Freedom’s just another word...’

The Police State of America

by DAVE LINDORFF

I no longer recognize my country.

Back in 1997, after two years living in China, and five more living in Hong Kong, during which time, as a correspondent for Business Week magazine, I slipped in and out of China regularly as a journalist to report on developments there, I got a good dose of life in a totalitarian society. When I alit from the plane in Philadelphia where my family and I were about to start a new chapter of our lives, I remember feeling like a big weight had been lifted off my chest.

The sense of freedom was palpable.

Almost immediately, though I got an inkling that something was amiss. An art teacher in Upper Dublin, the suburban town where we had bought a house, had just been arrested, charged with theft of $400 in school art supplies. Of course, my initial reaction was, “Great school district we’re in, if the teachers are stealing from the school!”

The teacher, Lou Ann Merkel, who had been arrested and briefly jailed pending arraignment, was fired and was facing trial on a felony charge of stealing public property. But in a few weeks, as I followed the story in the local weekly paper, it became clear that there had really been no theft (she was taking old supplies which were being replaced with new ones, intending to bring them to a local community center used by low-income children who went there for day care and after-school care. Moreover, when stopped by the principal and told that the old supplies had to be put in the dumpster, she grudgingly complied. She was arrested anyway later, at her home). I learned over subsequent weeks of news reports that Merkel actually was being hounded by an obsessive power-tripping school administration simply for being an “activist” and outspoken teacher. A school board hearing I attended was packed in December of that year with over a hundred angry parents and former students of Merkel’s demanding that the board drop its case against her. It did not, but a county judge had the good sense to do exactly that, ruling that “no crime occurred here.” (Merkel, who got her job back with back pay, later sued the school district and won a significant judgement against it.)

This was one small example of government tyranny run amok but since then I have seen it become the norm in a United States where people are now being arrested for almost everything — kids jailed without trial for shoplifting, hitchhikers jailed for arguing, correctly, with cops that it is not illegal for them to thumb for a ride, non-white youths in many cities stopped and frisked for “walking while black or hispanic” and then getting busted on trumped up charges (resisting arrest, assaulting an officer, disturbing the peace, etc.) when the cops find no guns or drugs on them, protesters beaten and gassed and jailed for simply trying to exercise their First Amendment rights.

But that is just the surface.

As a journalist working in China, I had to watch my back all the time. Spies from the Ministry of State Security (China’s KGB) or one of the local Public Security Bureaus that operate under its jurisdiction would secretly follow my movements, and would keep track of whoever I interviewed. In one case, after my departure, they badly beat a source to the point that he had to be hospitalized for reconstructive surgery to his crushed cheek bones (his entire groin region was also left black and blue after his brutal beating). The man’s offense? He had shown me around a rural region where peasants were improving their lives by sending some of their children off to the city to do construction jobs.

I thought this kind of monitoring and intimidation of sources was a nightmare back then in China.

Now it’s happening here in the US, only worse. Not only is the National Security Agency monitoring every phone call I make, every email I sent, every person I interview and every article I write–something Chinese police were not capable of at least in those days–but the agency can be watching what I write at this moment, as a type these letters on my keyboard.

How do I know they’re watching me? Well, of course I can’t know for certain, because they won’t tell me on the grounds of “national security,” which has rendered the Freedom of Information Act moribund. But courageous leakers from within the NSA, most notably Edward Snowden, have released documentary evidence proving that the super-secretive spy agency has been monitoring all communications between Americans and foreign contacts, most notably with countries like Russia or Iran or other nations which the US views as “enemies.”

In my case, as a journalist, I write often on international issues, as when I broke the story exposing an arrested killer in Lahore, Pakistan as a CIA operative, or wrote about how Israeli commandos executed a 19-year-old unarmed American peace activist in their raid on a Turkish-flagged peace flotilla headed for Gaza. I am also an occasional guest on news programs on RT-TV, the Russian state television news network, and on Iran’s state-owned Press TV. For one year, ending about a year ago, I was contracted to write a weekly column for PressTV’s English-language website, for which I was paid $200 per column. Because of US sanctions against Iran’s banking business, Press TV said they would pay me quarterly, rather than monthly, to minimize the paperwork hassles. This meant that for a year I was getting wire transfer of about $2600 every quarter from an Iranian bank. You can be sure I was on the NSA’s radar for that, if nothing else.

(Interestingly, I had more editorial freedom with that job than I’ve ever had writing for any news organization in the US. I picked my own topics for columns, Press TV agreed not to make any changes, or cuts, in my pieces, and I got paid in full whether they ran a story or not. Only once in the course of a year of columns did they not run a piece — an article I did on the debate over the death penalty in the US. The editor claimed that it was too “US-focused” and that it would “not be of interest” to Press TV readers. Even articles I wrote that included criticisms of Iranian policy ran unaltered.)

