1. “I think that we’re going to shine a light on something that a lot of people don’t want to look at” is how American Civil Liberties Union attorney Denny LeBoeuf put it, according to the New York Times on Saturday.
No problem, says Attorney General Eric Holder, who claims to have “great confidence” that other evidence – apart from what may have been gleaned from the 183 times Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded, for example – will suffice to convict him.
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Rather, it appears that the Israel-Palestine connection is pretty much kept off limits for discussion.
Yet, as Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators go to trial, the FCM’s tacit but tight embargo will be under great strain. Eyes will have to be averted from the sensitive Israeli-Palestinian motive even more than from torture, which most Americans know about (and, God help us, are willing to explain away).”
http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2009/11/15/shining-a-light-on-the-roots-of-terrorism/
2. “A Scoundrel With Permission
Such a person would not remain a minister in the cabinet of the U.S. or most European countries. In the homeland of the Nuremberg laws, he would not even come close to a government position.
Recently, during the operation “Cast Lead,” Yishai demanded that we “bomb thousands of houses, to destroy Gaza” – which does not hinder him from denouncing Judge Richard Goldstone as an abominable anti-Semite. He himself, by the way, never risked his skin as a combat soldier; this national hero served as an NCO for religious services in a transport unit.
Eight hundred years ago, Rabbi Moshe Ben-Nahman, called Nahmanides, coined the phrase “Scoundrel with the permission of the Torah,” meaning a person who does despicable things which are not expressly forbidden in the Bible.”
http://original.antiwar.com/avnery/2009/11/15/a-scoundrel-with-permission/
3. “Camp Lejeune whistle-blower fired
As Dr. Kernan Manion investigated the two Marines’ claims about conditions at the North Carolina military base, the largest Marine base on the East Coast, he found they were true. Manion, a psychiatrist hired last January to treat Marines coming home from war with acute mental problems, warned his superiors of looming trouble at Camp Lejeune in a series of increasingly urgent memos.
But instead of being praised for preventing what might have been another Fort Hood massacre, Manion was fired by the contractor that hired him, NiteLines Kuhana LLC. A spokeswoman for the firm says it let Manion go at the Navy’s behest. The Navy declined to comment on this story.
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Manion left Camp Lejeune after he got fired, but he did not stop worrying about the potential for violence there. In mid-September, Manion filed a 14-page complaint with the Department of Defense inspector general. On Sept. 29, he warned the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery inspector general in writing of “serious mismanagement of post-deployment mental health services that was both endangering patient, staff and community safety as well as severely compromising the quality of care” for returning Marines. Manion noted that the poor care at Camp Lejeune continued despite “the ever present threat of life-threatening violence by distraught service members towards themselves or others.”
Finally, Manion wrote President Obama that same day. “Frankly, in my more than 25 years of clinical practice, I’ve never seen such immense emotional suffering and psychological brokenness — literally a relentless stream of courageous, well-trained and formerly strong Marines deeply wounded psychologically by the immensity of their combat experience,” he wrote to the president. Manion added, however, that at Camp Lejeune, that immense problem was being met with “inadequate treatment” and “callous indifference.”
He still worries. “I don’t like seeing these guys mistreated,” Manion said. “This is akin to somebody dying on the battlefield and not being attended to,” he added. “These guys are saying they are broken and need help, and the system is saying, ‘next, next, next.’
http://www.salon.com/news/fort_hood_shooting/index.html?story=/news/feature/2009/11/15/camp_lejeune
4. “Even our phony-baloney counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine admits, “The primary objective of any COIN operation is to foster development of effective governance by a legitimate government.” We’re never going to get legitimate, effective governance in Afghanistan. We just let one of the biggest political crooks in history – Hamid Karzai – steal two elections. He’ll never be seen as a legitimate leader, no matter how many times President Obama exhorts him to begin a “new chapter.” (Dear diary, my brother Ahmed made another million dollars U.S. in the heroin trade today, and the CIA sent him another fat check besides. Boy, does Ahmed owe me!)
