Free Thought Manifesto

Dreams Deferred

2012-01-28T17:00:00.001-05:00

Posted by "CavalierZee"

Poem by "Cordie B."

Group: "Melibea"
Song: "Lamento"

What happens to our dreams deferred?
Unacted upon desires that are seldom heard . . .
Do they wash away with the crimson tide . . .
By the sands of time which can’t be defied?
What happens to our dreams alas. . .
which we sadly allow to simply pass. . .
or hold at bay for a better day
Do they await our return or simply fade away?
What happens when we put our dreams on a shelf?
Do they wait patiently for us to find ourselves
Or do they float away to an unknown dreamland
Where dreams deferred converge and reemerge once again . . .
In the soul of another child-like spirit . .
with the heart to reclaim our neglected dream’s merit
Who will take the forsaken dream and caress its face
And abandon not its saving grace
Allow not our dreams to become deferred
Unnurtured; Seldom talked to; Barely heard. . .
For without our love, passion, and concern
Our dream will whither; thus our heart will burn and yearn. . .
Yet the dream will one day find another
Who will embrace that dream like a new found lover
And the dream will lovingly reciprocate
But sadly for us, it will be too late;
Yet to ease our minds, we will call it fate.

Hell: A Division Of The IRS

2012-01-28T13:00:00.011-05:00

Hell, the most coveted Division in the IRS . If you desire a meteoric rise in notoriety and status, you are encouraged to apply to Hell and join the cream of the crop.
[Sayf Maslul]

Tax his land, tax his wage,
Tax his bed in which he lays.
Tax his tractor, tax his mule,
Teach him taxes is the rule.

Tax his cow, tax his goat,
Tax his pants, tax his coat.
Tax his ties, tax his shirts,
Tax his work, tax his dirt.

Tax his chew, tax his smoke,
Teach him taxes are no joke.
Tax his car, tax his ass
Tax the roads he must pass.

Tax his tobacco, tax his drink,
Tax him if he tries to think.
Tax his booze, tax his beers,
If he cries, tax his tears.

Tax his bills, tax his gas,
Tax his notes, tax his cash.
Tax him good and let him know
That after taxes, he has no dough.

If he hollers, tax him more,
Tax him until he's good and sore.
Tax his coffin, tax his grave,
Tax the sod in which he lays.

Put these words upon his tomb,
"Taxes drove me to my doom!"
And when he's gone, we won't relax,
We'll still be after the inheritance TAX!!!

[Author Unknown]

Are We Becoming A Police State?

2012-01-28T09:00:00.023-05:00

Oakland police officers in riot gear line Frank H. Ogawa plaza, the site of an Occupy Wall Street encampment, Tuesday, Oct. 25. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)

Five Things That Have Civil Liberties Advocates Nervous

By Sal Gentile
December 7, 2011
Courtesy Of "PBS"

Is Our Constitution Under Siege?

Many civil liberties advocates fear it might be. They’re worried about a provision tucked into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, approved by the Senate last week, that would allow the military to detain without a trial any American citizen accused of being a terrorist, or of supporting terrorists who plot attacks against the United States. The ACLU called the proposal “an extreme position that will forever change our country.”

The indefinite detention provision is just one of many trends in policing and law enforcement that have civil liberties advocates alarmed. New external threats, as well as technological advancements, are posing new challenges to our Constitutional rights, advocates say. Policymakers are debating those issues in Congress and in the courts right now, and the decisions they make could have fundamental consequences for what it means to be an American.

Here are five issues that are especially worrisome to civil liberties watchdogs:

1. Indefinite Military Detentions Of U.S. Citizens

The provision, part of the bill that authorizes Pentagon spending for 2012, was drafted by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and has bipartisan support in the Senate. The thinking, according to supporters, is that “America is part of the battlefield” in the so-called war on terror, as Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire put it, so Americans should be fair game when it comes to finding and arresting terrorists.

The bill, however, takes the power to arrest and detain terrorists away from law enforcement officials, like the police or FBI, and gives it to the military, which, under the law, would have the power to imprison an American who “substantially supports” Al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces” indefinitely, “without trial until the end of the hostilities.” And those hostilities aren’t likely to “end” any time soon, since the law that authorizes the use of military force against terrorists has no expiration date.

2. Targeting U.S. Citizens For Killing

Last week, lawyers for the Obama administration defended for the first time the administration’s decision to target radical Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, for killing. Awlawki, who was born in New Mexico, was killed in an American missile strike in September; the ACLU has criticized the targeted killing program as blatantly violating the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees that no American citizen shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

At a national security conference last week, the lawyers for the Obama administration, CIA counsel Stephen Preston and Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson, said American citizens are legitimate targets for killing when they take up arms against the U.S., according to the Associated Press. Jameel Jaffer, a deputy legal director for the ACLU, said in an interview in September that the targeted killing program sets up a precedent in which “U.S. citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government.”

3. Arresting Witnesses For Recording Police Actions

The raids at Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country have earned media attention primarily for their glaring instances of police brutality. But they’ve also tested the boundaries of police authority when it comes to limiting media access to police operations. As many as 30 journalists have been arrested covering Occupy protests, including many who clearly identified themselves as credentialed members of the media. Officials in New York and L.A., for example, have also tried to tightly restrict media access to the Occupy encampments, setting up barricades far away from the actual raids and allowing only hand-picked journaliststo go behind police lines.

Civil liberties advocates have decried these tactics as attempts to stifle media coverage of the raids. But the media blackouts are representative of a broader trend in law enforcement in recent years in which the police have been arresting citizens simply for recording official police actions in public places. Twelve states, for example, have adopted “eavesdropping” laws that prohibit people from videotaping police actions without the officers’ consent. And in California, police officials have openly stated that they will arrest people taking photographs without “apparent esthetic value” if those people seem suspicious. Several courts have ruled these policies unconstitutional.

4. Using GPS To Track Your Every Move

The Supreme Court is scheduled to rule soon on a case that could have far-reaching consequences for privacy in the 21st Century. The justices were asked to decide whether the police could use GPS devices to track people suspected of crimes without first obtaining a warrant. Police across the country use GPS devices to track the movements of thousands of criminal suspects every year, but critics say the practice violates the Fourth Amendment prohibition against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

In oral arguments in November, several justices expressed concern that, as technology improves, the power to track a U.S. citizens’ every move would only become more dangerous. “If you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States,” Justice Stephen Breyer told the lawyer for the Justice Department, which is defending warrantless GPS tracking. That, Breyer added, “sounds like ’1984.’”

5. Surveillance Drones Spying On American Soil

The use of drones to spy on states like Pakistan and Iran has become so popular in national security circles that many domestic law enforcement agencies are now considering using these spy planes to conduct covert surveillance on American soil. Drones are already used to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border, but now many police officials across the country are advocating for the use of drones in other types of police actions, like hunting fugitives, finding missing children and monitoring protest movements.

These drones, advocates note, can not only monitor large urban expanses, they can also use artificial intelligence “seek out and record certain types of suspicious behavior,” whatever that may be. The Orlando police, for example, initially requested two spy drones to help police the Republican National Convention next year, before changing their minds for budgetary reasons. Some police officials have even openly discussed arming the spy planes with “non-lethal weapons” like Tasers or bean bag guns.

These drones, and other tactics imported from battlefield to American soil, are an example of how the “war on terror” has threatened core protections guaranteed to American citizens by the Constitution, civil liberties advocates say. The erosion of these protections has been supported by both Democrats and Republicans alike. And, as the ACLU put it, the debate over these tactics “goes to the very heart of who we are as Americans.”

The Dignity Of Corpses

2012-01-28T05:00:00.015-05:00

(Associated Press) - This image made on Thursday, Jan. 12, 2012 from undated video posted on the Internet on Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2012 by a YouTube user who identified themself as "semperfiLoneVoice" shows men in U.S. Marine combat gear, standing in a semi-circle over three bodies. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is branding as "utterly despicable" the video purporting to show four U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. The Marine Corps had said Wednesday that it was looking into the YouTube video but hadn't yet verified its origin or authenticity.

However, upon reflection, it seems to me that, in all likelihood, in an era where positive spin is crucial to a successful war effort, the official stand in defense of the dignity of corpses may not be in deference to morality so much as public relations.

By: Robert C. Koehler
January 24, 2012
Courtesy Of "IslamiCity"

Civilization hasn't successfully drawn a moral border at the sanctity of human life itself, but because it needs to put some limit on human behavior, it has, apparently, taken a last stand at the dignity of corpses.

It's OK to kill your enemy, but not to urinate on him, at least not after he's dead.

The latest scandal of the war on terror - the release of the video of four Marines urinating on the corpses of two dead Afghanis ("Have a good day, buddy") - has turned the game of geopolitics downright surreal. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, exercising code-red damage control, said the men may be guilty of a war crime. Official condemnation of the act has been far swifter and more severe than the routine statements issued by Pentagon spokespersons after the mere bombing of a village and the deaths of disputed numbers of women and children. There were no press releases dismissing the incident because the desecrated Afghanis were insurgents.

It was almost as though, in the game of war, where nothing is sacred except the supremacy of power - winning - this is where power stops and humanity begins: You must respect your enemy's dead body. It says so right there in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

However, upon reflection, it seems to me that, in all likelihood, in an era where positive spin is crucial to a successful war effort, the official stand in defense of the dignity of corpses may not be in deference to morality so much as public relations. If skewering the head of one's enemy on a pike furthered a political end, official "thou shalt not" morality would manage to find a loophole for such behavior (it's for the greater good), and the nation's ultimate moral stand would retreat even further into obscurity and irrelevance.

My point is this: Morality is no match for the need to win, for the culture of domination. And the moral bedrock of civilization is nothing but sandstone.

This is not a plea for sterner morality but for a shift away from domination mentality, whether at the personal, the corporate or the geopolitical level - or at least for public awareness of the price we pay when we build a nation around the endless defeat of enemies, real and imagined.

"When you ask young men to go kill people for a living, it takes a whole lot of effort to rein that in."

The quote is from a breezy Associated Press story about the urination incident, putting corpse desecration into context. The speaker is a Marine lieutenant "who teaches the law of war to Marines before they are sent off to Afghanistan." His point is that we shouldn't judge these men too harshly.

The point is made with more vehemence further down in the story, when the reporters quote a Vietnam vet who sneers at the public's "na•vetŽ" about war: "I did a hell of a lot worse in Vietnam than urinate on some dead bodies," he said. "We cut left ears off and wore them around our necks to show we were warriors, and we knew how to get revenge."

It's just part of the time-honored tradition of war, from Achilles and Hector onward through the bloodstained millennia. The AP story reads like the shadow version of the speech President Obama gave at Fort Bragg last month, announcing the shutdown of the Iraq operation: "You are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries . . ."

When war is merely upcoming - with Iran, for instance - we talk about it with matter-of-fact abstraction and, of course, urgency. Gotta do it now or . . . or . . . Iran will become a member of the nuclear club, and then there will be hell to pay. And then we go to war and there is, indeed, hell to pay, but we pay it with a shrug and the unspoken words: What did you expect? "When you ask young men to go kill people for a living, it takes a whole lot of effort to rein that in."

Such quotes, however, did not accompany the recent stories about another former Marine, 23-year-old Itzcoatl Ocampo, who served in Iraq in 2008 and was arrested last week for the murders of four homeless men in Anaheim and Yorba Linda, Calif.

Ocampo, by all accounts, suffered not only serious and untreated PTSD related to his military service, but had this condition compounded by poverty. "After he left active duty in 2010, Ocampo returned to Orange County to find his father living under a bridge," according to a KTLA-TV report. His father was homeless! He loved his father. He started stalking and murdering homeless men - desecrating their corpses with 40 or more stab wounds - and even showed a picture of one of his victims to his father, warning him of the dangers of the street.

The psychology here is over the edge, but "when you ask young men to go kill people for a living . . ."

Let us stop shrugging off the madness of war - and I mean that term literally. We try to contain this madness with crisp rhetoric, discipline and honor codes, but human psychology will have none of that.

As Matthis Chiroux, an Afghan vet and war resister, pointed out recently in an excellent essay, the phenomenon of "war porn" - the photographic record of desecrated corpses - is widespread within the ranks and aggravated by our long, slow defeat in the war on terror: our inability to impose our will on a living enemy. "Historically, defeated or nearly defeated armies have been guilty of some of the most serious atrocities," Matthis writes.

When the glory of victory eludes us, we can only impose our will on corpses.

*****

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, contributor to One World, Many Peaces and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound(Xenos Press) is now available. Contact him at koehlercwgmail.com or visit his website atcommonwonders.com.

Dishonest Media

2012-01-28T01:00:00.015-05:00

By Jay Rosen
January 12, 2012
Courtesy Of "Press Think"

Somewhere along the way, telling truth from falsehood was surpassed by other priorities to which the press felt a stronger duty. Arthur Brisbane, public editor of the New York Times, was unaware of this history when he asked users of the Times whether reporters should call out false statements.

Brisbane’s post, Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante? exploded onto the web today, startling user after user, and journalist after journalist, all of whom reacted with some version of:Why is this even a question? Alright, I’ll tell you why.

Brisbane wrote: “I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge ‘facts’ that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” For example:

On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama has made speeches “apologizing for America,” a phrase to which Paul Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the “post-truth” stage.
As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?
If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:
“The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president’s words.”

Brisbane said he gets a lot of mail from “readers who, fed up with the distortions and evasions that are common in public life, look to The Times to set the record straight. They worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.” Then he got to the meat of his question, which was to us, the users.

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?

The comments at Brisbane’s blog post are blistering. They reveal the deep divide between “traditionalists” in the press, of which is Brisbane is one, and current users. I will just quote one to give you the tone. Matt Talbot in California: “That this should even be an open question is a sign that our supposedly independent press is a cowed and timid shadow of its former self.”

There will be plenty more said about this column because a lot led up to it. For now I want make one observation, and let that stand as my reaction.

Something happened in our press over the last 40 years or so that never got acknowledged and to this day would be denied by a majority of newsroom professionals. Somewhere along the way, truthtelling was surpassed by other priorities the mainstream press felt a stronger duty to. These include such things as “maintaining objectivity,” “not imposing a judgment,” “refusing to take sides” and sticking to what I have called the View from Nowhere.

No one knows exactly how it happened, for it’s not like a policy decision came down at some point. Rather, the drift of professional practice over time was to bracket or suspend sharp questions of truth and falsehood in order to avoid charges of bias, or excessive editorializing. Journalists felt better, safer, on firmer professional ground–more like pros–when they stopped short of reporting substantially untrue statements as false. One way to describe it (and I believe this is the correct way) is that truthtelling moved down the list of newsroom priorities. Other things now ranked ahead of it.

But wait a minute: how can telling the truth ever take a back seat in the serious business of reporting the news? That’s like saying medical doctors no longer put “saving lives” or “the health of the patient” ahead of securing payment from insurance companies. It puts the lie to the entire contraption. It devastates journalism as a public service and honorable profession.

And so officially, this event (“truthtelling moved down the list of newsroom priorities”) never occurred, even though in reality it did. Because no one was ready for that devastation. Therefore no reckoning (wait: how could this happen?) ever took place. Denial was successfully maintained, even as criticism built and journalists inside the fraternity announced what was happening. Professional practice even shifted to take account of the drift.

Arthur Brisbane, public editor of the New York Times, skipped onto this scene seemingly unaware of these events. And he basically blurted out what I just explained to you when he asked the users of the New York Times: so whaaddaya think… should we put truthtelling back up there at number one?

