Category: Uncategorized

By Christopher Wanjek posted: 16 June 2009 02:25 pm ET

The use of the powerful antibiotic streptomycin as a growth-promoting agent in turkeys also quickly promotes the growth of dangerous streptomycin-resistant coliform bacteria, according to researchers at University of California, Davis.

Perhaps such a finding should be cause for alarm, considering how agribusiness pumps more than 20 million pound of antibiotics into healthy livestock each year, constituting more than 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States.

Then again, the aforementioned study was published in 1951. Hundreds of similar studies have since been published. But no one seems to care.

Yet as serious questions arise about U.S. food safety nearly monthly, and with antibiotic abuse rampant and with antibacterial-resistant “super bugs” reaching epidemic proportions, maybe it’s time to rethink the practice of industrial-scale animal production.
Scientists at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and the Pew Charitable Trusts are now calling for a phase-out and eventual ban of antibacterial agents for nontherapeutic use in livestock. They have taken their cause to Washington this month with ads in the Metro subway system and elsewhere.

Old MacDonald had some drugs

Antibiotics down on the industrial farm serve two purposes. They make some animals, particularly chickens, grow faster. Chickens raised the old-fashioned way mature in about 90 days; industrial farms raise them in 42 days with antibiotics and growth hormones.

Antibiotics also help control the spread of harmful bacteria that is inevitable whenever you cram hundreds to tens of thousands of animals and their waste into cages only slightly bigger than their bodies.

Most antibiotics are given to healthy animals in low doses as a mass prophylaxis, a violation of the basic principle of antibiotic use. Antibiotics are intended for sick humans and animals and must be given at specific doses for a specific duration or else the bacteria they are killing can develop a resistance to the drug.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, warned that antibacterial-resistant strains would develop simply by exposing bacteria to doses insufficient to kill all of them. This is exactly what agribusiness has done with millions of pounds of penicillin (now largely ineffective against many of the bacteria it once killed) and other antibiotics.

Evidence still lacking

The meat industry is correct, however, when it states that there is no firm evidence that its 60-year-old method of doing business is driving the trend of antibiotic resistance in bacteria sickening humans.
Yes, antibiotic-resistance costs the U.S. health care system $4 billion to $5 billion per year. Yes, the actual amount of antibiotics used by agribusiness is unknown for lack of regulation.

Yes, if you sample a manure lagoon, a typical feature on industrial farms, you will find antibiotic-resistant strains of all kinds of nasty bugs. Yes, flies could transmit that manure to hard surfaces, bodies or food miles away. Yes, studies have shown upwards of 98 percent of bacteria such as staph and streptococci sampled from the air in hog farms were resistant to two or more antibiotics. Yes, factory farm workers have high rates of asthma, and residents in surrounding communities have high rates of undiagnosed illnesses.

Yes, nearly 100 percent of residents in communities around chicken and hog farms have antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their guts that came from those farms.

But no, you cannot yet conclude, for example, that hospitals are filthy with multidrug-resistant staph (MRSA) because chicken, pork and beef conglomerates are using and abusing antibiotic x, y and z.

Live Science for more

Ray McGovern: The “Memo” shows a premeditated war of aggression with intent to deceive.

Ray McGovern talks with Paul Jay about the paper trail on the Iraq war, as revealed in the British “Downing Street memo”. See Part 1 in yesterday’s post!

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. We’re talking to Ray McGovern about the Downing Street memo or minutes, and whether or not it shows criminal intent on the part of President Bush and Dick Cheney, and what implications it might have for the attorney general about whether or not to pursue charges, though we have not heard much talk about the Iraq War as even the potential for this investigation. But the Downing Street memo certainly suggests that there should be. So, Ray, pick up, first of all, with how do we know these minutes, this memo, even exists, and talk a little bit about how much coverage has it gotten in the US as compared to in Britain.

RAY MCGOVERN, RETIRED CIA ANALYST: Well, Paul, it’s really interesting. What’s needed to surface this kind of information is some courageous—we call them patriotic truth-tellers—who realize the enormity of what is about to happen or what has happened and release the details of that enormity to the press. Now, I don’t know who it was, but there was one such patriotic truth-teller that had access to the minutes that were prepared that same day by a participant at Downing Street—and there were only 14 there. Someone, one of those, either by carelessness or by intent gave that memo to someone who gave it to The Sunday Times of London—an incredible public service. Now, in Britain, of course, there’s a Secrets Act, which automatically condemns such a person who’s caught to at least two years in prison. And that person did it anyway. I’ll bet it was a woman, because there was only one other woman, besides Elizabeth Wilmshurst that we mentioned before, who spoke out before the war started, and that was Katherine Gun, who worked for the NSA [National Security Agency] equivalent in the British system and warned people that something really messy was happening at the UN, where the US and Britain were determined to shove through their plans for war.

JAY: How do we know this leak is legitimate?

MCGOVERN: It was verified, and Tony Blair swears by it—well, he didn’t swear by it. Tony Blair has verified its authenticity. It can’t be denied. It’s recognized by the British government as authentic.

JAY: So, given that this memo, in a fairly clearcut way, makes it evident that British and American officials knew there were no weapons of mass destruction and were going ahead anyway, why hasn’t this had more impact in US press, US politics? In the American discourse it’s as if this memo never existed.

