zaterdag 13 mei 2006
Martelen 41
"Mr. Kellenberger deplored the fact that the U.S. authorities had not moved closer to granting the ICRC access to persons held in undisclosed locations," the Geneva-based agency said.
Kellenberger said: "No matter how legitimate the grounds for detention, there exists no right to conceal a person's whereabouts or to deny that he or she is being detained." The former senior Swiss diplomat said that the ICRC would continue to seek access to such people as a matter of priority. The main objective of his annual visit this week was for the ICRC to be granted access to "all persons held by the U.S. in the context of the fight against terrorism, an issue he first raised with the U.S. government over two years ago," the agency said. ' Lees verder:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0512-03.htm
Irak 75
Nederland en Afghanistan 71
Quigley's remarks were amplified last night by her sister, Ann Marie Crafts, who expressed pride in her sister and said that the trip has a deep meaning for the two women. ''The way that I see it mostly is that she and Susan get so much support from their family and their community, and they saw that other women weren't getting the same thing," Crafts said by phone from her home in Chelmsford.' Lees verder:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/
articles/2006/05/12/widows_reach_beyond_911_to_aid_afghans/
Of: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0512-06.htm
Hirsi Ali 6
'Twijfel over status Hirsi Ali.
"Liegen is reden om iemand Nederland uit te zetten."
van onze verslaggevers.
VVD-kamerlid Ayaan Hirsi Ali bezit waarschijnlijk ten onrechte het Nederlanderschap. Dit volgt uit jurisprudentie van de Hoge Raad uit 2005 over een zaak van een Iraaks gezin. De Hoge Raad verwierp in november 2005 een beroep van een Iraaks gezin, dat na een beslissing van de Haagse rechtbank de Nederlandse nationaliteit was kwijtgeraakt. De ouders hadden valse namen en geboortedata opgegeven bij hun verzoek om naturalisatie. Volgens naturalisatie-expert prof. René de Groot moet minister Verdonk (vreemdelingenzaken en integratie) ’ogenblikkelijk’ een onderzoek instellen naar het Nederlanderschap van Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Volgens de Maastrichtse hoogleraar is niet uit te sluiten dat Hirsi Ali identiteitsfraude pleegde bij het aanvragen van de Nederlandse nationaliteit. De Hoge Raad bepaalde in 2005 dat een naturalisatiebesluit waarin valse persoonsgegevens zijn opgenomen, niet rechtsgeldig is.
In het tv-programma ’Zembla’ herhaalde Hirsi Ali donderdagavond dat zij bij haar komst naar Nederland, begin jaren ’90, een valse naam opgaf en loog over haar geboortejaar. Hirsi Ali heet eigenlijk Hirsi Magan.' Lees verder:
http://www.trouw.nl/hetnieuws/nederland/
article314924.ece/Twijfel+over+status+Hirsi+Ali+++ Intussen heeft de geloofwaardigheid van de 'liberale' volksvertegenwoordigster een forse deuk opgelopen, tenminste als we afgaan op de percentages van het radioprogramma Stand.nl. want 70 procent is het eens met de stelling: 'Ayaan Hirsi Ali heeft haar politieke geloofwaardigheid verloren.' Een opmerkelijk percentage gezien het feit dat haar claque van oudere heren onmiddellijk in de media hun woede over de Zembla-uitzending ventileerden.
Gedwongen door haar achterban is de populist Verdonk in het nauw gebracht. RTL-Nieuws meldt nu: 'Minister Verdonk van Integratie gaat de naturalisatie van Kamerlid Hirsi Ali toch onderzoeken. De minister laat de 'aspecten van de naturalisatie bekijken', aldus een woordvoerder. Gelogen. VVD-lid Hirsi Ali geeft al jaren toe te hebben gelogen om een verblijfsvergunning te krijgen. In een uitzending van Zembla donderdag verklaarden familieleden bovendien dat zij destijds niet tegen haar zin was uitgehuwelijkt en dat zij niet bang was voor haar familie. Dat had Hirsi Ali wel altijd beweerd. Naar aanleiding van die uitzending stelden Kamerleden, onder wie Hilbrand Nawijn, vragen over de kwestie. Verdonk zei vrijdag dat Hirsi Ali niets te vrezen heeft. Of dat nu wel het geval is, wilde de woordvoerder niet zeggen.'