Yes, that is what he said. Look at his post again. He tells us that readers are “fed up with the distortions and evasions” and they “look to The Times to set the record straight.” This seems to be their number one priority, he muses. “They worry less about reporters imposing their judgment on what is false and what is true.” (Which is what always stopped us before.) And so Brisbane wants to know: should we run with that? It would mean changing our practices, but we could do it. Hey, what do you guys think?

Is Islam Violent?

2012-01-27T21:00:00.009-05:00

By: Seyyed Hossein Nasr
January 24, 2012
Courtesy Of "IslamiCity"

Despite the presence of violence in many regions of the world ranging from Ireland to Lebanon to the Pacific Basin and involving many religions from Christianity to Hinduism, the Western world associates Islam more than any other religion with violence. The Muslim conquest of Spain, the Crusades - which were not begun by Muslims - and the Ottoman domination of eastern Europe have provided a historical memory of Islam as being related to force and power. Moreover, the upheavals of the past few decades in the Middle East and especially movements using the name of Islam and seeking to solve problems of the Muslim world created by conditions and causes beyond the control of Muslims have only reinforced the idea prevalent in the West that in some special way Islam is related to violence.

To understand the nature of Islam and the truth about the assertion often made of Islam's espousal of violence, it is important to analyze this question clearly remembering that the word Islam itself means peace and that the history of Islam has certainly not been witness to any more violence than one finds in other civilizations, particularly that of the West. In what follows. however, it is the Islamic religion in its principles and ideals with which we are especially concerned and not particular events or facts relating to the domain of historical contingency belonging to the unfolding of Islam in the plane of human history

First of all, it is necessary to define what we mean by violence. There are several dictionary definitions that can be taken into account such as -

Swift and intense force
Rough or injurious physical force or action
Unjust or unwarranted exertion of force especially against the rights of others
Rough or immediate vehemence
Injury resulting from the distortion of meaning or fact

If these definitions are accepted for violence, then the question can be asked as to how Islam is related to these definitions. As far as 'force' is concerned, Islam is not completely opposed to its use but rather seeks to control it in the light of the divine Law (al-shari'a). This world is one in which force is to be found everywhere, in nature as well as in human society, among men as well as within the human soul. The goal of Islam is to establish equilibrium amidst this field of tension of various forces. The Islamic concept of justice itself is related to equilibrium, the word for justice (al-'adl) in Arabic being related in its etymology to the word for equilibrium (ta'adul). All force used under the guidance of the divine Law with the aim of re-establishing an equilibrium that is destroyed is accepted and in fact necessary, for it means to carry out and establish justice. Moreover, not to use force in such a way is to fall prey to other forces which cannot but increase disequilibrium and disorder and result in greater injustice. Whether the use of force in this manner is swift and intense or gentle and mild depends upon the circumstances, but in all cases force can only be used with the aim of establishing equilibrium and harmony and not for personal or sectarian reasons identified with the interests of a person or a particular group and not the whole.

By embracing the 'world' and not shunning the 'kingdom of Caesar', Islam took upon itself responsibility for the world in which force is present. But by virtue of the same fact it limited the use of force and despite all the wars, invasions, and attacks which it experienced. it was able to create an ambiance of peace and tranquility which can still be felt whenever something of the traditional Islamic world survives. The peace that dominates the courtyard of a mosque or a garden whether it be in Marrakesh or Lahore is not accidental but the result of the control of force with the aim of establishing that harmony which results from equilibrium of forces, whether those forces be natural, social or psychological.

As for the meaning of violence as 'rough or injurious physical force or action', Islamic Law opposes all uses of force in this sense except in the case of war or for punishment of criminals in accordance with the shari'a. Even in war, however, the inflicting of any injury to women and children is forbidden as is the use of force against civilians. Only fighters in the field of battle must be confronted with force and it is only against them that injurious physical force can be used. Inflicting injuries outside of this context or in the punishment of criminals according to the dictum of the shari'a and the view of a judge is completely forbidden by Islamic Law.

As far as violence in the sense of the use of unjust force against the rights of othersis concerned, Islam stands totally opposed to it. Rights of human beings are defined by Islamic Law and are protected by this Law which embraces not only Muslims but also followers of other religions who are considered as 'People of the Book (ahl al-kitab)'. If there is nevertheless violation in Islamic society, it is due not to the teachings of Islam but the imperfection of the human recipients of the Divine Message. Man wherever he might be, no religion can neutralize completely the imperfections inherent in the nature of fallen man. What is remarkable, however, is not that some violence in this sense of the word does exist in Muslim societies, but that despite so many negative social and economic factors aggravated by the advent of colonialism, overpopulation, industrialization, modernization resulting in cultural dislocation, and so many other elements, there is less violence as unjust exertion of force against others in most Islamic countries than in the industrialized West.

If one understands by violence 'rough or immoderate vehemence', then Islam is totally opposed to it. The perspective of Islam is based upon moderation and its morality is grounded upon the principle of avoiding extremes and keeping to the golden mean. Nothing is more alien to the Islamic perspective than vehemence, not to say immoderate vehemence. Even if force is to be used, it must be on the basis of moderation.

Finally, if by violence is meant 'distortion of meaning or fact resulting in injury to others', Islam is completely opposed to it. Islam is based on the Truth which saves and which finds its supreme expression in the testimony of the faith, la ilaha illa 'Llah (there is no divinity but the Divine). Any distortion of truth is against the basic teachings of the religion even if no one were to be affected by it. How much more would distortion resulting in injury be against the teachings of the Qur'an and the tradition of the Prophet!

In conclusion it must be emphasized that since Islam embraces the whole of life and does not distinguish between the sacred and the secular, it concerns itself with force and power which characterize this world as such. But Islam, in controlling the use of force in the direction of creating equilibrium and harmony, limits it and opposes violence as aggression to the rights of both God and His creatures as defined by the divine Law. The goal of Islam is the attainment of peace but this peace can only be experienced through that exertion (jihad) and the use of force which begins with the disciplining of ourselves and leads to living in the world in accordance with the dicta of the shar'ia. Islam seeks to enable man to live according to his theomorphic nature and not to violate that nature. Islam condones the use of force only to the extent of opposing that centripetal tendency which turns man against what he is in his inner reality. The use of force can only be condoned in the sense of undoing the violation of our own nature and the chaos which has resulted from the loss of equilibrium. But such a use of force is not in reality violence as usually understood. It is the exertion of human will and effort in the direction of conforming to the Will of God and in surrendering the human will to the divine Will. From this surrender (taslim) comes peace (salam), hence islam, and only through this Islam can the violence inbred within the nature of fallen man be controlled and the beast within subdued so that man lives at peace with himself and the world because he lives at peace with God.

Source: Al-Serat (Published by, Muhammadi Trust of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) Vol. XIII, No. 2 - http://www.al-islam.org/

How To Integrate Europe’s Muslims

2012-01-27T17:00:00.014-05:00

Image by Shannon May

By JONATHAN LAURENCE
Published: January 23, 2012
Courtesy Of "The New York Times"

TWO weeks ago, dozens of cars were set alight in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand after a 30-year-old truck driver, Wissam El-Yamni, was roughed up and then died while in police custody. The uproar underscored the hostility of young minority men toward authority across communities in Europe, an antipathy that has at times led to deadly violence.

The failure of Islamic integration in Europe is often attributed — especially by right-wing parties — to an excess of tolerance toward the large-scale Muslim immigration that began in the mid-1970s. By recognizing Muslim religious requirements, the argument goes, countries like France, Britain and the Netherlands have unwittingly hindered assimilation and even, in some cases, fostered radicalism. But the unrest in gritty European suburbs stems not from religious difference, but from anomie.

Europeans should not be afraid to allow Muslim students to take classes on Islam in state-financed schools and universities. The recognition and accommodation of Islamic religious practices, from clothing to language to education, does not mean capitulation to fundamentalism. On the contrary, only by strengthening the democratic rights of Muslim citizens to form associations, join political parties and engage in other aspects of civic life can Europe integrate immigrants and give full meaning to the abstract promise of religious liberty.

The rise of right-wing, anti-immigrant parties has led several European countries to impose restrictions on Islamic dress, mosque-building and reunification of families through immigration law. These policies are counterproductive. Paradoxically, people for whom religion is otherwise not all that important become more attached to their faith’s clothing, symbols and traditions when they feel they are being singled out and denied basic rights.

Take, for example, the French debate over whether to recognize the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, and the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha as official holidays. Yes, the French state clings to the principle of “laïcité,” or secularism — but the state’s recognition of Easter and Christmas as official holidays feels, to some Jews and Muslims, like hypocrisy. It is Islam’s absence in the institutions young European Muslims encounter, starting with the school’s calendar, classroom and canteen, that contributes to anger and alienation.

In the last few months, there have been some signs that the right-wing momentum has slowed. A French bill to ban headscarves from day care centers was killed in committee. The Dutch Parliament voted down a bill to outlaw Islamic animal slaughter. And Germany’s most populous state helped offset a judicial ban on school prayer by announcing equal access to religion courses for Muslim students.

European countries could use a period of benign neglect of the Islam issue — but only after they finish incorporating religion into the national fabric. For too long, they have instead masked an absence of coherent integration policy under the cloak of “multiculturalism.” The state outsourced the hard work of integration to foreign diplomats and Islamist institutions — for example, some students in Germany read Saudi-supplied textbooks in Saudi-run institutions.

This neglect of integration helped an unregulated “underground Islam” to take hold in storefronts, basements and courtyards. It reflected wishful thinking about how long guest workers would stay and perpetuated a myth of eventual departure and repatriation.

In Britain, for example, race-based equality laws protected Sikhs and Jews as minorities, but not Hindus and Muslims, since they were still considered “foreign.”

Institutional exclusion fueled a demand for religious recognition, and did much to unite and segregate Muslims. Islamist organizations became the most visible defenders of the faith. It is crucial now to provide the right mix of institutional incentives for religious and political moderation, and the most promising strategy for doing that is for governments to consult with the full range of law-abiding religious institutions that Muslims have themselves established.

The French Council for the Muslim Faith, the German Islam Conference, the Committee for Italian Islam and the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board in Britain — all state-sanctioned Islamic organizations set up in the past decade — represent a broad cross-section of mosque administrators in every country. They have quietly begun reconciling many practical issues, from issuing mosque permits to establishing Islamic theology departments at public universities to appointing chaplains in the military and in prisons.

Ultimately, however, elected democratic institutions are the place where the desires of individual Muslims should be expressed. Ever since 1789, when a French legislator argued that “the Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals,” Europeans have struggled to resolve the tension between rights derived from universal citizenship versus group membership.

Over the next 20 years, Europe’s Muslim population is projected to grow to nearly 30 million — 7 to 8 percent of all Europeans — from around 17 million. Granting Muslims full religious freedom wouldn’t remove obstacles to political participation or create jobs. But it would at least allow tensions over Muslims’ religious practices to fade. This would avoid needless sectarian strife and clear the way for politicians to address the more vexing and urgent challenges of socioeconomic integration.

Jonathan Laurence, an associate professor of political science at Boston College, is the author of “The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims: The State’s Role in Minority Integration.”

War Beckons At The Request Of Israel

2012-01-27T13:00:00.007-05:00

"Some analysts have argued that unless America curbs Israeli appetite for military attack against Iran, the US will be unable to prevent the rise of China as potential strategic rival. The driving force for this US confrontation with China is the relative economic decline of American imperialism. It signifies a continuation of a global order dominated by the US in which the Pacific Ocean has been considered “an American lake” for more than a century, hemming China in by a network of US military alliances, and Beijing’s economic and strategic interests are subordinate to Washington’s."

By Iqbal Jassat
(Monday, January 23, 2012)
Courtesy Of "Media Monitors Network"

As the first month of 2012 ebbs away, a question dominating many conversations is whether war is still likely to break out in the Persian Gulf anytime soon.

While tensions have been heating up as “war talk” between regional players adds greater anxiety, it remains unclear whether the Obama administration is willing to risk more American lives in pursuit of an Israeli agenda.

Unlike former president George W Bush who seemed hell bent to settle personal scores with Saddam Hussein and was immensely assisted by a largely pliant media to “sell” America’s war on Iraq, Obama is not too certain of gaining similar levels of support.

The most obvious challenge he has failed thus far is to obtain a consensus amongst America’s allies. France and Britain may be on board, but for a US president who staked a great deal on forging multilateral consensus on sticky foreign policy issues, he needs more than these two European nuclear powers.

Obama also has to contend with dynamic changes in Arabia and North Africa that in the last year has dramatically altered America’s leverage following the ousting of two key despotic allies in Tunisia and Egypt. What ought to be clear for his administration is that these rapid revolutionary changes rested in large part on widespread anti-imperial sentiments paving the way for popularly elected governments whose political formations were outlawed as “terrorist” and whose members were subject to brutal repression, including detention without trial and torture – all courtesy of successive American governments.

In addition, failure to obtain a UN Security Council Resolution that would confer “legitimacy” for a premeditated war on Iran is largely due to reluctance by Russia and China to allow the US any new military adventures in a region they covet for their own national interests. In fact disclosures about the Pentagon’s new strategic guidance, “Sustaining US Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defence” places China squarely at the centre of American war planning.

Some analysts have argued that unless America curbs Israeli appetite for military attack against Iran, the US will be unable to prevent the rise of China as potential strategic rival. The driving force for this US confrontation with China is the relative economic decline of American imperialism. It signifies a continuation of a global order dominated by the US in which the Pacific Ocean has been considered “an American lake” for more than a century, hemming China in by a network of US military alliances, and Beijing’s economic and strategic interests are subordinate to Washington’s.

And if news reports on the Israeli population’s mood for war are to be believed, signs of disapproval seem to be dominant. Some of these signals emanate from the Zionist state’s inability to reconcile with the reality of having suffered defeat at the hands of Hizbullah in Lebanon and most recently in Gaza at the hands of Hamas.

A few days ago, reflecting on why Israel fell short against Hizbullah, Interior Minister Eli Yishai said that it was because its soldiers did not have faith! Though he has apologized for these remarks, parents of soldiers who died in this war are demanding that Yishai, who is also the head of the Sephardic Orthodox Shas Party, be removed from Netanyahu’s cabinet.

So whether it’s a question of “disinterest” in a war carrying huge risks for the Zionist regime or simply a lack of “faith/belief”, Israeli preparedness hinges on the message Obama’s high profile military envoy Martin Dempsey, who is the chairman of the US joint military chiefs of staff, is likely to bring on his visit.

In this context postponing their largest ever-joint military exercise, Israel and America explained that the major reason for the delay is due to tensions with Iran. And to top it off were the remarks made by Defense Minister Ehud Barak during an interview with Israel’s Army Radio a day before the arrival of Dempsey. An Israeli attack on Iran is “very far off” he said, adding that no decision has been made to do so.

As tensions mount so does the uncertainty of war that in all likelihood will engulf the entire region. Recent revelations of a secret visit to Israel by the Qatari Emir and support by the Saudi monarchy for any war effort by Israel and America has raised the stakes. Yet despite complaints by Israel accusing Obama of procrastinating and conflicting statements by members of his administration, the “unknowns” retain elements of surprise!

Obama vs. Netanyahu vs. Ahmadinejad

2012-01-27T09:00:00.012-05:00

Editor's Note: Trita Parsi is the president of the National Iranian-American Council and author of the new book A Single Roll of the Dice – Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Trita Parsi.

By Trita Parsi
Special to CNN
Courtesy Of "CNN"

U.S.-Israeli relations are in a crisis over Iran. It has been in the making for quite some time – arguably since the early 1990s – and edging closer to climax by the minute. The personal chemistry between the leaders is abysmal – Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy recently discussed how they can’t stand Benjamin Netanyahu – and disagreements abound on the Arab uprisings, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and on how to deal with Iran.

