Wednesday, September 04, 2013
Tuesday, September 03, 2013
Egypt Press Crackdown and Propaganda
... the current regime appears eager to shut down most political avenues and media outlets it can't control.
On Sunday, it released and deported three foreigners who were arrested while reporting in Cairo for Al Jazeera English. Last Friday, the offices of Al Jazeera Egypt Live (Al Jazeera Mubasher Misr) in three Cairo locations were raided and shut, their broadcasting equipment confiscated, for what government-controlled newspaper Al Ahram said was a lack of "professional ethics." Previously Al Jazeera Arabic's local offices had been shut down, though correspondents continue to file reports from inside the country.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said the government is trying to suppress dissent.
"The Egyptian government is widening its censorship campaign against critical media in Egypt to undermine coverage of Muslim Brotherhood protests," Sherif Mansour, the group's regional coordinator, said in a statement. "Like their predecessors, authorities apparently fail to grasp that the attempted suppression of dissenting voices only compounds the dissent."
The big picture: It appears that a battle has been joined in Egypt, with the military and its appointed civilian leaders seeking to put the genie of greater media freedom back in the bottle. The presence of Al Jazeera and other regional broadcasters in Tahrir Square during the uprising against Mubarak electrified not just the country, encouraging more people to get out of the house and join protests, but the region.
Controlling the flow of pictures and reporting stems the chances of a repeat. Meanwhile,
The increasing flow of disinformation, fabrications, and outright lies on Egyptian media pushed outgoing US Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson into a rare, extremely angry statement holding Egypt's interim rulers responsible for a fabricated article in Al Ahram late last month. An article written by the government newspaper's Editor in Chief Abdel Nasser Salama reported that Patterson was part of a conspiracy with Muslim Brotherhood members and foreign militants to destabilize Egypt and divide it into two smaller countries.
"I am writing to adamantly deny the outrageous, fictitious, and thoroughly unprofessional headline article that appeared in your paper on August 27. Your article’s claim that I personally am involved in a conspiracy to divide and destabilize Egypt is absolutely absurd and dangerous," Patterson wrote to Mr. Salama. "I am particularly disturbed to think that Al Ahram, as the flagship state-run paper in Egypt, is regarded as a representative of the government’s viewpoint. We will, therefore, raise this article at the highest levels of the government to protest its publication and the irresponsible behavior that led to it."
Ahram has long been a tool for state propaganda, and is emerging as an important figure in Egypt's ongoing information wars. Local television is likewise focused on the threats of the Brothers, allegations of ties to foreign plots, and warnings of the need for stability and order.
Which Countries Snoop On Facebook Users The Most?
Facebook released its first Global Government Requests Report, which tells us how many requests for user data they received during the first six months of 2013:
A total of about 11,000 requests covering 20,000 individual accounts.
Monday, September 02, 2013
Egyptian Government Sniper Executes Protester
An Egyptian government sniper executes a random protester, that was amongst a group of protesters, who surrendered to interior ministry forces, during the usurpers armed crackdown on the Rabiaa Square sit-in, on August 14th 2013.
The protesters were too terrified to offer any aid to their fallen comrade.
The CIA: War Crimes As Policy
By DOUGLAS VALENTINE and NICOLAS J.S. DAVIES
In February the Guardian and BBC Arabic unveiled a documentary exploring the role of retired Colonel James Steele in the recruitment, training and initial deployments of the CIA advised and funded Special Police Commandos in Iraq.
The documentary tells how the Commandos tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi men and boys. But the Commandos were only one of America’s many weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Along with US military forces – which murdered indiscriminately – and various CIA funded death squads – which murdered selectively – and the CIA’s rampaging palace guard – the 5,000 man strong Iraq Special Operations Forces – the Commandos were part of a genocidal campaign that killed about 10% of the Sunni Arabs of Iraq by 2008, and drove about half of all Sunnis from their homes.
Including economic sanctions, and a 50 year history of sabotage and subversion, America and its Iraqi collaborators visited far more death and destruction on Iraq than Saddam Hussein and his regime.
For the last few weeks, American pundits have been cataloguing the horrors. They tell how the Bush and Obama regimes, united in the unstated policy of war crimes, probably murdered more than a million Iraqis, displaced around five million, and imprisoned and tortured hundreds of thousands without trial.