MCGOVERN: Well, you know, the only reason it got any play at all was because two months, almost, or a month and a half after The Sunday Times of London carried the story, John Conyers was persuaded to hold a hearing on that. You know, he thought it was sort of interesting, as you and I do. And so he was allowed to convene a group down in the basement of the Capitol—that’s the only room they would give him, the Republican majority. But that was very interesting, because that brought the matter to the fore because C-SPAN televised it live and so forth. So Amy Goodman, on Democracy Now!, had us interviewed the day before. And the Washington Post that day, 15 June 2005, actually mentioned the Downing Street memo, and what they said was, you know, this is very vague but intriguing. Well, it wasn’t vague at all and it wasn’t intriguing. It was unconscionable. It was very depressing, these leaders of a so-called civilized country getting together in sort of a cabal to plan a war so that they could ingratiate themselves with other leaders across the Atlantic who were preparing the same thing. The Post, in other words, dissed it: they said that this is well known; there’s no news here; we knew this all the time. Well, if they knew that the British and the US, eight months before the war against Iraq, were plotting this matter, it would have been really neat if they had told us that, and they didn’t.

JAY: Do you think this meets the bar of criminality? Dick Cheney was on Fox and on television quite often. In one of the speeches he made, he said what’s happening is policy differences are being criminalized, and one administration can’t do that to the other.

MCGOVERN: They’re trying to obfuscate the situation here. When they talk about policy differences, they talk about torture as if, you know, this is a policy argument. It’s a crime; it’s not a policy argument. Torture is a crime under US law, as well as international law. With respect to waging a war of aggression—and that is a technical term defined by Nuremberg, the Nuremberg tribunal, which came after World War II. And what they said was that to institute a war of aggression is to commit the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only inasmuch as it contains the accumulated evil of the whole. Now, that’s where torture, that’s where kidnapping, that’s what putting people in black holes without telling their wives or their children, much less the Red Cross, that’s where that comes in. That’s the accumulated evil, okay? So the supreme evil is the war of aggression, and everybody knew that in the aftermath of World War II. But now we have one superpower, and it can be sort of pushed aside—you can do the war of aggression. And as night follows the day, there will be these accumulated evils, and these accumulated evils are banned by international and national law. But the war of aggression, well, unless you lose, hmm, unless you lose, then the thinking is, well, maybe it’s not so important, because we’re the one sole remaining superpower in the world, and besides that, we don’t recognize all those conventions that would have us before the Hague. Now, the ironic thing here is that George Bush and Dick Cheney can’t go outside the country. They can’t risk it. You know, they can take lots of secret service folks with them, but they run the risk of a citizen’s arrest on the plane to Cancún or the plane to Paris. And, you know, I’m not blowing smoke here; this has already happened. Don Rumsfeld, two years ago, was in Paris for a conference. Some brave soul filed a formal petition with the Paris police, saying this is a war criminal, we need to detain him here and investigate. As the Paris police were figuring out what to do about this, Rumsfeld went out the back door, went to Charles de Gaulle, and was off in the next plane out of the country. So this is a real thing. But isn’t it an embarrassment? Isn’t it an embarrassment that we, we Americans, are depending on people like the magistrate in Paris or gutsy lawyers in Spain—. You know, Spain is where we had waterboarding and sleep deprivation, all these other kinds of torture things, developed, pretty well, there, 500 years ago. So it’s really ironic that we have to depend on other people who, you know, subscribe to the civilized notion that torture is always intrinsically wrong, not to mention that it doesn’t turn up reliable information. We have to depend on others? Give me a break. I think the American people are up to it. I think that Barack Obama, in releasing those four shameless, pornographic memos—under Department of Justice letterhead, okay? These are the ones that were written as to what you can do and make it not torture. Okay? Really easy: you define torture as causing major organ failure or death. If you do either of those, you could be brought up on charges of torture.

JAY: But the question of waging war of aggression is a violation of international law, and that is a law that the United States has signed on to. The conventions and international law trumps domestic law, supposedly. If Iraq war is an illegal war, isn’t it a violation of American law? And that seems to be not even part of the conversation now.

MCGOVERN: Well, what you’re referring to, I think, Paul, it is the UN Charter, which we have made a matter of our domestic law. And there you get into situations where violence of this kind can be justified.

JAY: Except in this case it wasn’t. There was an attempt to get a Security Council resolution, and they didn’t get it. So Kofi Annan called this war an illegal war. Unfortunately, he didn’t do it until year afterwards, but he did do it.

MCGOVERN: Yeah. But, you know, it’s the same with McNamara, you know, when he was talking about General LeMay and killing 100,000 Japanese in cities toward the end of the war, saying, you know, if we lose, we could be brought up on war crimes, ’cause these are really war crimes, what we’re committing here. And that was LeMay, okay? Now, the supposition was we’re not going to lose, okay? That’s one heck of a way to do morality.

JAY: Thanks for joining us, Ray.

MCGOVERN: You’re most welcome.

JAY: Thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

DISCLAIMER:

Please note that TRNN transcripts are typed from a recording of the program; The Real News Network cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

Bio

Ray McGovern is a retired CIA officer. McGovern was employed under seven US presidents for over 27 years, presenting the morning intelligence briefings at the White House under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. McGovern was born and raised in the Bronx, graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University, received an M.A. in Russian Studies from Fordham, a certificate in Theological Studies from Georgetown University, and graduated from Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program.

Posted by Huma in Featured Articles, Pakistan on 08 7th, 2009

Earlier this week, I attended a talk about Islam and homosexuality at a medical school in Karachi. The very fact that medical practitioners, particularly psychiatrists, were gathering to discuss the subject piqued my interest. After all, a variety of psychological and physical ailments have been documented in patients who suppress or conceal their sexual identities in conservative societies.

But I was disappointed to learn that the lecturer was taking a historical perspective and simply tracing the history of homosexuality in Muslim societies. It would have been far more interesting to hear a debate about the prevalence of homosexuality in contemporary Muslim societies and consider ways in which psychiatrists and GPs respond to patients who are gay, and whether approaches differ if patients embrace their sexual identity or consider it an affliction.

