by Scott Ritter

As America enters the year 2010 and President Barack Obama his second year in office, the foreign policy landscape presented by American policymakers and media pundits appears to be dominated by two physical problems—Iraq and Afghanistan—which operate in an overarching metaphysical environment loosely defined as a “war on terror.” The ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, entering their seventh and ninth years respectively, have consumed America’s attention, treasure and blood without producing anything close to a tangible victory.

What exactly constitutes the “war on terror” has never been adequately defined and, as a result, the United States has been, and continues to be, militarily involved in other regions as well, including Somalia, Kenya, the Philippines and, increasingly, Yemen. The American people today are fatigued, and while their political leadership promises to lead the nation out of the long, dark tunnel of conflict, there continues to be no light emerging in the distance, only the ever-darkening shadows of wars without end or purpose.

While Obama has promised a draw-down of military forces in Iraq, the lack of stability in that nation since the removal of Saddam Hussein precludes any meaningful reduction of troops, and the ever-present potential of renewed civil and sectarian warfare means that whatever troop level is eventually settled upon will be deployed in Iraq for quiet some time. Moreover, the Iraq conflict, built as it was on an American policy that sought the alteration of the political character of the Middle East beyond simply removing an Iraqi dictator from power, has drawn the United States inexorably toward conflict with Iraq’s larger neighbor to the east, Iran.

Over the past 20 years Iraq and Iran have been linked in American policy objectives in the Middle East, both in terms of dual containment and dual transformation. Regardless of what rhetoric the Obama administration chooses to hide behind, the underlying characteristic that continues to define America’s Iran policy is regime change. It is not the policy that is subject to debate in Washington, D.C., but rather the means of implementing that policy. The ongoing tension over Iran’s nuclear program is less derived from any real threat such a program poses (it is, in reality, one of the least significant issues facing the United States today in terms of national security concern), but rather the utility that such an artificial crisis serves in facilitating the larger objective: regime change.

Truth Dig for more
(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

http://www.australiansforpalestine.com

This week has been one of high activism around the world for Palestine.  Hard on the heels of the Gaza Freedom March, which brought some 1400 internationals to Cairo in the hope of entering Gaza (only 80 ended up going) to remember last year’s war that decimated Palestinian society and to protest Israel’s continuing draconian siege, came the Viva Palestina convoy.  After many obstructions, delays and violence, most of the vehicles carrying aid got into Gaza for 48 hours and “Democracy Now” has a good video interviewing the British MP George Galloway who initiated and has led Viva Palestina since its first Gaza mission one year ago.  In New Zealand this week, activists have protested against the Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer for not taking a stand against Israel’s apartheid policies and practices.  Five were arrested for using megaphones to  convey their protest messages outside the tennis centre and when activists continued their campaign the next day, another two were arrested.  You can see the pictures and read about their fearless stance on our website.

Another deeply moving plea has come from Nurit Peled Elhanan who is widely known for her courageous and riveting  address “A Mother’s Plea” to the European Parliament on International Women’s Day in 2005.  She fears for the moral integrity of Israel’s children as they are drawn deeper and deeper into the net of hatred and violence against the Palestinians.   Then there is Alison Weir who responds passionately to Bono’s hope “that people in places filled with rage and despair, places like the Palestinian territories, will in the days ahead find among them their Gandhi . . .”  by telling him that Palestine already has many Gandhis if he would only look.  Gideon Levy despairs at Israel’s treatment of a teacher who dared to tell his students the truth about the occupation and what they should do to end it.  And Nadia Hijab wonders how much killing and more horrors will constitute genocide in Gaza.

There is also the remarkable video  “The Road to Gaza” which you should all take the time to watch so there can be no way you can say “I didn’t know” about what is happening in Gaza.  It is directed by Paul Hanes an Australian filmmaker living in London and is the work of two intrepid activists Patrick Ward and Stewart Halforty from the London Stop the War Movementin just 48 hours.  Hearing the description of the doctor who was there throughout the 3 weeks of bombardment and who treated the wounded and the dying in his hospital while every night wondering if he and his own family would be spared the same horrific injuries or even death, will haunt you for days.

As always, there is much more under the sections in the right hand column. These are constantly updated as well.  Please spare some time to inform yourself about the latest developments.  As you do, know that Israel is bombarding parts of Gaza again.   Who in our part of the world would know this when our media barely mentions any attacks unless it can say that the Palestinians are the violent, terrorising aggressors who give Israel no option but to retaliate?  What happened last year in Gaza was only the prelude to what is likely to happen over and over again with even greater ferocity leading to the very genocide referred to by Nadia Hijab in her article.  Can we live with ourselves if we allow another holocaust in the 21st century to occur without a murmur?  That is a question we must ask ourselves because all the tears and memorials later will mean nothing if we cannot say we tried our best to stop it.

