February 5, 2010

1.  “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — Don’t Go

For years, the US military has proscribed, tracked down, harassed, prosecuted, and imprisoned lesbians and gay men, entrapping them, depriving them of their pensions, and disrespecting them as people – and now that they’re desperate, and backed up against a wall, with an unpopular couple of wars to fight, suddenly they need us, they want us, and, by the way, they’re oh-so-sorry about the past.

Anyone who agrees to such a deal — far from being noble, or even patriotic — must be suffering from an enormous lack of self-esteem. We hear so much about “gay pride,” these days – so what kind of “pride” is that?

Finally, to any gay person contemplating a military career at this point, I have to ask: are you ready to not ask and not tell about the atrocities you could well be ordered to commit? If not, then my advice to you is simple: forget “don’t ask, don’t tell” – and just don’t go.”
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/02/04/dont-ask-dont-tell-dont-go/

2.  “Will Obama Play the War Card?

cutting off a country’s oil or gas is a proven path to war.

In 1941, the United States froze Japan’s assets, denying her the funds to pay for the U.S. oil on which she relied, forcing Tokyo either to retreat from her empire or seize the only oil in reach, in the Dutch East Indies.

The only force able to interfere with a Japanese drive into the East Indies? The U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Egypt’s Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1967 threatened to close the Straits of Tiran between the Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba to ships going to the Israeli port of Elath. That would have cut off 95 percent of Israel’s oil.

Israel response: a pre-emptive war that destroyed Egypt’s air force and put Israeli troops at Sharm el-Sheikh on the Straits of Tiran.”
http://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2010/02/04/will-obama-play-the-war-card/

3.  “Dubai Police May Seek Israeli PM’s Arrest Over Assassination

Dubai police chief Lieutenant General Dahi Khaifan Tamim today warned that if it is proven that Mossad is behind last month’s assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in the city, they will seek an international arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

http://news.antiwar.com/2010/02/04/dubai-police-may-seek-israeli-pms-arrest-over-assassination/

4.  “Israeli FM Threatens to Topple Assad Govt in Syria War

In his usual, confrontational style, Lieberman declared that in the next war Israel would destroy the entire Syrian government, and would drive everyone in the Assad family out of power. Lieberman’s comments were a response to criticisms from Syria that Israel wasn’t serious about peace talks.”

http://news.antiwar.com/2010/02/04/israeli-fm-threatens-to-topple-assad-govt-in-syria-war/

5.  “The Dead Hand of Foreign Aid

The World Bank is actually pretty good at reporting on the disastrous effects of Aid To Dependent Dictators. The conclusion of their economists is that “aid only works when there is a good institutional structure.” Ms. Moyo’s comment is that if a nation has a “good institutional structure” then it doesn’t need aid. The government can borrow for infrastructure projects on the world capital markets, and private investors can supply the private economy with all the capital it can use.

Foreign Aid Pays For War And Genocide

Paul Collier is the Director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford. He sounds more supportive of aid in The Bottom Billion… at first. But as the book progresses, he agrees with the World Bank and Dambisa Moyo that aid only works in countries that already have a good institutional structure. He claims to have calculated that 40% of the military expenditures in Africa are paid for by foreign aid. Both he and Moyo agree that aid causes coups and civil wars, as factions fight over the aid spoils. And when a faction succeeds in capturing the aid flow, it can then exterminate its ethnic rivals. Foreign money and military technology can be an insuperable advantage in a genocidal war, as in Darfur, Nigeria, Angola, and so many other examples over the last five decades.”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/walker/walker37.1.html

6.  “‘Don’t Be Evil,’ Meet ‘Spy on Everyone’: How the NSA Deal Could Kill Google

All of which makes the NSA a particularly untrustworthy partner for a company that is almost wholly reliant on its customers’ trust and goodwill. We all know that Google automatically reads our Gmail and scans our Google Calendars and dives into our Google searches, all in an attempt to put the most relevant ads in front of us. But we’ve tolerated the automated intrusions, because Google’s products are so good, and we believed that the company was sincere in its “don’t be evil” mantra.