Still, it was encouraging to see some acknowledgement within our local medical community that homosexuality is a phenomenon worth keeping in mind when dealing with patients (and what better place to start than at the very beginning). For readers who are now expecting a grand theological debate about whether homosexuality is permitted in Islam, feel free to click elsewhere on this website. That question is still up for debate, with some Muslim groups condemning homosexual acts as a sin and others arguing that it is natural, and therefore created and condoned by the Almighty. This post simply considers how Muslim societies deal with homosexuality in practice.

The fact that Muslim societies are struggling to figure out how to respond to homosexuals in their midst is perfectly illustrated by Iran. A few years ago, the country enraged human rights groups and made headlines when it publicly hung two young men – one 18, the other a minor – for being gay. Soon after, President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad further irked the global community by flat-out denying that there were any homosexuals in Iran. How then, the world asked, can you hang young men for something doesn’t exist and thus couldn’t have happened? Ahmedinejad’s – and Iran’s – confusion about what to do with homosexuals is widespread in the ummah – should Muslim societies seek out and punish homosexuals? Ignore their very existence? Or acknowledge that they live and – gasp! – worship in Muslim societies and therefore protect their human and constitutional rights?

To help address some of these questions, the lecturer went back in time to the Ottoman and Abbasid empires, during which homosexuality was commonly practiced and socially tolerated, though not explicitly legally protected. Back then, the lecturer explained, there were various reasons for homosexual behaviour (including lesbianism) being widespread.

Dawn for more

By gauging the subtle differences in light given off by a planet 1,000 light-years away, it shows that it’s up to the job.

The Kepler Mission is in search of Earth-like planets in the habitable zones. NASA.

By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the August 6, 2009 edition

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has passed its first “spot that planet” test, detecting a giant Jupiter-like orb hurtling around a star roughly 1,000 light-years away.

The test run clearly demonstrates that Kepler will have little trouble performing its primary mission: detecting Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of sun-like stars.

In the process, Kepler has given astronomers a detailed look at the planet – its temperature and how its atmosphere operates.

The results “are stunning indeed,” says Alan Boss, an astronomer who specializes in the birth and evolution of solar systems at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

The Kepler team was confident that their spacecraft would be able to achieve its main goal. But nothing substitutes for checking the observatory out on orbit to be sure.

“We now know that Kepler can do it,” Dr. Boss said during a briefing Thursday afternoon at NASA headquarters. “The question that remains is: How many Earths are out there for Kepler to find?”
Scientists have become adept at finding planets by measuring how starlight dims when planets pass in front of their suns – an occurrence called a transit. But that method has favored finding large planets that can dim the light of their star significantly. To see Earth-size planets, Kepler must be able to detect much more subtle changes – which is what it demonstrated in its study of the large planet dubbed HAT-P-7b.

CS Monitor for more

World Suicide Prevention Day on 10 September promotes worldwide commitment and action to prevent suicides. On average, almost 3000 people commit suicide daily. For every person who completes a suicide, 20 or more may attempt to end their lives.

With the sponsoring International Association for Suicide Prevention, WHO and other partners advocate for the prevention of suicidal behaviour, provision of adequate treatment and follow-up care for people who attempted suicide, as well as responsible reporting of suicides in the media.

At the global level, awareness needs to be raised that suicide is a major preventable cause of premature death. Governments need to develop policy frameworks for national suicide prevention strategies. At the local level, policy statements and research outcomes need to be translated into prevention programmes and activities in communities.

WHO for more

Islamabad, Aug.2 (ANI): So what if the odds are heavily against him, former Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf seems to be one man who knows how to live life tension free.

Musharraf’s penchant for Bollywood films and hindi songs is well known, but very few people are aware of the fact that he is a trained tabla player himself.

Musharraf’s veiled talent was disclosed by Lord Nazir Ahmed, who has been severely criticizing the British government for providing an unprecedented security cover to Musharraf, The Nation reports.

Quoting one of his close friends, Lord Nazir revealed that Musharraf was recently invited as a chief guest in a musical show where he showcased the talent of his ‘agile’ fingers.

According to Lord Nazir’s friend, during the show Musharraf found the ‘tabla nawaz’ accompanying the singer out of rhythm. Irritated by the performance, Musharraf himself jumped onto the stage and started performing on the tabla.

The audience was reportedly amazed to see a former general extracting the best of tabla beats.

It may be recalled that Lord Nazir, who became UK’s first Muslim life peer in 1998, has vowed to launch a legal war against Musharraf for his eight year long autocratic rule in Pakistan.

He said Musharraf could be tried for ‘war crimes’ in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for the numerous suppressive decisions that he took during his reign. (ANI)

ANI for more

By David Edwards

David Edwards’s ZSpace Page / ZSpace Aug 05, 2009

Iran’s June 12 presidential elections have been widely criticised, both domestically and abroad, as lacking credibility. During the popular protests that followed, some 30 people were killed by government forces with hundreds more arrested. These events have been subject to intense and continuous US-UK media scrutiny.

Also in June, a military coup overthrew the democratically-elected government of Honduras. President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and deported to Costa Rica on June 28. Initial clashes between troops loyal to the coup plotters and Zelaya supporters left at least one person dead and 30 injured. On July 30, as many as 150 people were arrested, with dozens injured, when soldiers and police attacked demonstrators with tear gas, water cannon, clubs and gunfire. One of the wounded, a 38-year-old teacher, was left fighting for his life after being shot in the head. Journalists reporting from the scene were also attacked. (Bill Van Auken, ‘Honduran coup regime launches brutal crackdown,’ August 1, 2009, World Socialist Web Site; http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/hond-a01.shtml)

Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, describes how the Honduran people have been “risking their lives, confronting the army’s bullets, beatings, and arbitrary arrests and detentions”. And yet the US media has reported this repression “only minimally, with the major print media sometimes failing even to mention the censorship there”. (Weisbrot, ‘Hondurans Resist Coup, Will Need Help From Other Countries,’ ZNet, July 9, 2009; http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21924)

Our own media database search (August 3) of national UK press editorials mentioning the word ‘Iran’ over the previous five weeks delivered 26 results. A search for editorials containing the word ‘Honduras’ delivered 2 results. In fact there has been a single leading article on the Honduran crisis (in the Independent on June 30 – see below). Over the same period, a search for UK national press articles mentioning ‘Iran’ gave 848 results; for ‘Honduras’ 96 results. This is not hard science, but it does indicate comparative levels of UK media coverage of the two issues.

