Mahler's Prodigal Son

Obama speaks. Three key questions remain unanswered

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Sat, 25 May 2013 06:35:00 +0000

Obama gave a major policy speech this week, principally addressing the question of the war on terror, drones and Gitmo. It will be recalled that an outburst by a woman as Obama spoke (see post) attracted almost as much attention as the speech itself. As this piece on truthdig points out Obama avoided 3 key issues in his speech.

"In the midst of his carefully scripted counterterrorism address Thursday at National Defense University in Washington, D.C., President Obama encountered an unexpected speed bump in the form of Medea Benjamin, the highly animated 60-year-old co-founder of anti-war group Code Pink whose track record for crashing high-profile political events and heckling speakers has earned her the reputation of being the country’s most disruptive protester.

As Obama shifted the focus of his wide-ranging remarks from drone attacks to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, attempting to craft a new and more transparent legal framework for the war on terror and promising an ultimate end to it, Benjamin shouted, “You are commander in chief. You can close Guantanamo today!”

Obama tried to quiet Benjamin, but she persisted, demanding to know with regard to the use of drones if the president valued Muslim lives as much as American ones, and if he would apologize to “the thousands of Muslims that you have killed?” Finally, Benjamin was escorted from the auditorium by a security detail, yelling as she left, “Abide by the rule of law. You’re a constitutional lawyer.”

Although the major media thus far have treated Benjamin’s antics as an amusing sideshow, the questions she raised about the legal basis for the administration’s policies are anything but funny or anywhere close to being resolved. Indeed, far from succeeding as a reassuring second-term milestone, the president’s speech left at least three core issues in the war on terror entirely unsettled"

As for that female interjector? It was Media Benjamin, of CODEPINK. She writes exclusively for CommonDreams in "Why I Spoke Out at Obama's Foreign Policy Speech":

"When the President was coming to the end of this speech, he started talking about Guantanamo. As he has done in the past, he stated his desire to close the prison, but blamed Congress. That’s when I felt compelled to speak out. With the men in Guantanamo on hunger strike, being brutally forced fed and bereft of all hope, I couldn’t let the President continue to act as if he were some helpless official at the mercy of Congress.

“Excuse me, Mr. President,” I said, “but you’re the Commander-in-Chief. You could close Guantanamo tomorrow and release the 86 prisoners who have been cleared for release.” We went on to have quite an exchange.

While I have received a deluge of support, there are others, including journalists, who have called me “rude.” But terrorizing villages with Hellfire missiles that vaporize innocent people is rude. Violating the sovereignty of nations like Pakistan is rude. Keeping 86 prisoners in Guantanamo long after they have been cleared for release is rude. Shoving feeding tubes down prisoners' throats instead of giving them justice is certainly rude."

It's a mugs game. They pay tax! The others?

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Sat, 25 May 2013 06:26:00 +0000

It looks like one can "organise" ones affairs so as to avoid, or at least minimise, the payment of tax. Certainly corporations can, especially if they are multi-national. Just look at what was revealed about Apple this past week.

"Earlier this week, a Senate panel investigated how Apple avoided billions in taxes through a web of offshore subsidiaries “so complex it spanned continents and went beyond anything most experts had ever seen.” Although the company may have achieved, in the words of Sen. Carl Levin, the “holy grail of tax avoidance,” senators didn’t accuse Apple of doing anything illegal and it is by no means alone in its use of loopholes and gimmicks to avoid paying taxes.

Here’s a list, topped by Apple, of 10 companies that increased their offshore holdings in the past year.

The U.S. corporate tax rate is 35 percent — one of the highest in the world — but as The New York Times reported yesterday, the effective corporate tax rate (what companies actually pay) “fell to 17.8 percent in 2012 from 42.5 percent in 1960,” according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Another chart from the Citizens for Tax Justice shows 10 companies that managed to do much better than average, paying little or no taxes for the past five years. Dollar amounts are numbers in millions and “rate” is the effective tax rate that the companies paid."

Israel's IDF: Living in a parellel universe....and, as is customary, lying

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Sat, 25 May 2013 05:17:00 +0000

Can anyone forget these graphic photos, believe it or not, back in 2000?

Apart from the question of why it has taken 13 years to investigate and report on the incident, one really has to wonder at least two things. What universe does Israel's IDF occupy? - and do they really believe that anyone will believe their tripe and lies?

"Thirteen years after the iconic photo of his shooting helped spark the Second Intifada, Israel has issued a report finding that 12-year-old Muhammad Al-Durra was not killed by Israeli forces, and in fact might not even be dead. Yes. It says that. The new report, focusing on the infamous image of the terrified Muhammad huddling against his father amidst gunfire moments before he slumped to the ground, argues that the shooting was either staged or the fault of Palestinians and has long been unfairly used to justify terrorism and "the delegitimization of Israel." Muhammad is one of nearly 1,400 Palestinian children killed since 2000 as a result of the Israeli occupation. The latest travesty from Israel has sparked outrage from many, here and here. Muhammad's father Jamal's response struck at the broken heart of the matter.

"Israel says my son is not dead? Then let them bring him to me."