Big Brother 13
********************
For the full story, see "Double Cheese With Fear," in Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War." ********************
The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company, formed in 1997, called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate. They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect if for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.
Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you? ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone -- even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.
I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.' Lees verder: http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=502&row=0
Martelen 40
ALEXANDRIA, VA -- The American Civil Liberties Union argued its case on the illegal abduction and detention of Khalid El-Masri today before a federal court in Alexandria. The ACLU said El-Masri is an innocent German citizen who was victimized by the CIA's policy of "extraordinary rendition." In today's hearing the CIA argued that the case must be dismissed because of the danger that 'state secrets' may be exposed. "By the CIA's reasoning, the entire world can discuss this case, newspapers can write about it, foreign governments can investigate it, but the court has no role," said Ben Wizner, the ACLU staff attorney who presented arguments this morning. "The idea that the court must close its eyes and ears to common sense, and protect the nation from disclosure of information that the whole world already knows, is simply absurd." The landmark lawsuit charges that former CIA Director George Tenet violated U.S. and universal human rights laws when he authorized agents to abduct El-Masri, beat him, drug him and transport him to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan. The corporations that owned and operated the airplanes are also named in the case. The CIA continued to hold El-Masri incommunicado in the notorious "Salt Pit" prison in Afghanistan long after his innocence was known. Five months after his abduction El-Masri was deposited at night, without explanation on a hill in Albania, never having been charged with a crime. According to the ACLU the government has been invoking the state secrets argument with more regularity in an effort to avoid the exposure of illegal and immoral practices, including, most recently, in an effort to dismiss suits challenging illegal NSA wiretapping. Yet in this case, the ACLU argues that all the information is already public. Recently, a special committee of the European Parliament issued an interim report concluding that the CIA has on several occasions illegally kidnapped and detained individuals in European countries. The report also found that the CIA detained and then secretly used airlines to transfer persons to countries like Egypt and Afghanistan, which routinely use torture during interrogations. Members of the European investigative committee have been in the United States for several days to meet with the ACLU and Members of Congress. A parliamentary inquiry into El-Masri's kidnapping is also currently ongoing in Germany. The ACLU has also called on a United Nations human rights investigative body, the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, to conduct a full investigation into the United States' "extraordinary rendition" program. Background and briefs on the case are online at: www.aclu.org/rendition' Zie ook: http://www.jinxmagazine.com/cia_torture.html
vrijdag 12 mei 2006
Mike Davis
Tomdispatch Interview: Mike Davis, Turning a Planet into a Slum (Part 1). Mike Davis, whose first book about Los Angeles, City of Quartz, burst into bestsellerdom and put him on the map as this country's most innovative urban scholar, has since written about everything from the literary destruction of LA to Victorian holocausts of the 19th century and the potential avian flu pandemic of our own moment. He has most recently turned his restless, searching brain upon the global city in a new book, Planet of Slums, whose conclusions are so startling that I thought they should be the basis for our conversation. We create a makeshift spot in the living room, my tape recorders between us, and begin. Davis has in him something of the older, nearly lost American tradition of the autodidact. In a tribal world, he would certainly have been any tribe's storyteller of choice. Midway through our interview, which is largely an inspired monologue, we are suddenly interrupted by weeping from elsewhere in the house. Casey has awoken from her nap upset. He quickly excuses himself, returning moments later with a collapsed, still sniffling, dark-haired little girl in pink pants and shirt on his shoulder. Under his ministrations she perks up, then sits up, then begins to talk, hardly less volubly (though slightly less comprehensibly) than her father. Soon she is seated inside the large plastic house, engaging both of us in a game of "big bad wolf." When she wanders off, perhaps twenty minutes later, he turns back to me and, before I can cue him on the interview (I've just checked his last words), he picks up in mid-sentence exactly where he left off and just rolls on. Tomdispatch: I was hoping you would start by telling me how you came to the subject of the city. Mike Davis: I came to the city by the most parochial path, which was studying Los Angeles, and I came to LA because, having been a Sixties new leftist and having invested a lot of time in studying Marxism, I thought radical social theory could explain just about anything. But it struck me that the supreme test would be understanding Los Angeles. