1. “The Bogus Anti-Terrorist Crackdown on Financial Freedom
In the post–9/11 era, federal officials are treating cash as they would a suspected weapon of mass destruction. They have created legions of new restrictions and reporting requirements for citizens’ money. But the new controls have done nothing to make Washington any more competent at protecting Americans from real threats.
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The USA PATRIOT Act gave the feds the right to financially strip-search every American. It created new financial “crimes without criminal intent” — empowering the Customs Service to confiscate the cash of American travelers who fail to fill out a government form.
Congress redefined the possession of cash to make it sound far more insidious. The PATRIOT Act created a new crime — “bulk cash smuggling” — to punish anyone who doesn’t notify the government of how much money he is taking out of or bringing into the United States (if he is carrying more than $10,000). The PATRIOT Act stated that “if the smuggling of bulk cash were itself an offense, the cash could be confiscated as the corpus delicti of the smuggling offense.”
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Treasury and Justice Department lawyers made sure the PATRIOT Act was written in a way to maximize seizures, regardless of a person’s guilt or innocence — and then political appointees have portrayed every seizure as a victory against terrorism. But maximizing political brownie points by making terrorist innuendoes is not the same as protecting the public.
There is no reason to expect the U.S. government to be more successful in tracking wads of cash than it has been in tracking bricks of cocaine or bales of marijuana. The end result is more federal control, more intrusions, less privacy — and little or no additional protection from terrorists.“
http://www.fff.org/freedom//fd0910c.asp
2. “Were Afghan Children Executed By Us-Led Forces? And Why Aren’t The Media Interested?
Ignoring or downplaying Western crimes is a standard feature of the corporate Western media. On rare occasions when a broadcaster or newspaper breaks ranks and reports ‘our’ crimes honestly, it is instructive to observe the response from the rest of the media. Do they follow suit, perhaps digging deeper for details, devoting space to profiles of the victims and interviews with grieving relatives, humanising all concerned? Do they put the crimes in perspective as the inevitable consequence of rapacious Western power? Or do they look away?
One such case is a report that American-led troops dragged Afghan children from their beds and shot them during a night raid on December 27 last year, leaving ten people dead. Afghan government investigators said that eight of the dead were schoolchildren, and that some of them had been handcuffed before being killed. Kabul-based Times correspondent Jerome Starkey reported the shocking accusations about the joint US-Afghan operation. But the rest of the UK news media have buried the report.
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The reported events are sickening. But we have been unable to find a single mention of the alleged atrocity on the BBC website. We emailed news editors at the BBC, ITN and Channel 4 News, asking why they had not reported these serious allegations of schoolchildren being executed in a US-led operation. None of them have replied. The lack of interest shown by the British news media in pursuing this story is damning indeed.
The famous maxim of the three wise monkeys who ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ is an apt description of the corporate media’s response to evidence for Western atrocities.”
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/4107
3. “King’s FBI files may be opened to public view”
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-01-15-king-fbi-files_N.htm?POE=click-refer
4. “Want To Make Use Of $47 Billion To Spare? Help Haiti
The only thing I’d add is that the bonuses of the six biggest banks are now estimated to come in at $150 billion. Ten percent of that would be two years worth of Haiti’s gdp.
With great wealth comes great responsibility. An economically flourishing Haiti would not only help the Caribbean but also help the American Deep South economically.
Contrary to Gordon Gekko, greed is not good. Growth and development and self-realization are good.
And, the history of Western neocolonial exploitation of the place calls out for redemption.”
5. “The Militarization of Emergency Aid to Haiti: Is it a Humanitarian Operation or an Invasion?
The main actors in America’s “humanitarian operation” are the Department of Defense, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). (See USAID Speeches: On-The-Record Briefing on the Situation in Haiti, 01/13/10). USAID has also been entrusted in channelling food aid to Haiti, which is distributed by the World Food Program. (See USAID Press Release: USAID to Provide Emergency Food Aid for Haiti Earthquake Victims, January 13, 2010)
The military component of the US mission, however, tends to overshadow the civilian functions of rescuing a desperate and impoverished population. The overall humanitarian operation is not being led by civilian governmental agencies such as FEMA or USAID, but by the Pentagon.
The dominant decision making role has been entrusted to US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).
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While presidents Obama and Préval spoke on the phone, there were no reports of negotiations between the two governments regarding the entry and deployment of US troops on Haitian soil. The decision was taken and imposed unilaterally by Washington. The total lack of a functioning government in Haiti was used to legitimize, on humanitarian grounds, the sending in of a powerful military force, which has de facto taken over several governmental functions. “
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17000
6. “Despite SOFA, US will deploy 21,000 troops in Northern Iraq
The move is contrary to a security pact, known as the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which was signed on November 17, 2008 by the Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari and the then US ambassador Ryan Crocker.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17003
7. “When Does It Become Genocide?
Legal scholars disagree about how to interpret the Convention’s articles and it has proven difficult, over the years, to define crimes as genocide, let alone to prevent or end them. In line with the Bosnia precedent — the only authoritative legal treatment of genocide to date — it would be necessary to establish deliberate intent for an accusation of genocide against Israel to stand up in court.
