC may be running offshore accounts for central banks. According to a US Senate investigation, an HSBC subsidiary in London called HSBC Equator Bank had a sister bank in the Bahamas.
According to an internal e-mail, the bank told HSBC USA it had been providing offshore accounts to central banks for 20 years, because the banks wanted to avoid "Mareva" injunctions, legally enforceable orders to freeze funds.
This was revealed by a report to be released Thursday by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. A subcommittee staff member who worked on the investigation said, "You have a central bank saying to their banker, I don't want to have to comply with a legally enforceable order so put me offshore. So they did" ...
The committee's 350-page report of an investigation that lasted two years focuses on how US banks, lawyers, real estate and escrow agents hide the origins of funds belonging to foreign government officials and other "politically exposed persons" (PEPS) who might be moving illicit cash.
Only banks are required under US law to know their customers and reject dirty money. Subcommittee head Sen. Carl Levin will chair a hearing Thursday on how US agents help launder funds into the US banking system.
In the HSBC case, the committee was looking into money transfers from the National Bank of Angola. Other case studies in the report involve Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria and Gabon.
From 2004 to 2008, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of the president of Equatorial Guinea, employed two lawyers, Michael Berger and George Nagler, to set up US shell companies - Beautiful Vision Inc., Unlimited Horizon, Inc., Sweetwater Malibu LLC, Sweetwater Management Inc., and Sweet Pink Inc. - with no employees or places of business, to open bank accounts and move money. Berger and Nagler will testify at the hearing.
The lawyers used their attorney client and law office accounts to hide the origin of the money and transfer it to an account in Citibank, which would never see a wire transfer from Equatorial Guinea. At this time Obiang was the subject of criminal investigations and complaints in the US and France.
The lawyers moved nearly 30 million dollars in wire transfers to buy a 30-million-dollar residence in Malibu, on the coast of California. An escrow agent, the Sidley Austin law firm, sent 900,000 dollars to help purchase the Malibu mansion.
When the law firm inquired of the Justice Department if it was okay to accept the funds, part of a 21-million-dollar transfer that initially was to buy a Gulfstream jet, the department replied it had no basis for seizing the funds, the report said.
Money moved from Obiang's bank in Equatorial Guinea to a correspondent account at Wachovia Bank which then transferred the funds to Bank of America in Oklahoma City. In a six-month period, about 73 million dollars went through the Wachovia account. Another 37 million dollars went through Citibank.
Committee staff discussed this with the banks. The aide said, "Wachovia said they've decided to add Mr. Obiang's name to the interdiction software just because they don't want to handle his funds. Citibank has declined to take the same step, because they said they're afraid they would get so many hits from Obiang that it would require their staff to take an awful lot of time to research those wire transfers" ...
In the case of BAI, Banco Africano de Investimentos, a seven-billion-dollar private bank whose largest stockholder is Sonangol, the state oil company, the report shows how HSBC ignored basic anti-money laundering rules.
Aside from Sonangol, the banks' major shareholders are the oil company's top executives, and the bank's clients are people in the oil and diamond industry. "We have a PEP bank," the committee aide said.
BAI opened a correspondent account with HSBC in New York. HSBC tried to find out who owned the bank, which is required by the 2002 US Patriot Act. But 19 percent of the stock was owned by shell companies. And they were being "held" by the bank's president until purchasers could be found.
After it could not determine the true owners, HSBC dropped the matter, said the report. BAI used HSBC to gain access to its wire transfer system so clients could send and receive US dollar transfers across US borders.

Congress wants billions in federal aid for Puerto Rico transferred to one of the world's largest liquor conglomerates
ProPublica
(2/3/10)

Lobbyists Help Smooth the Way for a Tax Break for Foreign Rum Maker

A transfer of billions of dollars in federal aid from public projects in Puerto Rico to one of the world's largest liquor conglomerates over the next 30 years continues to move forward without any objection from Congress.
As a result, money that's now being used to build schools and restore tropical forests in a US territory is being turned into what is essentially a $3 billion tax break for London-based Diageo, whose $20 billion in sales last year were powered by Dom Pérignon, Captain Morgan and other popular brands.
Diageo's windfall at Puerto Rico's expense wouldn't be possible were it not for pricey lobbyists, the complexity of the nation's tax laws and Congress's ability to approve politically embarrassing deals with a sleight of hand that leaves little trace.
On K Street, Diageo has an in-house team of lobbyists that was paid $2.25 million last year. Diageo also has the help of DLA Piper, one of the world's largest legal and lobbying firms, which has an office seven blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Last year, Diageo paid DLA Piper $770,000 to lobby on this and other issues.
Recently, Diageo hired the Breaux-Lott Leadership Group, a lobbying firm whose principals, former Senators John Breaux and Trent Lott, are now making money in the Washington influence bazaars ...
Puerto Rico's resident commissioner, Pedro Pierluisi, a nonvoting member of the U.S. House, is trying to quash the deal with a bill (PDF) he introduced last year. It would make the Virgin Islands subject to a 10 percent cap, too.
But the bill hasn't made it out of the starting gate.
It was referred to the Ways and Means Committee, where its chairman, Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., apparently has no plans to move it. Rangel has raised campaign money in both territories.
Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuño did not initially lobby aggressively for the bill because his top priority in Washington has been health care reform, which could mean $10 billion in extra Medicaid money for the territories over the next 10 years.
But now, with the health care bill facing longer odds, Fortuño is stepping up his lobbying efforts, sending written appeals to members of Congress.

Food supplier for US military's Iraq invasion charged with over-billing by as much as a billion dollars
Corpwatch
(2/1/10)

Agility Attempts to Vault Fraud Charges

Past This is Hell! guest Pratap Chatterjee writes ...

Agility, a Kuwait-based multi-billion dollar logistics company spawned by the US invasion of Iraq, is facing criminal charges for over-billing the US taxpayer on more than $8.5 billion worth of food supply contracts in the Iraq war zone. If the lawsuit, scheduled for February 8, is successful, the company could owe the US government as much as $1 billion.
Originally known as Public Warehousing Corporation (PWC), Agility boasts that it once supplied one million meals a day to US soldiers and contractors in the Middle East. The company's Mercedes trucks hauled delicacies from ice cream to lobster tails to feed soldiers living on military bases scattered throughout Iraq. Today it has new contracts to provide food to the US Agency for International Development in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa and – until about a month ago – was supposed to ramp up food delivery to the troops newly posted in southern Afghanistan.
In a lawsuit filed on November 18, 2005, Kamal Mustafa Al-Sultan accuses Agility of cheating him of a share of profits from the lucrative contract because he refused to go along with alleged corruption. A former business partner of PWC/Agility, Sultan is a cousin of the company founder and CEO, Tarek Abdul Aziz Sultan Al-Essa.
After conducting a grand jury investigation, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) joined Kamal Sultan and filed criminal charges against PWC/Agility on November 9, 2009, immediately boosting the original lawsuit's chances of success.
"We will not tolerate fraudulent practices from those tasked with providing the highest quality support to the men and women who serve in our armed forces," said Tony West, assistant attorney general for the District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, in a press release. "As this case illustrates, the Department of Justice will investigate and pursue allegations of fraud against contractors and subcontractors, whether they are foreign or domestic."