A few have further explained that the dictatorial administrative detention laws, torture, and executions that characterize the occupation are still in place under Prime Minister Maliki. The prime minister’s office, notably, is where the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau is currently ensconced.
All of this meets the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention, and violates multiple articles of the Geneva Conventions, which guarantee protection to civilians in time of war. But the responsible Americans have gone unpunished for their war crimes, not least of which was falsifying intelligence about Iraq’s non-existent weapon of mass destruction as a pretext for the invasion. British legal advisors repeatedly warned their government that invading Iraq would be a crime of aggression, which they called “one of the most serious offenses under international law.”
For anyone familiar with the CIA, this was predictable. But the US Government, through secrecy and censorship, destroyed much of the hard evidence of its war crimes, making it harder to prove. And the media is content to revise history and focus public attention on front men like Steele, rather than the institutions – in particular the CIA – for whom they work.
History, however, provides contextual evidence that what happened in Iraq amounts to a policy of carefully planned war crimes. Indeed, the CIA modeled the Iraqi Special Police Commandos on the Special Police forces it organized and funded in Vietnam. In November 2000, Counterpunch published an article describing how Congressman Rob Simmons, while serving as a CIA officer in Vietnam, created the Special Intelligence Force Unit (SIFU) on which the Iraqi Special Police Commandos are very likely modeled. This is only one of many historical examples of the CIA’s modus operandi.
There are other examples. As we were reminded by the Guardian, Steele headed the U.S. Military Advisor Group in El Salvador (1984-1986), where US advised units were responsible for thousands of cases of torture and extra-judicial killing. They operated in rural and urban areas, but wherever they operated, they were directed against anyone opposing US policy – usually leftists.
The CIA’s death squads in El Salvador were periodically moved from one administrative cover to another to confuse investigators. The CIA played this shell game with its Special Police Commandos in Iraq as well, rebranding them as the “National Police” following the exposure of one of their torture centers in November 2005. In its finest Madison Avenue marketing traditions, the CIA renamed the Commandos’ predatory Wolf Brigade as the “Freedom Brigade”.
In Vietnam, the CIA built an archipelago of secret torture centers to process the hundreds of thousands of detainees kidnapped by its mercenary army of “counter-terror” death squads. All around the world, CIA officers and their Special Forces lackeys teach torture techniques and design the torture centers, often hidden at military posts. This is well known.
Major Joe Blair, the Director of Instruction at the School of the Americas (1986-9), described the training the U.S. gave to Latin American officers as follows: “The doctrine that was taught was that if you want information you use physical abuse…false imprisonment…threats to family members… and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get that person to shut up or to stop what they’re doing, you simply assassinate them, and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.”
In 2000, the School of the Americas was rebranded as “WHINSIC”, but, as Blair testified at a trial of SOA Watch protesters in 2002, “There are no substantive changes besides the name. They teach the identical courses that I taught, and changed the course names and use the same manuals.”
General Paul Gorman, who commanded U.S. forces in Central America in the mid-1980′s, defined this type of warfare based on war crimes as “a form of warfare repugnant to Americans, a conflict which involves innocents, in which non-combatant casualties may be an explicit object.”‘
Another problem, apart from historical amnesia, is that each war crime is viewed as an isolated incident, and when the dots are connected, the focus is on some shadowy character like Steele. The Guardian made an attempt to connect Steele to Petraeus and Rumsfeld, which again, is commendable. But the fact is that the entire National Security State has been designed and staffed with right-wing ideologues who support the unstated US policy of war crimes for profit.
We know who these security ideologues are. The problem is, they regularly have lunch with the reporters we trust to nail them to the wall.
For example, on 17 March 2013, CNN talking head Fareed Zakaria had Donald Gregg on his show to discuss North Korea. Zakaria introduced Gregg as President Bush the Superior’s national security advisor in the 1980s, but did not mention that Gregg, while a CIA region officer in charge in Vietnam, developed the “repugnant” form of warfare based on war crimes described by General Gorman above, or that he oversaw its application in El Salvador through a back-channel “counter-terror” network.
Gregg’s plan, used by Steele in El Salvador and then Iraq, requires US advisers to coordinate civilian security services (like the Iraqi Special Police) with military intelligence and civil affairs units to provide death squads and military units with information on the location of guerrillas, whose hideouts are bombed by U.S. warplanes, then ravaged in My Lai-style cordon and search operations in which counter-terror hit teams hunt enemy cadres in their homes.