Yes, a horrid crime......but was it terrorism?

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Fri, 24 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000

There can be no doubting that the vicious murder in London a couple of days ago was horrific. Some aspects are downright bizarre. But, was it an act of terrorism as it has been labelled by all and sundry, from the British PM downwards?

"It's true that the soldier who was killed yesterday was out of uniform and not engaged in combat at the time he was attacked. But the same is true for the vast bulk of killings carried out by the US and its allies over the last decade, where people are killed in their homes, in their cars, at work, while asleep (in fact, the US has re-defined "militant" to mean "any military-aged male in a strike zone"). Indeed, at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on drone killings, Gen. James Cartwright and Sen. Lindsey Graham both agreed that the US has the right to kill its enemies even while they are "asleep", that you don't "have to wake them up before you shoot them" and "make it a fair fight". Once you declare that the "entire globe is a battlefield" (which includes London) and that any "combatant" (defined as broadly as possible) is fair game to be killed - as the US has done - then how can the killing of a solider of a nation engaged in that war, horrific though it is, possibly be "terrorism"?

When I asked on Twitter this morning what specific attributes of this attack make it "terrorism" given that it was a soldier who was killed, the most frequent answer I received was that "terrorism" means any act of violence designed to achieve political change, or more specifically, to induce a civilian population to change their government or its policies of out fear of violence. Because, this line of reasoning went, one of the attackers here said that "the only reasons we killed this man is because Muslims are dying daily" and warned that "you people will never be safe. Remove your government", the intent of the violence was to induce political change, thus making it "terrorism".

That is at least a coherent definition. But doesn't that then encompass the vast majority of violent acts undertaken by the US and its allies over the last decade? What was the US/UK "shock and awe" attack on Baghdad if not a campaign to intimidate the population with a massive show of violence into submitting to the invading armies and ceasing their support for Saddam's regime? That was clearly its functional intent and even its stated intent. That definition would also immediately include the massive air bombings of German cities during World War II. It would include the Central American civilian-slaughtering militias supported, funded and armed by the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s, the Bangledeshi death squads trained and funded by the UK, and countless other groups supported by the west that used violence against civilians to achieve political ends.

The ongoing US drone attacks unquestionably have the effect, and one could reasonably argue the intent, of terrorizing the local populations so that they cease harboring or supporting those the west deems to be enemies. The brutal sanctions regime imposed by the west on Iraq and Iran, which kills large numbers of people, clearly has the intent of terrorizing the population into changing its governments' policies and even the government itself. How can one create a definition of "terrorism" that includes Wednesday's London attack on this British soldier without including many acts of violence undertaken by the US, the UK and its allies and partners? Can that be done?

I know this vital caveat will fall on deaf ears for some, but nothing about this discussion has anything to do with justifiability. An act can be vile, evil, and devoid of justification without being "terrorism": indeed, most of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century, from the Holocaust to the wanton slaughter of Stalin and Pol Pot and the massive destruction of human life in Vietnam, are not typically described as "terrorism". To question whether something qualifies as "terrorism" is not remotely to justify or even mitigate it. That should go without saying, though I know it doesn't.

The reason it's so crucial to ask this question is that there are few terms - if there are any - that pack the political, cultural and emotional punch that "terrorism" provides. When it comes to the actions of western governments, it is a conversation-stopper, justifying virtually anything those governments want to do. It's a term that is used to start wars, engage in sustained military action, send people to prison for decades or life, to target suspects for due-process-free execution, shield government actions behind a wall of secrecy, and instantly shape public perceptions around the world. It matters what the definition of the term is, or whether there is a consistent and coherent definition. It matters a great deal."

Shades from the past....

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Fri, 24 May 2013 07:32:00 +0000

Credited to Rick McKee, Cagle Cartoons

Amnesty International: Much of the world is not a good place

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Amnesty International has issued its annual Report for 2013. It doesn't make for happy reading.

"Amnesty International says the world has become an increasingly dangerous place for refugees and migrants.

In its annual report, the group said millions were forced to live on the margins of society and allowed to be the targets of "populist rhetoric".

Amnesty said governments were more interested in protecting their own borders than the rights of migrants."
****

"The failure to address conflict situations effectively is creating a global underclass," said Salil Shetty, Amnesty's Secretary General.

"The rights of those fleeing conflict are unprotected. Too many governments are abusing human rights in the name of immigration control - going well beyond legitimate border control measures."

Increasingly, there is very little that governments and corporations can do in hiding behind 'sovereign' boundaries”

He added: "These measures not only affect people fleeing conflict. Millions of migrants are being driven into abusive situations, including forced labour and sexual abuse, because of anti-immigration policies which means they can be exploited with impunity. Much of this is fuelled by populist rhetoric that targets refugees and migrants for governments' domestic difficulties."

The report singled out the European Union, saying it implemented border control measures "that put the lives of migrants and asylum-seekers at risk and fails to guarantee the safety of those fleeing conflict and persecution".

"Around the world, migrants and asylum-seekers are regularly locked up in detention centres and in worst case scenarios are held in metal crates or even shipping containers," the report said."
****

"The report says 101 countries repressed their people's rights to freedom of expression in 2012, up from 91 out of 155 countries recorded in 2011.

