Ritter: By publishing intelligence on a possible Syrian nuclear facility, the US has endorsed after the fact Israel's illegal use of force in attacking it
Tags: north korea, syria, CIA, nuclear, iaea, israel, war, npt on 2008-04-28 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.informationclearinghouse.info
- Interviewed at DemocracyNow! http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/28/un_nuclear_watchdog_chief_blasts_uspost by mark2301 on 2008-04-28
Wurmser: US plotted to overthrow Hamas after election victory | The Guardian
Tags: dahlan, elections, fatah, gaza, hamas, israel, neocons, palestine, us on 2008-04-22 -All Annotations (0) -About
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- http://www.arabmediawatch.com/amw/Articles/Analysis/tabid/75/newsid395/4710/This-bombshell-took-a-year-falling/Default.aspxpost by mark2301 on 2008-04-22
Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe - The Times Insight
Tags: cia, edmonds, fbi, intelligence, isi, israel, khan, nuclear, plame, proliferation, state, turkey on 2008-01-30 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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How Trivial Can the Media Make the Presidential Race?
Tags: democrat, huckabee, media, obama, presidential, republican on 2008-01-18 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.informationclearinghouse.info
-
How did one of the most genuinely interesting primary contests
in American history devolve into a Grade-D smack-down that even
Vince McMahon would be ashamed to promote? The real story of the
campaign has been its unprecedented unpredictability -- and
therein lies the problem. On both tickets, the abject failure of
media-anointed front-runners to hold their ground was due at
least in part to voters having grown weary of being told by the
press who was "electable" and who wasn't. Both the Huckabee and
Ron Paul candidacies represent angry grass-roots challenges to
the entrenched Republican party apparatus, while the Edwards
candidacy is a frank and open attack on his own party's too-cozy
relationship with corporate America. These developments signaled
a meaningful political phenomenon -- widespread voter disgust,
not only with the two ruling parties, but with a national
political press that smugly enforced the party insiders'
stranglehold on the process with its incessant bullying of
dissident candidates. -
Stripped of its prognosticating element, most campaign
journalism is essentially a clerical job, and not a particularly
noble one at that. On the trail, we reporters aren't watching
politics in action: The real stuff happens behind closed doors,
where armies of faceless fund-raising pros are glad-handing
equally faceless members of the political donor class,
collecting hundreds of millions of dollars that will be paid off
in very specific favors over the course of the next four years.
That's the real high-stakes poker game in this business, and we
don't get to sit at that table
US Psychological Warfare:| Gareth Porter: Official Version of U.S.-Iranian Naval Incident Starts to Unravel
Tags: iran, media, pentagon, pretext, psywar, us, vietnam on 2008-01-18 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.democracynow.org
For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets - Sunday Times
Tags: 9-11, ahmad, aipac, cia, edmonds, fbi, franklin, isi, israel, khan, nuclear, pakistan, turkey, us on 2008-01-12 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Bush in the Middle East: Iran over Palestine, Israel over all. He intends to "clear up any confusion in the region regarding Iran" - ie repudiate the NIE
Tags: arabs, bush, iran, israel, nie, palestine, refugees, settlements, us on 2008-01-12 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.tni.org
Narco News: The Revolution Will Now Be Televised
Tags: appo, documentary, media, mexico, oaxaca on 2007-12-28 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.narconews.com
YouTube - Venezuela's referendum: What's at stake?