Publicly, the two sides claim to share a common objective with Iran, though they may assess risks differently. In reality, the divisions are much deeper. Israel is firmly committed to the zero-enrichment objective espoused by the George W. Bush administration, i.e. that the only acceptable way to prevent Iranian bomb is by preventing it from having nuclear technology, period. “Enrichment in Iran is certainly unacceptable,” Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told me in October 2010.

The Obama administration has left this issue vague, neither rejecting nor accepting this red line. Israel fears that in a final agreement, the Obama White House would accept enrichment in Iran, a fear fueled by the administration’s attempt to exchange Iranian low enriched uranium for fuel pads for a research reactor in Tehran earlier in 2009. Both France and Israel argued that the deal would legitimize Iranian enrichment. In Israel’s view, Obama has made America’s red lines flexible and unreliable.

And between bombing Iran and an Iranian bomb, Israel prefers the former. But it is not confident Obama shares that preference.

When the two states cannot agree on an objective, tensions over tactics and strategies are to be expected. Nowhere has the disagreements been more stark than on the idea of talking to Iran. Obama entered the White House on a promise to pursue diplomacy with Washington’s foes. While this shift away from Bush’s outlook was welcomed in some quarters, it was met with great dismay in Israel – precisely due to the fear that in a negotiation, Washington would betray Israel’s security interests.

“We live in a neighborhood in which sometimes dialogue . . . is liable to be interpreted as weakness,” then-Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni said in an interview with Israeli Radio only twenty-four hours after congratulating President-elect Obama on his historic election victory. Asked specifically if she supported discussions between the U.S. and Iran, she left no room for interpretation: “The answer is no,” she declared.

From the very outset, the Netanyahu government sought to steer Washington’s policy away from diplomacy.

On May 18, 2009, Netanyahu came to Washington for a visit that both sides hoped would dispel fears of a crisis, but neither side was in a compromising mood. Netanyahu did not have the appetite for either American diplomacy with Iran or American pressure against Israeli settlements. Going up against the American president, however, would be a dangerous gambit. Obama was immensely popular at the time and enjoyed the political latitude American presidents usually experience only during their first year in office. Clashing with Obama under these circumstances could be very damaging. Still, that was the path Netanyahu chose.

In the weeks prior to his visit to Washington, he intensified the Israeli campaign to weaken Obama’s ability to move forward with diplomacy. The strategy centered on four key areas: securing a tight deadline for diplomacy; tightening sanctions before any diplomacy began; securing American commitment to zero-enrichment; and keeping the military option on the table.

Read: Without renewed diplomacy, war with Iran lies around the corner.

The Israelis argued that diplomacy should not be given more than twelve weeks, otherwise the Iranians could play for time and use the talks to expand their program. Moreover, the only acceptable outcome of talks would be for Iran to completely capitulate and give up its enrichment program. Both requirements would set the bar so high for diplomacy that failure was guaranteed. Privately, the Israelis did not conceal their desire for diplomacy to be pursued solely to demonstrate its failure and boost the efforts to pursue other, more confrontational options. The Political-Military Chief of the Israeli Ministry of Defense Amos Gilad told Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security Ellen Tauscher that engagement is a good idea - "as long as you understand that it will not work."

Netanyahu’s approach did not lack critics back home in Israel. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz warned about the increasing distance between the two countries’ leadership and policies. “While the Americans are actively seeking a way to start a dialogue, Israel is preaching confrontation and the toppling of the government in Tehran,” the daily said in an editorial. “The new government should give Obama’s diplomatic initiative a chance.”

Obama prevailed in the first round. Netanyahu was shocked to find even some of his closest Congressional allies reluctant to challenge Obama’s Iran policy. Even the powerful America Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) efforts to pass sanctions through Congress prior to the talks fell short, prompting Andrew Glass of the Politico to write that AIPAC faced some “challenging times.” AIPAC’s failure resulted from the “rough consensus that had formed in Congress to give the Obama administration time and space” to pursue diplomacy, a senior Senate staffer told me. “Supporting Obama meant not supporting sanctions.”

In the end, all of Israel’s pressure against the diplomacy it so feared was for naught. The Iranians, it turned out, would do far more damage to diplomacy than Israel ever could. The massive human rights abuses following Iran’s fraudulent presidential elections significantly reduced Obama’s already compromised space for diplomacy. “After the elections, skepticism in Congress against our strategy turned to outright hostility,” a senior Obama official told me.

By the time diplomacy finally could take place in October 2009, pressure was enormous for instantaneous success. The Obama administration had neither space nor political capital to spend on prolonged talks. The Israeli demand for tight deadlines had de facto been adopted.

Diplomacy rarely yields immediate results, and the talks between the Permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) and Iran October 2009 were no different. The proposal to swap Iranian low enriched uranium for fuel pads for the Tehran Research Reactor ultimately did not win approval in Tehran, mainly due to infighting within Iran’s political elite. The deal fell “victim to internal Iranian politics,” then-Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom David Miliband told me.

Read: Assassinations to scuttle talks.

The damage to Obama’s gamble on diplomacy was so severe that advantage had now turned to Netanyahu in his next clash with the American president. But the game had shifted; it was no longer about diplomacy, but about sanctions. Would Obama have the time and space to secure sanctions at the U.N. or would Israel strike Iran’s nuclear facilities first? The Obama administration feared that Israel would start a war that inevitably the U.S. would get dragged into – against its own wishes.

The White House simply could not afford any Israeli adventurism with Iran. To drive the point home, Obama sent an army of high-level officials to Israel with the aim of pressing the Israelis to give Obama the time he needed to get a strong Security Council resolution. Between January and March 2010, Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg, Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, CIA director Leon Panetta, National Security Advisor Jim Jones, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Jack Lew, and Vice President Joseph Biden were all dispatched to Israel.

Mullen took the unusual step of convening a press conference to send a clear message to the Israeli public: an Israeli strike against Iran would “be a big, big, big problem for all of us, and I worry a great deal about the unintended consequences of a strike,” he said.

To make matters worse, in the midst of the jockeying over Iran, a major crisis erupted between Israel and the U.S. over a different issue mid-May 2010. Frustrated with the stalemate in talks between Israel and the Palestinians, Biden traveled to Israel to resume negotiations. But on the day that the vice president arrived, the Netanyahu government announced that another 1,600 apartments would be built in a settlement in Arab East Jerusalem.

The Israeli move infuriated the White House, which viewed it as a provocation and an insult. Such a blatant show of defiance by Israel against the U.S. served only to further weaken Washington’s position in the region, the administration believed. Biden himself was infuriated and had an angry exchange with Netanyahu, according to the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth. “This is starting to get dangerous for us,” Biden told Netanyahu. “What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace,” he said, linking negative sentiments in the region against the U.S. to Israeli policies.

This enraged the Israelis, who categorically rejected any suggestion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fueled anti-American terrorism. Netanyahu’s brother-in-law Hagai Ben-Artzi even went so far as to accuse Obama on Israeli radio of being an anti-Semite. “When there is an anti-Semitic president in the United States, it is a test for us and we have to say: we will not concede,” he said. “We are a nation dating back 4,000 years, and you in a year or two will be long forgotten. Who will remember you? But Jerusalem will dwell on forever.”

The drama escalated further a week later during Netanyahu’s visit to Washington. The visit coincided with AIPAC’s annual policy conference. In just three days AIPAC coordinated a letter signed by a whopping 326 members of Congress and sent to Secretary Clinton, asserting that “it is in U.S. national security interests to assure that Israel’s security as an independent Jewish state is maintained.” And a bipartisan chorus of lawmakers spoke aggressively against the administration and in favor of the Israeli position at the conference itself. “If military force is ever employed, it should be done in a decisive fashion,” Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), a close Obama ally, added to the anti-Obama chorus at the conference.

At the same time, only a few blocks away at the White House, Obama and Netanyahu were staring each other down. Obama had presented Netanyahu with a list of thirteen demands designed to end the feud. But Netanyahu would not yield, prompting Obama to abruptly rise from his seat and declare: “I’m going to the residential wing to have dinner with Michelle and the girls.”

Obama did leave the Israeli leader with an opening, though, telling him that he would still be available if Netanyahu were to change his mind. Netanyahu and his aides stayed in the Roosevelt Room in the White House for about an hour to prepare a response to Obama’s demands. But no resolution was found. The tensions with Israel and the debate inside the White House got so heated that leaks suggesting dual loyalty among some senior Obama administration officials emerged.

Fast-forward till today, and the crisis is even more acute. The Obama White House has pursued a strategy of maximizing pressure on Iran both through sanctions and by creating a credible military threat. The belief is that Iran only yields under such levels of pressure. The danger, however, is that Obama cannot control the Iranian reactions – and the risk of Tehran misreading Washington’s moves. After all, Obama is not seeking war, he is only signaling his readiness to go to war if Tehran doesn’t capitulate. Nor does Obama have the ability – or the political strength – to control Israel. All that is needed is a single spark and a major war can be triggered.

Whether Israel was behind the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran last week or not, much indicates that the Obama administration fears that the intent was to spiral things out of control by goading Iranian retaliation. This might explain the unprecedented step by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to – in person – quickly condemn the act and categorically deny any American involvement.

Clinton’s swift move might have saved the U.S. and the region from war for now, but it shows how risky the Obama administration’s Iran policy at this stage and its susceptibility to manipulation by hardliners in Israel, Iran – Washington.

China In The Persian Gulf

2012-01-27T05:00:00.007-05:00

By Paul R. Pillar
January 16, 2012
Courtesy Of "The National Interest"

Be careful what you wish for regarding how other powers react to the latest effort to ratchet up pressure on Iran. Especially when the other power is as potent a competitor as China. China depends on Iran for 11 percent of its imported oil. The idea of joining in a de facto embargo of Iranian oil through ostracism of the Iranian central bank thus naturally discomfits the Chinese. It is still unclear exactly how Beijing will play this one, as it considers how the issue affects both its relations with the United States and the state of its energy-thirsty economy. An obvious response is to work ever harder to shore up China's relations with the other Persian Gulf oil producers. That is largely what Chinese premier Wen Jiabao's current trip to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates is about.

Chinese diplomacy is not necessarily always opposed to U.S. interests, but the overall pattern as China has endeavored to secure sources of energy for itself has not been encouraging. Getting oil has taken precedence over issues important to the international community. China's major investment in the Sudanese oil industry (from which China gets another 5 percent of its imported oil) has gotten in the way of any Chinese help on the Darfur problem. (More recently, however, with the secession of South Sudan, China's interest in keeping the oil flowing may give it an incentive to be helpful. It dispatched a mediator last month to help resolve a dispute between Sudan and South Sudan over arrangements for exporting the South's oil through the North.)

In the Middle East, another Chinese interest—at least as strong as the one in oil—gives Beijing a new reason to be unhelpful. That is the interest in not having the Arab Spring put any democratic, revolutionary ideas into Chinese heads. Beijing's nervousness about this has gone to such extremes as making jasmine a sort of contraband, out of fear that the flower that became a symbol for revolution in Tunisia might come to play a similar role in China. To the extent that activist Chinese diplomacy gives China greater influence on Middle Eastern regimes, any Chinese advice given on how to handle popular discontent is bound to be bad advice from a Western point of view. It would be advice on how to crack down and maintain a dictatorship rather than on how to smooth the way toward a more democratic state.

Premier Wen's delegation signed a slew of agreements with Saudi Arabia, the first stop on his trip. One of them concerned Chinese help in developing nuclear energy in Saudi Arabia. That makes economic sense for the Saudis, conserving more of their oil for export and sale rather than domestic consumption. But it is an interesting development in light of the assertion one sometimes hears that the oil-rich country on the other side of the Persian Gulf can't really be interested in a nuclear program primarily for energy generation.

We should not rule out the possibility of Riyadh and Beijing springing strategic surprises on us. They have done it before, with the sale of Chinese CSS-2 intermediate-range ballistic missiles to Saudi Arabia in the late 1980s. Although there is no indication that the missiles have ever been armed with nuclear warheads, their inaccuracy gives them questionable strategic value when equipped only with conventional warheads.

In brief, the latest effort to pressure a Middle Eastern state that will never come anywhere close to challenging U.S. power is stimulating the one state that credibly poses such a challenge to become more active in the region in a way that will tend to lessen the relative influence of the United States and work against U.S. interests. It is another example of how the pressure is being exerted as if it were an end in itself, with little thought to the likely consequences.

The Internet Dodges The SOPA Bullet — For Now

2012-01-27T01:00:00.012-05:00

The Goal Is Freedom

SOPA and PIPA Meet Their Match.

By Sheldon Richman
Posted January 20, 2012
Courtesy Of "The Freeman Online"

Last week the acronyms SOPA and PIPA were unheard of, much less decipherable, by most people. Yet the other day a groundswell of opposition to them, led by Wikipedia, Google, and other Internet entities, was powerful enough to persuade a significant number of members of Congress to abandon their active or tacit support for those things. The juggernaut heading toward greater government control over the Internet met massive resistance and will now have to undergo renovation to regain its momentum.

We may be certain that those who seek this control will not give up easily.

By now most people know that SOPA is (was) the Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the former introduced in the House, the latter in the Senate.

They may sound innocuous, though we have enough experience with government to know that nothing about it should be assumed to be innocuous. Hidden powers and unintended consequences lurk in everything it does, regardless of intentions. (And, let’s say it, we can’t count on intentions of the high caliber.) So even if “stopping online piracy” and “protecting intellectual property” sound good to you, a healthy dose of skepticism is in order.

Foreign Websites

The bills are directed at foreign websites that allegedly provide or “facilitate” the provision of copyrighted material without permission. The bills’ reference to foreign sites comforts some people, but it shouldn’t. The Department of Homeland Security already has the power to shut down domestic websites by seizing their domain names —and has done so many times. (Try going to this site.) As this was written news came in that the government has moved against the file-sharing site Megaupload.com, which is based in Hong Kong but uses servers in the United States.

The U.S. government has a more difficult time, or so it is said, with fully foreign sites, so the powerful movie and music industries (among others) want it to have the power to do the next best thing: force, with less than minimum due process, search engines (like Google), payment services (like PayPal), and Internet service providers (ISPs) to stop you from visiting and dealing with those sites. (The U.S. government apparently doesn’t need SOPA to pursue alleged foreign offenders. It is extraditing a British student for “running a website posting links to pirated TV shows and films, despite significant doubts over whether such sites break any UK laws.” The student uses no American servers and has never been to the United States.)

The prospect of these new powers outrages those who value the openness of the Internet and fear the inevitable chilling effects of government authority in the area of free expression. The idea that the government could force American companies to prevent you and me from accessing foreign websites violates the spirit of the Internet. That’s why the protest took place Wednesday, featuring the self-suspension of Wikipedia and other gestures of opposition to the looming interference.

Copyright Legitimacy

There are two issues here, of course: the reasonableness of the proposed remedy and the legitimacy of copyright itself. I’ll largely restrict my remarks to the first, since I have discussed intellectual property (IP) elsewhere (here, here, and most recently here.)

One need not oppose IP to be concerned with SOPA and PIPA. Any authorization of power will contain vague language giving the government wiggle room and therefore discretion in whom it targets and why. A site might be blocked — and search-engines, payment-services, and ISP harassed – because a visitor posted something said to be protected by copyright. And what might happen to one of these domestic companies if it were deemed lax in monitoring sites that facilitate access to the wrong content? We should assume that such a law would be construed in the broadest way, considering the clout of the companies that lobbied for it. Laws, like constitutions,cannot interpret themselves.

