On the March

October 27th, 2006 at 19:58 Björn Hallberg

• Israel Admits Using Phosphorous Bombs in Lebanon - “Israel has acknowledged for the first time that it attacked Hezbollah targets during the second Lebanon war with phosphorus shells. White phosphorus causes very painful and often lethal chemical burns to those hit by it, and until recently Israel maintained that it only uses such bombs to mark targets or territory.”
• We Have Turned Iraq Into the Most Hellish Place on Earth - “This country has been turned by two of the most powerful and civilised nations on Earth into the most hellish place on Earth. Armies claiming to bring democracy and prosperity have brought bloodshed and a misery worse than under the most ruthless modern dictator. This must be the stupidest paradox in modern history. Neither America nor Britain has the guts to rule Iraq properly, yet they lack the guts to leave.”
• Time to Go! Inside the Worst Congress Ever - “These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the US parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula - a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.”
• Iraqis Were Better Off Under Saddam, Says Former Weapons Inspector - “Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix on Wednesday described the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as a “pure failure” that had left the country worse off than under the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein. In unusually harsh comments to Danish newspaper Politiken, the diplomatic Swede said the U.S. government had ended up in a situation in which neither staying nor leaving Iraq were good options.”
• German ministers ‘knew about CIA torture cells’ - “The German government is alleged to have received first-hand evidence that the CIA began torturing terrorist suspects at secret prisons in Europe shortly after the September 11 attacks, despite claiming it only knew about such sites through the media. Stern magazine quoted a leaked German intelligence report yesterday which said that only weeks after September 11 2001, two agents and a translator visited a US military prison at the American “Eagle Base” in the Bosnian town of Tuzla, where they saw a torture victim. The German intelligence report said US interrogators at the base had beaten a 70-year-old terrorist suspect with rifle butts and that “his injuries meant that he had to be given 20 stitches to the head wound he sustained”. The report said the American interrogator responsible “appeared to be proud” of his actions.”
• Now Europe Targets Bloggers As Terrorists - “Bush administration efforts to infiltrate, misdirect, regulate and pollute the Internet with Neo-Con propaganda, as well as their openly stated agenda to target American bloggers as terrorists, is now being aped by the British government across the pond as well as other major European countries. Home Secretary John Reid met with ministers from the six largest European Union countries and, according to a BBC report, “agreed to work together to make the internet a “more hostile” place for terrorists.” How will they accomplish this? By initiating a crackdown on people who use the Internet to “spread propaganda.” The very website you are now reading would be considered propaganda by these neo-fascists- no matter the fact that the criminal syndicates Bush and Blair front for are the most deceitful progenitors of lurid propaganda since the third reich.”
• War in the Dark? - “A new book in Germany is casting light on Israel’s covert program to provoke violence among Muslims in Western Europe and engage in “false flag” operations in order for Western governments to blame Muslim radicals. The book, Der Krieg im Dunkeln (War in the Dark) by Udo Ulfkotte, formerly a correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, provides details of the operations of two Israeli intelligence units — the Metsada, which specializes in sabotage, including “false flag” terrorist attacks and assassinations; and LAP (Lohamah Psichlogit), which engages in psychological warfare.”
• Review of James Petras latest book The Power of Israel in the United States

35,000 in Secret Prisons

1 comment October 25th, 2006 at 07:27 Björn Hallberg

We knew the number was in the thousands (14,000?), but this latest indication is surely shocking.

I’m at the Center for American Progress, listening to Sid Blumenthal and Glenn Greenwald talk about the Imperial Presidency, and one thing is important enough for me to want to live blog. Sid says that Wilkerson, Powell’s old chief of staff, believes that the correct number of victims in secret Bush prisons is 35,000, only %5 of which “may” have to do with terrorism. More than twice what I thought, and hardly any to do with the “war on terror.”

Wake up America, it’s getting closer.