Weisbrot notes that the Honduran coup is “a recurrent story” in Latin America, pitting “a reform president who is supported by labor unions and social organizations against a mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite who is accustomed to choosing not only the Supreme Court and the Congress, but also the president”. (Weisbrot, ‘Does the US back the Honduran coup?’ The Guardian, July 1, 2009; http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jul/01/honduras-zelaya-coup-obama)

Mainstream outlets claim the coup marks a worrying return to earlier regional trends. A July 23 BBC “Q&A” on Honduras commented:

“Coups and political upheaval were common in Central America for much of the 20th Century, and until the mid-1980s the military dominated political life in Honduras. Mr Zelaya’s removal is the first in the region since 1993…” (‘Q&A: Crisis in Honduras,’ BBC website, July 23, 2009; http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8124154.stm)

This is false. In April 2002, a US-backed military coup briefly ousted Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez until mass protests returned him to power. A Guardian article that month reported that the “US ‘gave the nod’ to Venezuelan coup.” Several weeks prior to the coup attempt, US government officials had met the business leaders who assumed power after Chavez was arrested. General Rincon, the Venezuelan army’s chief of staff, had visited the Pentagon the previous December and met senior officials. (Julian Borger and Alex Bellos, ‘US “gave the nod” to Venezuelan coup,’ The Guardian, April 17, 2002;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/apr/17/usa.venezuela)

A 2004 military coup forced Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide to flee to Central Africa. Aristide told the Associated Press that he was forced to leave Haiti by US military forces. (Eliott C. McLaughlin, Associated Press, March 1, 2004) Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, wrote:

“Haiti, again, is ablaze… Almost nobody, however, understands that today’s chaos was made in Washington – deliberately, cynically, and steadfastly.” (Sachs, ‘Fanning the flames of political chaos in Haiti,’ The Nation, February 28, 2004; http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0301-10.htm)

The BBC Q&A noted: “The role of the US is key, as it is Honduras’s biggest trading partner.”

Curiously, the article failed to mention that the US has its only Central American military base in Honduras. In fact the Honduran military is armed, trained and advised by Washington in a relationship that is deep and enduring. The two generals who led the coup were both trained at the US School of the Americas (SOA) based in Georgia (SOA is now known as The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHINSEC). Commander-in-chief Romeo Vasquez, head of the Honduran military, received training at SOA between 1976 and 1984. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, head of the air force, studied there in 1996. Colonel Herberth Bayardo Inestroza, a Honduran army lawyer who also trained at SOA, has admitted the illegality of the military’s kidnapping of Zelaya. He told the Miami Herald: “It would be difficult for us, with our training, to have a relationship with a leftist government. That’s impossible.” (Weisbrot, ZNet, July 9, op. cit)

Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of School of the Americas Watch, described SOA last month as “this school of assassins, this school of coups, this school with so much blood on its hands”. (‘Generals Who Led Honduras Military Coup Trained at the School of the Americas,’ Democracy Now!, July 1, 2009; http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/1/generals_who_led_honduras_military_coup)

Weisbrot notes that Washington’s response to the Honduran coup is guided by conflicting interests: “powerful lobbyists such as Lanny Davis and Bennett Ratcliff, who are close to [Hillary] Clinton and are leading the coup government’s strategy; the Republican right, including members of Congress who openly support the coup; and new cold warriors of both parties in the Congress, the state department and White House who see Zelaya as a threat because of his co-operation with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and other left governments.” (Weisbrot, ‘U.S.- Brokered Mediation Has Failed – It’s Time for Latin America to Take Charge,’ ZNet, August 1, 2009; http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22185)

This explains Washington’s ambiguous reaction. The Obama administration’s first statement did not criticise the coup, and the state department continues to refuse to describe it as a coup. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has repeatedly refused to say that ‘restoring the democratic order’ in Honduras requires the return of Zelaya. It took three weeks for the White House to threaten to cut off aid.

Roger Burbach, Director of the Center for the Study of the Americas, writes:

“U.S. efforts to restore Zelaya have been quite tepid compared to other countries. While many ambassadors have been withdrawn, the US head diplomat Hugo Llorens, appointed by George W. Bush, remains in place. There are reports that he may have even given the green light to the coup plotters, or at least did nothing to stop them. And while the World Bank has suspended assistance, the State Department merely warns that $180 million in US economic aid may be in jeopardy. Most importantly the United States refuses to freeze the bank accounts and cancel the visas of the coup leaders, measures that Zelaya and other Latin American governments have urged Washington to do.” (Burbach, ‘Obama and Hillary Nix Change in Honduras,’ ZNet, July 27, 2009;
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22136)

Recently, US Assistant Secretary of State Philip Crowley, commented:
“We certainly think that if we were choosing a model government and a model leader for countries of the region to follow, that the current leadership in Venezuela would not be a particular model. If that is the lesson that President Zelaya has learned from this episode, that would be a good lesson.” (James Suggett, ‘Honduras Coup,’ ZNet, July 28, 2009; http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22149)

The Independent – Doing Democracy A Service

In their June 30 leading article, the Independent’s editors, led by pro-Iraq war editor Roger Alton (formerly editor of the Observer), opened with this extraordinary paragraph:

“The ousting of the Honduran President Manuel Zelaya by the country’s military at the weekend has been condemned by many members of the international community as an affront to democracy. But despite a natural distaste for any military coup, it is possible that the army might have actually done Honduran democracy a service.” (Leading article, ‘Guns and democracy,’ The Independent, June 30, 2009; http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-guns-and-democracy-1724479.html)

By contrast, many experienced observers have warned that the coup represents an extreme threat to prospects for democracy in Honduras and the region. The Independent explained its reasoning:

“President Zelaya was planning a referendum to give him power to alter the constitution. But the proposed alterations were perilously vague, with opponents accusing Mr Zelaya of wanting to scrap the four-year presidential term limit. The country’s courts and congress had called the vote illegal.