Even if everything I say on the phone or write on my computer, every site I visit online, every place I travel, every person I interview, is not being monitored by the NSA, the fact that we know the government is doing this, and is capable of doing this thanks to billions of dollars being spent in secret on massive super-computer arrays in Maryland and Utah, the damage is done. I have to assume that it is being done, and adjust my mind and my working methods to that reality. Recent arrests, convictions and lengthy sentences handed out to journalists’ sources also mean I have to assume that my promises of anonimity to sources — a key to any good investigative journalism — are empty. The reality is that unless I resort to secret meetings in person with sources, or start using throw-away cell phones, the NSA can find out who I am communicating with.

A total police state may not exist (yet) in the US in the sense of the one I lived in for a while in China, where people get taken away without charge, not to be seen again for years, if ever, and where people get executed without even the semblance of a fair trial on trumped-up charges of corruption or assaulting an officer or threatening state security. But because of the extent of the spying secretly being done now in the US by the NSA, the FBI and other US “law-enforcement” and national “security” agencies, we have to live now as though it is happening.

Because it could be happening to any one of us, and because all that data they are collecting could be used later against us.

Not only that, but the data being collected can be manipulated, clipped and doctored, so as to make us look guilty of something when we are not.

Make no mistake. What happened to Lou Ann Merkel was an example of a police state at work. A courageous woman who dared to speak out against subtle and sometimes not so subtle racism in the school where she worked, and someone who dares to speak her mind on any topic, was threatened with jail by a school superintendent who felt he had absolute power and who in fact had the power to have her arrested on his say so on trumped-up charges.

Today we are all Lou Ann Merkel. Step out of line or stand on principle and we lose jobs, face arrest, and become the targets of the NSA’s spy machine.

(Incidentally, by way of full disclosure, Lou Ann is a friend and the wife of my ThisCantBeHappening! colleague John Grant. I met them both at that Upper Dublin School Board hearing mentioned above.)

There is one difference between China, the police state I lived in and reported on back in the 1990s, and the US police state of today. In China, everyone knows they are living in a totalitarian society. There is no confusion about that. Chinese people know that their news is controlled, that they are being watched and monitored on phone and online, and that if they step out of line there will be dire consequences for them and their families. Many do anyway, or resist in smaller ways.

In the US, most Americans remain blissfully unaware of how their freedoms have been stolen or surrendered. While they may say they don’t trust the government and don’t believe the news, they actually do to a remarkable extent. That’s the only explanation for society allowing — even encouraging — the government to continue to execute people based on a findings of a court system that is clearly corrupt to the core. It’s the only reason so many people say they support government spying to keep us “safe from terrorism.” It’s the only reason local communities, like mine here in Upper Dublin, keep voting more money for small armies of police officers equipped with M-16s and SWAT gear in places that violent crime is almost unheard of.

The United States is not China, or the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Not yet. But I’m afraid we are almost there, and in some ways we are in a worse place than the peoples of those societies, because so many of us here in the so-called “Land of the Free and the Brave” are living with eyes willfully closed to what is happening to us and to our country.

Americans can still wake up. We seem to have done that in the latest attempt by the war-mongers in Washington to launch yet another bloody war in the Middle East. But there is still far too much sleep-walking going on.

Benjamin Franklin once famously said: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

We Americans have been surrendering our liberty since the dawn of the national security state in 1947. The process accelerated with President Nixon’s “war” on crime and especially his “war” on drugs, which militarized police. Things grew worse under subsequent presidents, including President Reagan, who accelerated the “Drug War,
 and President Clinton, who gutted habeas corpus. Presidents George W. Bush and current President Obama have stolen more freedom from Americans than any leaders in the country’s history, with the acquiescence of most citizens.

Clearly we are not safer now. And as Franklin warned so presciently, when it comes to our liberties, we are now in danger of losing it all.

As it is, I no longer recognize the country I grew up in and in which I began my journalism career.

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/30/the-police-state-of-america/

We Live in a Police State The NSA isn’t just spying on foreigners

We Live in a Police State

The NSA isn’t just spying on foreigners

by Justin Raimondo, September 30, 2013

Thanks to Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras, we know the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting a huge amount of information about American citizens. But what are they doing with it?

Government officials have been quick to deny any "misuse" of this huge data bank – beyond the to-be-expected eavesdropping on spouses, and other anomalous pranks by errant ex-employees – and critics have so far focused on potential misuse. Well, now we know it’s much more than just potential: it’s real, it’s happening, and it’s downright scary.