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but almost everything I've written about other cities has grown, at least in part, out of my LA project. For instance, investigating the tendency toward the militarization of urban space and the destruction of public space in Los Angeles has led me to explore similar trends as a global phenomenon. Interest in suburban Los Angeles got me considering the fate of older suburbs across the country and then the emergent politics of edge cities. So, in this consistently parochial way, the world emerged from Los Angeles which, in my original project, was a mosaic of about 450 individual pieces. Let me explain: Back in the 1950s, when county welfare agencies were worried that war veterans moving into new suburbs had no sense of place, it did this big study of how many actual life-worlds there were in Greater Los Angeles and came to the conclusion that people lived in about 350 communities -- small towns, neighborhoods, suburbs. (Now, there are maybe 500 of these.) Behind my strategy for doing Los Angeles lay the thought that each of these constituent pieces had an entirely local, totally eccentric story to tell about itself, but also refracted some important aspect of the larger whole. I literally believe I could spend several lifetimes telling a story in each of these places about Los Angeles; so that was my methodology. I suppose in the process I only became an urbanist because people started calling me that. I've never actually considered myself a historian, sociologist, political economist, or urban theorist.' Lees verder:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=82655 En deel 2: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=82790
De Oorlogsstaat 51
De Guardian bericht: 'US in Secret Gun Deal. Small arms shipped from Bosnia to Iraq "go missing" as Pentagon uses dealers. The Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private companies, at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN. According to a report by Amnesty International, which investigated the sales, the US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05. But though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient. Senior western officials in the Balkans fear that some of the guns may have fallen into the wrong hands. A Nato official described the trade as the largest arms shipments from Bosnia since the second world war. The official told Amnesty: "Nato has no way of monitoring the shipments once they leave Bosnia. There is no tracking mechanism to ensure they do not fall into the wrong hands. There are concerns that some of the weapons may have been siphoned off." European administrators in Bosnia, as well as NGOs working to oversee the stockpiling and destruction of weapons from the Bosnian war of the 1990s, are furious that the Pentagon's covert arms-to-Iraq programme has undermined the disarmament project. "It's difficult to persuade people to destroy weapons when they're all holding back and waiting for Uncle Sam to arrive with a fistful of dollars," said Adrian Wilkinson, a former British officer overseeing a UN disarmament programme in former Yugoslavia.
The international administration running Bosnia repeatedly sought to impose an arms export moratorium, but under US pressure it was suspended several times to enable the arms shipments to go ahead. The British government is funding a programme to destroy 250,000 small arms, a legacy of the Bosnian war, but the project is faltering because people are reluctant to surrender weapons that might mean money. Nato and European officials confirm there is nothing illegal about the Bosnian government or the Pentagon taking arms to Iraq; the problem is one of transparency and the way the arms deals have been conducted. "There are Swiss, US and UK companies involved. The deal was organised through the embassies [in Bosnia] and the military attaché offices were involved. The idea was to get the weapons out of Bosnia where they pose a threat and to Iraq where they are needed," the Nato official said. Mr Wilkinson said: "The problem is we haven't seen the end user."' Lees verder: http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,,1773106,00.html Of:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051206L.shtml
Westers Terrorisme 9
Het verzet tegen de Westerse terreur in het Midden Oosten neemt almaar toe. Zelfs militairen beginnen hiertegen te protesteren: 'WEST POINT GRADUATES AGAINST THE WAR.
WHY DIE FOR A LIE?
WHY KILL FOR A LIE?
WHY TOLERATE LIARS?