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LINK: http://australiansforpalestine.com/weir-calling-bono
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LINK: http://australiansforpalestine.com/peled-elhanan-a-year-after-the-gaza-war
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LINK: http://australiansforpalestine.com/levy-teacher-of-a-lifetime
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LINK: http://australiansforpalestine.com/hijab-when-does-it-become-genocide

(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

Nicholas Schmidle

In late August, a couple of weeks after a U.S. drone strike incinerated Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, the country’s most popular televised chat show, “Capital Talk,” hosted a panel to discuss national security. Among the guests was a squat, middle-aged woman with short black hair, streaked with silver dye, named Shireen Mazari. A defense analyst and public intellectual, Mazari is known for her hawkish nationalism–and deep suspicions of India and the United States. Her presence in the studio suggested that, despite the enormous threat her country faced from homegrown terrorists, the conversation that night wouldn’t center around Mehsud or the Pakistani Taliban.

Instead, over the course of the next half hour, the panel discussed reports that Blackwater, the North Carolina–based defense contractor that recently changed its name to Xe Services, was operating in Pakistan. Hamid Mir, the host of “Capital Talk,” showed video footage of Islamabad’s most expensive neighborhoods, featuring multi-story villas with high walls and satellite dishes. The homes looked like any other on the street. But red arrows, superimposed on the screen, pointed to allegedly incriminating electrical generators and surveillance cameras perched atop the walls. “American undercover people are coming,” Mazari said. “They are renting homes, and Blackwater is providing security, running death squads and assassination squads … It is an occupation, by default.”

Mazari’s hunt for American spies and undercover defense contractors was only getting started. In September, she was named editor of The Nation, an English-language daily often described as “Fox News in Pakistan.” (Earlier this year, one columnist dubbed Mazari the “Ann Coulter of Pakistan.”) Throughout the fall, The Nation has published multiple front-page stories on the location of new “Blackwater dens” around Islamabad. It featured a news story last month titled “mysterious us nationals,” which described “two suspicious foreigners wandering in the guise of journalists … [who] seemingly belonged to the US spy agency CIA.” The proof? That they “were driven towards the US Consulate.” (The “mysterious US nationals” turned out to be an English freelance photographer and an Australian photographer who works for Getty.)

The low point, however, came a couple of weeks earlier, when The Nation fronted a story titled “journalists as spies in fata?”–a reference to Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas–that cited anonymous law enforcement sources accusing Matthew Rosenberg, an American correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, of working as a “chief operative” for the CIA, Blackwater, and the Mossad. “We put in a question mark,” said Mazari, referring to the punctuation at the end of the headline, when I asked her whether she realized she was endangering Rosenberg’s life. (Daniel Pearl, also a Journal reporter, was kidnapped in Karachi in early 2002, accused of being a CIA agent, and beheaded.)

In the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the United States and Pakistan are ostensibly on the same side. But, as the Obama administration prepares to pour tens of thousands of new troops into Afghanistan, it faces a daunting array of challenges from its allies in Islamabad. Perhaps none is as disturbing as the anti-Americanism that is being fueled by Pakistan’s mainstream media. In a twisted development, most Pakistanis now view the United States as their greatest threat and enemy, usurping a place that India seemed primed to occupy eternally. And Mazari, who holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University, may represent the vanguard of a well-educated, English-speaking, secular elite increasingly charged with hypernationalism and antipathy toward the United States. Mixing fact with demagoguery, and sometimes outright fiction, she represents yet another obstacle to Washington’s war on the Taliban.

For most of the past decade, Shireen Mazari wrote a regular column in The News, a popular English-language newspaper owned by the largest private media conglomerate in Pakistan. The country does not exactly have a free press–this fall, Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan in the bottom 10 percent of its Press Freedom Index, squeezed between Uzbekistan and Equatorial Guinea–but there is no shortage of dissenting opinions aired on any of the country’s myriad private TV channels. Over the past couple of years, much of the commentariat’s energy has gone into denouncing President Asif Ali Zardari and U.S. foreign policy. It’s an effort that Mazari, whose articles often criticize the country’s civilian leadership and breathlessly recount CIA plots to dismember Pakistan and seize its nuclear weapons, has played a large part in leading.

I first met Mazari in 2006, when I was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad (issi), a foreign ministry–funded think tank. She was the head of the institute, and I was in the country as a freelance journalist, but, at dinner parties, Mazari often introduced me as her “resident CIA agent”–a joke that’s never really funny and grew awfully uncomfortable over time. Eventually, in January 2008, I was expelled from Pakistan following months of reporting in Taliban-affected parts of the country. Last month, in a TV interview, Mazari said, “There is a history of American journalists misbehaving in Pakistan,” after which she mentioned my travels to supposedly off-limits regions and added, “Eventually, he had to be deported.”

The New Republic for more
(Submitted by reader)

A major new exhibition of photographs from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India leaves novelist Kamila Shamsie troubled, captivated – and wanting more

by Kamila Shamsie

Mohammad Arif Ali’s photograph of rain in Lahore. Photograph: White Star, Karachi/Whitechapel gallery

So much for the post-national, globalised world. Looking through hundreds of photographs from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, which will go on show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London this month, I find myself unable to follow the curators’ lead. Wisely, they have chosen to group the images thematically, rather than according to nationality; but almost immediately I am looking hungrily for Pakistan (my homeland), largely ignoring India, and pausing longest at pictures of Bangladesh from 1971, the year in which it ceased to be East Pakistan.