The rationale for the Surveillance State has always been "the foreign connection." There are these Bad Guys outside the US, you see, who are trying to infiltrate our society and cause violent havoc, so we have to create this huge "haystack" of data and sift through it with a fine-toothed comb – but Americans, we’re told, aren’t the primary targets. It’s them furriners we have to worry about.

This turned out to be a lie. We always knew it was a lie, but now James Risen and Laura Poitras have confirmed it in a recent New York Times article that blows the lid off this rationalization:

"Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials."

The "foreign connection" was only ever a fig leaf, utilized to get around existing lawsforbidding mass surveillance of Americans: this had to be true because, after all, Al Qaeda and its affiliates were and are a foreign group trying to gain entry to our shores and implant its operatives on our soil. Ipso facto, it was deemed necessary to gain access to the entire "haystack" in order to map their success in doing so. The focus isn’t on overseas operatives but on their allies inside the United States who might conceivably be utilized in terrorist attacks. Pushing the legal limits of this mass surveillance, US government officials finally breached the walls of the Constitution in November 2010, when, as Risen and Poitras report, they began to "examine American’s networks of associations."

In an empire such as ours, the distinction between a "foreigner" and an American isincreasingly hazy: every empire is a multi-cultural polyglot, by definition, and the American imperium more so than any other, surpassing even the British. For are we not a country of immigrants, an idea more than a nation in the European sense? Americans are connected through a thousand threads to foreign nationals, and once it was deemed "legal" to collect "meta-data" – i.e. records of our phone calls – the rest followed logically and inevitably.

Risen and Poitras report that a January 2011 memo, uncovered by Snowden, authorized the NSA to run "’large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness’ of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said."

And that’s not all:

"The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such ‘enrichment’ data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners."

Here is a perfect illustration of how the advancement of government power works: give them an inch or three – access to "meta-data" – and they take a mile. What we wind up with is a perfect framework for a police state. Although we still don’t know how many innocent Americans have been caught up in this dragnet, the old "six degrees of separation" principle certainly applies in this case: anybody can be "linked" to anybody, given the sheer amount of information at the government’s disposal.

When Risen and Poitras asked the NSA about these "graphical analyses" of Americans’ data, a spokeswoman replied:

"All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period. All of N.S.A.’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose. Our activities are centered on counterterrorism, counterproliferation and cybersecurity."

That’s easy enough. For example, when the US government decided that Antiwar.com merited an "investigation," all they had to do was establish a fairly dubious "foreign connection" – one of their terrorist suspects had apparently visited this web site – and the rest followed from there. Since the Internet is global, enabling instantaneous communication worldwide, any web site can be targeted for "terrorist" activities or be characterized – as we were – as an "agent of a foreign power." This is how Americans exercising their First Amendment rights are targeted as "terrorists," spied on, harassed, and smeared by the most powerful government on earth. This is how a police state – operating in the dark – establishes itself, and extends its tentacles in an ever-widening arc of repression.

They can map out your whole life: your friends, your family, your finances, yourenemies, your politics, your love affairs, your consultations with a doctor or apsychiatrist, and your location at any given time. They don’t need a warrant: they don’t need a judge: they just need to establish a "foreign connection" – and, as we have seen, that’s real easy.

Furthermore, once this data is obtained, it is stored away for later use: one NSA memo says it can be legally kept for ten years for "historical searches." They should call that one the "Blackmail File."

As Risen and Poitras document, a usurpation of the Constitution initiated by the Bush administration only gathered speed during the reign of the "liberal" Obama: so much for the partisan hacks who defend this administration at all costs.

What the NSA is doing, at the direction of the executive branch, represents a mortal threat to the Constitution. As such, it cannot be "reformed" or ameliorated by any kind of "oversight." As Risen and Poitras point out, the battering ram of "national security" was aimed at the feeble protections proffered by previous legislation – and these fell easily to the NSA’s relentless onslaught. Governments, once given this kind of power, invariably seek to expand it: the only way to stop this invasive process is to abolish that power altogether.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/09/29/we-live-in-a-police-state/

Hawkish Senators Slam Iran Diplomacy, Vow New Sanctions Push

Hawkish Senators Slam Iran Diplomacy, Vow New Sanctions Push

Promise 'Outspoken' Support for More Anti-Iran Measures

by Jason Ditz, September 29, 2013

For many politicians, war as an end unto itself, and with that sentiment in mind, Sens. Robert Menendez (D – NJ) and Lindsey Graham (R – SC) have angrily lashed out at the diplomatic push of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and the prospect of serious nuclear talks involving the P5+1.