Palestinians working inside Israel have been defrauded of more than $2 billion; "This is a clear-cut case of theft from Palestinian workers on a grand scale"
Monthly Review
(2/4/10)

Israel Stole $2 Billion from Palestinian Workers: 40-year Deception Exposed

Past This is Hell! guest Jonathan Cook writes ...

Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than $2 billion by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists have revealed.
A new report, "State Robbery," to be published later this month, says the "theft" continued even after the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994 and part of the money was supposed to be transferred to a special fund on behalf of the workers.
According to information supplied by Israeli officials, most of the deductions from the workers' pay were invested in infrastructure projects in the Palestinian territories -- a presumed reference to the massive state subsidies accorded to the settlements.
Nearly 50,000 Palestinians from the West Bank are working in Israel -- following the easing of restrictions on entering Israel under the "economic peace" promised by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister -- and continue to have such contributions docked from their pay.
Complicit in the deception, the report adds, is the Histadrut, the Israeli labor federation, which levies a monthly fee on Palestinian workers, even though they are not entitled to membership and are not represented in labor disputes.
"This is a clear-cut case of theft from Palestinian workers on a grand scale," said Shir Hever, a Jerusalem-based economist and one of the authors of the report. "There are no reasons for Israel to delay in returning this money either to the workers or to their beneficiaries."
The deductions started being made in 1970, three years after the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories began, when Palestinian workers started to enter Israel in significant numbers, most of them employed as manual laborers in the agriculture and construction industries.
Typically, the workers lose a fifth of their salary in deductions that are supposed to cover old age payments, unemployment allowance, disability insurance, child benefits, trade union fees, pension fund, holiday and sick pay, and health insurance. In practice, however, the workers are entitled only to disability payments in case of work accidents and are insured against loss of work if their employer goes bankrupt.
According to the report, compiled by two human rights groups, the Alternative Information Center and Kav La'Oved, only a fraction of the total contributions -- less than eight per cent -- was used to award benefits to Palestinian workers. The rest was secretly transferred to the finance ministry.
The Israeli organizations assess that the workers were defrauded of at least $2.25bn in today's prices, in what they describe as a minimum and "very conservative" estimate of the misappropriation of the funds. Such a sum represents about 10 per cent of the PA's annual budget.

Israeli government goes on attack against local human rights groups; "If the [parliament] is intent on holding hearings in the 21st century
that are reminiscent of the anti-Communist hysteria in the United States of the 1950s, then that is a sad moment for Israeli democracy''
The Christian Science Monitor
(2/3/10)

Rights groups under fire for scrutiny of Israel's conduct of Gaza war

As the United Nations prepares to decide what action to take on the Goldstone report, which alleges Israeli misconduct in last year's Gaza war, local human rights groups and their backers are facing a rising tide of domestic criticism for fomenting international scrutiny of Israel and its military.
A center-right group, "Im Tirtzu," issued a report last week charging that the Goldstone report relies on documentation from 16 local rights organizations that were vocal critics of Israeli conduct during the war. The report singled out a common financial thread, the multimillion-dollar New Israel Fund, which raises money among American Jews and foundations for progressive causes.
That sparked a drive in the Israeli parliament to approve an investigation to determine whether the work of those nonprofits undermines Israel's legitimacy. The investigation could lead to the outlawing of some groups.
The sponsor of the inquiry proposal, Knesset Member Otniel Schneller from the centrist Kadima party, accused the groups of "the worst incitement possible" against Israel. "Most of the quotes in the [Goldstone] report against Israel come from Israeli organizations,'' he said. "They are accusing Israel of terrorizing [Palestinian] civilians."
The Goldstone report assigns blame to both Israel and Hamas for committing possible war crimes during the war, but accuses Israel of intentionally killing Palestinian civilians and of destroying civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. ...
The campaign against the rights groups is sparking a debate over the limits of legitimate criticism of the government.
"We believe there are valid concerns with regard to Israel's conduct during [the war]. We believe the Israeli public has the right to know what was done in our name in Gaza,'' says Haggai Elad, the director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a beneficiary of the New Israel Fund. "If the [parliament] is intent on holding hearings in the 21st century that are reminiscent of the anti-Communist hysteria in the United States of the 1950s, then that is a sad moment for Israeli democracy.''

Following reports of Colombian paramilitary's abuses, rights group urges Obama administration to scuttle trade talks
The New York Times
(2/3/10)

Colombian Paramilitaries? Successors Called a Threat

Criminal armies that emerged from the ashes of the Colombian government’s attempt to disband paramilitary groups are spreading their reach across the country’s economy while engaging in a broad range of rights abuses, including massacres, rapes and forced displacement, a human rights group said Wednesday.
A report by the group, Human Rights Watch, detailed the activities of the paramilitary successor groups, which feed off Colombia’s cocaine trade. The drug trade remains lucrative despite Washington’s channeling of more than $5 billion of security and antinarcotics aid to Colombia, making it a top recipient of United States aid outside the Middle East.
“One major reason why combating these groups is not a priority is that it’s hard for the current government to acknowledge that a significant part of its security policy is failing,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for Human Rights Watch, speaking in Bogotá, Colombia.
Seeking to influence the Obama administration’s policies toward Colombia, the group recommended delaying ratification of a long-awaited trade deal until Colombia’s government vigorously and effectively confronts the criminal groups, which succeeded paramilitaries formed by landowners decades ago to combat guerrillas.
President Obama said in his State of the Union address last week that he would like to strengthen trade ties with Colombia.

War crimes trial testimony claims Pat Robertson was ousted Liberian President's man in Washington
Foreign Policy
(2/4/10)

Charles Taylor: Pat Robertson was my man in Washington

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor, testifying in his own war crimes trial today, said that the American conservative evangelist Pat Robertson was awarded a Liberian gold-mining concession in 1999 and subsequently offered to lobby the Bush administration to support his government.
The revelations came in the midst of a U.N.-backed trial of Taylor at The Hague on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity during Sierra Leone's 1990s civil war. Taylor is accused of directing a Sierra Leone rebel group, the United Revolutionary Front (RUF), in a campaign aimed at securing access to the country's diamond mines. The rebel movement stands accused of committing mass atrocities in the late 1990s in the West African country, including the mutilation of thousands of civilians.
The international prosecutors contend that Taylor offered concessions to Western individuals in exchange for lobbying work aimed at enhancing his image in the United States. The prosecution maintains that Taylor also spent $2.6 million on lobbying firms and public relations outfits in the hopes of influencing the policies of former President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Under cross-examination, Taylor said that Robertson had volunteered to make Liberia's case before US administration officials, and had spoken directly to President Bush about Taylor. He also confirmed that Robertson's company, Freedom Gold Limited, signed an agreement to exploit gold in southeastern Liberia, but that it never generated any profit.

• Here's allAfrica.com's report on Taylor's ongoing war crimes trial: Charles Taylor executed Liberian politicians whom he perceived as threats to his political ambitions, killed rebels who failed to carry out his orders, and persecuted human rights activists who opposed his policies, prosecutors alleged today at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. Mr. Taylor denied the allegations.

New Senate report 'offers a lurid primer explaining how big banks, powerful attorneys, influential
lobbyists, and a host of other businessmen in this country help launder dirty foreign money'
Mother Jones
(2/3/10)

Lawyers, Guns, and Money

Past This is Hell! guest Andy Kroll writes ...