In its summary of events in 2012, Amnesty says numerous nations have failed to address the abuse of women."

Does the USA have a greater involvement in Syria than we know about?

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:45:00 +0000

Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard, writing in his blog on FP, considers that the USA is much more involved in the Syrian conflict than we are being told.

"Permit me to indulge today in a bit of speculation, for which I don't have a lot of hard evidence. As I read this article yesterday on Hezbollah's involvement in the Syrian civil war, I began to wonder whether U.S. involvement in that conflict isn't more substantial than I have previously thought. And then I did a bit of web surfing and found this story, which seemed to confirm my suspicions. Here's my chain of reasoning:

1. The Syrian conflict has become a proxy fight between the opposition and its various allies (Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Turkey, etc.) and Bashar al-Assad's regime and its various outsider supporters (Iran, Russia, Hezbollah).

2. For Washington, this war has become a golden opportunity to inflict a strategic defeat on Iran and its various local allies and thus shift the regional balance of power in a pro-American direction.

3. Israel's calculations are more complicated, given that it had a good working relationship with the Assad regime and is concerned about a failed state emerging next door. But on balance, a conflict that undermines Iran, further divides the Arab/Islamic world, and distracts people from the continued colonization of the West Bank is a net plus. So Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won't object if the United States gets more deeply engaged.

4. Consistent with its buck-passing instincts, Barack Obama's administration does not want to play a visible role in the conflict. This is partly because Americans are rightly tired of trying to govern war-torn countries, but also because America isn't very popular in the region and anyone who gets too close to the United States might actually lose popular support. So no boots on the ground, no "no-fly zones," and no big, highly visible shipments of U.S. arms. Instead, Washington can use Qatar and Saudi Arabia as its middlemen, roles they are all too happy to play for their own reasons.

5. Since taking office, Obama has shown a marked preference for covert actions that don't cost too much and don't attract much publicity, combined with energetic efforts to prosecute leakers. So an energetic covert effort in Syria would be consistent with past practice. Although there have been news reports that the CIA is involved in vetting and/or advising some opposition groups, we still don't know just how deeply involved the U.S. government is. (There has been a bit of speculation in the blogosphere that the attack on Benghazi involved "blowback" from the Syrian conflict, but I haven't seen any hard evidence to support this idea.)

6. In this scenario, the Obama administration may secretly welcome the repeated demands for direct U.S. involvement made by war hawks like Sen. John McCain. Rejecting the hawks' demands for airstrikes, "no-fly zones," or overt military aid makes it look like U.S. involvement is actually much smaller than it really is.

To repeat: The above analysis is mostly speculative on my part. I have no concrete evidence that the full scenario sketched above is correct, and I don't know what the level of U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war really is. But that's what troubles me: I don't like not knowing what my government is doing, allegedly to make me safer or to advance someone's idea of the "national interest." And if you're an American, neither should you. If the United States is now orchestrating a lot of arms shipments, trying to pick winners among the opposition, sending intelligence information to various militias, and generally meddling in a very complicated and uncertain conflict, don't you think the president owes us a more complete account of what America's public servants are or are not doing, and why?"

Obama and press freedom (?)

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:42:00 +0000

Credited tocChristopher Weyant

Yes, Assange is the subject of being fitted up

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Wed, 22 May 2013 08:30:00 +0000

There seems to be little doubt that Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame- ever the pariah - has been framed. There is now even evidence of it, as UPI reports.

"WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said messages he got from a British agency included speculation he was framed by Swedish officials seeking his extradition.

The messages from the Government Communications Headquarters, obtained through an official request for information, included discussions by the government eavesdropping agency that speculated he was being framed by Swedish authorities seeking his extradition for questioning on rape allegations, The Guardian reported Sunday.

Assange spoke about the messages Sunday night during an interview with the Spanish television program, "Salvados."

The instant messages to which Assange had access remained unclassified by GCHQ.

Assange has spent the past 11 months in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid arrest and extradition to Sweden. He has maintained his innocence and said he feared he would be extradited to the United States. WikiLeaks posted millions of sensitive military and diplomatic documents and communiques

A GCHQ message from September 2012, read by Assange, allegedly said: "They are trying to arrest him on suspicion of XYZ. ... It is definitely a fit-up. ... Their timings are too convenient."

Assange provided little explanation about exactly who wrote the messages, The Guardian said.

Assange said GCHQ was unaware it may have anything on him that wasn't classified, The Guardian said.

"It won't hand over any of the classified information," he said. "But, much to its surprise, it has some unclassified information on us."

Another instant message conversation, as read by Assange, from August 2012 called the WikiLeaks founder a "fool" if he thought he could wait out Sweden's attempt to extradite him."

The agency confirmed it "responded formally to the subject who made the request. The disclosed material includes personal comments between some members of staff and do not reflect GCHQ's policies or views in any way."

Listening (is anyone?) Afghan voices

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Wed, 22 May 2013 08:23:00 +0000

Essentially the voices we read and hear in the West in relation to the Afghan war, is those of Westerners, principally peddling the pr handouts from politicians and the military. But what about Afghan peoples? What are they thinking, feeling and experiencing?