In their new op-ed, they parrot virtually word for word the claims of Israeli officials that all efforts at diplomacy are a “charm offensive” and amount to an Iranian trick aimed at destroying Israel.

To that end, and in keeping with 30-plus years of ever-worsening US-Iranian relations, the senators promise “outspoken” support for more anti-Iran measures in the Senate, saying they will push a new round of sanctions against Iran in the coming days.

The ability to push sanctions in Congress is not in serious doubt, and hawkish Congressmen have regularly aimed to undermine reports of progress at the P5+1 meetings with new sanctions and calls for war. The question is whether the pro-diplomacy momentum that has picked up in the past week can be sustained in the face of this push, and that’s yet to be seen.

http://news.antiwar.com/2013/09/29/hawkish-senators-slam-iran-diplomacy-vow-new-sanctions-push/

Netanyahu Heads to US to Push Against Momentum of Diplomacy

Netanyahu Heads to US to Push Against Momentum of Diplomacy

War-Minded Israeli PM Will Threaten Unilateral Attack on Iran

by Jason Ditz, September 29, 2013

Just a few weeks ago, President Obama was on the brink of attacking Syria. After a failed selling of the war, we now have a diplomatic deal, and Syria disarming its chemical weapons program. For the first time in years, Iranian diplomacy also looks like it might be going somewhere, with reformist President Rouhani driving the effort. Very much in spite of US bellicosity, diplomacy seems to be breaking out all over, and that’s making hawks very nervous.

Enter Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, heading to New York for his own UN General Assembly address, and planning to meet with Obama as well. His message is going to be one of war and hostility, angrily condemning the diplomatic momentum. It’snot expected to be well received.

The Netanyahu government has made no bones about its opposition to diplomacy, particularly toward Iran, and for years has aimed to undermine the process any time it looks like progress might be made. With the process happening so fast, subtlety is expected to fly out the window, and Netanyahu will be openly trying to revoke the perceived Israeli imprimatur for Iran talks.

Reports from Israeli media say Netanyahu will confront Obama and demand an end to diplomacy with Iran unless the nation agrees to fully and immediately ditch its entire civilian nuclear program, something Obama has repeatedly conceded Iran has a right to. He will reportedly threaten to attack Iran unilaterally if the US doesn’t back down.

Domestically, Israel’s government has been divided on a lot of things, but apart from Yair Lapid, the ministers seem pretty much universally opposed to diplomacy, and on board for anything restoring the path to an Iran war.

After Rouhani’s conciliatory, pro-diplomacy speech at the UN last week, Netanyahu’s address is expected to lay out a starkly different world-view, centered around distrust and a belief that anything but constant escalation of war rhetoric is inherently dangerous. Which will win out remains to be seen, but it’s a battle that will continue long beyond the General Assembly’s session.

http://news.antiwar.com/2013/09/29/netanyahu-heads-to-us-to-push-against-momentum-of-diplomacy/

The women of Kamathipura, photographed yet again

Delhi's Darya Ganj  is where I found that Book of Russian Self Portraits and most of My collection of Photography books. It used to house the old British Army  and had its "comfort Women" housed just a stone throw away in what  still is  Delhi's' Red Light' Area.

The colonial heritage  and the colonial gaze continue

 unhindered. Repeating themselves again and again. Yes "the colonial legacy has to change". That includes the legacy of objectifying  "Others" in do good "documentary projects" that still manage to exploit their subjects.  

Mumbai's sex slaves: 'I have had bad dreams about the life these girls lead'

Hazel Thompson, a photographer from Surrey, explains why she spent 11 years documenting the city's red light district 

Vanessa Thorpe

Photographer Hazel Thompson, 35, has spent a large part of the last 11 years in Mumbai learning about, and living with, the sex slaves who are held captive, often in cages, in the maze of backstreets known collectively as "the lanes" in Kamathipura, the city's oldest and biggest red-light district.

The plight of the trafficked children that Thompson has watched growing up has drawn her closer to the women than she could have predicted. It has changed her into a determined campaigner, instead of a journalist working at an emotional distance. Some of the girls whose lives she has charted are still living in the lanes as enslaved prostitutes. A few others have been rescued and have prospered, sometimes working with the charities that helped them.

Next month Thompson's extensive and shocking chronicle of life in these lanes, Taken, is to be published as an ebook, allowing readers to understand the reality of a grim trade that dates back to the colonial era.