New York Times tech columnist David Pogue sounds slightly naïve when he writes, “[T]he solution is to work on the language of the bills to rule out the sorts of abuses that the big Web sites fear.” He clearly mistakes the government for a disinterested dispenser of justice.

Joshua Topolsky illustrates the potential danger:

Say a French company just started a social networking site in which users can upload videos of themselves singing. Now let’s say some kids upload a video of themselves singing their favorite Britney Spears song, not even playing back the original recording but simply singing along innocently to a song they like.
In the eyes of Spears’s record label or any number of parties associated with her continued cash flow, that might very well look like an instance of piracy — and indeed, major labels have had content pulled off YouTube for similar “violations.” All the label has to do is send a letter to someone such as your ISP and request that the service stop routing traffic to the offending site, and, boom, no more French-sharing site for U.S. Internet users. And what’s really scary is that U.S. Internet service providers have immunity when it comes to what they can pull from their networks, so that French site might not even have a clear path to resolving the issue.
Now take that concept and begin to apply it across all the places you could potentially find “infringing” material. Sites about art, sites about movies, sites that let users generate content of all types — some of that content containing pieces of other work that should be considered fair use by any modern standard. Suddenly, a lot of destinations on the Internet will begin to look like island vacation spots — that is, they’re really hard to get to. And the impact won’t just be cultural or legal; the technical workings of the Internet itself will be dramatically affected.

Tampering With The Infrastructure

Topolsky quotes a colleague, Nilay Patel, who compared these bills to a crazy effort to stop the sale of unauthorized DVDs in New York City: It’s “the effective equivalent of blowing up every road, bridge and tunnel in New York to keep people from getting to one bootleg [DVD] stand in Union Square — but leaving the stand itself alone.”

Here’s the rub: As even Pogue admits, “the bills won’t work. For example, they’d make American Internet companies block your access to domain names like ‘piracy.com,’ but you’d still be able to get to them by typing their underlying numerical Internet addresses, like 197.12.34.56. In other words, anybody with any modicum of technical skills would easily sidestep the barriers.” (The sponsors have reportedly dropped the provision that permits messing with domain names, primarily because it would compromise Net security.)

They may not work, but they would allow the government wide scope to hassle lawful companies.

So where does that leave us? I see no remedy consistent with liberty for stopping foreign sites from making copyrighted material available. Perhaps that in itself should prompt us to question the legitimacy of so-called intellectual property. In a real sense, information cannot be owned, and attempts to pretend otherwise move us toward a police state.

Will Israel Sabotage US-Iran Diplomacy?

2012-01-26T21:00:00.008-05:00

By Robert Dreyfuss
On January 17, 2012 - 10:01am ET
Courtesy Of "The Nation"

The war of words between the United States and Iran is escalating, with much of it, as always, for domestic consumption—President Barack Obama against his hawkish Republican rivals, and various Iranians in competition within Iran’s fractured politics. Still, the bluster and toughened sanctions are worrisome. There’s little to no chance, practically zero, that the United States will attack Iran in 2012. But what’s worrisome is that Iran, feeling backed into a corner and under assault—the United States is threatening its lifeline by moving to cut off its oil exports and sanction its Central Bank’s transaction with financial institutions worldwide, while yet another of its nuclear scientists was assassinated this month—might lash out militarily or via terrorism of its own. Or Israel might decide to take matters into its own hands. In either case, it’s likely to lead to a full-fledged US-Iran war.

Strangely enough, it’s all happening just as it appears that talks between Iran and the P5+1 world powers might be restarting and it appears that a delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency will visit Iran later this month.

Like the Bush administration before it, the Obama administration is more than well aware of Israel’s ability to bomb some of Iran’s nuclear research sites. (Bush administration officials repeatedly warned Israel not to do so, and Obama’s team has done the same since 2009.) According to the January 14 Wall Street Journal,

U.S. defense leaders are increasingly concerned that Israel is preparing to take military action against Iran, over U.S. objections, and have stepped up contingency planning to safeguard U.S. facilities in the region in case of a conflict. President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top officials have delivered a string of private messages to Israeli leaders warning about the dire consequences of a strike.

The Journal article notes that in response to US pleadings, the Israelis have been “noncommittal.”

Outrageous as it might be that Israel, a supposed ally, would refuse to cooperate openly with the United States on a matter of such grave importance, it also appears that Israel is openly seeking to sabotage the possibility of US-Iran negotiations. The latest assassination of an Iranian scientist in north Tehran, via a bomb attached to his automobile by a motorcycle-riding terrorist, came one day after the arrival of a top State Department official, Bill Burns, in Turkey, part of an attempt by the Obama administration to restart the long-stalled negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 world powers. The timing of that act, which provoked great anger in Iran, was probably calculated to inflame opinion so that diplomacy, once again, fails.

The United States did deny responsibility for the assassination outright, but it failed to condemn it in strong terms. If that’s because the United States is trying to handle its seemingly uncontrollable ally with kid gloves, that’s an enormous mistake. Terrorism is terrorism, and killing Iranian scientists, inserting computer worms in its control systems, and the explosion that killed one of its leading rocket experts in 2011 are clearly acts of war. If Obama thinks that he can tolerate such behavior by Israel, or worse, abet it, and then talk Israel out of bombing Iran, then he’s wrong.

As Laura Rozen reported for Yahoo, a large-scale set of military maneuvers between the United States and Israel, set for later this year, has been postponed or canceled. Though both sides downplay the cancellation, hopefully it’s intended as a message to the Israelis that they need to behave themselves.

The Israel Lobby's Role In American Politics

2012-01-26T17:00:00.011-05:00

Posted By Stephen M. WaltFriday,
January 20, 2012 - 4:31 PM
Courtesy Of "Foreign Policy Magazine"

While I was away, a friend sent me a link to an article from the online magazine Tablet, and asked me what I thought about it. The piece is by Adam Kirsch, and it's basically a critical summary of the impact of my book (with John Mearsheimer) on the Israel lobby. Kirsch was clearly moved to write the piece by Robert Kaplan's laudatory profile of John in the Atlantic Monthly, which undoubtedly drove Kirsch and a number of our other critics crazy.

So what do I think? On the one hand, I could be somewhat gratified by the piece, insofar as he describes the book as an "intellectual landmark, one of those rare books that succeed in altering the intellectual climate." But on the other hand, Kirsch clearly thinks we've altered that climate for the worse, and his discussion of our work is filled with falsehoods. Like most of our other critics, Kirsch seems unable to address what we actually wrote. So he invents a straw man version of our argument -- in some cases accusing us of believing the exact opposite of what we actually said -- and proceeds to lambaste it instead.

Consider his very first paragraph, which purports to offer a summary of our argument (my emphasis):

"What [The Israel Lobby] did not do, to judge by the reviews, was convince anyone of its central argument, that an all-powerful "Israel lobby" had hijacked American foreign policy using illegitimate means…"

There are two problems here. First, "to judge by the reviews" doesn't tell you much about the book's merits (or its flaws), insofar as almost all of the mainstream reviewers in the United States were acknowledged Zionists who were bound to be hostile to our point of view. Not surprisingly, most reviews outside the U.S. -- including several in Israel itself -- were favorable.

Second, and more importantly, Kirsch's summary of our argument bears little or no resemblance to what we actually wrote. Indeed, he managed to pack three separate falsehoods into a single sentence, which is no small achievement. To wit:

1. He claims we said the lobby was "all-powerful." In fact, we wrote "we do not believe the lobby is all-powerful, or that it controls important institutions in the United States. As we will discuss in several subsequent chapters, there are a number of cases where the lobby did not get its way." (TIL, p. 14). We repeated this statement elsewhere in the book, in public presentations, and in several subsequent articles. So how did Kirsch manage to miss this?

2. He claims we argued that the lobby had "hijacked" U.S. foreign policy "using illegitimate means." In fact, we wrote "The Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy or anything of the sort. It is engaged in good old-fashioned interest group politics, which is as American as apple pie." We also emphasized that "it is perfectly legitimate for any American to have a significant attachment to a foreign country" (TIL, p. 13). And we repeated similar statements throughout the book. Either Kirsch didn't bother to read it, or he is just inventing arguments that we did not make so that he has something to criticize.

3. Kirsch alleges that "in our insinuations about secret Jewish power, Mearsheimer and Walt…had given a respectable imprimatur to old and sinister anti-Semitic tropes. " Wrong again. We have a lengthy section denouncing traditional anti-Semitism, and we never--repeat never--said one word or offered "insinuations" about "secret" Jewish power. On the contrary, we repeatedly emphasized that the lobby's activities were above-board and out in the open, like those of other prominent interest groups. We are both familiar with the long and sordid history of anti-Semitism, and we devoted a lengthy section of our introduction to a discussion of these various "anti-Semitic tropes" and our explicit rejection of them, emphasizing that they help explain why it is hard to even talk about this issue. Moreover, when discussing the neoconservative movement, we wrote "what may seem to some like a shadowy conspiracy (or even a "right wing cabal") is anything but. On the contrary.Tthe various think tanks, committees, foundations, and publications that have nurtured the neoconservative movement operate much as other policy networks do. Far from shunning publicity or engaging in hidden plots, these groups actively court publicity for the explicit purpose of shaping public and elite opinion and moving U.S. foreign policy in the directions they favor." (TIL, p. 131).

For that matter, we repeatedly emphasized that the term "Jewish lobby" was an inappropriate label, because many Jews do not support the lobby's agenda and because some key members of the lobby were not Jewish (most notably the so-called Christian Zionists). For this reason, we wrote "it is the specific political agenda that defines the lobby, not the religious or ethnic identity of those pushing it" (TIL, p. 115).

4. Lastly, Kirsch suggests that our book advocated "cutting Israel adrift," and implies that we believe "America's interests and problems in the Islamic world will be resolved…if and when a Palestinian state is created." This isn't even close to what we wrote. We repeatedly said that we supported Israel's existence, and that we believed the United States should come to its aid if its survival were in jeopardy." We repeatedly say the U.S. should have a "normal" relationship with Israel, akin to our relations with other democracies. How is this "cutting Israel adrift?" And we made it clear that our recommended policy approach "will not eliminate all the problems currently facing the United States in the Middle East…Israeli-Palestinian peace is not a wonder drug that will solve all the region's problems: it will by itself neither eliminate anti-Semitism in the region nor lead Arab elites to tackle the other problems that afflict their societies with new energy and commitment" (TIL, p. 348). Once again, Kirsch is either writing about a book he hasn't read, or engaging in willful distortion.

In short, Kirsch's supposed summary of our core argument, as well as his tortured effort to interpret the book's cover as anti-Semitic, is demonstrably false. It is not even a caricature of what we actually wrote; it is a wholly fictitious construction of his own. And the same could be said for virtually all of the reviews that he cites as "evidence" of our supposed errors and alleged bigotry. As I've noted before, our critics are forced to misrepresent our book because they cannot deal with the arguments that we actually made. The only way for them to challenge us is to distort or misrepresent what we said, or to pretend we said the exact opposite. And it is surely no accident that these distortions are always slanted to portray us falsely as anti-Semites, which has become the all-purpose way for hardline defenders of Israel to respond to those with different views.

Fortunately, there is a more parsimonious explanation for why our book may have helped open up public discourse on these issues. Not by legitimizing anti-Semitism, of course, which would be a deplorable development that both Mearsheimer and I would condemn in the strongest terms. Rather, our book may have helped open up a more fruitful debate on U.S. Middle East policy, and especially on the U.S.-Israel "special relationship," for the simple reason that we were pointing out obvious truths that many knowledgeable people already recognized. We may have succeeded because there was overwhelming evidence of the lobby's impact -- including testimony from a wide range of politicians -- evidence that no amount of distortion or slander could conceal. Eyes have also been opened by unfortunate events like the Lebanon War of 2006, the Gaza War of 2008-2009, and the Obama administration's failed attempts to advance a two-state solution, all of which cast a bright light on the lobby's clout in Washington. And it surely didn't hurt that our critics reacted in precisely the way we described in our book, resorting to misrepresentation and smear tactics instead of dealing with our arguments and evidence in a rational and fair-minded fashion.

If Kirsch is correct that we are "winning," in short, maybe it's because we paid close attention to facts and logic and did not attack our opponents with inaccurate smears or attempts at character assassination. Maybe we're "winning" because our core argument was correct: the various groups that make up the "Israel lobby" have been mistakenly advocating policies that were in fact harmful to the United States and to Israel itself, and more and more people have begun to figure this out.

The American Press and War

2012-01-26T13:00:00.010-05:00

By Tim Kelly,
January 17, 2012
Courtesy Of "The Future Of Freedom Foundation"

There is a myth of an independent American press existing as a counterforce to government power. Unfortunately, the truth is less inspiring, especially with respect to the U.S. government’s wars, invasions, and foreign interventions. Rather than keeping the public well-informed, journalists and reporters have all too often served as conduits for government propaganda in the march to war.

Sensationalistic “yellow journalism” played a big part in stirring up hatred of Spain in the 1890s and providing the pretext for America’s first war beyond her maritime borders. William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s theWorld, the two largest U.S. newspapers, printed misleading stories of Spanish atrocities in Cuba, thus inflaming public opinion and garnering support for American military intervention. When an explosion sank the USS Maine, killing 260 of her crew, the American press eagerly ran stories suggesting Spanish culpability, even though the most likely cause of the disaster was an accidental fire in the ship’s coal bunkers. Nevertheless, the public had been whipped up into a jingoistic frenzy, and the rallying cry was, “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!”

U.S. entry into World War I was facilitated by an American press credulously repeating false or exaggerated stories of German atrocities given to them by the British. The most notable example of these was the Bryce Report, a poorly researched document published by a committee of British lawyers and historians, which depicted the systematic murder and rape of Belgian civilians by German soldiers. The report made front-page headlines in major American newspapers and had a significant impact on public opinion.

The Bryce Report's impact in the United States was magnified by the fact that it was published soon after the sinking of the Lusitania, a British ocean liner carrying American passengers that was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland. What was largely ignored in American press accounts of the Lusitaniadisaster was the fact that the ocean liner was steaming through a declared war zone and transporting tons of munitions intended for the British Expeditionary Force then fighting the German Army in France; most newspapers in the United States treated the incident like an unprovoked attack by a maniacal and barbaric enemy.

Press disinformation also played a big role in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign to plunge the United States into World War II, although that objective would ultimately require provoking a Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii.

FDR’s White House worked with British agents to plant pro-British articles in American newspapers and magazines, rig national-opinion polls, and establish prointerventionist front groups. (See Thomas E. Mahl’s Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939–1944). Their methods were innovative, ingenious, and very effective — but also quite illegal.

To this day, the mainstream media provides cover for FDR’s duplicity regarding the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor by ignoring the overwhelming evidence of his intentional provocation of Japan.

In August 1964, the American news media repeated ad nauseum President Lyndon B. Johnson claims that two U.S. destroyers innocently plying international waters were targets of unprovoked attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. The two “attacks” were used by the LBJ White House to pressure Congress into passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing the deployment of U.S. forces in Vietnam to resist “communist aggression.”

Years later, it was revealed that the ship in the first incident, the USS Maddox, was in North Vietnam’s territorial waters supporting South Vietnamese coastal raids against the North. This incident was nothing more than a minor skirmish that had been provoked by U.S. military operations. And the second incident never occurred at all, but was a fabrication made to create a pretext for expanding the conflict in Vietnam into a full-scale war.