Tags: chavez, emergency, media, referendum, socialism, venezuela on 2007-12-15 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.youtube.com
Ron Paul - Bombed if you do, Bombed if you Don't - New NIE on Iran
Tags: cia, intelligence, iran, nie, nuclear on 2007-12-14 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.informationclearinghouse.info
Farhi: IAEA Finds Iran did not Divert Material to Weapons
Tags: iaea, international law, iran, npt, nuclear, un on 2007-11-24 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.juancole.com
-
[Some kind readers have written in anonymously to maintain that Israel cannot violate a treaty that it never signed. This allegation betrays a misunderstanding of how international law works. There is a sufficient basis in the sources for international law for proliferation to be considered illegal. The UNSC encourages member states to incorporate the NPT Treaty into their own national law by formally adopting the treaty. States may neglect to do so but that does not blunt the force of international law. Note that only three other states in the whole world join Israel in declining to sign the NPT. Sudan can violate the UN Convention on Genocide, which it has not signed, and Burma can violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which it has not signed. Not only has Israel ignored UNSC resolutions against proliferation itself, but it helped the odious South African Apartheid State with its nuclear weapons program in the 1970s. That's an outlaw status.]
Iraq Government to UN: 'Don't extend mandate for Bush's Occupation'
Tags: democracy, iraq, nationalist, occupation, parliament, separatist, us on 2007-11-10 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.informationclearinghouse.info
-
The key ingredient
to understand is this: The Iraqi executive branch --
the cabinet and the presidency -- are completely
controlled by separatists (including Shiites,
Sunnis, Kurds and secular politicians). But the
parliament is controlled by nationalists --
nationalists from every major ethnic and sectarian
group in the country -- who enjoy a small but
crucially important majority in the only elected
body in the Iraqi government.
The Wahhabis are Coming, the Wahhabis are Coming!
Tags: al qaeda, deobandism, empire, islam, propaganda, wahhabism, west on 2007-11-02 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.counterpunch.org
Fabio Mini (an Italian General) - "Operation Swarm"- War without End
Tags: emergency, humanitarian, iran, us, war on 2007-10-10 -All Annotations (0) -About
more frompeacepalestine.blogspot.com
-
The military actions have to be aimed at creating a humanitarian emergency that allows the international organizations to intervene in Iranian territory. Obviously, the responsibility for the catastrophe must be pinned on the Iranians themselves. Even in this respect, everything is ready or practically ready, not least after Kouchner’s exhortation. International agencies and NGOs are already looking forward to going to Iran to set women free from their chadors. If they are given the chance to intervene so as to gather refugees, to treat the wounded, to do the counts of the dead and to call elections every month, there will be a rush to bring democracy to Iran.
-
one of the most unusual connections is the one that has been established between military staff, humanitarian workers and foreign policy, to such an extent that each of the three components can pass itself off as the other two. The main cement of this union is the emergency concept
-
At the end of the day, emergency politics is the only kind that allows a limited and selective commitment
-
the military means and the humanitarian organizations which have by now become inseparable
-
The military strategy of the attack against Iran can’t therefore be entrusted to a surgical attack or to one single component. It can be nothing but that of “Swarm Warfare” (or Horde Warfare)
LRB | Perry Anderson: Depicting Europe
Tags: ecb, empire, emu, europe, liberalism, rendition, us on 2007-10-06 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.lrb.co.uk
-
What has been delivered in these practices are not just the hooded or chained bodies, but the deliverers themselves: Europe surrendered to the United States. This rendition is the most taboo of all to mention
-
the declared opposition of Paris and Berlin to the plans of Washington and London gave popular sentiment across Europe a point of concentration, confirming and amplifying its sense of distance from power and opinion in America. The notion of an incipient Declaration of Independence by the Old World was born here.
Realities were rather different. Chirac and Schröder had a domestic interest in countering the invasion. Each judged his electorate well, and gained substantially – Schröder securing re-election – from his stance. On the other hand, American will was not to be trifled with. So each compensated in deeds for what he proclaimed in words, opposing the war in public, while colluding with it sub rosa. Behind closed doors in Washington, France’s ambassador Jean-David Levitte – currently Sarkozy’s diplomatic adviser – gave the White House a green light for the war, provided it was on the basis of the first generic UN Resolution 1441, as Cheney wanted, without returning to the Security Council for the second explicit authorisation to attack that Blair wanted, which would force France to veto it. In ciphers from Baghdad, German intelligence agents provided the Pentagon with targets and co-ordinates for the first US missiles to hit the city, in the downpour of Shock and Awe. Once the ground war began, France provided airspace for USAF missions to Iraq (which Chirac had denied Reagan’s bombing of Libya), and Germany a key transport hub for the campaign. Both countries voted for the UN resolution ratifying the US occupation of Iraq, and lost no time recognising the client regime patched together by Washington.