It isn’t that I don’t find anything of interest in India or in photographs of it. But of the three nations, India has always been the most visually reproduced; many of the photographs taken there feel over-familiar. This is not the over-familiarity of a scene I’ve personally witnessed or inhabited: it is the compositions or the subject matter or sometimes the photograph itself that I feel I’ve seen time and time again. There is Gandhi stepping out of that train; there are the Mumbai boys leaping into a body of water on a hot day; there is the movie poster in the style of movie posters.

It is something of a surprise to find how intent I am on tracking down pictures of Pakistan. I have spent the greater part of my life there and will be returning shortly, but neither homesickness nor estrangement lie behind my wanting to see more. It is the role of photographs themselves in Pakistan that may serve as explanation. There is still very little appreciation of photo-graphy as an art form, so pictures tend to fall into three categories: private celebrations, news – and cricket. I have seen countless pictures of weddings, of burning buses, of a fast bowler winding his arm over his shoulder at the end of his run-up. Life’s more quotidian details occur away from the lens, and so feel unacknowledged. Pakistan is a nation tremendously poor at acknowledging what goes on when it comes to individual lives, and bad at acknowledging the sweep of its own history. Great areas of the past and present remain away from the nation’s gaze.

Guardian for more
(Submitted by reader)

by Pamela Hess and Adam Goldman

WASHINGTON — The suicide bomber who killed eight people inside a CIA base in Afghanistan was a Jordanian-born terrorist working as a double agent who had been invited to the base because he claimed to have information targeting Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a foreign government official confirmed Monday.

The bombing killed seven CIA employees — four officers and three contracted security guards — and a Jordanian intelligence officer, Ali bin Zaid, according to a second former U.S. intelligence official. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.

The former senior intelligence official and the foreign official said the bomber was Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year old doctor from Zarqa, Jordan, who had been recruited by Jordanian intelligence. Zarqa is the hometown of slain al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. NBC News first reported the bomber’s identity.

He was arrested more than a year ago by Jordanian intelligence and was thought to have been persuaded to support U.S. and Jordanian efforts against al-Qaida, according to the NBC report. He was invited to Camp Chapman, a tightly secured CIA forward base in Khost province on the fractious Afghan-Pakistan frontier, because he was offering urgent information to track down Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man.

The CIA declined to comment on the report.

Hajj Yacoub, a self-proclaimed spokesman for the Taliban in Pakistan, identified the bomber on Muslim militant Web sites as Hammam Khalil Mohammed, also known as Abu-Dujana al-Khurasani. There was no independent confirmation of Yacoub’s statement.

Al-Balawi was not searched for bombs when he got onto Camp Chapman, according to both former officials and a current intelligence official.

He detonated the explosive shortly after his debriefing began, according to one of the former intelligence officials. In addition to the eight dead, there were at least six wounded, according to the CIA.

The bodies of seven CIA employees arrived Monday at Dover Air Force Base in a small private ceremony attended by CIA Director Leon Panetta, other agency and national security officials, and friends and family, said CIA spokesman George Little.

” These patriots courageously served their nation. The agency extends its gratitude to the United States military for their unwavering support since the attack, including their assistance at Dover,” Little said in a statement issued Monday.

The former senior intelligence official said one of the big unanswered questions is why so many people were present for the debriefing — the interview of the source — when the explosive was detonated.

A half-dozen former CIA officers told The Associated Press that in most cases, only one or two agency officers would typically meet with a possible informant along with an interpreter. Such small meetings would normally be used to limit the danger and the possible exposure of the identities of both officers and informants.

San Francisco Examiner for more
(submitted by reader)

(The following comments and a synopsis of the movie Body of Lies are submitted by reader.)

I have been recommending this movie to my friends- the reality is getting closer to the unreal!

The Hollywood Film Body of Lies released in 2008 tells the story of a double agent run by a high-placed Jordanian Intelligence officer. Unlike the story above, the movie ends on a happy/better note.

Body of Lies (2008)

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, Mark Strong, Golshifteh Farahani, Oscar Isaac, Simon McBurney

Director: Ridley Scott
Screenwriter: William Monahan
Producer: Donald DeLine, Ridley Scott
Composer: Marc Streitenfeld

Synopsis: Leonardo DiCaprio fights terrorists for the CIA in this rapid-fire thriller from director Ridley Scott (GLADIATOR, BLACK HAWK DOWN). While Roger Ferris (DiCaprio) gets his hands dirty on the teeming Arab streets, his handler Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe) watches from Washington via spy satellite, cheerfully giving bull-in-a-china-shop style orders while picking up his kids from school. Innocent lives are lost, buildings blow up, and the threat of winding up beheaded on the internet is always one move away. LIES is decked out from front to back with fascinating bits of Arabic and espionage minutiae as it races along its wild mission to track down an elusive terrorist sect leader. Crowe has fun in his portly Southern-accented INSIDER mode, while DiCaprio does his usual anguished moral suffering over the fate of individuals (To Crowe’s Hoffman, it’s all just part of war and nobody’s innocent). As the suave head of Jordanian intelligence, Mark Strong gives a scene-stealing, cobra-like performance that clashes beautifully with Crowe’s “ugly American” bullying. The beautiful Golshifteh Farahani plays the obligatory love interest, the nurse who treats Ferris’s regularly occurring battle and torture wounds. When most action heroes are completely healed within minutes of every fight, it’s refreshing–in a grisly sort of way–to see how Ferris’s wounds bruises pile up. The solid, punchy script is by William Monahan (THE DEPARTED) from the David Ignatius novel.