Bush signs torture bill

October 18th, 2006 at 06:51 Björn Hallberg

Bush signs torture bill; Americans lose essential freedom

George W. Bush got what he wanted, ostensibly as a tool in his unfocused “war on terror”: By signing into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Bush has made it legal for the C.I.A. to continue operating torture facilities in undisclosed, foreign countries, and for the writ of habeas corpus to be suspended for individuals who are designated “enemy combatants” against the U.S. (Designated by whom? That question remains unanswered.) The law also “establishes military tribunals that would allow some use of evidence obtained by coercion [that is, torture], but would give defendants access to classified evidence being used to convict them.” (Reuters)

The provisions of Bush’s new torture law mean that Americans have lost the key, constitutional right on which Anglo-American criminal law (and criminal-law procedures in true democracies in general) is founded; that’s the basic right of an individual to know why he or she is being apprehended and detained. Now, technically, as in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, anyone labeled an “enemy combatant” - again, by whom; by Bush? - can be whisked away and never heard from again. That kind of authority, in the hands of corrupt or untruthful politicians, may or may not be an effective tool in some kind of “war on terror,” but it certainly can be a useful tool when it comes to silencing their opponents.

On The March

October 17th, 2006 at 07:36 Björn Hallberg

• Facing Up To 30 Years in Prison, Civil Rights Attorney Lynne Stewart Speaks Out As She Heads To Courthouse for Sentencing In the end she got 28 months for breaking the Kafkaesque silence surrounding the case. "Many argue that the government’s aim is to discourage them from representing unpopular clients." Ironically, the trial was held in the same courthouse that once tried and convicted the Rosenbergs on bogus charges. Weasel words indeed.
• CENTCOM harasses bloggers By new mass-emailings designed to sway a few insecure individuals and make them mouthpieces for the official propaganda.
• Judt at War: Two New York Talks by Israel Critic Canceled Tony Judt, Professor of European history at New York University has two concurrent speaking engagements cancelled after the ADL and the Jewish mafia throw their weight around.
• Pro-Israel Group Tops List of Congressional Travel Sponsors American Israel Education Foundation "spent $583,131, sponsoring 62 trips to Israel for lawmakers, their relatives and staff from July 2005 to July 2006." The organization is closely linked to AIPAC.
• Crisis of the U.S. Dollar System Just waiting for the inevitable.
• Revolution revisited The Budapest uprising in 1956 and the American involvement which played the Hungarians like pawns. Plus, when will Americas numerous attempts to squash popular protests, like the Kwangju uprising, elicit mainstream bemoanment.
• Taking the terror hoax mainstream 1: Chertoff: The Internet is turning people into terrorists Time to make war on the Internet? How predictable.
• Taking the terror hoax mainstream 2: No-Fly lists even dumber than suspected No surprise: They’re meaningless but they do maintain the idea that terrorists are everywhere, and anyone. Like the attack on the wired world, the governments of the world, spearheaded by the US, are reasserting a more oppressive state in the wake of the loss of public confidence.

Ban Ki-Moon new secretary-general

6 comments October 14th, 2006 at 06:58 Björn Hallberg

South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon will become the eighth U.N. secretary-general on January 1st. Best case scenario is that he is exactly the vegetable that he seems. Worst case scenario is that the U.S. has some sort of hold over him, seeing as the American influence over South Korea is still substantial. Even worse, the hold could very well be part religious, moonie or not, in addition to mere ideological inclinations. But things are really not all that complicated and they don’t need to be. The fact that the U.S. strongly supports Ban Ki-Moon is all I need to know.

Iraqi Death Toll Exceeds 600,000

7 comments October 11th, 2006 at 08:22 Björn Hallberg

America’s murderous cannons roar. The US has now — directly and indirectly — violently killed more people than Saddam in Iraq, and in less time too.

This study, “The Human Cost of the War in Iraq,” puts civilian fatalities at 426,369 to 793,663 but gives a 95% certainty to the figure of 601,027.

Human Rights Watch has estimated Saddam Hussein’s regime killed 250,000 to 290,000 people over 20 years.

And this is just an updated estimate of violent deaths since 2003. The fatalities as a result of the breakdown and wilful destruction of infrastructure, not to mention the more long-term environmental impact of depleted uranium and other pollutants obviously do not factor in. Even if the violence stopped today, people would still be dying unnecessarily for a very long time. And there isn’t a goddamn thing that the US has accomplished so far that could even begin to justify this appalling loss of human life. These poor souls can’t even claim that they snuffed it under the banner of security or a meaningful democracy.