“This is an increasingly familiar turn of events in emerging democracies: an elected leader, facing the end of his time in office, decides that the country cannot do without him and resorts to dubious measures to retain power. The Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez, won a referendum in February altering his country’s constitution and abolishing term limits. He now talks about ruling beyond 2030.”

On the same day, in the same newspaper, Heather Berkman, a Latin America associate at the global political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, wrote:

“Manuel Zelaya has taken a few unexpected turns to the left during his tenure as President of Honduras, deviating from its political norms. This time, it looks like he may have gone too far… Mr Zelaya can be blamed for staging a coup that, in turn, provoked a counter-coup.”

(Berkman, ‘Zelaya pushed,’ The Independent, June 30, 2009; http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/heather-berkman-zelaya-pushed-1724469.html)

Recall that these articles appeared in the Independent, widely considered to be at the left of the mainstream media spectrum.

Weisbrot argues that in fact there was no way for Zelaya to extend his rule even if the referendum had been held and passed:

“The June 28 referendum was nothing more than a non-binding poll of the electorate, asking whether the voters wanted to place a binding referendum on the November ballot to approve a redrafting of the country’s constitution. If it had passed, and if the November referendum had been held (which was not very likely) and also passed, the same ballot would have elected a new president and Zelaya would have stepped down in January. So, the belief that Zelaya was fighting to extend his term in office has no factual basis – although most people who follow this story in the press seem to believe it. The most that could be said is that if a new constitution were eventually approved, Zelaya might have been able to run for a second term at some future date.” (Weisbrot, ‘Hondurans Resist Coup, Will Need Help From Other Countries,’ ZNet, July 9, 2009; http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21924)

Nikolas Kozloff, journalist and author of ‘Revolution!: South America and the Rise of the New Left,’ traces the deeper sources of opposition to the Honduran president. Around 2007-2008, the initially conservative Zelaya began to embrace “the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas.” Kozloff explains:

“It’s Chavez’s answer to the US-imposed free trade agreements in the region. And Zelaya had come out in support of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. And so, this set him at odds with the United States, and there was a history of friction between the US and Zelaya leading up to the coup.” (‘What’s Behind the Honduras Coup? Tracing Zelaya’s Trajectory,’ Democracy Now!, July 1, 2009; http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/1/whats_behind_the_honduras_coup_tracing)

As the Independent editorial makes clear, the mainstream offers a different version of events. Kozloff comments:

“I think if you were just reading the reports in the mainstream media, you might get the impression that this coup is just about term limits in Honduras and it’s just a conflict over whether Zelaya will be able to extend his constitutional mandate of one four-year term.”

The BBC, for example, reported: “Zelaya was sent into exile on 28 June amid a power struggle over his plans for constitutional change.” (‘Q&A: Crisis in Honduras,’ op. cit)

The Times wrote: “His opponents say that he wanted to overturn term limits and extend his power like leftist regional allies such as President Chavez of Venezuela…” (Hannah Strange, ‘Deposed President “can never return”,’ The Times, July 3, 2009)

Kozloff comments: “And my point is that there is an ideological component to this coup… the first salvo against the Honduran elite was his moves to raise the minimum wage by 60 percent… I mean, this is a country where you have these maquiladora assembly plants, and the Honduran elite were, to say the least, displeased by the moves.”

In a rare exception to his newspaper’s wretched performance, Johann Hari wrote in the Independent of how Zelaya had “increased the minimum wage by 60 per cent, saying sweatshops were no longer acceptable and ‘the rich must pay their share’.

“The tiny elite at the top – who own 45 per cent of the country’s wealth – are horrified. They are used to having Honduras run by them, for them.” (Hari, ‘The other 9/11 returns to haunt Latin America,’ The Independent, July 3, 2009; http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-a-coup-latin-america-didnt-need-1729429.html)

As Hari noted: “It was always inevitable that the people at the top would fight back to preserve their unearned privilege.”

Prior to the coup, US multinational Chiquita expressed its concern at Zelaya’s minimum wage decrees, which they said would reduce profits and increase export costs. Chiquita appealed to the Honduran Business Association, which was also opposed to Zelaya’s minimum wage policy. Kozloff told the website Democracy Now!: “what I find really interesting is that Chiquita is allied to a Washington law firm called Covington, which advises multinational corporations. And who is the vice chairman of Covington? None other than John Negroponte…”. (‘From Arbenz to Zelaya: Chiquita in Latin America,’ Democracy Now!, July 21, 2009; http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/21/from_arbenz_to_zelaya_chiquita_in)

Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, when he played a key role in coordinating US terror attacks on Nicaragua by means of “the Contras”, a mercinary army. Negroponte is complicit in massive human rights abuses committed by the Honduran military.

Throughout the twentieth century, Chiquita, then known as United Fruit Company, was associated with “some of the most backward, retrograde political and economic forces in Central America and indeed outside of Central America in such countries as Colombia”, Kozloff notes. In 1954, United Fruit played a leading role in the US-backed coup that ousted Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically-elected leader of Guatemala.

Kozloff reports that the current US Attorney General, Eric Holder, was Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton. Holder defended Chiquita and its actions in Colombia when Chiquita was allied to right-wing paramilitary death squads in the 1990s and was found guilty of paying off paramilitaries. Holder was Chiquita’s lead counsel.