In Vietnam, Gregg and his CIA companions – many of whom migrated to El Salvador – put together a chart of VC political cadres from “battered” detainees. They’d force the detainees to point out on a map where their comrades were hiding. Then the CIA officers would take the detainees up in a helicopter to point out the hiding places on the ground. A Special Forces or CIA paramilitary unit would then snatch the cadre and bring them to region’s secret torture center, run by a CIA-paid and owned Special Police officer – the kind of guy Steele and before him Congressman Simmons advised.
“We brought guys in from the national prison to flesh out the reports,” Gregg told me about one particular operation. “We had guys analyzing reports, marking photographs, putting the pictures together on the wall, and then photographing that. That led to 96 people in the organization. Using military intel, we took photos of the houses where they lived… then took the photos back to the helicopter where we had the 23 people, who were hooded, and they circled the faces of the cadre. ”
There’s more historical evidence, of course, but this is the plan the CIA exported to El Salvador, and that Steele employed, with some modifications, in Iraq.
After finishing with Gregg, Zakaria took a commercial break and returned with Paul Wolfowitz, Bush the Inferior’s Deputy Secretary of Defense and proponent of the Iraq War.
ZAKARIA: “How do you think about as an American policy maker, the issue of – was it worth the price in American lives and treasure? By some estimates $1 trillion.WOLFOWITZ: “I would like as much as anyone to be able to say, let’s forget about the Persian Gulf. Let’s forget about the larger Middle East. But that part of the world isn’t leaving us alone. Al Qaeda isn’t leaving us alone. Pakistan isn’t leaving us alone. I think our interests and our values would be advanced if we stick with it.”
Zakaria did not ask Wolfowitz what he meant by “leaving us alone.” He simply said, “Paul Wolfowitz, pleasure to have you on.”
War Criminals Wave Press Passes
Given the history of America’s genocidal wars in Vietnam and Central America, it is unfortunate that the Guardian limited itself to establishing that Steele and his administrative boss, General David Petraeus, and his boss Donald Rumsfeld, underwrote systematic torture and extrajudicial killing.
What needs to be stressed is that thousands of Americans, including political bosses like Wolfowitz, and scores of journalists with access, knew that the CIA-owned Ministry of Interior had more than a dozen secret prisons, and they knew what went on in them – as one Iraqi general told the film-makers, “drilling, murder, torture – the ugliest sorts of torture I’ve ever seen.”
Likewise, the composition of and operations of Special Police death squads, an American interviewee said, “were discussed openly, wherever it was, at staff meetings,” and were “common knowledge across Baghdad.”
It is a testament to the power of U.S. “information warfare” that this policy of war crimes comes as a surprise to the general public. Such is the power of National Security State insiders David Corn and Michael Isikoff, who happily turn the policy of calculated war crimes into the “hubris” of a handful of sexy mad patriots whom the Establishment is glad to sacrifice on the pseudo-altar of public theatre.
Certainly people have to be reminded, and the young have to learn, that America’s long-standing policy of war crimes for profit cannot exist without the complicity of the mainstream media, who exploit our natural inclination to believe the best of “our” leaders and especially of our soldiers. As George Orwell wrote in 1945, “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
Belligerent nationalism is often understood as the essence of what it means to be a “patriotic” American, and this veneration for the nation is taught to all budding reporters at journalism schools, along with the Code of Silence. Which is why, when insider Seymour Hersh reported that the CIA and Israel were training U.S. Special Forces assassination teams for deployment in Iraq, on the CIA’s Phoenix program model, he described it in a bloodless manner that made it seem necessary and, at worst, a mistake.
But war crimes are not a mistake; they are a “repugnant” and thoroughly intentional form of warfare.
Hersh quoted a former CIA station chief as saying, “We have to resuscitate Iraqi intelligence, holding our nose, and have Delta and agency shooters break down doors and take them”—the insurgents—“out.”
Hold our noses, Hersh suggested, and commit war crimes. And when Amy Goodman interviewed him about it, she did not ask if what he described constituted a policy of war crimes. And when Zakaria looked at Wolfowitz, he failed to question him about the war crimes he plotted and committed.