Israel’s leadership has not, of course, issued a declaration of intent. However, many leading Israeli officials can be said to have done so. For example:
• Putting the Palestinians of Gaza “on a diet” — Dov Weisglass, chief aide to Ariel Sharon, in 2006.
• Exposing them to “a bigger shoah (holocaust)” — Matan Vilnai, former deputy defense minister, in 2008.
• Issuing religious edits exhorting soldiers to show no mercy — the Israeli army rabbinate during the actual conflict.
Such declarations echo at least three of the “8 stages of genocide” identified by Genocide Watch president Gregory Stanton in the 1990s after the Rwanda genocide: Classification, dehumanization, and polarization.
Then there is the deliberate destruction or barring of means of sustenance as Israel has done on land and at sea. Already, the Goldstone Report has said that depriving the Gaza Palestinians of their means of sustenance, employment, housing and water, freedom of movement, and access to a court of law, could amount to persecution.
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Alarmingly close is right. Here is how Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish legal scholar who pushed for the genocide convention, defined it in 1943:
“genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation…. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.”
It is hard to conceive of a better description of what is going on in Gaza.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16990
8. “Krugman, Gruber and non-disclosure issues
For me, this is the nub of the matter. I couldn’t disagree more with Krugman’s claim here, as he has it exactly backwards. What will make it impossible to effectively call out wrongdoing by future corrupt administrations (by which Krugman seems to mean: Republican administrations) is the willingness of some people to tolerate and defend corruption when done by “their side.” The next time we have what Krugman calls a “genuinely corruption administration” which, say, secretly pays people they’re holding out as “independent” experts, the administration’s defenders will say: “how can you possibly object to our doing this when Obama did it, and not only did you fail to object then, but you defended it?”
Minimizing or excusing unethical behavior when done by Your Side is exactly what normalizes the behavior, and turns ethical failures into nothing more than a partisan tool cynically used by each side, which in turn trivializes these issues. If the Bush administration had repeatedly relied on a Professor or other expert to publicly support their positions in a highly contentious policy debate and continuously held him out as “objective” – only for it to be revealed that the administration was paying that person many hundreds of thousands of dollars in undisclosed payments — would Paul Krugman and others really be claiming that it was all “no big deal”? That’s hard to envision.
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Just think about what the Republicans did for virtually the entire Bush administration. They refused ever to criticize anyone on their own side for ethical or even legal transgressions. They believed that even when the evidence of wrongdoing was overwhelming, the fact that the people involved were on the Good Side — or were striving for good outcomes — meant that it was “no big deal.” They not only refused to police their own side, but vehemently attacked anyone on their side who tried to hold Republicans to some standards. And the outcome of all that was clear and predictable: the party became a cesspool of ethics-free, anything-goes sleaze and corruption. That’s the inevitable result of an ”it’s-okay-when-we-do-it” mindset. The fact that the Obama administration isn’t in the same league as the prior one in terms of corruption (they’re plainly not), or that the Gruber matter isn’t a ”huge scandal” (it isn’t), is irrelevant. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong, and in terms of exposing and condemning it, that should be the end of the consideration.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
9. “Yemen – The Return Of Old Ghosts
What I find so fascinating about the reporting of the War on Terror is the way almost all of it ignores history – as if it is a conflict happening outside time. The Yemen is a case in point. In the wake of the underpants bomber we have been deluged by a wave of terror journalism about this dark mediaeval country that harbours incomprehensible fanatics who want to destroy the west. None of it has explained that only forty years ago the British government fought a vicious secret war in the Yemen against republican revolutionaries who used terror, including bombing airliners.
But the moment you start looking into that war you find out all sorts of extraordinary things.
First that the chaos that has engulfed the Yemen today and is breeding new terrorist threats against the west is a direct result of that conflict of forty years ago.
Secondly it also had a powerful and corrupting effect on Britain itself. To fight the war both Conservative and Labour governments in the 1960s set up international arms deals with the Saudis.
These involved bribery on a huge scale which led to the Al Yamamah scandal that still festers today.
To fight the war in secret the British government also allowed the creation of a private mercenary force. Out of it would come today’s privatized military industry that fights wars for dictators throughout Africa and is deeply involved in fighting against the insurgency in Iraq.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24402.htm
10. “ A note of appreciation from the rich
Naturally, we try to play you off against each other whenever it suits our purposes: high-waged workers against low-waged, unionized against non-unionized, Black against White, male against female, American workers against Japanese against Mexican against…. We continually push your wages down by invoking “foreign competition,” “the law of supply and demand,” “national security,” or “the bloated federal deficit.” We throw you on the unemployed scrap heap if you step out of line or jeopardize our profits. And to give you an occasional break from the monotony of our daily economic blackmail, we allow you to participate in our stage-managed electoral shell games, better known to you ordinary folks as “elections.” Happily, you haven’t a clue as to what’s really happening — instead, you blame “Aliens,” “Tree-hugging Environmentalists,” “Niggers,” “Jews,” Welfare Queens,” and countless others for your troubled situation.”
