Axis of Evil
Douglas Hamilton
Reuters
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:22 EST
Jerusalem - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for immediate and "crippling" sanctions against Iran on Tuesday, as it began making higher-grade nuclear fuel in defiance of international censure.
"Iran is racing forward to produce nuclear weapons ... I believe that what is required right now is tough action by the international community," Netanyahu told European diplomats.
"This means not moderate sanctions, or watered-down sanctions. This means crippling sanctions and these sanctions must be applied right now," he said in a short message to underscore Israel's concern over the latest developments.
Netanyahu's language implied Israel would not be content with so-called "targeted sanctions" which Western diplomats have predicted could be pursued against the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and other assets of the Tehran leadership.
Stephen M. Walt
Foreign Policy
Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:24 EST
Probably the most controversial claim in my work with John Mearsheimer on the
Israel lobby is our argument that it played a key role in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Even some readers who were generally sympathetic to our overall position found that claim hard to accept, and some
left-wing critics accused us of letting Bush and Cheney off the hook or of ignoring the importance of other interests, especially oil. Of course, Israel's defenders in the lobby took issue even more strenuously, usually by mischaracterizing our arguments and ignoring most (if not all) of the evidence we presented.
So I hope readers will forgive me if I indulge today in abit of self-promotion, or more precisely, self-defense. This week, yet another piece of evidence surfaced that suggests we were right all along (HT to Mehdi Hasan atthe
New Statesman and J. Glatzer at
Mondoweiss). In his testimony to the Iraq war commission in the U.K., former Prime Minister Tony Blair offered the following account of his discussions with Bush in Crawford, Texas in April 2002. Blair reveals that concerns about Israel were part of the equation and that Israel officials were involved in those discussions.
Take it away, Tony:
Marian Houk
Un-Truth
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:13 EST
What happens when Israeli Border Police decide to stage a massive raid - looking for "tax delinquents" as well as "illegal West Bank worker" - in Shuafat Refugee Camp (the only Palestinian refugee camp inside the boundaries of what Israel unilaterally defined as the "Greater Jerusalem Municipality" in 1967?
The legal residents of the camp have Jerusalem IDs. But, in recent years, Israel has unilaterally decided to exclude it and close it off from Jerusalem by the construction of The Wall around three sides of Shuafat refugee camps - it is now only freely open to the West Bank.
And, an awful Israeli military checkpoint has been put at the main entrance into Shuafat Refugee Camp. Now, children needing to get to school in the morning, and adults needing to get to their jobs, all have to pass out of the camp through this prison-like checkpoint. The traffic jam, and the stress, are terrible - every day, day in and day out - imposing great stress on people who are technically residents of Jerusalem but who have become de facto West Bankers...
Daniel Pipes
The Jerusalem Post
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:54 EST
I do not customarily offer advice to a president whose election I opposed, whose goals I fear and whose policies I work against. But here is a way for Barack Obama to salvage his tottering administration by taking a step that protects the US and its allies.
If Obama's personality, identity and celebrity captivated a majority of the American electorate in 2008, those qualities proved ruefully deficient in 2009. He failed to deliver on employment and health care, he failed in foreign policy forays small (e.g., landing the 2016 Olympics) and large (relations with China and Japan). His counterterrorism record barely passes the laugh test.
This poor performance has caused an unprecedented collapse in the polls and the loss of three major by-elections, culminating two weeks ago in an astonishing senatorial defeat in Massachusetts. Obama's attempts to "reset" his presidency will likely fail if he focuses on economics, where he is just one of many players.
He needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge and where he can trump expectations.
Such an opportunity does exist: Obama can order the US military to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons capacity.
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report
Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:21 EST
© Unknown
Howard Zinn RIP
"In America you can say anything you want - as long as it doesn't have any effect." - Paul Goodman
Progressive activists and writers continually bemoan the fact that the news they generate and the opinions they express are consistently ignored by the mainstream media, and thus kept from the masses of the American people. This disregard of progressive thought is tantamount to a definition of the mainstream media. It doesn't have to be a conspiracy; it's a matter of who owns the mainstream media and the type of journalists they hire - men and women who would like to keep their jobs; so it's more insidious than a conspiracy, it's what's built into the system, it's how the system works. The disregard of the progressive world is of course not total; at times some of that world makes too good copy to ignore, and, on rare occasions, progressive ideas, when they threaten to become very popular, have to be countered.