"Since 2009, Voices for Creative Nonviolence has maintained a grim record we call the “The Afghan Atrocities Update” which gives the dates, locations, numbers and names of Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces. Even with details culled from news reports, these data can't help but merge into one large statistic, something about terrible pain that's worth caring about but that is happening very far away.

It’s one thing to chronicle sparse details about these U.S. led NATO attacks. It’s quite another to sit across from Afghan men as they try, having broken down in tears, to regain sufficient composure to finish telling us their stories. Last night, at a restaurant in Kabul, I and two friends from the Afghan Peace Volunteers met with five Pashtun men from Afghanistan’s northern and eastern provinces. The men had agreed to tell us about their experiences living in areas affected by regular drone attacks, aerial bombings and night raids. Each of them noted that they also fear Taliban threats and attacks. “What can we do,” they asked, “when both sides are targeting us?”

****

"The world doesn't seem to ask many questions about Afghan civilians whose lives are cut short by NATO or Taliban forces. Genuinely concerned U.S. friends say they can't really make sense of our list - news stories merge into one large abstraction, into statistics, into "collateral damage," in a way that comparable (if much smaller and less frequent) attacks on U.S. civilians do not. People here in Afghanistan naturally don’t see themselves as a statistic; they wonder why the NATO soldiers treat civilians as battlefield foes at the slightest hint of opposition or danger; why the U.S. soldiers and drones kill unarmed suspects on anonymous tips when people around the world know suspects deserve safety and a trial, innocent until proven guilty.

“All of us keep asking why the internationals kill us,” said Jamaludeen. “One reason seems to be that they don’t differentiate between people. The soldiers fear any bearded Afghan who wears a turban and traditional clothes. But why would they kill children? It seems they have a mission. They are told to go and get the Taliban. When they go out in their planes and their tanks and their helicopters, they need to be killing, and then they can report that they have completed their mission.”

These are the stories being told here. NATO and its constituent nations may have other accounts to give of themselves, but they aren’t telling them very convincingly, or well. The stories told by bomb blasts or by shouting home-invading soldiers drown out other competing sentiments and seem to represent all that the U.S./NATO occupiers ever came here to say. We who live in countries that support NATO, that tolerate this occupation, bear responsibility to hear the tales told by Afghans who are trapped by our war of choice. These tales are part of our history now, and this history isn’t popular in Afghanistan. It doesn’t play well when the U.S. and NATO forces state that we came here because of terrorism, because of a toll in lost civilian lives already exceeded in Afghanistan during just the first three months of a decade-long war – that we came in pious concern over precious stories that should not be cut short."

Oklahoma Tornado: The tragic consequences of cost-saving

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:58:00 +0000

The devastation wrought by the tornado in Oklahoma, USA, is hard to believe. Even more difficult to fathom is how that there wasn't a greater, or better, warning to the populace about the pending tornado. The answer seems readily available. Lack of money for the weather service. And this in the supposed richest country in the world?

"Was the severe weather system culminating in yesterday’s Oklahoma City tornado intensified – or even created – by climate change? That question will almost certainly be batted back and forth in the media over the next few days. After all, there is plenty of scientific evidence that climate change intensifies weather in general, but there remain legitimate questions about how – and even if – it intensifies tornadoes in specific.

One thing, however, that shouldn’t be up for debate is whether or not we should be as prepared as possible for inevitable weather events like tornadoes. We obviously should be – but there’s an increasing chance that we will not be thanks to the manufactured crisis known as sequestration.

As the Federal Times recently reported, sequestration includes an 8.2 percent cut to the National Weather Service. According to the organization representing weather service employees, that means there is “no way for the agency to maintain around-the-clock operations at its 122 forecasting offices” and also means “people are going to be overworked, they’re going to be tired, they’re going to miss warnings.”

Summarizing the problem, the American Institute of Physics put it bluntly: “The government runs the risk of significantly increasing forecast error and, the government’s ability to warn Americans across the country about high impact weather events, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, will be compromised.”

The good news is that the National Weather Service station in Norman, Oklahoma had a warning in effect for 16 minutes before the most recent Oklahoma City tornado hit. That’s better than the 13 minute average, so thankfully, more people probably had more time than usual to evacuate or find safe shelter."

A "new" angle on the reason for the war in Syria......lack of water!

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:29:00 +0000

Thomas Friedman, author and op-ed writer for The New York Times, has been travelling in Syria. Now, whilst no one could ever say that Friedman is insightful, let alone knowledgable about foreign affairs - just to the contrary! - in his latest piece for the Times he notes one cause for the present conflict in Syria. Drought! To what extent he is on the money is hard to evaluate.

“The drought did not cause Syria’s civil war,” said the Syrian economist Samir Aita, but, he added, the failure of the government to respond to the drought played a huge role in fueling the uprising. What happened, Aita explained, was that after Assad took over in 2000 he opened up the regulated agricultural sector in Syria for big farmers, many of them government cronies, to buy up land and drill as much water as they wanted, eventually severely diminishing the water table. This began driving small farmers off the land into towns, where they had to scrounge for work.