In October 1990, the American people were treated to the emotionally moving testimony of a Kuwaiti girl claiming to have witnessed atrocities committed by invading Iraqi soldiers. Her story received wide media coverage and was instrumental in building public support for the Gulf War. However, it was later revealed that the girl was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador; her testimony was false and had been scripted by the politically well-connected PR firm Hill & Knowlton.

The American press also uncritically reported on the Bush administration’s claim that Iraqi troops and tanks were massing on the Kuwaiti-Saudi border in preparation for an invasion of Saudi Arabia. When the St. Petersburg Times reported that satellite imagery showed no signs of a massive troop buildup near the Saudi border, that story was ignored by the national media despite repeated attempts by the Timeseditors to get it wider attention.

During the run up to the Iraq War in 2002–03, mainstream journalists suspended critical judgment in their reporting on Saddam Hussein’s alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. The most notorious example of this was Judith Miller’s reporting in the New York Times, now revealed to have been based on false information provided by dubious sources.

Knight-Ridder’s Washington bureau was one news outlet that didn’t take the White House propaganda at face value; but their reporting, although well sourced, was given the cold shoulder by the national media, which chose to follow the lead of theNew York Times in cheerleading the Bush administration’s march to war. It is now known that the Iraqi WMD stockpiles did not exist, and that the White House misled the country into yet another unnecessary war.

While the American press’s historical pro-war bias can be explained partially by their appetite for sensationalism, the frequency of documented manipulation and disinformation suggests something too deliberate to be written off as deriving solely from the desire to sell more newspapers or boost ratings.

Such speculation is hardly the stuff of crackpot conspiracy theory or paranoia. After all, the infiltration and deliberate manipulation of the American news media by the U.S. government is well documented.

The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird began in the late 1940s and involved the broad-based recruitment of American journalists to incorporate anticommunist, “pro-America” propaganda in their reporting. Under Mockingbird, the CIA recruited at least 25 media organizations to disseminate propaganda, and had more than 400 journalists on its payroll, according to the testimony of CIA director William Colby before the Church Committee in 1975.

There was also the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF), an anticommunist advocacy group that was exposed as a CIA front in 1967 by the New Left magazine Ramparts and later by mainstream news outlets. Among CCF’s many functions was the publication of numerous magazines and journals.

The idea that the CIA or any other government agency could infiltrate news organizations and use them to wage a secret propaganda campaign should be appalling to all those who value a genuinely free press.

What guarantees do we have today that the CIA, the Pentagon, or any other clandestine government agencies aren’t conducting similar disinformation campaigns to manipulate public opinion? Indeed, given the history of CIA dirty tricks, how can we be certain that something akin to Mockingbird isn’t being carried out now?

In 2008, a secret Department of Defense program was exposed that involved using retired military officers to inject pro-war talking points into the media. The officers were instructed to present themselves as “independent analysts” on various news programs and talk shows, although they had been briefed and told what to say by the Pentagon.

The latest hysteria regarding Iran began in response to a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency on her nuclear program. But the new “smoking gun” in that document, as it was described in the mainstream media, was based on old and very dubious intelligence dating back to 2003. Given the lack of any new evidence to support the charge that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, the question may well be asked, why all the fear mongering? Is the mainstream press being used to push an agenda rather than just report the news?

The good news is that a significant portion of the public is aware of the extent to which the mainstream media is manipulated by the government and have spurned newspapers and network news in favor of alternative media.

The decline of old media and the rise of the Internet as a source for news and information has made it more difficult for the government to control information; and this gives hope to those who yearn for a news industry populated by intrepid and skeptical journalists rather than by glamorized government shills.

Perhaps this explains the recent flurry of proposals to increase the government’s control of cyberspace. In the name of “cyber security,” the Pentagon is proposing measures that would allow it to monitor virtually everything on the Internet, including personal computers and email. It has even been suggested that the president be given an Internet “kill switch” to defend the country from a cyber attack. Congress is also considering various pieces of legislation (SOPA, Protect IP Act) that are supposedly intended to boost Internet security and protect intellectual property, but would also give federal agencies the authority to shutdown websites immediately without any due process. The dangers to freedom here are obvious.

Tim Kelly is a columnist and policy advisor at the Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Virginia, a correspondent for Radio America’s Special Investigator, and a political cartoonist.

A War Prayer For The 21st Century

2012-01-26T09:00:00.015-05:00

By Laurence M. Vance
Courtesy of "Lew Rockwell"

Since the bombs began to fall on Baghdad in March of 2003, churches, Christian leaders, religious organizations, and individual Christians have been telling us to pray for U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq. We have been told to pray for the safety of U.S. troops while they defend our freedoms, protect us from another terrorist attack, rid the world of weapons of mass destruction, bring to justice the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, fight the global war on terrorism, liberate the Iraqi people, spread democracy, fight "over there" so we don’t have to fight "over here," protect American interests in the Middle East, ensure the security of Israel, and make the world a better place.

There are several problems with these war prayers.

First, our "enemies" are praying the same war prayers. The citizens of other countries likewise ask God to bless and protect their troops. How is the Lord going to take care of both sides in the same way? American Christians just assume that God will not bless and protect the troops on the other side. American troops alone are dear to the heart of God.

Second, why is it that war prayers never seek to limit war? In his "Prayer before Battle" from "Some New Prayers" (CWE, 69:137), Erasmus gives us a model:

Almighty king of Sabaoth, that is, of armies, you determine both war and peace for the regions of the earth by means of your angels appointed for the task. You gave new heart and strength to the boy David, so that although he was small, without weapons, and unskilled in war he attacked and overthrew the giant Goliath with a sling. If we are fighting for a just cause, if we are forced to fight, I pray you, first, to turn the hearts of our enemies to the desire for peace, so that no Christian blood may be spilt upon the earth; or to spread the fear that men call panic; or to let victory be gained with the least shedding of blood and the smallest loss by those whose cause is more pleasing to you, so that the war may be quickly concluded and we may sing songs of triumph with one accord to you, who reign in all and above all. Amen.

Third, why are we only asked to pray war prayers? Why is it that we are never enjoined to pray prayers for peace and non-intervention? It is never suggested that we pray for impressionable young men and women to not be ensnared by military recruiters. It is never suggested that we pray that American troops are never sent to fight on foreign soil. It is never suggested that we pray for the safety of innocent civilians in the country the U.S. military is bombing. It is never suggested that we pray for the safety of foreign soldiers defending their homeland against attack. It is never suggested that we pray that the U.S. military only be used for genuinely defensive purposes. It is never suggested that we pray that the United States return to a noninterventionist foreign policy. It is never suggested that we pray for Congress to limit the president’s ability to wage war. Instead of all these things, we are told ad nauseam to "pray for the troops."

Fourth, war prayers are vague and presumptuous. What exactly does it mean when we are told to pray for the troops? Is it their safety and protection we are supposed to pray for? Should we pray that God keep them safe while they fly their helicopter gunships, pilot their bombers, and drive their tanks? This sounds like a strange thing to request since U.S. troops are the ones that did the invading of a sovereign country.

Should we pray that God protect them while they drop bombs, throw grenades, launch missiles, fire mortars, and shoot bullets? This too sounds a bit odd since U.S. troops are the ones fighting an unnecessary, senseless, and immoral war. Would we ask God to keep someone safe while he was committing a crime? Then why should we ask God to protect U.S. soldiers who are committing a crime against the Iraqi people?

Fifth, and most significantly, war prayers are dishonest. Although not usually vocalized, implicit in every war prayer is a request for victory. It doesn’t matter what country U.S. troops are fighting in or the reason they are fighting. A war prayer for God to protect the troops is not just a prayer for the troops to be kept safe for some indefinite period; it is a prayer for the troops to be kept safe while they are vanquishing whatever group of people the U.S. government claims is the enemy. If war prayers were honest prayers they would openly and boldly call upon God to help U.S. forces crush the enemies of the United States.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) recognized the true nature of war prayers a hundred years ago. In his brief story called "The War Prayer," Twain tells of a church service held on the Sunday before "the battalions would leave for the front." A "war chapter" was read from the Old Testament, followed by a long prayer from the pastor that God would protect the "noble young soldiers," encourage them "in their patriotic work," and "bear them in His mighty hand." At the end of the prayer a mysterious stranger appears and addresses the congregation. He claims to be from the throne of God. After explaining that he was "commissioned of God" to put into words the other part of the pastor’s prayer that he and the congregation prayed in their hearts, the stranger uttered a real war prayer:

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it – for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

Although Twain dictated "The War Prayer" around 1904-1905, it was not published until 1923 in Albert Bigelow’s anthology of Paine’s writings called Europe and Elsewhere (Harper & Brothers, pp. 394-398).

Twain is supposed to have remarked to a friend that only the dead were permitted to tell the truth.

But Mark Twain was not the only one to shed light on the true nature of war prayers. Back in 1845, the American Peace Society assembled a collection of sixty-four essays by a variety of authors and from a wide range of viewpoints on the subjects of war and peace. It is titled The Book of Peace: A Collection of Essays on War and Peace. Essay No. XLI is called "War-Prayers." After pointing out that pagans have their war prayers, and explaining how "our prayers, if made in accordance with the pacific principles of the gospel, would oppose war, and be discarded by all war-makers as hostile to their designs," the author puts forth a war prayer that honest chaplains should pray on the eve of battle:

O Lord of hosts, smile upon thy servants now marshaled before thee for the work of death. Breathe into them, O God of war, the spirit of their profession. Let them for the time forget thy prohibition of old, thou shalt not kill, and also those commands of thy gospel which bid them do good unto all men, to love even their enemies and turn the other cheek to the smiter. Thou knowest, Omniscient Father of all, this is no time for the application of such principles; and we pray thee to animate them with sentiments more appropriate to the awful duties of this hour, and thus prepare them for a signal and glorious triumph over their enemies. Fill them with the spirit of war, and enable them, in humble reliance on thee, to shoot, and stab, and trample down their foes. Nerve every arm, direct every blow; guide every sword, every bayonet, every bullet to the seat of life, that we may soon reap a glorious harvest of death. Thou knowest, O God most holy, that our enemies, murderers in heart, if not in deed, all deserve the damnation of hell; and we beseech thee to aid us in sending as many of them as possible to the place "where the worn dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." Fight thou for us, and give thy servants a great victory, for which all the people shall praise thee.

And back in 1793, Anna Barbauld expressed her opposition to war in Sins of Government, Sins of Nations. She includes in her work this brutally honest caustic prayer:

God of Love, father of all families of the earth, we are going to tear in pieces our brethren of mankind, but our strength is not equal to our fury, we beseech thee to assist us in the work of slaughter. Whatever mischief we do, we shall do it in thy name; we hope, therefore, thou wilt protect us in it.

Well, since 9/11 "changed everything," what we need is a war prayer for the twenty-first century. Just as honest Christian warmongers should recite the Warmonger’s Psalm, assent to the Warmonger’s Beatitudes, manifest theWarmonger’s Fruit of the Spirit, and pray the President’s Prayer, so they should pray a war prayer like this:

O Lord God of war, we beseech thee to bless our troops in their latest military adventure. Go with U.S. soldiers as they travel around the globe to intervene in the affairs of other countries. Use the U.S. military to smite the enemies of the United States just like thou used the children of Israel in the Old Testament to smite the heathen nations. We ask for thy special protection on the U.S. soldiers who have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and now occupy those countries. Guide every bomb to its target, and every bullet to the heart of its victim. We pray that thou would send these Muslims to hell who dare to plant roadside bombs to harm U.S. soldiers. We know that thou will look after widows and orphans – so please help our soldiers, thy soldiers, to create as many widows and orphans as possible. Destroy the young Iraqi and Afghan children with bullets, malnutrition, or disease before they grow up and become suicide bombers. We beseech thee to guide all Predator drones to their targets in Pakistan and all the other countries where terrorists and their families need to be killed. Fill U.S. soldiers, thy servants, with the spirit of indifference to the death and destruction that they are causing. Avenge the United States, thy country, for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We also humbly request that thou move upon Congress to not only increase funding for this war, but the overall military budget as well so thy people can fight another just war against the Muslim infidel. All these things we ask in the name of the Prince of Peace.

We know, of course, that no war prayers like this will ever be prayed in public. No matter where or why U.S. troops are fighting, we will still simply be told to pray for the troops. But has anyone ever stopped to consider what the Lord thinks about these war prayers?

January 17, 2012

Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from central Florida. He is the author of Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State, The Revolution that Wasn't, and Rethinking the Good War. His latest book is The Quatercentenary of the King James Bible. Visit his website.

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"The War Prayer"

By Mark Twain

Mind Melding

2012-01-26T05:00:00.000-05:00

By Yasmin Anwar,
Media Relations
September 22, 2011
Courtesy Of "UC Berkeley News Center"

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers.

As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers.

“This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published online today (Sept. 22) in the journal Current Biology. “We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.”

Eventually, practical applications of the technology could include a better understanding of what goes on in the minds of people who cannot communicate verbally, such as stroke victims, coma patients and people with neurodegenerative diseases.

It may also lay the groundwork for brain-machine interface so that people with cerebral palsy or paralysis, for example, can guide computers with their minds.

Previously, Gallant and fellow researchers recorded brain activity in the visual cortex while a subject viewed black-and-white photographs. They then built a computational model that enabled them to predict with overwhelming accuracy which picture the subject was looking at.

In their latest experiment, researchers say they have solved a much more difficult problem by actually decoding brain signals generated by moving pictures.

“Our natural visual experience is like watching a movie,” said Shinji Nishimoto, lead author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher in Gallant’s lab. “In order for this technology to have wide applicability, we must understand how the brain processes these dynamic visual experiences.”

Nishimoto and two other research team members served as subjects for the experiment, because the procedure requires volunteers to remain still inside the MRI scanner for hours at a time.

They watched two separate sets of Hollywood movie trailers, while fMRI was used to measure blood flow through the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. On the computer, the brain was divided into small, three-dimensional cubes known as volumetric pixels, or “voxels.”

“We built a model for each voxel that describes how shape and motion information in the movie is mapped into brain activity,” Nishimoto said.

The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed the first set of clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity.

Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program so that it could predict the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject.

Finally, the 100 clips that the computer program decided were most similar to the clip that the subject had probably seen were merged to produce a blurry yet continuous reconstruction of the original movie.

Reconstructing movies using brain scans has been challenging because the blood flow signals measured using fMRI change much more slowly than the neural signals that encode dynamic information in movies, researchers said. For this reason, most previous attempts to decode brain activity have focused on static images.

“We addressed this problem by developing a two-stage model that separately describes the underlying neural population and blood flow signals,” Nishimoto said.

Ultimately, Nishimoto said, scientists need to understand how the brain processes dynamic visual events that we experience in everyday life.

“We need to know how the brain works in naturalistic conditions,” he said. “For that, we need to first understand how the brain works while we are watching movies.”

Other coauthors of the study are Thomas Naselaris with UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute; An T. Vu with UC Berkeley’s Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering; and Yuval Benjamini and Professor Bin Yu with the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics.

A FOREIGN POLICY OF PEACE

2012-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00

BY JEREMY DAVIS
AT 11:30AM JAN 19, 2012
Courtesy Of "Young Americans For Peace"

The non-interventionist approach to foreign policy is often mischaracterized as nothing more than dangerous isolationism appeasing our enemies. At one point during the most recent Republican presidential debate, the mere suggestion of endorsing peace through the golden rule in regards to American foreign policy was met by a round of boos from the audience.

The golden rule, taught by many of the world’s religions, is most commonly expressed as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The lesson is that if you treat others with respect, you shall be shown respect in return. Simple enough for third graders, this is mind-boggling for the Washington crowd. And when applied to an interventionist foreign policy such as that of the United States, it can essentially be boiled down to this: Don’t cause trouble around the world if you don’t want the world causing trouble at home.