The Anti-Empire Report

January 6th, 2010
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org

The American elite

Lincoln Gordon died a few weeks ago at the age of 96. He had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard at the age of 19, received a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, published his first book at 22, with dozens more to follow on government, economics, and foreign policy in Europe and Latin America. He joined the Harvard faculty at 23. Dr. Gordon was an executive on the War Production Board during World War II, a top administrator of Marshall Plan programs in postwar Europe, ambassador to Brazil, held other high positions at the State Department and the White House, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, economist at the Brookings Institution, president of Johns Hopkins University. President Lyndon B. Johnson praised Gordon’s diplomatic service as “a rare combination of experience, idealism and practical judgment”.

You get the picture? Boy wonder, intellectual shining light, distinguished leader of men, outstanding American patriot.

Abraham Lincoln Gordon was also Washington’s on-site, and very active, director in Brazil of the military coup in 1964 which overthrew the moderately leftist government of João Goulart and condemned the people of Brazil to more than 20 years of an unspeakably brutal dictatorship. Human-rights campaigners have long maintained that Brazil’s military regime originated the idea of the desaparecidos, “the disappeared”, and exported torture methods across Latin America. In 2007, the Brazilian government published a 500-page book, “The Right to Memory and the Truth”, which outlines the systematic torture, rape and disappearance of nearly 500 left-wing activists, and includes photos of corpses and torture victims. Currently, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is proposing a commission to investigate allegations of torture by the military during the 1964-1985 dictatorship. (When will the United States create a commission to investigate its own torture?)

In a cable to Washington after the coup, Gordon stated — in a remark that might have had difficulty getting past the lips of even John Foster Dulles — that without the coup there could have been a “total loss to the West of all South American Republics”. (It was actually the beginning of a series of fascistic anti-communist coups that trapped the southern half of South America in a decades-long nightmare, culminating in “Operation Condor”, in which the various dictatorships, aided by the CIA, cooperated in hunting down and killing leftists.)

Gordon later testified at a congressional hearing and while denying completely any connection to the coup in Brazil he stated that the coup was “the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century.”

Listen to a phone conversation between President Johnson and Thomas Mann, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, April 3, 1964, two days after the coup:

MANN: I hope you’re as happy about Brazil as I am.

LBJ: I am.

MANN: I think that’s the most important thing that’s happened in the hemisphere in three years.

LBJ: I hope they give us some credit instead of hell.¹

So the next time you’re faced with a boy wonder from Harvard, try to keep your adulation in check no matter what office the man attains, even — oh, just choosing a position at random — the presidency of the United States. Keep your eyes focused not on these “liberal” … “best and brightest” who come and go, but on US foreign policy which remains the same decade after decade. There are dozens of Brazils and Lincoln Gordons in America’s past. In its present. In its future. They’re the diplomatic equivalent of the guys who ran Enron, AIG and Goldman Sachs.

Of course, not all of our foreign policy officials are like that. Some are worse.

And remember the words of convicted spy Alger Hiss: Prison was “a good corrective to three years at Harvard.”

Mothers, don’t let your children grow up to be Nobel Peace Prize winners

In November I wrote:

Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.

Well, on December 10 the president clutched the prize in his blood-stained hands. But then the Nobel Laureate surprised us. On December 17 the United States fired cruise missiles at people in … not Iran, but Yemen, all “terrorists” of course, who were, needless to say, planning “an imminent attack against a U.S. asset”.² A week later the United States carried out another attack against “senior al-Qaeda operatives” in Yemen.³

Reports are that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Norway is now in conference to determine whether to raise the maximum number of wars allowed to ten. Given the committee’s ignoble history, I imagine that Obama is taking part in the discussion. As is Henry Kissinger.

The targets of these attacks in Yemen reportedly include fighters coming from Afghanistan and Iraq, confirmation of the warnings long given — even by the CIA and the Pentagon — that those US interventions were creating new anti-American terrorists. (That’s anti-American foreign policy, not necessarily anything else American.) How long before the United States will be waging war in some other god-forsaken land against anti-American terrorists whose numbers include fighters from Yemen? Or Pakistan? Or Somalia? Or Palestine?

