1. “Is Obama Taking on the Israel Lobby?
Assistant secretary of state Rose Gottemoeller’s surprise announcement that the US would like every nation – including Israel – to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) sent shockwaves from Tel Aviv to Brooklyn, confirming the worst fears of the Obama-haters who make up the radical fringe of the Lobby. You’ll recall that the first thing accused Israeli spy Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s former chief lobbyist, did when he resurfaced was to set up an “Obama Watch” blog on the web site of the crazed Daniel Pipes, one of the main perpetrators of the “Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim” meme. Expect the attacks on the President coming from the Lobby to intensify.
The Israelis are citing a supposed 40-year-old secret agreement to permanently shield the Israeli arsenal from international inspections – the same inspections Iran is expected to undergo without protest. Iran, unlike Israel, is a signatory to the NPT. To the Israelis, however, Tehran’s signature is proof that “the NPT is not “a miracle cure for the world’s ills.” Presumably Israel’s policy of nuclear “ambiguity” is one such solution, if not for the world’s ills, but for a very small part of the world. That this solution comes at the expense of the peace of the region – i.e. at everyone else’s expense – seems not to bother the elected leadership of the Jewish state at all. Indeed, under the new ultra-rightist regime – which includes neo-fascist Avigdor Lieberman, a former bouncer, as “foreign minister” – the Israelis seem to revel in it.
This is just posturing, of course, since the US could bring Israel to its knees rather quickly if it chose: without US aid, the Zionist settler colony would have disappeared long ago. What the Israelis depend on for their very survival is the existence and unmatched power of their lobby in America, which ensures the Jewish state a very large piece of the foreign aid pie. This lobby will now be mobilized for an all-out assault on the new policy, which could spell the end of our old Israel-centric stance in the region, and map out a new beginning for the US insofar as its historic role as the inheritor of Britain’s mistakes is concerned.
The very idea that Israel and Iran should be treated as equals, that they should both have to live up to the same standards, and go through the same inspections of their nuclear facilities, is unacceptable to the Israelis, and to this government in particular. The outright racist Lieberman reflects a very widespread sentiment in the country.“
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/05/07/is-obama-taking-on-the-israel-lobby/
2. “Pentagon’s Black Budget Grows to More Than $50 Billion
The Pentagon wants to spend just over $50 billion on classified programs next year, newly-released Defense Department budget documents reveal. “That’s the largest-ever sum,” according to Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman, a longtime black-budget seer — a three percent increase over last year’s total.
It makes the Pentagon’s secret operations, including the intelligence budgets nested inside, “roughly equal in magnitude to the entire defense budgets of the UK, France or Japan,” Sweetman adds. All in all, about seven and a half percent of the Defense Department’s total spending is now classified.“
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/pentagons-black-budget-grows-to-more-than-50-billion/
3. “Holder says he approved Clinton-era renditions
Under fire from Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder revealed that he had approved of rendition — essentially, legalized kidnapping — apparently more than once during his tenure as President Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general.”
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/05/07/holder-says-he-approved-clinton-era-renditions/
4. “Time Calls Geithner a “Con Man” and the Stress Tests a “Confidence Game”
Time Magazine assesses Geithner and the stress tests in a reasonably honest article entitled “Stress Tested: Has Geithner’s Bank Confidence Game Worked?”.
A “confidence game” is, of course, just the formal name for a con job.
Time writes:
In a remarkable bit of salesmanship, Geithner has managed to package [the negative realities regarding the banks' health] as positive…“
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/05/time-calls-geithner-and-con-man-and.html
5. “Government Will Backstop All Funds Required by the Stress Tests
Tim Geithner was interviewed by Charlie Rose yesterday.
Geithner said that the government will backstop the funds raised from private investors used to meet the cash requirements called for by the stress tests. So already, we know that the stress test procedure is not a free market procedure.
Moreover, Rose asked what would happen if a bank couldn’t raise the required funds within 6 months. Geithner said that, in that case, the government would just give the funds to the bank.
So not only is the methodology for the stress tests a joke, but the procedure going forward is as well.
Geithner and Bernanke are pretending that they are just letting the free market operate, and aren’t taking over the banks.“
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/05/government-will-backstop-all-funds.html
6. “The NYT’s definition of blinding American exceptionalism
There’s been a major editorial breach at The New York Times today, in this obituary of an American fighter pilot who was captured by the Chinese:
Harold E. Fischer Jr., an American Flier Tortured in a Chinese Prison, Dies at 83. . . .
From April 1953 through May 1955, Colonel Fischer — then an Air Force captain — was held at a prison outside Mukden, Manchuria. For most of that time, he was kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door through which a bowl of food could be pushed. Much of the time he was handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air.
After a short mock trial in Beijing on May 24, 1955, Captain Fischer and the other pilots — Lt. Col. Edwin L. Heller, First Lt. Lyle W. Cameron and First Lt. Roland W. Parks — were found guilty of violating Chinese territory by flying across the border while on missions over North Korea. Under duress, Captain Fischer had falsely confessed to participating in germ warfare.
So that’s torture now? To use the prevailing American mindset: a room that doesn’t meet the standards of a Hilton and some whistling in the background is torture? My neighbor whistles all the time; does that mean he’s torturing me? It’s not as though Fischer had his eyes poked out by hot irons or was placed in a coffin-like box with bugs or was handcuffed to the ceiling.
Also, using the editorial standards of America’s journalistic institutions — as explained recently by the NYT Public Editor — shouldn’t this be called ”torture” rather than torture — or “harsh tactics some critics decry as torture”? Why are the much less brutal methods used by the Chinese on Fischer called torture by the NYT, whereas much harsher methods used by Americans do not merit that term? Here we find what is clearly the single most predominant fact shaping our political and media discourse: everything is different, and better, when we do it. In fact, it is that exact mentality that was and continues to be the primary justification for our torture regime and so much else that we do.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
7. “Taking a Page From the Bush Playbook
The Obama administration is now considering reinstating the Military Commissions Act after a four-month suspension, in contradiction to the president’s promise to end military tribunals for detainees and to close down Gitmo. While there is talk about reforming the act to restrict hearsay evidence and to permit defendants to challenge intelligence used against them, the disparity between the tribunals and due process for other criminals leaves intact the concept of “unlawful enemy combatant,” as contained in the act, and thus threatens further evisceration of the rule of law.
Running on the platform of a constitutional law professor who would restore the rule of law to the United States, the stench of hypocrisy pervades Barack Obama’s administration.”
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22567.htm