"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war." (2)
"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity. War settles nothing." (3)
"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion." (4)
"If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government." (5)
Dwight D. Eisenhower
34th President of the United States
(1953-1961)' Zie: http://www.westpointgradsagainstthewar.org/
Big Brother 12
Big Brother 11
Fresh disclosures yesterday in USA Today about the scale of domestic surveillance -- the most extensive yet known involving ordinary citizens and residents -- touched off a bipartisan uproar against a politically weakened President Bush. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) vowed to haul telephone companies before his committee under oath to ferret out details the Bush administration refuses to supply, and more than 50 House Democrats signed a letter demanding a criminal investigation by a special counsel. Bush made an unscheduled appearance before White House reporters and sought to shape perceptions about the surveillance while declining to acknowledge that it is taking place. He said that "the intelligence activities I authorized are lawful," but specified no source of statutory or constitutional authority. He denied forcefully that his administration is "mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans," saying, "Our efforts are focused on links to al-Qaeda and their known affiliates." Neither Bush nor his subordinates denied any factual statement in the USA Today report, which said AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. have provided customer calling records to the NSA since shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Together those companies serve about 224 million conventional and cellular telephone customers -- about four-fifths of the wired market and more than half of the wireless market. According to data provided by the research group TeleGeography, the three companies connected nearly 500 billion telephone calls in 2005 and nearly 2 trillion calls since late 2001.' Lees verder:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/11/AR2006051100539.html?referrer=email
Westers Terrorisme 8
Het misdadig Europees-Amerikaans beleid waarbij getracht wordt de Palestijnse bevolking het leven zo zuur te maken dat ze niet langer meer Hamas steunen, veroorzaakt een humanitaire ramp. Tot nu toe zwichtten de Palestijnen niet voor de Westerse terreur. De Washington Post bericht: 'Out of Money but Not Resources . With Aid Cut Off, Palestinians Turn to Each Other to Get By. BEIT IKSA, West Bank -- At the end of last month, a crowd gathered in the town hall here to take part in an unusual act. About 75 people, all employees of the Palestinian Authority, were getting paid. Like the rest of the 150,000 Palestinian civil servants, the teachers, bureaucrats and policemen here had not received a paycheck for nearly two months, the result of a freeze in international aid following Hamas's victory in January legislative elections. But this village has a patron, a native son who prospered in the United Arab Emirates. Although he has returned to his birthplace only a handful of times since leaving with his family following the 1967 Middle East war, over the years Zuhair Jubran has remembered his village in trying times, few more so than now. With the government unable to make payroll, Jubran decided he would. Each public employee, including teachers from neighboring villages who work in Beit Iksa's boys and girls schools, has started receiving a monthly salary of $325 from Jubran's private accounts. As their government withers without international aid, Palestinians are tailoring modest lives to desperate times. Bartering, borrowing and doing without, thousands of people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are improvising their way through a deepening financial crisis with help from native sons, virtual strangers and each other.' Lees verder: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/11/AR2006051102089.html
Hirsi Ali 5
Ich Klage An. Ik heb net even geluisterd naar NOVA van gisteravond waarin het VVD-Kamerlid Hirsi Ali of Hirsi Magan, zoals ze in werkelijkheid heet, vertelt dat ze achter het standpunt van haar partij staat dat de grenzen hermetisch gesloten blijven, want 'ik deel de opvatting dat de integratie niet zal slagen als de emigratie niet wordt beperkt. Ik deel die opvatting omdat er een grens zit aan hoeveel migranten een welvaartstaat kan absorberen en tegelijkertijd een welvaartstaat blijven,' aldus de liberale volksvertegenwoordiger die zelf loog om van de welvaartstaat te kunnen profiteren. Ook toen zat er kennelijk 'een grens... aan hoeveel migranten een welvaartstaat kan absorberen,' maar daar trok Hirsi Magan zich toen niets van aan. Opportunisten waaien met elke wind mee. De rest van de Derde Wereld zal moeten lijden om de opportunisten en poseurs hun spelletje te laten spelen. Ondertussen kan minister Verdonk haar naturalisatie weer intrekken, omdat ze valse informatie heeft verstrekt. Dat heeft Verdonk al meermaals gedaan. Zie: http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.com/2006/05/hirsi-ali-3.html Eens kijken hoe de politici elkaar de bal toespelen. Mevrouw Ali wacht rustig af in New York, waar ze aan haar carriere werkt. Het zou aardig zijn als de luie parlementaire pers eens onderzoekt hoeveel dagen ze in het Nederlandse parlement aanwezig is geweest het afgelopen jaar. Uit welingelichte kringen weet ik dat ze meermaals in New York verblijft in het appartement van haar agente.