Because of the population explosion that started here in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to better health care, those leaving the countryside came with huge families and settled in towns around cities like Aleppo. Some of those small towns swelled from 2,000 people to 400,000 in a decade or so. The government failed to provide proper schools, jobs or services for this youth bulge, which hit its teens and 20s right when the revolution erupted.

Then, between 2006 and 2011, some 60 percent of Syria’s land mass was ravaged by the drought and, with the water table already too low and river irrigation shrunken, it wiped out the livelihoods of 800,000 Syrian farmers and herders, the United Nations reported. “Half the population in Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers left the land” for urban areas during the last decade, said Aita. And with Assad doing nothing to help the drought refugees, a lot of very simple farmers and their kids got politicized. “State and government was invented in this part of the world, in ancient Mesopotamia, precisely to manage irrigation and crop growing,” said Aita, “and Assad failed in that basic task.”

A real and true hero

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:22:00 +0000

Credited to Randall Enos, Cagle Cartoons

Russia shirt-fronts the West in relation to Syria

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:18:00 +0000

Putin, and the Russians, are playing hard-ball in relation to Syria. The West, notably the US and Israel, are not finding that they can have things there way with regard to what is happening in Syria. Of course, it's all a game of diplomacy and one-up-manship with Putin flexing his muscles in the process.

"President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation has drawn a line in the sand over Syria, the government of which he is determined to protect from overthrow. Not since the end of the Cold War in 1991 has the Russian Bear asserted itself so forcefully beyond its borders in support of claims on great power status. In essence, Russia is attempting to play the role in Syria that France did in Algeria in the 1990s, of supporting the military government against rebels, many of them linked to political Islam. France and its allies prevailed, at the cost of some 150,000 dead. Can Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad pull off the same sort of victory?

Even as Damascus pushes back against the rebels militarily, Putin has swung into action on the international and regional stages. The Russian government persuaded U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to support an international conference aimed at a negotiated settlement. Putin upbraided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his country’s air attacks on Damascus. Moscow is sending sophisticated anti-aircraft batteries, anti-submarine missiles and other munitions to beleaguered Assad, and has just announced that 12 Russian warships will patrol the Mediterranean. The Russian actions have raised alarums in Tel Aviv and Washington, even as they have been praised in Damascus and Tehran."

Great PR.......ignoring critical issues closer to home!

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:12:00 +0000

Pr is one thing. A reality check another. Here, Alice Rothchild explains in an op-ed piece in The Boston Globe why an outwardly laudable pr effort by the Israelis makes her (rightly so) uncomfortable and to use her word "uneasy".

"On the face of it, Israel has made a good and generous offer: a country well-versed in advanced trauma care offers a team of experts to Boston and its neighbors at a time of great hardship, supporting the needs of innocent victims of the tragic Boston Marathon bombings. Last week six Israeli trauma experts from the Israel Trauma Coalition for Response and Preparedness visited Boston to help develop recovery strategies with their local counterparts.

Funded by Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies to the tune of roughly $75,000, this is part of an effort to “provide people with a Jewish response to helping victims and their families recover from this traumatic event,” said Gail Weinberg of the Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas on its website. Interestingly, Israeli trauma teams have been active all over the world, from post-earthquake Haiti to post-Katrina New Orleans, from Mumbai, India to Toulouse, France. Coalition director Talia Levanon explains in The Times of Israel, “You are meeting different people in different parts of the world, but they all have the same fears and issues and responses. The world has become a small place and we derive a lot of strength when we work together. We speak the same emotional language all over the world.”

So why does this make me uneasy? While I have no doubt that the experience and broad community focus of the Israeli team has been helpful, Boston is a major medical center with world-class hospitals and trauma teams and strong community resources.

An Israeli team in Boston provides Israel with a feel good moment and well-publicized appreciation, from the Massachusetts governor on down.

But there is a powerful disconnect here. I just received a note from Rabbis for Human Rights about 40,000 Bedouin Israeli citizens who are being removed from their homes and sources of income to artificial townships. I am troubled by the steady stream of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strikes in Israeli jails, trapped for months without trials in endless administrative detention.

Then there is the news from the West Bank town of Budrus, where years of nonviolent protests led to a change in the path of the Israeli-built separation wall. Last week, after the release of a graphic novel by Just Vision documenting that struggle, the Israeli army arrived, shooting tear gas and starting a fire in the village’s olive groves. And the 1.7 million inhabitants of Gaza, over half of whom are children, live on the edge of hunger, deprivation, and uncertainty due to the ongoing siege and frequent Israeli incursions.

There is also the issue of asylum seekers. In February, Israeli authorities deported over 1,000 Sudanese refugees to North Sudan despite the fact that, “[Sudan] has vowed to punish any of its citizens who ever set foot in Israel.” Ironically, many of the Sudanese who fled to Israel left from Darfur where there is an ongoing struggle by Jewish US activists against the genocidal policies of the Sudanese government.

But to return to the Boston victims, I have no doubt that the Israeli trauma team was filled with good intentions as well as expertise, but this feels like an opportunistic political moment where good deeds are actually part of a larger intent to manipulate image making.