It is beyond foolish and incredibly naïve to believe that the United States can go around the world dropping bombs on whomever it pleases without inciting a negative reaction. The fact of the matter is that the United States is resented in many parts of the world simply because it assumes the role of its policeman. If indeed another country, such as Russia or China decided to invade and even occupy the mainland United States, you can bet our reaction would not be all that dissimilar from those protesting America's actions on their lands.

Take a glance at world history and you will unfortunately see that the United States has done its fair share of putting our nose where it didn’t belong. Of course to point this out, one would be harshly criticized by many as doing nothing more than blaming America for the problems we face from perceived foreign evils. Rather, the blame falls squarely on the feet of Washington, D.C. However, in order to correct the mistakes of the present and hopefully to prevent them in the future, we must accept the mistakes of the past. This is called learning and it’s a perfectly acceptable thing to do every once in a while.

Implementing the philosophy of the golden rule is an ideally more rational approach to pursue in foreign policy because the end result would undoubtedly bring about greater peace. But peace is tough to achieve when many in government favor war and conflict. Accepting this world view does not mean we would render ourselves defenseless against the aggressions of other nations seeking to do us harm. If attacked, we have every right to defend ourselves without question. But there is a major difference from defending one’s home and launching preemptive wars based on faulty suspicions that a country might have the capability to attack us at some point in the distant future.

But perhaps those so adamant in supporting constant warring should more deeply consider the effects of our foreign military adventurism. Consider all the innocents slain in our quest to demonstrate our superiority around the world. And for what? To prove we reign supreme over all others? If that is the case, then I would like to offer a simple word of discouragement to those in support of America’s aggressive and militaristic foreign policy: the United States cannot be the empire you so gleefully crave. To become so would forsake the very principles of our country’s founding and send our liberties forever spiraling down the black hole of tyranny.

Sure, America would be strong militarily, but weak in moral character and principle. It is truly disastrous to believe that America’s greatness can be measured by the size of its military force, how many wars the government generates, or how many countries are invaded. In a land where limited government was once valued and cherished and foreign military pursuits were restrained by a humble republic, support for militarism would NOT equal patriotism. Only in a dominion of empire would such ideas suffice.

America is not yet to the point of turning our foreign policy into one of peace, but we are rapidly moving in that direction. Everyday, more Americans are becoming fed up with our seemingly permanent state of warfare. Failing to embrace the golden rule won’t just ruin us economically, but it will continue to corrupt us morally. It is high time we come to accept that.

Stop Internet Censorship

2012-01-25T21:00:00.012-05:00

By Rep. Ron Paul,
January 24, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

Although Congress was back in session for scarcely more than a day last week, private citizens across the country managed to cause an uproar felt across Capitol Hill. The uproar took the form of hundreds of thousands of phone calls to both senators and representatives, urging them to oppose two draconian new bills that threaten the free and unbridled flow of information on the Internet.

On Wednesday last week, dozens of prominent websites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Craigslist were blacked out in protest of two bills known in D.C. jargon as SOPA and PIPA. SOPA is the House bill; PIPA is its Senate companion. These bills ostensibly will combat Internet piracy, and of course we also are told they will help us wage the never-ending “war on terror.”

What these bills actually do is force website owners to police the Internet; create entry barriers to the only relatively free and open medium of communication; and threaten to break the technological structure of the Internet itself. They also violate our 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech and our 4th Amendment freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.

SOPA and PIPA have been drafted not only without respect for the Constitution, but also without an understanding of the how the Internet works. These bills attack the very system upon which the entire orderly organization of the Web depends. Search engines, Internet service providers, advertising sites, and sites with user-generated content such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter — all magnificent creations of the market — are directly threatened by these bills. They will be held responsible if even a single one of their millions of users posts even one link to a website that a copyright holder claims is violating a copyright.

Note that under the bills as written, the Department of Justice or a copyright holder does not have to prove that a copyright was violated — they simply have to claim copyright infringement and an entire site is shut down. The burden of these regulations on the Internet will be enormous, shifting resources away from productivity and innovation and into monitoring and censoring. It turns Internet companies into involuntary tools for Big Brother government, further eroding our constitutional rights.

As is typical of so many bills in Congress, SOPA and PIPA were not crafted to make life better for the American people but rather were written at the behest of big business trying to enlist the federal government as its strong arm. For example, the Motion Picture Association of America spent more than $1.2 million so far lobbying for passage.

But the Internet community is fighting back effectively, not just with websites that went black but with millions of users who expressed their solidarity. Congressional sponsors of both bills have been jumping ship in response to the outrage. The House Judiciary Committee canceled the SOPA hearing they were planning to hold last Wednesday; the House leadership announced they have no intention of considering this bill; and at the end of the week Sen. Harry Reid announced he was postponing the vote until a “compromise” could be reached. The American people are speaking, and with their continued grassroots efforts the marketplace for free ideas and communication will prevail over government controls and censorship.

UN: Obama Flouting International Law At Gitmo

2012-01-25T17:00:00.020-05:00

Human Rights Chief Slams Arbitrary Detentions

By Jason Ditz,
January 23, 2012
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

In a statement issued today, UN Human Rights chief Navi Pillay slammed the Obama Administrationfor reneging on promises to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility.

“It is ten years since the US Government opened the prison at Guantánamo, and now three years since 22 January 2009, when the President ordered its closure within twelve months,” the statement noted. “Yet the facility continues to exist and individuals remain arbitrarily detained – indefinitely – in clear breach of international law.”

The massive facility has seen eight detainees die in custody, including six termed “suicides” by the US government, and only six “trials” have ever been completed. President Obama has expressed the belief that many of the detainees will be held without trial for the rest of their lives.

Despite making no effort to close the facility, President Obama’s advisers insist he remains “committed” to closing Guantánamo. The new commander at the facility has also imposed strict new rules, sparking increasing unrest among the inmates, who after a decade are growing less and less confident they will ever see anything resembling a courtroom.

ACTA Explained

2012-01-25T13:00:00.000-05:00

Posted by "Sayf Maslul"

ACTA is one more offensive against the sharing of culture on the Internet. ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is an agreement secretly negotiated by a small "club" of like-minded countries (39 countries, including the 27 of the European Union, the United States, Japan, etc). Negotiated instead of being democratically debated, ACTA bypasses parliaments and international organizations to dictate a repressive logic dictated by the entertainment industries.

ACTA would impose new criminal sanctions forcing Internet actors to monitor and censor online communications. It is thus a major threat to freedom of expression online and creates legal uncertainty for Internet companies. In the name of trademarks and patents, it would also hamper access to generic medicines in poor countries.

Operation ANTI-ACTA

2012-01-25T09:00:00.013-05:00

Posted by "Sayf Maslul"

By "Anonymous"

We are Anonymous. We are decentralized, non-violent resistance movement that seeks to restore the rule of law and fight back against the organized criminal class. As we're aware, the real terrorists known as the government continue to push for full domination and control of our Internet. They believe that it is acceptable to condition and enslave all of us. As proved in America, this just isn't the case. The people stopped your acts of trying to censor and enslave the Internet and we will do it again. On January 19, during a meeting with NGOs and business representatives, the Polish government announced that it would sign the controversial anti-piracy agreement ACTA on January 26. While the governement calls it a success of the Polish EU Presidency, we the people think this is unacceptable. ACTA would impose new criminal sanctions forcing Internet actors to monitor and censor online communications. Creating legal uncertainty for Internet companies, ACTA would become a major threat to freedom of expression online and another assault against the culture of sharing on the Internet. Poland believes that they can successfully get away with passing this agreement, however this will not occur.

Welcome to Operation ANTI-ACTA. We encourage anyone out there, for the freedom of yourself or for the freedom of your brothers and sisters in Poland to join our operation. We encourage you to spread the word of ANTI-ACTA far and wide. The top priority is to steal and leak any classified government information, including emails and documentation. Prime targets are Polish government websites and other high-ranking establishments. If they try to censor our progress, we will obliterate the censor with the power of the people. From this point until January 26th, we will disrupt and attack Polish government websites, leaking documentations and emails. We will show the government of Poland that they CAN'T censor the people. To Polish government, this is your last chance...reject ACTA or face consequence from the people. OPERATION ANTI-ACTA

We are Anonymous
We are Legion
We do not Forgive
We do not Forget
Expect us.

Lamento

2012-01-25T05:00:00.007-05:00

Posted by "Sayf Maslul"

Artist "Melibea"

Leaderless Global Governance

2012-01-25T01:00:00.016-05:00

The World Economy Is Entering A New Phase, In Which Achieving Global Cooperation Will Become Increasingly Difficult.

By Dani Rodrik
Dani Rodrik is author of The Globalization Paradox and professor of IPE at Harvard University.
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2012 19:27
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Cambridge, Mass. - The world economy is entering a new phase, in which achieving global co-operation will become increasingly difficult. The United States and the European Union, now burdened by high debt and low growth - and therefore preoccupied with domestic concerns - are no longer able to set global rules and expect others to fall into line.

Compounding this trend, rising powers such as China and India place great value on national sovereignty and non-interference in domestic affairs. This makes them unwilling to submit to international rules (or to demand that others comply with such rules) - and thus unlikely to invest in multilateral institutions, as the US did in the aftermath of World War II.

As a result, global leadership and co-operation will remain in limited supply, requiring a carefully calibrated response in the world economy's governance - specifically, a thinner set of rules that recognises the diversity of national circumstances and demands for policy autonomy. But discussions in the G20, World Trade Organisation, and other multilateral fora proceed as if the right remedy were more of the same - more rules, more harmonisation, and more discipline on national policies.

Empire - Superclass

Going back to basics, the principle of "subsidiarity" provides the right way to think about global governance issues. It tells us which kinds of policies should be coordinated or harmonised globally, and which should be left largely to domestic decision-making processes. The principle demarcates areas where we need extensive global governance from those where only a thin layer of global rules suffices.

Economic policies come in roughly four variants. At one extreme are domestic policies that create no (or very few) spillovers across national borders. Education policies, for example, require no international agreement and can be safely left to domestic policymakers.

At the other extreme are policies that implicate the "global commons": the outcome for each country is determined not by domestic policies, but by (the sum total of) other countries' policies. Greenhouse gas emissions are the archetypal case. In such policy domains, there is a strong case for establishing binding global rules, since each country, left to its own devices, has an interest in neglecting its share of the upkeep of the global commons. Failure to reach global agreement would condemn all to collective disaster.

Between the extremes are two other types of policies that create spillovers, but that need to be treated differently.

First, there are "beggar-thy-neighbour" policies, whereby a country derives an economic benefit at the expense of other countries. For example, its leaders restrict the supply of a natural resource in order to drive up its price on world markets, or pursue mercantilist policies in the form of large trade surpluses, especially in the presence of unemployment and excess capacity.

Because beggar-thy-neighbour policies create benefits by imposing costs on others, they, too, need to be regulated at the international level. This is the strongest argument for subjecting China's currency policies or large macroeconomic imbalances such as Germany's trade surplus to greater global discipline than currently exists.

Beggar-thy-neighbour policies must be distinguished from what could be called "beggar-thyself" policies, whose economic costs are borne primarily at home, though they might affect others as well.

Consider agricultural subsidies, bans on genetically modified organisms, or lax financial regulation. While these policies might impose costs on other countries, they are deployed not to extract advantages from them, but because other domestic-policy motives - such as distributional, administrative, or public-health concerns - prevail over the objective of economic efficiency.

The case for global discipline is quite a bit weaker with beggar-thyself policies. After all, it should not be up to the "global community" to tell individual countries how they ought to weight competing goals. Imposing costs on other countries is not, by itself, a cause for global regulation. (Indeed, economists hardly complain when a country's trade liberalisation harms competitors.) Democracies, in particular, ought to be allowed to make their own "mistakes".

"Over-ambitious and misdirected efforts at global governance will not serve us well at a time when the supply of global leadership and co-operation is bound to remain limited."

Of course, there is no guarantee that domestic policies accurately reflect societal demands; even democracies are frequently taken hostage by special interests. So the case for global rulemaking takes a rather different form with beggar-thyself policies, and calls for procedural requirements designed to enhance the quality of domestic policymaking. Global standards pertaining to transparency, broad representation, accountability, and use of empirical evidence, for example, do not constrain the end result.

Different types of policies call for different responses at the global level. Too much global political capital nowadays is wasted on harmonising beggar-thyself policies (particularly in the areas of trade and financial regulation), and not enough is spent on beggar-thy-neighbour policies (such as macroeconomic imbalances). Over-ambitious and misdirected efforts at global governance will not serve us well at a time when the supply of global leadership and cooperation is bound to remain limited.

Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University, is the author of The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy.

A version of this article first appeared on Project Syndicate.

Hotspots Of Potential Conflict In The Geo-Energy Era

2012-01-24T21:00:00.023-05:00

Around 20 per cent of the world's daily oil supply passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has threatened to close after the latest wave of sanctions [EPA]

Tensions Are Rising At Potential Flashpoints, As New Bottlenecks For The Flow Of Energy Are Identified.

By Michael Klare
Michael Klare is an author and professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College.
Last Modified: 20 Jan 2012 15:23
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

Amherst, Massachusetts - Welcome to an edgy world - where a single incident at an energy "chokepoint" could set a region aflame, provoking bloody encounters, boosting oil prices, and putting the global economy at risk. With energy demand on the rise and sources of supply dwindling, we are, in fact, entering a new epoch - the Geo-Energy Era - in which disputes over vital resources will dominate world affairs. In 2012 and beyond, energy and conflict will be bound ever more tightly together, lending increasing importance to the key geographical flashpoints in our resource-constrained world.

Take the Strait of Hormuz, already making headlines and shaking energy markets as 2012 begins. Connecting the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, it lacks imposing geographical features like the Rock of Gibraltar or the Golden Gate Bridge. In an energy-conscious world, however, it may possess greater strategic significance than any passageway on the planet. Every day, according to the US Department of Energy, tankers carrying some 17 million barrels of oil - representing 20 per cent of the world's daily supply - pass through this vital artery.

So last month, when a senior Iranian official threatened to block the strait in response to Washington's tough new economic sanctions, oil prices instantly soared. While the US military has vowed to keep the strait open, doubts about the safety of future oil shipments and worries about a potentially unending, nerve-jangling crisis involving Washington, Tehran and Tel Aviv have energy experts predicting high oil prices for months to come, meaning further woes for a slowing global economy.

Inside Story -
Can Iran survive US sanctions?

The Strait of Hormuz is, however, only one of several hotspots where energy, politics and geography are likely to mix in dangerous ways in 2012 and beyond. Keep your eyes as well on the East and South China Seas, the Caspian Sea basin, and an energy-rich Arctic that is losing its sea ice. In all of these places, countries are disputing control over the production and transportation of energy, and arguing about national boundaries and/or rights of passage.

In the years to come, the location of energy supplies and of energy supply routes - pipelines, oil ports and tanker routes - will be pivotal landmarks on the global strategic map. Key producing areas, such as the Gulf, will remain critically important, but so will oil chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca (between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea) and the "sea lines of communication", or SLOCs (as naval strategists like to call them), connecting producing areas to overseas markets. More and more, the major powers - led by the United States, Russia and China - will restructure their militaries to fight in such locales.

You can already see this in the elaborate Defence Strategic Guidance document, "Sustaining US Global Leadership", unveiled at the Pentagon on January 5 by President Obama and Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta. While envisioning a smaller Army and Marine Corps, it calls for increased emphasis on air and naval capabilities, especially those geared to the protection or control of international energy and trade networks.