That’s a lot harder to swallow, when Google starts working cheek-to-jowl with the overcollectors. The company pinkie-swears that its agreement with the NSA won’t violate the company’s privacy policies or compromise user data. Those promises are a little hard to believe, given the NSA’s track record of getting private enterprises to cooperate, and Google’s willingness to take this first step.”
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/02/from-dont-be-evil-to-spy-on-everyone/

7.  “How Corporations Secretly Move Millions to Fund Political Ads

Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, an attorney and campaign finance expert at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, said corporations already effectively end-run campaign finance law by shuffling money through trade associations.

…

“Money coming through the trade association doesn’t get disclosed,” Torres-Spelliscy explained. “You can’t tell if it came from particular corporations.”

For example, she said, “The disclaimer form is likely to just say, ‘This is brought to you by the Chamber of Commerce,’ with no extra ability to see behind that.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17425

8.  “When Israel joins NATO

James Jones, the US national security adviser who had been NATO commander in Europe from 2003 to 2005, is said to be busy putting together a plan for controlling the occupied Palestinian territories on behalf of Israel. The plan is said to involve actual policing of Palestinian areas.

Before Operation Cast Lead was launched in Gaza, NATO was already exchanging intelligence with Israel, sharing security expertise, and organising military drills. Israel and NATO also cooperated in non-proliferation programmes. Former NATO chief Scheffer visited Israel in the midst of Israel’s offensive on Gaza. And NATO officials were at the time of the opinion that cooperation with Israel was essential for their organisation.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17427

9.  “Top 10 Problems With America Assassinating Americans

2. Acts that are crimes under national and international law don’t cease to be crimes because you engage in them frequently. Assassinating non-Americans is just as illegal as assassinating Americans. The leap here is not to victims of a different citizenship but to the legalization of murder.

3. Killing people has nothing whatsoever to do with gathering so-called intelligence.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17430

10.  “The lynch-mob mentality

The fact that the Government labels Person X a “Terrorist” is not proof that Person X is, in fact, a Terrorist.

That proposition should be intrinsically understood by any American who completed sixth grade civics and was thus taught that a central prong of our political system is that government officials often abuse their power and/or err and therefore must prove accusations to be true (with tested evidence) before they’re assumed to be true and the person punished accordingly.  In particular, the fact that the U.S. Government, over and over, has falsely accused numerous people of being Terrorists — only for it to turn out that they did nothing wrong — by itself should compel a recognition of this truth.  But it doesn’t.

…

All throughout the Bush years, no matter what one objected to — illegal eavesdropping, torture, rendition, indefinite detention, denial of civilian trials — the response from Bush followers was the same:  “But these are Terrorists, and Terrorists have no rights, so who cares what is done to them?” What they actually meant was:  “the Government has claimed they are Terrorists,” but in their minds, that was the same thing as:  “they are Terrorists.”  They recognized no distinction between “a government accusation” and “unchallengeable truth”; in the authoritarian’s mind, by definition, those are synonymous.  The whole point of the Bush-era controversies was that — away from an actual battlefield and where the Constitution applies (on U.S. soil and/or towards American citizens wherever they are) — the Government should have to demonstrate someone’s guilt before it’s assumed (e.g., they should have to show probable cause to a court and obtain warrants before eavesdropping; they should have to offer evidence that a person engaged in Terrorism before locking them in a cage, etc.).  But to someone who equates unproven government accusations with proof, those processes are entirely unnecessary.  Even in the absence of those processes, they already know that these persons are Terrorists.  How do they know that?  Because the Government said so.  Even when it comes to their fellow citizens, that’s all the “proof” that is needed.

…

A very long time ago, I would be baffled when I’d read about things like the Salem witch hunts.  How could so many people be collectively worked up into that level of irrational frenzy, where they cheered for people’s torturous death as “witches” without any real due process or meaningful evidence?  But all one has to do is look at our current Terrorism debates and it’s easy to see how things like that happen.  It’s just pure mob mentality:  an authority figure appears and affixes a demonizing Other label to someone’s forehead, and the adoring crowd — frothing-at-the-mouth and feeding on each other’s hatred, fears and desire to be lead — demands “justice.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/