Among Bank of America’s 50 million customers, Pierre Falcone was far from ordinary. An infamous global arms dealer who unlawfully sold weapons to Angola for its civil war and an international fugitive, Falcone was convicted of tax fraud and illegal arms dealing in 2007 and 2009 and is currently serving six years behind bars. Yet for nearly two decades, Falcone and his relatives freely used 29 different bank accounts to funnel at least $60 million into the US from secretive havens like the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, and Singapore, and from shell corporations and secret clients. Despite his criminal record and worldwide notoriety, Bank of America essentially treated him like any other depositor.
The story of how a criminal like Falcone used Bank of America—which later received billions in a taxpayer-funded bailout—and the US financial system to advance his criminal activities appears in a new report by the Senate investigations subcommittee, led by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). In revealing the operations of Falcone and others—in most cases for the first time—the report offers a lurid primer explaining how big banks, powerful attorneys, influential lobbyists, and a host of other businessmen in this country help launder dirty foreign money.
The report highlights several gaping holes in American money laundering and corruption laws, including an exemption made by the Treasury Department in 2002 to the Patriot Act. "Foreign officials still get access to our financial system at times because US officials aid and abet their actions," Levin told reporters on Tuesday. The 325-page report sets the stage for a hearing Thursday featuring US enforcement officials as well as some of the main players who abetted secretive individuals like Falcone and the corrupt former president of Gabon, the late Omar Bongo.

US healthcare spending to double by decade's end - and government will foot most of the bill
Bloomberg
(2/4/10)

Health-Care Burden Shifts to U.S. Government as Spending Soars

Health-care spending in the US will almost double in 2019 to $4.5 trillion, or more than 19 percent of the economy, as unemployment and aging baby boomers drive up government costs, economists forecast.
Spending already jumped to $2.5 trillion, or 17.3 percent of the economy, in 2009, the economists from the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in their yearly estimate, published today in the journal Health Affairs. The increase in share of gross domestic product, from 16.2 percent in 2008, was the biggest since record keeping began in 1960.
The analysts, whose agency manages the government’s largest health-insurance programs, said their 11-year projections reflect “the influence of the recession” that began in December 2007 and the aging of the generation born from 1946 to 1964, the post-World War II population surge known as the baby boom. The projections don’t include the impact of a proposed health-care overhaul, which is stalled in Congress.
“One of the points to all this is we project public spending to grow much faster than private spending,” said Christopher J. Truffer, one of the government actuaries, in a telephone interview yesterday. “There will be a shift in how people get their health-care coverage and who’s paying for it. Public spending will pay for much more US health care over the next 10 years.”

Number of deaths from complications related to pregnancy has tripled in California
LA Weekly
(2/3/10)

Pregnancy-Related Deaths Have Tripled In California

The number of women who have died from complications related to their pregnancies has tripled from 1996 to 2006, California Watch is reporting. Two possible reasons: An increase in cesarean sections and a growing number of overweight moms-to-be.
Just as intriguing: The state Department of Health refused for seven months to release the figures proving the death-rate increase. Officials at the department, however, finally confirmed that it has seen the biggest spike in deaths among pregnant women since the Great Depression.

"Enormous understatement" of Great Recession's job losses; "things were actually worse on the ground than what the reports suggested"
CNN Money
(2/4/10)

Recession's job losses likely to rise by nearly 1 million

As bad as the government's jobs readings numbers have been during the Great Recession, we'll soon find out the real situation likely was worse.
Much worse.
Job losses during the recession may have been underestimated by close to a million jobs. So instead of employers cutting just over 7 million jobs from their payrolls since the economic downturn began in December 2007, it's expected that the Labor Department's new estimate will be a loss of 8 million jobs.
"It's an enormous understatement of the severity of the crisis," said Heidi Shierholz, labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a union-supported think tank. "It confirms that things were actually worse on the ground than what the reports suggested."
The new reading will come when the economists at the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics release their annual revision of US payrolls from April 2008 through March of 2009 Friday, using data that wasn't available as the monthly readings were being estimated and reported.
Typically the revision results in only a slight change in the previous estimate -- about 0.1% to 0.2% of the total number of jobs. But there was nothing typical about the twelve month stretch that ended last March.

Obama administration approves shifting Bush era Czech missile interceptor plan to Romania
The Associated Press
(2/4/10)

Romania to host US missile interceptors

Romania's top defense body on Thursday approved a US proposal to place anti-ballistic missile interceptors in the country as part of a revamped US missile shield, the president said.
President Traian Basescu said Romania will host "ground capabilities to intercept missiles" that will increase its national security and go into operation starting in 2015.
There was no official confirmation from the US government, but a US State Department official in Washington said President Barack Obama's administration had asked Romania to host the system. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
"Romania will not host a system directed against Russia, but against other threats," Basescu said, adding that the measure was not directed against Russia.
US Vice President Joseph Biden visited Romania in October as part of his tour of Central Europe, where he presented a revamped US missile shield plan to replace a scrapped Bush-era plan to install interceptors in Poland and radar in the Czech Republic.

One-in-three US soldiers who have served in Afghanistan will develop post-traumatice stress disorder
Al Jazeera
(2/4/10)

The war within

Out of two million US soldiers who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq, psychiatrists estimate that one in three may, at some point, develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
PTSD is a ticking time bomb with a decades-long fuse - a problem whose true magnitude is difficult to determine.
After years of denial, the US army is only now coming to terms with how to address this problem.

German commanders withheld information from US pilots during 2009 bombing mission; 142 killed, many of them civilians
Der Spiegel
(2/2/10)

German Army Withheld Information from US Pilots

As details from the deadly Sept. 4 bombing in Kunduz, Afghanistan continue to emerge, it has become more apparent that German commanders both disregarded NATO rules of engagement and misled the US pilots who carried out the attack. One pilot says he would have refused to attack had he been told the truth.
In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 4, 2009 bombing in Kunduz, Afghanistan -- which saw a German-ordered attack result in the deaths of up to 142 people, many of them civilians -- it quickly became clear that NATO rules of engagement may have been flouted.
Now, SPIEGEL has learned that German commanders on the ground withheld important information from the US pilots above Kunduz -- information which, had it been available, might have led to the pilots' refusing to drop their payload.
One pilot, who goes by the handle Dude 15, told NATO investigators that, prior to the bombing, he had "an uneasy feeling about everything." He and the pilot of a second F-15 flying over Kunduz that night both "could tell the ground commander was really pushing to go kinetic" -- in other words, to bomb. He said they even considered breaking off the operation altogether.
The bombing took place after the Taliban hijacked two tanker trucks full of fuel. In an attempt to cross the Kunduz River, however, the two tankers became stuck in a sandbank in the middle of the night. Faced with no other alternative, the Taliban encouraged locals to come and fill up containers with the gasoline. Before long, dozens of people had gathered on the sandbank to take advantage of the situation.