Though it tepidly reaffirmed historic US ties to Europe and the Middle East, overwhelming emphasis was placed on bolstering US power in "the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean and South Asia".

In the new Geo-Energy Era, the control of energy and of its transport to market will lie at the heart of recurring global crises.

The Strait of Hormuz

A narrow stretch of water separating Iran from Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the strait is the sole maritime link between the oil-rich Gulf region and the rest of the world. A striking percentage of the oil produced by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE is carried by tanker through this passageway on a daily basis, making it (in the words of the Department of Energy) "the world's most important oil chokepoint". Some analysts believe that any sustained blockage in the strait could trigger a 50 per cent increase in the price of oil and trigger a full-scale global recession or depression.

Leaders in the US have long viewed the Strait as a strategic fixture in their global plans that must be defended at any cost. It was an outlook first voiced by President Jimmy Carter in January 1980, on the heels of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan which had, he told Congress, "brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world's oil must flow". The US response, he insisted, must be unequivocal: any attempt by a hostile power to block the waterway would henceforth be viewed as "an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America", and "repelled by any means necessary, including military force".

Much has changed in the Gulf region since Carter issued his famous decree, known since as the Carter Doctrine, and established the US Central Command (CENTCOM) to guard the Strait - but not Washington's determination to ensure the unhindered flow of oil there. Indeed, President Obama has made it clear that, even if CENTCOM ground forces were to leave Afghanistan, as they have Iraq, there would be no reduction in the command's air and naval presence in the greater Gulf area.

"It is conceivable that the Iranians will put Washington's capabilities to the test."

It is conceivable that the Iranians will put Washington's capabilities to the test. On December 27, Iran's first Vice-President Mohammad-Reza Rahimi said: "If [the US] impose sanctions on Iran's oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz." Similar statements have since been made by other senior officials (and also contradicted by yet others). In addition, the Iranians recently conducted elaborate naval exercises in the Arabian Sea near the eastern mouth of the strait, and more such manoeuvres are said to be forthcoming. At the same time, the commanding general of Iran's army suggested that the USS John C. Stennis, a US aircraft carrier just leaving the Gulf, should not return. "The Islamic Republic of Iran," he added ominously, "will not repeat its warning."

Might the Iranians actually block the strait? Many analysts believe that the statements by Rahimi and his colleagues are bluster and bluff meant to rattle Western leaders, send oil prices higher, and win future concessions if negotiations ever recommence over their country's nuclear programme. Economic conditions in Iran are, however, becoming more desperate, and it is always possible that the country's hard-pressed hardline leaders may feel the urge to take some dramatic action, even if it invites a powerful US counterstrike. Whatever the case, the Strait of Hormuz will remain a focus of international attention in 2012, with global oil prices closely following the rise and fall of tensions there.

The South China Sea

Counting the Cost -
The battle for the South China Sea

The South China Sea is a semi-enclosed portion of the western Pacific bounded by China to the north, Vietnam to the west, the Philippines to the east, and the island of Borneo (shared by Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia) to the south. The sea also incorporates two largely uninhabited island chains, the Paracels and the Spratlys. Long an important fishing ground, it has also been a major avenue for commercial shipping between East Asia and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. More recently, it acquired significance as a potential source of oil and natural gas, large reserves of which are now believed to lie in subsea areas surrounding the Paracels and Spratlys.

With the discovery of oil and gas deposits, the South China Sea has been transformed into a cockpit of international friction. At least some islands in this energy-rich area are claimed by every one of the surrounding countries, including China - which claims them all and has demonstrated a willingness to use military force to assert dominance in the region. Not surprisingly, this has put it in conflict with the other claimants, including several with close military ties to the United States. As a result, what started out as a regional matter, involving China and various members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has become a prospective tussle between the world's two leading powers.

To press their claims, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines have all sought to work collectively through ASEAN, believing a multilateral approach will give them greater negotiating clout than one-on-one dealings with China. For their part, the Chinese have insisted that all disputes must be resolved bilaterally, a situation in which they can more easily bring their economic and military power to bear. Previously preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has now entered the fray, offering full-throated support to the ASEAN countries in their efforts to negotiate en masse with Beijing.

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi promptly warned the US not to interfere. Any such move "will only make matters worse and the resolution more difficult", he declared. The result was an instant war of words between Beijing and Washington. During a visit to the Chinese capital in July 2011, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen delivered a barely concealed threat when it came to possible future military action. "The worry, among others that I have," he commented, "is that the ongoing incidents could spark a miscalculation, and an outbreak that no one anticipated." To drive the point home, the US has conducted a series of conspicuous military exercises in the South China Sea, including some joint manoeuvres with ships from Vietnam and the Philippines. Not to be outdone, China responded with naval manoeuvres of its own. It's a perfect formula for future "incidents" at sea.

The South China Sea has long been on the radar screens of those who follow Asian affairs, but it only attracted global attention when, in November, President Obama travelled to Australia and announced, with remarkable bluntness, a new US strategy aimed at confronting Chinese power in Asia and the Pacific. "As we plan and budget for the future," he told members of the Australian Parliament in Canberra, "we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region." A key feature of this effort would be to ensure "maritime security" in the South China Sea.

While in Australia, President Obama also announced the establishment of a new US base at Darwin on that country's northern coast, as well as expanded military ties with Indonesia and the Philippines. In January, the president similarly placed special emphasis on projecting US power in the region when he went to the Pentagon to discuss changes in the US military posture in the world.

"Beijing will undoubtedly take its own set of steps, no less belligerent, to protect its growing interests in the South China Sea."

Beijing will undoubtedly take its own set of steps, no less belligerent, to protect its growing interests in the South China Sea. Where this will lead remains, of course, unknown. After the Strait of Hormuz, however, the South China Sea may be the global energy chokepoint where small mistakes or provocations could lead to bigger confrontations in 2012 and beyond.

The Caspian Sea Basin

The Caspian Sea is an inland body of water bordered by Russia, Iran, and three former republics of the USSR: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. In the immediate area as well are the former Soviet lands of Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. All of these old SSRs are, to one degree or another, attempting to assert their autonomy from Moscow and establish independent ties with the US, the European Union, Iran, Turkey and, increasingly, China. All are wracked by internal schisms and/or involved in border disputes with their neighbours. The region would be a hotbed of potential conflict even if the Caspian basin did not harbour some of the world's largest undeveloped reserves of oil and natural gas, which could easily bring it to a boil.

This is not the first time that the Caspian has been viewed as a major source of oil, and so potential conflict. In the late nineteenth century, the region around the city of Baku - then part of the Russian empire, now in Azerbaijan - was a prolific source of petroleum and so a major strategic prize. Future Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin first gained notoriety there as a leader of militant oil workers, and Hitler sought to capture it during his ill-fated 1941 invasion of the USSR. After World War II, however, the region lost its importance as an oil producer when Baku's onshore fields dried up. Now, fresh discoveries are being made in offshore areas of the Caspian itself and in previously undeveloped areas of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

Azerbaijan seeks to exploit gas reserves

According to energy giant BP, the Caspian area harbours as much as 48 billion barrels of oil (mostly buried in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan) and 449 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (with the largest supply in Turkmenistan). This puts the region ahead of North and South America in total gas reserves and Asia in oil reserves. But producing all this energy and delivering it to foreign markets will be a monumental task. The region's energy infrastructure is woefully inadequate and the Caspian itself provides no maritime outlet to other seas, so all that oil and gas must travel by pipeline or rail.

Russia, long the dominant power in the region, is pursuing control over the transportation routes by which Caspian oil and gas will reach markets. It is upgrading Soviet-era pipelines - and building new ones - which link the former SSRs to Russia to achieve a near monopoly over the marketing of all this energy, bringing traditional diplomacy, strong-arm tactics, and outright bribery to bear on regional leaders (many of whom once served in the Soviet bureaucracy) to ship their energy via Russia. As recounted in my book Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, Washington sought to thwart these efforts by sponsoring the construction of alternative pipelines that avoid Russian territory, crossing Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean (notably the BTC, or Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline), while Beijing is building its own pipelines linking the Caspian area with western China.

All of these pipelines cross through areas of ethnic unrest and pass near various contested regions such as rebellious Chechnya and breakaway South Ossetia. As a result, both China and the US have wedded their pipeline operations to military assistance for countries along the routes. Fearful of a US presence, military or otherwise, in the former territories of the Soviet Union, Russia has responded with military moves of its own, including its brief August 2008 war with Georgia, which took place along the BTC route.

Given the magnitude of the Caspian's oil and gas reserves, many energy firms are planning new production operations in the region, along with the pipelines needed to bring the oil and gas to market. The European Union, for example, hopes to build a new natural gas pipeline named Nabucco from Azerbaijan, through Turkey to Austria. Russia has proposed a competing conduit named South Stream. All of these efforts involve the geopolitical interests of major powers, ensuring that the Caspian region will remain a potential source of international crisis and conflict.

In the new Geo-Energy Era, the Strait of Hormuz, the South China Sea, and the Caspian Basin hardly stand alone as potential energy flashpoints. The East China Sea, where China and Japan are contending for a contested undersea natural gas field, is another, as are the waters surrounding the Falkland Islands, where both Britain and Argentina hold claims to undersea oil reserves, as will be the globally warming Arctic whose resources are claimed by many countries. One thing is certain: wherever the sparks may fly, there's oil in the water and danger at hand in 2012.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet. His newest book, The Race for What's Left: The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources, will be published in March.

A version of this article first appeared in TomDispatch.com.

War Criminal Charles Taylor 'Worked With CIA'

2012-01-24T17:00:00.016-05:00

Charles Taylor escaped from a US prison in 1985 and some analysts believe the CIA helped with the prison break [EPA]

Liberia's Ex-President, Now On Trial In The Hague, Worked With US Intelligence Agencies, Officials Admit.

By Chris Arsenault
Last Modified: 21 Jan 2012 02:25
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

He stands accused of funding rebels who hacked the arms off small children, smuggling blood diamonds, keeping sex slaves and torturing his opponents, but former Liberian President Charles Taylor also had another career - providing information to US intelligence agencies, according to information obtained by the Boston Globe newspaper.

Today, Taylor is jailed in The Hague as the first former African leader to face international prosecution from the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. In the 1990s, he was allegedly responsible for wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, which killed more than 250,000 people.

“It’s an intriguing development,” Will Reno, a professor at Northwestern University who studies political violence in Africa, told Al Jazeera. “Was the US still supporting him when he was responsible for all of these human rights abuses? Did the US contribute to that?”

While the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon’s spy arm, confirmed its agents and CIA agents worked with Taylor in the 1980s, they would not reveal details of the relationship on national security grounds.

Intelligence Asset?

“When he became president [in 2001], George W Bush found out that Taylor was still being paid by CIA and put a stop to it,” Alexander Yearsley, a former investigative campaigner in West Africa with the NGO Global Witness who now works in the private sector, told Al Jazeera.

Victims remember Taylor's brutal rule

Yearsley said he learned about Bush’s decision during conversations in Liberia with senior officials from British military intelligence. “It was more an accident that [his relationship with the US] went on so long, he was not a useful source of intelligence for the Americans at that time.”

Al Jazeera could not confirm Yearsley's allegations. Other analysts believe the US had all-but-stopped its relationship with Taylor by the mid-1990s. If true, however, the allegations would mean that Taylor was working for the CIA and DIA while he stoked one of the most brutal conflicts in the last two decades.

In 2009, Joseph Marzah, a former death squad commander, told court officials in The Hague that Taylor ordered forces to engage in cannibalism and the ritualistic eating of enemies during the conflict in Sierra Leone. A woman told the court she was forced to carry a sack full of severed heads, including those of her two children.

Prosecutors say that Taylor – who ruled Liberia from 1997-2003 - financed fighters from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone by selling blood diamonds and circumventing an international arms embargo. Taylor has vehemently denied the charges, calling them “diabolical lies”.

Cold War Politics

Jeffrey Michaels, a professor of war studies at the University of King’s College in London, said US-support for Taylor needs to be viewed in the context of the Cold War.

“I think that they probably recognised there are problems in getting into bed with these dictators and other unsavory people,” Michaels told Al Jazeera. “If you look at the most prominent cases where the US has been involved, such as Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam… and [Manuel] Noriega in Panama – the CIA is there as an adjunct to foreign policy, to keep a leader who is generally aligned with US interests in power.”

Back in 1983, when the US and USSR jockeyed for influence in West Africa, Taylor was a rising political star in Liberia, serving as chief of government procurement in the government of Samuel Doe. He fled in 1983 after a corruption scandal and was jailed by US authorities in 1984, pending extradition to Liberia.

Miraculously, he escaped from the Plymouth House of Correction in 1985. Analysts believe US intelligence operatives helped with the prison break.

In 2009, during testimony at his war crimes trial, Taylor said a jail guard opened his cell door and allowed him to sneak out a window. He then claimed a “government car” drove him to New York, before he made his way to Mexico and eventually back to Liberia.

Intelligence officials were said to have been particularly interested in information Taylor could provide about then-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

'Moral Thresholds'

In 1989, Taylor led a rebel army in an invasion of Liberia from the Ivory Coast and took control over most of the country in a war which killed thousands. “At that time, he was a DIA asset,” Yearsley said, noting that competition between the CIA and the better-funded DIA was often intense.

"In terms of Washington politics, this will be very quick. Liberia is a small country in Africa"
- Will Reno, professor of political science

Taylor was elected president in 1997, after inspiring almost a decade of virtual civil war. “He was being advised [by the US] on how to carry-out the conflict,” Yearsley said.

A period of peace did not follow his election, as various rebel groups fought to oust him from power and he supported RUF fighters in Sierra Leone.

“He launched the invasion of Sierra Leone, and he couldn’t be reigned-in or stopped and they [intelligence agencies] had to work to get rid of him” by supporting another rebel group, Yearsley said. “We saw utter chaos and devastation; the country was ruined.”

Despite Taylor’s actions, analysts do not believe the latest revelations of US-support will cause much embarrassment for intelligence agencies.

“If it turns out he was connected to them [intelligence agencies] beyond a certain point - pick your moral threshold – then it becomes a different thing,” Reno said. “In terms of Washington politics, this will be very quick. Liberia is a small country in Africa. It will be interesting to Liberians but inside the [Washington] beltway, I don’t think this will be a big deal.”

We Must Stop This Corporate Takeover Of American Democracy

2012-01-24T13:00:00.010-05:00

David Koch and Charles G Koch: the US supreme court's Citizens United decision has enabled the industrialists to fund conservative groups to the tune of $200m already in this electoral cycle. Photograph: Getty

Unless We Can Reverse The Supreme Court's Dreadful Citizens United Decision, US Politics Will Become A Plutocrats' Plaything

By Bernie Sanders
Friday 20 January 2012 09.00 EST
Courtesy Of "The Guardian"

The corporate barbarians are through the gate of American democracy. Not satisfied with their all-pervasive influence on our culture, economy and legislative processes, they want more. They want it all.

Two years ago, the United States supreme court betrayed our Constitution and those who fought to ensure that its protections are enjoyed equally by all persons regardless of religion, race or gender by engaging in an unabashed power-grab on behalf of corporate America. In its now infamous decision in the Citizens United case, five justices declared that corporations must be treated as if they are actual people under the Constitution when it comes to spending money to influence our elections, allowing them for the first time to draw on the corporate checkbook – in any amount and at any time – to run ads explicitly for or against specific candidates.

What's next … a corporate right to vote?