So it was with Howard Zinn's
A People's History of the United States. Here's Barry Gewen an editor at the
New York Times Book Review, June 5, 2005 writing of Zinn's book and others like it:
Len Hart
The Existentialist Cowboy
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:10 EST
© Unknown
Wannsee
The establishment derides conspiracies and, for awhile, it was fashionable to deny the existence of 'conspiracies'. In fact, conspiracies are how things get done. Very little is accomplished by one person working alone. If what is to be accomplished is illegal, the 'conspiracy' is called a 'crime syndicate' or 'orgnized crime'.
If the 'conspiracy' in question is legal, however questionable, it is called a corporation or a business enterprise. Theorists on the high court have said corporations are people! But, should you call five idiots who have thus conspired to subvert the U.S. Constitution by the term 'conspirators', you are likely to be called a nut job! But SCOTUS believes mere words on paper is a real, living breathing person if it happens to have a seal on it supplied to you by the Delaware Secreatary of State! So --I ask you --who is nuts?
Stephen Lendman
sjlendman.blogspot.com
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:39 EST
On February 3, a Department of Justice press release headlined "Aafia Siddiqui Found Guilty in Manhattan Federal Court of Attempting to Murder US Nationals in Afghanistan and Six Additional Charges."
At her scheduled May 6 sentencing, she "faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison on each of the attempted murder and armed assault charges; life in prison on the firearms charge; and eight years in prison on each of the remaining assault charges. Siddiqui faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years in prison on the firearms charge."
David Zephyr
Democratic Underground
Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:46 EST
Like many of you, I have witnessed the continual, steady rise of the radical right-wing throughout my life. It has had its bumps along the road, with a few setbacks, but whether it is our tax code, militarism, corporatism, freedom of the press, or civil liberties, the great strides made under the New Deal have been eroded methodically to a point that, frankly, is truly troubling.
Someone here, in good spirit, replied to one of my recent posts as "fatalistic". Well, at some point, those of us who have lived through this neo-fascist paradigm shift in our nation's political structure, simply begin to speak from our hearts. We are not frustrated. We are not just another opinion on a blog. We can see the conclusion of where this is heading...and it isn't pretty.
None other than Noam Chomsky wrote last week that the teabagging madness is nothing to simply ridicule. Noam, a chief custodian of language and the construct that it holds on us as individuals and in groupthink, is a man not given to hyperbole and yet he left the impression that the growing anger and hatred seeded deep within the right-wing lunacy we see with the teabaggers, which of course is fueled by corporate money and puppeteers, is something ominous and dangerous and not to be taken lightly.
Bill Van Auken
World Socialist Website
Thu, 18 Nov 2004 19:17 EST
The televised broadcast of videotape showing a US marine executing a wounded, unarmed Iraqi at point-blank range inside a Fallujah mosque has provoked outrage throughout the Middle East, while creating a fresh crisis for the American military.
The marine has been suspended from his command, as the Pentagon initiates an official investigation into whether the killing constituted a war crime.
"We follow the law of armed conflict and hold ourselves to a high standard of accountability," said Lt. Gen. John Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
Please, general, spare us. This killing was noteworthy only because it happened to be captured on camera by an "embedded" reporter. Similar actions have taken place throughout the siege of Fallujah, where the rules of engagement essentially amounted to "kill anything that moves."
Bill Van Auken
World Socialist Website
Sat, 06 Feb 2010 19:11 EST
As US and British troops prepare to attack the town of Marjah in Afghanistan's Helmand Province, military commanders and the media are openly comparing the operation to the November 2004 siege of Fallujah, one of the bloodiest war crimes of the Iraq war.
The operation in central Helmand province, long an area of intense resistance to the US-led occupation, will constitute the largest military offensive since Washington invaded the country in October 2001. At least 15,000 troops are expected to lay siege to the Helmand river valley town, which has 80,000 inhabitants and is said by the US military to be a stronghold of the Taliban.
A total of 125,000 people live in the district around Marjah, which is an agricultural center 350 miles west of Kabul. The population has been swelled by Afghans fleeing villages occupied by US Marines last summer, following President Barack Obama's order shortly after he took office to send 21,000 more troops into Afghanistan.
US Marines, frustrated and enraged over casualties suffered at the hands of an unseen enemy who is able to attack and then blend back into the local population, will be unleashed against the town in a violent military assault, with predictable results.
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