What about the victims that are not an ocean away? Do they not “all have the same fears and issues and responses?” Do they not “speak the same emotional language all over the world?” I can only ask, are they not deserving of the care, expertise, and attention of Israeli trauma teams? Why come all the way to Boston?"

Free-rein for billionaires

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Mon, 20 May 2013 07:30:00 +0000

Who said that money can't buy influence? Money, as we all know, can open all sorts of doors. True it is that notwithstanding millions of dollars, from a few donors, having been poured into candidates opposing Obama during the recent presidential campaign - with no visible effect - there is no doubting that money is going to have a significant bearing on elections in the USA in the future.

"Billionaires with an axe to grind, now is your time. Not since the days before a bumbling crew of would-be break-in artists set into motion the fabled Watergate scandal, leading to the first far-reaching restrictions on money in American politics, have you been so free to meddle. There is no limit to the amount of money you can give to elect your friends and allies to political office, to defeat those with whom you disagree, to shape or stunt or kill policy, and above all to influence the tone and content of political discussion in this country.

Today, politics is a rich man's game. Look no further than the 2012 elections and that season's biggest donor, 79-year-old casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. He and his wife, Miriam, shocked the political class by first giving $16.5 million in an effort to make Newt Gingrich the Republican presidential nominee. Once Gingrich exited the race, the Adelsons invested more than $30 million in electing Mitt Romney. They donated millions more to support GOP candidates running for the House and Senate, to block a pro-union measure in Michigan, and to bankroll the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservative stalwarts (which waged their own campaigns mostly to help Republican candidates for Congress). All told, the Adelsons donated $94 million during the 2012 cycle -- nearly four times the previous record set by liberal financier George Soros. And that's only the money we know about. When you add in so-called dark money, one estimate puts their total giving at closer to $150 million.

It was not one of Adelson's better bets. Romney went down in flames; the Republicans failed to retake the Senate and conceded seats in the House; and the majority of candidates backed by Adelson-funded groups lost, too. But Adelson, who oozes chutzpah as only a gambling tycoon worth $26.5 billion could, is undeterred. Politics, he told the Wall Street Journal in his first post-election interview, is like poker: "I don't cry when I lose. There's always a new hand coming up." He said he could double his 2012 giving in future elections. "I'll spend that much and more," he said. "Let's cut any ambiguity."

But simply tallying Adelson's wins and losses -- or the Koch brothers', or George Soros's, or any other mega-donors' -- misses the bigger point. What matters is that these wealthy funders were able to give so much money in the first place."
With the advent of super PACs and a growing reliance on secretly funded nonprofits, the very wealthy can pour their money into the political system with an ease that didn't exist as recently as this moment in Barack Obama's first term in office. For now at least, Sheldon Adelson is an extreme example, but he portends a future in which 1-percenters can flood the system with money in ways beyond the dreams of ordinary Americans. In the meantime, the traditional political parties, barred from taking all that limitless cash, seem to be sliding toward irrelevance. They are losing their grip on the political process, political observers say, leaving motivated millionaires and billionaires to handpick the candidates and the issues. "It'll be wealthy people getting together and picking horses and riding those horses through a primary process and maybe upending the consensus of the party," a Democratic strategist recently told me. "We're in a whole new world."

A threat (from Syria to Israel) not to be lightly dismissed

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Sun, 19 May 2013 09:10:00 +0000

Probably out of an arrogance developed over the years - and a military superiority over any other country in the region - Israel has, with impunity, attacked Syria, Lebanon and Iran.

But the bitten can also bite back! And Syria has warned Israel in no uncertain terms that it is now a target, if this report in The Sunday Times is correct.

"Syria has put its most advanced missiles on standby with orders to hit Tel Aviv if Israel launches another raid on its territory.

Reconnaissance satellites have been monitoring preparations by the Syrian army to deploy surface-to-surface Tishreen missiles.

An Israeli official told The New York Times that Israel, which has launched three recent attacks on Syria, was considering further strikes and warned President Bashar al-Assad that his government would face “crippling consequences” if he hit back at Israel.

The deployment of the Syrian-made Tishreen missiles, each of which can carry a half-ton payload, marks a significant escalation of tension in a region in which the United States and Russia appear to be preparing for a Cold War-style stand-off.

In a signal of its continued support for Assad, Russia last week sent a dozen warships to patrol the eastern Mediterranean close to its Syrian naval base in Tartus, its only naval outpost outside the former Soviet Union.

“This very much resembles the Cold War days when the Russian navy was patrolling the Mediterranean alongside the US Sixth Fleet,” said a Middle East analyst."

At Gitmo: 100 days.... and counting

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Sun, 19 May 2013 09:01:00 +0000

Last Friday saw the 100th day pass on which there has been a hunger-strike underway at Gitmo.

The day has been marked by those concerned enough to care - as we all ought to be!

Activists protest against the indefinite detention of detainees outside of the Supreme Court

"Hacker vigilante group Anonymous is marking the day with a "twitterstorm," implementing social media to bring greater awareness to the human rights violations going on at Guantanamo, particularly the indefinite detention of prisoners, many of whom have for years been cleared for release.

