Month: August 2013

Seconds before the bell rings in a professional boxing match, the two contenders meet in the center of the ring and touch gloves. Imagine what would happen if one of them used that brief opportunity of goodwill to headbutt the other. Everyone would call foul and the referee would stop the fight, possibly penalizing the aggressor.

Except that seems to be pretty much what Israel has done in the lead up to U.S.-brokered negotiations. While it’s true that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dropped his demand for a freeze in Israeli settlement construction as a precondition for talks, Israel’s announcement on Sunday that it’s constructing more than 1,000 new housing units in Palestinian land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

BBC:

Palestinians have reacted angrily to Israel’s approval of nearly 1,200 new Jewish settlement homes, just days before peace talks are set to resume.

Palestinian negotiators said the approval cast doubt on Israel’s sincerity in the peace process.

…Palestinian negotiator Mohammed Shtayeh said Israel aimed “to destroy the basis of the solution called for by the international community, which aims to establish a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders”.

He accused Israel of trying to “determine the negotiations in whichever way suits it best”.

Chief negotiator Saeb Erekat told Reuters: “If the Israeli government believes that every week they’re going to cross a red line by settlement activity, if they go with this behaviour, what they’re advertising is the unsustainability of the negotiations.”

PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi told the BBC: “We believe that Israel is deliberately sending a message to the US, to the rest of the world that regardless of any attempt at launching negotiations, ‘we are going to press ahead with stealing more land, building more settlements and destroying the two-state-solution’.

“This is an extremely dangerous policy, and if left unchecked it certainly would lead to greater conflict and the destruction of all chances of peace.”

The political use of settlement construction here is rather obvious. Israel has used settlement construction in politically motivated ways before. Back in 2010, after Obama had publicly called for a freeze in settlements, Israel unveiled plans for new settlements timed just perfectly for a special visit by Vice President Joe Biden. The move was widely seen as a slight at the U.S.

And those Palestinian representatives quoted above aren’t really speculating about Israel’s intentions. As I noted several weeks ago, citing this Brent E. Sasley piece at Foreign Policy which details the rise to political power of a gang of Israeli leaders explicitly supportive of annexation and openly opposed to a Palestinian state:

…a number of more moderate individuals were dumped and several hardline annexationists were promoted to higher positions on the electoral slate — all but guaranteeing them election to the Knesset and a place in government. Among them, Danny Danon has declared, “I will use my strength and influence to convince as many people as I can within the party…that a Palestinian state is bad news for Israel.” Tzipi Hotovely wrote last year that “the territories of Judea and Samaria [West Bank] are mostly uninhabited…90% of the territory is empty,” which facilitates “the complete application of Israeli law over Judea and Samaria.” Ze’ev Elkin believes in a single state between the river and the sea under Israeli sovereignty.

Yisrael Beiteinu has long been a little more far right; its autocratic leader, Avigdor Lieberman, lives in a West Bank settlement. Lieberman hates Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, calling him “the main and greatest obstacle to peace,” and mistrusts the Palestinians. He would tolerate a rump Palestinian state in the West Bank, but intends on annexing most of it for Israel. His firstreaction to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s announcement on the renewal of talks was that negotiations won’t be conducted on the basis of the 1967 lines, nor would he agree to any settlement freeze. He added, for good measure, that anyway, “Mahmoud Abbas does not represent the people of Gaza or Judea and Samaria [the West Bank].”

The coalition includes Jewish Home, a recent amalgamation of religious Zionist parties, with some hardline secular nationalist support. Its leader, Naftali Bennett, is adamantly opposed to the withdrawal of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank; he intends to annex at least all of Area C and control the rest of the territory. Like Lieberman, he insists that negotiating on the basis of the Green Line or freezing settlement building aren’t options; he said that building settlements “brings life.” And he’s threatened to bring the government down if talks get serious. His ministers have reacted even more aggressively: Minister of Housing Uri Ariel called freezing settlements “an immoral and non-Jewish act.”

This latest Israeli snub is a harbinger of things to come: so long as U.S. support is maintained, Israel will oppose substantive negotiations and a Palestinian state.

The headquarters of the Nobel Committee is in downtown Oslo on a street named after Henrik Ibsen, whose play "An Enemy of the People" has remained as current as dawn light falling on the Nobel building and then, hours later, on a Fort Meade courtroom where Bradley Manning’s trial enters a new stage – defense testimony in the sentencing phase.

Ibsen’s play tells of mendacity and greed in high places: dangerous threats to public health. You might call the protagonist a whistleblower. He’s a physician who can’t pretend that he hasn’t seen evidence; he rejects all the pleas and threats to stay quiet, to keep secret what the public has a right to know. He could be content to take an easy way, to let others suffer and die. But he refuses to just follow orders. He will save lives. There will be some dire consequences for him.