US-China tensions worsen, this time it's over money
The New York Times
(2/3/10)

Currency Dispute Likely to Further Fray U.S.-China Ties

To the growing list of grievances between the United States and China, add one more: the Obama administration is reviving American pressure on China to stop artificially depressing its currency, a policy that fuels its persistent trade gap with the United States.
The administration has told Chinese officials that currency policy will be high on its agenda this year for economic talks with China, a senior official said on Wednesday. The White House is also weighing whether to designate China as a country that manipulates its currency, when the Treasury Department issues its semiannual report on foreign currencies in April.
President Obama signaled the tougher line on Wednesday, telling Democratic senators that the United States needed “to make sure our goods are not artificially inflated in price and their goods are not artificially deflated in price; that puts us at a huge competitive disadvantage.”
Reopening the battle with Beijing over its currency may pay political dividends for Mr. Obama at a time of double-digit unemployment and growing fears that China is stealing American jobs. But experts say the president will have even less leverage over Beijing than President George W. Bush did. Mr. Bush prodded China for years to adjust its exchange rate with little success.
China, they say, is determined to reignite its export machine after a global recession that sapped demand for Chinese goods. A cheap currency is vital to that goal. And China’s leaders have grown impatient with lectures on economic policy from their chief debtor, the United States.
“It will be like water off a duck’s back,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “They’re puzzled by the criticism. They think they should be praised for keeping their currency stable at a time of global turmoil.”
Criticizing China’s policy, however, is likely to worsen a relationship already frayed by irritants on both sides.
In two weeks, Mr. Obama is expected to meet with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, over the objections of the Chinese, who condemn him as a subversive. The administration forged ahead with sales of weapons to Taiwan, drawing an angry blast from Beijing, which regards Taiwan as a breakaway province. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized China for censoring the Internet, in the wake of Google’s allegations about hacking.
For its part, the United States is frustrated that the Chinese will not back tougher sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. And China has resisted American initiatives on climate change policy, turning the recent climate meeting in Copenhagen into a diplomatic drama.
The administration has struggled to prevent the ill will from any single issue from contaminating the broader relationship. “We can’t pick the timing of when an issue becomes important,” said a senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter.
Exchange rates are an arcane subject, harder to explain than a meeting with the Dalai Lama. But they influence easy-to-understand issues like the competitiveness of American exports and job security.

'The right is terrified of peace. And, in the end, the right's fear of peace will be the death of Israel'
Haaretz
(2/3/10)

Fear of peace will be the death of Israel

The right is terrified of peace. And, in the end, the right's fear of peace will be the death of Israel.
They are afraid of peace, in part, because it threatens the core of what has come to replace other values as the goal of Judaism: permanent settlement of the West Bank. But that is only a part of it.
They are afraid of peace because they are afraid of the world. They dismiss fellow Jews who want to see a two-state solution - a majority of Israelis - as unrealistic, as living in a bubble. The name of the bubble these moderates live in, however, is planet Earth.
The right, meanwhile, wants to wall off Israel as the world's last remaining legally mandated Jewish ghetto. A place where all the rules are different, exit and entry, citizenship and human rights, because the residents within are Jews. A place where non-Jews, dehumanized as congenital Jew-haters, are rendered invisible. A place which, if suffocating and insufferable, still seems safer than the scary world outside.
A place which, because of its walls and its politics and its cowardice, is losing its ability to function as a part of the world, reveling in cheap-shot humiliations of key foreign ambassadors, deliriously proud of its sense that of all the world, including most of its Jews and Israelis - only the right sees the real truth.
This braid of thought was venomously endorsed this week both by an uncharacteristically Kahane-sounding Alan Dershowitz, and the obscenely infantile Im Tirtzu movement. According to them, where Cast Lead was concerned, the real war criminals are Richard Goldstone and Naomi Chazan - two people who are open about their love of Israel, and who have worked their whole adult lives for its well-being.
The fears of the right are not mere devices of rhetoric. The risks of making peace are real. Every bit as real as the risks of failing to make peace.
It all comes down to belief. It comes down to the kind of country the believer wants Israel to be. And for that reason, there is a civil war going on for Israel's soul.
It will not be weaponry that decides this war, but courage. People who care about the direction that Israel is moving, and whose watchword is moderation, would do well to choose one facet of the fight, and join. One place to start, is to support the New Israel Fund and the groups it supports ...
Things have reached such a devastating point, that for the first time in recent memory, even Ehud Barak is beginning to get it: "The simple truth is, if there is one state" including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, "it will have to be either binational or undemocratic," Barak told the Herzliya Conference Tuesday.
"If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."
The fear of peace has left Israel as a country which is prepared for nuclear warfare but not for non-violent protest on behalf of Palestinians. The fear of peace, and the blackmail of the right on behalf of settlement, has contorted Israel into a body which, unable to countenance the perils of treating the sickness of occupation, will eventually be killed by it.
Israel's defense minister, for one, is convinced: "The lack of a solution to the problem of border demarcation within the historic Land of Israel - and not an Iranian bomb - is the most serious threat to Israel's future."

Surveillance 2010: Law enforcement wants 'a national Web interface linking police computers with those of Internet and e-mail providers'
cnet news
(2/3/10)

Police want backdoor to Web users' private data

Anyone with an e-mail account likely knows that police can peek inside it if they have a paper search warrant.
But cybercrime investigators are frustrated by the speed of traditional methods of faxing, mailing, or e-mailing companies these documents. They're pushing for the creation of a national Web interface linking police computers with those of Internet and e-mail providers so requests can be sent and received electronically.
CNET has reviewed a survey scheduled to be released at a federal task force meeting on Thursday, which says that law enforcement agencies are virtually unanimous in calling for such an interface to be created. Eighty-nine percent of police surveyed, it says, want to be able to "exchange legal process requests and responses to legal process" through an encrypted, police-only "nationwide computer network." (See one excerpt and another.)
The survey, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, is part of a broader push from law enforcement agencies to alter the ground rules of online investigations. Other components include renewed calls for laws requiring Internet companies to store data about their users for up to five years and increased pressure on companies to respond to police inquiries in hours instead of days.
But the most controversial element is probably the private Web interface, which raises novel security and privacy concerns, especially in the wake of a recent inspector general's report from the Justice Department. The 289-page report detailed how the FBI obtained Americans' telephone records by citing nonexistent emergencies and simply asking for the data or writing phone numbers on a sticky note rather than following procedures required by law.

Huge increase in Americans going hungry
The Wall Street Journal
(2/2/10)

One in Eight Americans Used Food Banks in 2009

A charitable organization estimated Tuesday that 37 million Americans—or one in eight people—turned to food pantries and soup kitchens during the 2009 recession, forcing some sites to cut meal portions and turn away people.
Feeding America, a Chicago-based network of 200 food banks, said in its quadrennial hunger study that 46% more people visited a hunger-relief charity at least once in 2009 than did in 2005. The estimate was based on a survey of officials at 37,000 local feeding agencies nationwide...
As part of the hunger study, the group also interviewed 61,000 patrons at emergency feeding sites from February through June of last year. Among other things, the Feeding America study estimated that 13.9 million children were served by an emergency feeding center in 2009 compared with 9.23 million children in 2005.
Feeding America, which changed its name in 2008 from America's Second Harvest, said its survey showed that 76% of the adults who used a food pantry in 2009 were unemployed, including 3.2 million who had lost their jobs within the past 12 months ...
The Agriculture Department reported in November that 17 million U.S. households reported having difficulty in 2008 buying enough food, up 31% from 2007.

• The UPI's coverage included this quote: "'Hunger in America 2010' exposes the absolutely tragic reality of just how many people in our nation don't have enough to eat," Vicki Escarra, president of Feeding America, said in a statement."