The COIN doctrine has become the false military promise of the 21st century, having eclipsed naval power and air power and nuclear weapons as the ultimate answer to America’s security requirements and the leading excuse for our country’s distended military budget.
The difference between COIN and its militaristic philosophy predecessors is that its predecessors offered the promise of the end of war. Our foolhardy intercession in World War I, the war to end all wars, the war that would make the world “safe for democracy,” did neither. The lamentable end state of that horrible war set conditions that brought about Fascism and World War II, and the end state of World War II brought about global communism and the Cold War and the nasty little Third World wars (Korea, Vietnam, etc.) that accompanied it.
After World War I, air power was going to make all other forms of military power obsolete. After World War II, nuclear weapons were going to make all other forms of military power obsolete. Now we have COIN, which promises to make all forms of military power relevant for as long as our COIN wars last, which, if the American warmongery has its way, will be forever.”
http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/11/15/reading-the-af-pak-tea-leaves/
5. Good:
“Cool welcome to Bibi may hint of upcoming US withdrawal from Mideast mess
However, it seems that something bigger is going on around here. As hinted this week by journalist Thomas Friedman, the Americans are closer than ever to reaching the understanding that they would sleep well at night even without the Mideastern food poisoning, and that they have better things to do in life than playing the role of babysitter for us and the Palestinians (two children that no amount of Ritalin is enough for.) “
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3804670,00.html
6. “Motive vs. Justification
Thus, once we understand the motive of people who are intent on doing harm to the United States, the solution becomes obvious: Stop the sanctions and embargoes. Stop the invasions and occupations. Stop the killings, maiming, torture, and abuse. Stop the bombings. Stop the drone attacks. Stop the destruction. Immediately withdraw all troops and bring them home. Terminate all foreign aid, not only to Israel, Egypt, Saud Arabia, and Jordan but also to every other regime in the world. Stop the U.S. government from meddling in the internal affairs of other countries.
Sure, it’s theoretically possible that people might still want to retaliate for what the U.S. government has done in the past, but the likelihood is that once the U.S. government leaves people over there alone, people over there will return to their normal lives of making a living, raising a family, and so forth.
Why don’t U.S. officials favor examination into motive and instead do their best to confuse it with justification? Because they’re afraid that once Americans understand why foreigners are trying to kill them, Americans might demand an end to the U.S. government’s imperial overseas empire and its omnipotent power to sanction, embargo, invade, occupy, kill, maim, torture, and imprison people all over the world.”
http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2009-11-13.asp
7. “As such, the Palestinians are the most oppressed people in the world. There are other peoples who feel that they have the wrong citizenship and would like to secede, but at least they have a government and rights within that government’s framework. They have someone to give them a passport, which Palestinians do not. There are other peoples that are in conflict and being killed in fair numbers. A not insignificant number of Palestinians has been killed by the Israelis, whether through often indiscriminate and disproportionate violence or through food and services blockades (a lot of Gazan children are stunted owing to the bad nutrition caused by the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which is an illegal collective punishment of noncombatants,including children.) But of course there are other groups that are killed in larger numbers. But I would argue that the psychological toll taken by the imposition of statelessness on a people is more debilitating than the knowledge that some of the group has been killed by oppressors.
European Jews themselves were made stateless by Nazi decree, as were millions of other Europeans (leftists were denaturalized by Franco in Spain, e.g.). In the post-WW II world, citizenship has become recognized as key to basic human dignity and civil rights. There are only about 12 million stateless now, and the Palestinians are the single largest group of them.
If there is not a two-state solution, with the Palestinians gaining citizenship in that way, then ultimately there will be a one-state solution, and Israel will over the long term be forced to take them on as Israeli citizens. Boycotts of an Apartheid situation will grow in Europe and elsewhere in the world, and Israel is vulnerable to such pressures. The US has so far backed even the worst Israeli policies to the hilt, but those days may be coming to an end, and anyway the US is now itself an indebted nation rather than a creditor. It is the creditors who are in the position to deny Israel access to world credit markets over time.