The respectable authorities know when they’ve had enough. Thought crimes can be trivial but are apt to become intolerable if they lead to active transgressions. In the last act, our hero recounts: "They insulted me and called me an enemy of the people." Ostracized and condemned, he offers final defiant words before the curtain comes down: "I have made a great discovery. … It is this, let me tell you – that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."

Alone Bradley Manning will stand as a military judge proclaims a prison sentence.

As I write these words early Monday, sky is starting to lighten over Oslo. This afternoon I’ll carry several thousand pages of a petition – filled with the names of more than 100,000 signers, along with individual comments from tens of thousands of them – to an appointment with the Research Director of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The petition urges that Bradley Manning be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Like so many other people, the signers share the belief of Nobel Peace laureate Mairead Corrigan-Maguire who wrote this summer: "I can think of no one more deserving."

Opening heart and mind to moral responsibility – seeing an opportunity to provide the crucial fuel of information for democracy and compassion – Bradley Manning lifted a shroud and illuminated terrible actions of the USA’s warfare state. He chose courage on behalf of humanity. He refused to just follow orders.

"If there’s one thing to learn from the last ten years, it’s that government secrecy and lies come at a very high price in blood and money," Bradley Manning biographer Chase Madar wrote. "And though information is powerless on its own, it is still a necessary precondition for any democratic state to function."

Bradley Manning recognized that necessary precondition. He took profound action to nurture its possibilities on behalf of democracy and peace.

No doubt a Nobel Peace Prize for Bradley Manning is a very long longshot. After all, four years ago, the Nobel Committee gave that award to President Obama, while he was escalating the war in Afghanistan, and since then Obama’s dedication to perpetual war has become ever more clear.

Now, the Nobel Committee and its Peace Prize are in dire need of rehabilitation. In truth, the Nobel Peace Prize needs Bradley Manning much more than the other way around.

No one can doubt the sincere dedication of Bradley Manning to human rights and peace. But on Henrik Ibsen Street in Oslo, the office of the Nobel Committee is under a war cloud of its own making.

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books includeWar Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

As politicians and Washington policy wonks talk glibly of the “dual track” policy towards Iran, in which we dangle the prospect of substantive diplomacy in front of Tehran as it is crippled by harsh economic sanctions, ordinary Iranians continue to suffer.

Over at Jadaliyya, Mina Khanlarzadeh has an essay based on survey data arguing that, among other things, the U.S.-led sanctions regime blocks access to vital medical care for ordinary Iranians and even has the effect of marginalizing political dissidents (something the neo-cons constantly say they want to encourage in Iran).

Medical care:

Another area that the economic sanctions threaten the lives of Iranians is through a scarcity of medicine. Although the sanctions enacted by the US and the European Union claim to not impose a shortage on humanitarian trades, in reality, they have immensely affected the delivery and availability of medical supplies. The sanctions against Iran’s banking infrastructure and the exclusion of Iran from the global financial system and SWIFT have forced Iranian medical companies to use the old system of hawala (money transfer) for its transactions, causing the process to become significantly longer and more expensive. The depreciation of Iran’s currency has also contributed to shortages and skyrocketing prices of medicine, and advanced medical technologies such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines and other nuclear medical devices are banned from entering Iran. The devastation of those in need of medical care is illustrated by the image of an ill elder woman on a bed who had recently protested the high costs of healthcare and shortages of medicine in front of the presidential building in Iran.

The material and equipment used by dentists have become seven to eight times more expensive over the past year. As a result, dental care has become a privilege inaccessible to the working and middle classes. The overall outcome of these conditions has been the, “inability of pharmaceutical companies to purchase and import basic life saving medicines, ranging from Tylenol to cancer medicine and even prenatal vitamins.” The import of medicines containing antibiotics (of types that are not produced inside Iran) have been decreased by20.7 percent and the price have been increased by 308 percent. The estimated twenty thousand patients of Thalassemia throughout the country receive only a few days of their monthly medicinal needs, and several patients with Thalassemia have died. Chemical weapon survivors, a side-effect of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, in need of medicine and equipment, including cornea transplants and inhalers, similarly suffer from ashortage or lack of medicine. In essence, the medicines used to treat Hemophilia, cancer, Thalassemia, Multiple Sclerosis and transplant and kidney dialysis are either not produced domestically, or are produced, but are not as effective as those imported from Europe and North America. The shortage of medicine for suchchronic diseases often leads to death. Hence, a wave of deterioration of living conditions and destruction has been imposed on Iran by the economic sanctions, and when this wave reaches the country, it is unequally distributed among citizens, i.e. those living in poverty and the marginalized areas, and outside of the popular base of the government suffer the effects of sanctions more.