Department of Justice softens on punishing Bush lawyers for role in justifying torture
Newsweek
(1/29/10)

Justice Official Clears Bush Lawyers in Torture Memo Probe

For weeks, the right has heckled Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for his plans to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in New York City and his handling of the Christmas bombing plot suspect. Now the left is going to be upset: an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the "torture" memos of professional-misconduct allegations.
While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other "enhanced" interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding.
Previously, the report concluded that two key authors - Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor - violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter.
But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed "poor judgment," say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action - which, in Bybee's case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.
The report, which is still going through declassification, will provide many new details about how waterboarding was adopted and the role that top White House officials played in the process, say two sources who have read the report but asked for anonymity to describe a sensitive document. Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo - including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture - were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice's criminal division, refused the CIA's request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney's chief counsel, and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief's wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in "self-defense" to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.

Why were Democrats opposed to the Bush/Cheney 'war on terror' tactics if they allow Obama to continue them?
Salon.com
(2/2/10)

What exactly did Bush and Cheney do wrong?

As I noted several days ago, it is not only Republicans -- but Democratic and media establishment figures as well -- who clearly crave the preservation of the Bush/Cheney approach to Terrorism and civil liberties.  When Bush's popularity collapsed to historic lows, political and media elites pretended for awhile to object to his administration's fear-based and radical policies as extremist and an assault on "our values."  But that was all just such a transparent pretense.  In those few instances where Obama has rejected the Bush/Cheney template, the outrage and hysteria from Democratic and media voices is pervasive, and is growing louder.
Just look at these illustrative incidents.  Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell went on Fred Thompson's radio show yesterday to demand that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed be put before a military commission -- at Guantanamo.  Over the weekend, Time's Joe Klein lambasted the Obama DOJ, and embraced Bush's former CIA and NSA Chief Michael Hayden, by objecting to the criminal charges and Constitutional rights afforded the accused Christmas Day bomber, with Klein decreeing:  "the bomber is an enemy combatant.  He doesn't have Miranda rights."  MSNBC personalities Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie chatted yesterday with their boss, MSNBC Washington Bureau Chief Mark Whitaker, all agreeing that the decision to grant civilian trials for "Terrorists" is "a pure, self-inflicted wound."  When Najibullah Zazi was arrested for allegedly plotting a serious Terrorist attack, The New Republic's Michael Crowley said he was so frightened by this that he was open to torturing Zazi.  Democratic Senators are threatening to join the GOP in cutting off funds for civilian trials.  Democratic members of Congress joined with the GOP to prevent even modest reforms of the Patriot Act and other surveillance abuses.  City officials compete with one another over who can be the most frightened and terrorized by Terrorists.
And The Washington Post's Richard Cohen -- who was so frightened by Terrorism that he wrote multiple screeds screeching that we must have vengeance on Saddam -- devotes his entire column today to criticizing Obama for putting us In Grave Danger by rejecting a handful of Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies (headlined:  "Obama administration is tone-deaf to concerns about terrorism"):
"There is almost nothing the Obama administration does regarding terrorism that makes me feel safer.  Whether it is guaranteeing captured terrorists that they will not be waterboarded, reciting terrorists their rights, or the legally meandering and confusing rule that some terrorists will be tried in military tribunals and some in civilian courts, what is missing is a firm recognition that what comes first is not the message sent to America's critics but the message sent to Americans themselves. When, oh when, will this administration wake up? . . .
"No doubt George Bush soiled America's image abroad with what looked liked vigilante justice and Dick Cheney's hearty endorsement of ugly interrogation measures. But more is at stake here than America's image abroad -- namely the security and peace of mind of Americans in America. . . . The Obama administration, on the other hand, seems to have bent over backward to prove to the world it is not the Bush administration and will, almost no matter what, ensure that everyone gets the benefit of American civil liberties. But the paramount civil liberty is a sense of security and this, sad to say, has eroded under Barack Obama."
Leave aside that Bush -- like Obama -- also tried some accused Terrorists in civilian trials and some before military commissions.  Leave aside that the second-term Bush -- like Obama -- withdrew authorization for waterboarding.  Leave aside the factually inaccurate claim that Obama is "ensuring that everyone gets the benefit of American civil liberties" when he is, in fact, detaining many people without any charges at all and putting many others before military commissions.
Beyond all those factual errors, look at what Cohen is saying:  Bush "soiled America's image," but what he did was right, just and necessary, and Obama should follow that -- which is essentially what many Democratic Party and media elites are saying as well.  Seriously:  if you were a Bush follower, wouldn't you feel as though you were owed a major apology for all the accusations and the fuss that came from Democrats and media figures, accusing you of supporting radical and Constitution-shredding policies when, it turns out, they actually crave those policies in order to feel safe?  Doesn't all of this bolster the Republican claim that those attacks on the Bush administration for civil liberties abuses were not due to genuine conviction, but rather for partisan gain (in the case of Democratic officials) and cheap, preening, wet-finger-in-the-air moralizing (in the case of media stars)?  

Highest single-day death toll so far this year in US drone attacks on Pakistan
CNN
(2/2/10)

Sources: Drone strikes kill 29 in Pakistan

Several suspected US drone strikes killed at least 29 people in Pakistan on Tuesday, Pakistani intelligence sources said.
One of the strikes targeted Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, a group based in Pakistan that targets US forces and their allies in neighboring Afghanistan, said a Pakistan political source who asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the news media.
A commander of the group who spoke on the condition of anonymity told CNN that Haqqani "is alive and was not in the area at the time of the attack."
The reported strikes were unusual for the relatively high number of missiles fired -- at least 17, intelligence sources said -- and for the high death toll.
US drone strikes tend to kill fewer than 10 people, though one last year reportedly killed 60, said Katherine Tiedemann, a policy analyst at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington.
A death toll of 29 would represent the highest single-day death toll this year from a drone strike or strikes in Pakistan, she said.
The missiles hit targets Tuesday morning in at least four villages in North Waziristan, a region rife with Islamic extremists, the Pakistani intelligence sources said.

• The All Headline News report added this: The attack reaffirms the US strategy of its assassination campaign against terrorist leaders inside the country originally spearheaded by President Barack Obama's predecessor President George W. Bush.

On alleged secret Iraq war pact between Bush and Blair, Welsh MP says, "I do know for sure is that the deal was struck, incontrovertibly"
Western Mail
(2/3/10)

Bush and Blair did strike Iraq deal, says Welsh MP

A senior Welsh MP said last night he knew “for certain” Tony Blair and George Bush struck a deal to invade Iraq at their notorious Crawford Ranch meeting in 2002 – a year before war was declared.
Elfyn Llwyd, Plaid Cymru’s parliamentary leader, said he had seen a confidential memo to that effect, although he would not divulge its exact contents.
Critics of the military action in Iraq have long suspected Mr Blair and President Bush came to an agreement at the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas in April 2002, a claim Mr Blair denied in evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry last week.
Mr Llwyd said he had offered to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry himself, in private if necessary.
The Meirionnydd Nant Conwy MP said: “I think other things should have been pursued [at the inquiry], in particular the detailed conversation at the ranch in Crawford in April 2002.
“I do know that the deal was struck, I know for certain it was struck at that stage so just to pretend months down the road that no deal had been struck I think is unforgivable.
“I have offered to give evidence and Chilcot has said ‘I’ll come back to you’. At that stage I will have private discussions with him.”
When the document was leaked five years ago Mr Llwyd said the security services paid him a visit. He declined to comment when asked if he still had the document.
“What I do know for sure is that the deal was struck, incontrovertibly,” said Mr Llwyd.
“I’m sorry I am being cagey about it, I simply don’t want the plod knocking on my door again. It created a huge interest among the intelligence community and a section of the Met came to us.”