I know it is hard to imagine now the situation in 50 or 75 years, but I believe it will be increasingly unfavorable to Israel if the Palestinians are kept as chattel without basic rights deriving from citizenship. The rise of al-Qaeda and other radical movements is intimately linked to the oppression that the Palestinians suffer, and that wave of radicalization is not over. The Israeli and Neoconservative hawks who hoped that if Saddam were removed from Iraq, that Iraq would suddenly turn friendly to Israel have been proved fools. The ways in which Israel lost both the Lebanon war of 2006 and the Gaza War of Winter 2008-2009 in the court of world opinion are astonishing if the situation is compared to 1967, when the West supported Israel to the hilt in its war with Egypt. The trend lines are downward.
So if the Palestinians could get the UNO to declare a Palestinian state and pressure Israel over it, they would actually be doing the Israelis a huge favor.
The bully Netanyahu announced that if the Palestinians unilarerally declared a Palestinian state, then Israel would immediately formally annex the largest Israeli settlements on the West Bank. It is unclear why Netanyahu thinks a formal annexation would be meaningful. Israel has already de facto announced that territory and no one in Israel is even hypothetically offering to give it back. The question is not what has been annexed but what will be annexed. There is every reason to think that the Israeli far right will just steal all Palestinian land over time if this sham ‘peace process’ continues as it has since 1993.”
8. “War ALWAYS Causes Recession”
PhD economist Marc Faber predicts that the U.S. will launch a war to distract people from the bad economy.
China’s largest media outlet – Sohu.com – wrote in October 2008 that the Rand corporation, a leading U.S. military advisor, lobbied the Pentagon for a war to be started with a major foreign power in an attempt to stimulate the American economy:
According to French media, well-known U.S. think tank RAND Corporation … has submitted [to the Pentagon] an evaluation report assessing the wage a war to shift the feasibility of the current economic crisis…
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I asked if conventional wisdom that war is good for the economy is true, especially given that all of the spending on the war in Iraq seems to have weakened America’s economy (or at least, greatly increased its debt).
The economist explained the seeming paradox:
“War always causes recession. Well, if it is a very short war, then it may stimulate the economy in the short-run. But if there is not a quick victory and it drags on, then wars always put the nation waging war into a recession and hurt its economy.”
Given that America has been fighting both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars longer than it fought WWII, the exception obviously doesn’t apply.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/11/war-always-causes-recession.html
9. “Ex-Islamic radicals on what motivates — and impedes — extremism
the most potent weapon for undermining Islamic extremism is the efforts of Westerners to work against their own governments’ belligerent policies
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In other words, the very policies the U.S. has been pursuing in the name of combating Terrorism — invading, occupying, and bombing Muslim countries; locking them up without trials; torturing them; violating the values we’ve been preaching to the world — have been the most potent instruments for fueling Islamic radicalism and terrorism. By contrast, those who have been continuously accused of being “soft on Terrorism” and even being allied with the Terrorists — those who opposes our various wars, who demanded and provided basic human rights protections and equal liberties to Muslims, who objected to their own governments’ oppressive and belligerent policies — have done more to diffuse and impede Muslim radicalism than virtually anyone else in the world.
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And even in the face of the most compelling evidence imaginable that accommodation to the Muslim world and treating Muslims equally and respectfully is the greatest threat to the Islamic extremist, people like Weisberg perpetually worry that we’re doing too much of that. At some point, a rational person has to wonder whether people like Jacob Weisberg — who endlessly advocate policies that fuel Islamic extremism and intensify tension between the West and the Muslim world — aren’t desirous of exactly that outcome. After decades of pursuing this blatantly counter-productive approach, what else could explain such moral and intellectual blindness?”