Marginalizing political dissidents:

The violence resulting from economic sanctions against targeted people is falsely framed as a force that politicizes and revolutionizes them against their state…economic sanctions make the criticism of domestic economic policies and corruption harder. Having become economically more vulnerable by sanctions and threats of war, the demands of considerable sections of the society have been narrowed to the reduction, or preferably removal, of the economic sanctions and a stop to the threats of war, i.e. the right of the world powers’ invasion of Iran.

…The notion of foreign intervention, i.e. the economic sanctions and the threats of war against Iran, has assisted the government to articulate a discourse of national reconciliation without enacting any meaningful recognition of alternative political voices and demands. The threats of war and deteriorating living conditions, due to economic sanctions, have marginalized the voices that demand structural econo-political changes and reform of laws. It is impossible to lead a good life under the economic sanctions, hence the state does not need to negotiate with political dissidents or recognize their citizen rights and a political space for political dissidence. Rather, it needs only to refer to the imposed economic sanctions and threats of war to solidify its discourse of national reconciliation and the necessity for the political activists to postpone their criticism of domestic affairs.

For more on the Iran sanctions see here, here, and here.

On the bright side, at least Egyptians know the name of the U.S. Ambassador (Anne Patterson). Maybe if we doubled our foreign aid, they would take down at least one of those signs.

I have been railing against foreign aid since… hell…. since way back when my beard was red. Here’s a 2011 piece I did for Barron’s on how foreign aid corrupts recipient nations. It mentions the Egypt debacle: “The U.S. has provided more than $40 billion in aid to Egypt over the past 30 years—roughly equivalent to the personal fortune possessed by Hosni Mubarak when he was driven from office a few months ago. Regardless of how brazen the Egyptian élite’s thefts became, U.S. taxpayers were still forced to bankroll Mubarak and cronies.”

Barron’s June 4 2011
The Anti-Corruption Charade
by James Bovard

In much of the world, governing is a synonym for looting. Unfortunately, American and European foreign aid has a long history of accelerating the looting. Foreign aid created a generation of kleptocracies—governments of thieves—in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Mercedes-Benz automobiles became so popular among African government officials that a new Swahili word was coined: wabenzi—”men of the Mercedes-Benz.”

A 2009 Council on Foreign Relations report noted that “many public officials in Africa seek re-election because holding office gives them access to the state’s coffers, as well as immunity from prosecution.”

Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, author of the recent book, Dead Aid, wrote: “A constant stream of free money is a perfect way to keep an inefficient or simply bad government in power.” Numerous other studies over the past dozen years showed that countries that receive more foreign aid tend to have higher corruption.

Former President George W. Bush responded by creating the Millennium Challenge Corp. to reward foreign governments for moderating their greed (see “Bribing for Honesty,” Editorial Commentary, Barron’s, Feb. 21, 2005). Bush proudly though incoherently announced: “We won’t be putting money into a society which is not transparent and corrupt.” (He probably meant “corruption-free.”)

But the Millennium Challenge Corp. quickly became another garden-variety foreign-aid program, not posing a real challenge to corruption. Governments such as those of Georgia, Paraguay and Mozambique received MCC windfalls, despite their well-deserved reputations for venality and theft. MCC’s rhetoric didn’t deter the Bush administration from lavishing foreign aid on notorious regimes such as those that ruled Nigeria, Bangladesh, Tajikistan, Indonesia and Kyrgyzstan.

Easy Promises
Afghanistan is the latest exhibit for foreign aid as a political weapon of mass destruction. In a January 2002 speech at Georgetown University, newly designated Afghan ruler Hamid Karzai gave personal assurances that foreign aid his nation received would be properly spent: “We have to promise that we will not cheat our own people. If there is cheating, corruption, I will stop it.”

More than $50 billion of aid poured into Afghanistan in the following years. The flood made Afghan politicians far more rapacious. Economists in the 1990s had dubbed this tendency the “voracity effect,” and, according to Mohammad Yusin Osmani, chief of the Afghan government’s High Office of Oversight, the surge of aid helped intensify corruption throughout the country.

Between 2005 and 2009, Afghanistan’s “corruption rating” went from merely bad to worst in the world (except for Somalia, which doesn’t have a government), according to Transparency International, a highly respected campaigner against corruption. Average Afghans believe that corruption has doubled since 2007, according to a recent survey by an Afghan-based nonprofit, Integrity Watch.

A United Nations study found that most Afghans identified corruption as the nation’s biggest problem. Foreign aid-spurred corruption is turning average Afghans against the Karzai government. Most Afghans in a recent survey declared that the pervasive corruption was helping the Taliban’s revival.