Under the hashtag #GTMO17, the group is asking participants to tweet out facts or quotes in order to convey the reality of the detainees' imprisonment. Some examples include:

"...shackled by his wrists and around his waist —while food is “dumped into this throat” for up to two hours at a time." #GTMO17

Amnesty International added this week that the situation at the notorious camp is “at a crisis point,” #GTMO17

“They won’t let us live in peace and now they won’t let us die in peace,” said detainee al-Kandari. #GTMO17

"they go & invade people's cells and beat them up. Maybe they think by doing so is like to break you down/make you stop the strike" #GTMO17

"They had a photograph of a Chechen rebel, and they thought that was me. That was secret evidence for five years." #GTMO17"

Turn on, log in, opt out?

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Sun, 19 May 2013 07:30:00 +0000

Too much "life" with or on internet for you? For many other too. An "interesting" piece from Columbia Journalism Review:

"At a tech conference in Lake Tahoe three years ago, Eric Schmidt gave a talk that included a startling statistic. Schmidt—who was then CEO of Google, so we took his word for it—announced that every two days, we create as much digital content as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. By “we,” of course, he meant those of us who are connected to the Internet: about two billion of the world’s seven billion people. And by “create content,” he meant “upload data.” Lots and lots of data. Five billion gigabytes of data, every two days.

A not insignificant amount of that “content” is created by debates about what this constant hyper-connectivity is doing to our brains, our bodies, our children, our relationships, and our sense of ourselves in the natural world. These debates are led by an increasingly entrenched class of cyberpundits eager to help clarify and contextualize our everyday digital acts. Technology advances so rapidly, and then gets folded into our daily lives so effortlessly, that it can feel like a force of nature, or a political movement—one that we can join, or avoid, but not one that we could control. The pundits want to convince us that we are indeed in the driver’s seat—and then steer us toward their own particular visions for the digital future.

Lately, the discussion has focused more directly on the data itself—those five billion gigabytes of “likes” and retweets being created every single day. Every time we search on Google or Amazon, or talk on Twitter or Facebook, that information is recorded somewhere: where does it go, and to whom does it belong? Could we use it for a higher good? Could it mean the end of privacy? Could it mean the end of death? What’s coming next? What should come next? A veritable data-dump of new books, by a representative sample of cyberpundits, attempt to answer these questions and more."

Continue reading here.

AWOL at the White House?

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Sun, 19 May 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Tongue-in-cheek piece in the current issue of The New Yorker:

"President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years.

“Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am,” he said. “Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization.”

The President’s outrage only increased, he said, when he “recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice.”

“The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more certain I am that I would not want to be associated with them,” he said. “They sound like bad news.”

Mr. Obama closed his address by indicating that beginning next week he would enforce what he called a “zero tolerance policy on governing.”

“If I find that any members of my Administration have had any intimate knowledge of, or involvement in, the workings of the United States government, they will be dealt with accordingly,” he said."

"War on Terror" now permanent - and without any limitations

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Sat, 18 May 2013 08:30:00 +0000

It's now official. The USA is, in effect, officially at war, because of the "war on terror". Wherever it might go. Scary? And what the ramifications are of all of that of even greater concern. Think curtailing civil liberties as but one consequence. It can be taken as almost a given that what America does will flow on to other Western nations a la Canada, the UK, Australia and many European countries.

"On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this "war" - the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) - should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired's Spencer Ackerman (soon to be the Guardian US's national security editor) described the most significant exchange:

"Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, 'At least 10 to 20 years.' . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today - atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America's Thirty Years War."

That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the "war on terror" will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week's big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of "endless war". Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war - justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism - that is the single greatest cause of that threat."

****

"Though rarely visible, the costs are nonetheless gargantuan. Just in financial terms, as Americans are told they must sacrifice Social Security and Medicare benefits and place their children in a crumbling educational system, the Pentagon remains the world's largest employer and continues to militarily outspend the rest of the world by a significant margin. The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves?"

****

"Just to convey a sense for how degraded is this Washington "debate": Obama officials at yesterday's Senate hearing repeatedly insisted that this "war" is already one without geographical limits and without any real conceptual constraints. The AUMF's war power, they said, "stretches from Boston to the [tribal areas of Pakistan]" and can be used "anywhere around the world, including inside Syria, where the rebel Nusra Front recently allied itself with al-Qaida's Iraq affiliate, or even what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called 'boots on the ground in Congo'". The acting general counsel of the Pentagon said it even "authorized war against al-Qaida's associated forces in Mali, Libya and Syria".

A loud and clear message

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Sat, 18 May 2013 07:16:00 +0000

We all know that newspapers are in big trouble. Falling circulation and cutting back on staff leading to poorer newspapers all round. Almost all papers are hemorrhaging financially.

The infamous über-wealthy Koch brothers are on the look out to buy the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times - with the obvious intention of getting their slanted view of the world out there.

No way say readers of the newspapers!

"As reports mount that the infamous Charles and David Koch brothers are scheming to purchase the Tribune Company, and hence the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, readers are standing up and saying they will not subscribe to "Koch hate."