All this psychological warfare is waged in the name of morale – to make us, and our journalists, feel good about our belligerent nationalism – about being complicit in the war crimes perpetrated by the Perles, Frums, and Feiths.
After the CIA death squads eliminated the senior leadership of the Iraqi government, they eliminated “mid-level” Baath Party members, the middle class of Iraq. Cover was provided by Newsweek, which quoted an army officer who said, “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”
How did they do this? In one case, U.S. forces held a general’s three sons as hostages to persuade him to turn himself in. Then, instead of releasing his sons as promised, they staged an elaborate mock execution of his 15-year-old youngest son, before torturing the general himself to death.
All of it covered up. Not one victim featured on TV.
If you were to believe the New York Times – the newspaper of record – it doesn’t know the names of the senior CIA officers in Iraq behind these sorts of barbaric practices. Or publishers and editors may claim that the Intelligence Identity Protection Act prevents them from naming names, but they could easily describe the jobs, and tell us what’s being done. They could finesse the law. But they don’t even do that, and that’s the Big Secret upon which the policy of war crimes utterly depends.
The Times conceals the simple truths that undermine our so-called “democracy.” Truths, like how the CIA nurtured the exile leadership it installed in Iraq, and organized and funded the Ministry of Interior as its private domain, replete with a computerized list of every Iraqi citizen and every detail of their lives.
The Times could at least describe the CIA as “Keeper of the Hit Lists: Blackmail Central.”
But the Times won’t, because it’s a family affair. As we well know, the Iraqi National Congress was headed by Ahmed Chalabi, the CIA-sponsored source on the myth of weapons of mass destruction, hand-delivered to Times reporter Judy Miller, now a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Chalabi’s lies, and Miller’s dutiful reporting of them, were the pretext for the war on Iraq.
What is never mentioned is that the INC was founded and funded by the CIA, and that another of its leaders was the exiled General Hassan al-Naqib, whose son, Falah al-Naqib, then became the CIA’s handpicked Interim Interior Minister in Iraq and appointed his uncle General Thavit to lead the Special Police Commandos.
Times reporters undoubtedly lunch with Uncle Thavit and his CIA case officer.
The Times doesn’t explain the CIA’s precious methods of dominance: that any American working for the Interior Ministry, or prime minister’s office, was reporting to a publicly acknowledged administrative boss, usually in the military or State Department, and secretly to a CIA case officer, his operational boss. Or that every unit in the Special Commandos had a CIA case officer handing out hit lists to its American “Special Police Transition Team”. Up to forty-five Americans, mostly Special Forces, worked with each Iraqi unit. These teams were in round-the-clock communication with their CIA bosses via the Special Police Command Center, and there is no record of the Special Police ever conducting operations without U.S. supervision, even as they massacred tens of thousands of people.
Every militia and Iraqi Special Forces unit had a CIA case officer doing likewise. Every Iraqi politician and ministry officer has a CIA case officer too. And Times reporters drink with these advisors inside the Green Zone. It’s the secret that enables atrocity.
American journalists do not report the truth. Consider their deference to the Interior Ministry’s CIA advisor Steven Casteel after his Special Police Commandos launched their reign of terror in Baghdad. Hersh’s sanitized reports of a Phoenix-style terror campaign in Iraq were conveniently forgotten and instead they regurgitated Casteel’s black propaganda – that all atrocities were either rumor or innuendo or perpetrated by “insurgents in stolen police uniforms.”
Forget about what Hersh said about “mistakes.” Such an explanation was as ludicrous as General Petraeus claiming that the Iraqis formed the Special Police Commandos on “their own initiative.”
Knight Ridder did not mention that Casteel had managed DEA operations in Latin America and been the DEA’s Chief of Intelligence before being sent to Iraq, or that the CIA has controlled the DEA’s overseas targeting for 40 years, on a purely political basis. Casteel had served as a CIA lackey in Latin America, attacking left wing drug traffickers and letting right wing traffickers flourish, supporting the CIA sponsored Los Pepes-AUC death squads who were responsible for about 75% of civilian deaths in the Colombian civil war over the next 10 years.
To its credit, Knight Ridder did investigate Commando atrocities, and might have uncovered the whole story, except that its Iraqi reporter, Yasser Salihee, was shot and killed by an American sniper in June 2005. And while it had sufficient evidence to debunk Casteel’s cover story, it instead blamed the abuses on infiltration of the good guy Commandos by bad guy “Shiite militias”.