One should of course not forget history and hence make sure to add this to the context of the estimated number of overall fatalities caused by US foreign policy since 1945. However, like the (notoriously apologetic) “Iraq Body Count” index and despite their startling numbers, these tallies are just educated, moderate guesses based on commonly available data. Had America’s foreign policy been measured by the same modern, scientific standard as the above study, the figure could very well surpass 20 million deaths since 1945 alone.

Japan to review Yasukuni shrine

October 10th, 2006 at 13:36 Björn Hallberg

Because as we all know, America has a monopoly on writing history.

Japan’s controversial Yasukuni shrine is to review a controversial display that says the US provoked Japan into entering WWII, Japanese media reports.

The US government complained about the exhibit, which claims that a US economic embargo forced Japan into war.

Not only is the idea that Japan was forced into the larger WW2 by the embargo fairly accurate, but a closer examination will also reveal that Japan’s imperial ambitions (from the 1870s and on) were motivated and facilitated by America’s careless relationship with the nation and general policies in the region. This is important to note since Japan’s foreign conduct, or lack thereof, was named as the chief reason for setting up the same embargo.

On a side note, at least Shinzo Abe didn’t run snivelling to the USA the first thing he did, as has been customary among newly appointed Japanese prime ministers. However, to think that he is anything but a lap dog would be a most serious mistake.

Fundamental mistakes of US foreign policy

October 9th, 2006 at 17:45 Björn Hallberg

Stephen M. Walt on Misreading the tea leaves: US missteps on foreign policy

First, officials misunderstood how other states see US primacy. Convinced that American power was a force for good, Bush thought other states would welcome US leadership as long as he acted decisively. In fact, US primacy made even longstanding allies nervous because they didn’t know whether America would use its vast power in ways that would help or harm them.

A second mistake was blaming anti-Americanism on “what we are” rather than “what we do.” Bush says our enemies “hate our freedom” and believes that anti-Americanism arises from “hostility to core US values.” Wrong again.

Third, Bush has consistently underestimated America’s opponents, believing that they were too weak to stand up to the world’s only superpower. Unfortunately, the past five years have demonstrated that even much weaker actors have many ways to counter US power.

Also pertinent: Paul Kennedy on why America goes too far and imperial overstretch.

US Revises National Space Policy

October 9th, 2006 at 16:40 Björn Hallberg

New Bush Space Policy Unveiled, Stresses U.S. Freedom of Action … that is to say, actively limiting the freedom of everyone else. All in all inching closer to full-spectrum dominance and the weaponization of space.

Additionally, the Bush space policy is designed to “ensure that space capabilities are available in time to further U.S. national security, homeland security, and foreign policy objectives.” Moreover, a fundamental goal of the policy is to “enable unhindered U.S. operations in and through space to defend our interests there.”

The policy calls upon the Secretary of Defense to “develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries.”

How the US provokes North Korea

October 9th, 2006 at 14:35 Björn Hallberg

Or how the US turned a promising denuclearization agreement into disaster, to the point of subverting its own negotiator for making progress. It’s only the most recent incident of course in a long line of US provocations and swaggering that frankly shows a startling lack of pragmatism. One has to wonder if it is just North Korea being stuck in the cold war and whether there are those within the US that are in fact knowingly sowing the wind.

On Sept. 19, 2005, North Korea signed a widely heralded denuclearization agreement with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang pledged to “abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs.” In return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would “respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations.”

Four days later, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea designed to cut off the country’s access to the international banking system, branding it a “criminal state” guilty of counterfeiting, money laundering and trafficking in weapons of mass destruction.

At least the US is consistent in the bizarre handling of Korea, starting with the perplexing and unpopular division of 1945.

So much for the rationale for maintaining a US military presence in the region. If today’s nuclear hype is verified it would mean, above all else, that the American promise of stability in the region has now produced its fourth nuclear power. Not to mention several conventional wars and millions dead. Add to this the monumental hypocrisy that it takes to badger Iran day in and day out while North Korea openly declares its policies and ambitions.