Hirsi Ali 4
De Bush Bende 10
The deterioration in relations is risky for the US at a time when it is trying to persuade Russia to support a United Nations resolution against Iran over Tehran's nuclear programme. The acrimony will also encourage senior US Republicans such as John McCain to renew calls for Mr Bush to boycott this year's meeting of the Group of Eight, the world's wealthiest countries, which is scheduled to be held in Russia for the first time. The war of words is a long way from the optimism with which George Bush said, after his first face-to-face meeting with Mr Putin in 2001, that he had looked into the Russian president's soul and liked what he saw. Mr Cheney, reflecting Washington's growing disenchantment, told a conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, last week that Russia was sending "mixed signals" over democracy, as well as using its energy resources to "intimidate and blackmail" neighbours. Mr Putin, in his speech, noted that the American military budget was 25 times the size of Russia's and said the US had turned its home into a castle. "Good for them," the Russian president said, looking up from his notes, directly at his audience, "but this means we must make our own home strong and reliable. Because we see what is happening in the world. We see it." He added, in what appeared to be a reference to the US-led invasion of Iraq and its approach to Iran: "As they say, 'comrade wolf knows whom to eat. He eats without listening and he is clearly not going to listen to anyone'." He accused the US of hypocrisy over its criticism of Russia's patchy human rights record. "Where is all this pathos about protecting human rights and democracy when it comes to the need to pursue their own interests?"' Lees verder: http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1772175,00.html?gusrc=rss Of:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0511-08.htm
donderdag 11 mei 2006
Klimaatverandering 34
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/051006EA.shtml
The Fog of War
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12990.htm
Howard Zinn 4
Hirsi Ali 3
Nederland en Afghanistan 70
The father of one of the Italian soldiers killed in combat in Afghanistan collapses as coffins are off-loaded in Rome. A roadside bomb killed two Italian soldiers and wounded four in Afghanistan on Friday. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the bombing, symptomatic of their intensified campaign against foreign troops and the government in recent months.
De Washington Post bericht: 'Bomb Kills Two Italian Peacekeepers in Afghanistan. Kabul - A roadside bomb killed two Italian peacekeepers and wounded four in Afghanistan on Friday and the Taliban claimed responsibility. Taliban insurgents have intensified their campaign against foreign troops and the government in recent months with a wave of roadside and suicide bombings, attacks and assassinations. The latest blast hit one of a two-vehicle Italian convoy on a main road 16 km (10 miles) south of Kabul. The troops had been on their way to help an Afghan police vehicle that had hit a mine. "This tragic incident will not affect our total determination and commitment to this mission," the new British commander of the NATO force, Lieutenant General David Richards, said in a statement. Violence in parts of Afghanistan is at its worst since the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001. Twenty foreign soldiers have been killed this year. Italy has some 1,775 troops in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. It handed over command of the force to Britain on Thursday. A Taliban official, Abdul Raouf, claimed responsibility. Speaking by telephone, he said the Italians had been hit by a remote-control bomb. Italy is still recovering from last week's killing of three soldiers in Iraq by a roadside bomb which struck their convoy southwest of Nassiriya. "The issue of the price paid by our soldiers for peace and stability is one of the biggest issues, perhaps the biggest one in our country right now," Italy's incoming prime minister, Romano Prodi, told reporters. The security situation in Afghanistan was "very serious," he said.' Lees verder:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/05/AR2006050500726.html Of:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/B051006X.shtml
woensdag 10 mei 2006
De Oorlogsstaat 50
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the “disastrous rise” of American power. Talk about the trajectory from then to now.
JAMES CARROLL: Well, “disastrous rise” is a phrase -- it’s a polemical phrase, I acknowledge that. It's a phrase, though, that I get from Eisenhower in his famous military-industrial complex speech. He was, of course, talking about the military-industrial-political-academic-economic complex, labor, all of the great pillars of American life were recruited into, conscripted, you could say, into the power of this military machine centered in the Pentagon. At the crucial turning points of American history since World War II, again and again decisions have been made all too easily in favor of war and against creating structures of peace. It happened at the end of the war with the decision, the unnecessary decision to use the atomic bomb. It happened immediately after the war with the unnecessary militarization of the contest with the Soviet Union and so forth. At each of these crucial points, America misperceived the world and made decisions to protect against a threat that was more imagined than real.