Our blessed country is currently involved in so many bloody imperial adventures around the world that one needs a scorecard to keep up. Rick Rozoff of StopNATO has provided this for us in some detail.⁴

For this entire century, almost all these anti-American terrorists have been typically referred to as “al-Qaeda”, as if you have to be a member of something called al-Qaeda to resent bombs falling on your house or wedding party; as if there’s a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American terrorism while being a member of al-Qaeda and people retaliating against American terrorism while NOT being a member of al-Qaeda. However, there is not necessarily even such an animal as a “member of al-Qaeda”, albeit there now exists “al-Qaeda in Iraq” and “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula”. Anti-American terrorists do know how to choose a name that attracts attention in the world media, that appears formidable, that scares Americans. Governments have learned to label their insurgents “al-Qaeda” to start the military aid flowing from Washington, just like they yelled “communist” during the Cold War. And from the perspective of those conducting the War on Terror, the bigger and more threatening the enemy, the better — more funding, greater prestige, enhanced career advancement. Just like with the creation of something called The International Communist Conspiracy.

It’s not just the American bombings, invasions and occupations that spur the terrorists on, but the American torture. Here’s Bowe Robert Bergdahl, US soldier captured in Afghanistan, speaking on a video made by his Taliban captors: He said he had been well-treated, contrasting his fate to that of prisoners held in US military prisons, such as the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. “I bear witness I was continuously treated as a human being, with dignity, and I had nobody deprive me of my clothes and take pictures of me naked. I had no dogs barking at me or biting me as my country has done to their Muslim prisoners in the jails that I have mentioned.”⁵

Of course the Taliban provided the script, but what was the script based on? What inspired them to use such words and images, to make such references?

Cuba. Again. Still. Forever.

More than 50 years now it is. The propaganda and hypocrisy of the American mainstream media seems endless and unwavering. They can not accept the fact that Cuban leaders are humane or rational. Here’s the Washington Post of December 13 writing about an American arrested in Cuba:

“The Cuban government has arrested an American citizen working on contract for the U.S. Agency for International Development who was distributing cellphones and laptop computers to Cuban activists. … Under Cuban law … a Cuban citizen or a foreign visitor can be arrested for nearly anything under the claim of ‘dangerousness’.”

That sounds just awful, doesn’t it? Imagine being subject to arrest for whatever someone may choose to label “dangerousness”. But the exact same thing has happened repeatedly in the United States since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. We don’t use the word “dangerousness”. We speak of “national security”. Or, more recently, “terrorism”. Or “providing material support to terrorism”.

The arrested American works for Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI), a US government contractor that provides services to the State Department, the Pentagon and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). In 2008, DAI was funded by the US Congress to “promote transition to democracy” in Cuba. Yes, Oh Happy Day!, we’re bringing democracy to Cuba just as we’re bringing it to Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2002, DAI was contracted by USAID to work in Venezuela and proceeded to fund the same groups that a few months earlier had worked to stage a coup — temporarily successful — against President Hugo Chávez. DAI performed other subversive work in Venezuela and has also been active in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other hotspots. “Subversive” is what Washington would label an organization like DAI if they behaved in the same way in the United States in behalf of a foreign government.⁶

The American mainstream media never makes its readers aware of the following (so I do so repeatedly): The United States is to the Cuban government like al-Qaeda is to the government in Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government agents. Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds or communication equipment from al-Qaeda and/or engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al-Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States, evidence usually gathered by Cuban double agents. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents.

The Washington Post story continued:

“The Cuban government granted ordinary citizens the right to buy cellphones just last year.” Period.

What does one make of such a statement without further information? How could the Cuban government have been so insensitive to people’s needs for so many years? Well, that must be just the way a “totalitarian” state behaves. But the fact is that because of the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, with a major loss to Cuba of its foreign trade, combined with the relentless US economic aggression, the Caribbean island was hit by a great energy shortage beginning in the 1990s, which caused repeated blackouts. Cuban authorities had no choice but to limit the sale of energy-hogging electrical devices such as cell phones; but once the country returned to energy sufficiency the restrictions were revoked.

“Cubans who want to log on [to the Internet] often have to give their names to the government.”

What does that mean? Americans, thank God, can log onto the Internet without giving their names to the government. Their Internet Service Provider does it for them, furnishing their names to the government, along with their emails, when requested.

“Access to some Web sites is restricted.”

Which ones? Why? More importantly, what information might a Cuban discover on the Internet that the government would not want him to know about? I can’t imagine. Cubans are in constant touch with relatives in the US, by mail and in person. They get US television programs from Miami. International conferences on all manner of political, economic and social subjects are held regularly in Cuba. What does the American media think is the great secret being kept from the Cuban people by the nasty commie government?

“Cuba has a nascent blogging community, led by the popular commentator Yoani Sánchez, who often writes about how she and her husband are followed and harassed by government agents because of her Web posts. Sánchez has repeatedly applied for permission to leave the country to accept journalism awards, so far unsuccessfully.”

According to a well-documented account⁷, Sánchez’s tale of government abuse appears rather exaggerated. Moreover, she moved to Switzerland in 2002, lived there for two years, and then voluntarily returned to Cuba. On the other hand, in January 2006 I was invited to attend a book fair in Cuba, where one of my books, newly translated into Spanish, was being presented. However, the government of the United States would not give me permission to go. My application to travel to Cuba had also been rejected in 1998 by the Clinton administration.