We searched national UK newspapers (August 3) for articles containing the words ‘Honduras’ and (separately) ‘Chiquita’, ‘John Negroponte’ and ‘Eric Holder’ since June 28 – all searches produced zero results.

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Write to Roger Alton, editor of the Independent
Email: r.alton@independent.co.uk

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Email: J.Hari@Independent.co.uk

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From: Z Net – The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
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(Submitted by Reader)

McGovern: “It’s there in black and white – The intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy”

Please click here to watch the video.

Ray McGovern talks with Paul Jay about the paper trail on the Iraq war, as revealed in the British “Downing Street memo”. See Part 2 in tomorrow’s post!

Transcript

Transcript

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay. I’m coming to you from outside Washington today. And in Washington is Ray McGovern. He was a 27-year veteran analyst at the CIA. He used to do White House briefings during the Reagan administration, now an author, regular writer in Consortiumnews.com, and a regular contributor to the The Real News Network. Thanks, Ray.

RAY MCGOVERN, RETIRED CIA ANALYST: Welcome.

JAY: So seven years ago, the Downing Street memo meetings took place that gave rise to the famous or infamous memo. President Obama has said that the issue of criminal offenses that might have been committed during the previous administration (and one reads into that “by the leaders of the previous administration—President Bush, Vice President Cheney”), that this is in the hands of the attorney general, and he’ll decide whether or not criminal offenses have occurred. And most of the focus has been on torture cases, but I’ve always thought the bigger issue is waging an illegal war. So, Ray, take us back. Tell us what are the Downing Street memos. And do they suggest that there should be an investigation into the potential of criminal charges against Bush and Cheney for waging a war in Iraq?

MCGOVERN: Paul, the advantage of the Downing Street minutes is that it’s a documentary piece of evidence of the kind that intelligence analysts or investigative reporters or people really lust after in terms of proving a case, and this does prove a case. You have to think back to 2002. Blair was in Crawford, Texas. He committed himself to do whatever Bush decided with respect to war. And then he got a little bit worried. You know, Bush was on the phone with him every other week or so, and Blair was hearing these braggadocio type things about what we’re going to do to Saddam and why, and he wanted to check that out. And what better way to check it out than send his intelligence chief to meet with his opposite number, George Tenet, who at that time was head of the CIA and meeting with Bush six mornings a week with the president’s daily brief? What better way than to send Sir Richard Dearlove over the Atlantic to meet with Tenet? Now, Tenet was reluctant to meet with him for obvious reasons, but Blair prevailed upon Bush to make Tenet meet with Dearlove. And once you get Tenet going—he’s that big, garrulous fellow who likes to brag about all the secrets he knew—well, he really gave Dearlove an earful. And three days after Dearlove was with Tenet that entire Saturday—and I know folks who were there with him them all—they had a one-and-a-half hour tête-à-tête behind closed doors, and that was what Dearlove was reporting on when he was seeing Blair and his principal national security advisers—there were 14 there altogether—three days later on July 23, 2002. So we’re talking still eight months before the war, okay? Big message—this was Dearlove’s report: the president has decided that war is inevitable to remove Saddam Hussein for regime change; the war will be justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass disruption. Translation from the British: we’re going to say that Saddam Hussein has all manner of weapons of mass destruction and that he’s likely to give them to al-Qaeda or the terrorists. And then the crowning sentence: but the intelligence and facts are being fixed around around the policy. “Fixed around the policy.” I mean, there it is in black and white. That is the cardinal sin of intelligence analysis: you don’t fix the facts around the policy; you give them the facts, and if they want to do a stupid policy, well, your conscience is clean—you’ve told them what you think about the world. And so what happened was there was a little discussion there, and it’s really quite interesting on several counts. One is that the foreign secretary, who was getting a more sensible view from Colin Powell, upped and said, “Well, you know, the evidence is very thin, weapons of mass destruction. But, you know what we can do? Here’s an idea. We’ll serve an ultimatum on Saddam Hussein. We will propose the most intrusive inspection regime in the history of the world. We’ll crawl all over his palaces. We’ll interview his scientists one-on-one. And he should reject that. And then we’ll have a casus belli; then we’ll have a better reason to go to war.” Okay? And the attorney general, Sir Lord Goldsmith, says, “Yeah, that would be better, because regime change, that doesn’t do it from a legal standpoint, to start a war. So it’s much better to have something like that.” You know, it’s like a bunch of mafia a new northern New Jersey. It was really, really incredible. And there it is in black and white. Now, one of the interesting things here, Paul, is the inspection thing. Bear in mind that Dick Cheney was unalterably opposed to letting the UN inspectors go back into Iraq. He said so in his major speech before the war, of course. That speech was August 26, 2002. And he ridiculed the notion that there should be UN inspectors, because that just gives us a false sense of security, said Cheney. But the battle was waged, Blair and Dearlove against Cheney, and Bush was persuaded, in order to get British support for this war of aggression, that he needed to say, okay, we’ll propose this ridiculous regime, and Saddam will refuse it, and that’s the way we’ll go into Iraq. Now what does Saddam do? He’s too clever than half by these other guys. What he does is say, “Alright, come on in. You can interview my scientists one-on-one. We won’t insist on a minder there. You can crawl over my palaces. Just, you know, please put the cap back on the toothpaste. Do whatever you want.” And that’s what happened from the end of November 2002 until 17 March 2003. The UN people, the UN inspectors, were crawling all over Iraq. Now, I remember Carl Levin, a ranking member, at the time, of the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying to George Tenet, the head of the CIA, “They’re not finding anything. Are you giving him the best information you have about weapons of mass destruction?” and Tenet swearing on the Bible, yeah, he was giving them the best information. And for once Tenet was telling the truth, because the best information revealed—”the best” in quotes—revealed no weapons of mass destruction. So what happens? Well, George Bush entertains the prime minister of Spain four weeks before the war and tells him, well, you know, we’re going to go in there no matter what. He has discussions with Blair—and this is again recorded in the documents that we have—he has discussions with Blair on 31 January 2003 in which he says, you know, “We’re going to have to figure some other way to justify this. Well, I know what we’ll do. We’ll get a U-2 airplane, we’ll paint it with UN colors, and we’ll fly it over to attract Iraqi antiaircraft fire or missiles, and then we’ll have a casus belli. Or, no, no, this might be a good idea: we’ll get one of those Iraqi scientists to come out and tell us about all the bad things that are going on. You know. Well, a third one could be we could get Saddam Hussein assassinated. What do you think, Tony?” That’s in the document. That was 31 January 2003. Meanwhile, my old colleagues at the CIA had had success in recruiting guess who? The Iraqi foreign minister—not the former Iraqi foreign minister, but the foreign minister in place, who Saddam Hussein thought was working for him. He was working for us. He was reporting to us in the summer of 2002. And what he said was that there aren’t any weapons of mass distraction. When George Bush was told that by Tenet and his chief lieutenants, George Bush said, ah, he’s just lying. Okay? Then the British gave us access to the head of Iraqi intelligence—not the former head of Iraqi intelligence, but a fellow named [Tahir] Habbush, and he told us the same thing. He said, look, you know, there aren’t any weapons of mass distraction. So George Bush knew very, very well that there were no weapons of mass instruction. And this ridiculous business about saying, well, he had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein would not let the weapons inspectors in from the UN, you know, in the Bronx we call that—that’s a bald lie.