Majority of Brits say Prime Minister Brown should share responsibility for Iraq war; 37% say Blair should go on trial
Reuters
(2/4/10)

British say Brown should share in Iraq blame

The majority of the British public believes Prime Minister Gordon Brown should share the blame for the Iraq war with his predecessor Tony Blair, according to a survey ...
Brown, Chancellor at the time of the 2003 US-led invasion, is due to give evidence to a public inquiry into the Iraq war before an election due by June, a move commentators say could damage Labour at the ballot box.
The decision to go to war has been most associated with Blair. It was the most controversial episode of his 10-year premiership, and sapped support for Blair and his party.
But Brown faces criticism for decisions on defence spending, which critics say have hampered British operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The poll also found 37 per cent of those questioned between January 29 and 31 believed Blair should be put on trial for going to war in Iraq.

Israeli senior commander's admission could be "smoking gun" of army misconduct in Gaza War
The Independent
(2/3/10)

Israeli commander: 'We rewrote the rules of war for Gaza'

A high-ranking officer has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli army went beyond its previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian lives in order to minimise military casualties during last year's Gaza war, The Independent can reveal.
The officer, who served as a commander during Operation Cast Lead, made it clear that he did not regard the longstanding principle of military conduct known as "means and intentions" - whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon - as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter. A more junior officer who served at a brigade headquarters during the operation described the new policy - devised in part to avoid the heavy military casualties of the 2006 Lebanon war - as one of "literally zero risk to the soldiers".
The officers' revelations will pile more pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to set up an independent inquiry into the war, as demanded in the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, which harshly criticised the conduct of both Israel and Hamas. One of Israel's most prominent human rights lawyers, Michael Sfard, said last night that the senior commander's acknowledgement - if accurate - was "a smoking gun" ...
His remarks reinforce testimonies from soldiers who served in the Gaza operation, made to the veterans' group Breaking the Silence and reported exclusively by this newspaper last July. They also appear to cut across the military doctrine - enunciated most recently in public by one of the authors of the IDF's own code of ethics - that it is the duty of soldiers to run risks to themselves in order to preserve civilian lives ...
The Yedhiot newspaper also spoke to a series of soldiers who had served in Operation Cast Lead in sensitive positions. While the soldiers rejected the main finding of the Goldstone Report - that the Israeli military had deliberately "targeted" the civilian population - most asserted that the rules were flexible enough to allow a policy under which, in the words of one soldier "any movement must entail gunfire. No one's supposed to be there." He added that at a meeting with his brigade commander and others it was made clear that "if you see any signs of movement at all you shoot. This is essentially the rules of engagement."
The other soldier in the war-room explained: "This doesn't mean that you need to disrespect the lives of Palestinians but our first priority is the lives of our soldiers. That's not something you're going to compromise on. In all my years in the military, I never heard that."
He added that the majority of casualties were caused in his brigade area by aerial firing, including from unmanned drones. "Most of the guys taken down were taken down by order of headquarters. The number of enemy killed by HQ-operated remote ... compared to enemy killed by soldiers on the ground had absolutely inverted," he said.
Rules of engagement issued to soldiers serving in the West Bank as recently as July 2006 make it clear that shooting towards even an armed person will take place only if there is intelligence that he intends to act against Israeli forces or if he poses an immediate threat to soldiers or others.
In a recent article in New Republic, Moshe Halbertal, a philosophy professor at Hebrew and New York Universities, who was involved in drawing up the IDF's ethical code in 2000 and who is critical of the Goldstone Report, said that efforts to spare civilian life "must include the expectation that soldiers assume some risk to their own lives in order to avoid causing the deaths of civilians". While the choices for commanders were often extremely difficult and while he did not think the expectation was demanded by international law, "it is demanded in Israel's military code and this has always been its tradition".

'Three quarters of the benefit from antidepressants seems to be a placebo effect'
Newsweek
(1/29/10)

The Depressing News About Antidepressants

Although the year is young, it has already brought my first moral dilemma. In early January a friend mentioned that his New Year's resolution was to beat his chronic depression once and for all. Over the years he had tried a medicine chest's worth of antidepressants, but none had really helped in any enduring way, and when the side effects became so unpleasant that he stopped taking them, the withdrawal symptoms (cramps, dizziness, headaches) were torture. Did I know of any research that might help him decide whether a new antidepressant his doctor recommended might finally lift his chronic darkness at noon?
The moral dilemma was this: oh, yes, I knew of 20-plus years of research on antidepressants, from the old tricyclics to the newer selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) that target serotonin (Zoloft, Paxil, and the granddaddy of them all, Prozac, as well as their generic descendants) to even newer ones that also target norepinephrine (Effexor, Wellbutrin). The research had shown that antidepressants help about three quarters of people with depression who take them, a consistent finding that serves as the basis for the oft-repeated mantra "There is no question that the safety and efficacy of antidepressants rest on solid scientific evidence," as psychiatry professor Richard Friedman of Weill Cornell Medical College recently wrote in The New York Times.
But ever since a seminal study in 1998, whose findings were reinforced by landmark research in The Journal of the American Medical Association last month, that evidence has come with a big asterisk. Yes, the drugs are effective, in that they lift depression in most patients. But that benefit is hardly more than what patients get when they, unknowingly and as part of a study, take a dummy pill - a placebo. As more and more scientists who study depression and the drugs that treat it are concluding, that suggests that antidepressants are basically expensive Tic Tacs.
Hence the moral dilemma. The placebo effect - that is, a medical benefit you get from an inert pill or other sham treatment - rests on the holy trinity of belief, expectation, and hope. But telling someone with depression who is being helped by antidepressants, or who (like my friend) hopes to be helped, threatens to topple the whole house of cards.
Explain that it's all in their heads, that the reason they're benefiting is the same reason why Disney's Dumbo could initially fly only with a feather clutched in his trunk - believing makes it so - and the magic dissipates like fairy dust in a windstorm. So rather than tell my friend all this, I chickened out. Sure, I said, there's lots of research showing that a new kind of antidepressant might help you. Come, let me show you the studies on PubMed.
It seems I am not alone in having moral qualms about blowing the whistle on antidepressants. That first analysis, in 1998, examined 38 manufacturer-sponsored studies involving just over 3,000 depressed patients. The authors, psychology researchers Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein of the University of Connecticut, saw - as everyone else had - that patients did improve, often substantially, on SSRIs, tricyclics, and even MAO inhibitors, a class of antidepressants that dates from the 1950s. This improvement, demonstrated in scores of clinical trials, is the basis for the ubiquitous claim that antidepressants work. But when Kirsch compared the improvement in patients taking the drugs with the improvement in those taking dummy pills - clinical trials typically compare an experimental drug with a placebo - he saw that the difference was minuscule. Patients on a placebo improved about 75 percent as much as those on drugs.
Put another way, three quarters of the benefit from antidepressants seems to be a placebo effect. "We wondered, what's going on?" recalls Kirsch, who is now at the University of Hull in England. "These are supposed to be wonder drugs and have huge effects."
The study's impact? The number of Americans taking antidepressants doubled in a decade, from 13.3 million in 1996 to 27 million in 2005.