After the exposure of the al-Jadiriyah torture center, journalists reported that heads would roll. But a major CIA asset, Deputy Interior Minister Adnan al-Asadi, maintained command of the National (formerly Special) Police, undermining the reforms promised by the new Interior Minister, Jawad al-Bulani.
Asadi remains in that position, his forces embedded and deeply implicated in persistent human rights abuses in Iraq, where prisons are still rife with rape, torture, executions (judicial and extra-judicial) and disappearances. During Arab Spring demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Baghdad in March 2011, demonstrators spotted Asadi on a rooftop directing snipers as they shot peaceful protesters in the square below.
The Guardian and the BBC made a good start, but US journalists need to break the Code of Silence and launch an ongoing investigation into the full extent of U.S. command and control of the Special Police Commandos and all the other death squads and torture centers the United States brought to Iraq. The investigation must seriously examine the roles of the CIA and of US Special Forces, including the secret Joint Special Operations Command and the “Nightstalkers” who worked with the Wolf Brigade in 2005. The investigation must lead to accountability for each and every war crime committed.
American journalists were glad to demonize Saddam Hussein for his war crimes – real and imagined. Now they need to identify and humanize the up to 1,800 dead bodies that piled up every month in Baghdad, and to follow up with Iraqi human rights groups like the Organization for Follow-Up and Monitoring, who matched 92% of the bodies of execution victims with names and descriptions of people detained by US-led Interior Ministry forces.
America’s ruling National Security State, under the Obama regime, has expanded, through the CIA, “covert” paramilitary operations from 60 countries in 2008 to 120 nations. If we are ever to have a whiff of true democracy, we need our journalists to reveal the extent to which the CIA commands and controls these operations, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we need them to explain, on a daily basis, how the National Security State corrupts intelligence and “news” for the same racist imperial purposes that have defined US foreign policy since the Vietnam War.
Doug Valentine is the author of five books, including The Phoenix Program, and “A Crow’s Dream,” his first book poems. Seewww.douglasvalentine.com or write to him atdougvalentine77@gmail.com
Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq (Nimble Books: 2010), with a foreword by Benjamin Ferencz, a chief investigator and the only surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and the founding father of the International Criminal Court. Nicolas’ writing about American war crimes has been published by Alternet, Huffington Post, Z Magazine and warisacrime.org. You can reach 8im atpeacetopower@aol.com
Sunday, September 01, 2013
State Complicity In Myanmar Pogroms
By Tom Fawthrop
The government of Myanmar's President Thein Sein, so active in its efforts to assure Western governments and investors that the new Myanmar will never return to the dark days of the previous ruling military junta, has so far wholly failed to prevent the contagious spiral of brutal attacks on Muslim communities carried out in town after town by suspiciously well-organized Buddhist gangs.
Thein Sein's periodic appeals for ''an end to communal violence" are less than convincing given the absence of any government measures or plan to stem the anti-Muslim tide and prevent the next outbreak. Leaflets and magazines denigrating Muslims are being churned out every day across the country.
Extremist Buddhist monks, meanwhile, continue to spread a perniciously xenophobic version of Theravada Buddhism through inflammatory sermons directed against a Muslim minority that comprises only 5% of the population in this predominantly Buddhist nation of 60 million.
Muslim shops and homes in Lashio in Shan state were [the more] recent victims of a Buddhist motorbike gang in June. Shan researcher Sai Latt told Asia Times Online that "the government and the police are not doing anything at all to clamp down on extremist hate propaganda against Muslims."
The killings of Muslim Rohingyas in Rakhine state in the west of the country that started the violence in 2012 has spread this year to the wider Muslim population. In March, systemic arson razed to the ground 1,300 Muslim houses and shops in the central town of Meikhtila. Armed Buddhist gangs later brought terror to 14 peaceful Muslim communities in towns and villages in central Myanmar. Acting with total impunity, they moved south to Pegu division, unleashing another wave of havoc in Okkan district.
So is the violence the inevitable result of reformist changes and allowances for more freedom in Myanmar with the emergence of a quasi-civilian government after 50 years of brutal military repression?
Certainly this is what presidential spokesman Ye Htut would have us believe. "We cannot avoid this time of chaos," Ye Htut told AFP news agency. He insisted the wave of hate speech and violence targeting Muslims was the "ugly by-product" of new freedoms allowed by the reformist government.