"A few months ago, when a lot of the work on the book was already done, someone handed me a book called The Queen's Daughters, about two American missionaries in the Victorian era who uncovered the Bombay sex trade that had been set up for the British army," said Thompson, who first went out to Mumbai with the British charity Jubilee Campaign and has worked with the support of several fixers and researchers. "I found I have been following in the footsteps of these women and that much of the language used by the girls to tell their stories is still used today."

In 1888 the British parliament ruled that organised prostitution inside designated "comfort zones" should end in India, yet four years later the two missionaries, Elizabeth Andrew and Kathleen Bushnell, were able to report back that military-run brothels were not only still functioning, but around half the girls kept there were aged between 14 and 16.

Just as girls are still rounded up today and taken from their families, sometimes in exchange for money, in the days of empire a commanding officer would order his quartermaster to "go into the villages and take from the homes of these poor people their daughters". The colonel would make the final selection and the girls were then licensed and checked by a doctor.

"My work in the lanes became even more important to me after reading this, since it seems we caused the problem out there. It is a legacy of British rule that needs to change," said Thompson, the daughter of a teacher and an accountant – someone who enjoyed what she describes as the ultimate middle-class childhood in Surrey.

"It has affected me like no other story. I have bad dreams about the life these girls lead. It is your brain's way of getting it out of your system," she said.

Thompson's chief concern now has been to ensure that the publication of the ebook next month does not impact on the people who have helped her and who often live in fear of the rival gangs that dominate each different lane.

"I feel I have family out there now; that sort of level of trust was needed and so I feel a lot of responsibility. I am making sure that everyone is OK and that they know when the book is coming out. I don't want to harm anyone, I want to bring about change. And the people I work with out there have encouraged me and tell me they need international stories to help pressurise the Indian government to tackle this properly."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/28/mumbai-sex-slaves-prostitution-india

Haiti discovers the self-portrait

Not the first time this has been done but still a great idea. I remember an American project  called Russian Self Portraits " in the former Soviet Union. 

That was a project designed to break the  Cold War  ice. The pics were great .

I found a book of those self portraits  in  Delhi's book bazaar.  still have it  in my collection. 

. 

It informed my first challenges to Documentary Photography and led to my collection of Rotigraphy. 

Haiti discovers the self-portrait

Three years after Haiti's devastating earthquake, New York-based photographer Andy Lin has taken his Self-Portrait Project to the camps for those displaced by the disaster of January 2010

More photographs from the Self-Portrait Project's trip to Haiti

• 
  

• Isabelle Fraser
• The Observer, Saturday 28 September 2013
• Jump to comments (8)

The Self-Portrait Project let displaced people in Haiti take their own photographs. Photograph: Andy Lin

The Self-Portrait Project is, according to its creator Andy Lin, a "glorified photobooth": it works by a camera shooting through a two-way mirror, the subject taking their own photo via a remote control. The result, he argues, is a uniquely honest picture: "You can't be dishonest in a picture you take of yourself, even if you're trying to portray yourself as something else."

New York-based photographer Lin has amassed more than 300,000 self-portraits in the four years he has been taking his project to parties and NGO events in his city. But when an opportunity arose earlier this month to go to Haiti, he grabbed it with both hands: "I have been wanting to use the Self-Portrait Project in the context of social change, because it allows the subject control of their own image," he says. "I've been wanting to go somewhere where people have been marginalised, or victimised, or forgotten, to remind the world beyond that they're there."

Working with Haitian housing activist groups Frakka and Under Tents,the Self-Portrait Project was set up in four encampments and shantytowns: Grace Village, Cité Soleil, Mozayik and Solino. More than 280,000 Haitians are still living in camps, three and a half years after the earthquake that struck their country. They live without clean water, at risk of cholera and crime, and with the constant threat of eviction. Lin wants to exhibit these images to raise awareness of their plight.

He sees the project as a powerful tool of self-expression, each participant presenting themselves as they wish to be seen. "It's not like me as a photojournalist, going in there and asking, 'Hey, who here was raped? Can I take your photo?' The camera was set up in each camp only after the agreement of a council of residents. At first Lin's team faced scepticism. "But once we set up and people realised we weren't trying to exploit them, they became a lot more open.

"We took a printer, and I printed out a photo for everyone who participated. It's not a lot, but we left something for the communities."

The Self-Portrait Project visited four camps in Haiti. Photograph: Andy Lin

"The kids were full of life," commented Teresa Lopes, who accompanied the project to Haiti on behalf of Pink Stone, the foundation that funded it. "There was only one camp we went to – Cité Soleil, the largest and most dangerous shantytown – where you could see fear on their faces. Three days earlier someone had been shot, their body left burning. Every night there is gunfire, the bullets go whizzing over their makeshift plastic tents. The kids dig holes and hide in them, because that is the only way they can feel safe."