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you feel it wasn't necessary to drop the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
JAMES CARROLL: Well, obviously, it's a complicated question about which historians are still in argument. My conclusion is that the issue of unconditional surrender was the blinder that prevented American leaders at that crucial moment of fully taking in the messages they were getting from Japan. Japan was all but defeated in the spring of 1945. We had savaged 60 Japanese cities with firebombing. There were signals from the Japanese that they wanted to surrender, and we were willfully blocked in taking those signals in, especially under the leadership of Secretary of State Burns, and the irony is that we re-asserted our demand for unconditional surrender at the crucial point, the Potsdam Declaration at the end of July, yet again saying “unconditional surrender.” All the Japanese wanted by then was assurances about the emperor, which we refused to give them. When the Japanese did surrender after Nagasaki, they still didn't surrender unconditionally. They included a condition about the emperor, which at that point we accepted. My conclusion is: If we had accepted the condition on the emperor – the emperor was a divine being to the Japanese. They couldn't tolerate the thought that what happened to Mussolini and Hitler would happen to him. If we had accepted that condition ahead of the atomic bombings, there would have been no need for those bombings. That's the conclusion I came to.' Lees verder: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/10/1345217
Jim Tarbell
Afgelopen maandag interviewde ik de Amerikaanse schrijver en programmamaker Jim Tarbell over zijn boek 'Imperial Overstretch. George W. Bush & the Hubris of Empire' dat hij samen met de Amerikaanse historicus Roger Burbach schreef. 19 jaar geleden definieerde de Britse historicus Paul Kennedy in zijn boek 'The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers' het begrip imperial overstretch als volgt: 'the nation overextends itself geographically and strategically: if, even at a less imperial level, it chooses to devote a large proportion of its total income to "protection," leaving less for "productive investment," it is likely to find its economic output slowing down, with dire implications for its long-term capacity to maintain both its citizens' consumption demands and its international position. Already this is happening in the case of the USSR, the United States, and Britain.' Sindsdiens heeft dit proces zich in mindere of meerdere mate voortgezet en heeft zich nu zelfs versneld. De Sowjet Unie is ineen gestort en de Verenigde Staten is op weg daar naar toe. Dat is de centrale thesis van Jim Tarbell's boek. Het interview met hem kunt u hier beluisteren: http://webdisk.planet.nl/houck006/default.aspx
Big Brother 10
The FBI's targets in this period included the American Indian Movement, the Communist Party, Black Nationalist groups, and many social justice activists, including Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez. According to Brian Glick, in War at Home, COINTELPRO used a broad array of methods, including infiltration; psychological warfare from the outside (false media stories, forged correspondence); harassment through the legal system; and extralegal force and violence (in the case of radical Black, Puerto Rican and Native American activists, these attacks, including political assassinations, were so extensive, vicious, and calculated that they can only be accurately called a form of official "terrorism"). But COINTELPRO tactics are clearly not a thing of the past. In September of 2005, 72-year-old Filiberto Ojeda Rios, a leading figure in the fight for Puerto Rican independence, was killed by the FBI in a raid that coincided with the Grito de Lares, the annual pro-independence celebration of the 1868 anticolonial revolt in Puerto Rico. Ojeda Rios was wanted by the FBI for his role in a 1983 bank heist.' Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050906B.shtml
dinsdag 9 mei 2006
De Oorlogsstaat 49
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_3791081 Of: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050906K.shtml
Irak 74
Martelen 39
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/09/1415210
Israelisch Expansionisme 15
Danny Schechter
Crisis Alert: Bush Numbers Fall Again. Posted by Danny @ 5:25 am Print Email this Post
Mediachannel Seeks Webmaster. Scroll to end of blog.WAR CLOUDS IN THE SKYMASSAOUI NOW SAYS HE LIEDDEBATING THE MEDIA SHIFT. As readers know, I usually save the best of the many letters I receive for last, but today I will break that format because sometimes people see news in the making. In this case Ethel Steadman in Virginia Beach, home of Pat Robertson’s University and not far from the the Norfolk naval bases sends along a Mall sighting that has to be taken seriously even though it has yet to be reported:
”FYI, the fighter jets at Oceana NAS in Virginia Beach are doing touch-&-go practice landings night and day, so I can almost guarantee that we'll start bombing Iran soon and very soon. You can't hear yourself think at nearby Lynnhaven Mall -- and this has been going on for several weeks.
“Again, thanks for all you do, you amazing guy!”
More amazing than me are all the citizens of this country who can see whats happening and are willing to speak out about it.