Whereas the former general and current deputy minister of information claims the government "cannot control the chaos", Sai Latt, a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University in Canada, claims that there is a clearly orchestrated pattern to these anti-Muslim attacks.
"Prior to the riots, anti-Muslim literature arrives in a town, followed by monks preaching '969' sermons in the vicinity. On the day when violence breaks out, truckloads of strangers including monks have appeared on the scene. In each case an incident takes place that triggers the anger of the Buddhists." The numerals "969" symbolize the virtues of the Buddha, Buddhist practices and the Buddhist community.
Shortly after that all hell breaks loose as angry mobs cry "Kill the Muslims", attack mosques and set fire to their homes while carefully avoiding damage to nearby Buddhist-owned shops and houses.
According to Sai Latt, "there is never any preventive action. Whatever happened or however things turned out, the president's spokesman, Ye Htut, will blame Muslims and cover up the incidents on his Facebook page."
The central town of Meikhtila bears the ugly legacy of recent anti-Muslim violence. Large sections of the town have been reduced to rubble and a few broken walls - all that remains of what used to be a thriving Muslim community of almost 1,300 houses shops and mosques. This correspondent found compelling evidence of state complicity among the eye-witness accounts of the actions of residents during the four days of mob attacks on the Muslim community, which resulted in at least 41 deaths.
Bill Davis, former Burma project director for Physicians for Human Rights, and Andrea Gittleman, the group's senior legal advisor, reported that "In Meikhtila, investigators found that police were complicit in the violence against Muslims ... they marched unarmed Muslims toward an armed civilian mob, then refused to protect them from beating, stoning, and murder; they did not help injured Muslims; and they failed to apprehend perpetrators.
"The police force's actions in Meikhtila are in violation of the UN code of conduct for law enforcement officials, and the general lack of an effective response from the central government is a monumental failure to protect its citizens from organized and targeted violence," they said in a report.
Brutal efficiency
The United Nations has sounded similar notes. On March 26, UN Secretary General Special Advisor on Burma Vijay Nambiar said that Muslims were "clearly targeted" during the violence and that the attacks were carried out with "brutal efficiency".
UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Burma, Tomas Ojea Quintana, said he received reports of "state involvement in some of the acts of violence, and of instances where the military, police and other civilian law enforcement forces have been standing by while atrocities have been committed before their very eyes, including by well organized ultra-nationalist Buddhist mobs."
Ashin Issariya, one of the monks who led the 2007 "Saffron revolution" protests against the previous military government, has noted that Buddhists and Muslims in Myanmar have lived together harmoniously for decades, a statement repeated many times by both Muslim victims and Buddhist monks in Meikhtila and other places recently engulfed by the flames of hatred and the destruction of Muslim properties.
A recurring theme from locals is that "outsiders" are bussed in by trucks and nearly all of them are armed with sticks, swords and machetes. An incident soon happens between a Muslim and a Buddhist that provides the spark and then the gangs swing into action, agitating and enlisting locals to join the ensuing riot. Muslim homes and shops are demolished and along with them previous inter-communal and religious harmony.
Buddhist monk Ashin Issariya told Asia Times Online: "This is a well-planned campaign by a group of people who use religious bigotry to further their political ambitions. Certain forces yearn for the return of a military government. General Than Shwe [the supreme leader of the former ruling military junta] is more powerful than President Thein Sein."
Thiha Saw, editor-in-chief of the Open News Journal and vice president of the Myanmar Journalists Association, recently said: "Overall we have a history of religious harmony in the country. But the anti-Muslim card is the trump card, used by the military at critical times. It is an old trick. The Buddhist mobs attacking mosques are outsiders. These so-called Buddhists are often hired from the ranks of the unemployed and it is alleged they receive training from former military officers."
Buddhism in Myanmar has been battered and divided by the anti-Muslim campaign. Extremist monks, led by U Wirathu and his now infamous "969" campaign targeting Muslims, have garnered worldwide attention for their racist views. But Buddhist networks who assert the teachings of Buddha and the path of peace, religious tolerance and social justice have largely been ignored, both by international and local media.
At Meikhtila's Zay Yar Bun Buddhist monastery, senior monk Udamme Thara said, "I know more than a 1,000 Muslims fleeing from their attackers received sanctuary inside our monasteries. I am sure almost all temples provided safety and saved their lives."