Autopsy of Imam shot and killed by FBI, raises more questions than it answers; "If he
is killed instantly, why is his body found with his hands handcuffed behind his back?"
The Detroit News
(2/2/10)

Detroit imam's autopsy report raises ire

An autopsy report released Monday prompted renewed calls for an independent federal investigation into the death of a local mosque leader during an FBI raid in October.
Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah was shot 21 times during a raid on a Dearborn warehouse, according to the report. The cause of death was multiple gunshot wounds.
Abayomi Azikiwe of the Michigan Emergency Committee against War and Injustice called Abdullah's death "a targeted assassination."
"Whoever was responsible should be criminally prosecuted," said Azikiwe, who joined a protest at Dearborn Police headquarters Monday. "After they shot him, they dumped him in a trailer like a dog."
FBI agents have said they were justified in shooting Abdullah because he opened fire during their raid on a stolen-goods operation.
Agents said an FBI dog was killed, prompting them to return fire. Only four of the more than 20 agents at the scene fired shots, said a person familiar with the investigation. But some claim the FBI unfairly targeted Abdullah, and the shooting wasn't justified -- allegations U.S. Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers mentioned in a Jan. 13 letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
"These concerns are only inflamed when the special agent in charge of the Detroit FBI office asserts -- before investigation has been completed -- that 'I'm comfortable with what our agents did,' " Conyers, D-Detroit, wrote.
The autopsy found Abdullah was hit twice in the chest, four times in the abdomen, twice in the groin, four times in the left hip and side, seven times in the left thigh, once in the scrotum and once in the back.
Dawud Walid, executive director of Council on American-Islamic Relations Michigan, said his organization is requesting copies of the autopsy photographs and has hired an independent pathologist to review the findings. He said the group also wants to see the results of a necropsy on the dog, to confirm it was killed by bullets from a nonpolice weapon, as investigators have said.
"The results we have seen so far are disturbing, and we are going to be investigating more," Walid said. "Three shots in the genital area, and the broken jaw, and a bullet in the back: We don't know how he would have gotten that.
"If he is killed instantly, why is his body found with his hands handcuffed behind his back?"

Anti-tax citizens of Colorado's second-largest city about to find out what life's like without city services; "We're in trouble. We're in big trouble"
The Denver Post
(1/31/10)

Colorado Springs cuts into services considered basic by many

This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.
"I guess we're going to find out what the tolerance level is for people," said businessman Chuck Fowler, who is helping lead a private task force brainstorming for city budget fixes. "It's a new day."
Some residents are less sanguine, arguing that cuts to bus services, drug enforcement and treatment and job development are attacks on basic needs for the working class.
"How are people supposed to live? We're not a 'Mayberry R.F.D.' anymore," said Addy Hansen, a criminal justice student who has spoken out about safety cuts. "We're the second-largest city, and growing, in Colorado. We're in trouble. We're in big trouble."

CIA agents consult financial firms, hedge funds
Politico
(2/1/10)

CIA moonlights in corporate world

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.
In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.
The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253 ...
There is much about the policy that is unclear, including how many officers have availed themselves of it, how long it has been in place and what types of outside employment have been allowed. The CIA declined to provide additional details ...
But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.
The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.
BIA has employed active-duty CIA officers in the past, although BIA president Cheryl Cook said that has “not been the case with BIA for some time.”
But the ties between BIA and the intelligence world run deep. The name itself was chosen as a play off CIA. And the presence of so many former CIA personnel on the payroll at BIA causes confusion as to whether the intelligence firm is actually an extension of the agency itself. As a result, BIA places a disclaimer in some of its corporate materials to clarify that it is not, in fact, controlled by Langley.
BIA’s clients can put the company on a retainer for as much as $400,000 to $800,000 a year. And in return, they receive access to a variety of services, from deception detection to other programs that feature the CIA intelligence techniques.
In one presentation in 2006, BIA personnel promised to teach managers at a leading hedge fund some of the CIA’s own foolproof techniques.

"US threats ... give China a justified cause to increase its national defense expenditure"
China Daily
(2/1/10)

US deal forces China to boost defense budget

It would be justified and proper for China to increase military expenditure as the US has posed a threat and challenged China's core strategic interest by planning a $6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, Chinese experts said.
"The US action gives China a justified cause to increase its national defense expenditure, to enhance the development and purchase of weapons, and to accelerate its modernization process in national defense," said Luo Yuan, a senior researcher with the Academy of Military Science, in an interview with the Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV.
"China is being pressured by the US which is posing a threat to it's core interests," Luo said.
Within 17 hours of the Obama administration notifying US Congress on Friday of the plan to sell Taiwan an arms package that includes Patriot missiles, Black Hawk helicopters and minesweepers, China announced countermeasures.
The Defense Ministry said it would suspend scheduled military exchange visits with the US and closely monitor the situation and take further actions as required.
Exchange visits were arranged for this year during Vice-Chairman of China's Central Military Commission Xu Caihou's visit to the US last Oct 24 to Nov 3, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen's visits to China, and Chinese military's chief of the general staff Chen Bingde's visit to the US.
These arrangements were confirmed in the Joint Statement issued during US President Barrack Obama's visit to China last November.
However, similar steps were taken by China in 2008 after the former Bush administration announced a multibillion-dollar arms sale to Taiwan, but eight months later military dialogues were resumed.
"This sent the US a signal that China's actions only operate for a limited period of time, and later on everything will return to as before," said Luo Yuan.
But the international community should know this is not "China threats", but "the US threats". "China did nothing to threaten the US, why should the US challenge our core strategic interests?" said Luo.

Obama's support for Latin America's most rightwing governments 'highlights the continuity of the politics of control'
The Guardian
(1/29/10)

The US game in Latin America

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

When I write about US foreign policy in places such as Haiti or Honduras, I often get responses from people who find it difficult to believe that the US government would care enough about these countries to try and control or topple their governments. These are small, poor countries with little in the way of resources or markets. Why should Washington policymakers care who runs them? ...
Why do they care so much about who runs these poor countries? As any good chess player knows, pawns matter. The loss of a couple of pawns at the beginning of the game can often make a difference between a win or a loss. They are looking at these countries mostly in straight power terms. Governments that are in agreement with maximising US power in the world, they like. Those who have other goals – not necessarily antagonistic to the United States – they don't like.
Not surprisingly, the Obama administration's closest allies in the hemisphere are rightwing governments such as those of Colombia or Panama, even though Obama himself is not a rightwing politician. This highlights the continuity of the politics of control. The victory of the right in Chile, the first time that it has won an election in half a century, was a significant victory for the US government. If Lula de Silva's Workers' party were to lose the presidential election in Brazil this autumn, that would be another win for the state department. While US officials under both Bush and Obama have maintained a friendly posture toward Brazil, it is obvious that they deeply resent the changes in Brazilian foreign policy that have allied it with other social democratic governments in the hemisphere, and its independent foreign policy stances with regard to the Middle East, Iran, and elsewhere.
The US actually intervened in Brazilian politics as recently as 2005, organising a conference to promote a legal change that would make it more difficult for legislators to switch parties. This would have strengthened the opposition to Lula's Workers' party (PT) government, since the PT has party discipline but many opposition politicians do not. This intervention by the US government was only discovered last year through a Freedom of Information Act request filed in Washington. There are many other interventions taking place throughout the hemisphere that we do not know about. The United States has been heavily involved in Chilean politics since the 1960s, long before they organised the overthrow of Chilean democracy in 1973.
In October 1970, President Richard Nixon was cursing in the Oval Office about the Social Democratic president of Chile, Salvador Allende. "That son of a bitch!" said Richard Nixon on 15 October. "That son of a bitch Allende – we're going to smash him." A few weeks later he explained why:
The main concern in Chile is that [Allende] can consolidate himself, and the picture projected to the world will be his success ... If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile and have it both ways, we will be in trouble.
That is another reason that pawns matter, and Nixon's nightmare did in fact come true a quarter-century later, as one country after another elected independent left governments that Washington did not want. The United States ended up "losing" most of the region. But they are trying to get it back, one country at a time. The smaller, poorer countries that are closer to the United States are the most at risk. Honduras and Haiti will have democratic elections some day, but only when Washington's influence over their politics is further reduced.