Some people didn't see the point of the project at first, Lopes says: "Many of the Haitians in camps haven't seen themselves in a long time – I know some people don't even own a photograph of themselves; people hadn't seen the way they looked in so long."

"Pretty much every person I talked to had a similar story," Lin adds. "Almost everyone had had a family member die, they'd lost their houses, they were out of jobs. In Grace Village, there were some adolescent men, who were sceptical about what we were doing. They spoke perfect English, and one of them had been to Miami University. He'd come back to Haiti, got caught up in the earthquake, and now he couldn't leave."

These self-portraits have a unique vibrancy about them; most of the subjects have chosen to smile, a testament to their resilience. And while these Haitians have little power over their daily lives, for those few seconds they were in control.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/sep/29/haiti-selfie-self-portrait-project

 and for the pics. 

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2013/sep/28/haiti-self-portrait-project

Is Iran out of the US War Queue? The Twilight of the Hawks

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By Juan Cole

The short telephone conversation between US President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Friday may or may not lead to a successful diplomatic resolution of US-Iranian conflicts, especially over Tehran’s nuclear enrichment program. But if it does, how will the hawks in Washington survive?

The US is an unusually war-like country. Since 1963 it has launched a military action on average every 40 months. It is to the extent that the US is still at war in Afghanistan after 12 years, and many Americans may not even realize it.

Washington hawks always have a war queue, knowing that their campaign supporters in the war industries expect it of them. Iraq was in the war queue in the 1990s. Since the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Iran has been the number one state in the war queue. This is so even though Iran is not a superpower or even a regional power. It hasn’t invaded another country in at least a century and a half. Its annual military budget is on the order of Singapore and Norway. It has a population slightly larger than France.

The point of having an enemies’ list is only in part in order to curb an enemy. It serves to scare the public and rally them around the politicians and make them willing to give up personal liberties or forget about being upset at being ruled on behalf of a handful of large corporations.

Putting a country in the war queue requires demonizing its leader, twisting his words to make him seem aggressive, and exaggerating his capabilities versus the US. Even Nikita Khrushchev, who denounced Stalin’s crimes, was depicted in the US as a menace who pledged, “We will bury you!” What Khrushchev actually had said was, “We’ll still be here when your capitalist system is dead and buried.” He was wrong but he wasn’t threatening to bury anyone. The Soviet Union’s economy was never more than half that of the US, and its military was no match for the American, but Americans were taught to be mortally afraid of the Soviets, what with their challenge to … gasp … the supremacy of private property.

Likewise, former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s quotation of an old statement by Ruhollah Khomeini that “The occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” — a hope that Zionism would collapse the way Communism had in 1991, was transformed by American “journalism” into an aggressive threat to wipe Israel off the map. This, despite repeated Iranian assertions that they had a no first strike policy, and that they would never slaughter noncombatants, and despite the laughable character of the proposition that a weak country very distant from Israel could menace it despite Tel Aviv’s stockpile of hundreds of nuclear weapons, and its poison gas and other weapons capabilities. Iran does not have an atomic bomb or chemical weapons.

The significance of Friday’s phone call is that Iran may be removed from the war queue. Current president Hassan Rouhani is harder to demonize than his quirky, populist predecessor. Twenty years of breathless allegations that Iran is 6 months from having an atomic bomb have raised questions about why the Israelis and the American hawks keep being wrong (not to mention, why the kettle is calling the oven black– Israel and the US are nuclear powers but Iran is not).

The Israeli hawks have been promoting Iran as among the top challenges to the West since the early 1990s, aware that the loss of the Soviet Union and then Iraq left them nothing with which to frighten the American public. The Israel lobbies are horrified that they might now lose the Iran bogeyman. Likewise, the US war industries that back right wing senators and congressional representatives are putting their sock puppets such as Lindsey Graham up to seeking authorization for a war on Iran.

The unacknowledged elephant in the room is that Iran was queued because of petroleum, and to a lesser extent because it is among the few remaining rejectionist states toward Israel. But as the US moves to wind and solar electricity and electric and hybrid plug-in cars, petroleum’s value will plummet over the next 20 years. The US is going to be energy independent in 20-30 years, but not via fracked gas and oil, which are relatively expensive. Oil certainly won’t be worth going to war over. The Congressional refusal to authorize a strike on Syria is the writing on the wall here.

Some hawks want to put China in the war queue as a booby prize, but China is a tough sell. It has a nuclear arsenal and so the US can’t just go to war with it. US-China trade is huge and the US needs China. What would Walmart sell if it couldn’t load up on the products of Communist China? Even just alienating Beijing by talking about it as an enemy is difficult in today’s world.