“‘Counterrevolutionary activities’, which include mild protests and critical writings, carry the risk of censure or arrest. Anti-government graffiti and speech are considered serious crimes.”

Raise your hand if you or someone you know of was ever arrested in the United States for taking part in a protest. And substitute “pro al-Qaeda” for “counterrevolutionary” and for “anti-government” and think of the thousands imprisoned the past eight years by the United States all over the world for … for what? In most cases there’s no clear answer. Or the answer is clear: (a) being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or (b) being turned in to collect a bounty offered by the United States, or (c) thought crimes. And whatever the reason for the imprisonment, they were likely tortured. Even the most fanatical anti-Castroites don’t accuse Cuba of that. In the period of the Cuban revolution, since 1959, Cuba has had one of the very best records on human rights in the hemisphere. See my essay: “The United States, Cuba and this thing called Democracy”.⁸

There’s no case of anyone arrested in Cuba that compares in injustice and cruelty to the arrest in 1998 by the United States government of those who came to be known as the “Cuban Five”, sentenced in Florida to exceedingly long prison terms for trying to stem terrorist acts against Cuba emanating from the US.⁹ It would be lovely if the Cuban government could trade their DAI prisoner for the five. Cuba, on several occasions, has proposed to Washington the exchange of a number of what the US regards as “political prisoners” in Cuba for the five Cubans held in the United States. So far the United States has not agreed to do so.

Notes

1. Michael Beschloss, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes 1963-1964 (New York, 1997), p.306. All other sources for this section on Gordon can be found in: Washington Post, December 22, 2009, obituary; The Guardian (London), August 31, 2007; William Blum, “Killing Hope”, chapter 27 ^?
2. ABC News, December 17, 2009; Washington Post, December 19, 2009 ^?
3. Washington Post, December 25, 2009 ^?
4. Stop NATO, “2010: U.S. To Wage War Throughout The World“, December 30, 2009. To get on the StopNATO mailing list write to r_rozoff@yahoo.com. To see back issues: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/^?
5. Reuters, December 25, 2009 ^?
6. For more details on DAI, see Eva Golinger, “The Chávez Code: Cracking US Intervention in Venezuela” (2006) and her website, posting for December 31, 2009 ^?
7. Salim Lamrani, professor at Paris Descartes University, “The Contradictions of Cuban Blogger Yoani Sanchez“, Monthly Review magazine, November 12, 2009 ^?
8. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/democ.htm ^?
9. http://killinghope.org/bblum6/polpris.htm ^?

–

William Blum is the author of:

• Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
• Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
• West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
• Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

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By Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Shua nglin Lin and Wing Thye-woo (China Daily)

China’s pension system is at treacherous crossroads. It has a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security system, which covers less than 30 percent of the country’s workers and is financed by a 28 percent tax on the payroll of participating firms. Recent studies show non-funded liability of the pension system ranges from 120 percent to 140 percent of GDP. As the population is aging, such a funding problem will make things worse for China’s future retirees and seriously damage the long-term growth prospects of the economy.

To deal with the problem, the country should set up a fully funded and egalitarian “personal security system” (PSS), which allocates all investments to a global index fund and relies on the World Bank, the IMF and the Asian Development Bank to serve as joint third-party custodians of all account assets. The system would provide the public free access to the global capital market, and gradually transform retirement account balances into inflation-protected pensions – pensions that can be accessed by retirees from ATMs anywhere in the world.

This will yield a pension system that is simple, fair, efficient, transparent, reasonably safe, internationally diversified and cheap to operate.

The PSS would work as follows. The government would have to freeze the existing system, including the minimum social benefit, so no additional benefits would be accrued on the margin. It would have to use general revenue to hand over today’s retirees their current benefits on an ongoing basis and pay current workers in old age only those pension benefits accrued on the date of enactment of the PSS reform. Thus, the current system with its unaffordable costs would be retired over time.

The PSS would continue to compel saving. Indeed, it will require each worker to contribute 8 percent of his earnings to his personal security account, but with one big exception. Spouses would have half their 8 percent contribution allocated to their partner’s account. This means that low-earning partners in a marriage, typically wives, would have the same size PSS account as their high-earning partner, typically husbands.

The government would have to make matching contributions on behalf of the poor, the unemployed and the physically challenged. The PSS contributions would be managed at no cost to contributors by third-party trustees. PSS contributions would be required to be invested in a global market-weighted index fund of stocks, bonds (including government bonds) and real estate investment trusts.

The independent trustees would then set up a computer system (with lots of backups) to invest electronically. Since the fund would be market weighted, the only decision to be made by the trustees would be which financial markets to include in the index. For example, the trustees may conclude that a certain country’s stock market is too underdeveloped to be included in the index. But since the share of the PSS portfolio to be invested in any particular security would equal the share of that security in the world financial market’s total valuation, most of the PSS investments would be made in securities issued by firms and governments in developed countries and major developing countries, including China.

The account of each worker between the age of 57 and 67 would be gradually sold off, through the independent trustees’ computer, on a daily basis at no cost to the PSS participant and used to purchase shares of a cohort-specific longevity mutual insurance fund, managed at no cost by the trustees and invested in a global, market-weighted index of inflation-protected bonds.

