Charles Goyette interviews Ron Paul for their weekly podcast on the question of U.S. intervention in Ukraine and the new U.S./IMF bailout Kiev bill, as well as the leaked phone call of Turkish officials discussing the possibility of launching a false flag attack to justify further intervention in Syria.
Stand up comic and writer Amy Schumer discovers what it means to be “all you can be.” For more information on military rape, please read Kelley Vlahos, here, here and here.
Via Juan Cole and Mondoweiss, John Kerry’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday featured a clear admission that Israel was the cause of the collapse of peace negotiations with the Palestinians. First, the Israeli government refused to fulfill its promise to release Palestinian prisoners and then announced the construction of 700 new settlement units in East Jerusalem. Here’s Kerry:
In my judgment both leaders have made courageous and important decisions up until now. For Prime Minister Netanyahu to release prisoners is a painful, difficult political step to take, enormously hard, and the people of Israel have been incredibly supportive and patient in giving him the space in order to do that. In exchange for the deal being kept of the release of prisoners and not going to the U.N. Unfortunately, the prisoners weren’t released on the Saturday they were supposed to be released. And so day went by, day two went by day three went by and then in the afternoon when they were about to maybe get there, 700 settlement units were announced in Jerusalem. And poof! That was sort of the moment.
And now today, “an Israeli government official says the prime minister, Binjamin Netanyahu, has told his ministers to stop holding meetings with their Palestinian counterparts,” the Guardianreports, marking an official end to negotiations. Netanyahu blamed it on Palestinian attempts to sign on to international treaties, even though this happened after the events that Kerry argues dissolved talks.
Why would Israel want to deliberately terminate negotiations? The answer: Israel opposes a Palestinian state. A recent report from the European Union concluded that Israel’s construction of Jewish settlements is a deliberate strategy aimed at rendering a viable Palestinian state impossible. As The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg has written, “The right-wing wants the land, but not the people.” The better option, Israeli policy seems to indicate, is to smoke them out.
This should be surprising to no one. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party Charter describes Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza as “the realization of Zionist values” and declares the whole of the West Bank and Jerusalem as belonging to Israel (“The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river”). Did Kerry actually believe the Netanyahu government was entering into negotiations in good faith?
Update: I guess to demonstrate their good faith, influential right-wing members of the Israeli Knesset are calling on Netanyahu to “annex the West Bank now.”
The Naval War College, based in Newport, Rhode Island, runs a special 11-month course for foreign Navy officers. On February 3, the Naval War College held a special morning session at the Hoover Institution, where I am a research fellow. I was invited to speak. The best invites, in my experience, are those for which I get to choose the topic. That happened in this case. So the topic I chose was “An Economist’s Case for a Non-Interventionist Foreign Policy.”
The four speakers, in order, were Gary Roughead (Admiral-Retired), formerly the Chief of Naval Operations and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Hoover, me, Bruce Thornton, a professor of classics and humanities from Fresno State University and a research fellow at Hoover, and George P. Shultz, formerly Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan and a Distinguished Fellow at Hoover.
The audience was, I believe, all Navy officers. There were 47 of them, representing 44 countries. I was warmly received by many of them, especially the officer from Bangladesh, and courteously received by the few U.S. military officers in attendance.
There are few who deny that there is an acceptable range of opinion in official Washington on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and another range of opinion which lies outside of it. The latter range refers mostly to any direct criticism of Israel or legitimizing any Palestinian perspective on the conflict.
Some voices manage to argue positions outside the “acceptable range” without being called an anti-Semite or a terrorist. In this case, six former U.S. officials (emphasis on the former) have written a piece in Politico that is a must-read.
Former national security adviser Zbigneiw Brzezinski, former U.S. secretary of defense Frank Carlucci, former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Lee Hamilton, former U.S. trade representative Carla A. Hills, former under secretary of state for political affairs Thomas Pickering, and president of the U.S./Middle East Project Henry Siegman make several recommendations to John Kerry in the current negotiations. They call Israel’s policies of occupation and settlement in Palestinian territory “confiscation” and they describe Netanyahu’s demands as “politically and morally unacceptable.”
Here are the first two issues they cover:
Settlements: U.S. disapproval of continued settlement enlargement in the Occupied Territories by Israel’s government as “illegitimate” and “unhelpful” does not begin to define the destructiveness of this activity. Nor does it dispel the impression that we have come to accept it despite our rhetorical objections. Halting the diplomatic process on a date certain until Israel complies with international law and previous agreements would help to stop this activity and clearly place the onus for the interruption where it belongs.
Palestinian incitement: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s charge that various Palestinian claims to all of historic Palestine constitute incitement that stands in the way of Israel’s acceptance of Palestinian statehood reflects a double standard. The Likud and many of Israel’s other political parties and their leaders make similar declarations about the legitimacy of Israel’s claims to all of Palestine, designating the West Bank “disputed” rather than occupied territory. Moreover, Israeli governments have acted on those claims by establishing Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank. Surely the “incitement” of Palestinian rhetoric hardly compares to the incitement of Israel’s actual confiscations of Palestinian territory. If the United States is not prepared to say so openly, there is little hope for the success of these talks, which depends far more on the strength of America’s political leverage and its determination to use it than on the good will of the parties.
The second two issues they tackle relate to Israel’s absurd security demands which would essentially continue the occupation in perpetuity and Israel’s call for the Palestinian side to recognize Israel as “the national homeland of the Jewish people.” On the latter issue, the Palestinians already recognized the legitimacy of the state of Israel in 1988 and again in 1993. This fulfilled Israel’s demands at the time, but once the Palestinians agreed to it, Israeli policy then shifted to something they were sure Palestinians wouldn’t cave on. Like with Israel’s demands to continue to occupy the Jordan Valley, their negotiating tactics are designed to provoke Palestinian rejection and thus a breakdown in talks.
I emphasized that these were former U.S. officials because that seems to be the only time people in government dare utter a perspective contrary to Israel’s right-wing; that is, when domestic politics is no longer a factor. This makes John Kerry’s concurrence unlikely in the extreme.
Miriam Carey is dead and will never be able to tell us what happened on that fateful Oct. 3 day when she led police on a high speed chase through the busy downtown streets of Capitol Hill and was killed shortly after, before she could even exit her car, her 1-year-old daughter in the back seat, a silent witness to it all.
But an autopsy ordered by her grieving family may lend some detail to the sad story.
According to reports on Tuesday morning, the results of the autopsy have revealed that Carey was shot five times “from behind,” including one shot to the back of her head.
As we have covered here before, Carey, 34, may have been under some mental duress, and no one quite knows why she drove all the way down to Washington, D.C. from Connecticut with her young daughter that day. The entire incident is still under police investigation so officials did not return calls for comment by local reporters. The autopsy also revealed that she was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs when the incident happened.
Miriam Carey
Of course the chorus on one side is that police were just doing their jobs, trying to prevent a potential “terror” attack at the Nation’s Capital, which since 9/11 has been functioning in varying degrees of emergency security lock-down. Others say that very post-9/11 mindset has made police hostile and trigger happy and remote as ever from the people to whom they owe their livelihoods and salaries. Instead, everyone is a potential terrorist, until proven otherwise. The reaction from the members of congress and their staffs, many who hailed the police as heroes, in essence, for killing Miriam Carey that day, is a clear indication of how that mindset has set in here Inside the Beltway
Carey may have taken wrong turn and panicked, or, her intent may have been more diabolical. But to her family, this was a senseless loss of life and a stain on law enforcement, and they are suing the Capitol Police, which had the lead in this incident, for $75 million. Stay tuned.