U.S. military officials tout Kandahar as the most important battleground in the Afghan campaign. But the governor of Kandahar denounced his own government officials and police officers as “looters and kidnappers,” according to the Washington Post.

Easy Applause
The Obama administration has responded with huffing, puffing and posturing. In late 2009, President Barack Obama gave Hamid Karzai a six-month deadline to “eradicate corruption,” according Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. After his re-election campaign was caught stealing more than a million votes, Karzai promised, “Fighting corruption will be the key focus of my second term in office.”

In May 2010, President Obama hailed Karzai at a White House ceremony for “the progress that has been made, including strengthening anticorruption efforts.” In June, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder visited Kabul, and proclaimed that “we applaud” President Karzai for his anticorruption actions. Yet Karzai’s complaints led to the scuttling of U.S.-backed anticorruption teams that were nailing tainted Afghan officials.

The popular uprisings against Arab dictators earlier this year are further evidence of the failure of U.S. aid to promote good governance or political decency. The U.S. has provided more than $40 billion in aid to Egypt over the past 30 years—roughly equivalent to the personal fortune possessed by Hosni Mubarak when he was driven from office a few months ago. Regardless of how brazen the Egyptian élite’s thefts became, U.S. taxpayers were still forced to bankroll Mubarak and cronies.

Easy Policies
Foreign aid will continue to be toxic as long as politicians continue to be politicians. Imagine how Americans might react if some foreign entity foisted trillions of dollars of free spending money on the U.S. president and the ruling party in Congress. Yet we are supposed to believe that carpet-bombing a foreign nation with dollars is benevolent.

American leaders are far more concerned with buying influence than with safeguarding purity. Foreign aid is often little more than a bribe for a foreign regime to behave in ways that please the U.S. government. One large bribe naturally spawns hundreds or thousands of smaller bribes, and thereby corrupts an entire country.

There is no bureaucratic cure for the perverse incentives created by flooding foreign nations with U.S. tax dollars. It would be far more honest if American politicians openly admitted that aid corrupts recipient nations, but that such damage is justified when it underpins U.S. foreign policy. Taxpayers suffer enough without also having to endure politicians’ bogus humanitarian boasting.

Tagline: JAMES BOVARD is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and seven other books.
On Twitter – @jimbovard

Desperate to drum up some sort of evidence of the NSA’s effectiveness in tracking down terrorists by collecting phone records from literally every single American, officials have tapped a relatively minor case of an immigrant cab driver arrested for sending money to Somalia as proof of how important the program is.

Basaly Moalin, a San Diego cab driver who managed to get asylum after being wounded in tribal fighting in Somalia, was arrested for providing $8,500 to a top leader in his tribe, who was also considered a member of al-Shabaab. The FBI conceded at the time that the money wasn’t about ideological support but rather an attempt to promote his own status within his tribe.

Moalin was under constant surveillance from 2003 until his arrest in 2010, charged with “aiding terrorism,” and is still awaiting sentencing.

So to sum it up, it took them seven solid years to arrest a cab driver whose crime amounts to sending a relatively small sum of money to a member of his tribe, in a country where his family still lives. And that’s the NSA’s big story to brag about.

Officials even conceded that they could’ve just gotten a court order for Moalin’s phone records instead of collecting the phone records of every single human being on the planet, but argue that this way is just more convenient for them.

White House denials are so often overt lies these days that when they say something at least plausible it’s worth examining. Today, Press Secretary Jay Carney insisted the NSA “examine only a very small percentage” of the world’s Internet traffic.

Examine as in give serious scrutiny to. That may sound weird when you first hear it, because we’ve got so much evidence that the vast majority of online communication is surveilled as a matter of course. But here’s thing thing: most of the Internet isn’t communication.

Sandvine’s reports on North America have been really informative on this, showing that in the ballpark of 1/3 of Internet traffic is just plain Netflix streaming in North America. And that’s just one video service, with a good chunk of the top 10 also video streaming services.

Unless someone’s attaching big pictures, all your email for the day is unlikely to be much more than a megabyte. By contrast, streaming a whole baseball game in high-def is about 4,000 times that much, 4 GB. The NSA probably isn’t scrutinizing all the data being streamed from MLB.tv or Netflix or Hulu or any of the countless other services not because they can’t, but because there’s really no need to when they can intercept (or flat out subpoena) the data showing what you watched if they really want to know.

I don’t think anyone really thought the NSA was literally monitoring most of the bandwidth on the Internet to begin with, but that doesn’t make what they’re doing any more palatable. Your credit card number is just a few bytes. All of your instant messages in a given day are unlikely to be more than a few kB. A “very small percentage” of Internet traffic is still more than enough to be devastating to our personal privacy.