Without a demonized enemy number 1, how will hawks win election campaigns? How will they scare the public into letting them suspend the constitution and our civil liberties? How will they convince the public to let Congress spend billions on their industrial cronies? Maybe they won’t be able to. 

http://www.zcommunications.org/is-iran-out-of-the-us-war-queue-the-twilight-of-the-hawks-by-juan-cole.html

Why Obama Can’t Make Peace in Israel-Palestine

Barack Obama's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to Josh Reubner, resembles hammering a square peg into a round hole.

By Sarah Gold, 

Chief among the reasons to be skeptical about the Obama administration’s latest gambit for peace in Israel-Palestine is its own record on the subject. Barack Obama’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to Josh Reubner, resembles hammering a square peg into a round hole. And it’s no small surprise the pieces don’t fit.

Ruebner, the national advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, lays out his argument in a new book, the accessible and engaging Shattered Hopes: The Failure of Obama’s Middle East Peace Process. It’s a biting critique.

Here is a book that does not ignore the enormous power differential between Israel and the Occupied Territories—that tells it like it is with no apprehension or sugar coating. Having consulted both leaked classified sources and publicly available documents, Ruebner fillsShattered Hopes with an abundance of evidence culled from primary sources, allowing readers to see for themselves the seemingly endless mistakes that characterize the so-called “peace process.”

The first half of the book presents a play-by-play history of the Obama administration’s attempts to negotiate a peace deal. One by one, Reubner offers a context, description, and critique of each attempt, as well as a report of Israel’s response. This section spans from the time preceding Obama’s election, including his prior relationship with the conflict and with Palestinians, to the events surrounding Operation Cast Lead and the 2012 bid by the Palestinian Authority to be recognized as a UN member state.

Ruebner examines Washington’s failure to involve the Palestinian negotiating team in negotiations and lays bare the ugly details of Netanyahu’s plan for a neutered Palestinian state. He carefully illustrates the difficult positions Palestinians have been put into during past negotiations, such as when the Obama administration abandoned efforts to seek an Israeli settlement freeze as a precondition for talks, placing “Palestinians in the untenable position of either being forced to negotiate with Israel while it continued to colonize Palestinian land, or to rebuff the initiative and be portrayed by Israel and its supporters in the United States as the rejectionist party.” He details the many ways that Israel has continuously manipulated the United States into supporting Israeli actions—such as its aggressive settlement expansion—that defy stated U.S. policies and interests.

The second half of Shattered Hopes explores various themes that emerge in the Obama administration’s diplomatic policies, including its blocking of international efforts to hold Israel accountable for its actions. This includes its active opposition to the Goldstone Report (the result of a 2009 UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict), which helped to create a sense of impunity for Israel. Here Reubner also contrasts the strengthening of the U.S.-Israel military relationship ($3.1 billion dollars of military aid in 2013) with how U.S. aid to Palestinians is “specifically designed to de-develop the Palestinian economy” and “reconcile [Palestinians] to their open-air prison existence by making it slightly more palatable.”

Reubner also sheds some light on how Washington’s staunch support for Israel affects its relationships with its allies, such as when the United States “indefinitely postponed a planned multinational military exercise scheduled to take place in Turkey in October 2009” because Turkey, outraged over Cast Lead and protesting Israel’s continued colonization of Palestinian land, removed Israel from the exercise.

Reflecting on the standoff over Israel’s deadly 2010 attack on a Turkish-flagged aid flotilla to Gaza, Reubner quips that “the United States found itself in the unenviable position of trying to explain how both of its allies’ reports could be credible if they were diametrically conflicting.”

The book concludes with a final, clear analysis that explains the many reasons Obama has so far failed to broker a Middle East peace: Namely, Obama’s failure to recognize the asymmetry of power between Israel and Palestine—exacerbated by his provision of “unconditional military and diplomatic support” to Israel that “solidified the very conditions that made peace impossible”—led to a failure to create incentives for Israel to sincerely commit to a peace process. And all the while the administration relied on a “chauvinistic, heavy-handed approach to international diplomacy that belittled and quashed any alternative” to the failing U.S.-dominated effort.

Reubner ends with a defiant call for an end to U.S. “support for Israeli military occupation and apartheid toward the Palestinian people.” If his book is any indication, that’s a change that must come from without—not from within.

http://fpif.org/obama-cant-make-peace-israel-palestine/

Sarah Gold is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

Israel on the Sidelines

Potential diplomatic breakthroughs in Syria and Iran are apparently unnerving Israel's right-wing leadership.