JAY: It’s a lie that gets repeated on Sunday morning after Sunday morning television.

MCGOVERN: Charles Gibson, interviewing George Bush, he said, “Well, now, tell me really why you went into Iraq.” And he said, “Well, Saddam Hussein wouldn’t allow the UN inspectors in, and so I had to go in.” And Charles Gibson listened respectfully, and as all members of what I call the fawning corporate media, as they all conduct themselves, said, “Okay, Mister President, we’ll go on to the next question.” False on its face. George Bush, in 2003, in 2004, 2006, 2007, and then at the end of last year, felt it necessary to repeat that lie, and he was never once, never once called on it. So that’s what Bob Parry of Consortium News and I call faux history. It’s sort of—it might make the history books for all we knew, but the fable is that George Bush and Tony Blair had to go into Iraq because Saddam Hussein would not let the weapons inspectors in. Now, one last little footnote there. George Bush, on 17 March 2003, two days before the celebrated shock and awe, got up on the television, worldwide broadcast, and said, “I warn all foreign journalists and inspectors to get right out of Iraq immediately.” Okay? That’s when he gave the ultimatum for Saddam and his two sons to leave, you know, you know, leave Dodge right away. And so here’s the president himself, two days before the invasion, saying, “I warned the UN inspectors to get out.” And so how can he pretend now that they never were let in? The only way he can pretend that, Paul, is by the fawning corporate media not calling him on it. And that’s why I’m delighted to have one chance here to tell the real story, make some real news. And, frankly, it’s a little frustrating that the fawning corporate media won’t carry this story, but it’s part and parcel of the whole thing. When you look at what happened there, you take the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, in London, he had already ruled that regime change is not an adequate juridical justification for an attack on Iraq, and he had ruled again before the war. And then NSC [National Security Council] lawyers descended upon London, and guess what? He changed his mind and said, well, maybe it would be alright. And guess what? All the British lawyers went along with him save one. That was Elizabeth Wilmshurst, deputy general counsel for the foreign office. She said, “Look, this is illegal. This is a war of aggression. I know about wars of aggression. That’s my specialty. I’m out of here.” And guess what? When I made a little speech at Oxford in January at an Oxford forum, I mentioned Elizabeth Wilmshurst, and I could see that none of those hundreds of people recognized the name. And I said, “You know about Elizabeth Wilmshurst, do you not?” Not one raised their hand. And there you have it: the funding corporate media is a transatlantic phenomenon. In London as well, it’s very, very hard to get the real news.

JAY: Thanks, Ray. So in the next segment of our review, let’s talk about how we know about the Downing Street memos/minutes, but also how we don’t know—how little attention it’s received in the American mainstream press. It’s not part of the official discourse, although in England it certainly is—two very different news cultures. And also let’s talk about what is the implications of the minutes and of the knowledge of this intent on the issue of whether or not Bush-Cheney committed a crime in going to war in Iraq. Please join us for the next segment of our interview with Ray McGovern.

DISCLAIMER:

Please note that TRNN transcripts are typed from a recording of the program; The Real News Network cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.

The Real News for more

Before the fall

Aug 6th 2009 | LOS ANGELES From The Economist print edition

California’s financial crisis jeopardises one of the world’s finest universities

THE best public higher education in the world is to be found at the University of California (UC). This claim is backed up by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, which provides an authoritative ranking of research universities. The UC’s campus at Berkeley ranks third behind two private universities, Harvard and Stanford. Several of the other ten UC sites, such as Los Angeles and San Diego, are not far behind. Californians are justifiably proud.

It is therefore no small matter that this glory may be about to end. “We are in irreversible decline,” says Sandra Faber, a professor of astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz who has inadvertently become a mouthpiece for a fed-up faculty. University excellence, she says, “took decades to build. It takes a year to destroy it.”

California has been suffering serial budget crises, the latest of which was resolved last month in a rather desperate deal between the governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the legislature. It contained huge cuts, including $2 billion lopped from higher education. The UC alone has lost a cumulative $813m of state funding in the last fiscal year and the current one, a cut of 20%. The second-tier California State University (Cal State), with 23 campuses the largest in the country, and the third-tier community colleges have also been clobbered.