-
The history of enlargement, the Union’s major achievement – extending the frontiers of freedom, or ascending to the rank of empire, or both at once, as the claim may be – is an index. Expansion to the East was piloted by Washington: in every case, the former Soviet satellites were incorporated into Nato, under US command, before they were admitted to the EU
-
Pocock observed that Europe now faced the problem of determining its frontiers, as ‘once again an empire in the sense of a civilised and stabilised zone which must decide whether to extend or refuse its political power over violent and unstable cultures along its borders’.
-
In the current repertoire of tributes to Europe, it is this claim – the unique role and prestige of the EU on the world’s stage – that now has pride of place.
-
The salutary truth is that ‘the EU is overwhelmingly about the promotion of free markets. Its primary interest group support comes from multinational firms, not least US ones.’ In short: regnant in this Union is not democracy, and not welfare, but capital. ‘The EU is basically about business.’
-
Today’s EU, with its pinched spending (just over 1 per cent of Union GDP), minuscule bureaucracy (around 16,000 officials, excluding translators), absence of independent taxation, and lack of any means of administrative enforcement, could in many ways be regarded as a ne plus ultra of the minimal state, beyond the most drastic imaginings of classical liberalism: less even than the dream of a nightwatchman
-
The only two structural advances beyond the postwar gains of social democracy – the Meidner plan for pension funds in Sweden, and the 35-hour week in France – have both been rolled back.
-
By the 1990s, the Commission was openly committed to privatisation as a principle
-
But once heterogeneous populations were assembled in an inter-state federation, as he called it, they would not be able to re-create the united will that was prone to such ruinous interventions. Under an impartial authority, beyond the reach of political ignorance or envy, the spontaneous order of a market economy could finally unfold without interference
-
Since the Treaty of Maastricht, the Union has not by any means been confined to regulatory issues of scant interest to the population at large. It now has a Central Bank, without even the commitment of the Federal Reserve to sustain employment, let alone its duties to report to Congress, that sets interest rates for the whole Eurozone, backed by a Stability Pact that requires national governments to meet hard budgetary targets.
-
It is this expanse of mild amenities that no doubt explains the passivity of voters towards rulers who ignore their expressions of opinion. For nearly as striking as the repeated popular rejection of official schemes for the Union is the lack of reaction to subsequent flouting of the popular decision
-
The EU deals essentially with the technical and administrative issues – market competition, product specification, consumer protection and the like – posed by the aim of the Treaty of Rome to assure the free movement of goods, persons and capital within its borders. These are matters in which voters have little interest, rightly taking the view that they are best handled by appropriate experts, rather than incompetent parliamentarians. Just as the police, fire brigade or officer corps are not elected, but enjoy the widest public trust, so it is – at any rate tacitly – with the functionaries in Brussels. The democratic deficit is a myth, because matters which voters do care strongly about – pre-eminently taxes and social services, the real stuff of politics – continue to be decided, not at Union but at national level, by traditional electoral mechanisms. So long as the separation between the two arenas and their respective types of decision is respected, and we are spared demagogic exercises in populism – putting issues that the masses cannot understand, and that should never be on a ballot in the first place, to referenda – democracy remains intact, indeed enhanced. Considered soberly, all is for the best in the best of all possible Europes.
-
In the disinfected universe of the EU, this all but disappears, as unanimity becomes virtually de rigueur on all significant occasions, any public disagreement, let alone refusal to accept a prefabricated consensus, increasingly being treated as if it were an unthinkable breach of etiquette. The deadly conformism of EU summits, smugly celebrated by theorists of ‘consociational democracy’, as if this were anything other than a cartel of self-protective elites, closes the coffin of even real diplomacy, covering it with wreaths of bureaucratic piety. Nothing is left to move the popular will, as democratic participation and political imagination are each snuffed out.