Thus, each day over the 10-year period, a bit of one’s portfolio would be sold off and used to purchase a small annuity. These annuities would start paying out when the worker turns 62, and by age 67 the retired worker would be getting his annuity in full. Workers who die before reaching the age of 67 would be able to bequeath their PSS balances to their heirs. It has to be noted that stock brokerages and other financial firms play no role in either the investment of PSS assets or their eventual annuitization.

The PSS plan is, thus, very different from the typical social security privatization proposal that forces each participant to choose his/her asset allocation, and permits the financial sector to charge huge fees for “investing” the asset (which often consists of buying just government bonds) and then to impose huge additional fees for transforming his/her account balances into annuities when he/she retires.

What about investment risk? As indicated, the PSS balances would be invested in the global financial market, including bonds, real estate trusts as well as stocks. In addition, the transformation of PSS balances would be very gradual. If one cohort has a bad history of global returns, the government could add to the PSS annuity of that cohort so that it could earn some amount.

What about currency risk? This risk appears to be negative because when the Chinese economy is doing poorly, the value of its currency is likely to fall, leading to a capital gain on foreign asset holdings. The opposite would apply when the economy does well. Hence, investing abroad is a way for Chinese workers to hedge the risk they face.

What about longevity risk? The annuitization of PSS balances would be done on a cohort-specific basis with returns paid out each year based on the cohort’s updated survival probabilities. Hence, if a cohort survives longer than expected, it will receive smaller annuity payments than would otherwise occur. Again, if the Chinese government determines that this aggregate shock needs to be pooled across generations, it can easily do so by raising general taxes and using the proceeds to increase the annuities of retired cohorts.

Business as usual is not going to fix China’s pension problem. The PSS can. If China adopts the PSS system, it would inspire other countries to update their social security schemes to make them more transparent and socially inclusive, as well as cheaper to manage.

Laurence J. Kotlikoff with Boston University, Shuanglin Lin with Peking University, and Wing Thye-woo with University of California at Davis are all professors of economics.

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By Leticia Miranda

A new study links mental health to time spent in the U.S.

Asian American women are more likely than any other group to contemplate suicide, according to a recent University of Washington study. And this likelihood increases the longer they’ve lived in the U.S.

Roughly 16 percent of U.S.-born Asian women have contemplated suicide in their lifetime, and about 6 percent of U.S.-born Asian women said they had tried to kill themselves, exceeding the national average.

Researchers drew data from the National Latino and Asian-American Study and interviews with nearly 2,100 young Asian adults. They found that Chinese and Filipinos reported the highest rates of suicidal thoughts.

It is still unclear why the rates increase with the number of years spent in the U.S. But they found immigrants’ health weakens as they adopt American behaviors that are less healthy than those in their homeland.

“It is important for service providers, as well as policymakers, to know that U.S.-born Asian Americans, particularly the second generation, are at high risk for mental health problems and suicidal behavior,” said Aileen Duldulao, senior author of the study.

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by Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

I was wondering if someone could reconcile these three things:

From Obama terrorism adviser John Brennan, on this weekend’s Meet the Press:

MR. GREGORY: Why isn’t [Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab] being treated as an enemy combatant instead of a criminal?

MR. BRENNAN: Well, because, first of all, we’re a country of laws, and what we’re going to do is to make sure that we treat each individual case appropriately. In the past Richard Reid, the former shoe bomber; Zacarias Moussaoui; Jose Padilla; Iyman Faris; all of them were charged in criminal court, were sentenced some in — in some cases to life imprisonment.

From The New York Times, September 24, 2009:

The Obama administration has decided not to seek new legislation from Congress authorizing the indefinite detention of about 50 terrorism suspects being held without charges at at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, officials said Wednesday.

Instead, the administration will continue to hold the detainees without bringing them to trial based on the power it says it has under the Congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the president to use force against forces of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In concluding that it does not need specific permission from Congress to hold detainees without charges, the Obama administration is adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies.

From CNN, November 13, 2009:

Holder also announced that five other detainees held at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will be sent to military commissions for trial. They were identified as Omar Khadr, Mohammed Kamin, Ibrahim al Qosi, Noor Uthman Muhammed and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

So in order to justify giving a civilian trial to AbdulMutallab, John Brennan cites the fact that we are “a nation of laws.” Progressives defending the decision to treat AbdulMutallab as a civilian criminal are similarly invoking “the rule of law.” The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen, for instance, cites The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer to argue that “‘it’s really remarkable that we’ve gotten to a point in American history where the Republican Party has managed to make fair trials for people who commit crimes ‘controversial'” and adds: “that Brennan has to mount a ‘defense’ for following the rule of law, the same exact way the Bush administration did, suggests just how far the discourse has strayed from reality.”