The cuts threaten the legacy of two visionaries, Edmund “Pat” Brown, governor from 1959 to 1967, and Clark Kerr, who was in charge of the UC during those years. Kerr envisioned the state’s public universities as “bait to be dangled in front of industry, with drawing power greater than low taxes or cheap labour.” In a 1960 master-plan he created the three-tiered system.

His ambition was simple. First, to educate as many young Californians as affordably as possible. The best students would go to the UC, the next lot to Cal State and the rest to community colleges with the possibility of trading up. Second, to attract academic superstars. Kerr went about this like a talent scout, and his successors have continued the practice. The UC campuses have collectively produced more Nobel laureates than any other university.

But the master-plan has been under strain for years. State spending per student in the UC system, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by 40% since 1990, says Mark Yudof, the current UC president. The Public Policy Institute of California, a non-partisan think-tank, projects that California’s economy will face a shortfall of 1m college graduates by 2025, depressing the prosperity of the entire state. Public universities, which award 75% of all the state’s bachelor degrees, will be largely responsible.

Academic excellence is likely to be the first victim. Both the UC and Cal State are planning to send professors and staff on leave, cram more students into classrooms and offer fewer courses. Attracting and keeping academic stars, and the research dollars that usually follow them, will become much harder.

It is already happening, says Ms Faber. She recently hired three world-class assistant professors whose salaries are now at risk. Other universities have begun to get in touch with them, she says, and they will probably leave. Their best students may go with them. “We are eating our seed corn,” the professor laments.

Economist for more

(Submitted by reader)

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Tent cities springing up all over America are filling with the homeless unemployed from the worst economy since the 1930s. While Americans live in tents, the Obama government has embarked on a $1 billion crash program to build a mega-embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, to rival the one the Bush government build in Baghdad, Iraq.

Hard times have now afflicted Americans for so long that even the extension of unemployment benefits from 6 months to 18 months for 24 high unemployment states, and to 46 – 72 weeks in other states, is beginning to run out. By Christmas 1.5 million Americans will have exhausted unemployment benefits while unemployment rolls continue to rise.

Amidst this worsening economic crisis, the House of Representatives just passed a $636 billion “defense” bill.

Who is the United States defending against? Americans have no enemies except those that the US government goes out of its way to create by bombing and invading countries that comprise no threat whatsoever to the US and by encircling others–Russia for example–with threatening military bases.

America’s wars are contrived affairs to serve the money laundering machine: from the taxpayers and money borrowed from foreign creditors to the armaments industry to the political contributions that ensure $636 billion “defense” bills.

President George W. Bush gave us wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are entirely based on lies and misrepresentations. But Obama has done Bush one better. Obama has started a war in Pakistan with no explanation whatsoever.

If the armaments industry and the neoconservative brownshirts have their way, the US will also be at war with Iran, Russia, Sudan and North Korea.

Meanwhile, America continues to be overrun, as it has been for decades, not by armed foreign enemies but by illegal immigrants across America’s porous and undefended borders.

It is more proof of the Orwellian time in which we live that $636 billion appropriated for wars of aggression is called a “defense bill.”
Who is going to pay for all of this? When foreign countries have spent their trade surpluses and have no more dollars to recycle into the purchase of Treasury bonds, when US banks have used up their “bailout” money by purchasing Treasury bonds, and when the Federal Reserve cannot print any more money to keep the government going without pushing up inflation and interest rates, the taxpayer will be all that is left. Already Obama’s two top economic advisors, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers, are floating the prospect of a middle class tax increase. Will Obama be maneuvered away from his promise just as Bush Sr. was?

Will Americans see the disconnect between their interests and the interests of “their” government? In the small town of Vassalboro, Maine, a few topless waitress jobs in a coffee house drew 150 applicants. Women in this small town are so desperate for jobs that they are reduced to undressing for their neighbors’ amusement.
Meanwhile, the Obama government is going to straighten out Afghanistan and Pakistan and build marble palaces to awe the locals half way around the world.

The US government keeps hyping “recovery” the way Bush hyped “terrorist threat” and “weapons of mass destruction.” The recovery is no more real than the threats. Indeed, it is possible that the economic collapse has hardly begun. Let’s look at what might await us here at home while the US government pursues hegemony abroad.
The real estate crisis is not over. More home foreclosures await as unemployment rises and unemployment benefits are exhausted. The commercial real estate crisis is yet to hit. More bailouts are coming, and they will have to be financed by more debt or money creation. If there are not sufficient purchasers for the Treasury bonds, the Federal Reserve will have to purchase them by creating checking accounts for the Treasury, that is, by debt monetization or the printing of money.

More debt and money creation will put more pressure on the US dollar’s exchange value. At some point import prices, which include offshored goods and services of US corporations, will rise, adding to the inflation fueled by domestic money creation. The Federal Reserve will be unable to hold down interest rates by buying bonds.

No part of US economic policy addresses the systemic crisis in American incomes. For most Americans real income ceased to grow some years ago. Americans have substituted second jobs and debt accumulation for the missing growth in real wages. With most households maxed out on debt and jobs disappearing, these substitutes for real income growth no longer exist.

The Bush-Obama economic policy actually worsens the systemic crisis that the US dollar faces as reserve currency. The fact that there might be no alternative to the dollar as reserve currency does not guarantee that the dollar will continue in this role. Countries might find it less risky to settle trade transactions in their own currencies.

How does an economy based heavily on consumer spending recover when so many high-value-added jobs, and the GDP and payroll tax revenues associated with them, have been moved offshore and when consumers have no more assets to leverage in order to increase their spending?

How does the US pay for its imports if the dollar is no longer used as reserve currency?

These are the unanswered questions.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Counterpunch for more