-
The vast majority of the decisions of the Council, Commission and Coreper concern domestic issues that were traditionally debated in national legislatures. But in the conclaves at Brussels these become the object of diplomatic negotiations: that is, of the kind of treatment classically reserved for foreign or military affairs, where parliamentary controls are usually weak to non-existent, and executive discretion more or less untrammelled. Since the Renaissance, secrecy has always been the other name of diplomacy. What the core structures of the EU effectively do is convert the open agenda of parliaments into the closed world of chancelleries
-
the nexus of ‘Coreper’ committees in Brussels,5 where emissaries of the former confer behind closed doors with functionaries of the latter, to generate the avalanche of legally binding directives that form the main output of the EU
-
The effect of this axis is to short-circuit – above all at the critical Coreper level – national legislatures that are continually confronted with a mass of decisions over which they lack any oversight, without affording any supranational accountability in compensation, given the shadow-play of the Parliament. The farce of popular consultations that are regularly ignored is only the most dramatic expression of this oligarchic structure, which sums up the rest
-
The violation of a constitutional separation of powers in this dual authority – a bureaucracy vested with a monopoly of legislative initiative – is flagrant. Alongside this hybrid executive, moreover, is an independent judiciary, the European Court, capable of rulings discomfiting any national government
-
Constitutionally, the EU is a caricature of a democratic federation, since its Parliament lacks powers of initiative, contains no parties with any existence at European level, and wants even a modicum of popular credibility.
-
The pioneers of European integration – Monnet and his fellow spirits – envisaged the eventual creation of a federal union that would one day be the supranational equivalent of the nation-states out of which it emerged, anchored in an expanded popular sovereignty, based on universal suffrage, its executive answerable to an elected legislature, and its economy subject to requirements of social responsibility. In short, a democracy magnified to semi-continental scale (they had only Western Europe in mind). But there was always another way of looking at European unification, which saw it more as a limited pooling of powers by member governments for certain – principally economic – ends, that did not imply any fundamental derogation of national sovereignty as traditionally understood, but rather the creation of a novel institutional framework for a specified range of transactions. De Gaulle famously represented one version of this outlook; Thatcher another. Between these federalist and inter-governmentalist visions of Europe, there has been a continual tension down to the present.
-
The truth is that the light of the world, role model for humanity at large, cannot even count on the consent of its populations at home.
-
To let it disavow a referendum, Britain was exempted from the Charter of Fundamental Rights to which all other member states subscribed. To throw a sop to French opinion, references to unfettered competition were tucked away in a protocol, rather than appearing in the main document. To square the conscience of the Dutch, ‘promotion of European values’ was made a test of membership. To save the face of Poland’s rulers, the demotion of their country to second rank in the Council was deferred for a decade, leaving their successors to come to terms with it.
-
The operative maxim of the EU has become Brecht’s dictum: in case of setback, the government should dissolve the people and elect a new one.
-
Such popular repudiation of the charter for a new Europe, not because it was too federalist, but because it seemed to be little more than an impenetrable scheme for the redistribution of oligarchic power, embodying everything most distrusted in the arrogant, opaque system the EU appeared to have become, was not in reality a bolt from the blue
-
increased the power of the four largest states in the Union, Germany, France, Britain and Italy; topped the inter-governmental complex in which they would have greater sway with a five-year presidency, unelected by the European Parliament, let alone the citizens of the Union; and inscribed the imperatives of a ‘highly competitive’ market, ‘free of distortions’, as a foundational principle of political law, beyond the reach of popular choice.
-
The future charter of Europe was written for the establishments of the West, the governments of the existing 15 member states who had to approve it, relegating the countries of the East to onlookers. In effect, the logic of a constituent will was inverted: instead of enlargement becoming the common basis of a new framework, the framework was erected before enlargement.