Ashin Issariya's network of 800 monks, meanwhile, provided humanitarian aid to the victims of Meikhtila while at the same time organized many trucks with rice, clothes and other aid to be sent to internally displaced people (IDP) camps for fleeing Muslims.
Okkan-based Buddhist monk Shwe Nya told a gathering of monks, "We need to work together to stop this violence. This is not only good for Okkan, but good for Myanmar," reported the Irrawaddy, a Burmese newsmagazine and website. "If this conflict spreads to the whole country based on religious issues ... there will be a coup. So if this continues to happen, Myanmar is headed in a dark direction."
If a military faction or hardliners inside the cabinet are playing the anti-Muslim card, the real objective is probably not to stage another coup. The dark direction is more likely to be a process of entrenching the armed forces role in the country's new quasi-civilian configuration, a ploy to convince the grass roots population that a strong army is still needed to protect the nation from falling into further chaos. But in the process irreparable damage has been done to inter-ethnic harmony and the country's international reputation.
Tom Fawthrop is an author, a journalist and a director of the Mekong documentary Where Have All the Fish Gone?, about the danger of damming the mainstream river. He is based in the region.
How Grossly Unfair The U.S. Tax System Has Become
By Mark Gongloff
Apple CEO Tim Cook waved a magic wand in front of America on Tuesday, vanishing our outrage over how shamelessly companies avoid paying taxes, leaving the rest of us to foot the bill. As a public service to you, here is a chart that should enrage you about corporate tax rates all over again! (Story continues below chart of RAGE.)
Notice the beige stripe that is shrinking steadily? That stripe is the percentage corporate taxes contribute to total federal revenue. And notice the olive-green stripe that has swollen to be larger than the beige stripe used to be? That is the contribution of payroll taxes to federal revenue.
What this shows is how dramatically corporate tax contributions have shrunk in the past several decades, and how our personal taxes have risen to fill the gap. Payroll taxes now make up 35 percent of all federal government tax receipts, up from 11 percent in 1950. Corporate income taxes, meanwhile, now make up less than 10 percent of federal revenue, down from about 26 percent in 1950.
To 'splain those numbers a little more clearly: We who are on the payrolls of companies now bear way more of a tax burden than those companies bore decades ago. Those companies, meanwhile, bear less of a burden than we ever did.
And this doesn't include individual income tax, which accounts for about 46 percent of total federal tax receipts, roughly the same as 60 years ago.
Update: This chart of course does not reflect the fact that employers typically cover half of the payroll taxes collected by the government. Assuming companies pay half of the payroll taxes in this chart, the total tax burden for individual Americans is reduced to about 63 percent of total federal revenue, instead of 81 percent, as I estimated in an earlier version of this story. But that is up from about 45 percent in 1950.
And the total corporate contribution to federal revenue, including employers' share of payroll taxes, has dwindled from 32 percent in 1950 to about 17 percent today. Employer contributions to payroll taxes make the unfairness of the tax code slightly less unfair, but the trend is still clear and dramatic: Corporations are paying a lot less than they used to.
This chart was produced for aSeptember 2012 report (download-y PDF file) about corporate tax avoidance by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Walter Hickey of Business Insider helpfully republished the chart on Tuesday, in honor of Cook's testimony before the same subcommittee. Update: The Senate lifted the chart directly from an earlier Tax Policy Center report about the sources of government revenue.
Cook was there to techsplain how Apple holding $102 billion of cash offshore isn't really tax avoidance so much as good old fashioned ingenuity. Also, have you forgotten the shiny objects Apple makes (including the dreamy MacBook Air on which this here story was typed)? By the end of the hearing, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had demanded that Congress apologize to Apple for the inconvenience, and Sen. John McCain (R-My Lawn) was reduced to gently jibing Cook about how often he has to update his apps.
And Rand Paul is kind of right, you guys, as is Tim Cook: We should not be so mad at Apple for doing what the law allows. We should be mad that the law allows Apple and other companies to keep billions of dollars of cash offshore and out of the government coffers, where it could be helping the unemployed and our crumbling infrastructure and such. Another thing we can get mad about is how the "corporate tax reform" that Cook and other corporate leaders are always banging on about will actually serve tomake it so companies pay even less in taxes than they do now.
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