PRESIDENTIAL APPROVAL RATINGS DOWN, DOWN, DOWN
Reuters reports:
“President George W. Bush's approval rating fell to 31 percent in a USA Today/Gallup Poll released on Monday, the lowest recorded in the survey and a drop of three percentage points in a single week. Bush's approval rating, at 34 percent a week ago, tumbled on declining support from conservatives and Republicans.' Lees verder: http://www.newsdissector.org/blog/2006/05/09/crisis-alert-bush-numbers-fall-again/ Een president in het nauw maakt rare sprongen. Zijn almaar dalende populariteit kan veranderen in stijgende populariteit als Iran wordt gebombardeerd.
Aanval op Internet
AMY GOODMAN: We're joined right now by Professor Bob McChesney. Bob McChesney runs Free Press. He is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, co-founder of Free Press. His books include Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communications Politics in Dubious Times. Welcome to Democracy Now!
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Pleasure to be here, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain this bill and where it stands now?
ROBERT McCHESNEY: Well, in one sense, the bill is extraordinarily complicated. There are different versions in the House and Senate, and the nuances get tricky, because we have these enormous lobbies fighting it out to get the best deal for themselves. But in a general sense, the way that I understand it is that the phone companies and the cable companies, which provide internet access to 98% of Americans and almost all businesses, are viewing -- you know, they are companies that were set up by the government. They're not free market companies. Their entire business model has been based on getting monopoly license franchises from the government for phone and cable service and then using it to make a lot of money. And they’re using their political leverage now to try to write a law basically which lets them control the internet.' Lees verder: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/08/1352255
Martelen 38
Nederland en Afghanistan 69
This was a step too far for the parliament’s Islamic extremists and former warlords, who are still getting the hang of democracy. They leapt from their seats and rushed towards her. They hurled abuse and water bottles. Punches were thrown. Even women MPs joined in. Moderate MPs had to form a protective ring around Mrs Joya as she was hurried from the chamber. “My supporters heard one MP tell someone to wait by the door and knife me as I walked out,” she said. Omid Yakmanish, a television cameraman, was hit as he filmed the uproar, and dropped his camera. He said: “The MP (Al-haj Khyal Mohammad Husaini, from Ghazni) said in an interview, ‘I have the right to beat people up if I want to’.” The session was adjourned. Mrs Joya told The Times yesterday: “There are two problems for these people: firstly, that I am a woman and, secondly, that I believe in democracy. They don’t believe in democracy. They don’t believe in women’s rights.” She went on: “I have lots of threats. I have had people call me to threaten me, and in Kabul have to stay in a different house every night. I don’t feel safe. I’m never scared because I tell the truth and I believe in the truth and in democracy. They can kill me but they cannot kill my voice.” The episode was another embarrassment for the Western nations who invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taleban regime and install democracy.' Lees verder:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2171202,00.html
maandag 8 mei 2006
Het Neoliberale Geloof 5
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050806N.shtml
Iran 45
But faced with heated Russian and Chinese objections to the Chapter VII provision at ambassador level, Mr Bolton was saying by Saturday night that he had asked the two countries to come up with another way of making the resolution's demands mandatory.' Lees verder:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article362745.ece Of: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050806M.shtml
Iran 44
De Dollar Hegemonie 9
“Everybody knows the real reason for American belligerence is not the Iranian nuclear program, but the decision to launch an oil bourse where oil will be traded in euros instead of US dollars….The oil market will break the dominance of the dollar and lead to a decline of global
American hegemony.” Igor Panarin, Russian political scientist.