-
The standard hype demeans rather than elevates what has been achieved
-
a zone of business-friendly fiscal regimes, weak or non-existent labour movements, low wages and – therefore – high investment, registering faster growth than in the older core regions of continent-wide capital
-
Race-to-the bottom pressures are not confined to wages. The ex-Communist states have pioneered flat taxes to woo investment
-
Core European capital now has a major pool of cheap labour at its disposal, conveniently located on its doorstep, not only dramatically lowering its production costs in plants to the East, but capable of exercising pressure on wages and conditions in the West.
-
Between 1998 and 2006, unit labour costs in Germany actually fell – a staggering feat: real wages declined for seven straight years – while they rose some 15 per cent in France and Britain, and between 25 and 35 per cent in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece.
-
Self-satisfaction is scarcely unfamiliar in Europe. But the contemporary mood is something different: an apparently illimitable narcissism, in which the reflection in the water transfigures the future of the planet into the image of the beholder. What explains this degree of political vanity?
Iraqgate: How The United States Illegally Armed Saddam Hussein
Tags: arms, baker, bush, dual use, intelligence, iraq, iraqgate, israel, rumsfeld, thatcher on 2007-07-11 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.informationclearinghouse.info
Operation Rockingham: A Secret Operation of British Intelligence
Tags: butler, david kelly, intelligence, iraq, osp, ritter, rockingham cell, wmd on 2007-07-07 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromglobalresearch.ca
Economist| Bada Bing! | Saying goodbye to Tony Soprano
Tags: culture, sopranos, tv, us on 2007-06-09 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.economist.com
- cf 'James Gandolfini Shot By Closure-Seeking Fan': http://www.theonion.com/content/node/63130post by mark2301 on 2007-06-27
Hamas as a revolutionary movement - Conflicts Forum
-
If all of this is true, if it is in fact the case that it is more appropriate for Western political theorists to understand Hamas as a political movement that falls within the mainstream of historical understanding — if Haniyeh is more like Samuel Adams than, say, Robespierre — and, if it is the case that Hamas is interested in good governance and an emphasis on constituent services (as they claim), then why has the West so purposely attempted to strangle the Hamas Palestinian government? If, as it now appears, Hamas might be willing to reach an agreement, or long-term hudna with Israel (in which recognition of the Jewish State is the end product of negotiations, and not a precondition of negotiations) then what exactly are we afraid of? The answer, of course, is contained in Bernard Lewis’s initial description of the Iranian revolution — as rooted in a “religiously formulated critique of the old order, and religiously expressed plans for the new.” That is to say, we in the West are not afraid of Hamas at all. We’re afraid of Islam.
Somalia "The Most Lawless War of Our Generation"
Tags: ethiopia, somalia, un, us on 2007-04-29 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.democracynow.org
-
if this coalition comes into place, which I hope will not, it will merely internationalize the crisis
-
There is not a word about the fact that the Ethiopians are there without any international legitimacy. They're occupiers. They violated the UN Charter. They were not in any danger of being attacked, and they invaded
-
New York Times reported that the Bush administration recently allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from North Korea, in violation of international sanctions
-
But, in addition, there have been very concrete violations by the United States, to begin with, of two Security Council resolutions. The first one was the arms embargo imposed on Somalia, which the United States has been routinely flaunting for many years now. But then the US decided that that resolution was no longer useful, and they pushed through an appalling resolution in December, which basically gave the green light to Ethiopia to invade.
-
I think already this is one of the biggest movement of population, displacement of population we've seen this year, in terms of numbers, particularly in terms of comparative numbers, compared to the populations of Mogadishu or indeed of Somalia as a whole, greater in that sense than Darfur or eastern Chad, and the problems there are serious enough
-
he United Nations says more people - over 350,000 - have been displaced in Somalia in the past three months than anywhere else in the world.
Notation: * = Private bookmark and comment|… = Clipping [?] | … = Public highlight [?]
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