Amazon "very close to a tipping point"; one third could be lost in 65 years
Tierramérica
(2/2/10)

The Amazon Is Not Eternal

The Amazon jungle "is very close to a tipping point," and if destruction continues, it could shrink to one third of its original size in just 65 years, warns Thomas Lovejoy, world-renowned tropical biologist.
Climate change, deforestation and fire are the drivers of this potential Amazonian apocalypse, according to Lovejoy, biodiversity chair at the Washington DC-based Heinz Centre for Science, Economics and the Environment, and chief biodiversity adviser to the president of the World Bank.
Lovejoy laid out the scenario for participants at the Biodiversity Science Policy Conference in Paris last week, sponsored by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), and marking the beginning of the U.N.'s International Year of Biodiversity.
"The World Bank released a study that finally put the impacts of climate change, deforestation and fires together. The tipping point for the Amazon is 20 percent deforestation," and that is "a scary result," Lovejoy told Tierramérica in an interview.
The study, "Assessment of the Risk of Amazon Dieback," released Jan. 22, drew on the expertise of several international research institutions, including Japan's Meteorological Research Institute, Britain's Exeter University, Brazil's Centre for Weather Forecasting and Climate Change (CPET/INPE), Germany's Potsdam Institute and Earth3000.
The results and analysis were reviewed by an international blue-ribbon panel of scientists.
Lovejoy, head of the committee responsible for this major scientific investigation, said the Amazon has already lost 17 to 18 percent of its forests. Furthermore, "it has a remarkable hydrogeological system where the forest generates at least half of its own rainfall."
This literally means the rainforest makes its own rain, but it also brings rainfall to many areas outside of the Amazon, including the central-western Brazilian state of Mato Grosso and northern Argentina, he said.
What the study shows for the first time is the combination of global warming on a path to reach two degrees Celsius, deforestation of roughly 20 percent of the original forest, and forest fires that undermine the Amazon's unique hydrogeological system.

Tony Blair "misled", "conned" his cabinet into supporting Iraq war
BBC News
(2/2/10)

Cabinet misled on war, says Short

Tony Blair's cabinet was "misled" into thinking the war with Iraq was legal, ex-International Development Secretary Clare Short has told the UK's inquiry.
She said Attorney General Lord Goldsmith had been "leaned on" to change his advice before the invasion.
Mr Blair "and his mates" decided war was necessary, and "everything was done on a wing and a prayer", Ms Short said.
She quit the cabinet two months after the March 2003 invasion, in protest at planning for the war's aftermath.
In her evidence to the Iraq inquiry, during which she was highly critical of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, she said the cabinet had not been a "decision-making body" and called Parliament a "rubber stamp".
Ms Short, who was given a round of applause after her three-hour appearance, added that she had been "conned" into staying on as a minister until May 2003, despite her misgivings about the war.
The attorney general provisionally advised Mr Blair in January that year that it would be unlawful to invade Iraq without a further United Nations Security Council resolution.
But he changed his mind a month later after being persuaded to talk to senior US government lawyers and Britain's ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock ...
Ms Short said there was no suggestion given that he had had any legal doubts, and said that any discussion of the legal advice was halted at that pre-war cabinet meeting.
She had been "shocked" that the attorney general's advice was so late but was "jeered at" to be quiet by other ministers when she asked why.
Ms Short said that, when she repeated the question to Lord Goldsmith, he had replied: "Oh, it takes me a long time to make my mind up."
In light of the attorney general's "doubts and his changes of opinion" that have since emerged, Ms Short said: "I think for the attorney general to come and say there's unequivocal legal authority to go war was misleading."
She said: "I think he misled the cabinet. He certainly misled me, but people let it through."
Ms Short said that, after the failure to secure a second UN resolution, the government had put out "untrue" claims that France had vetoed it.
But she added that "I believed them at the time. You don't want to disbelieve your prime minister in the run-up to war and you want to believe the leader of your party. You want to be loyal".
Asked why she did not resign earlier, like her cabinet colleague Robin Cook, Ms Short said: "I was conned."

Pope opposes equality in UK
The Guardian
(2/2/10)

Your equality laws are unjust, pope tells UK before visit

Pope Benedict XVI marked the announcement of his first papal visit to Britain with an unprecedented attack on the government's equality legislation yesterday, claiming it threatened religious freedom and ran contrary to "natural law".
Speaking at the Vatican to visiting Catholic bishops of England and Wales, he described changes to the law as unjust and urged them to invoke "missionary zeal" to resist them.
The comments came during a five-yearly trip to the Vatican by the bishops, during which they made presentations on their concerns about the place of religion in an increasingly secular society.
The pope's broadside appeared to be aimed squarely at recent legislation that prevents Catholic adoption agencies from discriminating against gay couples, and the proposed equality bill, which would make it harder for churches to exclude job applications from homosexuals or people who have changed their gender.

On Holocaust Memorial Day, Namibian genocide forgotten
The Guardian
(1/31/10)

The forgotten genocide

Between 1904 and 1908, 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama people were exterminated in concentration camps in Namibia, then known as German South West Africa, during German colonial rule. In the years following Germany's annexation of Namibia in 1884, land already settled by indigenous communities was confiscated, livestock plundered and native people subjected to racially motivated violence, rape and murder.
Tensions reached a head in January 1904, when in protest at their treatment, the Herero launched an uprising in Okahandja during which more than 100 Germans were killed.
Despite their wish to avoid further confrontation, the Herero were ruthlessly suppressed six months later by Germans troops under an explicit "annihilation order" issued by General Lothar von Trotha. The Herero were ultimately defeated in a battle at Waterburg and forced into the Kalahari Desert to die of thirst and starvation.
The 13,000 who barely survived, including women and children, were rounded up and placed in concentration camps around the country, where they were beaten and worked to death in squalid conditions. Half of the total Nama population were also killed, many from exhaustion, in disease-ridden death camps such the infamous site on Shark Island, in the coastal town of Luderitz.
Despite the continuities that connect the mass slaughter of the Herero and Nama with subsequent genocides in Nazi occupied Europe, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia and Darfur, the deaths of the early 20th century Namibians are still not officially commemorated during Holocaust Memorial Day along with all the other aforementioned genocides.