By Carl Bloice, September 26, 2013.

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(Abode of Chaos / Flickr)

Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren recently spelled out quite clearly for MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell his government’s attitude toward possible new openings in relations between the United States and Iran.

Mitchell had asked him: “What is Israel’s posture towards this opening with Iran? Short of shutting down all of its nuclear facilities, is there a step-by-step process that is possible? Should there be bilateral talks with the United States?”

Talks between the two countries could be a positive thing, Oren replied, on one condition: Iran’s capitulation. The Iranians must “stop enrichment of uranium,” “ship out their stockpile,” and then “shut down the nuclear facility underground. Let them do all that and then let them sit down and talk,” he said.

Of course, that’s not about to happen.

(Actually, it takes some cheek for the Israeli government to demand that the Iranians roll over as a prerequisite for talks, considering that when it comes to negotiations with the Palestinians, the Israelis insist that negotiations commence without any preconditions.)

The Netanyahu government appears to be caught in a bind. The recent flurry of diplomatic activity that could result in ridding neighboring Syria of chemical weapons threatens to open a Pandora’s Box on which Israel would prefer to keep a lid. If the “international community” can persuade the Assad regime to forfeit weaponry it contends it holds as a deterrent, then inevitably questions will arise about Israel’s possession of both chemical and nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

If Syria were to ratify and abide by the international Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), there would be no logical reason for the international community not to insist that Israel do so as well. As a recent editorial in the Israeli daily Haaretz put it, “it would be a pity if in the future Israel finds itself in the position of Syria—forced to sign the convention under international pressure.”

This would be embarrassing indeed. Aside from Syria and Israel, only Egypt, Angola, South Sudan, North Korea, and Myanmar have yet to sign the convention.

In turn this would most likely direct attention to the proposed Mediterranean nuclear-free zone, which would directly confront Israel’s seldom acknowledged nuclear arsenal. A recent report in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimated Israel’s nuclear stockpile at 80 warheads, though the country has the capacity to produce many more.

Weaponry aside, it is widely recognized that behind the civil war raging in Syria, a multifaceted struggle is underway to alter the military and political balance of force in the region.

Oren appeared to let a big cat out of the bag when he told the Jerusalem Post that in Syria, Israel “always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran,” even if the other “bad guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda.

However, Tel Aviv quickly rebuked its diplomat, with Netanyahu’s office declaring that Oren’s comments do not represent the prime minister’s position. “Israel’s policy has not changed, and we are not intervening in internal Syrian affairs.” According toAlgemeiner.com, “Israeli officials have repeatedly said that the country has no interest in becoming involved in Syria’s civil war, and Netanyahu has repeatedly instructed his Cabinet and others representing the government to remain silent on the issue.”

The Jerusalem Post account of the Oren interview also contained this intriguing passage:

“On other issues, Oren – who has contact in Washington with some ambassadors from Persian Gulf countries – said that that ‘in the last 64 years there has probably never been a greater confluence of interest between us and several Gulf States. With these Gulf States we have agreements on Syria, on Egypt, on the Palestinian issue. We certainly have agreements on Iran. This is one of those opportunities presented by the Arab Spring.’”

Oren will soon be replaced by Netanyahu confidant Ron Dermer.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu is hard at work pressing his case to Obama and reprising his warnings to the UN General Assembly about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. “But this time,” notes the Financial Times, “he risks being upstaged by Mr. Rouhani,” whoseovertures to Washington have captured the headlines.

A strong counterpoint to Ambassador Oren’s call for Iran to partially disarm itself before any negotiations can begin was offered September 20 by Financial Times Associate Editor Philip Stephens. He wrote that the efforts to resolve the question of Iran’s nuclear program “has lacked two vital ingredients: the first is recognition of Tehran’s fear that the US wants regime change – probably the main driver of the nuclear program; the second is an offer of an everything-on-the-table dialogue reaching beyond the nuclear issue to a normalization of relations.”

“Negotiations, of course, would not carry a guarantee of success,” continued Philips. “But, bombing or no bombing, it should be clear by now that Tehran will not give up the right to a civilian nuclear program. Sanctions have hurt, but they have also proved Iran’s resilience. The discussion that matters is about whether it will choose to cross the threshold to become a nuclear weapons state.”

With high-level meetings between U.S. and Iranian officials set to occur, perhaps some of these issues can be hashed out—while Israel sits on the sidelines.

FPIF columnist Carl Bloice, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, is a columnist for the Black Commentator. He also serves on its editorial board

http://fpif.org/israel-sidelines/