Don't laugh. Just this month, the Republican National Committee filed an amicus brief in a US appeals court contending that the natural extension of the Citizens United rationale is that the century-old ban on corporate contributions directly to candidates and political parties is similarly unconstitutional. They want corporations to be able to sponsor candidates and parties directly while claiming with a straight face this would not result in any sort of corruption. And while, this month, they take no issue with corporations being subject to the existing contribution limits, anyone paying attention knows that eliminating such caps will be corporate America's next prize in its brazen ambition for absolute control over our elections.

The US Constitution has served us very well, but when the supreme court says, for purposes of the first amendment, that corporations are people, that writing checks from the company's bank account is constitutionally-protected speech and that attempts by the federal government and states to impose reasonable restrictions on campaign ads are unconstitutional, our democracy is in grave danger.

I am a proud sponsor of a number of bills that would respond to Citizens United and begin to get a handle on the problem. But something more needs to be done – something more fundamental and indisputable, something that cannot be turned on its head by a rightwing supreme court.

That is why I have introduced a resolution in the Senate (introduced by Representative Ted Deutch in the House) calling for an amendment to the US Constitution that says simply and straightforwardly what everyone – except five members of the United States supreme court – understands: corporations are not people with constitutional rights equal to flesh-and-blood human beings. Corporations are subject to regulation by the people. Corporations may not make campaign contributions – the law of the land for the last century – or dump unlimited sums of money into our elections. And Congress and states have broad power to regulate all election spending.

I did not introduce this lightly. In fact, I have never sought to amend the Constitution before. The US Constitution is an extraordinary document that, in my view, should not be amended often. In light of the supreme court's Citizens United decision, however, I see no alternative. The ruling has radically changed the nature of our democracy. It has further tilted the balance of power toward the rich and the powerful at a time when the wealthiest people in this country have never had it so good.

At a time when corporations have more than $2tn in cash in their bank accounts, make record-breaking profits and swarm Washington with their lobbyists 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the highest court in the land to suggest that there is just not enough corporate "speech" in our system defies the bounds of reason and sanity. The ruling already has led to plans, for example, by industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch to steer more than $200m – potentially much more – to conservative groups ahead of election day 2012. Karl Rove has similar designs.

Does anybody really believe that that is what American democracy is supposed to be about?

I believe that the Citizens United decision will go down as one of the worst in our country's history – and one that demands an amendment to our Constitution in order to restore sovereign power to the people, as our nation's founders intended.

If we do not reverse it and the culture of corporate dominance over our elections that it has exacerbated, there will be no end to the impact that corporate interests have on our campaigns and our democracy.

The Visible Hand

2012-01-24T09:00:00.013-05:00

The Crisis Of Western Liberal Capitalism Has Coincided With The Rise Of A Powerful New Form Of State Capitalism In Emerging Markets

By Adrian Wooldridge
Jan 21st 2012
Courtesy Of "The Economist"

BEATRICE WEBB grew up as a fervent believer in free markets and limited government. Her father was a self-made railway tycoon and her mother an ardent free-trader. One of her family’s closest friends was Herbert Spencer, the leading philosopher of Victorian liberalism. Spencer took a shine to young Beatrice and treated her to lectures on the magic of the market, the survival of the fittest and the evils of the state. But as Beatrice grew up she began to have doubts. Why should the state not intervene in the market to order children out of chimneys and into schools, or to provide sustenance for the hungry and unemployed or to rescue failing industries? In due course Beatrice became one of the leading architects of the welfare state—and a leading apologist for Soviet communism.

The argument about the relative merits of the state and the market that preoccupied young Beatrice has been raging ever since. Between 1900 and 1970 the pro-statists had the wind in their sails. Governments started off by weaving social safety nets and ended up by nationalising huge chunks of the economy. Yet between 1970 and 2000 the free-marketeers made a comeback. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher started a fashion across the West for privatising state-run industries and pruning the welfare state. The Soviet Union and its outriggers collapsed in ruins.

The era of free-market triumphalism has come to a juddering halt, and the crisis that destroyed Lehman Brothers in 2008 is now engulfing much of the rich world. The weakest countries, such as Greece, have already been plunged into chaos. Even the mighty United States has seen the income of the average worker contract every year for the past three years. The Fraser Institute, a Canadian think-tank, which has been measuring the progress of economic freedom for the past four decades, saw its worldwide “freedom index” rise relentlessly from 5.5 (out of 10) in 1980 to 6.7 in 2007. But then it started to move backwards.

The crisis of liberal capitalism has been rendered more serious by the rise of a potent alternative: state capitalism, which tries to meld the powers of the state with the powers of capitalism. It depends on government to pick winners and promote economic growth. But it also uses capitalist tools such as listing state-owned companies on the stockmarket and embracing globalisation. Elements of state capitalism have been seen in the past, for example in the rise of Japan in the 1950s and even of Germany in the 1870s, but never before has it operated on such a scale and with such sophisticated tools.

State capitalism can claim the world’s most successful big economy for its camp. Over the past 30 years China’s GDP has grown at an average rate of 9.5% a year and its international trade by 18% in volume terms. Over the past ten years its GDP has more than trebled to $11 trillion. China has taken over from Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy, and from America as the world’s biggest market for many consumer goods. The Chinese state is the biggest shareholder in the country’s 150 biggest companies and guides and goads thousands more. It shapes the overall market by managing its currency, directing money to favoured industries and working closely with Chinese companies abroad.

State capitalism can also claim some of the world’s most powerful companies. The 13 biggest oil firms, which between them have a grip on more than three-quarters of the world’s oil reserves, are all state-backed. So is the world’s biggest natural-gas company, Russia’s Gazprom. But successful state firms can be found in almost any industry. China Mobile is a mobile-phone goliath with 600m customers. Saudi Basic Industries Corporation is one of the world’s most profitable chemical companies. Russia’s Sberbank is Europe’s third-largest bank by market capitalisation. Dubai Ports is the world’s third-largest ports operator. The airline Emirates is growing at 20% a year.

State capitalism is on the march, overflowing with cash and emboldened by the crisis in the West. State companies make up 80% of the value of the stockmarket in China, 62% in Russia and 38% in Brazil (see chart). They accounted for one-third of the emerging world’s foreign direct investment between 2003 and 2010 and an even higher proportion of its most spectacular acquisitions, as well as a growing proportion of the very largest firms: three Chinese state-owned companies rank among the world’s ten biggest companies by revenue, against only two European ones (see chart). Add the exploits of sovereign-wealth funds to the ledger, and it begins to look as if liberal capitalism is in wholesale retreat: New York’s Chrysler Building (or 90% of it anyway) has fallen to Abu Dhabi and Manchester City football club to Qatar. The Chinese have a phrase for it: “The state advances while the private sector retreats.” This is now happening on a global scale.

This special report will focus on the new state capitalism of the emerging world rather than the old state capitalism in Europe, because it reflects the future rather than the past. The report will look mainly at China, Russia and Brazil. The recent protests in Russia against the rigging of parliamentary elections by Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, have raised questions about the country’s political stability and, by implication, the future of state capitalism there, but for the moment nothing much seems to have changed. India will not be considered in detail because, although it has some of the world’s biggest state-owned companies, they are more likely to be leftovers of the Licence Raj rather than thrusting new national champions.

Today’s state capitalism also represents a significant advance on its predecessors in several respects. First, it is developing on a much wider scale: China alone accounts for a fifth of the world’s population. Second, it is coming together much more quickly: China and Russia have developed their formula for state capitalism only in the past decade. And third, it has far more sophisticated tools at its disposal. The modern state is more powerful than anything that has gone before: for example, the Chinese Communist Party holds files on vast numbers of its citizens. It is also far better at using capitalist tools to achieve its desired ends. Instead of handing industries to bureaucrats or cronies, it turns them into companies run by professional managers.

The Return Of History

This special report will cast a sceptical eye on state capitalism. It will raise doubts about the system’s ability to capitalise on its successes when it wants to innovate rather than just catch up, and to correct itself if it takes a wrong turn. Managing the system’s contradictions when the economy is growing rapidly is one thing; doing so when it hits a rough patch quite another. And state capitalism is plagued by cronyism and corruption.

But the report will also argue that state capitalism is the most formidable foe that liberal capitalism has faced so far. State capitalists are wrong to claim that they combine the best of both worlds, but they have learned how to avoid some of the pitfalls of earlier state-sponsored growth. And they are flourishing in the dynamic markets of the emerging world, which have been growing at an average of 5.5% a year against the rich world’s 1.6% over the past few years and are likely to account for half the world’s GDP by 2020.

State capitalism increasingly looks like the coming trend. The Brazilian government has forced the departure of the boss of Vale, a mining giant, for being too independent-minded. The French government has set up a sovereign-wealth fund. The South African government is talking openly about nationalising companies and creating national champions. And young economists in the World Bank and other multilateral institutions have begun to discuss embracing a new industrial policy.

That raises some tricky questions about the global economic system. How can you ensure a fair trading system if some companies enjoy the support, overt or covert, of a national government? How can you prevent governments from using companies as instruments of military power? And how can you prevent legitimate worries about fairness from shading into xenophobia and protectionism? Some of the biggest trade rows in recent years—for example, over the China National Offshore Oil Corporation’s attempt to buy America’s Unocal in 2005, and over Dubai Ports’ purchase of several American ports—have involved state-owned enterprises. There are likely to be many more in the future.

The rise of state capitalism is also undoing many of the assumptions about the effects of globalisation. Kenichi Ohmae said the nation state was finished. Thomas Friedman argued that governments had to don the golden straitjacket of market discipline. Naomi Klein pointed out that the world’s biggest companies were bigger than many countries. And Francis Fukuyama asserted that history had ended with the triumph of democratic capitalism. Now across much of the world the state is trumping the market and autocracy is triumphing over democracy.

Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group, a political-risk consultancy, claims that this is “the end of the free market” in his excellent book of that title. He exaggerates. But he is right that a striking number of governments, particularly in the emerging world, are learning how to use the market to promote political ends. The invisible hand of the market is giving way to the visible, and often authoritarian, hand of state capitalism.

Peace and Harmony

2012-01-24T05:00:00.000-05:00

Photo by Jane Linders
Name: Peace and Harmony

Posted by "CavalierZee"

All people are children when they sleep.
there’s no war in them then.
They open their hands and breathe
in that quiet rhythm heaven has given them.
They pucker their lips like small children
and open their hands halfway,
soldiers and statesmen, servants and masters.
The stars stand guard
and a haze veils the sky,
a few hours when no one will do anybody harm.
If only we could speak to one another then
when our hearts are half-open flowers.
Words like golden bees
would drift in.
– God, teach me the language of sleep.

By Rolf Jacobsen
(Norway, 1907 – 1994)

Long Life To You My Friend

2012-01-24T01:00:00.010-05:00

Posted by "Sayf Maslul"

Artist "Bliss"

Sometimes we're not facing what we fear
Life goes on without no thoughts
Sometimes we're not seeing very clear
Then we wonder what is wrong
You find reality deep within yourself
No game to win without a fight.

Long life to you my friend!

Pressure Israel, Not Iran

2012-01-23T21:00:00.006-05:00

The Real Provokers

By MARJORIE COHN
JANUARY 18, 2012
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

Neocons in Israel and the United States are escalating their rhetoric to prepare us for war with Iran. Even the infamous John Yoo, architect of George W. Bush’s illegal torture and spying programs, is calling on the Republican presidential candidates to “begin preparing the case for a military strike to destroy Iran’s nuclear program.”

Under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran has the legal right to produce nuclear power for peaceful purposes. The United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no evidence that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons program. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently said on CBS that Iran is not currently trying to build a nuclear weapon.

Nevertheless, the United States and Israel are mounting a campaign of aggression against Iran. The United States has imposed punishing sanctions against Iran that are crippling Iran’s economy, and pressuring other countries and strong-arming financial institutions to stop buying oil from Iran, the world’s third largest exporter. The Obama administration is also preparing new punitive measures that target the Central Bank of Iran. And the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to pass the Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011 which would outlaw any contact between U.S. government employees and some Iranian officials.

There is also evidence that Israel, with the possible assistance of the United States, has orchestrated the assassinations of at least five Iranian nuclear scientists or engineers since 2007. The New York Timesreported: “The campaign, which experts believe is
being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on [January 11] when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.” These assassinations constitute acts of terrorism. There have also been cyber-attacks on Iranian centrifuges and an explosion at a missile facility last year that killed a senior general and 16 other people.

These acts of aggression are designed to provoke Iran to retaliate, including possibly closing the Strait of Hormuz, which will spark a war that could spread to the entire Middle East.

In addition, the United States has shifted combat troops and warships to the Middle East, and supplied Israel with bunker-busting bombs. Moreover, President Barack Obama has deployed 9,000 U.S. troops to Israel to participate later this year with thousands of Israeli troops in “war games” to test the U.S./Israeli air defense system; this exercise will be the largest ever joint drill between the two countries. Panetta said the exercise is designed “to back up our unshakable commitment to Israel’s security.

Iran is not a threat to Israel’s security. Iran has not attacked any country in some 200 years. In 1953, the CIA engineered a coup that replaced a democratic government in Iran with the vicious Shah. He ruled Iran with an iron hand for 25 years, wreaking torture and terror on Iranians while keeping Iran open to Western investment. When I visited Iran in 1978 as a human rights observer, there were dozens of U.S. corporations in downtown Tehran. One year later, the chickens came home to roost. The Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah, replacing him with a tyrannical theocracy that continues to violate the rights of the Iranian people. But that does not mean that Iran, if it does obtain nuclear weapons, will attack Israel. The Iranian government knows that Israel and the United States would retaliate with unimaginable military force that would devastate Iran and much of the Middle East.

Article 2 of the United Nations Charter requires the peaceful settlement of international disputes between Iran and the United States. Both the U.S. and Iran are signatories of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928, which states, “The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.” Yet the United States has been illegally threatening war against Iran, dating back to the administration of President George W. Bush.

Security Council Resolution 687, that ended the first Gulf War, requires a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone in the Middle East. Israel, which reportedly has an arsenal of 200-300 nuclear weapons, stands in violation of that resolution. Israel refuses to sign the NPT, thus avoiding inspections by the IAEA. As Shibley Telhami and Steven Kull advocate in a recent op-ed in the Times, we should work toward a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, and that includes Israel. They cite a poll in which 65 percent of Israeli Jews think it would be best if neither Israel nor Iran had the bomb, even if that means Israel giving up its nukes.

AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the Israel lobby in the United States, has tremendous support in the U.S. Congress. Even Zionist Thomas Friedman wrote in the Times last month that the standing ovation Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu got in Congress “was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” AIPAC also exerts considerable pressure on Obama to be tough on Iran. When the new Chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff and the new head of CENTCOM told Obama late last year they were disappointed that he was not firmly opposing an Israeli strike on Iran, Obama replied that he “had no say over Israel” because “it is a sovereign country.”

Obama does indeed have a say – a strong say – over Israel. The United States has pledged $30 billion to Israel over the next 10 years. Obama should inform his counterparts in Israel that if it launches a military attack on Iran, the U.S. will withhold foreign aid from Israel. Although pressure from the neocons to support an Israeli attack on Iran will increase as the presidential elections draws near, Obama has a legal duty to refrain from actions that will lead to war with Iran.

Additionally, the U.N. Security Council, which has the duty to prevent threats to international peace and security, should order Israel and the United States to cease their aggressive provocation against Iran.

The same voices who brought us the illegal, tragic, and ill-advised war with Iraq will continue to try to dominate the national conversation with battle cries against Iran. It is up to us to prevail upon our elected officials to avoid a tragic conflagration in Iran by pressuring Israel to cease and desist.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. Her most recent book is The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse. See her blog:www.marjoriecohn.com. .