Benen is right that the Obama administration is essentially doing what the Bush administration did with regard to terrorism suspects, but what does that have to do with “the rule of law”? How can anyone possibly argue simultaneously that (a) the “rule of law” requires civilian trials and (b) the Obama administration is following the “rule of law,” when: (c) the Obama administration is explicitly denying civilian trials to numerous terrorism suspects whenever it feels like doing so? If someone actually believes that “the rule of law” requires civilian trials for terrorism suspects, then it cannot be rationally argued that the Obama administration is upholding the “rule of law,” since providing civilian trials — which the “rule of law” supposedly requires — is a policy they are explicitly rejecting.

In order to explain this glaring contradiction, many Obama defenders — following the administration itself — have started to distort rather significantly what the “rule of law” means and what it requires, in order to squeeze Obama’s hybrid approach into it. Here’s what Josh Marshall said in defending a civilian trial for AbdulMutallab:

The truth is, until President Obama got into office and Republicans needed a new political attack angle, the idea barely occurred to anyone that you wouldn’t do a regular trial with someone you had plenty of evidence against.

I was always under the impression that “the rule of law” requires charges for all people accused of crimes whom we want to imprison — not only those against whom “you had plenty of evidence.” If the “rule of law” only requires a trial when the State is absolutely certain it can convict someone because it has “plenty of evidence against them” — and then allows the use of military commissions or indefinite detention when the evidence is weak — then “the rule of law” is a ludicrous joke. Criminally charging people only when you know in advance you can win — and imprisoning the rest without the benefit of criminal charges — is a sham system of show trials that is the opposite of “the rule of law.” What uncontroversial precept of justice ever suggested that the level of due process to which one is entitled is in any way dependent upon the amount and strength of evidence the State has to convict you? None that I’ve ever heard of — at least not until this year. If anything, isn’t it even more imperative under “the rule of law” to give a real trial to someone when — unlike KSM or even AbdulMutallab — the evidence against them is weak and/or they deny the accusations against them?

Salon.com via CD

by Randall Amster

A few months ago I inquired, rhetorically, “does anyone in the healthcare debate really care about health?” Obviously the answer was and is a resounding NO, as the discussion has wholly devolved upon insurance coverage to the exclusion of substantive aspects of health like nutrition and preventive care. Yet not only is the focus of the deliberations far removed from any talk of improving health — now it has explicitly gone to the next level in which it is simply about who will pay and who will profit. It isn’t health care being produced in this process, but rather, health carelessness.

Still unconvinced? Soon we will have the final proof in hand by way of an impending faux healthcare bill, now in conference committee while awaiting a guaranteed presidential signature no matter what it winds up including or omitting. A public option to keep the private insurers honest, as contained in the House version of the bill? Not likely. A requirement that all Americans carry private insurance anyway, backed by the government’s enforcement authority, as dictated by the Senate’s version? Quite likely.

Welcome to America, the new and improved “company town.”

Once this precedent is set, what other mandates will follow? How about no more public schools coupled with compulsory education. Or perhaps the elimination of public airwaves but a requirement that everyone be plugged in anyway. Maybe it will involve forced contributions to fund elections but the elimination of public referendums and any pretense to open ballot access. We don’t have to tread too far down a slippery slope to appreciate the ramifications of this, as recently observed in the New American in an article highlighting the potential unconstitutionality of this mandatory rubric:

“Indeed, a federal government mandate to require citizens to purchase such an expensive consumer item — health insurance often costs more than $1,000 per month — has never been created in U.S. history, even in wartime. As the Heritage Foundation recently asked: ‘Can Congress require all Americans to buy a new Buick every year or pay a tax equivalent to the price of a used LeSabre?’ Such is the same power being claimed on behalf of the healthcare legislation. Here’s what the principle [of] the healthcare mandate means: The federal government could literally require individual citizens to purchase any product or service under such a federal power, provided that the economy or some other alleged public good is served. For example, under such a power Congress could also require all citizens to deposit their cash in certain banks (perhaps to avoid the bankruptcy of the banks).”

Can you say, “taxation without representation?” Revolutions literally take hold under such conditions.

Oh, but healthcare is different, we will likely hear. “This is our best chance to have universal coverage. Once we get that established, then we can work on fixing the rest of the system. Making everyone carry health insurance will be for their own good and will protect everyone’s rights, just like requiring all drivers to carry car insurance does. Are you saying that you don’t want 30 million more people to have healthcare? You’re just supporting the far right by making these arguments, you know.”

Indeed, as Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake has observed, opposition to this unprecedented mandate has served to unite “liberal progressives and conservative libertarians” against an escalating “corporatist control of government that politicians in both parties seem hell-bent on achieving.” Hamsher’s FDL colleague Jon Walker likewise asserts that “private individual insurance in America will become a money-making scam into which Americans are forced to pay,” to which he subsequently added: “It is both immoral and financially reckless to do what the Senate bill does. It uses the power of the federal government to force people to buy private insurance and gives the private insurance companies hundreds of billions in federal funds.” In this sense, the imminent healthcare bill appears to be little more than an elaborate grift — or as Dave Lindorff colorfully refers to it, “rip-offs, screwjobs, and flim-flam.” And yet don’t count on it being struck down: Congress claims for itself an unbridled and broadly-construed power to “regulate commerce,” which the courts generally have let stand.

CD for more