A new petition, launched by Roots Action along with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), has collected the signatures of nearly 19,000 people who want to tell the Tribune Company, "Don't sell out journalism by selling your papers to the Koch brothers."

Signers vowed to cancel subscriptions if the sale goes through.

“I will cancel my subscription and so will family members," wrote one. "We have no need for propaganda dictated by far right-wing spoiled billionaires with an anti-citizenry, pro 1% agenda. This will be the death of your struggling paper in a town that once had a proud history of journalism. It’s a disgrace.”

“What an ignoble end to two fine papers known for excellence it would be if the Koch Bros. became the new owner," wrote another. "Forget about fairness and accuracy; the papers would simply become the latest bullhorn from which Charles and David would spew their propaganda. Has it come to this? Please don’t sell.”

Dumb!

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Sat, 18 May 2013 07:06:00 +0000

You have to wonder. Here is Obama and the Turkish PM at a press conference in the Rose Garden at the White House this week. The two of them have the "protection" from the rain of umbrellas The press corp? Zip.

Government run like a business?

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Fri, 17 May 2013 08:41:00 +0000

There can be little doubting that people around the world are, in the main, more than disenchanted with their political leaders. Perhaps a re-thinking of how governments "operate" is called for. It's a topic The Atlantic takes up in this piece "Government Should Run Like a Business—but Not in the Way You Think." The by-line says it all - "Regimes around the world are under pressure to deliver more and cost less. Here's a plan for how to actually make that work."

"Government" is, everywhere, an industry in serious trouble. Not only do its consumers constantly complain, but some also are finding alternatives. Its products are failing the tests of quality and innovation, and it costs more than users want to pay. If governments were private firms, they'd be facing the prospect of either a takeover to "rescue" them or death in the competitive marketplace as their customer base migrates to newer alternatives.

Don't buy the government-business comparison? In fact, governments today face precisely those challenges. Start with takeover threats. Many governments -- from a variety of municipalities in the United States (Governing maintains an online list and map citing at least 31) to several member countries of the European Union -- have been forced to accept one form or another of outside supervision of their fiscal affairs. The Tea Party openly offers the usual corporate raider's solution: dismemberment and liquidation of the hostile takeover target -- in this case, "government" generally.

Look at competitive challenges to governments today: not just a range of alternative public-sector models, from the autocratic to state failure, but also a growing host of private-sector challengers in the provision of every sort of "governmental" service, from the state's traditional province of use of force to such newer areas as social welfare (as we'll discuss in future posts, non-state actors ranging from major defense contractors, responding to former Secretary of State Hillary's Clinton "soft power" initiatives, to terrorist group Hamas have gotten into the social services field). Many businesses have qualities of de facto government (top-down decisions, no consumer voice, little transparency, trampling of individual rights like privacy, and no viable means of escape; as I've written elsewhere, Facebook comes to mind). So it's not too big a stretch to say that governments face pretty much the same challenges as any other business.

At some point, all entities need a demand for their services, to deliver those services at a level of quality that maintains that demand, to respond to innovation and competition by improving them for the times, and to do it with the resources they can command by performing those functions. Any entity that ignores these realities will eventually "go out of business" -- whether or not it's a business."

To make government work in the 21st century requires the same basic "business plan" as in any other failing, but potentially still viable, enterprise"

Security on the www well nigh impossible

noreply@blogger.com (Gustav) — Fri, 17 May 2013 08:36:00 +0000

If you ever had doubts about how secure and safe use of the world wide web is - in whichever way - then confirmation that it is not, comes from the words of an FBI high-up in the area of cyber operations, as reported in this piece in The New Yorker.

"Richard McFeely, of the F.B.I., is a former insurance adjuster from Unionville, in eastern Pennsylvania horse country. He has a friendly face, meaty hands, and a folksy speaking style that doesn’t seem very F.B.I.-like. “Call me Rick,” he said, when I met him at his office, in Washington, coming around his wide desk and gesturing toward the soft furniture in the front part of the room.

McFeely, who is fifty-one, and whose official title is executive assistant director (“E.A.D.,” in office shorthand), oversees about sixty per cent of F.B.I. operations, including the Cyber Division: some one thousand agents, analysts, forensic specialists, and computer scientists. The bureau has made several high-profile takedowns in recent years, including the dismantling of the Coreflood botnet, a network of millions of infected “zombie” computers, or bots, controlled by a Russian hacking crew.

“But we are just touching the tip of the surface in terms of what companies and what government agencies are at the most risk,” McFeely said, shaking his big head ruefully. “We simply don’t have the resources to monitor the mammoth quantity of intrusions that are going on out there.” Shawn Henry, McFeely’s predecessor at the F.B.I., told me, “When I started in my career, in the late eighties, if there was a bank robbery, the pool of suspects was limited to the people who were in the vicinity at the time. Now when a bank is robbed the pool of suspects is limited to the number of people in the world with access to a five-hundred-dollar laptop and an Internet connection. Which today is two and a half billion people.” And instead of stealing just one person’s credit card, you can steal from millions of people at the same time."