Overnight the story of Iran’s proposed oil bourse has slipped into the mainstream press exposing the real reasons behind Washington’s ongoing hostility towards Tehran. Up to this point, analysts have brushed aside the importance of the upcoming oil-exchange as a Leftist-Internet conspiracy theory unworthy of further consideration. Now, the Associated Press has clarified the issue showing that an Iran oil bourse “could lead central bankers around the world to convert some of their dollar reserves into euros, possibly causing a decline in the dollar’s value”. Currently, the world is drowning in dollars, even a small movement could trigger a massive recession in the United States. There’s nothing remotely “conspiratorial” about this. It is simply a matter of supply and demand. If the oil bourse creates less demand for the dollar, the value of the dollar will sink accordingly; pushing energy, housing, food and other prices higher. Oil has been linked to the dollar since the 1970s when OPEC agreed to denominate it exclusively in dollars. This provided the US a virtual monopoly which has allowed it to run huge account deficits without fear of crippling interest rate hikes. As Bill O’ Grady of A.G.Edwards said, “If OPEC decided they didn’t want dollars anymore, it would be the end of American hegemony by signaling the end to the dollar as the sole reserve currency.” “If the dollar lost its status as the world’s reserve currency, that would force the United States to fund it massive account deficit by running a trade surplus, which would increase inflationary pressures.” (Associated Press)' Lees verder: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12960.htm
Het Amerikaans Imperium 4
TomDispatch bericht: 'The Wide War. How Donald Rumsfeld Discovered the Wild West in Latin America. By Greg Grandin. How fast has Latin America fallen from favor? Just a decade ago the
Clinton administration was holding up the region as the crown jewel of globalization's promise: All is quiet on "our southern flank," reported the head of the US Southern Command, General Barry McCaffrey, in 1995, "our neighbors are allies who, in general, share similar values." "The
Western Hemisphere has a lot to teach the world," said McCaffrey's boss Secretary of Defense William Cohen two years later, "as the world reaches for the kind of progress we have made."
Today, with a new generation of leaders in open rebellion against Washington's leadership, Latin America is no longer seen as a beacon unto the world but as a shadowy place where "enemies" lurk. "They watch, they probe," Donald Rumsfeld warns of terrorists in Latin America; they look for "weaknesses." According to the new head of Southcom General Bantz Craddock, the region is held hostage by a league of extraordinary gentlemen made up of the "transnational terrorist, the narco-terrorist, the Islamic radical fundraiser and recruiter, the illicit trafficker, the money launderer, the kidnapper, [and] the gang member." "Terrorists throughout the Southern command area of responsibility," Craddock's predecessor warned, "bomb, murder, kidnap, traffic drugs, transfer arms, launder money and smuggle humans." Problems that Clinton's Pentagon presented as discrete issues -- drugs, arms trafficking, intellectual property piracy, migration, and money laundering, what the editor of Foreign Policy Moisés Naín has described as the "five wars of globalization" -- are now understood as part of a larger unified campaign against terrorism.
The Pentagon's Wide War on Everything in Latin America.
Latin America, in fact, has become more dangerous of late, plagued by a rise in homicides, kidnappings, drug use, and gang violence. Yet it is not the increase in illicit activity that is causing the Pentagon to beat its alarm but rather a change in the way terrorism experts and
government officials think about international security. After 9/11, much was made of Al Qaeda's virus-like ability to adapt and spread through loosely linked affinity cells even after its host government in Afghanistan had been destroyed. Defense analysts now contend that, with
potential patron nations few and far between and funding sources cut off by effective policing, a new mutation has occurred. To raise money, terrorists are reportedly making common cause with gun runners, people smugglers, brand-name and intellectual-property bootleggers, drug
dealers, blood-diamond merchants, and even old-fashioned high-seas pirates." Lees verder:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=82089
zondag 7 mei 2006
Noam Chomsky 8
In short, the major media are corporations "selling" privileged audiences to other businesses.... Media concentration is high, and increasing. Furthermore, those who occupy managerial positions in the media...belong to the same privileged elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations, and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own class interests as well. Journalists entering the system are unlikely to make their way unless they conform to these ideological pressures, generally by internalizing the values.... Those who fail to conform will be weeded out...
-- from the Massey Lectures
This book applies the propaganda model Chomsky has developed with Edward Herman to media coverage of the diplomatic process in Central America and the Middle East, human rights issues, terrorism, and other topics, revealing the crucial function of the media and educated elites in limiting democracy in the United States.
Rigorously documented, Necessary Illusions is an invaluable tool for understanding how democracy functions in the United States.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor of Linguistics at MIT and author of many books on U.S. foreign policy, including The Political Economy of Human Rights (with Edward S. Herman), The Fateful Triangle, On Power and Ideology, and The Culture of Terrorism.'
Het interview met Noam Chomsky deel 1 en 2 kunt u hier beluisteren: http://webdisk.planet.nl/houck006/default.aspx
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